Of Dantirya Sambail there seemed to be no news. Akbalik had returned from Ni-moya and was in the western port of Alaisor, awaiting a new assignment. Dekkeret evidently was still in Suvrael. No report had come from Abrigant thus far concerning his expedition to Skakkenoir. From the Isle of Sleep there was a message from the Princess Therissa, suggesting that he find occasion to pay her a visit as soon as his other duties permitted. That would certainly be an appropriate thing to do, Prestimion agreed. He had not seen her for many months. But for the time being that trip would have to wait.
The Council meeting, which lasted about an hour, came next. Navigorn’s report covered much the same material Prestimion had already seen in the papers on his desk. When he was done, the other Council members expressed their concern over the rising incidence of madness across the world, and Gialaurys offered a motion that the high wizards of Triggoin be summoned to the Castle for a consultation that might lead to a remedy. It passed by a powerful margin, despite a protest of sorts from Prestimion. “It was my hope to reduce the influence of superstition in the world, not to hand the government over to the sorcerers,” he said. But even he recognized the value of properly harnessed wizardry; and also he knew only too well how effective the incantations of such men as Gominik Halvor and his son Heszmon Gorse could be. After voicing his objections, then, he quickly withdrew them, and gave his assent to Gialaurys’s measure.
At that point, pleading the fatigue of travel, he ordered the meeting adjourned, and went to his private chambers.
“Ask the lady Varaile,” he said to the major-domo Nilgir Sumanand, “if she will have dinner with the Coronal this evening.”
She was as beautiful as he remembered her to be: more beautiful, even. But she had changed. Something was different about the expression of her eyes and the set of her jaw, and she held her lips now in a tightly compressed way that Prestimion did not recall from before.
Of course she had really been not much more than a girl when he had first met her at the time of his little masquerade in Stee. Now she was moving into her twenties; perhaps all that had happened was that the last vestiges of adolescence were going from her face as she made the transition into full adulthood. But no—no—there seemed to be something else at work—
Perhaps only nervousness, Prestimion decided. She was a commoner, he was the Coronal; and she was a woman, and he a man; they were alone with each other in the Coronal’s private chambers. They barely knew each other, and yet, in their last meeting long months ago, they had reached some sort of understanding that neither of them had been willing to voice explicitly, but which clearly had held implications of a future alliance. In all these months they both had had plenty of time to consider and reconsider those few words that had passed between them in the reception hall after the royal levee at which her father had been honored.
To put her at her ease he opened with what he hoped would be a light-hearted approach: “I told you, the last time we met, that we’d have dinner together as soon as I got back from my trip to the Labyrinth. I neglected to add, I suppose, that I would be going on as far south as Sippulgar before I returned to the Castle.”
“I did begin to wonder, as the weeks mounted up, my lord. But then my lord Navigorn told me that you would be making a further journey and might not be back for many months. He said it was a mission of the highest importance, one that would take you into a distant part of the continent.”
“Did Navigorn tell you just how far I was going, or why?”
She looked startled at that. “Oh, no! Nor did I ask. It’s not my place to be privy to the business of the realm. I’m a mere citizen, my lord.”
“Yes. So you are. But a lady of the court, also, now. Ladies of the court somehow come to learn of many things that mere citizens never hear of even in their dreams.”
It was meant as a joke, if only a feeble one; but it was not received as one. Something was definitely wrong, he thought. A certain degree of tension was only to be expected at such a meeting as this; he felt it himself. But what had impressed him about her whenever he had seen her previously was her remarkable poise, her utter command of self, far beyond her years. She made it seem as if there was no situation, however ticklish, that she would be unable to handle. The unsmiling woman who stood before him now was stiff and uneasy, guarded in her movements, seemingly weighing every word before she spoke.
She said, “Nevertheless, I felt it was inappropriate to inquire after the reason for your journey. Would it be proper to inquire of you whether your trip was a successful one, my lord?”
