“Your crowned ancestor wears borrowed glory,” Anghara said, her words more of a verbal lash than any hearth-guest had right to indulge in. “Forgive me, but to my eyes no Rashin would look well wearing this crown. It has belonged to men of my blood for many generations.”
“Are you saying it suits Sif Kir Hama?” asked Favrin, with a touch of malice, his eyes glinting.
“That will change,” Anghara said, with icy calm.
Favrin raised an eloquent eyebrow. “He took over the armies once before when it was deemed impossible for a woman to lead them,” he said.
“A girl,” Anghara corrected. “Yes, he took them. I am taking them back. It is time.”
“A minor point, but the armies in question are in Kheldrin; you are here, and it still remains for you to convince many you are not your own ghost,” Favrin said dryly.
“Red Dynan’s royal seal, lost when his daughter vanished, will do much to attest to the solidity of this particular ghost. It worked for you,” Anghara tossed out a vivid smile. “As for the rest…Sif’s armies aren’t the only ones in Roisinan. And even they will return to my banner once it is unfurled over Miranei.”
“I like your confidence in the future,” Favrin remarked conversationally. “I share it—alas, my crystal ball shows quite a different path than the one you have outlined.”
Anghara put down her wineglass. “I have said I am not here to bargain for my country. But I am here to bargain. For yours.”
She had succeeded in startling him, but, as before, he turned his surprise into sardonic amusement.
“For mine?” he questioned softly, a curious, shadowed smile playing around the corners of his mouth. “You come freely into my land and tell me you come to bargain for my country?”
There was a threat there, however veiled. But Anghara laughed, a brittle laugh which had little to do with merriment. “Yes, I came—I trusted in the given word of a prince and the honor of a soldier. Was I wrong? My friend might be interested to learn his uncertainties are likely to be so richly vindicated.”
Favrin’s nostrils flared briefly, and there was a spark in his eyes. “I keep my word,” he said curtly.
Anghara offered a half-bow from her chair. “I do not doubt it.”
There was still a last swallow of wine in Favrin’s glass; he drained it, brought it down with a sharp, spasmodic motion. His face was still wearing its mask of gentle amusement, but his eyes had darkened into violet. “You came here to tell me something,” he said. “What is it?”
“I claim Roisinan,” Anghara said, very softly, sitting very straight, the light wicker chair suddenly a throne. A soft golden light came to play around her head and shoulders; Favrin couldn’t see it, but it was hard not to be aware of it on some level—he could sense it, the air around her changed, became charged with royalty. He had to fight against the pull of it, else he would have been on his knees swearing fealty.
“There is still the right of conquest,” he said instead, his jaw set.
“There is,” Anghara agreed. “Shall I claim Tath, too?”
“You could not,” Favrin said.
Her eyes glittered strangely. “Could I not? Would you gamble with your birthright?”
“Others gambled with yours, long ago. The dice rolled against you.”
“Then,” said Anghara, with light emphasis.
Favrin, prodded into betraying a sudden disquiet, slipped off the parapet where he had been perched and turned away, staring into the distant horizon where the ocean met the sky. He heard a rustle behind him, then a footstep; he sensed rather than saw Anghara come to stand beside him. Surprised, he looked around into a pair of intense gray eyes.
And found himself at once prey to something completely unexpected.
He sought refuge in levity, as usual, but it was a weak and watery smile he dredged up as defense against a wave of sudden desire, a hunger that swept through him and left him acutely open and vulnerable in its backwash.
“In all your designs,” he said, “have you considered the inescapable fact that the single most effective way of solving our problems might lie not in sundering our Houses, but in joining them?”
Anghara blinked; for a moment the magnetic gray eyes broke their contact with his own, and Favrin found the strength to look away. “Joining them?” she echoed.
