by Judith Tarr
Iburan laughed. “Do they? Come now, youngling, tuck in your thoughts. They’re flapping like flags at a feast-day.”
“Maybe I want them to.” But Estarion shored up all his walls and slammed shut the gates and locked himself in the keep. Iburan winced. Estarion was briefly, nastily glad.
“Estarion,” his mother said. Her tone was a warning.
He bit his tongue, then said it in spite of her. “Was it all a sham, then? Shall I be your puppet still, and you the empress regnant?”
Her eyes narrowed: the only sign she gave that he had struck the mark. “You will learn to rule yourself. Or so one may hope. You are young yet, and I have raised you ill, maybe; protected you too well, and shielded you from good as from harm.”
“What, the good that’s in Asanion?” Estarion met her stare. “It comes to that, doesn’t it? I’m emperor of Asanion, too.”
“So,” she said. “You do remember it.”
“I never forget.”
“You never fail to regret it, either.” She set down the untouched cup and pressed fingers to her brows. “Ah, child, I did ill and worse than ill to keep you here in Keruvarion. You should have gone long since to Asanion, and conquered your fear of it.”
Estarion reared up. “I’m not afraid of the west!”
“No,” she said too gently. “Only of the people in it, and the memories it may hold.”
Estarion opened his mouth. No words came out. He shut it with great care.
“You cannot continue to shun Asanion,” his mother said, “or to offend its lords and princes. We have spoken for you through the years of your youth. That now is over. You must speak in your own name, for your own honor.”
“You must rule all of your empire,” said Iburan, “not only the east or the north. The west should know you, and know you fair. And not as one who loathes all that it is.”
“I do loathe it,” said Estarion, breaking in on their antiphon. “I’ve seen it. I know it. I despise it.”
“You remember nothing of it.” Merian’s voice was as calm as her eyes. “One fool passed all our guards and protections and destroyed your father. It could have been a northerner, or a man of the Hundred Realms. It could have been anyone at all.”
Estarion’s heart set hard and cold. “You never loved him, did you? He gave you a throne and an empire. He, himself, man and lover, was nothing to you.”
Her hand was so swift, the blow so sharp, that he never saw it, or even felt it, till it was done. His own hand flew up. But he could not strike her, no matter the heat of his temper. So well at least she had reared him.
“Never,” she said, soft and still. “Never say such a thing again.”
Iburan’s voice was deep and almost harsh, but there was calmness in it, and peace. “There now. Be still. You’re on the raw edge, both of you.”
“So we are,” said Merian. Her voice for once had forsaken its sweetness, and its grace that set an empire in awe of her. “So we must continue to be. That one who faced you, Starion, came out of Asanion to defy us all, and not you alone. Keruvarion is yours by right and by choice. Asanion is a conquered kingdom. Thus it reckons itself. It chafes at the rule of barbarians and mongrels. My dear lord did ill when he took me to wife and refused the woman his council had chosen for him.”
“An Asanian woman.” Estarion shivered through the dregs of his temper. “Then I would never have been; or been far other than I am.”
“Surely,” said Merian, “and I could never have endured a rival. But Asanion took its revenge, takes it still, and forgets nothing. And never, never forgives.”
“Then what’s left to us?” Estarion said. “Civil war? Asanion chafes, it always has, but in the end it gives in. You saw how yonder princeling was, once I made him see what else I am.”
“What you would rather not be.” Iburan sounded tired. “He saw that, too. Be sure of it.”
“What if he did? They’re slaves born, all of them, even the princes. Once he knew that I have blood-right to his homage, he gave it. He’d have slit his own throat if I’d ordered him to.”
“There,” said Iburan more wearily than ever. “There you have it. Half of your empire is Asanian. Half of you is Asanian. And you know no more of the truth of yourself or your empire than a blindfish knows of the sun.”
Estarion’s head throbbed. “It is not half of me! It’s a trickle in the tide that I am. No Asanian has tainted my blood since Hirel himself.”
