A Fall of Princes

by Judith Tarr

  Hirel’s voice in the dark was cool and calming. “Your lord has need of you here, to conceal his absence, to divert pursuit. He has trusted you with this most difficult of all our tasks; will you prove his trust misplaced?”

  There was a silence, until Shatri broke it. “My lord.” He gripped Sarevan’s knee. “My lord, I—you never—I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Nor was I,” Sarevan admitted, with a glance at Hirel. “If you don’t think you can do it—”

  Shatri’s head whipped up. “I can do it! My lord,” he added after a pause. He let go, backed away, bowed desert fashion: dropping to one knee, setting palm against palm. Pride had struck fire in his eyes. “Have no fear, my prince. They’ll not come after you while I’m here to stop them.”

  Sarevan saluted him. His smile was luminous.

  Then at last Bregalan would heed the touch of leg to side. He sprang forward. The dun mare ran swift in his wake.

  o0o

  Even in the dark before dawn, Bregalan knew this country as he knew his own stable. He set a strong pace, but one the other could match with ease, striking westward across the plain. As it rose into wooded hills, he slowed a little, but he ran lightly still, unwearied.

  Dawn rose in rain-washed clarity. Sarevan called a halt to rest the beasts and to see that Hirel took a little bread and a sip or two of wine. By sunrise they were in the saddle again. Their shadows stretched long before them.

  They went by paths Sarevan knew, swift enough but hidden from spying eyes. The shifting armies did not close in upon them; if they were hunted, the hunters did not find them in the wilderness through which they rode. Hirel practiced one of his greater virtues: he was silent, neither questioning nor complaining.

  They rode through the first day and well into the night, until at last Sarevan’s urgency would let him rest. Hirel’s mare was stumbling with exhaustion. The boy’s face was ghost-pale in the moonlight.

  He fell from the saddle into Sarevan’s arms, so limp and so still that for a moment Sarevan froze in fear. Then Hirel drew a long breath, shuddering with it.

  With utmost gentleness Sarevan laid him down, spreading all their blankets for him, wrapping him in them. Cursing that damnable pride which would never yield to its body’s frailty.

  Sarevan left the child to sleep. He ate a little, drank from the stream by which he had camped.

  The seneldi grazed, placid. Ulan had gone hunting. Sarevan lay back against his saddle and sighed. He did not want to sleep: the dream waited, armed and deadly.

  He settled more comfortably. Brightmoon gazed down. Greatmoon had set; she had the sky to herself, for a while. His eyes filled with her cool light.

  o0o

  The sun woke him. He lay under it, eyes closed, neither knowing nor overmuch caring where he was. He ached in sundry places, not badly, but enough to rouse curiosity, and with it memory. He started up.

  He had not dreamed it. He was doing what he had resolved to do. For all the sun’s warmth, he shivered.

  “Don’t think about it,” he commanded himself. “Just do it.”

  Hirel stared at him, half asleep still, baffled and scowling and all bright gold. Sarevan laughed at the scowl and leaped up. “Come,” he said. “Ride with me.”

  They rode; and still no hunter followed them. Sarevan was not easy, nor did he trust this quiet, but for a little while he accepted it; he let it think that it had mastered him. Slowly he relaxed his vigilance, letting it pass through thrumming tension to constant quiet watchfulness.

  o0o

  Sarevan gained strength. Hirel went brown again, and his mask slipped, and sometimes he smiled. Once or twice he even laughed.

  But for the most part he was silent, somber. “This venture of ours may fail,” he said, a camp or four after that first hidden haven, when they had taken to riding at night and sleeping through the burning brightness of the day. “My father can be no less intransigent than yours.”

  “But,” Sarevan pointed out, “even mine isn’t likely to attack Asanion while I stand hostage in Kundri’j Asan.”

  “If we come so far. Even if you are caught and returned to your father, you have less to fear than I. No one in your empire wishes you dead. Whereas I, and mine . . .”

  “We’ll face that when we face it,” said Sarevan.

  He lay on his back and laced his fingers behind his head. He was stripped in the heat, his breeches new-washed and spread where the sun could dry them. It was warm on his skin, the air still, pungent with the scent of spicefern.

