A Fall of Princes Read online

  The silence was deafening. Hirel shifted minutely, almost smiling.

  “Listen to me,” Sarevan said at last. “To you I’m a horror of no small proportions: a man who’s never had a woman; nor, for the matter of that, a boy. I won’t say it’s been easy. I won’t say it’s easy now. But my honor binds me, and my given word. Can you understand that?”

  “It is most immoral,” said Hirel. But quietly, as if he considered the matter with some shadow of care.

  “What is moral? To those children in the Green Court, you are the outrage.”

  That roused a spark. “They? They would happily die to have what I have.”

  “You frighten them. They think you have the power to corrupt me, if not to kill me outright.”

  “And so I do,” said Hirel, serene in his certainty. “As do you over me. We are equals. That is what they cannot bear.”

  “Equals.” Sarevan was not sure he liked the sound of it. He and this epicene creature?

  Not so epicene, sitting there, looking at him. It was only youth. Sarevan at not quite fifteen had been pretty enough, eagle’s beak and all. Was still rather too pretty for his own comfort, without a beard to mask the worst of it: as he had been amply dismayed to discover, when the razor showed him how little he had changed.

  Equals, then. Sarevan lowered his eyes. He had been treating Hirel as a child, or at best as a weakling youth. And weak, Hirel certainly was not.

  “So then,” said Sarevan, mostly to himself. “What do we do now?”

  “You do not know?”

  Hirel was mocking them both. Sarevan snarled at him. He grinned back, which was always startling.

  “Something,” said Sarevan with swelling heart. “Something outrageous.”

  “I will not swear priest’s vows!”

  “And I won’t claim your harem,” Sarevan said with a flicker of laughter, though he sobered swiftly. “You can be a moral man for both of us. But harken now—what can a pair of princes do when their fathers foment war?”

  “Fight,” Hirel said, but slowly, watching him. “What else can we do? We are born enemies. There is not even liking between us; nor, once I leave Endros, any debt of life or liberty.”

  “And yet there is something.” Sarevan held up his hand, the left, which bore no brand. “Equality. A love for this world that one of us must rule; a deep reluctance to see it marred.”

  “Marring can be mended, if there is peace under a single lord.”

  “Not such marring as I can see.” Sarevan’s hand clenched into a fist. “And it is my father who will begin it. Meaning naught but good, in the god’s name; seeing only the peace that will follow. Blind, stone blind, to its cost.” He let his head fall back, his eyes fix on the vaulted ceiling. “You don’t believe me. No one believes me. Even my mother, who has seen what I see, has refused it: she has sold her soul for love of my father. If she won’t listen, how can you? You don’t even believe in prophecy.”

  “I believe in you.”

  Sarevan’s head snapped forward. Hirel was grave, steady. Truthful; or playing a game that could cost him his neck.

  “Mind you,” the boy said, “I do not do this easily. Yet I am a logician. I who have seen magecraft cannot deny that it exists. Prophecy is part of magecraft by all accounts, yours not least. You are outrageous and you are quite mad, but a liar you are not. If you say that you have seen war, then war you have seen. If you say that it will be terrible, so is it likely to be. I have spoken with your father. I have seen what he is like, and I can guess what he will do when the fire of his god is on him.”

  “I love him,” whispered Sarevan. “Dear gods, I love him. But I think that he is wrong. Utterly, hopelessly, endlessly wrong.”

  He rocked with it, no longer seeing Hirel, no longer hearing anything but the echo of his own terrible treason.

  Terrible, and treason. But true. He knew it, down to the core of him. There was peace in it, almost. In knowing it for what it was. In ceasing his long battle to deny it.

  He had been no older than Hirel when it began. Maybe, when his power had gone but the dream held firm in all its terrible strength, it had broken him at last.

  “I think not,” he said. Hirel was staring at him. He mustered a smile. “No, brother prince, I haven’t lost the last remnant of my wits. I see a way through this tangle. Will you tread it with me?”

  “Is it sane?” asked Hirel.

  Sarevan laughed, not too painfully. “Do you need to ask? But it may work. Listen, and decide for yourself.”

