Chapter Fifteen - Stories

(Part II)

‘Your Majesty…’

The Keeper flinched as the Queen held up her hand, silencing him.

‘Open the doors.’ she told him, and he leapt back, somehow managing to bow as he did so, gesturing to the Black Guard flanking the door. A moment later, it was peeled open, and the hall beyond gleamed like amber jewels. The Queen swept through the opening, and her handmaidens followed her, blinking into the hall beyond.

Outside, night had fallen, but the Hall of the King was afire with flickering light. Beside the braziers that lined the sides of the enormous chamber, candles glittered, whispering, from every surface, climbing the stonework walls like incandescent vines, gleaming from the nooks of hidden crevices and alcoves beneath the endlessly shifting nightlass ceiling. The vast space of hall itself was filled with movement; nobles in embellished finery milling in an endlessly murmuring mass of courtly manoeuvring, bright jewels at their necks and easy smiles on their lips. Keepers in embroidered black robes slipped quietly between the revellers, bearing mirrors-edge trays of honeyed wine in glittering glass goblets. At the far end of the hall, Sara could see the King slouched in the Night Throne, behind a shimmering shield of Black Guard standing silent at the foot of his dais. His dark eyes watched the hall with a kind of distant boredom, unmoving, and the bare blade of his moonsilver sword lay across his knees, gleaming.

There was no announcement of newcomers to such occasions, no Keeper of the Hall ready at the door, but it did not matter. The nobles froze fast as ice when the Queen stepped across the threshold, resplendent in a deep emerald dress so dark it might almost have been black, but it caught the light as she entered, suddenly aflame, and lent some colour to the perfect paleness of her skin. Indifferent to their attention, or perhaps basking in it, she looked down over the hall with the haughty grace of a far younger woman, surveying her subjects coldly. A moment of stillness. The gold red necklace at her neck gleamed. Sara saw the King stir in his seat.

Then they were moving again, down the steps and into the throng. The Queen did not hurry, but her long strides had her handmaidens, even Velis, hurrying in her wake. They wore matching dresses in black, selected by the absent Matron, with golden rings at their wrists and necks. Tasteful, if not as striking as Eliana herself, of course. Sara had stolen a glance at one of the Queen’s looking glasses before they had left her apartments, and had decided the colour suited her raven hair, turning her emerald eyes to a cat’s.

The crowd parted before them, shifting, murmuring, watching, and they made their way easily towards the Night Throne, letting the great and good of Valia slide by around them; a dash of colour and sound in the immense, aching blur of the hall with its colourless, ancient stone. Sara could feel their eyes on her, scores of them, marking her, judging and assigning and whispering. There was a faint smile on her lips, relishing the thrill that shivered over the nape of her neck, but she kept her eyes forward, hot on the Queen’s heels. When they came to the foot of the dais, the Black Guard stepped back a little from the oncoming Queen. The King sat in the Night Throne, indifferent to the new arrivals, running his fingers along the darkling silver of the sword across his knees, much as he had when Sara had first approached the Night Throne, all those weeks ago. Behind him, the jagged black mass of the throne shimmered with candlelight, shifting like water. The tall shape of Captain Varos was at the King’s shoulder, black armour gleaming. Unlike the other Black Guard, the Silver Wolf was unhelmed, and his leathery skin caught the light of the candles. The Queen climbed the dais towards her husband, unfazed, and reached out one slender hand.

‘Happy nameday, husband.’ Their eyes met, and she smiled. ‘Your guests are anxious to see you.’

The King looked down at her for a moment, eyes flashing. He was wearing a black doublet and short cape trimmed with gold, his fair brow adorned with a circlet of slender golden vines, interwoven like knotted rope and studded with rubies. As Sara watched, her eyes politely and untruthfully lowered, he rose to his feet, and his lips curved into a smile. He looked down at the Queen and her attendants, surveying each of them in turn, and Sara blushed as she felt his eyes linger on her.

