The Hostage Prince

Hostages died.

Everyone in Kestryn knew it. They died of fevers in cold towers, and of falls down stairs nobody else had ever slipped on. When a treaty broke, they died on a scaffold in front of a cheering crowd. A hostage was a promise with a heartbeat. The day the promise broke, so did he.

Prince Cassian Daventry of Kestryn was walking across a bridge to become one.

The Vell Bridge was older than the war, older than either crown, and someone had scraped the frost from its stones so the two kings would not slip on their way to peace.

On the far bank waited the people he had spent years trying to kill. Less than a year ago he had watched their banners through the slit of a helm and judged how many of them would die before noon. Now they were going to give him a room, and a bed, and a place at their table. He would eat their bread and sleep under their roof, and many of them would want him dead.

They just didn’t know yet how much.

And he was not only coming as a hostage. He had promised his stepfather the king that he would spy. A hostage who died was a tragedy. A spy who was caught was a hanging, and no treaty in the world would argue for him.

He walked the bridge alone.

Not alone, exactly. Mira kept two steps behind him with his single trunk on a sledge, muttering about the cold in the thick southern dialect she used when she wanted to be overheard and underestimated.

She had been muttering since dawn, when a royal steward came to her door to collect her daughter. A place at court as a ward of the crown, he had said. A great honor. Mira had thanked him very properly, and Cassian, who had known her ten years, had never seen her face so still.

Behind her, on the Kestryn bank, his stepfather’s honor guard sat their horses in a gleaming line. None of them would cross. That was the point of a hostage. You sent one, and you kept everyone else.

The wind came down the frozen river like a blade. Cassian had been born in a city of white terraces above a warm sea, where winter meant rain and lemon trees wrapped in sacking. He had known cold like this only in the mountains, and he braced for it now the way he had there, as for something that would last. Up there the cold had always come with the war. He felt the memories of the Greywater campaign rise in him with the wind.

He kept his chin up anyway. Lord Elian Marr would have been raised to keep his chin up. Also, it kept him from looking back.

The real Elian Marr was a sickly cousin who had never once left his family’s estate in the hills, so far from the throne that the royal genealogies needed a magnifying lens to find him. This morning he had been bundled into a closed carriage and sent north with the crown prince’s baggage.

As far as Kestryn’s court knew, the crown prince had ridden north to winter with the mountain garrisons on the new border. Once snow closed the passes, nobody would expect a word from him until spring. Varian had even had a secretary write a stack of cheerful letters home in the prince’s name, dated weeks ahead.

His stepfather had given him his orders the night before, in the quiet of the royal study, without writing a word down. Kestryn’s princes carried nothing that could hang them.

Map their walls. Learn their council. Send word through Mira. And then, one hand resting on Cassian’s shoulder, in the warm voice Cassian had spent his whole life trying to deserve: There is no one else I trust with this.

Cassian had waited twenty-six years to hear those words, and he’d said yes before Varian finished the sentence. Be my eyes in Hartwell, Varian had said. If Aldric means this peace for a trap, I need to know before the thaw. Cassian wanted the peace more than any man alive, which was exactly why someone had to make sure it was real. There was another reason too, one he hadn’t spoken aloud: if his presence in Aldermere could keep the peace, perhaps it would pay for some small part of Greywater.

His mother had been Kestryn’s born queen, and she had married Varian already carrying another man’s child. The crown would come to Cassian through her, and Varian only held it until then.

None of that had ever stopped Cassian from calling him father out loud. His mother had loved Varian with her whole heart, and so Cassian had loved him too, for as long as he could remember, and wanted, with an ache he was far too old for, to hear Varian call him son.

He had carried the orders across the border the only safe way, in his head.

Halfway across, the Kestryn banners ended and the Aldermere banners began. Gold stags on navy, a crown between their antlers, stiff as boards with ice. Below the parapet the river had frozen around the stumps of the old bridge piers, the ones Kestryn’s engineers had pulled down in the second year of the war. Cassian passed the line where the two colors met and felt it like a hand closing on the back of his neck.

“Smile,” Mira murmured. “You look like you’re walking to a hanging.”

“I’m walking into a treaty.”

“That’s what I said.”

On the far bank the Aldermere court waited in furs. Cassian picked them out the way he’d been taught to read a battlefield: strength first, then weakness, then whatever didn’t fit.

The king sat a tall grey horse, gaunt under a mantle of white fox, a man held upright by pride and very little else. Beside him a silver-haired lord in sable smiled with every tooth. That would be Lord Mercer, the king’s spymaster and oldest friend, whose name came up in Kestryn dispatches more often than the king’s, and whose seal was on every iron contract Aldermere’s army had signed in ten years.