“It was and it wasn’t. My meeting with the Pontifex went well. After that, I visited strange and interesting places, and met the people who govern them. That part of it was fine also. But I had another purpose, which was to locate a certain troublesome lord whose actions threaten the stability of the realm. Do you know who I mean, Varaile? No. Well, you will, eventually. In any case, I wasn’t able to find him. He seems to have slipped through my net.”
“Oh, my lord, I’m sorry!”
“So am I.”
Prestimion noticed now, for the first time, how plainly and soberly she was dressed: a formal robe, yes, suitable for calling upon a Coronal, but of a drab beige tone that seemed inappropriate for her high-colored complexion, and her only ornament was a slender silver bracelet. And she had pulled her splendid hair back in an unflattering way.
This long-awaited reunion was going most unpromisingly. Some wine and food, he thought: perhaps that would relax things. He summoned Nilgir Sumanand.
Who had everything ready in the antechamber, a feast of truly royal quality. But Varaile only picked at her food, sipped desultorily at her wine.
Prestimion said, finally, when the conversation had sputtered out for the third or fourth time, “There’s some problem here, Varaile. What is it? You seem six million miles away.”
“My lord, do I? Certainly it was most kind of you to ask me to dine with you, and I don’t mean to seem—”
“Call me Prestimion.”
“Oh, my lord, how can I do that?”
“Easily. It’s my name. A long one, perhaps, but not hard to pronounce. Pres-tim-i-on. Try it.”
She looked close to tears. “This is not right, my lord. You are the Coronal and I am no one; and in any event we barely know each other. To call you by your name like that—”
“Never mind, then.” He began to feel some annoyance, but whether it was with her for her moodiness and distance, or for himself for his clumsiness in leading this conversation, he was not sure. Somewhat brusquely he said, “I asked you a minute ago to tell me what the problem was. You evaded the issue. Are you afraid of me? Or do you think it’s wrong, perhaps, for you to be here alone with me?—By the Divine, Varaile, you haven’t fallen in love with someone while I was away, have you?” But he could see by her face that that was not it either. “Tell me. You’ve changed, somehow, in my absence. What’s happened?”
She hesitated a moment.
“My father,” she said, in a voice so faint he could barely make out her words.
“Your father? What about your father?”
Varaile looked away; and a dozen wild suppositions ran through Prestimion’s mind at once. Was Simbilon Khayf seriously ill? Had he died? Gone bankrupt overnight through the catastrophic failure of one of his loathsome speculative schemes? Warned Varaile sternly to ward off any romantic overtures the seductive young Coronal Lord might make?
“He’s lost his mind, my lord. The plague—the madness that is sweeping the world—”
“No! Not him too!”
“It was very quick. He was at Stee when it happened, and I was at the Castle, of course. One day he was fine, I was told, working on deals, meeting with his agents and factors, arranging the takeover of some company, all his usual projects. The next day everything was changed. You know his hair, how proud he is of it? Well, his chief clerk, Prokel Ikabarin, is always the first person to arrive at his office every morning. This time, when
Prokel Ikabarin came in, he found my father kneeling in front of his desk, cutting off his hair. ‘Help me, Prokel Ikabarin,’ he said, and handed him the scissors to reach the places he couldn’t get to. He had hacked most of it off by then.”
A surge of amusement welled up in Prestimion at that. He turned aside to conceal his grin from Varaile. Simbilon Khayf’s extravagantly foolish sweep of silver hair, cut down to mere stubble? Why, what more delicious kind of insanity could have stricken him than that?
But there was more. And worse.
Varaile said, “When he was done with his hair, he announced that his life had been a sinful waste, that he repented all his greed, that he must at once distribute his wealth to the poor and take up a life of meditation and prayer. Whereupon he asked Prokel Ikabarin to send for his half-dozen closest advisers, and began signing away his property to whatever charitable organizations happened to come to his mind. He gave away at least half his fortune in ten minutes. Then he put on beggar’s robes and went out into Stee to ask for alms.”
