David Zindell - The Lightstone - The Ninth Kingdom - Part One

When all the guests had finally found their places, my father pulled out his chair and sat down, and everyone did the same. He took the position of honor at the center of the table, with my mother at his immediate right and my grandmother on his left. And on her left, in order, sat Karshur, Jonathay and Mandru, the fiercest of all my brothers. Where the other Valari knights in the room were content to wear their swords buckled to their waists, Mandru always carried his scabbarded in his three-fingered left hand, ready to draw at a moment’s notice should he need to defend his honor – or his kingdom’s. He sat looking down the table in silent communication with Asaru, who must have told him what had occurred earlier in the woods. Asaru sat to the right of my mother, Elianora wi Solaru, who was tall and regal in her brightly embroidered gown – and said to be the most beautiful woman in the Nine Kingdoms. Her dark, perceptive eyes moved from Asaru to Yarashan, who sat on Asaru’s right, and then down the line of the table from the silent and secretive Ravar to me. As the youngest and least distinguished member of my family, I sat at the far right near the end of the table. There I had hoped to lose myself in the clamor and vastness of the room. But there was no eluding my mother’s strength, goodness and grace. She was the most alive being I had ever known, and the most loyal, too, and she looked at me as if to say that she would gladly lay down her life to protect me should the unknown assassin try to kill me again.

‘Do you see him here?’ Ravar whispered to me. The fox-faced Ravar was older than I by three years and shorter by almost a head. I had to bend low to hear what he was saying.

I looked out at the sea of faces in the room as I tried to identify that of the assassin who had escaped us. At the table nearest the dais, on the right, sat the Brothers who were visiting the castle that night. Master Juwain was there, of course, accompanied by Master Kelem, the Music Master, and Master Tadeo and some twenty other Brothers besides Maram. I knew all of them by name, and I was sure that none of them could have drawn a bow against me.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same for King Kiritan’s emissaries, who had taken the next two tables. All of them – the knights and squires, the minstrels and grooms – were strangers to me. Count Dario, the King’s cousin, I recognized only by description and his emblem: he wore the gold caduceus of House Narmada on his blue tunic, and his carefully trimmed hair and goatee seemed like red flames shooting from his head.

At the left of the room, next to the Ishkan tables where I tried not to look, were the first of the Meshian tables. There I saw Lord Harsha beaming proudly at Behira, and Lord Tomavar and Lord Tanu talking with their wives. Lansar Raasharu, my father’s seneschal, sat there, too, along with Mesh’s other greatest lords. If any of these old warriors were traitors, I thought, then I couldn’t be sure that the sun would rise in the east the next morning.

As well I had faith in my countrymen in the second tier of tables where the master knights and their ladies waited for my father’s attendants to pour the wine. And so with the many lesser knights sitting at the tables beyond, out to the farthest corners of the hall. There, almost too far away to see clearly, I studied the faces of friends such as Sunjay Navaru and other common warriors at whose sides I had fought. There, I thought, near the great granite pillars holding up the arched roof, I would have sat too but for the happenstance of birth.

I whispered back to Ravar. ‘None of them looks like the one who shot at me.’

‘But what of the Ishkans?’ he asked with a gleam in his eyes. ‘You haven’t even looked at them, have you, Val?’

Of course, I hadn’t. And of course Ravar had noticed that I hadn’t. He had quick, black eyes and an even quicker wit. Mandru and the stolid Karshur often accused him of living in his mind, a battlefield upon which no Valari should dwell for too long. Like me he had no natural liking for war: he preferred fencing with words and ideas. Unlike me, however, he was very good at real war because he saw it as a way of perfecting both his mind and his will. Although there were some who thought him unworthy to wear the three diamonds of a master knight, I had seen him lead a company of men at the Battle of Red Mountain and cast his lance through Sar Manashu’s eye at a distance of twenty yards.

As Ravar began to study the Ishkans, perhaps looking for weaknesses with the same concentration that he had turned on Waas’s army, I did the same. And immediately my eyes fell upon an arrogant man with a great scar running down the side of his face. Although he had a great beak of a nose like an eagle, his father and mother had bestowed upon him scarcely any chin. His eyes, I thought, were like pools of stagnant black water, and seemed to suck me down into the coldness of his heart even as they challenged me. Because I didn’t like the slimy feeling that crept into my belly just then, I gazed instead at his bright red tunic, which bore the great white bear of the Ishkan royalty. I recognized him as Prince Salmelu, King Hadaru’s oldest son. Five years before, at the great tournament in Taron, in a game of chess, I had humiliated him in a crushing defeat that had taken only twenty-three moves. It wasn’t enough that he had won the gold medal in the fencing competition and had acquitted himself honorably in the horsemanship and archery competitions; it seemed he had to be preeminent at everything, for he took insult easily, especially from those who had bested him. It was said that he had fought fifteen men in duels – and left all fifteen dead in pools of blood. One of his brothers, Lord Issur, shared the table with him, along with Lord Mestivan and Lord Nadhru and other prominent Ishkans whom Ravar pointed out to me.

‘Do any of them look like your assassin?’ Ravar asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to tell – the man’s face was hooded.’

And then, even as I closed my eyes and opened myself to the hum of hundreds of voices, I felt the same taint of wrongness that I had in the woods. The red, twisting worms of someone’s hate began eating their way up my spine. From what man in the hall this dreadful sensation emanated, however, I couldn’t tell.

At last, the wine having been poured, my father lifted up his goblet and stood to make the opening toast. All eyes in the hall turned his way; all voices trailed off and then died into silence as he began to speak.

‘Masters of the Brotherhood,’ he began, ‘princes and lords, ladies and knights, we would like to welcome you to this gathering tonight. It’s a strange chance that brings King Kiritan’s emissaries to Mesh at the same time that King Hadaru sends his eldest son to honor us. But let us hope that it’s a good chance and a sign of good times to come.’

My father, I thought, had a fine, strong voice that rang from the stones of the hall. He fairly shone with strength, both in the inner steel of his soul and in his large, long hands that could still grip a sword with great ferocity. At fifty-four he was just entering the fullest flower of manhood, for the Valari age more slowly than do other peoples – no one knows why. His long black hair, shot with strands of snowy white, flowed out from beneath a silver crown whose points were set with brilliant white diamonds. Five other diamonds, arrayed into the shape of a star, shimmered from a great, silver ring. It was the ring of a king, and someday Asaru would wear it if no one killed him first.

‘And so,’ my father continued, ‘in the hope of finding the way toward the peace that all desire, we invite you to take salt and bread with us – and perhaps a little meat and ale as well.’