Fortress Draconis (25 page)

She sighed, but not very deeply, since the bodice would not allow her to draw a proper breath. For the women’s help she had been grateful, but the reason they had been present rankled. Just over a decade before, on her sole previous trip to Yslin, she had been given a similar gown and left to dress herself. She studied the gown as she might a battlefield, then put it on. Since lacing it tight would have been impossible without help, Alyx had posited that it had to be worn with the lacings forward and that was how she dressed herself. She liked the stiffness against her spine, and while the lacings did bind over her breasts and belly, having nothing more to cover her presented no problem for someone raised by the Gyrkyme.

Luckily her aunt had come to check on her and was able to correct the problem before she had left the room.They should know that I learn from my mistakes. She would have ventured another sigh, but felt reluctant to waste her breath. Instead she smiled and bowed her head to the women. “Thank you for your help.”

They curtsied deeply, the both of them, sinking into a puddle of skirts, then rising slowly. “It was an honor to serve you, Highness.”

Alyx smiled beneficently at them as they left the room. She started to reach around behind her to unknot the lacings, but a quick knock on the door barely preceded the tiny squeak of it swinging open. “If you do that, you’ll spill out of the gown and scandalize everyone.”

Her violet eyes blazed as the man slipped into the room. Shorter than she, and on the fuller side of a medium build, he wore his black hair long and raggedly cut. His moustaches drooped well past his jaw, but his goatee remained a triangle of black surrounded by the white flesh of his chin. Gold hose clung to his legs and a gold tunic clothed him, with a tabard of black over the top of it. A winged horse rampant, in white, emblazoned his chest.

His eyes widened in shock as he met her hot stare. He pulled back, and splayed a hand against his chest. “Have you forgotten me, cousin?”

Alyx’s jaw opened for a moment, then she smiled. “Misha?”

“The very same.” He bowed very low, sweeping a golden cap from his head and dusting the tops of his shoes with it. As he straightened up, he smiled. “I am now styled Duke Mikhail, of course.”

“Of course.” She moved to him carefully and kissed him on both cheeks. “Not quite the same cousin with whom I shared a dream raid.”

“I’ve grown up, as have you.” He stepped back and his smile broadened. “Perhaps I should not have been so opposed to their arranging our marriage.”

Alyx caressed his cheek. “Sweet Misha, you promised, and I know you would have sooner stabbed yourself through the heart than to violate your word.”

He shrugged. “Truthfully, cousin, I’d take you for a wife in a heartbeat, save that relatives I hate would then be related to me yet one more time.”

“How are they?”

“Some are truly dead, others walking dead. A few of us, we are realistic.” Misha shrugged and grabbed a handful of his long hair. “The customs they impose on us are not that hideous. Remaining unshorn for the summer, to mourn your father’s passing—as our grandfather did and does—is not difficult. What they do to the younger ones, and the way they are crossing our bloodlines, well, my father tells me they have always meddled.”

“And they sent you to get me?”

His brown eyes grew wide again. “Duke Mikhail? By all the gods, no, little Alyx. If they knew I was here they would all be angry. I just wanted to make sure that you would recognize your cousin and know you had an ally in there.”

Another knock, this one far more stout, rattled the door. Mikhail danced over past a screen in the small room, and almost slipped in a puddle of water leaking from the wooden bathing cask. He ducked down behind the cask and nodded to Alyx.

“Enter.”

The door swung slowly open, letting the stone archway frame a small but strongly built man. As had Misha, he wore black over gold, but appeared more striking because of his full snowy mane and beard. He had no moustache and his flesh bore the bronze tint of a lifetime spent under the sun. In a few places, on his hands, and in .one spot on his forehead, puckered scars resisted coloring; but otherwise the man was robust and the picture of health.

Though Alyx had not seen him in over a decade, she could not mistake him for anyone else. “Uncle Valery, it is good to see you.”

The older man’s face brightened as he entered the room and hugged her. He kissed both her cheeks and the brush of his whiskers tickled her cheek and throat. “Alexia, of you my brother would be so proud.” The man’s deep voice became gravelly with emotion.

