Epilogue

470 H.E.

The Grey Palace, Rajmuat

She will have no mourning colors. Not even in the twilight of her reign, not even with the shadow of doom looming over her. Not for Queen Dovasary or those of her court who still linger with her the blacks and the greys, or even the purples signifying a dignified, majestic passage from the world of the living. It stands not well on her, the greybeards and the dowagers agree, 'tis a blight upon the Gods' faces, a liberty that they might be slow to pardon. Dovasary, blazing, even beautiful, in her defiance, laughs when she hears. "The Black God yields not those in his realm to his brothers," she says. "Men and gods, they are all the same - brothers hate to share."

And then, locking herself in her chamber, she calls for wine. The rebel army's ships shift and shimmer in the mages' scrying bowls - soon, spying glasses and not scrying bowls will be needed to see them, for they are so close to Rajmuat. "By the week's end, they will be swarming the gates of the Grey Palace, Your Majesty," her councillors tell her.

She sits in the high and august throne she had ascended, six short years before. The swirling reds and golds of her many-hued mantle blaze in the sunlight, while the ropes of rubies and onyx arrayed about her hair, her neck, her fingers glitter. "Why by the week's end?" she murmurs, tracing the pattern of the winged stallion on a copper ring. It is her signet ring, a symbol of who she is and the royal - nay sacred - blood that she bears. "They will be here by the morrow." She slips off her ring and gazes at it for a moment, almost tenderly. Almost for it has been many a day since she has known tenderness. Winnamine is dead. She rises and with her, her councillors rise as one. Still toying with the ring, she places it on the table before her.

"My Lady?" It is the seniormost of the greybeards, a tottering fool, late in his dotage, with hair quite silver. His eyes are wide with astonishment. "My Lady, I beg you to reconsider, this is beyond all manner of protocol..." Dove looks at him with pity - poor old man, what shall become of him? The rebels... why would the likes of them be acquainted with mercy? How indeed could they be expected to know?

"It is for him," she says, cutting sharply through the earl's speech, and they know what she means. She claps her hands. "Gentlemen, my regards. Tonight this palace of many revels shall know one like no other. When Barzun rose in flames, her king toyed with his roses. I have never had more than a passing interest in flowers, but I have made up my mind." They did not ask her what she had made up her mind up. "Count Tomang," she says sharply. Indomitable Lady Genore's son bows to her. "You shall host tonight's banquet and the subsequent entertainments, in my absence."

She sweeps out of the Council Chamber, for the last time. "Your Majesty?" it is Ferdy's soft voice, as tender as it used to be in days of yore when he would make love to her sister in the Balitang mansion.

She turns, just at the door. A stray sunbeam catches at her gauze veil and glints off the copper sunlets she wears and suddenly blazes into a aureole of sunlight around her face. Kyprioth's doing, she thinks, with a knowing smile. Vain to the end aren't you, you old Trickster? "Yes, My Lord?" she asks.

As one, the councillors, from handsome, young, battle-scarred Ferdy to the petted greybeards who'd seen Oron as a child, bow to her. Dove's breath catches in her throat and for a moment she cannot speak. Ferdy fancies he sees a tear glimmering in her eye. It is just a fancy, though. Dovasary Balitang is past mistress of her emotions. "I thank you," she finally whispers. Then she slips out of the door.

"In a dark time, the eye begins to see..."

There is a new song doing the rounds in court, appropriate, some think, to the general melancholy. Dove is not one of them. Still, locked up in her chamber, having talked to her last visitor - Taybur - there is nothing she can do about it. She is done with the world of the living and she considers herself, in the last moments of her life, dead for all practical purposes. She is dressed like a young girl on the day of her betrothal and not as a queen. She is tired of being a queen. No, she prefers the role of a young virgin.

"I meet my shadow in the deepening shade..."

She rests her chin on her palm and thinks about how they will write about her. For they will write about her, truly the last daughter of the great Haiming dynasty. A footnote in history but her story, she knows, will fire people's imaginations for countless generations. So young, so very young, and beautiful - she isn't beautiful, it's all cosmetics, but they will think her beautiful because of her mother and Sarai -, the Virgin Queen... well she isn't.

"Afaf..."

Clad in a sheet and nothing else, her hair tumbling down her bare shoulders, the dark circles under her eyes plainly visible she is still mistress of the situation. And he, as always, is the servant. He inclines his head lazily in her direction as she slips behind a delicately-carved golden screen. "Your Majesty?" he asks. "Or is it Dovasary now?"

She doesn't reply, but he hears her putting on her clothes. "Do you want my help?" he teases.

"No, thank you, I'll be quite fine," she says. There's a rigidity about her voice that surprises him, but then dismisses it. Some feminine shilly-shallying about losing her virginity... well it was high time for her. She'd be a wrinkled gooseberry before long and if she waited for one of her fine lords to bed her... well then she'd be a girl, not a woman, for a very long time.

She slips out of the screen, dressed in a white robe that flutters about her thin, small frame. Around one slim ankle a heavy copper anklet, patterned in gold with a kudarung, clings. White and copper - the imperial colors of the Copper Isles. The significance of it does not strike him at once. She looks steadily at him for a moment and opens her mouth before closing it abruptly. "Thank you, Afaf," she says finally. "I did not want to die a virgin. And I thought you'd think it a pity if you died before bedding me." Nodding at him, she vanishes.

