It rained the entire day the Duchess’s body lay burning in the priests’
oven. Midsummer days, with the Sword-god’s harvest moon, were over, and with them had gone the fine hot weather. With dawn a storm had moved in, bringing a dark sky that loosed driving lashes of rain. Combined with the attack on the Prince the night before and the Duchess of Melaudiere’s passing, it seemed an inauspicious opening for the first day of the Sun-King’s month.
The preceding night’s events had advanced with bewildering suddenness. While Gaultry, Mervion, and Tullier had closed the townhouse and moved up to the palace—including the sad business of icing Melaney’s body and turning it over to Melaudiere’s servants for its final journey to her family’s manor—the Prince had met privately with Martin and Sharif, a meeting that extended for unexpected hours.
There had not been much left to the night when Martin delivered the Sharif to Gaultry’s suite of rooms and asked Gaultry—muzzy after dropping off to sleep while waiting for them—to join him in the vigil of the Duchess’s cremation.
Now a full day had passed, and the grassy slope of the graveyard, which led all the way down the back of the palace headland to a partially sheltered bay with sandy beaches, was cloaked in twilight’s darkening shadows. The rain muffled the sound of the sea, increasing the prospect’s melancholy.
Gaultry stood in the darkness of the crematorium’s porch, listening to the rain and the sounds of those working in the crematorium. It had
been a long day; a long uncomfortable day. A long night lay ahead, promising no improvements. Martin, sworn as the Duchess’s chief mourner, could not leave the crematorium until the ash-dividing ceremony at dawn, and she had taken a mourner’s oath with him, intending to keep him company throughout his sad vigil. She smiled, a little grimly, contemplating the day’s events. The custom of burning the dead was little practiced in the dense greenwood area where she had been raised. If she had fully understood the complexities of the cremation burial of a high-ranking peer, she might have hesitated before promising to join him.
After an entire day of prayer while the body lay burning, prayer, and the cremation, would continue through the night. Tomorrow, with the ash-dividing ceremony at dawn and the formal interment of a portion of the ashes in the Prince’s funerary chapel at noontime, the rest of the day would be filled with speeches and services as the remainder of Melaudiere’s ashes were dispersed by special messengers to the Duchess’s numerous land holdings.
After threescore and more years of service to Tielmark and its Princes, the Duchess’s lands were large and widely spread. It was sobering, how broadly the old woman’s ashes would lie scattered. To Gaultry, it felt quite unnatural.
This lull of relative inactivity—it would give way, soon enough, to fresh action. From the arrangements that Martin had made with various servants who came to him throughout the day, Gaultry understood that not only had Benet persuaded Martin to ready himself to ride west the very next morning to the Lanai battlefront, but that Benet intended to ride with him, accompanied by the knights of his inner circle.
The Prince’s change of mind had been sparked, to everyone at court’s surprise, by the unexpected mind-communication he shared with the Sharif. Gaultry did not know the particulars, other than the fact that something in that exchange had profoundly emboldened and transformed him. After a brief, flurried debate with his counselors, he had determined to leave politics behind and ride for war, and the west.
Separation from Martin loomed, sooner than either of them had anticipated.
None of these matters had yet been discussed between them.
I
f the day of mourning had felt constrained and tedious, the hours just after the light faded made up for it. Just as the sun dipped behind the palace
ridge, the wind and rain breached the lower oven of the crematorium.
For almost two hours, the ceremonies were abandoned as the crematorium’s caretakers called Gaultry, Martin, and the three acolyte flame-tenders to stanch the leak while they worked hastily, and with no little fright, to shore up the spell-embrittled stone at the oven’s back. As night settled in, the physical labor of running for sandbags and aiding in the stone work degenerated into a squalid and even dangerous task. The steadiness of the head caretaker’s nerves, as he drove wedge after wedge of cold flint into the scorching hot stones, was admirable and even impressive. But it was after midnight by the time the last sandbag had been packed and the job completed to his satisfaction.