‘Of course, my Queen, how rude of me.’ he said, and his voice was deep as seawater and cut with steel. He slipped the moonlight blade into a dark sheath at his waist, and the sound of it faded like a whisper. Then he took the Queen by her hand, and they went out together into the crowd of noblefolk, tracked unobtrusively by the Silver Wolf and a couple of his men. The murmur of the hall rose with excitement, and a flurry of movement erupted as the attendant nobles began to manoeuvre themselves into positions closer to the King and Queen, gliding craftily through the niceties of courtly engagement.

Sara made to follow them, but a hand touched her elbow, stopping her in place.

‘This is not a time for handmaidens.’ Dana told her quietly. Sara hesitated, then stepped back into line with the other girls, hiding a frown. The tension between her and Dana had eased since her arrival in the Queen’s service, and there was a softness in her tone that made Sara’s heart ease a little. It was little things, true; a small smile in a quiet moment of uncertainty, patient guidance when she had not known when to empty the pots, when to serve the Queen her wine. Not much, but Sara took what kindness she could get.

‘Don’t look now, Sara.’ Glada murmured at their side, lips tweaked into a small smile. ‘Your admirer approaches.’

Sara looked up to find Lord Royce making his way smoothly through the throng, apparently indifferent to the small whirlpool of interest around the King and Queen. He wore a typically colourful doublet in flaxen yellow, trimmed with silver, and his fox brooch gleamed in the light of the candles. The dark skin of his smooth head seemed more out of place than ever, amongst the paleness of the other nobles, but he didn’t seem to mind. He stopped before them at the foot of the dais, dropping into his low, graceful bow, and the amber light gleamed on his bald head. The girls dipped politely in response, and he straightened, giving Sara a smile that only touched one side of his mouth.

‘My Ladies.’ he said, looking at each of them in turn. ‘You are lovelier than Arana herself made flesh.’

‘Good evening, Lord Royce.’ Dana replied, somewhat coldly. ‘I’m surprised not to see you nibbling at the King’s heels, as usual.’

‘You wrong me, Lady Dana. I am ever the King’s servant.’ the Fox replied with a hurt look on his smooth face. Dana frowned, and his look dissolved into another half-smile. ‘But the King has a way of occupying himself well enough without me, and I find I am often more interested in the smaller details of such occasions.’

‘And what would those be, I wonder.’ Velis murmured dryly, eyeing him from under one arched brow.

‘My Lady Sara.’ the Fox went on, sharp eyes turning to her. ‘Would you grant me the pleasure of your company?’

Sara hesitated. She glanced at Dana, but her sister was silent, frowning squarely at Lord Royce’s smiling face. She took a breath.

‘The pleasure would be mine, Lord Royce.’ she said softly.

He smiled again, a shape sharper than a knife-blade, and held out his elbow for her. ‘Please, call me Royce.’

Sara returned his smile as she took his arm. She could almost hear the eye-rolling of the other girls as they stepped away towards the crowds of nobles. The masses twisted and turned around them like tidal eddies, cloth and silk and everything in between, red, blue, green, black, and lesser known colours too, wrought of rare dies from the Sea of the Maker and beyond. Brooches flashed, necklaces dazzled, gold and silver and emerald and ruby and sapphire, the wealth of a nation older than memory. Somewhere through the shifting veil, she could make out the disturbance that was the King and Queen, moving aside the water like a two-pronged prow.

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‘All rather grand, isn’t it?’ the Fox asked her in his faintly lilting voice as they walked, following her eyes.

‘It is beautiful.’ Sara replied, still staring.

‘I suppose it is. What a fine King to have such fine things all around.’ the Fox replied dryly.

‘You are bold to speak ill of His Majesty in such company.’ Sara replied, frowning.

‘You mistake me, M’Lady.’ Lord Royce replied, smiling reassuringly. ‘I would speak no ill. I am, after all, the Keeper of this Hall.’

‘For His Majesty’s Keeper you seem to have little interest in him tonight.’

‘Quite so, M’Lady.’ he replied, hawk-eyes flitting over the crowd. ‘Look at them. Our King and Queen. What do you see?’

