silver and white as the snow on the peak of Mount Starbrow. A mesh of wrinkles spun out from his eyes to cover most of his face. The purple veins stood out thinly on his hands. Tyrion looked at the smooth skin of his own hands and saw the difference at once. A life of failure had aged his father prematurely. Prince Arathion was only a few centuries old.
‘Tell me what you came to say, my son,’ said his father. His voice was calm and gentle and remote but not without a certain mocking humour. ‘What brought you into my workroom without even knocking?’
‘Riders are coming,’ Tyrion said. ‘Warriors mounted on warhorses.’
‘You are certain of that?’ his father asked.
Tyrion nodded.
‘How?’ His father believed that observations had to be tested and justified. It was part of his method of scholarship. ‘Not just book learning’ were his watchwords.
‘The horses were too large to be normal mounts and the riders carried lances with pennons on them.’
‘Whose pennon?’
‘I do not know, father. It was too far away.’
‘Might it not have been more useful, my son, to wait until you could see it? Then you might have been able to tell me more about who the strangers were and what their purposes might be.’
As always Tyrion could not help but feel that he was somehow a disappointment to his gentle, scholarly father. He was too loud, too boisterous, too active. He was not brilliant like Teclis.
His father smiled at him.
‘Next time, Tyrion. You will do better next time.’
‘Yes, father.’
‘And fortunately I have a spyglass here in my study that will allow me to find out the information you missed, despite the fact these aged eyes are not as keen as yours. Run along now and tell your brother. I know you are dying to give him the news.’
Teclis lay in the great four poster bed, covered in piles of threadbare, patched blankets. The room was so shadowy that it was impossible to see how moth-eaten the bed’s canopy was and how old and rickety the room’s furnishings were.
Teclis coughed loudly. It sounded as if a bone had come loose inside him and was rattling round in his chest. He twisted in the tangle of covers and looked up at his brother with bright feverish eyes. Tyrion wondered if this time Teclis was really going to die, if this illness would be the one that would finally claim him. His brother was so weak now, so feeble and so full of pain and despair.
And selfishly Tyrion wondered what would happen to him then. He felt the echoes of his brother’s pain and his weakness. What would happen when Teclis went on the dark journey? Would Tyrion too die?
‘What brings you here, brother? It is still light out. It is not yet reading time.’
Tyrion looked guiltily at the copy of Maderion’s Tales of the Caledorian Epoch that lay on the chipped table beside the bed. He walked over to the windows. The drapes were fusty and smelled of mould. Cold air whistled in through gaps in the shutters, despite the torn shreds of sacking he had stuffed into the gaps. There was no place in the old villa where Teclis could escape the cold that seemed to leech all vitality from him.
‘We have visitors,’ said Tyrion. Interest flickered in Teclis’s eyes and for a moment he seemed a little less listless.
‘Who are they?’ The tone was a dry echo of their father’s, as was the question itself. Tyrion wondered at the resemblance. For all his weakness Teclis was very much their father’s son, in a way that Tyrion never felt himself to be.
‘I don’t know,’ he was forced to admit. ‘I did not wait to check their heraldic banners. I merely ran in with the news.’ He could not keep the sullenness from his voice even though he knew his brother did not deserve it.
‘Father has been subjecting you to inquisition again, I see,’ said Teclis and was wracked by another long, horrible paroxysm of coughing. Laughing was sometimes a mistake in his case.
‘He makes me feel stupid,’ Tyrion confessed. ‘You make me feel stupid.’
‘You are not stupid, brother. You are just not like him. Your mind runs in different channels. You are interested in different things.’ Teclis was trying to be kind, but he could not keep a certain satisfaction from his voice. His twin was eternally conscious of his physical inferiority. His sense of intellectual superiority helped balance that. Normally it did not trouble Tyrion