A Fall of Princes Read online

  And she was treacherous. She had trumpeted his prowess to any who could hear. If he left this tent alive, he would kill her.

  Her father laughed and prodded Hirel in the most vulgar of places. “Sa, sa, little stallion! Did you leave your tongue in your bower by the water? Tell me what brings you here. Would you like gold? Seneldi? Another woman to teach your western dances to? Though that might not be so simple; my daughter has sharp claws, and she’s using them on any who even hints at taking a try at you.”

  Hirel’s voice astounded him; it was perfectly steady. “Sarevan,” he said. “Sarevan would speak with you.”

  Hirel had conjured rightly. Azhuran was up again at once without question or protest, shortening his stride a little so that Hirel needed only to trot to keep pace, seeking Sarevan’s tent amid a straggle of curious folk.

  o0o

  Sarevan sat up in his bed, and the old woman stood well apart from him. The air between them quivered with tension.

  Hirel thrust himself into it. “The chieftain is here,” he said to Sarevan. “Strike your bargains as you can, but be quick about it. You have need of rest.”

  He was certain that the witch would cast a curse on them all. But she stood back, arms folded, and glowered in silence. Azhuran bent over the Varyani prince, speaking in a rumble in his own tongue.

  The bargaining went on for a long while. Ulan came in the heat of it, when the old woman had added her own voice to the rest.

  The cat lay down unperturbed, drowsing with one ear cocked. Hirel settled against the warm solid body and tried to make sense of the words that flew back and forth above his head. It kept him from remembering shame; from resorting to murder.

  o0o

  “Swift seneldi,” Sarevan said when the chieftain had gone back to his judging and the wisewoman departed in disgust, “and provisions, and clothing for us both.” He had barely voice left to speak, but he looked eminently satisfied.

  “At what price?” asked Hirel.

  “A concession or two from my father, concerning mainly the freedom of the tribe to hunt on royal lands, and employment in my service for certain of Azhuran’s young men.”

  “I did not mean that. He could ask nothing that your father would not happily pay. At what price to you?”

  “None,” answered Sarevan. “We ride tomorrow.”

  Hirel sucked in his breath. He had meant to put an end to the old woman’s railings. Not to begin a new madness. “I see that I erred,” he said with a twist of scorn. “I credited you with a modicum of sense.”

  “I have to go,” Sarevan said.

  “Send Azhuran’s young savages in your place, and follow when you are stronger. Surely one of them can be trusted to carry your message.”

  “Not this.” Sarevan sighed and closed his eyes. “Let be, cubling. I do what I must.”

  “You are a howling madman.”

  Sarevan smiled thinly. He let the silence stretch; Hirel chose not to break it.

  It seemed that Sarevan had slid into sleep, until he said, “I’ve included you in the bargain. We’ll go to Endros together.”

  Hirel went rigid. “We will not. I too can strike bargains; I will find my way to Kundri’j. I am free of you now, as you are free of me.”

  Sarevan’s eyes opened. They were deep and quiet, and there was regret in them, but iron also. “I’m sorry, cubling. I wanted to take you home and have done with it. But now you know who I am, and you guess what I must say to my father. I can’t chance your reaching Kundri’j Asan before I come to Endros.”

  “And what,” asked Hirel softly, as a prince must, and above all a prince betrayed, “gives you either right or power to constrain me?”

  “Necessity,” said Sarevan. “And the Zhil’ari.”

  “Potent powers,” Hirel said, soft still, but never in submission. “But of right, you speak no word, as of honor you know nothing: you who so long deceived me, and cozened me, and reveled in your lies.”

  Sarevan sighed with all the weariness in the world. “Maybe I did take too much pleasure in it. It’s past; I’ve paid. Now need drives me, and you must come perforce, because you are what you are. You won’t suffer for riding with me. You’ll be treated with all honor; I’ll see that you have occasion to speak for your empire.”

  “My father will come with an army to free me.”

  “More likely he’ll treat with us for your safe return.”

  “It comes down to that, does it not? You but played with me while you spied in Asanion. Now you tell the truth. You always meant me to be your hostage. Gods, that I had killed you when I had the chance!”

