Finnikin of the Rock

from around the cloister?'

Finnikin shook his head. 'Not as long as the queen is within those walls,' he said firmly. 'Tesadora will have to let them in soon. The queen's yata and the Mont people will want her with them for a short while before she returns home.'

'Her yata is with her now.'

'Lady Beatriss,' Finnikin said, trying not to let his frustration show, 'can you not see a problem with the fact that the queen's First Man and the captain of her Guard have to obtain information about her well-being from you?'

She gave him a piercing look. 'I do believe, Finnikin, that the queen would be happy to speak to you if you were to visit.'

'Has she made such a request?' he asked quietly

'Does she need to?' This time there was reprimand in her tone.

'Finnikin will speak to the queen soon,' Sir Topher said. 'After he follows his father's example and has his hair clipped and looks ... presentable.'

Finnikin stared at his mentor in disbelief, a stare that Sir Topher studiously ignored.

'It's what the people of Lumatere expect from the one they believe will bond with their queen,' Sir Topher continued.

'What?'

Sir Topher sighed. 'Finnikin, I know I can speak of such things in front of Lady Beatriss. The people of Lumatere will want the queen to choose a—'

The snarl that came from Finnikin stopped Sir Topher in his tracks. 'The people of Lumatere are trying to rebuild their lives, Sir Topher. The last thing they're thinking about is who the queen chooses to bond with.' Yet Finnikin knew it was a lie, for he had been asked a number of times during the past two weeks if the rumors were true.

'How wrong you are, Finnikin,' Lady Beatriss chided. 'The queen is everything to our people. She's the leader of our land. As a single woman she is vulnerable. When Lumatere celebrates our reunification, our people will expect her to be settled so she can carry on with running the kingdom. Ever since the word on Vestie's arm hinted a return, the talk has been of you.'

'And was I ever to have a choice in the matter?' He was furious, but Beatriss did not seem fazed.

Sir Topher looked exasperated. 'Finnikin, you have loved her from the moment you climbed that rock in Sendecane.'

'When she was a novice, not a queen.'

'Oh, I see.' There was disappointment in Lady Beatriss's eyes.

'I don't think you do, Lady Beatriss.'

'If you were king and she were a mere novice, would you have chosen her to be your queen?' she asked.

This time he could not lie. Not to Beatriss. 'Yes,' he said quietly.

'Yet the queen cannot choose you?'

Suddenly he felt as if he were eight years old and Beatriss was reprimanding him for tying Isaboe to the flagpole by her hair.

'If this is about power, then perhaps you are not the right person for our queen after all, Finnikin.'

'The prince of Osteria has expressed interest,' Sir Topher announced.

'I've heard he's a strapping boy,' Lady Beatriss responded pleasantly as she disappeared into the other room. Finnikin kept his hooded stare on Sir Topher, who yet again chose to ignore it and turned instead to Lady Beatriss as she returned with a large book in her hands. She placed it on the table before them.

'Here are the dead,' she said, opening to a page. 'Marked next to each name is how they died.' She turned to another page. 'Here are the arrests. Here are the attacks on our property, although we stopped recording them after the first two years.'

Finnikin pointed to the names marked in red ink.

She stared at him. 'Informants.'

'Traitors?'

She shrugged. 'Whatever it is they did or said kept them free from any type of punishment. I'm ashamed to say that the nobility were the worst. We could have done with Lord Augie and Lady Abian. And I would have imagined the same noble behavior from Lord Selric.'

'Your actions were beyond reproach, Lady Beatriss,' Finnikin said. 'Your name has often been praised these past weeks in my travels. You went beyond the duty of a citizen.'

'Circumstances present themselves, and at times we have no choice. I had no choice but to work for the good of the people. Perhaps if I had been presented with different circumstances, I would have taken the path of my fellow nobles.'

'How is it that you survived, Lady Beatriss, when all exiles believed you to be dead?' he asked gently.

'Perhaps Lady Beatriss would prefer not to speak of such a time, Finnikin,' Sir Topher said.

Finnikin held her gaze. 'My father mourned your loss for ten years.'

'Finnikin,' Sir Topher warned.

'The births,' she said quietly, leaving Finnikin's question hanging in the air. 'There are one thousand, nine hundred, and twenty-three of us, last count. It is hard to determine with the Forest Dwellers. There were some who survived, perhaps hidden by our people during those days. I have never seen them, but Tesadora has hinted of their existence in the woods beyond the cloister.'

'Yet Tesadora allowed you to be part of her world with the novices,' Finnikin observed.

Beatriss nodded. 'But she was secretive all the same. There were so few of them in the end that they trusted no one.' She leaned forward to whisper. 'We were very lucky to have her hide the novices of Lagrami, and later the young girls.'

Finnikin took her hand gently. 'The impostor king and his men are no longer in power. You have no need to fear. So we must learn to speak with loud voices rather than in soft whispers. That, I know, is what the queen wants.'

She nodded. 'The crops.' She turned another page. 'The days of darkness.' She pointed. 'The days of light.'

'Did that happen often?' Sir Topher asked.

She nodded. 'The first five years were the worst. Some weeks there was day after day of darkness and we feared the crops would fail and we would starve. Even the surviving Sagrami worshippers had no idea how to control it or what it all meant. The answers seemed to have died with Seranonna.'

She pushed the book across to Finnikin and stood to refill their cups. Sir Topher walked to the window and peered outside. 'Is that Gilbere of the Flatlands, Lady Beatriss?'

'My cousin, yes.'

'We studied together as children. Will you both excuse me?'

'Of course.'

Sir Topher left, and Finnikin began to copy the recordings from Beatriss's book into his own.

'It's because she returned to fulfill her mother's request to save me,' Lady Beatriss said after a while.

Finnikin put down his quill. 'Tesadora?'

Lady Beatriss nodded. 'She's very frightening when you first see her, isn't she?'

He smiled, abashed. 'She's half my size, so it might be slightly humbling for me to admit that.'

'Well, I will admit it for you,' Beatriss responded with a laugh. Then her face grew serious. 'Seranonna and I were locked in the same dungeon cell. The day before the curse, she was permitted a visitor. A novice from the cloister of Lagrami. The novice was there to give a blessing to the Sagrami worshippers so they could repent before death. I remember feeling ashamed to hear such piety coming from a novice of my order. But it was a deception. The novice was Tesadora, her hair shorn, dressed in the stolen robes of a Lagrami novice. She gave Seranonna a blessing in the language of the ancients and pressed into her mother's hand a potion concealed in a tiny vial. It was a substance that would render her mother unconscious; she would be dead to all who saw her. But Tesadora knew enough to be able to revive her.'

Finnikin paled. 'Seranonna gave the potion to you instead?'