Page 4 of Stolen Princess's Secret

She shook her head, no.

‘It’s an old method of communication that falconers sometimes use when they fly their birds.’ He wasn’t even sure why he’d brought the silk with him in the first place, other than he’d been battling a memory of him and Claudia lying in front of his father’s fire with a fragile book spread out in front of him that listed all the colours a royal raptor could fly and what they meant. He’d been the one reading, as usual. Claudia had been listening like a little sponge. ‘When I attach it to Carys’s right leg, like this, it means royalty is in residence and it offers incoming visitors royal protection.’

‘Er, Master Falconer, sir, are you at liberty to be offering that?’

‘Too late.’ He lifted his arm and Carys shot into the sky. ‘There are only half a dozen people alive who even know what that ribbon means.’ So why was he flying that ribbon at all? Instinct?

Instinct and false, fierce hope, and a thundering heart.

Word went around the fortress that they had incoming visitors and curiosity grew. Visitors heading in from the high mountain pass, on horseback, was unusual. Carys had spotted the riders and was heading towards them. Nothing strange about that. He’d trained her to mark the presence of large animals.

And then the woman dismounted, pulled a gauntlet from her saddlebag and called that bird straight out of the sky.

His bird.

Using his signals.

It couldn’t be.

But what if it was?

He could feel the blood draining from his face, leaving him clammy and shaken. Had there not been an audience, he would have sunk to his heels and leaned against the wall and taken strength from the only home he’d ever known. As it was, he had to put his hand to the wall to steady himself.

‘Sophia, go get Housemaster Silas and tell him to get up here.’ Silas and his wife Lor had managed the running of the fortress for decades. Out of anyone, he might, might, hear Tomas out.

Ten long minutes later he met the gaze of an out of breath Silas, and avoided looking at Sophia’s mother—the soon-to-be Queen Consort Ana—and tried to project calm confidence as he explained the calling of his bird from the sky situation.

‘So she’s a falconer too,’ said Ana.

‘He thinks it’s Claudia,’ said Silas, his weary old eyes fixed on Tomas with unwavering intensity.

‘I didn’t say that,’ Tomas protested.

‘But you think it,’ Silas replied.

‘Just to be clear, you’re talking Claudia, as in Casimir’s dead sister?’ Ana looked from one man to the other. ‘You’re serious.’

‘We never got her body back,’ Tomas said stubbornly.

‘We got some of it back,’ countered Silas.

‘Okay,’ said Ana hurriedly. ‘Small girl on the battlements. Listening.’

Tomas felt himself flush. Silas shut his eyes and shook his head.

‘Is there any way we can get a look at the woman’s face?’ Ana said next.

‘She’s wearing traditional headdress. Only part of her face is showing. It could be anyone.’

‘But you think it’s her.’

‘I don’t know.’ Tomas swore and turned away before his control deserted him. Swearing in front of women and children, what next? ‘She knew about the coloured cloth instead of jesses and what they meant. It’s in one of the royal falconry journals and I read that section aloud to her when she was helping me nurse a hawk with a broken wing. She was good with the birds. They trusted her. She knew all our call signals.’

‘Why would she stay away all these years, only to return now?’ asked Silas.

‘Who knows?’ Tomas snapped but he could take a wild guess. ‘Because her father who left her to rot is dead, her brother is whole and happy, Byzenmaach is moving forward and she wants to come home? How should I know?’

‘But you think it’s her,’ said Ana. ‘Again, just to be clear.’

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