A Fall of Princes Read online

  And dreamed. No horror, now; but this was kin to the black dream, and to memory. Nothing so clear as prophecy had led him to a fernbrake on the marches of Karmanlios, and shown him a wounded child: a child who by fate and birth and necessity must be his greatest enemy.

  And yet, foremost, a child, and sorely hurt. Hirel would never know truly how close he had been to dissolution, or how bitter had been the battle to heal his body and his mind. There was no magery in him, but there was something, a will or a power for which Sarevan had no name, and it was strong in its resistance.

  It had found its way into Sarevan’s own healing, and somehow made it stronger. It was like Hirel its master. Fierce, heedless, haughty, but gentle in spite of itself. It neither knew nor cared where it dealt wounds, but it was swift enough to heal them, if only for its own peace.

  It shaped for Sarevan a vision, a young man’s face. Hirel’s, perhaps, shorn of its youth and softness. It was a stronger face than Sarevan might have expected, and more truly royal, with its pride pared clean.

  Sarevan could not like it, nor truly trust it. But love—yes, that would not be difficult. Neither did he like or truly trust his father. Mirain was above such simplicity.

  The golden eyes opened; the vision raised its chin. Oh, indeed, it was Hirel. No one else had quite that spark of temper.

  “I am the key,” he said. His voice was deep, and yet indisputably Hirel’s. “For war or for peace, I am the key. Remember.”

  “You’ll never lose your arrogance, will you?” Sarevan observed.

  The dream-image frowned at his levity. “I am no man’s pawn. Yet I am the crux. Remember.”

  Remember. Remember.

  “Remember!”

  o0o

  Sarevan started awake. His mind roiled. He clutched desperately at clarity. At memory.

  Not Hirel’s face. Not dreams, not prophecy that must be false or mad. Clear daylight. His own bed, his own high chamber, his own half-mended body. His power—

  Nothing. Silence. Utter absence, edged with agony. In dream at least, however terrible, he was whole.

  He dragged himself up. Morning flamed in the eastward window. By sheer will he won his way to it.

  The city spread below, his father’s city, his own. Above its roofs, beyond the broad flood of Suvien, loomed the rock from which the city took its name: Endros Avaryan, Throne of the Sun, and on it the tower that the Sunborn had raised in a night with song and with power, his own and his empress’ and his oathbrother’s.

  They had faced together all the million stars, and cried to Avaryan beyond them, and made a mighty shaping of magic. All night the rock was veiled in a mist of light, and when at last the sun rose, it rose upon a wonder. The lofty hill had grown more lofty still, and its upper reach was polished like black glass, edged and chiseled into a tower of four horns, with a fifth rising high from their center, and on this tallest spire a crystal that flamed like a sun.

  No window broke those sheer walls, no gate divided them. The tower might have been a deception, an image sculpted in the stone of the hill.

  It was no simple image, nor stronghold, nor monument to imperial pride. It was a temple of its own strange kind, raised to bear witness to the power of the god. While it stood, the tales said, the city of the Sunborn would never fall. A potent comfort while the son of the Sunborn lay yet in his mother’s womb.

  Sarevan stood by his window, leaning against it, staring at the black tower. Even so early, with Avaryan barely risen, the crystal blazed bright enough to blind a man.

  Sarevan fixed his eyes full upon it. That much at least he had still, the power to bear the sun’s light without flinching. Once he could have drunk it like wine, and fed on it, and gained life and strength enough to sustain his body for a servant-startling while.

  It was only light now, bright but endurable. As the earth was only earth, lovely but muted, oddly lifeless; as the air was only simple, mortal, summer-scented air. As living creatures were only bodies, and men no more than their outward seeming: hands and voices; eyes that mirrored nothing but his own face.

  Ulan leaned against him, purring. Sarevan looked down. Shadow-grey cat-shape, slitted green eyes. A mute beast that, sensing its master’s trouble, strove to comfort him with its body.

  He watched his fingers weave their way into the thick fur. They were very thin. “Tomorrow,” he said, “I call for my sword.” His voice, like his eyes, had changed little. It was still—almost—his own.

  He straightened. He was not strong, not yet, but he could stand and he could walk, and the rest was coming swiftly enough to make a simple man marvel. He began to walk.