  Sarevan raised himself on an arm that trembled but held. “I swear to you, Hirel Uverias, this is no betrayal. You will see your home and your people again; you will stand again in Kundri’j Asan. But first I must carry this message to my father.”

  “Must,” Hirel echoed him. “Always must. And what compels you? You were not your father’s only spy. Surely one at least will not be caught as you were caught.”

  That stung: Sarevan tensed and nearly fell. But he said as calmly as ever, “None of them has dreamed as I have dreamed. None of them is my father’s son.”

  “Speak to him from afar. Wield the magic you are so proud of.”

  “I have none.” Sarevan’s elbow buckled; he fell back, with a gasp at the jarring of his shoulder. “I told you, it is gone. You will ride with me. You need not try to escape. Azhuran’s warriors are instructed to guard you.”

  o0o

  Not ostentatiously. But wherever Hirel went, there were a few hulking tribesmen about, loitering, gaming, blocking every path of escape. When he swam in the lake, half the Zhil’ari came to join him, men and women alike, flaunting their nakedness.

  One slipped up behind him and tugged wickedly; he yelped more in startlement than in pain. Zhiani’s merriment rippled in his ear.

  She wanted to play, there, in front of everyone. He remembered that he was going to kill her. After he had killed Sarevan.

  Her fingers did something exquisite. He groaned aloud, and no one even heard. Close by, between himself and the shore, two men locked in passion, a great grizzle-bearded man and a downy-cheeked boy; little children gamboled over and about them.

  It was unspeakable. It held him as firmly as any bars, and Zhiani’s hands and mouth were chains, and the world itself his prison.

  o0o

  They were not like his brothers and their accomplices in Pri’nai. No one was careless here, or underrated Hirel for his youth and his prettiness and his sheltered innocence. When morning came, he was still in the camp, and Zhiani made much of his leaving, sighing and kissing him and heaping him with gifts.

  He had decided to let her live. She was only a savage; she could not know what she had done to him.

  Perhaps he might take her with him. She was no fit wife for a high prince, but she made a remarkable concubine. No one in Kundri’j had anything like her.

  If he ever saw Kundri’j again. But he would take her. For comfort. For company.

  She bathed him, kissing him wherever the fancy took her, nibbling here and there, but when desire rose and he reached for her, she eeled away.

  “No more,” she said in deep regret. She dressed him with a little less playful wantonness, and clearly she did not approve of the breeches that he had insisted on.

  “Woman,” she muttered. “Woman-weak.” But she helped him into them, skin-snug as they were, and fastened the codpiece with rather more pleasure, and the heavy plated belt; then settled the embroidered coat, leaving it open so that the gold of her first gift shone clear on his chest.

  Last of all she brought out the high soft boots, and in her mind they seemed to make up for the effeminacy of the breeches. Small feet were much prized among these broad-footed savages; his, narrow and fine and only lightly calloused, the scars of his wandering beginning to fade, delighted her almost as much as the golden brightness of his hair.

  When she was done, he looked like a pri
nce again, cropped head and all. He saw it in her eyes. She brushed his eyelids with royal gold, caressing as she did it; her finger traced a curve on his cheek. Asking with silent eloquence. Offering paints: gold, scarlet, green.

  Almost he yielded, but he had a little sense left. “No,” he said firmly. “No more.”

  She sighed, but she withdrew, holding back the flap of her tent.

  The others were waiting. Nine painted, jangling, kilted giants holding the bridles of their tall seneldi; and Sarevan.

  Sarevan on his own feet, painted and jangling and kilted like any Zhil’ari buck, with his hair in two narrow braids flanking his face and a long tail behind, and a red-eyed, red-maned demon of a stallion goring the air beside him.

  He turned toward Hirel; his face was a terror, painted in barbaric slashes of white and yellow, his beard braided with threads of gold. But his arrogance was the same, and the white flash of his teeth. “You took your time, cubling,” he said.

  “I had help.” Hirel looked about. “Am I permitted to ride? Or must I be bundled on a packbeast?”

  “You ride,” Sarevan said. He gestured; a boy led forward a tiger-striped mare.