“This isn’t easy for me to believe, Varaile.”
“Do you think it was for me, my lord? I know what sort of man my father was. I never had any illusions about him at all; but it wasn’t for me to lecture him on his ways, nor was I the sort to turn my back on his wealth myself, I suppose, no matter how I felt about his business practices. But when they came to me here at the Castle—I have been in residence here all the time of your absence, you understand, my lord—when they came to me and said my father was roaming through Stee in a torn and dirty robe, begging for a few copper weights for his next meal—well, I thought it was some black jest at first, of course. And then—then, when other reports came in, and I went down to Stee to see for myself—”
“He’s given away everything? The house, too?”
“He didn’t remember about the house. Just as well, too, for what would have become of all our servants, turned out into the streets overnight? Did he expect them to become beggars too? No, he didn’t manage to give it all away. His mind was too murky to manage that. Thousands of royals went, yes—millions, maybe—but there’s plenty left. He still controls dozens of companies, banks all over the world, great estates in seven or eight provinces. But he’s completely incompetent now. I had to have a receiver appointed to manage his holdings—it’s not something I could do myself, you realize. And he’s completely insane. Oh, Prestimion, Prestimion, I was aware of all my father’s faults, his vanity, his hunger for money, his coldblooded treatment of anyone who stood between him and what he wanted, but still—still—he’s my father, Prestimion. I love him. And what has happened to him is so utterly terrible.”
It did not escape Prestimion’s notice that she had begun calling him by his name.
“Where is he now?”
“At the Castle. I asked my lord Navigorn to bring him here, because if he stayed in Stee, someone was bound to harm him on the streets. They have him under guard in one of the back wings. I visit him every day, but he hardly recognizes me now. I don’t think he quite knows who he is, any more. Or what he once was.”
“Take me to visit him tomorrow.”
“Do you really think that you ought to see—”
“Yes,” he said. “I do. He is your father. And you are—”
There was no need to finish the sentence. The barriers that she had put up between them earlier were gone. She was staring at him now with an entirely new expression in her eyes.
This was the moment, Prestimion thought, to make everything completely clear between them.
“When I invited you here tonight,” he said, “it was with the notion of making some sort of speech about how important it was for us to spend more time together, to get to know one another, and so on and so forth. I won’t make that speech. I’ve had plenty of time, all these months roaming around in places like Ketheron and Arvyanda and Sippulgar, to get to know you already.”
She seemed apprehensive. “Prestimion—?”
His words came tumbling out helter-skelter. “I’ve lived alone long enough. A Coronal needs a consort. I love you, Varaile. Marry me. Be my queen. I warn you, it won’t be easy, being wife to the Coronal. But you are the one I choose. Marry me, Varaile.”
“My lord—?” she said, with astonishment in her voice.
“You were calling me Prestimion a moment ago.”
“Prestimion, yes. Oh, yes! Yes! Yes!”
PART 3
The Book
of Healing
1
More than thirty years had passed since there last had been a royal wedding at the Castle, that of Lord Confalume and the Lady Roxivail; and no one now attached to the Coronal’s staff was old enough to know the proper procedures and protocols for such an event. So a great scurrying about in the archives was initiated by the officials involved, until Prestimion found out about it and made an end to the search. “We’re capable of putting on a wedding here without having to turn to the oldsters to find out how we ought to do it, isn’t that so?” he asked Navigorn. “Besides, was the marriage of Confalume and Roxivail such a magnificent success that we want to take any aspect of it as a model for anything we do?”
“The Lady Varaile,” said Navigorn with diplomatic earnestness, “is nothing at all like the Lady Roxivail, my lord.”
No, Prestimion thought. Nothing at all.
