The "floats" were interspersed among the marching and mounted formations, and the imperial family's was actually rather near the end of the entire procession. In fact, despite the ruler-straightness of Emperor Daerha Boulevard, the official parade route, Kinlafia (whose vision really was as good as he'd told Alazon it was) found it almost impossible to make out details of the leading formations simply because of the sheer distance involved.
The floats also varied widely in size. Kinlafia's was one of the smallest; the imperial family's was undoubtedly the largest. Where his had only two wheels and was towed by a single pair of Shikowrs, the Emperor's float was a six-wheeled, articulated wagon towed by an entire six-horse team of tall, black Chinthai. The massive draft animals, descended from ancient heavy cavalry mounts, were taller at the shoulder than Kinlafia, and their flowing manes and tails had been elaborately braided and threaded with silken streamers in the green and gold of the House of Calirath.
Zindel chan Calirath himself sat on a throne which rose considerably higher than Kinlafia's, although the broader vehicle at its base promised greater stability. At least, Kinlafia certainly hoped it did. The thought of watching the future Emperor of Sharona plunge to his doom from a parade float left a little something to be desired from a public relations viewpoint.
Empress Varena sat beside him, on an equally elevated throne, and all three of their daughters were grouped around them on thrones of their own. It was fairly obvious from where Kinlafia sat that young Anbessa wasn't exactly enthralled, but it was equally obvious that her mother had "reasoned" with her to good effect. Razial, on the other hand, seemed excited, eager for the spectacle to begin.
And then there was Andrin. Kinlafia gazed at her for several seconds, trying to gauge her emotions from the set of her shoulders, the angle of her head. He couldn't. And yet, he could.
He grimaced and shook his own head. Was he really interpreting her emotions correctly? Or did he just think he was? How much of what he thought she was feeling was real, and how much was simply an echo of that devastating moment in which he had shared the Emperor's Glimpse?
No one could claim that your life's been exactly boring for the last two or three months, Darcel, he told himself. But the last thirty-six hours have to have established a new all-time record, even for you. A
private audience with the Emperor, Alazon, an invitation to a quiet little supper with the entire imperial family, and then Her Imperial Highness Grand Princess Andrin.
It didn't seem possible. Still, at least it had all come at him so quickly he hadn't really had time to come to grips with it. That was good, because he rather suspected that when he finally did have the opportunity to sit down and think about it, it was going to scare the holy living hell out of him. It was one thing to think about running for office, about the probably mundane career of a mere Parliamentary Representative. It was quite another to discover that he—Darcel Kinlafia, from a sleepy little university town in the pampas of New Farnal—had a fate which was somehow bound up with that of the heirsecondary to the Winged Crown of Ternathia ... and now of all Sharona.
Somehow, he didn't think his life was ever going to be "boring" again.
Andrin made a soft, soothing sound to Finena as the falcon shifted uneasily on the back of her elaborate chair. The sound itself was all but inaudible against the surf of background voices, but the falcon didn't have to physically hear it to recognize it. Her head bent, and the razor-sharp beak stroked gently against the side of Andrin's neck. Then the bird straightened once again, standing proud and motionless on her perch.
The good news was that Finena had already endured a half-dozen parades back home in Ternathia. The bad news was that none of them had been even remotely like this one was going to be. The rumble of voices which was making Finena nervous came almost entirely from the Calirath Palace staff—of which, admittedly, there seemed to be somewhere in the vicinity of fourteen million, she thought wryly
—and her family's personal retainers. Once they began moving out of the Palace gates and down the formal parade route, and the thousands upon thousands of spectators began to cheer, it was going to get infinitely worse.
"There," she murmured, reaching up to stroke Finena's folded wings comfortingly. "There, love. If it gets too bad, you can always fly back to the Palace." She smiled crookedly. "I wish I could," she added.
Her father glanced at her as if he'd heard her. He hadn't, of course—not as quietly as she'd spoken, and not through all the background noise. But he hadn't really had to. She'd realized, over the last several weeks, that her father actually knew her even better than she'd ever thought that he did. She'd never doubted his love, the time that he always somehow saved for his children. But since the disaster at Hell's Gate, he'd shown an almost terrifying awareness of what was inside her. What she felt, what she feared, what she dreamed of and about as all of them swept inexorably into the future. It was immensely comforting and simultaneously frightening, in an obscure sort of way.
Don't be silly, she scolded herself. And don't be a coward, either. You know why it's scaring the daylights out of you!
And she did know. It frightened her because she knew too much about the Calirath Talent. She knew how hard and fast the Glimpses were falling upon her father, because they were falling upon her, too.
Yet there was one enormous difference between her Glimpses and his.
Those gifted—or cursed—with the Calirath Talent were not given the ability to Glimpse events in their own lives. There were times—many of them, in fact—when a Calirath's Glimpse did tell that person a great deal about what was going to happen to him or her. But even when that happened, there was almost always a ... blind spot. A blankness. A cutout in the vision where the person whose Glimpse it was ought to have been and which kept him from Seeing himself, his actions ... his fate. No one knew why that was, yet it was true. With one exception.
There was one Glimpse that was given to most of those who carried the activated Calirath Talent, and cold comfort it was. It was the Glimpse of their own violent deaths. Not in accidents, or of disease, because the Calirath Talent didn't work that way. A Glimpse revealed the consequences of human actions, human events, not the simple workings of fate or chance. That was one reason there'd been so few successful assassinations of Caliraths over the millennia. It was hard for a killer to sneak up on someone who was able to Glimpse the moment of his or her own murder, after all. Not impossible, as history had unfortunately demonstrated, but difficult.
Andrin wasn't concerned about her own impending demise. She was worried—deeply and desperately—
over the continuous flickers of Glimpses about Janaki. She longed to be able to nail those down. To choke the truth out of them. But there were too many other people tied up in them, too much violence, too many images which made no sense.
Yet what frightened her even more than that was the possibility that her father's understanding, his obvious concern for her, meant he was Glimpsing something about her future that worried him deeply.
She knew her father would face anything to protect her and her sisters. What frightened her was her growing suspicion that he was afraid of something not even he could protect her from.
And how does Voice Kinlafia figure in all of that? she wondered, turning to gaze back over her shoulder at the handsome, brown-haired man perched in the one-person float behind her. She knew he had to be scared to death. Triad knew there were enough butterflies dancing in her middle, and she'd been riding in parades like this since she was younger than Anbessa! But if he was anxious, he was concealing it well.
That was good. Andrin had already discovered how frequently famous or important people failed to to measure up to others' expectations. She couldn't say Kinlafia was exactly what she'd expected from the power and the anguish and the clarity of the Voice transmission SUNN had broadcast throughout all of Sharona. She'd expected someone taller, bigger than life, with a granite chin and piercing eyes.
What she'd gotten was a man who needed no steely jaw or granite chin. A man whose brown eyes were wounded, not piercing, yet still remained warm and compassionate. A man whose heart had taken savage wounds, yet refused to close inward upon its pain. A man who was not yet fully aware of his own strength. She wondered if she were catching just a faint echo of the Glimpse her father had obviously experienced when she and voice Kinlafia first came face-to-face.