Arrows of the Sun (6 page)

The last of them halted at the boundary-stone, the white
pillar without adornment that marked the edge of Endros and the beginning of
the Hundred Realms. It stood on a long hill cloven in two by the river, first
outrider of the ridge-wall, and beyond it the land went up and up to a
tree-clad height. It was nothing to the mountains of the north, but on that
plain it stood high and haughty.

Estarion paused by the stone. “Go,” he said to the rest.
“I’ll follow.” Some hesitated, but he stared them down: even his mother. They
rode on up the slope.

Umizan lowered his head to graze. Ulyai dropped down just
beyond him and rolled in the sweet grass, singing a soft yowling song. Her mind
was full of sunlight. No sadness there; no regret to be forsaking the city of
her birth. All her kind remembered the free air and the wild places, even those
born within Endros’ walls: remembered it and yearned for it.

Estarion looked down upon his city. He could have cupped it
in his two hands, as small as it seemed and as perfect, like a carving in ivory
and gold.

He had left Endros often enough on journeys about his
empire. But only in the east and the north. Never in the west. Never for so
long or in such a mingling of anger and resentment, doubt and fear and piercing
exhilaration.

Free
. For however
brief a time, for however unwelcome a purpose, he was free of those walls. It
was terrifying, that freedom, and wonderful. That he went to a worse prison
than he had escaped—it mattered, and yet after he was not sorry for it.

He touched heel to Umizan’s side. The stallion snatched a
last mouthful of grass and wheeled, turning away from the city and the plain.
The Wall of Han-Gilen rose ahead of them, and the last of the escort riding
slowly over the crest. Estarion wound fingers in the long mane. “Go,” he said
into the back-turned ear. “Brother, go!”

Estarion’s riding fell somewhere between an army’s march
and a royal progress: soldier-speed where land or weather allowed it, but long
slow meanders through rough country, and pauses in this castle and that town
and yonder temple. Once free of Endros he knew less urgency, or more patience.
The pace was his to set, and he allowed his mood to set it, or Umizan’s whim.

He rode in the swelling spring, up the long roll of Suvien
with the Wall of Han-Gilen fading into mist behind him, through the hills and
woods of Iban and Sarios, into the forest-ridings of Kurion. There the towns
were fewer, the castles more frequent: crowning cliffs above the river, or
warding islands in its center. Their lords were not always delighted to find
the emperor at their gates of an evening, but he knew well enough how to talk
them round. It was as simple as a word and a smile.

“The trouble with that,” he said to Vanyi of a morning as
they rode down yet another steep and twisting track, “is that once they have
me, they don’t want to let me go.”

She had her hands full convincing her young idiot of a mare
that she had come up this way; she could very well go down it. It was a while
before Vanyi could answer. When she did, she was breathless and her face was
flushed. Her words were calm enough for that. “Of course they want to keep you.
You settle all their impossible cases, and physic their ailments with a touch,
and bless their women and their cows.”

“While my swarm of courtiers eats them straight into
poverty.”

“That’s pride,” she said. Her flush was fading; she pushed
her hair out of her face, where it would fall no matter how she bound it, and
smoothed the mane on her mare’s sweating neck. Everyone else was waiting below,
being patient and, in his mother’s case, subtly disapproving. Vanyi took no
more notice than he did. “They’ll just expect the more from their vassals, or
even from their equals, because they gave so much to you. Some will make a
profit from it. You’re a very useful guest, taking all in all.”

He looked down at the mill and muddle of his escort, and the
smaller party that belonged to the lord of the castle. That one looked ready to
ride back up and discover what was keeping his majesty, but Iburan held him in
what looked like easy conversation. Easy for Avaryan’s high priest in Endros;
excruciating, no doubt, for the lord of Inigal in Kurion.

Estarion rubbed his chin. One way and another he had been
neglecting to keep it shaven. Laziness, his squire muttered. Good sense, he
reckoned it. The stubble was ripening into a surprising luxuriance of beard. It
itched now and then, but not enough to be a nuisance. Nuisance was cold water
and cold razor on warm chin in the morning.

