LITMIR.BIZ

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the chapped hands she would earn in the laundry poured like venom through the shreds of her dreams and ambition.

      ‘I’m going with Elaira,’ she announced, her outrage driven bone deep by a background of wealth and privilege.

      ‘Your name was not called,’ Senior Cadgia reminded.

      ‘I don’t care.’ Lirenda pitched her horse into a headshaking trot.

      Cadgia turned in the saddle, her round, kindly features transformed from asperity to disbelief. ‘Lirenda, that’s folly!’

      But the demoted enchantress shook off well-meant warning. Impulse had solidified into mulish resolve. She could not accept ruin in gutless defeat, falsely masked under virtuous acceptance. Lirenda jabbed spurs to her tired mount, determined to narrow the lead Elaira had opened ahead of her.

      The massive, carved gate arch loomed and then swallowed her, its dank shadow bleak as her mood. By the time the wan daylight found her again, more foraging gulls had taken wing from gleaning the fish-market midden. Their shadows flicked a street jammed by workaday masses, a teeming press of patched umbers and saffron, with no trace of Koriani purple.

      Elaira had passed beyond view. Set under the threat of the new Prime’s authority, she would move unseen through the crowd. Her wary, street urchin’s self-reliance reflexively grasped that anonymous cover for protection.

      Lirenda cursed for the inconvenience.

      Highscarp was riddled with twisting alleys where a lone woman on horseback might vanish. Its massive breakwater skirted the foothills, a labyrinthine fortress grafted into the headland where the northbound combers thrashed into a granite coastline. The battlements were eyries that buttressed the sky, and the ramped eastern wall bore the brunt of the gales, hoary with moss between the repairs from the macerating wear of riptides and equinox storm surge. Highscarp endured, though the sea often triumphed. In a bad year, the pilings of the galley wharves became skewed and tumbled like matchsticks. Slate roofs capped by hammered lead rimmed the land, an anvil against the percussive onslaught of rough weather.

      The cobbled streets Lirenda traversed smelled of fish-oil lamps, and raw turpentine, and the astringent fumes of the resin men boiled to make varnish. Here, the relentless siege of the sea was given brash challenge: backdrop to the thud of gray breakers, the dauntless clang of steel mauls, as skilled masons dressed blocks from the quarries. Nor was grace forgotten. From the striated mountains due west of the city came the opaline granite once used to lay floors in the palaces of the old high kings. Before them, the great centaurs had mined the veins of white quartz for the dolmens they chiseled with patterns to mark the lands held unspoiled for the mysteries. If the nurses’ tales whispered over cradles held true, the innermost halls of the citadel had been carved before First Age history, by drake packs laired in the ledged rock.

      Certainly the thoroughfares were narrow enough to suggest such ancient origins. At each crossroads and turn, Lirenda was balked by piled-up snow, street stalls swarming with commerce and stopped carts, and racing urchins playing a northcountry game with flat sticks and a stitched leather ball. By the time she clattered into the walled courtyard and dismounted before the Prime’s residence, a whistling boy groom had already led Elaira’s unsaddled horse to the water trough. Minutes slipped past while the animal was stabled. Lirenda slapped her slack reins in her gloved palm and fumed throughout the delay.

      The house the Prime chose for her quarters commanded the view before comfort. The gabled front wing hugged the rim of a bluff, the patterned terracotta tiles of the entry chilled under the shade of the watchkeep. Gusts off the bay snapped Lirenda’s thick mantle. Her tucked-up hair suffered, the frayed ends lashed into tangles. Regarded askance by the squint-eyed servant who shuffled to answer the door, she demanded to share the Prime’s audience on the impetus of aristocratic breeding.

