A Fall of Princes (25 page)

o0o

Sarevan gained strength. Hirel went brown again, and his
mask slipped, and sometimes he smiled. Once or twice he even laughed.

But for the most part he was silent, somber. “This venture
of ours may fail,” he said, a camp or four after that first hidden haven, when
they had taken to riding at night and sleeping through the burning brightness
of the day. “My father can be no less intransigent than yours.”

“But,” Sarevan pointed out, “even mine isn’t likely to
attack Asanion while I stand hostage in Kundri’j Asan.”

“If we come so far. Even if you are caught and returned to
your father, you have less to fear than I. No one in your empire wishes you
dead. Whereas I, and mine . . .”

“We’ll face that when we face it,” said Sarevan.

He lay on his back and laced his fingers behind his head. He
was stripped in the heat, his breeches new-washed and spread where the sun
could dry them. It was warm on his skin, the air still, pungent with the scent
of spicefern.

He yawned. His back itched; he wriggled.

Hirel was watching him. Without stopping to think, he rolled
onto his stomach, resting his chin on folded arms.

It pricked. He was growing his beard again; it was little
enough yet to marvel at, and it would grow less lovely still before it
remembered what it had been. He rubbed it where it itched, and tried not to
feel the eyes on him.

In a moment or an age, they granted him mercy. When he
looked again, Hirel was asleep, curled on his side, childlike.

And yet he was a child no longer. The swift onset of first
manhood was upon him, working its magic from sunrise to sunrise, almost from
hour to hour. He had grown a hand’s width, measured against Sarevan’s shoulder,
since he woke wounded and haughty on the marches of Karmanlios; his voice
cracked seldom now, and then more often downward than upward.

It was going to be deep, that voice, as already he was tall
for one of his kind. His shoulders were broadening, beginning to strain his
coat, and there was no softness left in him except, a little, in his face: a
rounding still of cheek and chin, a fullness of the lips that recalled the girl
he might have been. And he was waxing into a man where manhood most mattered.

He was still very young, and delicate in odd ways: in what
he could eat, in how much he slept.

“Inbred,” Sarevan said as they camped in the west of
Inderan. “The blood is good, but it’s thin. No sister-wife for you, my lad, if
you want a son who’ll live to be a man.”

“What!” said Hirel, and perhaps his indignation was real,
and perhaps it was not. “Would you have me beget a litter of mongrels?”

“Mongrel blood is strong.” Sarevan grinned. “Look at me,
now. Bred of every race that walks the earth; and two nines of days ago I was a
rotting corpse, and here I am. Riding all night on a diet of air and wildbuck,
up half the day drinking sunlight, and sleek as a seal.”

Sarevan had meant to jest. But he looked down at himself and
started slightly. Why, he thought, it was true. He was as strong as he had ever
been.

He felt of his face, suppressing the urge to bring out his
scrap of mirror. The angles were familiar angles, the hollows the old hollows,
the skull returned at last to its proper place beneath the skin.

o0o

Air and wildbuck indeed, and the sun’s fire, and dreams
that drove him hard but were no longer a torment; and no pursuit. None at all.

Once Hirel ventured into a town, armed with his brown face
and his vagabond’s garb and a fistful of Sarevan’s silver. He returned with
both their scrips full, and even a coin left in his purse.

“And news,” he said, settling on his heels beside Sarevan, watching
as the other fell on the sweetmeats that were his great prize. He nibbled a
honeyed nut; he took his time about it, until he had Sarevan still and staring,
mouth full of spice and sweetness. “No, Sun-prince, nothing of our riding, and
no sign of a hunt. Rumor has it that the Prince Sarevadin is sojourning with
his grandsire in Han-Gilen, preparing for a new task: the taking of Ianon’s
regency. For practice, it is said. To prepare him for a greater throne.”

Sarevan’s breath caught. Suddenly he had no taste for
spicecake.

He choked down the last of it. His fingers, unheeded, raked
through his new beard. No hunt at all? He could not believe that.

And yet he had seen it. And that the common talk should be
full of what had been between himself and his father, as if he had never
committed this treason, as if he had gone docilely where he was meant to
go—there was no sense in it.

