The Queen’s Resistance

“Are you alone? Where are your parents?”

The boy prepared to spit again, but I pulled him from the back of the wardrobe, guiding the lad to sit on the saggy bed. His clothes were in tatters, his feet bare, one still bleeding. He couldn’t hide the agony on his face when he walked on it.

“Did you hurt yourself today?” I asked, kneeling to gently lift his foot.

The child hissed but eventually let me examine his wound. The glass was still in his foot, weeping a steady trickle of blood.

“Your foot needs stitches,” I said. I released his ankle and continued to kneel before him, looking into a pair of worried eyes. “Hmm. I think your mother or father will be missing you. Why don’t you tell me where they are? I can take you to them.”

The boy glanced away, crossing his lanky arms.

It was as I suspected. An orphan, squatting in the ruins of Brígh.

“Well, lucky for you, I know how to stitch wounds.” I stood and slipped my travel satchel from my shoulder. I found my flint and sparked some of the old candles to life in the chamber, then withdrew a woolen blanket and my medical pouch, which I never traveled without. “Why don’t you lie down here and let me tend to that foot?”

The boy was stubborn, but the pain must have worn him down. He settled back on the wool blanket, his eyes going wide when he saw my metal forceps.

I found my small vial of stunning herbs and dumped the remainder into my flask of water.

“Here. Take a drink. It’ll help with the pain.”

The boy carefully accepted the mixture, sniffing it as if I had sprinkled in poison. Finally, he relented and drank, and I waited patiently for the herbs to begin to work their numbing effect.

“Do you have a name?” I asked, propping up the wounded foot.

He was silent for a beat, and then whispered, “Tomas.”

“That’s a good, strong name.” I began to carefully extract the glass. Tomas winced, but I continued to talk, to distract him from the pain. “When I was a lad, I always wanted to be named after my father. But instead of Kane, I was named Aodhan. An old family name, I suppose.”

“I thought you said your name was … C-Cartier.” Tomas struggled to pronounce the Valenian name, and I finally pulled out the last of the glass.

“So I did. I have two names.”

“Why would a man”—Tomas winced again as I began to clean the wound—“need two names?”

“Sometimes it is necessary, to stay alive,” I replied, and this answer seemed to appease him, for the boy was quiet as I began to stitch him back together.

When I finished, I gently bound Tomas’s foot and found him an apple in my satchel. While he ate, I walked about the chamber, looking for any other scrap of blanket that I might sleep with, for the night’s chilled air was flowing into the room through the broken windows.

I passed my parents’ bookshelves, which still held a vast number of leather-bound volumes. I paused, remembering my father’s love of books. Most of them were moldy now, their covers stiff and rippled from the elements. But one slender book caught my interest. It was drab in comparison to the others, whose covers were exquisitely illuminated, and there was a page sticking out at the top. I had learned that the most unassuming of books typically held the greatest of knowledge, so I slipped it beneath my jerkin before Tomas could see me.

No other blanket could be scrounged up, so I eventually conceded to sit against the wall by one of the candles.

Tomas rolled around in the wool blanket, until he looked more like a caterpillar than a boy, and then sleepily blinked at me.

“Are you going to sleep against the wall?”

“Yes.”

“Do you need the blanket?”

“No.”

Tomas yawned, scratched his nose. “Are you the lord of this castle?”

I was surprised by how I wanted to lie. My voice sounded odd as I replied, “Yes. I am.”

“Are you going to punish me, for hiding here?”

I did not know how to respond to that, my mind hung upon the fact that the boy thought I would punish him for doing all that he could to survive.

“I know I was wrong to throw pebbles in your face, milord,” Tomas rambled on, his brow wrinkled in fear. “But please … please don’t hurt me too badly. I can work for you. I promise I can. I can be your runner, or your cup bearer, or your groom, if you like.”

I didn’t want him to serve me. I wanted answers from him. I wanted to demand, Who are you? Who are your parents? Where do you come from? And yet I had no right to ask such of him. These were answers that would be won by trust and friendship.

“I’m sure I can find a task for you. And as long as you are on my lands, I will protect you, Tomas.”

Tomas murmured a sigh of gratitude and closed his eyes. Not a minute passed before he was snoring.

I waited a few moments before withdrawing the book from my jerkin. I gently leafed through the pages, tickled that I had randomly chosen a book of poetry. I wondered if this had been my mother’s, if she had held this book and read by the window years ago, when a page fluttered loose from the leafs. It was folded, but there was a shadow of handwriting within it.

I took the parchment, let it unfold in my palm, delicate as wings.

January 12, 1541

Kane,

I know we both thought this would be for the best, but my family cannot be trusted. While you were gone, Oona came to visit us. I think she has grown suspicious of me, of what I have been teaching Declan in his lessons. And then I saw Declan yanking Ashling around by her hair in the courtyard. You should have seen his face as she cried, as if he enjoyed the sound of her pain. I am afraid of what I see in him; I think that I have failed him in some way, and he no longer listens to me. How ardently I wish it were different! And perhaps it would be, if he could live with us instead of being with his parents in Lyonesse. Oona, of course, was not even surprised by his behavior. She watched her son yank our daughter around, refusing to stop him, and said, “He’s only a lad of eleven. He’ll grow out of such things, I assure you.”

I can no longer go through with this—I will not use our daughter as a pawn—and I know you would be in agreement with me. I plan to ride to Lyonesse and break Ashling’s betrothal to Declan at dawn, for it is I who must do this, and not you. I’ll take Seamus with me.

Yours,

Líle

I had to read it twice before I felt the bite of the words. Kane, my father. Líle, my mother. And Ashling, my sister, betrothed to Declan Lannon. She had only been five then, as this letter was written mere months from the day she was killed. What had my parents been thinking?

I knew the Lannons and the Morganes were rivals.

But I never imagined my parents had been at the origin of it.

My family cannot be trusted, my mother had written.

My family.

I held the letter to the candlelight.

What had she been teaching Declan? What had she seen in him?