Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles (18 page)

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Authors: Katya Reimann

BOOK: Prince of Fire and Ashes: Book 3 of the Tielmaran Chronicles
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The movement peaked when a gaudy vulture, painted imperial purple, flapped creakily across the top of the stage, suspended on a very obvious wire. “Doom! Doom!” it squalled, clacking its beak. Below, the animal puppets cowered.
The mouse-prince, dramatically wrenching free from the twining strings of two rabbits, the cat, and the weasel, leaped to his little wooden feet, and pulled a ludicrously tiny sword from his belt.
“Follow me!” he squeaked boldly. “He’s at a run already! Victory rides with us!” He clattered off stage, waving his sword. Soon after, sounds—more like those of desperation than success—echoed forth.
The effect of these noises on the beasts of his court was more comical than rousing. A handful moved to follow him, including the mouseprincess. But rather than making progress to join him, they tangled into each other’s strings. The action degenerated into a fight, each puppet struggling selfishly to untangle itself, unmindful of the expense to those
around them. The result was a finale that fabulously displayed the puppeteers’ talents, as the puppets both continued to move with animated purpose and determination, and were jerked about, crazily random, as other puppets tugged at their strings.
At last, in time with the beating of an offstage drum, the puppets dropped to the stage, one by one, feigning exhaustion.
The green tabby was sprawled to one side, one limb tied by its string to the elbow joint of a rabbit. Only the strings that controlled its skinny tail were free to move. Its tail wagged vigorously, in time to the fading drum. As the audience watched, even with the string to its jaw hung slack, that jaw began to move—either magic or a hidden spring, triggered at the last moment. “We helped him!” the cat said. “Goddess-Twins as our witness, we helped him!”
With a loud chorus of barnyard noises, the curtain dropped.
“What artistry!” A plump boy emerged from behind the theater, holding out a greasy black hat. “What a show! Your appreciation, gentle companions! Show your appreciation!”
Still laughing, the crowd began to disperse.
“The mousie-marriage!” A woman passing near Gaultry giggled, and dug a hand into her purse. The boy was instantly at her side, proffering the hat. “They should appoint you to show your play at court. That would learn them!”
Gaultry, seething, pushed past and made for the stairs.
She had not risked her life in Bissanty so that she could appear in a puppeteer’s play as a stupidly grinning lapdog.
The tamarin wrestled in Gaultry’s arms, unsettled by the bright lights
and noise. Gaultry, uneasy herself, could do little to comfort it. “It isn’t always like this,” she murmured. Her plan to bring the tamarin and gift it to the Princess seemed, at least for the moment, a foolish and untimely indulgence. The palace’s lower court was packed with bodies, many of them already half soused. “Usually it’s quiet—and pleasant.”
Her intention had been to arrive early for the Prince’s concert, but she had not allowed for the crush of Midsummer celebrators. In the steep, narrowing streets that led to the palace headland, the throng had been so thick that even moving forward had been a challenge. The gates to the palace’s lower court were thrown open to honor the holiday, and anyone was welcome to enter. Two bonfires blazed in the center of the yard, bristling with clay-capped ironwork tubes, and a great hogshead of wine broached to provide refreshment. As Gaultry wrestled toward the stairs that led up to the inner palace, the tubes, reaching peak heat, began to pop their caps, showering the crowd with foil, confetti, and toasted beans—as well as occasional slivers of hot clay. In the scuffle to capture these favors and amid a chorus of swearing as the victors singed their fingers, Gaultry was much jostled and almost lost her hold on the tamarin.
The deserted half-battlement of the upper palace was a relief after the wine-heated crowd. The full Midsummer moon had just topped the palace walls, luminescent silver in the deepening marine-purple of the sky. Gaultry picked up her pace. A draft of warm air touched her face, wafting up from a small garden court. After the overwhelming human
crush below, the breeze was a pleasure, rich with night plant aromas and an undertone of burnt wood. The fires in the lower court would not be the only offering to the changing of the gods tonight.
At the bottom of the next staircase, she came to a manned guard point. One of the sentinels sketched the goddesses’ sign as she approached. Gaultry, who had a poor memory for faces, was pleased to recognize the man making the greeting.
“Ciersy,” she smiled. “You’re looking well.”
“You’re late,” he told her.
“Is that news?”
“The Prince will welcome your return, my lady.” He ushered her on.
Mounting the steps, she patted the tamarin’s fur, obscurely comforted. She had not imagined that her entry to the palace would feel so much like a homecoming.
“Behave,” she told the tamarin, hefting its weight higher on her shoulder. “Martin will meet us where he said.”
Tielmark’s palace had been built in stages over more than three centuries, progressively overtaking the craggy headland, surrounded on three sides by the sea. Its inner buildings had been altered and reconstructed numerous times to conform to successive rulers’ tastes, rendering it a motley collection of architectural styles, some humble, some grand.
