My Beloved Queen

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

xxvii. the queen and the ambassador

loyalist
// he has walked halls illuminated by an ancient sun and witnessed firsthand the terrible end of a once glorious age. the scenes rest still beneath the waters of his memory, faded with age, but still carefully intact.

————

The garden of the castle of Ceorid was an oddly pleasant, sunny place. Daylight rained down upon the plants and paths as eagerly and totally as it had the gardens of Alaimore, but as you settled upon a granite bench, the strange delight that began to buzz in the tips of your fingers was cold and somber.

A chill was gathering in the air, but it was natural and in being so, expected. Autumn would rise as it always did, even here, in the kingdom in the mountains, but its arrival did not sweep as readily over your heart as it should have. Autumn brought memories, now: the soft recollection of time spent with Didi, soaking in the warmth of a fire, or watching with Isil as the old willow slowly shed its flame-colored leaves.

Time passed so quickly. Did it not know that you were not yet ready for the end of summer? Had it no clue that you lived no longer in the embrace of Alaimore? No longer had you a sister with whom to split the warmth of a raging fire, nor an aging willow to gaze upon, to watch divest itself of its dying leaves.

It had not yet been even a week since the wedding. Surely, time could afford you some pause, some chance to settle, to breathe.

Yet, the air grew cold in spite of you, and it ran the tips of its thinning fingers over the flesh of your arms, stealing from you your warmth and the strange, melancholy delight the garden of Ceorid had spurred into being. Now would have been the time that the old willow's leaves would have begun to turn yellow, and in the coming days, the augurs would have taken the first to fall and offered their crumbling bodies to Mitemis and Edite.

The ceremony was never all that grand: the leaves would be first burned, and their ashes mixed with dye and water and used to paint the faces of the young acolytes, and then the augurs would ask that Mitemis convince Odemis to allay the worst of the winter storms. A simple and quiet sacrifice, and yet, somehow, fascinating still. The reverence in the air; the quiet hush of an autumn morning where the sky was still graying and the chill in the air was only teething.

The memory was so faded, so tattered and gray and ruined, but for a moment, you thought you felt its fingers press gently at the base of your skull. The ghost of a breath curling over the shell of your ear, passing you by in the beat of a heart, but if you closed your eyes, you might grab it and again smell the smoke of the burning leaves and spy the tongues of curling flames rising to lap at the air. You could watch the augurs color the ash and mix it with crystalline water, and then, if you were lucky, your face would once more be painted, and you would process in the ranks of the acolytes and join them in a romp about the willow tree.

They would laugh with you, and you would clutch their hands and sing songs and hymns and rejoice for the passage of time—the bountiful wonder of the coming harvest—but the warmth of their skin suddenly faded, and the memory disappeared beneath the surface of an ocean as vast and eternal as the sky.

There were no acolytes in Ceorid's castle. The young were augurs, and their elders were rotting beneath the earth.

So many dead. How? Why?

Why?

Had no one ever cared to ask? Had no one ever dared wonder why an augur had become the victim of a warrior's blade?