The Amber Legacy (29 page)

‘
T
his,’ Seer Diamond announced, ‘is the Outer Sanctum of Jarudha’s House.’ Meg stood inside a space that was part of a wider architectural circle, in a building separate from the palace. The building stone was yellow and symmetrically cut, and dark overhead wooden beams supported the red-tiled roof. Shafts of light angled in through coloured stainedglass inserts implanted every twenty paces, splashing patches of red and green and violet across the white marble floor tiles. ‘Beyond the iron door is the Inner Sanctum, where only true Seers can go. Not even the Queen can enter. It is consecrated and most holy ground.’ Seer Diamond smiled enigmatically and lifted his arm to usher Meg forward. ‘Let me take you to a chamber where we can talk privately.’

Her head was spinning with Queen Sunset’s words as she followed Seer Diamond along the steadily curving broad hall. How could she be a Marchlord when she wasn’t even a soldier? How long before she could go home? What did having a tithe mean? What would happen now that they knew that she had the Blessing? When would her period come? What would she do if it didn’t come? Seer Diamond stopped outside
a large door and lifted the handle, motioning for Meg to enter.

Within, she found three Seers gathered at a table. ‘Please take a seat,’ a Seer invited, indicating a tall chair at the end of the table. The gathering waited for Meg and Seer Diamond to be seated before the man who’d spoken said, ‘Jarudha’s blessing upon you. I am Seer Light. My colleagues are Seer Onyx and Seer Vale. You, of course, have already met Seer Diamond.’ Meg nodded politely, but she felt odd to be at a table with four men who looked alike with their white hair, long beards and blue robes. ‘Is it true that you come from a little village?’ Seer Light asked.

Meg nodded. ‘It’s called Summerbrook.’

‘Quaint name,’ Light remarked.

‘And you’ve always lived there?’ Onyx asked.

‘Yes,’ she replied. Light snorted. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, looking at Light.

‘The situation,’ Light replied.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘I think my colleague is bemused by the fact that you’re a rustic young woman who has appeared out of nowhere as a hero in the Queen’s war,’ Diamond explained. ‘It’s—just—’

‘Priceless,’ Light interjected, shaking his head.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘Of course, we’re very curious to hear that you apparently have Jarudha’s Blessing,’ Light said, ignoring her question.

She waited for him to say more, but all four men were staring at her, waiting for an answer. ‘I—I don’t really know,’ she said nervously. ‘Some say it is the Blessing.’

‘Could you describe what you do?’ Seer Onyx asked.

‘With what?’

‘Your healing power, girl,’ Light muttered disdainfully. ‘I hear you can heal with a touch.’

‘Can you?’ Diamond asked.

Meg nodded.

‘Do you mind showing us?’ Onyx asked.

She shrugged. ‘If you wish.’

‘Bring in the subject!’ Light yelled.

A door Meg hadn’t noticed in the wall behind her opened. Two soldiers hauled in a naked man and dropped him on the floor beside Meg’s chair. He had been savagely beaten, his face was bloodied and huge bruises covered much of his emaciated body. ‘What happened to him?’ she asked.

‘None of your concern,’ said the surly Light. ‘It is Jarudha’s business.’

‘Well?’ asked Diamond. ‘Can you heal him?’

She knelt beside the battered body. Beneath the dried blood and swelling she saw a young man’s face. His breathing was shallow, and he was close to death. She stroked his matted brown hair, and said, ‘I need hot water and cloths to bathe his injuries.’

‘If you truly have the Blessing, those things won’t be necessary to heal him,’ said Light.

Meg looked up at the four watchful faces, appealing for sympathy, but all she saw were men waiting for their question to be answered. She sighed as she placed her hands over the young man’s scalp, closed her eyes, and whispered, ‘Heal. Heal yourself.’ Her spine tingled, as it had when she’d healed Wombat and Westridge, and warmth spread from her hands into the young man. She remained bent over him for a long time, imagining his body repairing under her touch, and when she finally exhaled and straightened she was exhausted.

‘Is that it?’ Onyx asked, staring. Nothing about the unconscious victim’s appearance had changed.

‘For now,’ Meg answered wearily. ‘His wounds should have been cleaned to prevent infection. He has to sleep. Tomorrow morning he will feel better.’

‘He doesn’t look any different,’ said Light irritably.

‘We’ll see,’ said Diamond.

‘I need to rest,’ said Meg.

