by K.M. Weiland
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chris surveyed himself in the triptych of floor-length mirrors. “I feel like an idiot.”
“You don’t look like one. Not too much.” Parry stepped back and cocked his head. “You look like a real nobleman.”
“Well, I’m not. I’m just a normal, ordinary guy who doesn’t even own a tie.”
He’d take a tie any day over the getup in which Parry had decked him out. The high-collared doublet was made of black velvet with matching leather sleeves. A border of elaborate gold stitching and dark green velvet lined the buttons down the center, all the way to the stiff hem flared around his waist.
The matching pants—black velvet slashed to show a layer of green beneath—ballooned around his thighs. Really, they were more shorts than pants, since they abruptly stopped above the knee where they met his tall boots. And to top it off, Parry had convinced him he was supposed to wear a short cape, its hem embroidered in gold fully six inches deep, slung over one shoulder and tied under the opposite arm.
“Here’s the hat.” Parry held out a pancake of green velvet with long gold feathers curled all the way around the brim.
“Forget it.” He started unknotting the cape. “Forget all this stuff and give me back the leather shirt.”
“The jerkin? That’s not for occasions of state.”
He tossed the cape and the doublet at a chair and took the jerkin from Parry’s protesting grip.
“Her ladyship won’t approve.”
“Her ladyship is going to have to learn I’m not governed by her approval.”
“But the king—”
“Or the king’s.” He shrugged into the jerkin, and laced it up the front. The mirror showed him a slightly piratical reflection.
A knock sounded on the dressing room door, and Parry scrambled to open it. “My lady.” He sounded slightly shocked. No doubt visiting men’s dressing rooms wasn’t the sort of thing a princess was supposed to do, Searcher or not.
“Is he ready?”
“Um . . . not quite.”
“May I come in?”
“Let her in,” Chris said. She was going to see his chosen wardrobe sooner or later. Might as well let her finish her grumbling now.
Parry bobbed a series of bows and swept the door open.
Chris didn’t turn away from fiddling with his collar, and his first glimpse of her was in the mirror. He froze and stared.
She was an attractive woman at any time. But tonight she was resplendent. The brilliant blue of her gown matched her eyes and deepened the contrast between her hair and her skin. An over-gown of black lace covered the back and the wide sleeves and laced up over her stomach. A matching hood framed her face, pinned to the back of her softly upswept hair. Three blue stones hugged her throat.
She looked at his leather jerkin and stopped short. “What are you wearing?”
He turned to face her, mouth half open, trying to come up with a compliment that wasn’t utterly clichéd. The best he could do was a sincere, “Wow.”
She stopped midway into working up steam for her harangue. A hint of color rose on her cheeks, and she glanced away, obviously flustered.
“What?” He grinned. “You can’t tell me you haven’t been hearing compliments all the way up the hall.”
She positively blushed. “I—” Then she turned away, caught sight of his discarded cape and doublet, and moved to pick them up. “I’m sorry. I know how you feel about our clothing. But you have to understand how important it is you make a good impression tonight.” She met his eyes, back in Searcher mode.
She could meet his eyes when she was playing Searcher, but not when she was an ordinary woman? Was that it? Was that what she was afraid of? That if she let herself know him as a person, she’d have to leave behind the protection of her duty as a Searcher?
“Please,” she said. “You have to know half the nobles are already set against you. Not everyone here is orthodox. Even if they don’t adhere to Nateros, they’d like nothing more than a chance to make sport of you.”
He hesitated. Part of him—a big part of him—hated to capitulate, and hated even more to wear that foofaraw. But she was right. He knew she was.
“All right.” He reached for the clothes. “I’ll do it for you, how’s that?”
In the corner by the door, Parry harrumphed. “Is that all it’s going to take?”
Her lips parted, as if she wanted to say something, then she straightened up.
Fine. If that’s the way she wanted to be, that’s the way it would be. He was here to do a job just as much as she was. As long as they could work together calmly and rationally, that was all that mattered. He’d accomplished what he’d needed to accomplish in winning her trust as far as he had. She was absolutely, completely right: any more would be superfluous. They were on level ground now, and he had no reason to court her favor anymore.
He shrugged out of the jerkin and handed it back to her.
Parry hurried over to take it from her and position himself between her and Chris. His body language made it clear he was the manservant here. He was supposed to be helping Chris, and her ladyship needed to back down.
She watched for a second, then turned to go. “Quinnon and I will wait in the hall. Everything will be all right.”
“Don’t sound so convinced.” He raised his arm so Parry could knot the cape’s drawstring. “Don’t forget, if they start throwing tomatoes, I’m the one they’re going to be hitting.” His stomach squeezed a little. Truth be told, he was every bit as nervous as she was. At least, she knew what was coming. She’d grown up in this court. She knew the rules of etiquette forward and backward, and even if she slipped, she was princess of Lael. Everybody would forgive her.
