by Judith Tarr
He bit down hard on his tongue and schooled his face to blandness. “Lord Peridan,” he said. “I trust your wait was pleasant. I bring a gift, as you see: a dainty for your dinner. Will you share it with me?”
Lord Peridan looked as if he had swallowed one of Estarion’s fish, sidewise.
“Uncleaned,” said Sidani’s voice in Estarion’s ear. He did not jump—in that much, training held. And how in the hells she knew what he was thinking—
No time now. He smiled at Suvilien’s lord. “There, sir. Sit at your ease; Godri here will fetch you wine and whatever else you desire. And how is your lady? And your lady mother? Your sons are well, I trust? Your eldest son’s son—a fine tall lad he must be, and ready soon to come out from among the women.”
“In the autumn, sire,” Lord Peridan said, warming perceptibly.
Either he had forgotten his grievances, or he was choosing to play the game as Estarion led it. Estarion cared little which. This mountain of lard was his best defense against the storm that threatened in his mother’s eyes, and perhaps worse, in Iburan’s. He would keep it by him for as long as he could, and he would charm it into complacency, or he was no son of the Sun.
As he set himself to play the courtier, Sidani made herself a part of the camp. She did it with sublime simplicity: chose a fire, sat by it, began to tell one of her stories. He was aware of her, distant and yet close, as if she were a part of him; another thing to wonder at, but later, when there was time to spare for things that mattered. For now it was enough that she stayed.
o0o
“He has the gift,” the stranger said. “No doubt of that.”
Vanyi eyed her sidelong. The woman had come in with Estarion, walking in his shadow as if she had a right to be there. He never had got round to explaining her, nor had she seen fit to explain herself. She was simply there. People acted as if she belonged with them.
Idiots. Courtiers. If it walked with the emperor, it was his, and no one thought to question it.
Vanyi must have said it aloud. The stranger said, “What, like the royal cats? I like that, rather.”
“What do you know of anything royal?”
“His thoughts exactly,” the woman said.
The fish had all gone to the great glutton of a lord, except one that came by Godri’s hands, with his emperor’s compliments couched in the elaborate phrases of the desert. She accepted it graciously, Vanyi granted her that, and she showed a mastery of phrase that left Godri blinking in awe.
She did not, Vanyi noticed, include any of the many formulas of unworthiness. Nor did she try to decline the gift.
“And why should I?” she asked of Vanyi. “I caught it.” She divided it neatly and laid half of it on Vanyi’s plate. “Here, eat. It’s as good as anything you’d catch at home.”
“Fish of the sea is surpassingly fine,” Vanyi said.
“But fish of the river is sweeter.” The stranger disposed of hers with a cat’s neatness and economy, and followed it with a noble quantity of lesser meats. In the middle of them she tilted her chin in the gesture that, where Vanyi was born, meant greeting, and said, “Sidani, they call me.”
“Vanyi,” said Vanyi. A mage guarded her name; but courtesy was older than magery, and deeper rooted.
This was not a mage. Vanyi was almost certain of that. Not a priestess, either. And yet she had an air of both.
Maybe it was simply age, and arrogance that put Estarion’s to shame. They were all like that in the north. They called southerners servile, and sneered at the grovelings of the west. Imperial majesty meant nothing to them except as they partook of it. They never forgot that the Sunborn was king of Ianon first, and Ianon was the heart of the north.
“I’m not Ianyn,” Sidani said, “though my father was. I’m everything and nothing.”
“You look Ianyn,” Vanyi said. And stopped. “How do you do that?”
The dark eyes were as blankly innocent as a child’s. “Do what, priestess?”
Read my mind, Vanyi said without words.
Nothing. No flicker of response. The mind before her was a clear pool, transparent to the bottom, and thoughts in it as quicksilver-elusive as fish. One, caught, was pleasure in the honeycake she ate. Another held nothing more or less terrible than Vanyi’s own face, too white and sharp for beauty, but the stranger reckoned it splendid.
Vanyi did not like enigmas. Her body tensed to rise, to get away. Her mind held fast. This was danger. Not for herself, she never feared that, but for Estarion.
