The Storm Lord, with his Guard and personal, small entourage, rode over the slopes, bypassing Migsha, and was gone. It was too early in the year for dust to mark their passing. And there was a good deal of mud on the first part of Astaris’s royal progression.
The princess recaptured her solitude and lay bathed in it. She had responded to Amrek’s inner pain with vague maternal stirrings which surprised her, but even these small tokens had been exhausting. He had leaned on her so heavily. She sensed his need, yet the impassable barrier remained to lock her in, away from him as from all others. She experienced the bewilderment of closeness without intimacy, understanding without knowledge, a blind communion through layers of gauze. And when he left, she felt herself emptied of the little she had achieved with him. Quite suddenly he became again a stranger. Yet the stranger had worn her out.
They passed through Migsha moving north. She sat like a doll at feastings and withdrew early. She did not notice that Amrek’s new Dragon Lord watched her for a time very closely, for, as always, she scarcely noticed anything at all.
In the streets of the beautiful cities of Xarabiss, girls tossed early flowers, which fell in a rain about the procession and were trampled by the feet of men and pack animals and under the wheels of the chariots. To Raldnor the whole journey through Xarabiss came to be symbolized by this odor of crushed, bruised blossom, and by the eyes of women fixed on his face as he rode at the head of his Wolves.
In the warm humid evenings women would come to garrison gates, decked out in their various fineries, to request the pleasure of entertaining him. Sentries teased them, asked if they would do and finally divided the spoils among themselves. Something of Raldnor’s past rose up and sickened him. The Vis woman was a harlot, everyone a daughter of the Red Moon. The easy victories after the aridness before had begun to cloy. And these dark ladies were jealous too, as he saw too often with Lyki.
They crossed into Ommos, and there also his past caught him hard.
A narrow land with narrow-towered cities, ruled by a cruel, perverse code. Scant honor for Amrek’s bride here—she was a woman, merely the house of unborn men. The entourage kept to its own metropolis, the encampment, as it traveled. Only in Hetta Para, the capital, did they pause—etiquette dictated that they should. Uhgar, the king, had something of Yr Dakan in him for Raldnor; it was inevitable that he should. Raldnor took in the gaudy feasts, the fire dancers, the blazing-bellied Zaroks, the pretty simpering boys, with a grave face. Here, men, not women, importuned him. He was revolted but he had learned a sardonic tact along with the rest.
He slept poorly at Hetta Para.
On the second and third night in the capital he rose and walked along the bleak upper galleries of the palace, which were open to a sky full of enormous stars. He thought of Orklos, and of Anici. He became a Lowlander for brief agonizing seconds. It came to him at last, among the stones of Ommos, how pathetic Anici’s life and beauty had been to her.
Then he saw something that was like an omen—indecipherable, yet charged with portent.
Across the walls and the gulfs between them, a woman with blood-red hair stood on her balcony, wrapped in a blizzard of untimely snow. Astaris, dressed in a cloak made from the pelt of one perfect and unmarked ice-white wolf, the gift to her of the lord Kathaos, who had bought it by proxy in the market of Abissa. Raldnor shuddered.
He turned away, back into the corridors. She had been like a phantom to him. And he could not forget that she dreamed dreams which were his own. Anici had become a curious property between them.
Lyki had come to his bed in his absence, and lay awaiting him with her expectant sensuality. He desired her only because she was available.
She lay afterward at his side in the dark and said: “I think I have your child.”
The banality of her statement irritated him.
“Why assume it’s mine?”
“It can be no one else’s, Raldnor my love. With the others I took care not to conceive. Besides, I’ve been faithful to you. Can you say the same?”
“There are no vows between us. You can do as you like.”
“Well, so I have. And I carry. Your seed. Does it mean nothing to you?”
He did not answer. Many Vis women bore their children without the accessory of a husband, yet he sensed in her a desire to bind him to her by her maternity, to show other women that he had put a piece of himself into her, as if he had chosen her specially for this purpose.
“You’re angry,” she chided him sharply. “Well, it’s done now. I told her”—by her inflection he understood she meant Astaris. “She gave me a strange look, but then she’s always strange.”
Three days after, the rolling caravan crossed the river into Dorthar.
The suns were dazzling that day. Under a white metal sky he made out a land like a woman’s dark hair drawn through a comb of blue mountains. There came an unexpected and unlooked-for quickening. Oddly, he felt he had seen Dorthar before.
Koramvis disturbed him deeply. Part of him had wished to remain unimpressed. But then, he knew from his reading, there was no city like her in all Vis. Never a city with such architecture, such grace, such splendor, such legends.
A man met them on the road.
“Val Mala, mother of the Storm Lord, sends fond greetings to her daughter Astaris Am Karmiss.”
And this would be all the greeting Astaris would get, Amrek being in Thaddra.
As with the city, Raldnor had expected and wanted something different. He had pictured Val Mala in the light of what was said about her: a woman in her middle years, prone to rage and terrible cruelty, a whore and a villainess. He visualized a dragon woman with lines of age and evil living on her face.
His Wolves flanked Astaris and her attendants into the Storm Palace; so he saw Val Mala for the first time.
She had twice his years, yet her vanity and wealth had retained for her the long youth of the Vis. She had a voluptuous, vibrant beauty. Compared to Astaris’s own it might seem a sort of vulgarity; yet conversely, set off by Val Mala, the Karmian seemed more than ever like something fashioned from wax. The Queen of Dorthar wore a gown of flaring liquid scarlet, and on either side of her chair was chained a long-necked scarlet bird with a spreading tail. One thing startled him, even though he had been told of it: the whiteness of the unguent on her skin.
“Astaris, you are to be my daughter from this moment.”
She did not bother to conceal her dislike, and the ritualistic words accentuated this. She embraced the Karmian as if she were poisonous.
“We have allotted you apartments in the Palace of Peace.”
It was an insult. A brief murmuring went up from the room. This palace, not its subsidiary, should house the future consort of the King. But the King was absent.
Astaris said nothing. It occurred to Raldnor how her immobility would infuriate. It amused him to see these two astonishing women locked in a form of mortal combat, and one of them so uninterested.
A steward tried to smooth the way with mutterings at the Queen’s ear. She spoke to him softly, and he paled.
It was to be a day of strangeness for Raldnor. When they passed through the gate of the Palace of Peace, he felt a dark bird fly over his brain. Kothon, his charioteer, jerked a blunt thumb at old black markings on the walls.