A Fall of Princes (22 page)

He watched the moons’ patterns shift on the floor. The
windows were open to the wind; shadows danced, now lulling, now startling, now
alluring his eyes.

One was very like a human shape. When it moved, it moved
with fluid grace. The rest now approached, now retreated with the wind’s
turning. This paused often, but never drew back.

It stilled. Its shape was human surely: slender, supple, not
tall. It sat at his bed’s foot, and its weight was not considerable, but weight
it certainly had. It tucked up its feet and settled its rump and regarded
Sarevan with wide moon-brightened eyes.

A stare, like a shadow, can have weight. Sarevan fretted
under it. It did not waver.

“Cubling,” said Sarevan with elaborate patience, “it’s late.
Haven’t you noticed?”

“There are hours yet to midnight,” Hirel said. He blinked,
which was a small but potent mercy.

“Surely you have better things to do with those hours than
sit and stare at me.”

“No,” Hirel said. “I do not.”

Sarevan sat up. “Damn it, cubling! What’s got into you?”

“You kissed me.”

Sarevan scrambled himself together, cursing the mane that
tumbled and knotted and tried to blind him, raking it out of his face. Hirel
watched with grave intentness. For once in his life, Sarevan was aware that he
was naked: and under a blanket yet, and a heavy cloak of hair. “Damn it,” he
said again. “Damn it, infant. That was a game I played, to stop your nonsense.”

The golden eyes narrowed. “A game, prince?” Hirel asked very
softly.

“A game,” Sarevan repeated. “That was all. I erred, I admit
it. I cry your pardon.”

Hirel sat motionless. Sarevan could not read his face at
all. He was all alien, inscrutable, like one of his own discredited gods.

“Cubling,” said Sarevan, meaning to be gentle, sounding lame
even to himself. “Hirel. Whatever you think I meant, I was only playing. Being
outrageous, because you were there and being infuriating, and I couldn’t help
myself. I’m like that. It’s the most glaring of all my flaws.”

“What should I have thought you meant?”

Sarevan gritted his teeth. “You know damned well—”

Hirel tilted his head. “Would you be so angry if it truly
had meant nothing?”

The silence was deafening. Hirel shifted minutely, almost
smiling.

“Listen to me,” Sarevan said at last. “To you I’m a horror
of no small proportions: a man who’s never had a woman; nor, for the matter of
that, a boy. I won’t say it’s been easy. I won’t say it’s easy now. But my
honor binds me, and my given word. Can you understand that?”

“It is most immoral,” said Hirel. But quietly, as if he
considered the matter with some shadow of care.

“What is moral? To those children in the Green Court, you
are the outrage.”

That roused a spark. “They? They would happily die to have
what I have.”

“You frighten them. They think you have the power to corrupt
me, if not to kill me outright.”

“And so I do,” said Hirel, serene in his certainty. “As do
you over me. We are equals. That is what they cannot bear.”

“Equals.” Sarevan was not sure he liked the sound of it. He
and this epicene creature?

Not so epicene, sitting there, looking at him. It was only
youth. Sarevan at not quite fifteen had been pretty enough, eagle’s beak and
all. Was still rather too pretty for his own comfort, without a beard to mask
the worst of it: as he had been amply dismayed to discover, when the razor
showed him how little he had changed.

Equals, then. Sarevan lowered his eyes. He had been treating
Hirel as a child, or at best as a weakling youth. And weak, Hirel certainly was
not.

“So then,” said Sarevan, mostly to himself. “What do we do
now?”

“You do not know?”

Hirel was mocking them both. Sarevan snarled at him. He
grinned back, which was always startling.

“Something,” said Sarevan with swelling heart. “Something
outrageous.”

“I will not swear priest’s vows!”

“And I won’t claim your harem,” Sarevan said with a flicker
of laughter, though he sobered swiftly. “You can be a moral man for both of us.
But harken now—what can a pair of princes do when their fathers foment war?”

“Fight,” Hirel said, but slowly, watching him. “What else
can we do? We are born enemies. There is not even liking between us; nor, once
I leave Endros, any debt of life or liberty.”

“And yet there is something.” Sarevan held up his hand, the
left, which bore no brand. “Equality. A love for this world that one of us must
rule; a deep reluctance to see it marred.”

