The Lady of Han-Gilen Read online

  “You speak our tongue very well indeed.”

  “That is part of it. So much of ruling is in the tongue. Too much, some might add.”

  “Especially here in the Hundred Realms.”

  “In the Golden Empire, fully as much. You are eloquent, I am told, and have the gift of tongues.”

  “I like to talk.”

  “Why, so do I. But wit is hard to come by, and one cannot always converse with oneself.”

  “I talked a philosopher into the ground once. He sought to wed me; he wedded with solitude instead.”

  “He made a poor choice.”

  “Did he? I am thinking of taking a vow, my lord. To take lovers by the dozen, but never a husband.”

  “Surely you would grow weary of constant variety.”

  “Do you think I would?” She halted in the midst of the court and fixed her eyes upon him. “Have you?”

  His laughter was as sweet as his smile. “Oh, long since! Twice ninescore concubines: that is the number allotted to the heir of Asanion. One for each day of the sun’s year. Alas, I am cursed with a constant nature; where I take pleasure, there do I most prefer to love. So you see, if I follow my nature, some few of my ladies are content; the rest either dissolve in tears or succumb to murderous envy. But if I strive to please them all, I fail utterly to content myself.”

  “So you seek a wife.”

  “So I seek a wife. A married man, you see, may free his concubines.”

  “Ah,” she said in something close to delight. “Your motives are hardly pure at all. I had begun to fear that there would be no flaw in you.”

  “But surely perfection is most unutterably dull?”

  “You are not tall. That is a flaw, but one I cannot in conscience condemn; for you are also beautiful.”

  “In Asanion I am reckoned a tall man.”

  “And fair?”

  “That is not a word we like to use in speaking of men. But yes, they call me comely. We breed for it.”

  “My mother has Asanian blood.” Elian changed tacks abruptly, fixing him with her most disconcerting stare. “Some said that you would not come to us; that your borders are beset, and that your father has need of you there.”

  Ilarios was not disconcerted at all. He shifted as rapidly and as smoothly as she. “He has greater need of Han-Gilen and the Hundred Realms.” His eyes leveled. They were all gold, like an animal’s, but the light in them was godly bright. “You know what concerns us.”

  “The barbarians in the north.”

  “Even so. We have never exerted ourselves to conquer them, reckoning them little better than savages, too deeply embroiled in their own petty feuds to unite against us. So they should have remained. But they have spawned a monster, it seems. A chieftain—he calls himself a king—who seized the throne of one of the northern provinces—”

  “Ianon,” she murmured.

  “Ianon,” he agreed with a swift glance. “He usurped its throne, gathered its clans, and proceeded to do the same to its neighbors. It was easier than it might have been. He rode—rides still, for the matter of that—under the banner of the Sun-god; his father, so he claims, is the god himself, his mother—”

  He broke off. For once, Elian could see, his ready tongue had led him further than he liked to go.

  She led him to the end of it. “His mother was a priestess, born in Ianon but raised to the greatest eminence of her order: high priestess of the Temple of Avaryan in Han-Gilen. In addition to which, she was prophet of the realm, and bound in close friendship with its prince.” She smiled, closing in for the kill. “Tell me more of her son.”

  “But surely—” He stopped. His eyes knew what she did, and dared to guess why. They flickered as a hawk’s will, veiling just perceptibly. Calmly he said, “Her son appeared in Ianon some few summers past. He was little more than a child then; he is, so they say, very young still. But he is a skilled general, for a barbarian, and he has a knack of gathering men to himself. Hindered not at all by the parentage he claims and the destiny he has revealed to any who will listen. The world is his, he proclaims. He was born to rule it.”

  “Simply to rule it?” asked Elian.

  “Ah,” said Ilarios, “he says that it is not simple at all. He is the trueborn heir of Avaryan, the emperor foretold, the Sword of the Sun; he will bring all the world under his sway, and cast down the darkness and bind it in chains, and found an imperishable empire.”

  “He says? Have you spoken with him?”

  “Would the son of the Sun deign to speak with a mere high prince of Asanion?”

