“I think those are two men who fear very little,” said Septach Melayn.
But Iram persisted. “Beyond question they hold themselves in a very stiff fashion. As well they ought to, I suppose; for what a tremendous lot of awkwardness there must be between them! Prestimion pays deference to Korsibar, since after all Korsibar is the Coronal’s son and therefore somewhat royal himself. But Korsibar for his part knows that he has to show respect to Prestimion, who very soon will be a king in his own right and therefore a higher man than Korsibar.”
Septach Melayn laughed. “Prestimion will be king, yes. But never, I suspect, will he be a higher man than Korsibar.”
Count Iram seemed perplexed at that. His mind was not of the quickest. But then he grasped the point of Septach Melayn’s words; for it was plain to see that the long-legged Korsibar rose up far above Prestimion, who came not much more than breast-high to him. Which was all that Septach Melayn had intended, a mere idle jest.
“Higher in that sense, yes,” the count said. “I take your meaning.” He offered a polite chuckle for Septach Melayn’s feeble play on words.
“It was not a very profound observation,” said Septach Melayn.
Indeed he felt a little abashed at his own vapidity. How could anyone speak of Prestimion as inconsequential beside the Coronal’s son, even in jest? The smaller man’s sturdy breadth of shoulder and invariable air of unshakable aplomb gave him a commanding look all out of keeping with the meagerness of his stature. And this day in particular Prestimion seemed to glow with the radiance of his advancing destiny. He was dressed in a regal robe of glossy crimson silk belted with emerald-green, with a massy golden pendant in the form of a bright-eyed crab hanging from a thick chain on his breast; whereas Korsibar wore only a simple knee-length tunic of white linen that any sausage-vendor might have worn, and open sandals of the most common design. For all his noble height and grandeur of form, Korsibar just now seemed eclipsed, cast into shadow by the flood of light that streamed from Prestimion.
“Be that as it may,” Iram went on, “but tell me this, Septach Melayn: does Prestimion privately feel himself more worthy than Korsibar, or does he have secret doubts? And, more to the point: does Korsibar truly think that Prestimion’s fit to have the throne? There’s much talk going around that Prestimion’s coming greatness doesn’t sit very well with the Coronal’s son.”
“And who talks this talk?” asked Septach Melayn.
“Procurator Dantirya Sambail, for one.”
“Well, yes, Dantirya Sambail. I heard his famous remark. But there’s no substance to it. Venom drips as easily from the Procurator’s lips as rainfall does from the sky in the forests of Kajith Kabulon. The moist heavy clouds there have no choice but to let their surplus water spill out each day; and so it is with Dantirya Sambail. He’s a mass of hatefulness within, and from time to time he has to vent some of it into the air.”
“Dantirya Sambail is the only one who has said it aloud. But everyone thinks it.”
“Thinks that Korsibar is resentful of Prestimion?”
“Well, and is there any way for him not to be? When he’s such a grand figure of a man, and so much held in esteem everywhere, and the son of a great and beloved king besides?”
“No Coronal’s son has ever followed his father to the throne,” said Septach Melayn. “None ever will, without bringing calamity down upon us all.” Idly he twirled the tip of his little golden beard, and after a moment said, “I agree, Korsibar is very impressive-looking, yes. If Coronals were chosen for their looks, he’d have the job without question. But the law very clearly states that we have no hereditary kingship here, and Korsibar’s a law-abiding man. Never has he given any indication of harboring dishonorable ambitions of any sort.”
“So you think all’s well between him and Prestimion?”
“I have no doubt of it.”
“All the same, the air these days is heavy with portents, Septach Melayn.”
“Is it, now? Well, better portents in the air than a swarm of dhiims, eh? Because the bite of a dhiim is real, and hurts; but no one’s ever seen a portent, let alone been injured by one. Let the loathsome mages chatter all they like. I can see the future every bit as clearly as the best of them, Irani, and this is what I have to tell you: in due time Prestimion is going to come serenely to the throne, and Korsibar will gladly pay homage to him along with all the rest of us.”
