A Fall of Princes (30 page)

Sarevan laughed with him, freely, but hit him without
gentleness after. “Whelp! This isn’t a raiding party.”

Zha’dan hit back. Sarevan lunged at him. They rolled on the
grass in laughing combat.

Ulan made himself a part of it, growling in high delight. At
the end of it they lay all together, hiccoughing, scoured clean of aught but
mirth.

o0o

Sunset brought battle again, but battle of words, without
laughter. Sarevan was minded to cross Asanion as he had crossed Keruvarion, in
secret, taking sustenance from land and sky. Hirel would not hear of it. “This
is not your wild east. The hunting belongs to the lords and satraps, each in
his own demesne. Those who hunt without leave are reckoned thieves and punished
accordingly.”

“Not with Ulan and Zha’dan to cover our tracks,” said
Sarevan.

Hirel tossed his head, impatient. “And if they do, how
swiftly can we ride? How far must we wander, to be secret, to fill our bellies?
How careful must we be to spare our seneldi, now that we may find no others?”

“What do you want to do? Take the open road? Invite our
assassins to finish what our foolish flight interrupted?”

“Take the road, yes; outrun our enemies. If enemies we have.
I saw no daggered shadows. I tasted no poison in our wine. The posthouse might
have been abandoned, so easily we left it.”

“It was not—” Sarevan’s tongue met his mind and froze. He
had been too busy running to think. He had forgotten indeed that this was not
Keruvarion.

“Speculate,” said Hirel, “if you can. Sorcery nearly felled
you. You gave way to instinct: you fled it. What if you were meant to do just
that? To run into a trap. Or more subtle yet, to abandon the swift way; to take
to the shadows. And thereby most certainly to delay my coming to Kundri’j.”

“And if you are delayed, Aranos becomes high prince.”
Sarevan liked the taste of it not at all. It was alien; it burned, like Asanian
spices. He spat it out. “But if we ride openly, the enemy will know. He’ll lay
new traps. I don’t think he’ll wait long to make them deadly.”

“Are you afraid?” Hirel asked.

“Yes, I’m afraid!” Sarevan shot back. “But a coward, I’m
not. I don’t want to arrive late, but neither do I want to arrive dead.”

“That would not be comfortable,” said Hirel. “We have
Zha’dan and Ulan. We have you, whom sorcery cannot fail to rouse. We even have
myself. I have no power and no great skill in hunting or in fighting, but I do
know Asanion. If we vanish for a day or two, press on through the shadows, I
think then we may return to the daylight.”

“With stolen seneldi?”

“Ah,” said Zha’dan, entering the fray at last, “that’s easy.
We find a town with a fair. We trade. We do it twice or thrice, over a day or
two. Then when our path is comfortably confused, we go back to the inns and the
highroad.”

“It won’t work,” Sarevan said. “We may lose a pair of
seneldi, but we can’t lose our faces.”

“You may,” Hirel said slowly. “Sometimes, Olenyai go all
masked. It is a rite of theirs. We cannot sustain such a deception: the masked
do not mingle with folk in inns, nor speak any tongue but their own secret
battle-language. But for a day, two, three—it is possible.”

“Where will we find the robes?” demanded Sarevan. He was
being difficult, he knew it. But someone had to be.

“I can wield a needle,” said Hirel, astonishingly. “For the
cloth, we find a fair. I can be a slave for an hour if I must: a slave whose
mistress has a fancy for black.”

Sarevan opened his mouth, closed it. Zha’dan was regarding
Hirel in something remarkably like admiration.

With a sharp hiss, Sarevan conceded the battle. “Very well.
Tonight we ride in the shadows. Tomorrow we find a fair.”

Hirel did not gloat over his victory. It was Zha’dan who
whooped and kissed him, disconcerting him most gratifyingly, and went to saddle
the seneldi.

o0o

They found their fair: a town with a market, and a wooded
hill outside it, thick enough with undergrowth to shelter the beasts and the
two men who could not show their faces. Hirel went down on foot in his
underrobe, cut to the brevity of a slave’s tunic, with Zha’dan’s iron collar
about his neck and a purse of Asanian coins hung from his belt.

The Lord Uzmeidjian had not missed them or their golden kin,
Zha’dan had assured the two princes; and certainly Zha’dan had earned them.
Hirel had looked at him and sighed, but said nothing.

