Dragon Prince 03 - Sunrunner's Fire (3 page)

She shifted uneasily. “Including you,” she pointed out.

“Of course.”
And you, my Sunrunner witch of a High Princess,
his eyes said.

Turning to Maarken, she asked, “Well? What’s it like for you?”

“Just as Hollis described it. Dizziness, and spreading warmth. . . .” He looked startled, then smiled slightly. “And the most amazing need to be alone with my wife—and
not
just because we’re so short a time married.”

Hollis blushed in the dimness. “That will pass,” she told him.

“Goddess, I hope not!” But his laugh was strained. “This is the damnedest feeling! Like I could use my thoughts to change the tides!”

“Don’t try it,” Sioned warned. “Maarken, be careful.”

“I’m not saying I
want
to. I just feel as if I could.” He rubbed one hand over his face; the other was immobilized in layers of bandages, wrist broken in his battle against the pretender. “So this is what it’s like to be a sorcerer.”

“Partly, I suppose. But you haven’t the gift for it.” She glanced at Riyan, who did. “Don’t
you
go getting any ideas.”

“Not if the moons fell out of the sky.” The young man eyed the empty wine cup warily, his right hand worrying at the rings on his left. Then he shook himself and looked across the carpet at Ostvel. “Father . . . I’m glad I got to see Mother tonight. I didn’t know she was so beautiful.”

Ostvel stared down at his hands. “Her face
and
her spirit.”

Chay’s eyes were fixed on his eldest son and heir, dark brows shading his gray eyes nearly black. When the young man’s gaze lost focus and he turned pale, Chay demanded, “Maarken—what is it? Tell me!”

Rohan gripped Maarken’s elbow. “What are you watching?”

He gave a start at the touch, gulping in a great lungful of air. “I—I think somebody’s watching
us!
”

Riyan held both hands out before him. They were trembling. His eyes—Camigwen’s eyes, dark velvet brown with bronze glints—were glazed with pain. “My rings,” he whispered, staring at Maarken. “Just like when you were fighting Masul and sorcery was used—”

Ostvel jumped to his feet and hauled his son up. They stumbled toward the silent fountain, where Ostvel plunged Riyan’s hands into the shallow pool of brackish water. Maarken was gasping for breath, supported by Rohan and Hollis. Sioned wove moonlight with desperate speed, but could sense nothing and no one along it.

Then she looked straight up at the stars.

Beautiful, aren’t they?
a voice said in her mind, rich with mocking laughter.
And you know how to use them, High Princess. Why not use them now to find me? You’ve already made an excellent start by drinking that wine. You’re beginning to understand power—the kind your son will have once he’s grown. Oh, yes, we know all about him, your Sunrunner child who also has the Old Blood flowing through his veins. Someday I’ll figure out whether he got it from you or his princely father.

Wh-who are you?
Sioned didn’t dare think. She drew into herself, knowing that to accept the invitation and weave starlight was to court disaster.

And the last thing she heard was gleeful laughter on a breath of starlit wind.

 

 

Morning sunlight spilled across the floor as Ostvel gratefully accepted a winecup from Alasen, who settled uneasily on a chair near him. “Can you tell me about it now?”

“As much as I know.” He took a long swallow and closed his eyes. “Which isn’t much.”

“But everyone’s all right.”

“Yes. Still stunned, I think, but not from anything Andry did.” He looked at Alasen, touched her free-flowing hair. It was an unusual shade of gold-lit brown, straight and fine as silk thread. Her cheeks were pallid with worry and her green eyes, the same shape and color as Sioned’s, were strained. He made himself smile at her. “Don’t look so grim. There’s plenty of power among us to use against these sorcerers, you know.”

“Riyan doesn’t much like the idea of being of their blood.”

“But we learned something very useful last night.” He explained his son’s experience with his rings. “So at least we can know when they’re working their spells.”

Alasen shivered. “I can understand why they’d be watching tonight, with Andry’s ritual taking place. But why here? Why not Goddess Keep?”