The oldest part of the palace, predating Tielmark’s freedom from Bissanty by more than a century, was the armory block, a solid, squat building of roughly dressed stone. Next oldest was Clarin’s great hall, the massive building raised over the holy stone where the first Free Prince of Tielmark had stood to declare his land’s liberty. Both of these buildings were on the west side of the palace grounds, where the land was steep and rocky, discouraging new construction.
To the east, the ground was more gently contoured. There, where construction was less of a challenge, the buildings had been demolished and reconstructed completely since Clarin’s days, according to his heirs’ whims. The principal buildings were twinned, arcaded palaces with gracious proportions, arched galleries, and ranks of glass windows facing the garden courtyard between them. Their construction had been overseen by Berowne-the-Builder—the troubled monarch who had lived out the last two decades of his reign in an involuntary regency as Berowne-the-Mad. Most of the formal business of court went forward in these palaces. There rigid protocols were observed: When the Prince passed their doors he was no longer a man, but a symbol who represented Tielmark.
Gaultry was not very familiar with this part of the complex. In the days immediately following his marriage, Benet had granted her and her sister a suite of rooms in the Summer Palace. This palazzo, a smaller, less stylish building, tucked away behind the palace offices, was a remnant of older times and a less distinguished building style. Except for its situation, perched on massive arched foundations above the headland’s steep north cliffs, it would have been razed and replaced decades past. Gaultry had passed what little time she had spent at court in that building and its grounds: a lovely deer park that overlooked the sea on one side. She thought of the coziness of her own rooms and sighed.
Tonight she was headed for considerably grander chambers.
The smell of burning wood hung heavily in the air. An open archway gave her an unexpected view into the palace’s largest court, half a story below. At the court’s center, a great bonfire burned. Unlike the fires of the lower court, here there was little gaiety. The wood had been stacked in a towering pile, with wedges of faster burning branches spread throughout so sections of the pile would burn at different speeds. This was a ritual fire, not a part of the citizenry’s madscrabble celebrations.
The wooden figure of the god at the bonfire’s top had already caught fire. Rios Sword-god, his wicker sword raised above his head, saluted the passing of his moon. The god’s wooden skeleton flickered black and crimson through the flames. The fire’s tenders, their faces shining red with the fire’s light, were intense and joyless. A single figure, a thin rail of a woman with flowing unbound hair, danced wildly at the edge of the flame, whipping the fire’s edges with a blazing branch.
Gaultry drew away, and touched guiltily at the hidden ring-key that Victor Haute-Tielmark had given her, now tied on a string around her neck. She had witnessed Dervla making her devotions more than once, and the bleak quality of the dance and the flame were an uncomfortable reminder of the sheer power the woman wielded. A stab of fear touched her. She must not meet with this woman—not at least until after she had seen the Prince, and assured him of her loyalty.
And yet—the ceremony had a hypnotic quality that made her hesitate to turn away. As High Priestess, part of Dervla’s role was to align earth and sky. Here, her dance guided Tielmark through the rites that honored the gods’ passage in the night sky. “The new month will start when Rios falls,” Gaultry whispered to the tamarin. If the figure fell before the warm orange star, Andion’s lamp, crested the horizon, it would be an
unlucky sign, one god usurping another’s prerogative. “Dervla’s power has to hold it up until just the right moment.”
She hurried on, hefting the tamarin onto her other side. She had been carrying it so long the creature’s light weight had begun to get heavy. “They’ll read an omen in the way the god falls, and all who are watching will share in its portent.” Witnessing the figure fall, if it went down in one piece, was lucky, but Gaultry wanted no share of the bad luck if the figure broke in pieces.
Ascending a last covered staircase, she emerged into the lovely ordered gardens of the arcaded court between Berowne’s palaces. Prince Berowne, more than a century past, had planted the fruit trees and named it Adnam’s court after his son, but that name had proved unlucky. Now it was called glass court, for its beautiful windows.
Although the sky overhead was still vivid, the towering walls of the palaces had already thrown the garden into the deep shadows of night. In prettily trimmed rows, its lush fruit trees sparkled with the intense silver light thrown down from the moon, their shadows inky black. Overhead, the colored windows of the palaces’ grand salons blazed with light. Elaborate colored pictures had been worked into the leading, depicting the events that had closed Tielmark’s second cycle, two hundred years back. Gaultry, standing in the silver and black quiet beneath one of the peach trees, felt momentarily suspended between two worlds: the first shadowed and serene, heady with the scents of plant and fire; the second static and poised, yet ablaze with fiery colors and acts of heroism.
