Tad Williams - Shadowmarch

He was surprised by the frightened sincerity in her voice So she was trying to protect him from voracious women! He was pained but almost amused. She doesn’t seem to have noticed that the fairer sex are having no trouble resisting me so far.

They had reached the bottom of the small hill on which Chaven’s observatory-tower was set, its base nestled just inside the New Wall, its top looming above everything else in the castle except the four cardinal towers and the master of all, Wolfstooth Spire. As they climbed the spiral of steps, they put distance between themselves and the heavily armored guards.

“Hoy!” Barrick called down to the laboring soldiers. “You sluggards! What if there were murderers waiting for us at the top of the hill?”

“Don’t be cruel,” said Briony, but she was stifling a giggle.

Chaven—he probably had a second name, something full of Ulosian as and os, but the twins had never been told it and had never asked—was standing in a pool of light beneath the great observatory roof, which was open to the sky, although the clouds above were dark and a few solitary drops of rain spattered the stone floors. His assistant, a tall, sullen young man, stood waiting by a complicated apparatus of ropes and wooden cranks. The physician was kneeling over a large wooden case lined with velvet that appeared to contain a row of serving plates of different sizes. At the sound of their footsteps Chaven looked up.

He was small and round, with large, capable hands. The twins often joked about the unpredictability of the gods’ gifts, since tall, rawboned Puzzle, with his gloomily absorbed manner, would have made a much better royal astrologer and physician, and the cheerful, mercurial, dexterous Chaven seemed perfectly formed to be a court jester.

But, of course, Chaven was also very, very clever—when he could be bothered.

“Yes?” he said impatiently, glancing in their direction. The physician had lived in the marchlands so long he had scarcely a trace of accent. “Do you seek someone?"

The twins had been through this before. “It’s us, Chaven,” Briony announced.

A smile lit his face. “Your Highnesses! Apologies—I am much absorbed with something I have just received, tools that will help me examine a star or a mote of dust with equal facility.” He carefully lifted one of the plates, which proved to be made of solid glass, transparent as water. “Say what you wish about the unpleasantness of its governor, there are none in all the rest of Eion who can make a lens like the grinders of Hierosol.” His mobile face darkened. “I am sorry—that was thoughtless, with your father a prisoner there.”

Briony crouched down beside the case and reached a tentative hand toward one of the circles of glass, which gleamed in an angled beam of sunlight. “We have received something from this ship as well, a letter from our father, but Kendrick has not let us read it yet.”

“Please, my lady!” Chaven said quickly, loudly. “Do not touch those! Even the smallest flaw can spoil their utility…” Briony snatched her hand back and caught it on the clasp of the wooden case. She grunted and lifted her finger. A drop of red grew on it, dribbled down toward her palm.

“Terrible! I am sorry. It is my fault for startling you.” Chaven fussed in the pockets of his capacious robe, producing a handful of black cubes, then a curved glass pipe, a fistful of feathers, and at last a kerchief that looked as if it had been used to polish old brass.

Briony thanked him, then unobtrusively pocketed the dirty square of cloth and sucked the blood from her finger instead.

“So you have received no news yet?” the physician asked.

“The envoy is not to see Kendrick until noon.” Barrick felt angry again, out of sorts. The sight of blood on his sister s hand troubled him. “Meanwhile, we are running an errand Our stepmother wishes to see you.”

“Ah.” Chaven looked around as though wondering where his kerchief had got to, then shut the lenses back in their case. “I will go to her now, of course. Will you come with me? I wish to hear about the wyvern hunt. Your brother has promised me the carcass for examination and dissection, but I have not received it yet, although I hear troubling rumors he has already given the best parts of it away as trophies.” He was already bustling toward the door, and called back over his shoulder, “Shut the roof, Toby. I have changed my mind—I think it will be too cloudy tonight for observation, in any case.”

With a look of pure, weary despair, the young man began turning the huge crank. Slowly, inch by inch, with a noise like the death groan of some mythological beast, the great ceiling slid closed.

Outside, the twins’ four heavily armored guards had reached the observatory door and had just stopped to catch their breath when the trio appeared and hurried past them down the stairs, bound for the Tower of Spring.

A girl no more than six years old opened the door to Anissa’s chambers in the tower, made a courtesy, then stepped out of the way. The room was surprisingly bright. Dozens of candles burned in front of a flower-strewn shrine to Madi Surazem, goddess of childbirth, and in each corner of the room new sheaves of wheat stood in pots to encourage the blessing of fruitful Erilo. A half dozen silent ladies-in-waiting lurked around the great bed like cockindrills floating in one of the moats of Xis. An older woman with the sourly practical appearance of a midwife or hedge-witch took one look at Barrick and said, “He can’t come in here. This is a place for women.”

Before the prince could do more than bristle, his stepmother pulled aside the bed’s curtains and peered out. Her hair was down, and she wore a voluminous white nightdress. “Who is it? Is it the doctor? Of course he can come to me.” “But it is the young prince as well, my lady,” the old woman explained.

“Barrick?” She pronounced it Bah-reek. “Why are you such a fool, woman? I am respectably dressed. I am not giving birth today.” She let out a sigh and collapsed back out of sight.

By the time Chaven and the twins had crossed the open floor to the bed, the curtains were open again, tied up by the maid Selia, who gave Barrick a quick smile, then caught sight of Briony and changed it to a respectful nod for both of them. Anissa reclined, propped upright on many pillows. Two tiny growling dogs tugged at a piece of cloth between her slippered feet. She was not wearing her usual pale face paint, and so looked almost ruddy with health. Barrick, who unlike Briony had not even tried to like his stepmother, was certain they had been summoned on a pointless errand whose real purpose was only to relieve Anissa’s boredom.

“Children,” she said to them, fanning herself. “It is kind of you to come. I am so ill, I see no one these days.” Barrick could feel Briony’s tiny flinch at being called a child by this woman. In fact, seeing her with her dark hair loose, and without her usual paint, he was surprised by how young their stepmother looked. She was only five or six years older than Kendrick, after all. She was pretty, too, in a fussy sort of way, although Barrick thought her nose a little too long for true beauty.

She does not compare to her maid, he thought, sneaking a glance, but Selia was looking solicitously at her mistress. “You are feeling poorly, my queen?” asked Chaven.

“Pains in my stomach. Oh, I cannot tell you.” Although she was small-boned and still slender even this close to giving birth, Anissa had a certain knack for dominating a room. Briony sometimes called her the Loud Mouse.

“And have you been faithfully taking the elixir I have made up for you?”

She waved her hand. “That? It binds up my insides. Can I say this, or is it impolite? My bowels have not moved for days.”