Arrows of the Sun Page 33

  “There’s Shaiyel,” Vanyi said. And before he could object: “Yes, he’s male, but he’s Asanian. Isn’t he kin to the Vinicharyas?”

  “Distant kin,” said Iburan, “and a man.”

  “His wards are as strong as mine. His land-sense is better.”

  “He’s not a woman.”

  “I’m not the only priestess in this army!”

  Iburan let the echoes die.

  “Why are you asking me?” Vanyi demanded. “Am I being set a penance?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe you need lessoning in humility and forgiveness, and in the virtues of priestesses. And maybe,” he said, “I think that you can protect her as no one else can.”

  “Because I want to kill her slowly for having what I can’t have?”

  “She doesn’t have it now, either.” He sighed. For the first time she saw that he was not a young man: saw the glint of silver in his beard, the lines of weariness about his eyes. “You could leave us all. You have your Journey still. The Gates won’t break or fall for want of you.”

  “Wherever I am,” she said, “the Gates are in me. It’s like the land-sense, my lord. I have the Gate-sense. I always have.”

  She had not told him anything that he did not know. “Will you go?”

  “Of course not.” Vanyi was too tired all at once to be angry. “This is my Journey. I have no other.”

  “Will you guard the Lady Haliya?”

  Vanyi laughed without mirth. “I haven’t taken her hide yet. I don’t suppose I will. Hide-taking is for men. They can afford the simple pleasures.”

  “Young men,” said Iburan. “Old ones are as vexed as women.”

  “Would you know?” Vanyi took his hand, startling him a little, and kissed it. “I don’t know why I don’t hate you, my lord.”

  “Hate is a simple pleasure,” said Iburan.

  She stared at him. Then suddenly, and this time truly, she laughed.

  38

  Vanyi waited till morning. It was not a failure of courage. It was sense. She would have one untroubled night’s rest before she subjected herself to her penance.

  And she did sleep. She prayed first, for humility and forgiveness, and the virtues of a priestess. The god gave her no answer, but she had not asked for one.

  She was no humbler in the dawn’s dimness, no more forgiving, but she had virtue enough to do as she had promised. As the escort arranged itself, Vanyi claimed her mare and led her to stand beside the Suvieni mare.

  Haliya was mounted already, shivering in the chill. Her eyes were bright with excitement. She greeted Vanyi as if she were glad to see her, but to Vanyi’s surprise she did not vex the air with chatter. Maybe she had a sense of Vanyi’s temper, or maybe she was too full of words to decide which she wanted to burst out with first.

  Estarion came out last as always. The golden mail was put away; he was in his old familiar riding clothes, with mail showing under them, and a sword at his side.

  He looked as if he had slept well. He was smiling, saying something that made Lord Dushai laugh, pausing to greet people: lords, servants, hangers-on. His shadow was occupied as it always was now, by an Olenyas. The same one, Vanyi saw, the one with the lion-eyes.

  Her nape prickled. There was something different about him—about the two of them.

  Of course there was a difference. Estarion was himself again, or close enough. The trapped look was all but gone from his eyes. He moved with his old grace, laughed with his old lightness. He even smiled at his mother, though he barely inclined his head to Iburan.

  Vanyi he did not see at all. She made sure of that. There was no need for him to know what duty she had taken.

  He greeted Haliya with more than civility, standing full in front of Vanyi, so potent a presence that she almost forgot every vow she had sworn. Haliya was dignified. She did not fling herself on him or demand that he keep her with him. She said, “This is barely proper, my lord.”

  He smiled. “I won’t shame you, then. Am I permitted to kiss your hand?”

  She sucked in a breath, outraged. “My lord!”

  “Ah then.” His regret seemed genuine. “Fair riding to you, my lady. Send me word if there’s anything you lack.”

  “I have everything I need,” she said.

  He went away to lead the march. Haliya did not watch him go, or sigh over him. She gathered the reins and said, “You must tell me how you do that.”

  “What?” asked Vanyi. And after a moment: “My lady.”

  “I’m not your lady,” Haliya said. “Was it magic?”