Count Irani nervously fingered a small bright amulet of gold and sea-dragon ivory that he wore dangling by a little silver chain from the breast of his tunic. “You are very lighthearted about these matters, Septach Melayn.”
“Yes. I’m lighthearted about most matters, I suppose. It’s my character’s biggest flaw.” Septach Melayn gave Count Irani a good-humored wink and turned away to find some other conversational partner among a group of younger princes that had collected about the table of wines.
* * *
At the opposite end of the room a new figure now appeared, toward whom the attention of a great many instantly began to flow: the Lady Thismet, accompanied by her lady-of-honor Melithyrrh and a little group of her handmaidens. Sanibak-Thastimoon was with her also, garbed in the formal red and green livery of Korsibar’s service, and the sight of the Su-Suheris magus caused no little whispering in the hall. There were few who failed to find the Su-Suheris folk sinister and forbidding, if only for the strangeness of those double heads.
Like her brother, Thismet had chosen to dress in uncomplicated manner this day, a light cream-white gown of a matte texture, belted in red, with a tracery of red pearls woven into it along her left shoulder to her breast, and for other ornament merely a single sharp manculain spine thrust through the glossy tight-curled darkness of her hair. The simplicity of her costume made a striking effect in this congregation of formally robed lordlings. It was as though she stood in a brilliant spotlight, attracting all eyes to her; and yet she had done nothing at all other than enter the room, smile at this one and at that, and beckon for a bowl of wine.
She spoke for a time with her brother’s dear friend Navigorn of Hoikmar, who was regarded almost as Korsibar’s equal as a stalwart huntsman, and with Mandrykarn and Venta, those other close hunting-companions of Korsibar’s. Then she dismissed them smoothly from her and with one quick imperious glance summoned Farholt to her side, and Farholt’s smaller and more malevolent younger brother also, the serpentine Farquanor. These two had been standing with the Procurator Dantirya Sambail and the Coronal’s white-haired cousin, Duke Oljebbin of Stoienzar, but they came to her at once, lithe little Farquanor taking up a position at her left hand and big blocky Farholt stationing himself immediately in front of her like a one-man mountain, altogether concealing her from the view of those behind him.
It required some effort to believe that this pair had sprung from the same womb. They were opposites in all ways, hot raucous bellowing Farholt given to all forms of excess and impulse, and icy little Farquanor a quiet man of cunning and caution, who advanced inch by inch through life from one carefully constructed scheme to another. Farholt was huge and fleshy and ponderous of movement, Farquanor slim and taut-skinned and quick. But their kinship could be seen in their eyes, which were of the same flat deadly gray hue, and in the ruddiness of their complexions, and in the prominent jut of their noses, which seemed to spring at a straight line from the midpoint of their foreheads. They had royalty in their ancestry: the long-ago Lord Guadeloom, he who had abruptly and surprisingly been made Coronal as a result of certain curious events surrounding the sudden abdication of the Pontifex Arioc.
Like Lord Confalume, Lord Guadeloom had had a son of more than usual splendor and nobility, Theremon by name. A tradition persisted in the family of Farholt and Farquanor that Guadeloom’s son Theremon had been far more deserving to be Coronal after him than any other man. But when it was Lord Guadeloom’s time to become Pontifex, he had named a mediocre bureaucrat called Calintane to succeed him, putting aside his own son just as all Coronals before him
had done. That decision had rankled in Theremon’s descendants throughout the succeeding generations. The hereditary resentment of the family had descended through the long centuries to Farholt and Farquanor, who often when in their cups would hold forth on the fire that still coursed in them when they considered the ancient injustice done their ancestor. The Lady Thismet had long been aware of the passion those two felt on the subject; she found it of special interest at the present moment. They had talked about it most earnestly in her sitting-room only the day before, Farquanor and Farholt and she. “Concerning the matter that you and I discussed a little while ago—” Thismet said now.
The brothers were instantly attentive, though the flatness and dead-ness of their eyes seemed to bely the alertness of their features.