She'd stood at the door, not able to move, as the royal guards had rushed in and well... killed him. A queen could not - should not - abide traitors. It was only when the chief guardsmen had come out, his sword tinged with warm blood, and bowed to her, signifying that the deed was done, that she'd fled. She'd flung herself on her bed, with the sheets drawn about her face - her body had still smelt like him, then - and cried and cried like a child.

"What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!"

"Kyprioth, my dear, where are you?" she asks softly, just as Aly used to. She wonders where Aly and Nawat and the triplets are... they'd fled at the opportune moment. Aly was not one to to get herself stuck in a Gotterdammerung, particularly not when her children were involved. The only answer she gets is the whistling wind. "You won't come, will you?" She throws up her arms, and the soft, petal-pink sleeves roll down. "This is what I get for putting my faith in a god! It would have been better for me to be a country noblewoman under Imajane's reign, to fawn and scheme and bend and bow. I would have been happy. Elsren and Dunevon might have been allowed to live if you hadn't whispered in Rubinyan's ears - yes I know you did! But no I thought I knew what was good and noble and I chose the path of righteousness and look what I got for my pains."

She thought he would answer, but she'd miscalculated. He was a god and how could a mere mortal ruffle his spirits or tempt him out of the dark grotto he'd chosen to secret himself in?

"I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall."

It is a terrible, terrible ballad the minstrels strummed their lyres to. If she were still queen - but no, she isn't, she's as good as dead now, for all practical purposes. Best not to dwell on foolish fancies which might tempt her to hope that... that, what? The rebel ships were at the dock of Rajmuat, she could almost sense it. There was no hope left and she would not nurture it.

"That place among the rocks-is it a cave,
Or winding path?"

She closes her eyes and breaks the seal of the ring. There is a colorless pellet of poison within it - instantaneous death, the apothecary had assured her, with tears in his kind eyes. She puts it in her wine-glass and stirs it absently. The red wine clouds over for a moment and then it is clear again. She is standing on her private balcony and decides that it will not be fit for her to be found here. A queen should die with dignity, even if she has nothing else. She looks at the stars one last time, lingering over the familiar constellations. The Cat, the Wine-bowl, the Fawn, the Goddess - the Goddess, who has been her ill omen...

She sits down on her favorite armchair and draws up the footstool. It is a curiously carved affair, wrought of ivory, Ferdy's gift on her seventeenth birthday... The rebels will swarm the city by morn and by nightfall they will be in the Grey Palace doing what they do best - plundering and pillaging, burning and slaying, gorging and ravishing. They will break open the door to her chambers and they will find her, cold - perhaps rotting already. She arranges her hair so it falls gracefully over her shoulders, clad in petal-pink brocade. In the candlelight, her pearls shimmer. Perhaps they will defile her body - savages, the lot of them. Perhaps they will do the proper thing and have her buried in state. Or perhaps they'll throw her corpse away with the other corpses, flung in a common, hastily dug, anonymous grave.

She does not care anymore. Tilting her head back, she drinks the fiery wine in one gulp. She gives one last shudder and her head knocks against the back of her armchair. Her fingers writhe for a moment and then they lie, still, on the armrests.

"Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire."

Below, the nobles applaud and the minstrels bow, having finished the song. Above, the wineglass slips from her grasp and falls to the floor.

The next day, when Ichenon Sonaraiju, already called the Lion Hearted, storms into the palace, with his army at his heels, he finds the late queen's signet ring waiting for him. He flings it to the floor. "There," he roars, his voice ringing in the great chamber as the crowd falls silent, "will be no kings hereafter!" And that night, the Grey Palace truly knows a revel like none other.

000

482 H.E.

The Royal Palace, Corus

Liankokami of Conte, Crown (and only) Princess of Tortall, gazes at the woodcut illustration of Queen Dovasary thoughtfully. "Master Volney Rain made a portrait of her, in her last moments, didn't he, mother?" she asks thoughtfully. "Is it in the gallery here?"

"No, it was privately acquired by an anonymous family. Not currently in residence in Tortall, I believe. There was a great deal of interest in that particular piece at the time - some called it Rain's masterpiece." Queen Shinkokami looks up from the flowers she's been arranging and smiles at her daughter. "Why so interested in her?" Her fingers toy with the stem of a lily but she says cautiously, "It is not well, Lia, to dwell on things that are long past."

"But she's not long past!" Lia protests.

Shinko ignores her. "Her dynasty and all that she stood for, is long past. For all practical purposes. Why the sudden interest in her?"

Lia says nothing but Shinko is shrewd enough to understand. "Dovasary Balitang did not fall because the gods had turned their faces from her, nor because she was a woman. For the first, why look at your grandfather - where there ever odds as high, times as inauspicious, as were stacked against King Jonathan when he ascended the throne? For the second, look at Queen Anj'la of Maren. Look - I fear you will have to do more than look for there's a great deal about her that you must study in your lessons - and learn."

Lia bites her lip thoughtfully. "Then...?"

"Then why?" Shinkokami looks at her. "She was a bad queen, quite simply. Unfitted to rule. Nothing wrong with her blood or her gods."

"Oh?" Lia looks shell-shocked, the simplicity of the idea causing her to gape.

"Close your mouth, it looks most unbecoming," Shinko tells her daughter absently. Then she smiles. "Yes, dear. Oh."

"Oh," Lia says, grinning. Humming a popular new tune under her breath, she turns once again to her history book and flips the page. There is a new chapter to be learned today.

A/N: And that puts an end to that.