In the public chambers, however, the Haighlei love of color ran riot. The Haighlei felt as much at home in the jungle as within a building, and brought the jungle into their buildings as a pleasant reminder of the wealth of life lying outside the city. Huge, lush plants prospered inside, placed where sunlight would reach them and accompanied by cheerful fountains or pools with lazy fish of gold, white, and black. Tiny, huge-eyed furry creatures scampered tamely up the plants’ trunks, and out onto their limbs, and loud, rainbow-bright birds sang, whistled, or spoke mockingly down at the humans passing beneath.
The birds made Amberdrake feel comfortable amid all the alien architecture. They were like the tiny, rainbow-hued messenger-birds that the Kaled’a’in had brought with them, cherished, carefully nurtured, all the way from Urtho’s Tower. These birds were larger, but like the messengers, spoke in human voices, with sense to their speech. He had already made friends with two, a salmon-pink one with a backward-curving crest of deep red, and one seemingly painted in blue, gold, and green.
The walls were covered with mosaics that were just as colorful as the birds, and cool, dim, deep-green passages between the vast public rooms brought to mind the cool, dim trails between huge forest giants.
The Haighlei themselves were as harlequin-bright in costume as their architecture; the clothing the three envoys had worn was fairly typical. Silk, raime, the finest linen imaginable, and a gauzy stuff made from fluffy plant fiber were dyed and fashioned into elaborate, fluttering robes, billowing trousers, and draped gowns, none of which incorporated less than three colors.
Amberdrake had pulled out all his most elaborately beaded and embroidered robes in anticipation of this; Winterhart would have been in some sartorial difficulty if it hadn’t been for Lady Cinnabar. The Lady, it seemed, had used all of her old court gowns as padding on the floor of her floating-barge when planning for the evacuation of Urtho’s Tower. That was clever of her, and reasonable given that fabric for padding was not a high priority and that her gowns were not made of stuffs that could be used as bandages or other useful articles. The clever aspect was that she had packed her gowns in a way that allowed her to retrieve the robes and dresses unharmed. “All” of her court gowns comprised a formidable number, and most of them were utterly unsuitable for the life of a Healer in a half-finished city.
Not all of the gowns were still pristine, and the lighter the fabric, the more it had suffered from wear and the intervening decade. Winterhart, however, was smaller than the aristocratic Cinnabar, and even those articles showing signs of wear or weakness at the seams could be cut down for her and look new. Jewel and Corvi had spent most of the sea voyage frantically—but delightedly—retailoring those gowns to suit their new owner. There was nothing a hertasi enjoyed more than costume-making, and there had been little enough of that during the war with Ma’ar or the search for a new home. Even Gesten had gotten into the act, much to the amusement of Skandranon.
So now Winterhart could put on as fine a display as Amberdrake, wearing her elaborate gowns with all the aplomb of the lady of nobility she had once been. The difference was, now she was not suffering under the expectations of her high-ranking family; now it was Amberdrake who was under the careful scrutiny of countless critical eyes, and she who needed only smile and whisper a bit of advice unless she chose otherwise.
She was enjoying it; Amberdrake was quite sure of that. He thought about Winterhart with a wry smile as he looped string on his fingers, preparatory to making a cat’s cradle. She was enjoying the luxury and pampering she had not had in decades. For the past ten years she had done all of her own chores, her own cleaning, her own cooking—or rather, she had done those things with the help of Gesten and Amberdrake. For years before that, she had lived the rough life of a trondi’irn in Urtho’s army, a healer and tender of Urtho’s gryphons, a post where there were few luxuries and no pampering. Even Urtho himself had lived a life positively austere by the standards of the Haighlei Courts.
“Is Silver Veil able to visit us this afternoon?” Winterhart asked suddenly. Amberdrake covertly searched her face for any hint of jealousy, but to his relief, there didn’t seem to be any signs of it. He would not have been at all surprised to discover that Winterhart was jealous of The Silver Veil. His mentor was one of those fine-boned, ageless women who, once they achieve maturity, seem to hover at an indefinable perfection until they are very old indeed. Her hair had turned silver in her teens, and she had capitalized on what might have been a handicap for someone in her profession by growing and cultivating it until it reached the floor, making it the trademark that had become her name. She was as strikingly graceful and beautiful now as she had been when he knew her, and it would not have been unexpected for Winterhart to react with jealousy at the inevitable bond between astonishingly beautiful mentor and student.
“What do you think of her?” he asked cautiously, looping another strand. “Your own opinion, not what you think I want to hear.”
“I like her,” Winterhart said thoughtfully, her gaze turned inward for a moment. “If you can say you ‘like’ someone as self-contained as she is, that is. I want her to like me, and not just be polite to me, and that’s not just because she is your old teacher and your friend. I like to listen to her talking; I think she is fascinating. I hope that I may age as gracefully.”
Amberdrake nodded; it was a good observation. ‘To answer your question, she said she wanted to come to our suite this afternoon, if that is all right with you.”
“When everyone else is taking a nap, which is a good time for northerners like us to get together and pretend we are accomplishing something even though we aren’t,”
Winterhart chuckled. “I thought that was so absurd when we first arrived here, for everything to stop at the height of the day—but now, I can’t imagine even trying to get anything done when it’s so horribly hot. Even Windsong takes her nap without arguing now, and I thought that was nothing short of miraculous.”
“But it’s the perfect time of day to socialize,” Amberdrake pointed out, verbally, since his fingers were weaving and unweaving intricate knots. “Especially if little ‘why-mama’ is chasing dream-butterflies. And if we northerners can’t bear to sleep during the day when we should be getting work done, at least we can keep each other company.”
Gesten appeared in the doorway, as if on cue. “Windsong is asleep, and Silver Veil is here, Drake,” he said. “Would you prefer the sitting room or the garden?”
Amberdrake raised an eyebrow at Winterhart, signifying that it was her choice. After all, his hands were tied at the moment. “The garden, I think,” she replied after a moment. “I hope the fountains in the pool will make it cooler than the sitting room.”
By now, as always, even the cool stone of the floors was not helping cool the air much. It was always like this; shortly after noon, the heat began to collect, and it weighed down the very air until the sun neared the west-em horizon.
Gesten shrugged. “They’re supposed to, so they tell me,” the little hertasi said philosophically. “I’ll have Jewel tell someone to send up the usual refreshments.”