King's Dragon (Crown of Stars #1)

King's Dragon (Crown of Stars #1) Page 59

Frater Agius strode so quickly, Alain half running to keep up, that they soon passed the young men-at-arms strolling toward the castle. Had Alain been alone, the soldiers would have called him names or spit at him, but he had learned to endure such treatment because he understood that this, like weeping outside the church doors, was a penance, one he must bear without complaint. But now, because he was under Agius’ protection, they only looked at him and muttered.

They found Master Rodlin and Sergeant Fell in the castle yard. All was arranged as Frater Agius wished.

“Huh,” grunted Sergeant Fell when Agius took his leave. “You have gathered to yourself strange benefactors, my boy.” He exchanged a glance with Master Rodlin, who stood, hands folded, perfectly calm.

Alain wanted desperately to ask if these men, so long in the service of Count Lavastine, thought he was the count’s bastard son, but he dared not. He simply obeyed.

When it came time for Sergeant Fell to take the young men training as foot soldiers out into the fields, Alain went along as he had all winter. The snow had been light this year, and though the Mass of St. Herodia had not yet been celebrated, marking the thaw, the fields had been swept clean by the winter winds, leaving a plain, flat ground suitable for war games. And if the other young men hit him harder with their padded spearheads than was necessary, slammed him in the head with their bucklers, if they made him stand at the point in formation more often, where the risk was greatest, he did not mind it. Each bruise only made him stronger. Sergeant Fell nodded gravely and said, only once, that he was taking well to the drill.

Once they got to run ahead as beaters when Count Lavastine and Lord Geoffrey and the other lords went hunting with their falcons, though Alain had to run alongside the hounds to keep them from mischief with the riders. In the forest out past the old ruins the hounds ran a boar to ground, and Lord Geoffrey’s young son, born to his first wife, was granted the killing blow.

For one hour each day Alain sat with Frater Agius and laboriously relearned his letters and learned to recite by memory passages from the holy book. In the evenings he sat in the hall and ate and drank. He secretly slipped Lackling bits of fish, and he listened as poets sang, as musicians played, and watched as mimes entertained the count and his kin and guests with their dumb show.

After all that he would slip outside to his pallet in the stockade and huddle under the good wool blanket Aunt Bel had sent to him via a peddler in the autumn. Only in the kennels, alone with the hounds, could he be at peace—with the hounds, and with the Eika prince bound in his cage. The creature had weathered the winter’s cold without any sign that it disturbed his equanimity.

The Eika prince fascinated Alain. He was a beast, a savage creature who had almost ripped out the throat of one of the handlers who had come too near him at suppertime that first week of his captivity. The man had not died, but he had lost his ability to speak. The prince seemed to respect only the hounds, whom he surely recognized as like himself in their blunt fury.

It had become Alain’s task to feed him, once at noontide, once at evening bell. With the hounds as his snarling escort, Alain would bring a bowl of meat and gruel (the only food the Eika would eat), loosen one of his hands, and step back out of reach while he ate.

That was the curious thing. The prince had the most fastidious habits, both in eating and in caring for his person. He did not tear into his food, although with such small portions as Count Lavastine spared him, he must be hungry all the time. Rather, he ate daintily, with better manners than many of the nobles who sat at Count Lavastine’s table. If he must relieve himself (and he did this much less often, Alain judged, than any human person had to), he did so always in the same corner of the cage, as far as he could get in his chains. Alain took pity on him finally and cleaned out that corner every Jedday, since none of the other men would go near the cage. The prince watched him but never, even when a hand was loosened so that he could eat, tried to attack him. Perhaps it was only that Alain went everywhere inside the stockade with his retinue of hounds, who were certainly as fearsome and dangerous as the clawed, copper-scaled prince.

Perhaps, as he once overheard Master Rodlin mutter, the Eika devil knew by instinct a child spawned by an inhuman father. But Rodlin treated Alain fairly and never once hit him as he did Lackling or the other boys and young men who served under him if they made a mistake or did not do their chores quickly enough. But how could he be the child born of the mating of a human woman and the shade of an elvish prince at Midsummer’s Eve if he was actually the bastard son of Count Lavastine, gotten on a serving girl?