  “My lord called?”

  Sarevan, caught between window and door, nearly fell. He braced his feet and stilled his face. He did not know this nervous young creature in his own white livery. A new one, fresh from some desert chieftain’s brood from the look of him.

  Sarevan did not know that he had done it until it was done: the flick of his mind just so, the gathering of name and lineage, the skimming of thoughts unwarded by power. He had done it from instinct since before he could remember, as a simple man might judge another in a quick sharp glance. He kept doing it, from instinct; he could not school himself to forbear. When nothing came, and then the lancing agony, he almost welcomed them.

  One thing he was learning. He did not fall into darkness, though the boy cried out in dismay. “My lord! Are you ill? Shall I fetch—”

  “No.” Sarevan drew himself up again. The pain was passing. He put on a smile and said lightly, “I must be going to live. I’m down to a single nursemaid. What are they punishing you for?”

  The boy’s tawny cheeks flushed beneath the patterning of scars, but his narrow black eyes had begun to dance. “My lord, it is a high honor to serve you.”

  “Two hundred steps high.”

  Sarevan completed the journey he had begun. The squire moved aside, a little quickly perhaps.

  Sarevan looked out on the landing and down the long spiral. He knew what had possessed him to live in a tower. High air and young muscles and power that could give him wings if he had need.

  He had flown straight up more than once, and not always from the inside. One of the gardeners still went about with one eye cocked upward lest he lose his hat to a swooping wizardling.

  Sarevan eyed the ul-cat and the sturdy young squire, and counted the steps again. Two hundred and two.

  He drew a breath. With a word and a gesture he had them moving, the cat going before, the boy beside him. He walked every step of the two hundred and two, and he did not lean once on his companion.

  At the bottom he had to stop. His knees struggled to give way beneath him. His lungs labored; his eyes blurred and darkened. Sternly he called them all to order.

  The boy faced him directly, a head shorter than he, breathing with perfect ease. The black brows were knit. “You look unwell, my lord. Shall I carry you back up?”

  “What is your name?”

  The boy blinked as much at the tone as at the question, but he answered calmly enough. “Shatri, my lord. Shatri Tishri’s-son.

  “I know your name, my lord,” he added, like an idiot, but his eyes had filled with mischief.

  Sarevan studied the bright eyes until they went wide and veered away. Shatri was blushing again. When Sarevan touched him, he started and trembled like an unbroken colt. “Hush now, lad, I won’t eat you. Which name of mine do you know?”

  “Why, lord, all of them. We are required to know. But we must call you my lord and my prince.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, my lord. You are.”

  “Ah, simplicity.” But Shari was not simple at all. He would walk as Sarevan bade him, and he would offer his shoulder for Sarevan’s hand, but whenever Sarevan spoke to him, he suffered a fit of shaking.

  It was often like that with the new ones. It had little to do with the terrors of serving mages, and much to do with the terrors of serving kings.

  o0o
r />   They stopped in the stableyard beside the largest of the stone troughs. Sarevan sat on its edge.

  For a long while he simply sat, and his sitting was a prayer of thanksgiving that he need not force himself forward another step. His sight swelled and dimmed, swelled and dimmed. His body would not stop trembling.

  Yet he smiled at Shatri, and somewhere he found the voice to say, “My senel. Do you know him? The oddity, the blue-eyed stallion. Bring him to me.”

  The boy hesitated. Perhaps at last he was considering other orders than Sarevan’s. But he bowed and went away.

  Ulan stayed. Sarevan sat on the damp grass that rimmed the trough, half lying on the warm solidity of the cat’s flank. Ulan began again to purr.

  People came. They remonstrated. Sarevan smiled and was immovable. Then someone shouted, and darkness burst from a stable door.

  Bregalan was no simple lackwit of a senel. He was of the Mad One’s line: he had the mind of a man, a brother, a kinsman born to the shape and the wisdom of a beast. He did not suffer fools, or ropes, or doors that dared to shut him off from his two-legged brother; though for once he had suffered someone to saddle him, for Sarevan’s sake.

