From the
wardrobes at the castle Olivia had chosen the coronation gown of
Queen Mitygen herself. It was of fine lace woven in a single piece,
and it lay in a foam of shining threads traced with pure lines of
shadow. On her head were a jeweled coronal and jeweled hair-loops in
the Phoenician fashion, once taken from a king's casket and sent
secretly, upon the decline of Assyrian ascendancy, to be bartered in
the marts of Coele-Syria. Chains of jewels, in a noon of colour, lay
about her throat, as once they lay upon the shoulders of the dead
queens of Yaque and, before them, of the women of the elder
dynasties long since recorded in indifferent dust. Girdling her
waist was a zone of rubies that burned positive in the tempered
light. With all her delicacy, Olivia was like her rubies--vivid,
graphic, delineated not by light but by line.
The members of the High Council rustled in their colour and white,
and flashed their golden stars; the Golden Guards (save the apostate
few who were that day sentenced to be set adrift) were filling the
stairway like a bank of buttercups; and Olivia's women, led by
Antoinette in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated, were
entering by an opposite door.
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