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The Scepter_s Return

DAN CHERNENKO

CHAPTER ONE

Down in the southern part of the Kingdom of Avornis, spring had come some little while before. It was just now reaching the capital. The city of Avornis had had a long, hard winter. It wasn't as bad as it could have been – the Banished One hadn't tried to bury the city in snow and ice, as he had a few years earlier – but no one who'd been through it would have called it mild.

Today, King Lanius was glad to be able to leave the royal palace without a hooded fur cloak that reached down to the ground and sturdy felt boots with wool socks inside them to keep his toes from freezing. His breath still smoked when he did go out, but the icicles had melted from under the eaves of steep-pitched slate roofs and all the snow was gone from the streets, leaving those that weren't cobblestoned (which was most of them) calf-deep in stinking mud.

A few of the oaks and maples around the palace showed the buds that foretold new leaves. Some of the season's earliest birds perched in the mostly bare branches. The songs they sang sounded relieved and perhaps a little surprised; as though they too had trouble believing winter might be over.

Prince Crex and Princess Pitta, Lanius' son and daughter, stood beside him. They were happier to get out of the palace than he was. Snowball fights and snowmen were all very well, but they'd had to spend most of the winter indoors, and that had chafed at them. If the smell from those nearby muddy streets bothered them, they didn't show it.

Pitta pointed to one of the birds in the closest oak. "What kind is that, Father?" she asked, confident Lanius would know. People were always confident Lanius knew any number of small, mostly useless things. They were usually right, too.

"The one on that second branch there?" he asked, squinting toward it – he was a bit shortsighted. His daughter nodded. He said, "That's a goldfinch.

"How come it isn't gold, then?" Crex asked.

And Lanius knew that, too. "They're only gold in the later spring and the summer and the first part of fall," he answered. "The rest of the time, they're this sort of greenish yellow color. But you can tell what they are by the song they sing. " He whistled a few notes of it, not very well.

He wondered if Crex would ask why the birds were gold only half the time. He would have, when he was a boy. But he'd always been wildly inquisitive about everything. He still was. Crex – and Pitta, too – had only ordinary children's curiosity.

He smiled down at them with a strange blend of affection and exasperation. Most ways, they took after their mother's side of the family, not his. Queen Sosia was King Grus' daughter, and Grus was as practical and hardheaded a man as had ever been born. Lanius did not like his father-in-law very much. How could he, when Grus had grafted his family onto Avornis' ancient royal dynasty and held in his own hands most of the royal power? That Grus' hands were extremely capable made matters no better. If anything, it made them worse.