A Fall of Princes Read online

  The sun was warm in its nooning. Hirel yawned. What an oddity they would think this creature: a redheaded northerner, a sweet singer, a priest of the Sun. All the east in a man. He would fetch a great price in the market.

  Hirel shivered. He did not want to think of slave markets. His hand found its way under the cap, catching on the brief new stubble.

  Three days now. And Vuad, whose mother was an Ormalen slave, had shaken his mud-brown hair and laughed, cheering the barber on. Vuad had never forgiven Hirel his pure blood, or the splendid hot-gold mane that went with it.

  “It will grow back.” Sarevan’s shadow was cool, his voice soft and warm.

  Hirel’s teeth ground together. “Get,” he said thickly. “Get your shadow off me.”

  It moved. Sarevan stripped off his shirt and rolled it into a bundle and laid it in his bag, apparently oblivious to the offense he had given. He went back to his pacing, tracing precise and intricate patterns like the steps of a dance, humming to himself.

  He stilled abruptly. Hirel heard nothing but breeze and birdsong, saw nothing but shapeless wilderness. Trees, undergrowth, thornbrake; the stones of the slope below him. All the animals they had seen that day were small ones, harmless. None came near them now.

  Sarevan made no move toward his weapons. His face in profile was intent but untainted with fear. Hirel was not comforted.

  The breeze died. The bird trilled once and fell silent. In the thicket below, a shadow moved. Faded. Grew.

  Hirel’s mouth was burning dry. A beast of prey. A cat as large as a small senel, the color of shifting shadows, with eyes that opened and caught the sun and turned it to green fire. It poured itself over the stones, so swift and fluid that it seemed slow, advancing with clear and terrible purpose.

  It sprang. Hirel threw himself flat. The grey belly arched over him, deceptively soft, touched with a faint, feline musk.

  He never knew why he did not break and bolt. The beast was on Sarevan, rolling on the hilltop, snarling horribly. And Hirel could not even make a sound.

  The battle roared and tumbled to its end. Sarevan rose to his knees with no mark on him; and he was all a stranger, no longer the haughty wanderer but a boy with a wide white grin, arms wrapped around the neck of the monstrous, purring cat.

  “This,” he said, light and glad and almost laughing, “is Ulan, and he says that he is not eating tender young princelings today.”

  Hirel found his voice at last. “What in the twenty-seven hells—”

  “Ulan,” repeated the barbarian with purest patience. “My friend and long companion, and a prince of the princes of cats. You owe him your life. He drew off the hounds that haunted you, and gave your hunters a fine grim trail to follow. With a bloody robe at the end of it.”

  Hirel clutched the earth. It was rocking; or his brain was. “You—it—”

  “He,” said Sarevan pointedly, “caught wind of you before you crossed the border. I tracked you. Ulan headed off the hunters.”

  “Why?”

  Sarevan shrugged. “It seemed worth doing. Maybe the god had a hand in it. Who knows?”

  “There are no gods.”

  One brow went up. Sarevan ran his hands over the great grey body, stroking, but searching, too, as if hunting for a wound.

  It seemed he did not find one. A sigh escaped him; he clasped the beast close, burying his face in the thick fur, murmuring something that Hirel could not quite catch. The cat’s purr rose to a mutter of thunder.

  “They think that I am dead,” Hirel said, shrill above the rumbling. “Devoured. By that—”

  “By an ul-cat from the fells beyond Lake Umien. That should give your enemies pause.”

  Hirel managed to stand. The cat blinked at him. He unclenched his fists. “They will not know. They will think of forest lions and direwolves, and maybe of devils; they are superstitious here. But,” he conceded, “it was well done.”

  Again Sarevan loosed that astonishing grin. “Wasn’t it? Come then, cubling. Ulan will carry you, and tonight will find us with a roof over our heads. A better one even than I hoped for.”

  Hirel swallowed. The cat yawned, baring fangs as long as daggers.

  And yet, what a mount for a high prince. A prince of cats. Hirel advanced with the valor of the desperate, and the creature waited, docile as any child’s pony.

