Young Haikor Read online

winning. Jaap was struggling just to follow behind him, and guess at what he meant.

  “I loved my father dearly,” said Jaap. “I remember when he died last year. I wept for days.”

  “But not in front of your people, I should hope,” said Haikor.

  “Oh, I had no need to hide my feelings. My people do not expect a king to feel nothing. On the contrary, I think it is good for them to see me as one of them. Then when I speak, they know that I understand their world.”

  Haikor’s mouth twisted, but only for a moment. “Truly?” he said. “You think your people want you to be one of them? What is the purpose of having a king if he is not elevated above them? If he does not live more largely than they do, striding leagues to their inches, and showing them how to live immortally in their own minds?”

  Immortality was never something that Jaap had aspired to. “I do the work that they do not want to do. Like meeting with your brother, for instance,” said Jaap calmly.

  Haikor let out a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a coughing fit. Jaap could never be sure.

  “A king must rule from above,” said Haikor. “He must never be seen to be like his people or they will think to overthrow him and take his place.”

  “Is that what your brother has taught you?” said Jaap.

  “That is what every day of my life has taught me. I only wonder that your life has not taught you the same. You and every king of Weirland before you. How have you survived this long without learning of the real world?”

  “Perhaps the real world of Weirland is not so harsh as the one here in Rurik,” said Jaap mildly.

  “I cannot believe that,” said Haikor, his head high, his neck tight.

  “And why is that?” said Jaap.

  Haikor held Jaap’s gaze. “Because I would not stay here another moment, but steal away in your baggage train and make myself a servant to you if only to live in a place where I could be myself and sing as I was meant to sing.”

  Jaap stared at the young man. He was never going to be tall. He might be full-grown now, though he was half a head shorter than Jaap, and Jaap was no giant. Haikor was slight, as well, his shoulders narrow and his wrists thin. But there was a strength in him, if only in his personality. No wonder he hid himself. If Prince Aart knew the real Haikor, he would never let him grow old.

  “You love singing?” asked Jaap.

  Haikor merely inclined his head to the side, as if the answer was too obvious to be spoken.

  “Your voice is very fine,” said Jaap, though to be honest, he did not know much of music at all. The kind of music prized in Weirland was merely the loudest possible, mostly horns. He had thought it was the same in Rurik. Music was for continentals.

  “A king does not sing,” said Haikor.

  “Why not? But I suppose it does not matter, since you are only a prince.”

  “And never likely to be more. Is that what you mean?” asked Haikor.

  “Well, of course, if something were to happen to your brother before he had an heir . . .” Jaap began, but found himself trailing off at the expression in young Haikor’s face. It was—hungry. Like a child who had never tasted food in his life.

  “I am twelve years old,” said Haikor. “Far too young to be a king in Rurik.”

  “There have been kings of Weirland younger than that. King Toofor, for instance. He was king at the age of six, and ruled until he was nearly eighty. One of the best kings of Weirland. And King Kieran, who was king at the age of eleven, though they say even then that he was as tall as a giant and no one dared to best him in fisticuffs.”

  “In Weirland, perhaps,” said Haikor. “But it is different here in Rurik.”

  Jaap was trying to comfort a young boy who appeared to be in distress. “Your brother has not married yet. He will need a queen to get an heir, and that will take some time. Until then, you are his only heir. He may not think much of you, but it is so.”

  “And do you think it would be wise of me to draw my brother’s attention to this fact?” asked Haikor.

  Jaap’s mouth opened and closed without a word.

  “And to make him see me as useful?” Haikor said again.

  “Perhaps not,” said Jaap softly. He felt sorry for the boy now. Not that he thought young Haikor would appreciate the sentiment.

  “But he will see it eventually. I can make myself as small as a mouse. I can squeak at him and scurry away when he speaks. But eventually, he will do what a cat does. He will leap upon me and devour me,” said Haikor.

  There was a poetic turn to the gruesome description that Jaap admired. He had a library of books and it was one of the few things that Weirland had that Rurik could not prove better at. It was what he spent all those long winters, trapped in the castle for snow and storms, doing. He read.