She looked harmless enough, an old wanderer woman taking the emperor’s charity. He was free with it, as Vanyi well knew. A priestess on Journey had come once to his city, with nothing to distinguish her from any of a hundred like her, except a gift of magery, and that was hardly uncommon in that city of mages and priests. But he had seen her, and he had singled her out. He had chosen her for his beloved.
No threat of that here. This woman was long past any such thing. And if she was not, she would not want a youth as callow as Estarion.
The glint of her eye belied that. But she could not know what Vanyi was thinking. There was no power in her. Vanyi had a gift for such things. She knew.
o0o
“Who is that woman? Where did you find her?”
Estarion was easy to entrap. Vanyi simply followed him into his tent when that interminable feast was over, evicted his squire with a well-placed glare, and set herself to do the squire’s duties.
Estarion made no effort to resist her, but neither did he answer her. He said, “I hope my mother doesn’t take it into her head to try the same thing. Seeing Lord Peridan settled for the night won’t keep her occupied long.”
Vanyi shook his hair out of its plait and reached for the comb. He sighed under her hands. “So,” she said, “before her majesty comes to take her own piece of your hide: Who is that woman?”
“A wanderer,” he said. “She tells stories. She caught the fish I fed to his lordship. She says she was in Suvilien before she came down to the river and found me.”
“His lordship didn’t act as if he’d seen her before.”
“His lordship doesn’t see anything beyond his next meal. How did such a glutton ever get hold of a castle as vital as Suvilien?”
“Most likely he inherited it. Why not ask Iburan? He’ll know. And he’ll be here on your mother’s heels, you can be sure of it.”
“Not if I can help it.” He turned on the stool and clasped his arms about her. “Will you help me?”
She studied him. The new beard aged him, made him seem more a man, but from so close she could see the shape of the face beneath it, and that was still in great part a boy’s.
“You trust too easily,” she said. “What if the woman is an assassin? Remember the Exile who nearly destroyed the Sunborn in the womb, and came back when he was grown and tried to cast him down.”
“There’s no darkness in Sidani,” said Estarion. “Maybe she is a little mad. Maybe more than a little. But she means me no harm.”
Vanyi’s arms locked about him, startling him into rigidity. “How do you know? How can you be certain? She’s not what she seems, I know it. I feel it in my bones.”
He eased slowly, though a remnant of tension lingered in the angle of his shoulders, the straightness of his back. “Maybe she isn’t. She was a lord’s bastard, I think. She has the air. What of it? She’s neither mage nor sorceress. She interests me. I’d like to hear more of her stories.”
“Child,” said Vanyi tenderly. “Infant. Beloved idiot.” His mouth tempted hers. She set a kiss in the corner of it. But she would not let him escape so easily. “I don’t like her. Or,” she said, “no. Not dislike, exactly. I don’t think you were wise to bring her here.”
“Maybe I wasn’t,” he said. “But when I did it, I felt that I’d done rightly—wise or unwise or whatever else it might have been. She won’t hurt me. While I live, she’ll never touch you but by your leave.”
“She’s no danger to me at all,�
�� Vanyi said. “That I’m sure of. Thank you, sweet child, for not suggesting that I’m jealous.”
His eyes were wide with honest surprise. “Should you be?”
“She’s beautiful in her way. And, as you say, interesting.”
“She’s old.”
He sounded all of ten years old himself. He was not too badly offended when she laughed, although he said, “She is. She says she’s ninety at least.”
“A hale seventy,” Vanyi judged. “Sixty, more likely. Or less—the road is hard on aging bones. See? She tells stories. Keep her for that. But don’t trust her, or anything she tells you.”
“Not even if it’s true?”
She hit him, but the blow turned to a caress.
He would have made it more. She pulled away. In time, just, to appear decorous when his mother stepped into the tent, and in her shadow as always, the high priest of Avaryan in Endros, lightmage to her dark as the old tales said. But they were not twinned mages. Not in any way the Guild would have understood, though it might have understood that they were lovers. It was obvious to anyone with eyes to see.
