“How will this transformation be accomplished?” asked Ark-robin, for Tar-brona seemed dumbfounded by the queen’s words. “We are a smaller house than Bel Amica. To increase the way they have, we would need to—”
“It’s not a matter of population,” she sighed. “It’s a matter of distinction. Of glory. When people speak of a House, what do they speak of first? The palace. That is where we start. The people will refashion the palace until it is the envy of the land.”
“The Housefolk will renovate the palace?” Tar-brona seemed profoundly suspicious.
“They will make this place a wonder,” said the queen with a smile that told them much was already decided. “You want to know how we achieve such dedication? Motivation.”
And then she announced the unthinkable.
“The king has asked me to oversee a period of celebration and change in which the Housefolk will unite for the transformation of the house. We will call the first chapter of this grand story ‘the Wintering of Abascar.’”
During this period of Wintering, she explained, the people would redirect all their work, devote all their talents, to tasks set for them by the palace designers. They would build a better palace, beautify it.
But why “the Wintering of Abascar”? Her secret courtyard garden had inspired her. It was speaking to her every day, revealing a plan.
As a sign of commitment and unity, all people of Abascar dwelling between the palace and the walls would wear common garments—a wardrobe of black, brown, grey, and white, the colors of the Expanse in winter. “Abascar’s people will give up their colors, their craft, their weaving, their bounty, the treasures that sit unseen within their homes…all to enhance the corridors of the palace.”
And what of the soldiers? Abascar’s officers would police the streets, visit homes, inventory belongings, and monitor the efforts. They would note those who served without complaint and promise rewards to those who dedicated themselves openly to the queen’s plan.
Tar-brona and Ark-robin were to lead the counting of Abascar’s riches, from garments to livestock, from structures to combs and pillows. Then the king and queen would invite the people to offer their best belongings as tribute. Anyone who gave willingly would win recognition, receive badges of various colors to signify the strength of their devotion, and collect an appropriate measure of precious stones from Abascar’s abundant mines. These they could trade for increased privileges during the second season of Abascar’s transformation.
Abascar’s armies would carry this collection of the people’s finest to the Underkeep in a celebratory procession. Anything judged beautiful and excellent would adorn the palace and serve to glorify the king. Others items would be stripped down to raw material and recrafted into finer inventions.
“In this way, the palace will belong as much to the Housefolk as to their king and queen,” said Jaralaine.
“And…when the palace draws attention from across the Expanse?” Ark-robin heard himself whisper. “When it shines like the sun, what then?” Envisioning the change, the assembly of color like a bonfire at Abascar’s center, he was distracted from asking the questions that would plague him later, questions about what this would cost the Housefolk.
When this was accomplished, Jaralaine continued, the king would declare the beginning of the second season, which they would call “Abascar’s Spring.” On the commencement of this Spring, the Housefolk would be charged to fashion a new world for themselves, with design and invention surpassing anything known. “During Abascar’s Spring, color and splendor will return to Abascar’s streets, as if spilling from the palace,” Jaralaine rejoiced.
The freedom of colors would be restored to Abascar’s Housefolk according to the contributions they had made. Mantles would distinguish their rank. Such visible honor would compel devotion to their House.
The captain of the guard was not easily convinced. He inquired how the people would be persuaded to give up what they had. The queen insisted that Abascar’s people were proud and loyal. Those who set themselves against the Proclamation of the Colors would be revealed as troublesome dissenters responsible for so much of Abascar’s lapse into irrelevance.
When Tar-brona tried to disguise an indignant laugh as a cough, Jaralaine answered without amusement. “Do you challenge your king’s authority?” The queen of Abascar dropped the king’s heavy, square-faced ring onto the center of the table. “Or are you accusing me of stealing this ring to use while my husband is too sick to stop me?”
Immediately all laughter—indeed, all color—drained from Tar-brona’s complexion.
“Consider other possibilities, Captain. Perhaps I am a good wife, delivering a message for her beloved lord.”
“So,” Tar-brona sighed, “King Cal-marcus plans to make a royal proclamation.”
“It is why you have been summoned. You are the witnesses, and I now speak for Cal-marcus.”
Jaralaine stood straight and tall, one hand raised, the glow from the fire filling her garment with light so that she seemed to emanate supernal power. “By proclamation of the king…I declare the rising of tomorrow’s sun the first day of Abascar’s Wintering.”
That was when the shelves of scrolls had fallen, casting the histories across the floor.
Cal-raven, quietly climbing the shelves like a ladder, certain that the missing figurine had been placed out of reach, had toppled them, and he fell in a cavalcade of journals.
Jaralaine ran to his side, gushing words of comfort, but the boy did not cry. He stood, kicking aside the scrolls, furious, holding up a figurine. “Look, Mama,” he shouted. “Look! Someone’s tried to hide the Keeper!” He marched to the map table and, imitating his mother’s presentation of the ring, set down the stone figurine. It was crafted like a large beast with a horse’s head, wings, and a gator’s tail. “Someone’s tried to take it away.”
