Stronghold Read online

  THE DRAGON AZHDEEN ROUSED IN SURPRISE—

  and a picture appeared in the air. Dragon-conjured before Pol was a strange sight: dragons floating on the sea. Not living dragons, but stiff, motionless, with uplifted wings frozen in place. Like sails, Pol thought, tracing with his gaze the raised necks with their sightless heads dipping to the rise and fall of the waves. Ships, of course, built of wood and not dragon bones and hide, but Azhdeen couldn’t know that. He evidently thought dragons had been killed and made to float on water.

  Pol wove his colors into the picture, altering it to reflect what he knew was the reality. Wings became sails; bones changed to masts and rigging. He had never seen such a vessel himself, but his years as a squire at Graypearl had familiarized him with ships. He added people on what was now a wooden deck.

  It’s nothing more than that, he told Azhdeen, conveying reassurance.

  The reaction felled him. The dragon threw back his head with a roar. Pol was knocked off his feet and out of the intricate weave of color. His wits spun and for a time he could barely see. When Pol could stand again, Azhdeen was rearing back on his hind legs, wings unfurled, bellowing his rage.

  Pol again offered his colors to the dragon. What is it? What have I done?

  Azhdeen glared. Again the picture formed. Believe! was the emotion whirling on sunlight . . . .

  DAW Books Presents

  the Finest in Fantasy by

  MELANIE RAWN

  Exiles

  THE RUINS OF AMBRAI

  THE MAGEBORN TRAITOR

  Dragon Prince

  DRAGON PRINCE

  THE STAR SCROLL

  SUNRUNNER’S FIRE

  Dragon Star

  STRONGHOLD

  THE DRAGON TOKEN

  SKYBOWL

  THE GOLDEN KEY

  (with Jennifer Roberson and Kate Elliott)

  Copyright © 1990 by Melanie Rawn.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Michael Whelan.

  Map by Marty Siegrist.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 832

  ISBN: 978-1-101-66628-9

  First Paperback Printing. September 1991

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Version_1

  For all the teachers who figured there must be something going on with this kid—but never suspected it would be anything like this.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  PART TWO

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  PART THREE

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Index of Characters

  Genealogy

  Author’s Note

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Rohan squinted into the Desert sky, watching his circling hawk. All at once the bird plummeted to the rough scrub of the Vere Hills. Rohan held his breath. A few moments later the hawk soared upward, a greentail clutched in her talons. She spiraled on a thermal, then swooped down to deposit the plump bird neatly at Rohan’s feet. When she balanced on his arm again, he whistled appreciatively; she replied with a grating coo of affection.

  “She’s flirting with you again,” Sioned observed.

  “I have that effect on ladies of taste and perception.” He fed the bird a morsel of raw meat, whistled the flight command again, and flung her smoothly into the air. The hawk flew off to seek her own dinner.

  Sioned sat down on a rock. “I assume that means Avaly of Rezeld would’ve had more luck if she’d batted her lashes?”

  “So that’s what’s been bothering you all day.” Unhooking the water skin from his belt, he took a swig and offered her some.

  “It was embarrassing to watch.” She drank and stoppered the skin.

  “All I could think about was getting her off her knees and out of my sight as fast as possible.”

  “Why did she wait nine years? It couldn’t have taken that long to think up that tale about her father’s being under a diarmadhi spell like Chiana.”

  “Her proposed husband evidently inspired her. He wants the holding and the title along with her highborn blood. That’s the only dowry a merchant that wealthy would care about.”

  “Well, he can’t have them. Morlen was just waiting for a chance to betray you and Pol, and I see no reason to reward his daughter for it. And anyway, how could she think of marrying a man who forced her to that performance?”

  “Sioned! Wouldn’t you plead on your knees for me?”

  “With my aching joints? Certainly not.”

  He grinned down at her. “Well, I suppose you are getting old and crippled and decrepit.”

  “Half a season your senior, young fellow, and don’t you forget it!” She wagged a finger at him, laughing.

  He caught her hand and was about to pull her up into his arms when a screech and a feather-rush warned him. He turned just in time to extend his right arm to his hawk, who dug her talons into protective leather and preened.

  “Jealous, too,” Sioned remarked. “Goddess, doesn’t she look pleased with herself!”

  They walked back through the late afternoon haze to Stronghold, entering by the grotto passage—once secret, but not anymore. Sioned lingered by the waterfall to bathe her face and arms while Rohan returned his hawk to the mews. This autumn, her thirty-ninth in the Desert, was the hottest she could recall. She and Rohan had avoided summer completely this year by indulging in a lengthy journey through Syr before going up to Dragon’s Rest for the Rialla. She’d shown him her childhood home of River Run, taken a side trip into the Catha Hills to investigate the dragons’ winter lairs, and stopped in at High Kirat to visit her nephew Prince Kostas and his family. Many times they’d left their small retinue behind and slept in the open, hunted or hawked as fancy dictated, and forgotten for days at a time that there were titles and responsibilities attached to their names.

