Winter King

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

Ashtar, Andrion thought, do not show me her vulnerability. She must be certain, so that I can be certain, too. Dana, as if hearing his thought, straightened, firmed her shoulders, turned toward the horses.

  The soldiers, without waiting for orders, were rolling the stone back across the entrance of the tomb. Did tendrils of shadow still flow from it? But they were powerless now. The sun’s rays were blotted by cloud, and the evening air took on an oddly hazy, muted quality, as if tombs and soldiers, Patros and Dana, were all hidden behind a gauzy veil.

  Suddenly Andrion was tired, and he wanted nothing more than a bath.

  Silently the company mounted and rode, jostling against one another in their haste, out of the city of the dead. And the dead stayed behind, the wind moaning about their abandoned monuments.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Reclining was a preposterous way to eat, Dana thought. She shifted again on her couch, achieving an even more awkward angle of arm and leg. She nibbled at an herbed mushroom and eyed with irritation the food arrayed before her: honeyed larks piled in intricate towers, suckling pig lying as if asleep on its platter, molded sugar palaces guarded by ranks of rose petals.

  This is Sardis, she told herself, more style than substance. Twenty years ago it had been the implacable enemy of Sabazel. But the wind brought many changes; not only did she know her father, she knew him to be a Sardian. Faintly nauseous, she threw down the delicacy.

  The lamps in the banquet hall glared yellow-white. To Dana, still shadowed with the darkness of the tomb, the light struck with an almost audible clangor on the bronze-plated armor of the sentries, on their bronze weapons, on the gold vessels lining the tables. Jewels gleamed, and exotic perfumes rose like a warm mist from a hundred bodies.

  A harp player sang the lay of Daimion, daring to say the name of Mari; he sang the lay of Bellasteros, mentioning in passing that the queen of Sabazel had come to him a supplicant. Dana scowled. The young noble beside her refilled her wine cup; it was unwatered Sardian wine, blood red, blood warm, and already her head spun.

  Patros watched her from the head table, dark eyes resting fondly on the image of her mother. Her mind envisioned him as a skeleton with gleaming, empty eye sockets. Her mind veered around the crash of a granite slab falling and the sudden tug on her hair like dead hands seizing her. She could have cut herself free, but she had submitted to fear, waiting for Andrion to save her.

  The Sabazians, she thought, burned their dead, purifying the mortal flesh; they did not preserve it, worship it, dread it. She set her cup down with a crash and wine splattered the tiles of the tabletop.

  There was Andrion, beside Patros. Did they hear the lying words of the bard? Yes, they exchanged an amused glance. Only amusement, to hear Danica so slighted. Dana writhed. The man beside her touched her hand, beginning some flirtatious query; she snarled at him, and he retreated in confusion.

  Valeria, on Andrion’s other side, looked up at him with luminous eyes, hanging on his every breath, her unveiled cheeks becomingly pink. Well coached by Shurzad, Dana thought, to sell herself. She allowed herself only slight sympathy for her sister.

  Shurzad sat beside Patros, her eyes bruised with the exhaustion of a long battle fought and lost. Her eyes saw everything and passed secret judgment upon it, touching Dana, darkening, moving on. Her gaze fixed with unblinking calculation upon Andrion. Her hand rose again and again to her throat, where the Eye of Qem glowed a pale phosphorescent green.

  Dana realized her hands were knotted fists against the rich fabric of her couch. Valeria would indeed be a worthy match for him, she scolded herself. But Ashtar! He would dash himself to death on her innocent sweetness. And Shurzad—something unhealthy held Shurzad.

  Andrion, maddeningly unaware of Dana’s surly thought, of Shurzad’s steady look, of Valeria’s adoring gaze, tipped his cup and drained it. His face was flushed, and he laughed gracefully, but too often. The sword Solifrax rested on the couch beside him, the snakeskin sheath shining in brief ringlets of light, taut and full. His hand rested on the sword, stroking it proprietarily.

  Patros turned to him, saying something, smiling. Andrion laughed again. Shurzad passed him another cup and again he drank. Of course he would drink, Dana thought scornfully. He has triumphed. The legions await his word, and despite the storm that gathers above them, the populace stands outside the palace calling his name and the name of his father and the name of his new toy, Solifrax. What has he to fear, now?

