Arrows of the Sun (52 page)

“Guildmages?”

Korusan frowned more darkly. “Yes.” He went on with the
rest, which was simple enough. “Your empire is secure, or no less so than
before. Your priestess has it in hand. She does all that must be done.”

“My—” Estarion struggled against a sudden thickening of wit.
“Vanyi?”

“The Islander. The fisherman’s daughter.”

Estarion did not think that he would ever smile again. But
warmth welled and spilled over, and maybe a little touched his face. “Ah,
Vanyi. She’ll be my empress yet.”

Korusan did not say anything to that, but his grip tightened
nigh to pain.

“But you,” Estarion said, “are the half of myself.”

The golden eyes closed. The face, the beautiful face, was as
white as Estarion had ever seen it, but for the flush that stained the
cheekbones.

Fever again. Estarion uncoiled a tendril of the fire that
was in him, took the fire of fever to himself. He was not even aware that he
had done it until it was done.

It was a shock, like cold water on the skin, or joy at the
bottom of grief. Korusan shivered.

“You are ill,” Estarion said.

The boy laughed, breathless, bitter as always. “Am I ever
not?”

“No longer,” said Estarion.

“No,” said Korusan. But what he meant by that, Estarion
could not tell. He would have had to break the wards that were on the boy’s
thoughts, and that, he feared, would break the boy’s mind. Later, when both of
them were stronger, would be time enough to take down the wards, to heal the
sickness, to put all fever to flight.

Now . . .

He sat up slowly. Korusan, at first resisting, suddenly let
him go.

He swayed. The ache in his head was blinding. Wind roared
through his soul, wind of wrath, wind of grief.

He pulled himself to his feet. He did not remember this
room, although it must be the one in which he had slept before this all began,
the lord’s bedchamber in Pri’nai. Memory of trifles was lost to him. But the
great things, the grim things, the ranks of the dead—those he would never
forget.

His hands were full of fire. It dripped from them, splashing
on the floor. Each droplet congealed into gold, rayed like a sun.

He clenched his fists. The fire welled in them. He willed it
to subside. It did not wish to. Its anger burned.

Korusan’s eyes were wide and blank.

“Warrior child,” Estarion said to him. “Lion’s cub.”

Korusan blinked, started, came to himself. The quick flash
of temper was deeply comforting.

“Yelloweyes,” Estarion said, “don’t tell anyone.”

“What?”

Estarion flexed his throbbing hands. They bled fire still,
but more slowly. “This. It’s not . . . it’s nothing to be afraid
of. But I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone about it.”

“Liar.”

Estarion went stiff.

“Your magic,” said Korusan. “It has mastered you. Has it
not?”

Estarion set his teeth. “Not yet. Not, gods willing, ever.”

“I heard the priests talking. They were afraid that it would
be so. That the magic would be too strong and you too weak, and it would
consume you.”

“No,” said Estarion. “I won’t let it.”

“Is it a matter for letting and not-letting?”

“
Yes
!” Estarion
winced with the pain of his own outcry. And maybe it was a lie, maybe it was
the feeble wishing of a fool, but he would not yield. Not while he had wits
left to resist. “I will . . . not . . . give in.
I will master it. It will be my servant. On my hand I swear it.”

“Gods willing,” said Korusan.

o0o

Korusan held the throngs at bay while Estarion drowned
himself in drugged wine. Laughing, making light of it, but with a sharp edge of
desperation. He had shown himself in the doorway of his chamber, smiling,
upright, very much alive; he protested when his nursemaid coaxed him in again.
But when the door was shut and barred, he downed the wine with rather too
evident relief, and toppled headlong into sleep.

Once he was safely unconscious, his Vinicharyas crept out of
hiding. She had fled there when he showed signs of waking, leaving the field to
Korusan.

As she had then, she said nothing, seemed not to know that
the Olenyas was there. She sat where she had sat before, at the bed’s side.
What she thought she could do, Korusan did not know. He doubted that she did,
either.

o0o

He left her to it. Tight-coiled terror had held him until
he saw Estarion awake and speaking sense. Now it was gone.

