Hall of the Mountain King

by Tarr, Judith

  Mirain looked at Vadin in something close to horror. Later, maybe, he would find some small comfort in that.

  “You are strong,” Vadin went on. He cradled Moranden’s head in his lap. “Now, god’s son. Destroy this priest of the Dark.”

  Mirain tossed his head from side to side as if in pain. “I cannot. Not this way. Not . . .”

  “Then,” Vadin said, “heal him.”

  Mirain stared. He had never looked younger or less royal.

  “Heal him,” Vadin repeated without compunction. “You’re a mage, you told me yourself. You’re full to bursting with your father’s power. It can destroy this man, or it can save him. Choose!”

  “And if I choose neither?” Mirain could hardly speak; his voice cracked on the final word, to his bitter and visible shame.

  “If you won’t choose, you’re no king. Now or ever.”

  Mirain moved convulsively, flinging up his hand: defense, protest, royal outrage. Vadin held fast, although he averted his eyes from the flame of gold. “Choose,” he said again.

  Mirain’s hand lowered. Slowly it settled on Moranden’s cheek. The elder prince trembled under it, and twisted as if in pain.

  Death, Vadin thought dully. He chooses death. As in his own way Moranden had chosen, for the sake of the kingship. They were kin indeed, these two, closer than either could bear to know.

  Mirain’s eyes closed. His face tightened with strain; his breath came harsh. Someone cried out—Moranden, Mirain, Vadin, perhaps all three.

  Mirain sank back on his heels. Vadin looked down; his eyes stretched wide.

  Moranden lay still, eyes closed as if in sleep, breathing easily. Where the wound had been, on the high arch of cheekbone at the very edge of his eye, was a scar in the shape of a spearhead. It faded even as Vadin watched, and greyed as if with age.

  A stir drew his glance upward again. Mirain stood erect, cradling his golden hand. “I am mad,” he said. “Someday I may be king. But I am not a murderer. Not even when I can see—” A shudder racked him. “May the god preserve us all.”

  SIX

  Vadin stood once more in the shadows. Clean shadows, fire-cast, dancing around the edges of the king’s chamber, seeming to keep time to the music of Ymin’s harp. She played no melody that he could discern, simply a pattern of single notes, random and beautiful as rain upon a pool.

  The king sat at a table near the fire. A lamp shed a steady yellow glow on the book before him.

  He was a great rarity in a Ianyn lord: he could read. And did so as often as he could, and savored it enough to want to learn the intricate letters of Han-Gilen.

  Or maybe that was only an excuse to keep his grandson near him, standing as he stood now with his arm around the old man’s shoulders, reading in a low clear voice. By all accounts the king had never been a man for touching, walking apart in the armor of his royalty; but Mirain had pierced those strong defenses. Strangely enough, the king seemed to accept that, even to take pleasure in it, although any other who dared such familiarity would have paid in pain.

  They laughed, the old man and the young one, at a sudden turn of wit. So close together in the lamp’s light, their faces were strikingly alike: proud, high-nosed, deep-eyed. When Mirain was old he would look just so, like a carven king.

  Vadin shivered in a sudden chill. Mirain’s face, gaining years in his mind’s eye, blurred suddenly and faded. As if Mirain would never grow old. As if—

  The squire shook himself hard. This whole hideous day had bereft him of his wits. Moondark fancies to begin it, and the horror in the wood, and the rest lost in a fog. When he tried to think he could not, or else saw nightmare visions. And Mirain had said no word to him since they left Moranden to recover his senses in the sunlight with words of guard upon him; since they rode back to the castle together, the prince half a length ahead and the squire behind as was eminently proper.

  With each of Rami’s long smooth strides, Vadin had sunk deeper into silence. But Mirain had conducted himself as if nothing had happened, except that he made no effort to pierce his servant’s new-forged armor.

  The book was rolled and bound, the music stilled. Mirain sat at the king’s feet with his arm across the scarred and age-hardened knees.

