Highness’ notice, with every faith that your wisdom will find a solution and that dragons will once again fill Desert skies.
All homage and wishes for the continued health and happiness of Your Royal Highnesses.
Feylin of Skybowl
Rohan leaned back in his chair and sighed deeply. His gaze strayed from the parchments on the desk to the tall, wide-open windows of his private study. Stronghold was secure and serene in the spring twilight, its stone gentled by a rosy-gold light from the setting sun. The scents of new flowers and fresh grass drifted up from the gardens; he could even smell the grotto waterfall, swollen by spring runoff from the distant hills. The annual renewal of beauty here was justification of the peace he had worked so hard to create, and its seduction was nearly overwhelming. In the last six years there had been so few times when he could truly enjoy his home.
Delivery of Feylin’s troublesome message had come with another stack of parchments, and Rohan eyed the pile with a grimace. The Rialla would happen this year, the first since his portrayal of imbecile prince—an option no longer available to him—and his vassals had presented their requests with almost indecent haste. He could not in good conscience “forget” about them until late summer, and he certainly could not ignore the news from Skybowl. But Goddess, how he wanted to, just for a little while.
A wry smile crossed his face as he reflected on the truth that a prince with too much leisure was a prince who was not doing his job. Even in the good years there were a million things to be done and decided and overseen. And in the bad years, like the year of the Plague—
So many dead. So much lost. Crushing the Merida in the plains outside Tiglath that first spring of his rule had demonstrated his strength, but there had been no fighting the silent, stealthy disease. The power of a prince with an army at his back had been impotent against the enemy that invaded the body and took away breath, sanity, and life in hopeless progression.
It had come with the flight of dragons three years ago, and at first had been blamed on the great beasts themselves. As Plague and panic spread throughout the princedoms, demands had come for Rohan to eradicate the dragons once and for all. But then the dragons had started dying, too.
By the time the first huge, stinking corpse had been discovered in the sand without a battle wound on it, Rohan had been too desperate to worry about dragon deaths. His mother had been one of the first at Stronghold to contract the Plague, and the first to die. The disease swelled the lungs and burned the flesh from agonized bones; fever raged unchecked no matter what cures were tried. Violent purging, coma, and death followed. Princess Milar’s struggles had lasted for twelve horrible days. Others had survived a little longer, but of every ten persons at Stronghold, four fell sick—and all of these died.
Word filtered in from other courts and holdings, communicated by faradh’im who often used their last strength to weave the terrible news through the sunlight. Princes Seldeen, Durriken, and Vissarion; Lords Daar, Kuteyn, Dalinor, Bethoc, and Reze; wives and sons and daughters and countless retainers—all dead. Andrade herself sent the sorrowful news that Mardeem of the pure golden voice had succumbed at Goddess Keep along with scores of others. No castle, manor, or cottage was immune, with the exceptions of the isolated Merida in their wilderness and the islands of Dorval and Kierst-Isel. Prince Lleyn had forbidden his harbors to all ships, and Volog and Saumer had wisely followed his example. Indeed, in the latter case the Plague proved a perverse sort of blessing. Deprived of outside sustenance, the two antagonists were forced to cooperate with each other so their people did not starve.
Then the miracle happened. In midsummer, word flashed on the sunlight that a cure had been found. An infusion of a little-known herb, combined with more standard remedies, reduced the fever and stopped the purging, which gave the victims a chance at life.
Rohan’s fingers clenched around the arms of his chair and he consciously relaxed them. Memory of that time could still send fury pounding through his blood. The herb had been dranath. Roelstra, controlling its source in the Veresch, controlled its dispersal. Not openly, of course, for that would have brought all the other princes raging across his borders, High