Hall of the Mountain King (8 page)

The book was rolled and bound, the music stilled. Mirain sat
at the king’s feet with his arm across the scarred and age-hardened knees.

“Yes,” he said with the hint of a smile, “I walked up from
Han-Gilen. At first because I would have been too conspicuous astride, with the
prince scouring the land for me; and afterward because I found it pleasant.
Outside of Han-Gilen, no one knew my face, and I kept my hand out of sight. I was
only a vagabond like any other.” His smile widened. “Sometimes I was wet or
cold or hungry; but I was free, and it was splendid. I could go where I chose,
stop where I pleased. I tarried a whole cycle of Greatmoon in a village that
had lost its priest.”

“A village?” The king’s voice was a low rumble. “Among
common folk?”

“Farmfolk and hunters,” Mirain answered him. “They were good
people, on the whole. And not one knew who or what I was. No one called me king
or prince. No one bowed to me for my father’s sake. One”—he laughed a
little—“one even brawled with me. One of the girls had taken to following me
about, and she was promised to a wealthy man as folk are reckoned there. His
house had a door of wood, and his father had a bull and nine cows. He would not
suffer such a rival as I, a spindling lad with a braid like a woman’s. He
challenged me. I accepted, of course; the lady was watching.”

“And you promptly struck the peasant down for his
insolence.”

Mirain laughed again, freely. “I was trying to be careful,
because I was war-trained by masters and he was but a plowboy. And he came
round with a great sweeping blow and flattened me.”

The king bridled. But Mirain was grinning. He smiled at
last, wryly. “What said the lady to that?”

“She shrieked and ran to my aid, which was rather
gratifying. But in the end she decided she would rather have a bull and nine
cows and a wooden door than a lover whose body was vowed to the god. I said the
marriage-words for them the day I left. By then their new priestess had come,
but both of them insisted: None but I must see them wedded. I foretold for them
a dozen children and a lifetime of prosperity, and they were well content.”

“Were you?” Ymin asked, abandoning her harp for the fire’s
warmth.

Mirain turned to her, half grave, half smiling. “I was free
again. I understand now why the law enjoins a Journey upon the young initiate,
though mine perforce was shortened. But I made a year do for seven.”

“You may yet have your full Journey,” said the king.

Mirain clasped the gaunt gnarled hand in his young strong
one. “No, my lord. My mother Journeyed for both of us while you waited with no
word of her. You will not have to wait again.”

The king’s free hand passed over Mirain’s thick waving hair,
a rare caress. “I would wait for you though it were a hundred years.”

“One and twenty are quite enough.” Mirain raised his head.
“Grandfather. Do I trouble you too much? Would you rather I had never come?”

Ymin drew her breath in sharply, but the king smiled. “You
know I would not.”

“Yes,” Mirain admitted, “I do know. Nor would I be aught but
here.”

“Even to be free upon the world’s road?”

“Even so,” he said.

When Mirain left the king he did not go directly to bed, but
remained for a time at his window. This had become a custom of his, a moment of
silence with the garden’s night scents rising to sweeten his chamber.

It had been early spring when first he came, the passes but
newly opened after winter’s snows. Now it was full spring. Brightmoon was dark,
but Greatmoon was rising, waxing to the full. The battlements glowed blue-white
before him.

“Father,” Mirain said, “when you begot me, did you bethink
yourself that I might not be equal to your task?”

The silence was absolute. Mirain sighed a little; when he
spoke again it might have been Vadin he addressed, however obliquely. “Ah well.
It’s not as if he were a mortal man, or one of the thousand tamed gods of the
west, to come at any creature’s bidding. Even his own son.” He rested his cheek
against the edge of the window.

The stone was luminous with somewhat more than moonlight,
although it was far yet from dawn. It knew him, the king had said more than
once. Where he was, the castle responded as to the sun’s coming.