“Perhaps they consider what happens here more important. I don’t know. Sioned says there was no contact, no communication. Besides, can we be sure they weren’t watching Goddess Keep as well?” He drank again and set the cup aside. “We missed the last part of it,” he added idly. “I would have liked to see him conjure with light from the stars.”

“With knowledge gained from the Star Scroll?” Alasen shook her head. “He’s doing dangerous things, Ostvel. And there will be more.” She rose and went to the windows, where dawnlight seeped across the Desert far below Stronghold.

Ostvel gazed at her for a long, silent time. It would be difficult to find a woman more different from his first wife in either looks or character; where Camigwen’s personality had been all angles and bright light, Alasen was made of intriguing spirals and a more subdued glow hinting at shadows. In Camigwen there had been no fear, but Alasen had that summer discovered absolute terror. What for Cami had been joyous and exhilarating gifts were to Alasen things to flee from as fast as she could. Both Sunrunners, one trained and one who would never be trained. That he loved both women was no surprise. That both loved him was a blessing from the Goddess. And he knew that Alasen’s love for Andry had nothing and everything to do with the fact that she had Chosen him instead.

He rose and stretched, then went to slip an arm around her slender waist. “I do love you, you know,” he murmured.

She tilted her head back and smiled up at him. “And I love you. So no more chatter about how scandalous it is that I’m half your age, hmm?”

He laughed. “Well, it
is
a scandal. A little one, anyway. But I’m feeling younger all the time.”

Alasen pressed closer to him. “Rohan left orders that no one was to be disturbed until noon at the earliest. Are you feeling
that
young, my lord?”

“My lady, by the time we get to Skybowl for the winter, you’ll have made me eighteen years old again.” The sunlight rippled along her hair and he buried his lips in its silken thickness. Alasen’s hands skimmed up and down his back, lingering over the muscles of his shoulder. Ostvel smiled into her hair and bent his head to take her mouth with his own.

All at once she broke away from him and cried out. Sun flooded her white face and sank its light deep into her green eyes. “No,” she whispered. “Andry, please—no!”

Ostvel caught her up in his arms and carried her to the bed. Once out of the direct glare of the morning sun, she stopped trembling. He smoothed back her hair and waited for the terror to fade from her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she breathed. “It was Andry—he—”

Ostvel cursed himself. He ought to have remembered, and kept Alasen out of the sunlight. At dawn after the ritual, the new ruler of Goddess Keep wove the colors of all
faradh’im
present into one vast fabric of light, spreading it across the continent and as far away as the islands of Kierst-Isel and Dorval. With Andry dominant, directing the flow, every Sunrunner everywhere was touched. Through the weaving it was announced that a new Lord of Goddess Keep had been accepted, having demonstrated his worthiness to wear the ten rings. Ostvel ought to have realized that of all
faradhi
-gifted people, Andry would have singled out Alasen in particular for his touch.

“I should have known,” he told her now. “He loves you. And it’s the only way he can touch you.”

“Sioned must tell him never to do it again.” She raked her hair back from her brow and sat up. “Ostvel, I don’t want him intruding in our lives!”

Ostvel spoke very softly. “He’ll always love you, my dear. And I know that you’ll always love him—just as you know I’ll always love Cami.” He took both her hands in his. “Both of us must undertake not to be jealous.”

“I Chose you, not him. He’ll have to accept that.”

Ostvel pressed a kiss into the warm hollow of each palm, and smiled.

 

 

Sioned did not tell Rohan about the words exchanged on starlight. She told no one but Urival. And he promised that as soon as he could, he would come to Stronghold—with a translated copy of the Star Scroll.

O
n taking possession of Castle Crag in the spring of 720, Ostvel had set about several formidable tasks—the most immediate of which was to learn his way around the labyrinthine keep.

After spending much of his youth at Goddess Keep, an imposing and logical structure, he had become chief steward of Stronghold, a castle built for defense with a correspondingly efficient design. Skybowl, his holding for fourteen winters, was a small place without need or opportunity for eccentricities. But his new home was something else again.

