A Fall of Princes Read online

  “You have sinned as all men must while they dwell in living flesh,” said the priest whose name was hidden behind his magecraft. In Endros they called him Baran, which was simply, Priest. “You will atone for it; have no fear of that. But now we ponder other matters.”

  He raised his hand, commanding. Orozia came quietly, eyes lowered. She halted behind Sarevan. He felt her hands on his hair, braiding it with much patience for its tangles.

  She bound it off and returned to her place. He thought he saw tears on her cheeks; but that was not likely. She had never been able to weep stone-faced as she wept now.

  He swept his eyes around the circle. “You grant me my priesthood. Now grant me your courtesy. Tell me what I see here. Have I guessed rightly? You are a conspiracy?”

  “Just so,” answered Aranos. “A conspiracy of mages. Of the guild, and of those outside the guild. Of the light and of the dark. Of all those who foresee only ruin in the Sunborn’s war.”

  “Even you?” Sarevan demanded of his grandfather.

  “Even I.” Orsan had warmed not at all. “I who began it by snatching a priestess from the Sun-death and fostering the child she carried. I saw even then that in him lay the seeds of the world’s salvation; yet also those of its destruction. He is truly the son of the god. Of the true god, who is both life and death.”

  Sarevan was not astounded. He had heard it before, if never so explicitly. But he set his chin and his mind and said coldly, “You and all your line made Avaryan supreme long years before my father was born. Are you repudiating your own doctrines?”

  “I am not. No more than are you.”

  “I don’t have any doctrines. I’m merely selfish. I don’t want to be lord of a desert.”

  “And you love him.”

  “Yes!” cried Sarevan with sudden heat. “I love him, and I think he’s trapped himself, and he knows what he has to do, and he knows what will come of it, and he has no escape. But at least he can die in a blaze of glory, with Asanion in ruins under his heel.”

  “It need not be so.”

  “Of course it need not. But now it must. Even for me, he wouldn’t stop it.” Sarevan tugged viciously at his braid. “Maybe we’re all fools. If I’d succeeded, what would I have done except to postpone the inevitable? I love the heir of Asanion; I love him as a brother. But he would no more bow to my rule than I would to his. The world simply will not support two such emperors as we would be.”

  “Granted,” said the Red Prince. “Be patient for a moment now. Believe that we shall return to your dilemma; but first, hear a tale.”

  He paused. The young Zhil’ari rose. Like Orozia, he would not let Sarevan catch his gaze. He brought a warm soft robe which Sarevan was glad of even so close to the fire, and set a chair for him.

  Sarevan sat as much at his ease as he might, and waited with conspicuous patience.

  Something flickered in Orsan’s eyes, too swift to be sure of, but perhaps a smile. After a moment he said, “As you see and as my lord prince has affirmed, we are a conspiracy. A reluctant one, truth to tell. I cannot say who began it. It seems that we came independently to the same conclusion: that both Keruvarion and Asanion were advancing toward an inevitable conflict, and that that conflict would be one not only of weapons but of wizardry. Many wielders of power would welcome that: a final battle for the mastery, light against dark, with the god’s own son on the side of the light, and arrayed against him all the cult of the goddess and of the gods below.

  “But a few of us have seen past the names and the divisions. The true masters of mages, and with them the shamans of the tribes, have always known that it is not a war of opposing powers, but a balance. I have learned it slowly and against my will, for it flies in the face of much that I thought I knew.

  “Some few years past, I had a sending. It was you who brought it, Sarevadin, with your dream of destruction repeated night after night until we feared for your sanity. For you were and are no prophet, and it is your mother who is the Seer of Han-Gilen; and if she has had such a foreseeing, she has not seen fit to reveal it to any of us.”

  “She has,” said Sarevan. “She refuses it.”