  He yawned. His back itched; he wriggled.

  Hirel was watching him. Without stopping to think, he rolled onto his stomach, resting his chin on folded arms.

  It pricked. He was growing his beard again; it was little enough yet to marvel at, and it would grow less lovely still before it remembered what it had been. He rubbed it where it itched, and tried not to feel the eyes on him.

  In a moment or an age, they granted him mercy. When he looked again, Hirel was asleep, curled on his side, childlike.

  And yet he was a child no longer. The swift onset of first manhood was upon him, working its magic from sunrise to sunrise, almost from hour to hour. He had grown a hand’s width, measured against Sarevan’s shoulder, since he woke wounded and haughty on the marches of Karmanlios; his voice cracked seldom now, and then more often downward than upward.

  It was going to be deep, that voice, as already he was tall for one of his kind. His shoulders were broadening, beginning to strain his coat, and there was no softness left in him except, a little, in his face: a rounding still of cheek and chin, a fullness of the lips that recalled the girl he might have been. And he was waxing into a man where manhood most mattered.

  He was still very young, and delicate in odd ways: in what he could eat, in how much he slept.

  “Inbred,” Sarevan said as they camped in the west of Inderan. “The blood is good, but it’s thin. No sister-wife for you, my lad, if you want a son who’ll live to be a man.”

  “What!” said Hirel, and perhaps his indignation was real, and perhaps it was not. “Would you have me beget a litter of mongrels?”

  “Mongrel blood is strong.” Sarevan grinned. “Look at me, now. Bred of every race that walks the earth; and two nines of days ago I was a rotting corpse, and here I am. Riding all night on a diet of air and wildbuck, up half the day drinking sunlight, and sleek as a seal.”

  Sarevan had meant to jest. But he looked down at himself and started slightly. Why, he thought, it was true. He was as strong as he had ever been.

  He felt of his face, suppressing the urge to bring out his scrap of mirror. The angles were familiar angles, the hollows the old hollows, the skull returned at last to its proper place beneath the skin.

  o0o

  Air and wildbuck indeed, and the sun’s fire, and dreams that drove him hard but were no longer a torment; and no pursuit. None at all.

  Once Hirel ventured into a town, armed with his brown face and his vagabond’s garb and a fistful of Sarevan’s silver. He returned with both their scrips full, and even a coin left in his purse.

  “And news,” he said, settling on his heels beside Sarevan, watching as the other fell on the sweetmeats that were his great prize. He nibbled a honeyed nut; he took his time about it, until he had Sarevan still and staring, mouth full of spice and sweetness. “No, Sun-prince, nothing of our riding, and no sign of a hunt. Rumor has it that the Prince Sarevadin is sojourning with his grandsire in Han-Gilen, preparing for a new task: the taking of Ianon’s regency. For practice, it is said. To prepare him for a greater throne.”

  Sarevan’s breath caught. Suddenly he had no taste for spicecake.

  He choked down the last of it. His fingers, unheeded, raked through his new beard. No hunt at all? He could not believe that.

  And yet he had seen it. And that the common talk should be full of what had been between himself and his father, as if he had never committed this treason, as if he had gone docilely where he was meant to go�
�there was no sense in it.

  Or perhaps there was. Frightening sense. If someone knew or guessed what he did, and favored it, or was not minded to stop it . . . if someone was willing to cover his trail, even to lie outright for him . . .

  Shatri had promised to do just that, but he had not this measure of power. Vadin? The Lord of the North belonged to his emperor. Even for his namesake, whom he loved as a son, he would not turn against Mirain. Elian—maybe. She was capable of it. But in this he could catch no scent of her. The Prince of Han-Gilen . . .

  Sarevan pulled at his beard, scowling. This was his treason, and his alone. He would not share it with some faceless power, some web of purpose and counterpurpose that dared to weave itself into his own. That would not even grant him the courtesy of naming its name or asking his leave.

  “You are very well thought of,” Hirel said, oblivious to his fretting. “Every idler remembers you, or claims to. Did you know that you spent three seasons in the dungeons of the evil emperor himself? You escaped in fire and magic, took his heir for a hostage, and died in battle with his mages; your body returned to Endros in no less than nine pieces, borne on the backs of demons. Your father bound the fragments together with his power, and called your soul from Avaryan’s side, and made you live again. And when he had done that, he swore a mighty oath: that the Emperor of Asanion would suffer each and every torment to which he had subjected you.”