Vanyi liked to play with it. He grinned at her, touching the
edge of her mind with a memory. She blushed gloriously and glared, but laughed
through it. “I think,” he said, “tonight, we’ll make ourselves a camp. No towns
a day’s ride upriver of here, they tell me, and no castle past the meeting of
the waters.”

“But a great one there,” she said, “and its lord waiting for
you, like enough, if he’s heard you’re riding this way.”

“So we’ll summon him to be our guest under the moons. He’ll
reckon it a novelty.”

“Not an insult?”

“Not with me to charm him out of it.”

“Ah,” she said, caressing him with the word. “You are
incorrigible.”

He kissed his burning palm and laid it on her cheek. “Bless
you and all your lineage, my child.”

She stiffened and went white, shocking him into stillness.
“Don’t,” she said, strung tight. “Don’t mock me so.”

“Vanyi—” he began.

She shook herself so hard he heard the clack of her teeth.
Her hair escaped the last of its plait and tumbled free, autumn-colored silk
blowing in her eyes. She dug heels into her senel’s sides. The mare grunted in
surprise and shied, and nearly tumbled down the slope.

Estarion gasped, snatched. Vanyi eluded him, scrambling
mount and self together, half sliding, half running down the steep descent.

Once the road was level and the way clear in front of them,
she found her voice again. It was tight, and it came close to trembling. “I’m
not a cow,” she said, “or a farmer’s wife, for you to set a wishing on. I can’t
give you a child till my Journey is over. Don’t make it hurt any more than it
has to.”

That was sharp, but just. Not that he would say so. He had
his pride. He said instead, “Do you know, this is my Journey, too. I never had
one before this.”

“You have a dispensation,” she said, with an edge still, but
she was not refusing to speak to him. “And isn’t it a life’s Journey in itself,
to be emperor?”

“Not without Asanion,” he said.

Vanyi pondered that, gentling her senel as the mare objected
to the slant of a shadow. Umizan snorted at her and lowered his horns.

That was a mark of great disgust for a stallion to threaten
a mare so, and she without horns to answer him. She laid her ears back at his
presumption, but she settled somewhat.

“Yes,” said Vanyi at length. “Yes, that’s a Journey worthy
of you, to go into the west and win it.”

“If this were a proper Journey,” Estarion said, “I’d be
alone, or at most with one companion, and I’d go wherever the god led me.”

“Isn’t he leading you now?”

“No,” said Estarion, but he paused. The road ran along the
river through a colonnade of trees. Sun slanted through the branches, now dim,
now dazzling. He gathered a handful of it as Umizan carried him through, holding
it cupped in his palm.

It was warm; it tingled. No one else, even a mage, could
capture light as he did. He tasted it. It was heady, like wine. It tasted of
evening and of the west, though it poured from a rising sun.

“You see,” said Vanyi, who could read him like letters on a
parchment.

He opened his fingers to let the light drain away. Umizan
sidled, restless. Estarion gave him his head. He stretched from trot to canter
to gallop, running ahead of them all down the long smooth track.

o0o

They camped a league short of the meeting of Suvien and
Ilien, still on the sunrise side of Suvien. There was a ferry below Suvilien’s
fortress, or so the guides said, and boats enough to bring them all across.
Here the river was both deep and wide, its banks high but less steep than they
had been or would be, and a level of grass and trees stretching round a long
bend.

“Eddy there,” the guide said. He was a dour man, a forester
in the service of the lord of Kurion, and in no apparent awe of the imperial
majesty. “Round that bend she wraps her arms around an island, Suvien does, and
up past that is the castle and the rivers’ mating. There’s good fishing in the
quiet place. People come down from Suvilien with nets and poles, and bring
catches up for milord’s dinner. He’s partial to fish, is milord.”

“His majesty will dine on fish tonight,” said Estarion’s
squire. Godri took his duties to heart. He did not approve of commoners who
spoke too easily to his emperor.

The forester raised a brow at him. “Who’s fishing for it,
puppy? You?”

