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“Eat.”
“I am not hungry.”
Xor looked across the table at his beautiful betrothed. “You will eat,” he ordered her. “If not because you are hungry, then because I am hungry. For a plump and pretty queen.”
Vana toyed her fork against a slice of jellied peach upon her plate. It was rigid in its syrupy, mawkish preserve. The fruits of Zoll Zora were few and unripe, and these confections were a sad attempt to sweeten and to hide that sorry fact.
She speared the thick slice with the tines of her fork, then raised her dark eyes toward her king. Her voice was dim and lowered, hardly glad with the glad tidings that it bore. “Or for a plump and pretty prince?”
The king’s own dark eyes fixed on her, his full mouth paused mid-chew. He swallowed the half-processed lump of tough meat on his tongue. “You are with child?”
Vana smiled, weakly, almost imperceptibly, in loath assent.
“And even before we are wed!” Xor remarked, his own smile wide and gladsome, then darkening into a bit of a smirk. “You are more of a whore than I thought.”
She was, she silently agreed. But she was not ashamed of it.
“In any event, my sweet, sweet queen-to-be,” the king continued, rising from his seat and crossing over to the other end of the table, where his future bride sat wordless and demure, “I do believe that that deserves a kiss.”
He took her face in both his hands and stared her down a moment. He then lowered his hands to her waist and bent to lay his cheek against her belly. She leant back slightly to accommodate his head between her midriff and the table, out of habit of obedience, and for fear for what he might do to her newly gravid body if she failed now to obey.
“Let us hope,” Xor uttered as he caressed the unborn child through its mother’s silken dress, “that this queenly womb carries a prince.”
Vana lowered her eyes to the unsightly sight, of the king whose face, whose hopes, she wanted nowhere near her child. “Let us hope,” she softly echoed.
Xor pressed his lips against her belly in a cold and bloodless kiss. When he raised his head and stood straight up again, his would-be fatherly smile had transformed into a grimace.
“You smell of my brother,” he complained.
“Xor!” she half-laughed in a trembling voice. “You know that Borghos is away, fighting one of your many wars for you. He’s been away for moons now.”
“All the same,” he persisted as he moved to return to his side of the table, “you smell of him.”
Ere he had retaken his seat, a firm knock rapped against the oaken door.
The king turned his head toward the familiar sound. “Yes, Olbe?”
Olbe opened the door, just enough to lean his head into the room. These were private chambers he’d been urged not to disturb. “Apologies, my king, for the disturbance,” he spoke, “but your men have sighted something most… intriguing.”
Xor looked at his high palace lord expectantly.
“You had best come and see,” Olbe exhorted him.
The king furrowed his brow, then reached for his wineglass to take a last swig. “And do you know, Olbe,” he added as he set the goblet down and gestured toward his queen-to-be across the table, “that my Vana is with child?”
Olbe arched his brows and pursed his lips. “Indeed! I know it now,” he acknowledged. “And I congratulate the both of you, of course. In best hopes, it will be a strong and healthy son. A strapping high prince for Zoll Zora.”
“A strapping future king,” Xor amended.
Vana shuddered and sighed, but ventured a smile. “Thank you, Olbe.”
Olbe bowed his head at her from where he stood at the doorsill across the room. He looked importantly, almost impatiently, at Xor. “My king?”
Xor wiped his mouth with a linen at hand, then set it down and turned to leave. “Indeed.”
Olbe led his king to the harbor.
From across the wide sea, a lone ship was approaching.
Its sails were white, its hull lighter and brighter than any vessel of Zoll Zora. Xor stared out at it in wonderment, almost in fear, his eyes darkening, deepening beneath a creased brow.
“Whence does it come?” he asked Olbe.
“We cannot tell,” the palace lord replied. “Your men first spotted it on the very rim of the horizon. As if it were coming from… from the opposite side of the sea.”
Xor moved forward along the dock, drawn by what he could only describe as a magnet.
Olbe drew up to his king’s shoulder, coming just behind him. He felt a similar magnetic pull, but was somewhat more afraid of it.
By the time the great craft had drawn in and dropped anchor, Xor could discern some of the forms upon the deck. One figure on the prow compelled his gaze. Even from this distance, he thought to descry two bright eyes of dark honey, and hair of dark gold.
