Then the smell of roast beef reached me from somewhere in the warm recesses of the castle keep. I followed Sir Robert through the huge mahogany door, into a well lit room of polished marble, filled with buffed armor and dark paintings.
It was the kind of lodging I was born for, I decided.
“I heard the name ‘Galen’ in my exchange with Sir Bayard,” Sir Robert began, draping his magnificent blue cloak over a nearby chair. “Is the family name one I would recognize, or are you . . .” and he smiled without any irony I could see, “. . . from a faraway place where I might not know the names?”
“I’m a Pathwarden myself, sir,” I said.
“I see,” Sir Robert replied, and said nothing else, as he lit a candle resting on a mahogany table in the hall and beckoned to me to follow him.
We passed through the anteroom of the family di Caela. I knew the Brightblades had some sort of historical importance—and I was hoping devoutly that Sir Robert wasn’t going to ask me to refresh his memory on my family history—but somehow both names paled in the glamor and traditions housed by this building. I was walking in a shrine of sorts—I knew Father and Gileandos would both be impressed. For this was the seat of a great family, one who fought side by side with Vinas Solamnus. Who could trace their ancestry back a millennium. And the man who walked in front of me, holding a candle, was the heir to all this—not only the wealth, mind you, but the history and the heroism and the nobility. It was enough to impress the hardest head in Solamnia.
Sir Robert guided me past several paintings—ancient oils of his di Caela ancestors. I looked out of the corner of my eye for a portrait that might be Benedict’s. The eyes of one portrait—that of a handsome old man with a livid scar on his left cheek—seemed to follow me as I moved down the hall. I thought of the childhood stories of haunted galleries, of things behind the walls who watched passers-by through ides in the portraits. With my eyes on the painting, my thoughts on the likelihood of spooks in the woodwork, I didn’t notice that Sir Robert had stopped until I walked into him.
“A Pathwarden, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Son of Sir Andrew Pathwarden?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But I had been told . . .”
“Sir?”
“. . . that Sir Andrew has but two sons,” Sir Robert mused, tilting his head and, taking me by the shoulder, moving me beneath a sconce on the wall—no doubt so he could get a better look.
“I am often forgotten when sons are tallied at our moat house,” I replied quickly, desperately, staring wide-eyed at the sconce above me, filling my eyes with the tear-jerking heat and smoke of the torch. For some reason, my throat burned without aid of torch or smoke. And easily I burst into false sobs after the fire had stirred up the tears.
“My brothers keep me in the mews, Sir Robert. With the hunting birds!” I sniffed. His grip on my shoulder softened.
“If that’s so, they’ll answer for it soon, lad,” he declared—a puzzling statement, to be sure. I looked at him curiously. He turned away, addressed me awkwardly.
“Now compose yourself, Galen. You’re too big for tears.”
As we passed beneath an arch into another room and approached a wide staircase, my eyes followed up the steps to a landing surrounded by a marble railing and statues of hawks and of unicorns. Intricate metal cuckoos perched upon swings that hung from the ceiling of the keep, their moorings lost in darkness and in height. Suddenly a cuckoo whistled behind us. I turned to the source of the sound.
And saw a vision there on the landing, winding a metal bird.
Actually, it was a girl about my age, dressed in a simple white gown that a girl of almost any station—from princess to servant—might wear in comfort. It was obvious, however, that this one was unaccustomed to following orders of any kind. She walked the landing as if she owned it.
She had blond hair and fair skin, but even from where I stood I could tell that her eyes were dark, her cheekbones high like those of a Plainswoman. It made me wonder about her ancestry from the first, and I instantly believed she had gotten the best from both sides of her family.
The girl paid little attention to us, intent on fixing one of the cuckoos whose cuckoo had, evidently, ceased to function. With some tiny, glittering instrument, she inspected the head of the toy and made adjustments too small for me to see at the distance from which I stood.
“Tell the servants to set another place at the dinner table, my dear,” Sir Robert called up to the girl on the landing. “We have a guest.”
“You tell them,” the girl called down, attention still fixed on her business. “You’re heading in that direction.”
Sir Robert reddened for a moment, clenching his fists. Then he laughed, shook his head, and continued walking. I doubled my steps, walked alongside him.
“Your wife, sire?”
“My obedient daughter, Enid di Caela,” Sir Robert chuckled, as we walked up a small flight of stairs toward another mahogany doorway.
Enid? The pastry-baking, hefty Enid of my imaginings? Bayard had good reason to be downcast!
“Enid di Caela,” Sir Robert repeated, this time more quietly, less merrily. “Soon to be Enid Androctus.
“Ah, and here is one of your brothers!”
It took a moment for Sir Robert’s last statement to sink in. I was still wrestling with the idea that the Enid of fact far surpassed the Enid of my imaginings, still entangled in the blond hair, drowned in the dark eyes, as the poets might say. But when Alfric appeared from an archway ahead of us, it was all I could do to keep from turning and taking flight through the paneled and cuckooing hallways.
Chapter Thirteen
My brother was disturbingly untroubled, almost serene, when he met me in the long corridor of Castle di Caela, though I expect it puzzled Sir Robert that two long-lost brothers did not rush into a warm, fraternal embrace.
While Sir Robert escorted us back to our assigned quarters, I began to entertain the hope that something on the road had transformed my brother, had left him a wiser and more forgiving man than when I had left him waist-deep in Warden Swamp. As Alfric kept conversation polite, even friendly, I decided there could be worse things than sharing his rooms for the evening.
When he sprang upon me as the door closed, fully intent on throttling me, it was all I could do to utter feeble protest.
“Please, Brother! P-please! You’re killing me!”
This loud enough, I hoped devoutly, to call Sir Robert back. But no footsteps returned to the door. And all the while Alfric’s death grip tightened.
“This is it, little brother. This time all the bluster and promises and crying wolf is over on account of I am going to kill you. Going to strangle you dead for leaving me back there mired in Warden Swamp.”
“But what will Sir Robert s—” My voice was pinched into hisses and whistles.
Alfric’s grip slackened.
“You’re right, Weasel. If I was to do you in it could cause great harm to my prospects here.
“Even though you are not the favorite folks around here at the moment—you and your high and mighty Sir Bayard Brightblade, that is—it would not do me to fall into something as un-Solamnic as killing a brother, now would it? Specially since you are no more a danger to me, and you no longer have got what I want.”
He told me what he had learned about the tournament—of the lists and the sorrows and the cold power of Sir Gabriel Androctus, and Sir Robert di Caela’s rising impatience as the days wore on and no Bayard Brightblade showed. He straddled me and reveled in our delays.
“I would expect that it’s only Solamnic courtesy what keeps him from tarring and feathering the both of you and rolling you back to the Vingaard Mountains in a barrel.”