Their crown prince couldn’t even save the woman he loved.
So why would anyone ever think he’d be able to savethem?
“No,” Kinlear said, shaking himself from his thoughts as he realized the Riders were still staring at him. He lifted his chin. “I willnotjoin you. I wouldn’t be so foolish to even dare.”
He turned his gaze to the young squire who’d scurried over to the landing pen, already eager to help unsaddle Indriya’s eagle. But his eyes went wide when he saw Kinlear, and he knelt...as if to be a stepping stool for the sick prince to dismount.
“You havelegsfor a reason,” Kinlear snapped at the squire. “Use them and stand up.”
The squire yelped and scurried out of Kinlear’s way as he swept him aside with his cane, feeling for all the world like Magus.
He walked as fast as his ruined leg could carry him across the barn floors, the weakness and the cough catching up to him as soon as he entered the dusty space. It was terrible for his lungs, but Kinlear still loved it here.
This washisplace, because it was the only place he’d ever done a thing of worth.
He took a sip from his vial to calm the quivering in his lungs and kept walking. Deeper into the barn he went, past rows of eagles already in stalls. They looked at him with bright, expectant eyes, as if hoping he would get right back to Minding them, as he once had.
Gods, I was good,he thought.
But by king’s decree, he would never Mind a war eagle again.
That was his fault, too, he supposed.
He hadn’t paid enough attention to his vial that day. His cough was bad, evenbeforean important fledgling Demonstration...but he’d not had time to go refill it with Alaris, for his limp had made him late to the Aviary already. He could have told the Masters, but his determination outweighed his care for his own health. He was ready to prove to them that he was the greatest Eagleminder in the Citadel.
Perhaps...the greatest Eagleminder of all time.
But his illness had other ideas that day.
It came on strong enough that Kinlear had passed out during his Demonstration. He was sitting in one of the training saddles, and he’d tumbled sideways off the fledgling’s back. His ankle had gotten stuck in the stirrups –so Alaris told him, later– and a cluster of Eagleminders had rushed to help his unconscious body get free.
The fledgling nearly killed one by slamming them headfirst into the wall.
Then it spiraled so out of control, they’d had to shoot the beast with the runed crossbow they kept by the barn doors.
The fledgling hadn’t been the same since. It would likely never make it to fly in true war, a waste of a hatching.
When Kinlear woke up, days later, from his own runic sleep...
His mother was there to greet him. It should have been his first indication that something was wrong, for it was the first time she’d come to visit the Citadel since she’d sent him away from Touvre without so much as a goodbye.
His father, old and shriveled and dying faster than even Kinlear at the rate he’d had to practice magic these days, was standing right beside her, though the two did not touch hands.
There was no love between them. Not for each other, and certainly not for him.
“What....what are you doing here?” Kinlear had asked.
“You’re done Minding the Eagles,”his father told him.
“You’re a danger to yourself and others,”his mother said.
He’d gone into such a panic then, that the Healers dropped him back into a runic sleep. When he woke...
Soraya was gone.
Gone.
His episode was her breaking point, he supposed. She was so tired of watching him suffer, enough that she finally did what she’d told Kinlear just before the Demonstration, a black book in her hands, and tears in her eyes.
