Page 97 of Golden Queen (Idrigard #1)

Thirty-Three

I woke to find Io already out of bed, talking to a servant framed in the doorway.

He spoke casually, familiarly, as though interacting with a peer or another noble.

I knew it was a servant, though, because he carried a tray into the room, keeping his eyes averted from me even though I was under the covers up to my chin.

I smiled warmly at the man. Without turning his head, he gave me a slight nod of acknowledgment.

He was dressed finely, in a black tunic and pants with a symbol on the lapel—what I now knew to be the sigil of Darkwatch.

Not a dragon, or fire, or the elderwood sword that represented their ancient duty as guardians of the realm, but a cluster of five-pointed stars—almost whimsical in its simplicity.

When the servant had gone, we had a delicious breakfast laid out for us on a table in front of the massive wall of windows. I also had a pile of fresh clothing and the promise that more were being procured for me with all due haste.

"You talked to him like a person," I said, as I seated myself at the table and began to dig into the food.

Io looked at me, baffled. "He is a person."

"I know that! But I've never heard someone speak so...casually to a servant or heard them answer as he did."

"You'll find a great many things different about Darkwatch, Sera.

For starters, we don't have a servant's class.

Tarkiel is a chef—a damned good one—and he's paid well for his services.

As are the maids who clean the chambers.

And I can't even take credit for that. It’s been this way in Darkwatch since the first of the druids found this valley and decided to carve out the fortress from the mountain. "

I smiled. "Well, I like it," I said. The servants in Albiyn had never been paid enough to make existing outside servitude possible. I had always been overwhelmed with guilt over their treatment in Windemere.

It was refreshing to be able to live without the great lie of my existence—that I was somehow special or better than anyone because of my name—one that I was becoming more and more convinced didn’t belong to me at all.

After breakfast, we dressed, preparing to go to Meroway and the Citadel. I reached for the baldric that now held Sangui and slung it over my shoulder to hang at my hip.

"You won’t need your sword. You'll find no trouble in the city," Io said confidently.

"How can you be so sure—after everything?" I asked, thinking of the falciferum who rose from the ground in Windemere.

"Meroway is protected by ancient spellcraft, and it has no road. It's a city in the middle of impassable mountains. The only way to reach it is by flying—which is one of the reasons my mother has only ever been there twice. She hates being on dragon-back."

He laughed as though the memory was a humorous one. "She’ll spend a full day on the mountain road rather than suffer the few minutes of time it would take for one of my dragon knights to deliver her to the Reach."

I wanted to share in his humor but mention of the Queen Mother who lived with her son in Orin, caused tension and dread to settle between my shoulders.

The gods only knew what she must have been thinking of me by then.

I would hardly be able to fault her for her ill opinion of the woman who spurned one son to run away with another—putting a kingdom already on the brink of war, on the brink of another.

I asked him a question I had been meaning to ask for some time. "You hardly need your own sword, why do you ever bother to carry it?"

"It's more of a deterrent than anything, though I won't pretend I don't like to wield it just for the fun of it."

The calluses on his hands proved he spent a lot of time at least training with a blade.

"An unarmed man presents something of a temptation," he explained, pulling on his boots. "Just having the sword is often enough to deter many overzealous would-be combatants."

"I'm surprised you would seek to deter them, when I know how very much you love to fight." I said it with a hint of a wicked smile, remembering how he had enjoyed our swordplay—and even just the sight of me naked with a blade in my hand.

He chuckled. "I only enjoy fighting when I’m well-matched in my opponent," he said, raising one dark brow. "Fighting some drunken farmer in a tavern is not quite so satisfying as facing my brothers across the ridge for sport—or the Golden Warrior Queen of Windemere."

The words were a pleasure I could not put into words as they lanced straight through to my soul—where that warrior I hardly dared to admit I wanted to be, lived. She heard them, and she marveled in her own ability to recognize them for truth.

Veles flew us up and over the ridge at the back of the mountain palace, and then dropped down with a dizzying turn of his wings. The rapid descent hollowed my stomach and sent my pulse racing.

