Iylaine watches through the window

To Lady Gwynn’s great delight, Iylaine had spent much of the day in her room, although she had spent most of it staring out the window. Iylaine could scarcely be bothered to help Gwynn with her sewing or to chat with her dolls, for she was busy watching Selwood burn.

The lightning of the evening before had set the northern hills afire, and no rain had come to extinguish the blaze. Since then the wind had driven it to the southeast, where it had burned through the Baron’s old farm and was now devouring the great forest beside it.

Bertie had climbed to the roof of the highest tower at the King’s castle and had returned to report that one could see several other fires between here and Raegiming, but it was the fire at Selwood that was the anguish of Iylaine’s heart.

Many of the woods around the castles had grown up only in the last hundred years or so—there were often traces of fences or abandoned houses to be found within them, and sometimes a grove of apple trees would appear unexpectedly amid the birches—but Selwood was clearly far older. There were no fences, no foundations, no dense stands of young and fast-​growing trees. The trunks of the trees there were so large that she and Malcolm could not join hands when they tried to reach around them.

It was often to Selwood that they went when they two were alone. Few children played there, and so they could both let down their guard.

Nearly all of their favorite “spots” were there: the hollow tree where the two of them could sit together and peer out through the waving ferns that hid the entrance… the big flat-​topped rock where they would eat their picnic lunch… the hole in the earth that led to an underground lake far below and which, if one shouted into the hole, would reply with a confused overlapping of echoes that sounded like nothing so much as laughter, no matter what one said…

And there was the still, dark, stone-​lined pond in which Malcolm liked to swim—but that was not for Iylaine. He would grumble and taunt her if she sat on the rock that overlipped it, and would splash her if she sat low on the bank, but she would never join him. He could not even tell her how deep the bottom was, for he had never found it, and that, for her, was the very definition of terror.

But they had done none of those things this summer. Her father did not let her out with only Malcolm as a guard, and she would not have gone to those places with him or with the Duke, even though they both would have taken her. It would not have been the same.

And now Malcolm was far away, and their forest was burning. What would he find when he returned? What would he say?

If he had been home, he would have understood why she had spent the day swallowing tears. If he had been home, he would have watched with her and shouldered half of the sorrow—she would even have dared to climb onto the roof with Bertie and the other boys if Malcolm had been there to protect her.

But Malcolm was far away, playing with his brothers and sisters, and didn’t need to waste his thoughts on a mere cousin who wasn’t even truly his cousin.

Iylaine stifled another sob and Gwynn looked up with a compassionate frown. “Do you miss your Papa?” she asked. She certainly missed hers, and it seemed to her the most obvious explanation for tears.

“Aye,” Iylaine said, keeping her face turned to the window.

“The fire won’t hurt us,” Gwynn soothed. “Mama says. The castle won’t burn, and we have water to put it out if it does.”

“I know,” Iylaine grumbled.

“So don’t cry.”

“I’m not crying. I’m going to get a drink.” She climbed out of her chair.

“May I come?”

“No.”