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.
2
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?
So they were sitting or standing there, waiting as they must have waited all day, talking quietly; and the center of the group was Andor, slim and graceful in dark green, tall for an imp. He was the key to the kingdom, she thought. If she was to marry Andor, the council would accept him as her consort. He was young and handsome and personable and competent. Even Foronod seemed to be engrossed, smiling now with the others at some tale that would likely have made them all laugh aloud in a happier time. If Andor was the key, then Foronod was the lock, for he was a jotunn and probably the most influential. If the factor would accept Andor as king, then likely they all would. Except perhaps Yggingi.
Andor would not have returned with her had he not cared. Then she was noticed. They turned to await her in sympathetic silence. Mother Unonini was there, black-robed and bleak-faced as always. Aunt Kade in silver and pink had been sitting at the bottom of the stairs like a watchdog. Bless her!
She hugged Aunt Kade and was hugged by the chaplain, smelling of fish. She wondered how she could ever have been frightened by this dyspeptic little cleric with her resentful air of failure and bitter exile.
One by one the men bowed, and she nodded solemnly in return: Foronod, grim, lank in a dark-blue gown, winter pale, with his white-gold jotunnish hair glowing against the outer dark of a window; old Chancellor Yaltauri, a typical imp, short and swarthy, normally a jovial but bookish man; the much older Seneschal Kondoral, openly weeping; the vague and ineffectual Bishop Havyili; the others.
“It will not be long,” she told them.
Mother Unonini turned and headed for the stairs.
“You must eat now, dear.” Kade led her to a table that had been laid out with white linen and silver and fine china, like a small oasis of Kinvale in the barren arctic, but bearing cakes and pastries that looked cumbersome and lumpish. And therewonder of wonders!—balanced on its warming flame, Aunt Kade’s gigantic silver, tea urn, like a forgotten ghost from Inos’s childhood. The day she had met Sagorn and knocked over that umabsurd, irrelevant, vulgar thing!—Father had joked about her burning down the castle . . . That insidious, unexpected, irrelevant fragment of memory made a quick dash around her defenses and grabbed her by the throat and almost defeated her, but she averted her eyes quickly from the wretched tea urn and started to say that no thank you she couldn’t eat a thing. Except that her mouth was full of pastry. So she sat down and stuffed herself, drinking strong tea poured by Aunt Kade from that same monstrous urn, which was now only a very ugly utensil.
Then she looked up to see that Mother Unonini had returned. Inos rose slowly and was given another fishy hug. “Insolan, my child—I mean, your Ma . . .” The gritty voice hesitated, and then began a knell about the weighing of souls, and how much the Good had exceded the Evil in Father and all the predictable platitudes. Inos shut it out.
It was over, and she would shed no tears today. It was a release.
There was some good in every evil.
There was also a medic, shuffling and awkward. She asked him, “What now?”
He began to mumble about the lying in state. She remembered her mother’s lying in state in the great hall and the chains of weeping citizens filing by. So she told the man to go ahead, and some part of her was standing back, watching this masterly selfcontrol of hers with amazement. Then there were more hugs from Aunt Kade and Mother Unonini, and a stronger one from Andor, and bows and mutterings from the other men, while she was vaguely aware that people were trooping through the room, heading up to the royal bedchamber. In a little while they carried the body back down, she supposed, but she turned her face away and ignored these necessary unpleasantnesses. Soon the great bell of the castle began to toll, slow in the distance, muffled and dread.