The single throne on a dais at one end of the Great Courtyard faced a vast emptiness; the walls were encrusted with balconies where in happier times the lesser folk would have gathered to watch the important ceremonies below. Here there had been no bombardment or invasion, and that was an awesome tribute to the control that someone held over this horde of wildlife.
The duke walked out and stood in front of the throne and waited, feeling very conscious of the crowded sky above him and his own vulnerability. He had to wait a long time, but then a single bronze circled down and settled on the lip of a balcony at the far end. It lifted one foot and turned to face him. One of his own silvers swooped over and perched on the top of the wall nearby, higher up.
He knew the bronze, and he knew the small male figure sitting in the sling it carried. He thought he would give up everything he had ever owned to have his bow in hand--but he would not have dared to use it.
He started to walk forward.
Shadow stayed in his sling, feet dangling over a long drop.
As soon as Foan was within earshot, Shadow called, 'Not you.'
The duke shrugged and turned to go, then stopped. In spite of the war and the siege and the death, his own mind was full of thoughts of Elosa--and the kid up there was human, too.
'Shadow? Jarkadon did release your parents. I checked when I arrived.'
Shadow looked down at him for a while without expression. He was very pale, as though exhausted or in shock. 'I had thought my father would have been in the army.'
'I don't know what may have happened recently,' Foan said, 'because I've been kept away, but when I checked, they were at home under house arrest. So perhaps not.'
Shadow nodded. 'I flew by Hiando Keep, and their eagles told me they were there. It's too late to make friends, Keeper.'
The duke spun on his heel and walked away. He eventually found the lord chamberlain. He dragged him back to the court and then along it until they stood together at the end, staring up at the kid high above them. Shadow had moved from the sling to a bench on the balcony and gone to sleep--they had to shout to waken him.
'I have a proclamation here, from the king,' Shadow called down to them. 'You can fill in whatever name you want; it grants power of regency until the king arrives. Probably tomorrow.'
He tossed down a roll. The duke picked it up and held it while the lord chamberlain and he read it together.
Proclaim Vindax VII as King of Rantorra.
Proclaimtemporary regent.
No one to leave the palace.
The following to be held in chains, awaiting the
king's pleasure:
the usurper Jarkadon,
the duke of Foan,
Elosa, his daughter.
Shadow climbed over the wall as the bronze took hold of his sling once more. 'Got any questions?' he called down.
'No,' the lord chamberlain said.
'I have!' the duke of Foan shouted. 'How do you feel?'
The big bird launched, flapped wildly to gain altitude as it flew the length of the courtyard, and narrowly cleared the far wall beside the high mirror. Then it was gone. IceFire followed.
But the question remained behind, unanswered.
Chapter 20
'Birds of a feather flock together.'
So it would end where it had begun. Shadow stood at the side of the throne and stared out at the assembled courtiers of Rantorra. One by one the senior nobles were coming forward to kneel and do homage to Vindax.
They had managed very well, those courtiers. The palace was a devastation, its interiors littered with fallen beams and smashed artwork, with plaster, with fragments of plows and cartwheels and chunks of rock. Throughout the grounds bodies still lay in heaps, especially near the gates. Yet somehow the nobility had rounded up its servants and its finery and dressed itself again in grandeur. The coiffures glittered with jewels, and the brocades and silks and laces shone in a thousand hues from doublets and plumes and sashes. They had painted the face of a corpse.
The balconies were deserted. High in the vault of the sky floated the eagle army, faint as gnats, waiting with endless patience. A single bird sat on the far wall, behind the courtiers: IceFire. She was chatting with the watchers overhead and once in a while would pass a message to Shadow.
Sweat trickled down his ribs and face. His legs trembled with the effort of standing, and he wanted to crawl off to bed for a hectoday. Even NailBiter had been exhausted by that journey, that great sweep along the Rand, flying three watches out of three, with Shadow sleeping in the air, grabbing food when he got the chance as towns and castles fell and the eagles flocked to his banner. His plan had worked, worked too well: Jarkadon had fallen into the trap and emptied his aeries.
The inside of Shadow's head was ringing like a tolling bell in an empty church, echoing back and forth, and the peals were the words of Karaman:
No, he had not known.
Where it had begun...yet it was not the same. Two hectodays ago that nervous Sald Harl had worried about his coat of arms, how he looked, how to behave. Now Shadow still wore his battered flying suit with its cumbersome sling--his getaway suit, he called it to himself, grimly aware that he might need a fast getaway very soon. In the vertical blaze of sunlight around the throne he sweltered, and certainly he stank. He had not been out of that garment since he had left Allaban, and he had unfastened the front of it as far as he decently could. He did not care. Nor, seemingly, did the courtiers. No eye met his. They were not admitting his existence--long might that last.
There was a new archbishop, holding out the sacred text as each noble repeated the words of the oath.
The portly duke of Aginna, Sald's old neighbor from the robing room, came stumping forward to do homage. Like all those who had preceded him, he looked at Shadow not at all, and very little at the human wreckage now occupying the proud throne of Rantorra.
Vindax had survived his journey well. He seemed to burn with some fierce internal forge. How long could such a cripple live? How long would he be allowed to live?
'Explain,' IceFire signaled, 'why this
If only he were not so weary...How to translate
'They are showing,' he signed back, 'that The-one-with-broken-legs is higher than they are.'
No wonder the eagles thought that the human race was mad.
The courtiers had changed. Women outnumbered men by three to two. There were almost no young men. This was a joyous occasion, the throning of a new king. Mourning was not allowed, else that swarm of fireflies would be an army of ants. Husbands, sons, brothers, friends--fourteen thousand had died in the bloodstorm over
