Shadow Over Kiriath

by Karen Hancock

  She wore an ivory gown of fine linen, piped in blue and gold, with panels of gold satin slashing the full skirt. The sleeves were short and gathered, with ribbons of gold dangling from them, the neckline scooped low and wide, even in the back. Her hair had been plaited into multiple braids caught up in interwoven loops at the back of her head, tendrils of it dangling fetchingly from her nape.

  He crossed the room to stand at her right shoulder, glancing briefly at the view outside before his eyes returned to her, admiring the lovely glow of her skin as he wondered again how he’d ever thought her plain looking.

  “So then, my lady,” he said softly. “Does this mean you’ve decided?”

  She whirled to face him, her eyes locking on his as a red flush spread over her face and chest, the color setting off the blue in her eyes, which were very wide. Her hands came up to her waist, the fingers interlocking. And then she burst out, “Are you sure about this, Abramm? Because, really, I don’t think you understand what you’re asking of me. What you’ll need of me. And I just . . . I mean . . . You know how unsuited I am to courtly life, and I can’t imagine why you would . . . why anyone would . . . I mean, I’m too blunt. I loathe small talk and big parties and getting dressed up. . . . Really, I’m just . . . I’m not . . .” She trailed off helplessly, fingers working back and forth.

  He frowned at her. “Are you telling me you don’t want to be my wife, Maddie?”

  “Oh, plagues, no!” She turned away from him, laying her hands flat on her fiery cheeks, only to drop them and turn back again. “I love you more than I ever thought I could love anyone. The idea of living without you is unthinkable. I do want to be your wife! I just . . .” Her face grew pained and her fingers, interlocked once more, worked furiously in her agitation. “I just don’t think I can be a queen.”

  He snorted softly. “I didn’t think I could be a king, either, when people first suggested it.”

  “Yes, but you were obviously made to be one, whereas I’m—”

  “Exactly what I want.” He smiled. “Exactly what I need.”

  The color drained from her face. “I don’t know. . . . I just . . . I don’t see how I can do it.”

  “Maybe you can’t, but Eidon can. If he could make a king of me, he’ll have no problem making a queen of you.”

  “But . . . I . . .”

  He slid his hand down her arm and took her hand. “You don’t have to do it yourself, Mad,” he said. “That’s one thing I’ve definitely learned. He does it while we’re not looking. We just have to be willing to let him work.” He chuckled. “And I, for one, am absolutely confident you’ll be a magnificent queen.”

  “Oh, Abramm . . . are you sure?”

  At that he sobered and brought her hand up to lay his lips upon the backs of her trembling fingers, his eyes never leaving hers. “I have never been more sure of anything in all my life.”

  She caught her lower lip between her teeth. Tears glittered on her eyelashes. She took a deep breath, started to speak, and then gasped, “Oh, heavens!” She took another breath, pressed her fingertips to her lips, and finally nodded as the tears spilled down her cheeks. “Yes. I’ll do it. I will be made First Daughter and I will marry you, Abramm Kalladorne. Eidon help us all.”

  For a moment he could hardly believe she’d said it. Then, nearly whooping aloud, he caught her by the waist and pulled her to him. He brushed the tears from her cheeks, then bent and kissed her as if she were the only woman he had ever kissed. Or ever would. And after a moment her arms came up around his neck, clinging to him with a vigor that belied all her former fear and indecision.

  Sometime later Byron Blackwell’s startled voice interrupted them.

  “Oh. Excuse me, sir. I didn’t . . .”

  Abramm pulled his mouth free of Maddie’s to glance over his shoulder as his secretary reached for the door. “Wait a minute, Byron. I want you to summon the court.”

  Blackwell turned back to him, his face devoid of expression. “Summon the court, sir?”

  “We have an announcement to make.”

  A moment more Byron stared at him, as if he could not have been more stunned. His eyes flicked down to Maddie, secure in Abramm’s arms. Finally understanding registered and a smile broke onto his pasty face. “An announcement, sir. Very good, sir.”

