A Fall of Princes

by Judith Tarr

  The twelve true Olenyai surrounded him, shadows in the dusk, masked and silent. They did not glance at Sarevan. His part was less simple than theirs, and more perilous. He was to be the young lord’s slave, he and Zha’dan who was near enough to his own size to make no matter.

  Hirel had taken wicked pleasure in pointing out what neither of them had wanted to remember: that slaves in Asanion kept neither their beards nor their hair. Zha’dan howled in anguish. Sarevan set his chin and his will and took a firm grip on his braid. “This belongs to the god. I will not give it up.”

  The boy inspected his hands with studied casualness. He had sacrificed his barbarian claws again to look a proper warrior, as on a time he had tried to look a proper commoner.

  “That is different!” Sarevan snapped at him. “Look here, cubling—”

  “My lords.” Orozia came between them, grave, but clearly trying not to smile. “I can satisfy you all, I think, though my lord of Keruvarion must yet pay a price.”

  And so he had; but it was one he could pay without undue reluctance. The dye, she assured him, would wash out easily enough with cleanroot and ashes.

  Zha’dan had assented grudgingly to the shortening of his beard, that the two of them might match; in the same cause, Sarevan lost a handspan of his mane. They put on slaves’ tunics and bound their necks with collars of iron—Sarevan’s the heavier by far, and Sun-gold beneath its grey sheathing—and stood together before the castle’s silver mirror.

  Sarevan gaped like an idiot. Zha’dan laughed aloud. They looked like more than kinsmen. They looked like brothers of the same birth.

  Sarevan rubbed his arm, where no copper glinted to betray him; ran a hand over his many oiled braids, that were as safely dark as Zha’dan’s own. “I’ve never looked like anyone else before.”

  “You’re beautiful,” said his image in Zha’dan’s voice.

  “You are vain,” Sarevan said. Zha’dan laughed again, incorrigible.

  Hirel’s expression, when they came out together, had been thoroughly gratifying. He looked from one to the other. Stopped. Looked again. Blinked once, slowly, and drew a long breath. “Very . . . convincing,” he said at last, in the face of matched and blinding grins.

  o0o

  Sarevan was still fingering his drying beard, wondering that it did not feel stranger. His other hand gripped a sturdy chain, with Ulan collared and deceptively docile at the end of it.

  There had been, both Orozia and Hirel had assured him, no other way to bring an ul-cat safely into Kundri’j Asan; and Sarevan would not leave him, even to Orozia’s care. They had not been apart since they became brothers. They did not intend to begin now.

  Ulan was content; but Sarevan had not reckoned on Bregalan. Hirel left his wicked little mare behind out of care for her life. The blue-eyed stallion would not be so forsaken. Four years of seeing his two-legged brother only when Sarevan paused for a day or two in his Journeying, or when the court’s yearly progress from Endros to Ianon crossed the young priest’s path, quite obviously had exhausted his patience.

  He was in the courtyard as they readied to ride, trailing his broken bonds. He would not attack a mare who had done him no injury, but he saw to it that Sarevan could not approach the rawboned bay whom he had chosen.

  Sarevan seized the stallion’s horns. “Brother idiot, you are interfering with my insanity. Move aside.” Bregalan laid back his ears and set his feet firmly on the paving. “You fool, you can’t come with us. We’ll be riding posthaste, with remounts at every stop. Even you can’t keep the pace we’ll set.”

  The wild eyes rolled. Try me, they said.

  “And,” said Sarevan, “moreover, O my brother, a slave is forbidden by Asanian law to bestride any stallion, still less a stallion of the Mad One’s line. Would you betray me to my death?”

  Bregalan snorted and stamped. He had no care for mere human laws. He would go with his brother.

  Hirel was watching. Sarevan caught his eye, paused. His own eyes narrowed.

  “If you go,” he said slowly, “you cannot carry me. You must carry the lion’s cub.”

  Bregalan lowered his nose into Sarevan’s hand and blew gently.

  Sarevan thrust him away in something very like anger, and called for his saddle. Bregalan was all quiet dignity, with no hint of gloating. Sarevan summoned a bridle. The stallion, who had never in his life submitted to a bit, opened his mouth for it and stood chewing gently on it, placid as a lady’s mare.