Gloriel had been looking at the city as the ship approached. Its sharp towers, its palette of onyx and jet, the sooty pall that overhung it, as if the very land itself breathed smoke and fire. It was a fearsome sight. Fearless as Gloriel was with her Glorian heart, it was a fearsome sight.
And yet, as the Glorious ship drew nearer, her eyes were pulled instead toward one small figure standing at the harbor. He was dark-clad, like the city behind him. And yet his dark gaze was the only thing, in the entire cityscape before her, that was somehow full of light.
The ship had come now to a stop, but she practically lurched forward from the prow. The one thing that stayed her on deck was the babe in her arms, whose life and safety she had vowed to guard and cherish with every fiber of her heart. If that heart compelled her to leap from the deck onto the dock, then she would have to fight that urge, at least for now, while this infant was cradled feather-light and feather-fragile in her arms. She had promised Trisde as much. And that promise to her sister—a promise also to herself—was one that she would never break.
Crion and Anorrah disembarked, Kevriel cradled in the arms of the latter.
Gorovan turned to the prow before descending the gangway. “Gloriel,” he called to her.
She started, woken from her momentary trance, and turned to follow her brother off board. The rest of the Glorian crew stayed on deck, uncertain yet as to whether they even wanted to set foot on such dark soil.
Crion, the only one among them in whose heart the thrill of novelty completely outdid any twinge of fear, walked up closest to the king. He was beaming as bright as the Glorian sun—whose rays, somehow, seemed not to kiss this place as brightly. But Crion did not notice that, or care. This was a world across the sea. Its very otherness, its across-ness, made it beautiful.
“What is this place?” he asked wonderingly, breathless as his gaze surveyed the cityscape before him, not pausing to so much as bow his head to greet the king.
Xor blinked at him. “The city of Zoll Zora,” he declared. “The heart of the empire.”
Crion’s eyes widened, his brows lifting high. “Empire?”
The king regarded him, bemused and bewildered at this evidently witless, brainless foreigner. “Yes. The Zoll Zoran empire,” he confirmed. “And you? Who are you, and these people? Whence and why have you come?”
“I am Crion,” he introduced simply, then gestured in turn to each of the Glorians behind him. “This is my wife, Anorrah, and our son. My dear friend Gorovan. My sister, Gloriel, and our nephew.”
“Our son,” Gloriel corrected.
Crion and Xor both fixed their eyes on her—the former in mild confusion, the latter in a mix of many other things.
“Well. My son, at least,” she insisted, cradling Lastor closer in her arms.
Crion smiled faintly at his sister, then turned back to face Xor. “He is our nephew,” he explained, “but we are taking him up as our own. His mother died in childbirth just days ago.”
Something of relief washed over the king. His heart, he mused, was behaving most strangely today. Then again, till now it had hardly behaved at all.
“And what is his name?” Xor found himself asking. “This nephew. This son.” He blinked at himself, wondering why in hell’s name the name of a baby should matter to him.
Gloriel beamed at him; he was drawn in, a drunken bee drowned in those honey-colored pools. And in those smiling eyes, he knew what mattered, and he knew exactly why.
“His name is Lastor,” she apprised him. Gloriel, for her part, felt compelled to answer any question, any thing, this man might ask of her.
Xor nodded. “Indeed.” Indeed? Indeed what?
“Well, and this,” Olbe presently put in, laying a hand against his king’s high shoulder, “this is King Xor. The high emperor, potentate of the world throne.”
Olbe had felt a fleeting urge to ask the name of the child in the other woman’s arms. That urge, he had quickly dismissed, along with all the other foreign urges that had come with it.
He instead introduced his king, and then himself. “And I… I am Olbe.”
“Lord Olbe Morowyn, highest among all the king’s men,” Xor appended.
The introductions completed, a silence ensued.
Xor cleared his throat. “I would have you all to dinner,” he stated frankly.
Olbe’s eyes darted up to the emperor. Those were not the words he’d have expected from this king. It seemed that many expectations, on this day, were being radically overthrown.
Xor formally welcomed these strangers into his palace. He invited the entire ship to dinner, though only a handful of the rest of the crew chose to accept that invitation. The rest preferred to stay on board, as if believing that this craft provided safety from the sprawling city before them.
The palace attendants saw to ushering these new guests to their quarters, where they could situate themselves in the hours till dinner. The order was issued to arrange a feast. All the highest palace lords and ranking soldiers were invited.
