Arrows of the Sun Page 35

  Estarion did not love him as he loved Estarion. Estarion’s heart burned like the sun. Worlds basked in it, and it had warmth to spare for them all.

  Korusan’s was a fiercer, frailer, narrower thing, a spark in the night. It had room for one love, and one great hate. Both of them the same. Both fixed here, in this heart under his hand, in this beloved enemy who slept oblivious, like a child or a blessed saint.

  Korusan rose slowly. Estarion did not move. His branded hand lay half across him, glinting gold in the light of the lamp. Korusan turned his face away from it.

  o0o

  Robed, veiled, hidden in shadow, Korusan slipped from the tent. The fire had died down. The camp slept but for the sentries and, rising from beside the embers, the woman Sidani.

  Brightmoon was high amid swift-running clouds; Greatmoon hung low in the east, the color of blood. The twofold light struck frost and fire in her hair, now white as the bright moon, now red as copper.

  Her eyes gleamed on him. Her voice came soft, blurred as if with sleep. “Hirel?”

  Korusan stopped. He had misheard. She had not given him that name.

  She drew closer. They were nearly of a height. “Hirel? Hirel Uverias?”

  “He is dead.”

  The words came flat and hard. She laughed. Moon-touched, he thought. “You promised me. If there was a way, you would come back. I never knew you’d come in the same body.”

  And how in the hells had she known whose face he bore? He felt stripped naked, he in his robes and his swords and his veils.

  “Madam,” he said with control that he had learned through hard lessoning, “you are mistaken. I am Olenyas; no more, if no less. The last of the Golden Emperors is dead.”

  “No Olenyas ever born could claim those eyes.” She was close enough now that he felt the heat of her body, breathed the startling sweetness of her breath. She must have been beautiful in youth, a beauty to break the heart.

  It was in her still, here under the moons. She raised a hand.

  He shied, but she was too quick. The air was cold on his bared cheeks.

  His hands leaped to his swords, but he did not draw them. Her eyes held him fast. Great eyes, dark eyes, eyes to drown in.

  “I always forget,” she said, “how beautiful you are.”

  “You must die,” he said, gasping it. “You see my face.”

  She laughed. “I am dead, child. Years dead. Here,” she said. “Look.” She held up her hand.

  Gold, gold turned to ash and grey scars; but there was no mistaking the shape of it. He had kissed its image just this evening, held its burning brightness to his cheek till he could bear it no longer: and Estarion smiling, not knowing that Korusan’s trembling was pain—willing, joyful, fire-bright pain. They branded their emperors in Keruvarion, branded and ensorceled them; or the god did it, if one believed in gods.

  “I tried to cut it out,” said the madwoman, soft and deceptively calm. “I took the sharpest knife I had. I heated it in fire and began to cut. It was no worse than the burning I was born with. But the god was having none of it. The gold goes all the way to the bone, did you know? and wraps about it. And when I thought to cut off the hand, it was the knife that went instead, flared up and went molten and poured away. Thus the scars. The cuts healed clean, but molten steel is a match for any god. It took away the fire, and that I was glad of; but now it burns like ice.”

  “Gods,” said Korusan. “You—are—”

  “Sarevadin.” She smiled. Yes: he saw it now. Estarion favored her, and in more than face. “You always were slow to know me.”

  “I am not Hirel!” Korusan snapped. “I am Koru-Asan of the Olenyai, and you are stark mad.”

  “Of course I am. All the dead are.”

  He gripped her shoulders. They were bone-thin, fire-warm, and very much alive. “You are no more dead than I.”

  “Exactly.” She closed long fingers about his wrists, not to resist, simply as if it were her whim to know the swift pulse of blood beneath the skin. “Whose get are you? Jania’s?”

  His teeth clicked together.

  “I never did approve of that expedient,” she said. “Fifty brothers were a great inconvenience, but it was hardly kind to keep them locked in prison their lives long, and no sons to carry on after they were dead. Did any outlive me, do you know?”

  “The last took his life before the fourth Sunlord died,” said Korusan. He was falling into her madness, hearing her as if it were nothing to him but a tale.

