Arrows of the Sun

by Judith Tarr

  Estarion set his teeth. “Not yet. Not, gods willing, ever.”

  “I heard the priests talking. They were afraid that it would be so. That the magic would be too strong and you too weak, and it would consume you.”

  “No,” said Estarion. “I won’t let it.”

  “Is it a matter for letting and not-letting?”

  “Yes!” Estarion winced with the pain of his own outcry. And maybe it was a lie, maybe it was the feeble wishing of a fool, but he would not yield. Not while he had wits left to resist. “I will . . . not . . . give in. I will master it. It will be my servant. On my hand I swear it.”

  “Gods willing,” said Korusan.

  o0o

  Korusan held the throngs at bay while Estarion drowned himself in drugged wine. Laughing, making light of it, but with a sharp edge of desperation. He had shown himself in the doorway of his chamber, smiling, upright, very much alive; he protested when his nursemaid coaxed him in again. But when the door was shut and barred, he downed the wine with rather too evident relief, and toppled headlong into sleep.

  Once he was safely unconscious, his Vinicharyas crept out of hiding. She had fled there when he showed signs of waking, leaving the field to Korusan.

  As she had then, she said nothing, seemed not to know that the Olenyas was there. She sat where she had sat before, at the bed’s side. What she thought she could do, Korusan did not know. He doubted that she did, either.

  o0o

  He left her to it. Tight-coiled terror had held him until he saw Estarion awake and speaking sense. Now it was gone.

  He slipped out by the servants’ way. In a corridor lit by a single guttering lamp, he leaned against the wall and shivered. Estarion had taken the fever, and with it the little warmth that was in Korusan’s thin blood.

  He wrapped arms about ribs that stabbed with pain. Broken. Maybe. Who was to tell now, with sickness set deep in his bones?

  His stomach spasmed. There was nothing for it to cast up: and that was well for his veils.

  He pulled himself up, back flattened against the wall. The pain grew no less, but his will remembered its strength. He was the Lion’s heir. He yielded to no master.

  Plain obstinacy set him to walking. Training kept him erect, even lent him a semblance of grace. Between the two, he walked out of the palace as the Olenyas he was; and even, somewhat, convinced himself that he was strong.

  He had the watchwords and the secret ways; they had been given him in Kundri’j Asan, for all the cities where the rebellion was strong. He did not think that he was expected here. The watchers admitted him unquestioned, as much on the strength of his eyes as on that of the words and the signs. They looked less wary than they ought.

  The Master of Olenyai stood in a room like a guardroom, empty of any furnishings but a tier of lamps, but full of strangers. The Master of Mages faced him, looking unwontedly ruffled. The air had the thunder-reek of battle.

  Korusan neither wavered nor hesitated. He was too angry to be afraid, too fevered to be cautious. He strode to the center of the circle, dropped his veils and faced them all.

  He had shocked them properly. He raked them with his eyes: Master and Master, black veils of Olenyai, blank faces of mages, faces of strangers who were lords of the empire. He lashed them with his voice. “Who gave you leave to loose the attack?”

  The lords stared openly at his face. Mages and Olenyai neither moved nor spoke.

  Save the Master of the Mages. “It was time,” he said. He granted Korusan no title, no mark of respect.

  The Master of the Olenyai lowered his veil slowly. The lordlings flinched. “Your lives are mine,” he said to them. “Remember it.”

  Korusan looked into that face which he had come to know so well, with its nine thin parallel scars, the last of them still faintly livid. His own two ached as scars will in the cold, although it was warm here with the heat of bodies and braziers. “Did you countenance this?” Korusan asked.

  “I did,” said Asadi, “my prince.”

  “I did not,” said Korusan, soft and still.

  “It was time,” the Master of Mages said again. “You were not within our reach, to consult. And,” he said, “it was our thinking that you were best left untold, lest he or his mages discover our intent.”

  “You are saying,” Korusan said very gently, “that you did not trust me.”

