A Fall of Princes (49 page)

Hirel helped her: she would not let Orsan touch her. She
almost pitied him, such pain she gave him, and he grown too feeble to conceal
it. But she could not stop herself.

Mounts awaited them in the court of the green silences. At
sight of the smaller, Hirel nearly forgot his princely hauteur. Time had done
little for her beauty and less for her temper, but the Zhil’ari mare had gained
back all her strength.

She greeted Hirel with the air of one who has waited much
too long for a dawdling child; her nostrils trembled with the love-cries that
she would not utter. He greeted her with a tug of the girth and, under lowered
lids, a shining eye. They were made for one another, they two.

Sevayin forced herself to walk forward. Ulan was waiting,
soul’s kin, and no foolish man to care whether she was one who bore children or
one who begot them. Bregalan stood prick-eared beside him.

The stallion wore no bridle; his saddle was a tooled and
gilded offspring of the flat training saddle, no high pommel to mock her
ungainliness. His gladness sang in her.
Come
,
his eyes called to her;
come and ride,
run, be free and together, soul and soul and soul, beast of prey and beast of
the field and mage of the bright god’s line
.

He was a poet, was Bregalan, though he scorned mere rattling
words. She smiled and thought warmth at him, but her heart was cold.

He stood in the center of a guard of honor. Nine Zhil’ari in
the full panoply of their people. Nine proud young men who had known the Prince
of Keruvarion. Their eyes glittered in their fiercely painted faces. Fixed on
her. Level, bitter-bright, relentless.

“We are yours,” said Gazhin. Great hulking Gazhin-ox who
never lied, because he never saw the need; who never bowed, because a true king
knew who revered him and who did not. “You are the great one: the Twiceborn,
the dweller in the two houses, the mystery and the sacrifice. We are yours. We
would die for you.”

Sevayin laughed like blades clashing. “Don’t. I’m not worth
it.”

Nine pairs of eyes refused belief. Zha’dan said, “We belong
to you.”

He was wearing his best air of innocence, the one with the
wide liquid stare. “And what does your grandmother say to that?” she demanded.

The mageling’s eyes held fast. They had laid aside their
innocence. “Sometimes,” he said, “one has to make choices.”

She paused a breath, two. She bowed to that, to all of them.

Bregalan pawed the turf lightly, barely scarring its mown
perfection. Before she could think, she was on his back.

No one troubled to marvel at her feat. She was not maimed or
ill or too old to master her body. She was simply with child.

Self-pity was a curse. Her grandfather had taught her that.
She would not look at him as she rode past him, or bid him farewell. It was
Hirel who did both, rebuking her with his graciousness.

At the gate she turned back. Or Bregalan turned. Orsan stood
alone on the trampled grass, bent and frail but mantled in his power.

It held open the mage-way into Asanion. It asked nothing of
her. Not understanding, not acceptance, and certainly not forgiveness.

“Not now,” he said. “Now is not the time for that choosing.
Go with the god, Sarevadin.”

She could not answer him, either to bless or to curse him.
She raised her burning hand. Bregalan spun away.

o0o

The Army of the Sun and the Ranks of the Lion stood face
to face across a field of desolation. It had been a city once: Induverran, the
City of Gold, which guarded the gate of Asanion’s heart.

Mages had cast it down, warring over it: a blast of fire; a
wind out of the dark. Its towers were fallen, its walls laid low. The shrines
of its gods were smoking ruins. Its men were slain; its children were dead or
wandering or wailing in the emptiness. Its women lay in the ashes and wept.

Sevayin paused at the summit of a low hill, drawing a cloak
of power about her company. The air was heavy with the reek of death.

Death, and magery. They had loosed the power; it had tasted
blood. It roamed like a living thing, hungering.

This was worse than dream. The sounds of it. The carrion
stench. The beast that walked the ruins, neither shadow nor substance, fed by
the hatred of warring mages.

They had ceased their open battling. The emperors who
wielded them had reined them in. The bonds of royal will strained sorely: the
beast snarled as it stalked the domain it had made.

Sevayin saw them all with eyes and power. She saw the armies
arrayed on the smoldering field. Asanian gold, Varyani gold and scarlet, brave
and splendid.

