Royal Bastards Read online

  Then I threw open my door and found my father in my room, staring silently out my window, his thin hands folded neatly behind his back.

  “Ah!” I startled, then pulled the door shut behind me. “Father! I didn’t…I wasn’t expecting…”

  He turned to me, his head cocked slightly to the side. He was already dressed for the feast, wearing a black tunic that clung to his tall, narrow frame. His brown hair hung straight at his shoulders, and you could only make out the faintest silver strands starting to appear in his neat beard. A narrow gold chain lay across his collarbone with clasps on each shoulder, and at the center of it dangled a golden medallion with an eagle emblazoned on it: the crest of the High Lord of the Western Province. “Hello, Tillandra,” he said.

  “Hi!” I blurted out, my eyes darting wildly around the room. If I’d known he was going to come by, I would have at least gotten it ready. It wasn’t just that my bed was unmade or that my clothes were all over the floor. It was how obvious it was that I didn’t spend any time here. My desk was a mess of dusty papers, stacks of uncompleted assignments for Headmaiden Morga. The walls were covered with keepsakes I hadn’t touched in years: a wooden mask from the time my father took me to Bridgetown, a pinwheel from a harvest festival three years ago, a wooden sword from back when Jax and I would play Warriors and Zitochi with the Dolan brothers. It looked like a child’s room. A child who’d forgotten it.

  “You were out,” my father said drily. “I was waiting for you.”

  “I was…um…” I scrambled for a plausible excuse. Bathing? I was too dry. Riding? I was too clean. Studying? No one would ever believe that.

  “You were out getting into trouble with that half brother of yours,” my father said, his disdain for Jax barely concealed.

  I looked down at my feet, cheeks burning. “What can I help you with?”

  He walked toward me slowly, stiffly, his face unreadable. My father was always a calm, serious man, never rising to anger or showing any fear. I’d spent hours trying to analyze a memory of his face, trying to find the real expression behind the stern front, hoping to crack it for just one smile. “I know that you have been removing yourself from courtly life lately. That you have become distant here, preferring the company of the servants.”

  “I…I may have skipped a few lessons here and there, but—”

  “I’m not chastising you, Tilla,” he said sharply, and I decided it’d be best to shut up and let him talk. “I’m saying I don’t blame you. I know you and I were once much closer. And I know you’re smart enough to understand why that had to end. You know our laws.”

  I nodded. I’d heard that in the other Provinces of Noveris, bastards were treated differently, but out in the West, the laws were clear. Each Lord could take exactly one unlawfully born child as the House bastard. This child would be raised in the castle but separate from the other children, alongside the family, but not part of it. At any moment, the Lord could legitimize the bastard as a rightful child, or disown them altogether. The reasons for this were coldly practical: kids died, wombs went barren, and a Lord always needed an heir. Jax liked to call us “noble spares.”

  “I married Lady Evelyn Yrenwood because I needed her father’s armies to keep the peace,” my father continued. “I had heard it said she could never have children, but those rumors were wrong. The laws of the Old Kings dictate that her daughters are my rightful heirs. The laws dictate that you must always come after them. The High Lord of the West must uphold the old laws, even when he would choose not to. That’s the cost of power. That’s the burden. We’re all bound by our roles.”

  I nodded again, but less certainly. What was he saying? That he only married Lady Evelyn because he had to? That he wanted to legitimize me but couldn’t because of the laws? That he really did love me as a daughter?

  No. Couldn’t be.

  “Do you know why the royal family is visiting us?” he asked. That was a subject change if I’d ever heard one. I struggled to keep up.

  “As part of her education, Princess Lyriana must visit all four Provinces,” I said, happy to know the answer to this one. Like everyone else in the castle, I’d been gossiping about the Princess’s visit for months. “She grew up in the city of Lightspire, so she knows the Heartlands, obviously, and she’s already visited the Eastern Baronies and the Southlands. That just leaves us.”

  “That’s why the Princess is here, yes,” my father said. “But why is the Archmagus here with her?”

  I stared at him blankly. To protect the Princess? To tour the land? Something about taxes?

