A Fall of Princes (48 page)

Hirel laughed in the midst of his struggle. There was the
simple truth. A prince served but one purpose: to engender his successor.
Perhaps the empires should dispense with the charade of ruling dynasties: put
all their lords out to stud and let the lesser folk fend for themselves.

“Yes,” breathed Sevayin. “Go on.”

He faltered. Was the road a shade broader?

The wolves were closing in. But they had slowed. They cast
as hounds will who have lost the scent. Yet Hirel could see them with perfect
clarity.

Sevayin had won her feet again. “Don’t stop. Nonsense
distracts them. Do you know any bawdy songs?”

Hirel stopped short, mortally and preposterously affronted.

She laughed. Their pursuers tangled in confusion.

“Levity,” she said. “It’s a shield. It scatters their power.
Did you ever hear the tale of the Sun-priest and the whoremaster’s wife?”

It was outrageous. It was scurrilous. It widened and firmed
the road and quickened their pace.

Dragonwings boomed. Dragonfire seared their shrinking flesh.
Dragons’ claws snatched at them.

“Run!” cried Sevayin.

Hirel took wing and flew.

Worlds whirled away. Sevayin, linked hand to hand, was
singing. Even in wind-whipped snatches, the song set Hirel’s ears afire.

A blow rocked him. The pain came after, runnels of white
agony tracing his back.

His will found a minute, impossible fraction of strength.
The next stroke fell a hair too short. The third wrapped claws around his
trailing foot.

His training was a tatter. He had forsaken sacred modesty,
and he had learned to believe in magecraft, and his careful princely manners
had gone barbarian. But he could still meet agony with royal silence, and royal
rage. He turned on his tormentor.

He flung Sevayin off.

She gripped his wrist. She was as strong as the dragonmage.
Stronger. He was the link and the center, and they were rending him asunder. He
twisted, desperate.

His desperation had substance. It was dark, round, heavy. It
lay cold in his lone free hand. Without thought, he flung it.

The dragon howled and fell away. Hirel whirled through
madness.

The road was lost. He was lost. He was not afraid; he was
intrigued.

So this was damnation. Now he had proof beyond doubting: the
logicians were ignorant fools.

A few moments more and he would be worshipping Uvarra.

Something tore. Sevayin cried out, sharp and high. Hirel
fell headlong into darkness.

o0o

He did not know why this dream should be pleasant. It had
all the trappings of a nightmare. His back and his foot were afire; his wrist
throbbed. His every bone cried for mercy.

He lay on that tortured back and saw the blue vault of the
sky with the sun pitiless in it, and knew without seeing that the solidity
under him was earth, a barren fell, bitterly cold. The wind keened over him.

It was the sweetest song he had ever heard. And the shadows
that rose above him, the most beautiful he had ever seen. Sevayin’s faceless,
shapeless shape; Ulan’s dagger-fanged grin. He flung arms around them both.

Together they drew him up. He could stand, with cat and
Sunchild to hold him. He glanced once at his foot. Only once. The boot was a
charred remnant. The flesh . . .

He did not want to know what the mage had done to his back.

“I was beautiful once,” he heard himself say.

Sevayin tugged. He swayed.

Ulan crouched. He understood. He was inordinately proud of
that. He bestrode the supple back; the cat rose.

His legs dangled. His foot screamed in a voice of fire.

“Vayin,” he said quite calmly. “Vayin, I do not think I
can—”

“Be quiet,” she said, and she was not calm at all. Ulan
began to move, and she with him, swift and smooth. But never smooth enough for
his pain.

The sun shifted. The fell had grown a wall. Hirel heard
water falling; and, sudden and sweet and improbable, a trill of birdsong.

He did not wonder at it. Worlds changed. That was his new
wisdom.

The wall spawned a gate. It swallowed them.

o0o

There were always voices when one dreamed. These were
fascinating. One was Sevayin’s, cold and quiet. “I did not escape one prison
simply to cast myself into another.”

“I could not let you die as you intended.”

Hirel knew this deep voice with its whisper of roughness.
The name would not come. Merely a memory of power, a vision of fire dying to
ash.

“I have no intention of dying,” Sevayin said. “How can I?
You made me a woman; and I have two children to think of.”

“Do you believe that, Sunchild?”

