Chapter 10 - The Crown and the Hearth
The great feast of the midsummer solstice was the first time in forty years that the Hall of the Sun was lit not by tallow candles or smoky pine torches, but by two hundred glass lamps filled with clear mountain oil, their light reflecting off the amber walls and the red granite pillars until the entire room looked as though it were carved from a single block of gold.
At the high table sat Queen Clara.
She wore neither the coarse grey wool of her scullery days nor the heavy green velvet of her first weeks in the court; she wore a gown of pale silver-grey silk that caught the light like running water, and upon her brow, the Crown of Aurel burned with a steady, warm amber glow that warmed the air for ten paces around the throne.
Below her, the tables groaned under the weight of roasted venison, wild honey-cakes, silver flagons of mountain wine, and huge baskets of summer cherries picked from the orchards of the southern valleys.
There were no guards with halberds standing behind the chairs tonight. In their place stood the young men and women of the mountain levies, their leather jerkins replaced by simple tunics of blue and silver, laughing and talking with the merchants from the river-cities and the old lords from the western hills.
Duke Raymond’s son—now Earl of Westmere—sat to her right, his hand occasionally touching hers where it rested on the white linen tablecloth. Father Thomas sat to her left, dipping his bread in barley soup and smiling toothlessly at the children who ran between the benches with handfuls of spring flowers.
King Darian did not sit at the high table. He had retired three weeks before to the small stone cottage near the lower orchards where he spent his days carving wooden toys for the orphans of the castle guards and smoking his old clay pipe in the sun.
“To the crown,” Almon the archivist said, standing up with a silver goblet of wine in his hand, his old voice cracking slightly with emotion as he raised it toward the dais. “And to the hand that knows how to hold it.”
The whole hall rose—three hundred lords, merchants, soldiers, and kitchen-folk standing as one man.
“To the crown!” the cry went up, rolling off the vaulted roof and out through the open oak doors into the warm, starry night of the northern summer.
Clara stood up.
She didn't raise a goblet; she simply raised her right hand, palm upward, so the silver star on her wrist caught the light of the seven diamonds on her brow.
“To the hearth,” she said, her voice clear and strong, carrying to the furthest corners of the hall. “And to the people who keep the fire burning.”
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The cheering that followed shook the very stones of Aethelgard—not the cold, terrified silence of the days when the iron gates were rusting and the wolves were gathering in the snow, but the roar of a living, breathing kingdom that had finally found its way home.
And high above the towers, against the vast, star-strewn vault of the northern sky, the seven spires of the crown shone like a constellation that would never set again.
