A Fall of Princes

by Judith Tarr

  Hirel, at his ease in a single robe, leaned back on his cushions. “You will explain the meaning of this,” he said. “We are taken like criminals. We are transported in a litter like women, but set within like slaves, in robeless shame. And yet you pay me homage. Is it,” he asked gently, “that you mean to mock me?”

  “Errors have been committed,” said Aranos with equal gentleness. His mages were pale; their eyes had lowered. “They will not be repeated.”

  “We are therefore to be set free?”

  “I did not say that.”

  “Ah,” said Hirel. Only that.

  “You mistake me,” Aranos said. “The Olenyai who rode with you were sworn to betray you; to complete what was left undone by Vuad and Sayel. Your companion they were to treat likewise and to send back to his father with the compliments of the Golden Empire.”

  Calm though he willed himself to be, Sarevan shuddered. Hirel was white about the lips. “That would not have been wise of them,” he said.

  “Indeed not. My mages had word of the plot; they were undertaking to warn you. But matters moved too swiftly, as did you. You mistook their sending, but it saved you. When the traitors came to seize you, you were gone.”

  “Even should I believe that there was a conspiracy to destroy me,” Hirel said, “still I would wonder. A loyal man does not drug and abduct his high prince.”

  “There was no time to do otherwise. Your betrayers were closing in upon you. It was most ill-advised, that disguise of yours. No true Olenyas could have been deceived by it; and word passed swiftly that three impostors had taken the road to Kundri’j, and two of them extraordinarily tall, and one on a blue-eyed stallion.”

  “I do not see one of them, though he was caught with us. Nor have I seen the stallion.”

  “You shall see them,” Aranos said. “Come now, my brother and my lord. You have always suspected me of hungering after your titles: of lying and deceiving and even slaying in order to gain them. And yet the brothers whom you thought you loved, whom you went so far as to trust, turned against you. Can you alter your vision of me? Can you begin to see that I may not be your enemy?”

  “You were the heir apparent until I was born.”

  “Apparent only,” said Aranos. “It was known to me even before our father wedded your mother that I would be supplanted by a legitimate son. When our father went in pursuit of the Gileni princess, there was open fear in the High Court, and no little resistance to the prospect of a halfblood heir; but heir most certainly that child would be. When he returned alone and rejected, to drown his sorrows in his harem and thereby sire his mighty army of sons, I knew that in the end he would surrender to necessity. As indeed he did. He took the sister-bride who was chosen for him. He sired your sisters, those who died of their frailty and the one who lived to be her mother’s image. Then at last he sired you. I would have been glad; I would have been properly your brother. But your mother would not abide me. The others she feared little or not at all. I who was eldest, whose blood was high and quite as pure as your own, in her eyes was deadly. Neither of you ever sought to learn the truth of me.”

  Sarevan looked from one to the other of them. He did not try to speak. Hirel was white and rigid. Aranos was pure limpid verity.

  Very slowly Hirel said, “I do not know whom to trust.”

  “You trust yon outland prince.”

  Hirel’s eyes flashed on Sarevan, white-rimmed as a startled senel’s. “He is not Asanian.”

  “Do you therefore mistrust yourself?”

  Hirel’s fists clenched on his knees. He drew a swift sharp breath. “Prove yourself to me. Ride with me to Kundri’j. Stand behind me on Autumn Firstday. Name me living man; proclaim me high prince before our father.”

  Sarevan watched Aranos narrowly. The princeling seemed unshaken and unstartled. He said with perfect calm, “So I had meant to do.”

  “If you lie,” said Hirel softly, “then you had best destroy me now. For if I live, even if I live unmanned, or slave, or cripple, I will have your life in return for your treachery.”

  “I do not lie,” Aranos said. He went down once more, prostrating himself, kissing the floor at Hirel’s feet. “You are my high prince. You will be my emperor.”

  o0o

  Aranos kept at least one of his promises. His guards brought Zha’dan to them. The Zhil’ari was unharmed save for a goodly measure of Sarevan’s own trapped terrors, and quite as bare as Sarevan had been. He had refused a robe; they had refused him a kilt.