He, on the other hand, was an upstart nobody who was already disliked by a good-sized chunk of the population and who would probably be stoned by the rest of it if they ever learned what he’d done on his first day in their world. He breathed out.
“Everything will be all right,” she said again, on her way out. “Just be yourself. Be honest.”
Parry handed him his sword belt—empty now, so it could be filled ceremonially later this evening.
He grimaced at himself in the mirror, then headed for the door. “Wish me luck.”
Parry followed. “Could I watch? I mean, it being an important moment in the history of Lael and all that. Isn’t every day a Gifted enters the court. I could tell my grandchildren about it years down the road, and—”
“Come along.” He finished buckling his scabbard. “One more person watching me fall on my face isn’t going to make much difference.”
They headed down the hall to where Allara waited with Quinnon near the first flight of stairs. The muted roar of conversation from below woke the butterflies he’d hoped to keep dormant. What was he going to say to these people? It wasn’t going to take an atomic physicist among them to realize he was no Alexander the Great.
Allara raised an eyebrow at Parry.
He tried on a grin. “Chris said I could come.”
She looked at Chris, then back to Parry. “Chris?”
“He, uh, said I could call him that.”
“Hmph.” Quinnon nudged Chris toward the stairs. “You just mind what I’ve been telling you. You don’t have to make friends tonight. You just have to avoid making enemies.”
In other words, just put on a good show.
Chris fidgeted with the cape’s drawstrings. “What exactly are they expecting me to tell them?”
Quinnon shook out his fingers, as if preparing for a swordfight. “Why not tell them you never picked up a sword in your life until this month, you never rode a horse until this month, and you’re the one who brought Mactalde back to begin with.”
Allara faced forward and focused on the doors at the foot of the stairs. “Tell them you’re the Gifted.”
In the room beyond, a horn trumpeted a fanfare. She took a deep breath and started down the stairs.
Chris walked
one step ahead, just as she’d instructed him earlier. They reached the foot of the stairs, and two footmen swept open the double doors to the banquet hall.
Beneath its six fawa-radi chandeliers, the room glittered. Ceiled in white, enameled in gold, and carpeted in crimson, it boasted a long horseshoe-shaped table arrangement that seated two hundred jeweled and velveted nobles.
At the far end of the room, in an arched recess, King Tireus rose, and in a great scuffle of chairs, everyone followed his example.
Chris would have kept walking, but the touch of Allara’s fingers on the back of his arm stopped him. He was supposed to wait until Tireus introduced him.
“Princes of Lael.” Tireus’s regal bellow carried all through the room. “Princesses, dukes and duchesses, earls and countesses, lords and ladies. I introduce to you a traveler from beyond the worlds. Chosen by the God of all, foreseen of the Garowai, found by the Searcher, and now, appointed by us, he is the Gifted. Chris Redston.”
Allara had already gone over the ceremonial introduction with him. These were the words spoken over every Gifted, words most of these people had already heard once before in their lives. But tonight, to Chris, they sounded less an introduction and more a benediction.
With equal formality, the people responded. In unison, men and women alike stamped one foot, like Guardsmen coming to attention, and the sound of their single stomp resounded against the high ceiling. They saluted him with their hands to their eyes and spoke the formal antistrophe:
“Hail the Gifted. Welcome the Gifted.” Their applause thundered.
Allara’s fingers touched his arm again, and he started forward, down the side of the room. He could breathe again, but he struggled to keep his face neutral and confident. Swords and horses were one thing. Facing a horde of upper-crust society was something else.
They sat behind the table, the king in the middle, with Chris and Allara at his sides and Denegar and another noble beside them. Quinnon, in his Guard uniform, stood at attention behind Allara’s chair.
The meal was a parade of silver platters that offered at least three selections for every course. Chris ate capon with olives and chestnuts, roasted salmon, eggs with cream and honey, and chocolate-covered dassberries. A footman hovered over his shoulder with a flagon of craniss wine, but he didn’t finish even his first goblet. Tonight, he needed a clear head.
The crowd below watched him and whispered about him without any attempt at concealment. They didn’t seem to mean it rudely, but their curiosity obviously remained to be sated.
Halfway through the meal, at a signal from Tireus, the entertainment began. The orchestra, in their balcony, struck up a heroic march, and a troupe of actors entered. Half a dozen were dressed as Cherazii, their skin painted white and veined with blue, with large swords strapped to their backs. A few were dressed in the red uniforms of Koraud. A teenage boy with dark hair wore brown trousers and a loose white tunic stained with red. He carried a big Cherazim sword in one hand and a white rock lofted in the other.
