handed him the matching chased dagger, Lysaer, Prince of Tysan, felt whole for the first time since exile through Worldsend.
He quieted his creeping doubts over the lifestyle of the realm’s subjects until he could know them better. Under fair consideration, he might find the differences between Athera’s wild clansmen and Amroth’s more sophisticated courtiers were just reflections of profoundly changed perception. He was no longer the pampered prince who had been haplessly tossed through the Worldsend Gate. In a rakingly perverse turn of conscience, he wondered which promised the sounder reign: the cosseted and idealistic royal heir he had been before banishment, or the more self-sufficient man who needed a crown to feel complete.
Outside, the temperature had fallen severely. Chilled through his fine velvets, Lysaer followed Maien’s lead across the compound and through the midst of brisk activity as a company muffled in furs and armed with bows and javelins prepared to depart on patrol. Faces seamed by weather and scars lit at the sight of their prince. The men and two women offered him brisk salute while they checked laces and shouldered javelins, then slipped quietly away into the gathering mountain dusk.
‘Where are they going?’ Lysaer asked.
Maien regarded his prince slantwise. ‘Out to the pass on night watch, your Grace.’
‘To raid caravans?’ Almost, Lysaer let slip the contempt he held for such thievery.
‘Partly,’ said the grandson of Tysan’s steward, brazenly unabashed. ‘They guard the camp, as well.’
The pair skirted the blood-spattered snow where the deer carcass had lately been butchered. The prince received a smile and a wave from another sword-bearing woman who carried yoke buckets toward the horse pickets. Past the tied-back flap of a tent, a man whistled over the scrape of a blade on a whetstone. Maien turned down a much-trampled path that led through a final stand of cabins, threaded into a steep-sided defile, and deadended before the shadowed double arch of a gateway cut into the mountain. The doors were armoured. Stonework barbicans built against the rocks on either side lent the impregnability of a fortress. If the place had ever seen battle, any scars had been painstakingly repaired; four fur-clad sentries stood duty, the leather-wound grips of their javelins worn shiny from hard use. They dressed weapons in smart salute at the approach of their liege.
Maien spoke a password at a niche. Lysaer heard the clank of a windlass and a dismal rattle of chain; then the great portals ground on their hinges and cracked open.
Asandir strode from the gap. ‘Good, you’ve arrived.’ He dismissed the prince’s young escort with a smile. Maien darted ahead to alert the herald as the sorcerer ushered Lysaer from the cold into the torch-lit vault of an outer hall. Walls and floor of rough-hewn stone sheared his voice into echoes as he said, ‘Maenalle awaits you.’
Above the din as the defenceworks were laboriously cranked closed, Lysaer said, ‘You might have given me warning.’
‘I might have done the same for Grithen’s clansmen,’ Asandir returned. ‘I chose not to.’
Stonewalled, and for no apparent cause, Lysaer reined back annoyance. ‘Is this a kingdom that encourages lawlessness?’
Asandir regarded the prince with eyes like unmarked slate. ‘This is a land afflicted by mismanagement, greed and vicious misunderstanding. The clans rob caravans to ease a harsh existence, and the mayors pay headhunters to exterminate as a means to ease their terror. Your task is not to judge but to set right. Your royal Grace, justice must be tempered by sympathy if the unity of the realm is to be restored. So I did not explain, because words cannot substitute for experience.’
The heavy doors boomed shut, leaving a ponderous quiet.
Asandir gestured toward the light and warmth that spilled through a second set of arches. ‘Go in,’ he urged, while ahead, in cultured accents, Maenalle’s appointed herald announced the royal presence. ‘For these people you are the living embodiment of hope. Listen to their woes and understand what they’ve sacrificed to preserve their lives and heritage.’
Lysaer squared his shoulders under his exquisitely embroidered tabard. What Asandir expected of him was a great deal more than tolerance: he could return no less than his best.
‘You are favoured with the gifts of your ancestors,’ Asandir reassured as they walked side by side into a chamber transformed since afternoon. ‘If the Seven believed you incapable, you would never have stood before these clans as a candidate fit to rule.’
The drab rock walls beyond the threshold were covered over by tapestries, masterful weaving and bright dyes depicting a kingly procession that celebrated the first greening of spring. Lysaer stared in delight. For an instant, he seemed to view through a window into a prior age, when Paravian habitation had graced hills unsullied by Deshthiere’s mists. Here in shining glory lay the centaurs’ fire-maned majesty, spritely dancers wreathed in flowers who were the fair-formed sunchildren, and mystical as moonlight on water, the snowy grace of unicorns. Entranced, caught into thrall by emotion, Lysaer blinked; and the spell snapped. The weaving on the wall became just a fabric of ordinary thread, worked with extraordinary artistry. Dazed by split-second bewilderment, Lysaer shook off gooseflesh and continued after Asandir and Maien, over patterned carpets imported from far-off Narms. Torches were replaced by tiers of wax candles, and glittering in their smokeless light were the clanborn of the west outpost, descendants of Camris’s aristocracy.
They looked the part, Lysaer thought in astonishment. Divested of furs and weapons, reclothed in velvets, dyed suedes and jewelled brocades, one could almost forget that most of the women carried sword scars, or that the wrists of young and old alike were lean as braided sinew from the hunt.
Maenalle waited at the head of a delegation of clan lords. Regally gowned in black and adorned with silver interlace, she wore only a badge of rank to denote her office. ‘Colours are never worn in the royal presence,’ she explained in response to Lysaer’s compliment that a brighter wardrobe would become her. ‘By tradition, the Steward of the Realm wears sable, since the true power of governance lies in the crown. Before the rebellion my office was sometimes called
There was no envy in her, Lysaer observed, while she steered him through introductions to the officers and elders of her council currently in residence at the outpost. As she guided him past a bowing honour-guard and rows of candle-lit, damask-covered trestles toward the dais at the head of the hall, he watched with a ruler’s perception. Maenalle did not resent yielding leadership to a younger, unknown man; in steady, unquestioned and understated confidence, she placed absolute faith in the s’Ilessid name.
Prepared for the eventual trial of winning loyalty from these fierce and independent clansmen, of proving his fitness to rule, Lysaer found the gift of her trust unnerving.
