The Heretic Kings by Paul Kearney Read Free Book Online Page B

pacing to look out of the tower windows. He pushed aside the iron grilles and stepped out on to the broad balcony. The city was a serried sea of roofs reaching out to the north, but he could glimpse the puffing smoke clouds from the casemates on the walls.
    “Here at last,” he said. The relief in his voice was a palpable thing.
    “Perhaps now you will sit a while,” a woman’s voice said.
    “Sit! How can I sit? How will I ever take my ease again, mother? I should never have listened to Abeleyn; his tongue is too renowned for its persuasiveness. The kingdom is on the brink of ruin, and I brought it there.”
    “Pah! You have your father’s gift for drama, Lofantyr. Was it you who brought the Merduks to the gates of Aekir?” the woman retorted sharply behind him. “The kingdom won a great battle of late and is holding the line of the east. You are Torunnan, and a king. It is not seemly to voice the doubts of your heart so.”
    Lofantyr turned with a twisted smile. “If I cannot voice them to you, then where shall I utter them?”
    The woman was seated at the far end of the tall tower chamber in a cloud of lace and brocade. An embroidery board was perched on a stand before her, and her nimble hands worked upon it without pause, the needle flashing busily. Her eyes flicked up at her son the King and down to her work, up and down. Her fingers never hesitated.
    Her face was surrounded by a deviously worked halo of hair that was stabbed through with pearl-headed pins and hung with jewels. Golden hair, shot through with silver. Earrings of the brightest lapis lazuli. Her face was fine-boned, but somehow drawn; it was possible to see that she had been a beautiful woman in her youth, and even now her charms were not to be lightly dismissed, but there was a fragility to the flesh which clothed those beautiful bones, a system of tiny lines which proclaimed her age despite the stunning green magnificence of her eyes.
    “You have won the battle, my lord King—the fight against time. Now you have a Pontiff to parade before the council and quell these murmurings of heresy.” She caught her tongue between her teeth for a second as the needle bored in a particularly fine stitch. “Unlike the other kings, you can show your people that Macrobius truly lives. That, and the storm which approaches from the east, should suffice to unite most of them under you.”
    She set aside her needle at last. “Enough for today. I am tired.”
    She stared keenly at Lofantyr. “You look tired also, son. The journey from Vol Ephrir was a hard one.”
    Lofantyr shrugged. “Snow and bandit tribesmen—the usual irritants. There is more to my tiredness than the aftermath of a journey, mother. Macrobius is here, yes; but beyond the city walls thousands upon thousands of Aekirians and northern Torunnans are screaming for succour, and I cannot give it to them. Martellus wants the city garrisons moved to the dyke, and the Knights Militant promised to me will now never arrive. I need every man I can spare across the country to hold down the nobles. They are straining at the leash despite the fact that I promised them the true Pontiff. Already there are reports of minor rebellions in Rone and Gebrar. I need trusted commanders who do not see opportunity in the monarch’s difficulties.”
    “Loyalty and ambition: those two irreconcilable qualities without which a man is nothing. It is a rare individual who can balance both of them in his breast,” the woman said.
    “John Mogen could.”
    “John Mogen is dead, may God keep him. You need another war leader, Lofantyr, someone who can lead men like Mogen did. Martellus may be a good general, but he does not inspire his men in the right way.”
    “And neither do I,” Lofantyr added with bitter humour.
    “No, you do not. You will never be a general, my son; but then you do not have to be. Being King is trial enough.”
    Lofantyr nodded, still with a sour smile upon his face. He was a young man like his