“
I
do not!” Hirel
would have cried, had his body been his own.

Sevayin said, still calmly, “I know that if I die, they both
die. And I love them. Whatever magnitude of idiot that makes me.”

Hirel’s eyes dragged themselves open. Sevayin confronted the
Prince of Han-Gilen: old and young, man and woman, he drawn thin with age, she
ripened and rounded with the child; yet, for all of that, blood kin. Red-maned
Gileni mages with tempers tight-reined behind the rigid faces.

Hirel was the foreigner here, half the bone of their
contention. The lesser half, he suspected. He saw that she cradled her belly as
if to guard it.

“Let us go,” she said.

“Your prince can go no farther without healing.”

“Then give it to him. It was your servant who wounded him.”

“It was not.”

She bared her teeth. “Don’t quibble, Grandfather. So it was
your ally. Who bore firmly in mind that a man needs very little of his body to
beget sons. And who did all he could to leave little else.”

“Sevayin,” said the Red Prince, “I had nothing to do with
it.”

“Are we deluded? Is this not your summer palace? Did we not
come to it from the heart of the Golden Empire?”

“I knew when you made your gate. I knew where you would come
if you were not taken; I feared that you would be in sore straits. Thank
Avaryan, you are unscathed and he is but little hurt.”

“You call that little?”

“Flesh wounds,” the prince said, “as you would see, were you
less blind with fear for him.” He bent over Hirel, meeting the boy’s level
stare, unsmiling. To Sevayin he said, “I will heal him.”

“And then?”

“We will speak together.”

Hirel struggled to rise. He came as far as his knees; he
held himself there.

He was naked. He had not noticed. He had no time to notice
now. “We will speak before you touch me. You will tell us why we should trust
you: a man who would sacrifice his own grandchild in the name of a god.”

Prince Orsan’s eyes considered Hirel. Reckoned the count of
his forefathers. Widened at the sacrifices some had made in the name of a god
or a throne or their own pleasure.

The Red Prince said, “You have no choice but to trust me.
The mages could not keep you: they did not know your true measure. I know it,
and I know that while I may not be the stronger, I have the greater skill. You
will not escape me.”

“We can try,” said Sevayin.

“And then?” Her own words, set coolly before her. “What do
you fancy that you can do?”

“Stop the war.”

“No,” the Red Prince said. “Tell me the truth, priestess.”

She stiffened at the title. Her nostrils thinned; she would
not speak.

“I will tell you,” he said. “You foresee what I foresaw;
what sent me from the Heart of the World. The circle of deaths that must
encompass the peace.”

Still she was silent.

Not so Hirel. It was all bitterly, brutally clear. “It will
be soon. Within days. If it has not already befallen.”

“Not yet.” The Red Prince looked very old. He lowered
himself stiffly into a chair, bowing his head with infinite weariness. “I was
to keep you here if you came so far. I thought I had the strength. I thought
that I could countenance it all, for the world that will be. Even the murder of
my heart’s son.”

“Why not? Your body’s son is safe enough. He’ll have the
regency when the birthing kills me.” Sevayin tossed the fire of her mane,
fierce with despair. “Let be, old man. You’ll heal my prince, because you know
you’ll get no peace until you do. We’ll do our utmost to get out of your
clutches. Meanwhile our fathers will die, and the war will end, and the mages
will have their victory. What use to say more?”

“Yes,” said Orsan, sharp enough to startle her. “What use?
Your heart is set on hating me. I am the one you loved most, who betrayed you
most bitterly.”

“Just so.”

Hirel let himself fall, and a cry escape him.

At once they were beside him. The fear in Sevayin’s eyes was
little more than that in the Red Prince’s.

He quelled a smile. So then: he was worth a moment’s
anxiety.

He lay on his face, masked in pain, and let them fret over
him. The heat of their anger abated, and with it the fire of his wounds.

It was fascinating. It was pleasant, like the first
movements of the high art. Very like.

Sevayin’s hands stroked where the prince’s had passed. Her
kiss brushed his nape; her whisper sighed in his ear. “You were too clever,
cubling. You tried the merest shade too hard.”

He yawned. His foot itched; he rubbed it. It was healed. So
too his back. It could be convenient, this magic.

“I shall remember,” he said drowsily to Sevayin, “when next
you quarrel.”