It took Chris a second to realize the boy was supposed to be him and the play was a reenactment of his crossing. The actors spoke no lines, relying instead on the swell of the music and their own stylized body language. For the remainder of the meal, they ran and leapt and jumped across the open floor between the king’s table and the nobles.
Whoever put the play together had obviously heard only a secondhand account of events—and nothing about Mactalde’s involvement. In this version, Chris woke in the woods to the sounds of the Koraudian attack on the Cherazii. Without hesitation, he jumped into the fray, killing fully half the enemy before being overcome. Enter stage left: a woman in a flowing white gown, accompanied by half a dozen Guardsmen. That pretty much spelled the end for the Koraudians. The rescued Cherazii fled, and the Guardsmen and the Searcher alike knelt to the Gifted’s bravery and prowess.
That wasn’t quite the way he remembered it.
As the applause died down and the troupe took their bows and ran out of the room, Tireus stood. He motioned for silence and the people hushed expectantly.
“As I’m sure you all know, it is my extreme honor to host an unprecedented second Gifted.” He sounded so sincere, Chris almost believed him. Allara’s trick of hiding behind a professional mask had obviously been learned from a master.
“The Gifted always come to Lael when we need them most. And as we stand on the brink of war, I think it’s apparent our needs are many. We face troubled times. Even this very night, I and Lord Denegar, among others, leave to join our troops on the Aiden River. But I rejoice we do not face the trials of these times alone. We have a Gifted.”
He extended his arm toward Chris. “We know not yet what his gifts may be, but we trust he was sent to us because he, and he alone, can bring us the succor we need most. And that, more than anything, is why I am pleased you should all bear witness to the ceremony that welcomes Master Chris Redston to our kingdom and knights him as a lord among us.” He gestured Chris forward with his fingers. “Rise.”
Chris stood, one hand on his scabbard to keep it from bumping the chair, and trailed Tireus around to the front of the table.
Allara knelt behind her father and held up a jeweled rapier in one hand and a flickering candle globe in the other. She breathed steadily, her features composed, and gave him a little nod.
Servants dimmed the lights by raising nets of black cloth, secured to long poles, to cover the glassed-in chandeliers. Here it was then. His big moment. Tireus took the globe from Allara and held it in both hands as he turned back to Chris.
“I give you your old life. Turn upon it. Blow it out.”
He did as he and Allara had practiced earlier this afternoon and put his hands over Tireus’s. Then he leaned forward and blew out the candle, dousing the room in darkness.
Tireus slipped his hands out from under Chris’s and left him holding the globe, while he reached back for a smoldering punk. Chris balanced the globe in one hand and accepted the punk with the other. He took a deep breath and spoke loudly enough for the whole room to hear him.
“I take my new life. I stride out into it. I ignite it.”
He touched the punk to the candle’s wick, and it sputtered before catching. As soon as he had a proper flame, he set aside the punk and lowered himself to one knee.
Tireus had accepted the rapier from Allara’s upraised hands. He lifted the sword in front of his face.
“You are the Gifted. Sir Chris Redston.” He lashed the blade down on each of Chris’s shoulders, hard enough to slice through the doublet material without touching skin.
The lights came back on, and Chris rose to face the crowd.
“Will you swear your fealty?” Tireus asked the room.
Every chair slid back. The women knelt immediately, their skirts puffing out around them. The men paused to draw their swords, then clanked to their knees beside their wives and daughters.
“Fealty!” they roared. “To the Gifted, to the king, and to Lael!”
Tireus turned the rapier around and offered Chris the jeweled basket hilt. “Tonight, they’re yours,” he murmured. “Speak to them.”
Now came the part he had been dreading. He steeled himself with a breath and eased to his feet.
Allara remained on her knees behind her father. Her face was passive, tight, but she tucked her chin in a nod probably intended to be reassuring.
He turned to the crowd and raised his sword, still following the script. “Rise, and thank you.”
They stood, and he lowered the sword. And now he was supposed to make a speech that would tell them how exceedingly honored he was and what a slam-bang Gifted he was going to turn out to be. He was supposed to inspire them with hope and give them confidence.
“Thank you,” he said again. “I, um, I’m honored to be the Gifted.” He stared out into the sea of eager, cynical, hopeful, laughing faces. Allara had told him to be honest. “I’m not going to lie. I haven’t been here very long, and I still have a lot
to learn. But I’m working hard—” He half-glanced back at Allara. “We’re working hard, so we’ll be ready to meet this threat.”
The crowd shifted. Those who had been eager and hopeful frowned and whispered to one another. Those who had been cynical and amused only looked the more so. This was not the speech they’d been expecting.
What was he supposed to say? That he had it all under control? That he was here to save the day and their worries were over?
He gave it another shot. “You have a long history of Gifted coming to your aid and helping in the need of the time. And I promise you I will do everything in my power to meet those expectations.”