They stood ranked and ready, poised on the edge of battle:
that moment when all rituals were done; when the heralds had withdrawn from the
game of threat and parry and the companies taken their places, alert, braced
for the signal.

The generals played at patience. Even the beasts—seneldi
ridden or yoked to chariots, warhounds, fighting cats, eagles of battle—even
they were still, waiting.

It was like a game upon a board. Perfect, frozen,
comprehensible.

Ziad-Ilarios had chosen the classic opening of the west: the
Three Waves of the Great Sea. First his infantry, serfs and slaves and
half-trained, half-armed peasants, driven like cattle before scythed chariots.

They would die to hinder the enemy’s knights, while the
chariots mowed down friend and foe alike, and the archers in the second wave
sent down a hail of arrows. Third and last and irresistible would ride his
princes: cataphracts in massive armor on stallions as huge as bulls, and the
swifter, lighter Olenyai lancers on racing mares, and a wall of the terrible
chariots.

Before that formidable precision, Mirain’s army seemed
scattered, each company setting itself where it pleased. Sevayin, who had been
born and raised in his wars, saw the order in the careful disorder.

Three wings of manifold talents, three armies trained to
fight as one, taking their shape from the necessities of the battle. Against
the Three Waves they offered a shieldwall and a wall of mounted bowmen and a
shifting fringe of foot and knights and chariotry. The center beckoned, its
line a shade thinner, with a flame of scarlet waiting in it.

His crowned helmet caught the sun; his black stallion
fretted, goring the air. Green glowed beside him, green knight on red-gold
mare: his empress riding as ever at his right hand, and behind her, her warrior
women.

Sevayin’s eyes were burning dry. The Lord of the Northern
Realms commanded the right under Geitan’s crimson lion; the left looked to the
flame and green of the Prince-Heir of Han-Gilen. How brave they looked, those
mighty princes, with their knights about them and their panoply glittering and
their armies straining to run free.

Brave fools. Children gone mad in the wreck of worlds.

Hirel sat his senel knee to knee with her. His hand closed
about hers. He was half a child who pleads for comfort, half a man who comforts
his woman.

She could not find a smile for him. He kissed her
fingertips. “Consider,” he said with royal Asanian steadiness. “We are
not—quite—too late.”

Not quite. She glanced at the Zhil’ari. They waited,
patient. On the field below, a horn rang.

“Now,” she said. Bregalan plunged down the hillside.

o0o

Hirel rode still at her knee, his mare defending valiantly
the honor of her sex. The Zhil’ari fanned behind. Ulan wove through them,
settling at last on Sevayin’s right hand. He laughed his feline laughter, drunk
on the sweet exhilaration of danger.

Her own fear had burned away. The child was quiet within
her, but his soul was a white fire, exulting, exalted.

She looked about her and knew that the battle had begun. A
sound escaped her, half laughter, half curse. She cast aside all concealments.

The armies surged toward one another. Arrows fell in a
sparse rain. Horns blared, drums rattled. Men sang or shouted or howled like
beasts.

Where the air had bred nine Zhil’ari and two princes, the
battle eddied. But like the storm and the sea, once it had risen, it knew no
mortal master.

She was no mortal woman. They were hers, all her barbarians.
She drew their wills together and set her power above them, burning through the
glass that was her prince. She forged a weapon like a blade of fire.

It clove the armies and flung them back. It swelled,
billowed, grew.

Arrows fell in a shower of ash. Beasts veered and screamed
and fled. Men struck the wall and could not pass. Could not pierce it, though
Varyani pressed face to face and all but sword to sword with Asanian warriors.

The melee ground to a halt. Both sides collapsed into chaos.
Men had died, were dying still, crushed in the confusion.

But most, having barely begun the charge, or having waited
in reserve for the second assault, had fallen back in good order. These were
the cream of their empires: seasoned fighters who knew how to face the
unexpected, and who knew when to wait.

There were mages among them. Sevayin felt the pricks of
their power, testing this working of hers, measuring her strength; goading the
beast that haunted the field, deepening the shadow of it.

