5
Gwydion Navarne was pacing the thick carpet outside the Great Hall, awaiting his turn to be called into the room. That this was his first council since becoming fully invested as duke on his seventeenth birthday a few months before weighed heavily on his mind as he strode up and down upon the heavy fibers woven into a tapestry that told the history of his family. With each step he unconsciously traced the lineage of the tuatha Navarne, from its Cymrian progenitor, a First-Generationer named Hague who had been Lord Gwylliam the Visionary’s best friend, to the ascendancy of his own late father. Stephen Navarne, who in his youth had been the best friend of Ashe, the current Lord Cymrian, Gwydion’s own namesake, godfather, and guardian. The rich colors of the plaited threads—forest-green and crimson, deep blue, royal purrple and gold—told a melancholy story that was fitting in its mood. Over and over as he walked in circles he silently repeated what he had seen in the harbors and outposts of Sorbold, the great nation of threatening mountains and windswept deserts to the south of Roland, struggling to keep the facts and figures straight in his mind. Seventy-five three-masted cutters, he thought to himself running down his list again in anticipation of the discussion that would sooner or later come about. Sixty three-masted schooners, at least four score heavy barges, all in the south-western port of Ghant, all in the course of one day’s time. All carrying slaves, thousands of them, perhaps the contents of ten or more entire villages, probably bound for the salt mines of Nicosi or the sweltering ironworks of Keltar. Gwydion had been unable to fully quell the racing of his heart since the moment he had witnessed the unloading of the human cargo a few weeks before. Compassion and outrage at the sight had quickly been joined by fear; a little sleepy harbor town teeming with soldiers and longshoremen, mountain guards and human chattel, had been enough to convince his companion that the war for which Sorbold was preparing would be greater in scope than anything the Known World had ever seen. Given that his companion at that moment had been Anborn ap Gwylliam, the Lord Marshal of the first Cymrian empire and perhaps the greatest military mind that had ever existed on the Middle Continent, Gwydion had been quickly and nauseatingly convinced, especially since Anborn had engineered the previous war to be described as such. The heavy carpet beneath his feet bulged up into a ridge from where he had unconsciously worn a groove. Gwydion smoothed it down with his feet, pushing the bump to the edges, arriving at the fringe at the same moment that the doors to the Great Hall banged open with urgency.
Standing in the door frame was his father’s long-trusted chamberlain, Gerald Owen, an elderly Cymrian who had served Gwydion’s father and grandfather, and perhaps a few ancestors before him. The old man stepped back in surprise, then opened the door wider for the young duke. “Finally,” Gwydion muttered as he entered the Hall. “I’ve been waiting a week to talk to him.”
“He’s aware of that, sir,” Gerald Owen said smoothly, closing the door behind him. “The Lord Cymrian needed to see that the Lady Cymrian and the baby were attended to before the meeting. She was in a grave state when she returned.” Gwydion stopped and turned back quickly. “And is she better now?” he asked anxiously. Rhapsody had adopted him and his sister Melisande four years before as honorary grandchildren, though in many ways she had been more like a second mother. “Will she be missing the council?”
“Yes, and no,” came a warm baritone voice from behind him. Gwydion looked over his shoulder to see his godfather standing in the center of the feeder hallway leading into the central meeting place of the keep. Ashe, as the Lord Cymrian was called by his intimates, was a man in possession of the blue eye color most often associated with Cymrian royal lineage, but whose face and body bore the lines of the mixed races of human and Lirin, with draconic vertical pupils scoring his eyes and copper-colored hair that appeared almost metallic in its sheen, signs of the wyrm blood that ran in his veins as well. “She has been tended to, and will be sitting in on the council meeting. We would be sorely lacking in wisdom were she not to attend.”