Berowne had been Briern-bold’s son—Briern, the great war-leader Prince who crushed the Bissanties in open battle on Tielmark’s marches in the North. The row of windows depicted Briern’s heroic exploits, following his life from the wild days of his foolhardy boyhood through to his great victory against the Bissanty army. Gaultry stared up, her eyes tracing the stories she had known from her earliest childhood, so superbly rendered in the glass panes.
On every level, the work was a masterpiece. The jewel-bright windows were one of Tielmark’s most glorious treasures. Tonight was the first time she’d had opportunity to see the picture cycle entirely backlit, and the breath caught in her throat at the beauty of the colors and the grand scale of the work. Some scenes—that of Briern’s future wife, Arcana, beating her plowshare into a sword (the window of a small corner room which did not see much public service) and a large picture of knights
spurring their horses toward a battlefield—were entirely new to her. The big image of Briern, smiting Bissanty soldiers from the saddle of his great dappled stallion, shone so brightly she could almost imagine that the great Prince was ready to charge free from the window and leap toward the night sky. Nothing had caught her imagination so strongly in Bissanty, and for a moment enthusiasm and pride leapt in her.
The tamarin, pulling her hair as it climbed onto her shoulder to reach for a half-ripe peach, brought her back to earth.
“Of course Berowne brought in Bissanty craftsmen to do the finish work.” She sighed, reaching up to twist down a plump fruit. Would Bissanty and Tielmark ever be truly separate? In this, as in so much else in Tielmark, the ties to Bissanty were still strong, however many years Tielmark had been a free state.
The tamarin bit wetly into the peach’s riper side, giving Gaultry an anxious moment for the front of her dress. “Be careful!” she scolded. It was already well past time to go in. A few more steps, and she would reach the entry to the foyer where the grand state staircase led up to the Prince’s public rooms.
“I hope Martin’s there,” she said, throwing the peach pit into a bush and smoothing her dress with her clean hand.
A pair of muscular footmen in Tielmark’s blue-and-white livery rose as Gaultry entered. “You’ve missed the first movement,” the first man said helpfully, as his partner resettled restfully into his niche in the wall. “They’re tuning for the second now. You may go up to the landing, if you’d like.” He knew who she was! The warmth, the feeling of homecoming, swelled.
“Have you seen Martin Stalker tonight?” she asked. “He’s supposed to be waiting for me.”
The man shook his head.
The staircase was built on an intentionally intimidating scale, with tiles glazed in gilt and silver, and painted inlays on the banister. Engrossed by her thoughts, Gaultry took little notice of the party of men and women who clustered on the first landing, their attire neatly brushed, their faces a mingling of pleasure and nerves. Then an elegant, patrician-lean gentleman, coated in formal black, emerged from among them and stepped into her path.
“Lady Blas.” The man spread his hands in a courtly gesture, gracious, yet effectively broad to block her. “What a delight that you have chosen to join us tonight.”
Paré Ronsars was the Prince’s warder. A man whom Gaultry, in her short time at court, had already crossed too many times, with her many accidental lapses from convention.
“Sieur Ronsars,” she blurted, pulling up in an ungainly half-curtsy. “I wasn’t expecting to see you.”
“Nor I you, my lady.” Ronsars returned her greeting with a shallow bow. “You can imagine how many here tonight have begged to hear Dame Julie’s performance. It’s not often she comes out of her retirement to perform. Sadly, I have not seen your sponsor tonight. If you would be so kind as to wait for your call—”
“Sponsor?” Gaultry stiffened. “I am not here with a sponsor.” Surely he did not mean to prevent her from seeing the Prince? “My duty is to Prince Benet—”
“As is mine,” Ronsars answered smoothly, making no move to get out of her way. “My humblest apologies, my lady, but if you have no sponsor you must wait here until you are called.”
This landing was one of the places the Prince’s petitioners had to stand, if they had business they wished to bring before him out of turn and had not been granted a public hearing—unless they could bribe Ronsars or one of his toadies and get leave to approach the Prince more closely. Gaultry glanced at the beautifully tiled steps, twelve in number, that led up from the landing to the double doors of the long salon, each one decorated with a god’s mark. The long salon, she recollected with a twinge of acrimony, was yet another place where the ministers of protocol could delay petitioners. Then, if they wanted to be completely punctilious, they would also stall them in the crimson-painted corridor that opened into the grand salon.
The subtly downcast faces of those crowding the landing observed her interchange with Ronsars with ill-concealed interest. Who was she, the faces seemed to ask, to think that she could push ahead of them? These, she belatedly realized, would all be people who wished to air some plaint to Benet before the next assizes. They were not here to listen to the music. They were here hoping that the Prince would stop a moment and listen to their troubles as he descended from his night’s entertainment. Small wonder stress marked their faces. With a war to plan and a household full of powerful witches, she doubted Benet would have time for them tonight.

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