Chapter 2

Katrin hummed to herself, then played the same tune on her harp before marking it down on the sheet of paper before her. While she hummed the next few notes, Shavala came into the room and greeted her.

“Back to trying to write a song?” the elven woman asked.

“Now that my fingers aren’t constantly frozen, I figured I should. I just can’t think of the lyrics. I’ve finally got two decent melodies, but they’re not good enough to stand by themselves. I need to put words to them, and I just can’t come up with any.”

“What sort of songs?”

“One sounds almost heroic, the other is sort of sad. I tried to write something about Fergus for the sad one, but what can I say? He died when a tree branch hit his head after the snow beasts broke our spear trap. I can’t put that in a song. He deserves better.”

Shavala bit her lower lip as she thought. “Why not write about his life rather than his death?”

Katrin considered that. The leader of the Jol’s Brook refugees had been a decent person and a hard worker, a man who was just trying to get by in a situation that kept growing steadily worse. He wasn’t some great hero out of legend, but then, he didn’t have to be. He was what the refugees had needed at the time. Maybe she could work with that somehow—a requiem rather than a lament. He deserved to be memorialized. She just hoped he wouldn’t mind if she was the person to do it.

“I’ll try that,” she said. “What have you been up to?”

“I went to see the horses.”

“How are they doing?”

“Socks and Dot want to leave. They’re tired of being in the same place for so long. The others are happy enough—they’ve got plenty to eat, the stable is warmer than outdoors, and the stable boys are exercising them every day.”

Katrin nodded. “I wonder if Sarette has a horse.”

“Are you thinking of giving her Duchess?”

“That’s why we brought her—in case we needed another,” Katrin said. Duchess had been her own mount for the ride from Circle Bay to Tyrsall. They’d sold the other extra animals from that trip, but Katrin had kept her as a spare, though she herself usually rode Flower, the mule Corec had bought for her the day after they’d met. “Though I suppose, even if Sarette’s already got a horse, Nedley still needs one.”

“Either way, I’m sure Duchess will be happy. She’s been feeling left out.”

Katrin laughed. “I thought you could talk to animals but they couldn’t talk back to you?”

“You can learn a lot from their body language. Horses are very expressive if you know what to look for.” Shavala glanced out the window to check the position of the sun. “Isn’t it time for you to go downstairs?”

“I don’t know if it’s worth the bother. Yesterday, I only made six coppers for the whole afternoon.”

“You get a free room, too,” Shavala pointed out.

“I suppose, but it’s still not much.” Despite her words, Katrin gathered up her harp and her flute.

There weren’t many inns in Snow Crown, and they were mostly frequented by outside visitors and traders rather than locals. The stormborn themselves rarely left the mountains, so they seldom had need for temporary accommodations. This particular inn was small, and Katrin and her friends took up half the rooms. While the music had attracted others to come inside, business had been slow.

“Maybe if you ask him again, he’ll let you play in the evenings,” Shavala said.

The innkeeper did good business at night, mostly among Snow Crown’s tiny community of foreigners, but he didn’t allow music after the sun went down. He made more money selling food than ale, so he focused on moving patrons in and out rather than having them linger around for hours.

The city had plenty of taverns that allowed minstrels to play, but the customers were almost all stormborn. Katrin had visited two different places, but with the looks of surprise she’d received from everyone in the room, she hadn’t felt comfortable asking for work. The stormborn preferred their music to be in their own language, which she didn’t speak, and she’d only learned a few of their songs so far.

“No, it’s not worth it,” she said. “We’ll be gone in a day or two, and I’ll do better once we get back to Tyrsall. I don’t know about the trip to Cordaea though. Maybe I should stay in Tyrsall while everyone else goes.”

“What? Why wouldn’t you come with us?”

“I won’t be able to work there at all. Bobo says they don’t even speak trade tongue; it’ll be like here but worse.”

“The others won’t care about that,” Shavala said. “We’ll just pay for our rooms the normal way.”

