"My lady," he said as she looked up from her breakfast of wine and cheese, "the beginning of the end of the elves is here."
Chapter 6
In the dawn of the day, with the sky turning to rosy lavender and the late night mists rising from the little lily ponds in the Garden of Astarin, Alhana Starbreeze went through the Tower of the Stars, through high chambers and low, in search of her father. She went in silence, as was her way. Her soft leather slippers made no sound upon the marble floors. The hem of her azure damasked gown did not whisper against her ankles. She wore upon her arms the golden bracelets her father had given to her mother upon the day of her birth, nine circlets, each shaped like twining vines. These did not ring one against another as she went, for she walked with her hands clasped before her, tightly held so that her knuckles shone white where bone pressed against flesh.
She went from room to room. In his empty bedchamber a green tunic lay upon the bed, embroidered in silver runes. Beside lay hose of softest brushed wool. At the foot of the bed on the cool marble floor stood Lorac's slippers, golden leather tanned to buttery softness. A small coffer of mahogany chased with silver sat unopened beside the tunic. In it, she knew, lay the Speaker's jewels, necklaces, pendants, circlets to hold his hair from his brow-all made by the most skilled dwarf smiths in the days when there had been commerce between Silvanesti and Thorbardin. That was a long time ago. Now the dwarves kept themselves apart from the world in their mountain fastness, and the Silvanesti elves stayed always within the confines of the Barrier Hedge. The only thing they had in common was their need to keep themselves removed from the rest of the world and a stubborn disdain for outlanders.
Alhana did not find her father in the library or the music room. She hastened to the solarium, but he was not there. Neither was he in the arboretum, though she had hoped to find him there, enjoying the rising light in those sweet sunny rooms where flowers grew in riotous profusion. She went out onto the gallery where it rounded the well of the audience chamber, and her heart sank.
A green glow, shimmering and shining, reached up from the floor of the audience hall and stained the white marble rail and balustrades to the unpleasant green of algae scumming on a still pond. A cold sheen of sweat broke out on her face. She had seen this light before, in dark dungeons in the late watches when her father had waked from nightmare.
Her hand on the cold marble rail, Alhana leaned over, looking down into the well, and mere she saw Lorac Caladon. He sat upon his throne, hunched over a little. He held something cradled in his hands, a thing from which that dreadful light emanated. The green glow shone upward, giving his face a terrible hue, a corpse's hue.
Alhana shuddered. Her heart pounding, she lifted her skirts and ran swiftly across the floor to the wide, winding staircase.
"Father!" she cried, her voice ringing in echoes around the gallery and into the well of the chamber below.
He looked up, but only slowly, as one who is roused from a deep sleep. His face held no color but that of the orb's green glow. With startling suddenness, his eyes flashed, like lightning leaping out from running clouds.
"Be still!" he called.
And he was her father. He was her king.
Alhana stopped midstep, her hand upon the cold marble banister, her foot poised to take the last step.
"Father?"
His voice an ugly snarl, he said, "Be still."
The light of the orb pulsed, like a malevolent heart beating.
Far away, up in the gallery, she heard the voices of servants talking to each other, a woman's raised in question, a man's enjoining silence. Alhana took a step closer to her father, down from the last stair and onto the floor of the audience hall.
"Father," she whispered, "Father, you frighten me. Are you well?"
He did not move, not even to look at her. Another step, and another, and now, by the last light of day, she saw her father's lips tremble. Why, this is the trembling of an old man, she thought, the thought itself like a whisper of treason.
Lorac old? Lorac trembling? Lorac-oh, dear gods, was he frightened?
The green glow faded, drawing back from the king's face, from the hall, and returning to the orb itself. Emboldened, Alhana took another step and then another. At last, when Lorac made no protest, she ran swiftly across the hard marble floor, her little slippers pattering now, her arm-rings jangling in metal's harshest voice. She ran, and she knelt beside him, the Speaker on his throne.
He sat in perfect stillness. His face, like marble, showed no expression, but his eyes, his eyes…
Alhana Starbreeze covered her father's hands with her own, gently. When he did not resist, she lifted the orb and set it upon the stand. In the moment she did, she nearly dropped it. The stand, once white ivory and shaped like two hands lifted in offering, had changed. It was the same stand. She knew it. She could see that, but something had warped it. Something had scraped and clawed it, and now it was not two hands at all, but one large, broad claw with five talons curled. Into those talons, into that claw, the dragon orb of Istar fit as neatly as it had always done.
"My child," whispered the king, her father looking up at her, "my poor Alhana."
His eyes were awash in sadness so deep, so terrible, that Alhana, seeing them, felt she would fall into them as into a drowning pool.
"Father." She touched his face and held it with both hands. Beneath her hands she felt a trembling, the flesh of his face quivering. It was, she thought in horror, in pity, as though he longed to weep but had lost the ability. "Father, please tell me. What is wrong?"
He looked at her from within the frame of her white hands, and now she saw that his pupils were dilated, grown so wide that they gave his eyes the appearance of being coal black. Alhana shivered, and she withdrew her glance in fear. But she did not withdraw her hands, for she feared that if she let him go, her father, the king of all the Sylvan Land, would fall away, spinning down into a terrible dark place.
"My child," he said, his voice quavering. "My child, the world is lost."
What spell had the orb cast to catch him? What spell out of doomed Istar worked here in Silvanost?
"No," she murmured, stepping back, her hands still on him so that he, too, must rise. "No," she said softly, urgently, her arm around his shoulders. How thin they seemed! How bowed down with care! "Father, the world is not lost. Neither is the kingdom. We have the gods on our side. We have E'li himself, and so we will prevail."
Lorac said nothing to agree or protest. Breathing shallowly, like a man in sleep, he allowed her to lead him down from the throne and up the long winding staircase to his chambers. They went in haste, or as quickly as Alhana could manage, for though she neither saw nor heard servants in the gallery, she did hear their voices in the various chambers they passed. She must not allow Lorac to be seen in this condition, not under any circumstance.
Once safely inside her father's suite, she found his chamberlain there, old Lelan, and gave the king into his care. Whispering and hushing, Lelan took the king to his bed and settled him there, sweeping all his careful arrangement of clothing to the floor and tossing the mahogany coffer into a corner of the room as though it were all some pile of leaves blown in with the wind.