Free The Falcon Throne (The Tarnished Crown Series) by Karen Miller

keen and sharp as a curved Sassanine dagger, Harald danced and dreamed days of glory for his son.
    Night. Star-pricked, meagrely moonlit, and crackling with frost. Hiding in a copse of saplings and shadows, Roric pulled his rabbit-lined cloak closer about his ribs and listened to the distant, derisive barking of foxes. Winter might be on the turn but there was life still in the stubborn old man, one cold, miserly fist clutching fast to Harald’s duchy. Waiting for the arranged signal from the castle, shivering, he breathed in ice and breathed out smoke.
    It’ll come. It must. Belden’s with us. Save a handful, everyone in Clemen will stand with us. Love for Harald is dried up like a sun-scorched puddle
.
    Where he stood, at the copse’s fringe, the deer-rutted, rain-pooled ground before him ran away in a long, lazy slope towards the castle’s bright green lawns. Harald owned twelve such strongholds, scattered across Clemen like thrown knucklebones. This one, fancied Heartsong by some long-dead duke’s lady, curtsied prettily to the surrounding countryside. No raised hackles here, no growling threats uttered in counterpoint to the singing of a naked sword. Heartsong was a fretworked white stone jewel. A woman’s castle, more manor house than fortress, lacking high, wide curtain walls and treacherous moat and impassable drawbridge. Argante’s castle, where she held court over wellborn ladies twice her age and older, and in triumph wielded Harald’s infant son as though the babe were a blade made of soft, swaddled flesh.
    And so he was, in a way. Poor noble brat. Poor Liam.
    Thinking himself safe here, safe everywhere, his monstrous arrogance a helm with its visor hammered shut, Harald debauched himself within Heartsong and without, never noticing, never
dreaming
, that—
    The damp crack of a twig breaking underfoot heralded someone’s approach. A familiar tread. A trusted friend, who’d taken a trembling, owl-eyed boy of seven as a page and guided his journey from childish tears to knighted manhood.
    “My lord Humbert,” Roric said, not turning, his voice pitched low. “You should remind Vidar that patience is an admirable virtue.”
    For all Humbert possessed his own castle and a wealth of land, and armour scratched and dented in scores of confrontations since the day he won his spurs, Harald’s most leaned-upon councillor had of late become yawn by yawn more fond of a close ceiling than an open sky. Not weak, never weak, but attached to his comforts, there was no denying. Padded beneath his heavy mail with fat these days; more than a linen-stuffed jambon. Even so, despite his changes, he still boiled with courage. Offended, as most were, by Harald’s greedy, vindictive ravagings, he was prepared to be called traitor, to risk his life that those ravagings might be ended for good and the duchy’s happiness restored.
    “Oh ho. So I’m Vidar’s squire, am I?” Humbert retorted, his own voice conspirator soft and teasing. “Come to bend my knee with querulous demand?”
    Turning briefly from Harald’s moonlit Heartsong, Roric clasped the older man’s shoulder with leather-gloved fingers. “No, my lord. If there’s knee-bending wanted it will be me in the mud, not you.”
    Humbert’s untamed, black-and-grey beard trembled as his jaw worked against emotion. “Don’t be a fool, Roric. Knee-bending? You? Never. You’re Berold’s grandson.”
    He couldn’t long look away from the castle, for fear he’d miss the signal. “So is Harald,” he said, turning back. “More truly than I am.”
    “Harald.” Humbert spat at their feet. “
That
for Harald. Your grandsire would never know him. I could believe yon Harald was a cradle-snatched changeling, so far from the great Berold has your cousin run his course. Bastard or not, Roric,
you
are Berold’s true heir. Not that bloat who wears the ducal coronet, breaking the heart of every man who should love him.”
    “So you’ve said, many times.