A Fall of Princes (15 page)

He fled. He sought his mare, found her more nondescript than
ever among the seneldi of the high lords of Keruvarion, knew that she had few
equals for spirit or for swiftness. He was not comforted, even though he rode
her a little, to her great and queenly pleasure. He left her, to wander the
palace.

It was all open to him now. People stared and murmured as he
went past. Rumor gave him a hundred names, a hundred tales. A few were
accurate, or close to it.

He found the Zhil’ari; they were content with their
barracks, though not with the order that they restrict their paint to a
pathetic sigil between their brows. It was indecent, all that bare skin
flaunted to the world.

Hirel commiserated, and throttled his impulse to laughter,
and wandered on. He felt like a shadow, a thing half real, visible yet
intangible.

The sun sank. Hirel climbed the long stair to the prince’s
door, and the strangers on guard did not try to challenge him. Sarevan was
asleep with his arm around Ulan’s neck.

Hirel sat by him in silence as the shadows lengthened.
Faintly, through the open windows he heard chanting. Avaryan’s priests were
singing their god to his rest.

The priest on deathwatch left; another took his place,
settling on the edge of Hirel’s awareness.

From where he sat he could see the sky flame with sunset and
fade slowly. A star kindled. Behind Hirel the watcher lit a lamp, a flicker in
the twilight.

Hirel straightened. He was stiff with long sitting. He rose
and stretched each muscle as he had learned to, with grace and precision.
Making a dance of it, his tutor used to say.

The old man was dead now. He spoke too freely to someone
powerful, and one morning there was a new and much younger man waiting to
instruct his imperial highness in the proper pursuits of princes.

Hirel turned. The new watcher was a woman, and patently akin
to the redheaded princes of Han-Gilen.

She did not appear to share her young kinsman’s hatred of
Hirel. Her eyes admired his figure, and certainly his unconscious display of
it.

She was not a priestess, he noticed; she wore no torque, nor
any ornament at all. Her gown was green, and very simple, like a servant’s. Her
bright hair coiled at the nape of her neck. She was well past that first bloom
which the poets judged to be the perfection of a woman’s beauty, but well shy
of raddled age; her features were too strong for perfection, in truth would not
have looked amiss on a boy, and her figure in the gown, though far from boyish,
was somewhat scant of breast and hip.

She was, in truth, too old and too thin, and she was far
from pretty. She was the most beautiful woman Hirel had ever seen.

He blinked. She did not vanish. Her eyes had the southern
tilt, but they were more round than almond-narrow, long and dark in the
honey-gold face—Asanian blood there, no doubt of it. There were shadows under
them.

Her cheek was scarred, thin parallel furrows, ivory on gold.
The marring only made her more beautiful.

She rose. She was somewhat taller than Hirel. She bent over
the sleeper, smoothing his hair with ineffable tenderness.

Hirel’s heart, ever a fool, throbbed with jealousy. Oh, yes,
his brain mocked it. Begrudge a woman’s love for her son. Fall instantly,
hopelessly, and eternally in love with the Empress of Keruvarion.

Why not? His father had done it before him. And been sent
packing with courtesy but with great dispatch, because she preferred a
fatherless upstart to the heir of the Golden Throne.

It was as well, Ziad-Ilarios had said once. The royal line
had clung to its purity against a millennium of alien wives and concubines, had
fought an often desperate battle to stern the sullying tide. Ziad-Ilarios had
gone home alone to Kundri’j, wedded the sister whom the High Court had allotted
as his mate, and begotten an heir of unimpeachable legitimacy. No wild redheaded
savage to cast shame on the dynasty.

Hirel shivered. One word from this woman’s mouth, and he
would never have been. Nor Sarevan. Nor this hour in Endros, full of lamplight
and darkness.

She stood erect. A pin slipped free; her hair tumbled down her
back.

She snatched, and muttered something utterly unqueenly. Her
glance crossed Hirel’s, bright with temper.

His lips quirked. He bit them.

Hers were tight, but they wobbled. It burst forth all at
once, as laughter must, even in the midst of grief.

“You look,” she gasped, “you look exactly like your father.”

“So I am told.”

Her laughter died. He was sorry: she had a wonderful laugh,
rich and full-bodied, like Sovrani wine. “He could do that, too. One look, and
all my crotchets would collapse.” She paused. “Is he well?”