  But having escaped the summer heat, they returned after the Rialla to find their princedom had taken on all the soothing qualities of a smelting furnace. The sun blazed, the dunes burned with shimmer-visions, and heat clung to every stone. Rohan shrugged off the brutal climate, being Desert born and bred, but even though she’d spent two-thirds of her life here, Sioned felt the heat more as she grew older.


  She settled on a mossy rock and hauled off her boots. Gasping with the shock as she plunged her feet into cool water, she closed her eyes and tried to dream herself back at River Run. No use. If Avaly hadn’t arrived yesterday with her foredoomed plea, she could have been at Radzyn by now, enjoying its crisp sea breezes, visiting Maarken and Hollis at Whitecliff—

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” advised Rohan from behind her. “We’ve just been graced with an emissary from Prince Velden of Grib.”

  “Damn it, what’s wrong with these people? Why couldn’t they have talked to us at the Rialla?”

  “Doubtless they had their reasons.”

  “Whatever they are, I don’t like them.”

  “Come on, High Princess—we played all summer. Time to get back to work.”

  She kicked water at him across the little pool. “I don’t want to.”

  “Now you sound like Jihan.”

  “Well, you have to admit people make things difficult. You can hardly pretend to be reluctant with your power when they’re always handing you chances to use it.”

  “Pretend?” He frowned.

  “Demanding that you use it, actually. At least Pol’s honest about it. He loves to fix things and makes no pretense of—”

  “Just be grateful that someone still finds it worthwhile to consult us old folks,” he drawled.

  That silenced her. She followed him back through the gardens and upstairs, gnawing over his implication. It was amusing to tease each other about oncoming old age—especially when neither believed the other had aged at all—but at times they were forcibly reminded that the years were indeed accumulating.

  The knowledge had sneaked up on them at first. Perhaps it had started at the Rialla of 731, Pol’s first as husband and father as well as prince. He had spoken for Princemarch before, of course, but with his new family had come new awarenesses. The terms he gained, independent of anything Rohan won for the Desert, were highly advantageous and gave subtle hints about his plans for his daughters’ future. Rohan and Sioned had congratulated themselves on their success—after all, they had taught Pol everything he knew.

  But more leisurely reflection, and repetition of the experience in 734 and again this very summer, had shown them a hard truth. While the princes still looked to them, they also looked to Pol. The next High Prince.

  Rohan and Sioned had given him the world in which he exercised his share of the family cunning. The peace they’d established had lasted with only minor lapses since 704. They’d founded a school for physicians and a scriptorium. Specific borders agreed to by all princes ensured that no more wars were fought over a few square measures of land. Arts and sciences thrived. Interwoven trade made the princedoms economically dependent on each other. Most importantly, Rohan had nudged the other rulers into standardizing much of the legal code. Over the years this had come to be known as the High Prince’s Writ, and it would be his most lasting achievement. It was more than any other High Prince had done before him, more than anyone else could have hoped to do in a lifetime—even if anyone else had been the dreamer Rohan was. But because he did have dreams, leavened with vast patience and ruthless practicality, there was so much more that he wanted to accomplish.

  It was a proud thing to watch Pol fulfill their hopes. And Meiglan had surprised them all with her adjustments to her role as his wife. Though she would never be the kind of High Princess Sioned was, she had grown into her own sort of wisdom. People didn’t confide in Meiglan, or consult her about matters of state. They merely did not guard their tongues around her. It was an opportunity not open to Sioned, whose intelligence was well known and often feared. She learned more from what people didn’t tell her than from what they did. But Meiglan was so quiet, so unobtrusive, that most of the time one forgot she was there. What she reported was colored by her personal prejudices—she loathed Pirro of Fessenden, for instance, and was terrified of Chiana. But she had learned to weed out what was important and present it with an eye to Pol’s needs. Her methods differed from Sioned’s, but she got the job done.

  This past Rialla Rohan and Sioned had mostly watched the young couple’s work, giving private advice here and there. It was time for them to move into the background; eventually Pol and Meiglan would take their places. The other princes must accustom themselves to the next generation. Eminently practical—but a little depressing.

  Sioned wondered if Zehava had experienced the same thing when Rohan had been the one young and strong and full of impatient energy. She understood Pol’s eagerness—the young dragon exhilarated by the strength of his wings. Perhaps Zehava had watched with the same smile she saw sometimes on Rohan’s face, a look of pride and rueful regret.

