Page 27 of Heart of Winter
The boy blinked at him – and then grinned, revealing gapped teeth.
The blond boy finally succeeded in tugging Bo back down into his chair with a muttered reprimand. “Don’t mind him, sir, he’s soft in the head.”
“Hey! Am not!”
“Why else would you ask that?”
A tussle broke out, and Oliver found himself grinning. Even if he’d never been one for that sort of roughhousing, he appreciated the honest show of temper, an insult said to someone’s face, rather than the den of vipers at Drakewell’s court.
A stoop-shouldered, scholarly-looking man with a white beard thumped into the room, and promptly whacked the edge of the table with his walking stick. The boys all jumped, startled, and faced forward, heads down meekly.
Oliver chuckled to himself, selected a few books, and went to climb up into one of the cushioned window seats, content to be hidden away and in the company of the best of friends: words.
The first volume he opened, squat, thick, and well-handled, was a biography of Erik’s grandfather, King Halfdan the Half-Blood. From the first page, Oliver realized he was dealing with a biographer with a clever tongue, and a heart for the dramatic, and he sunk down deeper against his fur pillow and went walking back through Erik’s lineage.
Halfdan’s grandfather, Rolf, had been born of an Aquitainian mother, and a father said to be a hulking brute of a man nearly seven-feet-tall, the heir to the Northern Úlfheðnar clan – the “wolf-shirts.” A fierce warrior, but one with a clear head for negotiations, and a tendency toward mercy, Rolf had been sent to Aquitainia to be educated, and, upon his return to Aeretoll, only then just beginning to design itself a true kingdom apart from the constantly-feuding clans of the North, one with a foot in each region, he’d begun the construction of the palace at Aeres, placing the ceremonial foundation stones himself, the mortar mixed with the blood of a new-killed reindeer for luck.
By the time Halfdan became king, Aeretoll had been firmly established as a sovereign kingdom, one which dealt with the heathens farther north, and the lords and scholars of the Southern continent with tough, but fair even-handedness. Aeretoll became a bridge between two disparate worlds, a place that gave evidence to the fact that the barbarians had at one point been the learned conquerors, and that they had now become a blending of two peoples, belonging to neither region.
Thinking them up-jumped and too proud, the Northern clans had warred with Halfdan for all of his life and beyond. It was Erik’s father, Frode, who’d finally brokered an uneasy peace, one still fostered by the annual Midwinter Festival journey north, where the King of Aeretoll shed his cloak of dignity and returned to his wolf-shirt roots for a span of seven days. Apparently, there was much axe-throwing, shirtless wrestling, ale-drinking, and feat-performing.
Oliver could admit that he’d never thought of it that way: the King of Aeretoll caught between two very different worlds, a part of both, comfortable in neither.
The biographer went on to extoll Halfdan’s many – no doubt well-padded – virtues, and ended with an image of the great king’s funeral pyre, his heir looking on as the flames licked up toward the stars, Prince – now King Frode’s heir, Herleif, at his side, father and son holding hands as the boy rested his little, golden head against his father’s hip.
Herleif must have died shortly after, Oliver thought, recalling what Birger had told him at breakfast.
Frowning to himself, Oliver set the book aside, stretched, and shifted his weight from one hip to the other, his legs all full of tingles from sitting too long. Beyond his enclave, he could hear the low murmur of voices, and wondered if the children were still at work, or if these were adult scholars turning pages with soft sounds, now.
He paged absently through a book of myths for a few minutes, but set it aside in favor of the red-leather cover that had been calling to him silently for some time:The Ancient Histories of the Drake Lords, and the Eventual Duchy of Drakewell.
When he opened the cover, he found an inked sketch of the same symbol that was embossed on the spine: a coiled, serpentine dragon, its jaws open, tongue protruding, its wings spread as if in flight.
“But why?” he murmured to himself. His whole life, the flying drake – a mallard, to be exact – had been the sigil of his house; had adorned their banners and flags and the knights’ spangled tourney tunics. He’d read all the history books that the library at Drake Hold possessed, and each one had made mention of the duchy’s many lakes, and ponds, and streams, gleaming like glass on hot summer evenings, the duchy itself named for the many, many ducks that resided there. He’d always found it charming, even if a duck hadn’t been the most awe-inspiring of animal mascots.
He turned the pages, and slowly felt his brows climb higher, and higher, and higher, until his forehead began to ache from it and he had to rub the tension from the skin there, eyes closed a moment.
He went back to the title page, just to check, because surely this was a work of fiction, and not a historical accounting of anything. Itcouldn’tbe.
After a moment, he realized that he was squinting to see, and that what little light touched the page in front of him came not from the window – now dark and velvet with the press of nightfall – but from candles in the library, soft and flickering. A library that had gone silent, and still. He heard the pop and creak of the logs in the fire and nothing else save his own breathing.
He’d been sitting here for hours. All afternoon and into evening. What time was it? Had he missed supper? Was Tessa all right? Had she come back from her trip to the village with Revna?
Oh, gods…
Wincing at the stiffness and soreness in his limbs, all of the morning’s overexertion in the yard made worse from sitting so long, he staggered to his feet and out of the alcove.
Only to find that the library was not, in fact, empty.
King Erik sat at the table where the children had been studying before, his back to the fire, elbows braced on the tabletop and temple resting against a fist as he read from the open book before him. Candlelight glinted off the beads in his hair, and the silver embroidery of his tunic.
Oliver stood still for a long moment, heart pounding, debating.
Should he apologize for his behavior today? No, he couldn’t bear to, even if it would have been the smart thing to do.
But he couldn’t just stand here. He would have to walk past the man at some point. So he squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and tried to walk as softly as he could toward the door.
He got halfway there before Erik’s head lifted, and his gaze pinned Oliver in place.