  “Yes,” he said with the hint of a smile, “I walked up from Han-Gilen. At first because I would have been too conspicuous astride, with the prince scouring the land for me; and afterward because I found it pleasant. Outside of Han-Gilen, no one knew my face, and I kept my hand out of sight. I was only a vagabond like any other.” His smile widened. “Sometimes I was wet or cold or hungry; but I was free, and it was splendid. I could go where I chose, stop where I pleased. I tarried a whole cycle of Greatmoon in a village that had lost its priest.”

  “A village?” The king’s voice was a low rumble. “Among common folk?”

  “Farmfolk and hunters,” Mirain answered him. “They were good people, on the whole. And not one knew who or what I was. No one called me king or prince. No one bowed to me for my father’s sake. One”—he laughed a little—“one even brawled with me. One of the girls had taken to following me about, and she was promised to a wealthy man as folk are reckoned there. His house had a door of wood, and his father had a bull and nine cows. He would not suffer such a rival as I, a spindling lad with a braid like a woman’s. He challenged me. I accepted, of course; the lady was watching.”

  “And you promptly struck the peasant down for his insolence.”

  Mirain laughed again, freely. “I was trying to be careful, because I was war-trained by masters and he was but a plowboy. And he came round with a great sweeping blow and flattened me.”

  The king bridled. But Mirain was grinning. He smiled at last, wryly. “What said the lady to that?”

  “She shrieked and ran to my aid, which was rather gratifying. But in the end she decided she would rather have a bull and nine cows and a wooden door than a lover whose body was vowed to the god. I said the marriage-words for them the day I left. By then their new priestess had come, but both of them insisted: None but I must see them wedded. I foretold for them a dozen children and a lifetime of prosperity, and they were well content.”

  “Were you?” Ymin asked, abandoning her harp for the fire’s warmth.

  Mirain turned to her, half grave, half smiling. “I was free again. I understand now why the law enjoins a Journey upon the young initiate, though mine perforce was shortened. But I made a year do for seven.”

  “You may yet have your full Journey,” said the king.

  Mirain clasped the gaunt gnarled hand in his young strong one. “No, my lord. My mother Journeyed for both of us while you waited with no word of her. You will not have to wait again.”

  The king’s free hand passed over Mirain’s thick waving hair, a rare caress. “I would wait for you though it were a hundred years.”

  “One and twenty are quite enough.” Mirain raised his head. “Grandfather. Do I trouble you too much? Would you rather I had never come?”

  Ymin drew her breath in sharply, but the king smiled. “You know I would not.”

  “Yes,” Mirain admitted, “I do know. Nor would I be aught but here.”

  “Even to be free upon the world’s road?”

  “Even so,” he said.

  When Mirain left the king he did not go directly to bed, but remained for a time at his window. This had become a custom of his, a moment of silence with the garden’s night scents rising to sweeten his chamber.

  It had been early spring when first he came, the passes but newly opened after winter’s snows. Now it was full spring. Brightmoon was dark, but Greatmoon was rising, waxing to the full. The battlements glowed blue-white before him.

  “Father,” Mirain said, “when you begot me, did you bethink yourself that I might not be equal to your task?”

  The silence was absolute. Mirain sighed a little; when he spoke again it might have been Vadin he addressed, however obliquely. “Ah well. It’s not as if he were a mortal man, or
one of the thousand tamed gods of the west, to come at any creature’s bidding. Even his own son.” He rested his cheek against the edge of the window.

  The stone was luminous with somewhat more than moonlight, although it was far yet from dawn. It knew him, the king had said more than once. Where he was, the castle responded as to the sun’s coming.

  He turned, his right hand a fist at his side. It could not clench as tightly as it might, stiffened by gold where gold had no right to be. “It hurts,” he said, soft yet taut. “It burns. It fills my hand like a great golden coin, a coin heated in fire, that I can never let go. Sometimes it’s greater, sometimes less; sometimes it seems no worse than metal warmed too much by the sun, sometimes it takes all my poor strength to endure in silence. I’m proud of that, Vadin. I’ve never wept or cried out, or even spoken of it, since I was a young child. No one ever knew what pain was mine, except my mother, and the Prince of Han-Gilen. And certainly—certainly his sister.” He paused; his brows knit, eased. He almost smiled. “Odd that I should think of her tonight. It must be my mood. Rampant self-pity. Little good it does, either, to put a name to it. Shall I conjure it away? Look.”