  He was impressed with Haikor. Clearly the boy had done more reading than his brother. Jaap had become certain during the negotiations that Prince Aart was all but illiterate, for his eyes slid away from any written letters that Jaap pointed at in the treaty and he looked to one of his men instead, or grew angry and shouted his demands once more.

  “You might find that Weirland would be a welcome refuge,” said Jaap carefully. He could not offer Haikor asylum directly, but the boy was canny enough to see understand what was meant.

  “If I came enough after that you were not suspect?” Haikor seemed to consider it for a moment, then shook his head. “It would only make my brother send an army after me. It would make him think me that much smarter before my time.”

  Jaap let out a sigh. The boy was likely right. He knew the climate of his brother’s court better than Jaap did. “Then what will you do?” he asked.

  “Do?” There was a faint smile hidden behind his thin lips.

  “Let us speak openly, shall we?” said Jaap.

  “By all means. Here, where no one can listen but the river,” said Haikor, with a grand gesture like a king’s. “That is why I come here, to sing my truest self to the skies.”

  “If your brother becomes king after your father dies, I cannot think it would be good. There have been civil wars before, against weak kings and against those who are too brutal.”

  “You think my brother would be a brutal king?”

  “I think your brother is selfish and unfeeling. I think he is a man who has no mercy and no compassion.”

  “My father was cruel to him,” said Haikor. There was pity in his voice and it made his tone rough.

  Jaap was astonished to discover that Haikor had some feeling for his terrible brother.

  “You do not know how cruel. I saw such terrible things.”

  “And you? Your father did not do the same to you?”

  Haikor shook his head. “I never knew if it was because I was smaller and the second heir, and weak-minded and useless. Or—” he hesitated.

  “Or what?” asked Jaap.

  “Or because my brother protected me,” said Haikor.

  “Ah,” said Jaap. He did not know what to say. He did not like to think well of Aart, but it was possible that there was some good in him. It was rarely true that any man was all one thing or all the other.

  “He said once that I was the lucky one, born second. He said that I could indulge myself in music, in singing, and that he would never be able to be free to do that. Not here in Rurik, where all things from the continent are scorned and all that matters is the magic, the taweyr.”

  “But you have the taweyr in plenty, I am sure,” said Jaap, who was not, in fact, sure.

  “My brother has never seen me use it,” said Haikor. “He thinks that I may never come into it at all.”

  “He came into it late himself, so he can hardly judge you for the same,” said Jaap.

  Haikor’s eyes narrowed. “Late?” he said. “You are sure of that? He has the taweyr? You have seen it?”

  “Well, I thought so.” Jaap sifted his thoughts. Had he seen Prince Aart show any taweyr? He realized he had not, even when he had beaten his
lord about the head and might have spared himself any physical pain.

  Prince Aart had all the attitudes of a man poisoned with too much taweyr, but now Jaap was not sure. A man could pretend to a weyr he did not have. As a man could pretend to many thing.

  Jaap looked at young Haikor. “There is nothing wrong with a man who has neweyr instead of taweyr,” he said.

  “You say that after you have met my brother, do you?” asked Haikor.

  “It has nothing to do with the weyr, what he is,” said Jaap. He knew several women with taweyr and men with neweyr in Weirland. It was a little odd and took getting used to, but the ekhono had their uses.

  “And if Aart died before my father died?” asked Haikor.

  Jaap listened as his heart beat loudly in his chest. This was not what he had planned, when he left the palace to calm himself. He had somehow found himself involved in an assassination plot with the prince’s younger brother. And Jaap did not know if it would be good or bad for Rurik to be ruled instead by young Haikor. He was intelligent, that was certain.

  “Do you want a demonstration of my taweyr?” asked Haikor. “In order to encourage me in this? Do you want me to prove what kind of man I am?”

  “What does it matter what I think?” said Jaap.

  “Because you are the king of Weirland, and if you do not accept me, no one else will.”

  “But I am not here often. I will likely leave in two days and never return,” said Jaap.

  “Yes. Two days,” said Haikor.

  “You cannot be thinking—” said Jaap.

  “Can I not?” said Haikor.

  He turned to Jaap and began to speak using a high-pitched voice that