  “Ah,” she said. “He lived long, for an Asanian. But Jania—I won the field there. We married her to a man in the far west of the empire. He was a good man, I made sure of that; he cherished her.”

  “She hated you,” said Korusan.

  “She did not,” said Sarevadin. But then, slowly: “Maybe she did. She had hopes of me before I changed; and after, when I was as you see me, I let her brother send her away. She had the spirit that covets empires. Pity she wasn’t born a man, and that she had so many brothers.”

  “Had she been a man, Asanion would never have fallen.”

  “Oh,” said the old one, the empress who had been, who should have been dead, “it would have fallen, cubling, in blood and fire.”

  “So may it yet.”

  “In the end, yes. All things end. But not in this generation. He’s a charming child, isn’t he? He looks like my father.”

  “He looks like you.”

  “So he does, though I was prettier, even when I walked in man’s shape. The god meant me for a woman, I think, but changed his mind. For a while.” She brushed Korusan’s cheek with her unbranded hand. The touch was like bone sheathed in raw silk. “Do you love him, youngling?”

  Korusan wrenched away. The terror of it was not that she was dead and yet she lived. It was not even that she was the enemy, the one whom he had been born to hate—more even than Estarion. It was that he felt the power of her, the same power that was in her grandson’s grandson. To dwell in his blood. To make herself a part of him.

  Korusan was not her consort, not that great lord and traitor. Hirel Uverias was dead. Korusan might wear his face, and bitter penance that was, but he was no one but himself.

  “You can’t deny the blood,” said Sarevadin.

  He whirled away from her, back into the tent and the dimness and the blessed quiet. He shuddered with cold that pierced to the bone. So it was, fools and children said, when one spoke with the dead.

  He lay again beside Estarion, pressed body to fire-warm body. Estarion half-woke, smiled, gathered him in.

  He struggled not to cling. Estarion was asleep again already, his arms a wall against the dark.

  40

  It snowed by morning, but lightly, drifting from a leaden sky. Estarion had them all up and riding by full light. A great restlessness was on him. It made Vanyi’s skin twitch.

  The heat of him made nothing of cold or snow. He was everywhere, it seemed, with and without his yellow-eyed shadow: now in the lead with Sidani, now riding back to speak with one or another of his escort, now bringing up the rear.

  Haliya had been avoiding him with remarkable subtlety, managing always to be where he was not. Not that it was difficult. She needed but to stay close by Iburan, and make herself small when Estarion rode past.

  But on this raw grey morning, Iburan’s mare came up lame. He fell back to the rear and the remounts, calling to the others to go on, he would follow.

  Vanyi would have stayed to guard him—and in great relief to be freed from her other and more onerous duty. But he sent her away. He had Shaiyel and Oromin and a pair of the empress’ warrior women, and he would tend his mare before he sought out another that would carry his bulk. He did not need Vanyi. Haliya, the leveling of his brows reminded her, did.

  Haliya took what refuge she could among the empress’ women. She was the only Asanian among them, and the smallest but for Vanyi. As Estarion roved rearward for the dozenth time, he checked Umizan’s stride and swung in beside her.


  Vanyi roused with a start to find her mare sidling toward Umizan with clear and present intent: ears flat, neck arched in the way mares had when they came into heat. Umizan would have been more than senel if he had been oblivious.

  Estarion did not even see the mare or the woman who rode her. His eyes were on Haliya. Haliya looked as serene as an Asanian woman could in her veils and her modesty, but Vanyi caught the trapped-beast dart of her glance.

  Vanyi let slip a finger’s width of rein. It was enough for the mare. She slashed at Umizan’s shoulder.

  He veered, snorting and tossing his horns. Estarion cursed; and met Vanyi’s eyes.

  She would have wagered gold that, had he been as fair as she, he would have blushed scarlet. “Good morning, sire,” she said.

  Haliya’s gratitude was an intense annoyance. He was blind to it. They were on either side of him now, hemming him in.

