“Would you—can I offer you wine? Or send a kyrri for some hot jaco?”
“I have a favor to ask of you,” she began. Her voice, though steady, was lower than usual in pitch.
Of course—
“No.” She shook her head, insisting upon words. “It’s complicated. Hear me out ”
“All right,” he said aloud, settling back into the chair to indicate that she should proceed in her own way and pace.
“Tonight was my rotation on the relays,” she began. “I received news of rather more personal importance than the senders at Hali intended. Queen Taniquel Hastur-Acosta has died.”
Varzil blinked. “The Queen Taniquel? The one from the ballads? I didn’t realize she was still alive.” Those tragic events were but a generation past. The glamour of legend had made them seem far more distant.
Felicia smiled, a little sadly. “She didn’t want—After everything that happened, she withdrew from public life.”
Varzil waited for her to continue. This news clearly affected Felicia more deeply than the passing of a famous queen.
“She’ll be buried at Hali, at the rhu fead with her illustrious ancestors. It will be a private affair, but I will have to attend.” She paused, looking away, into a distance that only she could see. The fire crackled and the flickering lights burnished the smoothness of her cheek. An unshed tear glistened at the corner of one eye.
So softly, he could barely make out the words, she said, “She was my mother.”
For a long moment, he could not be sure he’d heard correctly. His first impulse was to suspect a metaphorical reference, as if she had claimed the Blessed Cassilda, or Naotalba the Accursed as her parent. Suddenly, he understood her modesty and her insistence upon proving herself.
He smiled gently. “I never knew your mother except as the heroine of song. I am sorry to never have had that privilege.”
She sighed and some of the iron poise melted from her posture. “There’s something so comforting in talking to you. You’re the one person I could count on not to run down the halls, screaming out the news. I would rather my parentage not be generally known, even now. You can, I hope, understand why.”
He saw her walking down a street in Hali, in Arilinn, saw people crowding around, crying out her name and then, “Taniquel! Queen Taniquel!” reaching out to her with their hands, not ten or twenty but hundreds, hands and eyes and shouting everywhere she turned. He saw her eyes white and strained, watched her struggle to keep her laran barriers up against the battering adoration, the hunger for a hero.
It’s impossible, he thought. No human can live up to a legend. Not Queen Taniquel. Not you.
You have been on the streets, she answered silently. You know how desperately these people, want someone to save them. And not just in Arilinn, but in Dalereuth, in Temora ... in Thendara ... everywhere.
“Does anyone else know?” Who you really are?
“Here? Only Auster and now, you. Were I a man, I could travel to Thendara and no one would ask my business. Alas, that is not the case. So, Auster has made arrangements for me to go as part of the entourage of Lady Liriel Hastur. She knows me only as a distant cousin of a minor branch of the family, a leronis of Arilinn.”
Liriel Hastur had been at Tramontana this last year, lending the prestige of her rank to the newly rebuilt Tower there. She had arrived in Arilinn only a tenday earlier, on some private business in the Hidden City.
“So you will travel in disguise?”
“Oh!” she said, with a little gesture as if that part were obvious. “I’ll be her attendant ”
“But you—”far outrank her.
No, it’s Felicia Hastur-Acosta who outranks her. I am Felicia of Arilinn, Felicia Leynier. Nothing more.
Oh, a great deal more.
Don’t flatter me. “Varzil, listen. I—I have been long alone and in hiding. If my brother had survived, I would have had some consolation there. As it is, the few Hastur relatives who are even aware of my existence are strangers to me.” She paused, eyes downcast and blinking hard. “This will be the hardest thing I have ever had to do, to stand at my mother’s grave and say nothing, just as if I never knew her.”
Varzil, already in rapport, caught a ripple of her fear. The funeral might be open to only family and a few select close friends, but it was impossible to disguise that it was Queen Taniquel being honored. Rumors would spring up like wildflowers after the last frost. The very assemblage of Hastur dignitaries would generate questions. Lady Liriel might speak as befitted a Comynara and Hastur. Carolin also had the right. But anything at all Felicia said would attract the very attention she feared, for why should an unknown leronis, even if distantly related, share that privilege?