Prestimion had seen the vain and willful estranged wife of Lord Confalume only once in his life—at the coronation games in honor of her son Korsibar, when that prince’s brief, illegitimate, and disastrous reign as Coronal was just getting under way. Roxivail, a small, dark, strikingly attractive woman, had maintained her looks well into middle age with the aid of wizardry, and Prestimion had been startled by her beauty. As well he might be; for she and her daughter Thismet resembled each other in an extraordinary way, to the degree that Roxivail seemed more like Thismet’s elder sister than her mother.
Her surprising appearance at the coronation games, her first visit to the Castle in some twenty years, had revived all the old gossip. Confalume, masterly and potent Coronal that he was, had not been able to govern his own wife; their marriage had been stormy throughout, and had culminated in Roxivail’s noisy departure from the Castle to take up life in a luxurious palace on an island in the Gulf of Stoien. She had remained there ever since, excepting only her journey to the Mount at the time of her son’s coronation. In her long absence Confalume had had to rule without a consort and to raise their twin children alone—twins whose very existence no one, not even their parents, now remembered at all. Those who had any recollection of the previous Coronal’s marriage would think of it, if ever they did, as being barren as well as unhappy. Prestimion had fonder expectations for his own.
In the end it was Prestimion himself, with some help from Navigorn and an immense amount of advice on matters of taste and style of decor from Septach Melayn, who worked out a formal program for the wedding. The usual high princes of Castle Mount would be in attendance, but not, Prestimion decided, anyone from the provinces. For that would mean extending an invitation to Dantirya Sambail along with all the other great provincial lords, and the absence of the Procurator of Ni-moya would be awkward to explain.
Invitations would go to the Lady Therissa, of course, and the Pontifex Confalume. But Prestimion assumed that their own current responsibilities and the great distances they would have to travel would keep them from coming to Castle Mount for a second time in little more than a year, and indeed they sent their apologies and regrets. They would be represented by their official surrogates at the Castle, the hierarch Marcatain for the Lady, and Vologaz Sar for the Pontifex. The Lady Therissa reiterated her hope that Prestimion would come to her at the Isle as soon as his present duties at the Castle permitted, and that he would bring his bride with him.
Some of Varaile’s own friends from Stee would be her ladies-in-waiting. Prestimion would be attended at the ceremony by Septach Melayn, Gialaurys, and Teotas. His other brother Abrigant should ha
ve been part of the event as well; but there was no telling whether he would return from his quest for the iron ore of Skakkenoir on time, and Prestimion did not propose to delay the wedding on his behalf.
He dealt quickly with the fact that Varaile was a commoner, and that nobody at the Castle could recall an occasion when a Coronal had chosen a commoner as his bride. Summoning Navigorn, he said, “We are creating a new duke today, and I have just drawn up the papers. See to it that the normal procedures are followed.”
Navigorn glanced at the document Prestimion handed him and his face turned scarlet with surprise and dismay. “My lord! A dukedom for that abominable, money-grubbing, utterly offensive—”
“Gently Navigorn. You’re talking about the father of the Coronal’s consort-to-be.”
Appalled at his own words, Navigorn made a little choking sound and mumbled an apology.
Prestimion laughed. “Not that anything you just said is untrue, of course. But we will ennoble Simbilon Khayf even so, because that will ennoble his daughter as well, and thus we sidestep a certain little problem of protocol. It seems the simplest way to handle it, Navigorn. And, best of all, he won’t ever know that it’s happened. His mind’s completely gone, you know. I could just as easily make him Coronal or Pontifex as give him a dukedom, for all he’d be able to understand.”
Which brought up another little difficulty involving the father of the bride, which was that Simbilon Khayf was altogether unfit to appear in public. He was a babbling, pathetic figure now, indifferent to cleanliness or decorum and muttering constantly of a need to atone for his sins. Even at his best, he would have been an embarrassment to Prestimion at the ceremony; but in his present condition there could be no question of it. “We will let it be known that he is too ill to attend,” Varaile declared, and so it was done.