Sara looked. The King and Queen were making their way, hand in hand, across the eddy patterned floor of the hall. The King’s narrow crown gleamed from the middle of the crowd with its escort of Black Guard, shifting and turning around them at its centre like a whirlpool. He was smiling as he walked, hand on the mirror-grey pommel of the moonsilver blade at his waist.

‘Power.’

The Fox smiled.

‘Precisely. How he enjoys himself, torturing the patient penitence of his subjects. A luxury few men are afforded.’ The Fox paused, looking at the royal couple distantly. ‘When I first came here, I was nothing. A rumour for the court. Lord of the Rift, a barren place of little value, more graveyard than land. My mother’s gift. That and my Eastern name. But I was always a foreigner. The son of a Western father.’

Sara watched him as he spoke. She had to admit, he didn’t look much like a Royce.

‘Twenty years, I have served the Night Throne. Fifteen of those, it was Dekar that sat there. But I remember the man who ruled before him. And I remember when he was Lord Dekar, his lady Queen the second daughter of a nameless house. Did you know, for instance, that our noble King was once the Keeper of this Hall, as I am now?’

Sara frowned, looking towards the King and his retinue again.

‘I see you did not. But that was long ago, when the sigil on these doors was not so golden.’ the Fox went on, smile fading. ‘That is why you watch them. But I am past familiar, and familiarity is not so interesting to me.’ He nodded towards the throng around them. ‘I find you can find much more interesting stories floating in their wake. New is almost always more interesting.’

Sara looked back at the nobles, the bewildering maze of colour and sound, smiling and laughing through pale teeth, eyes drawn back inexorably to the King and Queen like moths to a flame. Sara realised she could not see a single familiar face amongst them.

‘I know none of them.’ she said quietly, frowning.

‘Then for you they will be most interesting of all.’ the Fox told her.

He led her by the arm away into the crowd, heading towards the King and Queen. The revellers parted around them as they came, murmuring, and Sara caught a few dark looks cast in their direction. Just as it seemed that they might intersect the royal couple and their watchful escort of guardsmen, the Fox twisted left and away with the grace of a fencer into the innermost swirls of their whirlpool. They moved effortlessly through the crowd, and the Fox spoke quietly in his carefully lilting voice to her as they went, putting names to faces and stories to all. A few, they greeted, others they simply passed, gliding on, absorbed by Sara’s courtly education.

He had not been wrong, of course. The variety of the King’s guests was as startling as their numbers. Here was the stout old Lord of the South Realm in his green doublet, nervously brushing at his puffy red cheeks with a damp handkerchief. A rather simple man, by all accounts, but the South Realm was the most fertile land this side of the Sea of the Maker, and he had wealth close to that of the King himself. Beside him, ashen-haired Lady Frindella of Cerin-by-the-Sea, with a necklace of pearls large as grapes around the narrow creases of her neck. The Lord of Arinath on the Sea of Storms, a distant relative of Glada’s, flashed sharp, white teeth as he regaled a little semi-circle of wide-eyed listeners with the latest tales of piracy and vice at his borders. There were more besides, and Sara frowned to realise there was even a large contingent from beyond Valia’s borders. A clutch of dark-skinned men with broad shoulders from the city of Dal, in colourful doublets not unlike the Fox’s, their women showing bare arms and skin as lovely as polished wood. A small, quiet group of men with pale faces and narrow, dark eyes were from the far West, she heard, a land of mysticism and mystery. No Northmen, of course. Or any of the Elahi. No one had come down out of the High Places since the rebellion started, they said, and no one had returned who went looking, either.

Not all were nobles either, for the Guild Masters of Uldoroth too plied the room with the quick charm of practiced tongues. The Master of Shapers dazzled in a black robe hung with more than a dozen chains in fine metals, dotted with stones in all the colours of sunlit oil and wrought with runes finer than spider-scratches. The Master of Forgers had attracted something of a crowd with a little clockwork mouse that raced across the floor between the feet of delighted revellers. The Master of Merchants slipped quietly through the throng, passing careful words to ready ears, and the Master of Knowers was quietest of all, observing the affair with the eye of a chronicler, ready no doubt to record the occasion later that night, hidden away in a cell somewhere in the Library of the Ulwe. Each had their gods, marked in silver at their breasts; she saw Horis the craftsman and Falk the tradesman. Arana, too, and Ulwe the First Maker, of course. There was even a navy man with the sign of Lorar at his breast; a silver wave cresting a rocky shore.