“I will serve you in any way I can,” he said. Would you have me speak for you?
For a moment, Felicia retreated into herself. Then she touched the back of his hand with her fingertips. “You—it is known that you are a friend of Carolin Hastur. It would not be unseemly for you to go to Thendara. Will you come with me, so that I am not alone? Will you do this, and keep my secret?”
For a long moment, her eyes held his in wordless communion. Their heartbeats echoed one another.
“Considering the number of lords and kings on Darkover who want to be famous, the opposite strikes me as a reasonable enough request,” he said, forcing a lighter tone. “It will be good to see Carlo again, although I would wish for happier circumstances. I will have to ask permission of Auster, as my Keeper.”
She nodded. “I’ve already done so. I would not have approached you without his leave.”
Varzil wondered what Queen Taniquel had been like, the real person and not the stuff of legends. It did not seem a kind thing to ask now. In bereavement as in every other aspect of life, there was a time when words flowed and memory became a gift, and a time to keep silent.
Varzil set off as part of Liriel’s entourage the next day. They traveled together across the Arilinn Plains and up into the Venza Hills. From here, they would descend into Thendara and the true lowlands.
Varzil remembered Liriel from his Midwinter season at Hali, tall and reserved. She wore ordinary clothing, although of superb quality, but there was no question that she was a Tower-trained leronis. She spoke little, and then primarily to Felicia, treating her with impeccable, if distant, courtesy. Beyond greeting Varzil with a nod and an acknowledgment of his rank, she had little to say to him. Her reticence bothered him very little. She would be a difficult coworker, should they ever find themselves at the same Tower, with her combination of Hastur arrogance and natural reserve. But there was no malice in her.
Felicia often rode at Varzil’s side, sitting easily upon the same horse she had ridden to Arilinn. The guards were all Lady Liriel’s own, having accompanied her from Tramontana. As the days stretched on, Felicia began to talk about her mother.
“I was born at Acosta and spent my childhood there,” she said in a voice so low that only Varzil could hear. “After the destruction of the two Towers—Tramontana and Neskaya, you know—my parents opened their home to the survivors. Tio Aran, who had been my father’s dearest friend, stayed with us the longest. He taught me how to ride and when I was very little, he laughed a lot. Then he stopped laughing. After that, my father died. I must have been about eight or nine, so I don’t remember much. My mother was never the same. After my brother Julian died of threshold sickness, she took me away from Acosta. It must have been too painful for her, with all those memories. I don’t know.”
She fell quiet, looking into the distance. Her mind, usually as clear as a running spring, turned opaque. After a while, she came back to herself.
She spoke again of her childhood, of the nightmares that plagued her. “... and when I woke frightened from those dreams, she would sing me back to sleep, no matter how weary or sad she felt. I always knew I was safe in her arms ... And when the time came, she blessed my leaving, so that I might never regret my own choices or fear to follow my own destiny
. I think the greatest gift she gave me was the absence of her shadow.”
Once he asked about her father, and she shook her head. “His gift to me was his name, so that I could live out in the world like an ordinary person.”
“Leynier?”
“Yes, Coryn Leynier.”
The Coryn, the Coryn of Coryn and Taniquel.
“I have never known whether to love him for the life he gave me or to hate him for taking my mother away with his death,” she said softly. “All I know is that I want to live my own life, to be Felicia, myself, and neither an echo nor a sacrifice.”
He nudged his horse closer to hers, so that he could reach out and take her free hand where it lay on the saddle pommel. Her fingers, cool through the thin gloves, closed around his.
“There is very little certain in this world of ours, except for death and next winter’s snow,” he said. “But as long as I have breath and mind, you will be only Felicia to me.”