Godri drew himself up. He was a chieftain’s son from the
deep desert south of Varag Suvien, and the swirling scars that ornamented his
cheeks were marks of one who had killed a man in battle. He was neither the
eldest nor the chief of Estarion’s squires; he had won his place in combat,
though he would have been mortified to know that Estarion knew.

He looked like a court elegant, with his delicate hands and
his slender grace. “We have servants,” he said, “to do servants’ work.”

“Maybe I’ll do it myself,” said Estarion.

That silenced both of them. He laughed at their faces:
matched astonishment and matched outrage. “My lord of Suvilien will be sharing
our dinner tonight. See that he’s received as his rank deserves.”

“But—” said Godri.

“I am going fishing,” said Estarion.

o0o

He escaped before they could marshal their resistance.
There was camp to pitch, fire to build, mounts and baggage to see to. The lord
of it all could slip away uncaught.

Vanyi’s saddlebag yielded a hook and a coil of line, and a
parcel wrapped in soft silk. She was with the priests, building wards about the
camp.

He touched the edge of her power, a bright singing thing
like water in the sun. She was deep in the working, unaware of him save in her
bones, where he was part of her. He set a smile where she could find it in the
secret places of herself, and left the camp behind.

It was quiet round the bend of the river. Now and then the
wind brought the sound of men’s voices or the squeal of a senel.

They comforted him, but they did not touch him. Escape was
rare, solitude rarer yet. Even Ulyai was gone, hunting in the deep coverts. She
would come back in the night, purring and replete, or she would appear in his
shadow on the morning’s ride, then ghost away again.

The air was colder here than in Endros. There summer would
have begun after the long spring. Here it was spring still, the leaves young
and green, and in hidden hollows a memory of snow.

He paused to dip his hand in the river. It was snow-cold. He
drank a little of it. Earth was in it, and snow, and something of the northern
sky. That was the taste of Ilien that was born in the mountains of Ianon, first
kingdom of the Sunborn, bastion of the world’s edge.

He wandered along the bank. There was another bend farther
up, where the river curved round one of its many promontories. High and
forbidding as that was, the one beyond it, they said, was greater. Suvilien sat
on that. Kurion’s lord would be coming down from it even now, riding a boat on
the river.

Estarion could see none of that from here. This arm of the
river curved round a steep wooded islet, running aground on a spit of sand
before a trickle of it freed itself to run back into the greater stream. It was
more pool than river, its current faint, its water deep but almost clear.

Fish would gather here. He knew that from Vanyi’s teaching.
She had not taught him as much as she knew, and at that he had kept distracting
her, but he had a little knowledge of finned folk’s ways. He eyed the stretch
of water and the dance of winged darters on its surface, and, keenly, the swirl
and flash of scaled body as it struck for the kill.

One of the treasures from Vanyi’s silken parcel was like
enough to the darters to please his eye. He mated the line with the delicate
weaving of thread and down and hidden, deadly hook.

Foolishness, the forester would have decreed. So had
Estarion once, and been proved false a dozen times over.

He cast the line with its lure as Vanyi had taught him. The
breeze was fitful but strong enough to lift the false darter and tangle it in
branches, where it would catch nothing but curses. The brush of his magery
lifted it from certain capture and sent it winging out over the water, to
settle among its mortal kin.

The fish took their time in coming to the lure. Estarion let
them. The sun was warm, the air was sweet. No one came to trouble him, no
squire bent on duty, no tribe of lordlings questing for mischief. He cast his
line, he drew it in, he cast again. Some of the shadows beneath the water had
begun to draw nearer, circling, closing for the strike.

“There!”

Estarion jumped nigh out of his skin. The lure sprang out of
the water. Living silver arced after it, fell short, vanished with a scornful
flick of tail.

He whipped about. “You thrice-begotten son of a leprous—”

It was not Godri, nor any of the hellions who rode with him.
It was not any face he knew.

“You jump,” the stranger said, “like a plainsbuck in rut.”

Estarion’s mouth was open. He shut it. “That was my dinner,”
he said. Calmly. All things considered.

“This?” The stranger drew in Estarion’s line with cool and
perfect insolence, and inspected the damp and draggled thing on the end of it.
“Little enough meat on these bones.”