It crouched, catlike. Its eyes were madness visible. It
began a slow and sinuous stalk.

It was not even a tool, that creature. No mage had willed to
make it. It was pure raw power. Neither dark nor light; neither good nor evil.
Death was its sustenance.

Power fed it. Lightnings swelled it. The wall was nothing to
it. It had never lived, therefore it could not die.

She gave it flat denial. It was not. It had never been. It
had no power to touch her.

It stretched forth a limb like the shadow of a claw.

She refused its existence.

It closed its claws about her.

She felt nothing. She saw nothing. There was nothing.

o0o

The sky was clear. A shadow passed: a bird, a cloud, an
eyelid’s flicker.

Sevayin wound her fingers in Bregalan’s mane. Night and
raven, woven. The stallion danced gently.

“Yes,” she said.

He gathered his body, held for a singing moment, loosed it.

She rode headlong between the armies, flaming in the sun.
One bold bowman loosed an arrow. She caught it, laughing, and flung it skyward.
It kindled as it flew, flared and burned and fell.

Now they knew her. The roar went up behind her, followed
her, rolled ahead of her. “Sarevadin!”

And in the army of Asanion, someone had counted robes and
marked a crown and raised the cry: “Asuchirel!”

Army faced army once again across the no-man’s-land, the
broad expanse of ash and ruin made terrible with power. In its center Sevayin
halted.

Her Zhil’ari spread in a broad circle. Hirel set his mare
side by side with Bregalan, facing his people as she faced her own. The thunder
of their names rose to a crescendo and died.

Gazhin circled the circle, his stallion dancing, snorting at
shadows. He halted a little apart and raised his great bull’s voice. The clamor
sank into silence.

“The heirs of the empires have come before you. They command
you to lay down your arms. They bid you lay aside your enmity. They say to you:
‘We must rule when the war is ended. We will not rule a realm made desolate. If
you will not give us peace of your own will, then we will compel it, as we
compelled the sundering of the armies.’”

Never had such words been spoken on any field of battle.
Never had the heirs of two great kings not only refused to fight, but put an
end to the fighting by sheer force of wizardry. It was presumptuous. It was
preposterous. It was highest treason.

Sevayin was well past caring. She could not sustain the
wall. The Zhil’ari were flagging. Hirel had begun to waver. Healed though he
had been, he was but newly come from a bitter wounding. Already the power was
escaping his control, sending darts of fire through brain and body.

With infinite care she loosed the bonds. Too swift, and the
power would run wild and destroy them all. Too slow, and Hirel would break and
burn and die.

He knew, because she knew. His fear, rising, sapped her
strength and fed the power.

He struggled in vain to quell it. She could not touch him; dared
not. He was a shell of glass about a rioting fire. A breath would shatter him.

The last bond melted. Sevayin nearly fell.

Hirel snatched. Sparks leaped, startling them both. He
recoiled in horror; but it was only power’s fierce farewell.

Sevayin gripped his hands and laughed. He scowled. “I am a
disgrace to my lineage.”

“You are indeed. Practicing high sorcery, interfering in
imperial wars—”

“Turning coward at the crux and nearly destroying my
consort.”

“You’d be worse than a disgrace if you hadn’t, cubling.
You’d be truly, heroically stupid.”

He glared at her. She remembered the lesser world and turned
to it.

It had gone mad. Much of it was howling for blood. Some was
roaring for the emperors’ destruction and the enthronement of their heirs. A
vanishing fragment was striving for sanity. The battle looked fair to begin
again, true chaos now, man against man, mage against mage, and no commander but
the beast-mind of the mob.

She raised a cry with more than voice, a great roar and
flame that cowed and quelled and fixed every eye and mind and power upon her
alone. She made of them a summoning.
You
who would rule this waste, come forth. Answer to me
.

She could not see the emperors. They were walled and buried
in furious princes.

Asanian, Varyani, they thought for once with one mind. They
cried treachery. They dreaded a trap. And in it the bait: the heirs of the
empires. Prisoners still, or illusions of magery, set to lure even greater
hostages than themselves. Or set to lure the emperors to their deaths.