Wings of Flame (15 page)

Kyrem said nothing. He was still feeling an odd pain in his heart, and he returned Omber to his bay in silence, walked with Auron back to the palace in uneasy silence, and when they arrived, he went off to his chamber to brood. Seda had been there again. Clean linen towels lay on the washstand, neatly folded, and clean clothing lay on the bed.

Kyrem shoved the articles to one side and sat down to think. He thought, on and off, for several days. In the end, fight it though he might, his conclusion was inescapable. Seda was a Vashtin. He had to give Omber to Seda, under Vashtin terms. He owed the shuntali everything, his life thrice over. And the gift of the horse, the highest gift, was the only way he knew of lifting his beloved stableboy out of the shadow under which she had been born.

Chapter Twelve

“Kyrem son of Kyrillos, prince of Deva, with his servant Seda, humbly presents himself,” the doorkeeper announced. “Auron ataron, fire-maker, son of Rabiron, king of Vashti and emperor of the Untrodden Lands, grants audience.”

“So, Kyrem,” said Auron kindly, “what is it?” He could not imagine why the prince should have petitioned him for a private audience, a most formal affair, complete with footbearers, when he knew he could speak to him at any time. And for the matter of that, Kyrem seemed to be having trouble in stating his reason.

“Sire,” he said, then stopped and put his arm around his little manservant Seda, drawing her forward. Seda looked as bewildered as Auron.

“Sire,” Kyrem began again, “I have told you what I owe to Seda, my friend and comrade. And you know I owe him yet more since I have come here, friendship and loyalty beyond all expectation. As a guest under the protection of this house, I wish to make him a solemn gift. I adopt the custom of this kingdom of Vashti in presenting to him my horse, Omber.”

Auron sat too astonished and touched to reply. The prince had spoken firmly, but his face held far from steady.

“Think carefully, Kyrem,” Auron said at last. “There will be no replacing the steed.” Then he winced, fearing that he might have offended the mettlesome youth. But Kyrem replied evenly.

“I know. I have thought. But it has to be done.” Their eyes met. “The gift of the heart.”

The gift, Auron sensed, was as much to him as to the little shuntali. The trust and, yes, the love in that glance.… It was moments before he withdrew his gaze and moved it to Seda. There the boy stood with that trapped-animal look of his—and he ought to be overwhelmed with joy! What was wrong with the youngster?

“Seda,” said Auron in gentle exasperation, “what is the matter?”

She wet her lips, moved them stiffly. “I can't,” she whispered.

“What?” Auron could not hear.

“I can't accept Omber.”

Auron could not understand. To him the horse was the Vashtin ritual, the Gift, and very fittingly presented. But Kyrem, the Devan, thought of the horse as a comrade and fellow creature and imagined that Seda did the same, and he had a reply ready for her.

“Omber adores you,” he told the boy. “He loves you, you know that. Take him with all blessing.”

“I am not worthy,” she said.

“Everyone is worthy and no one is ever worthy of the Gift of love,” replied Auron.

“But I am a liar!” For the first time she willingly met King Auron's eyes, facing him in plea for Kyrem's sake. “From the day we met, I have been a walking lie, a wretched, living deceit—”

Auron straightened on his throne in sudden, terrible suspicion. “What are you saying?” he thundered. “Are you in league with his hidden enemy?”

She shook her head, trembling violently. Kyrem supported her with his strong right arm. “Seda,” he appealed, “whatever are you talking about?”

She spoke without looking at him, but still, by the movement of her head and the pitch of her voice, speaking to him alone. “I am a girl.”

“What?” Auron demanded.

“My flux has come on me, and my poor breasts, bound up.…” Seda spoke tonelessly, lifting her skinny arms in a gesture of defeat or despair, a gesture that cried for pity. “I can no longer hide it.”

“A girl.” Kyrem repeated the words without comprehension, then shouted as they came to rest in his mind. “A girl!” He turned her bodily, peered at her. “Why, to be sure you are!” he cried, grinning broadly with the delight of discovery. “I am an idiot not to have seen it before. You make a lovely girl.”