  He was black, like his grandsire. He was beautiful, which he knew very well. He was, as Sarevan had said, an oddity. His eyes were not seneldi brown or silver or green, nor even the rarer ruby of the Mad One and his get.

  When he was at peace, they were as blue as the sky in autumn. When he was in a rage, they were the precise and searing blue that lives in the heart of a flame.

  They found Sarevan. They rolled. Bregalan scattered the presumptuous few who stood in his way; one, slow to retreat, he very nearly gored.

  Having cleared the stableyard, he approached Sarevan with perfect dignity marred only by a snort at Ulan. The cat responded with a lazy growl. Bregalan disdained to hear it, lowering his head to examine Sarevan with great care.

  Sarevan reached up, wound his fingers in the senel’s mane. Bregalan sank to his knees. He had never done it before. Sarevan fought the easy tears, mustered the rags of his strength, dragged himself onto the familiar back. “Up,” he whispered into the ear that cocked for him.

  It was easier by far than walking. Bregalan had soft paces: they were bred into him. He softened them to silk, and he wrought a miracle. He reined in his wild temper, although he could not forbear from dancing gently as Sarevan woke to something very like joy. He could still converse with his brother, a wordless, ceaseless colloquy, body speaking to body with nothing between. He was no cripple here, no invalid, no precious prize wrested from death. He was a man, and whole, and riding free.

  “Is that an art reserved for mages?”

  Sarevan looked down. Wide golden eyes, all but whiteless like a lion’s or a falcon’s, looked up. Alone of anyone in Endros, Asanion’s lion cub was brave enough to stand on ground that Bregalan had cleared.

  He did not seem aware of his own courage. That was the legacy of a thousand years of careful breeding: an arrogance as perfect as Bregalan’s own. And the stallion, like Ulan before him, recognized it and approved it.

  Ulan had been much amused. From the glint in his eye, Bregalan was no less so. Sarevan smiled. “Riding is an art that any man can learn. Much like loving. With which, I understand, it has something in common.”

  Hirel was losing the sun-stain of his wandering, returning to the perfect pallor of ivory; even a slight flush was as vivid as a flag.

  Odd, reflected Sarevan, how a youth of his accomplishments could blush at the merest suggestion of a coarse word. But being Hirel, he covered it with prickly hauteur. “I can ride. I am reckoned a master. But not without a bridle.”

  “Ah,” said Sarevan, “but that’s only for the Mad One’s kin. This is his daughter’s son.”

  Hirel laid a hand on Bregalan’s neck. Bregalan did not warn him away.

  Sarevan knew an instant’s piercing jealousy. An outlander, a haughty infant with no power at all; and Sarevan’s homed brother not only suffered him but showed every sign of approving of him. The little fool did not even know that he was honored.

  Sarevan slid from the saddle, which was half his penance for thinking like an idiot. The other half he set in words. “Do you want to learn how we do it? Bregalan will teach you, if you promise not to insult him by regarding him as a dumb beast.”

  The Asanian was cool, but Sarevan had seen the sudden light before he hid it. “What is he if he is not a beast?”

  “He is a kinsman and a friend. And he has a thinking mind, though he has no tongue to tell you so.” Sarevan gestured, princely gracious. “Will you mount?”

  Bregalan was the tallest of the Mad One’s line; and while that was nothing remarkable for a stallion of the Ianyn breed, it was a goodly leap for a prince of the old Asanian blood. Hirel made it with that studied, dancer’s grace of his, and looked down for once into Sarevan’s face.

  Sarevan grinned at him. “Now begin. You have no bit and no reins, but you have your whole body. Use it. Talk to him with it. Yes, gently. Listen now; he answers. Yes. Yes, so.”

  o0o

  Sarevan ended again on the grass with Ulan, voice pitched to carry well without effort. People had gathered: grooms, stablehands, the inevitable scattering of idlers. This was a great rarity, a stranger mounted on one of the Varyani demons; that it was an Asanian, and this Asanian to boot, made it worth a stare or six.

  And, Sarevan admitted reluctantly, they had come to stare at him. For their sake he sat upright, cross-legged in his no longer pristine white robe, and leaned on Ulan more than they knew but less than he would have liked to.