  “You aren’t supposed to know about that.”

  “I’m Vinicharyas. We know too much about it.” Haliya nudged her mare into the line of riders.

  Vanyi kicked her gelding in behind. She had thinking to do. It was not supposed to concern Estarion, or the way he had spoken to Haliya. Light. Easy. Tender—yes, he was that. But not passionate.

  He was not in love with her. If there was a word for a man who was happily in friendship with a woman, then he was that.

  It would have been better, Vanyi thought, if he had been madly in love with her. Passion died. Friendship had a way of persisting.

  o0o

  It rained more often than not as they rode southward out of Induverran. Estarion took no visible notice of it. The rest of them endured, most in silence. They were riding swiftly, but not at racing speed, and not precisely as an army to war.

  There were armies mustering. Estarion made himself known to them. They cheered him, albeit with bafflement, as if they could not quite understand that this was the emperor. The emperor was ten robes and a mask in the palace in Kundri’j. How could he be riding in the rain, bareheaded as often as not, and stopping to talk to commoners?

  For he did that. It was something he had always done in Keruvarion, but in this half of his empire it was unheard of.

  His Varyani kept constant watch, but they did not try to prevent him. His Asanians looked sorely tried by it: hands twitching near weapons, eyes darting at every shadow.

  Vanyi heard the captain of Estarion’s Guard say to the captain of the Olenyai, “Chin up, man. Do you think any of these mudgrubbers understands that that’s the emperor in his own self?”

  “They,” said the Olenyas, “no. But others will know. And they can kill.”

  “Not while we’re here to stop them,” said the captain of the Guard.

  Vanyi could admire his confidence. The land was quiet about them. Too quiet. As if it waited, or readied an ambush. Rumors told of violence: riots in the towns, people killed, a lord stripped of his escort and flogged like a slave and cast out naked upon the road.

  But that was west of their march, too far to ride in a day or even two. Estarion was dissuaded from turning aside. Matters were worse in the south, people said. He was needed more urgently there.

  He did what he could, she granted him that. For those who rode with him, it meant sudden swift riding and then long pauses as he worked his way through a city or a town.

  He would have gone alone if his guards had let him. He even, more than once, climbed up on a fountain’s rim or a market-table and spoke to as many as would listen. “You hear prophets giving speeches,” he would say, “and prophets’ disciples. Now hear what they’re ranting against.”

  People thought him mad. Vanyi knew better than to think that he would care.

  Vanyi, traveling unregarded in his train, found that she could not hate Haliya, or even despise her. Haliya was a child, an innocent, an infant in the ways of the world. And yet she knew more of men and their follies than Vanyi had learned in half again her years.

  It was training, she said. That was what women did. They studied their men.

  She was in awe of Vanyi. She said so the first day, when Vanyi informed her that she now had an attendant. “Of course I should have one,” she said, “but I can’t have you.”

  “Why not?” Vanyi asked. “Because I’m a foreigner? A commoner? A rival?”

  �
�You are a mage,” said Haliya, with a tremor in the word. “You are the gods’ voice. How can they waste you on me?”

  “They think I need a lesson,” said Vanyi.

  Haliya would not believe her. “I should be waiting on you. Is that what you’re telling me? You don’t have to be delicate. It’s more than proper. Since you are mage and priestess and—”

  “Maybe,” Vanyi said, “we can wait on each other.”

  Haliya stopped short. She looked shocked, then she laughed. “That’s outrageous.”

  “So is his majesty.”

  “There is that,” said Haliya, as if it settled things.

  She was not one to show awe in stumbling and in awkwardness. She did it gracefully. She let herself be looked after, but she did her share in turn. She kept quiet when she thought that Vanyi wanted it.

  Vanyi did want it, to pray or simply to think, but Haliya seemed to think that she was working magic. She never asked to see any. That would be improper, her manner said.

  They had to share a bed most nights, when they were crowded into a lord’s small house. If the house was large enough they shared a room: more of that endless Asanian propriety. Vanyi half expected to be offered more than a warm presence when the nights were cold. That was a way of the harems, or so she had heard. But either the tales were false or Haliya did not presume so far.