‘Send her back to her chamber,’ said Light to Diamond. ‘An acolyte can take her. We need to talk.’

Diamond guided Meg from the room into the curved hallway where he beckoned to a young man wearing a yellow robe. ‘Take Lady Meg to the palace,’ he ordered, and to Meg he said, ‘We’ll talk again,’ before he hurriedly retreated to rejoin his colleagues.

Meg cupped the rat in her hands against the background of the vast palace courtyard and the distant city as she sat at the large chamber window. She stared into the rat’s glittering eyes, sceptically studying the little animal. ‘You rescued me last night, didn’t you?’ she asked, expecting the rat to answer. ‘Was it you who told me to run?’ Whisper sat up on her haunches and started methodically cleaning her whiskers. ‘You aren’t all that you pretend,’ Meg said, mimicking a phrase she’d heard used about herself. ‘No one is in this place.’ She shut her eyes and tried to send thoughts to the rat. After a frustrating moment of nothing, she opened her eyes and sighed. ‘Am I going crazy?’ She nervously turned, expecting someone to answer her question, but the chamber was empty. Whisper jumped down from her hands and scampered towards the black woollen rug, where she promptly curled up to sleep. ‘I appreciate the company,’ Meg said sullenly.

She crossed to the table, where she poured a measure of water from a crystal jug and drank, and sighed with boredom. After the audience with the Queen, and the disturbing meeting with the Seers,
she’d returned to the chamber to sleep. When she’d woken, there was a meal laid on the table so she ate a portion of what tasted like roasted duck and vegetables. She’d hoped Spring would be in the chamber, but the young woman wasn’t, so she talked to Whisper, mulling over the strange events that had consumed her life in the past cycles and brought her to this alien place so far from her home. Now, even the rat was uninterested. Her shoulders sagged as she went to the bookcase and rifled through the collection. Eventually she selected a green leather-bound book with the title
Lessons of a Monarch
and flicked through it. A knocking broke her reverie. ‘Who is it?’ she asked warily.

‘Follower Servant,’ came the answer in a softly spoken familiar voice.

‘What do you want?’

A curt cough was followed by, ‘I was wondering if my lady would be interested in walking the palace grounds.’ Meg opened the door to find the Intermediary standing between five Elite Guards. ‘These are the men Her Majesty has assigned to your protection, my lady,’ Follower announced. ‘If you are interested in taking a walk with me, two will accompany us. The others will guard your chamber.’

‘Will they go in?’

‘Only if they hear something unusual, my lady.’

Meg turned to the Guards. ‘Inside my chamber is a pet rat. She’s black and her name is Whisper. She’s meant to be there. All right?’

The Guards exchanged glances. ‘As your ladyship orders,’ one man replied.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

‘Straightaim, your ladyship.’

‘Thank you, Straightaim. Whisper is in your care.’ She raised an arm towards Follower, who looked
momentarily surprised, before he gave an approving nod and graciously took her proffered arm.

She gazed across the grey-blue watery expanse in wonder, breathing in the invigoratingly salty ocean smell. Seagulls wheeled around the walls and cliffs below the parapet where she stood with Follower, and waves boomed against the rocks sending spray cascading high into the air. Nothing she had ever seen matched the awesome majesty of the ocean vista from the palace walls. ‘I am to assume you’ve
never
seen the ocean?’ Follower asked.

‘Never. Does it go on forever?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘Once upon a time the ancients thought that if you went too far to the west in a boat you would fall off the edge of the world. We can’t see them, but out there are other lands, some even like our own. Explorers have returned with tales of civilisations wanting to trade, and rich lands waiting to be settled. Unfortunately, to journey to those places takes many cycles on even our best ships, and it’s dangerous with storms and other unknown perils. More people have perished at sea than have come back from those voyages.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘she can be very beautiful. Wait until you see the ocean on a calm, sunny morning, or when the sun sets. Or on a moonlit night when the wind is calm and the air is warm. Poets and balladeers write lyrics about that beauty. “Full sweet is her breath as she moans at the moon, as she lures swooning sailors to their watery doom.” The Queen’s Bard penned that last year. But the ocean is also a fierce and ruthless mistress. When you see her from the safety of the cliff tops in the middle of a wild storm, you’ll see an animal of such brutality unleashed that you will wonder how the land
can contain her along its borders. At her whim, the ocean can carry a ship on her breast like a mother bearing her child, and viciously and remorselessly tear that same ship asunder on her hidden rocks and reefs.’