Vanyi was expected to leave. That was the coward’s part, and the prudent servant’s. She was neither. She busied herself about the tent, keeping to the dimmer places, for the little good it did, and cursing his squire for the perfect order he kept.
“Oh, come,” said Iburan at last, half weary, half amused. “Sit with us, priestess. We’ll not be flaying him alive quite yet.”
She felt the flush rise to her cheeks, and knew they saw it. Her chin came up. If it was defiant, then so be it. She set a stool by Estarion’s right hand, and sat on it, and waited.
For a long while no one spoke. Estarion seemed content to rest his eyes on the lamp, letting it fill them, and him, with its little light.
Again it was Iburan who spoke, who said what had to be said. “Suppose we consider the matter disputed: that you left the camp unseen. That you took a truant’s liberty, and nigh caused a scandal by your absence. Suppose it argued, and the matter settled as well as it ever may be, at no great profit to any of us.”
“And no great disadvantage,” Estarion said. “Are you telling me that I’m to be forbidden any more such escapades?”
“We can hardly forbid you,” said Iburan. “You are the emperor.”
Estarion laughed, brief and bitter. “When has that stopped you? No, I wasn’t wise in what I did. I didn’t mean to be wise. Maybe the god led me. Have you thought of that?”
“Certainly,” said the god’s priest. “And which god, my lord? He of the east, who is light and truth, or he of the west, who is darkness and the Lie?”
“Aren’t they both, in the end, the same?”
“Not in their consequences.”
“You may argue theology until the stars fall,” the empress said, clear and cold, “but it changes nothing that is. Estarion, mere error we can forgive. Idiocy, never. What if you had been killed?”
Vanyi kept her eyes scrupulously on her feet. One of her boots needed mending. Tomorrow, if there was time. If tomorrow came.
She felt the heat that burned in her lover’s body. Heat of the sun, and heat of temper banked, flaring to sudden brilliance. Yet he kept his voice low. “If I cannot walk alone in my own empire, by my own river, under my own sky, then god and goddess forbid that I call myself emperor.” He drew a breath so sharp it must have cut. “This is Keruvarion, Mother. In Asanion, yes, I’ll walk low and I’ll walk soft, and I’ll never walk unguarded. Here at least, while I walk in my own country, let me walk free.”
“Very pretty,” she said. “Very foolish. Is a border a wall and a warded fastness, that no assassin should pass it?”
“Not here,” he said, lower yet, and fiercer. “Not in Keruvarion. I’m not an utter fool. I have an art or two here and there. I can guard myself.”
“So your father said,” said Merian.
Estarion started, then went still. Those were cruel words, Vanyi thought, but—yes—necessary.
He looked rather more angry than convinced. But he did not argue further, nor say much at all, until his mother was gone. And then he only said, low, as if to himself, “He never died in Keruvarion.”
8
“Oh aye,” said Sidani, “I sailed the seas with Chubadai. He was never quite the pirate that they say, but he took what he wanted, when he wanted it, and if he wasn’t too careful about how he paid for it, well then, as often as he stole it outright, he rendered its value in gold thrice over.”
“Stolen gold,” someone said.
Someone else jeered at him. “I’ll wager he magicked it out of the sea-salt, to deck his lady with.”
“He never magicked any for me,” Sidani said.
That made them all laugh. The nearest yelped: she had a hard hand.
“Puppy! I was none so ill to look at when I was young. Though I grant you, I’d lost the best of it by the time Chubadai set eyes on me. I was a whip-lean mad thing with an ear for the sea-spells, and so he took me on, and sailed the world around.”
Vanyi listened in spite of herself. There was always a crowd where the wanderer was, pressing her for one of her wild tales or coaxing her into a song. She could sing with a voice that time had barely blunted, and she could play the harp that one of the lordlings had given her.
God and goddess knew, he could barely play it; and for a wonder he knew it. He was in love with her. He made no secret of it. They were all twitting him for his ancient lady fair.