  She sat at her dressing table, brushing out her hair, watching him covertly in the mirror. The hot misted light of sunset drifting through open windows turned his hair as gold as it had been in his youth. Looking at him as he shrugged out of his sweat-stained shirt, it was impossible to convince herself that this coming winter would be his sixty-first. That it would be forty years next spring since she’d first seen him on the road to Stronghold, bloodied and exhausted after killing the dragon that had killed his father. That they were not just growing older, but growing old. That not only had she never fallen out of love with him, but had, in fact, fallen in love with him all over again many times—most recently this very summer.

  Preposterous. The product of an overactive imagination that insisted on picturing him at River Run, enchanted with the greenness, lazing back in flower-strewn grass, making love to her in a hayloft, racing for shelter during a sudden thundershower. Or at Dragon’s Rest: long walks in the forest or through Pol’s beloved gardens, nights on their own in Meiglan’s little hillside cottage, a memorable evening when she took him on a tasting tour of the wine cellar she’d personally assembled for their son.

  Yet there had been reminders of age, too, most obviously in the form of twin seven-year-old granddaughters. Rohan didn’t look like a grandsire. But Jihan had not only half his name but his blue eyes as well, and the cleft in Rislyn’s dainty chin could have come from no one else. He gleefully indulged them with endless games of dragon slaying, and earned the supreme accolade that Grandsir was much better at it than Papa. Jihan usually won; she was the dominant twin, running riot around the palace, trailing mischief in her wake. Rislyn was quieter, gentler, more like her shy mother. Everyone adored Jihan, but everyone’s favorite was Rislyn.

  They even said that Rislyn looked very like Sioned.

  Gentle fingers clasped her shoulders, and she gave a start. “I didn’t mean that, you know,” Rohan said. “About being old.”

  “I know you didn’t, but it’s true.” She met his gaze in the mirror. “Though it’s hard to believe, looking at you. You’ve gone all silvery instead of golden—that’s the only difference.”

  “Liar. My bones creak and my right shoulder aches in the cold and my arms aren’t long enough to hold parchments where I can read them.”

  “And last night all you could do in bed was sleep.”

  He grinned. “Well, I do seem to have a soft spot for elderly ladies.”

  “My dear decrepit azhrei, right now I haven’t the slightest interest in your soft spots.”

  Quite some time later, he stretched and dug his toes into the cool silk of bunched sheets at the end of the bed. Using a strand of Sioned’s long hair to tickle her shoulder, he whispered, “I think I saw it that time.”

  “Hmm?” she asked drowsily. “Saw what?”

  “The colors.”

  She quivered with silent laughter. “Now we have the truth at last. He only makes love to the Sunrunner witch for the sake of intellectual curiosity.”

  “Certainly,” he agreed. “You should never have told me what you see. I’ve been trying to catch a glimpse ever since.”

  “And did you?”

  “Why don’t we try it again and I’ll let you know?”

  • • •

  The Gribains were growing
impatient by the time Rohan and Sioned finally came downstairs for dinner in the Great Hall. Casual pleasantries were the order of conversation; the Gribains were firmly steered away from any formal discussion during the meal. Rohan knew why they were here. According to his habit, he had made no decision and would not until one presented itself. Though open discussion was prevented by Sioned’s tact and Rohan’s sporadic deafness whenever the subject was hinted at, he had not counted on the artless innocence of the squire who was serving at dinner.

  Isriam was the only child of Sabriam of Einar and Isaura of Meadowlord, Prince Halian’s niece. With his family connections and the wealth of his father’s city, one day Isriam would be an important man. At sixteen he was a dark-eyed, dark-haired, gawky adolescent possessed of not the slightest hint of subtlety. Rohan kept telling himself the boy would grow out of his awkwardness, but despaired of ever teaching him how to keep his every thought from his face and his every idea from spilling over into speech. As he served taze and cakes to the high table, Isriam asked, “Will your grace desire the Summer Room made ready for a conference with the Gribain ambassadors this evening?”

  This was the perfect opening, and the courtier who had been sent by Prince Velden took advantage of it with practiced smoothness. “It is extremely wise of your grace to wish this unhappy matter settled as quickly as possible. We will, of course, make ourselves available to your grace immediately after dinner.”

  Rohan considered answering Isriam in the negative, then chided himself. He had spent most of the spring and all summer at play. He planned a trip to Radzyn in a few days that would extend the holiday well into autumn. He really ought to do a little work and earn the privilege of being bowed to and gossiped about behind his back. Deciding to give in, he replied with a smile, “That’s very kind of you, Master Eschur. The journey from Grib is a tiring one. But if it suits, then yes, we’ll meet in a little while.”

  “As your grace wishes,” Eschur said with a slight bow. Rohan reflected that his name suited him; eyes with a “wolf’s sight” he truly had, yellowish and sharp. The High Prince did not anticipate a fun evening.