“Zyerne?”
Sudden color flooded his pallid face. “Nothing,” he mumbled, and avoided her eyes. “That is—I don’t remember.”
After she had seen him safely back to the dark doorway of his room. Jenny stood for a moment in the hall, hearing the small sounds of bed curtains and sheets as he returned to his rest. How late it was, she could not guess. The hunting lodge was deathly silent about her, the smells of long-dead candles, spilled wine, and the frowsty residue of spent passions now flat and stale. All the length of the corridor, every room was dark save one, whose door stood ajar. The dim glow of a single nightlamp shone within, and its light lay across the silky parquet of the floor like a dropped scarf of luminous gold.
VI
“He’ll have to listen to you.” Gareth perched himself in the embrasure of one of the tall windows that ran the length of the southern wall of the King’s Gallery, the wan sunlight shimmering with moony radiance in the oldfashioned jewels he wore. “I’ve just heard that the dragon destroyed the convoy taking supplies out to the siege troops at Halnath last night. Over a thousand pounds of flour and sugar and meat destroyed—horses and oxen dead or scattered—the bodies of the guards burned past recognition.”
He nervously adjusted the elaborate folds of his ceremonial mantlings and peered shortsightedly at John and Jenny, who shared a carved bench of ebony inlaid with malachite. Due to the exigencies of court etiquette, formal costume had been petrified into a fashion a hundred and fifty years out of date, with the result that all the courtiers and petitioners assembled in the long room had the stilted, costumed look of characters in a masquerade. Jenny noticed that John, though he might persist in playing the barbarian in his leather and plaids among the admiring younger courtiers, was not about to do so in the presence of the King. Gareth had draped John’s blue-and-cream satin mantlings for him—a valet’s job. Bond Clerlock had offered to do it but. Jenny gathered, there were rigid sartorial rules governing such matters; it would have been very like Bond to arrange the elaborate garment in some ridiculous style, knowing the Dragonsbane was unable to tell the difference.
Bond was present among the courtiers who awaited the arrival of the King. Jenny could see him, further down the King’s Gallery, standing in one of the slanting bars of pale, platinum light. As usual, his costume outshone every other man’s present; his mantlings were a miracle of complex folds and studied elegance, so thick with embroidery that they glittered like a snake’s back; his flowing sleeves, six generations out of date, were precise to a quarter-inch in their length and hang. He had even painted his face in the archaic formal fashion, which some of the courtiers did in preference to the modem applications of kohl and rouge—John had flatly refused to have anything to do with either style. The colors accentuated the pallor of young Clerlock’s face, though he looked better. Jenny noted, than he had yesterday on the ride from Zyerne’s hunting lodge to Bel—less drawn and exhausted.
He was looking about him now with nervous anxiety, searching for someone—probably Zyerne. In spite of how ill he had seemed yesterday, he had been her most faithful attendant, riding at her side and holding her whip, her pomander ball, and the reins of her palfrey when she dismounted. Small thanks. Jenny thought, he had gotten for it. Zyerne had spent the day flirting with the unresponsive Gareth.
It was not that Gareth was immune to her charms. As a nonparticipant. Jenny had an odd sense of unobserved leisure, as if she were watching squirrels from a blind. Unnoticed by the courtiers, she could see that Zyerne was deliberately teasing Gareth’s senses with every touch and smile. Do the mageborn love? he had asked her once, back in the bleak Winterlands. Evidently he had come to his own conclusions about whether Zyerne loved him, or he her. But Jenny knew full well that love and desire were two different things, particularly to a boy of eighteen. Under her innocently minxish airs, Zyerne was a woman skilled at manipulating the passions’ of men.
Wry? Jenny wondered, looking up at the boy’s awkward profile against the soft cobalt shadows of the gallery. For the amusement of seeing him struggle not to betray his father? Somehow to use his guilt to control him so that one day she could turn the King against him by crying rape?
A stir ran the length of the gallery, like wind in dry wheat. At the far end, voices murmured, “The King! The King!” Gareth scrambled to his feet and hastily checked the folds of his mantlings again. John rose, pushing his anachronistic specs a little more firmly up on the bridge of his nose. Taking Jenny’s hand, he followed more slowly, as Gareth hurried toward the line of courtiers that was forming up in the center of the hall.
At the far end, bronze doors swung inward. The Chamberlain Badegamus stepped through, stout, pink, and elderly, emblazoned in a livery of crimson and gold that smote the eye with its splendor. “My lords, my ladies—the King.”
Her arm against Gareth’s in the press. Jenny was aware of the boy’s shudder of nervousness. He had, after all, stolen his father’s seal and disobeyed his orders—and he was no longer as blithely unaware of the consequences of his actions as the characters of most ballads seemed to be. She felt him poised, ready to step forward and execute the proper salaam, as others down the rank were already doing, and receive his father’s acknowledgment and invitation to a private interview.
The King’s head loomed above all others, taller even than his son; Jenny could see that his hair was as fair as Gareth’s but much thicker, a warm barley-gold that was beginning to fade to the color of straw. Like the steady murmuring of waves on the shore, voices repeated “My lord... my lord...”
Her mind returned briefly to the Winterlands. She supposed she should have felt resentment for the Kings who had withdrawn their troops and left the lands to ruin, or awe at finally seeing the source of the King’s law that John was ready to die to uphold. But she felt neither, knowing that this man, Uriens of Bel, had had nothing to do with either withdrawing those troops or making the Law, but was merely the heir of the men who had. Like Gareth before he had traveled to the Winterlands, he undoubtedly had no more notion of those things than what he had learned from his tutors and promptly forgotten.
As he approached, nodding to this woman or that man, signing that he would speak to them in private, Jenny felt a vast sense of distance from this tall man in his regal crimson robes. Her only allegiance was to the Winterlands and to the individuals who dwelt there, to people and a land she knew. It was John who felt the ancient bond of fealty; John who had sworn to this man his allegiance, his sword, and his life.
Nevertheless, she felt the tension as the King approached them, tangible as a color in the air. Covert eyes were on them, the younger courtiers watching, waiting to see the reunion between the King and his errant son.
Gareth stepped forward, the oak-leaf-cut end of his mantlings gathered like a cloak between the second and third fingers of his right hand. With surprising grace, he bent his long, gangly frame into a perfect Sarmendes-in Splendor salaam, such as only the Heir could make, and then only to the monarch. “My lord.”
King Uriens II of Belmarie, Suzerain of the Marches, High Lord of Wyr, Nast, and the Seven Islands, regarded his son for a moment out of hollow and colorless eyes set deep within a haggard, brittle face. Then, without a word, he turned away to acknowledge the next petitioner.
The silence in the gallery would have blistered the paint from wood. Like black poison dumped into clear water, it spread to the farthest ends of the room. The last few petitioners’ voices were audible through it, clearer and clearer, as if they shouted; the closing of the gilded bronze doors as the King passed on into his audience room sounded like the booming of thunder. Jenny was conscious of the eyes of all the room looking anywhere but at them, then sliding back in surreptitious glances, and of Gareth’s face, as white as his collar lace.