The queen flashed her effervescent smile in apology to the soldiers. “The little prince is that age, you know. Phantoms, monsters, adventures everywhere.” She knelt down and put an arm around her son. “Cal-raven, you recognize Captain Tar-brona, don’t you? He’s been organizing patrols for many years, from the Cliffs of Barnashum to Deep Lake, all the way to the Forbidding Wall. And do you know? He has never seen the Keeper.”
Tar-brona was not listening. His eyes were fixed on the map of Abascar. Ark-robin could see that the captain already wandered its avenues in his mind, imagining the chaos that would ensue.
“And here also is Ark-robin, our house defender, who is charged with training soldiers to protect us from danger. Do you think such a large and dangerous animal could hide from him?”
Ark-robin met the boy’s inquisitive gaze. Cal-raven was now fully returned from his imaginary journeys, realizing the strange company of this midnight meeting. Ark-robin sensed the prince was sifting him, judging him.
“They’ve never seen the Keeper,” the boy concluded, “because they’ve never really looked for him.”
Ark-robin promised himself, and not for the first time, that he would never let any son of his develop such fantasies. That is, if Say-ressa ever gave him a son.
The child suddenly shrieked, distracted by a muffled voice from the corridor. He broke loose from his mother, running to the chamber’s closed doors. Before the queen could rebuke him, he opened them to reveal Scharr ben Fray, the king’s old friend, the stonecrafter, clad in the heavy robes of a House Jenta philosopher. The old man entered as though pursuing a burglar.
“I’ve just come from the bedside of the king. And I must—” He stopped, surveying the spectacular sight of the scroll-strewn floor, and then pointed in disbelief at the table where the ring lay upon the map like the triumphant remaining piece after a strategy game. “I see there is a ring upon the table.” Scharr ben Fray kept his face concealed in his deep hood, so no one could see his expression, but his voice was weary and laced with bitterness. “I crafted that ring for the king. It represents discernment, not rash decisions and folly. Do not betra
y him, Jaralaine. Do not rob the ring of its meaning, or you will ruin the one you wear as well.”
“This is a private matter between the king, myself, the captain, and the defender,” the queen hissed.
The mage’s shoulders sank. “The hunger driving this affair will not be satiated, Jaralaine. Ask any of the thieves in Abascar’s dungeons. The more you feed such appetites, the greater the pit becomes, until you collapse into it yourself.”
The old man then departed and closed the doors behind him, taking Cal-raven with him.
From that day on, Ark-robin’s life would be divided in two, forever before and after the Proclamation of the Colors.
It sickened him to remember that he had been convinced, and worse, moved by Queen Jaralaine’s promise that Abascar’s people would benefit from the tide of grandeur and extravagance. Her voice had been like that of a fortuneteller, spinning enchantment, conjuring possibilities. He was breathless from the enormity of the vision.
And later he felt robbed, distraught to find how deeply ran her lies. The queen slipped through hidden doors and tunnels in every statement, springing traps on any who protested. What was presented as an endeavor to glorify House Abascar had been a maneuver to satiate Jaralaine’s immeasurable jealousy and greed.
For favor and advantage, volunteers carted away family treasures. They unhinged ornamental doors. They battered hand-painted shutters off their hinges and swept them into wheelbarrows. They rolled and shouldered exquisite handmade rugs like fallen trees. They strapped colorful garments into bundles and replaced them with uniforms of stifling dullness.
Ark-robin stood by while his soldiers followed instructions. The defender frowned like one of the victims, even as he acted as the king’s—the queen’s—hand against his neighbors, his own family. His bed would suffer a winter indeed.
Most of the Housefolk begrudgingly cooperated, for the king and queen had offered assurance of gratitude and repayment.
But not everyone. An old weaver, refusing to weave for the palace, collapsed dead as soldiers tore open a wall to extract the giant loom he had built inside. Another, an outspoken mosaicist, barred entrance to her workshop for the inventory; when they disciplined her by removing her works from the walls, informing her that thereafter she would craft what they prescribed, she grabbed a stone-breaking implement and cast herself forward, the sharp point of the device completing the breaking of her heart in full view of her horrified neighbors and the angry enforcers. (Furious, King Cal-marcus, with the queen standing beside him, banished the mosaicist’s young brother to the Gatherers, to be raised with the other orphans.) Parents forced children loose from prized horses, favorite hounds, even a sizable hog, as the best livestock was marched to the royal stables, kennels, and pens.
Diggers and builders expanded the Underkeep to swallow a thousand cartloads of gilt and glitter, silks and satins. Workers labored under soldier supervision to construct, weave, and replace colorful things with dutifully dull and simple equivalents.
The palace loomed above it all, trumpeters lining its walls and Abascar’s flag flying from every window, every watchtower, and every spire. To some the sights and sounds were festive. But others, especially those who gave up what little they had to offer, murmured that the palace resembled nothing so much as a gloating thief.
Spring never came. Housefolk accustomed themselves to their plain garments, sacrificing color and invention to their king, hoping for the day when such sacrifices would earn them lasting glory. A community of cooperation became a house of contention, one family against another in the struggle to earn honors and opportunities.