“‘Tainted,’” said Merian. “Dear goddess help me. And you believe it.”
“Is it false?” Estarion asked her.
She did not answer.
He swept his hand down his body. “Look at me. What do you see? Northerner, as pure as makes no matter. Except for this.” His fingers clawed as if to rake his eyes; but he knotted them into fists. “If my father erred, then so did Varuyan before him, and Ganiman before that. None after Sarevadin endured an Asanian marriage. And she was married to Hirel Uverias, who was like no Asanian who ever was, or ever would be.”
“No,” said Iburan. “He was nothing remarkable, except that he loved a foreigner. And that, he always said, was a doom of his line.”
“So it is,” Estarion said slowly. He caught himself before he said something he would regret. He would not bring Vanyi into this, or soil her with its touch.
“Estarion,” said Merian, “listen to me. The time is ill, but it will never be better; and you must know, and accept. When your father wedded me, he promised his council that his son would not repeat his error.”
“It was an error to marry for love?”
“For him,” said the empress mother, “and for his empire, it was. It killed him. You must not err as he erred. You must do what he failed to do. You must take a bride in the west.”
“No,” said Estarion flatly.
He could not say that he had not expected it. He had ears, and wits. He knew that his council did not approve of Vanyi. She was a commoner. Her father fished off the coast of Seiun isle. She brought him no wealth or power, nor any dowry but herself.
But an Asanian. A yellow woman. Serpent-breed, to breed serpent-children.
His gorge rose. He would not do it. He could not.
“You will consider it,” his mother said. “That much at least you will do.”
“I have considered it,” he said. “I refuse it.”
“Have you ever even seen an Asanian woman?”
Estarion rounded on Iburan. “Why in nine hells—”
“How can you judge anything unseen and untested? Before your priestess came, you shuddered at Islanders and called them corpse-folk and fish-people, and reckoned them less than human.”
“Islanders never killed my father,” said Estarion.
“That’s Asanian, you know. That obstinacy. That unwillingness ever to forgive.”
Estarion laughed. It hurt. “You can’t have both sides of it, foster-father. Either Asanians are sorely misunderstood, or all my vices are theirs, and none of my virtues.”
“How can you know until you know them? You can’t avoid them forever, no matter whom you choose for your empress. Asanion has had no emperor in its palace since your father died there. Soon or late, you’ll have to face it and them.”
“Are you telling me that I should ride west in the morning?”
“Hardly that,” said Iburan, impervious to the weight of Estarion’s irony. “You’ll need a cycle or two at least to settle this half of the empire. But then, yes, I think you should begin a progress into the west. People are expecting it. They need to see you, to know what you are.”
“As yonder princeling did?”
“Even so,” said Iburan. “If you have nothing better to give them.”
“God,” said Estarion. “Goddess. That would be war.”
“So shall it be, if you let him go back unchallenged to his people, and tell them what you did to him.”
Estarion shut his aching eyes. It was no quieter in the dark. “I don’t suppose one could a
pologize.” The word caught in his throat.
“One could,” said Iburan. “But he’s only one man. What he did . . . he acted for a whole realm. That realm must see you. It must know that you belong to it as to the rest.”
“My father took such counsel,” Estarion said. “He died for it.”
“He died because no one would believe that an emperor, a mage born, needed protection from magery in his own palace. He died because we were fools, Estarion.”
“Yes,” Estarion said. His throat was sour with bile. “You were fools. All of you. He too. I. Everyone.” He swallowed hard. “I’ll be a fool. I’ll go. Damn you, foster-father. I’ll go.”
“Soon?”
Estarion’s head was splitting. No one was trying to get into it—it was not that kind of pain. This came from within. It made his sight blur, and made him say, “When Brightmoon comes back to the full. Four days—no. Three. I’ll go into the west. I’ll face my demons. I’ll make myself remember. But I won’t—I won’t—bed an Asanian woman.”
“That is as the god wills it,” said the god’s priest. There was no triumph in his voice. He was never one to gloat over victories, was Iburan of Endros.
