Betrayed by their government and its business interests, Adred and his wealthy father had more in common with the poor in Miru Square than any of those beggars could have suspected or imagined.
CHAPTER FOUR
“I cannot allow Elad to have the throne.”
Abgarthis turned. She had not moved, and she had spoken so softly that for a moment, he thought to ask her to repeat what she had said. He approached her. “My queen?”
“How can I?” Still Yta did not move; her hands were folded in a religious posture, a habit she had brought with her to the throne twenty-eight years earlier: the fingers locked together, the hands resting upon her belly—the joining of two equal halves, the right female and the left male, over the womb. Her eyes studied some far shadow of the room. “He will rip Athadia apart with his ambitions. He and Cyrodian—”
Her words rested there. Abgarthis marveled at the strength of her.
“I cannot decide,” Yta whispered. “I cannot decide, O adviser.”
Abgarthis sighed. He set down his cup. “Shall I call in astrologers?” he suggested. “Seers? Wine readers?”
“I am trapped upon the rock, between the serpent and the sword, Abgarthis.”
“I do not understand.”
“When I left the Holy Order of Hea, in my young womanhood, to marry that dead king, that was my counsel: ‘Upon the death of this man you will find yourself trapped on a rock between a serpent and a sword.’ Those are my sons, Abgarthis.”
Abgarthis studied his queen, noticed her paleness, and sensed, now, the frailty her strength sought to defend. He moved to light an oil lamp.
“No light, please, Abgarthis.”
“But night comes.”
“Let it come. Please.…”
He moved away, feeling the closeness of shadows.
“I carry a curse, Abgarthis. Do you know how deep my love was for the king? You understand, although you never took a wife. Do you know how I trembled with joy when I left Hea Isle to come to the continent? How I trembled with joy to become wife and queen to the young king?”
Abgarthis did not speak.
“When I heard from my mother’s sister at court that Evarris had loved me since boyhood and had suffered when I left for the Order—do you know how I thrilled at the idea of renouncing my vows? I was so young, and fiercely independent. Hea has cursed me for that one wild, happy moment.”
“I know that you loved Evarris.”
“I always wanted him to die first, adviser. I never wanted him to suffer this grief over my passing. But with our first child, and a second, then the third.… How,” she asked, “can a woman give birth to living sons, raise them and guide them, instill her love and patience and hopes in them, and see them become men who have nothing to do with what she saw in them as boys?”
Abgarthis felt compelled to speak. “Men are not boys, Queen Yta. They forget their boyhoods. Boyhood is the molting skin they leave behind.”
Yta drew in a slow breath. “A serpent, and a sword, and a rock,” she said. “I must go to the oracle, Abgarthis.”
“Queen Yta—”
“Council can delay itself for a day or two. I must speak with the Oracle at Teplis. I must go to her. And I will follow her words. Whatever they may be, I want—”
Abgarthis listened carefully.
“—I want to return to the goddess, Abgarthis. With all my strength, I do. I want to return to Hea Isle to die. But I want to remain queen, as well. I have never been a good queen. I was a good wife, a fair mother, but a poor queen. Now I want to be a good queen, yet I want to die and be with the Mother. I want to achieve and I want to begone, in the same moment. What could come of that? What does that mean?”
“That you are human. A woman. On the funeral day of your husband.”
“The world looks at me— I can feel their eyes now. I want to hide from their eyes.”
“Perhaps you should rest,” Abgarthis suggested, abandoning the hope that Yta might come to a decision tonight. And he rankled inside—rankled that he, an official, should have to put such pressure on her in her hour of grief, that it was necessary.
He softly crossed the room, thinking it best to leave; as he put his thin hand to the door latch, he looked back.
“Good night, my queen.”
Yta moved. Turned her head to regard him. Her features, white clay, seemed to betray surprise at the sight of him, as though she had just noticed his presence. And Abgarthis was distressed and astounded to see in Yta’s eyes an emotion he had never before known her to exhibit.