  Its fur was thick, coarse above, heavenly soft beneath; its back held him not too awkwardly, his knees clasping the sleek sides. Its gaits were smooth, with a supple power no hooved creature could match. Hirel could even lie down if he was careful, pillowed on the broad summit of the head between the soft ears.

  Quiet, almost comfortable, he let his eyes rest on nothing in particular. Trees. Shafts of sunlight. Now and then a stream; once Ulan drank, once Sarevan filled the flask. The priest looked content, as if this quickened pace suited him, and sometimes he let his hand rest on the cat, but never on Hirel.

  o0o

  The sun sank. The trees thinned, open country visible beyond, hills, a ribbon of red that was a road. On a low but steep-sided hill stood a wall and in it a town. A poor enough place: a garrison, a huddle of huts and houses, a tiny market and a smithy and a wineshop, and in the center of it a small but inevitable temple.

  They were seen long before they came to the gate. A child herding a flock of woolbeasts along the road glanced back, and his eyes went wide. He flung up both his arms, waving madly. “Sa’van!” he shrilled. “Sa’van lo’ndros!”

  The cry ran ahead of him, borne by children who seemed to spring from the earth. They poured out of the gate, surrounded the travelers, danced around them; and several hung themselves about Sarevan, and a few even overwhelmed Ulan. Hirel they stared at and tried to babble at, but when he did not answer, they ignored him.

  Their elders came close behind, slightly more dignified but no less delighted, chattering in their barbaric tongue. Sarevan chattered back, smiling and even laughing, with a child on each shoulder and half a dozen tugging at him from below. Obviously he was known here.

  Hirel sat still on Ulan’s back. He was tired and he ached, and no one took the least notice of him. They were all swarming around the priest. Not a civilized man in the lot; not even the armored guards, who made no effort to disperse the crowd.

  Quite the opposite. Those few who did not join it looked on with indulgence.

  For all the press of people, Sarevan moved freely enough, and Ulan somewhat behind carrying Hirel and a bold infant or two. One tiny brown girlchild, naked and slippery as a fish, had chosen Hirel as a prop, nor did his stiffness deter her.

  She was not clean. From the evidence, she had been rolling in mud with the dogs. But she clung like a leech and never knew what she clung to, and he was too taut with mortal outrage to hurl her off.

  o0o

  The tide cast them up at last in front of the temple. Small as it was, it boasted a full priestess. A pair of novices attended her, large-eyed solemn children in voluminous brown who might have been of either sex; but perhaps the taller, with the full and lovely mouth, was a girl.

  They were both staring at Sarevan as if he had been a god come to earth. But the priestess, small and round and golden-fair as an Asanian lady, met him with a smile and a word or two, and he bowed with all proper respect.

  Her hand rested a moment on his bright head, blessing it. Yes, she was highborn; she had the manner, and she had it as one bred to it.

  Half of his own will, half of his body’s weariness, Hirel slid from Ulan’s back and leaned against the warm solid shoulder. The child, robbed of her prop, kept her seat easily enough, but her wail of outrage drew a multitude of eyes.

  Hirel drew himself up before them. Dark eyes in brown faces, and Sarevan’s darkest of all, and the priestess’ the golden amber of the old pure blood. Of his own.

  She saw what he was. She must.

  Sarevan spoke, and the eyes flicked back to him, abruptly, completely.

  He did not speak long. He turned to Hirel. “Come,�
� he said in Asanian. And when Hirel gathered to resist: “You may stay if you please, and no one will harm you. But I intend to rest and eat.”

  Hirel drew a sharp breath. “Very well. Lead me.”

  The crowding commoners did not try to pass the gate, although several of the children protested loudly the loss of their mounts. Sarevan paused to tease them into smiles. When the gate closed upon them, he was smiling himself.

  “Ah, lad,” the priestess said in Asanian considerably better than his, “you do have a way with them.”

  Sarevan shrugged, laughed a little. “They have a way with me.” He laid his hand on Ulan’s head and not quite on Hirel’s shoulder. “I have two who need feeding, and one has hurts which you should see.”

  o0o

  Hirel could suffer her touch, the better for that Sarevan left them in a chamber of the inner temple and went away with the novices. She did not strip him unceremoniously, but undressed him properly and modestly, with his back to her, and she bathed him so with sponge and scented water, and offered a wrapping for his loins.

