Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [82]
In the center point of the roof of the cave was a huge chandelier. It glittered and sparkled with thousands upon thousands of quartz crystals, strung like beads, and looped about it like so many frozen flower garlands. They gathered the light and reflected it out into the room, filling it with a dancing interplay of light and shadow.
It didn’t take him long to realize that this was an audience chamber. It was fairly empty of furnishings, and entirely empty of people except for himself and his guards, but it certainly was nothing like a room where you would take prisoners. You didn’t take a prisoner to a room with a chandelier, as a rule.
At the far end was a single throne, a simple and graceful piece of flowing lines that echoed the stone of which it was made: malachite. He had never seen a single piece of malachite that large before, never seen carving of that level of expertise before. Behind the throne was a tapestry in which every stitch held a bead, so that the tapestry too glittered in the light. And the subject was the portrait of a mountain, presumably the same one he was now inside. The lower slopes were a kaleidoscope of verdant greens, the upper third, a misty blue. There was no snow on this mountain; it was held in this tapestry in an eternal spring and summer.
The throne, the tapestry, the huge and empty room. Now, it occurred to him that maybe his Luck hadn’t run out after all. Whoever was in charge here could have had him thrown straightaway into a cell in a dungeon. Instead, he’d been hauled into the audience chamber.
Someone wanted to see him. Someone wanted to be seen by him. Either. Both, perhaps.
This was a room that dwarfed the inhabitants, but he got the sense this was accidental, that an existing cave had been used rather than a new room had been cut from the rock for the purposes of cowing visitors—or prisoners. On the far side of the room there was another tunnel entrance. He wondered where that one went. How many people lived here? For that matter, who were these people? This did not match any Traditional tale he knew.
There was a stirring where the tunnel picked up again on the other side of the room; he had the feeling that he was about to find out just who it was that wanted to see him.
The cause of the commotion entered the room, followed by her entourage of ladies, secretaries, guards, and assorted flunkies. And if the world did not acknowledge her as one of the most beautiful in the Five Hundred Kingdoms, it was because the world hadn’t come down here to see her yet.
Her skin was pale as cream, and as smooth and—he guessed—as soft. Her hair was the red of copper newly forged. Her neck was long and graceful, the overused word swan-like sprang immediately to mind; her legs and her back seemed just as long and graceful. It came to him at that moment, that if someone had taken little Katya and made her taller but proportionally the same, she would have looked like this.
He didn’t know a lot about women’s clothing, but he’d never seen any girl in Led Belarus dress like this. The gown looked to have been poured over her, the sleeves clung to her upper arms, the bodice to her body, and the whole flowed down to the floor and pooled there at her feet.
The body in the close-fitting green gown was lush, sensuous.
He started to get up, but a meaty hand on one shoulder disabused him of that notion. So he stayed where he was, as she approached him.
She gazed down on him dispassionately. Her eyes were as green as her gown, which, on closer inspection, clung closer to her than he had thought, and made guessing about what was beneath it unnecessary.
“I am the Queen of the Copper Mountain,” she said. “And what are you, that Baba Yaga’s servants pursue you so relentlessly?”
Sasha swallowed. She wore some sort of perfume he didn’t recognize except that it was rich and sweet. “I am Sasha Pieterovich, Prince of Led Belarus,” he replied. “And I made the old witch annoyed.”
The Queen laughed. “I like you, Prince