  Vanyi was not going to make it easy for him, or for his lady, either. She called her mare to order. It took time, and sufficient attention to keep her eyes from fixing on his face as they were sorely tempted to do.

  She was aware even so that he looked from one of them to the other, and did battle with training against transparent cowardice. “My ladies,” he said at length, stiffly. “Are you well?”

  “Very well,” said Haliya with perfect steadiness. “And you?”

  It went on so, an exquisite dance of Asanian courtesies. Vanyi would not have believed Estarion capable of it.

  Unless, she thought, he suspected something. He would not get it out of Vanyi, and Haliya was bred to keep secrets. In the end, and none too soon, he went back to the lead and the woman whose mysteries were nothing to do with him.

  Haliya breathed a long sigh and let herself slump briefly against her senel’s neck. “Oh, gods,” she said, “I was so afraid he’d want me tonight.”

  “Not likely,” said Vanyi. “Not with me here, watching him think about it.”

  Haliya did not understand, but she knew enough of Vanyi now to believe what she said of Estarion.

  Haliya’s hand crept to her middle. It often did that of late. Vanyi was not finding it easier, the longer it went on. This should have been her child, her secret, her fear of being sent back to chains and safety.

  Grimly she reined herself in. She had brought this pain on herself. She would bear it as she must, with a priestess’ fortitude.

  Simple to say. Unbearably difficult to do.

  o0o

  Korusan was wretchedly ill. It was the cold and the snow, and the fever that would not go down for any will he laid on it.

  He had managed to conceal his weakness from Estarion: rising before the emperor, pulling on his garments and his weapons, mastering himself enough to mount and ride. Estarion might have questioned him, but he took refuge in silence.

  When Estarion rode back to speak with his ladies, Korusan did not follow. Chirai’s gaits were soft, his responses light. Folly to expect that a beast would understand a man’s troubles, but the stallion seemed to be moving more carefully, smoothing his paces to spare Korusan’s pain.

  For there was pain. It was deep, in the bones, and it gripped with blood-red claws.

  He did not allow himself to be afraid. When the pain set deep, the mages had told him, there would be nothing that they could do.

  They had kept him alive his life long, nursed him through all his sicknesses, warded him with their magics and mounted guard on his bones. Now their protections were failing. He could feel them unraveling, fraying like silk in a cord.

  He should have been dead in infancy like his brothers, or feeble of mind and body as his sisters had been. He was the last of his blood, the last child of the Lion. And he was dying.

  But not now. Not, fate willing, too soon to do what he must do.

  He was aware always of the madwoman’s eyes on him. Sarevadin. He would have dismissed it as a folly of night and madness and newborn fever, but in the cold snowlight he knew that it was true. She even moved like Estarion, sat her mount as he did, with light long-limbed grace, held her head at that unmistakable, arrogant angle. How anyone could fail to see, he did not know. It was as clear as lightning in the dark.

  She was dead, and he was close enough. It was said that the dead knew one another, even when they walked among the living. She tilted a smile at him, sweet and wild.

  It widened for Estarion as he rode back from the excruciation of two ladies in one orbit. He returned it with ease that knew only innocence. Blind, blessed fool, not to know his own dead kin.

  o0o

  Estarion could not keep still. People noticed it: he saw how their eyes rolled on him, and how they looked at one another and sighed. He tried to keep down the pace, for the seneldi’s sake if not for the riders’, but Umizan was willing, and he was possessed of a bone-deep urgency.

  The land pulled him southward, and stronger the farther he rode. The canker that was in Ansavaar was distinct and persistent, but there was another, closer, and it rankled deeper as the day went on.

  When they halted to rest in a wood protected from wind and blowing snow, Estarion called in the chief of the scouts. The man was Olenyas, shadow-silent and shadow-quick. It vexed his Asanian propriety sorely to see his emperor go down on one knee in unmarked snow, but Estarion was in no mood to care for outland decencies.

  He smoothed the snow with his hand and took up a stick, and drew the shape of the land as his land-sense knew it. He marked the ache that was in Ansavaar, and the closer, stronger one that was on the road he followed, and looked up into the amber eyes. “What is this?” he asked, thrusting his stick into the latter marking.