He took a half step back, then straightened. “It is my duty and honor, profound and deep, to conduct you into the Crown Circle.” He extended his right arm, which she took by slipping her left hand through the crook of his elbow, then he led her sideways through the door and into the corridor.

Fortress Gryps had once been the largest fortification in all of Yslin. It had been supplanted by Fortress Libertas out on the eastern point to guard the entrance to the harbor. King Augustus had been kind enough to make Fortress Gryps available to the Okrannel exile community, not as a permanent dwelling place, but a societal hub. For special gatherings, the titanic stone structure—with its vaulted ceilings and stone columns, friezes and tapestries—became transformed into a place in which the glory of Okrannel was resurrected.

Alexia knew nothing of the fall of her nation. She had been borne away to Gyrvirgul in the final days of the war against Chytrine. The nation had fallen and her father had retreated with loyal retainers to defend Fortress Draconis, far to the north. He had died there and she had been given over to the Gyrkyme to raise and train.

She had grown up being told that the Gyrkyme stewardship of her life was her father’s final wish. By the time she grew old enough to question the truth of that—having heard that her father’s manner of death precluded the communication of any last wishes, no matter what the songs said about it—she had wondered why her grandfather, her aunt, uncles, and cousins had not wanted to care for her themselves. Not long after that point she took her previous journey to Yslin, to be presented to the Crown Circle for the first time.

After that event, she did not wonder further why they didn’t want her, but simply rejoiced in the fact that the Gyrkyme did.

On her uncle’s arm, with the long skirts catching at her legs, she drifted through a fortress that had been transformed. The tapestries—some new and bright and exaggerated, others ancient, stained, and dour—all bore images from Okrans history. The newer ones seemed more imagined than real, with a number having a dreamlike quality to the pictures that revealed their inspiration.

She shook her head and hoped her uncle would not notice. The Okrans nobility, having been driven from their homeland, had come to Yslin and taken up residence. King Stefin had vowed to remain until Okrannel was liberated. The court in exile became known as the Crown Circle, and the Crown Circle determined and dictated that which was and was not part of Okrans life. While the effects of the edicts lessened with each league from Yslin—such that the refugees living in Jerana viewed them with mild amusement or deep contempt—they had the rule of law in Yslin.

One of the edicts had required each noble child at the age of fifteen to undertake a sojourn to Okrannel, to sleep on his native soil for a night. Somehow it became believed that the dreams one had during that night were prophetic, and these prophecies took on the same sanctity that the Norrington prophecy held for the Vorquelves.

At seventeen years of age she went on her journey, along with her uncle Valery, a troop of loyal retainers, and her cousin Misha. She should have gone at fifteen, as Misha did, but it took two years for the Crown Circle to get over their pique and grant her permission to go. The two of them had ventured into Okrannel and slept, then shared their dreams, refining them in the telling, so they would be suitably impressive for the Crown Circle.

Her throat tightened for a heartbeat as regret choked her. She’d have told the Crown Circle nothing of her dream, save for how they had looked at her when she was first presented to them, and later how Grand Duke Valery had silenced everyone so she could share her dream. The delight on his face as she told him what she had dreamed, the pleasure in his voice as he’d ordered someone to fetch her tea with milk and sweetened until thick, that had convinced her that what she had done was right.

Her uncle again smiled at her with such delight as two liveried courtiers opened the door to the Grand Hall. “Come, my dear child. You are awaited.”

Thick incense cascaded down in phantom ribbons from censers mounted high on massive stone pillars, filling the room to knee high with a pungent fog. Oil lamps provided illumination, but scant little of it. Men and women hid in the shadows, each wearing gold, but with black over it. Alyx alone had been permitted the right to wear gold un-shrouded, and she chose to imagine that the gasps she heard from behind beards, hands, and fans were from the shock of wan light reflecting off her gown.

The Grand Duke led her forward at a stately pace. He clasped his left hand over her hand, locking it down against his arm. She felt no tremor in him indicating he thought she might bolt. Instead, as he walked deeper and deeper into the long room, drawing nearer the distant end, his steps became more certain and serene.

