The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(107)

He did not argue as he got to his feet. There was a dress on my bed—a long, formal gown, beautifully made, except that it was a drab gray in color. There were matching shoes and accessories sitting beside it.

“Servants brought those,” Naha said. “You’re to wear them tonight.”

“Thank you.”

He moved past me on his way out, not looking at me. At the room’s threshold I heard him stop for a moment. Perhaps he turned back. Perhaps he opened his mouth to speak. But he said nothing, and a moment later I heard the apartment’s door open and close.

I bathed and got dressed, then sat down in front of the windows to wait.





26


The Ball


I SEE MY LAND BELOW ME.

On the mountain pass, the watchtowers have already been overrun. The Darren troops there are dead. They fought hard, using the pass’s narrowness to make up for their small numbers, but in the end there were simply too many of the enemy. The Darre lasted long enough to light the signal fires and send a message: The enemy is coming.

The forests are Darr’s second line of defense. Many an enemy has faltered here, poisoned by snakes or weakened by disease or worn down by the endless, strangling vines. My people have always taken advantage of this, seeding the forests with wisewomen who know how to hide and strike and fade back into the brush, like leopards.

But times have changed, and this time the enemy has brought a special weapon—a scrivener. Once this would have been unheard of in High North; magic is an Amn thing, deemed cowardly by most barbarian standards. Even for those nations willing to try cowardice, the Amn keep their scriveners too expensive to hire. But of course, that is not a problem for an Arameri.

(Stupid, stupid me. I have money. I could have sent a scrivener to fight on Darr’s behalf. But in the end, I am still a barbarian; I did not think of it, and now it is too late.)

The scrivener, some contemporary of Viraine’s, draws sigils on paper and pastes these to a few trees, and steps back. A column of white-hot fire sears through the forest in an unnaturally straight line. It goes for miles and miles, all the way to the stone walls of Arrebaia, which it smashes against. Clever; if they had set the whole forest afire, it would have burned for months. This is just a narrow path. When it has burned enough, the scrivener sets down more godwords, and the fire goes out. Aside from crumbling, charred trees and the unrecognizable corpses of animals, the way is clear. The enemy can reach Arrebaia within a day.

There is a stir at the edge of the forest. Someone stumbles out, blinded and half-choked by smoke. A wisewoman? No, this is a man—a boy, not even old enough to sire daughters. What is he doing out here? We have never allowed boys to fight. And the knowledge comes: my people are desperate. Even children must fight, if we are to survive.

The enemy soldiers swarm over him like ants. They do not kill him. They chain him in a supply cart and carry him along as they march. When they reach Arrebaia, they mean to put him on display to strike at our hearts—oh, and how it will. Our men have always been our treasures. They may slit his throat on the steps of Sar-enna-nem, just to rub salt in the wound.

I should have sent a scrivener.


The ballroom of Sky: a vast, high-ceilinged chamber whose walls were even more vividly mother-of-pearl than the rest of the palace, and tinted a faint rose hue. After the unrelenting white of the rest of Sky, that touch of color seemed almost shockingly vivid. Chandeliers like the starry sky turned overhead; music drifted through the air, complicated Amn stuff, from the sextet of musicians on a nearby dais. The floors, to my surprise, were something other than Skystuff: clear and golden, like dark polished amber. It could not possibly have been amber since there were no seams, and that would have required a chunk of amber the size of a small hill. But that was what it looked like.

And people, filling this glorious space. I was stunned to see the enormous number present, all of them granted special dispensation to stay in Sky for this one night. There must have been a thousand people in the room: preening highbloods and the most officious of the Salon’s officials, kings and queens of lands far more important than mine, famous artists and courtesans, everybody who was anybody. I had spent the past few days wholly absorbed in my own troubles, so I had not noticed carriages coming and going all day, as they must have been to bring so many to Sky. My own fault.

I would have happily gone into the room and merged with the crowd as best I could. They all wore white, which was traditional for formal events in Sky. Only I wore a color. But I wouldn’t have been able to disappear in any case, because when I entered the room and stopped at the top of the stairs, a servant nearby—clad in a strange white formal livery that I’d never seen before—cleared his throat and bellowed, loudly enough to make me wince, “The Lady Yeine Arameri, chosen heir of Dekarta, benevolent guardian of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms! Our guest of honor!”