  She regarded him sidelong. “If he were anywhere within reach of you, he might.”

  “Soon he may be. However mad his ambitions may be, his generalship is entirely sane. With an army no larger than the vanguard of our own, he has set all the north under his heel. Since winter loosed its hold, he has begun to threaten our northern satrapies. We suspect that, should he fail there, he will move east and south into the Hundred Realms.”

  “We in turn suspect that he will move first against us, thinking to forge an alliance, and with our strength to advance on Asanion.”

  “So he might,” Ilarios said. “And so I am here, rather than in the north of the empire. We have much more to fear from a barbarian allied with you than from a barbarian alone.”

  “That would be a deadly joining, would it not? A hundred realms, a hundred quarrels, we say here, but at need we can band together. Not easily, not for long, but long enough to drive back any enemy. The Nine Cities, the last time. I was very young, but I remember. Have you ever fought in a war?”

  He seemed no more disturbed by this latest barb than by anything else she had said. “There has been no war since I was a child.”

  “But if there had been?”

  “I would have fought in it. The heir of the empire commands its armies.”

  “The Sunborn has been a warrior since his childhood. He rides always in the van, with scarlet cloak and plume lest anyone fail to know him. And under him a demon in the shape of a black charger, fully as terrible in battle as its master.”

  For the first time, Prince Ilarios frowned. “He is a demon himself, they say, a mighty sorcerer, a shapeshifter who may choose to be seen as a giant among his northern giants, or as a dwarf no taller than a nine days’ infant. But in his own flesh he is nothing to look at, little larger than a child, with no beauty at all.”

  “What, none?”

  “So I have heard.”

  Ehan looked at him, head tilted. “You would be delighted if he were hideous, would you not?”

  “Women sigh at the thought of him. Young, barbarian, and half a god—how wonderful. How enchanting.”

  “How utterly exasperating. You, after all, were born to be emperor; if you become a great conqueror, you but do as your fathers have done before you. Whereas this upstart has but to gather a handful of mountain tribes and he becomes a mighty hero.”

  “Who is blasphemous enough to name Avaryan his father. They call him An-Sh’Endor: God-begotten, Son of the Morning.” Ilarios sighed and let his ill temper fade. “He vaunts; but more to the point, he conquers. Much to our distaste. We prefer our world as it is, and not as some young madman would have it.”

  “Oh, yes, he is mad. God-mad.” She smiled, but not at Ilarios. “His birthname is Mirain. He was my foster brother. One morning before dawn he left us. I saw him go. I like to think I helped him, though what could a small girlchild do when her brother would leave and her father would have him stay? except follow him and get in his way and try not to cry. The last thing he did was cuff me and tell me to stop my sniffling, and promise to come back.” And the last thing she had done was to swear her great oath. But that was no matter for this stranger’s pondering.

  This stranger had clearer eyes than any outlander should have, and he no mage nor seer, only a mortal man. They rested level upon her, and they granted no quarter. “Ah,” he said, soft and deep. “You were in love with him.”

&nb
sp; She met stroke with stroke. “Of course I was. He was all that was wonderful, and I was eight summers old.”

  “Yet now you are a woman. I can make you an empress.”

  Her throat had dried. She defied it with mockery. “What, prince! A barbarian queen over the Golden Empire? Could your people endure the enormity of it?”

  “They will endure whatever I bid them endure.” He was all iron, saying it. Then he was all gold as he smiled at her. “Your high heart would not be content with the place of a lesser wife, however honored, however exalted. Nor would I set you so low.”

  “Nor would Mirain,” she said, reckless. “I knew him once. You, I do not know at all.”

  “That can be remedied,” he said.

  She looked at him. She was shaking. She stiffened, angrily, and made herself toss her head. “Ah! Now I see. You are jealous of him.”

  He smiled with all the sweetness in the world. It was deadly, because there was no malice in it. “Perhaps. He is a dream and a memory. I am here and real and quite royal, though no god sired me. And I know that I could love you.”

  “I think,” she said slowly, “that I could . . . very easily . . .”