  She was a tidy sleeper, and quiet. At first she woke when Vanyi rose to sing the sunrise-rite, but after a day or two she merely stirred and muttered and went back to sleep, or feigned it.

  She was always up and dressed when Vanyi came back from her hour among the priests. If she broke her fast she did it then, while Vanyi was away. Vanyi did not ask. She nursemaided the child the rest of the day, and the night too. Surely Haliya could be trusted to fend for herself in the morning. She was in exuberant health by all accounts, ate voraciously at the nooning and at evening, and slept as healthy children sleep, deeply and long.

  What first made Vanyi suspicious, she did not know. A hint of greenness about Haliya’s cheeks, one rain-sodden morning. A servant coming late to clear away the remains of her breakfast, of which she had touched nothing, not even the sweetberry pastries of which she was so fond. When Vanyi came in unexpectedly early—and maybe she did it by design, and maybe she did not—she was not at all surprised to find Haliya retching into a basin.

  Haliya looked as guilty as a woman could look, and as defiant. She said, “I had too much wine last night. I should have known better.”

  Vanyi would dearly have loved to believe her. But there was no hiding the cause of her illness. Not from a mage.

  Iburan must have known or guessed. Vanyi spared a moment to damn him, silently, to the deepest of the twenty-seven hells. Of all the guards he could have chosen for this duty, for all the reasons he could have chosen her, she was the least fit, and this the most unforgivable.

  “You’re pregnant,” she said. “How long?”

  Haliya raised her head. She looked dreadful; she was actually green.

  Vanyi had no pity to spare for her. She swallowed painfully, and grimaced. “I think six cycles,” she said. “Maybe seven.”

  “You knew when you left Kundri’j.”

  Vanyi’s voice was absolutely flat. Haliya shied at it, but nothing could stop her tongue from running on. “I wasn’t sure. I’ve missed courses before. They came on early, you see, but they never have been regular about it.”

  “You knew,” said Vanyi. She was being unreasonable, she knew it. She did not care. “Does he?”

  Haliya went even greener. “Oh, no! Don’t tell him. Please. He’ll send me back.”

  “And so he should.” Vanyi throttled an urge to seize her and shake her. It was not mercy. She knew that if she did it, it would empty the rest of the little idiot’s stomach. “I lost a baby on the ride to Kundri’j. Do you think he’ll take even a moment’s chance of losing this one?”

  “They say that wasn’t the riding. It was the magic on you. The priestess-thing. The bond.”

  True; and bitter beyond bearing. “What did you think you could do? Lie? Hide it till the baby was born?”

  Haliya was recovering in spite of everything. She straightened; the color crept back into her cheeks. “I wasn’t going to lie. I was going to tell him when we got back to Kundri’j, or when we came to Ansavaar.”

  “And I wouldn’t have guessed?”

  “You won’t tell him, will you? It would be a dreadful nuisance to send me back now. You’d have to go, to keep me safe, and we’d have to be so careful. If anyone found out that I was his lady, and that I was bearing his son—”

  “What makes you think it’s a son?”

  “It has to be,” said Haliya. “You see why I have to stay, and why we can’t tell him. He’d want me to go back, you see. And I’d be dead or taken before I got there.”

  And good riddance, Vanyi thought. But there was more of her awake now than shock and petty malice. It was not Haliya’s fault that she had done what Vanyi failed to do. She had conceived, probably, the first night Estarion lay with her. The night Vanyi drove him away.

  Vanyi had brought this on herself. She was learning, a little. She could see what her folly had won her.

  Haliya could not even be smug, so that Vanyi could hate her. “I know I should have stayed in the palace. But I couldn’t bear to stay, and to know that he was gone, and maybe that he’d die. He could. They hate him out here. He travels like the sun, in a mantle of light, but that only makes it darker where his light doesn’t fall.”

  Vanyi was not in a mood to listen to poetry, however prettily conceived. “You had better pray,” she said, “that he doesn’t take it into his head to keep you warm of nights. Men are only blind when we most want them to see. He’ll know in an instant.”