  The priest Bonifacio came forward, and over the burble of voices began an unctuous prayer. The name of Harus, legendary Gerlac, glorious Bellasteros. Dead Chryse, Andrion’s mother. At that Andrion looked up, met Dana’s icy gaze, shrugged sheepishly.

  I hate you, she thought. You hypocrite, I hate you.

  The banquet was over. Patros rose, thanking all the guests. To raucous cheers he bowed Andrion from the hall. The two figures were both lean and straight, Patros’s hand resting on Andrion’s shoulder; it never occurred to him to resent this princeling who came in Bellasteros’s place.

  Dana spurned the smiles of Patros’s officers and hurried into one of the upper passages of the palace. There she paused by a window; the moon would be just past the full, perhaps she could catch a glimpse of it. But the storm had begun. Lightning, sudden stark blasts of searing light, defined every rooftop and then whisked them into impenetrable blackness. She turned away, suddenly frightened, as thunder rolled along the streets of Sardis and sent mysterious vibrations through the stone of the palace.

  Rain burst from the sky, thousands of tiny drumbeats combined into one great roar. Perhaps the stone at the mouth of the sepulcher had been left ajar, Dana thought. The water could run in, swirl away bone and jewel, lap at the sarcophagus where her own hair hung lankly, fill the tomb with a cool sapphire light like that of Ashtar’s cave, clean and pure.

  She huddled for a moment in a dim corner behind a statue, shaking herself free of fear and resentment and longing for Sabazel. Footsteps clicked along the marble corridor; voices drifted on the heavy air, Shurzad’s as hollow as though emanating from a deep well. A well filled with acid, no doubt. “But she is your own daughter!”

  “So you admit that, at the least.” Patros, in the presence of Andrion, never seemed tired. With Shurzad he spoke like an old man ridden by time and worry. “But she is Sabazian, living by different rules than yours. If she has lain with Andrion, it was under the blue eyes of Ashtar.” Dana realized with a start that they spoke of her, not Valeria; peering around the pedestal of the statue she saw that the girl walked with them, eyes downcast in fascinated embarrassment.

  Lightning flared. Thunder shivered the city. Valeria squeaked, but Shurzad did not notice. “Sabazians,” she sneered, “are not proper women. Do not hasten to defend your bastard; it is she who would use Andrion, I daresay.”

  “Harus,” Patros moaned. “How can I make her understand?” And wearily, by rote, “Andrion is a man of honor, like his father.”

  “Indeed,” mused Shurzad. “Indeed, that he is.”

  Dana crept from her hiding place, more indignant at Shurzad’s meddlesome words than shamefaced at having overheard a private conversation. She stamped down the hallway and gained the door of her room.

  Lightning rent the night, followed by an immediate peal of thunder. Dana blinked, and realized that Shurzad was standing alone at the end of the darkened corridor. The gray cat sat beside her, its tail twitching from side to side. The beast’s eyes glinted. Shurzad bowed in some odd acknowledgment, her hand on her amulet.

  Dana shivered; indeed, the taint of sorcery ran like a black thread through the bright tapestry of the palace. Perhaps the opening of the tomb had released some loathsome shade. But last night Shurzad had already been possessed by . . . what? Petty jealousy, yes, but even Dana had never thought her evil. For a moment she spiraled downward through her thoughts, sifting them, following that dark thread, but her Sight eluded her.

  Shurzad disappeared. Dana turned across the hall to Andrion’s door
with some vague notion of warning him about Shurzad’s scheming, with some notion of apologizing for her resentment at the banquet. This man’s world was difficult, but Ashtar knew that it was his own world and he had his role to play in it.

  She knocked and stepped inside without waiting for a reply. Andrion stood as she had, before a window, his head cocked back, his face turned toward the sky. For a moment lightning illuminated his body; he still glowed brightly against the darkness outside, even after the flash of light winked out.

  He turned at Dana’s entrance, not at all startled. A cool, damp breeze puffed the curtains beside him, and his carefully draped cloak fluttered. Solifrax hung at his side, gleaming in the faint light of two small lamps, just as the winged brooch gleamed, and the ever-shifting depth of his gaze. She fell dizzyingly into those dark pellucid eyes.

