The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [105]
“Hush, whelp,” the king snarled. “I told you I would not see her. Why have you brought her here?”
“You said I could not present her in court,” Berimund replied. “You said nothing about hunting.”
“That’s a hair in my beard,” Marcomir snapped. “You understood my intent.”
He swung back to Muriele. “But since you are here, let me spell clearly for you. Your shinecrafting daughter is not and will never be queen. She has unleashed horrors that no man should ever see and tilted the world toward doom. I will not be guiled with words; I will not be won with gifts or favors. This is the battle foretold, the great war against evil, the ansuswurth itself, and we—with the holy Church—will stand against your dark lady and your unhulthadiusen, and we will send you all back to the abyss.”
As she watched the spittle drip down his chin, Muriele found that she had had enough.
“If I had known,” she began, “that Your Majesty was a despicable liar who clothes himself in holy raiment to disguise the greedy, covetous ambition he has nursed for decades, I certainly would never have come here in hopes of a conversation. You are a loathsome thing, Marcomir. A better man would simply admit his avarice for power and control, but like a little child you make up stories to disguise your disgusting nature and in doing so become even more abhorrent. You dress your lords and ladies in homage to your beloved ancestors, but there is more honor in a single one of their rotting bones than in your entire body. Sing your churchish songs and play the harp of saintliness, but I know what you are, and so do you, and nothing you say or do, no host you muster, no war you win, will change that. I traveled to Hansa in hope of finding a man. Instead I find this. How sad and repulsive.”
Marcomir had found color for his face somewhere. He trembled more violently than ever.
“My dear sister-in-law,” a voice said behind her. “You still have that turn of phrase that so wins the hearts of men.”
Only Muriele’s anger kept her from screaming as she turned and saw Robert Dare sitting casually on a spotted mare, grinning from ear to ear.
Neil glanced up at the vast ceiling of the chapel and shook his head.
“What’s that for, Sir Neil?” Alis asked.
“Why is it so big?”
“You don’t find it beautiful?”
Neil traced his gaze up a narrow buttress that must have been twenty kingsyards high. Light colored its lean length, suffused through a dome pierced by a myriad of crystal portals that also illuminated statues of the winged saints, the lords of sky, wind, thunder, the sun, moon, stars, and planets. Many looked as if they actually were flying.
“It is. But it’s also distracting. How can one pray properly among so much…so much?”
“The chapel in Eslen is easily as large and ornate.”
“I know. I didn’t understand that, either.”
“It’s not so in the islands?”
“No. The chapels are very plain and no bigger than necessary to kneel or be lustrated. I feel lost in a place this big.”
“Well, I, for one, feel the need to pray. Will you wait for me?”
“Should we separate?”
“I don’t see why not,” she said. “If our escort wanted to do us harm, I don’t imagine that would be a problem.”
“I’ll try to find Lier’s fane in all of this, then,” Neil said. “I’ll meet you back here in the center.”
Alis nodded and walked off, the whisk-whisk of her skirts echoing in the cavernous place.
Neil strolled past the saints of law and war, wondering if he ought to stop there, but the real need he felt was to find Lier, and so he continued to search, wondering what the saints thought of such ostentation. He supposed it depended on the saint. Some of them might be flattered.
It took a bit of time for him to realize the consistency of the groupings. The saints of sky were above, those of the qualities and affairs of men at eye level. That meant logically that he ought to look for a staircase down.
Once he knew what to search for, it wasn’t hard to find. Soon he was in a darker, quieter part of what was rightly a temple rather than a chapel.
There he found the saints beneath the earth and there, at