“Marriage,” Favrin said, his voice already firmer. His knees still felt suspiciously as though they might give way if he let go of his balcony’s balustrade too abruptly, but having gained solid ground after nearly drowning in her eyes his mind worked round the idea and found it curiously pleasant. Which was odd; he had enjoyed his share of bed-mates—women came willingly to one of royal blood—but until this instant he had never contemplated wedlock.
It was Anghara’s turn to be startled; this was certainly not the turn of events she had envisaged when, prodded by the cryptic words of the oracle at Gul Khaima, she had first formulated the nebulous idea of coming to the White Palace of Algira. In the short but charged silence following Favrin’s single word, she considered the concept. Above the idea towered the shade of Red Dynan—a huge ghost, and one unlikely to ever be laid to rest. Favrin might not physically have Anghara’s father’s blood on his hands, but they both knew only youth and inexperience had kept him from the battle which had taken Dynan’s life. The war had been started by the Rashin clan—the blood guilt would always be there. And yet…Anghara was deeply shocked to discover her father’s death hadn’t been her first concern. Other images had crowded Red Dynan out of her mind. One was a hazy thing, trembling on the edges of comprehension—Favrin was wrong, the wrong man. The wrong man for her. It was an instinct that was bone-deep, even if she didn’t have time to chase it down and discover exactly why. The other was something far more specific, and far more compelling.
“Clever,” she murmured at length, looking down at her interlaced fingers.
“Does that mean you accept?”
“To you, my enterprising lord, would go all the advantages of such a match. Should I agree, it would be no less than a complete surrender—and the battle hasn’t even been joined.”
“Not so,” Favrin said. Too quickly. Anghara braced herself, and looked up; there was an odd, fervid heat in his eyes. She hadn’t been afraid until this moment, but now the faintest touch of fear traced an icy path down her spine. “And must there be a battle after all, Anghara?” he added softly, almost as an afterthought.
“You forget what your women accept when they wed,” Anghara murmured. “The silken chains that lie behind the Silk Curtain.”
“Say rather that they rule their men with a rod of iron from the women’s quarters. It is not an ill life.”
“I was crowned in Miranei when I was nine years old,” said Anghara. “My kingdom is, has always been, my own—I hold what I hold in my own right. If I gain Roisinan and take back my throne, I will not rule my kingdom from behind the veils of the bedchamber, at some man’s whim or indulgence. If you are after an easier way to gain the throne of Roisinan, this is not it, my lord.”
“It could still be.”
“Would you break the traditions of your people and eschew the Silk Curtain? Would you have your barons call you unmanned because your woman would not keep to the confines of the kaiss?”
“Do you not think my barons might call me unmanned if they should ever discover what went on here tonight—if they find I stayed to listen to my enemy who is a woman, and then let her go free?” Favrin said.
“Do you measure manhood in this land by how much less worthy a woman is of your attention, except when she is bearing your children?” Anghara said.
“I told you, there is power of a sort in the kaiss.”
Anghara shook her head. “Not for me.”
“You would not be an average kaissan, that is true—but it could still be. It could still be,” Favrin said, and something leapt in his eyes at the words.
Anghara forced herself not to shrink from his gaze. “Your word,”
she reminded him.
He recoiled, swallowed, fought to master his face. Then, again, he laughed. “I think that I find myself in sore need of another glass of wine,” he said, with the slow southern drawl she was beginning to recognize. “May I refill your own?”
Her own glass was still half full, but Favrin scooped it up in passing as he turned and made what was almost an escape into the main chamber.
Kieran had been thinking of late that all the trouble and pain of the last few months had been no more than a training ground to provide him with the endless reserves of patience he increasingly seemed to require. He had been sitting quietly by himself in one of Favrin’s carved chairs by the cold fireplace. Something on Favrin’s face made Kieran leap to his feet, instantly alert; he was not, however, given the chance to find out what it was that had stung him, because this was the moment when everything began to unravel around them.