  She was not as tall as the others, though still no pony, and she was no great beauty. Her like would never have been suffered in Hirel’s stables in Kundri’j. But she moved well, and she had a bright wicked eye in her narrow head, and when Hirel took the bridle she snorted and stamped and threatened him with her teeth.

  He laughed. He liked a senel with a temper.

  He vaulted into the odd high saddle with its softening of fleeces, its festoons of straps and rings and bags. But there was a senel under it all, lightly bitted and gathering to test him, and if there was anything he could do, it was ride. Shorn, captive, and thrice betrayed, in this at least he had come home.

  The others were mounting. Azhuran had come while Hirel was absorbed in his mount, and Zhiani was close by her father, watching him speak to Sarevan.

  Hirel nudged the mare toward them. Sarevan ended his colloquy and mounted lightly, favoring his wounded shoulder only a little.

  Azhuran saluted Hirel. “Good morning, little stallion,” he said.

  Hirel inclined his head. “You have been most generous. I thank you; if ever I can repay you—”

  “It was nothing,” Azhuran said. “We did it for the prince. If anything, we’re in your debt. My daughter asks me to thank you with all her heart. You’ve taught her more than she could ever have hoped for, even from a yellow dwarf.”

  Hirel would ignore the insults. He would remember who and what these people were. He would—

  The chieftain’s grin was abominably lewd. “Yes, you’re the best teacher she’s ever had. Come Fall Gathering, when she spreads her girdle in front of the tent, she’ll win a high chief’s son; and he’ll give a whole herd to lie in her bed.”

  Zhiani stood beside her father, and she was smiling luminously, not a tear to be seen. Hirel’s teeth locked on the words he would have said.

  That he was more than a high chief’s son. That she could be a queen; or as close to it as her barbarian kindred might ever come.

  She had never loved him, only the arts that he could teach her, which every Asanian nobleman learned from his early youth. He was nothing to her but the passport to a rich husband.

  “May you wed as you wish,” he said to her in his court voice, that could mask anything. Anger. Hurt. Reluctant relief. “May your husband give you many sons.”

  The mare fretted. Hirel let her dance about, away from Zhiani’s heartless smile, toward his captivity.

  It would, he vowed, be brief. As brief as wits and will could make it. He did not look back. The company sprang whooping into a gallop; he kicked the mare after them. She bucked, squealed, and set herself to outpace the wind.

  FIVE

  “He kills himself,” said the smallest of the nine Zhil’ari, who stood hardly taller than Sarevan.

  They were camped by the southernmost of the Lakes of the Moon. Hirel eyed it longingly. If only this great lanky creature would go away, he could bathe and swim and loosen his travel-wearied muscles. But Zha’dan had caught him alone, and was not inclined to sacrifice the opportunity.

  Hirel took off his coat and hung it tidily from a branch. With equal care he said, “Sarevan looks well enough to me. He rides without falling. He eats well. He—”

  “He keeps the saddle because he refuses to fall. He pretends to eat, but the demon cat eats for him. He paints himself not for beauty as is proper: he hides what the riding does to him.”

  Hirel loosened his belt. The savage watched with interest. Hirel let his hands fall. He was not ready to strip in front of this glittering meddler; no matter that the whole tribe had seen all of him there was to see. There was no logic in modesty.

  Nor in Sarevan’s weakness, if it came to that. “His wound is healing. It was healing before we left the village. His wizardry—how can he be dying of that?”

  Zha’dan regarded him as one would regard an idiot. Hirel watched tolerance dawn behind the paint. Ah, it said. Foreigner.

  Zha’dan took care with his words, stumbling a little with the roughness of tradespeech. “Mages are very great, like gods. But they are not gods. They are men. They pay for their magics. Small magics, small prices. Great magics, prices sometimes too great to pay. The body pays, always. And the power itself pays more. The great one—he fought great mages, and he won, but he killed one. A stone, you throw it, it strikes down the kimouri, but maybe it comes back. It strikes you, too. It puts out your eye. So with power, and mages who use it to kill. Death’s price is power’s death.”

  “And the body’s?”