Katrin sighed. “I just feel so useless compared to everyone else. What am I contributing?” It was the first time she’d spoken out about the concerns that had been building up in her mind over the past few months.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not like you or the others. You’ve got your bow and your magic, Treya can punch a man hard enough to knock him out, Ellerie casts spells. And now there’s Sarette—Corec and Boktar already trust her to fight alongside them. What do I do? I’m no help in a fight.”

“You’ve helped before. You stopped two of the snow beasts.”

“I sang to them and made them fall asleep. It’s not the same thing. You hit them with lightning.”

Shavala stared into the distance. “I wish I hadn’t. It’s good that we can defend ourselves, but being able to kill someone ... It shouldn’t have been necessary. Why do you feel like this now? When you killed that man in Circle Bay, you were sad for days.”

“I don’t know. Seeing Sarette jump into the fight like that ... She’s the sort of person Corec should be recruiting, not me. He cast the binding spell for her on purpose, but for me, it was an accident.”

“It was an accident for the rest of us too, but he still spends most of his time with you.”

“That’s different,” Katrin said, allowing herself to smile. “I’m not worried about my relationship with him; I just feel like I’m not contributing enough. If I stay in Tyrsall while you’re gone, I could support myself, plus make enough money to get us started in Four Roads or wherever we end up.”

Shavala frowned. “We could be away for half a year, maybe more. You can’t stay by yourself for that long.”

Katrin hadn’t considered how long the trip would take. Circle Bay might be better than Tyrsall if she didn’t want to be alone, but she wasn’t ready to see her brother and uncle again yet. “Well, maybe I’ll go, but I wish I could do more to help. My singing didn’t work on the red-eyes.”

“The red-eyes shouldn’t be a problem now that Treya knows how to deal with them.”

“See? That’s what I’m talking about. She can do things I never knew were possible. You all can, except for me. All I can do is sing.”

“Do you remember what Yelena said about wardens and their bondmates? One person’s strength compensates for another’s weakness.”

“But I don’t have a strength.”

Shavala shrugged. “Sometimes you sing to get us free rooms, sometimes you make snow beasts fall asleep, sometimes you cook or gather firewood. Not everything has to be about magic or killing.”

The royal guards bowed as Rusol approached. He ignored them, passing through the archway that led to the palace’s inner quarters, followed by Yassi, Kolvi, and Samir. Kolvi peeled away wordlessly when they passed the corridor leading to her apartment, and soon they reached another pair of guards outside the royal family’s quarters.

Rusol paused there and looked back at Samir. “It’ll likely be weeks before we hear anything, but I’d appreciate it if you remained in Telfort while we wait.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” his old friend said with a bow. He usually remembered to follow protocol when others were watching.

“Have a pleasant evening, Yassi,” Rusol said to Samir’s sister, while giving her a look of warning. She’d been acting stranger than usual on their trip to Northtower. If she wasn’t careful, Samir might grow suspicious.

She stared at him expressionlessly with those dark eyes of hers until he passed through the double doors to his family’s private domain.

His manservant was there waiting for him. “Your Highness,” the man said with a bow. “Welcome back. Would you like me to have the cooks make up a meal for you? Or perhaps you’d prefer a bath? Fresh clothing?”

“Draw a bath for me, but first, I’d like to see my father. Where is he?”

“His study, Your Highness.”

“I’ll go speak with him now. Start that bath, and see to it that someone is supervising the servants unloading our things from the carriage.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

The man left the room, and Rusol proceeded to his father’s study, surprised to find his mother Sharra—his father’s concubine—there as well.

“Mother, Father, I’ve returned from Fort Northtower.”

“So I can see,” King Marten said. “What did you find out? Is Leonis dead? Is he the one that killed Rikard?”

Rusol sprawled on one of the chairs facing his father’s desk. “I doubt he was directly involved, but he may have known about it. He’s more dangerous than I thought, though. He claims to be Torwin Larse.”

Marten leaned forward in his chair. “Torwin Larse? Which one? Our family hasn’t used that name in over two hundred years.”

“Torwin the First.”

Sharra drew in a sharp breath.