“I-I’m sorry—” she stammered.
Miyon made a visible effort and smiled at her. “No matter, my little treasure. Run along now. You may thank me later for your gifts.”
Marron had paused a few paces away from them. The girl backed away from her father and Marron advanced once more, smiling as if to an equal.
“Your grace,” he said with a bow. “You favor me with your notice.”
“We are pleased to entertain the proposals of clever merchants in our princedom,” Miyon responded. “But we have many others to listen to this day.”
Ruval took the hint and escorted his brother out.
They made their way by a back staircase to the doorway of the mess. All Ruval said, between his teeth in fury, was, “Get in there and do as you were told!”
Marron chuckled. “As you command, brother dear.”
Ruval watched for a moment as Marron used the charm perfected in Chiana’s court to ingratiate himself. But beneath the affable grin was a profound distaste for the company of common soldiers. Neither did Ruval look forward to submerging his identity in that of a hired swordsman. But it was necessary in order to get within Stronghold’s walls. Marron, taken on as escort, would bring along a “friend.” And they would walk right into Rohan’s castle, unsuspected.
Suspicions roiled in his own mind, though, as he left the castle and walked through town. Where did Rohan’s wealth come from? Miyon’s reasoning appeared sound, but exacerbated curiosity rather than satisfying it. Reaching the precincts of the merchant district with its shops and public houses, he glanced at the sun and decided he had time for a contemplative wine cup before meeting Mireva at their lodgings in the poorest section of town. He chose a tavern and sat in a corner with a crudely made glass container of sweet, potent wine made from pine cone resin, ignoring all around him as he thought the matter through.
One of his few really clear childhood memories—other than the horror of the night Feruche had burned—was of gold. Ianthe had taken him to the deepest level of the keep one night to show him their wealth: square, palm-sized gold ingots stacked on shelves in a locked room. He remembered touching one with almost superstitious awe, taking as many as he could into his hands, feeling their heaviness, flinging them up into the air to make a glittering rain by torchlight. He could still hear echoes of his mother’s delighted laughter.
But should it not have been minted coin in sacks, rather than ingots?
He scowled into the golden-brown wine. Sediment had gathered at the bottom, leaving the liquid almost clear. A swift glance told him that the few patrons were paying him no attention. He spun the necessary mental threads and plunged his thoughts into the wine, cupping his hands around the glass.
He never looked at her without a thrill of pride that this magnificent woman was his mother. He didn’t understand why her body was growing so thick, but the extra flesh dimmed her beauty as little as the darkness of the staircase. He clung to her hand as they descended, his breath rasping in his throat with the dampness and the chill and the excitement of sharing a secret. When she unlocked the door of the storeroom, he flinched back as torchlight struck a flare of gold brighter than the Desert sun. He looked up at her face in wonderment and she laughed, setting the torch in a holder and flinging her arms wide as if to embrace the wealth stacked neatly on the shelves.
It was real; he touched it, took up handfuls of it and flung it toward the ceiling to watch its enchanting glitter as it fell. And he was laughing, too. He plucked up one of the leather sacks from the pile near the door to pretend he was robbing the treasure room. His mother laughed and told him he didn’t need to steal it, it was all his, just as the Desert and Princemarch would be.
Ruval pulled in a deep breath and looked up. No one gave him so much as a glance. He poured the wine down his throat and left a coin in the cup to pay for the drink.
After a long, aimless walk through the streets to clear his head, he allowed himself to remember what he’d seen. Peripherally he was aware that the question of paying for rebuilding Feruche was answered; Sorin must have found the treasury in the rubble. He also knew that his mother’s increasing bulk had meant she was pregnant with her last child, Rohan’s son who had died with her that terrible night. But something else concerned him now, something a little boy had seen but not recognized.
The ingots had been carried to Feruche in leather sacks left tidily folded in case of future need. By law all raw materials and finished goods indicated place of origin. Crafters had their various hallmarks, holdings and princedoms their colors or ciphers. Cattle and goats were branded; pottery, furniture, ironwork, and other manufactured items were stamped. Foodstuffs were labeled on packing crates, wine on bottles. The gold ingots at Feruche had been no exception: on those sacks had been the image of Skybowl.
But it was silver they took from the ground near Skybowl. Ruval kept walking, distracted by his thoughts, and annoyed honest citizens by pushing peremptorily past them in the crowded residential section of Castle Pine. Threadsilver Canyon was named for the metal mined there for a hundred years—yet the leather sacks of gold had been stamped with an outline of Skybowl. Not Stronghold, not Radzyn, not Tiglath, not any of the other important keeps of the Desert. Had Rohan been clever enough to arrange this bit of misdirection if anyone noticed the sacks rather than the gold? Or had this been an oversight?
Ruval left the gates of the town and walked out beyond the first fields. Torrential winter rains had washed away topsoil in buckets, and farmers were trying to encourage the crippled land into its yearly yield of grain. He walked past their ponies and wains and anxious conferences, up a hill and in among the trees. Over the rise was a ravine likewise stripped bare by the rains, where not even enough grass grew to sustain sheep. The place was deserted, and it was from this privacy that he worked a hated but useful Sunrunner spell.
Skybowl crouched like a brooding dragon on the shores of its perfectly round lake. The crater had filled way past its usual level, and a trench had been dug to drain the water. Ruval paused, noting that bags had been filled with sand to guide the course of the runoff; these bags bore the outline of Skybowl. With Lord Riyan absent, his blue-and-brown pennant did not fly over the keep. But there was plenty of activity and a line of pack horses just disappearing over the crater rim on the route to Threadsilver Canyon. Ruval followed on sunlight to where perhaps thirty men and women went about the business of hacking silver from the walls of long-abandoned dragon caves. At the bottom of the canyon light flickered from within a large cavern; the smelter, Ruval guessed. But no evidence of gold.
Frustration gnawed at him. Returning to Cunaxa, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, thin, hexagonal gold coin. He turned it in his fingers for a moment. Mireva had given him this coin. It depicted an outline of Castle Crag on the obverse, his grandsire’s profile on the reverse: both proud, regal, commanding. Rohan had recalled all money minted by Roelstra, replacing it with coins stamped with his own crowned dragon. But Mireva had kept this one and when he had become adept enough had presented it to him. But it was more than a souvenir. This coin was dated 703, the year before Roelstra’s and Ianthe’s deaths had splintered Ruval’s world, and it had been struck from some of the gold Rohan had paid for dranath. And if he was fortunate, contact with Fire would release a vision of where it had been minted and, earlier even than that, where it had been forged.
He conjured a gout of pallid Fire in the dirt and knelt beside it, glad he had imbibed enough dranath that morning to facilitate the spell. Dropping the coin in the flames, he spared a moment for appreciation of his own disciplined mind, working with Fire he’d created to gain a picture of fire many years dead. The primal attraction of each element for itself functioned with smooth swiftness; he was soon looking at the thin, sweat-streaked face of the artisan who had made coins of liquid gold. Ruval squinted at the sudden brightness, his eyes tearing. But he forced the spell back further, seeking the flames from which the ingot had sprung.