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She also knew he was from Asoli because the last of the men waiting for her there was from Lower Corte and she knew himA figure from her own internal legends, from the myths and hopes that had sustained her life this farAnd this was the one whose presence here almost froze the blood in her veins
In white of course, majestic as she remembered him from when she was a girl, gripping the massive staff that had always been his signature, and towering over every man there, stood Danoleon the High Priest of Eanna in Tigana
The man who had taken Prince Alessan away to the southSo Baerd had told her the night he saw his own riselka and went away to follow them
She knew him, everyone had known Danoleon, his long-striding, broad-shouldered preeminence, the deep, glorious instrument that was his voice in temple servicesApproaching the doors Dianora fought back a moment of wild panic before sternly controlling herselfThere was no way he could recognize herHe had never known her as a childWhy should he have, the adolescent daughter of an artist loosely attached to the court? And she had buy miu miu changed, she was infinitely changed since then
She couldn't take her eyes off him thoughShe had known d'Eymon was arranging for someone to be there from Lower Corte, but had never expected Danoleon himselfIn the days when she had worked in The Queen in Stevanien it was well-known that Eanna's High Priest had withdrawn from the wider world into the goddess's Sanctuary in the southern hills
Now he had come out, and was here, and looking at him, drinking in his reality, Dianora felt an absurd, an almost overwhelming swell of pride to see how he seemed to dominate, merely by his presence, all the people assembled there
It was for him, and for the men and women like him, the ones who were gone and the ones who yet lived in a broken land, that she was going to do what she would do todayHis eyes rested on her searchingly; they were all doing that, but it was under Danoleon's clear blue gaze that Dianora drew herself up even taller than beforeBehind them all, beyond the doors which had not yet been opened, she seemed to see the riselka's path growing brighter all the time
She stopped and they omega constellation bowed to her, all six men putting a straight leg forward and bending low in a fashion of salute not used for centuriesBut this was legend, ceremony, an invocation of many kinds of power, and Dianora sensed that she must now seem to them like some hieratic figure out of the tapestry scrolls of the distant past
"My lady," said d'Eymon gravely, "if it pleases you and you are minded to allow us, we would attend upon you now and lead you to the King of the Western Palm
Carefully said, and clearly, for all their words were to be remembered and repeatedEverything was to be rememberedOne reason the priests were here, and a poet
"It pleases me," she said simply She did not say more; her own words would matter lessIt was not what she would say today that was to be remembered
She still could not take her eyes from DanoleonHe was the first man from Tigana, she realized, that she had seen since coming to the IslandIn a very direct way it eased her heart that Eanna, whose children they all were, had allowed her to see this man before she went into the sea
D'Eymon nodded a commandSlowly the massive chanel classic bag bronze doors swung open upon the vast crowd assembled between the palace and the pierShe saw people spilling across the square to the farthest ends of the harbor, even thronging the decks of the ships at anchor thereThe steady murmur of sound that had been present all morning swelled to a crescendo as the doors swung open, and then it abruptly stopped and fell away as the crowd caught sight of herA rigid, straining silence seemed to claim Chiara under the blue arch of the sky; and out into that stillness Dianora went
And it was then, as they moved into the brilliant sunshine along the aisle, the shining path that had been made for her passage, that she saw Brandin waiting by the sea for her, dressed like a soldier-king, without extravagance, bareheaded in the light of spring
Something twisted within her at the sight of him, like a blade in a woundIt will end soon, she told herself steadilyOnly a little longer nowIt will all be over soon enough
She went toward him then, walking like a queen, slender and tall and proud, clad in the colors of the dark-green sea with a crimson gem about tiffany silver her throatAnd she knew that she loved him, and knew her land was lost if he was not driven away or slain, and she grieved with all her being for the simple truth that her mother and her father had had a daughter born to them all those years ago
For someone as small as he was it was hopeless to try to see anything from the harbor square itself and even the deck of the ship that had brought them here from Corte was thronged with people who had paid the captain for a chance to view the Drive from this vantage pointDevin had made his way over to the mainmast and scrambled up to join another dozen men clinging to the rigging high above the seaThere were compensations inherent in agility
Erlein was somewhere below amid the crowd on deckHe was still terrified, after three days here, by this enforced proximity to the sorcerer from YgrathIt was one thing, he had said angrily, to elude Trackers in the south, another for a wizard to walk up to a sorcerer
Alessan was somewhere among the crowd in the harborDevin had spotted him at one point working his way towards the pier, but couldn't see him tiffany co earrings n |
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