Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

of them was to take the chair set beside the Island Throne. They did sometimes—and so had the beautiful, unlamented Chloese before her surprising, untimely death—but Brandin was quite punctilious when guests from Ygrath were among them. At such times the seat beside him stood pointedly empty. For Dorotea, his Queen.

Brandin had not yet entered the room of course, but Dianora saw Rhun, the slack-limbed balding Fool, shamble towards one of the servers carrying wine. Rhun, clumsy, grievously retarded, was clad sumptuously in gold and white, and so Dianora knew that Brandin would be as well. It was an integral part of the complex relationship of the Sorcerer Kings of Ygrath and their chosen Fools.

For centuries in Ygrath the Fool had served as shadow and projection for the King. He was dressed like his monarch, ate next to him at public functions, was there when honours were conferred or judgement passed. And every King’s chosen Fool was someone visibly, sometimes painfully afflicted or malformed. Rhun’s walk was sluggish, his features twisted and deformed, his hands dangled at awkward angles in repose, his speech was badly slurred. He recognized people in the court, but not invariably, and not always in the manner one might expect—which sometimes carried a message. A message from the King.

That part, Dianora didn’t entirely comprehend, and doubted she ever would. She knew that Rhun’s dim, limited mind was mostly under his own control but she also knew that that was not completely so. There was sorcery at work in this: the subtle magic of Ygrath.

This much she understood: that in addition to serving—very graphically—to remind their King of his mortality and his own limitations, the Fools of Ygrath, dressed exactly like their lord, could sometimes also serve as a voice, an external conduit, for the thoughts and emotions of the King.

Which meant that one could not always be sure whether Rhun’s words and actions—slurred or awkward as they might be—were his own, or an important revelation of Brandin’s mood. And that could be treacherous ground for the unwary.

Right now Rhun seemed smiling and content, bobbing and bowing jerkily at every second person he encountered, his golden cap slipping off every time. He would laugh though, as he bent to pick it up and set it again on his thinning hair. Every so often an overanxious courtier, seeking to curry favour in any way he could, would hastily stoop to pick up the fallen cap and present it to the Fool. Rhun would laugh at that too.

Dianora had to admit that he made her uneasy, though she tried to hide that beneath the real pity she felt for his afflictions and his increasingly evident years. But the core truth for her was that Rhun was intimately tied to Brandin’s magic, he was an extension of it, a tool, and Brandin’s magic was the source of all her loss and fear. And her guilt.

So over the years she had become adroit at avoiding situations where she might find herself alone with the Fool; his guileless eyes—unnervingly similar to Brandin’s—gave her genuine trouble. They seemed, if she looked into them for too long, to have no depth, to be only a surface, reflecting her image back to her in a fashion very different from that of the gold-plated mirrors, and at such times she did not like what she was made to see.

From the doorway, with the polished grace of long experience, Solores drifted to her right as Dianora moved left, smiling at people she knew. Nesaia and Chylmoene, chestnut- and amber-tressed, crossed the floor together, creating a palpable stir where they passed.

Dianora saw the poet Doarde standing with his wife and daughter. The girl, about seventeen, was obviously excited. Her first formal reception, Dianora guessed. Doarde smiled unctuously across the room at her, and bowed elaborately. Even at a distance, though, she could read the discomfiture in his eyes: a reception on this scale for a musician from Ygrath had to be bitter gall for the most senior poet in the colony. All winter he had preened with pride over his verses that Brandin had sent east as a goad for the Barbadian when word had come in the fall of the death of Sandre d’Astibar. Doarde had been insufferable for months. Today though, Dianora could sympathize with him a little, even though he was a monumental fraud in her view.

She’d told Brandin as much once, only to learn that he found the poet’s pompousness amusing. For genuine art, he’d murmured, he looked elsewhere.

And you destroyed it, she’d wanted to say.

Wanted so much to say. Remembering with an almost physical pain the broken head and sundered torso of her father’s last Adaon on the steps of the Palace by the Sea. The one for which her brother, finally old enough, had served as model for the young god. She remembered looking dry-eyed at the wreckage of that sculpted form, wanting to weep and not knowing where her tears were any more.

She glanced back at Doarde’s daughter, at her young, scarcely contained exhilaration. Seventeen.

Just after her own seventeenth naming day she had stolen half of the silver from her father’s hidden strong-box, begging pardon of his spirit and her mother’s blessing in her heart, and asking the compassion of Eanna who saw all beneath the shining of her lights.

She’d gone without saying good-bye, though she had looked in a last time by carried candlelight, upon the thin, worn figure of her mother, uneasily asleep in the wideness of her bed. Dianora was hardened, as for battle; she did not weep.

Four days later she’d crossed the border into Certando, having forded the river at a lonely place north of Avalle. She’d had to be careful getting there—Ygrathen soldiers were still ranging the countryside and in Avalle itself they were hammering at the towers, bringing them down. Some yet stood, she could see them from her crossing-place, but most were rubble by then, and what she saw of Avalle was through a