But never where the woman could hear. And never with conviction enough to suit Vanyi. The damnable creature was looking younger by the hour. On the ferry across Suvien, though the swirl and rush of water made the mages ill, all but Vanyi who was seaborn, Sidani stood in the bow with the wind in her hair, and she laughed as the great ungainly thing rocked and pitched under the weight of its cargo.
Estarion was delighted with her. She had claimed one of the remounts for herself, a mean-tempered gelding who knew too well the use of his stunted horns, and she rode him as if she were born to his back. They rode for long hours knee to knee, trading tales; or sat by the fire of an evening, arguing the ways of men and gods; or sang together, dark voice and light, and sometimes, by a trick of the wind, Vanyi could not tell which was which.
The nights were another matter. He was all Vanyi’s then, so wholly that often she wanted to weep. She kept a brave face for him, and braver, the nearer they came to Asanion.
“I’ll never leave you,” he said, “nor send you away, unless you ask to go. I swear it, my love. No matter what comes of this—I’ll never be aught but yours.”
“Hush,” she said, and stopped his mouth with her hand. His beard was well grown in, rich and full; she had trimmed it that morning, smoothing its ragged edges. She tangled her fingers in the curls of it. “Don’t swear to anything. Just let us have what we have now, for as long as we may have it.”
“Always,” he said.
Her throat locked. She flung herself on him as if he were a feast and she were starving.
o0o
He fell asleep unwontedly soon. This traveling tired him, for all that he denied it. And the last few nights had been short of sleep: all of them in towns along the edge of the great wood, and all much beset with petitions for him to grant, dignitaries for him to entertain, affairs for him to settle.
In a day or two they would enter Asanion. Tonight they guested in another of the numberless towns; but Saluyan was less importunate than the rest.
Its people had let him go not long after sunset. Its priestess was compassionate. “Poor my lord,” she said where Vanyi could hear, “you need sleep more than we need your sleeplessness. Rest, sire, and be comforted. We’ll not trouble you till you wish to be troubled.”
He would have argued with that, of course, but the priestess was adamant. He would sleep, and her people would let him be.
Wise woman. Stubborn, too, to resist Estarion.
Not that one would expect any less from Iburan’s kins
woman. In her the northern blood ran thin, though it gave her height and breadth enough to tower over people here. She was a brown-gold woman, brown-gold skin, gold-brown hair, brown-gold eyes: Asanian blood, Asanian face, but enough of north and east that Estarion barely bridled at the sight of her. He warmed to her swiftly, even when she opposed his will: and that was a rarity.
They were still awake, Iburan and the priestess, cousin and cousin. The empress was with them.
Vanyi was hardly tempted to join their company. Nor was she minded quite yet to sleep. Restlessness twitched in her, and something deep, like an ache, or a cramping in her middle. It had been vexing her off and on for a day or two. Travel-weariness; anxiety for Estarion and for herself; too much riding and too little walking and not enough plain stillness.
She kissed Estarion’s brow. He murmured in his sleep, but did not wake. She left him softly, pulling on such clothes as came to hand, and crept barefoot out of the room they shared.
This was the priestess’ house, the largest in this town and for leagues about. Vanyi had counted ten rooms besides the room they dined in. Still it was hardly large enough for an emperor’s train. Most of Estarion’s escort camped outside the town; only his Guard and his closest companions shared his lodging.
Sidani should not have been one of them, and yet she was. Vanyi found her in the temple, or rather at the entrance of it, leaning against the doorpost. As Vanyi approached she moved aside, somewhat to Vanyi’s surprise. She had looked as immovable as one of the pillars.
Vanyi wanted to pray at this altar, to beg the god’s protection for her lover and emperor. The wanting was as keen as a blade, twisting in her center. And yet she paused. The wanderer’s face was a shadow in shadow, her mind a singing silence.
“Do you want to come in?” Vanyi asked her.
“Do you give me leave?” Sidani asked. Vanyi could hear no mockery in her, and yet surely that was what it was.
“Do you need it?”
“Maybe,” the wanderer said. “I cursed the bright god long ago, and his dark sister, too. They took from me all that I loved. They left me in ashes.”