She said, with the serenity of a smooth-flowing stream, “Sanibak-Thastimoon has cast the auguries. The moment is auspicious for making a beginning of great endeavors: the time has arrived to commence our project.”
“Here? Now?” Farquanor asked. “In this room?”
“This very room, this very instant.”
Farquanor looked warily toward his brother, then to the Su-Suheris, whose faces were as inscrutable as ever, and lastly at Thismet.
“Is this wise?” he asked.
“It is. I am determined.” Thismet gestured toward the far side, where Prestimion and Korsibar were still engrossed in their talk, looking like nothing so much as a pair of old friends who had not seen one another in many months and were warmly renewing their acquaintance. “Go to him. Draw him aside. Say to him the things we agreed yesterday you would say.”
“And if I’m overheard?” Farquanor asked, his lean hard-angled face clouding, his eyes coming to life with the glint of uncertainty. “What then for me, publicly uttering subversive and indeed seditious notions under Prestimion’s very nose?”
“I would assume that you’d utter your utterances in a low guarded voice,” Thismet said. “No one’s going to overhear you amidst all this noise. And I’ll see to it that Prestimion himself is busy elsewhere while you speak with Korsibar.”
Farquanor nodded. His moment of unsureness was gone; already, Thismet could see, he was eager for the task. With a flick of her fingertips she sent him on his way, and she watched intently as Farquanor set out across the room, approached Korsibar and Prestimion, spoke briefly with them, doing some pointing and nodding in her direction. Then Prestimion, smiling, broke away and began to head through the crowd toward her. “Leave me,” Thismet murmured to Farholt. But she asked Sanibak-Thastimoon to remain with her.
Farquanor and Korsibar, she saw, had now withdrawn a little way deeper into the room, to a quiet alcove at the next angle of the wall, where the immense hideous flat-faced bust of some primordial Coronal partly concealed them from view. The way they stood, face-to-face, presenting themselves in profile to the rest of the room, it was impossible for anyone to read their lips. She could see Farquanor saying something to Korsibar, and Korsibar’s brow lowering in a heavy frown, and Farquanor speaking on, with many a quick gesture of his hands, while Korsibar leaned forward from the waist as though to hear more clearly what the smaller man was telling him.
Watching them, Thismet felt the rate of her heartbeat accelerating and her throat going dry. The pattern of the years to come—for Korsibar, for her, for the entire world—would very likely be shaped by the words Farquanor was speaking now. For better, for ill, the thing was being set in motion. She stole a quick glance at Sanibak-Thastimoon beside her. He was smiling an eerie double smile at her, as though to say, All will be well, have no fear.
Then Prestimion was at her side and saying, with the courteous little gesture of formal obeisance due to her as daughter of the Coronal, “The Count Farquanor tells me you have something you wish me to hear, lady.”
“Indeed,” she said.
She studied him with carefully hidden care. They had, of course, known each other ever since they were children, but to Thismet, Prestimion was just one of the many young lords who thronged the Castle, and not nearly the most interesting of those: she had paid little attention to him over the years. He had always seemed to her nothing more than a self-absorbed lordling on the make, earnest and studious and ambitious, and perhaps a trifle too short to be really attractive, though certainly he was good-looking enough. It was only after Prestimion had begun to emerge a few years ago as the probable candidate for her father’s throne that she had given him any serious scrutiny. Mainly, Thismet found him irritating these days; but how much that was because of anything he did or said, and how much simply because she disliked him for the likelihood that he was going to occupy the throne that she wished her brother would have, she could not say.
What surprised her this day, as he stood beside her now perhaps a trifle too closely, was something that she had never in any way felt before: a faint troublesome stirring of response to Prestimion as a man.
He was no taller than he ever was, and he wore his fair hair, as always, in an unflattering way. But he was different today in other ways. Already he had begun to hold himself in a truly regal fashion, but without seeming to be working hard at it, and there was a kingly glint in his eyes, and it seemed almost as though a sort of electricity were playing about his brow. Perhaps the rich splendid garb he wore today had something to do with it: but Thismet knew it was something else that was drawing her, something more elemental, which was nothing but the gathering force of Prestimion’s imminent rise to power. There was a magnetism in that. She could feel its pull. A strange pulsation came sweeping upward through her from her loins to her breast, and onward to her head.