  Hirel waited. Sarevan drew a long steadying breath. “I’m going to Asanion with you.”

  Hirel’s eyes widened a careful fraction. “And what,” he asked, “do you hope to accomplish by that?”

  “Peace. My father won’t attack Asanion if I’m held hostage in Kundri’j Asan.”

  “Think you so? More likely he will raise heaven and hell to get you back.”

  “Not if it’s known that I went of my own will.”

  “Ah,” said Hirel, a long sigh. “That is blackest treason.”

  “It is.” Sarevan was dizzy, thinking about it; bile seared his throat. “Don’t you see? I have to do it. He won’t yield for anything I can say. I have to show him. I have to shock him into heeding me.”

  “What if I will not assent to it?”

  Sarevan seized his gaze and held it. “You will,” he said, low and hard.

  The boy tossed his head, uncowed. “And if I do—what then, Sun-prince? I am Asanian. I have no honor as you would reckon it. You are a fool to dream of trusting me.”

  “You won’t betray me.”

  “No,” said Hirel after a stretching pause. “You are my only equal in the world. That cannot endure; but while it does, I am yours. As you are mine.”

  “We ride together.”

  “We ride together,” Hirel agreed. He stood. “The Lord Varzun has been commanded. I depart on the third day from this. I shall give thought to the manner of your concealment.”

  “As shall I,” said Sarevan. “Good night, high prince.”

  “Good night,” said Hirel, “high prince.”

  TWELVE

  The Zhil’ari, like Hirel, heard Sarevan out. Unlike Hirel, they did not hesitate. They were apt for this new mischief.

  He told them what he would have of them; they obeyed with relish but with astonishing circumspection. No one remarked that the nine most recent recruits of the high prince’s guard had vanished from Endros. They might never have come there at all.

  Sarevan’s own part, for the moment, was an old one. When the new sun struck fire in the pinnacle of Avaryan’s Tower, he appeared on the practice field with sword and lance. If anyone took note that the prince chose to confine himself to mounted exercises, he did not speak of it.

  From the field Sarevan came to his father’s council, and to a wild game of club-and-ball in one of the courts, and again to a leisurely meander through the streets of Endros. At nightfall he dined with a youngish lord and a merchant prince and a glitter of courtiers.

  The second night of his plotting was quiet, as if his will, having set itself on treason, was minded to let his body rest. The second day brought rain and wind and the empress’ presence in the window to which Sarevan had retreated. It was a broad recess, and deep, and cushioned for ease; it lay in the lee of the wall, letting in neither wind nor rain, only cool clean air.

  He started when she laid her hand on his arm; his body gathered itself, coiling to strike. The blow died unborn, but he was on his feet with no walls to hamper him, and she was braced for battle.

  She relaxed all at once. He was slower. He made himself sit again and laugh, and take her hand, and pretend that nothing had changed. “I’m well trained, aren’t I?”

  “Too well,” she said, but she smiled. “You’re a perilous man altogether. Do you know, there’s a whole bower full of women yonder, and every one is passionately in love with you?”

  “Was my chatter that captivating?”

&nbs
p; “Not only your chatter.”

  “Oh, yes. My charming smile. My even more charming title. Who’s offering daughters this season?”

  “Everyone but the Emperor of Asanion.”

  It was an old jest. Yet Sarevan stiffened. She could not know what he was doing. No one could walk in his maimed mind. His father, finding it broken beyond all mending, had sealed it against invasion. Even Mirain’s power was shut out; only the rebirth of Sarevan’s own magics could lower those walls.

  She did not know. She could not. Sarevan was doing nothing but what he always did. It was only what he did it for that had changed.

  And the intensity of it. Perhaps. Time was too short for subtlety.

  She was frowning at him. She felt his brow, traced his cheek that was no longer quite so hollow. “You push too hard,” she said, “and too fast.”

  “Not fast enough for me.”

  “Of course not.” She sat by him. She would never admit to weariness, but surely that was the name of the shadows beneath her eyes, and the faint pallor of her honey skin, and the stiffness with which she held herself erect.