  “So,” said Orsan steadily. “I know that I wished your dream to be a nightmare only, the midnight fancies of a boy on the brink of manhood. But the truth came surely, if slowly. I saw what you have come to see. I knew that I must do all in my power to avert the destruction. First I spoke with trusted priests. Then I spoke to Baran of Endros, who sent me where I would never have gone of my own accord. He sent me to his shadow in the guild: to the one who was matched with him at his initiation, darkness to his light, black sorcerer to his white enchanter. We spoke, and it was slow, for there was no trust on either side. But at last we agreed. We would fight together to keep Avaryan within the bounds ordained for him. Which he ordained for himself before the world was made.”

  “Why?” cried Sarevan. “Why can’t my father see it?”

  “He can. He denies it. My fault, my grievous fault. I raised him all in the light. I never taught him to comprehend the dark. Nor did he ever learn it from all the wizards whom he vanquished. They turned to the dark, and they did it without wisdom, and he laid them low. When the guild would have taught him, he called it falsehood and drove them from his empire.”

  Sarevan’s throat ached with tension. “They say,” he said, low and rough, “that Avaryan is not his father at all. That you came to his mother in your magic. That you begot him upon her.”

  “Look at your hand, Sarevadin. Look into your heart. What do you see there?”

  “Gold,” grated Sarevan, “and doubt. My father is wrong in one thing. Why not in all the rest?”

  “A man may err once, even if he be half a god. If he is a great man, he may commit a great error. It does not negate either his lineage or his greatness.”

  Sarevan let his eyes fall. His fingers flexed around the anguish of the Kasar. “What do we do, then? What can we do?”

  “We have you,” Orsan answered, “and we have the heir of Asanion. By now that is known. One hostage was not enough; two may well be.”

  “For a while,” said the guildmaster. “This is the Heart of the World, the hidden place that only our masters may know. I will not tell you where it is. It may not be in the world at all. Certainly neither your father nor his loyal mages, nor the sorcerers whom the Asanian emperor has sworn to him, can find you and snatch you free.”

  Comprehension dawned, late but almost comforting. Sarevan’s head came up. “He was going to do it. My father. Take me before they killed me.”

  “But we came before him.”

  “I would have refused. I would have killed myself to stop him.”

  “You would have. It would have been a great waste and a very great folly. Now that danger is averted. The Asanian prince will sleep until we wake him. For you we have a choice.”

  Sarevan sat perfectly still. They had all tensed. He remembered what he had said to the guildmaster. Chance? A remnant of foresight beyond even dreaming?

  It would be hard. They were not all in accord over it. The younger mages were losing their composure, and beneath lay a fire of protest. It might be hard enough even to suit Sarevan’s madness.

  He smiled with remarkably little strain. “So now we come to it. You’ve plotted this from the beginning, haven’t you? Aimed my every stroke; guided my every move. To bring me here before you.”

  None of them denied it. He sat back. He was almost easy. Almost comfortable, here at the heart of things, with the truth within his grasp.

  “Tell me now, O bold conspirators. How shall we escape our dilemma? Is there any escape? I can die. That will leave my father without an heir. You can protect Hirel, and when it’s over, produce him to rule the ruins.”

  “Or,” said the Zhil’ari witch, “we may slay him and leave you alone to live. But we will not.”

  Sarevan shivered. He did not want to die. But he was ready for it. He had been ready since he left Endros. "So, then. Hi
rel lives. I die. May I ask you to kill me quickly?”

  “You may not,” Prince Orsan said.

  Sarevan had no words to say. The Red Prince looked long at him. He stared back. He could read nothing in those hooded eyes. He was beginning to be afraid.

  “There can be but one emperor,” Orsan said. Steady, quiet. “Another emperor may not share his throne. But,” he said, “an empress may.”

  Sarevan stared at him, incredulous, almost laughing. “That is the summit of all your plotting? Even I know it’s not worth thinking of. I could marry every princess in Asanion, but the emperor would still have sons. Unless you mean to kill all forty-odd of them.”

  “Fifty-one,” murmured Aranos. “There was no mention of their murder, and no intention thereof. Nor any of your marriage to my royal sister.”

  That was a shrewd blow. Sarevan hardly felt it. If there had ever been any logic in this council, it had fled.