Or perhaps there was. Frightening sense. If someone knew or
guessed what he did, and favored it, or was not minded to stop it . . .
if someone was willing to cover his trail, even to lie outright for him . . .

Shatri had promised to do just that, but he had not this
measure of power. Vadin? The Lord of the North belonged to his emperor. Even
for his namesake, whom he loved as a son, he would not turn against Mirain.
Elian—maybe. She was capable of it. But in this he could catch no scent of her.
The Prince of Han-Gilen . . .

Sarevan pulled at his beard, scowling. This was his treason,
and his alone. He would not share it with some faceless power, some web of
purpose and counterpurpose that dared to weave itself into his own. That would
not even grant him the courtesy of naming its name or asking his leave.

“You are very well thought of,” Hirel said, oblivious to his
fretting. “Every idler remembers you, or claims to. Did you know that you spent
three seasons in the dungeons of the evil emperor himself? You escaped in fire
and magic, took his heir for a hostage, and died in battle with his mages; your
body returned to Endros in no less than nine pieces, borne on the backs of
demons. Your father bound the fragments together with his power, and called
your soul from Avaryan’s side, and made you live again. And when he had done
that, he swore a mighty oath: that the Emperor of Asanion would suffer each and
every torment to which he had subjected you.”

Sarevan would have liked to leap up and bolt into the woods.
To run away from it all; or run full into it, crying anathema on all liars and
their lies.

He sat still, eyes on Bregalan who grazed unruffled by men
and their wars.

“No one hunts us,” Hirel said. “No one speaks of it. It is
all war and weapontakes and who will remain to bring in the harvest if the war
lasts so long.”

The fire was rising. Sarevan let it. Words came, slow at
first, pale shadows of the rage within. “I don’t like this,” he said. “I don’t
like it at all.”

“It serves us,” said Hirel.

“It reeks to heaven.” Sarevan sprang to his feet. “Ulan!
Bregalan! Quick now, up!”

o0o

Bregalan was swifter than any stallion had a right to be unless
he were of the Mad One’s line, and the mare was of Zhil’ari breeding. They
thrived on long running and short commons. Like Sarevan himself; but Hirel was
not so sturdy.

He needed sleep and he needed feeding. Sarevan willed
himself to be patient, to stop now and then, to lie quietly while the sun
wheeled overhead and his companion slept the sleep of the dead.

He himself slept hardly at all. All that had befallen him
since he battled mages in Asanion—all he had heard and seen and dreamed—all of
it was coming together.

Not entirely, not yet. But he saw the first blurred glimmer
of a pattern.

He had stopped raging at it. He had sworn, and he would
fulfill his oath: he would learn the name behind the plotting. Then he would
exact its price.

o0o

The farther they rode, the quieter the land seemed. But
that was only a seeming. Every town had its company of armed guards. Every
castle rang with the clamor of men in training and of weapons in the forging.
Travelers were few, and those rode armed and watchful.

Not all the men who had gathered meant to fight for their
emperor; of those who did, some few had a mind to end old feuds before they
rode to war, or else to pick up the odd bit of booty while they waited. Armies
took considerable maintenance; if a captain could keep his troops honed with a
quick raid and fed with the proceeds, so much the better.

None of them came near to Sarevan. Perhaps he owed it to
Ulan’s watchfulness and his own caution. He would not have sworn to it.

He rode because he must, drawing the others with him. He did
not pause to fear that he rode into a trap: his plots betrayed, the borders
held against him. With the fear that rode him now, he would have welcomed so
simple a snare.

o0o

At last they came to the marches of Karmanlios, and to Asan-Vian
gasping in the heat of that cycle of Brightmoon called the Anvil of the Sun.
Hirel’s mare was close to foundering; even Bregalan showed ribs beneath a
sun-scorched coat. Hirel’s head was down, his body stiff, bracing at every
jolt. There were blue shadows under his eyes.

Vian was the castle that ruled among others the town of
Magrin. Its lord had died wifeless and childless; his fief had passed by his
will into the care of the Sun’s priests. Whose senior priestess in the barony
was Orozia of Magrin.