He turned, his right hand a fist at his side. It could not
clench as tightly as it might, stiffened by gold where gold had no right to be.
“It hurts,” he said, soft yet taut. “It burns. It fills my hand like a great
golden coin, a coin heated in fire, that I can never let go. Sometimes it’s
greater, sometimes less; sometimes it seems no worse than metal warmed too much
by the sun, sometimes it takes all my poor strength to endure in silence. I’m
proud of that, Vadin. I’ve never wept or cried out, or even spoken of it, since
I was a young child. No one ever knew what pain was mine, except my mother, and
the Prince of Han-Gilen. And certainly—certainly his sister.” He paused; his
brows knit, eased. He almost smiled. “Odd that I should think of her tonight.
It must be my mood. Rampant self-pity. Little good it does, either, to put a
name to it. Shall I conjure it away? Look.”

Vadin had no choice, no time to choose. Mirain’s eyes had
seized him, enspelled him, sucked him in.

He was within them. He was Mirain. A body of no great beauty
or consequence, centered around a white agony.

But the agony retreated, held at bay by a will as strong as
forged iron. He saw a face: a child’s thin solemn countenance with skin the
color of amber and hair as red as new copper. From the time she could walk she
had appointed herself Mirain’s shadow; which often made the wits laugh, for he
was the dark one, all blackwood and raven, and she was honey and fire. But she
was unshakable, even for ridicule, even for outright cruelty.

“You shame me!” he had cried once. She had escaped her nurse
and scorned the placid mount deemed proper for a maidchild of barely seven
summers and stolen his own outgrown pony, and set out after him as he rode on a
hunt. She had mastered the black devil of a pony, which surprised him not at
all; but her intrusion on the chase, among a round dozen of the prince’s
squires, put him out of all charity.

“You shame me,” he repeated in his coldest voice. “You drag
at me like shackles. I don’t want you here, I don’t want you dangling at my
tail, I don’t—”

She looked at him. The pony was too large for her, the
saddlecloth awry, her hair tangled with twigs and straggling over her eyes, but
her stare set all the rest at naught. It was not the stare of a young child.
“You’re not ashamed,” she said. “You don’t hate me, either.”

He opened his mouth and shut it again. The hunt was long
gone, hot on a scent and unmindful of his absence. He could hear the baying of
the hounds growing faint even as he tarried.

The pony tossed its wicked head and threatened his stallion
with its horns. It was all she could do to hold it back, but she did it without
any lessening of her intensity. “I let you alone when you really need it. You
know that.”

“I must need it very seldom indeed, then.”

“When you wanted to play with Kieri in the hayloft—”

His cheeks flamed; his head throbbed. He flung himself at
her. They tumbled to the ground together, their mounts shying over and past
them; he beneath, she flailing on top of him. She was a negligible weight, but
her elbows were wickedly sharp.

He lay winded, trying to curse her. She sat on him and
laughed. “Hal says you have to play all you can now before you win your torque,
because after that—”

He clapped his marked hand over her mouth. The sight of it
alone was enough for most, but Elian feared neither god nor man. She sank her
teeth into it.

By design or by fortune, she bypassed the brand and bit
flesh. Pain on top of spiraling pain emptied him of all wrath or shame and cast
him howling on the edge of darkness.

The lesser pain faded. The greater swelled without cause,
without end, beyond all hope of bearing. Yet he bore it, fully and horribly
aware of it, even as the pit gaped before his feet. It would not swallow him
into merciful oblivion. It would—not—

The pain was gone.

Not wholly. It had shrunk to its least dimensions, the
closest to painlessness he could ever know, but after that blinding agony it
was relief so perfect that he could have wept. His eyes, clearing, saw Elian
kneeling by him, clutching his hand to her heart. Her face was grey-green, her
voice a croak. “Mirain. Oh, Mirain!”

He had no strength to pull his hand away. He could barely
speak. “What—what did you—”

“I took it away.” Her face twisted. “It hurt. How can
anything hurt so much?”

“You took it away,” he repeated stupidly. “You . . . took it
. . . Elian. Witch-baby. Do you know what you’ve done?”

“It hurt.” She cradled it as tenderly as if it had been her
own. “It always hurts. Why, Mirain?”

“You can heal it. Elian, little firemane, you have your
father’s magic.”

She disregarded that. Of course she had the power; she had
always had it; and being what he was, he should have known. “Why does it hurt,
Mirain?”

“Because my father makes it hurt.”

Her brows met. Her jaw thrust forward. “Tell him to stop.”

Even in his weakness he could laugh. “But, infant, he’s the
god. No one can tell him what to do.”

