Froi of the Exiles

The room was suddenly quiet. The Princess was trembling, but shook her head and spoke as though rehearsing a speech. ‘We only say thanks if we feel gratitude and the Reginita does not believe –’

A fist came down on the main table. Froi saw her close her eyes and flinch.

‘Enough of the Reginita.’

Froi watched as Bestiano made his way towards their end of the table. Froi stood to step in the man’s way, but Gargarin pulled him back into his seat just as Bestiano dragged Quintana out of her chair by her hair and pushed her out of the room.

‘It has a greater effect on morale when the girl takes her meals in her chamber,’ Froi heard one of the ladies say. The others went back to their breakfast as though the incident had never taken place.

‘Are you happy now?’ Gargarin asked, quietly furious.

With a shaking hand, Froi picked up his tea and drank.

A little while later, he walked to her chamber, practising a sincere attempt to make amends. If he wanted to know more about her father’s whereabouts he’d have to try to make things right with her. A part of him also felt guilt. He imagined that Bestiano had the authority to give her a blasting worse than any Froi received from Perri. But when he arrived at her chamber, the door was locked.

‘Princess,’ he said, knocking. ‘Your Highness. Open up, I know you’re in there.’

There was no response. Froi entered the chamber he shared with Gargarin and opened the doors, walking out onto the balconette. It was a short distance between the two chambers and despite the depth of the gravina, it was an easy jump. Froi climbed onto the wrought iron of his balconette and leapt, landing comfortably on hers.

He looked inside the room, his hands ready to knock at the glass.

But he recoiled in horror.

Later, when he couldn’t get the image out of his mind, he tried to work out what had made him sickest. Was it the way Bestiano would trap her hand in his grip, stopping her from making shapes in the nonexistent shadows over his head? She didn’t look as though she was struggling, but there was something dead in her eyes, so unlike the squints and inquisition or the coldness that had followed Froi around since he first stepped foot in the palace.

He turned away, taking deep breaths of air.

Across the gravina in the godshouse, he saw someone standing at the window. But a moment later the man was gone.

Chapter 8

What would Lucian’s father have done? About Orly’s prized bull? And the Mont lads running riot? And the Charynites in the valley? And the wife he sent back? And the fact that everyone in the kingdom had an opinion of what Lucian of the Monts was doing wrong? What would he have done about the loneliness that woke Lucian each day before dawn?

Except this morning, when it was Orly’s neighbours who woke Lucian before daybreak to tell him about the bull running riot across the mountain.

‘Every night, Lucian. Every single night that blasted idiot of a bull gets out, and if I see it again, I’ll kill it,’ Pascal said when Lucian managed to pull the animal out of Pascal’s wife’s rose garden.

‘You’ll do no such thing, Pascal,’ Lucian said with much patience. ‘I’ll speak to Orly.’

Splattered with mud and bleary-eyed, Lucian dragged the bull back to Orly.

‘Do you honestly think I wouldn’t check and recheck the latch each night, Lucian?’ Orly said, as they studied the pen to determine how the bull could have escaped. ‘Do you honestly think this bull stood on his hind legs and unlatched the gate himself? Find the culprit and lock him up with that Charynite, or I’ll find him myself and cut off his legs so he’ll be running away from me on his stumps.’

‘You’ll do no such thing, Orly,’ Lucian said, looking from owner to bull. They strongly resembled each other and Lucian didn’t want to cross either of them. He waved to Orly’s wife, Lotte, hoping to make a dash for it, but Lotte wanted to stop and talk.

‘He’s awfully precious about that bull, Lucian,’ she said with a sniff, as they stood outside the cottage watching Orly sing soothing words to the bull. ‘He won’t even allow my Gert to breed with his Bert. Enough is enough, I tell him.’

Gert was Lotte’s cow and Lucian knew this because when both cow and bull went missing they would hear, ‘Gert, Bert, Gert, Bert,’ hollered in a singsong through the mountains at any time of the morning; Lotte’s high-pitched Gert followed by Orly’s grunting Bert.

‘Honest to our precious goddess, Lucian, if he doesn’t change his ways I’m going to pack up my things and go and live with your yata.’

‘You’ll do no such thing, Lotte,’ he said. ‘Orly wouldn’t know what to do without you.’

‘Fix this, darling boy,’ Yata said later, handing him a mug of hot tea. ‘Because if Lotte comes to live with me, I’ll pack up my things and move down into the valley with Tesadora and the Charynites.’

‘You’ll do no such thing, Yata.’

‘You know what I say,’ Pitts the cobbler said, as Lucian handed him a pair of boots to mend. Pitts waited for Lucian’s response and despite the fact that Lucian didn’t think a response was required, he responded all the same.

‘What do you say, Pitts?’

‘I say, it’s one of those thieving, stinking, gods-less Charynites down in that valley. Round them up, I say, and I’ll fix them all for you.’

‘I’ll do no such thing, Pitts,’ Lucian sighed. ‘And I think they have more gods than we can poke a stick at.’

Then there was the matter of the lads who snuck down the mountain half the night and were too tired to work for their ma and fa most the day. Lucian faced them all that afternoon and tried to look stern.

‘We want to keep an eye on Tesadora and the girls,’ his cousin Jory said. He was fourteen years old this spring, a thickset lad with a stubborn frown and the leader of the lads.

‘And what is it you do down there?’ Lucian asked. Jory was his favourite, and showed great promise as a fighter.

‘Make sure they don’t come up here and rape our women because theirs are so ugly,’ another cousin said, and the lads laughed.

‘Men don’t rape women because their women are ugly,’ cousin Jostien said, but there was a protest at his words. ‘That’s what my fa said! He says that inside their hearts and spirits they are nothing but little men who need to feel powerful.’

‘I’ll tell you what else about Charynite men is little,’ another called out and they all tried to outdo each other with their boasts about their own big ‘swords of honour’.

There was something about the lads and their words that made Lucian feel uneasy, but lads were lads and he walked away, firmly reminding them that work was not going to be done with all of them standing around.

Most days he went to see the Charynite, Rafuel. A calmer man he had never encountered, despite the circumstances of his imprisonment.

‘Can I at least have something to read?’ the Charynite asked.

‘Strangely, we don’t have many Charynite books on the mountain,’ Lucian said, sarcasm lacing his voice. ‘And we’re not here to make your life more comfortable.’

Usually he checked the prisoner’s shackles for infection around his wrist and ankle.

‘You don’t have someone else to do this?’ Rafuel asked. ‘One would think a Mont leader had better things to do.’

‘A Mont leader does have better things to do,’ Lucian murmured, not looking up from his task, ‘but every man and woman on this mountain who volunteers to check your shackles is usually armed with a dagger and my queen is very particular about who gets the pleasure of stringing you up if Froi doesn’t return, Charynite.’