A Fall of Princes (27 page)

Damn the boy for laying open what Sarevan had schooled
himself to forget. Damn himself for falling prey to it. It was hard won, this
holiness of his. His body knew what it was for; it had no more sympathy than
Hirel had with this most painful price of his priesthood. At the very thought
of a woman, it could stand up and sing.

At the thought of Hirel, it barely quivered. But his soul,
that had never before come even close to falling—his soul was in dire danger.

This was not friendship, this that he had with his brother
prince. Often it was nearly the opposite. And yet, when he thought of leaving,
of never seeing that maddening child again, or worse, of meeting him on the
battlefield, he could not endure it.

When he was very young, there was one thing in his world
that he had never understood, nor known how to understand. Other children had
mothers, fathers, uncles: that was right and proper. But no one had a mother or
a father or an uncle who were like his own. To power’s eyes they were hardly
separate at all, though in the body they were most distinct. When Mirain worked
great magics, he never worked them without his empress or his Ianyn
oathbrother.

“He can’t,” the Lord Vadin said once, when Sarevan dared to
ask. Mirain had been too kingly proud to approach with such a question, and
Elian was not the sort of person one asked difficult things of, unless one
needed them desperately enough to be snapped at before one was given them.

Vadin always managed to have time for a small prince with a
large store of questions; and though he was splendid to look at, taller than
anyone else in Sarevan’s world, glittering in his northern finery, with his
beard gone august silver already though he was not even thirty, he was never
either stern or lordly when he was with children.

He sat on the sweet blue grass of Anshan-i-Ormal, on a hill
that looked out over the Sunborn’s camp, and smiled at Sarevan. After a moment
Sarevan decided rather to be content than to be proud; he settled himself in
his uncle’s lap and played with one of the many necklaces that glittered on
Vadin’s breast.

“Your father can’t work high magic without us,” Vadin
repeated. He had another virtue: he did not mistake Sarevan for the four
summers’ child he seemed to be. He talked to him as if they were equals. “We’re
our own selves, have no fear of that; but in power we’re one creature.
Horrible, some would call it; unnatural. I call it merely unheard of.”

“None of you tried to do it,” Sarevan said.

Vadin laughed. “We most certainly did not! If you’d told me
when I first met Mirain what the two of us would turn into, I think I would
have killed him and done my best to kill myself. Or run very far away and never
come back.”

“Why?”

“I wasn’t born a mage,” said Vadin. He was not looking at
Sarevan now; his eyes were lifted, staring straight into the sun.

Sarevan had learned that no one could do that except Vadin
and Elian and Mirain, and himself. It was because they were part of the Sun’s
blood. He was proud of it, but a little afraid.

It turned his uncle’s dark eyes to fire, and filled him as
water fills a cup. He spoke through it in his soft deep voice, the way he did
when he was remembering something long past but not forgotten. “I was a simple
creature. I was a hill lord’s heir; I knew what my lot would be. I’d do my
growing up in my father’s house with my brothers and sisters. Then I’d be a
man, and I’d be sent to serve the king for a year or two, to uphold the honor
of my house. Then I’d come back home and learn how to be lord in Geitan, and
when my father died I’d take his place, and take wives and sire sons and rule
my lands exactly as all my fathers had before me. But then,” he said, “I stood
guard at a gate of Ianon castle, and it was a fine morning of early spring, and
the old king was on the battlements above me; and a stranger came to shake me
out of all my placid certainties. His name was Mirain; he proclaimed himself
the son of the heir of Ianon who had died far away in the south, and the king
named him heir in her place, and made me his personal servant. I hated him,
namesake. I hated him so perfectly that I couldn’t see any revenge more apt
than to force him to accept my service.”

“You don’t hate him now.”

Vadin smiled at the sun. “Sometimes I wonder,” he said.
“We’re beyond hate, he and I. I think we’re beyond even love. Your mother knows
it. She didn’t want this, either. She wanted your father, that’s true enough;
but I wasn’t supposed to be part of it. I died for him, you see. An assassin
had a spear, and I stopped it, and thereby stopped myself. But he wouldn’t let
me go. He had his own revenge to take, and we had a wager on whether we’d ever
be friends. He said I would. I said never. I’d lose, of course, in the end. He
brought me back to life; and he left some of his power in me, and a part of
himself. Then in his turn he almost died, waging duel arcane with a servant of
the darkness, and Elian and I between us brought him back, and now we were
three in one.”