Cut into the side of cliffs above the Faolain River and built out from those cliffs in cantilevered overhangs, Castle Crag was a maze of rooms, halls, suites, staircases, and the most exquisite oratory in all thirteen princedoms. Ostvel had taken his first tour of the place guided by a small battalion of functionaries, all eager to point out the wonders of his or her own domain within the keep. Their chatter had prevented him from gaining any reliable knowledge of where he was, let alone where he was being led.

That night he had frowned over his problem, knowing that the next day would show him as ignorant of the castle’s environs as he had been at the moment he’d arrived. The servants, he knew, would be watching for mistakes; that afternoon Alasen had lost her way after what she suspected was purposeful misdirection on the part of a page. At midnight therefore he had enlisted her and their Sunrunner, an old friend of his named Donato, in a secret expedition through the twisting corridors. Each of them chose an essential location. Armed with a collection of trinkets—bronze, gold, silver, copper, blue ceramic—privately color-coded to each destination, they spent the rest of the night seeking out the best routes and at all important junctures left behind a vase, a candlestick, a figurine, a dish on convenient tables and shelves.

“Copper to the kitchens,” Alasen had recited as they finally fell into bed, exhausted but well-pleased with their trick. “Gold to your library, silver to mine, bronze to the great hall, blue to the gardens. But, Ostvel, what if somebody moves everything tomorrow morning?”

“You forget, my princess, that when you began rearranging our suite you ordered that anything we changed or added be touched only to clean it.”

“Did I?” She chuckled. “That
was
clever of me.”

The next morning all their signposts were still in position. With supreme confidence they strode through their new home. The servants were astounded. Donato even waited three whole days before rearranging the entire system. But the joke had been on the Sunrunner;
he
was the one who had forgotten the direct route to the back gardens.

Now, a year and a half later, Ostvel rarely needed a glance at the trinkets to remind him where he was. Still, every so often he found himself in an unfamiliar corridor without the faintest idea which hallway led where. On one of these confused wanderings, too embarrassed to ask directions from servants, he had discovered the archives.

He never ceased being grateful to the impulse from the Goddesss that had made him go through the archives himself rather than send them untouched to Stronghold or Dragon’s Rest. The records of five High Princes—Roelstra and his ancestors—and a Regent of Princemarch were stored at Castle Crag, enough parchment to fill a square measure of bookshelves. He had been working methodically back through them since finding the locked door that led into a series of dark, dry chambers. Into history. At first he had thought to have Alasen help him, but one of his first discoveries had quashed that notion immediately. For in the archives he had found Pandsala’s precise, logical, oh-so-secret list of her murders.

Rohan had told him the bare minimum of facts: that during her regency Pandsala had removed several persons she considered detrimental to Pol’s future as High Prince. The disclosure had been brief and bitter. Ostvel had not pursued the matter despite horrified curiosity about what Pandsala had done and how. But he had at last understood why she was a forbidden topic around Rohan and Sioned, and why they had not gone to Castle Crag for her ritual burning.

Roelstra’s daughters,
he told himself, shaking his head as he locked his library door and sat down at the huge slate-topped desk. One of a score of keys unlocked yet another coffer of most-secret records. The lesser archives were being sorted by trusted scribes. Treaties, trade agreements, marriage contracts, the everyday effluvia of running a large and powerful princedom; none that held any dangers. But all that was in the locked coffers Ostvel read himself.
Roelstra’s daughters,
he thought again; the labeled dates told him that within would be Roelstra’s concealed records about Ianthe, Feruche, and Rohan.

And perhaps what he feared to find: record of Pol’s true ancestry.

He flinched when rusted hinges squealed a protest as he raised the lid. At least it had obviously not been opened in years, probably not since Pandsala received the keys he himself now possessed. He wondered what she had felt on reading this parchment giving Feruche to her hated sister, or this copy of a letter from Roelstra congratulating Ianthe on the birth of her first son, Ruval. Ostvel stared at the name, remembering with terrible clarity the first time he had seen it: on Pandsala’s list of murders.