A Fall of Princes (19 page)

“Is that an art reserved for mages?”

Sarevan looked down. Wide golden eyes, all but whiteless
like a lion’s or a falcon’s, looked up. Alone of anyone in Endros, Asanion’s
lion cub was brave enough to stand on ground that Bregalan had cleared.

He did not seem aware of his own courage. That was the
legacy of a thousand years of careful breeding: an arrogance as perfect as
Bregalan’s own. And the stallion, like Ulan before him, recognized it and
approved it.

Ulan had been much amused. From the glint in his eye,
Bregalan was no less so. Sarevan smiled. “Riding is an art that any man can
learn. Much like loving. With which, I understand, it has something in common.”

Hirel was losing the sun-stain of his wandering, returning
to the perfect pallor of ivory; even a slight flush was as vivid as a flag.

Odd, reflected Sarevan, how a youth of his accomplishments
could blush at the merest suggestion of a coarse word. But being Hirel, he
covered it with prickly hauteur. “I can ride. I am reckoned a master. But not
without a bridle.”

“Ah,” said Sarevan, “but that’s only for the Mad One’s kin.
This is his daughter’s son.”

Hirel laid a hand on Bregalan’s neck. Bregalan did not warn
him away.

Sarevan knew an instant’s piercing jealousy. An outlander, a
haughty infant with no power at all; and Sarevan’s homed brother not only
suffered him but showed every sign of approving of him. The little fool did not
even know that he was honored.

Sarevan slid from the saddle, which was half his penance for
thinking like an idiot. The other half he set in words. “Do you want to learn
how we do it? Bregalan will teach you, if you promise not to insult him by
regarding him as a dumb beast.”

The Asanian was cool, but Sarevan had seen the sudden light
before he hid it. “What is he if he is not a beast?”

“He is a kinsman and a friend. And he has a thinking mind,
though he has no tongue to tell you so.” Sarevan gestured, princely gracious.
“Will you mount?”

Bregalan was the tallest of the Mad One’s line; and while
that was nothing remarkable for a stallion of the Ianyn breed, it was a goodly
leap for a prince of the old Asanian blood. Hirel made it with that studied,
dancer’s grace of his, and looked down for once into Sarevan’s face.

Sarevan grinned at him. “Now begin. You have no bit and no
reins, but you have your whole body. Use it. Talk to him with it. Yes, gently.
Listen now; he answers. Yes. Yes, so.”

o0o

Sarevan ended again on the grass with Ulan, voice pitched
to carry well without effort. People had gathered: grooms, stablehands, the
inevitable scattering of idlers. This was a great rarity, a stranger mounted on
one of the Varyani demons; that it was an Asanian, and this Asanian to boot,
made it worth a stare or six.

And, Sarevan admitted reluctantly, they had come to stare at
him. For their sake he sat upright, cross-legged in his no longer pristine
white robe, and leaned on Ulan more than they knew but less than he would have
liked to.

Another voice slid smoothly into a pause in Sarevan’s. “No,
don’t lean. Sit straight; guide him with your leg. Your whole leg, sir. Heels
are merely an annoyance.”

How dull the world had grown, that Mirain An-Sh’Endor was
only a smallish man, very dark, with the bearing of a king. No blaze of light;
no high and singing presence in Sarevan’s mind, part of it, source of it,
anchored as firmly as the earth itself. Even when he came and settled his arm about
his son’s shoulders, he was only warm flesh; beloved, yes, but separate.
Sundered.

Sarevan would not cling and cry. He had done that when he
made the long terrible journey from the marches of death’s country, and woke,
and found himself a cripple. No power at all, only the void and the pain. He
had wept like a child, until his blurred and swollen eyes, lifting, saw the
anguish in his father’s face.

Then he had sworn. No tears. He was alive; his body would
mend. That must suffice.

“He does well,” Mirain said, holding Sarevan up and
mercifully refraining from comment on his condition.

Bregalan was showing Hirel how a battle charger fought in
Keruvarion; the boy had dropped his masks and loosed a blood-curdling whoop.
They were a fine and splendid sight: the great black beast with his blue-fire
eyes, his rider all gold and ivory, molded to the senel’s back, singing in a
voice too piercingly pure to be human.