“I was part of that,” Sarevan said. “I wasn’t born yet.”

“You were barely there, infant,” said Vadin. “Now when we
raised the Tower on Endros, that’s different. By then you were big enough to
kick, and you put something of yourself into the working. That’s when we knew
you’d be a mage.”

“I’ve always been a mage.”

“From before the beginning of time,” Vadin agreed gravely,
but with a touch of wickedness. “And now you see, power isn’t always contained
in one mage at a time. Sometimes it’s two together, or three. Souls are the
same, I think. Some of them aren’t made to be alone. They may think so. They
may live for years in blessed solitude. Then suddenly, the other half or the
other third comes, and the poor soul fights with all it’s got to stay alone,
but it’s a losing fight. Souls and power, they know what they are. It’s minds
and bodies that struggle to be what they think they are.”

o0o

Sarevan’s mind and body, grown and set on betraying all
three faces of that one shining power, had no power of their own to fight
against. But soul they had, and the soul had found its match. The other did not
know what it was; he called it desire, and yearned for what he could not have.

“Avaryan,” Sarevan whispered. “O Avaryan. Is this how you
amuse yourself? Of all the souls in the world, this is the one you’ve made for
me. And you set it in that of all the bodies there are. We can’t be man and
woman together. We can’t share the world’s rule. We can’t even be brothers,
still less lovers while I wear your torque. What do you want us to do? Suffer
in silence? Tear one another apart? Kill one another?”

The god’s answer was silence. Sarevan buried his face in
Ulan’s warm musky fur. The cat purred, soft, barely to be heard. Slowly Sarevan
slid into sleep.

o0o

Zha’dan would never dream of gloating, but he was
conspicuously content. “It’s true what they say,” he said toward the next
sunset, “of Asanian arts.”

“I’m sure,” said Sarevan, meaning to be cool. His tongue was
not so minded. “It’s me he wants, you know.”

Zha’dan did not flinch from the stroke. “Of course he does,
my lord. But even he knows better than to stretch so high.”

“He’s no lower than I.”

Zha’dan was polite. He did not voice the objections that
glittered in his eyes.

This inn was no less crowded than the last, but its master
was more difficult. He took exception, it seemed, to Ulan, or perhaps to the
young lord’s slaves.

Hirel had expressed his will already. The cat was to be
neither caged in the courtyard nor penned in the stable. The slaves did not
leave his presence.

Halid was making slow headway. Hirel had settled for the
siege, drawing prince and savage to the heaped carpets at his feet, which he
rested on Ulan’s quiescent back.

Zha’dan was entirely content to lean against Hirel and be
stroked and fed bits of meat from the Asanian’s plate. Sarevan was not content
at all, but resistance here would have been too conspicuous. He yielded because
he must.

Hirel smiled at his rebellious glare and fed him a beancake
dipped in something dark, pungent, and hot as fire. Sarevan gasped, sputtered,
nearly leaped up in his outrage.

His tormentor caught him, bending close as if to kiss. “Do
you see those men in yonder corner?”

Sarevan stilled abruptly. His eyes were hot still, hotter
even than his throat, but his mind had remembered princely training.

He knew better than to turn and stare; but the edge of his
eye marked them. Two Asanians sitting together, eating and drinking as did
everyone else in the common room, doing nothing that might rouse suspicion.
Their hair was cut strangely, shaven from brow to crown, worn long and loose
behind.

“Those,” said Hirel, “are priests of Uvarra. They were in
the inn last night. They watched us then as they watch us now.”

“We’re interesting,” Sarevan said, “and we’re on the
straight road to Kundri’j. Why shouldn’t they be on it with us?”

Hirel fed him wine in dainty sips, a lordling amusing
himself with his favorite slave. “Priests of Uvarra do not wear that tonsure
unless they serve in the high temple in Kundri’j Asan. Nor do they wander as
your kind do, save for very great need.”

“They’re too conspicuous to be spies.”

“Perhaps, like us, they know the virtue of hiding in plain
sight.”

“But why—”

“They are mages.”