The boy was gone for a long while. Sarevan tried to sleep
through some of it. The rest he spent on his belly in a knot of canes, keeping
watch over the road and the town. Ulan kept him company.

He had shed his damnable tunic; flies buzzed about him in
the day’s heat but did not sting, and the earth was cool. He would have been
comfortable, if he had known how Hirel was faring. The boy had done well enough
in his venture into a Varyani town, but this was Asanion. Who knew what
niggling law he might have managed to break in his princely ignorance? Did he
even know how to bargain in the market? Or if the mages after all had not lost
him, and had seized him—

Sarevan set his jaw and willed himself to stop fretting. His
face itched more maddeningly than ever. He had used the last of the dye this
morning. It had stung like fire; he had almost cried out, as much with
knowledge as with pain. It was the dye that so tormented his skin: eating at
it, burning it, leaving it raw and angry. Even if he could find another bottle,
he did not think his face would survive it.

He worked his fingers into Ulan’s fur, lest they claw new
weals in his cheeks. People passed on the road. Was that a boy with hot-gold
hair cropped into a wild mane, coming up from the town?

Not yet.

He set himself to his vigil. The sun crawled to its zenith.

o0o

Ulan growled, the barest murmur. Sarevan shook himself
awake and peered. A slave with a pack on his back trudged slowly toward the
thicket. A slave with dust-drab hair.

Dust in truth, and a handsome bruise purpling his cheekbone.
He started as Sarevan rose out of the thicket; his eyes widened at the bare
body.

He did not speak. He looked both furious and pleased with
himself. He strode into the thicket’s heart, tossed down his pack, greeted
Zha’dan with a vanishingly brief smile.

“You’ve been fighting,” Sarevan accused him.

He knelt to uncover his booty. Coolly, without looking up,
he said, “I have been defending my honor.”

Sarevan seized him by the nape and hauled him up. “What did
you do, you little fool? Were you trying to get us all killed?”

Hirel twisted free, angry now; a white heat, rigidly
restrained. “I was trying to be what I seemed to be. I did not heed the taunting
of the market curs. But when they seized me and sought to strip me, because
they had a wager, and they wished to see what sort of eunuch I was—was I to let
them see that I am no eunuch at all?” He tossed his hair out of his eyes. They
were fiery gold. “I had already let it be known that I served a lady; and the
law is strict. One of my adversaries had a knife, if perchance it should be
needed. Should I have let him use it?”

Sarevan said nothing, quenched for once, beginning to regret
his hastiness. Hirel was white and shaking. He was worse than angry. He was on
the thin edge between murder and tears.

He calmed himself visibly, drawing in deep shuddering
breaths. “I defended myself well enough. Better certainly than they looked for.
They chose to seek meeker prey elsewhere; and I won a modicum of respect from
the merchants. They did not drive as hard a bargain as they might have.”

“You liked that,” Sarevan said. “Maybe you should have been
born a merchant.”

“Better a tradesman than a worthless vagabond. Or,” said
Hirel, bending again to his unpacking, “a eunuch. Of any sort.”

Zha’dan looked ready to ask how there could be more than
one. Mercifully for all of them, he held his tongue.

o0o

Hirel had needles and thread and cutting blades. He had
bolts of black linen and bolts of fine black wool. He had belts of black
leather, and black gauntlets, and boots that proved not to fit too badly; and
marvel of marvels, four black-hilted swords in black sheaths. They were Olenyai
blades; but he would not tell how he had found them. He looked both proud and
guilty.

“He stole them,” Zha’dan translated, with approval.

Hirel flushed. “I appropriated them. As high prince I am
overlord of all warriors. I claimed my royal right.”

Zha’dan applauded him. He flushed more deeply still and
attacked the somber linen.

The others found themselves pressed into service. With Hirel
directing them, they transformed themselves into
shiu’oth Olenyai
: warriors under solemn vow.

When they were done, the sun was westering, and Sarevan was
sucking a much-stabbed finger. Hirel slapped down his hand. “Mask yourself,”
the boy commanded. Sarevan obeyed rather sourly.

Hirel stood back, hands on hips, head cocked. “You will do,”
he judged, “for a while. If no one examines you too closely.”

“You comfort me,” said Sarevan.

