Dragon Prince 03 - Sunrunner's Fire by Melanie Rawn Page B

came a young maidservant, black-haired and slender; she paused just long enough in the sunshine to make sure Pol had seen her, then stretched her arms wide, as if she’d just slipped out for some fresh air. Pol excused himself a few moments later—not even having the grace to enter the Hall by a different door.
    Sionell watched him disappear, stunned. Right in front of my face, too! All the subtlety of a rutting dragonsire!
    Then: Fool! Idiot! He’s the High Prince’s heir, the great Sunrunner Prince—he can do as he likes and—damn him! I am not going to cry!
    And, finally: Very well, then. If that’s the way the wind sets, so be it. I’m not twelve anymore. If he doesn’t want me, lots of others do. He can find a convenient Hell and rot in it for all I care.
     
     
    The next afternoon the High Princess enlisted her namesake’s help in packing presents for Andry’s son and daughter. He had not brought them to the Rialla. Rumor had it that this neglect earned him an interview with his parents that acquainted him intimately with their blistering views on the subject. Their anger was not that the children existed; they were furious and hurt that Andry had left them behind at Goddess Keep. Sionell and everyone else knew why. He intended little Andrev and Tobren to be raised as faradh’im only, with no ties and thus no second loyalties to the Desert. She could just imagine what Lord Chaynal—not to mention Princess Tobin—had said to that.
    The latter had indulged her thwarted grandmotherly instincts with a buying spree at the Rialla Fair. It was this collection of toys, clothes, and trinkets that Sionell helped wrap and label for the children—while Tobin fretted at not having had them ready for Andry’s departure two days earlier.
    “He would ride out in a hurry, wanting to make good time back to Goddess Keep, when he knew I had things for the babies! I swear that one of these days I’m going to skin that boy alive.”
    Surveying the piles of packages—and the things yet to be wrapped—Sioned laughed. “Smart of him to escape while he had the chance. Honestly, Tobin, it’s going to take two wagons and four pack horses to get all this to Goddess Keep.”
    Sionell said innocently, “The pony cart she bought them ought to hold quite a bit.”
    “Goddess in glory, don’t remind her!” Sioned begged. “She’ll go after the departing merchants and load that up, too!”
    “Go on, tease me,” Tobin invited, making a face. “You just wait until you become a grandmother, High Princess!”
    Sionell prudently did not comment that if Pol kept putting off marriage while doing what he was doing with the maidservants, Sioned would have grandchildren long before she had a daughter-by-marriage. His bedchamber exploits were no one’s business but his—not even his mother’s. And certainly not any of my concern—the graceless swine—
    She glanced up from folding a stack of shirts to find that both Tobin and Sioned had run to the windows. An instant later the whole tower seemed to shake as an arrogant roar shattered the morning stillness.
    Dragons.
    Sionell was first down the stairs. She arrived breathless outside the tower and stared up at the flight of dragons heading for the lake. Training her mother had given her in the intellectual study of the beasts warred briefly with the sheer delight of watching them. Emotion won, as ever. The day it didn’t, she’d order up her funeral pyre—for surely she would be near death.
    “I never get over it,” Sioned murmured at her side, as if she’d heard Sionell’s thoughts. “All these years, watching them everywhere from Remagev to Waes, and I’ve never gotten used to their beauty.”
    Others joined them on the grassy slope in front of the Princes Hall—Sionell’s parents, Maarken, Hollis, Arlis, and the High Prince himself. He was shirtless and barefoot, his damp fair hair indicating he’d leaped from a bath and barely remembered to pull on trousers. He