The daughters had been fluttering for days, ever since realizing that some of them were likely candidates to be Prince Rohan’s bride. He wished he could attend the Rialla this year and be entertained by their graceless maneuverings—especially the little dance Ianthe and Pandsala would do. Crigo had so few diversions; this was one Lady Andrade would appreciate, he told himself, wishing he had the courage to inform her on the moonlight. Palila would be just as amusing to observe, especially if she and Pandsala really thought she could influence Roelstra’s decisions. Her role would evidently be to aid Pandsala’s cause in payment for the plot outlined tonight, but Crigo did not underestimate Ianthe’s powers of scheming—not with such a prize at stake. That was the appalling part of it, the thought of the young prince wedded to any of Roelstra’s spawn. Crigo knew the High Prince’s daughters. As the spring was poisoned, so flowed its streams.
He turned his winecup around and around in his hands. He wondered whether or not he would tell Roelstra about what he had heard. A thin smile stretched his mouth. It might be difficult to choose between ruining Palila and cherishing the secret knowledge that Roelstra’s son was not in fact his own. Both offered satisfactions.
Crigo set the goblet aside and rose, slightly unsteady on his feet. He went to the windows that had been left open to the moonlight. The rocks opposite Castle Crag were stark and cold, the river invisible far below. But he could hear its muted thunder from the north, where it crashed over a cliff and foamed into rapids before settling into a smoother flow past the keep. Closing his eyes, he listened and shivered. He could never escape that sound, and longed for an absolute silence he found only in dranath-induced sleep.
It would be silent now in the Desert as they watched Prince Zehava’s corpse burn. Lady Andrade would be there, with many faradh’im to attend her. The old prince had chosen a fine time to die, with so many there to do him honor. Crigo would receive a full account tomorrow from the spies at Stronghold, but they would have watched the ritual through cynical eyes. He felt the whispery chill of moonlight on his face, the spurious strength of the drug in his veins, and decided that he dared look with his own eyes. He longed to commune with his own kind again, to belong again. He could not, and knew it—but neither could he resist this chance to watch their work, even if he could not join with them on the clean, pale light.
He lifted his face to the three glowing circles rising in the night sky, and wove the thin light into a fabric of delicate beauty. He flung it like an unrolling carpet to the east and south, exhilarated as he sped along it to the sands outside Stronghold. So free, this feeling, and so much like flying that his shoulders shifted as if he possessed dragon wings. There was a pinpoint of light below him, like a golden star earthbound, and as he descended toward it he saw the gray figures standing nearby. Crigo yearned to call out to them, to feel the brilliant colors of their minds. But he held himself back, the shame burning anew as he watched them honor the dead prince with Sunrunner’s Fire that freed Zehava’s spirit to ride the Desert winds.
Tobin held her sons’ hands as the moons rose above her. Jahni and Maarken were exhausted, having gone with their father and Maeta to assist in moving the dragon’s carcass from Rivenrock. Their faces were hidden by gray hoods and despite their weariness they carried themselves like the young lords they were, but their palms were moist and they shifted restlessly as the assembly waited for Rohan to begin the ritual.
Along with the family and more than two hundred others, they had followed him in silence the three measures to the Goddess’ Apronful, a scattering of huge boulders that took on strange, fearsome shapes in the moonlight shadows. Legend had it that the stones had dropped from the sky when the mountains had been built, to lie here forgotten in the sand. Maarken and Jahni had active imaginations even for five-year-olds, and Tobin knew they would be seeing monsters lurking behind every stone. She wished she could whisper a few soothing words to them, but silence was the rule.