  There: that was a cause of the battle that had broken off with his coming. He saw the tightening of Olenyai hands on swordhilts, the tensing of mages’ bodies.

  “It is true,” said the Master of Mages with calm that was either great arrogance or great folly, “that you appear to be entirely his putative majesty’s creature. Could we endanger your semblance for the sake of a warning that, in the end, you did not need? You were not by his side when he fell.”

  “I was kept from him,” said Korusan, “by my brothers.” He glared at them, and at Marid most of all. “You knew!”

  “We wanted to tell you,” said Marid. “But when we were told, it was already too late; you were with him, and it wasn’t safe.”

  Korusan turned back to the mage. “So. It was you who decided it. And it will be you who rule when I am emperor, yes?”

  “If you are emperor,” the mage said. “Is he dead, prince? You had him in your power—held him as he lay helpless. Did you finish what we began?”

  Korusan’s lungs were full of knives. He could not speak. There were blades in his throat, and his tongue was numb.

  “He lives,” the mage said. His voice was calm, expressionless, with an edge that might have been contempt. “You held his life in your hand, and you let it go.”

  “He has seduced you, prince,” said another of the mages. It was a woman, a lightmage. He had not seen her before. “You are snared in his spell. For they do weave magery, those of his blood, all unknowing, and as they breathe, to make themselves beloved.”

  “When would you have given us leave to begin?” her master asked. “You forbade us in Kundri’j, before he had bound you. Now that you belong to him—”

  “Koru-Asan is no one’s slave,” said the Master of the Olenyai, soft and deadly.

  Master of Olenyai and Master of Mages stood poised on the edge of a new quarrel. Korusan found his voice somewhere and beat it into submission. “No, I did not kill him. If I am enslaved to him, then so is he to me. I will take him when and as I please, and ask no one’s leave.”

  “So you said in Kundri’j,” said the Master of the Guild. “And we gave him to you, laid him at your feet, and you pleased to let him live. There are good men dead because of him, strong mages destroyed, an empire in worse disarray than it has ever been.”

  “Blame him not for that,” Korusan said, clipping the words off short. “You would not wait for me to take him from behind. You must open your Gate, proclaim your presence to every mage in every temple from westernmost Veyadzan to the Eastern Isles, declare open war upon the body of the empress mother, rouse the emperor’s wrath and with it his magic—and you cry foul against him for your own immeasurable folly?”

  “And how long would we wait?” the mage shot back. “Years, prince? Decades? While you wallow in his bed, come crawling at his bidding, weep tears of bliss when he permits you to kiss his fundament?”

  Korusan could not kill him. That would be too simple.

  Marid would happily have done it for him. He restrained his swordbrother with a glance, and looked the mage up and down. “I had wondered,” he said, “whether you were arrogant or a fool. Now I am certain. You are a perfect idiot.”

  He drew his lesser sword, the left-handed blade, and stepped forward. The mage went grey-green. He held it before the man’s eyes. “Your life is mine. Tempt me and I take it, magebound or no.”

  The blade flashed down, up. The mage gasped and clapped hand to brow. Blood dripped into his astonished eyes.

  Korusan granted him a modicum of respect for keeping silence, though a blade as sharp as this wounded to the bone first and wok
e the pain long after.

  The mage vanished in a flurry of light robes and dark. Korusan turned his back on them. The lordlings and the Olenyai waited in varying degrees of stillness. “You will wait,” he said, “until the empress has had her death-rite. Then I promise you, we bring all of this to its end.”

  The Olenyai inclined their heads. The lordlings went down on their faces.

  He swept his blade clean along the edge of his outer robe and sheathed it, and looped up the veils again. Some of the mages had left their master and faced him. He could not read them, whether they pondered threat or submission.

  “You thought that you had simple enemies,” he said to them: “a Sunlord who had slain his own magic and left himself open to your power, a son of the Lion so enfeebled by the failing of his blood that he would be your puppet, your creature and your slave. Long years you labored to create us both: he the weakling, easily destroyed; I the weakling, easily mastered. I will take what is mine, mages. Have you no least doubt of that. But I will take it as I will, and when I will, and where. You will serve me then. You will do as I bid.”