Until it cracked, and Bregalan wearied of perfect obedience
and bucked him neatly into the trough. He came up gasping, more shocked than
angry, but he came up in a long leap that somersaulted him over the javelin
horns and onto the back that had spurned him.

A roar went up. Laughter, cheering, even a spear smitten on
a guardsman’s shield. Hirel sat and dripped and grinned a wide white grin.
Bregalan raised his head and belled in seneldi mirth.

o0o

Sarevan was not regretting what he had done. Not
precisely. He had had no strength left to face the stair; his father had
carried him up, taking not the least notice of his objections, standing by
sternly while his servants stripped him and bathed him and laid him in bed.

“And mind that you stay there,” said Mirain; and he left
Shatri on guard within the door.

The squire, transparently grateful to have escaped with a
mere reprimand, took his charge all too seriously. If Sarevan moved, Shatri was
there, alert, scowling formidably.

Not that Sarevan moved much. He was discovering muscles he
had not known he had.

There were not enough of them, that was the trouble. The bones kept thrusting
through.

o0o

He slept a little. He ate, to keep his nursemaids quiet.
When they pressed wine on him, even his sluggish nose could catch the sweetness
of dreamflower.

He flung the cup across the room. That was petulant,
unprincely, and very satisfying. And it persuaded even Shatri to let him be.

o0o

Sarevan started awake. Hirel regarded him steadily,
without expression.

For a moment Sarevan could not choose between waking and the
memory of a dream. It was a little unreal, that face, like something carved in
ivory. Perfect, without line or blemish, and poised still on the edge between
child and man.

In gown and veil he would have made an exquisite girl; in
coat and trousers he was a strikingly beautiful boy. Sarevan always wanted to
stroke him, to see if he would be as pleasing to the hand as to the eye.

Hirel’s eyes flicked aside; his brows met. “You drove
yourself too hard. I should have seen.”

“You couldn’t have stopped me.”

Hirel answered that with a long look. Abruptly he said,
“Roll over.”

Surprised, piqued with curiosity, Sarevan obeyed. Quick
hands stripped off the coverlet.

He shivered a little. The corner of his eye caught Hirel’s
infinitesimal pause, the widening of the golden eyes. “Not pretty, am I?”

“No,” Hirel murmured, hardly more than a whisper. His hands
found one of the hundred screaming muscles. Sarevan gasped and tensed; Hirel
did something indescribable; the pain melted and flowed and transmuted into
pleasure.

The boy’s deepening voice spoke just above his head. “No,
you are not pretty at all. You are beautiful.”

Sarevan’s cheeks were hot. Thank Avaryan and his Ianyn
ancestors, it never showed. And his tongue always knew what to do.

Lightly, carelessly, it said, “What are you trying to do,
infant? Make me vain?”

“That,” said Hirel, “would be salting the sea.” His weight
settled on the bed, kneeling astride Sarevan’s hips; his hands wrought wonders
up Sarevan’s back and across his shoulders.

Sarevan sighed from the bottom of his lungs. It was almost
sinful, this. Purest animal contentment.

What an artist the child was with those hands. What an
innocent, in spite of everything.

“You would have made a splendid bath-slave,” Sarevan’s
tongue observed, incorrigible.

Hirel worked his way downward, inch by blissful inch. Then
up, and with more ease than he had any right to, he turned Sarevan onto his
back.

A faint flush stained his cheeks. His curls were loosening
as they grew, falling over his forehead. Sarevan had no will left; he reached
to stroke them.

The boy was learning. He tensed, but he held himself still.
Only his hands moved. Upward.

Sarevan laughed. “I dare you,” he said.

Slowly Hirel straightened, gathered himself, sat on the
bed’s edge. His eyes slanted toward Sarevan’s middle, and slanted away.

Sarevan refused to cover it. Even and especially when Hirel
observed to the air, “So very much, to so very little purpose.”

“What, child! Envy?”

“Moral outrage.” Hirel tucked up his feet and drew his brows
together. The line between them was going to be etched there before he was very
much older. “Sun-prince, there is that which I must say.”

Sarevan waited.

