Now it was Simon’s turn to send a warning look. Neither of them were happy with Hernystir’s King Hugh at this moment, but such things were not to be shared in front of any but the most important advisers. “Enough, Lord Chamberlain,” Simon said, gently lifting away Jeremias’ hand as he tried to give the medallion one last burnishing with a kerchief. “You are right and I apologize, I suppose. It looks splendid.”
“I should hope so,” said Jeremias, his face red from effort.
? ? ?
The royal procession slowly climbed the main road through the city of Hernysadharc, past waving and cheering Hernystiri lined up on both sides, many crowded on overhanging balconies, or even perched precariously on sloping roofs. The houses and shops had been done up in festive style, bright banners and fresh paint so that sunlight seemed to jump back into the air as soon as it landed, full of new life. Simon and Miriamele rode side by side as they always did—monarchs together, not monarch and royal spouse. In the early days Simon had been the stickler for that distinction, but as the years had rolled past Miriamele had become increasingly determined to remind people that she herself was the daughter of a king, however blackened his name might now be, and also the grandchild of Prester John, founder of the High King’s Ward that gave them dominion over much of Osten Ard.
“Hugh should have come to meet us at the gate,” the queen said, in words so quiet only Simon could hear them. “I will tell him so myself.”
“Give him a chance, my dear.” Simon waved his hand at the crowd. “You see he has brought the people out for us.”
“He could not have kept them inside,” she said. “And why shouldn’t he bring them out? We are High King and High Queen. He is only a king himself because his great-grandfather did my grandfather a favor, so Hernystir kept its crown.”
“Still, he is a king for all that, and kings have their pride. As do queens.”
“Do not make it my complaint, Simon.” Her voice was firm but her look contained love and a little amusement as well as irritation. “You are too kind and you hate a fight, but there are people—and I suspect Hugh is one of them—who take that for weakness.”
“Yes, I do hate a fight. Let’s not have one now.” He waved to the cheering Hernystir-folk again. Near the road, a group of small girls were leaping up and down, waving colored ribbons that curled and snapped like a frayed rainbow. “Look at them. It makes me miss Lillia.”
“Our granddaughter would be out in the road, trying to lead the procession.”
Simon smiled. “Yes, she would.”
Miriamele sighed. “Sweet God give me strength.” She squinted up the road, lined as far as they could see with well-wishers. “We will not reach the Taig until nightfall at this rate.”
“Patience, my dear. Patience.”
“No more for me, thank you.”
Count Eolair covered his goblet with his hand and kept it there until the servant had gone away. He would have enjoyed a little more wine, and after a long day in bright sun after a fortnight of clouds and dark days he certainly deserved another cup or few, but Eolair’s sense for conflict, as trained as the nose of a hunting hound, suggested restraint. Queen Miriamele’s and King Simon’s Lord Steward, more commonly known as the Hand of the High Throne, did not want a haze of wine slowing his thoughts tonight.
The scene itself could scarcely have been more familiar to him, of course. The wooden palace called the Taig had been Eolair’s second home for much of the early part of his life, when he had become first a messenger to kings and eventually an esteemed advisor. The atmosphere in the Great Hall, where ancient wooden carvings of animals and other totems hung from the rafters, was unquestionably festive, the bright colors of the Hernystiri gentry in their best clothes mingling with the sounds of tipsy laughter and the succulent smell of roast pork. But something was off-kilter here. Queen Miriamele and King Simon were out of sorts with the delays and confusions King Hugh had put them through, of course, but Eolair could not help feeling that something deeper and more troubling was going on.
A few seats away, Queen Miriamele was being entertained—“distracted” she would doubtless have termed it—by Lady Tylleth, an attractive widow who was almost certain to become King Hugh’s wife. Many at the Hernystiri court thought her too old, nearly thirty years, though her children by her husband, the late Earl of Glen Orrga, showed that at least she was fertile. In fact, with her handsome, womanly figure, glossy chestnut hair, and high color, Lady Tylleth looked a bit like Eolair’s idea of the Hernystiri goddess Deanagha, or even great Mircha herself, the mistress of the rains.
The high queen made a stark contrast to dark Tylleth. Miriamele’s golden hair was largely silver now, worn in simple plaits under a modest circlet. Her cheeks were pale, her green eyes shadowed, and Eolair was worried for her. This was the first time the king and queen had faced the anniversary of Prince John Josua’s birth while away from home. Eolair did not blame Queen Miriamele in the least for her irritation at being marooned in conversation with King Hugh’s mistress.
In fact, as Eolair watched, the queen seemed to have lost patience entirely with Tylleth’s chatter and was trying desperately to draw King Simon’s eye. Her husband saw, but Hugh was leaning close to him, talking with quiet animation, and Simon could only shrug to show his helplessness.
Eolair shifted on his seat and felt his joints complain at him for sitting too long on a hard bench. He was beginning to wish he had accepted that offer of more wine, if only to ease his old bones. The day seldom passed now that Eolair—once among Hernystir’s best riders and swordsmen—did not marvel at what age had done to him.
I have become Time’s poppet, he thought sadly. She plays with me as a child with a doll, pulling off a piece here, another there, dragging me through the mud, then carrying me back to sit at some mock-banquet.
But this gathering was no child’s performance of grown-up ways. It was deadly serious business, the monarch of Hernystir welcoming his liege-lords, the king and queen of Erkynland. Simon and Miriamele ruled over Hugh’s Hernystir and most of the rest of Osten Ard by the authority of the High King’s Ward, the empire that Miriamele’s grandfather John of Warinsten had created with his strength and his sword. But even at the best of times, some of the lords of the High Ward’s component nations had chafed under John’s rule.
Eolair could not help wondering whether Hugh was becoming such a man. Or did something else explain his odd behavior in keeping Simon and Miriamele waiting so long outside the city? And even after they rode in, Hugh had waited to meet them until they had reached the Taig itself, which suggested less than perfect subservience on his part. But Hugh had been changeable and headstrong all his life, something Eolair knew better than most.
Hugh’s father Prince Gwythinn had been one of the first to die in the great war that had made Simon and Miriamele monarchs. Gwythinn had been killed and mutilated by renegade Rimmersmen serving Miriamele’s father, King Elias of Erkynland, who had been corrupted by the lying promises of Ineluki the Storm King. Gwythinn’s body had been left for his kinsmen to find. When his father King Lluth had died in battle against the Rimmersmen not long after, only Lluth’s daughter Maegwin and the king’s young wife Inahwen had remained to lead their shattered people. Then madness had taken Maegwin, and with her, nearly all that remained of Eolair’s hope for his native land.
The Storm King’s attack on the countries of men had failed at last, but in the chaos that followed, the ruined, headless nation of Hernystir struggled to hold itself together. Over the first few months a surprising number of nobles asserted slender if not completely spurious claims to the throne, and it seemed only civil war would settle their rivalries. Then a sort of miracle occurred. Everyone had been certain that the line of royal blood had ended with Maegwin until a young woman of the court was pushed forward by her mother and father to tell her tale and show the infant she had been sent off to bear in secret—Prince Gwythinn’s bastard.