The Ruling Sea by Robert V S Redick

gone Thasha turned and looked at the tarboys. “Darlings!” she said.
    “Thasha,” said Pazel. “You’re swaying.”
    “You’d be swaying too if you tipped left and right.”
    Neeps’ jaw dropped. “Lord Rin,” he whispered. “She’s drunk.”
    Pazel leaned closer, sniffing. “Brandy! Oh Thasha, that was a bad idea.”
    “Yes,” she said. “It took me about half a minute to realize that. But I’m all right.”
    Hercól returned, with Mr. Fiffengurt at his side. “The girl’s been drinking,” Neeps informed them. “Eat something, Thasha. Anything. Rose petals. Grass. Make yourself sick before—”
    “Neeps,” said Pazel. “She’s not exactly falling down.”
    “Ha!” said Thasha. “Not yet.”
    “Don’t joke about that,” hissed Fiffengurt. “You shouldn’t have drunk a blary thing! Foolish, foolish, Mistress!”
    “That it certainly was,” said Hercól. “More than any of us, you need your wits about you. But we must make the best of it now. Perhaps the drink will steady you for the ordeal to come. Hello, Admiral.”
    Eberzam Isiq had arrived at the gate, quite winded. He waved at Thasha in distress. “She has—I objected fiercely—but the fact is—”
    “We noticed, Excellency,” said Pazel. “Don’t worry. Neeps and I will stay close to her.”
    “He will worry,” said Thasha. “And just wait—he’s going to try once more to tell us all what to do, even though he has no idea and will have to make up some useless flimflam on the spot. He’s an old buffoon.”
    “No he’s not,” said Pazel, startling everyone. “Leave off baiting him, won’t you? Think of what Ramachni said: we’re a clan, like Diadrelu’s clan, and we have to work together.”
    “Dri’s clan took her title away,” said Thasha.
    “And we are humans, not ixchel,” said Hercól. “There are worthier comparisons. But Pazel speaks a vital truth. Our enemies bicker; we must not, for whatever advantage we may have can be lost in a heartbeat.”
    At that moment King Oshiram spotted Thasha and her father. He gestured to his guard captain, who sounded a note on a boar’s-tusk hunting-horn: the signal for the march to the shrine. The dignitaries rose and hurried to their places. Thasha looked Pazel swiftly in the eye. It was an involuntary look, a reflex. It was the first time since daybreak that he had glimpsed her fear.
    The road to the Mzithrini shrine stretched for a gentle mile, but some of the older dukes and bishwas had not walked so far in years (or their whole lives, in some cases); and the Templar monks at the head of the procession were much given to their gongs, and stopped dead for their ritual beatings; and the Boy Prince of Fulne was stung by a wasp; and goats defiled the road, leading to an ablutionary summit of all the attendant holy men. So it was that a walk the young people might have finished in half an hour stretched to thrice that time and more.
    Treaty Day was a holiday, naturally. From all over Simja the common folk had come, and from neighboring islands, and well beyond. At first light they had rushed to the city square to watch the Rite of the Firelords, in which masked figures representing the Night Gods were driven back to their dark kingdom by dancers with torches, who then proclaimed Simjalla ready to receive the bride. Later when Thasha approached the Cactus Gardens, the crowd stretched far ahead of her, and so again when she left the city by the North Gate.
    Everyone who had entered the city seemed to have raced out of it again, eager for another glimpse of the procession. Beyond the wall the land was mostly field and heath, but wherever a barn or goat-shed or granary abutted the road it was covered with well-wishers, crammed in the windows and on the rooftops. Others had scaled the stormbreak pines that rose in a thin stand halfway between the city and the shrine.
    But most simply swarmed alongside. They could draw only so near: the king had caused a chain to be stretched