“Greetings and welcome! Prosperity and well-being! You must be the one Erai-Yanya sent to Atan,” he exclaimed.
Hibern blinked. How many of Sartor’s strictly defined social circles had the morvende blurred with his unexpectedly informal greeting?
“I thank you for your greetings and felicitations,” Hibern said, groping for the right words. “But who is Atan? Do you mean the Queen of Sartor?”
“It is short for Atanrael. It is her heart-name. Who would go by ‘Yustnesveas Landis the Fifth’ if she did not have to?” He flicked his long, thin fingers through the air, the talons at the ends painted a cheery orange. So were his toe talons.
“As for me, you must call me Hin,” he said. “For Hinder. You’ll meet my cousin Sinder around here somewhere, but she is never ‘Sin’ to anyone but me. Not to confuse you. Just to help you sort us out,” he went on in the same cheerful tone, thereby doing away with all the careful formality on which Hibern had been coached. “Atan is presiding over the high council interviewing the Colendi ambassador. If you can call a formal assembly in Star Chamber a mere interview. I suspect the idea was to intimidate Colend into agreement.” He grinned. “We have a saying, ‘A juggling snake has no time to bite.’”
How does a snake juggle? Hibern said, “There are problems with Colend?” Aside from the gossip about their king being mad, the Colendi were renowned for using politeness as a weapon.
Hin’s fingers lifted to the side of his face and twiddled, as if he played a flute.
“Oh,” Hibern breathed. “The Music Festival?”
Hin’s smile vanished. “That interview was to last a glass.” The orange talons flashed as Hinder mimed turning over a small sandglass. “It’s been an entire hour.”
Chapter Eight
Elsewhere in Eidervaen’s royal palace
THE time has come to introduce Atan, saddled with the name Yustnesveas, queen at fifteen of the oldest country in the world. Therefore her influence would always be disproportional. She knew it. She hated it.
She also hated crying.
When she was small and impatient with chores, in her haste once she’d accidentally splashed boiling water on her hand and wrist. She’d refused to give in to tears while her hand was wrapped with soothing keem leaves, because nowhere in the records she’d been given to study did any queen of Sartor cry.
Tsauderei, her guardian and tutor, had said, “Atan, you keep forgetting that those records you’re reading are what people want you to remember about the individuals, not necessarily what they were truly like. Go right ahead and howl, if it helps.”
But Atan hadn’t. Queens were supposed to have self-control. Their decisions affected a lot of people, so giving in to passion was the next thing to evil.
Even so, there were three occasions when she did cry.
She’d felt the sting of tears when she first walked into the Tower of Knowledge, known for centuries and centuries as Sartor’s mind. But she’d been too hurried and frightened to let the tears fall, for she had to break the cruel enchantment that had been bound to the Landis family (who Norsunder thought had all been safely killed), while Norsundrian warriors were chasing her people into the square below.
The second time she cried happened a few days after Sartor was freed from the enchantment, during her first Restday-dawn walk through the Purrad, the twelve-fold labyrinth in its secluded garden at the oldest part of the royal palace—the place sometimes called Sartor’s soul.
She had not expected the ancient silver-barked trees, lit by slanting shafts through time-worn stone traceries, to be so beautiful when seen from all sides as she walked the Purrad’s interlocking circles; she had not expected the rush of sorrow and wonder when she imagined her own parents having stepped on these same smoothed pebbles so carefully placed and tended.
The third time she cried was when she walked into her parents’ bedroom, and saw the little signs of haste: her mother’s nightgown tossed on the rumpled bed, her father’s desk scattered with papers and books.
However, she had not cried when she first walked into Star Chamber, Sartor’s oldest chamber of governing, known as Sartor’s heart. High under the complicated vaultings of the ceiling, windows let in the light at different times and seasons, golden shafts in winter, cleverly multiplied through crystal, and in summer, coolly diffused to silver. At night, or on a gloomy winter’s day, floating lights glimmered above in ever-changing patterns, like stars.
