Until last winter, Sionell had despaired of ever acquiring a waistline. Desert dwellers tended to be vain about their slim figures. In Gilad, a comfortably rounded woman was much preferred over a slender one—but Sionell no longer had to wish she lived in Gilad.
“I suppose there’s no way to get around it,” her father sighed. “I wanted to talk to you about Pol.”
She felt her cheeks burn. “A childish habit I’ve grown out of.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” She’d have to, sooner or later.
“You’re very young, darling. I thought this might be the case. It would hurt your mother and me to see you dream after a man who can marry whom he chooses—as long as his Choice is highborn and faradhi.”
“I know.”
“I needed to be sure because of something that happened tonight.”
He was watching her in a way that made her want to squirm. Thinking over the conversation at dinner and afterward, she remembered her outburst regarding Miyon’s half-sister and blushed again.
Walvis was quick to see it. “So you have an idea about it already. I’m glad. He’s a worthy man, and a good friend. He quite rightly asked permission to begin a formal courtship. But I told him I’d have to consult you first. As fine a man as he is, and as good a husband as he’d make you, I wouldn’t give my consent even to Tallain if you were still—”
The brush dropped to the rug.
“So you didn’t know.”
Her wits reeled like hatchling dragons darting through the sky. Tallain?
“He admires you and would like to know you better. Give you the chance to know him. If you both like what you see, and can love each other, then your mother and I would be very happy with the Choice.”
Humiliating that her first coherent thought was: I could have him if I wanted—that’d show Pol!
“He wants to spend part of the winter at Stronghold so he can visit Remagev every so often. He won’t rush you, love. He knows you’re only seventeen, and certainly by next Rialla you’ll have an even wider choice of young men than you did this year.”
And there had been plenty—but Tallain had not been among them. He had danced with her only once. Shyness? She doubted it. Fear of competition? Not with those eyes and that hair and that face—not to mention all that money. Abruptly his words about the riches to be obtained from Cunaxan merchants took on new meaning, and she almost giggled. Subtle of him, to indicate he didn’t need her dowry. More seriously, she realized that he didn’t need her family’s connection to the High Prince, either. If he Chose her, it would be for herself alone. Sionell was forced to admire his tactics. And his wits. And his sense of humor. And his looks.
He wasn’t Pol—but no man could be. And Pol would never be hers.
With a suddenness that stopped her breath for a moment she recalled the previous afternoon’s conversation with Pol. He knows—that’s why he said all those things about Tallain—trying to get me married off!
Her father was talking again, a bit nervously as she stayed silent. “Think it over for now, Ell. You don’t have to decide yet. There’s plenty of time.”
“I don’t need any time,” she heard herself say. “Tallain can come visit me if he likes.” After a brief pause, her lips curving slightly, she added, “But we don’t need to tell him that just yet.”
Walvis blinked, then burst out laughing. “You’d keep him guessing until the moment you accept him, wouldn’t you?”
Sionell answered only with a shrug, but she was thinking, Yes, and if he thinks he has to work harder to win me, we’ll probably both fall in love. Nothing so interesting as someone unattainable, as I well know. But if I do marry Tallain, it’ll be because I can make a life with him. She had a brief vision of Pol hurrying to join the flirtatious maidservant. He’d look at every woman in the world but her. She’d known that since childhood. But now she believed it.
Walvis rose and ruffled her hair as if she were still ten, saying she was too clever for her own good. Then he went back downstairs to persuade Feylin to leave her musings about the dragon population and come up to bed.
Sionell smoothed and rebraided her hair with automatic movements. If not Tallain, then someone else. But she did like him. And it was soothing to be admired by a handsome, wealthy young lord.
“Lady Sionell of Tiglath,” she whispered. Then, even more softly: “High Princess Sionell.”
No decisions tonight, except the one allowing Tallain to try. But if he was as she believed him to be, then it wouldn’t be difficult to love him. Not as she loved—had loved—Pol, of course. Tallain would know that. But he would never say anything about it, no more than Ostvel ever said anything to Alasen about Andry.
And it was very nice to be wanted. Very nice indeed.
6
726: Swalekeep
Autumn was breathlessly hot in Meadowlord. Nothing moved. Swollen gray clouds neither blew away nor rained nor seemed able to do anything but loiter. Even the mighty Faolain River lay sluggish just outside the city walls, as if reluctant to flow. The stillness would break soon. But until it did, even walking through the stifling air was an effort.
If autumn affected Swalekeep’s population, who were used to it this way, it was even worse for visitors. Two such, longing for the Veresch Mountains where they made their home, dragged themselves from their beds at the Green Feather Inn, hoping for some vague coolness in the dawn.
“Hideous climate,” the old woman muttered. “How do these people bear it?”
Her companion, a tall young man with copper-threaded brown hair and intensely blue eyes, bent a sardonic glance on her and made no comment.
“And so many of them,” she went on. “All jammed together—it’s not natural to live like this, Ruval.”
Still he said nothing, knowing as well as she the history of Swalekeep. The warrior who had originally set himself up as lord of the general vicinity had built the first part of a defensive castle, to which his heirs had added as need or whimsy prompted. Swalekeep’s population had swelled periodically as Meadowlord’s powerful neighbors treated the princedom as their private battlefield and refugees swarmed in. Eventually a Prince of Meadowlord, weary and impoverished by the sporadic influx of mouths to feed, decreed that enough was enough and built a wall higher than a dragon’s wingspan around his holding. During High Prince Roelstra’s last war with Prince Zehava, that wall had kept Swalekeep safe.
During the twenty-one years since Rohan had taken Roelstra’s princedom and title, the wall had been unnecessary. When bits of it were spirited away to become foundation stones for new homes and shops, no one did anything but shrug. Swalekeep’s inhabitants had eventually knocked down whole sections of wall, and all over the city blocks of gray-veined granite did duty as everything from mounting blocks to entire first floors. And the words of Eltanin of Tiglath, that Rohan would build walls stronger than any stone to keep peace among the princedoms, were in Swalekeep attributed to their late prince, Clutha.
The old man had never had half so abstract a thought in his life. But it made a good story—except in Princess Chiana’s hearing.
“I wonder how Marron likes it here,” the old woman asked suddenly.
“Servitude is hardly his style—but he’ll have to get used to it. Only one of us is going to be the next High Prince, after all. And it won’t be him.”
She chuckled low in her throat. They paced off the neat cobbled streets, past shops with living quarters above, the elegant homes of rich merchants and court functionaries, and finally neared the old castle itself. Of the more than five thousand who lived in Swalekeep, perhaps a hundred were out and about in the muggy morning heat.
“He’s probably become quite civilized these last two winters. Let him rub some polish onto you, Ruval.” She stopped outside a shop where a fine Cunaxan rug was displayed. A rathiv—“carpet of flowers”—done in brilliant colors, it was perfect for her purposes. “I want that. Come back later and acquire it for me.”