  Hirel approached him. He whickered a greeting. The boy was all prince tonight, but standing beside Bregalan, stroking the arched neck, he loosed a little of the delight that was singing in him. Lightly he sprang onto the stallion’s back.

  Sarevan glared at them both. “Mind,” he said to Hirel, sharp and short. “The bit is for show. No more. You keep your hands off it. Tighten the reins one degree, raise one fleck of foam, and if he doesn’t throw you off his back, I will.”

  Hirel’s nostrils thinned. He did not speak. His hands were eloquent enough. He knotted the reins on Bregalan’s neck, folded his arms, and looked haughtily down his nose.

  Sarevan laughed suddenly, at both of them, but mostly at himself. He left them to one another and went to claim his nameless mare.

  o0o

  Eight Zhil’ari watched them go, tall as standing stones around the still form of Orozia. Sarevan looked back once, with uplifted hand. Gold flashed in the torchlight. He veiled it again and turned his face toward Asanion.

  Keruvarion’s wardens never saw them. By careful coincidence, as Hirel’s company neared the border, a pack of young savages fell whooping and laughing on the border wardens’ very camp. One patrol, coming in, stumbled into the very midst of the melee. The other, going out, met it head-on. Asanion’s prince and twelve Olenyai and two northern slaves, with an ul-cat loping among them, passed unseen.

  Asanion’s guardians might have been more fortunate. There were, after all, only eight Zhil’ari, and they were thoroughly occupied in convincing the Varyani forces that they were a full tribe. But there were a round dozen Olenyai, and Halid their captain, though no greybeard, was old in cunning.

  While Ulan struck terror among the cavalry lines, the captain laid a false and twisting trail. By sunrise he was riding briefly eastward, to encounter a company in disarray, with lathered and wild-eyed mounts.

  “Raiders,” their commander said, too weary even for anger. “We lost them, but they were headed west. Keep watch for them, and have a care. There’s a lion loose in the woods.”

  Halid spoke all the proper words, while Hirel waited near him, haughtily indifferent. Zha’dan was shaking with silent laughter. The Olenyai, masked and faceless, were unreadable; but their eyes glinted.

  Within the hour they rode west again openly: a young lord with his following in a country full of his like. In a little while Ulan returned to them, to suffer again the collar and the chain that his disguise demanded, loping docilely at Bregalan’s heel.

  FOURTEEN

  “Now I’m sure of it,” Zha’dan said in the anonymity of a posthouse thronged to bursting. “The god is with us. Else we’d never have come so far so easily.”

  He spoke in Sarevan’s ear, in Zhil’ari, without greater concealment. Sarevan frowned at him. “The god, or someone mortal, weaving webs to trap us in.”

  He glanced about. People were staring in Asanian fashion, sidelong. Halid was settling matters with the master of the house. Hirel had a table to wait at and his Olenyai to wall it and his enormous hunting cat to guard his person, and his exotic slaves to serve him wine and attract attention.

  The proper sort of attention, Sarevan could hope. No one would be expecting the lost high prince to appear so, neither in his own person nor in secret.

  “I like this,” said Zha’dan, unquenched by Sarevan’s severity. “I’m not the runt of the litter here. Look: no one’s taller than I. I’m a giant.”

  “You are also a slave,” Sarevan reminded him.

  He shrugged,
but he had the sense not to grin. “Stars! People are ugly here. Yellow as an old wolf’s fangs. And fat, like swine fed on oil. And they stink. How can they stand one another?”

  Hirel spoke from between them, through motionless lips, in tradespeech. “If you are not silent, I will have you whipped.”

  Zha’dan started, teeth clicking together. Sarevan bent down to refill the barely emptied cup. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said in the same tongue, in the same fashion.

  Hirel’s eyes flashed at him, unreadable. His own flashed back in purest insolence.

  o0o

  Even in a posthouse packed to the walls with patrons, a young lord was granted his due: a chamber for his following and a chamber for himself. The inner room had amenities. A flagon of wine; a bowl of sweets. An enormous mound of cushions that in Asanion betokened a bed, and artfully arranged among them, the specialty of the house.