4
Silence ruled the heart of Avaryan’s temple in Endros, silence so deep it seemed to drink the light, to transform the hiss of breath to a roar and the murmur of blood into thunder. No foot fell, no voice spoke. Even the air was still, wrapped in the temple’s veils and bound with magery.
Vanyi kept vigil in her due turn, now praying to the omnipresence of the god, now casting nets of power on the seas that were the mageworld. Most often there were two to watch and to pray, but on this day of Estarion’s enthronement, all mages who could were set to guard the palace and the emperor.
He was more valuable by far than the Magegate that shimmered where wall should be. That might fail or close, but mages could restore it, however high the cost. If Estarion died, there would be no heir of the god on earth; and that would be beyond repairing.
Strange to think of him so, and to know what he had been in the morning, tousled laughing boy-man covering terror with exhilaration. Her power twitched, yearning toward him, but the magewall barred it. And she was forgetting her duty.
She traced the patterns of the dance, sang the song that sustained the Gate. Dance and song were part of her, had always been part of her. Even on the shores of Seiun, fingers raw from mending the nets, nostrils full of the stink of the fish, her feet had known the steps, her voice the notes. Mooncalf they had called her, and witch, and changeling, with her sea-eyes and her hair the color of moors in autumn. She knew the speech of the gulls, felt in her bones the sway of the tides.
That was far away now, long ago. She stood in this chamber as in a globe of glass, and even the pull of the moons was faint, overwhelmed in the roar and reach of the Gate. There was sea on the other side of it, tides that were no tide of this earth, waves heaving and falling on a shore that looked like dust of rubies, or like blood.
As she watched, it blurred and shifted, and she looked into darkness full of stars; but stars that were eyes, great burning dragon-eyes staring into her own. Seeing her. Knowing her for what she was.
She gasped. A Word burst out of her, raw and barely shaped. The stars blinked, steadied. They were only stars.
A shudder racked her. The worlds changed: that was the way of Gates. Most were alien. Some were horrible, hells of ice or of fire, swarming with demons. None had ever left her as these stars had, crouched on her knees, heaving as if she had taken poison.
She scraped wits and power together. They were thin, threadbare, but they were enough to cast a net.
The seas were calm. Nothing swam there but what belonged in that place. Mages about their workings. Lesser folk dreaming, asleep or awake. Spirits of air and fire at their incalculable pursuits. No threat. Nothing to fathom that instant of horror.
She pulled in the net. Her heart had ceased its hammering. Her knees were steady again. The sweat dried on her body. She went down on her face before the Gate, and began the prayer of the sun’s descent.
o0o
Estarion came to his chambers much earlier than Vanyi had expected. It would have been like him to leave the lords’ feast and go down into the city and pass the night with his people, drinking their beer and singing their songs and showing them why they loved him.
He never calculated that, or thought of it as politic. He liked them, that was all.
He had been in the city: the beer-scent came in before him. He was in plain city-walking clothes, his court robes long since laid away. She heard him calling goodnights to the battalion of his friends, and them chaffing him for turning lily maid while the night was young.
“Maid!” someone cried. “And what’s he got inside, then? Maybe he’s got the right of it. Who’s for a fine warm woman to while the night away?”
They roared at that. Estarion laughed and shut the door on them.
Vanyi looked up from the book she had been staring at for longer than she could reckon. Estarion was a shadow beyond the lamp’s glimmer. She mustered a smile for him.
He moved into the light. There was no laughter in him, no sign that she could see of the face he had shown his friends. This was somber, almost grim.
“Troubles?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. He gave himself the lie: snatched the rings from his ears, flung them at the wall. They clattered to the floor.
Carefully, precisely, she rolled the book shut and fastened the cords. “Disasters, then,” she said.
He dropped his coat more gently than he had the rings. “When Brightmoon is full, I’m going to Asanion.”
She stared at him.
“Surely someone told you?”
