Arrows of the Sun (12 page)

“Not yours, youngling. She’s not the mage she thought she
was. She finds that hard to forgive in herself.”

“Does she think I don’t care? It was my baby, too.”

“Did you want it as badly as she did?”

He could not answer that. He wanted an heir, yes. He had
been bred and raised to want one. “It would be terribly impolitic, if my
mother’s to be believed. Then I wouldn’t need an Asanian empress.”

“That could be dealt with. There’s the Sunborn’s law, true,
that the firstborn of the Sun’s heir, whether son or daughter, is heir to the
throne. But there’s nothing in the law that the child’s mother must be
empress.”

“It would be awkward if she weren’t.” He pulled himself to
his feet. “They’re waiting for me now. Hordes of them. Women of every size and
shape, but only one color. I won’t eat till I’ve passed them in review.”

“It’s not as bad as that,” Sidani said.

“Do you want to wager on it?”

She said nothing. He took odd comfort in her disapproval.
She
did not want him to marry for cold
politics. She cared nothing at all for such things.

“Only remember,” she said. “They’re people, not devils. Even
if they do have yellow eyes.”

He lowered his own. “I can’t help it.”

“Nonsense.”

“They killed my father.”

“A demented fool killed your father. Stop whining, child. He
died, and that was an ill thing. You killed his murderer with magery, and that
was a worse thing. It’s none of it Asanion’s fault.”

“I don’t need to listen to you,” he said through gritted
teeth. “I hear it from my mother, I hear it from Iburan, I hear it endlessly and
forever, and it doesn’t matter. Here, in my belly, I know what I know. Asanion
will be the death of me.”

“Poppycock,” said Sidani. “You’ve stewed it in your innards
till it’s gone to bile, and not a drop of truth in it. You should have stayed
here till you were whole again, or come back as soon as you could ride.”

“How do you know what is truth and what is not?”

She smiled her terrible, sweet smile. “I’ve lived a little
longer than you, child. There’s nothing wrong with Asanion that a good
scrubbing and a blast of fresh air won’t mend.”

“Maybe,” he said, “I’ll take the roof off the palace in
Kundri’j. What will people say to that?”

“That you’re stark mad. But they already know as much.
You’re Sun-blood.”

She could drive him to the edge of rage, and back again to
laughter. He bowed to her, all the way to the floor, and came up laughing, and
went to his bath in better spirits than he could have imagined, his first night
in Asanion.

o0o

The bath was none so ill. They wanted to shave him smooth,
face and body, but he had been warned of that. The servants were men and boys,
not women or eunuchs. Except one, maybe; he was beardless past the age one
might expect. But he was the lightest-handed, and when the razors approached,
he turned them aside before Estarion could do more than roll an eye at them. He
even ventured a smile, which Estarion found himself returning.

When he was clean, bathed and oiled till he purred like
Ulyai, they offered him garments. Not the ten robes of the imperial majesty,
but a simple three, underrobe and inner robe and loose outer robe, all of them
white, and the outermost embroidered with gold. It was not an insult, he
judged, but a gesture toward his outland sensibilities. They fit him well,
which was interesting. In the east he was middling tall; in the north a
stripling. Here he rose to a towering height, even unshod as kings walked in
their palaces.

Lord Miyaz’s servants held up a mirror, a wonder of a thing,
a shield of polished silver taller than Estarion by a full handspan. His face had
grown no prettier since the last time he looked, though the beard lent it a
degree of distinction. His eyes were a brighter gold than he remembered, bright
as coins. Time was when he would have demanded a hat or a hood, to cast them in
shadow.

Tonight he went bareheaded. The tallest servant bound his
brows with a thin band of gold, confining his hair with no more than that, no
plaits, no cords, no chains of gems.

He would never look Asanian, however they tried. Not with
that face or that midnight skin. The robes made him seem even taller and
narrower than he was. He was as exotic as a sunbird in a flock of finches.

He could hunch and creep and hope to pass unnoticed. Or he
could stand straight, walk light and haughty, tilt his chin at its most rakish
angle. Born arrogant, was he? Then let them see it, and think what thoughts
they pleased.