  She was clad from head to painted toe, but her draperies were little heavier than gossamer. Her hair was butter yellow and carefully curled and, Sarevan judged, owed little more to nature’s hand than his own black braids. Her body was riper than he liked but pleasing enough to make him wish, however fleetingly, that he were free to savor it.

  Zha’dan was both repelled and fascinated. He would have hung over her in wide-eyed wonderment if Sarevan had not kept a firm grip on him.

  He almost groaned when Hirel spoke her fair and accepted a moment’s intimate fondling and sent her away. Her regret had an air of ritual; her eyes on the seeming slaves were wry and much too wise.

  “Did you see?” Zha’dan marveled as she betook her wares to another and more amenable patron. “No fleece at all, anywhere. Not even on her—”

  Sarevan stopped listening. Hirel had cast himself among the cushions, and he was trembling, and trying visibly not to. Sarevan knelt by him. His fists clenched convulsively; he pressed them to his eyes.

  Sarevan caught them. They did not resist him. Neither did they unclench.

  He held them to him, first to his breast, then to his cheeks. They were cold, quivering in spasms. “Cubling,” he said softly, as he would to a small child or to a frightened animal. “Hirel. Little brother. You will be strong; you will conquer. You will live to be high prince again.”

  Hirel stilled, but it was not calmness. His fists opened, and then his eyes. “Soft,” he said, wondering, like a child. His fingers moved, stroking. “It is soft.”

  “I’m young yet,” said Sarevan, trying to be light. He had not been wise, again.

  He let go Hirel’s hands. They did not fall. Hirel’s eyes were all gold.

  Very carefully Sarevan eased himself free. This child was more beautiful than the innkeeper’s whore could ever be, and infinitely more perilous; and he knew it. He said, “While you are with me, I do not find it easy to endure a lesser lover.”

  “Then I should leave you,” said Sarevan, “lest I condemn you to chastity.”

  Hirel pondered that, gravely intent, and all the more deadly for it. “Or lest I condemn you to worse. How ingenious, that treachery would be. I need but seduce you as I very well can, and see that your chief priests know of it, and let them put you to death.”

  “It’s not death now,” Sarevan said, low, edged with roughness. “I’d only lose my torque and my braid, and suffer a flogging, and be bathed in salt and cast out of the temple in front of my torque-kin.”

  “Naked, one can presume?”

  “Naked,” Sarevan answered. “Body and soul.”

  “But alive.”

  “That’s not life,” Sarevan said.

  “And yet you will commit treason, knowing what you do, knowing that you may die for it.”

  “Some things are worth dying for.”

  “And I am not?”

  Sarevan’s lips set. Hirel did not know how to be contrite, but his eyes lowered.

  “Child,” said Sarevan, vicious in his gentleness, “be wise. Cure yourself of me.”

  “What if I do not wish to?”

  “Then you’re a worse fool than I took you for.”

  “Both of us,” said Hirel, rising, seeking the wine.

  o0o

  Hirel was wise. He took Zha’dan to bed with him.

  Sarevan, curled in a comer with Ulan for blanket and bedfellow, refused to hear what they did; even if it were nothing. He told himself that he was no lover of boys, which was true. He told himself that he cherished his vows to the god, which was truer yet. He told himself most sternly that he had nothing to fret over, and that was not true at all.

  Damn the boy for laying open what Sarevan had schooled himself to forget. Damn himself for falling prey to it. It was hard won, this holiness of his. His body knew what it was for; it had no more sympathy than Hirel had with this most painful price of his priesthood. At the very thought of a woman, it could stand up and sing.

  At the thought of Hirel, it barely quivered. But his soul, that had never before come even close to falling—his soul was in dire danger.

  This was not friendship, this that he had with his brother prince. Often it was nearly the opposite. And yet, when he thought of leaving, of never seeing that maddening child again, or worse, of meeting him on the battlefield, he could not endure it.

  When he was very young, there was one thing in his world that he had never understood, nor known how to understand. Other children had mothers, fathers, uncles: that was right and proper. But no one had a mother or a father or an uncle who were like his own. To power’s eyes they were hardly separate at all, though in the body they were most distinct. When Mirain worked great magics, he never worked them without his empress or his Ianyn oathbrother.