“Marring can be mended, if there is peace under a single
lord.”

“Not such marring as I can see.” Sarevan’s hand clenched
into a fist. “And it is my father who will begin it. Meaning naught but good,
in the god’s name; seeing only the peace that will follow. Blind, stone blind,
to its cost.” He let his head fall back, his eyes fix on the vaulted ceiling.
“You don’t believe me. No one believes me. Even my mother, who has seen what I
see, has refused it: she has sold her soul for love of my father. If she won’t
listen, how can you? You don’t even believe in prophecy.”

“I believe in you.”

Sarevan’s head snapped forward. Hirel was grave, steady.
Truthful; or playing a game that could cost him his neck.

“Mind you,” the boy said, “I do not do this easily. Yet I am
a logician. I who have seen magecraft cannot deny that it exists. Prophecy is
part of magecraft by all accounts, yours not least. You are outrageous and you
are quite mad, but a liar you are not. If you say that you have seen war, then
war you have seen. If you say that it will be terrible, so is it likely to be.
I have spoken with your father. I have seen what he is like, and I can guess
what he will do when the fire of his god is on him.”

“I love him,” whispered Sarevan. “Dear gods, I love him. But
I think that he is wrong. Utterly, hopelessly, endlessly wrong.”

He rocked with it, no longer seeing Hirel, no longer hearing
anything but the echo of his own terrible treason.

Terrible, and treason. But true. He knew it, down to the
core of him. There was peace in it, almost. In knowing it for what it was. In
ceasing his long battle to deny it.

He had been no older than Hirel when it began. Maybe, when
his power had gone but the dream held firm in all its terrible strength, it had
broken him at last.

“I think not,” he said. Hirel was staring at him. He
mustered a smile. “No, brother prince, I haven’t lost the last remnant of my
wits. I see a way through this tangle. Will you tread it with me?”

“Is it sane?” asked Hirel.

Sarevan laughed, not too painfully. “Do you need to ask? But
it may work. Listen, and decide for yourself.”

Hirel waited. Sarevan drew a long steadying breath. “I’m
going to Asanion with you.”

Hirel’s eyes widened a careful fraction. “And what,” he
asked, “do you hope to accomplish by that?”

“Peace. My father won’t attack Asanion if I’m held hostage
in Kundri’j Asan.”

“Think you so? More likely he will raise heaven and hell to
get you back.”

“Not if it’s known that I went of my own will.”

“Ah,” said Hirel, a long sigh. “That is blackest treason.”

“It is.” Sarevan was dizzy, thinking about it; bile seared
his throat. “Don’t you see? I have to do it. He won’t yield for anything I can
say. I have to show him. I have to shock him into heeding me.”

“What if I will not assent to it?”

Sarevan seized his gaze and held it. “You will,” he said,
low and hard.

The boy tossed his head, uncowed. “And if I do—what then,
Sun-prince? I am Asanian. I have no honor as you would reckon it. You are a
fool to dream of trusting me.”

“You won’t betray me.”

“No,” said Hirel after a stretching pause. “You are my only
equal in the world. That cannot endure; but while it does, I am yours. As you
are mine.”

“We ride together.”

“We ride together,” Hirel agreed. He stood. “The Lord Varzun
has been commanded. I depart on the third day from this. I shall give thought
to the manner of your concealment.”

“As shall I,” said Sarevan. “Good night, high prince.”

“Good night,” said Hirel, “high prince.”

The Zhil’ari, like Hirel, heard Sarevan out. Unlike Hirel,
they did not hesitate. They were apt for this new mischief.

He told them what he would have of them; they obeyed with
relish but with astonishing circumspection. No one remarked that the nine most
recent recruits of the high prince’s guard had vanished from Endros. They might
never have come there at all.

Sarevan’s own part, for the moment, was an old one. When the
new sun struck fire in the pinnacle of Avaryan’s Tower, he appeared on the
practice field with sword and lance. If anyone took note that the prince chose
to confine himself to mounted exercises, he did not speak of it.

From the field Sarevan came to his father’s council, and to
a wild game of club-and-ball in one of the courts, and again to a leisurely
meander through the streets of Endros. At nightfall he dined with a youngish
lord and a merchant prince and a glitter of courtiers.