  After the barbarities he had endured, that simple decency brought him close to tears. He fought them, fumbling with the strip of cloth until he could turn and face her.

  She inspected his hurts with care and without questions. “They are clean,” she said at length, as Sarevan had.

  She wrapped the worst in fresh new bandages, left the rest to the air, and set a light soft robe upon him. As she settled the folds of it, the bare plain room in which they stood seemed to fill with light.

  It was only Sarevan. He had bathed: his hair was loose, curling with damp, his beard combed into tameness, and he had found a robe much like Hirel’s. He was rebinding the band of his Journey as he came; his quick eyes glanced from the priestess to Hirel and back again.

  “You have done all that you should,” she said, “and done it well.”

  With a gesture she brought them both out of the antechamber into the inner temple, the little courtyard with its garden, and the narrow chamber beyond, open wide to the air and the evening, where waited the novices with the daymeal. A poor feast as Hirel the prince might have reckoned it, plain fare served with little grace, but tonight it seemed as splendid as any high banquet in Kundri’j Asan. No matter that Hirel must share it with a barbarian and a woman; he had a royal hunger and for once a complaisant stomach, and the priestess was excellent company.

  Her name was Orozia; she came of an old family, the Vinicharyas of eastern Markad. “Little though they would rejoice to hear me confess it,” she said, sipping the surprisingly good wine and nibbling a bit of cheese. “It is not proper for the daughter of a high house to cleave to the eastern superstition. And to vow herself to the priesthood . . . appalling.” She laughed with the merest edge of bitterness. “My poor father! When I came to him with my braid and torque, dressed for my Journey, I thought that I had slain him. How could he ever explain this to his equals? How would he dare to hold up his head at court?”

  “He was a coward,” Hirel said.

  She bowed her head, suddenly grave. “No. He was not that. He was a lord of the Middle Court whose fathers had stood higher, and he had the honor of the house to consider. Whereas I was young and cruel, burning with love for my god, whom he had scoffed at as a lie and a dream. He was a fool and I was a worse one, and we did not part friends. Within the year he was dead.”

  Hirel bent his eyes on his cup. It was plain wood like the others, unadorned.

  The cap, Sarevan’s coarse awkward commoner’s cap, slipped down, half blinding him. With a fierce gesture he flung it away.

  The air was cold on his naked head. “Within the year my brothers will not be dead. They will be shorn and branded and gelded as they would have done to me, and sold as slaves into the south.”

  He looked up. The novices had withdrawn. Priest and priestess regarded him steadily, black eyes and amber, unreadable both.

  He wanted to scream at them. He addressed them with tight control. “I have no god to make me wise. No dream. No lies. Only revenge. I will have it, priests. I will have it or die.”

  “They would have been wiser to kill you,” Sarevan said.

  Hirel looked at him with something like respect. “So they would. But they were both craven and cruel. Neither of them wanted my blood on his hands; and even if I were found and recognized, what could I do? A eunuch cannot sit the Golden Throne. Their misfortune that they listened to the barber who was to geld me. I must be purged, he said, and left unfed for a day at least, or surely I would die under the knife. That night I found a window with a broken catch, and made use of it. Fools. They called me Goldilocks, and Father’s spoiled darling, and plaything of the harem. They never thought that I would have the wits to run.”

  “No one ever credits beauty with brains.” Sarevan sat back in his chair, gloriously insolent, and said, “Tell me, Orozia. Shall I take this cubling back to his father? Or shall I take him to mine and see what comes of it?”

  Hirel sat still as he had learned to do in the High Court of Asanion, toying with a half-eaten fruit and veiling his burning eyes.

  Treachery. Of course. Haled off to some northern hill fort, given to a kilted savage, set to cleaning stables for his meager bread. And he was trapped here with a woman who had abandoned all her honor to take the demon’s torque, and with a man who had never known what honor was.