  Sarevan would have liked to leap up and bolt into the woods. To run away from it all; or run full into it, crying anathema on all liars and their lies.

  He sat still, eyes on Bregalan who grazed unruffled by men and their wars.

  “No one hunts us,” Hirel said. “No one speaks of it. It is all war and weapontakes and who will remain to bring in the harvest if the war lasts so long.”

  The fire was rising. Sarevan let it. Words came, slow at first, pale shadows of the rage within. “I don’t like this,” he said. “I don’t like it at all.”

  “It serves us,” said Hirel.

  “It reeks to heaven.” Sarevan sprang to his feet. “Ulan! Bregalan! Quick now, up!”

  o0o

  Bregalan was swifter than any stallion had a right to be unless he were of the Mad One’s line, and the mare was of Zhil’ari breeding. They thrived on long running and short commons. Like Sarevan himself; but Hirel was not so sturdy.

  He needed sleep and he needed feeding. Sarevan willed himself to be patient, to stop now and then, to lie quietly while the sun wheeled overhead and his companion slept the sleep of the dead.

  He himself slept hardly at all. All that had befallen him since he battled mages in Asanion—all he had heard and seen and dreamed—all of it was coming together.

  Not entirely, not yet. But he saw the first blurred glimmer of a pattern.

  He had stopped raging at it. He had sworn, and he would fulfill his oath: he would learn the name behind the plotting. Then he would exact its price.

  o0o

  The farther they rode, the quieter the land seemed. But that was only a seeming. Every town had its company of armed guards. Every castle rang with the clamor of men in training and of weapons in the forging. Travelers were few, and those rode armed and watchful.

  Not all the men who had gathered meant to fight for their emperor; of those who did, some few had a mind to end old feuds before they rode to war, or else to pick up the odd bit of booty while they waited. Armies took considerable maintenance; if a captain could keep his troops honed with a quick raid and fed with the proceeds, so much the better.

  None of them came near to Sarevan. Perhaps he owed it to Ulan’s watchfulness and his own caution. He would not have sworn to it.

  He rode because he must, drawing the others with him. He did not pause to fear that he rode into a trap: his plots betrayed, the borders held against him. With the fear that rode him now, he would have welcomed so simple a snare.

  o0o

  At last they came to the marches of Karmanlios, and to Asan-Vian gasping in the heat of that cycle of Brightmoon called the Anvil of the Sun. Hirel’s mare was close to foundering; even Bregalan showed ribs beneath a sun-scorched coat. Hirel’s head was down, his body stiff, bracing at every jolt. There were blue shadows under his eyes.

  Vian was the castle that ruled among others the town of Magrin. Its lord had died wifeless and childless; his fief had passed by his will into the care of the Sun’s priests. Whose senior priestess in the barony was Orozia of Magrin.

  She was waiting for the riders. So too were nine Zhil’ari and a dozen Asanians and a handful of closemouthed servants. Their greetings were various: Zhil’ari exuberance, Asanian reserve, and Orozia’s long level gaze that warmed into welcome. “Well come at last, my lord,” she said, “and in good time.”

  Sarevan looked hard at her. She smiled.

  He saw no deception in her, nor scented any. After a moment he bowed low. “Reverend sister. All is well?”

  “All is most well.”

  He had not known how tautly he was strung until the tension left him. He staggered. She was there, and nine Zhil’ari with her, desperately anxious.

  He fended them off. “Here now, don’t hover. Look to the lion’s cub.”

  His hellions were obedient. Orozia did not choose to follow them. “I have prepared everything as you would wish it.”

  He considered her. Her loyalty; her strength. A smile found its way through his new-raised walls.

  He brushed her cheek with a finger, half in mischief, half in deep affection. “You don’t approve, do you?”

