Born fourth, Fulk had outlasted his two older brothers, and seen a younger half Karronish sister born when he was eight.
But it was because he was the only child of her shortlived second marriage to the man she had loved best—besides her father—that the queen loved him so well. Too well, some said in whispers when they thought he wasn’t listening. He should never have been fostered out to his grandfather and grandmother in Lavas, but he had been raised there, and well loved there, and there he had fallen helplessly in love with a young woman not five years older than him who yet seemed so far out of his reach that he might as well have hoped to fly. And it wasn’t just calf love, a youth’s callow infatuation!
As they rode up, Chabi bent close and murmured one last comment near his ear.
“Your grandmother would never have asked permission. She just would have done it.”
He burned. But he said nothing.
“Fulk,” said the queen as he dismounted to greet her. She kissed him on either cheek, and turned to the phoenix. “You are come, but I suppose you will wish for drink and food, and perhaps a bath to wash away the dust of your travels.”
“So I would, Your Majesty, and be grateful for it, for I’ve nothing urgent to bring to your attention. I only wondered—” She hesitated, and he saw for the first time that she had a full heart and could not speak.
At last she swallowed and forced out a few words. “I meant to go to Lavas, but now … I am not so certain. I’ve been gone a long time.”
The queen nodded. She was scarred, but resilient. “You’ll be welcome there, and needed, I am thinking. My younger sister is a strong count, a good steward for her lands, but I fear she does not have the temperament to advise such an unruly schola. They need a firmer hand to keep them in line. You were always my mother’s best student.”
She blanched. “I am accustomed to—a different life, Your Majesty. I am not accustomed to biding in one place.”
The queen nodded. “Yet it is my command, phoenix. I want you to go to Lavas and become praeceptor at the schola there. It is what I need from you, right now. Captain, if you will.”
The captain gathered horses and soldiers and directed them toward the barracks. Henry made his courtesies and headed for the chapel from which Fulk heard a pair of handsome voices singing the nightly chain of psalms celebrating Mother and Son.
The queen took Fulk’s arm and drew him away. Chabi followed as they crossed the court and entered into the innermost chambers, reserved for the regnant, which looked out over a garden made invisible by night. The scent of flowers wafting in on the night breeze teased them. He yawned, feeling both drowsy and strangely on edge.
As if the tide had already turned, and he was caught in the rip current, being dragged out to sea.
“Sit down,” the queen said to him, but she remained standing, as did Chabi, and it was to the phoenix that she addressed her words.
“Let me say this quickly, or I will not say it at all. The boy is restless. He is much like his father, a quick mind and eager heart. His father studied for a year at Lavas, that very first year, and learned much and would have learned more but he was sent away at the order of Queen Theophanu—of blessed memory—to marry an Alban princess. It was necessary to preserve alliances and to throw up obstacles in the path of a string of rebellions. I see that now, naturally. He did as he was told. He was still grieving for Conrad’s daughter. I see that now.”
She turned away, hiding her expression in shadow. The lamps hissed. At the door, a Dragon guard, one of the Quman youths come in this year’s levy from the east, stepped in with a full pitcher of water and a flagon of wine. At last, she cleared her throat and turned back to them.
“Even so, when after many years his Alban wife died and he could come home, he asked again to join the schola at Lavas. But it happened that I had been made a widow recently, when Benedict died of the flux, poor man, and the margrave of Villain would see her family raised as high as she could, and naturally my father listened to her second only to my mother, and of course I was all too eager for the match to think of what it might mean to him—”
Again, her voice caught. She touched Fulk on the arm affectionately, but did not smile.
“And then, after all, he died within three years of our betrothal and marriage. I would not have his son be forced onto the path he was commanded to walk. I made no promises at that time, for you know, Berthold died so suddenly.”
It was a raw wound still, although Berthold Villam had died almost sixteen years ago.
“Liath always spoke fondly of Lord Berthold,” said Chabi.
The queen smiled sadly. “I thank you for saying so.”
In Lavas hall the nightly feasting was warm and boisterous. It had always been a lively place, and Fulk noted the contrast with the hushed corridors of Thersa. There had been a feast the first night they had come here, of course, so the locals might greet them and be presented in their turn, but after all the queen preferred a quiet sojourn, her attention fixed on a series of charters and capitularies and disputes brought to her attention from the string of royal estates and monasteries in this part of Wendar.
She sighed. Because he had spent his childhood and youth in Lavas, he did not know his mother well. It was usual to foster a child out in order to cement alliances, but he could not help but wonder how she could claim to love him so well and then send him away so early and for so long—and not even to. a distant ally, to foster an alliance, but to the home of her own beloved parents.
“I have had news today, from one of my Eagles. Constance has given birth to a healthy daughter, in Gent. If the infant lives, then she has borne two living children out of her own body, and Fulk takes a second step back from the succession.”
“May God bless child and mother both,” said Chabi, and Fulk echoed her, although he scarcely knew his older sister and had not spent more than a month altogether in her company in his entire life.
The queen took up a poker as if wielding a sword and stirred the coals on the hearth until they flickered into flame. Two braziers heaped with coals also battled the growing autumn chill.
“I am weary, phoenix,” she continued. “I have two husbands dead and the third not at all to my taste despite the importance of the treaty and the child we conceived between us. I do not wish this on my son. I will not put on him the burden that was given onto me. I want him to have what his father could not. If he so chooses.”
Suddenly the room was too hot. Fulk was flushed, heart galloping. But the queen’s grave expression gave him pause.