The Lioness

Again the king stirred. Kerian wondered whether he stirred in pleasant dream or in nightmare. With the latter, she had some familiarity. He was a haunted one, her lover. Outside, in corridors, voices ghosted by, whispering the day awake. Kerian turned from the king to continue dressing, crossing the room to the mirror, a long sheen of glass framed in scrolled silver. As she lifted her hair, she heard the king wake.

“Good morning,” she said, smiling at Gilthas in the mirror as he sat up. He was a little taller than most elves, for he had a human grandfather, it was whispered, a man whose name no one knew. It was said that Tanis Half-Elven, the king’s father, was a child of rape.

Gilthas gestured, one small motion of his hand, and Kerian turned, holding her hair ready to braid.

“Let me do that,” said the king of the Qualinesti elves.

“Gil, no. I have to go. If I’m missed from my quarters—”

He gestured almost imperiously. His voice, though, was a lover’s and so did not command. “Don’t worry about Rashas. He’s going to be hours dressing for the procession today. He won’t miss one servant among all those in his hall.”

So much was true. It took a king less time to prepare himself for the procession that traditionally welcomed the season of Autumn Harvest than this one proud senator. Rashas likely would not miss Kerian, a servant of the humblest station.

Kerian went to the king, holding back her hair as she sat on the end of the bed. He took the shining weight of it from her and combed it out with his fingers, separating it into three thick strands to braid. He worked gently, in silence, and bound up his work with a ribbon of rose-colored grosgrain. Finished, he gave the braid a gentle, playful tug. She turned, laughing, and he put his two hands on her shoulders, tenderly tracing the line of her collarbone with his thumbs. His forefinger outlined the tattoo on her neck, the twining vines winding round and round and down. That touch, the warming light in his eyes, she knew what these meant.

“No, Gil.” She lifted his hands. “I have to go.”

He knew it. She would go in secret, threading passages few but the king himself knew about. He had designed his residence, his forest palace built not in or of a grove of tall oaks, but as part of that grove, a many-chambered mansion that did not require the felling of ancient oaks but demanded that rooms and stairways, atria and sudden secret gardens, be built in such a way as to let the grove of trees guide the shaping. Because this royal residence had been dismissed as a moody boy-king’s amusement, few had paid attention to the planning or the building. Few knew that, here and there, secret passages lay behind seemingly innocent walls, narrow ways to take a traveler hastily from certain chambers out into an innocent garden. One of these passages lay behind the eastern wall of the king’s own bedchamber.

Reluctantly, Gilthas agreed. “You must go, for Rashas must never know about us.” As one reciting a lesson, he spoke with a thread of sulky bitterness in his tone.

Not Rashas or another person more than those who already did. Their secret was shared only by the Queen Mother, Gil’s trusted servant Planchet, and Kerian’s dearest friend in her master’s hall, Zoe Greenbriar. That secret had been kept for thirty years, for political reasons, and it was for political reasons that, later today, the king would be obliged to attend a dreary Senate meeting.

Gilthas would attend the meeting of the Thalas-Enthia, ostensibly because Senator Rashas insisted that he do so. To Rashas, indeed to nearly everyone, Gilthas seemed a weak, vacillating youth who could not determine which color hose looked well with what tunic and so could be counted on not to interfere with any serious work the senate had before it.

“The lad—ah, the king—the king is a youth and he is learning,” Rashas insisted to his fellow senators, the ladies and lords of the Thalas-Enthia. He insisted, but with seeming gentleness. “You see that our young lord is already showing wisdom in this terrible time, when the half of Krynn lives under the talons of dragons. He is showing the wisdom to wait, learn, and watch while older, wiser heads govern.” Carefully, the senator would withhold his smile and maintain gravity. “We are blessed in our king.”