  He greeted his companions with a cry of joy and a leap that brought blades out of sheaths. Hirel had to fend off the guards: Sarevan had had the breath crushed out of him.

  Zha’dan had lost even tradespeech; he babbled in his own tongue, too fast for Sarevan to follow, until Sarevan shook him into silence.

  He drew back, searching Sarevan’s face. “They caged you,” he said. There was no lightness in him; none of the bright reckless temper with which he liked to mask what he was. “I heard you. I thought they had broken you.”

  “Am I so fragile?” Sarevan asked him, the sharper for that he came so close to the truth.

  He frowned. “They think they know what you are. They’re fools.”

  “Are they treacherous?”

  “They all are, here.” Zha’dan looked as if his head hurt. “They don’t want to kill you. Either of you. Yet. The ivory doll—have you seen him? He has more in that tiny head of his than anyone might imagine. I don’t like him,” said Zha’dan, “but he thinks it’s to his advantage to serve the little stallion. For now.”

  “I wonder why,” said Sarevan.

  He was thinking aloud, but Hirel answered him. “Convenience. And cleverness. If all is as he has told us, we owe him a debt for our escape. That can be parlayed into great power.”

  “But not imperial power.”

  “He is my heir until I sire a son.”

  “You’d best get about it, then, hadn’t you?”

  Hirel blushed, but his tongue had not lost its sting. “Can you preach to me, O priest of the Sun?”

  Sarevan grinned. “A priest can always preach. It’s practice he has to walk shy of.” He shook off levity. “Are you going to trust him?”

  “I have little choice.”

  Sarevan bowed to that. “We can all walk warily. I’ll guard your back; will you guard mine?”

  “Until it behooves me to betray you,” answered Hirel, “yes.”

  o0o

  Hirel armed himself and rode in the free air as one of Aranos’ men-at-arms. He did not even need his helmet unless he wished to wear it: his face was pure High Asanian, but there were others like it in the company.

  Sarevan and Zha’dan had no such fortune. Sarevan refused flatly the concealment of the litter, and shied away from Aranos’ curtained chariot with its team of blue dun mares.

  He was betraying his cowardice, he knew it, but he could not master himself. He insisted on his freedom and the sweet familiarity of Bregalan’s back.

  He won it, and Zha’dan won it with him, but as always, at a price. He wore armor from head to foot, magewrought to his measure, with a great masked helm. It was ridiculously ornate and ridiculously uncomfortable, but it matched him to the small company of the princeling’s personal guard; and it hid all his strangenesses.

  The mages rode with their master. The forging had wearied them; they slept, perhaps, behind the swaying curtains.

  Sarevan did not like to think that a darkmage had had a hand in the making of his armor. It seemed perfectly earthly gilded bronze; no stink of evil clung to it. Only when he first put it on did his branded hand throb as at the touch of power; thereafter he had no pain, of hand or of head.

  o0o

  If a lordling of the Middle Court or a riding of shiu’oth Olenyai could win free passage on the roads, a prince of the High Court could empty them before him. To him all inns were open, all posthouses his own to command; if that did not please him, he had his way of the local lords. No one imped
ed him; no one ventured to question him.

  That Hirel had not chosen to ride in comfort with his brother was a scandal in the guard. Sarevan and Zha’dan were endurable: they were only outlanders, however royal they might consider themselves, and they did not inflict their barbarian faces on good human men. Hirel was more than human, and they all knew it. They liked not at all to have him riding knee to knee with the least of them, cropped head bare, helmet on saddlebow in the heat, looking as mortal as any man.

  He did not seem to notice, still less to care. Often he rode by Sarevan at the tail of the princeling’s personal guard and the head of the company of men-at-arms. Sometimes he reached across as if he could not help it, and stroked Bregalan’s neck.

  He did not ask to ride the stallion, nor would he let Sarevan offer it. He was turned in upon himself. He spoke, sometimes, in the beginning, but the Asanians would not answer him. After the first morning he did not speak at all.

  o0o

  On the fourth night of the compact with Aranos, three days yet at swift pace from Kundri’j Asan and four days shy of Autumn Firstday, the princeling took an inn for himself. Its patrons left perforce, with no objections that they let him or his small army hear.

