Heir to the Shadows

"You know what, Uncle Saetan?"
    "What?" Saetan replied warily, sipping his yarbarah.
    Karla's wicked smile bloomed. "Since you're the Warlord Prince of Dhemlan and rule that Territory, and I'm the Queen of Glacia and rule that Territory, now whenever Dhemlan has to deal with Glacia, you get to deal with me."
    Saetan choked.
    "Appalling thought, isn't it, that you're going to have to deal with all the things you taught me."
    "Mother Night," Saetan gasped as Karla plucked the glass out of his hand and thumped his back.
    "What'd you do to Uncle Saetan?" Morghann asked, accepting a glass of wine from Khary.
    "Just reminded him that we're now the Queens he has to deal with."
    "How unfair, Karla," Kalush said, joining them. "You should have eased into it instead of springing it on him."
    "How?" Karla frowned. "Besides, he knew it already. Didn't you?"
    Saetan retrieved his glass and drained it to avoid answering. After all the hours he, Geoffrey, Andulvar, and Mephis had spent chewing over the implications of having this particular group of Queens coming into power at this time,
    none of them had thought of the obvious—that he was going to have to deal with them as Territory Queens.
    A gong sounded throughout the Keep. Once. Twice. Thrice. Then, after a pause, a fourth time.
    Four times for the four sides of a Blood triangle, the fourth side being what was held within the other three. Like the three males—Steward, Master of the Guard, and Consort—who formed a strong, intimate triangle around a Queen.
    At the back of the room, huge double doors opened outward, revealing a dark emptiness.
    Paying no attention to the hesitant stirring around him, Saetan set his glass aside, smoothed his hair, and straightened his new clothes. Since Protocol dictated that processions went from light Jewels to dark, first all the males and then the females, he would be at the end of the male line.
    So he didn't realize no one had moved and that everyone was looking at him until Lucivar poked him.
    "Protocol dictates—" he began.
    "Screw Protocol," Karla replied succinctly. "You go first."
    When everyone nodded agreement, he slowly walked toward the double doors. Lucivar and Andulvar fell into step on either side of him. Mephis, Geoffrey, and Prothvar followed them.
    "What's in there?" Lucivar asked quietly.
    "I don't know," Saetan replied. "I've never been in this part of the Keep before." He glanced back at Geoffrey, who shook his head.
    They reached the doors and stopped. The lights from the room behind them revealed the first handful of wide, descending steps.
    We'll all break our necks trying to go down without lights.
    The thought was barely completed when little sparkles embedded in the dark stone began to glow, growing brighter and brighter.
    Like swirls of stars, Saetan thought, his breath catching. Like the poem Geoffrey quoted to him years ago, about the great dragons who had created the Blood. They spiral down into ebony, catching the stars with their tails.
    Ebony had once been the poetic term for the Darkness.
    Saetan froze, his foot suspended over the first step.
    Was it still?
    "Something wrong?" Lucivar whispered.
    Saetan shook his head and slowly descended, grateful for the solid Eyrien strength on either side of him.
    When he reached the bottom step, a second set of double doors swung inward. The midnight-black chamber slowly lightened, the dark giving way to the dawn. The light gradually spread from their end of the chamber to the other. But he noticed, as he moved forward, that it didn't illuminate the ceiling. At thrice his height, the light gave way to twilight, which, in its turn, yielded once again to the dark.
    The back wall began to lighten from either side. Filling the wall, as high as the light reached, was a highly detailed bas-relief. A dreamscape, a nightscape, shapes rising up from and dissolving into others. Kindred shapes. Human shapes. Blending. Entwined. Fierce and beautiful. Ugly and gentle.
    The light finally reached the center of the back wall and the Dark Throne. Three wide steps ran around the dais on three sides. On the dais itself was a simple blackwood chair with a high, carved back. Its simplicity said that the power that ruled here had no need for ornamentation or ostentation—especially when it was protected on the right-hand side by a huge dragon head coming out of the stone.
    "Mother Night," Andulvar said in a hushed voice. "She created a sculpture of Lorn's head."
    "Hell's fire," Lucivar