people brought before him that much heavier upon his shoulders. He knew he couldn’t fix everyone’s problems, but his goal was to make life a little easier for the ones suffering the most. Some came not to ask for aid, but to hear the hope in his voice as he took his first unsteady steps towards rebuilding his kingdom.
His personal attendant brought a cup of the hot, brown drink his wife had introduced him to and set it on the heavy writing table before him. Its aroma tickled his brain and beckoned his tongue. The chair creaked under his weight, unusually loud in the large, empty room, as he leaned forward to bring the steaming cup to his lips.
“May I bring you a fruit pastry, my liege? Perhaps a bit of duck or pork?”
“No, thanks, Quint. Just the coffee is fine for now.” His kitchen servants were going to make him plump with all the food they cooked for him, and he hadn’t had a real battle since he fought the last beyonder almost three months earlier. Without the daily travel, fighting or labor he was used to, he would grow weak and soft at twenty-six years old, a notion that saddened him. Though he felt good from yesterday’s work along the riverbank, he needed more to keep his body firm and his reactions sharp. Maybe he’d start doing drills with the guards at dawn.
He sipped his coffee and leaned back to let his mind drift back to the things that needed doing.
The door in the back of the room creaked open. Edan came in and sat down, setting his writing supplies on the table before him. His blond hair was combed, his face freshly shaven but for the mustache that framed his ever-smiling mouth. “Good morning, Gav. I hope you don’t catch your death from working in the rain yesterday. How did you sleep last night?”
The relentless rain had turned the city into a dreary, muddy mess, and its constant patter on the roof and against the newly glazed windows reminded him of the destruction it brought, the lives that were lost, and his inability to do a damned thing about it. The work building up the riverbank had brought sleep more quickly than usual. “Well,” he said. “You?”
“Not badly.” Edan nodded to Daia Saberheart as she strode in and took her seat to Gavin’s left. “Though I stayed up too late reading.”
“Again,” Daia added with a grin. Her hair, tied in a long braid that perpetually trailed down her back, was still damp from her morning practice in the training yard. She wore the loose-fitting trousers and half-sleeved tunic that had become the customary uniform of his guards since he’d adopted blue and gold as the royal colors. They hid her bulging muscles well, though one could plainly see by the thickness of her neck and her corded forearms she was lean and strong, despite her natural beauty. She flashed her remarkably pale-blue eyes at Gavin. “Good morning, my king. Edan.”
“And to you,” Edan said. “I’ve been making good progress getting through the pile of messages.” Starting almost the very day the palace was unlocked, messages had begun to pour in — requests for aid, congratulations from people he’d saved or helped over the years, offers from parents for infant daughters to wed any princes Gavin might soon father.
At first, Edan had tried to read them all as they arrived, but the king’s demands on his time required him to hire an assistant, who’d separated the messages into two stacks, one marked urgent and the other trivial. Though the rate of their arrival had slowed somewhat, new messages arrived every day, along with invitations and gifts as gestures of goodwill from the leaders of foreign lands, some of which Gavin had never heard of. One day, he would need to begin inviting them to visit or accepting their invitations to travel, but he had many problems to solve and people to care for before he could entertain or enjoy a vacation. For now, all he could manage was a polite reply, penned with Edan’s help, of course.
“Anything I should know about?” Gavin asked.
“The Master Scholar from the Tern Institute of Science reports he has men who specialize in studying weather, and they’ve determined that the cloud patterns and continuous rain are unlikely to be naturally caused.”
Gavin turned to him with a scowl. “Are you saying this rain is caused by magic?”
“That’s what they’re suggesting. I’ve never heard of