All The Queen's Ladies [NaNoWriMo Project]

The Season of the Ladies. Prologue.

A palace on a river; aren't they all? But there are palaces and palaces: peacetime castles with turrets and towers and creeping flowers, sprawling gardens just about contained within walls that have stood for hundreds of years without advance or improvement, statues and pillars and pennants, music floating from the rafters of the various halls; and there are wartime castles, squatting ugly declarations of intent with arrow slits for windows, crossbows bristling from rooftops, no colour unless it is the red of blood or the occasional flash of a banner, no music but drums, hunkered close to the soil like a limpet to a rock. Blue waters flush with commerce, or brown and stirred with mud.

This is the former. A palace of peace; in fact, all other palaces of peace could have been copies of this one. The towers are taller, and numerous. They all have names, remembrances of kings and queens and treasurers and ladies long gone. The gardens are lush in the summer and sparkle with frost in the winter. The water runs deep and clear and true. The people are all beautiful - at least, none of them are ugly - and what troubles there are can be swiftly patched over within its very own walls. The city around it blooms, though it reeks when the heat is high and sometimes struggles when the snows fall. It is a peacetime castle, and it shines.

We are entering the Season of the Ladies. The fresh innocent sheen of spring has matured into a bold glitter. Pearls become sapphires. Emeralds droop from perfumed hair, pinned up in knots of honey gold, black, rosy brown, silver, chestnut, and set with nets so fine they only show when they catch the sun. The fashion this year is for lace; it creates the illusion of coverage. By the second week of blazing sun almost all the women of the court wears dresses cut low over the breasts, with panels of lace to effect the impression of modesty. The boldest of them slice through their side-seams and slide in thin sheer ribbons of it in their place, so you cannot be sure if you are seeing the skin underneath or just a clever substitute. The musk of roses and honeysuckle seeps through the palace corridors. The gardens are thick with it. It clings to everything, as if it will never go away, but a brush of wind will send wafts of it through the windows and into the noses of anybody passing. The women parade in flocks of flesh and colour, among the leaves and the statues and the fountains, whispering between themselves. Who knows what they talk about? When the sun dips, though, they break apart and disappear on their own errands. The shadows swallow them. You may be walking past a bust of an old queen and see a sparkle of gold from behind a tree, but when you pause to listen for the footsteps, it is a man's voice you hear. In the twilight the ladies moving around the halls have a spectral, unreal quality; wood and water nymphs of legends long gone, they will disappear in a swish of lace and silk if you look at them too directly, leaving behind only a faint giggle and a trail of scent. Follow it, and who knows where you may find yourself? It may not even be anywhere of this world.

Outside the palace, people talk. They say that if the walls were to come down and the inhabitants left to wander the streets with everybody else, you wouldn't be able to tell the noblewomen from the whores.

There are exceptions. There are always exceptions. Lady Pallina Thorngrove, one time mistress to the King Who Was, knows her days of beauty are over. She shrouds her shoulders in grey and lines her neck with muted silver and fragments of jet. It makes no difference. Women still give her a respectful space as she passes and the older, wiser men of the palace admire her figure from the corners of their eyes. The King Who Was thought well of her, and the gloss this adds to her reputation still has not tarnished, even twenty years later. If the girls snigger, she doesn't hear it. And outside the walls, she is forgotten.

The queen herself, as dignified as ever, remains cool in blue and green silks. As a concession to fashion she wears two teardrops of rubies in her ears, and sometimes a lace veil over her startling hair. She enjoys the spring more, but she still walks in the summer. She appears on balconies, drinking in the sweet smells from the climbing plants, or walks along the walls by the river, where the breeze stirs her skirts. With her are always a rainbow of ladies-in-waiting, young and vibrant and excitable, pleased to be able to share in some of her glow, to be seen with her, to revel in their position and wish their people back home could see them. Theirs is quite a station. The only one who seems insensible of this honour is Lady Branwen Clare.

Lady Clare, the last of the exceptions. As young as Queen Cerys and, if the court whispers are to be believed, almost as powerful. Her brother, whose ear she holds, is the Lord Commander, and her husband, Lord Clare, is the kingdom's most formidable warrior, and respected by all. She walks arm-in-arm with the queen, as a freckled vision wrapped in clothes the colour of a bruise, a silver band holding her unruly hair in check. She spots something below; points it out to the queen; the pair of them share an indulgent look and laugh. After a beat, the other ladies laugh too. The sound frightens the birds, which take flight, and echoes across the water. Somewhere, a young man with a turned-up nose smiles.

This is the Season of the Ladies, and the last before the war.