The second night of his plotting was quiet, as if his will,
having set itself on treason, was minded to let his body rest. The second day
brought rain and wind and the empress’ presence in the window to which Sarevan
had retreated. It was a broad recess, and deep, and cushioned for ease; it lay
in the lee of the wall, letting in neither wind nor rain, only cool clean air.

He started when she laid her hand on his arm; his body
gathered itself, coiling to strike. The blow died unborn, but he was on his
feet with no walls to hamper him, and she was braced for battle.

She relaxed all at once. He was slower. He made himself sit
again and laugh, and take her hand, and pretend that nothing had changed. “I’m
well trained, aren’t I?”

“Too well,” she said, but she smiled. “You’re a perilous man
altogether. Do you know, there’s a whole bower full of women yonder, and every
one is passionately in love with you?”

“Was my chatter that captivating?”

“Not only your chatter.”

“Oh, yes. My charming smile. My even more charming title.
Who’s offering daughters this season?”

“Everyone but the Emperor of Asanion.”

It was an old jest. Yet Sarevan stiffened. She could not
know what he was doing. No one could walk in his maimed mind. His father, finding
it broken beyond all mending, had sealed it against invasion. Even Mirain’s
power was shut out; only the rebirth of Sarevan’s own magics could lower those
walls.

She did not know. She could not. Sarevan was doing nothing
but what he always did. It was only what he did it for that had changed.

And the intensity of it. Perhaps. Time was too short for
subtlety.

She was frowning at him. She felt his brow, traced his cheek
that was no longer quite so hollow. “You push too hard,” she said, “and too
fast.”

“Not fast enough for me.”

“Of course not.” She sat by him. She would never admit to
weariness, but surely that was the name of the shadows beneath her eyes, and
the faint pallor of her honey skin, and the stiffness with which she held
herself erect.

He settled his arm about her and drew her to him. “Tell me
what it is,” he said.

She laid her head on his shoulder and sighed. For a long
while he thought she would not answer.

When she did, her voice shared not at all in her body’s
languor. “It’s always something. Generals getting out of hand. Governors
maneuvering for power. Common people losing patience. Ianon crying that it was
never more than a stepping-stone to Mirain’s empire, when it should be the
first and foremost of all his realms, the only one to which his blood entitles
him; but he abandoned it to rule out of the south. As if he never spent two
seasons out of every four in Han-Ianon, remote and troublesome as that can be
for the ruling of an empire as wide as his. And the Hundred Realms cry now
separately and now in chorus that he gives too much of his heart to the north,
when it was they who made him emperor. Forgetting that it was the Prince of
Han-Gilen who inveigled and threatened and flogged them into it. And the east
wants more of him, and the west more yet, and the lords want war, and the
commons want peace, and the merchants want their profits.”

So much of an answer, and it was no answer at all. “And?” he
asked.

“And everything, and nothing. I never wanted to be empress.
I only wanted Mirain.”

“You should have thought of that before you tricked him into
marrying you. Found some well-connected lady with a strong aptitude for
clerkery and none at all for the arts of the bedchamber, and tricked him into
marrying her, and established yourself as his concubine.”

She pulled back, her temper flaring. “Concubine! I would
have been his lover and his equal.”

“And therefore, empress to his emperor.” She glared. Sarevan
laughed, truly this time, and kissed her. “I for one am glad you married him.
It makes life easier, legitimacy. Now stop evading and tell me what’s got you
prowling the halls when you ought to be bewitching the council.”

“You.”

His mind spun on, expecting subtleties, shaping
counter-subtleties. The silence shocked it into immobility. She never did what
one expected, did Elian of Han-Gilen, the Lady Kalirien of the Sunborn’s
armies.

She knew. She had come to stop him.

No. Whatever was in her eyes, it was not the horror of one
who faces treason. She was blind, as they all were. She saw only her poor maimed
child.

Sarevan let his mouth fall open. He knew he looked a proper
fool. “Me?”

He inspected himself. He was dressed as a southerner,
because the multiplicity of garments covered his bones. But he was less thin
than he had been. His body, wonderful creation, wasted not one grain of all he
fed it. “Don’t fret yourself over me. I’m mending, and I’m mending well, and I
was just going to sit in council. Shall we go together? Or would you rather do
something else that needs doing? I can speak for us both if there’s need.”