  ————

  It was the most surreal thing Maddie had ever done, standing there at the top of the king’s gallery stair, her hand in Abramm’s as she listened to him announce to the gathered courtiers that she had consented to be his wife. She still couldn’t believe she’d said yes. And yet, hard as it had been, the moment she’d done it, she’d known it was the right choice. As much as the prospect terrified her, as impossible as it seemed for her to ever be what Abramm really needed, at the same time she realized this was the reason Eidon had sent her to Kiriath: to marry Abramm, to bear his heirs. To be queen to his people.

  It took her breath away and made her legs shake when she thought of it, though that was nothing compared to what she felt when pondering the truth that all she had dreamed and longed for these last months was coming true.

  After the announcement they retired to the lower court, where the nobility came to offer their congratulations. Carissa could hardly contain her enthusiasm, and Maddie lost count of how many times she expressed disbelief that her brother had finally done something so imminently sensible. Even Trap and Simon were chuckling, and it was the first time Captain Channon had ever looked at her with anything save a hostile glower.

  The other courtiers offered congratulations that ran the gamut from cool propriety to genuine and almost rowdy enthusiasm. Byron Blackwell was one of the former, and his sister Leona went through like a sleepwalker, shaking Maddie’s hand and speaking the proper words without ever making eye contact. She gave Abramm the same treatment but then stood in front of him afterward, looking up at him with a lost and confused expression until Byron finally pulled her away and she fled the hall altogether.

  Then suddenly here was Leyton, cutting a swath through the crowd to stop before them, staring first at Abramm, then at her, his blond brows arched above eyes so wide the whites showed. “It’s true, then?” he blurted at Abramm. “She’s agreed?” But before Abramm could answer him he turned to her. “You said yes?”

  She lifted her chin. “I did.”

  Leyton’s brows drew down. “You don’t have to, you know. Father will accept the treaty without it.”

  “I know.” She turned to look up at Abramm. “I want to.”

  “You want to submit to him? Obey him? Give up your freedoms and your independence for him? All those things the Words command a wife that you swore you’d never do?”

  She smiled at her betrothed. “Yes, all those things. So far as I am able.” Though really, she thought, I don’t think it will be that hard. He’s already asked me to do the hardest thing he could have asked, and I did it.

  Leyton rocked back on his heels, and for the first time in Maddie’s memory, looked thoroughly surprised. “Well.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “How about congratulations?” Abramm suggested.

  They were married a week later on the wallwalk at Graymeer’s because workers had only just begun to rebuild the Hall of Kings and would not be finished for at least a year. Thus it was that she stood before Abramm on the ramparts beneath the bright spring sunlight and joined her life with his, as Kesrin wrapped the traditional binding around their clasped hands. Only this time he used not the silk ribbons that were the norm but the bottom of her bedgown, given to Abramm as her token before he’d faced the morwhol.

  Then she looked up into his eyes and said the vows that sealed the binding, meaning them with all of her heart and soul. After that he kissed her and the multitude gathered in the fortress yards and on the wallwalks raised their voices in a thunderous cheer as the bells were rung and the cannon fired. She hardly heard any of it.

  They left the fortress in the wedding carriage,
the road back to Springerlan lined with well-wishers who cheered and waved and cast handfuls of flower petals over them. And in all that wide blue sky and magical day there was no sign of Shadow and not even the distant silhouette of any dragon. The only disruption occurred when Eudace burst in upon the wedding supper, shrilling out a prophecy that Abramm would be destroyed because he had joined himself with this Chesedhan witch. The holy man was shouted down and dragged off to the prison for his impertinence, and the party continued with hardly a break. The bride and groom barely knew he’d been there, too caught up in one another to trouble themselves with happenings at the other end of the Great Room.