  He sat back under the force of their stares. He was quick-witted. Too quick, many would say. He had never felt as slow as he felt now. He should know what they were telling him. He could not begin to guess.

  Zha’dan sprang up. “Tell him, damn you. Stop torturing him. Tell him what you want to do to him!”

  No one would. He smote his hands together. Lightnings cracked; he started.

  Sarevan would have smiled if he had had time. Zha’dan gave him none. “It’s you, you fool. It’s you who’d be the empress.”

  Sarevan laughed, sudden and full and free.

  No one else laughed with him. The silence was thunderous. His mirth shrank and fled. “That’s preposterous,” he said. “I know shapeshifting is possible, though it’s not supposed to be. But you can’t—”

  “We know we can,” the guildmaster said. “It has been done. It has been done to me.”

  This was not illogic. It was insanity. Sarevan could only think to ask numbly, “Why?”

  “It was one of the tests of my mastery. Not the greatest and not the most perilous, but great enough and perilous enough, and not easy for the mind to endure.”

  Sarevan closed his eyes. When he opened them again, nothing had changed. He thought of the woman whom the master must have been. Of the girl whom Hirel could have been, to no purpose; not with fifty brothers. Of himself. Great, gangling, eagle-nosed mongrel of a creature: attractive enough as a man, but as a woman—

  He gripped the arms of his chair until the wood groaned in pain. He could not take his eyes from the master. He dared not; for that would slay all his courage.

  “It is not easy,” the master said. “There is pain. Great pain in the working and great pain after. But the foreseeings have shown us. If you do it, if you wed Hirel Uverias, if you bear him a child . . .”

  He went on and on. Sarevan stopped listening. This was worse than death. Worse even than death of power.

  “It is not so terrible to be a woman,” said the Zhil’ari witch. Her eyes glittered, perhaps with anger, perhaps with mockery. “Less terrible than to be a man. To be a man, and to rule over ruin.”

  “At least I would be—” Sarevan throttled his tongue. He had never been like Asanians, who were said to thank their gods on each day’s rising that they had not been born women. He knew that they were not lesser beings or weaker vessels or pretty idiots to be pampered and protected. He had known his mother; he had spent long hours with her warrior women. He had been one. Almost. When in Liavi’s mind he had shared the bearing and the birthing of her daughter.

  But to be one in truth. To face his father, his mother, his kin. To face his empire. A eunuch could not rule. And that, broadly and brutally, was what they would call him.

  “That will be a lie,” the witch said, reading him with almost contemptuous ease. “You will be a woman whole and entire, in all respects. You will unite the empires; you will lessen the destruction.”

  “But not stop it.”

  “Not what has already begun. More than ruin will remain.” She folded her arms over her breasts. “No one will be astonished if you refuse. You will live, whatever befalls. You need not live maimed.”

  Sarevan’s own frequent thought, mercilessly twisted. He flashed out against them. “I’m maimed already. A woman is anything but that. But I was never made to be one.”

  “We can see to that,” Orsan said.

  Sarevan surged up. “You. Even you would consent to this?”

  “I proposed it,” said the Red Prince.

  Sarevan sank down, all strength gone. He had thought his world was broken when he woke without power. He had not known that it could break again. And again. And again. Or that his mother’s father, his master and his teacher, his blood kin, could grind the shards beneath his heel.

  “Would it be so terrible?” asked Aranos. “You longed for a solution. This one is simple. It gives you your empire and your peace. It gives you my brother whom you love.”

  “Will he have me?” Sarevan demanded. “Will he want me?”

  “How will you know unless you do it?”

  “I can ask him.”

  “No,” Aranos said. “That is not part of the bargain. You and you alone must choose. No other may make your choice for you.”

  Sarevan laughed in pain. “It comes to that, doesn’t it? Myself, alone. Courage or cowardice. Peace or war. Life or death. You think you know what you ask of me. Do you? Even you, master—do you?”