A girl of perhaps seventeen craned past her guards for a better look, all honey-gold curls and wide grey eyes and open curiosity.

Behind the court stood the people who had come to watch. Farmers. Women in mourning grey. A man with one sleeve pinned to his shoulder. Nobody cheered.

Ten years of war had cost Aldermere its iron and Kestryn its grain, and both of them their sons. The crowd on the riverbank looked at Cassian the way people look at a bill that has finally come due.

And at the king’s left, a little apart, stood a young man dressed every inch a prince: a coat of deep navy velvet worked with gold stags, a mantle lined with grey fur and fastened at the throat with a gold clasp, a thin silver circlet on tousled hair the color of dark honey. Everyone else on the riverbank was watching the kings perform the ritual signing of the treaty. He was watching Cassian.

He was a little above middle height and broad through the shoulders, and he held the left one slightly lower than the right, the way men did when an old wound had healed badly. A scar ran from his temple into his hair. His eyes, when they found Cassian, were the grey of the river ice, the same as the girl’s, and there was nothing in them but a long, patient hatred.

A hooded goshawk sat on his gloved fist: a big, grey-backed hunting hawk, the kind falconers flew at hares among the trees. It was perfectly calm, and he held it the way other men held something precious. An Aldermere prince with a hawk on his wrist, come to collect a hostage from Kestryn. Somewhere, Cassian thought, a god was laughing.

He was also, Cassian noted with deep irritation, the most beautiful man on the riverbank. It was a hard, unfinished kind of beauty, all strong bones and stubbornness, like a coast that ships wrecked on. Cassian looked away first. A moment later he found he was looking again, and had to make himself stop.

Cassian knew him before anyone said his name. Every Kestryn officer did.

Prince Tor of Aldermere. Edric’s brother.

Three years ago, Crown Prince Edric of Aldermere had fallen in the Greywater campaign. That was all Aldermere had ever said. Kestryn’s heralds had added only one word to it: massacre.

Cassian knew the rest. He knew it had been the Greywater Gap, at night, on a road too narrow to turn a horse. He knew Edric had ridden it with only sixty men, and that a Kestryn commander called the Grey Hawk had closed both ends. He knew Edric had died under the snow with every man he’d brought.

The Grey Hawk had never shown his face. He had fought helmed, as all Kestryn’s royal sons were taught to fight, so that a prince could be any man on the field.

After that night the Hawk fought on for two more years, and never again for glory. Then the peace talks began, Varian pulled his heir from the field, and the Hawk simply vanished. Cassian spent the long months of the talks in Saltreach, slipping down to the Lantern House most mornings to help with the fevers and broken bones, because the herb room there smelled like his mother, and nobody asked what he dreamed about. In the north, they said the Hawk was only waiting. In the north, they said a great many things.

Cassian had been twenty-three. He still dreamed of the snow, and of Edric on his knees in the pass, sword thrown down, asking for terms for his men.

His stepfather’s orders had been no quarter. For the first time in his life Cassian had disobeyed, and he had been riding forward to accept the surrender when the snowfield above the pass gave way. His own men, at either end, had room to run. Edric’s had nowhere to go.

He had been a healer before he was ever a soldier. He and his men dug through the night, until their gloves wore through. There was too much snow. They did not find one of them alive. The mountain had killed them. Not him.

Knowing that had never stopped the dreams. He still heard the roar of it coming down in the dark. He still felt the snow packed hard under his torn gloves, and the silence afterward, when his men stopped calling out names because no one ever answered.

At first light his officers had dragged him back from the slide, before Aldermere’s army could come over the ridge and find the Hawk on his knees in the snow.

It was what came after that he could not forgive himself for. Within a week Kestryn’s heralds were crying a massacre, and the court in Saltreach was drinking to the Hawk. Cassian said nothing. He could have told them it was the mountain. But both kingdoms had already decided what had happened in the Gap, and he did not have it in him to stand against all of them. So he let the lie stand, and let Edric’s family believe their son had been butchered on his knees.

He stopped at the end of the bridge, on the last stone that belonged to no one, and bowed exactly as low as a minor lord should bow to a king.

“Lord Elian Marr,” the herald announced, “of the House of Marr, kinsman to His Majesty King Varian of Kestryn, given in surety of the peace.”

Given. As if he were a horse, or a cask of wine. Cassian kept his face pleasant.