“
I
can. He hurts
you. He shouldn’t. Especially there, where it hurts most. It’s not right.”

“It makes me remember who I am; what I’m for. It keeps me
from growing too proud.”

She scowled, stubborn. “There’s no need for it.”

“No?” he asked. “I was being cruel to you. You see how I
paid.”

“I have good strong teeth. Even if half of them aren’t grown
in yet.” She patted his hand, which showed no marks of her passing. “You won’t
hurt again while I have anything to say about it.”

oOo

“Nor did I,” said Mirain. “Much. But I left her, to follow
where my father led. No one here can cool the fire.”

Vadin had no voice to speak. It was all lost in horror.
Sorcery—soul-slavery—

“My father wrought me,” Mirain said. “He shaped me for his
purposes. The Sword of the Sun, his mightiest weapon against the Dark. But he
made me in mortal likeness, flesh and blood and bone, and worst of all, a mind
that can think and be afraid. I may not be strong enough. I may fail him. And
if I fail—”

“Stop it!” Vadin’s shout was raw with the twofold effort. Of
speaking; of keeping his hands from that gold-circled throat. “My body is yours
to do with as you will. My service is yours for as long as my body lasts. But
if you touch my mind again, by all the gods that ever were, I’ll kill you.”

“I didn’t touch your mind,” Mirain said, low and still.

“You didn’t, did you? No. You raped it.”

For all the heed Mirain paid him, he might never have
spoken. “I didn’t touch you. I opened my own mind, and you plunged headlong
into it.”

“Wizard’s logic. You led me into a trap. You violated me.”

“I showed you the truth.”

“Yes. That under the upstart prince is a trembling coward.”

Mirain laughed. It sounded like honest mirth, with no great
measure of mockery. But priests were good liars, and princes better, and royal
pretenders best of all. “I’ll lay you a wager, Vadin. Before this year is out,
you’ll call me friend. You’ll do it willingly, and you’ll do it gladly, and
you’ll do it without the least regret.”

“I’ll see you in hell first.”

“That’s possible,” Mirain said, lightly but not in jest.
“What will you lay on it?”

“My soul.”

Mirain’s breath hissed sharply. His teeth were sharper
still, bared in a grin. “I warn you, Vadin. I can take it.”

“I know you can.” This was blackly wonderful, like racing
the lightning, or dancing on blades. “And you? What stakes can you offer?”

“A place at my right hand, and the highest lordship, save
only mine alone, in my empire that will be.”

“I can claim that, Mirain of Han-Gilen.”

“I know you can,” said Mirain. His hand cast darts of light
into Vadin’s eyes. Its clasp that sealed the wager was startling for more than
mere strength: it did not sear Vadin’s own hand to ash. All the fire burned
within.

They drew apart in the same instant, with the same feral wariness.
Half of one another, half of the one who had come into the room behind them.
Someone large, with a long stride, but light on his feet. They turned slowly,
as if at ease, but their bodies tensed.

Prince Moranden stood in his accustomed stance, legs well
apart, shoulders back. The goddess’ brand had done nothing to mar his beauty,
and he held his head as if he knew it. His eyes flicked from one to the other.
With a quiver of the lids he dismissed the squire, focusing full and
burning-cold on his sister’s son.

Mirain let the silence stretch until it broke. “Uncle,” he
said lightly, coolly, “you honor me. How may I serve you?”

The southern formality curled Moranden’s lip. He sat without
asking leave, stretching out at his ease. Vadin thought of the black lion of
the mountains, that was most deadly when it seemed most quiet. “You, my lord?”
asked the elder prince. “Serve me? That’s an honor too great for this humble
mortal to claim.”

Mirain left the window and approached another chair, but he
did not sit in it. While he stood, he was a little taller than his unwelcome
guest. He leaned against the carven back. “We are inundated with honor tonight.
I honor you with my service, you honor me with your presence. It is courtesy
that brings you here at last? Or need? Or simple goodwill?”

Moranden laughed sincerely, but with an edge of bitterness.
“Your manners are prettier than mine, prince. Shall we leave off playing?
Courtesy’s a word I don’t know the meaning of, northern savage that I am. Need
. . . the day I need the likes of you, my young kinsman, you can be sure I’m in
dire straits.”