The Kingdom of Eternal Sorrow (The Golden Mage Book 1) (19 page)

Raya’s eyes lit up. “Of course!” she replied eagerly. “By the time I’m finished
with you, no handsome young suitor will be able to keep his eyes off you!”

The thought was appalling. “Um, I was kinda hoping to attract as little
attention as possible,” Allison explained hastily. “You see, I’m not very good
at socializing, and large crowds make me nervous.”

“You’ll do fine,” Raya assured her. “With Aidric as an escort, you
don’t need to speak much at all. He’ll speak enough for the both of you! Believe
me, once he introduces you to a few people, you’ll start to feel more comfortable,
and before you know it, you’ll be having the time of your life. Of all the
things the people of Lamia are not, they most certainly make up for it with
their celebrations and festivals! Now, enough of my gabbing. You need to be off
to the bathing room if you want to be presentable at a decent sand-mark. Everything’ll
be ready for you here when you return.”

“Thank you, Raya—for everything,” Allison said sincerely as she headed
towards the bathing room in good spirits.

As she walked down the garden path towards the palace courtyard, her arm
snugly intertwined with Aidric’s, Allison fidgeted nervously, suddenly feeling
very shy and awkward despite the assurance his presence gave her. In just a few
moments, she would face the majority of the kingdom of Lamia for the first
time, and no matter how many times she told herself that it wouldn’t be so bad,
she could already feel her stomach muscles knotting up with tension as Aidric
and she, followed immediately by Raya and Selwyn, crossed the threshold of the
arched doorway that separated the indoor garden from the courtyard and into the
midst of celebration.

Allison’s senses were immediately overwhelmed as she was suddenly
bathed in light and color, greeted by the sounds of lively music and a chorus
of a thousand voices. Her eyes widened in wonder as they soaked in the near
havoc of activity going on before her, her anxiety instantly forgotten.

What seemed like thousands of people swarmed aimlessly around the
courtyard, each dressed in an elaborate assortment of costumes of various
colors and design that seemed, to Allison, to come straight out of medieval
Europe. The women were all dressed similar to her, either in elegant, ruffled
gowns made of lace and wool or the silk-like material that the queen had
identified for her as
sholkie
, a thread derived from the fibers of the
giant leaves of a tree located in the Forest of Peri along the northern borders
of Lamia.

Ileanna had explained to her that the only way anyone could depict a noblewoman
from a peasant at a celebration or festival was by the material used to make
their gowns and the type of stones used in their jewelry.

“Every maiden, no matter how poor or young, owns at least one elegant
gown suitable for social events,” Ileanna had said with a laugh, “and unless
one looks closely, it’s virtually impossible to tell the peasant from the
highborn maiden. Bright Thrones, one could almost believe it’s required by law
to own an extravagant celebration gown when listening to a few women speaking
of them!”

Allison had regarded her skeptically then, but now that the very
mixture of both highborn and peasants confronted her, she surprisingly found
that you indeed could not discern between the two classes by a glance alone.

The men, however, were far easier to determine their social status by
their clothing. The nobles were dressed far more elaborately than the
peasants—in
sholkie
shirts, breeches, and tights of bright colors and
heavily adorned with precious and semi-precious jewels that sparkled
brilliantly with their every movement. Long, flowing capes completed the look,
some even trailing a few feet behind them.

Allison absently wondered how they managed to keep people from stepping
on them. Aidric, thankfully, donned a cape that only reached to his ankles, so
she didn’t have to worry about accidentally stepping on it and embarrassing
herself.

The peasant men wore similar outfits but without the capes. Nor did
their tunics or shirts sport any gems or the elaborate designs of their lords, but
despite those small differences, they were just as elegantly dressed as the
highborn.

However, the costume-like clothing was not what truly amazed Allison. It
was the fact that everyone seemed to be mingling with each other despite the
class in which they belonged. She saw several groups of women, containing both
peasants and highborn, gossiping and giggling together with none of the
superiority or airs that many of the noble class throughout history tended to
express while in the presence of peasants.

When she asked Aidric about it, he just looked at her peculiarly, and
answered simply, “It has been that way for some time now.”

She waited for him to elaborate, and when it became apparent that he
wasn’t going to oblige her, she shrugged and turned her attention from the
Lamians to the courtyard itself. She could always ask Raya about it later.

