“Windows?”
“Of course.” She looked at him in genuine surprise, forgetting momentarily, as the Icefalcon forgot when speaking to Gil, that he was an outworlder and a stranger in the land. “Have you any idea how much glass costs? Even we quality folks have to bring our own windows with us when we travel. One could never afford to glaze all the windows in all of one’s houses.” She smiled at his expression of dawning comprehension. A little ruefully, she went on. “But I don’t think we’ll need the windows in the Keep of Dare.”
“What’s it like?” Rudy asked. “The Keep, I mean.”
She shook her head. “I really don’t know. I’ve never been there. The Kings of the Realm abandoned Renweth so long ago; there was never even a hunting lodge there. Until—Eldor—” Again there was that hesitation, almost an unwillingness to speak his name. “Until the King went there some years ago, to have it re-garrisoned, I don’t think a King of Darwath had visited it in generations. But he remembered it. My grandfather remembered it, too.”
“Your grandfather?”
“Oh, yes. Our House, the House of Bes, is descended from Dare of Renweth, a side descent. Now and then the memories show up in our people, sometimes hundreds of years apart. Grandfather said he remembered mostly the darkness inside the Keep and the smoke and the smell. He said he had memories of twisting passageways lit by grease lamps, and rickety old makeshift stairways going up and down into darkness. He remembered himself—or Dare, or some ancestor—walking through the corridors of the Keep and not knowing whether it was day or night, summer or winter, because it was always lamplight there. When he’d speak of it,” she went on, her hands pausing, still and white against the colors of the gown she was holding, “I could almost see it, it was so close to him. I could see the stairs, going up like scaffolding, and the fitful gleam of the lamps on the stone. I could smell it, damp and murky like old blankets and dirty clothes, and could feel the darkness surrounding me. It will be hard to live always by torchlight.”
“Always is a long time,” Rudy said, and Minalde looked away.
They talked a while longer of the Keep, of the Palace at Gae, of the small doings that had made up the life of the Queen of the Realm of Darwath. The fire sank in the open brazier that warmed the room, the flames playing in a small, steady amber glow over writhing scarlet coals; the soft smells of camphorwood and lemon sachet drifted from the folded clothes. “A lot of this will have to be left, I’m afraid,” Alde sighed. “We have only three carts, and one of those has to be for the records, the archives of the Realm.” She was sitting on the floor now, turning over in her hands book after book from the small pile beside her. The firelight sparkled off their jeweled bindings and spread gold, like a warm suntan, on the soft flesh of her chin and throat. “I’d wanted to take all of these, but some of them are terribly frivolous. Books are so heavy, and the ones we take really ought to be serious, philosophy and theology. These may very well be the only books they’ll have in the Keep for years.”
Behind the gentle run of her voice Rudy heard the echo of another voice, Gil’s voice, saying, Do you realize how many of the great works of ancient literature didn’t survive? All because some Christian monk didn’t think they were important enough to preserve? He’d forgotten the context and the conversation, but the words came back to him, and he ventured, “Probably a lot of people are going to hang onto the philosophy and theology.” And, God knows, I wouldn’t want to be shut up for years with nothing to read but the Bible.
“That’s true,” she mused, weighing the two books in her hands, as if measuring pleasure and emotional truths against fine-spun scholastic hairsplitting. Then she turned her head, the dark sheet of her hair brushing his knee where he sat on the edge of the bed behind her. “Medda?”
The stout servant, who all this time had worked in silent disapproval in the darker corners of the room, came forward now, and her manner softened imperceptibly. “Yes, my lady?”
“Could you go up to the box room and see if you can locate another trunk? A small one?”
The woman bobbed a curtsy. “Yes, my lady.” Her heavy tread with its clicking heels diminished down the dark hall. Rudy thought to himself, Score one for Gil and ancient lit.
Alde smiled at him across the gemmed fire-glint of the gilded bindings. “She doesn’t approve of you. Or of anybody, really, who isn’t sufficiently impressed by my being Queen. She was my nurse when I was small and she puts a lot of store in being the Queen’s Nurse. She isn’t like that when we’re alone. Don’t let her worry you.”
Rudy grinned back at her. “I know. The first time I saw the two of you together, I thought you were some kind of junior servant, the way she bossed you around.”
The fine, dark eyebrows raised, and there was a teasing light in her eyes. “If you’d known I was the Queen of Darwath, would you have spoken to me?”
“Sure. Well, I mean—” Rudy hesitated, wondering. “Uh—I don’t know. If somebody had said, ‘Look, that’s the Queen,’ maybe I wouldn’t even have seen you, wouldn’t really have looked at you.” He shrugged. “We don’t have kings and queens where I come from.”
“Truly?” She frowned, puzzled at the incomprehensible thought. “Who rules you, then? Whom can your people love and honor? And who will love and guard the honor of your people?”
To Rudy, this question was equally incomprehensible, and since his major area of success in school had been evasion of classes, he had only a sketchy notion of how the United States Government worked. But he gave her his perceptions of it, perhaps more informative than political theory, and Alde listened gravely, her arms wrapped around her drawn-up knees. Finally she said, “I don’t think I could stand it. Not because I’m Queen—but it all sounds so impersonal. And I’m not really a Queen anymore.”
She leaned her back against the carved post of the bed frame, her head close by his knee. Profiled against the amber glow of the fire, her face seemed very young, though worn and fragile and tired. “Oh—they honor me, they bow to me. It’s all in my name. And Tir’s. But—it’s all gone. There’s nothing of it left.” Her voice was small and tight suddenly, as if struggling to be calm against some suppressed emotion. He saw the quick shine of tears in her violet eyes.
“And it all happened so suddenly. It’s not the honor, Rudy, not having servants who wait on me. It’s the people. I don’t care about having to pack my own things, when all my life servants have done it for me. But those servants, the household at the Palace—they’d been around me for years. Some of them were from our House, from when I was a girl; they’d been with me since I was born. People like the Guards who stood outside my bedroom door—I didn’t know them well, but they were like part of my life, a part I never really thought about. And they’re all dead now.”
Her voice flinched from it, then steadied. “You know, there was one old dooic slave who scrubbed the floors in the hall at the Palace. Probably he’d done so for his whole life, and he must have been twenty years old, which is very old for them. He knew me. He’d grunt and sort of smile at me when I went past. In the last battle in the Throne Hall at Gae, he grabbed up a torch and went with it against the Dark Ones, swinging it like the men swinging their swords. I saw him die. I saw so many people I knew die.” One tear slid down the curve of her cheek, those lobelia-dark eyes turning to meet his, seeking in them some comfort, some bulwark against the fear and grief she’d locked in.