“Charm,” the old Sunrunner mused. “The whole family has it to one degree or another. Andry’s worse—he gets it from Chay as well as Tobin. Charmed all of us into accepting things we’d never have considered in a hundred generations. And by the time we realized where he was going with it. . . .”
“Oh, for the love of the Goddess and all her works, tell him!” Morwenna snapped.
Urival eyed her. “It’s the privilege of my seventy winters and nine rings to speak when and as I please.” He set down his untasted wine and sank back in his chair, looking every one of those seventy winters. His golden-brown eyes, remarkably beautiful in an otherwise unhandsome craggy face, were dark and lackluster. But not from mere tiredness, Rohan thought. There was an older and deeper weariness in him, one of the spirit.
“Andry was never what you’d call biddable,” Urival began. “Brilliant, intelligent, mind-hungry, yes. But as ungovernable as Sioned in his own way. A more dangerous way, it turns out. Had you heard he’s to be a father next spring?”
“Andry’s married? Who to?” Rohan didn’t bother to hide his astonishment. Tobin and Chay, as uninformed on the subject as he, were going to be furious.
“Did I say he’d Chosen a wife?”
Rohan looked at Morwenna, who nodded grimly.
“That’s why we left. Not because he didn’t marry the girl, or even because he’d gotten her with child. But it was the way he did it and the future which it implied that shattered all for us.”
“For me,” Urival corrected. “You wanted to stay and try to talk him out of it. Perhaps that would have been the right way. I don’t know. But I couldn’t stay there any longer. Not when he’s using the first-ring night to sire a son on a girl no older than sixteen!”
Rohan’s wine cup nearly dropped out of his hand. He stared at the faradh’im, too stunned to speak.
“You know about that night, of course,” Urival went on. “The boy or girl calls Fire formally for the first time in front of the Lord or Lady of Goddess Keep. That night they’re virgins no longer.” He glanced briefly at Morwenna. “She has been one of the more enthusiastic initiators of boys into the delights of being men.”
Morwenna tossed her black braid from her shoulder. “And, of course, they had to drag you kicking and screaming to the same duty for more than a few girls!”
A smile flitted across his face. “That’s many, many years ago.”
“But I’ll bet you still rememberl” Her manner was sharp, but her dark eyes danced.
“Memories to warm an old man’s long, cold nights,” he riposted easily. Then he turned to Rohan again. “The guise of the Goddess is used to hide identity from the virgin.”
Rohan nodded. “Sioned . . . spoke of it once or twice, a long time ago. She never knew,” He recalled his own disgraceful behavior of—could it really be twenty-five years ago?—when he’d found out that his Chosen lady would not come virgin to their marriage bed. He looked on the memory from a bemused distance now, amazed to think that it had meant so much to him at the time. Of course, at the time he had been barely twenty-one, unsure of himself both as a prince and as a man, and desperately in love.
“She never knew,” Urival echoed softly, holding Rohan’s gaze with his own.
And the High Prince suddenly realized that one of the sweetest memories to warm the old man’s nights was the initiation of Sioned. He felt blood heat his face, and told himself sternly that at his age he should be long past the curse of a fair complexion. Urival gave another fleeting half-smile.
“Of course she didn’t,” Morwenna said briskly. “None of them do. The point here is that Andry’s changed tradition. At least as far as the girls are concerned. We’ve always been very careful to time that night so no child comes of it. And the duty is parceled out among several men. But Andry’s reserved the right to himself and two others. When I questioned him about Othanes’s pregnancy, he flat out admitted he arranged it so she’d conceive!”
“And then declined to marry her.” Urival was grim-faced again. “Told me that she had agreed to bear his child—was honored, in fact. As what ambitious woman wouldn’t be, to have the child of so powerful a Lord of Goddess Keep, and a close kinsman of the High Prince into the bargain?”
Rohan thought this over for a time. Then he asked, “How many others feel as you do?”
“Quite a few. They stayed.” Morwenna shrugged uncomfortably. “We’re here because of your son—Urival to train him, me to be Urival’s company.”
The old man added, “Ostensibly I’m in retirement. Morwenna’s along to keep an eye on me, as she said. At least she’s not had to lie.”
“Then Andry doesn’t know—”
“He suspects.” Urival shrugged. “His suspicion may be a certainty by now. But officially he can’t take any notice. I go where I like and do as I please. I gave over my keys as Chief Steward to one of his friends. Trained the boy myself, so he knows his work. Sorin met him in 719.”
“The Fironese? The one who had so many fine ideas for rebuilding Feruche?”
“Torien’s his name. And now that I’ve left, he can do to the Keep what Andry’s doing to the Sunrunners themselves—remaking the entire structure of both.” Urival shook his head. “I’m too old for this, Rohan. I don’t like so many changes.”
“And yet,” Morwenna pointed out, “you’re going to change the way the most important Sunrunner alive will be trained.”
Rohan stared at her long and hard. “You’re not here merely for Urival’s sake, are you?”
Her dark skin acquired two blossoms of dusky color across the cheekbones. Then she laughed heartily. “Ah, my lord, you have me there! But from what I hear from Graypearl, I won’t be Pol’s first by any means!” She paused and sighed her regret. “Wish I could be. But I’ll take care of the first-ring night for him, yes. He’ll know it’s me, but that can’t be helped. It’s something he has to experience if his training is to approximate that at Goddess Keep.”
“But it won’t,” Urival said. “That’s the whole point.”
Rohan poured himself a much-needed second cup of wine. “Meath and Eolie have been training him at Graypearl. They keep in close contact with Sioned and she’s pleased with his progress. Andry knows about it.”
“And doesn’t dare say anything,” Morwenna added. “He has to behave as if it’s perfectly all right with him, or people will realize that he doesn’t have the power he claims to have. A good deal of his influence rests in his relationship to you and Pol, my lord.”
“Exactly the way Andrade engineered it when she married her sister to your father,” Urival said, nodding. “She envisioned a Sunrunner Prince connected to her by blood, trained by her to rule with both kinds of power, princely and faradhi. ”
Andrade had been disappointed in the first generation, for Rohan’s sister Tobin had the Sunrunner gifts, not he. So she had arranged for him to marry Sioned, reasoning that their children would be her tools. What she had not known—what only seven people now living knew—was that Pol was not Sioned’s son.
“There’s a third kind of power,” he said in level tones.
Urival met his gaze unblinking. “Which is why I’m here.”
“The Star Scroll has been fully translated, then,” he guessed. “And you have a copy Andry doesn’t know about.”
Morwenna shifted uneasily in her chair. “He’s not afraid of it,” she burst out. “The Star Scroll is only another means of power to him. More knowledge. But it scares me half to death. I’m the one who copied most of it in secret for Urival. Who knows better than I what it contains?”
“Calm yourself,” the old man advised. “If you don’t feel comfortable discussing it, perhaps you’d better go have your bath now.”
“Treat me like a child and I’ll use what I learned from it,” she threatened.