Stephen Deas - The King of the Crags

Around them all lay the palace walls. Not particularly tall, but they were wide enough to drive a horse and cart right around them. In fact there were several ramps to allow the Adamantine Men to do just that when they were putting their scorpions up. More than anything else, that was what the walls were for: to mount the hundreds upon hundreds of scorpions that would defend the speaker from the dragons of her enemies. The walls, as of now, were empty. Zafir hadn't seen fit to deploy her arsenal. That would show the realms that I am afraid, Jehal…

Jehal stood in the wind and chuckled to himself while his gaze wandered and explored the world outside the palace. Below the low slopes of the Palace Hill, the City of Dragons fed and decorated itself with the wealth and power that oozed from the speaker's presence. Somewhere down there too were the barracks of the ten thousand men of the Adamantine Guard. Past the city, the Diamond Cascade falls poured out from the peaks of the Purple Spur, the water falling so far that it never quite reached the ground but instead filled the city with a perpetual misty haze. The bottomless Mirror Lakes glittered and gleamed and rippled in the breeze. Beside them, the Adamantine Eyrie was currently filled to bursting with riders and dragons from the realms to the south. Very empty of dragons from the north. Through a different arch, the Hungry Mountain Plain stretched away to the south, to the chasm of the Fury River and Gliding Dragon Gorge. Beyond that, far away, lay the warm hills and valleys and meadows of Zafir's home, and then his own, Furymouth, and the sea, and beyond that, perhaps, the lands of the Taiytakei sailors and other places Jehal had never seen. To the east, the plains rolled and twisted into the foothills of the Worldspine, the dominion of the King of the Crags. To the west, they grew slowly more broken and wooded until they reached the Sapphire River and then rose sharply to meet the moors and bogs of King Silvallan's realm. To north, beyond the wall of the Purple Spur, the plains became the great deserts of sand and stone and salt that wrapped the northern realms.

He looked back at Zafir. I stood here naked once, at the windows, when Hyram was about to make you a queen, hooking down at all that was going to be mine. If anyone had seen me here they would have known we were lovers, you and I, and all would have been lost. But they didn't. He tried to look away but it was hard. Too hard. For all her flaws, she was still beautiful. I watched you so many times, through the eyes of the Taiytakei dragon. I watched you writhing and moaning under Hyram, drawing him in to you, and I watched you make yourself sick each time he left. And I watched you writhing and moaning alone, just for me, knowing my eyes were there.

So many fond memories. Below them was the room where he'd watched Zafir poison Hyram and then destroy him as cruelly as she could. Where he'd finished what she'd started and broken Hyram's mind. Where he'd struggled with himself not to throw Hyram off one of the balconies when he was done. Here, from this arch, was where he'd watched, that same night, as Hyram had thrown himself off another one right in front of Queen Shezira, spouting gibberish about kings and queens who'd been dead for decades.

And now…

And now he was slowly getting bored. He sighed and his eyes fell away from Zafir's skin. The Night of the Knives, they called it behind Zafir's back and to her face too. The night Valgar tried to have her assassinated and Shezira pushed Hyram off his tower, if you were inclined to believe Zafir's version of events. The night that Zafir imprisoned a king and a queen, the first time that a speaker had done such a thing in nearly a hundred years. The night that the riders of the north had fought with the Adamantine Guard and left more than a hundred corpses strewn across the palace. The night that the Red Riders had been born.

That had been a month ago. The next day, High Priest Aruch had placed the flawless shaft of the Adamantine Spear into Zafir's hands and her reign had begun. And then…

And then? And then nothing, that's what. More than a month of kick-ing my heels around the palace when I should be back in Furymouth, watching over my realm. A month of listening to Zafir bellyache about Lystra. A whole month of nothing to do except…

Jehal looked at Zafir's naked shape, sprawled out before him.

Well it could be a lot worse, and one must confess to having found a few diversions, I suppose.

Above the bed, two pairs of ruby eyes looked down at him from the rafters. Jehal stared back at them. Two golden mechanical dragons, wedding gifts of the Taiytakei, imbued with magics that let him look through their eyes. Perfect spies and yet now he had no one to spy on. He had to wonder, sometimes, why they'd given him such precious things, and why he'd given one of them to Zafir.

No, that wasn't right. He knew exactly why he'd given one to the Speaker of the Realms.

He took another step forward, out onto the balcony until his toes curled over the edge. This time, if anyone saw him, what would it matter? The whole palace knew they were lovers.

This isn't what I wanted. I thought I did, but I was wrong. He glanced back at Zafir, watching her chest slowly rise and fall. If I was speaker, what would I do? Bathe in the power, in the glory, in the knowledge that there was no higher place to be? Yet I see now that the view from up here was far better when it was forbidden.

Shit.

Of all the things that might have happened, of all the things he'd planned for, of all the fates that might have befallen him on his path to this place, here was an outcome he'd never foreseen. He was bored.

Jehal walked back to the bed. He let his eyes linger on Zafir for one last time and listened to her breathing, slow and untroubled. You understand, don't you? That's why you can't simply let Shezira go. Because then it would be over. He leaned down and gently kissed her hair. 'Have a care, my lover,' he whispered. 'Listen to your advisers, for they're no fools. And please let us not become enemies.'

He picked up his clothes, quietly dressed, and slipped away.

Vale Tassan, Night Watchman, commander of the Adamantine Men, most feared soldier in the realms, bowed his head and waited.

'What do you mean, he's gone?' For a moment Speaker Zafir went rigid. Vale thought she might be about to throw something at him. Speakers came and went and Queen Zafir was the fourth that Vale Tassan had lived to see. If he'd been permitted an opinion, it might have been that the others had been immeasurably better. Since he wasn't, he did exactly as tradition and the law demanded. He bowed precisely as low as was required, ready for whatever orders would come his way.

'He has left the palace, Your Holiness,' he said calmly and quietly.

'Idiot. Where did he go?'

Vale bowed again. The action was mechanical, a reflex honed over years. He didn't have to think about it any more. 'To the eyrie, Your Holiness. He went with most of his riders to the eyrie, woke up Eyrie-Master Copas, demanded his dragons be roused and they all flew away, Your Holiness. I believe they flew west, towards the Worldspine and Drotan's Top. What's left of it.' Which put him heading towards the Red Riders, but Vale saw no need to mention something so obvious.

If anything, the speaker's anger grew. Vale watched, calmly indifferent. Adamantine Men were chosen almost before they could talk. Usually they were orphans or unwanted children of poor folk who couldn't afford another mouth to feed. Some were bastard by-blows of higher-born men, conveniently pushed away to a place where they wouldn't cause any trouble. In the Guard, blood didn't matter. Everyone was the same. Vale might have been the son of a king or a fool, but in his own mind he was a son of the Guard, nothing more and nothing less. He'd stood in shield walls with his brothers, the ones who managed to stay alive, for more than twenty years. Together they defied the strength and fire of the dragons. He might have been alone before the speaker's throne but he always felt his brothers at their posts and at their work, not far away. Queen Zafir's anger meant nothing to him. He waited, silent and still, for her to send him away.