Kherda, you could take a lesson from the General.”
The blood drained from the Prime Minister’s face, then returned in a crimson flood. He would have spoken, but no words could express his humiliation and fury.
“General,” the queen continued, “I extend to you once again the full command of the Golden Throng. Do with the girl what you choose,” Ligne dismissed Bronwynn with a flick of her hand.
Joss recognized this as a bold gambit to assert her dominance in their relationship. Ordinarily he would have responded with equal coldness. But there was something about this woman, something compelling about the combination of her physical charms and her steel ambition, that caused him uncharacteristically to gulp. Ligne saw it and, before he could summon any reply, she spun on her heel and was gone. . The House now remembered several other events of that same day, but they were matters of little importance. At the moment it was much more interested in discovering what had transpired in the weeks or months since that vision. Its curiosity had been thoroughly aroused.
It took only a moment to spot the Princess. While kings and emperors might redecorate their own apartments with regularity, few ever troubled to remodel their dungeons. The House found Bronwynn sitting at the bottom of the Pit.
Though she sat in a darkness so total that she couldn’t even see her own hands before her face, Bronwynn’s knotted hair and the scrap of rag that passed for her dress could be clearly perceived by the House.
The lack of light was unimportant, for the castle’s sense of sight was no more Hfce men’s vision than its language was like men’s speech. lit was by a subtle and totally unconscious shaping of ^magical power. That same form of shaping allowed it to jbear the rustling as Bronwynn pawed blindly through heaps of straw in search of a lost morsel of bread. “I know |P here someplace,” the girl mumbled as she dug. She had hopped it hours ago—or maybe days who could tell in timeless hole? and had been searching for it ever r psraktence was fueled by her hunger and by fact that she had nothing else to do.
House felt no pity for her. Though it had witnessed before, it had experienced neither any need for it nor inclination toward it in its centuries of consciousness. humans imprisoned other humans within walls of stone had been among the first things the castle ever comprehended. The House saw little reason in the anger and frustration persons felt toward their imprisonment, however. It was, after all, a prisoner itself of sorts, and quite at peace with its immobility. One thing it did relate to, however, was the isolation that captives experienced. This Princess Bronwynn was doubtless lonely, and the castle decided to approach her.
The object you seek is to your left and behind you, said the House.
Bronwynn jerked backward, landing prone in a pile of straw, staring up toward the grating that was the only entrance into the hole. The House chuckled, stirring the stale air with an incongrous draft.
Now it is by your left foot.
“Is there someone there?” Bronwynn called. The raspiness of her own voice startled her momentarily; she had screamed herself hoarse during the first week of her captivity, and the constant chill of this dank place had added a persistent cold to her list of torments. But more startling by far was the sense that there was something present in the cell with her something nonhuman.
It is the House who speaks.
Bronwynn peered into the darkness, looking first one direction, then another. She succeeded only in making herself dizzy. “Who’s there?”
she whispered, fighting off the sense of vertigo.
It is the House, the House said a bit peevishly.
Bronwynn could make no sense of the odd stirrings in the straw around her or the rapid changes of temperature in her cell. She only knew that some power or force had manifested itself toward her; she made the only assumption that seemed logical. “Are you the Power that Pelmen told me about?”
The Power? the House asked. Such an idea was confusing.
“If you are and I pray you are I only ask that you let him know where I am and send him to rescue me.”
Now the Imperial House had heard many pleas for rescue in its ages of existence some even from tboss of royal blood. But all of these had been addressed to itself not to some Power. Such a request made no sense.
_Must it be stated again? It is the House who addresses jpu. What do you mean by a Power?
“I began to wonder if you even existed. Haven’t you heard me calling out for you all these weeks?” The Princess sounded cross, which made the conversation that much more perplexing. It was as if she didn’t understand a word the castle said.
“Are you not listening? Or do the shapers no longer teach castle speech to the royal children?
*% I know…” Bronwynn began, then she faltered, suddenly self-conscious about talking to nothing. She listened for a moment to the dark, then murmured: “Am I going insane, the way they want me to think? No!” she answered herself firmly, and she began again. “Of course, I know you haven’t been active in Chaomonous in ages, but Pelmen always said he thought that was because of the dragon, and that the more people in this land learned of you, the more apparent your presence would become…”
i What are you talking about? Who is this Pelmen?
Bronwynn groped her way to her feet, stumbling against a wall in the process. It was wet with sweat. Odd, she thought, not realizing that her own inability to communicate had caused the wall’s condition.
**! it is you, I’m begging you take care of Pelmen. And take care of Rosha, too…”
Hie House hastily withdrew from the conversation, thor-oughiy bewildered by the strangeness of her notions. Bron-srynn heard no more. She slumped against the moist wall and sighed. Her sensitivity, which had once caused Pelmen io suggest she might shape the powers some day, told her tfaat the moment had passed.
’ .; “Or is my mind slipping…” she asked quietly. No aw answered.
“House was experiencing some of those same feel-It had slept too long.
It needed someone to fill in the y sizable gaps in its understanding.
Quickly, the located the Queen. Evening had painted the sky le, then black, and though the wind was chilly, Ligne strolled atop the parapets.
explanation is required, the House demanded. didn’t even pause. She pulled her fur-lined cloak
The WizartJ In Waiting tightly around her shoulders, and gazed downriver toward the sea. The full moon had peeked above the eastern horizon, washing the countryside with pale light. The afternoon’s vexations were long forgotten now. As the wind destroyed her careful coiffure, her eyes dropped slightly to study the farthest reaches of her vast city, where distant torches tiny pinpoints of brilliance seemed to reflect the starry sky back at itself. Her thoughts were far away…
Is there no courtesy anymore? Where are your manners? the castle snapped.
Ligne made no response. She was busy weighing the qualities of her various Jovers, clinically analyzing their strengths and weaknesses.
Her present prospects all bored her. She wished for some new diversion to break up the sameness of castle routine…
Or has the world gone mad?
The House began to panic. Why would no one respond?
The castle had repressed the thought long enough. Now it sprang to full, horrifying consciousness. The logical next step was to turn to the present castle power shaper for counsel. The problem was, the power shaper quarters were missing. The apartments occupied by Nobalog and the other shapers of old had been replaced by the terraced gardens.
With brutal impact, a new set of memories returned memories of the shocking years just prior to the coming of the dragon. Wars abounded.
The One Land, united for ages, took only a moment to splinter apart.