Hirel’s hands fisted on his knees. “This should never have
come to pass. You, I. You should have slain me before ever I woke by your fire.
I should have taken your life while you lay helpless by the Lakes of the Moon,
or held you back on the journey until you died of your own accord. We cannot be
what we are. We must not. For I have heard and I have seen, in Kundri’j and in
Endros. I know that two emperors rule the two faces of the world; but when our
time comes, only one of us may claim throne or power. And that time is coming
soon. Your father makes no secret of it. Mine intends to move before him. Has
moved already, subtly. Are you not the proof of it?”

Sarevan’s throat tightened into pain. He thrust his voice
through it. “I’m proof of nothing but my own stupidity.”

“That, too,” Hirel said all too willingly. “As am I of mine.
Your father declares that his god will not permit a peaceful union of our
empires. Mine insists that we must not be overrun by the barbarian vigor of the
east. Yet here are we. I am not going to find it easy to bring about your
death.”

“What ever makes you think that you should have to?”

“Bow to me, then. Bow to me now, and swear that you will
serve me when I am emperor.”

Sarevan sat bolt upright. The last languor of Hirel’s
ministrations had vanished. His branded hand had flared into agony. But he
laughed, though it was half a howl. “You forget, cubling. You forget what I am.
Avaryan is not only my father’s god. He is mine, and he rules me. He—still—rules
me.”

Still. Sarevan laughed harder, freer, cradling the pain that
was driving him through madness into blessed, blissful clarity.

Avaryan. Burning Avaryan. No mere mage could drive him from
his only son’s only son. He was there. He was pain. He was—

Sarevan’s cheeks stung. He rocked with the force of Hirel’s
blows, blinking, still grinning.

“Are you mad?” Hirel all but screamed at him.

“No,” said Sarevan. “No more than I ever am.”

The boy hissed like a cat, thrust his hand into his coat,
held it up shaking and glittering. “Do you know what this is?”

Laughter, joy, even madness forsook Sarevan utterly. The
thing in Hirel’s palm glowed with more than sunlight, but its heart was a
darkness that writhed and twisted like a creature in agony.

Or like a slow and deadly dance. It lured Sarevan’s eyes,
drew them down and down, beckoned, whispered, promised. Come, and I will make
you strong again. Come, take me, wield me. I am power. I am all the magics you
have lost. Take me and be healed.

Sarevan gasped, retched. “Take it—take—”

It withdrew. Slowly, far too slowly, into the embroidered
coat.

“No!” cried Sarevan. “Not there!” He snatched wildly,
striking, hurling the jewel through the air. It fell like a star, whispering.

He seized Hirel’s wrists. “How often has it touched your
skin?
How often?”

The boy blinked like an idiot. “Just now. And when first I
took it. I do not like to hold it. But—”

“Never,” said Sarevan, choking on bile. “Never touch it
again. It is deadly.”

“It is but a jewel. The deadliness lies in what it stands
for.”

“It is an instrument of blackest sorcery.” Sarevan dragged
himself up, dragging Hirel with him until he remembered to let go. He snatched
the first cloth that came to hand, and fell to his knees.

The stone sang to him.
Power.
Power I bear
.

His sight narrowed. He groped. His right hand throbbed.

He fell forward. His hand dropped boneless to the stone. He
had no will to rule it. To close. To take, or to cast away.

Gold met topaz. The song rose to a shriek. The pain mounted
through anguish into agony, through agony into purest, whitest torment, and
through torment into blissful nothingness.

o0o

“Vayan.
Vayan
!”

Sarevan groaned. Again? Would he never be allowed to die in
peace?

“Sarevadin.” That was his mother, in that tone of hers which
brooked no opposition. “Sarevadin Halenan, if you do not open your eyes—”

His mind cursed her, but his eyes opened. He was in bed
again, and they were there, she and his father, and Hirel green-pale and great-eyed
beside them.

“Poor cubling,” said Sarevan. “We’re too much for you, we
madmen.”

“Mad, yes,” snapped Elian, “striking an Eye of Power with no
weapon but your
Kasar
.”

Sarevan struggled to sit up. “Is it gone? Did I do it? It
wanted me to take it. It promised me—it promised—”

They all fell on him at once, bearing him down, holding him,
trying to stroke him calm again. But it was his own will that stilled him, and
his own wish that laid him back in his bed, somehow gripping three hands in his
two.

One freed itself: his mother’s, strong and slender. She
looked angry, as always when her pride refused to weep. “Will you never learn?”
she demanded.

“I rather think not.”