The Puppet Queen: A Tale of the Sleeping Beauty
Page 53
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After a day and a half’s march, each step of which pained me with its slowness, we arrived at Nyneveh. The citizenry lined the streets, dressed in their brightest best, cheering and throwing petals. Horns and harps sounded out their tunes, discordant, but too jolly to not be pleasing. The day had been called a holiday and the law of merrymaking prevailed. Before the night was over, I knew that most of the city would be well and drunk, perhaps much of Ghalain. How many babes named Selene would be conceived this night? I chuckled at the thought. I was eager to see my Talia once more.
Scraps of colorful flowers tumbled down on the victorious army. For the cages, hastily constructed for the perpetrators of the war, no fruit was too rotten. I did not feel too badly—they were to have baths immediately afterwards. I doubted that if Quenela were to have won, I would have been alive to experience the ignominy of rotted fruit splashed across my face. I wrinkled my nose. The too-sweet stench reached me, even here at the head of the triumph, surrounded by my generals, emirs, and emiras.
A whispered roar filled my ears, growing louder and more persistent, too deafening to ignore.
“Queen Selene! Queen Selene!”
It was the same heartfelt adoration I had felt on the day of my coronation. I grinned and waved enthusiastically at Nyneveh’s inhabitants. They could not have been more pleased with their new queen, who had overturned a civil war in a single, major battle. Other wars of succession had lasted years. It had not been an easily won battle, many good men and women had met their deaths, sword in hand, but we had emerged victorious.
My finger hovered close to the lamp necklace at my throat. It was luck. It was such a gamble, an absolute game of chance. Whatever skill you had, whatever intelligence, if you did not possess the luck behind it, it would take you nowhere. But with the blessing of chance...anything was possible.
Chapter Thirty-Two