“He was when I left him.”

“I’ve always regretted that we were what we were. That we
had to make choices.”

Hirel was silent. She smiled quickly. “You are very welcome
in Endros.”

He bowed. She touched him, a feather-brush of her hand across
his cheek. It felt not at all like lèse-majesté.

“Yes,” she said, “you are his image. He was the fairest of
men, and the gentlest, and one of the strongest.”

Hirel laughed a little. “I fear I fall far short of him.”

“Ah, but he was older. Those shoulders, look, they’ve inches
coming. And you’ll be taller than he was.” Mischief sparkled in her glance.
“Come back to me in a hand of years, and I’ll gladly run away with you.”

“Need we wait?” asked Hirel. He took her hand and kissed it.
“Come now, be my love, and let the empires fend for themselves.”

“Why,” she said in wonder, “you almost mean it.”

“It must be in the blood.” He sighed. “They breed us for
beauty, for color, and for such size as we can attain; and, it seems, for
conceiving mad passions for redheaded royalty.”

“No,” said Sarevan behind him, “that’s not madness, that’s
taste.”

They turned. Sarevan was wide awake. Perhaps he looked a
little better; perhaps it was only the warmth of his smile.

“Good evening, Mother,” he said. “Good evening, O lion of
the west. Would either of you be inclined to succor a starving man?”

When Sarevan ate, Hirel discovered that he could share it;
and that it would stay quietly in its place. As if his stomach knew what his
brain had not yet comprehended.

The crisis was past. Sarevan was mending. He would live and
be strong.

Hirel was no stranger to temples. Asanion’s high prince was
high priest of a dozen gods, each with his shrine and his worship and his
priesthood, each with his festivals which royalty must adorn. If Avaryan’s
temple in Endros had been set among the others Hirel knew, it would have been
but middling large, and though extraordinarily well attended by both priests
and people, not remarkably rich.

Folk in Asanion would have looked on it with disfavor,
muttering that the god’s own son could spare so little of his fabled wealth to
adorn the holy place. Here it was of a piece with the rest, simplicity shaped
into high art. All that simple pillared hall of gold-veined stone looked toward
its center: the altar, and above it an orb of gold suspended in the air, its
heart an everlasting fire. Nothing held it up. Nothing at all.

Hirel had come here out of curiosity, and because a novice
had brought a summons worded properly and courteously. He stopped to stare at
the altar and the orb, and to wonder how anyone could have wrought such a
prodigy.

“Magic,” said the novice as if he had spoken. “It’s nothing
in particular, though it makes ignorant people afraid. A few of the novices
stole it once and played ball with it. They say it was Prince Sarevan who
scored a goal with it, full in the prioress’ fishpond, and he not even a novice
yet, though he was bound for Han-Gilen’s temple that High Summer. But he was
mageborn; he didn’t need the spells the others had to sing to keep the Orb in
the air.”

“Are you all mages here?” Hirel asked a little sourly.

The child skipped, tossing her long unruly hair. “Most of
us. We’re New Order here, under the Sunborn; we’re priest-mages, white
enchanters.”

“You, too?”

“I will be,” she said from the promontory of her nine
summers. Or did she have so many? “I was chosen. The empress says I’m mageborn;
she says I’ll know it when I’m a woman, and I’m lucky, because by then I’ll be
old enough to use my power properly.”

“Unlike her son.”

“Ah well, what can he do? He’s not only mageborn, he’s
godborn; it’s a fire in him. That’s why he did his novitiate in Han-Gilen.
They’re Old Order there, no mages, but the Red Prince is the wisest mage in the
world. He taught the Sunborn, and he took the Sunborn’s son in hand, and tamed
him nicely, everybody says.” She stopped short. Her eyes filled with tears. “Is
it true what they’re saying? Is he like to die?”

“Not now,” Hirel answered her.

The tears fell; she shook them away, scowling to make up for
them. “Thank Avaryan! We’ve all been praying our hardest. I wanted to do my
praying where he was, but no one would let me. It’s because I’m still too
young; I haven’t come into my power. But when I do . . .”

Hirel gratified her with a visible shiver. She was formidable
enough now; she would be a woman to walk well shy of.