  He waited, not daring to move. But hope shone in his eyes. Splendid eyes, all gold. He was beautiful; he was all that a woman could wish for, even a princess.

  Except. Except. She curtsied, hardly knowing what she did, and fled blindly.

  oOo

  The nightlamp was lit in her chamber. Her ladies flocked about her; she tore herself free and bolted her door against them all.

  She flung off her robes and her ornaments and scoured the paint from her face. It stared from her mirror, all eyes, with the wildness of a trapped beast.

  A trap, yes. This one was most exquisitely baited. So fair a young man; he spoke to her as an equal, and looked at her with those splendid eyes, and promised her a throne.

  And why not? asked a small demon-voice, deep in her mind. Only a fool or a child would refuse it.

  “Then I am both.” She met her mirrored glare. Either she would accept this prince and ride off with him to Asanion, splendid in the robes of an empress-to-be. Or—

  Or.

  Mirain.

  Her throat ached with the effort of keeping back a cry. It had all been so simple, all her life mapped and ordained. A childhood of training and strengthening; and when she became a woman, she would ride to take her place at Mirain’s right hand. Her suitors had been a nuisance, but easy enough to dispose of: not one was her equal. Not one could make her forget her oath.

  Until this one. It was not only a fair face and a sweet voice. It was the whole of him. He was perfection. He was made to be her lover.

  “No,” she gritted to the air. “No. I must not. I have sworn.”

  You have sworn. Do you intend ever to fulfill it? Behold, here you stand, a legend in your own right, acknowledged a master of the arts of princes: why have you never gone as you vowed to go?

  “It was not time.”

  It was no vow. You will never go. It would be folly, and well you know it. Better far to take this man who offers himself so freely, and to submit as every woman must submit to the bonds of her body.

  “No,” she said. It was a whisper, lest she scream it. Not that Ilarios would bind her. That he could, so easily; and that her word had bound her long ago.

  If she lingered, she was forsworn, surely and irrevocably. If she left, she lost Ilarios. And for what? A child’s dream. A man who by now had become a stranger.

  Her eyes darted about. At her familiar chamber; at her gown flung on the floor; at her mirror. At her reflection in its shift of fine linen, boy-slim but for the high small breasts.

  Her hair was a wild tangle, bright as fire. She gathered it in her hands, pulling it back from her face. Her features were fine but strong, like Halenan’s when he was a boy.

  Prettiness, never. But beauty all too certainly. And wit. And royal pride. She cursed them all.

  Prince Ilarios would remain for all of Brightmoon’s cycle. A scant hour with him had all but overcome her. A month . . .

  Her dagger lay on the table, strange among the bottles of scent and paint, the little coffers of jewels, the brushes and combs and ointments. A man’s dagger, deadly sharp, Hal’s gift for her birth-feast. Freeing one hand from her hair, she drew the blade.

  For the honor of her oath.

  The bright bronze flashed toward her throat, and veered. One deft stroke, two, three. Her hair pooled like flame about her feet. A stranger stood in it, a boy with a wild bright mane hacked off above his shoulders.

  A boy with a definite curve of breast.

  She bound it tight and flat and hid it beneath her leather riding tunic. Breeched and booted, with sword and dagger at her belt and a hunter’s cap over her hair, she was the image of her brother in his youth, even to the fierce white grin and the hint of a swagger.

  She swallowed sudden, wild laughter. If her mother knew what she did now, woman grown or no, she would win a royal whipping.

  oOo

  Han-Gilen’s palace was large, ancient, and labyrinthine. When she was very young, she had managed with her brothers to find passages no one else knew of.

  One such opened behind an arras in her own chamber. She had used it once before, for it led almost directly to the postern gate, and near it a long-forgotten bolthole: when Mirain eluded the prince’s guardianship to vanish into the north.

  Now she followed him, lightless as he had been then, cold and shaking as she had been when she crept in his wake. In places the way was narrow, so that she had to crawl sidewise; elsewhere the ceiling dipped low, driving her to hands and knees.