  Andrion stepped toward her. “I was thinking of you.” His hand never left the hilt of his sword.

  She said nothing, not trusting her voice. The pit of her stomach churned, and sternly she quelled it.

  “I was hoping you would come.” His voice was silkened by the wine he had drunk. His full lips were moist, his hair clung in auburn ringlets to his brow. The scent of his body was salt and sandalwood, filling her nostrils with searing memory as he kissed her.

  She cursed herself for remembering and wrenched herself away. The room reeled about her, but she steadied it. “I am not some reward, to be taken at your pleasure,” she said, more harshly than she had intended.

  Andrion’s face crumpled like a hurt child’s. “Are you not pleased for me?”

  Gods take the man! “The Khazyari still contaminate the southern provinces and approach the borders of Sabazel; do not let your new toy beguile you into thinking the battle is already won.”

  “Toy?” he asked, and his face cleared. He offered her a formal bow. “I would never have left the tomb but for you. My thanks.”

  “I would never have left but for you,” she replied, with an equally formal nod. “But then, I would never have gone there but for you. And I would not have needed to be rescued if you had stayed by my side, instead of running off with your toy.”

  “Perhaps,” he snapped, “you should have let Lyris cut your hair, then you would never have been trapped.”

  “Perhaps,” she spat, “I should have let Lyris kill you, and spared myself your arrogance!”

  His eyes flared. Another breeze rippled the draperies. The lamps fluttered. Thunder rumbled in the distance and the rain slowed to a swishing murmur, as if the palace were at the base of the waterfall in Ashtar’s cave . . . No, Dana ordered herself. No, forget that, it is over. This is a man, and he grows more dangerous every day.

  “What is wrong with you?” Andrion snarled. “Where is your good humor?”

  “It was cut off in Gerlac’s tomb!” She sprinted for the door, hurling one last taunt. “Do you really think Tembujin will be impressed by your new play-pretty? He will not worship you, and neither will I.”

  Andrion stood as hard and still as a statue of Bellasteros, white-knuckled hand clasping the hilt of Solifrax, shoulders taut, face averted. Dana grimaced in pain, and almost turned back to him. Something fills the air this night, she told herself, something beyond the wasted shade of Gerlac and the warlike aura of Sardis.

  “Leave me.” Andrion growled, as if it were an order. “I do not need you.”

  So be it! Dana silently replied, plunged through the door and slammed it behind her. She ran across the hall and burst into her own room, seized a pillow from the bed and threw it, raging, across the room. It burst and a cloud of feathers spewed into the air, eddied, drifted down.

  Her flaming anger drifted like the feathers and subsided. “Mother,” she pleaded, “I know it is my fear that angers me, and the burden you have given me; forgive me.” And, more quietly, “I know I cannot have him, I know I cannot even want him, but why, why, must I hurt him? He has every right to savor this moment, as it will pass too quickly. And he did come back for me.”

  A breeze swirled through the room. Thunder rumbled distantly. A tremor passed through her thoughts, the slow stirring of the Sight. Her blood prickled. She inhaled deeply and let the vision fill her.

  Shurzad padded like a cat down a darkened hallway and entered Valeria’s room. She lifted a lamp, poured fiery oil on her daughter’s sleeping form, stood calmly while the girl burned.

  Dana shook herself, and the images spun in whirling scintillants of flame. Surely this was not to be taken literally; she had taken literally the intimation of her death in the tomb, and had been wrong. She pressed her hands to her temples as if her mind were a winepress from which she could squeeze more images.

  Andrion held the erect blade of Solifrax before him. The crystalline metal melted, burning his hands, his body. His eyes, pale taupe like the ensorcelled Bellasteros’s, mirrored only the fire, no will, no pain.

  She lowered her hands, trembling. The night was still, the storm over. A guard paced across the courtyard. Soft steps padded down the hallway. Ashtar! It begins! Dana blew out her own lamp, crept to the door, opened it. Something, someone was there. At first the shape was unclear, obscured by darkness; then she saw. It was Valeria.

  Dana’s heart started into her throat at seeing the object of her vision. But the girl was as luminous and pale as a waning moon, not flushed with fire. Her diaphanous nightdress revealed the lines of her slender child’s body. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, tinted with dream; was she sleepwalking?