  “You know what you will do,” said the priestess, eyes level on Sarevan, and she spoke to him with an inflection that raised Hirel’s hackles. Not as to the inferior he was, or as to the equal her graciousness might have allowed, but as to one set high above her. “But if I am to be consulted, I advise the latter. His highness is in great danger in the west, and you would be in no less. Avaryan is not welcome in Asanion. In any of his forms.”

  “Still,” said Sarevan, “the boy wishes it.”

  “When did that ever sway you, Sarevan Is’kelion?”

  The barbarian grinned, unabashed. “I should like to see the fabled empire. And he needs a keeper. Demands one, in fact.”

  “I need a guard,” snapped Hirel. “You do not suit. You are insolent, and you try my patience.” He turned his shoulder to the mongrel and faced Orozia. “Madam, I shall require clothing and a mount, and provisions for several days’ journey, and an escort with some sense of respect.”

  She did not glance at him. Her eyes fixed on Sarevan. She had changed. There was no lightness in her now, nor in the one she spoke to. “Have you considered what your death would mean? They are killing priests in Asanion. And if they learn what you are . . .”

  “What I am,” Sarevan said softly, “yes. You forget the extent of it. I will venture this.”

  Her voice shook slightly. “Why?”

  He touched her hand. “Dear lady. It is no whim. I must go. I have dreamed it; the dream binds me.”

  Her eyes widened. She had paled.

  “Yes,” he said, as cool as he had ever been. “It begins.”

  “And you submit?”

  “I wait upon the god. That he has given me this of all companions— that is his will and his choice, and he will reveal his reasons when he chooses.”

  Her head bowed as if beneath a bitter weight; but it came up again, with spirit in it. “You are mad, and you were born mad, of a line of madmen. Avaryan help you; I will do what I can.” She rose and sketched a blessing. “It were best that I begin now. Rest well, children.”

  TWO

  Hirel knotted his hands into fist and buried them in the hollows of his arms. “I will not!”

  They had cajoled him into the rough garb of a commoner, and given him a cap that fit him properly, and begun to persuade him that he could pretend to be lowborn. If he must. But when the smaller and plainer novice came toward him with a short sharp knife, he erupted into rebellion.

  “I will not make my hands like a slave’s. I will not!”

  Orozia’s patience strained somewhat at the edges, but her words were quiet. “Highness, you mu
st. Would you betray yourself for merest vanity? A commoner cannot make his hands beautiful; it is banned.”

  Hirel backed to the wall. He was beyond reason. The cap bound his throbbing brows; the harsh homespun garments grated on his skin. The long nails, touched still with fugitive glimmers of gilt, drew blood from his palms. But they were all he had left. The only remnant of his royalty.

  Firm hands seized his shoulders, lifted him, set him down again with gentle force. “Look,” Sarevan commanded him.

  He struck the mirror with all his strength. It rang silver-bright but did not bend or break. In it trembled and raged a peasant’s child.

  “Look,” said the barbarian behind him. Forcing him, gripping his head when he struggled to spin away.

  Compelled, he looked. Lowborn. Drab-clad, bare-skulled, wealthless and kinless. But the skull was elegant, pale as ivory, sheened with royal gold; and the face was fine, gold-browed, the wide eyes all burning gold, the thin nostrils pinched white with anger. A peasant with the look of a thoroughbred and the bearing of an emperor—

  “Who will ever believe the lie?”

  “Anyone,” answered Sarevan, “who sees the clothing. If you have the hands to prove it.”

  “Not the face?”

  “Faces are the god’s gift. Hands are made, and the law limits them.” Sarevan raised one of Hirel’s easily despite resistance. “Keri.”

  Woman’s name, stolid all-but-sexless face. And the other, sweet-mouthed, had proved to be male; he waited to pounce if his fellow novice had need.

  Hirel thrust out his stiff hands. “Do it, then, damn you. Make me hideous.”

  They laughed behind their eyes. Hirel the Beautiful, shorn and clipped, was still a pretty creature, a plaything for a lady’s chamber. He spat in the reflected face, blurring it into namelessness.

  “You have blessings to count,” Sarevan said, cool and unused. “Two, to be precise.”