This was the moment, Prestimion thought, to make everything completely clear between them.
“When I invited you here tonight,” he said, “it was with the notion of making some sort of speech about how important it was for us to spend more time together, to get to know one another, and so on and so forth. I won’t make that speech. I’ve had plenty of time, all these months roaming around in places like Ketheron and Arvyanda and Sippulgar, to get to know you already.”
She seemed apprehensive. “Prestimion—?”
His words came tumbling out helter-skelter. “I’ve lived alone long enough. A Coronal needs a consort. I love you, Varaile. Marry me. Be my queen. I warn you, it won’t be easy, being wife to the Coronal. But you are the one I choose. Marry me, Varaile.”
“My lord—?” she said, with astonishment in her voice.
“You were calling me Prestimion a moment ago.”
“Prestimion, yes. Oh, yes! Yes! Yes!”
III. The Book of Healing
1
More than thirty years had passed since there last had been a royal wedding at the Castle, that of Lord Confalume and the Lady Roxivail; and no one now attached to the Coronal’s staff was old enough to know the proper procedures and protocols for such an event. So a great scurrying about in the archives was initiated by the officials involved, until Prestimion found out about it and made an end to the search. “We’re capable of putting on a wedding here without having to turn to the oldsters to find out how we ought to do it, isn’t that so?” he asked Navigorn. “Besides, was the marriage of Confalume and Roxivail such a magnificent success that we want to take any aspect of it as a model for anything we do?”
“The Lady Varaile,” said Navigorn with diplomatic earnestness, “is nothing at all like the Lady Roxivail, my lord.”
No, Prestimion thought. Nothing at all.
Prestimion had seen the vain and willful estranged wife of Lord Confalume only once in his life—at the coronation games in honor of her son Korsibar, when that prince’s brief, illegitimate, and disastrous reign as Coronal was just getting under way. Roxivail, a small, dark, strikingly attractive woman, had maintained her looks well into middle age with the aid of wizardry, and Prestimion had been startled by her beauty. As well he might be; for she and her daughter Thismet resembled each other in an extraordinary way, to the degree that Roxivail seemed more like Thismet’s elder sister than her mother.
Her surprising appearance at the coronation games, her first visit to the Castle in some twenty years, had revived all the old gossip. Confalume, masterly and potent Coronal that he was, had not been able to govern his own wife; their marriage had been stormy throughout, and had culminated in Roxivail’s noisy departure from the Castle to take up life in a luxurious palace on an island in the Gulf of Stoien. She had remained there ever since, excepting only her journey to the Mount at the time of her son’s coronation. In her long absence Confalume had had to rule without a consort and to raise their twin children alone—twins whose very existence no one, not even their parents, now remembered at all. Those who had any recollection of the previous Coronal’s marriage would think of it, if ever they did, as being barren as well as unhappy. Prestimion had fonder expectations for his own.
In the end it was Prestimion himself, with some help from Navigorn and an immense amount of advice on matters of taste and style of decor from Septach Melayn, who worked out a formal program for the wedding. The usual high princes of Castle Mount would be in attendance, but not, Prestimion decided, anyone from the provinces. For that would mean extending an invitation to Dantirya Sambail along with all the other great provincial lords, and the absence of the Procurator of Ni-moya would be awkward to explain.
Invitations would go to the Lady Therissa, of course, and the Pontifex Confalume. But Prestimion assumed that their own current responsibilities and the great distances they would have to travel would keep them from coming to Castle Mount for a second time in little more than a year, and indeed they sent their apologies and regrets. They would be represented by their official surrogates at the Castle, the hierarch Marcatain for the Lady, and Vologaz Sar for the Pontifex. The Lady Therissa reiterated her hope that Prestimion would come to her at the Isle as soon as his present duties at the Castle permitted, and that he would bring his bride with him.
Some of Varaile’s own friends from Stee would be her ladies-in-waiting. Prestimion would be attended at the ceremony by Septach Melayn, Gialaurys, and Teotas. His other brother Abrigant should have been part of the event as well; but there was no telling whether he would return from his quest for the iron ore of Skakkenoir on time, and Prestimion did not propose to delay the wedding on his behalf.
He dealt quickly with the fact that Varaile was a commoner, and that nobody at the Castle could recall an occasion when a Coronal had chosen a commoner as his bride. Summoning Navigorn, he said, “We are creating a new duke today, and I have just drawn up the papers. See to it that the normal procedures are followed.”
Navigorn glanced at the document Prestimion handed him and his face turned scarlet with surprise and dismay. “My lord! A dukedom for that abominable, money-grubbing, utterly offensive—”
“Gently Navigorn. You’re talking about the father of the Coronal’s consort-to-be.”
Appalled at his own words, Navigorn made a little choking sound and mumbled an apology.
Prestimion laughed. “Not that anything you just said is untrue, of course. But we will ennoble Simbilon Khayf even so, because that will ennoble his daughter as well, and thus we sidestep a certain little problem of protocol. It seems the simplest way to handle it, Navigorn. And, best of all, he won’t ever know that it’s happened. His mind’s completely gone, you know. I could just as easily make him Coronal or Pontifex as give him a dukedom, for all he’d be able to understand.”
Which brought up another little difficulty involving the father of the bride, which was that Simbilon Khayf was altogether unfit to appear in public. He was a babbling, pathetic figure now, indifferent to cleanliness or decorum and muttering constantly of a need to atone for his sins. Even at his best, he would have been an embarrassment to Prestimion at the ceremony; but in his present condition there could be no question of it. “We will let it be known that he is too ill to attend,” Varaile declared, and so it was done.
Easily enough solved; but hardly a day went by without some new procedural problem arising.
One was the issue of how many mages would be at the wedding other than Maundigand-Klimd, and of which schools of practice, and what roles, if any, they would play. If Prestimion had had his own way, there would have been none. But Gialaurys was able to convince him of the rashness of that position. In the end a full array of wizards was in attendance at the rite, although at Prestimion’s insistence they were kept at a circumspect distance from the dais and allowed to utter their incantations only as part of a general preliminary invocation.
Then there was the matter of finding some function for Serithorn, as the senior peer of the realm, to perform, and the question of what to do about preventing another mountain of gifts from flowing toward the Castle when so many of the coronation presents still had not yet been unpacked, and of whether to hold another round of knightly games by way of celebrating the Coronal’s nuptials. Prestimion had not anticipated so many little details to deal with. But in a way he welcomed the distraction: for the time being, he was spared the need from fretting about the madness epidemic, or pondering the problem of finding the unfindable Dantirya Sambail, or dealing with any of the thousand routine questions that come before a Coronal in the course of an ordinary week. Everyone about him understood that the royal wedding took precedence, for the moment, over all of that.