by Judith Tarr
“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.”
“Were you born a fool,” Estarion asked, “or did you study to become one?”
“Clearly you were born rude.” The stranger cast the line long and low and level, as a darter flew. It barely brushed the surface of the water.
Silver flashed. Line snapped taut. “There,” said the stranger, but softly, almost tenderly. “There now.”
Estarion stared at the fish flopping and gasping at his feet. Blank bliss had transmuted into blank rage, and thence into plain blankness.
The stranger was a woman, he realized with a small but penetrating shock. It was not obvious. She was whipcord-thin, dressed in ancient hunting leathers, hair plaited as simply as a priest’s, although she wore no torque. Her nose was as fierce an arch as his own, her skin as velvet-dark, but her eyes were northern eyes, black in white, under brows as white as the flash of her teeth when she grinned at him.
She was old: and that too was not immediately obvious, for all the whiteness of her hair. Her skin was stretched taut over the haughty bones. She still had her teeth, and she carried herself like a young thing, with a light, arrogant grace that raised his hackles and set his pride to spitting.
She brought in another fish as quickly as the first, with ease that was like contempt. “You are a witch,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” said the stranger. “But here I’m a fisherman.”
“Woman,” Estarion said. His tone was nasty.
“You’re jealous,” she said. “Touchy, too. Here’s enough for your dinner and mine. Where’s your gratitude?”
“I’d have had my own dinner if you hadn’t helped me out of it.”
“And whose fault was that? This isn’t milady’s fishpond, where any idiot can drop a line in peace. There’s a fair to middling army over yonder, and rakehells enough in it, and here are you, as if there was never a danger in the world.”
“There isn’t,” he said.
“I walked right up to you. What if I’d been minded to stick a knife in you?”
“I’d have known if you were,” he said. “Look here, whoever you are—if this is his lordship’s personal pool, then tell him it’s his dinner I’m fishing for, and would he mind not sending his servants to startle me out of nine years’ growth?”
“You don’t need that much,” she said, measuring his length against her own. She was middling small for a woman in the north: he stood a head-height above her. She was anything but cowed. “And who says I’m anyone’s servant?”
“You’re from the castle, aren’t you? You’re not Lord Peridan, and you’re not his mother either, from anything I’ve heard.”
“Oh,” she said, rich with irony, “I certainly am not that delicate flower of womanhood. I came here from Suvilien, but I was never a bondsman there, nor anywhere on this wide earth. I’m no one’s servant but my own.”
“And the emperor’s,” Estarion said. It was a devil in him, a stab of wickedness. She did not know who he was, that was clear to see. He was not about to enlighten her.
“Not even the emperor’s,” she said. “He doesn’t own the whole world, or even the most of it.”
“What is there beyond the twofold empire? Wastes of sand or wastes of ice—fine prizes for a lord who has everything.”
“The Realms of the Sun are great enough, but they’re no more than a single continent on a single face of this wide and turning world. There’s land beyond the desert, youngling, on the world’s bottom, and land beyond the seas, both west and east.”
“And you’ve seen it?”
She paused to hook another fish. He was interested in spite of himself; he hardly cared that she took her time in answering. “Some of it,” she said at last, having freed the hook of its bright burden and cast again. “The seas are wide, and some few of the ships upon them are brave enough to sail out of sight of land. Or storm carries them, and they fetch up on isles no man of our race has ever seen.”
“Are there people there? Or dragons?”
“People enough, who speak strange tongues, and reckon us gods for that we sail on ships out of the sea. Dragons? Nothing so dull or so common. Dragonels as big as hawks, yes. And fish with wings. And insects like jewels, and furred beasts that sing like birds.”
“Stories,” said Estarion.
“Certainly,” she said. “But true enough for that.”
“But if they were true,” he said, “then wouldn’t the Sunborn have conquered them?”
A shadow crossed her face, too brief almost to see. “If he had known of them, he would have tried.”
“Someone will, you know. Eventually.”
“Or one of them will conquer us.”
“Not while I live,” said Estarion, forgetting his pretense. But she did not seem to hear him. She was drawing in another fish, the largest yet and by far the most determined to escape.