Then there was a second rush of activity as the acolytes—and Martin with them as chief mourner—hurried to catch up with their prayers.
From that last, at least, Gaultry was thankfully exempt.
A slight noise from the crematorium made her look up.
“There you are,” Martin said, coming out to join her. His eyes looked puffy and tired, the hours of prayer clearly weighing on him. “Have you managed to get yourself clean?”
Gaultry shook her head. “I’ll wait until morning. It’s dark, and I don’t have the energy.”
“They’ve finally caught up on the prayers. Happily, this little fiasco we’ve been through didn’t slow the actual cremation.” He managed a grin. “I think Grandmère would have enjoyed the spectacle of all this dirty work going on so frantically around her. It’s a fitting completion—her death serving to expose a hidden weakness in a destabilized form. Maybe I should pledge my part of her legacy to rebuilding this place.”
They took refuge together in a protected niche at the side of the porch. The bench there was cold and hard, but utterly welcome. Gaultry tiredly pressed her head against his damp shoulder, grateful for the cover of darkness that allowed them this intimacy.
The day had been trying and hard, with the sadness of loss intensified by the foul weather, but there had also been fine moments too. To stand by Martin’s side, close so that the cuff of his sleeve touched the cloth at her hip, circumspect in display of their shared feelings, yet openly unified in their grief … something in that was stronger than Gaultry’s feelings of loss, and the ambivalent silence she’d chosen to maintain regarding Martin’s imminent departure.
They had been granted one day away from affairs of state. Even as she had hauled hot, ashy, slippery stones out of the collapsing back of the
crematorium oven, one part of her had known this would be a time she would come to cherish in the days ahead. Time with Martin, effectively alone.
She drowsed off leaning against Martin’s side, and fell into a sleep so comfortable and still she did not notice when he gently eased away to perform another round of prayers.
M
artin roused her a little after dawn. She rose from the scratchy folded blanket wedged under her head, and stepped out of the porch niche. The wind had settled, but the rain continued, a dull drizzle. The somber light of the clouded dawn freshly revealed her own filth and Martin’s. Crustings of ash and earth from their work in the foundations covered their skin and clothing.
“Dervla’s here to divide the ash,” Martin said, pulling on his boots and raking his hair into order. “She must want to get this part of the ceremony over and done with before she breaks her fast.”
The High Priestess was dressed in simple funerary regalia, grey to hide the ashes that would inevitably find their way onto her clothes. The beautiful silver-wrought chain of her office hung at her waist, her head was uncovered and her long hair, a thick mass of brown shot lightly through with silver, worn loose as a sign of mourning and respect. Her immaculate appearance contrasted sharply with that of those who awaited her on the porch, though the fatigued tension in her face suggested that she too had spent the night uneasily. She did not acknowledge the mourners as she passed into the crematorium’s antechamber and opened the upper oven’s doors, even as the trio of her acolytes gathered around her, whispering the particulars of the accident with the foundations.
As she listened, standing in the burnishing light of the opened oven, Dervla seemed emaciated and spare, as though a long fasting had brutally reduced her flesh. When they were finished, she nodded curtly and directed them to their places. She leaned a little way into the oven, her stern carriage proof against the blistering heat, singing in a low voice and casting signs. The stiff line of her back reflected an angry or ill-satisfied temper.
“Does she seem unwell?” Gaultry whispered.
“She has not been happy,” Martin said. “And she must be even less happy, given Benet’s resolve to ride west to the battle lines this very
noonday. She will be trapped at the palace completing the funeral ceremonies while he mounts up to ride west.”
Noon. The very hour when Dervla would be preoccupied with the Duchess’s last rites. “I don’t understand,” Gaultry said. “Doesn’t he want to take the High Priestess’s blessing with him to battle?”
“He already has it,” Martin said shortly. “He obliged her to give it to him last night, in private, against her strongest inclinations. She wanted a public consecration, and he refused her. Lily will perform the Prince’s functions at Grandmère’s funeral, while Benet and his war-party ride west.”