His tone was nasty. She ignored it. “I came direct from the temple. Everyone else was in the hall or elsewhere.”
His long mouth twisted. She wanted to kiss it. He said, “I looked for you after your Gate-duty should have been over. I thought you would come to my banquet.”
“I wanted to.” She shivered. It was cold in the room, she told herself. She had dismissed the servants when they came to light the brazier, then forgotten it and them. “I was more tired than I thought. I slept a little.” And waked to nightmares, and sought refuge in a book of which she remembered nothing, not even its name. “By the time I could have come, you were gone into the city.”
He pulled his heavy plait over his shoulder and tugged at the bindings. They were stubborn. His brows knit.
She worked her fingers under his. They were stiff, quivering with tension. He let his hands fall, let her unwind the cords, loosen the braid. His hair was his great beauty, thick and curling yet soft and fine as silk, so black it gleamed blue. She filled her hands with it.
His body was taut. She kissed the point of his shoulder. He barely eased. “Why?” she asked. “Why exactly now?”
He told her all of it, words honed to a bitter edge. The Asanian, the test—he made little of it. Too little, maybe, but she was not ready to solve that riddle tonight. But his mother’s command—
“I’ll go west,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’ll face my demons. I’m no coward. But I won’t—I won’t—be stud bull to a herd of yellow women.”
“It need only be one,” Vanyi said. Her voice was steady. She was proud of that. “So. It’s a long way to Kundri’j Asan. Long cycles of the moons. A year, maybe, at the pace of a royal progress.”
“A year and three days?” His smile was thin. He kept count, too. “Not likely, my love. They’ll have me over the border as fast as the court can travel, and into the Golden Land, marshaling parades of yellow women.”
“Teaching Asanion that you are its emperor.”
“It does need lessoning,” he said. Breath gusted out of him. “God and goddess, Vanyi. I thought I was safe from this for years at least. There’s empire enough here to keep any man occupied.”
“Except that it’s yours entirely, and always has been, a
nd always will be. Keruvarion knows you, loves you. Asanion has never seen you.”
“It saw plenty of me when I was younger. I do remember that much,” he said, sharp, almost angry. “They marched me about like a prize calf. They dressed me in so many robes I could barely move, and perched me in a litter, and made me sit like an icon for people to gape at.”
“You were a child then,” Vanyi said. She did not know where the words were coming from. The earth, maybe. The cold thing that, a little while ago, had been her heart. Had the empress mother been trying to ease the blow this morning, telling her that she could never be empress? She worked the knots out of the emperor’s shoulders and said to him, “They never knew you as a man. Now you’ll show them. You’ll teach them to love you as your easterners do, for the brightness that’s in you.”
“I’m as dull as an old stone,” he said, with the soul burning so fierce in him that her mind’s eyes were dazzled, and his eyes lambent gold, and gold burning in his hand. She felt the wash of it, the pain that would have sent any other man into whimpering retreat, but only sharpened his temper and made him rub his hand against his thigh.
She caught it, held it to her cheek. It was no more than humanly warm, stiff with the metal that was born in it, holy and impossible. All the heat burned within. “Oh, my lord,” she said, and her eyes pricked with tears. “Oh, my dear lord. How can anyone keep from loving you?”
“You’re besotted,” he said. But a little of the tautness was gone. Not all, yet enough that he could lie down, and let her hold him, and be soothed into something resembling peace.
o0o
Dark. Stars. Eyes. Teeth that gleamed in the blackness. Maws opened wide, gaping to devour.
“Vanyi!” "
She clutched at warm solidity. Estarion’s voice thrummed out of it, deeper always than one expected, with a singer’s purity. She clung as much to the voice as to the body, gulping air. He stroked the rigid line of her back. “Hush, love. Hush.”
She pulled free. She was laughing, hiccoughing. “No! That’s my part. You’re the one with nightmares.”
“Sometimes,” he said, “one has to share.” He was barely smiling. His eyes were as dark as lion-eyes could be, all pupil, and about it the thin rim of gold.