He lent a hand with the line. Together, hand over hand, they brought the catch to shore.
“We’ll feed an army with this,” the stranger said.
“Not the one yonder,” said Estarion. “That would take a whole boatload. But milord of Suvilien will have a dainty for his dinner.”
“He is a glutton,” she said.
It was hardly polite to say so, even if she had not been a commoner. Estarion forbore to rebuke her. She would not have listened in any case, and he had other matters to settle. “Do you have a name?” he asked her.
“Do you?”
“Estarion,” he said before he thought; and scowled. “You?”
She half shrugged, half smiled. “Many. Call me Sidani if you like.”
Wanderer, that meant. And maybe, a little, Exile. It fit her well enough. “Sidani,” he said, marking her with it.
“Estarion,” she said, still half-smiling. “I knew someone by that name once. His hair was as red as fire, and he had a temper to match. He married a priestess in Asanion. Fine scandal that was, too.”
“That was the last Prince of Han-Gilen but three,” Estarion said, “and he died young, and if you knew him, you must have known him in your cradle.”
“Oh, I am terribly old,” she said. “Are you named for him, maybe?”
“It’s a common enough name in the south,” he said. “You can’t be as ancient as that.”
“Why, youngling? Because you can’t conceive of anything older than yourself?”
She wanted him to draw himself up haughtily and declare himself a man grown, he could well see, and then she could go on laughing at him. He said, “You’d have to be ninety at least, then, and you’d never be roving the roads. You’d have yourself a house somewhere, and a chair with cushions, and servants to run at your call.”
“I had that,” she said. “I wearied of it.”
“But—”
She had stopped listening. She gutted the fish with a knife as lean and wickedly curved as a cat’s claw, and strung them on a coil of the line, and presented them to him with a bow and a flourish. “Your dinner, my lord.”
“And yours,” he said. He did not know what demon possessed him, but he was not one to alter his word. “Come to camp with me. I can offer you a place by the fire, and all the dainties you can eat, and good company, too. Stories, even. Though maybe none as good as yours.”
She frowned. She would refuse, he could taste it. He cast another lure. “You don’t want Lord Peridan
to eat all your hard-caught fish, do you?”
“That belly on legs.” She spat just to leeward of Estarion’s foot. “Very well then. I’ll come. I hope you don’t regret it.”
So did Estarion. But if there had been evil in her, or any sorcery, he would have known; and his head was not aching even a little. Rather the opposite. He could not remember when he had felt as well as he did now. No pain, no ache of knotted muscles, no constant press and fret of rank and duty.
She cleaned her knife with a knot of grass and sheathed it at her belt. There was nothing feminine in the gesture, and everything female. He wondered how he could ever have failed to see that she was a woman.
“Well,” she said in her deep sweet voice—nothing male in it, and nothing old either. “Are you going to dawdle the day away?”
“Yes,” he said, to take her aback; then he laughed. “Come then, lady and stranger. Try your wits on the emperor’s men.”
7
Estarion’s return was somewhat less calamitous than he had feared. The camp was quiet; alarmingly so. Lord Peridan sat in the middle of it in a massive sulk.
“The least,” he was saying—growling—“the very least his majesty could do is to be present when his loyal vassal comes to attend him. Comes, it should be needless to say, at no little cost of time and inconvenience, not to mention the danger to his digestion, to dine at his rustic table, when the table in that lord’s castle is renowned for its excellence, not to mention its comfort, and furthermore—”
Estarion swept a bow before him. It brought his peroration to a halt and began a new one. “And what, pray, are you? Who gave you leave—”
The man was a walking gullet, but he was a clever one. He heard the gasps. His eyes darted round the circle that had opened to admit Estarion. They settled on Estarion’s face.
The eyes, of course. Everyone always stopped at the eyes. “Sire,” he said, as smooth as if the rest of it had been a litany of homage.
Estarion should not have spared a glance to see how the stranger was taking this revelation. She betrayed no flicker of surprise, and no repentance, either. The tilt of her brow almost pricked him to laughter.