Carefully she turned her face away. “Yes, yes—good night.”
Fear.
CHAPTER FIVE
Cyrodian, the second prince of the empire, was indeed a man to inspire fear. Huge—taller by a head than the tallest soldier in the Khamar palace guard—he was broad-shouldered, buffalo-chested, with arms and legs the size of oaks. His beard and mustache were coarse, and he wore his hair in a modified soldier’s cut: far back from the forehead, unkempt at the shoulders. In aspect he was a human bear; in temperament, as wayward and eruptive as a demon; in intellect, intelligent though roughly schooled, preferring muscle to argument. Truly might Yta, in comparing her second to her first and third sons, wonder whether Cyrodian were some strange changeling.
Yet he was not evil. He was a brute, a braggart, an ill-tempered mammoth, a man of unswerving and unservile opinions. “Hrux,” some of his men called him, borrowing a name from religious parable—for Hrux had supposedly been the wild ox made human for a year; when returned to its animal state, it bewailed the fact constantly. Hence the ox’s constant low bellow, sounding as of pain or torment.
Hrux, he was called by his men. The youngest general in the army of the Athadian Empire. Cyrodian: a man of strength, sword, anger.
Tonight, while Khamars guarded his late father’s ashes out on the plain, while Yta sat speechless and undecided in her chambers with Abgarthis, while the temple gongs and bells tolled death and anguish to the heavens, Cyrodian sat in his elder brother’s lavish rooms in the east wing of the palace and played with his daggers—six of them, the edges keen, their points exactly sharp. Dressed in his rough trousers and open shirt, he relaxed in a large wooden chair, feet up on a hassock, watching Elad as Elad paced before the great fire in the wall.
“Sit, brother.”
“I am nervous, Cyrodian.”
“You’re making me ill with your old woman’s games.”
Elad stopped and threw his hands behind his back. Uncomfortable with ceremonial attire, he had changed into a plain shirt, loose doublet, and black woolen trousers. He regarded his brother coolly. “Old woman?”
“Let Yta cry over the passing of our father. You and I must talk. Sit and drink your wine.”
“I am not thirsty.”
Cyrodian barked a laugh. “Not for wine, anyway.”
A slight tapping at the outer door. Elad called, and a servant entered with a tray of fresh wine and hard brown bread and meats.
“Put it over there,” Elad told him.
The servant set down the tray, placed the decanter on the table, and the plate of bread and meats, then took up the half-empty, warm jug.
“Where is the queen?” Elad asked this man.
“In her chambers, my lord, resting.”
“And Abgarthis?”
“In his own room, I believe.”
“Drafting the queen’s formal abdication, I trust?” Cyrodian said.
Elad shot him a hard glance.
“I—I know not,” stuttered the servant.
Cyrodian aimed a knife and let it fly in the servant’s direction. It chunked into the wooden jamb; the servant, astonished, cried out, jumped, and dropped his tray and wine jug on the floor. Cyrodian howled with laughter.
Elad spat at him. “So very humorous, isn’t it? Fool!”
Cyrodian made an expression of mock intimidation. The servant, sweating, bent to the floor, placed the broken jug onto his tray, and sought to
soak up the spill with his apron.
“Just let it go,” Elad ordered him impatiently.
“My lord?”
“Clean it up later!”
“Y-yes…yes.…” He rose to his feet and left the princes alone.
Elad scowled at Cyrodian. “You make enemies of all the small people. A fine king you’d be.”
Cyrodian quickly aimed his other knives and hurled them. All five struck close to the first in the doorjamb, their blades no farther apart than a finger width.
“You have to keep them on their toes,” Cyrodian explained, reaching for the new wine after his display of targetry. “Make them dance to your song, my weak-stomached brother, or you’ll dance to theirs.”
“You learn that in the army?”
“I taught that to the army.”