The eunuch, who seemed to be the chief of servants, led him
out of the baths and down a passage. He barely noticed its furnishings, if it
had any. The air was full of mingled perfumes, amurmur with sweet voices.

He halted. “These are the women’s quarters.”

The eunuch regarded him without comprehension. He had spoken
Gileni unthinking. He shifted to Asanian. “This is not the way to the place of
feasting. Why are you leading me among the women?”

His guide bowed to the floor. “Majesty, forgive. The lady
empress, she commanded—”

“So she would.” Estarion lifted the boy—man—whatever he
was—with hands that tried to be gentle. “Go on, then. Lead me where she bade
you.”

o0o

It was a hall of feasting after all, with tables laid,
gleaming in the light of many lamps, and flowers banked about them, filling the
air with their scents; but no food, no drink in the cups of gold and silver.
And no sign of his mother.

She was keeping herself out of it, then, or hiding behind an
arras and a mage-wall, watching unseen. Wise lady. The feast stood arrayed
before him, trembling or steady, white with terror or blushing scarlet with
embarrassment, but every one gowned and jeweled till surely she could not move,
and wrapped in veils to the eyes. Yellow eyes in plenty, but dark, too, under
brows of every color from dun to ivory.

No more than anyone else in this damnable country would they
look into his face. But they darted glances. He caught a murmur: “How dark he
is! And so tall. Can you imagine—”

The rest of it was drowned in a man’s voice. “Sire,” said
the lord of Shon’ai, “for your majesty’s pleasure, we have gathered a garden of
flowers. Will you look on them? Will you taste their sweetness?”

Slow heat crawled up Estarion’s face. He raised his chin a
fraction. “I see a swathe of veils,” he said, “and eyes too shy to look on me.”

Lord Miyaz gestured sharply. The ladies glanced at one
another. Slowly first one and then another raised a hand to her veil.

They were beautiful. He granted them that. Most were too
smoothly plump for his taste, and some seemed barely out of childhood. Only one
or two dared lift their eyes, and that only for a moment.

He walked down the line of them. They stood like troops on review,
with the same air of mingled pride and panic. This was the battle they had been
bred for, this war of beauty against beauty, lineage against lineage, and all
triumph to the fairest.

He horrified them with his size, with his strangeness, with
the rank he bore and the power he embodied. His head was aching. One of them at
least was a mage. Spy, he thought. He could not muster the proper degree of
wariness.

Even if he did not single out an empress, he was expected to
choose one for his night’s pleasure. That much of Asanian custom he knew.

His gorge rose. He came to the end of the line, turned. They
watched him as birds would watch a cat: the same stunned fascination, the same
willing acceptance of what must be. He was the predator and they were prey. So
the world was made.

He mustered a smile. It was not, he hoped, too ghastly to
look at. “My thanks,” he said, “my lord and ladies. How can I choose any single
lady from amid so much beauty? Will you dine with me, all of you, and enchant
me with your company?”

The response was a little time in coming. He held his
breath. If he had given insult, he would hear of it to infinity.

Then his lordship said, “The emperor is most kind, and most politic.
Those men who wait without—”

“I’ll go to them later,” Estarion said quickly. “Bid them
sit to their own dinner. When the wine comes round, I’ll share it with them.”

Thus providing himself with an escape. Lord Miyaz saw it,
surely, but he bowed with every evidence of approval. “Wisely chosen, majesty.”

He smote his hands together. The eunuch bowed himself out.
Miyaz remained, smiling, watchful, alert to the emperor’s every need.

A prince’s training had its uses. It taught a man to endure
the excruciations of courtesy, to be charming when he would have preferred to
turn and bolt. He spoke to every lady in that hall, however shy she was,
however weary he grew of yellow faces, yellow eyes, yellow curls under silken
veils. He put aside grimly his longing for a sweet dark face, or a sweet white
one, sea-eyed, autumn-haired, and a body as supple as it was slender, and a
voice that had never learned to giggle in chorus.