  He settled his arm about her and drew her to him. “Tell me what it is,” he said.

  She laid her head on his shoulder and sighed. For a long while he thought she would not answer.

  When she did, her voice shared not at all in her body’s languor. “It’s always something. Generals getting out of hand. Governors maneuvering for power. Common people losing patience. Ianon crying that it was never more than a stepping-stone to Mirain’s empire, when it should be the first and foremost of all his realms, the only one to which his blood entitles him; but he abandoned it to rule out of the south. As if he never spent two seasons out of every four in Han-Ianon, remote and troublesome as that can be for the ruling of an empire as wide as his. And the Hundred Realms cry now separately and now in chorus that he gives too much of his heart to the north, when it was they who made him emperor. Forgetting that it was the Prince of Han-Gilen who inveigled and threatened and flogged them into it. And the east wants more of him, and the west more yet, and the lords want war, and the commons want peace, and the merchants want their profits.”

  So much of an answer, and it was no answer at all. “And?” he asked.

  “And everything, and nothing. I never wanted to be empress. I only wanted Mirain.”

  “You should have thought of that before you tricked him into marrying you. Found some well-connected lady with a strong aptitude for clerkery and none at all for the arts of the bedchamber, and tricked him into marrying her, and established yourself as his concubine.”

  She pulled back, her temper flaring. “Concubine! I would have been his lover and his equal.”

  “And therefore, empress to his emperor.” She glared. Sarevan laughed, truly this time, and kissed her. “I for one am glad you married him. It makes life easier, legitimacy. Now stop evading and tell me what’s got you prowling the halls when you ought to be bewitching the council.”

  “You.”

  His mind spun on, expecting subtleties, shaping counter-subtleties. The silence shocked it into immobility. She never did what one expected, did Elian of Han-Gilen, the Lady Kalirien of the Sunborn’s armies.

  She knew. She had come to stop him.

  No. Whatever was in her eyes, it was not the horror of one who faces treason. She was blind, as they all were. She saw only her poor maimed child.

  Sarevan let his mouth fall open. He knew he looked a proper fool. “Me?”

  He inspected himself. He was dressed as a southerner, because the multiplicity of garments covered his bones. But he was less thin than he had been. His body, wonderful creation, wasted not one grain of all he fed it. “Don’t fret yourself over me. I’m mending, and I’m mending well, and I was just going to sit in council. Shall we go together? Or would you rather do something else that needs doing? I can speak for us both if there’s need.”

  Now it was her part to stare and pause and hunt for words. She did not look like a fool. She looked more beautiful than ever, and more tired, and more—something. Sad. Angry. Pitying. “No, Vayan,” she said much too easily. “I can face it alone. If you won’t rest, will you look in on our guest from Asanion? I saw him a little while ago, cursing the rain. He seemed in need of company.”

  Sarevan sat still. There was a darkness in him, a bitterness on his tongue. She had not used that tone with him since he was still small enough to carry. That tone which said, Yes, yes, child, of course you may help Mother, but not now; Mother will come back when she’s done, and then we’ll play, yes? Which said, Of course you can’t handle the council alone, poor innocent. You have no power to handle it with. Which said, You are weak and you are a cripple, and you tear my heart, because you strive so bravely to be as you were before. But you cannot. You cannot, and you must not pretend that you can.

  Sarevan was on his feet again. It could still surprise him to find her so small, no higher than his chin, who had towered over his childhood. Now he was a man, and if not the largest of her redheaded Gileni kinsmen, not the smallest, either.

  Among mages, he was nothing at all. “Yes,” his tongue said, acid-sweet, “I’ll go and play with the heir of Asanion. He wants to teach me a new game. It’s played in bed, mostly, and it’s fascinating. Though I may be a little old to learn it properly. Am I too old, do you think, Mother?”

  She slapped him. Not lightly. Not in play. He swayed with the blow, and met her white fury with something whiter and colder. “Don’t treat me like a child, Mother. Or like a simpleton. Or like a broken creature who must be handled gently lest he shatter. I’m none of them. I still carry Avaryan’s brand, and the fire that comes with it. I’m still High Prince of Keruvarion. And nowhere,” he said, soft and deadly, “nowhere at all does the law ordain that the king must also be a mage.”

