Роберт Асприн - Forever After

To report Jancy Gaine’s success back to Caltus.

The rain fell in sheets, by buckets, and as great slashing waves. It even smelled a little like cow urine. Jancy Gaine bathed once a year, in the spring when the ice broke, so the odor wasn’t a matter of great concern to her.

Despite the storm, she should have been a lot more cheerful than she was.

Calla Mallanik caught the lead of the gray mare so that Jancy could finish cinching the pack. The animal was supposed to stand drop-reined to be loaded, but the weather spooked her. Sif, the mare thought she had problems?

Under the sluicing rainfall, the soil was vanishing faster than good intentions at a bachelor party. By the time Jancy grabbed the last pack‘ saddle, it had washed twenty feet down the slope. She hoped the damned horses liked their fodder wet and muddy, because that’s the way they were gong to be eating it till they escaped the Desolation of Thaumidor.

She and Calla loaded the roan gelding. The horse came that close to being strangled with its own tail, but it realized its danger in time to stop sidling away from Jancy. Its breast was a froth of nervous sweat, despite the cleansing rain.

Jancy paused, then kneed the gelding in the ribs to tighten the girth another notch. “Where in Sif s name is Squill?” she shouted to Calla.

The elf pointed up the disintegrating dune. “Right where he was,” he said. “I guess he’s still trying to call Caltus through this storm.”

The artio was silhouetted against the western sky. The clouds hid every trace of sunset, but lightning was a constant white glare across the heavens.

“Well, if he doesn’t get down here now , we’re heading back without him!” Jancy said.

Squill stood up. He took a step toward them, as if he’d heard Jancy from a quarter mile away through a chaos of deluge and thunderclaps. He waved.

A lightning bolt touched the tip of the artio’s twelve-foot wand. The flash was brighter than the sum of all those the storm had flung down previously. Squill’s bones stood out momentarily from a ball of actinic radiance before dissolving like the rest of him.

Jancy got to her feet again. She didn’t know if electrical shock, the sky-splitting thunder, or pure surprise had knocked her on her ass.

“Let’s get moving!” she said to Calla. The elf wouldn’t be able to hear anything for a while after the boom that followed the lightning; r>ut it wasn’t as if he needed to be told to get out of this place, either.

The storm ended not far beyond the base of the dune covering Anthurus. The boundary between rain and not-rain was as sharp as a razor cut.

The dune that had covered Anthurus. Rain gouged the loess and carried it away with an enthusiasm no human public-works crew would ever show. Great rivers of silt flowed in four directions from the site, following subtle variations in topography and cutting them deeper.

Or maybe the streams were flowing uphill. This was the Desolation of Thaumidor, after all.

The packhorses whickered, congratulating one another on being alive. Calla Mallanik paused and took off his tunic to wring it. Even if they’d carried changes of clothing, nothing could have come through the downpour without being soaked.

Jancy looked back at the foaming, rain-torn lake. “I suppose we could have waited,” she said. “Anthurus is going to unloose itself completely in the next twenty minutes.”

“I don’t think it would have worked that way,” the elf said. He didn’t sound particularly cheerful either.

The western sky was scarlet, though the sun should have been well below the horizon by now.

“Sombrisio’s going to be all right,” Jancy said in a bright voice. “Someday a guy named Mohammet is going to be seeing something on a pile of sand. When he bends over to pick it up, it’llask if nis mother brought a paternity suit against the camel.”

“Yeah,” Calla said. “Nothing a mountain can do is going to bother that ring.”

Jancy clucked to the pair of horses she led. She began to walk on. “We really did it, didn’t we?” she said. “They’ll be talking about us for a long time. The heroes who got rid of Sombrisio.”

“You bet,” Calla agreed. “This one was a quest and a half, I’ll tell the world!”

There was a small noise. Jancy spun around.

“Sorry,” the elf said in embarrassment. “I had a can of beans and franks for dinner.”

“Oh,” said Jancy. She clucked to the horses again.

“I miss her too,” said Calla Mallanik in a voice almost too soft to be heard; but then, it wasn’t as if Jancy needed to be told that.

Behind them, the opal towers of Anthurus gleamed under a bloody sky.

“ How tall are your bridesmaids, m’lady?” the seamstress said in disbelief.

Rissa gestured. “Well, I am quite tall and both are taller than me. I think I have set of Jancy’s togs around here somewhere, and Domino — well, she was Dominik Blaid, so you should have no trouble seeing her tailor. She’s lived here forever, at least when she wasn’t in the field.”

The pinched lines about the seamstress’s eyes grew deeper. They had given the wedding dress a second fitting and it was stunning. Not much was left but the routine stitching on of yards of lace, hundreds of pearls, and hemming the lot — including the thirty-foot train.

Now, with Daisy’s able assistance, they were designing the costumes for the wedding party. It would not be a large group, as royal weddings went. All of Rissa’s family had been slaughtered by Kalaran — as had all of Rango’s. This settled the difficult problem of coordinating dresses to be worn by the mothers of the bride and groom, but still left plenty of others.

“Dominik Blaid,” the seamstress repeated faintly. “Very good, Your Highness. I believe I had heard something of the sort. If I recall correctly, she is dark and Jancy Gaine is fair?“

‘That’s right,“ Rissa said. ”Is that a difficulty?“

“It does limit our selection of colors. Pink, for example, suits blondes quite well, but it rarely flatters brunettes.”

“I don’t think that Jancy would wear pink,” Rissa said, flinching a bit at the thought. “What about a pale blue?”

“I considered that, but both of the ladies in question are somewhat tan.” The seamstress frowned. “Pale blue might make them look sallow. How about lavender? It is quite regal and would be quite nice given that your coronation is to follow the wedding ceremony.”

Rissa nodded, reflecting as they began to inspect swatches of lavender fabric that it would be nice once the new Royal House was established and had selected its royal colors. Decisions like this would become a matter of the past. No one ever worried about how suitable royal colors were to anyone’s complexion.

Sketching out rough designs for the gowns drove the poor seamstress to distraction. Clothing that would suit full-figured, muscular Jancy would swallow the slimmer, more hard-bodied Domino. Dresses that flattered Domino’s boyish figure would make Jancy look hulking. When she left with initial design notes in hand, the seamstress was muttering prayers to any deity who would listen.

Rissa sent Daisy to see the woman home, promising she could look after herself for a half hour. Although she meant the guild-woman a kindness, she also craved a brief moment of privacy. Daisy tended to mother her, something that Rissa would not have minded from her own nurse. However, that poor lady had been slain when Kalaran’s forces looted her family castle. She had not been young or pretty enough for the slave markets. Indirectly, Nurse had saved Rissa’s life, for she had insisted on dressing the Princess in servant’s clothing. Thus, none of the troops had realized that the Princess had lived, instead of being slaughtered with the rest of her family.