11
Lystra stood at the window. This was her window, high in King Tyan's palace, at the top of one of the towers, in a solar where her husband had once bedded his lovers. The place where he'd brought her, on their wedding night. The room didn't have much to offer except a luxurious bed and an extravagant view. Most of the windows in the palace looked south towards the sea, but here Lystra had found a view that reached out over the walls of the city, over the sweeping breadth of the Fury River flood plain, and out towards the distant and invisible north. Sometimes she squinted, imagining that if she tried hard enough she might see all the way to the Adamantine Palace, to her lover, her husband, her lord, her prince. To the father of the child growing inside her. He'd been away for a long time. Too long. She was pining.
Sometimes when she'd had enough of thinking and wondering about Jehal, she'd think about her sisters instead. Almiri, who was strong and clever. Almiri, who Would always find a way, somehow, to make everyone happy again. And Jaslyn. She thought about Jaslyn most of all. Thin, hollow, mean Jaslyn, who burned on the inside with passions clenched tight and buried deep within her. Starved middle sister.
Jaslyn whom she missed more than anyone else.
She had ladies to keep her company and they amused her well enough. But when she came to this window she sent them away. Even Lord Meteroa, Jehal's strange uncle, the eyrie-master who ruled far more than an eyrie, knew better than to bother her when she was at her window.
She was surprised then when she heard footsteps shuffling slowly up the stairs. The tread was unfamiliar. Not Meteroa, who walked briskly and usually viewed a staircase as a challenge to be overcome as rapidly as possible. Not one of her ladies either; they would have coughed to warn her they were coming.
She let her eyes wander for a last few seconds, dreaming that she would see a speck in the sky that would be Wraithwing, Prince Jehal's dragon, bringing him home. Then she turned, facing the door.
The shuffling stopped outside. The world fell suddenly silent. All at once, Lystra was afraid. 'Who's there?' Silence.
With a fluttering heart, Lystra took a step towards the door and then stopped. She could hear breathing, low and rasping. 'Who is it?'
'Princess Lystra,' whispered a voice, 'do you love your husband?'
'Who are you?'
'Do you love him, Princess Lystra?'
'Yes, of course.' She took another step towards the door. Lord Meteroa was forever forbidding her this and that, warning her of the constant dangers of assassins sent by the speaker, although why the speaker would want her dead was something he could never quite explain. She'd never paid his warnings much heed. Not until now.
'No,' growled the voice. 'Not the right answer. Do you love him? Does your heart yearn for him? Would you give yourself away for him, body and soul? Would you die for him?'
'Yes.' She bit her lip. She knew at once what Jehal would have said: Yes, but do I really have to? Or: Of course, but only when I'm very old, or something like that. He would have made her laugh. At that moment she wished he was there with her more than ever.
'And he for you.' A figure stepped into the doorway. He threw hack his hood and Lystra squealed and wept for joy.
'Jehal!' She threw herself into his arms, staggering him.
'Careful, careful!' She couldn't see him properly for happy tears. He held her tight, just the way she wanted him to. 'Ancestors! Next time I make a surprise return, I shall make sure I stand a little further from the top of a long and steep and winding stair before I reveal myself!'
'You've been gone for such a long time!'
'Now that is just so typical of your sex,' he chided. 'A prince has to work, you know. Weeks away without you, far from home, alone and friendless, toiling away for the good of my kin. Work, work, work, and when I finally limp home, exhausted and saddlesore, all I get are complaints about how long I've been gone.' His grip on her didn't loosen though, so she knew he was joking.
'I wasn't complaining.'
'No, well, Lord Meteroa got to me before I could find you hidden away up here, and he most certainly was. After that, I dare say you could have thrown daggers and chamberpots and screamed abuse at me and I would barely have noticed.' He pushed her back into the room, still crushing her to him. 'Oh look, a bed.' His voice turned sly. 'Or did you somehow know that I was coming back?'
She didn't bother to reply: she was too busy kissing him. And she couldn't have said whether she was pulling him or he was pulling her or whether the bed was somehow pulling both of them. She stopped him though, when they were nearly naked, and put his hand on the side of her belly.
'Feel!' she said, and watched his face. The baby inside was kicking, feeding from her own excitement perhaps. She watched his eyes light up, watched his mind working, frantically searching for words and, for once failing. Watched an amazed little smile creep across his lips.
'Your son,' she whispered.
12
'I'm grateful you came. This used to be Hyram's favourite place.' Zafir stood high above the City of Dragons, perched on a tiny shelf of rock overlooking the top of the Diamond Cascade Valley. Hyram had brought her here, before she'd become the speaker. Afterwards she'd come here with Prince Jehal. Today, she had a king beside her, watching the water rush by, hundreds of yards beneath their feet. Set back from the edge behind her was a tiny lodge, a single room squashed under an overhang. From the bottom of the cliff it was invisible; even from above it was almost impossible to spot unless you knew it was there. It had become a secret place passed clown from one speaker to the next. One of several, tucked away up here among the silent crags of the Spur.
T know. We came here often in the earlier days of his rule. Before the shaking sickness took him.' King Sirion, Hyram's cousin, stood beside and slightly behind her. Zafir made sure that she was right at the edge. The wind pulled at her. If Sirion wanted to push her over, it would hardly be any effort at all.
'Shezira came up here with Hyram a few days before she killed him. This is where he told her that we were to be wed. She must have stood here, beside him, like we are now. She must have known at that moment he would not name her to follow him. I wonder why she didn't push him over the edge there and then.'
'Perhaps because she is a true queen, born and bred, forged of steel and honour.' Sirion's words were stony. 'I do not easily believe these stories of murder.'
Zafir ignored him. 'Before I came here, I thought the Purple Spur was just another cluster of mountains, like the Worldspine only a bit smaller. It starts that way, over by the Spine. If you fly across the end of the Spur into the realms of the north, that's what it looks like. But here…' She gestured around her. 'It's as though some god reached down and pulled this part of the world up by the roots. There's nowhere else in the realms like it. No gentle foothills and valleys, just a sheer cliff all the way around. And then on the top… These aren't mountains. Anywhere else and we'd say they were hills. Canyons. Caves. Snow and waterfalls and gushing rivers. The Diamond Cascade here, the Emerald Cascade and the Sapphire Cascade. Cold forests. It's like a tiny realm all of its own, torn up out of the Hungry Mountain Plain. But not mountains, King Sirion. Sometimes, when you see something from a distance, you do not see it for what it truly is.' She leaned back, fractionally closer to Sirion. 'I would never have thought Shezira capable of such a murder either. That she might go to war, yes. I feared that, I admit it. But that she would kill Hyram with her own hands?' She tried to sound a little mournful, a faint tinge of wistful regret, but Sirion was having none of it.
'And very convenient for you that he should fall, eh? And I have known both the Purple Spur and Queen Shezira