Hirel ignored the barb. For himself he had stitched a
headdress to match the rest: the filleted headcloth and the mask that concealed
all beneath it, even to the eyes. A panel of thinnest linen set over them was
easy enough to see out of, but from the outside seemed featureless darkness.

“We look alarming,” Zha’dan said. He sounded highly amused.

Sarevan was stifling already. At least, he reflected wryly,
he would not find it so easy to claw at his itching cheeks.

o0o

People had stared at a dozen Olenyai and a young lord and
his two barbarian slaves. They did not stare at three
shiu’oth Olenyai
. Their eyes slid around the shadowed shapes; their
voices muted; their bodies drew back smoothly, as water parts from a stone.

It was almost ridiculously simple to exchange the stolen
seneldi for a pair of black mares. The seller did not haggle at all. He almost
thrust the beasts at them, his eyes rolling white, his plump face sheening with
sweat. He asked no questions. When they left him, he looked ready to weep for
relief.

So with the next seller, and the next. Most often it was
plain fear. Sometimes it was fear poisoned with hate. Then Sarevan’s back would
twitch, dreading a stone or a hurled blade.

o0o

Zha’dan was swift to lose his pleasure in the game. In the
night, when they camped, he was unwontedly silent. He would speak of it only
once. “I’ve never been hated before. It hurts.”

Hirel comforted him as only Hirel could. Sarevan lay apart
and tried not to hear them.

The trying only made it the more distinct. Whispers. A
flicker of laughter. A breath caught as if in sudden pleasure. The rhythm of
bodies moving together: the oldest dance in the world.

For the first time in a long while, he was aware of the
weight of his torque. He took it off, straining a little, for the iron
sheathing stiffened it.

The night air was cold on his bared neck. He rubbed it,
feeling of the scars, the circle of calluses that had grown from old galls.

A bitter smile touched the comer of his mouth. An Asanian
would not have known that he was not a slave, that he had not been one for long
years.

The first had been the worst. He had lived with numbroot
salve and no little blood, and wounds that festered, and no bandages. Bandages
only prolonged the agony.

He turned the blessed, brutal thing in his hands. Disguised,
it looked liked what it was: a badge of servitude.

He held it to his breast. It was a cold lover. It granted no
mortal peace.

Yet there was peace in it, bounded within its circle. Peace
that came neither easily nor quickly, and yet it came. He was still Avaryan’s
priest. Neither murder nor treason could rob him of that.

o0o

The hunt had lost them. Sarevan marked it in the passing
of pain.

“For a long while I could feel them looking for us,” said
Zha’dan. “They followed the seneldi we stole, I think, and when that trail
proved false, cast wide for scent of us. Now there’s nothing.”

“They will wait ahead,” Hirel said. “In Kundri’j.”

He did not sound unduly cast down. The Golden City was far
away yet, and they were advancing at a good pace under a clear sky. The
brilliance of autumn had begun to touch it; the land beneath was like and yet
wholly unlike anything Sarevan had known in the east.

Hirel had been wise, he conceded now, to demand that they
take the open road. In the heart of Asanion, there were no shadows to hide in:
no wilderness. The broad rolling plain was a pattern of walled towns joined
together by roads, each town set like a jewel in a webwork of fields.

The streams here ran straight and steady, wrought by men and
not by gods; the trees were planted in rows that guided and guarded the wind,
or in the artful disarray of the high ones’ hunting grounds. And always there
were the gods, the small ones and the great ones, worshipped in shrines at
every milestone, and often between.

This was a tamed land. A company could not ride free over
the fields, or wander from the highroad on a path that though narrower might
prove a shorter way to Kundri’j. Even the road had its laws and divisions, its
hierarchy of passers, from the slave on bare feet to the prince in his chariot.

For
shiu’oth Olenyai
on swift seneldi, there was the broad smooth verge and an open way, but they
might not stray into a field or onto the road itself. And even they had to stop
for the passage of a personage, or slow to a crawl in traversing a town.

Now and then as they crossed Asanion, and more often as they
drew near to the imperial city, they had seen caravans of slaves shuffling in
chains from market to market. Hirel had seen, but he had not seen, as was the
way in the Golden Empire. Zha’dan learned that custom quickly enough: his
people had captives and the odd bought servant, though never whole
market-droves of them.