Aleksey's Kingdom (A Royal Affair #2)(43)

You might think it strange, therefore, given the great wonder that lay only a few hours beyond the point we had marked as ours, that we had never visited and confirmed some of these tales for ourselves, and I cannot rightly explain it to you. I suppose Aleksey would have gone out of curiosity, had I been willing to accompany him. I was not at all willing, and so we did not go. After all, it was not as if we lived a life of ease and luxury as we had in some ways in Hesse-Davia, with our every need taken care of, allowing time for leisure pursuits. Here, in this savage country, life hung on a very thin thread at most times. We were constantly busy (or I was) keeping us alive: fed, housed, warm. I did not have time for amusing travels to waterfalls.

That I would not have gone, even if I had been granted the time, I will add now, for I am attempting to be truthful in this account. My dislike of the idea, I suppose, was what initially caused me to refuse to venture on this journey, but no man likes to have a secret little cause of fear, cowardice even, worming away inside himself, and I knew I had built my fear of the falls to an unreasonable level and that the fear needed to be conquered. I had gone on a ship. I could do this. So I thought.

My fear began to creep upon me as soon as we crossed the boundary to our land—and I am not even sure where that border is, to be honest. We did not have waymarkers, after all. Upon our arrival in the New World, we had just ridden around a vast acreage of forest, marking trees and calling it all ours. It had almost been more of a joke than real, for how can men own the earth? Aleksey did not see this as I did, of course, as he came from the very essence of the tradition of owning land, but I did not.

I came from a people who more saw the land owning them, and so they had a duty to care for it and it was a privilege to be allowed to live upon it.

So, as I say, an unpleasant tightness began to form in my stomach as we rode beyond the borders of Aleksey’s kingdom, a worm of despair that even my new accord with Aleksey could not dispel.

Aleksey and I were pretty much always in harmony, despite appearances and the fact we derived so much enjoyment out of arguing, but this morning was different. We had found some new bond, I think, in Faelan’s death and our shared grief over this that we had possibly not thought to ever find, both being men. Perhaps it was a bond only those who lose children can know, and we had not thought that to be our lot in life. And although Faelan clearly was not a child to us, he fulfilled some of that role, and so this shared agony at his passing bound us in a way we had not experienced before.




I GENUINELY believed at the time, and I still believe this now, that I could feel the power of the falls long before we came to them. I remember looking around at my fellow travelers and wondering that they had not commented yet upon this. I could feel it like a drumming up through Xavier and into me, and I knew he felt it. If Faelan had been there, I would have consulted him, and that he was not put yet another stab into my heart. Aleksey moved Boudica close and enquired in a low voice, “What is wrong? You are pale.”

I glanced over. “Do you not feel it?”

“What?” Clearly he did not.

I had heard tales of men who had experienced the ground shaking beneath their feet so badly that things fell around them. It was hard to believe such a report, frightening to do so, I suppose. But now I did believe. I had also heard from these same men that dogs howled before the shaking and that they had seen strange portents in the skies. I felt like one of those dogs; I wanted to howl.

It was awful, and it got worse as the afternoon progressed. Before nightfall, Aleksey insisted we stop early and thus reach our destination fresh the following morning. He told Major Parkinson that we would go hunting and that if he got a fire ready, we would return with some fresh food. I stood apart from the group, my head ringing as if I had taken a blow and my body so tense and off-kilter that I was actually sick soon after we left the camp. Aleksey watched me with concern. “You must have eaten something that was not good.”

I shook my head. “Can you not feel it?”

“What? You keep asking me this. I can feel nothing!”

“Well, then, I cannot explain it to you.”

“You are tired. You did not sleep after our turn on sentry and not before, either, if I recall.”

“If you remember that, then you must have been awake too.”

“But I am not sick. Do you want to stay here? I will hunt on my own.”

I was tempted to say yes, but he was truly alone without Faelan. Yet another stab. I had never really considered just how safe Faelan made Aleksey. Without the guardianship of his ferocious wolf, he seemed far too beautiful to be left alone in this world. He snorted. I think he caught something of my thoughts. “Come on, then, for I am hungry, even if you are not.”

We caught a moose very easily, a yearling that had probably recently been chased away by its mother. We hoisted it onto Freedom, which unsettled him, and took it back to butcher closer to the camp.

I wished I had dressed it there where we caught it when I saw that I had an audience for this activity. The child, now freed of its restraints, had left the campsite and come to the area a little way away where I had hung the young animal to drain. He stood at the edge of the clearing, fiddling with his little cloth doll, squeezing it in his hand, squeezing, releasing, squeezing, his eyes wide with delight as intestines spilt upon the ground. None of this helped my nausea, as you can imagine, but I was interested to see that once or twice he lay down and put his ear to the ground as if he too could hear what I was. I would have asked him about this, but naturally I was not about to speak to it under any circumstances. I kept my knife in my hand, and I knew exactly where Aleksey and my three horses were. I was taking no chances with this creature again.