Shadow Hand (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #6)(3)
When he spoke up now—fulfilling the role of uninitiated newcomers everywhere by putting his foot in his mouth—the others fixed him with stares of contempt.
“Not all bad?” said Graybeak. “Where were you those five years when he left us, run away to safety while we remained imprisoned? And where were you when, on the very week of his nuptials, he brought a dragon into the Eldest’s City—”
“Don’t be speaking of that!” said Stoneblossom with sudden severity. For when Graybeak spoke, all eyes had filled with haunted memories: memories of a cold winter’s day. Of smoke. And fire.
“Don’t be speaking of that,” Stoneblossom repeated. “Don’t go calling bad luck down upon this day by mentioning such things. The devil-girl was banished, the prince sent packing without his crown. It’s a new day for Southlands.”
“Aye,” said her husband, taking a deep draught of his cider. “Aye, a new day, a new crown prince, and very soon a new princess.”
“Here’s to the princess!” cried Tippertail with determined jollity, and the others took up his cry and clashed their mugs with such enthusiasm that hands and faces were soon sticky with cider. “Here’s to the princess!”
They raised their mugs again. But one little boy, a second cousin of Stoneblossom’s recently come to South Stretch, missed connecting his mug to Tippertail’s when something else attracted his eye, nearly causing Tippertail to lose the whole foamy contents of his mug down the front of the boy’s shirt. But the boy scarcely noticed, for he was busy pointing and saying, “Ain’t that the princess?”
Stoneblossom turned a stern eye upon the lad, prepared to scold him for a fool. But she took a moment to glance the way he pointed. “Iubdan’s beard!” she gasped and nearly dropped the plate of crumb cake she’d been passing round. “Look you over there!”
The groundskeepers turned to look beyond their little world of celebration out to the broader grounds in which they earned their bread each day. The Eldest’s parklands were not what they’d been before the Occupation. Elegant hedgerows and shaded avenues, long rolling swards of green—all now had given way to scorched craters and ruin. Trees stood like great, burnt matches, and the ground reeked of poison.
Dragon poison.
Once a dragon set upon a kingdom, its poisons remained in the soil for generations to come. It mattered not if the dragon flew away again, never more to be seen.
There was only so much the groundskeepers could do to restore order, much less splendor. But they were true if unsung heroes, doing battle every day to reclaim their king’s domain, far out of sight of the lords and ladies they served, lords and ladies they never saw.
So it was that, one by one, the groundskeepers muttered and swore as they watched none other than the prince’s bride, running alone down a broken path not far from their grove.
“It cain’t be her,” said Graybeak with dubious authority. “She’s gettin’ married.”
“Who else is it, then?” his wife demanded, and he had no answer. For who else could it be? Who else in the Eldest’s court boasted such a crown of curly ginger hair piled and pinned with fantastic elegance atop her head? Who else could wear a silken gown of silver and white, with billowing skirts and billowing sleeves; indeed, with so much billowing one half expected her to take flight? Who else could wear a coronet set with pearls and opals, a coronet that she even now—as the groundskeepers watched aghast—tore from her head and cast aside?
It was she, the prince’s bride-to-be. It was the Lady Daylily.
And she was running, skirts gathered, as though for her life.
“Should we go after her?” whispered Tippertail.
“And what?” Stoneblossom replied. “Drag her back, kicking and screaming? She’s a lady, she is, far beyond the likes of us. Let her run where she wills.”
No one spoke the thought that nevertheless flitted within their staring eyes: There would be no wedding today.
“More crumb cake?” Stoneblossom suggested.
There are few things more useless than a bridegroom on his wedding day. He goes where he is told, wears what he is told, sits where he is told, stands where he is told; and between these events he waits in stasis, praying to anyone who might be listening that he won’t faint or stutter or otherwise make a clown of himself on this Day of Days. However necessary he is to the due process of things, at least temporarily, he is otherwise merely another warm body to be hustled around.
But he might at least look smashing while he is about it.
Prince Foxbrush, his mouth compressed into a tight knot, straightened the already straight fibula on his shoulder and admired himself. He was not a man to make the ladies sigh, certainly not by classical princely standards, being of rather narrow frame with a tendency both to squint and to stoop. He flattered himself, however, on having a decent turnout in red velvet and blue silk, the official colors of the crown prince, everything cut to the latest trends in Continental fashion, complete with a bejeweled collar and a crisp white cravat.
His man stood behind him at the mirror, brushing invisible nothings from his shoulders. “What do you think, Tortoiseshell?” the prince asked, turning his head to inspect his reflection from a new angle.
“A dashing figure, Your Highness,” said Tortoiseshell, who knew how his bread was buttered. “Quite striking. And may I congratulate Your Highness on the bold choice of wearing the princely colors rather than the traditional ceremonial white?”