Allison was surprised at how different the courtyard now seemed to her
in comparison to the state it had been in only hours before. It seemed as if
the servants had converted it into a huge garden of paradise. Strange fern-like
plants and flowers in various shades of blue, violet, and rose, resembling
honeysuckle blossoms but at the size of basketballs, lined the walls and
walkways throughout the yard.

Huge lanterns, burning with the same eerie, green flames that
illuminated Aidric’s suite and the palace corridors, hung from lines that were
stretched high above from the enclosed walkway leading to King Diryan’s suite
to the east and west walls, bathing the courtyard in a faint green glow that
somehow gave the scene a dreamlike quality.

“Why are the flames in those lamps green?” she asked Aidric as the four
of them headed towards a group of people.

“It’s not true fire,” Aidric explained. “They are mage-flames, fueled
by the power of the Mage-field and not by such things as lamp oil. Firestarting
will be one of the many things I’ll teach you, and I’ll explain mage-flames to
you more thoroughly then. As for now, there are some friends I would like you
to meet.”

As Aidric led her deeper into the courtyard and into better light,
Allison heard many gasps of shock as the people they passed realized who she
was. All conversation around them seemed to cease all at once, and she suddenly
felt a thousand eyes burning into her back. She began to feel nervous and
awkward again under their scrutiny, and something in the back of her mind, some
bit of information, was struggling to emerge—something very important—

“Ignore them, Allison,”
Aidric whispered into her mind,
distracting her from what she was trying to remember.
“Just smile at them,
and show them that they have nothing to fear from you.”

Allison nodded, and did her best to smile, if feebly, at all the people
they passed. She immediately noticed that some inched away from her when she
passed them and tried not to attract her attention to them. Whenever she
happened to glance at someone, an intense look of fear flashed across their
face, and they hastily tried to lose themselves in the surrounding crowd.

By the time they reached the targeted group of Aidric’s friends,
Allison was struggling not to cry. The group of seven immediately stopped
talking when they caught sight of her, and most of them gazed at her with
widened eyes of shock and fear.

“Oh, for the love of Seni, stop looking at her as if she’s going to
strike you dead,” Aidric snapped impatiently. “I know the villagers don’t know
any better, but as mages,
you
should. I brought her over here for
introductions,
not
for you to insult her with your foolish fear.”

Looking sheepish, the man closest to her, a brunet that
looked to be about Aidric’s age, took a tentative step towards her and said,
“My apologies, Milady Golden Mage. We meant no insult.” He inclined his head
slightly. “I am Maldon, of the House Felan.”

“I-I’m Allison,” she stammered shyly.

Her obvious shyness and Maldon’s boldness seemed to cause the other
mages to lose most of their initial fear of her, and one by one, they
introduced themselves to her. Aidric wore a peculiar half-smile as the mages
were introducing themselves to her, and she suspected that he was
thought-speaking with them, likely answering all of the questions she
knew
they must be flinging at him about her.

God, it’s like they’re talking about me behind my back
, she
thought, annoyed,
except it’s worse since they’re standing right in front of
me! If they’re so damned curious about me, I wish they would just ask me their
questions and not Aidric.

As if reading her mind, the mages suddenly turned to her all at once
and bombarded her with questions. What world did she come from? How did she get
across the Lamian border undetected? Was her hair really golden? Was it Seni, Himself,
who had sent her?

“You asked for it,”
Aidric’s amused voice said in her head,
“and
before you ask, you accidentally thought-spoke me again. We must do something
about these little mishaps and soon, but for now, I do believe you have your
hands full at the moment with this curious bunch. I would have answered their
questions, but since you were so annoyed that they were not asking you—”

“All right, all right, I did ask for it,”
Allison sent,
struggling not to laugh.
“You don’t have to rub my nose in it, though!”

“Then how else shall I amuse myself?”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

She heard ripples of laughter over the surface of her mind
as she once again turned her attention to the group of mages to answer their
questions as best she could. They continued to play their little question and
answer game for perhaps thirty minutes or so before Aidric decided that she had
suffered their questions enough and rescued her from them with the excuse of
wanting her to meet a few other people.

“There’s a couple of bards I would like you to meet,” Aidric said
loudly over the music and voices as they headed towards the center of the
courtyard. “They have been singing ballads of your coming since they were old
enough to wail in pitch, and they insisted that they
had
to meet you.”