  “Yes,” the master answered levelly. “We do not compel you. It is not a simple magic, and the pain of it is terrible. All your body will be rent asunder and made anew; so too your mind and your soul. You will pass through the sun’s fires, slowly, infinitely slowly, with no mercy of unconsciousness.”

  Sarevan shivered in spite of himself. But he said, “Hirel will survive, you say.”

  “And your father,” said the mage who had been silent for so long.

  Sarevan spun to face him. It was truth he spoke. He spoke it without joy, as one who knows he must, for the truth’s sake.

  But he was a servant of the dark. His stare raised Sarevan’s hackles. Strangeness roiled in it. Darkness. Warmthless, sunless cold.

  And yet, woven into it, something that Sarevan had never expected to see: acceptance. He could endure the survival of the Sunborn, if the balance was kept.

  “You’re lying,” Sarevan said to him, a soft snarl.

  “Not in this,” said Baran, the light of his shadow, who never lied.

  Mirain alive. Hirel alive. The war ended.

  For a price.

  Such a price.

  Sarevan gathered his body together. His beautiful proud body, just now awakened to the delights of a woman’s embrace: one woman, who might have been, who might still be his lady and his queen. He had been more vain of it than of anything but his power. He had lost the one. Now must he lose the other? Would he have nothing left?

  Mirain. Hirel. Two empires made one. Peace. A child. They had all but promised that. An heir of his body.

  Even if it must be a woman’s body. He was not afraid of that. He had birthed a child already.

  They waited. He could read them. Even Orsan. Even the darkmage. They would not scorn him if he shrank from the choice. Orsan could not have made it. None of them could. The master, who had, had begun as a woman. Had passed in the world’s eyes from lesser to greater.

  Sarevan stood again. His knees melted; he froze them with his terror. They asked too much. He could not do this.

  He was royal; he was a warrior trained. He could die for his empire. He could even betray it for its own salvation. But he was no great selfless saint, to give up all that he was and to live on after. Death was frightening, but it was final. This . . .

  “I suppose,” his tongue said, hardly stumbling, “that you’ll do it now, before we all have time to turn craven.”

  Damn his tongue. Damn it.

  No one smiled. No one looked triumphant. Orsan rose as Sarevan had never seen him rise, as an old man, stiff and palsied. “We will do it now,” he said.

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  They brought Sarevan to a high bare chamber. Its many tall windows were open to the wind; its center was a table of stone. Dawnstone slab on nightstone base, stones of the light and the dark brought together in balance.

  They took his robe; they freed his hair from its braid and combed it carefully; they took the gold from his beard and the emeralds from his ears and the torque from about his neck. With no knot or weaving on him, bare as he had come into the world, he lay upon the table.

  And started a little. His skin, braced for cold stone, recoiled from a warmth as of the sun in summer. The dawnstone knew his lineage; it kindled for him although it was full day and not rising dawn, flushing with the splendor of the morning sky.

  Blessed numbness had brought him so far; now it was forsaking him. His brain screamed and struggled, battling for escape. His body lay meekly where it was bidden. He could not even move to bid it farewell.

  The mages stood about him, a circle of shadows against the windows’ brightness. One bent. His grandfather kissed him gently on the forehead.

  No word passed between them. Make me stop, he tried to plead. Don’t let me do this.

  The Red Prince straightened. His hands rose. Power gathered in them.

  Sarevan closed his eyes, breathing deep. He could still see.

  Witch-sight. They had given it to him: thinking to have mercy, maybe. They had forgotten how bitterly clear it could be.

  Slowly his breath left him, and with it fear. He had chosen. Not his tongue, not his madness. His deepest self. There had never been such a choosing, for such a cause; nor would there ever be again.

  Avaryan, he prayed in the center of the power, take me. Hold me fast.

  Light wove with dark. Chanting fused with silence. Mage and sorcerer wrought together.

  And there was beauty in it. There was rightness. Balance. Perfection. A strength that, wielded, could alter worlds.

  He would remember. He swore it, even as the power took him. He would remember the truth.

  Then there was no memory. Only pain.

  PART THREE

  Hirel Uverias