“I have more than the army to worry about. I have the council and cities and bankers, ten thousand aristocrats, a hundred thousand bureaucrats—”
“Not yet, you don’t,” Cyrodian reminded him. “Now pour yourself some wine and sit. Or is the wine not safe?”
Elad scowled. “Of course it’s safe. What do you take me for?”
“I take you,” Cyrodian replied, “exactly for what you are. Brother.”
He swallowed a long draft as Elad at last followed his suggestion and took a cushioned chair.
“Our mother is not our problem,” Cyrodian said. “Not our paramount problem. We can outflank her. Drive for the center—hard, fast. Cut off the poisonous part of the snake first; the rest you chop up at your leisure.”
Elad rolled his goblet between the palms of his hands. “Meaning—Dursoris.”
“Meaning Dursoris. You have the council. Let’s be frank. If you made your bid tonight, two-thirds of them are with you, if only because they think you’re not man enough to be the crown and so the more easily manipulated. And I have the army.”
Elad scowled, set aside his cup, and slumped in his pillows.
“There are only two ways to get and hold power,” Cyrodian continued, “—legally and illegally. Short of causing another civil war, our best chance for now is to bring Dursoris around to our way of thinking. Yta has just enough faith in you to give you the throne; she doesn’t want succession, yours or hers, to drag on to the detriment of the empire. Which is just what could happen if we decide to throw it before the council, even on the most transparent of motives. Are you listening, brother?”
“We’ve discussed this so many times, I know it by heart. We’ve recited it like a ballad. ‘We must win Dursoris.’ But if Dursoris doesn’t wish to be won? What then? ‘Another civil war’?”
“Of course not; that leaves us far too unprotected.” Cyrodian finished his wine and wiped his sprinkled beard. “He meets with an accident. Happens in the army all the time.”
“Did you teach that to the army, too?” Elad scowled.
Cyrodian laughed again. “It happens often enough in court, too. Think how many of our father’s enemies accidentally had their throats slit.”
“Those days are gone, Cyrodian.”
“Then let’s keep it that way. The right of the nation is stronger than the right of blood. To sacrifice one life for the empire is far better than sacrificing the entire empire because of one dissenting voice. The common good, Elad.” Cyrodian shrugged then. “But I don’t relish killing my own brother, and I don’t think I’ll have to. Dursoris knows how we feel, and I’m certain that at this very moment, he knows where his loyalty lies.”
CHAPTER SIX
At that very moment, however, Dursoris’s loyalty to his brothers was not his chief concern.
Orain murmured and nestled herself more securely in his arms, and Dursoris pressed his lips to her hair, inhaling the good perfume of her. “Happy?” he whispered.
She smiled at him.
The cushions rustled as he rolled onto his back, threw a hand behind his head, and stared upward.
Orain grunted in her throat, moved and laid her cheek on Dursoris’s chest, and blew softly on his belly. The dark hairs around his navel fluttered like wheat in a field. She tickled Dursoris’s navel with her thumb, then reached below; she held his damp penis in her fingers and stroked it.
“Don’t. Please, Orain.”
She dropped her hand to his thigh and asked in a disappointed tone, “What’s the matter with you? We haven’t seen each other in two weeks.” Resentful, she kissed his chest, lifted her head, and tongued one of his nipples.
Dursoris sighed heavily.
“You don’t expect Cyrodian to come through the door, do you? I haven’t seen the sharp side of his sword in more than seven years.”
“It’s not proper,” Dursoris admitted in a low voice. “Not at a time like this.”
“That’s not it, either.”
“No. No, it’s not,” he admitted, and told her, “Tomorrow, Elad will make his bid for the throne. You realize that, don’t you?”
Orain frowned. “But it’s already decided. It was decided months ago. Even if Yta fights him, the council will try to overrule her. She can ask for a Vote of Reprimand—is that what it is?”
“Yes.”