  Finally, after the feasting and the singing and the joking and the dancing were completed, the royal couple was brought up to the bridal suite, where Carissa, Peri, Elayne Cooper, and Liza took Maddie into a separate chamber to prepare her. There they stripped off her wedding gown, robed her in fluid, white silk, and unpinned her waistlength hair, all the while offering a steady stream of advice. She hardly heard it, so focused was she on what was to happen next. By the time they delivered her over to her bridegroom, waiting in the adjoining bedchamber, she was shaking with nervous anticipation.

  As the door closed and the women’s teasing voices faded, she stared at him in wonder. He stood at the room’s midst, robed in white, tall and strong and unbearably handsome in the candlelight. Suddenly her heart felt as if it might beat its way out of her chest and she couldn’t find her breath. And though she thought surely her legs would give way at any moment, somehow they brought her to stand directly before him.

  He looked down at her soberly, his eyes shining dark blue in the shadows of those stern brows. She lifted her hand to touch his face, tracing her fingers along the scars from brow to lip, then continuing down through the narrow beard, along the corded neck, and coming to rest at last upon the shield glittering over his heart. All the while he watched her, unmoving. “Heart of my heart,” she murmured, quoting from their marriage vows.

  “Bone of my bone,” he responded. “Flesh of my flesh. Love of my life.”

  And now his fingertips brushed her cheek, Light spangling from his touch as he smoothed the hair back from her face. “The impossible is possible,” he murmured.

  By then her feelings had grown so intense they hurt, and she swayed toward him. Surprise flashed across his face. Then his hand slid about her waist, pulling her to him, and she lifted her lips to his, letting the fine sweet fire of his embrace sweep her into her destiny.

  Afterward it was said that many took the Star that day, which may have accounted for why, on that very night, the guardstar at Graymeer’s blazed to life for the first time in three hundred years.

  CHAPTER

  33

  “Makepeace, take this to Master Amicus and his guest.” The brother in charge of the kitchen gestured at the tray he had just finished loading with teapot, cups, and plate of shortbread. “You know where they are?”

  “In the Master’s receiving room,” Gillard replied, striving to keep the resentment and irritation from his voice. After two and a half months, he still wasn’t used to being ordered around. But he was definitely learning to keep his negative reactions to himself. He’d already been punished too many times for the sin of “pride” to want any more of it. They couldn’t cane him as they did the others, for fear of cracking his ribs, so they used a thin, supple switch of the sort one would use on a child. It stung like fire and left more thin marks on his pale flesh than was perhaps normal, but what he hated most was the way it reminded him of his infirmity.

  He was still sporting bruises from the last one.

  His hand had been unwrapped and freed of its splint a week ago, shocking him by how stiff and useless it had become. He could still hardly bend the fingers, though the brother who’d been treating him assured him it would improve with time and work. Of course, he’d not been able to say how much it would improve, though he’d insisted that even if Gillard might not ever be able to use a pen properly, he would at least be able to write.

  Gillard couldn’t have cared less about his ability to write. He wanted to be sure of regaining his ability to use a sword, but he knew he couldn’t say that. And, of course, he’d had no time to pursue that goal of late, anyway. Despite having had no contact with the outside world, he was almost never alone, and constant hard work, prayer, worship services, memorizing scriptures, and mastering the complex and inscrutable system of mandates to guarantee spiritual purity occupied every waking moment.

  Last week he’d been assigned with the other First-years to clean out the garderobes, a task he’d never even realized existed, let alone had to perform. It made sense that if one used the middle of the keep’s thick outer walls as a privy, one would eventually have to empty it. But it was a job for the lowest of the low, something not even proper to mention in the presence of a royal prince.

  Amicus seemed to enjoy giving him the assignment, and Gillard had nearly refused, despite the prospect of another switching. Only the realization that he’d be singling himself out from the other acolytes by doing so had stopped him. That they’d had visitors that day—a party of wealthy travelers— had only made it all worse. When whispers in the hallways afterward suggested it had been the king himself with his new queen—who was very beautiful—he was more irritated than ever. Bad enough to be hauling excrement out of the keep walls at all, much less be doing it on the day his brother came to visit. The stench was so bad the guests had not stayed long, and in retrospect, Gillard supposed Amicus had chosen that time for the task deliberately so as to shield himself and the keep, and guard the secret of his royal acolyte.

