Winterlands 4 - Dragonstar (42 page)

“Can we really go to seek the Dragonshadows?” she asked, as the trumpets sounded by the palace gates, calling all latecomers to the procession. Down at the end of the garden Badegamus appeared, gorgeous in green-and-purple satin so crusted with jewels that he seemed, in his fluttering mantlings, to be a dragon himself, hastening toward them with all the ribbons fluttering on his staff as he gestured for them to hurry.

“I wouldn't miss it for the world,” John said with a grin. “Though God knows what we'll find—not what either of us expects, I daresay. Maybe not even anything Morkeleb expects. And what they'll think of him I can't imagine—always supposin' we find them. He's not a dragon anymore, as he said, no matter how much he tries to pretend he isn't interested in humankind or mortal lives. Whatever else he is …”

He shook his head, and finished, “… is what he is.”

“I only hope he may find happiness in so being,” Jenny said softly. “As I have.”

Badegamus reached them, puffing so hard he could only gesture them toward the procession. Tinán, Prince of Imperteng, fairly glittered in his barbaric embroideries; the beautifully arrayed lords of the Islands bowed, looking like a flower garden when the wind passes. The Master of Halnath, like John and Jenny, wore scholar's robes, his long reddish hair trailing out from beneath his cap; Lord Ector stood beside him, erect and soldierly under thirty pounds of elaborately dagged satin mantlings and fussing over the proper order of procession.

Resplendent in a gown of ancient cut, Gareth led the way through the streets of the ancient city on foot, marking out, square by square, the place whose people he would be answerable for, even at the cost of his life. At each of the gods' twelve temples he was anointed, and swore before each deity—the Green God of Law, and the Gray God of Learning, the Blue Goddess whose name the city had originally borne and the Many-Colored Lady of the Wastelands, and all the rest—to stand in for the lives of the people, in all things touched by that lord. And before each god the rulers of the great fiefs and marches swore their loyalty: the Master of Halnath, and the Thane of the Winterlands, the Prince of Imperteng, and the lords of the various isles. And the people who followed the procession replied, in a many-voiced cry like the sweeping music of ten thousand blades of grass, “And so we swear.”

Then there would be music and a little pageant by the local guilds and temple choirs singing slightly out of tune, and John and Ector discussing the history of the coronation rite under their breaths just as if Ector hadn't shoved a torch into a pile of kindling around John's feet a month ago: “… but accordin' to Tenantius, if the King is selected before the beginnin' of the world by the Spirit of Universal Justice …”

“Yes, yes, but in Garuspex's Rites it says that no King is truly King until he is invested, and therefore …”

Jenny shook her head, and looked at the young man standing before her on the steps of the Temple of Sarmendes, the last born and greatest of the Twelve. Gareth looked pale and haggard still in the red robes of the House of Uwanë, and in spite of the dignity of the day his spectacles flashed in the sunlight. He took the rite too seriously to risk offending any god by a single myopic misstep, no matter what he looked like in front of the people. The hooded priests of Grond and Ankethyes grouped around him, waving censers and mumbling rote invocations in a language that nobody remembered anymore, but when she scanned the crowd on the steps, Jenny saw little Millença with the nurse Danae and Danae's daughter, Branwen, all watching Gareth with mingled joy and love.

And around them, other people. Gareth's people, Jenny thought, the way the villagers of Alyn and Great Toby and Far West Riding were John's people. She could almost match them, face for face—old ladies who were certainly the spiritual sisters of Granny Brown, the rough-faced, smiling Cowans and Bills and Muffles of the world; girls in bright dresses and tight bodices like Mol Bucket, and innkeepers like Gowla and Grobe from the Silver Cricket, and the woman who'd been hawking hot pies in the alley behind Bliaud's house. She glimpsed Bliaud's son Abellus, in elaborate mantlings and a truly amazing hat, and Brâk with his scrollwork tattoos.

Weary faces full of hope, or red with free wine. The faces of those who'd come through plague and war and Rocklys's rebellion, through doubt and confusion and lies. The faces of those who'd lost wives and husbands and children to the plague—some who'd seen them return, only to be cheated and mocked by the demons who'd poisoned even their memories.

They deserved their celebration, thought Jenny. And their time of peace.

It would be good, she thought, to start for the North again. She looked forward to teaching Ian, sensing that he was already a better mage than she and would be better still—that knowledge filled her with joy. To meditate in quiet in the house on Frost Fell, watching the luminous blue borealis ripple through the summer evenings when the birds sang through the hour or two of darkness, and the world smelled as close to God as it was ever likely to get.

To be with her children, and with John, and with herself.

With Morkeleb, too, she hoped—if not to go away adventuring, then to lie, as he had once said, in the thin turf of the downs, and to talk as friends of the endless lore of the star-drakes.

Time is long, she thought as her eyes turned to John once more—“—yes, but if the sceptre only dates back to the reign of Heskooth IV—” he was arguing, oblivious to the priests of Cragget investing Gareth with the keys and hammer of the Orange God in the name of the twenty-seven Guilds of the city. Time is long, and the God of Time, the thirteenth God who dreamed the other Twelve, holds all things in his pockets. And no one knows what he will decide to bring forth.

We all are what we are, and to fear that is to fear the stars in the sky.

The gnomes of the Deep came forward: Sevacandrozardus the King, who was called Balgub among men, in robes that seemed to be plated with gold and gems; the gnomish Wise Ones and the Patriarchs of the noble clans of the gnomes, Miss Mab's clan of Howeth-Arawan among them; Miss Mab herself, bowing with great dignity to the young man who had visited her in the slums when the dragon drove her and her people forth from the Deep.

Yet another hymn was sung by yet another ill-rehearsed choir. A face in the crowd caught Jenny's eye: a thin, small man with gray hair and eyes like the diamond labyrinths of the star-fields, and hands gloved in black, to hide his dragon claws. Morkeleb stood in the crowd, elbow-to-elbow with fishmongers and pork-butchers and the girls in their bright dresses and tight bodices, watching the King and watching the King's people with the fascination of one who has never seen such things before.

A dragon? she thought. Never.

A Dragonshadow?

Or one who was only the sum of what he had once been, and was now only what he was? As are we all, she thought.

The musicians broke into a fanfare, marred by a single out-of-tune hautbois; the children of the Weavers' Guild Choir lifted their voices in yet another hymn of banal praise. For one moment, across the crowd, Jenny met those diamond eyes.

Then Morkeleb lifted a hand to her, and smiled, and disappeared into the crowd.