Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [3]
And of course, Katya knew very well that it had.
Here again was the hand of The Tradition at work. The Tradition decreed that the first sight of the Sea King’s Palace should be of it bathed in a shaft of sunlight piercing the depths.
So, of course, it was. All the time—well, all the daylight time at any rate. By night, as long as there was a moon of any strength, it was bathed in moonlight. As a child, Ekaterina had taken particular and mildly mischievous delight in dragging visitors through the kelp forest on wretched and stormy days just to see that shaft of sunlight break through the clouds in time to perform its magic.
The walls were made of pink coral, carved and polished to a soft glow. Beautiful patterns had been inlaid around each window in mother-of-pearl, black and red coral.
Unlike the fortress-palaces of Rus, this place could not possibly withstand a siege, or even the attack of a child with a sling and a stone. There looked to be two dozen spiral spires, like the long and delicately pointed seashells or a narwhal’s horn, and half again as many filigree towers. In fact there were twenty-one spires and nine towers, each of them the private domain of someone in the Royal Family. Not just the King and Queen and their brood, but the Dowager Queen, and several assorted Aunts and Uncles. Whenever another family member turned up, if there were no vacant places available for them, another was created.
This wasn’t just whim or fancy. This was, after all, the sea, and such an arrangement made it possible for the Royals to come and go as they liked without having to pass through the rest of the Palace. When you lived at the bottom of the sea, an exit was as easy as swimming out your window, and the towers gave discreet points from which to do so. No doubt many Royals in the past had taken such exits to have adventures—or even to meet with a paramour they had rather their spouses didn’t know about.
To Katya’s immediate right, the parade grounds, which just now were empty, but often as not held her brother Mischa as he drilled his troops. For the most part, the Sea King’s troops were ranged in “battles” that had very little to do with war. There were monsters in the sea, enormous behemoths that came with ravening appetites for which a whale was nothing more than a morsel to whet the appetite. When they appeared, they had to either be killed or driven away, and it took strong creatures armed to the teeth to do so. Mischa thrived on combat, hence his position as the Commander of all of the Sea King’s forces.
And though the army was a small one, it was formidable, for Mischa employed magicians alongside the armsmen, training the two to work together as a seamless whole. To Ekaterina’s certain—and it was very certain—knowledge, no one else in the sea kingdoms did such a thing. As a consequence, it was vanishingly unlikely that any attempt to take this kingdom by force would succeed.
Today Mischa was out there alone, drilling. The resistance of the water to fast movement made sword-work impractical, so the most common weapons beneath the sea were extremely powerful bows and arrows, trident, spear, and knife. Today he was working with knives, battling a seaweed-stuffed dummy that already was losing its stuffing.
She swam a bit faster; this close to the Palace there was always the chance of being ambushed by a would-be suitor, some acquaintance trying to find a way to the King more direct than waiting his turn for an audience, or one of the young women at the court hoping for one of Katya’s brothers to happen along.
Katya was of the mind that her brothers were perfectly capable of deciding for themselves who they would and would not court, she was not about to play the stooge for yet another sycophant, and as for would-be suitors for herself…
Those, she could do well enough without. So far there had not been a single young