  Another voice slid smoothly into a pause in Sarevan’s. “No, don’t lean. Sit straight; guide him with your leg. Your whole leg, sir. Heels are merely an annoyance.”

  How dull the world had grown, that Mirain An-Sh’Endor was only a smallish man, very dark, with the bearing of a king. No blaze of light; no high and singing presence in Sarevan’s mind, part of it, source of it, anchored as firmly as the earth itself. Even when he came and settled his arm about his son’s shoulders, he was only warm flesh; beloved, yes, but separate. Sundered.

  Sarevan would not cling and cry. He had done that when he made the long terrible journey from the marches of death’s country, and woke, and found himself a cripple. No power at all, only the void and the pain. He had wept like a child, until his blurred and swollen eyes, lifting, saw the anguish in his father’s face.

  Then he had sworn. No tears. He was alive; his body would mend. That must suffice.

  “He does well,” Mirain said, holding Sarevan up and mercifully refraining from comment on his condition.

  Bregalan was showing Hirel how a battle charger fought in Keruvarion; the boy had dropped his masks and loosed a blood-curdling whoop. They were a fine and splendid sight: the great black beast with his blue-fire eyes, his rider all gold and ivory, molded to the senel’s back, singing in a voice too piercingly pure to be human.

  Until it cracked, and Bregalan wearied of perfect obedience and bucked him neatly into the trough. He came up gasping, more shocked than angry, but he came up in a long leap that somersaulted him over the javelin horns and onto the back that had spurned him.

  A roar went up. Laughter, cheering, even a spear smitten on a guardsman’s shield. Hirel sat and dripped and grinned a wide white grin. Bregalan raised his head and belled in seneldi mirth.

  o0o

  Sarevan was not regretting what he had done. Not precisely. He had had no strength left to face the stair; his father had carried him up, taking not the least notice of his objections, standing by sternly while his servants stripped him and bathed him and laid him in bed.

  “And mind that you stay there,” said Mirain; and he left Shatri on guard within the door.

  The squire, transparently grateful to have escaped with a mere reprimand, took his charge all too seriously. If Sarevan moved, Shatri was there, alert, scowling formidably.

  Not that Sarevan moved much. He was discover
ing muscles he had not known he had.

  There were not enough of them, that was the trouble. The bones kept thrusting through.

  o0o

  He slept a little. He ate, to keep his nursemaids quiet. When they pressed wine on him, even his sluggish nose could catch the sweetness of dreamflower.

  He flung the cup across the room. That was petulant, unprincely, and very satisfying. And it persuaded even Shatri to let him be.

  o0o

  Sarevan started awake. Hirel regarded him steadily, without expression.

  For a moment Sarevan could not choose between waking and the memory of a dream. It was a little unreal, that face, like something carved in ivory. Perfect, without line or blemish, and poised still on the edge between child and man.

  In gown and veil he would have made an exquisite girl; in coat and trousers he was a strikingly beautiful boy. Sarevan always wanted to stroke him, to see if he would be as pleasing to the hand as to the eye.

  Hirel’s eyes flicked aside; his brows met. “You drove yourself too hard. I should have seen.”

  “You couldn’t have stopped me.”

  Hirel answered that with a long look. Abruptly he said, “Roll over.”

  Surprised, piqued with curiosity, Sarevan obeyed. Quick hands stripped off the coverlet.

  He shivered a little. The corner of his eye caught Hirel’s infinitesimal pause, the widening of the golden eyes. “Not pretty, am I?”

  “No,” Hirel murmured, hardly more than a whisper. His hands found one of the hundred screaming muscles. Sarevan gasped and tensed; Hirel did something indescribable; the pain melted and flowed and transmuted into pleasure.

  The boy’s deepening voice spoke just above his head. “No, you are not pretty at all. You are beautiful.”

  Sarevan’s cheeks were hot. Thank Avaryan and his Ianyn ancestors, it never showed. And his tongue always knew what to do.

  Lightly, carelessly, it said, “What are you trying to do, infant? Make me vain?”

  “That,” said Hirel, “would be salting the sea.” His weight settled on the bed, kneeling astride Sarevan’s hips; his hands wrought wonders up Sarevan’s back and across his shoulders.