  “The power is the body,” said Zha’dan. “If the great magics were all mine to use, and I lost them because I let myself fall into a trap, I would want to die.”

  “What are you asking of me?” demanded Hirel. “I have no power to wring sanity from that madman.”

  “He is no god to you. You can make him act like a man of sense.”

  “Sense? In Sarevan Is’kelion?” Hirel laughed almost freely. “Tribesman, you seek a miracle. Pray to your god. Perhaps he will hear you.”

  Hirel retrieved his coat, with a sigh for his lost bath. While Zha’dan stood in silence, eyes wide and hurt like the eyes of a wounded kimouri, Hirel stepped around him and walked away.

  o0o

  The nine Zhil’ari were becoming people, if slowly. There was Zha’dan, who hovered and worried; who painted concentric circles in scarlet on his brow and on his breast, and who liked to sing in a loud unmusical voice. There was Gazhin his brother, who always bellowed him into silence, and who was as burly as Zha’dan was slender. Unlike the others, whose beards were still uncertain of their welcome, he had thick copper-wound braids that brushed his breastbone. There were the twins, Rokan and Kodan, as like as two pups of the same litter, but Rokan painted himself with crimson, Kodan with blue.

  Sometimes Hirel amused himself in trying to find the faces behind the thickets of hair, and in wondering how their women could possibly endure to kiss those bristling cheeks. Small wonder that Zhiani had taken such delight in learning the arts of love from a beardless Asanian boy.

  They had made camp boisterously, as seemed to be their wont, and amid apparent chaos, but it was well made: a firepit dug, the daymeal set to cook, a guard sent off into the trees. The rest tended seneldi or swam in the lake. Two coupled in the open like animals; Hirel did not think they were the same two whose thrashings had kept him awake all last night.

  The one on top saw him staring and grinned, never missing a stroke. He tore his eyes away.

  This was an art. It had its times, its private places, its rites and its cadences. Always it was to be regarded with reverence as the highest of earthly pleasures. These hulking shaggy men, with their noise and their contortions—they made of it a mockery.

  “This is play. With women, it’s as sacred a rite as you could wish for.” Sarevan stood beside him, perfectly
steady, garish in his paint. Hirel saw no black bird of death perched on his shoulder.

  “Sacred.” Hirel snorted his contempt for the very word. “Sacred enough to buy with gold and amber and trumpet from the mountaintops.”

  “No priest enters his rite unrehearsed,” said Sarevan. He looked Hirel up and down. “I confess, I didn’t believe you were capable. Even after all the tales I’d heard. Is it true that the training begins in the cradle?”

  “I am not an infant!” Hirel’s voice cracked upon the words.

  Sarevan laughed. “Of course not, cubling. But does it?”

  “Yes.” Hirel’s eyes would not lift from the ground. “It is an art. Like dancing, like weaponry, like courtcraft. The sooner begun, the greater the skill.”

  “Even with that?”

  At last Hirel could look up. Sarevan looked bemused, and amused, and insufferable. “I suppose I should envy you. I merely learned dancing and weaponry and courtcraft, and the rest was for whispering in corners. For a while I committed a dreadful sin. I went into the minds of people who were loving. Women, even. One day my mother caught me at it. I was mortified, and I knew that I was about to be flayed alive.”

  “Were you?” Hirel asked in spite of himself.

  “Oh, yes. With words so keen, the air bled where they passed. And then I had to serve my penance. I’d been trying to see if I could will a child out of the coupling, and it turned out I had. I lived in the woman’s mind throughout her pregnancy, and it was far from an easy one, even in our nest of mages: it was her first, and she was old for it, one of my mother’s warrior women who’d never taken time for childbearing until I tampered with her protections. She forgave me. Eventually. After we’d birthed her daughter together.”

  “But how—”

  “I lived in two bodies, and my own was often asleep. My tutors were much concerned. If they had known . . . It was hard sometimes, to know I was a boy of twelve summers, strong and quite disgustingly healthy, but to feel like a woman of thirty with a child growing in her belly. Toward the end I had to watch every moment, or I’d even walk like her. And that was painful, stretching a boy’s bones to move as a woman’s. But never as painful as hers, that stretched to carry the child.”