Dûrathian Hymns: The Old Blood

A crown doesn't ensure power remains with you. Yes, it may give it to you, but only for a while. You just claim it as your own, unless it shall be taken away from you by another. My father told me that when I was younger. I had come to him upset about something I no longer remember — some slight from a court lady, cruelty dressed as etiquette — and he had set down whatever he was reading and looked at me the way he sometimes did. Like he was seeing something in me he was still deciding whether to name. I have turned those words over in my hands every day this last week. Worn them smooth as river stone. I was still turning them over when Ama's voice found me. "Your Grace." Soft. The way she always spoke when she needed to pull me back from wherever I had gone. "They are ready." I became aware of myself in pieces. The cold weight of mourning black against my shoulders. The grey morning pressing through the window. The sound of Northfeld below — hushed in that particular way cities go hushed when they are watching something they know will matter. I turned from the window my heavy mourning dress swishing against the cold stone floor. Ama stood at the door with her hands folded and her eyes doing what they always did. Reading me. She had been reading me since we were children and I had long since stopped trying to arrange my face for her benefit. "How do I look?" I asked. She took a while to assess me again. "Like your father's daughter," she finally said. It was the right answer. It was the only answer that mattered today. The procession moved through Northfeld like a held breath. Emperor Roland Nasren, third of his line, Sovereign of the Dûrathian Empire, beloved of the Eternal and anointed leader by the gods — or so the Canon said — was carried through the streets of his capital on a bier of pale northern ash wood, draped in the imperial black and gold, his hands folded across his chest in the posture of peaceful surrender that the Order prescribed for the faithful departed. He had not looked peaceful in life. He looked like a man who was always thinking three conversations ahead of the one he was having. Death had smoothed that from his face and left something that resembled him without quite being him. That thought for no reason, sent a shiver down my spine. I walked behind the bier, my back straight like my mother and court maids had taught me long ago, and set my eyes forward. My grief was folded somewhere in my chest where the court could not reach it, but it ached. This was not the first time I walked this very road. Rhys had been buried on a morning very like this one. Grey sky. Cold air carrying the particular stillness of Northfeld in mourning. The same pale ash bier. The same black and gold. The same prescribed folding of hands. He had been seventeen. I was fifteen and I had stood where I was standing now and felt something c***k open in my chest that had never fully closed again. What I remembered most was not the grief. The grief I had expected. What I had not expected was the noise that came after. Not loud noise. The other kind. The kind that moves through a court in whispers and meaningful glances and carefully worded condolences that were actually questions. Such a tragedy…the Emperor must be devastated. And the succession — well. These things must be considered…the empire cannot afford uncertainty…there is the matter of — yes, yes, of course, dreadful timing, but still — I had stood at my brother's grave and listened to the empire begin reorganizing itself around his absence before the earth had fully settled over him. I remember clenching my fist in anger. Three months later I had stood in the great hall of the palace with the court assembled, the Order presiding, and something heavy and cold was placed on my head while faces watched from every angle — my father's proud and unreadable, my mother perfectly still, my uncle Gareth smiling in the way that never reached his eyes — and the High Priest had said words in the old formal Dûarthi tongue that bound me to a title I had spent my whole life watching belong to someone else. I had been so focused on keeping my face composed like I was taught, that I had not looked at any face except my mother's until the ceremony was nearly finished. There had been a man there I did not recognize. Standing apart from the assembled court. Holding something small against his chest that caught the torchlight strangely — silver and gold, shifting between the two — and when my eyes did find him, he was in front of me, bowing deeply with a gravity that felt older than the ceremony around it. By the time the Ordained finished their final ritual, he was gone. I had not thought about him again for months. The procession reached the burial ground as the morning light shifted from grey to the pale cold gold of a Northfeld winter. The Order's priests were assembled in their white ceremonial robes, with Aldric Vorne at their center, his face arranged in the expression of profound spiritual gravity he wore the way other men wore crowns. He caught my eye as I took my place. Held it for precisely one moment, then looked away. I filed that away in my mind. The rites took two hours. I stood through all of them without moving. I had learned very young that stillness reads as strength and movement reads as weakness and that the court was always watching even when it