Arrows of the Sun (34 page)

As he watched, she lifted the hand that did not hold the
pen, and traced an intricate pattern in the air. It shaped itself in red-gold
fire, hovering after her hand retreated. She inspected it without astonishment,
frowning a little, retracing one of its many woven curves. It flexed like a
living thing, smoothed, flattened, sank down to the written page and spread
itself there, as if it had been a bird and that its nest. Korusan fancied that
it tucked its lacework beak beneath a latticed wing and went placidly to sleep.

A shiver ran down his spine. He had seen mages at their
workings. They had worked on him more often than it comforted him to recall.
But this was magic so calm, so matter-of-fact, performed with such ease and
apparent pleasure, that it took him aback.

The priestess smiled at her handiwork and applied pen to
parchment, writing smoothly and swiftly, as one who did it often. He recognized
the characters of the Gileni script, but not the words.

He came to stand at her shoulder, moving as soft as a cat or
an Olenyas. He watched her become aware of him. She was not alarmed. What
Keruvarion must be like, that everyone he saw who came from it would let anyone
walk up behind, and know no fear: he could not imagine it.

Maybe it was that so many of them were mages. They thought
themselves invulnerable.

Out of curiosity, and because she needed the lesson, he
leaned forward, peering at the image she had made with magic. She started most
satisfactorily. “Who—”

He met her eyes. Her mouth snapped shut. What came then was
tight and hard, as through gritted teeth. “Tell him no. I will not go to him,
summoned or unsummoned.”

Korusan should not have been surprised. “He has not summoned
you,” he said. “He is with his ladies.”

That might have been a misjudgment: she had a temper, and it
thrust her to her feet. She was smaller than he. Interesting. He had thought of
her as tall. She was so, if she had been Asanian, but for an easterner she was
a small woman. “Then why are you here?” she demanded.

Presence of mind, too. Korusan was beginning to like this
odd fierce creature. He shrugged at her question. “I had thought,” he said,
“that you might wish to know to what you drove him.”

“Why? What profit is in it for you?”

He gave her a part of the truth. “I would wish that a lady
of good family not bear mongrel offspring.”

She very nearly struck him. He could have eluded her, if he
chose to. She knew that: she showed him her teeth, and her flattened hand.
“Sometimes,” she said, “you people are repellent.”

“And you, madam, are without flaw?”

She returned to her seat. She was not wary of him, which was
either courage or great folly. She took up the pen and turned it in her
fingers, but her eyes lingered on him. “You’re his shadow,” she said. “They all
call you that. Do you dog his steps because you love him, or because it pleases
you to hold his life in your hand?”

“I am his guard and his servant,” said Korusan. “But for me,
when the assassin struck, he would have died. Do your people understand
life-debt?”

“We understand that Asanians are anciently inscrutable, and
Olenyai worst of all. Does life-debt mean that you are bound to him until you
set him free?”

“And he to me.” Korusan inclined his head. “You understand
much.”

“He wouldn’t agree with you.” The pen snapped between her
fingers. She laid down the shards of it carefully, as if she feared to break
them further. “What do you want with me?”

“To understand you,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, “my master loves you.”

Her fists struck the table. “Stop it! Will you
stop
it? Bad enough that he hounds me
and haunts me and drives me to distraction. Must I have his every slave and
servant doing the same?”

“Why?” asked Korusan. “Has anyone else come to you?”

“
No
!” She lowered
her head into her hands. It was not defeat, nor was it weariness. It was
violence grimly throttled. “Go away,” she said.

o0o

He went. She had not expected him to. But he was not
Estarion, to resist will as well as word.

She raised her head from her hands. The shadow of him
lingered in the room: a shape of veils and silent movement, soft voice and wide
bright eyes. Feverish, she thought. As if he were ill, or touched with
something of his master’s fire.

She swept up the first thing that came to hand: an empty
scroll-case, solid and heavy. With all her force, she hurled it at the wall.

The silence afterward was blessed. She stared at the dent
the case had made in the plastered wall, and called to mind each line of that
faceless shape.

