It was not the prince, however, who was responsible for the grisly ornaments, but his mother.
The Crown Prince had remained unmarried all his life. At first it had been rumored by those outside his realm that the reason was his deeply held standards, set too high for any mortal woman to reach. As the years passed, however, other reasons were proffered when the topic came up over tankards of ale around inn hearth fires or in sewing circles.
Perhaps it was the prince’s own noxious personality that kept him from winning a bride; he was said to be fussy and high-strung, easily offended and given to spates of impotent smoldering. In addition, other types of impotence were widely rumored. But, for all that Vyshla was, without question, annoying and childlike, he certainly was not the first ruler of a powerful nation to be devoid of a pleasant personality. That lack of personal charisma had never been a barrier to a royal marriage before; on the contrary, it had been more or less proven that the most attractive appendage in a royal man was the scepter he held in his hand by divine right, not anything more centrally attached to his body.
As time went on, the gossip shifted. Crown Prince Vyshla’s lack of betrothal, marriage, and progeny, it was now believed, had been engineered entirely by the Dowager Empress. Jealous and avaricious, the woman who had ruled Sorbold for more than seventy-five years had broken the aggressions of her enemies, held armies at bay, and elevated a dry, resourceless land into a realm of tremendous power and influence by the mere force of her will and vision. Quite simply, the stories said, she was not willing to entertain the possibility that an heir was necessary, because she was never planning to leave the throne. One of the more exaggerated tales claimed that she had wind-dried the unfortunate soldiers who joked at her son’s expense as an experiment to see how better to preserve herself post mortem, so that she might continue to rule without interruption after her death.
For all the iron-clad avarice of the self-serving dowager, and the finicky, spoiled behavior of the pampered prince, however, there had been one moment in recent history that showed that the Empress of the Dark Earth and her son were levelheaded monarchs, reasonable in their policies of international relations, acting in the best interests of Sorbold.
They had more or less willingly agreed to, and ultimately signed, treaties of trade and nonaggression with the new Cymrian Alliance.
Initially the elderly queen and her son worried when the benison of Sorbold, the foremost clergyman in their land and the dowager’s personal confessor, had returned from Sepulvarta, the independent city-state that was the capital seat of the religion of the realm, with news of the alliance between the central human nation of Roland to their north, the forested Lirin realm to their west, and Ylorc, the savage kingdom of Firbolg monsters across the mountainous barricade to the east.
The new queen of the Lirin, a half-human woman named Rhapsody whom Vyshla had halfheartedly sued for the hand of, and Gwydion of Manosse, the Heir Presumptive of the Cymrian line that had ruled Roland, Ylorc, and Sorbold itself for a time a thousand years before, had been selected by a council of the surviving Cymrians and their descendants to reign over a loose alliance of the realms of the central continent, while each kingdom retained its sovereignty. The empress was able to see the value in being perceived from the outset as a friendly independent nation, rather than have the alliance of men, Lirin, and Bolg test their mettle as a possible conquest later on.
The Dowager Empress had a remarkable gift for looking forward. Her visionary glance saw down the road into a future where cooperation from the outset would yield protection in later days.
As with most visionaries, what her eyes couldn’t see was the shadow that loomed behind her.
The three-quarter moon rose heavily over the streets of Jierna’sid, the capital seat of Sorbold, glowing sparingly on the sand that blasted the formal gardens and well-kept roadways, a constant reminder of the endless desert that flanked the city on two sides. The wind seemed to laugh in time at the moon, teasingly blowing wisps of clouds in front of the pale sky-lantern, shrieking fitfully over the sleeping city. Try to tame me, the wind seemed to taunt. I dare you.
That moon, in answer, doused the central object of the city with a particular shine.
Towering above the palace of Jierna Tal, the Place of Weight, stood the holiest artifact in the land. It was a gigantic set of ancient scales, the wooden column and beam planed smooth by artisans of the old Cymrian empire a thousand or more years before, the ancient metal pans even older, trays of gleaming gold carried across the ocean on ships fleeing the destruction of the place they had been smithed, burnished by the relentless sand and wind.
The last time those mammoth scales had been used to weigh a decision of heavy import had been three years prior, when the Patriarch in Sepulvarta died. The Patriarch had decreed in his final moments that, rather than naming his own successor, he wished to allow the Scales to select one. The benisons of the religion, those clergyman directly beneath the Patriarch in power and influence, had gathered in Jierna Tal for the Weighing, a long-revered rite in which the ancient Scales passed judgment on a candidate’s worthiness. Historically the Scales had at one time made determinations on many different kinds of offices, as well as the innocence or guilt of accused criminals, and whether treaties were balanced and fair, but in recent memory their wisdom was only consulted on matters of state or great import. The selection and investiture of a new Patriarch was deemed a worthy cause for consulting the Scales.
The Ring of Wisdom of the Patriarchy had been placed, amid solemn ceremony, into the tray that aligned with the west wind, Leuk, the wind of justice, to serve as the weight. One by one, each of the benisons had stepped onto the eastern tray.
One by one the Scales had tilted crazily and the eastern tray upended, finding the candidate unworthy, and depositing him unceremoniously onto his hindquarters at the base of the enormous scaffold amid roars of amusement from the immense crowd that had gathered to watch the selection. The youngest of the four benisons, Ian Steward, had bravely volunteered to go first. He landed with a resounding splat, his body splayed out in such an unflattering manner that the eldest benison, Colin Abernathy, had decided to forgo the process and pass up a chance at the Patriarchy altogether.
Finally, when each of the existing benisons had been deemed unworthy of the Ring and the Patriarchy by the Scales, another man had stepped forward. He was tall and broad of shoulder, despite being advanced of years, his white-blond beard and hair curling in streaks of gray. He had stepped onto the scale tray as if it were something he had done many times before, and stood, as if listening to a voice in the clouds, as the enormous arm and chains of the Scales raised him on high, over the heads of the now-silent crowd, then balanced the trays.
As the stunned crowd recovered from its shock and roared assent, the man quietly spoke but one word, his name.
Constantin.
The noise from the crowd dimmed for a moment. The name was renowned in Sorbold, shared with a famous gladiator in the western city-state of Jakar, a cool and bloodthirsty arena killer who had disappeared from the gladiatorial complex some months before. The thought that this elderly holy man, soon to be anointed and invested with the powers to become the most potent healer in the land, had the same name as the gladiator was such a great irony as to invoke a sea of rippling laughter across the city square that rattled the bell towers of Jierna Tal.
Later that day, long after the decision of the Scales had been officially inscribed in the holy tomes of Sepulvarta, many hours after the crowds in the square had dispersed, the new Patriarch could still be seen, standing at the foot of the Scales, staring up at the holy instrumentality, a look of reverent amazement etched into the lines of his face.