      The servant gave back a draconian glower. Lirenda waited. Her imperious foot tapped. Cowed by her scathing arrogance, the servant sniffed and led off through the hush of a wainscoted hallway. Rich carpets were pooled with marigold light cast by oil lamps hung on brass chains. At home in an atmosphere tanged with the citrus of polished linenfold paneling, and admiring the beauty of claw-footed furnishings with vine-patterned ivory inlay, Lirenda surmised the new Prime had invoked some well-to-do merchant’s oath of debt.

      The massive, carved doors to the salon were not locked. Since the servant balked at tripping the latch, Lirenda was left the irrevocable choice of whether to proceed or turn back.

      She paused, overcome. The crushing weight of the moment stalled thought. To enter the Prime’s private sanctum, unasked, was to force her fate to a summary resolution. She could lose everything, sealing her plight to a lifetime of thankless servitude. The young woman now wielding Morriel’s authority was a frustrating, unknown quantity.

      Of all senior peers in the Koriani Order, Lirenda alone had been raised to eighth-rank training. Her knowledge would not let her gnawing doubt rest: the new Prime’s accession could never have taken the time-honored, legitimate steps. The vacuous chit who had stood as her rival never owned the deep strength, far less the arduous self-control to bear the accession to prime power. No measure of compromise existed behind that sand grain of irritable discrepancy: desperate, even dying, Morriel might have dared an unprecedented breach, casting aside untold thousands of years of uncompromised moral tradition.

      Either Lirenda lived out her days cowed by that flagrant rebuttal, or she dared confrontation here and now at the risk of her very survival.

      At the cusp, outrage drove her, and the wild-card threat, that Elaira’s frank testimony over Arithon’s escape might prove just as thoroughly damning. Lirenda seized her chance to wrest back her autonomy and brazenly opened the door.

      The panel swung into a dimly lit anteroom, curtained with tapestries in glowing Narms dyes. Dried lavender wafted delicate scent from elegant, cloisonné vases. The space appeared empty. Lirenda shed her mud-splashed mantle by the entry, startled by an unexpected movement in the corner as another travel-stained figure whirled to face the rustle of wool.

      ‘You!’ gasped Elaira. Tension sharpened her carriage. ‘Are you here to make certain I don’t say too much? Or shall we agree to be allies in adversity?’

      Lirenda draped her stained cloak on a chairback, her eyes the pale amber of poured whiskey. ‘Allies,’ she responded, begrudging acknowledgment that Arithon s’Ffalenn had spun a common thread between their disparate stations. ‘You don’t trust me, I see. To prove my sincerity, I’ll offer a warning. Throughout your audience, behave exactly as though you were examined by Morriel herself.’

      Elaira weighed this through a pregnant pause, her level brows hooked to perplexity. ‘Should such a threat frighten me?’ In her few past encounters, the deceased Prime Matriarch had treated her with fairness, and at times a grandmotherly sympathy.

      No chance remained to test Lirenda’s statement. The inner doors opened, and a liveried, blond page boy called out in formal summons.

      Elaira squared her shoulders. Her snagged plait an auburn flame down her back, she clasped the bronze buttons sewn for luck into the lining of her mantle, then strode resolute through the doorway. She did not glance behind as Lirenda ran roughshod over protocol and followed her.

      Gloom enfolded the hammer-beamed chamber beyond. The bow windows with their breathtaking view of the bay were curtained in night-colored velvet. Nicked to gold by the flame of beeswax candles, velvet upholstery and damascened silk braid glinted from corners and lover’s nooks. The furnishings were costly southern imports of Vhalzein lacquer and ebony. Carved tables and chairs wore graceful wreaths and the beardless faces of dryads. The carpets, with their twisted fringe borders, were the masterworks of skilled Morvain craftsmen. Glass and silver candlestands showed Paravian workmanship, eight centuries old, and exquisitely rare. Brought up to appreciate beautiful things, Lirenda curbed her wandering eyes and locked glances with the new Prime.

      Elaira had already curtseyed to the floor. Lirenda eschewed the same rite of obeisance, instead giving the seated Matriarch on the dais her insolent, tight-focused survey.

      Selidie

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