The Delian Cycle

Chapter nineteen-3

I heard what she said.

She raised those luminous cornflower blue eyes to Varden, who was staring down at her with a foolish, happy, devoted and unbelieving look on his face.

“I think,” said the Princess Natema, “that blue will go with my eyes very well.”

I almost smiled, then.

A press circled in the hall and I saw a stately palanquin swing and sway in between the towering columns of the main entrance, slowly move toward the dais as the solidly packed masses of men whirlpooled away to give it passage. I also saw a sharp, weasel-faced little man dressed incongruously in clansman’s russet and with a long knife stuck through his belt, standing truculently, as though he had conquered everything himself, at the foot of the dais. Beneath the tunic of Nath the thief there were a number of high