It was winter’s golden light that she had first seen: so clear, striking the marble and diffusing, so the vast room seemed infinite as sunrise.
The tree-shaped throne where she sat now, an elaborate combination of carved golden marble, real gold, mirror, and magic so that she could be seen from all sides, stood in the center of the room, around which the floor circled in wide, shallow marble tiers on which courtiers could move in the ancient complexities known as Circles.
Right now she was bored, irritated, and increasingly angry as the beautifully modulated, carefully cadenced adult voices murmured in the first circle tier below her throne. The high council was gathered there, where only the duchas and the mage guild head could stand in more formal gatherings.
There stood Chief Veltos, head of Sartor’s mage guild, tall, thin, and grim-faced as she glared at the Colendi ambassador. The first time Atan met Chief Veltos, she had insisted on taking Atan to this very room. As they stood beneath the vaulted ceilings in this chamber freighted with history, the chief mage had said in a low, bitter voice, “Everyone knows that our army lost the war with Norsunder, but your father, as commander, is dead, past blame or care.” She paused, her tone flattening. “I lost the magic battle, for it was my strategy that Detlev of Norsunder ripped apart so easily, before binding us under enchantment. Our first job must be new, and better, protections. Because we must expect Detlev to attack again.”
Atan had been too overwhelmed for tears.
Her next visit to this chamber had been her coronation on New Year’s Firstday 4735—for the Sartorans, a jump of ninety-seven years—that she only recollected as great noise and color as the remnants of Sartor’s Three Circles gathered to see her take her father’s place. After fifteen years of secluded life she had been too terrified to raise her head beyond the formidable array of staring faces.
Most recently, Midsummer’s celebration felt hollow without the ancient tradition of the Music Festival, which now took place in Colend. As it had for the last ninety years.
She’d been unprepared for the anguish and sorrow in every adult who’d gathered to make the Progress through the Twelve Stations, when for the first time in centuries, it would not signal the start of the Sartoran Music Festival.
Centuries, everyone had repeated, their voices ringing with the weight of moral outrage.
So here they were in the summer of the year 4737, and all Sartor wanted the Music Festival back.
The Colendi ambassador’s lovely singsong echoed through the chamber now, mellifluous and rehearsed. “. . . And our king is the first to acknowledge Sartor’s respect for tradition, but his majesty bade me speak for our own traditions, beginning with honoring the treaties we have made with the Alliance of Guilds. For, if you will permit me to offer a reminder, it is not merely the hostelries and bakeries and eateries and houses of entertainment in Colend, but those along the road leading to us, who have invested much in expectation of the yearly gathering.”
The elderly Duchas of Chandos, who stood first within the first circle opposite Chief Veltos, lifted his hand. “I hear no objections being offered to Colend establishing its own music festival in complement, but it seems reasonable to us to expect that the Sartoran Music Festival would continue to be held in Sartor, as it has for centuries.”
“What greater way for Sartor to rejoin the world?” stated a baras, her chin elevated, eyes darting glances from side to side. She was in the high council, though as baras
she was only third circle, because her daughter was deemed one of Atan’s Rescuers.
The dapper guild chief bowed to the duchas, light shimmering along the tiny mois stones embroidered on his formal tunic as he said to the ambassador, “Our Sartoran guilds will suffer greatly if denied the yearly gathering. And we are already sorely burdened due to the war which, for us, was recently lost.”
The Colendi ambassador turned to each, his hands and expression apologetic, but Atan suspected that he was not really sorry. His voice was too smooth, the corners of his mouth easy, as he went on in the musical Colendi version of Sartoran, “My king respects Sartor’s place in history. Were we not once a part of the Sartoran empire? Did not my own ancestors travel here every summer, claiming their summer sojourn the pinnacle of their year?”
