To Tristan’s utter shock, as she stood, her body and shadow lengthened, taking on height and width that it had not had a moment before. In the fading light of the fire her hair seemed to darken, her face to elongate, and when she turned around, her eyes sparkled with a wicked black light.
The Lord Roland felt all the breath leave his body.
After two attempts that produced no sound and sour spittle, he finally got his mouth to form the word.
“Portia?”
The chambermaid laughed merrily. She continued to stand, looking down amusedly on his astonishment, until his mouth finally closed.
“Isn’t self-deception a remarkably powerful entity?” she asked playfully. “I told you, m’lord, I’ve been at this a long time.” She turned and headed for the door, then stopped for a moment. “You should get up from the floor, Tristan,” she said. “Your position there does not befit the position you will soon attain.”
Then she left the room without a backward glance.
27
Faedryth, king of Nain and Lord of the Distant Mountains, stared ruefully into the darkness beyond the gleaming throne in the center of his Great Hall hidden deep within the cavernous earth. Though the seat of power had been his, undisputed, for nearly a thousand years, it never ceased to give him pause whenever he beheld it.
A single slab of crystal purer than the flawless diamonds adorning his crown, the throne was a rough-hewn chair shaped from the living rock, growing seamlessly from the cavern floor, reaching in jagged and uneven slabs skyward to the dark vault of the Great Hall above. The Nain who had lived in this place before Faedryth, despite being the greatest miners, architects, and road builders the continent had ever known, had left the miraculous formation almost untouched, preferring to merely polish it and tolerate some discomfort of their monarchs’ hindquarters rather than insult the earth that had given birth to such an awe-inspiring wonder by altering it in any way. Accordingly, they had also deemed it appropriate to outfit the Great Hall with only the barest of torchlight, so as not to presume to externally illuminate the giant pure gem that glowed with a light of its own.
The Nain king glanced around the empty, cavernous room, and returned to his musings. He recalled the first time he had ever seen this place, led here under a flag of truce by the guards of Vormvald, the Nain king who had reigned over these lands when Faedryth came, more or less as a refugee. Vormvald, then in the hundred and twelfth year of his reign, had graciously taken in Faedryth and his followers, thousands of Nain from the other side of the world where Faedryth had once been their king. At the time they were both men in their middle years, but unlike Vormvald and his subjects, Faedryth and his followers had been granted an enduring and uncanny youth, a dubious blessing of near immortality, conferred somewhere in the course of their flight from their doomed homeland. This dubious blessing had already caused several of their number to take their own lives.
But Vormvald did not know that. The appearance of thirty thousand of his kind, under the banner of a seemingly humble and cooperative leader like Faedryth, had been seen as welcome reinforcement of the military, mining, and construction brigades of the Distant Mountains. He made Faedryth’s people, survivors of the destroyed Island of Serendair, at home in his lands, appointed Faedryth his viceroy, allowed the newcomers autonomy under their king, and set about, with the former king’s help, transforming his own kingdom, achieving even greater visions of magnificent architecture and invention. The production of the mines doubled, the artisanship and artistry of the forge and smelting fires became legendary, and the kingdom, now united, continued its self-sufficient progress hidden a thousand miles away from any of the other races of man.
The influence of the Cymrian Nain, as Faedryth’s followers were known in the Distant Kingdom, was immediately apparent. Their ingenuity with the hinge and pulley, in the forging of weapons with which Vormvald was not familiar, their ability to move earth and sculpt the stone of tunnels and mines, quickly became part of the societal fabric of the Distant Mountains. The old Nain king was delighted with the accomplishments that were wrought, the cities that were built, the works of art that were fashioned, the inventions that were realized. All the while, as each new era of advancement came and went, replaced by another, greater era, Vormvald’s eyes began to dim, his hand to weaken, his beard to gray into the whiteness of mountain snow.
But not Faedryth. He remained as youthful as on the day he had arrived in Vormvald’s court. He had been a partner in vision, in labor, in the rule of the United Kingdom of Nain, and when Vormvald finally failed in his fourth century of life, passing from the world as each man passes to the next one, Faedryth became the kingdom’s undisputed ruler. Vormvald’s heirs squawked for a generation or two, but in the end Time erased his dynastic line, and their claim to the throne, and eventually their mortal memories, as easily as the jeweler’s cloth polishes out a scratch in an otherwise flawless gem.
Now the crystal throne was Faedryth’s. It had been for a millennium and yet, somehow, there was still a newness to it, and an uneasiness, a vague sense of intimidation each time he placed himself on the horizontal plane in the rock that served as the seat. He had become accustomed to its deep power, the pressure and flow, the sheer might that radiated from the depth of the earth through the giant glowing crystal, an authority sanctioned by the very mountains over which he ruled. Faedryth could feel bloods he had not been born to, as if he could feel the breathing of the earth, and that power was now his power. Nonetheless, Faedryth had never taken the throne for granted. Great and vain as he was, the mighty immortal leader of a deep nation of hidden men, smiths and builders, miners and jewelers, and an army numbering almost half a million, in spite of all the riches at his disposal, recognized that there were still a few things greater than himself.
One of those things might be within the black ivory box he now held in his hands. A soft cough behind him stirred Faedryth from his reverie. Thotan, his minister of mines and his only nonmilitary earl, hovered at the edge of the fireshadows, respectful in his silence. Polite comportment was unusual for a Nain lord; most Nain spoke little unless they were in their cups, but even so did not give much concern to how they were perceived by others. Thotan was different, being the administrator of the merchants, the upworld Nain who took the wares from their mines across the seas to the kingdoms of men and sold them, allowing the rest of the kingdom its peace and solitude in the silent earth. His job required uncharacteristic forbearance and civility; Thotan had been waiting patiently beyond the gilded doors of the throne room since the king had summoned him more than an hour before. Faedryth exhaled, then nodded to him, almost reluctantly.
Thotan turned on his heel and hurried from the room.
The box in Faedryth’s hands felt smooth against his calloused palms, and cold. He continued to stare at it, lost in thought, until Thotan returned with Therion, Faedryth’s aide-de-camp, followed by fourteen of his most highly trusted corpsmen, each in the silver fittings and banded black leather of Faedryth’s personal regiment, in pairs. In their arms they carried something wrapped in linen, heavy, bulky and regular of shape. From the expressions of measured concentration on their faces, it was clear that their cargo was both fragile and precious beyond reckoning.
Faedryth watched in grim silence as the corpsmen gently set their burdens down around the base of the crystal throne and carefully unbound the silk ropes that secured their wrappings. The flickering torchlight flashed ruby-red suddenly as it came to rest on the first of the objects, a large, smoothly honed piece of colored glass with a thickness the width of Faedryth’s hand. The piece had a perfectly curved edge on the outside, an arc of a circle a little more than a seventh of the circumference, and tapered like a wide pie wedge to a smaller, similar arc, which Therion’s corpsmen were busily fitting into place at the base of Faedryth’s throne.