  He had no care for resentment or anger or thwarted pride. They gave him all of that. But they gave him also silence, and slowly, one by one, the lowering of proud eyes, the bending of stiff necks.

  He turned on his heel. There had been bodies between himself and the door. They barred his way no longer.

  Sheer white-hot will kept him on his feet through the maze that was that house, past the watchers and the guards, into the twilit street. People passed, scurrying from the shadow of him. His stride slowed. He stumbled, caught himself.

  He would come to the palace again. He had willed it, therefore it must be. But it would be no easy journey. The knives in his lungs had sharpened. The ache in his bones was fiercer now, almost too much to ignore.

  He was not dying. He would not allow it. He would walk, so, one foot before the other. Walls helped him; where they were not, he willed the air to hold him up.

  It was no more difficult than the run through the mages’ wood that had begun his initiation into the Olenyai, nor any more impossible than running from that ensorceled place into the test of wits and will against the mages’ snares. Certainly it was no less simple than standing robed, veiled, two-sworded, Olenyas, and yet naked before a pair of golden eyes in a black eagle’s face. All that, he had done. This too he would do.

  He was aware of the shadow as it moved. Oh, he was feeble: he should have known it before ever he saw it, sensed it waiting, slipped round to catch it by surprise.

  He tried to leap aside, but his feet were leaden heavy. He stumbled and fell.

  No blade swept his head from its neck. “Sweet Avaryan!” said the shadow in a voice he knew. He had not known how cordially he hated it, or even yet how weak he was, till he felt her hands on him, pulling him up, and no will in him to resist.

  The Islander draped his arm about her neck. She was smaller than he but sturdy enough, no doubt from hauling nets since she was big enough to stand.

  One hand gripped his wrist. The other circled his middle and closed on his belt. So joined, like drunken lovers, they swayed and staggered homeward.

  o0o

  Such as home was, a palace sunk in the stillness of exhaustion, guards alert to every shadow, and its heart a dead empress, a dying priest, an emperor drugged into a stupor. Korusan was recovering somewhat, but Vanyi was too strong for him. She half-carried, half-dragged him into a chamber that must be her own, and lowered him to the narrow bed. She was gentler than she looked.

  He struggled to sit up. “I cannot—I must—”

  She held him down with one hand. He struck it aside and surged to his feet.

  Pain ripped through him. He gasped. The gasp caught on hooks and tore.

  It was true, what they said. One could cough up one’s lungs. One did it in racking agony, in bloody pieces.

  His veils were gone. A basin hovered in front of him. Hands held it, and eyes behind that, eyes as grey as flints.

  “Yes,” she said. “Now you have to kill me. You can wait till you’re done dying.”

  “I am not—” he said. Tried to say. His throat was raw, his voice scraped bare.

  “Stop it,” she said. Damnable arrogant peasant. “The blood’s given out, hasn’t it? It’s a miracle you’ve lived as long as you have.”

  “Kill me, then,” he whispered, since he could not say it louder. “Get it over.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “You belong to Estarion. He’s the one to say whether you live or die.”

  “What? Is he your god?”

  She smiled a blade-thin smile. “No. But I think he’s yours.”

  That outrage laid him flat. The knives at least were not sunk so deep, the pain faded to a dull roar. He was weak beyond bearing, but he would live, he thought, for yet a while.

  She laid the basin aside without apparent revulsion at its contents, and bent over him. Her hands ran down the length of him, not touching.

  His flesh quivered. Magery. Hers was less repellent than the others he had known, the pain of it sharper, but it was a clean pain.

  “Goddess,” she muttered. “You’re a patchwork of ill-matched magics. What were they trying to do to you? Kill you quicker, or kill you more slowly? Or couldn’t they make up their minds?”

  He refused to answer. She took no notice. “That’s half the trouble. Look, there, that mending goes to war with this, and this—” She spat a word that must have been a curse. “Hedge-wizards! Why in the hells couldn’t they have let you crumble away in peace?”

