This all made perfect sense to him, and accepting it granted him a calm he had never felt before. He thought fondly of his sisters and brother. He wished he had seen them grow to adulthood. He hoped they would succeed at whatever they attempted. He, Aliver, had always been the weak link, no matter how hard he tried to be otherwise. His father had put too much faith in him.
Around midday he stumbled and fell. He pushed himself up to his knees, around him a flat expanse of sand, dotted here and there with oblong rocks the same tan color as everything else, standing or on their sides or leaning against each other. He half wondered at the geological oddities they were, but his throat was so very dry and that seemed more of note. His skin had stopped sweating some time ago. His head pounded with his heartbeat, and at times the pulse of it dimmed and brightened his vision.
He lay down. None of this would be so bad if he did not have to feel it from inside his body anymore. He lay like this for some time, content not to have a purpose any longer. That was why from the first sign of movement, of change, he felt an emotion wash through him, a coloring of the world that he experienced as…not as fear, as he might have expected. Not as awe or disbelief. The emotion was harder to define. It was something like regret. What caused it was the fact that the stones all around him awoke. They awoke and began walking slowly toward him.
CHAPTER
The hunting lodge of Calfa Ven clung to a south-facing granite buttress, looking down upon the sharp, wild valleys of the King’s Preserve. Half carved into the rock and half perched atop it, the lodge had been a pleasure retreat for Acacian nobility for over two hundred years. The name meant “nest of the mountain condor” in the Senivalian tongue. The preserve was a densely forested land rich in game, protected by a small staff that maintained the lodge and patrolled the broad-leaved woodlands for poachers. Corinn had not visited it since girlhood, but it remained a place she remembered well.
It had taken the Meins several years to come to grips with the empire enough to be able to take holidays. The very idea was somewhat strange to a people who had hunted for sustenance, but they had recently warmed to the custom. When Corinn learned that Hanish requested her presence with him at the lodge, she had little choice but to accept. Not that she would have refused if she could. She made sure that her resentment showed in her demeanor and speech, but she never felt more nervously alive than she did in his company.
She was riding a little distance behind Hanish, along with several Meinish noblewomen, when they arrived at the lodge. From this side it was a gray granite structure, composed of large blocks in a simple style meant to hark back to humbler times. The contingent of staff awaited them on the steps. Corinn recognized one of them, the head house servant, Peter. She had thought him handsome when she was a girl, and it stunned her how old he seemed now. He was the first thing about the lodge that truly showed the passage of time.
Peter was effusive in his greeting. He approached Hanish with a half-stooped posture, his body trembling like an old hound trying to wag its arthritic tail. “We are most pleased by your visit, lord. Most pleased…” He barely gave Hanish the space to respond, his flow of words testifying to how long they had waited to meet him, how carefully they had prepared for his visit, how lush he would find the forest, how the hunting would be beyond his expectations. “The preserve is teeming with all manner of beasts. You will have no trouble-”
The servant paused mid-sentence. His eyes, which had just begun to move across the company, had found Corinn. He stared at her for a moment, wide-eyed, the full circle of his irises visible within the surrounding whites. He bowed his head and welcomed her by name, stammering. Then he turned away and gave his attention to Hanish once more.
His look unnerved Corinn. Why did he seem frightened? He feared Hanish, that was obvious, but the look he had briefly set on the princess was a different sort of alarm. She could not entirely get his expression out of her mind, although the experience of touring the lodge largely pressed it to the side. It was strange listening to Peter lead the entourage through rooms that she already knew. He spoke as if all of it had been created especially for Hanish’s pleasure, as if the memory of former inhabitants was a distant thing indeed.
The interior rooms were cramped and somewhat dark, lit by lamps hung on the walls and by fires in the fireplaces. Some of the old trappings were in view: a wall hanging of a hunt that ran the length of the dining room, a candelabra into whose ornate silverwork the tale of Elenet was carved, the bubbling glasswork pots of fragrant herbs and spices. How she had loved that scent. Inhaling it threatened to flood her with emotion. She tried to breathe shallowly and note the things that had been added or changed to suit the new masters. Fur rugs and furniture coverings in the Meinish style; a few low, stout-legged tables; the Mein crest stained on the stones of the floor before the dining hall fireplace: there were plenty of new touches, superficial as they were.
Larken, the Acacian Marah who had betrayed her years before, walked beside Hanish, puffed up by his status and talking almost as much as Peter. With Maeander gone, Larken was nearly always at the chieftain’s side. Corinn still hated him, though she tried not to let it show.
She heard the other women talking, commenting on the things they saw, finding this or that object quaint, charming. Rhrenna kept running her fingers across the tabletops, checking them for dust. They wore their new gentility so garishly it annoyed Corinn, though she did not let this emotion show either. The main weapon she had against these people was an inward defiance. Disdain nourished her, and she tended it like a gardener cares for the prickled beauty of a rosebush.
The greatest feature of the lodge was the view that its placement afforded. Each room overlooking the King’s Preserve had an open-air balcony from which to stare at a lush canopy of broad-leaved trees that stretched into the northern distance, disturbed here and there by other granite outcroppings. Wind brushed through the treetops in places, much as storm breezes ruffle the seething sea. The rough beauty of it stunned her. This part of it seemed nothing at all like her childhood memories. She recalled only the ominous fear of the greenness of the place, the shadows beneath the trees that seemed to everywhere hide ogres, wood ghouls and wolver-bears. True enough, she could still sense the threat of all of these things, but she found it invigorating. It reminded her of the images she had conjured of Igguldan’s northern forests.
That evening she dined at Hanish’s table in the main room. All told, the company numbered about thirty, with about the same number of servants busy behind the tables, rushing in and out of the hallway leading to the kitchens. The food was somewhat too gamy for Corinn’s tastes, all venison and boar, blood cakes and fattened livers. She did little more than move it around on her plate. One of the things she hated about such occasions was the ever-present possibility that she would be called into conversation as some sort of representative of things Acacian. Early on she had risen to the bait and worked herself up, recounting the accomplishments of her people, but this had never achieved what she wished. Either she felt a fool because her knowledge did not match the verifiable facts others answered her with, or she ended painfully aware that she had only made the Mein triumph over her people seem that much greater. Tonight she found herself again and again the focus of conversation. Larken could have answered any of the questions directed at her better than she, but no one seemed to remember that he had ever been an Acacian.