He slipped out by the servants’ way. In a corridor lit by a
single guttering lamp, he leaned against the wall and shivered. Estarion had
taken the fever, and with it the little warmth that was in Korusan’s thin
blood.

He wrapped arms about ribs that stabbed with pain. Broken.
Maybe. Who was to tell now, with sickness set deep in his bones?

His stomach spasmed. There was nothing for it to cast up:
and that was well for his veils.

He pulled himself up, back flattened against the wall. The
pain grew no less, but his will remembered its strength. He was the Lion’s
heir. He yielded to no master.

Plain obstinacy set him to walking. Training kept him erect,
even lent him a semblance of grace. Between the two, he walked out of the
palace as the Olenyas he was; and even, somewhat, convinced himself that he was
strong.

He had the watchwords and the secret ways; they had been
given him in Kundri’j Asan, for all the cities where the rebellion was strong.
He did not think that he was expected here. The watchers admitted him
unquestioned, as much on the strength of his eyes as on that of the words and
the signs. They looked less wary than they ought.

The Master of Olenyai stood in a room like a guardroom,
empty of any furnishings but a tier of lamps, but full of strangers. The Master
of Mages faced him, looking unwontedly ruffled. The air had the thunder-reek of
battle.

Korusan neither wavered nor hesitated. He was too angry to
be afraid, too fevered to be cautious. He strode to the center of the circle,
dropped his veils and faced them all.

He had shocked them properly. He raked them with his eyes:
Master and Master, black veils of Olenyai, blank faces of mages, faces of
strangers who were lords of the empire. He lashed them with his voice. “Who
gave you leave to loose the attack?”

The lords stared openly at his face. Mages and Olenyai
neither moved nor spoke.

Save the Master of the Mages. “It was time,” he said. He
granted Korusan no title, no mark of respect.

The Master of the Olenyai lowered his veil slowly. The
lordlings flinched. “Your lives are mine,” he said to them. “Remember it.”

Korusan looked into that face which he had come to know so
well, with its nine thin parallel scars, the last of them still faintly livid.
His own two ached as scars will in the cold, although it was warm here with the
heat of bodies and braziers. “Did you countenance this?” Korusan asked.

“I did,” said Asadi, “my prince.”

“I did not,” said Korusan, soft and still.

“It was time,” the Master of Mages said again. “You were not
within our reach, to consult. And,” he said, “it was our thinking that you were
best left untold, lest he or his mages discover our intent.”

“You are saying,” Korusan said very gently, “that you did
not trust me.”

There: that was a cause of the battle that had broken off
with his coming. He saw the tightening of Olenyai hands on swordhilts, the
tensing of mages’ bodies.

“It is true,” said the Master of Mages with calm that was
either great arrogance or great folly, “that you appear to be entirely his
putative majesty’s creature. Could we endanger your semblance for the sake of a
warning that, in the end, you did not need? You were not by his side when he
fell.”

“I was kept from him,” said Korusan, “by my brothers.” He
glared at them, and at Marid most of all. “You knew!”

“We wanted to tell you,” said Marid. “But when we were told,
it was already too late; you were with him, and it wasn’t safe.”

Korusan turned back to the mage. “So. It was you who decided
it. And it will be you who rule when I am emperor, yes?”

“If you are emperor,” the mage said. “Is he dead, prince?
You had him in your power—held him as he lay helpless. Did you finish what we
began?”

Korusan’s lungs were full of knives. He could not speak.
There were blades in his throat, and his tongue was numb.

“He lives,” the mage said. His voice was calm,
expressionless, with an edge that might have been contempt. “You held his life
in your hand, and you let it go.”

“He has seduced you, prince,” said another of the mages. It
was a woman, a lightmage. He had not seen her before. “You are snared in his
spell. For they do weave magery, those of his blood, all unknowing, and as they
breathe, to make themselves beloved.”

“When would you have given us leave to begin?” her master
asked. “You forbade us in Kundri’j, before he had bound you. Now that you belong
to him—”

“Koru-Asan is no one’s slave,” said the Master of the
Olenyai, soft and deadly.