As the evening drew on, the honeyed wine was replaced with artfully presented trays of every delicacy Sara had ever heard of, and a few more besides. There were sweetmeats from the South Realm dressed in honey glaze, prawns from the Sea of the Maker in dark oil, cured trout sliced thinner than paper and dressed with lemon juice on a bed of soft bread. Fruits too, in every colour of the crowd, apples shined to a gleam and diced into slivers, grapes, strawberries, sliced pears, even a few Sara did not know; one tray carried a host of pinkish bulbs from the far West with spines like a pinecone that the nearby nobles scrambled to snatch, for a moment forgetting their practiced courtesy.

Despite the offerings, Sara found she had little interest in the food, or the drink, for that matter, after the first dainty goblet of honeyed wine had smoothed her tongue to a dull heat. Her eyes darted about, struggling to maintain the grace of her footsteps, her hand on Lord Royce’s arm. There was no shortage of interest in herself, either; curious noblefolk eager to smile and compliment the latest addition to the Queen’s retinue, surprised, perhaps, by the company of the dark-skinned nobleman at her side. Her confidence grew with each encounter, and soon she watched it all with a filmy excitement; a kind of tinted hue had come over the candlelight, and the faces of the nobles gleamed and smiled and laughed, dreamy as reflections at midnight beneath the endless shifting of the distant nightglass ceiling. But the Fox guided her softly on through the hall, tracing the aftermath of the King and Queen, always just far enough from the royal party to avoid their attention.

A shadow fell over the crowd, then, and Sara blinked. The King and Queen had stopped before an enormous shape in boiled leather. A woman, she realised, if you could call her that. Easily seven feet tall, broad as a wagon, and the stone-slab head that protruded from her black jerkin was bald as cooked meat.

‘Who is that?’

The Fox followed her eyes.

‘Ah,’ he said quietly, frowning. ‘I see the King’s mad dog is back from her travels.’

Sara stared up at the giant woman, barely concealing her revulsion. Her skin was pale, almost blueish, thin and swollen at the edges like an overstuffed skin. There was a notch in the top of her bald pate deep as a thimble, and a twisting scar trailed down from it across the ruined remains of her face, clawing across the dent where her nose should have been, curving her blue lips into a cruel smirk. The blade strapped roughly to her back was bigger than most people. Sara had never seen a man so tall, let alone a woman. Several of the nearest nobles visibly flinched back from her, averting their eyes.

‘Is she a giant?’

‘No.’ the Fox murmured.

‘A Northerner?’

‘No. Even they are rarely so… Monstrous.’

‘So that is…’ Sara’s eyes went wide. ‘The Bloodless?’

‘Indeed. Though I try not to call her that within earshot.’

Sara was still staring. ‘She’s…’

She was cut off as a large bell chimed somewhere overhead, echoing through the hall like a thunderclap. The nobles began to move, and Sara allowed herself to be led away with them by the guiding arm of the Fox, taking her place amongst the waiting throng. There was a sudden flurry of activity beside the doorway, and several score Keepers in dark robes hurried into sight, bearing large wooden slabs over their shoulders with the ease of practiced hands. A few moments later, row upon row of long tables had appeared in the space vacated before the great black slab of the Night Throne. Those closest to it were lined with high-backed chairs, those furthest away had to settle for benches.

‘Excuse me, M’lady. I must take my place.’ the Fox told her politely, bowing his smooth, dark head. ‘I will look for you, after.’ Then he was gone, dissolving like a shade into the crowd. Sara frowned.

‘Enjoying yourself?’ Dana asked her, suddenly at her shoulder. Sara blushed.

‘It was… educational.’ she replied softly.

‘Careful, sister.’

‘I am be-’

‘Ladies!’ Glada interrupted, arriving beside them. There was a goblet of honeyed wine in her hand, and she was smiling easily. ‘Velis says we must find our places.’