Once the queen had cultivated a vast garden of garments, jewelry, and wares, her devotion to management of the house disappeared. She spent days wandering the palace corridors, dreaming up new ideas, from murals for the great halls to furniture for Cal-raven’s chamber. At night, she rose, restless, and explored the Underkeep’s corridors, talking to herself (or, some said, boasting to her murdered sisters), touching all that had been collected, selecting what she liked to carry with her. She scribbled lists to catalog her treasures, and a year later, she did it again, until eventually even that became uninteresting to her.
When the queen’s health began to fail, the inventory quietly cloaked itself in dust. The contents of the Underkeep lay abandoned, entombed, but never forgotten. When Jaralaine voiced further wishes for the house and was refused by the beleaguered king, she began to withdraw from him.
What transpired between them in those final days together was a tale the king would never tell. But everyone knew its penultimate chapter. The queen deserted her treasures one night, even her precious garden. She ran into the woods and disappeared, inspiring a hundred stories about what sort of terrible end awaited her there.
She left the king in ruins.
And young Cal-raven motherless.
Ark-robin ran his fingers through the blue stones in Auralia’s basket. As he did, he wondered at the strange sieve of memory, how it caught and preserved so few days of significance. Yesterday was already fading. But he could still remember intimate details from the day he’d married the Lady Say-ressa—clouds patterned like cobblestones, the burning of new tattoos on the backs of his hands, the heaviness of the wedding tent curtain. He could even remember the day he first saw her, years earlier, when she mended his wounded shoulder. The death of Tar-brona—that, too, lived bold in his memory, for some had suspected him of playing a part in the captain’s demise, even though the king saw no reason to investigate. Later that same day, Ark-robin’s sudden promotion to become the new captain of the guard—he remembered the king placing the helm upon his head but little more.
And yet, of all these vivid memories, it was Jaralaine’s summons he could recall most clearly. He remembered the intricate detail of the heavy ring on the king’s table as the queen proclaimed the Wintering. Her seductive perfume still lingered. And for all his anger at her wicked machinations, he still felt the pulse of a thrill to recall her striding around the library in a gown only her husband should have seen.
“What’s wrong, Captain?”
The voice smashed his reverie. He jerked at the reins, brought the vawn up short, and shouted as the sudden movement strained the wounded muscle in his shoulder. The basket tumbled from his grasp again, blue stones spilling into the grass.
Prince Cal-raven, now sixteen years old, fair-haired, was dressed in a royal advisor’s robe. As always, he was unnervingly quiet. He stood between two moonbeam trees to the left of the trail, calmly chewing a sweetreed. “You look like you’re sitting on an arrowhead.”
“I was merely noting the lateness of things, my lord.” Such a foolish boy, Ark-robin thought. Still creeping about outside the walls while others prepare to sleep? I would teach my own son differently. If I had a son.
“Indeed. It’s late…for tree-climbers anyway.” Cal-raven knelt and lifted a handful of stones. “There aren’t many who know about cwauba bird treasure, Captain. Mother taught me how to find stones like these. Haven’t seen anything like them in years. Father will be so surprised.”
Ark-robin surrendered them immediately with a wave of his hand. His wife would never see these exquisite stones. It would do no good to argue with the prince.
“Yes, of course, you don’t even need to ask. I’ll deliver them for you, Captain. Perhaps they will give my father a moment’s distraction from his foul mood.”
Ark-robin never contradicted the prince, although each time they encountered each other, his dislike of the boy increased. “I’ll let you in on a secret,” he replied, momentarily inspired by his anger. He could strike back at Jaralaine even in her absence. He could punish her son. “I took these stones from a strange girl who lives free in the forest.”
“A strange girl who lives free?”
“The Gatherers call her Auralia. She claims she isn’t from Abascar. She refuses to accept the protection of the house. It will take some doing to catch her and bring her in for proper train
ing.”
“Where can I find her?”
Ark-robin smiled. “Oh, you won’t find her…not unless she allows it.” There was something sweet about this. The bait was set. And Cal-raven, mirroring his mother’s arrogance and his father’s curiosity, would take it. What would the king think of this, watching his own errors played out before him? “Do not trouble yourself with a wild one like her, Cal-raven,” he continued, knowing the warning would only stoke the fires of intrigue. “Free folk in the woods can lead you on quite a chase.”
“You’ll alert your patrols, of course,” Cal-raven smirked. “If she’s smart enough to find a secret cwauba nest, oh what danger we’re in!”
“After my reprimand, she’ll likely move to trouble some other house. A shame really. She’ll be quite a beauty someday.” Ark-robin’s grip tightened around the reins. This talk was risky, rash, and driven by a grudge Cal-raven had not inspired. The consequences of such meddling might well outweigh the shallow satisfaction it could bring.
Would the boy follow in his father’s footsteps and fall under the enchantment of a meddlesome wood sprite? “May the king be heartened by the gems I’ve brought him. I’m sure they’ll be kept safe…where no one else can see them.” He risked an ultimatum by refusing an appropriate salute, then spurred his vawn on, cursing his impulsive temper.
He glanced back over his shoulder once more, hoping to see the prince brushing off the exchange and moving on. But Cal-raven stood still, lost in thought, staring into the woods, blue light in his hands, as the starlings drew darkness over Abascar.