  It was not fitting, Sarevan had been told the first night he tried it, that he bed down with the guard. He suspected that they were not pleased to bed down with a barbarian. He was given a chamber of his own; he was allowed to keep Zha’dan with him.

  Tonight he had been offered his choice of the house’s women, an error which had not been committed before. Someone must have forgotten to warn the innkeeper.

  He was interested to witness Hirel’s swift and scathing refusal on his behalf. It was much swifter and more scathing than his own would have been.

  Everyone looked at Zha’dan and thought he understood. Some looked at Hirel, longer, and grew very wise. The boy quelled them by choosing the most pleasing of the women and departing for his chamber, from which neither of them returned.

  Sarevan went slowly to his solitary bed. Zha’dan took station across the door, too wise to long for what he could not have, too fastidious to sample the innkeeper’s culls.

  “Once was enough,” he said as he spread his blanket. “They’re not clean, these people. No wonder they shave themselves smooth. Else they’d crawl with vermin.”

  “They say much the same of us, I think,” Sarevan said.

  Zha’dan snorted. Even if he had not bathed every day, more often if he could manage it, he would not have deigned to entertain small itching guests. Vermin did not like mages, even apprentice mages of the Zhil’ari.

  Some air of it must still have clung to Sarevan. He was in comfort, in that respect at least.

  He lay and closed his eyes and tried not to think. It was hard. Last night, after a blessed respite, he had dreamed again. The old darkness; the old fear. But at the end of it, strangeness, which he both hoped and feared was not prophecy but plain dreaming born of wish and fear and the day’s living.

  It was clear in him even yet, try though he would to blot it out. After the lightning-torn blackness of foreseeing, a soft light. Lamplight on walls of grey stone; a tapestry, rich and intricate, alive with figures: beasts, birds, blossoms, a jeweled dragonel. He was lying on softness, languid, free for a little while of either horror or urgency; although there was a strangeness in him, in the way he lay, in the way his body felt, it did not trouble him. Stranger still was the way his heart was singing.

  A light finger caressed his cheek. Its touch was distinct. It made him shiver with pleasure.

  He turned his head. In his dream he knew no surprise at all, nor any of the alarm that in waking would have cast him into flight. It was perfectly and properly right that Hirel should be lying there with all his masks laid aside, smiling a warm and sated smile.

  Sarevan’s mind had not even troubled to transform him into a woman. He was a little older and a great deal larger—as large, impossibly, as Sarevan himself—and incontestably a man.

  Perhaps he would have spoken. Sarevan never knew. Zha’dan had awakened him, calling him to the sunrise prayer and the day’s riding.

  All day, as they rode, Sarevan had caught himself shooting glances at the boy: not a simple feat in the heavy gilded helm. Hirel showed no signs of growing suddenly to match Sarevan’s Gileni height. Sarevan’s body did not yearn toward him as it had in the dream, although he was very good to look on in the plain harness of a man-at-arms, erect and proud, sitting his mount with the easy grace of the born rider.

  o0o

  It was the mind, Sarevan told himself as he lay alone. It confused the body with the soul. He did not want Hirel to his bed.

  Then why, asked a small wicked portion of his self, was he tossing in it like a thwarted lover?

  Because he was dream-maddened. Because on Autumn Firstday he would be two-and-twenty, and his body had never known either woman or man, but his mind—his wild mageling’s mind—had known them both very well indeed.

  The Litany of Pain frayed in his head and scattered. He tried to mock himself. It was the Asanian air. It was full of lechery. He offended its sense of rightness; it struggled to make him like all the rest of the Golden Empire. Would it then turn his copper to gold and bleach his skin to ivory?

  He rose on his elbow, regarding himself in the nightlamp’s flicker. He was as perfectly a mongrel as he had ever been, and rather more rampantly male than he was wont to be. He covered it, somewhat, with the robe that which one was expected to wear to sleep here: odd constricting custom, but useful if one were in a state which one did not wish to proclaim to every eye.

  Zha’dan did not stir when Sarevan stepped over him. Sarevan prowled softly through the passages. Movement cooled him a little. No one else was abroad. Aranos’ guards eyed him warily but did not challenge him.