Sarevan’s teeth clicked together. Oh, indeed that was
stretching coincidence. But how could the boy know? He had no power.

Sarevan darted a glance. One’s robe was light, and perhaps
it was grey. The other’s was dark: violet, perhaps. Guild colors. A lightmage
and a dark.

“They’re sorcerers,” murmured Zha’dan, resting his head on
Hirel’s knee.

Sarevan’s eyes flashed to him. He would know. The wisewoman
of the Zhil’ari was his grandmother. He was her pupil and her heir, and quite
as mageborn as Sarevan himself, though never so free with it. Mages of the wild
tribes did not wield full power until they were judged worthy of it.

A custom which Sarevan might have been wise to follow. He
met Zha’dan’s clear stare with the width of Hirel’s knees between. “You’ve set
wards?” he asked in Zhil’ari, just above a whisper.

Zha’dan’s eyes glinted. “I hardly need to. You’re guarded.
The veiled ones are invisible to power—I’d pay high to know how they do that.”

“They pay high for a spell; it’s laid on each of them at
initiation. In an amulet.” Sarevan was in no mood for teaching, even in a good
cause. “And the cubling?”

“Safe,” said Zha’dan. “With little enough help from me. He
doesn’t chatter inside. He knows how to throw up walls.”

“He’s no mage.”

“He’s not. But he has shields.”

Sarevan scowled blackly at nothing. Hirel had never had
shields when Sarevan had power. His mind had been as open and aimless as any
other man’s, with walls where scars were, closing off memory that pricked him
to pain; but nothing a mage could not pass if he chose.

If it puzzled Zha’dan, he did not let it vex his peace. He
stroked his cheek against Hirel’s thigh, catlike, smiling at Hirel’s frown. In
tradespeech he said, “We talk about how beautiful you are.”

Hirel flushed, but he had perforce to swallow his temper.
Halid had won his battle with the innkeeper. The innkeeper himself had been
prevailed upon to serve to young lord’s pleasure.

He occupied them all with his fluttering, until at last they
drove him out. By then, Hirel had forgotten Zha’dan’s insolence; or simply let
it pass.

o0o

They were being followed.

It was not always obvious. The roads were crowded with
troops, with travelers, with traders. But Sarevan remembered faces, and even
where that failed in the likeness of one plump yellow face to another, Uvarra’s
tonsure and the Mageguild’s colors, once noticed, were hard to mistake.

He did not see them every day, nor every night in inn or
posthouse. Still, he saw them often enough, and perhaps they had allies: men
less conspicuous yet oddly tenacious; the same faces, or faces like them,
appearing again and again.

“They’re not strong in power,” Zha’dan said of the mages.

“Who needs strength?” Sarevan demanded. “They only need to
know where eyes have seen two black slaves together.”

Zha’dan regarded his hands on the reins of his gelding.
“Better black than bilious,” he said.

Sarevan bit back laughter. “Oh, surely! But there’s no one
like us between here and the Lakes of the Moon. We’re noticeable.”

The Zhil’ari looked about at the Olenyai ringing them, the
prince on the blue-eyed stallion in front of him, the traffic of the Golden
Empire making way for their passing. “Illusion?” he suggested.

“Too late for that. They’d track us by the scent of your
power.”

A knot of wagons blocked their path; Sarevan muscled his
ironmouthed nag to a halt beside Bregalan. The stallion adamantly refused to
collapse or go lame or even look tired. Maybe he had learned to drink the sun.
The Mad One could; why not his daughter’s son?

Sarevan straightened in the saddle and set his teeth. His
head had been aching in spasms for a day or three. Not often; not in any
pattern.

He could have blamed it on the sun, but today there was
none: the clouds were heavy, threatening rain.

This was no dull throbbing ache. This was pain as keen as a
dagger’s blade, stabbing deep behind his eyes. It wrung a gasp from him.

“Hirel,” someone said, light and bantering, “Hirel, think
about last night, and Zha’dan, and the woman with the passion for two lovers at
once.”

The someone was himself. He was going mad.

Hirel had flushed scarlet, which made Zha’dan grin, but his
eyes on Sarevan were steady. Thinking hard.

With crawling slowness the pain faded. Sarevan almost
fainted with the relief of it. And with the knowledge.