  “Perhaps I wished to live,” he said.

  She paused. She seemed surprised that he could speak, even in a croak. But she did not know Olenyai hardihood.

  “You are a pretty thing,” she said. “That must be why he fancies you.”

  He bit his tongue. He was feeling stronger. More magery; but again it was different. He could, in a fashion, see through it into the mage herself: a tang that was jealousy, a white heat that must be her magic, a great bright singing thing that seemed to be part of Estarion, and yet was not.

  It was for that that she healed him. Because she fancied that she saw it in him also, and because she thought that he had power, somehow, to guard the emperor. She, like the Guild-mages, believed that there had been a test; that Korusan had passed it, and proved himself bound to Estarion. And no one so bound could turn traitor. It was not possible.

  Nor was this that she did. She could not make him whole. That was beyond any mage’s power. But she could give him a few days’ life—cycles, she was thinking, even years. But his bones knew better.

  He rose carefully, drew a breath. It did not catch. He flexed his shoulders. They ached, but no more than they should.

  She sat on her heels, watching him. He could kill her now. He had his swiftness back, and his strength. She was unarmed, unwary, bone-weary as mages were after a working. She would die before she mustered wits to move.

  Estarion loved her. There was no accounting for it—she had neither beauty nor lineage nor sweetness of temper to endear her to any man, let alone an emperor—but Korusan could hardly escape the truth of it.

  “I let you live,” he said to her, “because I am not ungrateful. And because you belong to him.”

  “I do not—”

  Her anger startled him; it made him laugh, which startled her. They stared at one another in sudden silence.

  “I begin to understand,” she said, “what else he sees in you.”

  o0o

  Not until he was long away from her did it strike Korusan what she had done.

  He was Olenyas. He was—or he thought he had been—warded against magic. And she had worked magic on him. Easily, potently, as if there had been no defenses on him at all.

  He should be alarmed, but he was grimly delighted. Guild-mages scorned her for her common lineage, her lack of training in their arts of magic. And she made nothing of their magics on him; spat contempt at the weaving of them
. She was more than they could imagine, greater danger than they might have anticipated.

  It would be a pleasure to see their faces when they learned what this priestess-witch was. Even if he died thereafter, he would die in some measure of content.

  45

  When Estarion woke from his drugged sleep, he was alone. But there was a memory of presence—piercing to senses that, dulled for so long, were grown painfully keen.

  Haliya. As easily as he breathed, his magery followed the trail of her out of the room and through a maze of passages to the women’s chambers. He did not track her within. She was safe there among his mother’s guards.

  Wild joy smote him. Mage—he was a mage again. But then with memory came the stab of grief, felling him even as he rose.

  Merian was dead. He had quarreled with her endlessly, fretted the bonds of love, duty, honor, flown in the face of them all until surely she would learn to hate him. But she never had, no more than he had hated her for what she was: empress, priestess, mother of his body.

  Robed as a priest but cloaked as a king, he went in to the hall where she lay. They had given her a bier worthy of her royalty, coverlets of silk, great pall of cloth of gold. She lay in the stillness of the dead, her beautiful hair woven into the many plaits of a northern queen. Gold was on her breast above the pall, and gold in her ears, and gold set with jewels on her arms, her wrists, her fingers.

  Her panoply, she had always called that, like the armor that a king wore into battle. When she would be in comfort she wore an old threadbare robe, her hair loose or braided down her back, and no jewel but the armlet that her royal lover had given her before he made her his empress.

  That she wore still, a plain thing amid the rest, copper that was much prized among her people, inlaid with golden wires shaping a skein of dancing women. She was the tall one, the one whose beauty shone even through the rough unskillful work. For her Sunlord had made it himself, given it to her in shyness that by all accounts was alien to him, and in accepting it, she had accepted all of him—not the man alone but the empire he ruled.

  Now they danced together on the other side of the night. Their son knelt by her bier, hands fisted in the pall, and wept.