“But Elad will still go after her with the council’s approval. Or they drag things out until Yta gives up.” She said, with disgust in her voice, “That’s how they all think. It’s a game for them. All of them against one old woman.”
“And Cyrodian controls the army, and the council is afraid of what the army might do. Which means I’m the only remaining uncertainty.”
Orain stared at him. “You’re not serious! You’re going to try to fight him?”
“Mine is the only sensible voice remaining.”
“Dursoris!”
“Keep your voice down, you’ll—”
“You’ll destroy us!” Orain exclaimed. She sat up, flushed, pushing back the loose hair that had fallen into her face. Then she grew a smile. “I know what you’re going to do,” she guessed. “You’re going to goad Elad just enough, just to remind him that—”
“I’m going to fight him to the death if that’s what it takes.”
“You can’t—”
“Orain, it’s the law. Am I the only one who remembers what law is?”
“He’ll get the throne anyway!”
“If Yta abdicates, yes. But if she decides to continue her rule and he and Cyrodian try to force his succession…that’s punishable by death. The law doesn’t exclude firstborn princes any more than it does anyone else, no matter what Cyrodian and the army and Elad think.”
“But all you’ll do is put yourself in danger!”
“Orain, I intend to enforce the law, and I don’t care how many purses Elad has filled full of money just to get whatever he wants.”
She tried to put all of this into perspective. She told him, “Then it’s only symbolic. Yta doesn’t want the throne.”
“We don’t know what Yta wants. But if Elad makes a motion in council tomorrow to protest her continuation as the crown, then I’m bound by the code to call him down.”
“And he’ll fight back! He and Cyrodian both will!”
Dursoris put a hand to her shoulder. “Orain.…”
“Your hand is cold.”
He removed his hand, letting the fingertips linger on her soft shoulder. “Orain, the right of the nation is stronger than the right of blood. You know that. If I were to sacrifice everything we’ve fought for merely on the grounds that Elad would get the throne anyway—Orain, I’d be betraying myself and everything we’ve been taught. Whether or not Elad and Cyrodian believe that the right to rule belongs to the strongest man, those days are done. We have laws. We have laws, and laws are history, and history is justice. We’ve learned that. Haven’t we?”
She waited a long time before answering. Dursoris watched the tapers on a table as they glowed in the heavy darkness of the chamber. He watched the back of Orain’s head, marveling at the silken texture of her golden hair, and sought to look inside her skull, into her brai
n, to see the mechanism of her mind—stared at her lovely hair and sought by some power of will to influence the working of the mind beneath.
Finally, she said to him, “It’s late. I have to go.”
“Orain, heart—don’t you understand?”
She faced him. “I made one great mistake in my life,” she admitted, “and that was marrying your brother. I’ve rectified that by trying to raise Galvus into everything his father isn’t. Now I’ve made another mistake: I’ve fallen in love with you.”
“Orain—”
“And I do love you because you’re so…idealistic, and you’ll stand up in council tomorrow and fight Elad, and I understand that, I know that. It’s why I love you. I admit it. That’s the man you are. But then what? Cyrodian’s assassins will hunt you down in some alley somewhere and kill you, Dursoris, and then what do I do? I’ll wonder for the rest of my life whether I was a wise woman or simply foolish to love a man who loves his damned ideals so much that he couldn’t even feel any satisfaction in finding a moment’s happiness for himself!”
“Orain, please! That’s not fair!”
“Look out there. Look! Evarris’s ashes are still on fire, and jackals are fighting for his seat! They’re nothing more than animals fighting over his body! Dursoris, they’re going to kill for the throne! So who gets murdered? Elad? Cyrodian? You? Yta? I think you should all draw knives and fight in the arena! See who gets the throne then!”
Trembling, she got up from the bed, stood, and began to dress. Dursoris watched her, his pain mixed with utter affection. He had to watch her, the fall of her hair, the trembling of her small breasts, the outline of her slender body against the lamplight.…
“Orain, we can—”
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