Дэйв Дункан - Magic Casement

The palace staff and the officers of the realm had been hurriedly assembled in the great hall that now seemed like a shoddy barracks to Inos. They, also, glared in impotent fury. Their greetings were curt, their welcomes insincere. Familiar faces bore unfamiliar expressions—old Chancellor Yaltauri and the much older Seneschal Kondoral, Mother Unonini and Bishop Havyili, and the tall, stark figure of Factor Foronod, his livid face almost as pale as the silver helmet of his hair.

How small Krasnegar was, how bleak, how shabby after Kinvale! The palace was a barn. And when she was ushered politely up into the withdrawing room she looked around at the gilt and rosewood furniture that Aunt Kade had brought back—three years ago now—and it seemed pathetic, a bitter mockery of what comfort and elegance ought to be. Yet it had not changed and she hated herself because it was she who had changed.

The way she spoke to them, the way she moved, the way she returned their looks—she had gone, but she had not returned. She never would return. The place was the same place. She was another person.

Then the doctors, bowing and mumbling and making excuses. His Majesty was conscious and had been informed—

It was at that moment that Inos issued her first command.

“I shall see him alone!” she stated, and she silenced their protests with the best glare she could muster. Even Andor. Even the hated Yggingi. Even Aunt Kade.

Astonishingly, it worked. They all agreed and no one was more surprised than Inos herself.

She climbed the familiar curving stairs alone, noting with surprise that the treads were dished by centuries of footsteps, noting how narrow the way was, and how the very stonework of the walls was glazed by the caress of innumerable garments. Kinvale had all been so new. She came to the dressing room and remembered it as it had been in her childhood, with her own bed against the northwest wall, although now there was an ancient wardrobe standing there. Nurses and doctors came trooping out the far door and bobbed politely to her and hurried across the room and off down the stair behind. And when the last of them had gone, she pushed unwilling feet to the steps and began to climb once more.

The drapes of the bed had been pulled back, the room was bright with transitory sunshine, and at first she thought there had been some terrible mistake, some macabre joke, for the bed looked empty. Then she came near and… and smiled.

She sat by him for many hours, holding his hand, making conversation when he was capable of it, else just waiting until he awoke again or the spasm of pain had passed. His mind wandered much of the time. Often he mistook her for her mother.

Aunt Kade came at intervals, tiptoeing and doleful. She spoke to him, and sometimes he knew her. Then she would ask if Inos wanted anything, and slip quietly away again. Poor Aunt Kade! Weeks on horseback… she had ridden all through the wastelands, bravely insisting that this was the greatest adventure of her life, not to be missed. It had not done a damned thing for her figure. She was just as dumpy as ever, and today she looked old.

The lucid moments were at once the best and the worst.

“Well, Princess?” he asked in his whisper. “Did you find that handsome man?”

“I think so, Father. But we have made no promises.”

“Be sure,” he said, and squeezed her hand. Then he began to mumble about repairs to the bandshell, which had been torn down before she was born.

Her mother’s portrait had been cleaned and moved to one side. Alongside it hung Jalon’s pastel sketch. It made her look absurdly young, a mere child.

Her father asked about Kinvale and seemed to understand some of what she said. He talked of people long dead and troubles long since solved. When pain struck and she offered to call the doctors, he refused. “No more of that,” he said.

Much later, after a long quietness, he suddenly opened his eyes very wide. She thought it was another pain, but it seemed more as if he had remembered something. “Do you want it?” he demanded, staring at her.

“Want what, Father?”

“The kingdom,” he said. “Do you want to stay and be queen? Or would you rather live in a kinder land? Now you must choose. So soon!”

“I think I have a duty,” she replied. “I should not be happy evading a duty.” He would approve of that, although she could not quite suppress her own resentment. Why must she be so bound, when ordinary people were not? She had never asked to be a princess.

He gripped her hand tightly in pain. “You have grown up!”

She nodded and said she thought so.

“Then you will try?” he asked. “You can do it, I think.” His eyes roamed restlessly around the room. “Are we alone?”

She assured him that they were alone.

“Come close, then,” he said softly. She bent over him and he whispered some nonsensical thing in her ear. She jerked up in surprise, for she had thought he was clear-minded. He smiled up at her weakly, as if that had been an effort. “From Inisso.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Ask Sagorn,” he muttered. “You can trust Sagorn. Maybe Thinal, sometimes, but not the others. None of the others.”

She thought that statement a harsh verdict on all the faithful servants and officials who had served Holindarn all their lives—if that was who he meant. And who was Thinal? He was rambling. But Sagorn? Andor had said that Sagorn had returned after she had left, but she had seen no sign of him.

Her father winced suddenly, but then he said, “Call the council.”

“Later,” she said. “Rest now.”

He shook his head insistently on the pillow. “I must tell them.”

Just then Aunt Kade made one of her visits, and Inos told her to call the council. Doubtfully she went off to do so. In a short while they all trooped in, the bishop and Yaltauri and half a dozen others. But by then the king was mumbling about grain ships and white horses; the council withdrew.

After that, he seemed to sink rapidly. The silences grew longer, broken only by the hiss of the peat in the fireplace and a periodic cry of wind through the leaky west window. She recalled how that plaintive wail had frightened her when she was a child, and how that casement had always defied repair. Once or twice she thought she heard a faint creak from the ceiling, but she dismissed it as imagination. On Aunt Kade’s next visit, Inos asked her to send a doctor, and thereafter she allowed the man to stay.

You can do it, he had said. Sitting by the bed as the long day passed, as the moments of consciousness became shorter and rarer, she felt a strange determination emerging, like a rock uncovered by the ebbing tide.

For him, she would try.

She would show them! And that thought seemed to give her strength she had not suspected she had. She waited, she endured, and she shed no tears.

The shadows moved. The day faded. Flames were set in the sconces. Finally, after the sun had set, when there had been a long time with no movement from her father beyond the shallow rise and fall of his chest, the doctor came and laid a hand on her shoulder, and she knew it was time to go. So she kissed the wizened yellow face and walked away. She went slowly downstairs, crossed the dressing room, down another flight, and paused in the door of the withdrawing room to look, and consider.

The council was gathered there, and some others, all waiting around in lamplight, for the windows were quite dark now. No one had yet noticed Inos in the doorway. Queens had no time for personal grief—she must look to her inheritance. She had discussed the problem often enough with Kade on the journey, and with Andor. Would Krasnegar accept a queen? A juvenile queen? The imps likely would, they had decided, but the jotnar were doubtful. Now her father had given her his realm, but he had not told his council; that might not matter very much, anyway, for the next move would be made by the hateful Yggingi, whose army held the kingdom. What would his terms be? Would she be forced to swear allegiance to his Imperial Majesty Emshandar IV?