Benet’s outmaneuvering of Dervla should have been heartening, but all Gaultry could hear in Martin’s words was that Benet had taken Martin into his full confidence, moving him one step closer to accepting a formal post among the ranks of his military commanders—a move the Prince had long wanted, and Martin, disillusioned with titles, had long resisted. Gaultry, disturbed, fixed her eyes on the glowing interior of the crematorium. Atop the fire-table, just visible in the oven beyond Dervla, a long mound of ash glittered orange and black in the reflected light of the oven’s walls.
Gabrielle of Melaudiere had always known that Martin must serve his Prince. With his military talent, it was inevitable that at least a part of that service would be to support Tielmark on the battlefield. But the old woman had confided to Gaultry more than once the fears that had risen in her following the death of Martin’s older brother Morse, in service as field commander to Prince Ginvers—Benet’s father. Before Morse, she had lost both her sons in this same way, in this same posting. She had wanted to prevent—or at least delay—Martin’s rendezvous with a similar fate, and she had urged him never to ride at Benet’s side into battle.
“Will you be riding west with Benet at noontime?” Gaultry asked. She spoke the words as neutrally as she was able, but she was too tired to fully hide her pain when Martin reluctantly nodded.
“I will. I had hoped that you would perform in my place at the noon ceremony. Grandmère would have wanted that.”
It was too soon. She had watched him send for servants, watched him make the preparations for his departure. But it was still too soon.
“The Prince and I agreed on the timing the night Grandmère died,” Martin said. “Allegrios Rex! It was as much as I could do to dissuade him from mounting up that very night. Your Ardana—are you sure she hasn’t
bewitched him? I would say yes, save for the matter that she agreed when I tried to tell Benet that giving his knights at least a full day to prepare and gather their equipage and men was a better course than forcing them to ride out on a whim in their nightshirts.”
“I know the Prince is needed at the front,” Gaultry said. “But I wish he would leave it a while longer.”
Martin sighed. “Then you should not have introduced our Prince to the Ardana. Whatever
sun-marked
entails, Benet has taken it as the sign he’s been waiting for, telling him there’s no time to delay his departure.”
Sun-marked. The Sharif had managed only a garbled explanation in the few moments they’d had before the war-leader collapsed into her makeshift bed, and Gaultry left with Martin for the crematorium.
The Sharif could share her mind with those she trusted, but that trust was something earned, rather than voluntarily granted. Yet during the confusion of the mêlée at the townhouse, the Prince had called out to the Sharif and imposed that connection. She claimed he had called her and invested her with a berserker power—though Gaultry privately thought that the horror of fighting at the side of a monstrous cat would be sufficient to drive most anyone into a killing terror. Whatever the case, the Sharif had held firm to her story.
The power to call me, to invest me with such strength—only those destined to become great and powerful rulers can own it.
The Sharif believed what had happened between her and Benet proved the presence of her god.
Andion Sun-King rules in Ardain, where we give him primacy among all the Great Twelve. I never thought to see the Sun’s touch on your white-faced Prince. Be assured, Andion’s eye is watching him.
“Sun-marked means the Sharif believes Benet has the strength to be King,” Gaultry said dryly. “I’m sure Benet was very ready to hear that.”
Inside the crematorium, Dervla accepted a tray of clay reliquary vessels from one of her acolytes. She cast the Twins’ spiral sign with one hand, then set the little pots to warm in the dying embers beneath the fire-table.
“If it wasn’t the Sharif, I’d say it was flummery,” Martin said. “But you’re right. It’s what Benet wanted to hear, and it came just at the time he wanted to hear it—in the moment he was flushed with the heat of battle, after the long chill of court.” He passed his hand tiredly through the thick of his hair, then smiled thinly. “If it’s upsetting the court’s political calculations, it has to be a good thing. I would have liked to see Dervla’s face when she discovered that Benet had requisitioned a ship to
return the Sharif and her big cat to Ardain. It’s not an honor that has been awarded a foreigner in my lifetime.”