He paused to bow in Atan’s direction. “My king commanded me to beg her majesty’s forbearance, and assure her that no one understands better than he the difficulties besetting a new monarch, especially in this troubled time.”
Though he bowed to her, Atan could see how his attention stayed with the high council as he opened his hands in a graceful gesture, fingers pointed starward, slightly opened. If she stuck her tongue out at him, she suspected he wouldn’t even notice.
Chief Veltos would.
“I am enjoined to request a hiatus of five years,” the ambassador oiled on, “that our own treaties may be renegotiated, and his majesty also hopes that in that time Sartor will have fully recovered its rightful place in the world.”
The bells rang then. Atan wondered if he had chosen his time.
The high council had not risen. They didn’t even look at one another, much less at Atan. That meant they’d already agreed to force the interview to last until they got what they wanted.
Atan stirred impatiently. Chief Veltos, at least, should remember that Erai-Yanya’s student was coming. No, she was probably already here. But it was Chief Veltos who had said so reasonably, “We will honor you all our lives, your majesty, for yours was the hand freeing the kingdom from the enchantment. However, now that we of the guild are no longer enchanted, we can free you of the necessity for continuing those studies . . .”
And they still had not invited Tsauderei to visit, much less found time in the schedule for her to visit him—the mage who had saved her life when he found Atan as a baby, lying in the border mountains with the wounded guard who had run with her. It was Tsauderei who had tutored Atan as well as guarding her for fifteen years.
Atan meant to be good. She meant to wait for the signal that the interview was over, but she could not contain the surge of resentment at this evidence that they intended to talk through her impending interview as if it did not matter. As if she did not matter, as if she were part of the decoration of this ancient room. Perhaps not as important as those decorations, as she wasn’t centuries old.
She knew that that was self-pity, but the prospect of a study partner was important to her. And they kept reminding her of her duty as queen.
So . . . maybe it was time to act like a queen.
She put her hands together in the old gesture of peace. It caught the attention of the ambassador, as she had hoped. She then opened her hands and held them out, palm up, the signal that he could withdraw.
She saw at once from the little smile the ambassador gave her as he raised himself from his bow that he had won some kind of contest. Yes, there it was, in the faces of the council, the little narrowing of eyes and thinning of lips that indicated she had done wrong. They all rose as the ambassador touched his fingertips to the air above her palms and bowed, retreated the full twelve steps backward, then bowed again at the door before it boomed shut behind him.
“Five years,” the Duchas of Chandos began in a querulous voice.
“‘His majesty,’” the Duchas of Mondereas repeated contemptuously. He was one of the few leaders who had survived the war previous to Detlev’s enchantment. “Just because we were away a century can he possibly think we are not aware that his king is mad?”
“Who really makes the decisions in Colend?” a duchas asked. She was young, and very new to both her title and her place on the council, as her elders had all been killed in the failed defense of Sartor before the enchantment.
A babble of voices broke out.
Chief Veltos had turned away from Atan as if she really were an invisible part of the throne. But now she placed her hands together and bowed to Atan, saying, “We would not keep you from your interview, your majesty. We will take counsel among one another and wait upon you at your convenience.”
In other words, they would tell her what to do.
Atan made her first-circle bow. The high council bowed, heads low until she left the chamber.
She knew she shouldn’t complain. She had not been raised as a royal heir, in spite of all of Tsauderei’s efforts. Neither he nor Gehlei, the bodyguard who had run with Atan, could train a Sartoran queen the way monarchs had been trained for centuries. She had a lot to learn, and she knew that the high council worked tirelessly to bring Sartor back into a world that had gone on for nearly a century while Sartor was frozen beyond time.
As Atan walked back, she glanced along the corridors, mentally ticking off all the people who watched over her.
First was Chief Veltos, who headed the Sartoran mage guild as well as the high council that governed the kingdom while Atan learned statecraft.
There was the council-appointed herald-steward, who taught her the traditions and protocol of that statecraft.