She was waiting for the riders. So too were nine Zhil’ari
and a dozen Asanians and a handful of closemouthed servants. Their greetings
were various: Zhil’ari exuberance, Asanian reserve, and Orozia’s long level
gaze that warmed into welcome. “Well come at last, my lord,” she said, “and in
good time.”

Sarevan looked hard at her. She smiled.

He saw no deception in her, nor scented any. After a moment
he bowed low. “Reverend sister. All is well?”

“All is most well.”

He had not known how tautly he was strung until the tension
left him. He staggered. She was there, and nine Zhil’ari with her, desperately
anxious.

He fended them off. “Here now, don’t hover. Look to the
lion’s cub.”

His hellions were obedient. Orozia did not choose to follow
them. “I have prepared everything as you would wish it.”

He considered her. Her loyalty; her strength. A smile found
its way through his new-raised walls.

He brushed her cheek with a finger, half in mischief, half
in deep affection. “You don’t approve, do you?”

“Of course I do not. I am only half a fool. But that half
has proved the stronger. It dares to hope that this madness of yours will bear
fruit.” She shook herself. “Enough now. Time is short and the borders too well
watched on both sides. You will rest the night and the day. At full dark
tomorrow, you must ride.”

o0o

No sooner, though Sarevan burned to be gone. Hirel could
not ride again that night; they could not dare the armies under the sun.

The company, at least, was excellent, and the food was
passable; the wine was cool and sweet. Sarevan finished off a jar with Orozia’s
aid, sitting late and unattended in the room that had belonged to the old lord.

“You look well,” she said when speech had waned into
wine-scented silence. “As well as you ever have; as if you were taking your
sustenance from the sun itself.”

“That,” said Sarevan, “I can’t do. Not any longer.”

“No?”

The wine rose strong in him. It loosened his tongue, but it
lightened the words that rolled out, leaching them of pain. “I’m a mage no
longer. I’ve got used to it; I don’t waste time bemoaning my fate. It’s even
pleasant, when I stop to think. No thoughts clamoring through my shields. No
fire begging to be set free.”

“No?”

He peered into his cup, found it empty, filled it to the
brim. When he had drunk it down in a gulp, he laughed. “You look exceedingly
oracular, O friend of my youth. Of course, no. That part of me is dead. Gone.
Burned away. I’m a man among men, no more, if never less.”

“No,” she said yet again, flatly. “You will never be a mere
man. You are the son of the son of the Sun.”

“Ah well, that’s something I’ll have to live down, won’t I?”

She slapped him, not hard, but hard enough to sting. He
gaped at her. She blazed back with rare and potent anger. “Did we labor so long
in Endros and in Han-Gilen to create a fool? Is it true what the philosophers
say, that great men by nature can only engender idiots? Are you
blind
, Sarevan Is’kelion? Look at
yourself! No mortal man could suffer as you have suffered, ride as you have
ridden, and sit as you sit now, no more weary than any man who sits late over
wine.”

“My father healed me. That’s the miracle you see.”

“It is not,” she said stubbornly. “I watched you from the
walls. You had the sun in your face, and it was pouring into you, filling you
as wine fills yonder cup.”

He drained it. “So then. The god hasn’t abandoned me. Maybe
he approves what I do, in spite of my father’s convictions to the contrary.
That doesn’t make me a mage.”

“What does it make you?”

“God-ridden.” Sarevan yawned and stretched. “There’s nothing
new in that. And for once I’m glad of it. It’s high treason I’m committing,
Orozia. You can still escape the stain of it, if you move quickly.”

She moved. To touch his hand, to meet his eyes.

He shivered a little. There were not many who knew her secret:
that she was a mage.

There was no other power quite like hers, strong, skilled in
its strength, but strangely circumscribed. Of the lesser magics she had few;
she could walk in a mind only if her hand lay on the body of its bearer. But
none could walk in hers save by her will.

None at all could walk in Sarevan’s. She sighed faintly. Her
eyes lowered, though her hand remained.

He turned his own, clasping it. “I’ll fight,” he said, “but
I won’t blame you.”

“You have no need. I too would see this war averted. Though
not at the cost of your life.”

“Maybe it won’t come to that.”

She said nothing. There was too much to say; she let it all
pass unsaid.