  “He’s here as a show of force. To remind us of our place. He’s here so we know just how quickly the King could tighten his grip on us, if we so much as threatened to wriggle out.”

  “Oh,” I said. I knew plenty of Westerners were unhappy with being part of the Kingdom, of course. Once the old-timers down in the Servants’ Quarters got a few pints of beer in them, they’d start cursing the royal tax collectors and singing ballads about the Golden Age and telling dirty jokes about Lightspire priests. And I heard the stories that came in, about those rebels who called themselves Rattlesnakes, ambushing caravans from the Heartlands and smashing the Titan shrines dotting the roads. But I’d never thought that was a big deal, just some angry people and the grumblings of old fogeys. I’d always thought most people in the West had accepted King Leopold Volaris of Lightspire as our rightful ruler. Was I just sheltered? Were things much worse than I’d thought?

  “I found this on your desk,” my father said. He reached into a pocket in his tunic and held something out, something small and golden that sparkled in the sunlight. My stomach plunged with embarrassment as I recognized it: a thin golden necklace with a pendant of an elderbloom blossom. I’d bought it from a traveling Heartlands merchant a week ago, who swore up and down they were all the rage in Lightspire. I never bought fancy jewelry, but that stupid merchant had put the idea in my head that I’d be meeting the Princess, after all, and if she saw my necklace and liked it, well, that was the first step to becoming friends, and could I imagine being friends with the Princess?

  It had seemed so plausible then. But now, staring at the necklace in his hands, my cheeks burned. “I just…I thought…This merchant, he was really…”

  My father spared me any further blubbering by ignoring me altogether. “Have I ever told you the story my grandfather told me? About the day the Great War ended? The day we surrendered?” I shook my head, because of course he hadn’t. My father never told me anything. “My grandfather was just a little boy, five years old. And his father, Albion Kent, was the King of the West. The last of the Old Kings.” His voice was strange, distant. “It was right here, in the Great Hall of Castle Waverly, where Albion Kent bent the knee to the King of Lightspire, where he tossed off his crown and put on the chains of the High Lord. My grandfather was there, hiding behind my mother’s skirt, watching his own father destroy the Kingdom our family had ruled for centuries. There were riots that night, riots all across the West, angry mobs that attacked the castle and had to be put down by the King’s mages, our new protectors. ‘The West will never forget,’ the people yelled as they died. ‘The West will never bow.’ When my grand-father told me this story, there were tears in his eyes.” My father tossed the necklace back onto my desk. “And now my own daughter wears the Volaris sigil.”

  No words came to me, partially because I was so mortified, but mostly because I couldn’t understand what was happening. My father was talking like one of those old-timers, but nothing he’d ever said before had even hinted he felt this way. He defended the king’s tax collectors and quelled any talk of rebellion. He made sure all captured Rattlesnakes were publicly hanged. He even let a visiting Lightspire priest set up a Titan shrine in the old crypts, something that I knew made many of the servants unhappy. Had I been that wrong about him?

  “The West has never fit well in the Kingdom. We were the last Province to bow, and the one that went down fighting. Our people are p
roud and free. We don’t sit well beneath a gilded throne. We never will.” My father let out the softest chuckle. “You might even say we’re the Kingdom’s bastard. Do you understand?”

  “Of course,” I replied.

  “The next few days will be incredibly important, Tilla. Change is coming. Tremendous change. And with it, tremendous danger.” He turned back to me, his stern green eyes piercing mine, like he was trying to see right through me. “When the time comes, I’d like you to help me. I’d like you to stand by my side, no matter what happens. Can I count on you?”

  “Of course, Father,” I said, and meant it with every bit of my heart.

  He took a step toward me, and I thought he might actually embrace me, or kiss me on the forehead like he used to when I was a little girl. Then he hesitated, stopped himself, and with a sad nod, turned to the door. “I’ll see you at the feast?”

  “Definitely.”

  I swear, for one second, the corners of his mouth twitched, giving just the barest hint of a smile. “Good,” he said.

  He shut the door. I stared at it for a moment, then collapsed onto my bed.