“By Suth, my powers must be sadly on the wane.” Auron sat astonished anew. “I ought to have sensed it the first time he … she … came into my presence, yet I cannot feel it of her even now.” He stared at her, puzzled and unconvinced. “Seda, are you sure?”

“My organs are.”

Auron bestirred himself, drew his feet up and put the buskins on them. “You two,” he told the auburn-and-alabaster footbearers, “take her or him into the next room and find out.”

The girls rose gracefully, their filmy gowns floating about them, and glanced at each other in confusion.

“Do it,” Auron told them in some small annoyance. “You've known organs enough of either sort, and don't try to tell me otherwise.”

They left at once, taking Seda with them, she looking awkward and earthen next to their porcelain perfection. Auron sat staring at Kyrem. “So, Prince,” he said slowly, “you have befriended two muddled untouchables.”

Kyrem shrugged. “Both of you befriended me first. And we do not have untouchables in Deva. Here—they are returning.”

The footbearers whispered their report to Auron, and he nodded and sent them out of the room. Seda came straight to Kyrem, looking pale. He did not notice it, for his eyes had fallen willy-nilly to the small puckers that her young breasts made in the fabric of her shirt.

“You need not have bound yourself up for those,” he teased, smiling. “Why, they are scarcely larger than freckles.”

She ignored that. “You can't give me Omber,” she said.

“To be sure, I can and I will!” he stated, annoyed. “Talk sense, Seda! How did you come to be a boy?”

“I'm not certain. I was little, in rags, no one could tell—”

“Wait,” said Auron. “He—she looks faint.” He came down from his dais and, lifting her, seated her on it, found wine for her, taking it from a compartment right under the throne.

“And … and I had to be a boy unless I wanted to be a whore,” Seda faltered.

“What?” Kyrem exclaimed.

“A female shuntali is customarily put to prostitution,” Auron said in a low voice, and Kyrem turned on him with a savagery that surprised even himself.

“This is your vaunted Vashtin piety? Your people revile me because I ride a horse, a beast, and care for it with all love. Yet they think nothing of enslaving unfortunate women?”

“Kyrem!” Seda snapped, reviving.

“I have told you, the condition called shuntali has no legal status in my kingdom.” Auron sounded very tired. “But custom dies hard.… I admire Seda more than ever for her ingenuity.”

“It just happened,” she said quietly. “And then … I couldn't have traveled with Kyrem had I been a girl. He is too honorable for that.”

He stared at her, all his righteous wrath forgotten, sensing her meaning and realizing that things would never again be the same between them, that he had forced a drastic change. And slowly he too sat down on the steps of the dais.

“So, Prince Kyrem,” Nasr Yamut taunted, “your catamite has turned out to be your concubine, ay?”

The two footbearers had spread word of their discovery quickly. The whole palace was full of the news that Seda the boy was now a girl, and even the stable, apparently, where Kyrem had come to find some peace in communion with Omber.

“Of course it is to be expected,” Nasr Yamut went on. “You Devans are so fond of mounting, you hardly seem to know where to leave off.”

The priest stood a bit too close for his own safety. Kyrem swung out with lion quickness and hit him hard in the mouth. Nasr Yamut fell sprawling, sullying his yellow robes with the dirt of the stable yard, and in the same instant Kyrem realized with sickening certainty that he had done exactly what Nasr Yamut wanted of him.

“Blasphemer!” the priest screamed as blood started from his split lip. “Infidel! To attack the body of Suth's anointed fire-master!”

All the priests in the place ran to the defense of their stricken master, and for the first time in his life, Kyrem found himself facing a truly angry mob. Men were shouting, and some were brandishing broom handles and the like. Kyrem could perhaps have held them off with his personal magic, his presence, but perhaps not—he was tired, and it seemed to him that the day had held tumult enough. He chose the obvious way out. Omber stood close at hand. He vaulted onto the steed and galloped through their midst; they scattered before the horse's driving hooves, and in a few moments prince and mount were beyond the stable gates and the city gates and away.

The free wind of the open farmland was balm. Kyrem let Omber gallop until the horse slowed to a walk of his own accord. Then he drew him to a halt, laid his head against the black silky mane and sighed. He would have liked to have galloped all the way to Deva. But after an hour or so of roaming among the gentle hills that surrounded Avedon, he turned back and started home—Auron's city was home to him now, and Auron awaited him, and he did not know how he was going to manage the priests, and he did not greatly care.

