“But Prince Sanglant was conceived and borne to give King Henry the right by fertility to reign. Not to rule after him!”
“Henry must give him legitimacy, but he cannot simply confer it upon him as he—and I—conferred legitimacy upon you. The princes of the realm will not stand aside and watch a half-human bastard become regnant, no matter how respected a war leader he is. Nay, he’s scarcely better than a dog at times now.” He nudged Ardent’s corpse with his shoe, then looked surprised and rubbed his toe. With a frown, he touched the hound’s ears and with that same hand wiped away tears before turning back to his son. “Which is why the prince seeks to bring me into his circle by showing me such marked favor. He must cultivate powerful allies, and he must marry well.”
“Someone like Tallia.” Heat flushed Alain’s skin and scalded his tears away.
“Yes. Now that you are married to Tallia, no one will remember that you were once a bastard. I believe that Henry will send Prince Sanglant to Aosta. It is what I would do in his place, and Henry is a strong and cunning king.” He whistled the dogs to heel. “Come. Let us lay poor Ardent to rest.”
They made a solemn procession: the count, his heir, their servants, and the six black hounds. It took six men to carry the corpse on a litter, whose woven branches had to be reinforced twice over before it could take the weight of the dead hound.
Servants had gone ahead to dig a grave outside the lower ramparts. Robins hunting for worms along the banks of newly-turned earth fluttered away as the funeral procession came up beside the open pit. The men carrying the litter set it at the lip of the grave and heaved up one side to roll the body out. The corpse did not budge until they hoisted the litter almost perpendicular, faces strained and backs sweating, and then the body tumbled down. It hit dirt with an audible thud.
Alain winced. Ai, Lady, what a strange death had overtaken her! The hounds snuffled around the upturned earth, but they seemed not to recognize the remains which lay in the grave as those of their sister and cousin. She no longer smelled of the pack.
A space chipped into the bank of soil as the servingmen began to fill in the grave. Clumps of dirt rained down, drowning her, as if sorrow could be buried together with the corpse of a loved one. The patter fell like hailstones. Somewhere, in the distance, he heard a horse galloping off down the southward road. He smelled the perfume of soil, roots and earth and crawling things intertwined. A worm wiggled out of the unforgiving stare of the sun where it had been upended by the grave-digging and slid away into a heap of moist earth.
The fragrance engulfed him, made his head spin….
He smells blood and cautiously approaches the tumble of boulders. Tenth Son of the Fourth Litter lies splayed in death, limbs bent at awkward angles, throat ripped clean and one arm torn off. The pebbles sprayed everywhere, scuffed ground, moss torn into scraps all around the bloody soil might as well be signs recording in their ephemeral writing the course and outcome of the duel. By next summer, after winter scours the earth clean, no one will be able to trace in this arena that one fought and the other died.
He grips one copper-skinned shoulder of the corpse and rolls it over to reveal the back of the neck: The braid is shorn free. He touches the braid now coiled around his right arm. After he cut it off Second Son, he bound it to his own arm as both trophy and proof, just as one of the other brothers now carries the cut braid of Tenth Son in like manner. Where is that brother now?
He hears a scuff, and the wind shifts to bring him the whisper of a girdle shifting along thick flanks as someone steps stealthily toward him behind the cover of rocks. That quickly, he bolts.
That he is slender makes him swift. Fourth Son of the Ninth Litter thunders after him, but his vast girth makes him as slow as he is brutishly strong. This brother could rend him limb from body with a casual yank—as he did to Tenth Son.
Fifth Son gauges distance and speed and, like lightning forking, veers right to sprint for Lightwoven River, where his second trap waits.
“Hai! Hai! Hai! Coward and weakling!” howls Fourth Son.
He minds it not but keeps running, although he slows to a lope, knowing that Fourth Son cannot catch him even with a burst of speed. He need only stay far enough ahead to be free of that overpowering grip and yet close enough that Fourth Son will keep after him rather than give up to go hunt one of the others.
River gravel spins under his feet. He leaps for the narrow footbridge that spans the rushing waters here where they funnel toward the cliff and the great spill of Lightfell Waterfall. The planks sway dangerously under him; he feels the weakened ropes creak and can almost smell the strands fray further.