The chill faded. Cautiously Dairine opened one eye. Roshaun’s expression was confused but not scandalized. Not that that means anything in particular. Does his culture even have a nudity taboo? Never mind, mine does! She looked down at herself.
“Whoa,” Dairine said.
She was wearing a simple, scoop-necked, short-sleeved, floor-length dress, in a velvety substance as green as grass and as light as fog. Around her left wrist, where her watch usually went, was a bracelet of emeralds the size of quail’s eggs, held together with nothing but a series of characters in the Speech—a delicate chain of symbols in softly burning green smoke, scrolling through the gems as she watched. Another chain just like it held a single similar stone at her throat.
“Nice,” Dairine said. Then she realized there was something on her head. She put her hands up to feel it.
Her eyes widened, and then she grinned. Tiaras might have gone out of fashion again after their recent brief period as a fashion accessory, but Dairine paid only so much attention to fashion as pleased her, and right now it pleased her to wear the thing, if only for shock value. She turned toward Roshaun. “That okay?” she said.
Roshaun looked impressed. “There are likenesses to our own idiom,” he said. “To what land of your world is such raiment native?”
“Possibly Oz,” Dairine said, “but I doubt the Good Witch of the North’s gonna come after me for stealing her look.”
“Good,” Roshaun said. “This way—”
They headed toward those crystalline doors, Spot spidering along behind them. Out beyond the doors lay a goldstone terrace with a broad stone railing, and beyond that, a huge formal garden full of red and golden flowers and plants. Past the garden, the surface of the “sunside” of Wellakh spread: miles and miles of unrelieved flatness reaching straight to the horizon on every side—the everlasting reminder of the catastrophic sunstorm that had blasted half the surface of Wellakh to slag all those centuries ago.
Just in the doorway, before stepping out onto the terrace, Roshaun suddenly paused. He stood there for some seconds simply looking at the setting sun—straight at it, blinding as it was. Finally he dropped his gaze. “This is not good,” Roshaun said softly. “Still, let us go.”
They walked through the doors and out across the terrace, and as they did, Dairine thought she saw something stirring out there, a waving movement. Her first thought was that she was seeing the motion of wind in the garden plants. But there isn’t any wind, she thought as they came closer to the rail. Is there a—
She froze. There were people out there… about a million of them. Or two, for all I know, Dairine thought. Since I don’t know a thing about counting crowds—
Two million, six hundred and eight thousand, four hundred twenty-four, said Spot silently.
The multitude of Wellakhit men and women started just past the formal garden and went on and on, seemingly all the way to the horizon. The slight motion Dairine had seen was the million-times–multiplied tremor of people shifting a little in place as they stood waiting for someone to appear.
Roshaun walked up to the railing and just stood there, resting his hands on the broad rail. As he came to where everyone could see him, a sound started to go up from the crowd nearest the balustrade, and rolled back across it like a wave: a murmur of comment, curiosity … and straightforward hostility. These people wanted to see Roshaun, but not because they liked him. The murmur sounded to Dairine like the thoughtful sound an animal makes deep in its throat when it sees something it considers a threat, an utterance just short of a growl.
Roshaun simply stood there with his head up and let it wash over him. The sound got not necessarily more angry, but more pronounced. Roshaun moved not a muscle, said nothing. Very slowly the murmur began to die away again. Only when the crowd was quiet did Roshaun move at all, to look over his shoulder.
“Don’t stay hiding back there,” he said. “They know you are here. Come out and let them see you.”
At the moment, it was the last thing Dairine wanted. No one could ever have called her shy—but not being shy in front of a classroom full of kids, or a crowd of wizards, was one thing. Not being shy in front of a couple of million pairs of staring, hostile eyes was something else entirely.
Dairine swallowed and stepped forward to stand beside Roshaun at the railing. She couldn’t think of anything to do with her hands. She put them down on the balustrade as Roshaun had, and held very still.
She had thought it was quiet before, but she was mistaken. A silence fell over all the people at the edge of the garden, rolling back from them right across that vast multitude. The stillness became incredible.
Dairine didn’t move a muscle, though she desperately wanted to bolt. The pressure of all those eyes was nearly unbearable. The faces closest to the two of them wore a look very like Roshaun’s normal one: proud, aloof, very reserved. They were all as tall as he was, or taller, which made Dairine feel, if possible, even smaller than usual. And the expression in the eyes of the closest people held a hostility of a different kind than what they’d turned on Roshaun. Alien, it said. Stranger. Not like us. What is that doing here?
Dairine manufactured the small the-hell-with-you smile that she usually applied just before getting into a fight with somebody. “You might have mentioned this beforehand,” she said under her breath.
“Why?” Roshaun said. “Would you have worn something different?”
Maybe a force field! “Who are they all?”
“My people,” Roshaun said. “They have come to look at their new king.”
“How long have they been here?”
“I have no idea,” Roshaun said. “Perhaps since the time they heard that my father had abdicated.”
Dairine tried to figure out when that might have been. A couple of days ago? She wasn’t sure. “What do they want?”
“What I do not think I can give them,” Roshaun said.
He turned his back on the great throng of people. Reluctantly—for to her it felt somehow rude—Dairine did the same. “Our transport will be here in a moment,” Roshaun said. “We have very little time. However casually you may enjoy speaking to me, believe me when I tell you that such a mode would not be wise with my father. He may have resigned his position, but he keeps his power as a wizard—”
“However much of that anyone his age is going to have for much longer,” Dairine said.
Roshaun looked at her, and for the first time Dairine understood what it was like to see someone’s eyes burn. That sunset light got into them and glowed, impossibly seeming to heat up still further in Roshaun’s anger. “I would not put too much emphasis on that if I were you,” he said. “Not with him, or with me. He and I may have our differences, but anybody who would find humor in a wizard losing his power should probably consider how it would feel to them. Or does feel.”
Spot came spidering along to Dairine. She bent down to pick him up, glad of the chance to get control of her face, for she was blushing with embarrassment at how right Roshaun was. “Sorry,” she said.
“Yes,” Roshaun said. And more quietly, over the upscaling scream of an aircar that Dairine heard approaching, he said, “I, too. Now stand straight and properly represent your planet.”
Dairine stood straight. Between them and the crystalline doors of Roshaun’s residence-wing, the egg-shaped aircar, ornately gilded like everything else here, settled onto the terrace and balanced effortlessly on its underside’s curve without rocking an inch to one side or the other. Dairine looked up past it to what she had partly forgotten—the mountainous bulk of the rest of the Palace of Wellakh, bastion upon bastion and height above height, all carved from and built into the one peak that had survived the solar flare that slagged down everything else on this side of the world. The palace was not only a residence but a reminder to the kings who lived in it. Your family saved us all once, it said in the voice of the people of Wellakh, and you showed such power then that now we fear you. We keep you in wealth and splendor now; just make sure you protect us. Because if the Terror by Sunfire should ever come again, and you don’t—And the message was far stronger than usual with them all standing there, silent, watching.