Meg watched a small sailing ship ply the watery entrance to the harbour. Three larger vessels rocked at their deep-water anchorage. She’d only seen small boats in the river at Summerbrook, but never been in one, and her only water-borne experience was the ferry with Wombat. ‘It must be amazing to float on the ocean.’

‘Perhaps you’ll get the chance one day, my lady,’ Follower suggested. ‘We’d best continue our walk. It will soon be time for dinner.’

Meg enjoyed Follower’s tour. The intricate stone and wood architecture and the multitude of carvings of the palace’s main building fascinated her. Many smaller buildings—military and servants’ quarters, storage areas and retreats—reflected a common theme of white stone and dark wood with intricate carvings and statuettes. There were manicured gardens, and open spaces of grass, fountains and grottoes, vines and rotundas scattered through the grounds, and she felt that a person could wander for days. The palace seemed bigger than the entire Summerbrook village. Only the Temple of Jarudha, to where Diamond had taken her after her audience with the Queen, was deliberately set apart from the palace with its yellow stone and circular shape.

Outside the temple, young men in yellow robes sat in a circle, listening to a blue-robed Seer. ‘You believe in Jarudha, of course, my lady?’ Follower asked as they stopped to watch the group.

That was a question she really hadn’t considered. She knew her mother did. Did Emma? Did her father, before he was killed in the war? ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, and noticed that Follower frowned. ‘Is that a problem?’

He adopted a congenial smile to answer her. ‘It will be if you are truly a receiver of Jarudha’s Blessing.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it is Jarudha’s Blessing,’ he said abruptly. ‘Jarudha wouldn’t bestow it upon a heretic. It wouldn’t make sense.’

‘Oh,’ she murmured, sensing that his statement contained an important warning. To change the conversation’s direction, she asked, ‘What is the Seer talking about?’

Follower shook his head. ‘That is for the acolytes, not for us.’ He took her arm and drew her away from the circle. ‘Come. I’ll show you the library and the museum.’

Back in her chamber, the afternoon waning as dark clouds rolled across the ocean, Meg cuddled Whisper and gazed out the big window at the main courtyard. Follower told her that the palace had approximately two hundred and thirty rooms, but the number wasn’t exact because no one had ever been allowed in secret chambers known only to the Royals. The library dwarfed the bookcase in her chamber and contained more books than she imagined could exist. The museum, which stretched easily twice the length of the palace’s main entry hall, held artefacts and paintings and maps collected from regions and civilisations farflung across the world—east, south, north, west. She’d wandered, looking at preserved and stuffed animals—horrified to discover a dingo in the collection—fascinated by the stripes of a tiger and the sheer size of an elephant. There were relics of past wars and examples of unusual items brought back by explorers who’d ventured overseas. Full armoured suits representing different eras and different cultures, looking like soldiers waiting for someone to breathe
life back into them, were displayed. She’d never thought much about the past, or imagined that people and civilisations had not only existed before her time, but had risen, believed that they were the sole inheritors of the world, and then vanished into dust. After the museum, she felt as if her perspective on the world had altered irrevocably.

Her chamber door opened and Spring entered with a bundle in her arms. ‘The clothes you requested, my lady,’ she announced.

‘Thank you, Spring. Put them on the bed so I can get changed.’ She ignored the girl’s use of the title that irritated her. ‘Do you know what will happen regarding my dinner?’

Spring headed for the bed, replying, ‘I haven’t been given orders yet, my—Meg.’ She laid out the green tunic and bone trousers, and a black vest embroidered with the royal gold serpent emblem.

‘Where did you get them from?’

‘I had to ask Her Majesty’s wardrobe adviser. She gave them to me. She said to tell you that if anything needs adjusting, you know, like taking in or up, to send them back and she’ll see to it.’

Meg held the trousers against her leg and smiled. ‘I think you have a good eye, Spring.’

‘Thank you, my—Meg,’ Spring replied, and bowed.

The door opened again, and Queen Sunset entered with two attendants. The Queen, in her black gown, glanced at Whisper before crossing to Meg. ‘Lady Meg, please excuse my intrusion. Sadly, I’m always in a hurry during the day, and one of the good aspects of being Queen is being able to come and go wherever I please without having to ask.’ Her eyes shifted to the clothes on the bed, and she smiled. ‘Getting changed?’