  The Olenyas would never show surprise, but he paused before he spoke. “You do not know, sire?”

  Estarion bared his teeth. “If I did, would I ask?”

  “That is a map, majesty,” the Olenyas said. “Or so it seems.”

  “Indeed,” said Estarion. “And this?”

  “A city, sire. A day’s ride from here, perhaps more in the snow. Pri’nai.”

  Estarion regarded the stick propped upright in the snow. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Yes, that is what they call it. Pri’nai.” He rose. “Can we get there by evening?”

  The Olenyas seemed to have decided that all foreigners were mad, and Sunlords maddest of all. “We would be hard pressed to do it. And we would leave some behind. Your priest—his mount—”

  Iburan could fend for himself. But Estarion was not entirely lost to sense. “No, we’d best not try to get there in the dark. And it will be dark early tonight. We’ll camp as late as we can, and ride before sunup. We’ll be in the city by midmorning.”

  “Unless the snow worsens,” the Olenyas said. “Sire.”

  “It won’t.” Estarion swept his foot across the map, obliterating it. “It will clear by morning. We’ll have the sun with us when we reach the gates. Then,” he said, “we shall see what waits for us in Pri’nai.”

  41

  The snow ended in the middle night, the clouds scattered before a sudden wind. By dawn when Estarion was up and pacing, waiting for the rest to rouse, it was bitter cold, the stars like frost in the paling sky.

  The sunrise was brilliant but empty of warmth. It found them on the road, hoofbeats muffled by the carpet of snow.

  Estarion was barely aware of them. He knew that Korusan was near him, that Sidani was beside him. He sensed the coming of another like a shiver on the skin: Iburan on a tall Ianyn stallion, towering over Umizan.

  Estarion would not glance at him. Even when he said, “There’s trouble ahead.”

  “The whole west is trouble,” said Sidani.

  “Granted,” Iburan said equably, “but there’s worse here.”

  “We’re riding under arms,” Estarion said, “and in battle order.”

  “So I noticed.” Iburan paused. “What drives you, Starion?”

  “You need to ask, my lord of mages?”

  “I need to ask,” Iburan said.

  That was meant to
shame Estarion into sense. It pricked his temper, but it cleared his head a little. “Do you feel the land, Iburan?”

  “I feel the trouble in it. Blood has flowed on it. Hate rankles in it.”

  “Yes,” Estarion said.

  “And you think that you can stop it?”

  “If not I, then who?”

  Iburan was silent.

  “You don’t think I’m arrogant?” Estarion asked.

  “I think that you may be both more than anyone thought you, and less.”

  Estarion stiffened.

  “Oh, he is that,” said Sidani. “Who trained him? You? You didn’t do badly, as far as you went. But you didn’t make a Sunlord of him.”

  They rounded on her, both alike and both astonished. The irony of that did not escape Estarion.

  She grinned at them. “Oh, he’s emperor enough, priest—and more since he came to Asanion. He’s still not all that he could be.”

  “He’s young,” Iburan said with a touch of sharpness. “He’ll grow into it.”

  “Will you still be saying that when he’s a greybeard? Because he’ll be then as he is now.”

  “And how is that?”

  Estarion wondered if she enjoyed the spectacle as much as he did. Iburan in a temper was a rare thing; Iburan struggling to keep from roaring was a wonderful one.

  She sat her evil-tempered gelding with grand insouciance and laughed. “Oh, such outrage! Look at him, priest. Isn’t he a pretty thing? Fine wits, fine mind, and a light foot in the dance. He knows how to make people love him; and that without magery, because he assures himself that he has none. Why is that, Iburan of Endros? What makes this prince of mages so eager to deny the whole of himself?”

  Estarion’s laughter died soon after she began. She could not be saying what she said. She knew nothing of power, or of Sunlords, or of anything but wild stories. It was too much like hope; too much like all his prayers, before he had forgotten how to pray. “Woman, you are a fool. I have no power worth the name, nor ever shall again.”

  She waved him to silence. He had obeyed before he thought, for pure startlement.