is glance precisely as bleak as it always was. It was a look that had bothered Dianora when first she came. She'd thought d'Eymon had taken a dislike to her, or, worse, that he somehow suspected her. It wasn't long before she realized that he disliked and suspected virtually every person who entered this palace. Everyone received the same glacial, appraising scrutiny. It had been exactly so, she gathered, in Ygrath as well. D'Eymon's loyalty to Brandin was fanatical and unwavering, and so was his zeal in protecting his King.
Over the years Dianora had developed a respect, grudging at first, and then less so, for the grim Ygrathen. She counted it as one of her own triumphs that he seemed to trust her now. For years now, in fact, or she would never have been allowed to spend a night in Brandin's bed while he slept.
A triumph of deception, she thought, with an irony whose teeth were all directed inward against herself.
D'Eymon made an economical circling motion with his head and then repeated the gesture for Solores. It was what they had expected: they were to mingle and converse. Neither 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 honors were conferred or judgment 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.◥本◥作◥品◥由◥◥網◥友◥整◥理◥上◥傳◥
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 favor 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 yea