He narrowed his eyes. “Would you be the empress’ fosterling?
The one whom Sarevan—”

“Yes, I’m the one who’s here because he did something with
his power that he shouldn’t have. That’s why I’m mageborn. A mage made me. When
I want to make him annoyed, I call him Mother.” She tilted her head,
bright-eyed. “He must be fond of you. He doesn’t tell everybody. Only people he
trusts.”

Hirel blinked. She waited for him to gather his wits. She
was another mongrel, a small wiry brown creature with hair and eyes of purest
Asanian gold. When she was older she would be striking.

She was going to be very dangerous indeed.

She grinned, gap-toothed, and patted his cheek. She had to
stretch to do it. “Poor child, you’re shaking. What’s the trouble? Is it all
too much for you?”

“It is impossible!” he burst out.

“Of course it is. We’re mages.” She took his hand without
the least suggestion of diffidence. “Come now, we’re dallying.”

o0o

Hirel had not known what to expect. A priest certainly. A
mage, from the child’s chatter. But not precisely this.

The blunt earth-colored face bespoke the Nine Cities, whence
had come the Order of Mages; the greying braid, the torque, the white robe
marked him a votary of Avaryan. He sat over a scroll in a bare sunlit chamber,
companioned by a small bright-eyed creature that sat on his shoulder and
purred.

“I had not known,” said Hirel, “that a mage of the Guild
would endure Avaryan’s yoke.”

The man looked up with perfect calm. His familiar coiled its
long tail about his neck and yawned in Hirel’s face. The priest stroked it; it
arched its supple back.

“I had not known,” he responded, “that an heir of the lion
would endure captivity in Keruvarion.”

Hirel smiled with a distinct edge. “It is given out that I
am a guest here.”

“Are you?”

“I bow to the inevitable.”

“Of course.” The familiar left its perch to stalk a shadow.
Its master rolled and bound his scroll and turned to face Hirel fully. “Have
you approached the Asanian ambassador?”

“Is that a concern of yours?”

The wizard-priest folded his hands. To the eye he was
harmless, a small aging man with tired eyes. “It concerns me that I be able to
trust you.”

“Why?”

The man sighed. “The heir of the Sunborn has known betrayal
in one of its more appalling guises. He may yet die for it. And you are the
highest lord but one, of the people who betrayed him.”

“I am no stranger to treason.”

“From which side of it, prince?”

Hirel drew himself up, measuring his words in ice and iron.
“Much ill can be said of me, and much has been said, by your own prince not
least. But of that I am not guilty.” He advanced a step; his voice quickened,
heated. “What can you know of all that he has suffered? How can you begin to
comprehend it?”

“Peace,” said the priest, unruffled. “I but do my duty.”

“They did their duty likewise, who would have left your high
prince to die within call of his father.”

The priest rose. His familiar wove mewing about his legs. He
cradled his arms; it sprang up weightlessly and curled there, fixing Hirel with
a steady golden stare. He glared back, gold for gold.

The mage’s voice seemed almost to come from within the
creature’s eyes, a soft voice, but implacable. “If you had brought him here,
there would have been no such contention.”

“I brought him to his father as he desired.”

“Commendable,” the priest said evenly.

“Why have you summoned me?” Hirel demanded. “What use can I
be to you? Will you make an example of me, and execute me for a traitor?”

“That is the emperor’s province. Not ours.”

“Why, then?”

The priest looked long at him. Certainly he used more than
eyes. Hirel’s nose twitched at the tang of wizardry.

At last the priest spoke. “I wished to see you. To know what
you are.”

“And?”

“You are not what you think you are.”

“Folk seldom are.”

“Your self-possession is admirable.”

“I am a prince.”

The priest bowed. Mocking, and not mocking. His familiar
purred. “I would not doubt the truth of your birth. But do you know the
fullness of it?”

“I have been instructed.”

“By philosophers.” The priest was above scorn. “Logicians.
Men who see with their eyes, but who are blind to the vision within.”

“What is there to see, save the reflection of one’s own
face?”

“What was it that slew your mother?”

The blow rocked Hirel to his foundations. His eyes went
dark; his mind emptied. From far away he saw himself, frozen, stunned; and
watched his body spring from immobility into deadly flight. The mage fell back,
raising neither hand nor power in his own defense.