The Harvest Court
By midday the petitions grow harder. A lord asks why the order's riders answer to a royal writ instead of to the lords of the realm. A town reeve asks, very carefully, what becomes of a man the order has judged, and whom he should ask to get him back. The king's brother, the Inquisitor, stands at the foot of the dais and answers before the king can, smoothly and kindly, and the king lets him.
Through it all, a healer in white stands just behind the throne. Twice the king stops in the middle of a ruling and looks at his hands as if he has set something down and cannot think where. Twice the steward leans in and quietly gives him the next word. The court smiles, the clerks write on, and nobody in the hall says what all of them have noticed. As the lamps are lit, one last petitioner is still waiting at the doors, travel-worn and patient, asking to speak to the king alone.
He is a broad, tired, kindly man who looks more like a farmer in borrowed finery than a king, and his people love him for it. His house has held the crown on one oath for generations: the roads open, the harvests fair, the realm at peace. He has kept it better than most.
When the Army of Light came marching up the king's roads, healing as it went, he granted it his royal writ to march, heal and judge in his name, and the towns opened their gates. His younger brother carries his words to the order and theirs back to him. The order's healers attend him every morning now. He has started losing small things - a name, a date, the end of a sentence - and the court smiles politely and calls it age.
- Harvest King
- Oath Keeper
- Fading Certainty
- Royal Seat
- Spiral Towers
- Terraced Fountains
Solspire rises out of the patchwork farmland of a broad river valley, east of the main river and inside the tall ridge, and nothing else in the realm looks like it. Its towers are slender and pale, and they twist as they climb, like wheat stalks turning toward the light, until each one flares open into a crown of coloured glass that throws the sunrise across the fields in red, amber and green. High arched bridges run between the towers, green-copper domes sit among them like upturned bells, and the tallest spire carries a great sun-disc of polished bronze that farmers in the far fields tell the hour by. Below the towers the castle steps down in terraces of gardens and fountains, fed by channels cut from the river, until the last terrace wall gives way to hedgerows and barley. It is the grandest seat in the realm. Market carts still roll right up to the lower gates, the court buys its bread from the same bakers as the farmhands, and on a still evening the whole valley can hear the fountains.