A/N:
{}={}={}
It had taken an army of palace servants over three weeks to prepare the Hall of Crowns. Right now, ten of them were adding the finishing touches—jugs of water on the town representatives' tables, ink and paper for the scribes, and a last-minute dusting of any surface that stood still.
Meanwhile, while Salma's crew stirred up the dust, Gary was sitting on the edge of the couch in Alanna's room. At her insistence, he was drinking an herbal tea with calming properties.
"Relax, Gary," she ordered him for about the hundredth time. And for a second, he seemed to relax, until someone knocked softly on the door.
"Gary!" Alanna scolded as he jumped to his feet, spilling the tea all over the floor.
"Sorry," he said sheepishly, reaching for a towel. Alanna went to answer the door. It was Myles, and his face was dead white.
"Someone's set fire to the Hall of Crowns," he told them.
{}={}={}
Gary, Alanna, and Myles arrived, panting, at the door to the Hall of Crowns to find servants and nobles alike frantically trying to douse the fire. Several mages were treating the fire like a large candle and attempting to "blow it out" with strong magical winds, but this only made it worse.
Numair came running down the stairs. He had obviously just left his workroom, as his sleeves were rolled up and his hands covered in a thick, goopy purple substance.
"Mages!" he called. The inept sorcerers let their wind die and turned their heads. "Water," Numair said sensibly, and sent an ocean of water over the hall. Most of the flames subsided, and the other mages chased after the stray blazes.
Numair made his way through the crowd over to where Gary, Alanna, and Myles were standing. "Good thinking," Myles told him as a sympathetic Alanna brought her tired friend a glass of water (from one of the closed jugs).
"What are we going to do with all these people now?" Gary wondered aloud. The others looked at him in surprise. "Well, do you expect me to cancel the convention because of some insane conservative?"
"You don't really think anyone did this on purpose, Gary, do you?" Alanna asked frantically. "Do you?"
"Everything suggests it," Gary said. "The day that we're set to begin, our meeting place is destroyed. There are plenty of people who don't want our efforts to succeed… "
{}={}={}
Numair, Alanna, and the other palace mages had assured Gary that the Hall of Crowns would be ready in twenty-four hours if they worked through the night. He had agreed to push back the meetings exactly one day, and left Myles to send messages throughout the palace while he went up to his room to ponder the problem. Who is so against this that they would set fire to one of Tortall's monuments? he thought. The Hall of Crowns was built before the writing of the Book of Gold. It's one of our most treasured monuments…
"Gareth of Naxen!" called a voice a hundred or so feet down the corridor. Gary, about to open his door, turned around.
"Yes?" he asked impatiently. The owner of the voice was a man wearing a black facemask and carrying a crossbow with an arrow on the string. Gary dived out of the way, but not in time. He felt a sharp pain in his left bicep as he hit the floor painfully. By the time he had scrambled to his feet, the man was gone.
"Mithros," he whispered before losing consciousness.
{}={}={}
"Gary? Can you hear me? Wake up, Gary!"
Gary opened his eyes to a blurry world, and mostly something blurry and purple with orange on top. A few seconds later, he could distinguish Alanna, wearing a purple tunic, standing over him with an expression of worry on her face. The pain in his arm, while dulled (likely by the efforts of healers), was still acute. He sat up, head swimming briefly, and found himself in the healers' wing, as he had suspected.
"Alanna?" he said. She was sitting on a chair next to his bed, and took his hand gently.
"Do you remember who shot you?" she asked. "Did you see the face of anyone you knew?" Gary shook his head.
"It was a man with his face covered. He could have been anyone." He looked down dejectedly, and Alanna squeezed his hand in reassurance.
"What time is it?" he asked suddenly. Alanna twisted around to look at the clock on the wall.
"A little after ten," she said. "Duke Baird gave you a sleeping potion and…hey! Where do you think you're going?"
Gary had swung his legs over the edge of the bed and shook off Alanna's attempts to pull him back down. "I have less than half an hour to bathe and change," he said. "Make sure you get down to the Hall in time."
"But Gary!" the lioness protested as he tested out his balance. "You're supposed to stay here and rest until tomorrow! You can't go!"
"Watch me," he said, shutting the door behind him.
{}={}={}
A/N: I'm having a lot of fun with this! What do you think? I really, really like reviews! Especially on strange stories like this one. Oh, and if I make mistakes (I realized that I made a mistake in a Letters one, because I'm too lazy to proofread), can you call my attention to them? Thanks!
Off-topic A/N: Never listen to David Bowie's "Space Oddity" during that time of the month if you get tearful like me. Just trust me on this one.
