Legend of the Storm Hawks

Fire and Water

Fire and Water~

Nigel Willoughby

Jorendon

“The Great Fire cleansed a world defiled by iniquity. And the world was made new again.”

The Beacon’s oratory echoed across the Grand Cathedral. Congregants with sufficient wealth and social status to merit a seat near enough to make out the words of His Holiness’ sermon listened with the usual assortment of rapture and ambivalence.

“God promised his children, ‘Never again shall you hunger or thirst. There shall be no more mourning or crying or pain, for the old earth has passed away.’ And so it was until the Great Serpent tempted the children into iniquity once again.”

Nigel half-listened as the admonitions continued. Deighton was a master at stirring emotion. Emotion tended to muddle logical thought in men. More so than usual.

“We must root out evil wherever it sprouts, lest He return to cleanse the earth again.”

Eliminating evil sounds reasonable until you’re the one named evil.

Nigel scanned the congregation for faces uncharacteristically missing or present this morning. The Langdon pew was minus its most illustrious son. The Ellsworths of Lewsland brought a guest Nigel had not seen before, a nondescript little man notable for having nothing notable about him, his brown hair cut in the floppy fringe fashionable in Erusa these days.

“—not by fire, but by flood.” Nigel’s attention snapped back to Deighton. “If we prove too weak for the task, the earth shall drown in its iniquity.”

Intriguing ploy. Legitimize myth as canon. Deighton lifted his sermon straight from the legend of the Storm Hawks and the Great Serpent, and the Children of Promise in the days when the rains come. When the water did start rising, the Beacon might even be hailed a prophet.

It rises for you too, charlatan.

“He who has ears,” said the Beacon.

“Let him hear.” The dutiful response echoed through the cathedral.

Liturgy and prayers concluded the service, uneventful as usual, and Nigel navigated the crowd to attach himself to King Walter’s departing assemblage. Keeping Walter in check was a more pressing concern than investigating the Lewsland stranger.

# # #

Nigel allowed the customary hour for the king to dine and retire to the small throne room. He had established the routine in Walter’s childhood, and they kept to it still. It was their time alone each week to speak freely over a game of chess. Nigel used the time to redirect any undesirable influences the morning’s sermon might have had on his protégé and to lay the foundation for what he needed of Walter in the coming week.

He stopped short when he entered the room. Walter was there ahead of him, giving audience to the Lewsland stranger with the Erusian fringe. The little man stood beside a framed canvas as tall as he was, propping it up for Walter’s appraisal.

“Nigel,” Walter hailed him. “Come and see what my sister has sent us.”

Nigel walked around to view the painting and bit his tongue. In a life-sized portrait, Anne and Franz regarded him with regal indifference.

“A reasonable likeness,” he said, though it was hardly a compliment. Plain little Anne had not improved with age, not even with liberal artistic license.

“Prince Elbert here is a cousin to Prince Franz,” Walter managed with only a slight smirk, for he often jested Erusa had more princes than potatoes.

“Your Grace,” Nigel acknowledged the Erusian.

“I have no time for chess today,” Walter said in dismissal. “Anne seems sincere about mending our estrangement. I’ve chosen to hear Prince Elbert has to say.”

“I can return later,” said Nigel. He needed to return later to corral whatever damage Elbert was about to let loose.

“I do not need your counsel today, Minister Willoughby.”

Walter chose not to hear what he already knew Nigel would say.

Nigel swallowed his frustration and left. He’d orchestrated the marriage that kept Anne in Cadron. By the time she came of age, Anne favored her father so strongly that if she had returned to Jorendon, she would have been an inconvenient reminder that Walter did not.

So Anne sent a portrait in her stead.

Walter the First had preferred his bevy of mistresses over his shy young queen and had been as stunned as anyone when her belly rounded with child. Nigel placated his pride, convincing him it was an opportunity to stop everyone from pestering him about siring an heir. Walter the First went along with the pretense. When his unfortunate queen died delivering a stillborn daughter, Nigel was prepared with a substitute infant son.

Walter the Second was the bastard of a minor Connor noble, born of a Cabbagetown w***e.

Years later, as if reminding Nigel never to lose control of his pawns, Walter the First had announced his second queen was expecting his second child. Something in her pious preaching to him, or perhaps in his late-awakened sense of duty to the realm, had led him to her bed at least often enough to sire Anne.

Now, Anne was threatening to shred his painstakingly crafted illusion of Walter’s legitimacy.

Chapter 36