When last he’d led her forward she had been a gangling child who twisted and gawked at all those shrinking back. Now he brought her, a woman grown and a warrior trained, before the Crown Circle, and the sheer pride of it bunched the muscles of the forearm where her hand rested.

Finally they stopped three meters shy of the throne squatting at the hall’s far end. She bowed her head to her grandfather, after the fashion of warriors greeting one another, then curtsied awkwardly. The night-shrouded women flanking the throne began breathing again when she curtsied, exhaling the breath they’d gathered when she’d given King Stefin a warrior’s nod.

Her grandfather sat slumped on the throne, his crown slightly askew and sunk low, as if the man’s head had shrunk. He looked almost a child wearing his father’s raiment, but those dark eyes had a deadness to them that no child ever could have possessed. The man sat there, crushed down not by years alone, but by the hand of Death as it vaulted him to kill his eldest son and kill his nation.

The old man’s eyes flicked up and held her stare for only a moment. He had vowed he would not die until his homeland had been liberated. Many people who undertook such vows did so halfheartedly, but those who made them with full knowledge and intent often suffered for their temerity. In the brief moment her grandfather looked her in the eyes, she could see he was a prisoner of his own body.

And he sees me as his liberator.

King Stefin mumbled something, his parched lips barely moving. One of the women behind him moved forward, and despite the thickness of the incense in the air, Alyx caught a whiff of the moldy scent rolling off the woman. Alyx, who had not wavered when charging through Aurolani battle lines, shivered in this woman’s presence and had Valery not still held her hand against his forearm, she would have taken a step back.

Scent far more than sight of the cadaverously slender, hatchet-faced woman sent Alyx reeling back through the years to when she was first presented. At that time the king had been more animated and actually smiled at seeing her. Grand Duchess Tatyana had not even made an attempt at a smile. Though only a decade older than the king, she was his aunt, so he gave her great latitude. She’d swept forward and grabbed Alyx roughly, twisting her this way and that, humming and hawing as she did so.

Then, with her sharp, bony fingers, she’d pried the girl’s mouth open and thrust fingers in to count her teeth and probe her mouth. Alyx struggled, gagging as fingers hit the back of her throat, but other fingers dug deeply into her forearm. The woman hissed at her malevolently and shook her to stop her struggling.

So Alyx bit her.

She didn’t draw blood, though she knew she could have easily, simply by shifting her jaw to let her molars slice through the crone’s thin skin. Tatyana wrenched her fingers out of Alyx’s mouth and held her left hand up as if she expected her fingers to be a couple digits shy of whole. Alyx pulled free of her right hand and stepped back, not caring that the hem of her gown tore. She set her feet and balled her fists.

Tatyana advanced only as far forward as the king’s side. “His Highness says he is pleased to see his fated granddaughter again.”

“As am I pleased to seehim‘’ Alyx knew Tatyana caught the emphasis. ”And you, Great-Aunt Tatyana, you are well?“

“As well as can be expected when one’s heart aches from breathing foreign air, sleeping on foreign soil, pining for one’s homeland.”

“It is a burden, yes.” Alyx wished the gown’s bodice would allow her to suck in enough air for a decent snarl. Tatyana, whose reputation as a mystic had grown over the years, served as the king’s closest advisor and often interpreted his unintelligible remarks. Many of the new traditions handed down from the Crown Circle originated with her. A year or so after the fall of Okrannel, she’d had a vision that led her, covertly, to undertake the first dream raid. She also was the author of edicts concerning fashion that, Misha had once noted, seemed more designed to make sure exiles did not resemble the population of the lands where they dwelt than it did any preservation of Okrans tradition.

Again King Stefin mumbled, and Tatyana’s sharp expression softened slightly as her lips twitched into a smile. “His Majesty says he is pleased you could join us this night. News of your victories has preceded you, and they make us most proud.”

Alyx bowed her head toward the wizened figure of the king. “Too much has been made of these battles, Grandfather. My forces merely slapped the snout of a bear sniffing about for food. When it chooses to slap back, things could be much worse.”

“I think, my darling niece, you are overly cautious.” Tatyana’s ice-blue eyes focused distantly for a moment. “There are those who see great victories in your future. Even you, yourself, have seen them.”