24
The rhu fead at Hali, holiest place of the Comyn, lay an hour’s ride north from Thendara. The high white haze of the early hours turned into an intermittent drizzle, as if the sky could not make up its mind whether to rain or not. The horses shook beads of water from their ears and plodded on.
Felicia, like Liriel, wore the drab formal attire of the morning, but the subdued colors only served to heighten her dignity. She went veiled, a cloud of black gauze obscuring her features. Though she kept to herself and spoke little, her mind touched Varzil’s from time to time. She asked nothing of him, only his presence.
The funeral party was small, much smaller than befitted a Hastur Queen. Carolin arrived with a single attendant, but no other member of the ruling family. There were a only few people Varzil did not know, including one elderly kinsman, an Elhalyn lord, who spoke little but wept silently.
In the sight of that assembly, the body of Taniquel Hastur-Acosta was laid to rest in an unmarked grave, according to custom. Here she would join countless generations of Comyn, her resting place indistinguishable except for a slight mound ing of earth that would disappear in a few seasons.
Liriel Hastur walked slowly to the open grave. “I speak not only for myself, but for Lady Bronwyn Hastur, who knew and loved her. She said—” Liriel’s voice broke, though she quickly recovered her composure, “—she said that all the gifts of the mind, of laran itself, counted as nothing without a generous heart and a noble spirit.”
When she ended her message with the formal phrase, “Let that memory lighten grief,” her shoulders sagged in relief.
One by one, the others took her place. Each had some personal memory of Queen Taniquel to offer, not the legendary image, but the woman—human, fallible, and loved.
Can any of us ask for more, than to be remembered like this? Varzil wondered.
Without conscious intention, he stepped forward to stand beside Taniquel’s grave. “I never had the privilege of knowing her, yet she has touched my life. In being remembered here, by the people who did know her, she has given me the knowledge that within every legend is an ordinary person who has found herself faced with extraordinary trials and has risen to them. That how the world and history see us is very different from how we see ourselves. In her memory, I am reminded it is not fame but inner truth that makes us who we are. Let that memory lighten grief.”
He moved back, to find himself at Felicia’s side. Her eyes, green like spring, like the sea he had never seen, met his own. His mind reached out to hers and for a trembling moment, there was no separation, no difference between them. Then the sounds of the funeral assembly reached him.
“Forgive me, I have been rude in staring at you,” he said, holding out his arm for her to take.
“There is no lapse of courtesy.” She placed her fingertips on his sleeve so lightly that he felt only a featherweight of pressure. “Not between bredin.” She used the plural form of the word which might mean sibling but also beloved.
Have we not spoken mind to mind? she asked. And have there not been times when we have been of one mind?
He choked off the response, for Carolin had come up to him. With a nod, Felicia left them to walk in Liriel’s shadow.
“My friend,” Carolin said, “I cannot return with you to Thendara, but I would very much like to arrange a proper visit. I hope you do not need to return immediately to Arilinn?”
“I am not expected back at Arilinn for some while,” Varzil said. “We cannot return immediately, for even with fresh mounts, the ladies will need to rest.” He did not add that Felicia had business to conduct regarding her mother’s estate.
“A tenday or two, at the least, knowing Liriel,” Carolin said. “Times have changed since we could send an aircar for such a purpose.”
“Serrais has now reserved aircars for military use only,” Varzil said. “Arilinn’s airfield is closed now, did you know?”
“Yes, we’d heard.”
They walked together toward the area where servants held the reins of their mounts. Carolin said, “If you have the time, perhaps you can ride with me out to Blue Lake. It’s the coun- . try estate where I was raised. I’ve business there and I’d welcome the company for the journey. It’s been too many years since we were at Arilinn together.”
Returning to Hastur Castle, Carolin went first to his uncle’s chambers. Rakhal was there, sitting across the beautifully inlaid game table, now spread with a few scattered castles. Rakhal was clearly playing to lose, to prolong the game, to keep the King amused.
King Felix looked up. The late afternoon light fell across his features, bleaching his eyes colorless and turning his cheeks into a myriad of tiny creases. “Sit down, my boy.”