Master of Olenyai and Master of Mages stood poised on the
edge of a new quarrel. Korusan found his voice somewhere and beat it into
submission. “No, I did not kill him. If I am enslaved to him, then so is he to
me. I will take him when and as I please, and ask no one’s leave.”

“So you said in Kundri’j,” said the Master of the Guild.
“And we gave him to you, laid him at your feet, and you pleased to let him
live. There are good men dead because of him, strong mages destroyed, an empire
in worse disarray than it has ever been.”

“Blame him not for that,” Korusan said, clipping the words
off short. “You would not wait for me to take him from behind. You must open
your Gate, proclaim your presence to every mage in every temple from
westernmost Veyadzan to the Eastern Isles, declare open war upon the body of
the empress mother, rouse the emperor’s wrath and with it his magic—and you cry
foul against him for your own immeasurable folly?”

“And how long would we wait?” the mage shot back. “Years,
prince? Decades? While you wallow in his bed, come crawling at his bidding,
weep tears of bliss when he permits you to kiss his fundament?”

Korusan could not kill him. That would be too simple.

Marid would happily have done it for him. He restrained his
swordbrother with a glance, and looked the mage up and down. “I had wondered,”
he said, “whether you were arrogant or a fool. Now I am certain. You are a
perfect idiot.”

He drew his lesser sword, the left-handed blade, and stepped
forward. The mage went grey-green. He held it before the man’s eyes. “Your life
is mine. Tempt me and I take it, magebound or no.”

The blade flashed down, up. The mage gasped and clapped hand
to brow. Blood dripped into his astonished eyes.

Korusan granted him a modicum of respect for keeping
silence, though a blade as sharp as this wounded to the bone first and woke the
pain long after.

The mage vanished in a flurry of light robes and dark.
Korusan turned his back on them. The lordlings and the Olenyai waited in
varying degrees of stillness. “You will wait,” he said, “until the empress has
had her death-rite. Then I promise you, we bring all of this to its end.”

The Olenyai inclined their heads. The lordlings went down on
their faces.

He swept his blade clean along the edge of his outer robe
and sheathed it, and looped up the veils again. Some of the mages had left
their master and faced him. He could not read them, whether they pondered
threat or submission.

“You thought that you had simple enemies,” he said to them:
“a Sunlord who had slain his own magic and left himself open to your power, a
son of the Lion so enfeebled by the failing of his blood that he would be your
puppet, your creature and your slave. Long years you labored to create us both:
he the weakling, easily destroyed; I the weakling, easily mastered. I will take
what is mine, mages. Have you no least doubt of that. But I will take it as I
will, and when I will, and where. You will serve me then. You will do as I
bid.”

He had no care for resentment or anger or thwarted pride.
They gave him all of that. But they gave him also silence, and slowly, one by
one, the lowering of proud eyes, the bending of stiff necks.

He turned on his heel. There had been bodies between himself
and the door. They barred his way no longer.

Sheer white-hot will kept him on his feet through the maze
that was that house, past the watchers and the guards, into the twilit street.
People passed, scurrying from the shadow of him. His stride slowed. He
stumbled, caught himself.

He would come to the palace again. He had willed it,
therefore it must be. But it would be no easy journey. The knives in his lungs
had sharpened. The ache in his bones was fiercer now, almost too much to ignore.

He was not dying. He would not allow it. He would walk, so,
one foot before the other. Walls helped him; where they were not, he willed the
air to hold him up.

It was no more difficult than the run through the mages’
wood that had begun his initiation into the Olenyai, nor any more impossible
than running from that ensorceled place into the test of wits and will against
the mages’ snares. Certainly it was no less simple than standing robed, veiled,
two-sworded, Olenyas, and yet naked before a pair of golden eyes in a black
eagle’s face. All that, he had done. This too he would do.

He was aware of the shadow as it moved. Oh, he was feeble:
he should have known it before ever he saw it, sensed it waiting, slipped round
to catch it by surprise.

He tried to leap aside, but his feet were leaden heavy. He
stumbled and fell.

No blade swept his head from its neck. “Sweet Avaryan!” said
the shadow in a voice he knew. He had not known how cordially he hated it, or
even yet how weak he was, till he felt her hands on him, pulling him up, and no
will in him to resist.