  The kitchen’s fires were banked, cooks and scullions snoring in concert. A grin of pure mischief found its way to Sarevan’s face. Royal prince and man grown he might be, but he was young yet; and it took more than a year or six to forget old skills. He uncovered a trove of sweet cakes and a flask of the thin sour wine that was all they seemed to drink here. He filled a napkin, appropriated the flask.

  A small door opened on starlight and coolness. He had found the kitchen garden; a breeze was keeping at bay the stink of the midden.

  Near the wall stood a bench overhung by a tree in full and fragrant fruit. He sat back against the bole, filling himself with cakes and fruit, drinking from the flask. His body’s heat had all but faded; the ache of it was passing. He stretched to pluck another sweetapple.

  His hand stopped. Someone was walking toward him among the beds of herbs.

  A remnant of youthful guilt made him tense to bolt. The rest of him remembered that he was a wild boy no longer; no one would dare now to thrash him for his thievery.

  He finished plucking the apple. His eyes sharpened. Not one figure approached him but two. The other paced on four legs, a great graceful shadow with eyes that, turning upon him, flashed sudden green.

  He forgot guilt, manhood, gluttony, even the fruit in his hand. Ulan met him in midleap, singing his joy-song. “Brother,” Sarevan sang back in a loving purr. “O brother!”

  Ulan butted him full in his center. He dropped to his rump half in the path, half in pungent herbs. He clung to the massive neck and laughed, breathing cat-musk and silversage, while Ulan feigned with mighty snarlings to devour him.

  It was love, purely. He lost himself in it.

  He remembered the sweetapple first. He was still holding it. He laughed at that, using Ulan for a handhold as he pulled himself to his feet.

  He was almost body to body with Ulan’s erstwhile companion. It was, his skin knew utterly and instantly, a woman. He drew back swiftly, not quite recoiling, shaping a spate of apologies.

  None of them passed his tongue. The stranger had become a shape he knew: plain epicene Asanian, he had thought the creature, or even a eunuch. Tonsured for Uvarra’s service; rob
ed as a mage.

  The darkmage.

  Knowledge and starlight limned her face, transformed eunuch softness into feminine strength. She was not beautiful. She did not need to be. She made his body sing.

  And yet his heart was cold. She had come with Ulan. A black sorceress. She had seen him in naked joy. She knew, now, the most mortal of his weaknesses.

  Ulan purred against him. The cat was not bewitched. Sarevan would have known. There was no mark on him; no stink of evil.

  Perhaps she sensed Sarevan’s thoughts. She seemed amused. “He is a great hunter, your brother,” she said. “Did you know that he tracks by scent of power? He marked mine. He cast me from my bed, that I might conduct him to you.”

  All of Sarevan’s training cried to him that she lied; that no servant of darkness ever told the truth. And yet he knew that it was so. Ulan could scent magery. It would be like him to seek out a mage, to demand an escort to his lost brother. He knew how a simple man would see him; he did not like to be shot at.

  And yet, a darkmage. Sarevan glared at the cat. He felt betrayed.

  Ulan sat, yawned, began to lick his paw. His nose wrinkled. He did not like the scent of silversage.

  Yes, the witch was amused. “I see,” she said, “that the tales are in error that give you the readiest tongue in Keruvarion. Or is it that a priest of your order may not address a woman?”

  Sarevan’s cheeks flamed. “What do I have to say to you? You are a slave of the dark.”

  “Are you any less a slave of the light?” she inquired calmly.

  “Your kind should be scoured from the earth.”

  She sat on the bench that Sarevan had abandoned. Her robe was belted loosely; it opened as she moved. He caught a glimpse of full and lovely breasts.

  His own was not belted at all. He clutched it about him.

  She smiled. “One always fears most what one knows least.”

  “I know all I need to know.”

  That was feeble, and they both knew it. She took a cake, nibbled it with visible pleasure. “Avaryan was Uvarra, long ago. She has kept her two faces. He has bound himself to one alone. That I serve the night, that my power is of the moons’ dark, does not bar me from either the arts or the worship of the light.”