Christmas Eve
Adrian Goldsmith was the last man to leave the scaffolding. He was an odd young man, a study in contrasts, like so many of his generation; he wore the somber, plain clothes of a workingman, and yet on his hips was a knight’s belt, and on his collar was the wheel badge of the company.
Below him, in the nave of the great hall of the new palace of Liviapolis, the dowager empress, great with child, sat on a chair specially made for her to watch the progress on the vast fresco. Goldsmith waved, and she smiled, and her knight, Galahad d’Acon, waved, too.
It took Adrian a long time to get down; No Head’s scaffolding was itself a miracle of design, and he had included ladders and platforms enough for a siege, or so it seemed to the artist-knight as he climbed down.
He bowed to the dowager empress when his feet were on solid marble. “Majesty. I wanted you to see what it would look like.”
Mortirmir accepted a nod from No Head and raised his arms, flooding the upper portions of the palace with light. But he did more than add light; working from Goldsmith’s drawings, he added touches of colour that would be there in the final work; he gilded pieces of armour, and added a deep black to the dragon.
The Porphyrogenetrix, Irene, caught her breath. “Oh my God,” she said simply.
By her side, Gavin Muriens burst into a grin. “He’d like that,” Gavin said.
“When Adrian is done,” Mortirmir said in his most pedantic voice, “I’ll add a level of enhancement, and then make the whole ceiling an artifact; with its own hermetical lighting and protections …”
“Thank you, Morgon,” Blanche said. She was still lying back, looking at the wonder of the depiction above her. “Are we all there?” she asked. “I mean …”
Goldsmith laughed. “I’ve done seven hundred portraits,” he said. “1Exrech is the only baron I have yet to do; I’m going west when the thaw comes. I got Duchess Mogon this morning, and Looks-at-Clouds.”
Blanche looked at the hermetical sketch. “We have been asked if this work is not … too frivolous for such a brutal winter,” she said. “But we say, no man would cancel Christmas Day because he had a bad harvest. Let us remember our hour of triumph, even as we roll up our sleeves to work. What matters is not Gabriel and his … death.” She paused, and commanded herself. “What is important is that we, together, triumphed.”
“That is what I am painting,” Goldsmith said.
Irene glanced at Gavin.
He was trying not to cry.
The next day, Christmas Day, as part of Christmas Mass, Tom Lachlan and Sukey were married in the great hall of the palace of Liviapolis. Sukey had insisted that they be married amid the rebuilding and the repairs. And Sukey generally got her way.
The bride was given away by the new Earl of Towbray, who had only just been invested with his new lands and title by the Queen of Alba. His father had died suddenly, in an accident, while hunting. The queen stood by Earl Michael on this occasion, Kaitlin being a step behind. And Tom Lachlan, whose family was dead, was supported by Ser Alison Audley, known to almost everyone as Sauce, who was now also the Marquesa of Albin; and by her stood Donald Dhu, for the Hills.
The vast hall was packed; every man and woman who could get a ticket was there; the front rows had most of the nobility of the Nova Terra and a surprising number of nobles of the Antica Terra, too. The gates remained open; the soldiers of the empire kept the road clear; grain from Etrusca was feeding the farmers of Alba in the worst winter anyone could remember. The snow fell, and fell; the cold deepened. But the grain rolled through four worlds, and the farmers of Alba had other allies; allies who left a bag of nuts by a cottage door, or a basket of dried berries on a front step.
Regardless, at the wedding, everyone wore their best and tried to forget the snow, the press of business, the alliances, the betrayals, and the dead, and the succession crisis of the empire. Because some stories end, and other stories begin; and even as it is foolish to forget the past, so it is foolish to cling to it.
The Patriarch of Liviapolis said the blessing; Tom and Sukey exchanged a kiss that had Tippit bellowing “Get a room” in his old accustomed way. The company cheered the new earl and his lady, and then three thousand men and women, bogglins, irks, and wardens sat to feast. The dowager empress gave the toast; the Queen of Alba cried, and the two sat together, laughing and weeping by turns, as women who have endured much often do.
And when the feasting was drawing to a close, the Empress Blanche rose and led her people out into the great square, which the Nordikaans had sweated to clear of snow, and there ten thousand of her people joined all the revelers in forming circles, circles within circles, and the music began to play, and all across Alba, all across the Nova Terra and the Antica Terra and even across other worlds, there was dancing to celebrate the new sun, to shore up the wards that hold the dark at bay, and that promise tomorrow.
And then, when Blanche’s baby stirred in her, and her breath came in gasps, and it seemed that everyone might have reached an exhaustion of everything that made a party great, there fell a silence across the square. And from the west, from the gates of the city, there came the sounds of bells, thousands of bells, or perhaps millions, and in rode the knighthood of Faery and their ladies, hundreds of irks on great stags and forest horses, and there was Tapio on a magnificent white hart, and there Tamsin, like a flower in the midst of winter.
And the Faery Knight rode to the center of the square, and his great stag reared, and people roared their approval.
He bowed to the dowager empress, and to the Queen of Alba.
“I beg leave to ssspeak,” he said.
The dowager waved that he might.
“I am the Lord of Faery,” he said. “And on thisss night when all the worldsss are open, and all magicksss true, isss there by chance sssome knight here presssent with a vow, who will run a courssse with me for the love of hisss lady?”
Because when some stories end, others begin.