He walked Omber quietly through the city, in no hurry. At the stable gates he found a troop of Auron's household retainers awaiting him, and raised his black brows at the captain in inquiry.

“We're here for your protection, young my lord Prince,” the man explained, and Kyrem had to smile.

“What, does King Auron hear everything?”

“Sees everything, my lord.” The men ranged themselves to either side of Kyrem as he dismounted. Priests watched from a sullen distance as he cared for Omber and put the steed in his stall. They would not attempt to harm the horse, Kyrem felt sure, or fairly sure, since the stallion was a sacred animal. Such must have been Auron's reasoning also, or he would have seen to that matter as well.

Auron was awaiting Kyrem for a late dinner.

“Where is Seda?” Kyrem asked him.

“In the women's quarter. They're fussing over her and trying to find her some clothing.” Auron looked up with a tilted smile. “It is going to take some getting used to, that Seda is a girl.”

Kyrem nodded in weary and wholehearted agreement and lapsed into his chair.

“What in the world did Nasr Yamut say to you?” Auron asked.

The prince shrugged. “Something about Seda and me. Ignorant insults.”

“Why did you not just turn them back on him, as you did the last time?”

Kyrem laughed softly in a sort of despairing wonder; he had not told Auron about the last time. Then he sobered. “I don't know why not,” he said. “I just felt … spent, and I reacted in anger. I am sorry I have caused trouble.”

“Trouble would have come soon or late anyway,” Auron said. “The priests think they run Vashti, and to a large extent they do. All the ceremonial nonsense that hems the king in, the proscriptions, the sacred silliness, is largely of their making. They want power; that is all they understand. Nasr Yamut has had an eye on you from the first day you arrived, sensing power in you, seeing you as a piece in some game of power. But he does not know what game.”

“No more do I,” said Kyrem. “Do you think Nasr Yamut could be the one who set those horse-bird demons on me, and the archers?”

“What do you think?” Auron turned the question back on him.

“I think he has not the means,” said Kyrem. “Nor the imagination.”

“No more do I,” said Auron.

Kyrem was weary in more than body and went early to his bed and took it ill, though he did not say so, that an unfamiliar servant waited on him. He did not know that Auron spent most of the night on the alert, watching with his mind's eye from afar the shadowed form of a splendid blue roan stallion within a stall in a hostile stable.

“I can't get used to it,” Seda said. “This being a girl, I mean.”

She wore a long indigo skirt with a paisley overskirt and a fringed maroon sash, a white cotton embroidered blouse with a paisley shawl and a lapis brooch. Her scraggly hair had been rinsed with henna and trimmed into a semblance of style and symmetry, then practically hidden under a beaded headdress. Her thin face gazed out plaintively from amidst the finery.

“You are yet half a boy at heart,” Auron told her. “No wonder you fooled me so. Your body is still thinking of riding through the mountains.”

“And I still want to give you Omber,” Kyrem said.

They sat around the table in Auron's private chamber, holding impromptu council. The matter of Omber had to be settled, and the matter of the priests added urgency to that of Omber. Auron sat back in his chair and his eyes turned sleepy; for several moments he stared at nothing, and no one spoke or disturbed him until he blinked and came back to them.

“Omber is munching his morning grain,” he told Kyrem.

“Good. Do you think they would treat him as well if they knew he is Seda's?”

“It is hard to tell what priests might do,” said Auron. “They do not always react as other men.”

“Keep your horse,” said Seda. “I … I think I am going to have to go away.”

“But why?” exclaimed Auron. Kyrem sat silent, his face taut.

“I … ache,” she said softly. “I have felt it since I became woman—a sort of pang, an empty feeling, as though something is missing, some part of me.”

“Your twin,” said Kyrem through dry lips.

“Maybe. I don't know for sure. I have dreams sometimes, and I feel a sort of … of whereness, eastward, toward Deva. That alone would not have made me leave you, Ky. But everything seems different now that I have put on these skirts.”