  What in the frozen hell had that been about? My father had actually seemed to be saying he cared about me? And then all that stuff about the West and change and standing by his side? What did he know that he wasn’t telling me? The way he’d talked, it was almost like he was sympaHthetic to the Rattlesnakes…but that couldn’t be right. The rebels hated him. They called him the King’s lapdog. They—

  I squished the thought. I wasn’t going to let myself get caught up speculating about the real meaning of my father’s words. I didn’t have time for that.

  I had a dress to get into.

  CASTLE WAVERLY HAD ONE OF the most beautiful Great Halls in all the West, a cavernous stone chamber bigger than some Houses’ whole keeps, and tonight it looked better than ever. Dozens of chandeliers sparkled overhead, their multicolored inlaid Sunstones casting the whole room in a rainbow of light. The tables were covered in imported silk cloths, far too fancy for the drunken Lords spilling wine on them, and the redwood floor was so polished you could do your hair in it. Oil paintings hung on the walls in golden frames, depicting generations of the Kent family, from my father and his father through all the Old Kings, all the way back to the grizzled pioneers who’d first crossed the Frostkiss Mountains to settle this wild land.

  Getting dressed had taken me forever, so I got to the feast a good half hour late. This was the most full I’d ever seen the Great Hall. The Western Province was divided among fifty Houses, and it looked like all their Lords and Ladies were here with their retinues, the tables packed shoulder-to-shoulder, and the party was already in full swing. A quartet of singers stood on a rounded platform, their joyful voices belting the bouncy (and surprisingly filthy) “Lady Doxley’s Garland.” Servants roamed among the tables, carrying glistening silver trays with rows of spiced oysters and braised salmon and minced lamb wrapped in spinach leaves. At all the tables, the Lords of the West drank and shouted. Amazingly, Lord Collinwood was already passed out, his bushy beard soaking in his beet soup.

  The biggest surprise was at the very front of the room, near the entrance. There, on the inset stone shelf that normally housed the crowns of the Old Kings, sat twelve golden statues with blank smiling faces and glistening jewels for eyes. They were from the Titan shrine the priests had set up, and they’d been moved here to, I don’t know, make them seem more important, I guess?

  I would’ve loved to sneak in through the back, but courtly etiquette demanded all guests, even bastards, enter through the Great Hall’s main entrance, to pay their respects to the host’s table. There was my father, seated at the center, with Archmagus Rolan seated opposite him. There was no sign of the Princess, which was weird, but Lady Evelyn was on my father’s right and my three half sisters on his left. They looked absolutely adorable, their blond hair curled, their little dresses sparkling. What I’d give to be sitting in their place.

  I made my way across the Hall, squeezing past servants and guests. The Lords of the West had mostly seated themselves by region. One table had the pale, dark-haired Lords of the swamps along the southern coast; another had the Lords of the northern quarries, ruddy-faced and bearded; a third sat the coastal Houses that ran along the shore to the south of Castle Waverly, their wealthy Lords looking decadent in striped furs from the K’olali Isles. A squire from one of those Houses tried to grab my ass as I walked by his table, so I gave him a swift kick in the shins; that got a big laugh from everyone at his table, including the triple-chinned Lord Darren. As their laughter shook the Hall, I shoved past the last gaggle of guests. There, at the very back of the room—out of sight, out of mind—was the Bastard Table.

  As always, it was underwhelming. There was no fancy tablecloth here, just hard, bare wood. This far from the front, the singers’ voices were a distant warble. The food laid out was obviously scraps, butts of bread and trimmings of meat. Worst of all, though, were the other bastards. It was rare in the West to see a bastard older than ten. By then, the Lord had usually decided to legitimize or disown. So this table, this table where I was expected to sit the whole feast, was packed tight with squabbling, screaming, snot-nosed brats.

  There was just one bastard there my age: Miles of House Hampstedt.

  “Tillandra!” he exclaimed, lunging out of his seat as he saw me. “You look absolutely beautiful!”