She nipped him. He only laughed, and that for but a moment.
Her kinsman was watching. Hirel said, “I do not trust you, Red Prince. I do
believe that you will let us go. My lady is in no danger while she carries the
child; and she may work a miracle: end the war without ending the lives of its
principals.”

“You are clever,” Orsan said, “and cold, and wise. If you
did not have the grace to love my grandchild, I would crush you as I crush a
scorpion.”

Hirel smiled. “And I detest you, old serpent. I do not make
the error of despising you.”

They understood one another, as true enemies must. The Red
Prince vouchsafed the glimmer of a smile. Hirel saluted him as a warrior will
who grants his opponent due respect.

But no quarter. Not now, not ever.

Sevayin Is’kirien

No one would ever know how much she hated this body. Hated
and loved it. Its softness. Its roundness. Its downy skin. Its heavy swaying
breasts; its grotesquerie of belly; its limbs like a spider’s, thin and
strengthless.

It knew what it was made for. To receive a man’s seed. To
carry his children.

To carry this child, this alien, this stranger growing and
dancing and dreaming within her. She hated him as she hated the body that had
conceived him. She loved him with an intensity that made the
Kasar’
s fire seem a dim and warmthless
thing.

When on the road she had nearly lost the bonds of her being,
and her son with it, she had known surely that if he died, she could not bear
to live. She still reached often for him with hand or mind, assuring herself
that he was well; that he had not suffered, that he was prospering.

She loved only Hirel more. She loved her body but little
less. Because one of them loved it, and one of them waxed within it, and she
had chosen it in full awareness of what she did.

As full as it could be, when she was he. She did not know
the whole of it yet. She was too new to it.

The heart of the matter was purest simplicity. The shape had
changed; the self remained the same.

She laughed in the darkness, knowing it. There was no escape
from the tangle of loves and hates and fears and joys and flaws and perfections
that were Sarevadin.

She hated it. She loved it. She was beginning, slowly, to
accept it.

o0o

She lay beside Hirel, that last night before they faced
their fathers, and watched him sleep. There was no sleep in her. She had done all
her shaking; she had caged her multitude of terrors.

She was calm, resting her eyes on his face. He looked like a
child.

She could go. Leave him there, safe and hidden, and soothe
his anger after. She did not need him. It was not his father who would accept
no end but his own and utter victory. She only needed herself as she was now,
carrying the heir of the empires.

He stirred, seeking her warmth. His hand found her middle.
Even in his sleep he smiled. His dream saw a bright-headed manchild, nightskinned,
with startling golden eyes.

She buried her face in his hair. No. She was lying to
herself. She could not leave him. She needed him.

Her dream had seen it long since. He was the key to her
power. She could not even hate him for it: there was too much else to hate.

Prince Orsan would not ride with them. He had turned his
coat too often; this last turning had broken him. The man who faced them in the
dark before dawn was become a stranger, ill and old, leaning heavily on a
staff.

He was their servant in spite of their resistance. He fed
them; he led them to bathe. He offered them clothing: garments fit for princes
who must face their people, splendid to garishness but practical enough under
the crusts of gold and gems.

The eightfold complexity of Hirel’s robe went on all
together, like his wedding garment; this was divided for riding, its folds as
supple as good armor. Its diamonds adorned his every point of vulnerability; a
broad collar of gold and diamond warded his throat, and his coronet was of an
ancient style, shaped as a crowned helmet. He smiled when he put it on, an
edged smile.

Sevayin’s own finery was less warlike, if no less antique.
Men and women both had worn it a hundred years ago in Han-Gilen.

Its ornateness bespoke the Asanian fashion. Its simplicity
was of the east. Boots heeled with gold, their soft leather dyed deep Gileni
green. Trousers cut full, cloth of gold lined with Asanian velvet. A
breastband, which she was wise enough to put on in silence. A shirt of fine
linen. A tunic, knee-long, stiff with embroidery. A glittering overrobe, half
coat, half cloak, which would pour beautifully over a senel’s back, and ward
off arrows with all its gemmed embroideries, and merely in passing disguise
both her sex and her condition. Her torque guarded her throat; for crown she
had her hair, woven with strings of emeralds and coiled about her head in the
helmet braids of the Ianyn kings.