  Then Dana saw Shurzad. The woman slipped like a shadow behind her daughter, turned her toward Andrion’s room, guided her inside. And stood leaning against the door, her eyes hidden but her teeth glinting eagerly between parted lips.

  Dana’s mouth curled in contempt. So the shepherdess sent her lamb to the sacrifice, baiting a snare for a prince. And she had dared to accuse Dana of using him!

  It took all Dana’s willpower to quietly close the door, creep to the bed, perch upon its edge. Still her mind reeled, slow eddies circling rather than seizing thoughts, skirting some barrier, some power outside herself. Andrion, in his present mood, might well fall for this trick. Shurzad had probably even spiked his wine with an aphrodisiac. Fire, indeed; drunken passion, more likely.

  But Valeria is intended for him, Dana insisted. I cannot interfere.

  And yet, and yet . . . A chill settled like a heavy drapery over her. Dana again pressed her hands to her temples, trying to thrust herself through that mantle that her Sight could not penetrate, trying desperately to discern the significance of her vision. And slowly, painfully, the threads of the curtain began to tear, shreds of dark stuff floating away to be consumed in a growing flame of certainty.

  * * * * *

  Andrion stood so stiff and still that his muscles cramped. He cursed himself for his rash words. Dana, he moaned silently, did I ever think it would be easy to love you?

  His tension snapped and he sat, hard, on the edge of the great canopied bed. The gauzy hangings moved, slowly inhaling and exhaling the cool dampness of the breeze. Andrion took a deep breath, steadying his thoughts.

  He had drunk too much, he admitted that. He had sought to erase the memory of the tomb, of his folly in leaving Dana behind; he had sought to erase the knowledge that the evil of past generations followed him as closely as the good. He had held his father’s skull in his hands, as he had held the hand of a demon, and whether his own hands were stained or sanctified, he could not tell.

  Dana spoke the name of Tembujin. Harus, how could she speak that name, corrupting her lips! But she should remind him of the task ahead. He drew the sword, considering its line, its light, its perfection. He ran his thumbnail up the burnished blade and spilled a faint spray of sparks over the coverlet. So I have Solifrax, Andrion told himself; I have succumbed to its spell. And yet it is not itself an end.

  His glow, and the angry pride that was its edge, drained from his body. He fell back on the bed, fully clothed, and laid Solifrax beside him. A toy ind
eed, he thought with wry amusement. Never that. But Dana, how can I make you understand?

  His mind fluttered into that twilit country between sleeping and waking. Tomorrow he would seek out Dana and apologize, and they would be friends again. When the legions went west, they could pass the fall equinox in Sabazel. There he could touch her, stroking her firm body as he now stroked his sword. He could bury himself in her, for a time forgetting who he was. He shifted uneasily on the bed, his body stirring with desire, with the image of her face and form this night, a beauty etched of both spirit and flesh.

  The door opened. Drowsily he turned, but failed to wake himself. Dana, he thought, coming back to take him; an offering to Ashtar here in the heart of Sardis, how appropriate.

  The woman was clad in a diaphanous gown that shifted around her like an illusory mist, teasing him with glimpses of her form. Dana seemed, Andrion thought fuzzily, to have suddenly lost weight. Her arms were taut at her sides, a soldier standing to attention, not lithe, not supple. Intrigued, he sat up. The room spun around him. He shook his head, but the motion only dizzied him further. The woman stepped stiffly toward him.

  The sword shimmered, hissing. The body of the woman shimmered, beckoning. He pulled her down beside him. Jerkily, she yielded.

  Dark hair, cornflower-blue eyes, face as fragile and open as a snowdrop. Dana, Andrion puzzled, you disguise yourself. Will it be easier for you this way? She lay stock-still, staring beyond his back as if seeing something move in the lamp-chased shadows.

  Wings beat uncontrollably inside his mind, hiding something, revealing something. He closed his eyes, opened them again, and found the same face, the same delicate body before him. The same odor of lotus bathed him, a scent too heavy for this girlish figure but enticing nonetheless, hinting of dark delights beyond his meager experience. Tentatively but firmly Andrion ran his fingertips from her throat to her thigh. His body responded even if hers did not, lifting and hardening like the naked steel blade of Solifrax beside him, aching to be ignited.