  “Of course I do not. I am only half a fool. But that half has proved the stronger. It dares to hope that this madness of yours will bear fruit.” She shook herself. “Enough now. Time is short and the borders too well watched on both sides. You will rest the night and the day. At full dark tomorrow, you must ride.”

  o0o

  No sooner, though Sarevan burned to be gone. Hirel could not ride again that night; they could not dare the armies under the sun.

  The company, at least, was excellent, and the food was passable; the wine was cool and sweet. Sarevan finished off a jar with Orozia’s aid, sitting late and unattended in the room that had belonged to the old lord.

  “You look well,” she said when speech had waned into wine-scented silence. “As well as you ever have; as if you were taking your sustenance from the sun itself.”

  “That,” said Sarevan, “I can’t do. Not any longer.”

  “No?”

  The wine rose strong in him. It loosened his tongue, but it lightened the words that rolled out, leaching them of pain. “I’m a mage no longer. I’ve got used to it; I don’t waste time bemoaning my fate. It’s even pleasant, when I stop to think. No thoughts clamoring through my shields. No fire begging to be set free.”

  “No?”

  He peered into his cup, found it empty, filled it to the brim. When he had drunk it down in a gulp, he laughed. “You look exceedingly oracular, O friend of my youth. Of course, no. That part of me is dead. Gone. Burned away. I’m a man among men, no more, if never less.”

  “No,” she said yet again, flatly. “You will never be a mere man. You are the son of the son of the Sun.”

  “Ah well, that’s something I’ll have to live down, won’t I?”

  She slapped him, not hard, but hard enough to sting. He gaped at her. She blazed back with rare and potent anger. “Did we labor so long in Endros and in Han-Gilen to create a fool? Is it true what the philosophers say, that great men by nature can only engender idiots? Are you blind, Sarevan Is’kelion? Look at yourself! No mortal man could suffer as you have suffered, ride as you have ridden, and sit as you sit now, no more weary than any man who sits late over wine.”

  “My father healed me. That’s the miracle you see.”

  “It is not,” she said stubbornly. “I watched you from the walls. You had the sun in your face, and it was pouring into you, filling you as wine fills yonder cup.”

  He drained it. “So then.
The god hasn’t abandoned me. Maybe he approves what I do, in spite of my father’s convictions to the contrary. That doesn’t make me a mage.”

  “What does it make you?”

  “God-ridden.” Sarevan yawned and stretched. “There’s nothing new in that. And for once I’m glad of it. It’s high treason I’m committing, Orozia. You can still escape the stain of it, if you move quickly.”

  She moved. To touch his hand, to meet his eyes.

  He shivered a little. There were not many who knew her secret: that she was a mage.

  There was no other power quite like hers, strong, skilled in its strength, but strangely circumscribed. Of the lesser magics she had few; she could walk in a mind only if her hand lay on the body of its bearer. But none could walk in hers save by her will.

  None at all could walk in Sarevan’s. She sighed faintly. Her eyes lowered, though her hand remained.

  He turned his own, clasping it. “I’ll fight,” he said, “but I won’t blame you.”

  “You have no need. I too would see this war averted. Though not at the cost of your life.”

  “Maybe it won’t come to that.”

  She said nothing. There was too much to say; she let it all pass unsaid.

  In a little while, Sarevan went to his bed. He suspected that she did not follow suit; that she sat there nightlong in the fading scent of wine, staring into a darkness that her power could not pierce.

  o0o

  Sarevan had not known how much he feared for Hirel until he saw how greatly the princeling profited from a full night’s sleep and a full day’s idleness. He was even glad when Hirel slid eyes at him—in Orozia’s presence, yet—and smiled the most wicked of all his smiles.

  That was proof positive: there was nothing wrong with the boy but a lifetime of pampering. He would not die of a few days’ hard riding.

  Those days had been only the beginning. “You can stay here,” Sarevan said. “You’ll be safe; you can give me a token for your father, to prove that you’re alive and well.”

  Hirel would not dignify that with a response. When night fell, he was ready to ride, clad as a young lord of eastern Asanion who chose to affect the Olenyai fashion: the black robes, the headcloth, the two swords; but never the mask that was permitted only to the true bred-warrior. In his scrip he carried the token of carved ivory that would pass all gates in the Golden Empire and open the posthouses with their beds and board and remounts.