He had eyes like Estarion’s, lion-eyes as they called them
here. She had thought them plain Asanian until she came to this place and found
that eyes in the Golden Empire were much as elsewhere, more often yellow than
brown, but never whiteless like an animal’s.

o0o

Shaiyel was not unduly disturbed to be roused in the
middle of the night, although the priestess with him blushed and hid her face
from the light. It was a sin in Asanion, Vanyi recalled out of nowhere in
particular, for a grown man to lie in bed alone. Shaiyel smiled at her,
welcoming her, offering what hospitality a priest could in his cell: a seat on
the stool, a cup of water from the jar.

She declined them. “Shaiyel,” she said. “Tell me about eyes
of the Lion.”

His own widened. They were amber-gold, large, round, and
quite human. “They are the mark of the blood imperial,” he said.

“Always?” Vanyi demanded.

He clutched a robe about him and rose, pouring a cup of
water, sipping it before he spoke. “There have been lines of slaves,” he said,
“but they never prospered. Too many defectives. Too many incorrigibles. It’s
something in the blood. It goes with the eyes, maybe; I don’t know. I’m neither
physician nor healer.”

“What of the Olenyai? Do they have a strain of it, too?”

“Very little is known of them,” Shaiyel said. “I suppose
it’s possible. I’ve never seen one who, as far as I could tell, was anything
but plain Asanian. Purer blood than most, maybe, and better breeding; but there
are lordly houses that can claim as much.”

“Have you noticed the emperor’s shadow?” She spoke of
Estarion without her voice breaking. She was proud of that.

“Ah,” said Shaiyel. “That one. He has life-debt. I wonder if
Starion knows what that means.”

“I doubt it,” said Vanyi. So: that much was true. “Do you
think that any of the old royal line survived?”

“Certainly,” said Shaiyel, drawing her into a knot until he
said, “Starion is the last of it. He even has the eyes. His son will, too, if
he goes on as he’s begun.”

“No,” said Vanyi, thrusting pain aside. “I don’t mean
Estarion. Could there have been others who were full Asanian? Didn’t Hirel let
one of his sisters marry?”

“Jania,” said Shaiyel. “Yes. But that was far away in the
west, almost to the sea. And her line died out, I heard, as the slave-lines
did, and for much the same cause.”

“And,” said Vanyi to herself, “there’s no way they could
have gone among the Olenyai. The blackrobes don’t take in strangers. Do they?”

“So we’re told,” Shaiyel said. “Their lines are more sacred
to them than our altars are to us. We can break an altar if we must. They won’t
break their bloodlines.”

Vanyi shook herself. “This place . . . I’m
starting at shadows. He came this evening, you see. The Olenyas. He seemed
curious, as if he were inspecting me. I think he wants to breed me to his
emperor.”

It did not come out as lightly as she wanted it to. Shaiyel
touched her hand in sympathy. “There’s no understanding Olenyai. Maybe he
wanted to see what you were, and he’ll come back again when he judges it time,
and ask you the question that’s in his mind.”

“Probably not,” she said. “I told him to go away. If he
wants his fortune told, there are mountebanks in the market who can do it
better than I.”

“But is any of them the emperor’s beloved?”

“I don’t
want
to
be—” She broke off. “Shaiyel, I don’t like it, that he came to me. He’s not
what he seems to be. I know, Olenyai can’t be read, they have a magery on them.
But there’s something under it. And it frightens me.”

Shaiyel had no comfort to offer. She left him as soon as she
could, sooner maybe than was polite.

o0o

Dawn surprised her. She had been walking nightlong, back and
forth through the temple, round about its gardens, up the street and back
again. When she realized that she could see her hand in front of her without
the aid of the lamps, she was standing at the crossing, poised to turn back
toward the temple.

She drew a breath. The city was waking about her. Some of it
had never gone to sleep.

A woman without a veil, walking the open street, was a
scandal, but a priestess in robe and torque, hair plaited behind her, was not
reckoned as other women were. Once or twice people spat just past her. More
often they bowed or gave her room.

The palace admitted her without question. Some of the guards
were Estarion’s own from Endros. It half warmed, half pained her that they were
still there.