He left them smoothly enough, he hoped, to forget for a
moment that he had chosen none of them for his bed or his bride. Their fathers
and brothers and guardians were waiting for him, schooled to patience, and none
quite bold enough to ask the question that burned in every mind. Frayed though
he was about the edges, he had power left to charm them as he had their women.

o0o

Vanyi was not in the chamber when he came to it. He had
dared to hope she would be, at least to quarrel with him. A quarrel would have
lightened his spirit.

There were guards on the door: his own, he had been pleased
to see when he came in, with eyes that would meet his, and minds that did not quail
in fear of his presence. “Find Vanyi,” he said to redheaded Alidan, “and tell
her I’d welcome her company.”

Alidan shifted his feet and looked uncomfortable. “My lord—”

“And when,” Estarion wanted to know, “have I ever been ‘my
lord’ to you, except when you were up to something?”

“My lord,” Alidan said again. And when Estarion glared:
“Starion, Vanyi said to tell you. She won’t come to you at night any longer. If
you want a woman, she said, you know where to find a sufficiency of them.”

The world narrowed to a single, bitter point.

Alidan, red Gileni and no coward, flattened against the
wall. His face was grey under the bronze.

Estarion spoke softly. “That’s not Vanyi speaking. That’s my
lady mother.”

“It is Vanyi,” Alidan said. “Believe it, Starion. She told
me herself.”

“With my mother at her back, forcing her.”

“No,” said Alidan. “She was alone, and she wasn’t under
binding. Whoever put her up to it, she wanted it. She said so.”

“Bring her to me.”

“She won’t come,” said Alidan. “She said that, too. You’ll
sleep alone, or you’ll sleep with a yellow woman.”

Estarion took a step forward. Alidan flattened further. But
Estarion had no mind to strike him, and none, upon reflection, to confront
Vanyi. She would be guarded with iron and with magic, and if she said she would
not see him, then nothing short of a mage-blast would win him through to her.

“Coward,” he said to the wall she had raised about herself.
It returned no answer.

This coldness, this thing that was growing in herself, was
nothing that Vanyi could stop. There had been warmth once, gladness, mind that
met mind and knew no walls between them. Loss of the child had altered
everything: broken, darkened, marred it perhaps beyond mending.

She loved Estarion still, down at the bottom of things. But it
was very far down, and the heart that beat there was a tiny thing, globed as if
in glass. When mind or tongue shaped his name, the light about it was warm. But
when her eyes looked on him, the wall came up between them. He was other,
stranger, emperor. His touch, she knew, would burn.

So he had seemed when she first came to Endros: alien,
exotic, not quite human. The quick light wit that masked the knots of old
scars, the sudden temper, the smaller things—the way he stretched all over when
he woke, like a cat; or the turn of his head when he was startled; or his
inexplicable and quite insatiable fondness for sour apples—were walled in with
her love for him. She could not touch them.

It was best, she told herself. He had to marry in Asanion.
He was too loyal in himself; he would never look at another woman while she was
there to distract him. If she turned him away from her, even taught him to hate
her, then he would look for comfort where it best served him, and surely find
it.

She would happily strangle any woman whom he called beloved.
But she could not—physically could not—make herself go to him. Even to face
him; to lay her hand over his heart, just so, and know the power that slept in
him, and know, know surely, that the child of this night would not die unshaped
and scarce begun.

No one tried to talk to her. Estarion’s lords and servants
were too shy of the priestess-mage or too scornful of the commoner. The guards
had no time. The priests had troubles of their own.

That, if she would let it, was cure and physic for her hurt.
She had the land-sense—it was the first thing any mageborn child woke to
knowledge of, and she had sea-sense on top of it, or water-sense at least. She
knew how the earth welcomed Estarion: which was both pleasure and pain, because
he had been so sure that it would recoil from him, and because that surety had
become a part of her. But something had gone, or was going, awry.

“He’s only partblood Asanian,” she said to the priests and
priestesses who had come from Endros, half a cycle’s journey into the Golden
Empire, when there was no one else to listen or to intrude. “And we all know
what happened to him here. Is he twisting the worldlines, do you think? Or
finding them twisted, and tangling them further?”