  I could tell he meant it. His big gray eyes looked ready to burst out of his head. He had a round, gentle face with permanently ruddy cheeks, framed by loose ringlets of curly blond hair. He wore expensive tunics, imported from the Heartlands, but they never quite sat right on him, too tight in the chest and too loose in the sleeves.

  “Miles,” I said. He reached for my hand. With Jax’s words echoing in my ears, I feigned a warm smile and gave it to him, and he lifted it to his lips.

  He didn’t do anything gross like Jax had joked, just gave a soft, courtly kiss. It was a bit outdated, maybe, but mostly nice. I felt a twinge of guilt for having made fun of him earlier.

  I shoved aside Lord Hyatt’s redheaded bastard, who’d somehow managed to get a chicken bone wedged up his nose, and took a seat opposite Miles. “So. How’re things at Port Hammil?”

  Miles shrugged. “Oh, same old hassle. I thought I could take it easy this month because we had an exceptionally good haul from the iron mines, but the caravans got raided by bandits, and we lost half. Then my mother made this deal with the merchants from the K’olali Isles to buy up some dwarf goats to see if they could flourish here, I guess, but with the shortfall caused by the iron loss, we…” He stopped. “Oh hell. I’m boring you to death, aren’t I?”

  “Those dwarf goats sound kind of cute?” I shrugged apologetically. “Any way to get some real food here? I’m starving.”

  Miles squinted across the room. “I could probably flag down a servant next time one comes by us. Though at the rate they’re moving, that’ll be next winter, and I’ll have a full beard.” He slumped back down, food obviously way less important to him than it was to me. “Not that I blame the servants, of course. They’ve got their work cut out for them. This is the most packed I’ve ever seen this place.”

  “Well, it’s not every day the Princess herself visits.” I glanced back around the room. “Speaking of which…where is she?”

  “Oh right, you missed all the drama. She hasn’t shown up yet. The Archmagus said she was still getting ready and that we should just start the feast. Your father tried to wait, but the Archmagus insisted. It was all very tense.” Miles reached across the table for a butt of bread. “Like things weren’t tense enough already, right? My mother was telling me this whole feast is just a cover for the Archmagus to snoop around the West about those missing mages.”

  “Missing mages?”

  “You haven’t heard?” Miles seemed incredulous. “Six mages have gone missing from the West in the last three months. And not just some lowly Artificers, either. One of the
m was a captain in the Knights of Lazan.”

  “Who took them?”

  Miles shrugged. “No idea. My mother doesn’t know, either.”

  If Miles’s mom didn’t know, no one else had a chance, because she was, more or less, the smartest person in the Kingdom. Lady Robin Hampstedt sat at the table just next to my father’s, an older woman with a severe look and a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. She was my father’s closest friend and one of the very few women to be the head of a House, inheriting it after her brothers died of frostkiss fever. She’d insisted on remaining the head even after her oh-so-scandalous romance with Miles’s father, a lowborn blacksmith, and she’d refused to get married since, despite the dozens of highborn suitors who came calling after her brilliant inventions made House Hampstedt the wealthiest in the West. The Sunstones currently bedazzling the room? All her.

  “So.” Miles awkwardly cleared his throat. “Are you, um, doing anything after the feast?”

  I thanked the Old Kings I had a legitimate excuse. “Actually, yeah. Jax and I have this tradition where we head down to Whitesand Beach to see the Coastal Lights and—”

  Before I could finish, the Hall doors flew open with a crash. The conversations in the room stopped at once, and even the singers went quiet. Incredibly heavy footsteps plodded in.

  “Oh boy,” Miles whispered. “Here come the Zitochi.”

  I craned around. Three men entered the room silently, wearing bulky black cloaks lined with gray fur. Most of the Zitochi visiting were still camped out in the courtyard, but my father had made an exception for their highest leader, the Chief of Clans. That was the man in the middle, Grezza Gaul, and he was, bar none, the biggest person I’d ever seen. He stood nearly seven foot tall and was built like an anvil. His skin was a light brown, and his face looked like it had been hacked from a block of cold stone. Four deep rifts, obviously from a very big claw, were scarred into his left cheek. Two huge nightglass axes formed an X across his back.