Myrren's Gift by Fiona McIntosh Read Free Book Online Page B

at first. Try though his caretakers might, they could not protect the sharp, highly intelligent four-year-old from absorbing the enormity of what was being gossiped about. If he valued his father’s praise, he worshiped his mother ten times as much. Although he had sensed her cool detachment from Morgravian society and its people—especially his father—Celimus also grasped that this aloofness did not extend to him. Celimus she loved with intensity. He was every bit her child. While his father was golden in looks, the son had her dark, exotic glamor. Olive skin and black lustrous hair meant Celimus was Adana all over again. She granted him his height was no doubt inherited from the King but that was all. Men should be tall, she had argued. For sovereigns she felt it was a prerequisite. She had no doubt that Celimus would be an imposing man in years to come—he was already an arresting child to look at. And with it came a bright and agile mind that she adored. Adana made good use of those early years, manipulating her son’s thoughts, trying to poison him against his father— the peasant , she called him—but not to much avail. It remained a failure of hers. The infant Celimus craved the attention of Magnus but she was relieved to note the King had neither time nor inclination to level much interest toward the boy. She hated the red-headed General even more and used his presence as a weapon to turn Celimus against the King.
    “He loves that Thirsk fellow more than us, child. See how they bend their heads together. Plotting.
    Always conniving.”
    Celimus had not understood the grown-up words then but he had grasped her meaning. She accused Thirsk of constantly filling his own coffers at the King’s expense; she laughed hard at the shy and reticent creature Thirsk had finally married. “Peasant for peasant!” she had spat at Celimus one day. Although he had thought Helyna Thirsk quite pretty, he was only a few years old, and so believed his mother must surely be right. And when she had finally seen the Thirsks’ first child, Adana had attacked the infant’s red hair, claiming it was the sign of a warlock. Magnus had overheard her snide comment and his reaction was the closest Celimus believed his father had come to striking his mother. His parents had hardly spoken after that. They had never behaved as a family might—eating together or playing together.
    Magnus was absent as a father, preferring his war rooms, his soldiers, the hunt, and other manly pursuits.
    But despite his caretakers striving to assure the boy that his majesty had little time for anything but running his realm, Celimus knew his father avoided him. He watched other nobles making time for simple pleasures with their families and his mother’s words rang true: his own father disliked him, hated them both in fact, and deliberately chose to evade all contact with his wife and his son.
    It hurt. And Adana made it her business to prey on her small son’s pain and turn it into her own weapon.
    Her machinations worked. The young Celimus hardened his thoughts; the changes were initially subtle—he no longer asked whether he might see his father before going to bed or whether the King might care to take a ride with him sometime soon. Then they became more apparent. One one occasion.
    Magnus had sent a message that he would be joining them for supper. Celimus was absent, claiming a stomach upset, but Adana knew better and she rejoiced in his shunning of the King.
    It was after the aggressive incident between his parents that Celimus felt compelled—and that he had right on his side—to openly reject his father. Watching the tall man’s anger stoke so fast had frightened him. His mother had fallen to the floor as if struck, though he knew his father had pulled the blow just in time. She had shrieked and writhed on the flagstones of that courtyard before rising to cast a final cold slur at the man she despised.
    Celimus remembered it well.
    “I would