  Her rage had chilled and died. “Vayan,” she said. “Vayan, I didn’t mean—”

  “You didn’t, did you? You only believed it. That’s your deepest trouble. Keruvarion’s heir is no longer fit to hold his title. Keruvarion’s emperor refuses to speak of it. Keruvarion’s chancellor insists that there’s no profit in fretting. The Lord of the Northern Realms, most reluctant of mages that he is, has no sympathy to spare for you. And I—I know that if I don’t teach myself to live as a simple man, I won’t be able to live at all.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said.

  “Such trust. Such faith in your strong young son.”

  “Don’t sneer. It’s unbecoming.”

  His lip curled further. He raised his chin. “I’ll go to my lessons, Mother. Then at least, if I can’t rule, I’ll know how to beget a son who can.”

  If she tried to stop him, she did not try hard enough. His temper brought him to Hirel’s door and flung him through it.

  o0o

  No one was there to applaud or to jeer. He stalked through the rooms in the dim rainlight.

  A lamp burned in the innermost chamber, shining on two twined bodies, bronze and gold. Hirel had a woman in his arms, and neither wore more than a bauble or two, and it was clear enough what they had been doing. Even as Sarevan froze on the threshold, Hirel’s hand moved, wandering over a ripe swell of breast.

  Sarevan backed away. That was not jealousy, that twisting in his vitals. It was outrage. This was a lady. A baroness. The widow of a high baron. How dared she let that infidel seduce her? How dared he do it?

  They saw him. She rose with aplomb. Her eyes sparkled; her cheeks were rose-bronze. She curtsied deeply. “My prince,” she said. Her face had no great beauty: broad-cheeked, blunt-nosed, wide-mouthed. But her eyes were splendid, and her body . . .

  She covered it, not hastily, not slowly, and took her graceful leave.

  Sarevan shuddered and remembered to breathe. Hirel had risen to face him. The boy did not have the grace to look ashamed.

  “Is that your revenge on Keruvarion?” Sarevan asked him. “The corruption of its nobility?”

  “
You say it, not I.”

  “So.” Sarevan advanced into the chamber. “Corrupt me.”

  “No.”

  “Why? Because I want you to?”

  “Not at all.” Hirel returned to his nest of cushions, stretching out like a cat, yawning as maidens were taught to do, with becoming delicacy. He propped himself on his elbow and looked up under level brows. “I do not corrupt. I teach, and I tame, and I set free.”

  Sarevan dropped to one knee, bending close. “Free? Can you set me free?” His hand closed lightly about the boy’s throat. “Can you, Hirel Uverias?”

  “You,” said Hirel calmly, “are in a remarkable state. Are you dangerous? Should I be begging for mercy?”

  Sarevan looked at the placid face. At the hand below it. At the body below that. He thought of being dangerous. Of falling on Hirel; of disdaining to grant mercy.

  His hand fell. He tasted bile. He was not made for that sort of violence.

  He lay on his face among the cushions. It was that, or run howling through Endros. “I won’t,” he gritted. “I won’t be shunted aside, watched over, indulged and protected like an idiot child. They’d leave me nothing that befits my breeding or my training. Only pity. Because they are all mages, and I—and I—”

  “Stop it,” said Hirel. “Or I swear, I will laugh, and you will try to strike me, and I am in no mood for battles.”

  Sarevan thought of murder. Even with power he would have gone no further than that. But his mind did not know it. It reached for what was not there, and touched something, and that something was pain.

  He dragged himself up. He fought his hands that would have clutched his throbbing head. “Tonight,” he said. “Tonight we ride.”

  “So soon? But I have told Varzun—two days—”

  “Tonight.” He turned with care. He set one foot before the other.

  He struck an obstacle. It was well grown and strong, and subtly skilled in the use of its strength. It said, “You are being quite unreasonable.”

  “Be ready,” Sarevan repeated. “I’ll come for you.”

  “You are mad,” Hirel said. But he let Sarevan pass.