There was the wardrobe mistress, who chose exactly the right clothing for every occasion and saw to it that everything was fresh, the embroidery perfect, the panels creased.
There was a personal maid whose job it was to brush out Atan’s hank of brown hair, trying to coax highlights into it, and dressing it up with pearls and tiny gems worked into butterflies and blossoms. There was a maid whose job it was to expertly twitch away any evidence of a tiny hangnail on her cuticles, to keep her nails buffed and trimmed.
Then there were the scribes, heralds, and pages who inexorably swept her from one event to another all through her day.
There was somehow in her carefully orchestrated schedule scarce time or place for friends.
* * *
—
Hibern’s mood had turned uneasy when the morvende boy reappeared. “I found her! They had her closeted with the Colendi ambassador.” He said that as he opened a door, and fluttered those distracting orange talons in invitation for Hibern to go through.
Hibern gained a vague impression of a beautiful room, full of light and color, but her attention went straight to the girl her own age who rustled in from another door, her smile tentative until she saw Hinder’s orange talons. She laughed, a quick, soft sound. “Orange, Hin?”
“Sin considered purple, then decided your overseers would be even more aghast at orange.” He walked out, shutting the door behind him.
The two girls were left alone.
Both Hibern and Atan were used to being the tallest of anyone their age. Their gazes met at eye level, each appraising, and a little shy. Each wanting to like, and to be liked. The two girls took one another in: Hibern a thin girl plainly dressed in cream linen with blue over it; Atan a big girl wearing an elaborate costume consisting of a stiff brocaded under-gown in green, made high to the neck, the lace edging goffered, an over-robe of pure white silk embroidered with stylized patterns of wheat, and over that, a brocade stole of gold, with interlocked patterns connected by stars picked out in gems and tiny pearls. Her brown hair was bound into a coronet made of three braids, threaded through with gold.
“Welcome,” Atan said—just one word, no ritual greetings, but the tone made it sound real. “Before we begin I must apologize for keeping you waiting.”
Hibern belatedly remembered her bow, and performed it, feeling intensely awkward, as Marlovens did
not bow.
“Come within, please, and do make yourself comfortable,” Atan said, indicating an oval-backed chair, as she sat in its twin.
Hibern had been warned that most outland rulers would keep visitors standing. In Sartor’s history, she’d read, people once had had to kneel before royalty. In Marloven Hess, the throne was on a dais, so the jarls in the back could see the king and the king could see them. As Senrid said, “Kings up on daises were also great for target practice when the jarls wanted a new king.”
Hibern sat on the edge of her chair, hands flat on her knees. So far Atan was not using the formalities she had been told to expect. So she must rely on her own eyes and ears.
“I may address you as Hibern?” Atan asked.
“Yes, your majesty.”
“And you learn magic from Erai-Yanya?”
“Yes, your majesty.”
“Have you studied at all at the northern mage school in Bereth Ferian?”
“I go there once a month. My tutor wishes me to study certain things with the students, your majesty.” When Atan seemed to be waiting for more, Hibern said, “Erai-Yanya goes there to visit her son, as well as to lecture to senior students on advanced magic. Arthur was made heir to King Evend. Before Evend died—”
Atan’s hand came up. “I’m familiar with the tragic history. That is, I’ve heard about Evend dying and taking the Norsunder rift with him, which ended the Siamis enchantment last year. So you learn from these northerners, and yet, if I’m not misled, you’re from the south?”
“Marloven Hess, your majesty,” Hibern stated.
Atan’s eyes widened. Hibern was distracted by the color of Atan’s eyes, a rare dark blue. One couldn’t call such protuberant eyes pretty, but they were distinctive, a familiar feature of her exalted lineage. Anywhere else in the world, she’d be called plain—as would Hibern herself.
“How is it that a Marloven came to study light magic? From everything I’ve heard, they have been . . .” Atan made a gesture. “Not allies. Your family differed, or have I been given false information?”
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