  Dust choked her; small live things fled her advance. More than once she paused. She could not do this. It was too early. It was too late.

  She must. She said it aloud, startling the echoes into flight. “I must.”

  Her shorn hair brushed her cheek. She tossed it back, set her jaw, and went on.

  oOo

  With Asanion’s prince in the city, even the postern gate was guarded. Elian crouched in shadow, watching the lone armed man. From where he stood with a cresset over his head, he commanded the gate and a goodly portion of the approach to it, and the hidden entrance to the bolthole.

  Despite the obscurity of his post, he was zealous. He kept himself alert, pacing up and down in the circle of light, rattling his sword in its scabbard.

  Elian caught her lower lip between her teeth. What she had to do was forbidden. More than forbidden. Banned.

  So was all she did on this mad night.

  She drew a cautious breath. The man did not hear. Carefully she cleared her mind of all but the need to pass the gate. More carefully still, she lowered her inner shields one by one. Not so much as to lie open to any power that passed; but not so little as to bind her strength within, enclosed and useless.

  Thoughts murmured on the edge of consciousness, a babel of minds, indistinguishable. But one was close, brighter than the rest.

  Little by little she enfolded it. Rest, she willed it. Rest and see. No one will pass. All is quiet; all remains so. All danger sleeps.

  The man paused in his pacing, hand on hilt, immobile beneath the torch. His eyes scanned the circle of its light.

  They saw nothing. Not even the figure that left the shadows and passed him, walking softly but without stealth. Shadow took it; his mind, freed, held no memory of captivity.

  oOo

  At the end of darkness lay starlight and free air. But a shape barred the way.

  So near to escape, and yet so far. Elian’s teeth bared; she snatched her dagger.

  Long strong fingers closed around her wrist, forcing the weapon back to its sheath. “Sister,” said Halenan, “there’s no need to murder me.”

  Fight him though she would, he was stronger; and he had had the same teachers as she. At length she was still.

  He let her go. She made no attempt to bolt. Her eyes caught his, held.

  He wo
uld weaken. He would let her pass. He would—

  She cried out in pain.

  His voice was soft in the gloom. “You forget, Lia. Mind-tricks succeed only with the mind-blind. Which I am not.”

  “I won’t go back,” she said, low and harsh.

  He drew her out of the tunnel into the starlight. Brightmoon had risen; though waning, it was bright enough for such eyes as theirs. He ran a hand over her cropped hair. “So. This time you mean it. Did the Asanian repel you as strongly as that?”

  “No. He drew me.” Her teeth rattled; she clenched her jaw. “I won’t go back, Hal. I can’t.”

  He lifted a brow. She pressed on before he could begin anew the old battle. “Mirain is riding southward. I’ll catch him before he enters the Hundred Realms. If he means us ill, I’ll stop him. I won’t let him bring war on our people.”

  “What makes you think you can sway him?”

  “What makes you think I can’t?”

  He paused, drew a sharp breath, let it go. “Mother will be more than displeased with you. Father will grieve. Prince Ilarios—”

  “Prince Ilarios will press for the alliance, because he stands in dire need of it. Let me go, Hal.”

  “I’m not holding you.”

  He stepped aside. Beyond him a shadow stirred, moving into the moonlight. Warm breath caressed Elian’s cheek; her own red mare whickered in her ear.

  She was bridled, saddled. On the saddle Elian found a familiar shape: bow and laden quiver.

  Tears pricked. Fiercely she blinked them away. Halenan stood waiting; she thought of battering him down.

  For knowing, damn him. For helping her. She flung her arms around him.

  “Give Mirain my greetings,” he said, not as lightly as he would perhaps have liked. “And tell him—” His voice roughened. “Tell the damned fool that if he sets foot in my lands, it had better be as a friend; or god’s son though he be, I’ll have his head on my spear.”

  “I’ll tell him,” she said.

  “Do that.” He laced his fingers; she set her foot in them and vaulted lightly into the saddle. Even as she gathered the reins, her brother was gone, lost in the shadows of the tunnel.