“And shall I summon her highness?” one maidservant asked her king.
Xor paused. He bade the maid leave Vana be—he had eaten with her earlier, and surely she was full, and tired, especially what with the child inside her.
Vana was eventually informed of the feast nevertheless, by way of palace hearsay. She was happy that her king had not invited her. She lay in bed with unborn Eldor in her womb and cherished these moments alone with her son.
The dinner was peaceful and friendly, albeit rather tense. The Zoll Zorans hadn’t the faintest idea what their king meant to do with these guests, and why he did them so much kindness. And the Glorians were quite underwhelmed with the food.
The food was of no matter to Crion, or to Gloriel, both of whom were occupied with entirely other, overwhelming things.
They told the king about their home across the sea. They described it and its deep and many differences from this land. Gloriel spoke of all the beauty and brightness of Daerion, and of Glorion at large. Crion spoke of his drive to explore the worlds beyond that land, and his happiness that he had come across such an exotic and awe-inspiring place.
The king listened intently, hanging on Gloriel’s every word, much like the honeybee he was. Olbe listened just as intently, but with quite a different brightness in his eyes—the brightness of empire, of all the imperial promise that this Glorious picture painted in his mind.
Most of the other Zoll Zorans at the table were not near enough to hear these descriptions of Glorion. Those few who were dismissed the talk as pure fancy, the ranting of mad, raving foreign minds, with grand delusions of the land from which they’d come. Misguided, vagrant lunatics. These pictures that they painted were straight from a storybook. There could be no reality behind them.
Once the dinner had ended, the spiced wine and heady mead drained from the goblets and tankards—at least those of the native Zoll Zorans, who imbibed these things like water—the guests were led back to their quarters and bidden goodnight.
Xor headed back toward his own chambers, his feet heavy and his heart strained as he moved in the opposite direction of the guest wing.
Olbe accompanied him on his way, his own chambers being just beside those of the king.
“They spoke of Glorious things indeed,” the palace lord reflected.
“Indeed.”
“Surely a land such as theirs would be a glorious acquisition for the empire.”
Xor looked at his feet as he walked. “Surely.”
“And surely theirs would be an easy land to conquer, as they sound to be so ill-equipped for war. If even equipped at all. I daresay we might not even have to wage war to lay conquest.”
The king stopped as they approached his oaken door. “Indeed. We might not have to at all.”
Olbe looked up at him, his oak-brown eyes keen with concern. “My king.”
Xor looked at him expectantly.
“I fear that you… that you will be seduced, my king. That visions of goodness and beauty will seduce you away from your rightful destiny.”
“And what if these visions are my rightful destiny?”
Olbe blinked.
Xor smiled and clapped a hand against his high lord’s shoulder. “Come, Olbe. You know the power that beauty wields over any man. Perhaps, soon, you will find yourself seduced as well.”
“There is no danger of that,” Lord Morowyn fiercely professed.
The king looked hard at his lord, at his truest and dearest friend. Up till today, this man had been the one thing in this world that Xor loved most. It had perhaps been a weak love, as love goes. But it had been the only sort of love he knew. The love of friendship and of trust.
And yet on this day, two new loves, it seemed, had been born in him—one of them lay in the womb of his soon-to-be queen, and the other in the wing at the opposite end of the palace. These loves both had nothing to do with trust or with friendship. They instead were bringing to life in him new modes of love and feeling that he’d never known existed. Modes of love and feeling that had been smothered in him, many moons ago. Sparks blown out like weakling candles in a fragile, fallow, and impressionable soul.
They seemed to have rekindled on this day. Rekindled twofold, in the form of two loves, both of which were stronger than any allegiance he had ever felt toward this lord before him.
Olbe was suddenly eclipsed. Olbe was suddenly not so important.
Just a few moons ago, he had fallen out of his regency. It seemed that today, he fell out of a great many other things as well. There were some things Lord Morowyn had fallen into, but neither Xor nor Olbe knew of that quite yet.
“Well,” Xor spoke, letting his hand fall away from the lord’s shoulder, and a deep, powerful smile fall over his face, “in any event, my good lord, I have come into my full kingship. My word on this, as on all things, is final.”
Olbe’s oaken eyes were locked on his king in slight horror, deep deference, and deeper despair. He swallowed hard and forced a weakling, fledgling smile. “Indeed, my king,” he conceded. “Indeed.”