appeared to be watching something else. They were watching now. Every lord. Every lady. Every Faith official with their careful eyes. My uncle Gareth stood across the grave with his hands folded and his head appropriately bowed and his son Edric beside him, two years my senior and wearing an expression I had catalogued long ago. The expression of a man who believes he is standing in the wrong place. Who believes the correct version of events has been interrupted and needs only the right moment to reassert itself. I let my gaze move past them both without pausing. The priests finished their words. The earth received my father. The court exhaled. In the silence that followed, before anyone could move, speak or begin the quiet reorganization that I knew was already underway — the same reorganization I had heard beginning over my brother's grave two years ago — I felt the weight of it settle onto my shoulders with a clarity that was almost physical. They were all waiting to see what I would do next. I went to my mother's chambers that evening. The formal mourning would continue for seven days. The court would observe the prescribed rituals. The Order would conduct the evening prayers. Everything would proceed according to the Canon and the custom and the long tradition of the empire burying its dead with appropriate ceremony. And in the spaces between ceremonies, the court would move. As it always had. Zahra, my mother, sat by her window in the failing light. She had changed from the heavy mourning formal into something simpler. Her dark hair was down. Without the architecture of court presentation she looked smaller than I was accustomed to seeing her like my mother and not a queen— and something else. Something I registered and set aside to examine later. Naeri, my Ashfox, was on the windowsill beside her. The creature's silver and gold fur shifting in the last of the daylight. Its white eyes found me when I settled down and held for a moment, before it looked away with the air of something that had assessed me and reached its own conclusions. She was the ethereal creature the strange man had given me on my coronation day. One of my few sources of true comfort. I sat across from her, and for a moment neither of us spoke. We didn't need to. We had always been able to sit in silence together, and have it mean something rather than nothing. Rhys was like her in silence. "They will move quickly," I said finally. "They are already moving." She did not look away from the window. "Gareth hosted last night. Before your father was in the ground." "I know." I had known three days before the dinner happened. She looked at me then. Something shifted in her expression — not surprise. My mother had not been surprised in a very long time. It was something else. Something that sat between pride and sorrow and I had never been able to determine which of the two was stronger. "The Order," she said. "Is manageable." "Aldric Vorne is not a man who is managed." "No," I agreed. "He is not. He is a man who is made to believe he is doing the managing." I paused. "There is a difference." The corner of her mouth moved. Almost. Outside, Northfeld had gone quiet in the way it went quiet at the end of a long and significant day. The kind of quiet that was not peace but the held breath before whatever came next. My mother reached out and touched my hand once. Brief and certain. "Your father believed you were ready for this," she said. "He told me so. The night before—" She stopped. Began again. "He told me." I thought about the man standing at the back of the hall at my coronation. The thing shifting silver and gold in his hands. The bow that felt older than the ceremony around it. Why am I suddenly remembering that? I suddenly remembered my father's face in his study when I was thirteen. A candle relit itself before I even touched it. He had looked at me for a long moment, said nothing and blown the candle out himself. You must claim the power as yours. "I know," I suddenly said to myself. The window darkened. Naeri's white eyes caught the last of the light and held it longer than should have been possible. I loved her eyes the most. Or maybe it was her fur. Tomorrow the court would begin in earnest. Tomorrow Gareth would smile at me over the morning table and Edric would stand slightly too straight. Aldric Vorne would request an audience because he is Aldric Vorne, and the Lords would send their careful letters. The empire would begin the quiet work of deciding whether I was strong enough to hold what my father had left me. I had been preparing for this moment my entire life. I stood, smoothed my mourning black, and pressed my lips to my mother's forehead. "Rest," she nodded in reply. She caught my hand before I could pull away. Held it for just a moment. Her eyes when she looked up at me carried something I did not have a name for yet. "There are things I need to tell you," she said quietly. "Not yet. But soon." I waited. "Before I cannot," she finished. I looked at her for a long moment. Then I nodded. Squeezed her hand once, and let go. I walked to the door, opened it and stepped back into the corridor where Ama was waiting with a candle and her steady unreadable patience. "Well?" Ama asked. "Tomorrow," I said. "It begins tomorrow.” She fell into step beside me without another word. Behind us, was Naeri walking elegantly beside following my every step.