A man called out, “I’ve heard you’re the son of a Belkin Bay fisherman.”
He turned to find the speaker, a big man with several gold medallions strung across his chest.
“Why should that interest you?”
Beneath waxed mustachios, the man’s lip twisted. “Why shouldn’t it interest me? We’re about to go to war with Faolan Mactalde, and the son of a ruddy fisherman is all set to lead us into battle.”
He could feel the weight of every gaze in the room. In his peripheral vision, Allara stood. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to find himself tripping over that wrong impression she was so worried about and landing flat on his face.
His hand tightened around his hilt. “I’m not leading you into battle. That’s not my job.”
“Indeed not.” Tireus walked up beside him. “The Gifted has his own role to play, as do we all. Please sit, everyone. The footmen will be bringing in mugs of mulled craniss. We will drink to the war, and, more importantly, to peace!”
With a murmur, half satisfaction, half displeasure, the crowd sat.
Across the table from the original heckler, a skinny old man with a pointy cap pulled low over his ears blustered, just loud enough for Chris to hear him. “As lords of the realm, we have every right to know whether we’re pledging our allegiance to an incompetent.”
Chris glanced up and caught sight of Parry in an empty balcony. The kid grinned and shook his clasped hands above his head. If he thought the speech deserved congratulations, he was the only one.
Chris returned to his seat, drank the sweetness of the mulled craniss to its dregs, and tried to keep his frustration from his face. In the history of Gifted ceremony speeches, his had probably just made the record books as the worst. He’d failed to make a good impression, failed to inspire the troops, and failed to discover what, if any, gifts he was supposed to use to save Lael.
Forty minutes later, the guests trooped out, bowing and curtsying. He bowed right back and looked every single person in the eye. He had made a fool of himself, but he wasn’t cowed. And he wasn’t quitting, even if that’s what half these stuffed shirts wanted him to do.
Finally, Tireus led Chris and Allara into the back hall. Denegar followed.
“Well,” Tireus said. “Could have been worse.” He touched his hand to the back of Allara’s head and pulled her forward so he could kiss her forehead. “And now we’re off. We’ll take the skycar to the Wall and ride down. With any luck, we’ll reach the Aiden River camp in three days.”
She touched his hand. “Be careful.”
He nodded and turned to Chris. “Keep at your training. Gifted have a way of becoming useful. Whether any of us like it or not, we’ll probably be calling you up sooner or later.”
After tonight, Tireus wasn’t likely to be in any great hurry.
Chris nodded anyway. “I’ll be ready.”
“See that you do.” Tireus turned to go.
Denegar stepped up to shake Chris’s hand. “Gifted are good for morale.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Just because you can’t make a speech doesn’t mean a thing. Or not much at any rate.” He grunted. “Depending on what things are like at the front, I’ll send you a message in the next week or two. In the meantime, do like his majesty says and keep training.” He patted Allara’s shoulder, then followed Tireus out.
Chris breathed out a sigh. Despite the fact nobody wanted him at the front, he could help feeling he should be going with them. “So much for first impressions.”
Allara unpinned her hood and let it fall. Her hands were shaking, and her eye blazed. “They didn’t give you a chance out there tonight.”
“Don’t tell me you’re defending me.”
She stabbed a finger at the banquet hall door. “What were they expecting? A bloody rehearsed-and-polished show straight out of the bloody Russo Theater? Do they think Gifted cross over the worlds like avenging angels, born ready to slay dragons and strike heroic poses?”
“Don’t they sometimes?”
“No, they’re like you.” She faced him. “They’re all like you. You come across like newborn babes, lost and confused, and it’s a rotted wonder you find the strength and the commitment to rise up and become heroes and legends. But you do.” Some of the fire drained from her face. “Eventually.”
She turned around and toyed with the jeweled hairpin in her hand. “You’re still rising up. You’re still becoming. And if that self-righteous lot had any brains at all, they’d see that.”
Of all the reactions he’d expected from her, this hadn’t been on the list. He had expected her to be angry and frustrated and embarrassed. But, mostly, he’d expected those emotions to be directed at him.
“It wasn’t a total loss,” he said. “Parry liked the speech.”
It took a few seconds for that to penetrate whatever moil of thoughts she was immersed in. Finally, she snorted softly. “Parry liked the speech. Well, that’s something.”
“I guess we’ll be adding speechmaking to my training sessions.”
“No. The best speeches aren’t the kind you learn. They’re the kind that well up from deep inside you, charisma born of passion.” She started for the stairs, then stopped, one hand on the newel post. “I asked you to be honest, and you were. But honesty can only speak to honesty. If everyone in that room had been as honest as you, they would have heard you.”
He watched her climb the stairs. Honesty. Well, if they were both being honest, they’d have to admit that the moment this war came down to him making a speech, they were sunk.