Carolin sat, exchanged a few pleasantries, and delivered Lady Liriel’s respects as she had asked. The King remembered little of the morning’s business, for the funeral had been private and quiet.
As soon as he could do so with decorum, Carolin took his leave. He would be up half the night, catching up on the day’s work which he had put aside for the funeral, not to mention this overlong and pointless interview. Blue Lake called to him; he missed its simplicity and freedom. He longed equally for time with Varzil. He had never lost the sense of connection with his friend, although their lives had taken very different directions.
He worked well into the evening, stopping only for a private dinner in his chambers, together with Alianora and their two boys. Rafael, the older, ran to him with delight. Alianora carried little Alaric with an ease which spoke of both deep affection and custom. She had long since moved to her own suite of rooms, but often met with Carolin at times like this. Carolin suspected, from the obvious attachment of the boys, that she spent as much time in the nursery as in her own sitting room. Motherhood had rounded Alianora’s curves and bestowed upon her an air of gentle contentment. She remained reserved, an essentially private person. Only her children, two fine, healthy sons and another on the way, evoked any spark of passion. She did not ask about the funeral, nor about any of Carolin’s other business; he could never be sure if she felt it improper to inquire, or simply had no curiosity. The children sufficed for her; they comprised her entire world.
Carolin sat back in his chair, finishing the last of his single cup of wine, and regarded his family. Fatherhood had surprised him; the memory of the first time he had held Rafael in his arms still brought a rush of tenderness. Watching his son play in front of the fireplace and Alaric in his mother’s arms, he tried to etch their images into his mind. Outside the fragile haven of these walls, untold dangers stalked their world. He knew it was foolish to become too attached to children who might die of any of a hundred causes, from lung fever to threshold sickness, and in the case of little princes, deliberate assault.
No, he would not think of that. He must go on as if all would be well, must hold to the dream of a world in which children like Rafael and Alaric had no need to fear being seized as a hostage or having poison slipped into their milk, face hostile armies at their gates, or clingfir
e raining from heaven.
In this world, the love which welled up in his heart was so very precious ...
He thought of other kinds of love, too. The love he had felt for his own parents. The love for his friends, for Orain and Jandria and Maura. For Varzil.
Now, a gentle sadness crept over him. Undoubtedly it was the influence of the day’s events, the intense, unexpressed emotions of the funeral, what was said and what left unsaid. He had seen the way Varzil looked at Felicia Leynier, had felt their moment of mental communion. It did not take a telepath to realize that they were in love, or would be very soon.
He would say nothing of it; some things were not discussed, and besides what would he say? That he was happy for his friend, that he feared such an alliance could never end in happiness, that against all sense, some secret part of him wished that he might have known such a love?
“You look tired,” Alianora said, “and it is time for the boys to be in bed. Shall we see you again before you leave for Blue Lake?”
Carolin roused from his melancholy; the woman before him was his lawful wife di catenas, the mother of his children, who had kept her own promise to be a good and dutiful wife to him. How could he insult her by wishing she were someone else?
The world went as it would, and not as any one man would have it, Carolin reminded himself of the old proverb. He would be a loyal prince, a faithful husband, a loving father. Someday, as King, he would have the chance to do more.
Two days later, Varzil and Carolin set off on horseback, leading a chervine laden with supplies, into the Venza Hills headed for Blue Lake. There really was a lake, Carolin assured him, and most of the time it was blue. If the weather cleared, as it looked likely, they would have fine fishing.
They let their horses set an easy pace. The road dwindled and the land grew steeper and more rugged. First Hali and then Thendara, with all its noise and color, fell behind. As hours stretched into days of easy companionship, fellow travelers became even fewer. They stayed in simple but comfortable travel shelters that were placed a day’s journey from one another along the major mountain roads. Under strict truce, no man might draw a weapon upon another in a shelter, no matter how dire the cause. No sane man dared risk exposure to the Venza’s killing storms.