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ROWAN

Estmere, Elydor

I stood with my hand on the door, unable to open it.

When I’d left, my grandfather had been reasonably well. But the second I returned home, it was apparent something was amiss. The hall of our manor house wasn’t bustling with activity. Instead, I’d been greeted by our steward as if someone had died.

I pushed the door open.

Knowing my grandfather would not live forever and being confronted with the evidence of that fact were two very different things. Propped up by pillows, he sat alone.

“You look like shite,” I said, striding toward him and leaning down to kiss the wrinkled, white-haired man on his forehead. Sitting on the side of the canopied bed, I wasn’t surprised when he reached for my hand.

“Talk to me when you’re dying,” he said with a weak smile. “It is a messy business, death. With luck, you will find a way to delay your own, but I fear my time has come.”

I wanted to argue with him. Tell Sir Thomas Durnell, my grandfather and mentor, he simply could not die. I’d thought he was invincible.

“The Fade?”

His frail fingers squeezed my own. “I’d always imagined it to happen much more slowly,” he said.

“Would you rather it this way?”

“Now that you’re home, aye. I would.”

I suspected as much. “I wish I could stay.”

My grandfather sighed heavily. “I already know that you cannot.”

All humans in Elydor, but especially my family, had some sort of intuitive abilities. But as The Keeper, my grandfather had more than most. Only those with Durnell blood—or Harrow blood, to be precise, though that name hadn’t been used in centuries—knew of it.

“What did you see?”

“The lost princess has, indeed, returned. You intercepted her and spent some time in Aethralis. You are on a mission, heading to Thalassaria, are you not?”

As always, my grandfather was entirely accurate.

“This mission of yours will not go as planned. I see nothing else yet, but worry for your safety, Rowan.”

That was not information to take lightly. My grandfather had mentored me since I could wield a sword. He knew I was capable and very rarely worried for me. Or at least enough to admit as much.

“That isn’t like you.”

“No,” he said. “It is not.”

I waited, but he didn’t seem inclined to elaborate. If he were anyone else, anyone but The Keeper, I could use my own intuitive skills to sense his emotion. To learn more. But he had long ago learned how to shield out others from gaining information from him: an essential skill for someone who held all of the secrets of our family’s history.

He blinked, as if attempting to focus on me. All Keepers, every person with the same blood running through them, had been trained for this. For my grandfather’s death. Some with more trepidation than others, but all knew the signs.

“Your eyesight?” I asked.

He nodded. “I can see you, but not as well as when you left. Tell me everything.”

I started from the beginning.

“I met Princess Mevlida, Mev, on the road fleeing north. As you foretold, she’d been taken by Prince Kael of Gyoria, but in an interesting twist of fate, the two had already formed a bond. And later, a formal union,” I said. “Kael has sworn his allegiance to King Galfrid.”