“Insisted my rump,” Raya said dryly. “It’s more like
‘demanded’ with those two. They probably just want to either grill her for
stories of her world to put into their wretched songs or try to court her.”

Was it her imagination, or did Allison suddenly see a flash of what
looked like jealousy in Aidric’s eyes? It had come and gone so quickly that she
wasn’t entirely sure that she hadn’t just seen what she had wanted to see.

However, if Aidric had been jealous, his voice betrayed nothing. “Too
true, barbarian. I’ll have to keep a watchful eye on them.”

“Hey! That’s my wife you’re calling a barbarian,” Selwyn retorted in mock
anger. “Say it again, Mage-general, and you might find yourself on your ass
again!”

“Aidius, help us all,” Aidric lamented with a grin as Selwyn playfully
punched him in the arm while Allison and Raya giggled.

As they reached the center of the courtyard, Allison saw a group of
bards, flamboyantly dressed in gold and silver robes of a more flowing, wider
design than Aidric’s mage-robes, sitting in the grass and busily playing
fiddles, lutes, harps, wooden flutes, and a strange u-shaped reed instrument
that emitted a hypnotic, low-pitched sound that was similar to a male bass
voice but nothing she had ever heard an instrument produce. She had a sudden
image of a group of Gregorian monks chanting in a majestic cathedral.

Before them stood four mages that were busily entertaining the crowd
with what appeared to be a laser and light show to Allison but accomplished
with magic instead of laser beams. She stared at the glorious spectacle in awe,
watching the mages skillfully weave the colorful lines, flashes, and showers of
light into various shapes and patterns to the accompaniment of the bards’
music.

Aidric pointed to the young, silver-haired man playing the strange
instrument and to the man sitting next to him playing a lute. Allison started
when she realized that they were identical twins.

“Those are the two that I want you to meet,” Aidric told her. “The one
playing the lyra is Keldan, and the lute player is Aren. Despite the fact that
those two were born—or should I say we were cursed—with the largest wagging
tongues in all of Lamia, they are quite a remarkable pair. They aren’t simply
bards, but bardic-mages. Until they were born, Lamia had not seen a bardic-mage
for four centuries.

“From the moment of their birth, they were treated basically the same
as you are now being treated—with much fear and uneasiness because bardic magic
is a powerful force when cast in concert, and Seni only sends those with the
ability to wield powerful magicks when great chaos is about to befall us and
there will be great need for such magicks. Furthermore, a certain prophecy also
mentions the birth of bardic-mages. They won’t look on you with fear since they
have walked the same path you have begun.”

Allison didn’t in the least like the way Aidric’s voice had tensed when
he had spoken of this “bardic magic.” She suddenly had the strangest feeling
that he had not told her the whole reason why he wanted her to meet the twins.

She eyed him suspiciously and said, “Something tells me that there’s
more to it than you just wanting me to meet them because everyone was as scared
of them as they’re now scared of me.” The surprise in his eyes was all the confirmation
she needed.

“I thought so,”
she thought-spoke to him.
“All right, Aidric,
what’s going on?”

“No longer timid, are we?”
Aidric replied lightly. The casual
expression on his face never changed.

“Not when I’m in the dark about something that concerns me,”
she
sent,
“and don’t try to change the subject, Aidric. I want to know what you’re
hiding from me.”

“I’m not ‘hiding’ anything from you, Allison,”
he said with a
mental sigh that echoed throughout her mind and said volumes more than a normal
sigh would have.
“I only wished to confirm my suspicions before I spoke to
you about them.”

“What suspicions?”
she demanded.
“And what do those bards
have to do with—oh—”

Her eyes suddenly widened, and she felt all the blood drain
from her face when she realized exactly what he had implied.

Aidric nodded at her expression as Raya and Selwyn eyed them both
curiously, and sent,
“Exactly. Now do you understand why I didn’t mention
this to you before? While you slept and your mind was free from torment, I took
the liberty of probing your mind to view the extent of your abilities. I wanted
to have a good idea of what exactly I needed to teach you before your first
lesson tomorrow. That’s when I discovered that the section of your brain that
houses the ability to control the greater bardic magicks was not dormant. I’ve
asked Keldan and Aren to confirm this, and they have agreed to instruct you in
learning to control this magic if indeed you possess the ability, for I have
very little knowledge of bardic magicks.”