Thismet wondered whether Prestimion might feel any corresponding pull himself that came from her. It seemed to her that she detected the signs of that—the movements of his eyes, the shifts of color in his face. It gave her a moment’s giddy pleasure.
Which gave way to anger, turned against herself. What absurdity this was! Every atom of her being must be devoted from this time onward to preventing this man from attaining the very power whose mere prospect was so deplorably unsettling her. For him to be drawn to her might be useful to her purpose; for her to be drawn at all to him, nothing but wild folly.
“You know Sanibak-Thastimoon, I think?” Thismet asked, inclining her head slightly in the direction of the Su-Suheris standing just behind her. “Magus to my brother, and occasionally to me as well?”
“I know of him, yes. We have not actually spoken.”
Sanibak-Thastimoon bowed to Prestimion, lowering his right head rather more than his left.
Thismet said, “In recent days he has been peering long and hard at the stars, prince, seeking omens for the new reign. He tells me now that he’s found auguries that will be of considerable interest to you.”
“Has he, now?” said Prestimion, with what seemed like no more than well-mannered formality. Too late, Thismet remembered that Prestimion was said to be skeptical toward all forms of wizardry and omen-seeking. But no matter: her only intention at the moment was to distract him from the conversation between Farquanor and Korsibar that was taking place across the room.
She gestured to the Su-Suheris to speak. Sanibak-Thastimoon made no show of dismay or surprise, although Thismet had not given him any warning of what would be required of him. “What I have determined,” said Sanibak-Thastimoon unhesitatingly, “is this: many great surprises are in store for you, prince—and for us all—in the times that lie ahead.”
Prestimion managed a slight elevation of his eyebrows, by way of showing mild curiosity.
“Pleasant surprises, I hope,” he said.
“Oh, yes, some of those as well,” said Sanibak-Thastimoon.
The prince laughed. “I’m not entirely sure I’m pleased with the sound of that.”
He invited the magus to be more specific; and Sanibak-Thastimoon replied sonorously that he would, so far as it was in his power to do so.
Thismet, meanwhile, was looking past Prestimion’s shoulder and outward t
oward her brother and Farquanor. She noted an expression of intense animation on Korsibar’s face: he was speaking quickly and with many firm chopping gestures of his hand, while Farquanor, rising almost on tiptoe to reduce the gulf of height between them, appeared to be trying to mollify Korsibar, to soothe him, to reassure him. Suddenly Korsibar turned and stared across the room, directly at Thismet. She fancied that she saw astonishment and bewilderment—and perhaps anger—in her brother’s eyes; and she felt a great yearning to know without delay what had occurred between him and Farquanor.
Closer at hand, Sanibak-Thastimoon was sharing portents of things to come with Prestimion as fast as he could invent them; but his utterances were couched in the cloudy generalities of his trade, with much murky talk of the stars traveling retrograde in their courses and brazen serpents devouring their own tails, such-and-such happenings and configurations implying the possibility of such-and-such an event and such-and-such a corollary consequence, unless of course they were countermanded by the contrary omen implied by thus and so, and so on, none of this being phrased with any great clarity or specificity.
Prestimion showed increasing signs of distinct inattention. At an appropriate pause in the narration he thanked the Su-Suheris most graciously for his guidance and excused himself. Then, looking toward Thismet, he gave her a quick dazzling smile and a startling intimate stare that made her feel both flattered and furious at the same time. And then he was gone.
Farquanor now was on his way back to her side of the room.
Her forehead throbbed with apprehension; her brain was spinning in her skull. “Well?” she demanded fiercely.
He seemed drained and wilted, like a plant left too long in the sun. Thismet had never seen him look so shaken. He held up a hand to forestall further pressure from her. Grabbing a bowl of wine from the tray of a passing servitor, he gulped it down before making any answer. She compelled herself to be patient, watching him regain strength and poise until he was again the Farquanor she knew, fearless, resourceful.
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