Fire and Valor: The Complete Series by W.M. Fawkes & Sam Burns

Author:W.M. Fawkes & Sam Burns [Fawkes, W.M. & Burns, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

Tristram

Roland was getting worse as the days passed. They tried to pretend he wasn’t, but the boy hadn’t been conscious enough to speak in over a day, and he tossed and turned in his sleep, not even getting rest there.

Tristram sat with him sometimes in the evening instead of joining the rest of the court for supper. In the main hall, he had to look at Nicholas’s smug face, listen to his snide suggestions that if Llangard was truly in the terrible shape Tristram kept implying, perhaps he should be working, not spending his time on revelry in the great hall.

As though anything they did in Atheldinas resembled revelry any longer. Dinners were somber and quiet, conversations were all about the king’s health, the impending winter, and the deaths of so many important people.

Tris was bitterly pleased that more people still cared about Reynold’s death than Laurence’s. Perhaps it was their fear of dragons at play, or perhaps the people had loved Reynold better.

Regardless of what he’d done in his madness, at least Reynold had never poisoned his own family. Sitting in the dungeon, wondering if—or when—Reynold would kill him, Tristram hadn’t imagined that the situation could end up worse.

But there he sat holding the hand of his sick king.

There was a soft knock on the door, and—Rhys? The dragon? His father?—poked his head inside. “May I sit with you?”

Tristram glanced at Roland, then back, and nodded.

Sensibly, Rhys sat across the bed from Tristram. “This is the king?” he asked. For a second, Tris was annoyed, because he sounded dubious.

“Yes, this is His Majesty,” Tris agreed, emphasizing the title.

Rhys shook his head sadly. “So young.”

There was nothing to say to that. The boy wasn’t even ten years old, and he’d been through as much as some men lived through in a lifetime. Lost both parents, one to violence, and been thrown into a position no one could ever be ready for, let alone a child.

“How are you treating it?” Rhys asked, voice hesitant, concerned about how Tristram would react to him.

Tris looked up, really looked at the man. At his father. It was disturbing, like looking into a mirror with a crack down the middle—almost, but not quite right. He was slender where Tris had spent years building muscle, and soft in his concern, where Tris felt brittle. Like he was going to shatter at any moment.

He glanced away, back at Roland. “There isn’t much. We don’t know exactly what it is. He’s feverish, and—”

“It’s crimsonberry,” Rhys interrupted. “The boy was poisoned by the same thing as—as your previous king, yes? It was crimsonberry.”

Tristram stared at him, uncomprehending. How did he even know about the poison, let alone what kind of poison it had been?

Rhys sighed and shook his head, as though he could see Tristram’s thoughts. “I can’t explain, but I promise you, the king before him was full of crimsonberry.”

That was an odd way to put it.

Tristram had an inkling, and decided that he wasn’t going to consider that particular problem.

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