  “He can’t,” the Lord Vadin said once, when Sarevan dared to ask. Mirain had been too kingly proud to approach with such a question, and Elian was not the sort of person one asked difficult things of, unless one needed them desperately enough to be snapped at before one was given them.

  Vadin always managed to have time for a small prince with a large store of questions; and though he was splendid to look at, taller than anyone else in Sarevan’s world, glittering in his northern finery, with his beard gone august silver already though he was not even thirty, he was never either stern or lordly when he was with children.

  He sat on the sweet blue grass of Anshan-i-Ormal, on a hill that looked out over the Sunborn’s camp, and smiled at Sarevan. After a moment Sarevan decided rather to be content than to be proud; he settled himself in his uncle’s lap and played with one of the many necklaces that glittered on Vadin’s breast.

  “Your father can’t work high magic without us,” Vadin repeated. He had another virtue: he did not mistake Sarevan for the four summers’ child he seemed to be. He talked to him as if they were equals. “We’re our own selves, have no fear of that; but in power we’re one creature. Horrible, some would call it; unnatural. I call it merely unheard of.”

  “None of you tried to do it,” Sarevan said.

  Vadin laughed. “We most certainly did not! If you’d told me when I first met Mirain what the two of us would turn into, I think I would have killed him and done my best to kill myself. Or run very far away and never come back.”

  “Why?”

  “I wasn’t born a mage,” said Vadin. He was not looking at Sarevan now; his eyes were lifted, staring straight into the sun.

  Sarevan had learned that no one could do that except Vadin and Elian and Mirain, and himself. It was because they were part of the Sun’s blood. He was proud of it, but a little afraid.

  It turned his uncle’s dark eyes to fire, and filled him as water fills a cup. He spoke through it in his soft deep voice, the way he did when he was remembering something long past but not forgotten. “I was a simple creature. I was a hill lord’s heir; I knew what my lot would be. I’d do my growing up in my father’s house with my brothers and sisters. Then I’d be a man, and I’d be sent to serve the king for a year or two, to uphold the honor of my house. Then I’d come back home and learn how to be lord in Geit
an, and when my father died I’d take his place, and take wives and sire sons and rule my lands exactly as all my fathers had before me. But then,” he said, “I stood guard at a gate of Ianon castle, and it was a fine morning of early spring, and the old king was on the battlements above me; and a stranger came to shake me out of all my placid certainties. His name was Mirain; he proclaimed himself the son of the heir of Ianon who had died far away in the south, and the king named him heir in her place, and made me his personal servant. I hated him, namesake. I hated him so perfectly that I couldn’t see any revenge more apt than to force him to accept my service.”

  “You don’t hate him now.”

  Vadin smiled at the sun. “Sometimes I wonder,” he said. “We’re beyond hate, he and I. I think we’re beyond even love. Your mother knows it. She didn’t want this, either. She wanted your father, that’s true enough; but I wasn’t supposed to be part of it. I died for him, you see. An assassin had a spear, and I stopped it, and thereby stopped myself. But he wouldn’t let me go. He had his own revenge to take, and we had a wager on whether we’d ever be friends. He said I would. I said never. I’d lose, of course, in the end. He brought me back to life; and he left some of his power in me, and a part of himself. Then in his turn he almost died, waging duel arcane with a servant of the darkness, and Elian and I between us brought him back, and now we were three in one.”

  “I was part of that,” Sarevan said. “I wasn’t born yet.”

  “You were barely there, infant,” said Vadin. “Now when we raised the Tower on Endros, that’s different. By then you were big enough to kick, and you put something of yourself into the working. That’s when we knew you’d be a mage.”

  “I’ve always been a mage.”

  “From before the beginning of time,” Vadin agreed gravely, but with a touch of wickedness. “And now you see, power isn’t always contained in one mage at a time. Sometimes it’s two together, or three. Souls are the same, I think. Some of them aren’t made to be alone. They may think so. They may live for years in blessed solitude. Then suddenly, the other half or the other third comes, and the poor soul fights with all it’s got to stay alone, but it’s a losing fight. Souls and power, they know what they are. It’s minds and bodies that struggle to be what they think they are.”