At what seemed like the last possible moment, he drew himself up, snapping out his wings to catch the wind and glide over the frozen landscape.

Meroway quickly came into view ahead of us. A sprawling city grew from the unbroken white expanse like rusty crystals jutting up from the ground. Most of the buildings were a dark, reddish hue that seemed utterly out of place in the frozen Iyridian mountains.

Meroway was famous for being the city built underground, but I was surprised to find that it had apparently spread far beyond the confines of the cavern. There was more of it under the dancing star-strewn sky than I imagined there would be.

Io held me tight with that arm around my waist. I realized belatedly that he had not bothered with the strap over my legs—perhaps because it was such a short flight up and then down into the city.

Veles turned, angling for the mouth of the cavern. I could see great, reaching fingers of ice hanging down over the cave mouth. I wondered what prevented the enormous ice spikes from falling into the city and smashing entire buildings under their weight.

As we passed beneath them and entered the cavern, I noted warmer air and a rich, earthen scent that reminded me of clay.

The walls of the cave solved the mystery of where the red stone of the buildings had come from as I saw the color repeated in striated bands of red, fading to almost orange, that covered the walls.

Huge, wet-looking stalactites hung from the ceiling, their rough-textured bodies made of the same repeating striations. Their twins were on the floor of the cavern, reaching upwards.

Many of them jutted up from between the buildings as though the people either hadn’t had the heart or the ability to remove them. They had instead built the city around the tall spikes.

Meroway was enormous and utterly beautiful in the way it ran back into the cavern almost organically, as though it truly had sprouted from the stones under it.

Its many colorful roofs and buildings sparkled like jewels in the light from thousands of lanterns hung all around the city.

They lined the streets, surrounded the edges of the structures, and hung suspended by long chains from the cave ceiling high above.

As I took in the scope of Meroway, I understood why Britaxia had called Albiyn small. The whole of my city could have fit twice just in the portion of it that stretched outside the cavern. The inside could have held Albiyn many times over.

Veles passed over it all, so low in some places that I was able to make out the faces of people on the streets. They looked up at the passage of the big onyx dragon. I wondered if they knew it was their lord flying over with his stolen bride.

I was watching the city pass below, so I did not at first notice when Veles slowed, angling his wings to land. But then I looked up and gasped as I beheld the citadel of Darkwatch. The academy of the druids—the fabled source of all the knowledge of the ancient world.

The Citadel was built into the walls of the cavern. It ran all along the back curving around on each side.

Even as Meroway continued, disappearing down a decline that angled off to the right, the ascending steppes of the citadel rose over it. Doors, windows, terraces, walkways—all carved into and out of the striated stones of the cavern.

People—students and scholars, I assumed—could be seen on every level. They walked behind low stone walls topped with brightly-colored banners and pennants, or strolled along suspended bridges between tall towers.

Many of the buildings were topped by gilded roofs. Others featured huge plazas where gardens and meandering walkways could be seen. They were somehow all green and lush, with neatly trimmed lawns and bright flowers in bloom—even in the absence of any sunlight.

As Veles aimed for a wide platform, I could see a long pool of glassy water in a central courtyard. It was lined with a few neatly sculpted trees, their dark-green leaves draped with pale hanging vines that I was sure were moonflowers.

Once we were close enough, I could see more of the vines hanging from walls and structures across the academy grounds.

I was surprised to see them there in the frozen mountains.

Moonflower usually only grew in warm climates, though the air inside the cavern was almost muggy.

No doubt thanks to the lava that pervaded every part of Darkwatch just beneath the surface.

Young people milled about the courtyard. Others raced over the cobbled stones with their heads bent, hurrying past as though late to some important lesson.

Most looked up as the big dragon landed, though. Their eyes widened in recognition, and they bowed before hurrying away.

Io helped me down, and I took a moment to smooth my rumpled clothes.

They were similar to the ones Master Juriae's wife Cazmiri had lent me; high-waisted black trousers and a fine white shirt under a dove gray fitted jacket that I was certain was nesericum silk.