No doubt a similar impatience rose from those shadows. Though Gunthar claimed that Boniface wore the waiting more gracefully in his ardor for Oath and Measure, there was something else to the big Knight's restlessness and silence, thought Alfred. To Gunthar's way of thinking, ceremony was the delay between battles, but to Boniface, it was the battle proper.
To Lord Alfred's right, Lord Stephan Peres, an ancient veteran on his last but extraordinarily durable legs, had seated himself with an audible creak and a quiet groan. Alfred leaned back, drumming his gloved fingers across the dark arms of the chair, then raised his right hand. At his signal, the music began. It was a ponderous march, slow and melancholy as befit the dirge for the year, the three hundred and forty-first since the Cataclysm.
Beside the High Justice, old Lord Stephan smiled faintly in his forest of a beard. He was a tall man and lean, having parried gracefully that tendency of the older Knights to sink into heaviness and dreams. They said it was eccentricity that had kept him healthy-that and the gift of being amused at just about anything that came to pass in the Tower and the Order.
Tonight, though, the old man's amusement was strained. The end of his eighty-fifth year approached, and with it, as always, this ceremony of memory where the halls were decked with banners. He was weary of it all: the pomp and the trumpetry, the abyss of winter, December's winds full bitter in the Vingaard Mountains.