  Vadin had no choice, no time to choose. Mirain’s eyes had seized him, enspelled him, sucked him in.

  He was within them. He was Mirain. A body of no great beauty or consequence, centered around a white agony.

  But the agony retreated, held at bay by a will as strong as forged iron. He saw a face: a child’s thin solemn countenance with skin the color of amber and hair as red as new copper. From the time she could walk she had appointed herself Mirain’s shadow; which often made the wits laugh, for he was the dark one, all blackwood and raven, and she was honey and fire. But she was unshakable, even for ridicule, even for outright cruelty.

  “You shame me!” he had cried once. She had escaped her nurse and scorned the placid mount deemed proper for a maidchild of barely seven summers and stolen his own outgrown pony, and set out after him as he rode on a hunt. She had mastered the black devil of a pony, which surprised him not at all; but her intrusion on the chase, among a round dozen of the prince’s squires, put him out of all charity.

  “You shame me,” he repeated in his coldest voice. “You drag at me like shackles. I don’t want you here, I don’t want you dangling at my tail, I don’t—”

  She looked at him. The pony was too large for her, the saddlecloth awry, her hair tangled with twigs and straggling over her eyes, but her stare set all the rest at naught. It was not the stare of a young child. “You’re not ashamed,” she said. “You don’t hate me, either.”

  He opened his mouth and shut it again. The hunt was long gone, hot on a scent and unmindful of his absence. He could hear the baying of the hounds growing faint even as he tarried.

  The pony tossed its wicked head and threatened his stallion with its horns. It was all she could do to hold it back, but she did it without any lessening of her intensity. “I let you alone when you really need it. You know that.”

  “I must need it very seldom indeed, then.”

  “When you wanted to play with Kieri in the hayloft—”

  His cheeks flamed; his head throbbed. He flung himself at her. They tumbled to the ground together, their mounts shying over and past them; he beneath, she flailing on top of him. She was a negligible weight, but her elbows were wickedly sharp.

  He lay winded, trying to curse her. She sat on him and laughed. “Hal says you have to play all you can now before you win your torque, because after that—”

  He clapped his marked hand over her mouth. The sight of it alone was enough for most, but Elian feared neither god nor man. She sank her teeth into it.

  By design or by fortune, she bypassed the brand and bit flesh. Pain on top of spiraling pain emptied him of all wrath or shame and cast him howling on the edge of darkness.

  The lesser pain faded. The greater swelled without cause, without end, beyond all hope of bearing. Yet he bore it, fully and horribly aware of it, even as the pit gaped before his feet. It would not swallow him into merciful oblivion. It would—not—

  The pain was gone.

  Not wholly. It had shrunk to its least dimensions, the closest to painlessness he could ever know, but after that blinding agony it was relief so perfect that he could have wept. His eyes, clearing, saw Elian kneeling by him, clutching his hand to her heart. Her face was grey-green, her voice a croak. “Mirain. Oh, Mirain!”

  He had no strength to pull his hand away. He could barely speak. “What—what did you—”

  “I took it away.” Her face twisted. “It hurt. How can anything hurt so much?”

  “You took it away,” he repeated stupidly. “You . . . took it . . . Elian. Witch-baby. Do you know what you’ve done?”

  “It hurt.” She cradled it as tenderly as if it had been her own. “It always hurts. Why, Mirain?”

  “You can heal it. Elian, little firemane, you have your father’s magic.”

  She disregarded that. Of course she had the power; she had always had it; and being what he was, he should have known. “Why does it hurt, Mirain?”

  “Because my father makes it hurt.”

  Her brows met. Her jaw thrust forward. “Tell him to stop.”

  Even in his weakness he could laugh. “But, infant, he’s the god. No one can tell him what to do.”

  “I can. He hurts you. He shouldn’t. Especially there, where it hurts most. It’s not right.”

  “It makes me remember who I am; what I’m for. It keeps me from growing too proud.”

  She scowled, stubborn. “There’s no need for it.”

  “No?” he asked. “I was being cruel to you. You see how I paid.”