A tap on the door made Favrin turn with coiled ferocity, betraying a prince’s fury at an order disobeyed. It was followed almost instantly by the fair-haired man who had conducted Kieran and Anghara here and had subsequently withdrawn—Kieran supposed he had gone no further than the guardroom. He had shed the coat and the velvet hat, and now showed himself to be an athletic young man. But the face he turned to his lord was drawn and gray, his eyes blazing with pride and pain. Whatever had happened to bring him here in defiance of Favrin’s instructions had to have been momentous—and, after a frozen moment, Kieran knew what it was, the only thing it could be. He was a breath ahead of Favrin himself, who suddenly reached blindly for the nearest support. He did it with the hand holding the two wineglasses; the delicate glass, the secret of whose making was something the south guarded as jealously as the honor of its women, shattered. A thin trail of red wine ran from what had been Anghara’s glass, like blood from a wound.
“The court doesn’t know yet,” Moran said breathlessly, ignoring the staring guest by the hearth. “The kaissar brought the message to me first, not a minute ago.”
“In the kaiss?” Favrin asked, his voice oddly hoarse.
“His chambers,” Moran said, shaking his head in swift denial. “Delvera. She will stay quiet.”
Favrin bowed his head, brought a hand up to cover his eyes. “Oh, my lord father!” he murmured; it was a private imprecation, words hardly meant to be heard by anyone else. The gesture was woven from pure pain, but the voice was Favrin’s usual sardonic tone, rich with irony. “You always knew how to live; small wonder you chose to take the God’s hand from the arms of a lover…”
Behind Favrin’s back, Kieran met Anghara’s level gray eyes. Alerted through esoteric senses of her own to impending doom, she had entered the chamber almost at the prince’s heels. She knew what had happened, as though Moran, opening the door, had let the news in before him and it had come at once to lay at her feet. This changed things. It changed everything. They had come to speak with an heir; they were now in the presence of a king.
Favrin seemed to remember this, and the two of them, at about the same moment. He lifted his head, straightening his back. “Send the kaissar back; make sure Delvera says nothing, not before I’ve had a chance to speak with her. Then come, and wait.” Moran, who had dropped to one knee before his new king, bowed his head briefly in acquiescence and departed. Favrin turned, very slowly, to Anghara, and she was astonished at the change a few charged moments had wrought in him.
“I can offer you sympathy, if not condolences,” Anghara said, taking the initiative, after a pause which both seemed reluctant to break. “I too lost a father. But you are hardly likely to share my fate—when this old lion died, the lion cub was grown and ready. Whither Tath now, King Favrin?”
The eager fever that had been in his eyes a moment ago had vanished, replaced by something cool, calculating. “It almost seems as though everything about this was planned,” he murmured.
Anghara raised an eyebrow. “If you think I had anything to do with this death, you grievously misjudge me—and the last place I would have been found when the deed was discovered would be my victim’s son’s own chamber.”
Favrin found strength somewhere to laugh. “My father would have enjoyed this. Intrigue was his love,” he said laconically. “And it seems to be something of a legacy; a plot was not what I was thinking of, but it isn’t entirely beyond the bounds of possibility. I should investigate Delvera’s links to Roisinan.”
“Your father always did have a penchant for the women of the north.”
Favrin’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Be careful, young queen, for you may yet step on quicksand.”
“I came here on a safe-conduct that was the given word of a prince, and trusted in a knight’s honor,” Anghara said pointedly.
“But you found a king,” Favrin said. He seemed to find the concept strange, as if he couldn’t imagine holding all that had been his father’s—a kaiss full of exotic women, a city, one crown held firm in one hand and free, finally, to reach for a far older and nobler royal circlet.
If it hadn’t been for the bright-haired girl before him, who now gathered herself with a royal poise he had yet to discover in himself.
“And shall a king’s honor be less than the prince’s, and both mean less than the sworn word of a true knight?” his strange guest now inquired from the glittering heights of court protocol.