  Gillard could hardly blame him. Though he’d escaped the notice of the king’s men every time they’d come by in the more than two months since he’d taken his vows, it was largely because they’d barely looked at him— focusing on the older, larger acolytes who had full heads of hair. Abramm, however, knew what to look for.

  Still, he’d hated missing the opportunity to at least spy on the visitors. With news of the bigger world deliberately withheld to promote the acolytes’ concentration on their calling, he had no idea what was happening with his brother, why he’d come, who he’d married, whether he was strong or weak . . . Apparently his crippling had not restricted him to being carried about in a chair, but it would have been nice to have seen the ugly scars they said he bore.

  Now he picked up the tray, one side balanced on his flattened right hand, the other gripped securely by his left, and departed the kitchen. Crossing the yard to the main keep, he went directly to the first-floor receiving room. Voices murmured on the other side of the latched door as he set the tray on the floor so as to free his functional left hand. Depressing the latch as quietly as he could, he eased the door open and the murmuring resolved into actual words.

  “. . . say you might know something about his disappearance,” said one that must be the guest. The words themselves were as interest-piquing as the voice, which seemed familiar, so he paused, hoping to hear more. “One man even implied he might be hiding—”

  The voice silenced as Gillard realized Amicus, whose desk faced the door, must have seen it open. If Gillard waited another moment he’d be accused of eavesdropping and there’d be another switching. Quickly he squatted again and picked up the tray, using it to push the door open farther before stepping into the Master’s austere receiving room.

  The visitor sat in a chair facing Amicus’s wide, dark desk, a gaunt young man with thick brown hair tied into a queue and a woolly beard upon his face. Homespun tunic and knee breeches, threadbare woolen cloak and wellworn, mud-spattered boots bespoke a commoner status, and a poor one at that, typical of those investigating the possibility of pursuing a life in the religious orders.

  “Ah, ’ere’s the tea,” Amicus said as Gillard drew up beside the visitor’s chair. The latter glanced up then, giving Gillard clear sight of his face and he almost dropped the tray with the shock of it. No wonder the voice sounded fa
miliar! This was no commoner looking for a better life, this was Ian Matheson, the former Lord of Bryermeade and one of Gillard’s oldest and closest friends.

  Matheson barely glanced at Gillard as he took the offered teacup and turned back to Master Amicus, while Gillard went around to serve the latter. Did Amicus know who this was? Probably. He seemed to be extremely well informed. And the bit of conversation Gillard had actually heard seemed to indicate—

  “Makepeace, ye may leave us now,” Amicus said gruffly. “Wait outside the door ’til I call fer ye.”

  Leaving the tray on the big desk, Gillard hurried out, latching the door behind him before sagging back against it. He was so excited he could hardly contain himself. It shocked him how powerfully he responded to Matheson’s presence. Just seeing a familiar face, a friend who was inquiring about him, was wonderful, but even better was knowing that here was someone—unlike that stick Prittleman—who might actually help him do something besides all this religious nonsense. He stood there, grinning madly, then realized the voices had continued their conversation once he’d closed the door. He leaned his head back against the wood, straining to hear the faint words the visitor now spoke:

  “Is he here? Please, sir, I have to know.”

  “Why?” Facing the door, Amicus’s voice was much louder and clearer than Matheson’s.

  “Because if he . . .” Gillard lost the words and turned quickly, pressing his ear full to the wood without a twinge of guilt. “. . . our cause is not lost.”

  “Yer cause?” Amicus asked.

  “To restore the rightful king to his throne,” said Matheson, lowering his voice so much that even with his ear to the wood Gillard strained to hear him. And yet, as the words registered, his joy increased tenfold.

  When Amicus did not respond, Matheson pressed his point. “Surely you cannot enjoy incidents such as occurred last week. The way he came here as if he owned the place, flaunting that blasphemous shieldmark in your face . . .”