The Time Of The Dark - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,78

corners of the room, came forward now, and her manner softened imperceptibly. "Yes, my lady?"

"Could you go up to the box room and see if you can locate another trunk? A small one?"

The woman bobbed a curtsy. "Yes, my lady." Her heavy tread with its clicking heels diminished down the dark hall. Rudy thought to himself, Score one for Gil and ancient lit.

Alde smiled at him across the gemmed fire-glint of the gilded bindings. "She doesn't approve of you. Or of anybody, really, who isn't sufficiently impressed by my being Queen. She was my nurse when I was small and she puts a lot of store in being the Queen's Nurse. She isn't like that when we're alone. Don't let her worry you."

Rudy grinned back at her. "I know. The first time I saw the two of you together, I thought you were some kind of junior servant, the way she bossed you around."

The fine, dark eyebrows raised, and there was a teasing light in her eyes. "If you'd known I was the Queen of Darwath, would you have spoken to me?"

"Sure. Well, I mean-" Rudy hesitated, wondering. "Uh-I don't know. If somebody had said, 'Look, that's the Queen,' maybe I wouldn't even have seen you, wouldn't really have looked at you." He shrugged. "We don't have kings and queens where I come from."

"Truly?" She frowned, puzzled at the incomprehensible thought. "Who rules you, then? Whom can your people love and honor? And who will love and guard the honor of your people?"

To Rudy, this question was equally incomprehensible, and since his major area of success in school had been evasion of classes, he had only a sketchy notion of how the United States Government worked. But he gave her his perceptions of it, perhaps more informative than political theory, and Alde listened gravely, her arms wrapped around her drawn-up knees. Finally she said, "I don't think I could stand it. Not because I'm Queen-but it all sounds so impersonal. And I'm not really a Queen anymore."

She leaned her back against the carved post of the bed frame, her head close by his knee. Profiled against the amber glow of the fire, her face seemed very young, though worn and fragile and tired. "Oh-they honor me, they bow to me. It's all in my name. And Tir's. But-it's all gone. There's nothing of it left." Her voice was small and tight suddenly, as if struggling to be calm against some suppressed emotion. He saw the quick shine of tears in her violet eyes.

"And it all happened so suddenly. It's not the honor, Rudy, not having servants who wait on me. It's the people. I don't care about having to pack my own things, when all my life servants have done it for me. But those servants, the household at the Palace-they'd been around me for years. Some of them were from our House, from when I was a girl; they'd been with me since I was born. People like the Guards who stood outside my bedroom door-I didn't know them well, but they were like part of my life, a part I never really thought about. And they're all dead now."

Her voice flinched from it, then steadied. "You know, there was one old dooic slave who scrubbed the floors in the hall at the Palace. Probably he'd done so for his whole life, and he must have been twenty years old, which is very old for them. He knew me. He'd grunt and sort of smile at me when I went past. In the last battle in the Throne Hall at Gae, he grabbed up a torch and went with it against the Dark Ones, swinging it like the men swinging their swords. I saw him die. I saw so many people I knew die." One tear slid down the curve of her cheek, those lobelia-dark eyes turning to meet his, seeking in them some comfort, some bulwark against the fear and grief she'd locked in.

"It wasn't being Queen or not being Queen," she went on, wiping at her cheek with fingers that shook. "It's the whole life, everything. Tir is all I have left. And in the last fight, I left him, too. We locked him in a little room behind the throne, my maid and I. They needed every sword in the hall, though neither of us had ever handled one before. It was like a nightmare, some-some insane dream, all fire and darkness, I think I must