  “I have good strong teeth. Even if half of them aren’t grown in yet.” She patted his hand, which showed no marks of her passing. “You won’t hurt again while I have anything to say about it.”

  oOo

  “Nor did I,” said Mirain. “Much. But I left her, to follow where my father led. No one here can cool the fire.”

  Vadin had no voice to speak. It was all lost in horror. Sorcery—soul-slavery—

  “My father wrought me,” Mirain said. “He shaped me for his purposes. The Sword of the Sun, his mightiest weapon against the Dark. But he made me in mortal likeness, flesh and blood and bone, and worst of all, a mind that can think and be afraid. I may not be strong enough. I may fail him. And if I fail—”

  “Stop it!” Vadin’s shout was raw with the twofold effort. Of speaking; of keeping his hands from that gold-circled throat. “My body is yours to do with as you will. My service is yours for as long as my body lasts. But if you touch my mind again, by all the gods that ever were, I’ll kill you.”

  “I didn’t touch your mind,” Mirain said, low and still.

  “You didn’t, did you? No. You raped it.”

  For all the heed Mirain paid him, he might never have spoken. “I didn’t touch you. I opened my own mind, and you plunged headlong into it.”

  “Wizard’s logic. You led me into a trap. You violated me.”

  “I showed you the truth.”

  “Yes. That under the upstart prince is a trembling coward.”

  Mirain laughed. It sounded like honest mirth, with no great measure of mockery. But priests were good liars, and princes better, and royal pretenders best of all. “I’ll lay you a wager, Vadin. Before this year is out, you’ll call me friend. You’ll do it willingly, and you’ll do it gladly, and you’ll do it without the least regret.”

  “I’ll see you in hell first.”

  “That’s possible,” Mirain said, lightly but not in jest. “What will you lay on it?”

  “My soul.”

  Mirain’s breath hissed sharply. His teeth were sharper still, bared in a grin. “I warn you, Vadin. I can take it.”

  “I know you can.” This was blackly wonderful, like racing the lightning, or dancing on blades. “And you? What stakes can you offer?”

  “A place at my right hand, and the hig
hest lordship, save only mine alone, in my empire that will be.”

  “I can claim that, Mirain of Han-Gilen.”

  “I know you can,” said Mirain. His hand cast darts of light into Vadin’s eyes. Its clasp that sealed the wager was startling for more than mere strength: it did not sear Vadin’s own hand to ash. All the fire burned within.

  They drew apart in the same instant, with the same feral wariness. Half of one another, half of the one who had come into the room behind them. Someone large, with a long stride, but light on his feet. They turned slowly, as if at ease, but their bodies tensed.

  Prince Moranden stood in his accustomed stance, legs well apart, shoulders back. The goddess’ brand had done nothing to mar his beauty, and he held his head as if he knew it. His eyes flicked from one to the other. With a quiver of the lids he dismissed the squire, focusing full and burning-cold on his sister’s son.

  Mirain let the silence stretch until it broke. “Uncle,” he said lightly, coolly, “you honor me. How may I serve you?”

  The southern formality curled Moranden’s lip. He sat without asking leave, stretching out at his ease. Vadin thought of the black lion of the mountains, that was most deadly when it seemed most quiet. “You, my lord?” asked the elder prince. “Serve me? That’s an honor too great for this humble mortal to claim.”

  Mirain left the window and approached another chair, but he did not sit in it. While he stood, he was a little taller than his unwelcome guest. He leaned against the carven back. “We are inundated with honor tonight. I honor you with my service, you honor me with your presence. It is courtesy that brings you here at last? Or need? Or simple goodwill?”

  Moranden laughed sincerely, but with an edge of bitterness. “Your manners are prettier than mine, prince. Shall we leave off playing? Courtesy’s a word I don’t know the meaning of, northern savage that I am. Need . . . the day I need the likes of you, my young kinsman, you can be sure I’m in dire straits.”

  “Then,” said Mirain levelly, “it must be goodwill.”

  The elder prince hooked a knee over the arm of his chair. “Very good, sister-son! So good I’ll even tell you a truth. I’d give my soul to be rid of you. I think I already have.”