Dawn's Edge I: The Queen's Seeker

CADERYN - IMBROGLIO

The great hall was alive with movement as the servants of Irondorne made the preparations for the feast that would come in a few days. Caderyn busily ducked and dived from table to table as servants narrowly avoided him whilst shouting curses in his wake. He collided with the cook, Frenba, and hot sticky onion soup spilled on his jerkin, but he did not care; there was more excitement in this hall now than there had been in ten years of his life.

He had been woken by the shrill of an eagle in the morning and the busy tapping of raindrops on his windowsill. Caderyn knew that laziness was a sin in the eyes of his father, but in that moment he had prayed for just a little longer in his sleep.

He had dreamt of a knight encased in glittering silver and blue armour, the colours of a raging sea. The knight, who he had named Stormheart, summoned an entire ocean to catch a falling princess from a tower. An evil shadow had crept into her castle and threatened to steal the light from her heart away, but Stormheart had heard her cries for help on the wind and, though he only had one arm, he rode as fast as lighting to save the princess. The shadow pushed the princess from the tower and Stormheart stretched a blanket of waves to save her but the calling of an eagle and the screaming of men had woken Caderyn from his sleep. Now he would never know the ending of Stormheart and the Pale Princess.

'My lordling, pull that hood over your face,' Gaius Flynt told him as Caderyn clambered into the back of the cart. 'I can't allow people to know a lordling travels with me. It's dangerous on the open road.'

'I am not afraid of people seeing my face, Gaius,' Caderyn replied. 'I am Sir Stormheart of the King's Sea.' His straight blonde and brown hair hung wet and heavy in loose curtains parting at his forehead, and he could imagine how unkempt and wild he must look, but he didn't care. His father had given him permission to travel to Port Murkstone with his sword master to gather food and drink for the king's feast. It had made Caderyn so excited to hear his father say that, because he and his sister were rarely allowed below the mountain.

Even their escapades in the Grey Grass Sea beneath Irondorne were put to a stop when Ulryden's Rebellion broke out in the irondeep. He had always thought his father worried too much. Caderyn wanted nothing more than to play in the horngrove with Hinfren Ferric; he was the only boy the same age as him. In the horngrove there were wilting branches heavy with rainwater, and the sound of traders barking at markets in Noveðrein on the air. He and Hinn often pretended to be assassins from the sacred city, given a contract to sneak into Noveðrein and kill the princess. Hinn had always told Caderyn that that was his favourite game of all, even if the princess was his sister Ingritte. He had had so much fun back then in the irondeep, in the long, bright days of summer. But then Hinn's brother Ulryden went to war with his father, Ildfred, and the Thorns became a more dangerous place.

'My skin is flowing with rivers,' Gaius complained as they descended down the north road into the grass sea. 'My heart is cold and wet.' The sky was grey above them with clouds that refused to move, and the trickling of rainwater sliding through grooves in the cliffs was accompanied by the small sucking sounds the horses made as their hooves pulled free of the mud. The saffron stars that had shone since morning made Caderyn feel warm inside, even though the icy rain was freezing his hair. He named the Seven 'the King's Stars' and thought of his longing to become a knight in the King's Guard someday. 'You look troubled, master Greyscar,' Gaius said with his bushy eyebrows in a knot. 'Are you well?'

Caderyn's mind returned to his dream of the ocean knight. 'I dreamt of a princess falling from Widow's Walk last night,' Caderyn told him. 'A knight tried to rescue her by bringing the sea to her castle for her to land in. But I woke up before I could know whether or not Stormheart saved her.' He looked at Gaius whose face was now sullen and sunken.