  “That won’t happen,” said Haliya.

  “You hope it won’t. Hoping isn’t happening.”

  “It won’t,” Haliya said. She peered into Vanyi’s face. She was a little shortsighted, Vanyi suspected. It gave her an all too charming air of preoccupation. “You really don’t know,” she said. She sounded incredulous and yet resigned, as if to the foibles of foreigners.

  “What should I know?” Vanyi demanded.

  But Haliya was choosing to be maddeningly Asanian. “He was well taken care of, that night before we left. Too well, I thought. That’s art to the high art, but there shouldn’t be blood in it. He had hardly anything left for us.”

  “Who is she?” Vanyi asked. She was proud that she was calm, that she was thinking clearly, not screaming at the walls. “Someone else in the harem?”

  “It’s not a she.”

  Vanyi blinked. “Of course it’s a she. He doesn’t incline toward men. Even that lordling from Umbros, back in Keruvarion—beautiful as a girl, everyone was sighing over him, and he had nothing in his pretty head but wailing love-songs under Estarion’s window—he got a smile and a word and a summons home, and that was that. Why would it be a man? How could he be . . .” She stopped. “Blood, you said? He drew blood?”

  “Not much,” said Haliya with that damnable Asanian aplomb. “More like a brawl in a pride of lions. It sounded like that, people said. Lots of scratches. Bruises in interesting places. They thought it was murder, but it was only the two of them.”

  Vanyi had thought herself beyond shock. This she had never expected, never foreseen, never prepared for. “How could I not know?”

  She was not aware that she spoke aloud until she had done it. Haliya was kind. “It was a surprise, wasn’t it? I’d have sworn he wouldn’t, either. But you can tell, the way they stand together.”

  “Who?”

  “The blackrobe,” said Haliya. “The Olenyas. Or didn’t you notice him? I think he’s young under the veils. And beautiful. Those eyes go with beauty more often than not. I expect he’s fascinating, too.”

  Vanyi’s knees gave away; she sat down. She had seen. She had refused to see. The shadow in the emperor’s shadow. The bond that no mage c
ould mistake, unless she willed it.

  They were lovers. Not two who kept one another warm of nights; not friends who happened to be lord and concubine. Lovers.

  “There,” Haliya said. “Don’t faint. He won’t take harm. Olenyai are sworn to defend their lord to the death. It was that one who saved his life, the night the assassin came, though it was too late for the squire from Keruvarion; so there’s life-debt in it too. That’s strong bonding, and strong protection.”

  “Pray,” said Vanyi. “Pray to any gods you worship, that you speak the truth.”

  Haliya did not understand. She thought it jealousy, which was nothing an Asanian woman would admit to. And yes, Vanyi conceded, it was that; but only the shell of it. The core was cold fear.

  o0o

  She watched, now that she knew. She saw how it was.

  It was not the bright shining thing she had shared with Estarion and slain by her own fault, because she was both wise and a fool. This was a meeting like matched blades.

  They had been open with it, she and her emperor. The Olenyas had nothing open in him. He was all shadows and secrecy. But he was there, unfailing, fixed on Estarion as a cat fixes on its prey.

  When she lost the child she had not known she was bearing, she had thought she knew what it was to be emptied. But Estarion still loved her; she was sure of it, and secure in it, even in casting it away. When he went to his harem, she had been jealous, bitterly so, but even then she knew that he would have preferred to go to her. Haliya bore his child, did the one thing that Vanyi wanted most to do, and now never would; but Haliya was not Vanyi, not his first woman and his first love.

  The Olenyas was a new thing, a terrible thing. Vanyi was not afraid of any woman in Estarion’s harem. She feared the Olenyas.

  She told herself that she was starting at shadows, dreading a harmless man because she could not see his face or touch his mind. What danger could he be? He was oathbound to protect Estarion. He could not bear a child or share the throne, or claim any part of the woman’s portion. And while he preoccupied Estarion, no new woman could come to claim the emperor’s heart. Vanyi should be glad of him.