The Dragon Star (Realms of Shadow and Grace: Episodes 1-3 of 7)

THE THRONE - RHOG-KAN

Maybe the light drew him to her in that moment. Maybe the visage of her sitting there pulled the words from his mouth. For whatever reason, he asked her if she knew of any books detailing long wars in the old dominions. She had looked up from her book, startled to find someone standing there. She appeared surprised that anyone might speak to her. Her reply began tentatively at first, as though she were unaccustomed to the sound of her own voice, but as she proceeded to answer his further questions, they sparked a flame within her. He could see it in her eyes. She spoke at length of various volumes littering the library shelves, of wars and tigans, of defeats and triumphs. Rhog-Kan stood stunned before her erudition and breadth of learning. He had never known her to speak more than two words aloud in the presence of others. Although she gave no outward evidence of such a condition, he had often considered her addle-minded. This torrent of reasoned verbosity revealed a sharpness of intellect he had rarely encountered.

In retrospect, Rhog-Kan realized, he might have fallen in love with her in that very first moment. Certainly, she stirred an interest in him he thought dead if not long dormant. The passing of his wife to the Pure Lands so many years ago left him with a wariness of heart. Love, once gifted, could be ripped away by fate and the often cruel hand of Ni-Kam-Djen. Such sorrow led men to act in error, and while the mistakes of a common man in grief might cause no harm, a leader of men in battle could not afford to endanger their lives with an unbalanced heart. He had not appreciated, or had forgotten in the long years of emotional solitude, that love could also lead one to actions far more irrational and unbalancing than mournfulness.

"As this man before us completes the transformation from mere tahn to zhan, from one of many to one alone, we recite the names of those self-same singular men who preceded him since the dawn of the first dominion." The high priest opened a large, black, leather-clad book and began to read a seemingly endless list of names.

The coronation of a zhan took even longer than a royal wedding. Rhog-Kan shifted where he stood, ignoring the ache in his aging knees. The reading of the names, if he remembered correctly from the coronation of Tin-Tsu's brother, would take nearly half an hour. There were not so many zhans with long names or titles, but the great dominions, and especially the Third Great Dominion, had often been racked with regicide and battles between the tahns for power. Some zhans fulfilled their duty for only a few months, and in one case, for less than a day. Rhog-Kan considered it a perverted blessing that the dissolution of the Third Great Dominion of the Iron Realm had left at least one stable dominion to rise from its corpse. The Daeshen Dominion never suffered the internecine fights that plagued the Tanshen Dominion, or the series of rebellions that befell the Atheton Dominion.

Rhog-Kan looked again to Dju-Tesha and found the thoughts of politics and war and succession fading from his mind. She turned to look at him, caught his eye, smiled ever so slightly, then turned back to watch her brother as she listened to the list of names droning from the high priest's lips.

"Yaol Hindo-Shan, Glorious Upholder, Keeper of the Seventh Flame of the Long Night. Kinish Jilado, Magnificent Maintainer, Hunter Beyond the High Mountains and Bringer of the White Heavens. Hu-Wan-Zi..."

A part of Rhog-Kan's mind noted the Juparti name among the list of zhans and pondered how many years had passed since a heathen filled the great seat of governance. The rest of his attention rested with Dju-Tesha. How had she come to hold such sway over his heart and thoughts? How had she come to draw his desires so powerfully? Even now, two dozen paces separating them, he felt the physical connection to her body, how his flesh longed to touch hers, how his arms ached to embrace her.

He had chastised himself for the indiscretion and blasphemousness of their first pairing that late night among the red-and-black patterned cushions of the private reading room in the palace library. To bed the sister of the zhan, to claim her long-held virginity beyond the boundaries of marriage — these sacrileges demanded holy justice. He had sworn himself never to allow such an occurrence to repeat and had condemned himself for his weakness. He had declaimed his devotion to his god and made countless prayers in penitence.