Red Country Read Free Page A

were safe enough in our little kingdom, and we played as only the children of safety can.
    All too soon that play reached its end. I was just eighteen when my father, climbing Asterne’s hundred and fifty steps to watch them fly the kites on Air’s day, fell down with a terrible pain in his chest and died.
    I do not mean to say any more. He was my father, I loved him dearly. He was a good king, and he is dead.
    Nor shall I deal at length with the mourning, the funeral, the pyre, the solemn procession to lay his ashes with those of Harran’s previous heirs in the tomb at Asterne’s base. It seems now as if that time is separate; shut away behind the ponderous bronze-studded door that swings to at my back with its grinding thump! Life begins again on its other side.
    It begins as I look out over Saphar’s roofs, sleek bright red from the first winter rain, over the Resh stripped to tawny dark-stippled earth beneath the pruned stumps of vines, down to the loop of Azilien shining steely blue beneath the steely gray clouds, and the backs of my mother and two younger brothers receding slowly toward the royal apartments. As I feel the weight of the royal coronet on my brow, the swing of the royal crimson cloak against my skirts, and I think, It is over. The past is past. This is Now, and Now is mine.
    I was still the princess Sellithar, for tradition decrees that those already crowned keep the vice-regal title till they come of age, at twenty-one. It did not stop me hatching plans with infernal glee. A clean sweep, I wanted, harpers, door-holders, chamberlains, every crusted bastion of tradition gone. Kastir would help me. With his advice, I resolved, I would strip Everran’s monarchy down to the fact. Slough the ritual, the formalities, the rigid, pointless, fossil program for every moment of my day, and become a ruler, not a figurehead so hobbled in robes I could not even walk.
    * * * * * *
    Needless to say, it was easier to plan than to perform, for every cleansing meant a painful amount of maneuver, adjustment, resettlement of superseded retainers, arguments with irate traditionalists. Or wounded ones, which was worse. I had hardly managed to cancel the royal harper’s unquestioned right of entry to his sovereign’s private apartments when the Quarred embassy arrived.
    In the Quarred tradition they were, superficially, excessively polite. They had a “Note” in a huge parchment scroll bearing the seal of the Tingrith’s ram horns, but they did not ask me to demean myself by actually reading it. They grouped before my high seat in the audience hall in strict order of precedence, and the eldest, who had the longest beard and the largest cauliflower of a turban, recited what their government had said.
    Under the compliments and tautology, it boiled down to Quarred’s concern for a fellow Confederate, intimately linked by bonds of trust and border and trade, now deprived of its noble lord. Here followed an oblique glance at past military alliances and a long eulogy on my father, whose effect I overcame by mentally writing between the other lines. Quarred summered half its sheep in our Raskelf highlands. Wool was Quarred’s chief export, Estar paid weight for weight for it in gold. Their income was in jeopardy.
    Moreover, civil disturbance in Everran might embroil the Quarred shepherds, refugees would certainly cross the border, punitive expeditions might follow, it could come to open war. I was just eighteen, and worse still, female. It behoved them to secure their pastures, their border and their purses by forestalling trouble and backing the legitimate heir.
    â€œWell enough so far,” said Kastir, when we were alone in the royal presence chamber. “But not far enough. What more do you know of Quarred, princess?”
    I studied the thick crimson Quarred carpet which matched the rosewood paneling’s patina of age. It was made in Harran’s day.
    â€œThe