“No, damn you,” Favrin said at last, blood rushing to his cheeks. He lifted his hand, only now seeming to realize the glass had cut him as it shattered and bright blood was welling out from a gash across his palm. He stared at this for a long moment, then closed his hand into a fist around the wound and lifted his eyes to Anghara, stepping aside to clear her path. “My word protects you. Leave this place with honor, as you found it. But go, Anghara Kir Hama. Go now, before it is too late. Remember, though, that ere you can become a true queen in Roisinan two men need to step out of your way; and neither your brother nor I will do so lightly.” He raised his good hand, palm open toward her, in a gesture of farewell. “We may yet meet again,” he said, in a softer voice, “in some green court in Miranei. Very soon.”
Anghara gazed at him for a long moment, and then her eyelashes swept down, veiling her eyes. Kieran was already waiting with her cloak, and she allowed him to drape it over her shoulders.
“Moran,” she heard the King of Tath say behind her to the chamberlain who had reappeared in the doorway, “make sure they are conducted from the palace in safety. Thereafter,” Favrin said, and he was speaking directly to Kieran now, “my writ does not run. I gave you safe-conduct to enter the White Palace, but my obligation ends at the pierhead; I offer you no promises at all if, tomorrow, I find you still in the city.”
“You won’t,” Kieran said.
The expression on the other’s face shaded into something oddly like relief; Kieran, who couldn’t begin to understand this subtle prince, found nonetheless that it was all too easy to like the man. Once he had seemed larger than life, the subject of his schoolroom lessons, against whose forces he had first bloodied his sword. He offered, at the last, a smile.
“Tend to that hand,” Kieran said softly, turning back from the doorway, meeting Favrin’s eyes, blue on blue. “Make sure they get any stray slivers out, else it could stiffen.”
“We wouldn’t want that to happen,” Favrin said, unable to resist meeting this unexpected solicitude with a barb.
Kieran parried the jab with relentless honesty. “It would be a pity…and a waste.”
With that, he turned and was gone, following Moran into the guardroom to claim his sword. The door snicked gently shut behind him, leaving Favrin to sink into the carved chair Kieran had just vacated and stare at the closed portal. The expression on his face was curiously similar to the one with which he greeted Anghara Kir Hama’s entrance an hour and a lifetime ago—astonishment, and reluctant respect.
14
Kieran didn’t volunteer where he got the two horses before the young sun cleared the horizon the next morning, and Anghar
a didn’t ask. In fact, they were doing very little talking. She had balked at leaving Algira. I nearly had him, were her despondent words; another hour, and I would have had him. But Kieran had seen something he could still not completely define on Favrin’s face as he came in from the balcony the night before. No—the chance had been and gone. Favrin would have no time and no room for them, not now—certainly not with every baron at court closely monitoring his smallest move. Favrin was a great soldier—but, for all that his had been the unseen hand on Tath’s helm for a long time, he was an untried king. There was too much at stake for him to risk a highly visible intrigue with what was, after all, as yet only another pretender to the throne he himself coveted.
But Anghara had been adamant, a stubbornness owing as much to royal self-confidence as to an almost childish frustration at the denial of a cherished wish. In the end Kieran lost his temper and did something he thought he had almost forgotten how to do—he spoke to her from the only height the yawning chasm between their ranks allowed him, that of older foster brother. Perhaps out of sheer astonishment Anghara had stopped arguing and obeyed. That didn’t mean she did it willingly. She had taken up the mantle of royalty, with all its prerogatives, and one of those had been a certain incontestable authority it had been all too easy to become used to. Now she found herself resenting the control Kieran had so easily invoked; relations were strained in the early hours of their ride north.
This persisted through a pause for a lunch so stilted and polite they could have been strangers—or, worse, deadly enemies unable to avoid being seated together at a court banquet. They were both relieved when the meal was over and they could divert their frustrations into the physical exertion of hard riding. Eventually monotony began to restore their good humor; when they stopped for the night, Anghara could ask calmly whether Kieran thought Favrin would have them followed.
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