voices violated the reverent stillness of the temple. No servants this time. I could hear the clink of gold chains around their necks and feel the steel menace of their weapons. The very air carried the assurance of royal privilege. The newcomers stood on the far side of the bier, just out of my line of sight.
“Shades of Druya, Aleksander. You look like some barbarian priest calling up gods to protect his village. No one’s done this kind of silly blood-marking in three hundred years.” The visitor had a lilting voice that curled around its edges, as if he were forever on the verge of sneering laughter. “One might think you were actually mourning the old devil’s passing.”
“Have you come to lick at the trough now he’s dead, Edik? Do you think I’ve forgotten that he forbade you to stand or speak in his presence?”
“Ah, my young cousin, this is the time to draw up the ties of blood, not—”
“On your knees, Edik, and hold your coward’s tongue! You are in the presence of your Emperor, and until he is ash, you will obey him.” Aleksander strode to the end of the bier. “Bring in the bearers!”
No one in the palace could have failed to hear Aleksander’s scornful rebuke of his visitor. But only I, with a Warden’s hearing, could have heard the visitor’s whispered response, buried as it was beneath the shuffling clamor of those who came to carry Ivan to his pyre. “And afterward, dear cousin Zander ... once my cousin is burned and only you are left ... then what?”
I crept along the floor far enough to glimpse the three on the far side of the empty bier, and the odor of danger was so strong, it almost gagged me. Two Hamrasch lords stood smiling at Aleksander’s back, and before them, kneeling on the floor, was a middle-aged man. His sleek blond braid fell to the side of his placid face. No anger twisted his full lips; no offense or indignation marred his wide brow or glinted in his narrow-spaced eyes. But he had ridden into Zhagad with a troop of Hamrasch warriors, and he propped his hands and his chin on a stick of polished wood, still stained with the blood of a clumsy slave.
CHAPTER 5
Derzhi inheritance was strictly through the male line. Horses, land, titles—and in the case of the Denischkar heged, the Lion Throne—passed from eldest son to eldest son. Fortunately or unfortunately, the most recent generations of the royal branch of the widespread, powerful Denischkar family had produced few children of either sex. Aleksander was Ivan’s only child. Ivan’s only brother Dmitri, Aleksander’s harsh and well-loved likai, had been childless when he was murdered by the Khelid. Aleksander’s closest cousin Kiril was of the female line, the son of Ivan’s widowed sister Rahil and therefore unable to inherit, dependent upon the Emperor for his position and fortune. And so to find the man who stood next in line to Aleksander, one had to look back another generation, to Varat, a younger brother of Aleksander’s grandfather. Varat himself was long dead in some Derzhi war, as was his youngest brother Stefan, but Varat had left an only son, Prince Edik. It appeared that the Hamraschi had no intention of wresting the throne from Aleksander’s family ... only from Aleksander.
Though I had served in the Emperor’s summer palace in Capharna for some five months, I knew little of Edik. One of my previous masters, an elderly Derzhi baron, claimed that Edik had once abandoned fifty warriors to be slaughtered by the Basranni, and was therefore a proven coward whose braid should be shorn. Perhaps true, perhaps not—the baron was not always the most accurate in his history. But I knew that Edik did not change expression when he beat a helpless man.
I did not leave Aleksander that night. There were few enough honorable people in the imperial court. I knew of none save his wife, the Princess Lydia, his personal guard captain, Sovari, and his cousin Kiril who understood Aleksander well enough to
“Shades of Druya, Aleksander. You look like some barbarian priest calling up gods to protect his village. No one’s done this kind of silly blood-marking in three hundred years.” The visitor had a lilting voice that curled around its edges, as if he were forever on the verge of sneering laughter. “One might think you were actually mourning the old devil’s passing.”
“Have you come to lick at the trough now he’s dead, Edik? Do you think I’ve forgotten that he forbade you to stand or speak in his presence?”
“Ah, my young cousin, this is the time to draw up the ties of blood, not—”
“On your knees, Edik, and hold your coward’s tongue! You are in the presence of your Emperor, and until he is ash, you will obey him.” Aleksander strode to the end of the bier. “Bring in the bearers!”
No one in the palace could have failed to hear Aleksander’s scornful rebuke of his visitor. But only I, with a Warden’s hearing, could have heard the visitor’s whispered response, buried as it was beneath the shuffling clamor of those who came to carry Ivan to his pyre. “And afterward, dear cousin Zander ... once my cousin is burned and only you are left ... then what?”
I crept along the floor far enough to glimpse the three on the far side of the empty bier, and the odor of danger was so strong, it almost gagged me. Two Hamrasch lords stood smiling at Aleksander’s back, and before them, kneeling on the floor, was a middle-aged man. His sleek blond braid fell to the side of his placid face. No anger twisted his full lips; no offense or indignation marred his wide brow or glinted in his narrow-spaced eyes. But he had ridden into Zhagad with a troop of Hamrasch warriors, and he propped his hands and his chin on a stick of polished wood, still stained with the blood of a clumsy slave.
CHAPTER 5
Derzhi inheritance was strictly through the male line. Horses, land, titles—and in the case of the Denischkar heged, the Lion Throne—passed from eldest son to eldest son. Fortunately or unfortunately, the most recent generations of the royal branch of the widespread, powerful Denischkar family had produced few children of either sex. Aleksander was Ivan’s only child. Ivan’s only brother Dmitri, Aleksander’s harsh and well-loved likai, had been childless when he was murdered by the Khelid. Aleksander’s closest cousin Kiril was of the female line, the son of Ivan’s widowed sister Rahil and therefore unable to inherit, dependent upon the Emperor for his position and fortune. And so to find the man who stood next in line to Aleksander, one had to look back another generation, to Varat, a younger brother of Aleksander’s grandfather. Varat himself was long dead in some Derzhi war, as was his youngest brother Stefan, but Varat had left an only son, Prince Edik. It appeared that the Hamraschi had no intention of wresting the throne from Aleksander’s family ... only from Aleksander.
Though I had served in the Emperor’s summer palace in Capharna for some five months, I knew little of Edik. One of my previous masters, an elderly Derzhi baron, claimed that Edik had once abandoned fifty warriors to be slaughtered by the Basranni, and was therefore a proven coward whose braid should be shorn. Perhaps true, perhaps not—the baron was not always the most accurate in his history. But I knew that Edik did not change expression when he beat a helpless man.
I did not leave Aleksander that night. There were few enough honorable people in the imperial court. I knew of none save his wife, the Princess Lydia, his personal guard captain, Sovari, and his cousin Kiril who understood Aleksander well enough to
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