I’m trying to teach her to take a path that doesn’t involve trampling the crops. Where she goes, the others follow. I thought if we nudged her in the right direction, we wouldn’t have to replant every few days.”
Chay snorted. “One of my best studs and three of my best mares I gave you last year, and you greet us riding a cow.”
“ ‘Gave’?” Pol laughed. “Sold!”
Sioned fixed her green eyes on her son. “Where’s this glorious set of chambers you’ve been promising?”
He pointed to a fretwork of girders and chimneys. “See that?”
Rohan squinted down the valley to the palace complex. “What happened? I thought the crafters had orders to finish by now.”
“It was a choice between living quarters and the Princes Hall,” Pol said cheerfully. “Mine are up there somewhere, too. Or so my architects tell me.”
Rohan peered at the empty air divided off by stone and steel. “Sleep well at night, do you?”
“Sorry, Father. For now you’ll have to make do with the Guard Tower.”
Sionell knew the plans for Dragon’s Rest as well as she knew the ancient walls of her home castle, Remagev. Her brother Jahnavi was Riyan’s squire at Skybowl; Riyan often visited Sorin at Feruche; Sorin had helped with the design for Dragon’s Rest; Jahnavi had made a copy of the plans for Sionell. She knew what the finished palace would look like down to the last gravel pathway and fountain. Most of it she approved; some of it she would have altered for the sake of comfort, convenience, or charm. As if she had any right to say a single word about Dragon’s Rest, or share in it as anything more than a guest. She’d known that while riding down the valley to the Princes Hall, and the days that followed had made it even more painfully clear.
Well, so what, she thought, digging her bootheels into the soft, damp soil. Who needed him, anyway? She’d been surrounded by young men of wealth and position all during the Rialla, men eager to claim her attention and, if possible, her heart. Not to mention my dowry, she added cynically.
One thing was certain: Pol would never Choose a wife for her wealth. He needed more money the way dragons needed more teeth. Dragon’s Rest was ample proof—built, in fact, to impress within a hair of overawing.
Two buildings had been completed in time for the Rialla. The Guard Tower, five floors high and perfectly round, was constructed of pale silvery-gray stone, its roof of gray-blue Kierstian tiles. It would be matched on the other side of the Princes Hall by a similar tower for the masters of horses and hawks and vines and harvests, with all their assistants and gear. For now, the Masters Tower was only a circle of flagged stakes in the ground, making the whole place look lopsided.
The Princes Hall was a masterpiece of dazzling Fironese crystal windows and graceful proportions, round on the approach side and flat where it faced the water gardens. In time, two more buildings would face each other across the fountains, hollow and curving like halves of a Sunrunner’s ring. One was the iron-and-stone skeleton Pol had pointed out to his parents, and would become his private domain. The other was for servants, guests, reception chambers, and the machinery of Princemarch’s government. Of course the palace would be beautiful; it wouldn’t dare be anything else. It was Pol’s.
Sionell got to her feet, pacing restlessly toward the central fountain. The pool was quiet now. Water had blossomed there during the Lastday banqueting, but she supposed that since there was nobody left here to impress, Pol had ordered it stilled. That night, he’d called and extinguished Fire to racks of torches in sequence, constantly changing the direction of light thrown onto the water. It had been a spectacular show as seen from the dining chamber of the Princes Hall, culminating in his casual gesture that had illuminated hundreds of white candles around the pool at the same time all the torches went out. The glow had spread from candles outward to ignite the torches once more, until the whole of the water garden was ablaze in Sunrunner’s Fire.
And Pol had reveled in it. A season away from his twenty-first winter, he was taller than Rohan by a hand’s span, his hair a darker blond, his eyes green and then blue and then both as he smiled with a not-quite-innocent pleasure in his own skills. Wearing a shirt of Desert blue and a