They greeted her with pleasure, even with fondness. They
were all full of the emperor’s nights in the harem: not meaning to be cruel,
but it was clear, was it not, that she had set him free. And it would be a
wonderful thing, or a dreadful one, if he sired a son in Asanion, of an Asanian
woman.

She was almost glad to enter the perfumed confines of the
queen’s palace. The empress had done what she could to make it bearable: torn
down hangings, discarded cushions and carpets, flung windows wide. It was still
a stifling prison.

Vanyi had to wait to be admitted. She did not mind overmuch.
Servants brought breakfast, which she nibbled at, and offered diversion. She
accepted the book. She refused the lute-player.

She was beginning to think that she had acted too quickly.
What could the empress do? Vanyi had nothing more than vague suspicions, an
intrusion in a Gate, an Olenyas with the eyes of an emperor. Plain sense would
bid her consider that she was a woman still unbalanced from the loss of a
child, further shaken by the loss of a lover, and prey to wild fancies.

Just as she gathered to rise and escape, a eunuch entered
and bowed. “The empress will see you now,” he said.

o0o

The empress had been celebrating the rite of the goddess:
she was still in her robes with her hair loose down her back, and a look on her
as of one who has not quite returned from the gods’ realm to mortal reality.

Vanyi, who had forgotten the sunrise-rite in her
distraction, knew a stab of guilt. It did nothing to sweeten her mood. She
managed a punctilious obeisance, even a proper greeting.

Merian forestalled it before it went on too long. “Enough.
This may be Asanion, but I prefer the usages of Keruvarion. Will you sit? Have
you eaten?”

“Your servants saw to it, lady,” Vanyi said.

“Then you will pardon me if I break my fast in front of
you.”

Vanyi inclined her head. Merian’s servants brought a much
lighter repast than they had offered Vanyi, bread only, and fruit, and water
scented with the sour-sweetness of starfruit.

The empress seemed to take an endless time about her frugal
meal, chewing each minute bite, swallowing, pausing as if in prayer before she
took another. Vanyi was ready to scream by the time Merian put down the last
bit of fruit half-tasted and waved the rest away, and said, “Tell me.”

“I know about Estarion,” Vanyi said, which was not how she
had meant to begin at all.

“Everyone knows about Estarion,” said his mother. “Do you
want him back?”

“No,” Vanyi said, “damn it. Everyone asks me that, too.”

“Including Estarion?”

“I’m the one who drove him to it.”

“So you both may like to think.” Merian sat back in her tall
chair, as much at ease as she ever allowed herself to be. “My son is quite
excessively dutiful, and quite clever at casting blame on others for the pain
it costs him.”

“I had a great deal to do with it,” Vanyi said. “Don’t try
to tell me I didn’t. It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? I hear she’s even a
hoyden, as Asanians go. He gave her a senel, and she rides it every day.”

“She is quite charming,” said Merian, “and very forthright
in her opinions.”

“I’m sure that delights him.”

“It is what he is accustomed to.”

Vanyi wanted to laugh, but if she did, she would burst into
tears. “He does like a woman who will give as good as she gets.”

“Even now,” said Merian. She sighed. “He is changing.
Asanion has altered him.”

“For the better?”

“For the worse.” The empress rose and began to pace. Vanyi
had never seen her restless before. She walked to the wall and spun. “No. Not
for the worse. I cannot reckon it, or him. He comes to me, he speaks, he is
courteous, he is everything a son should be. And yet he seems to me to be walking
in a dream.”

“A nightmare,” said Vanyi.

“Yes.” Merian closed her eyes for a moment. “And since his
squire died, there is no touching him at all, mind or body. He has closed
himself off altogether.”

“He . . . came to me,” Vanyi said through a
narrowing throat. “He wanted . . .”

“Of course you refused,” said Merian. Vanyi could not judge
her tone, whether she meant to lend comfort or to prick with scorn. “If you had
accepted, you would have broken your vows.”

Comfort or scorn, it did not matter. “So he went to the
Asanian woman,” Vanyi said. “And now he belongs to her.”

“You should not envision her as a snare or a temptress,”
Merian said. “She is a child who was born to breed princes.”

“And so she will,” said Vanyi. “But I didn’t come to speak
of her. Or even, directly, of him.”