by Judith Tarr
“I watched,” she said. “From windows. Walls, sometimes. Even the roof, until Nurse caught me. I knew how to do it before I tried it.”
“Did the pony think so, too?”
She bristled at him. “I’m dreadful. Aren’t I? You didn’t say anything, but I saw you laughing with that painted savage.”
“That painted savage is a lord and warrior of Varag. He is also,” said Estarion, “the only one in Kundri’j whom I can honestly call friend.”
That quenched her a little, but she was not one to let go a fight. “You were laughing at me.”
“We were marveling. Godri says you’ll make a rider.”
“I’m not one now?”
“Do you think you are?”
She lowered her eyes. Her fingers knotted and unknotted in her lap. “My lord,” she said after a while. “Did you mean that? About the gift?”
“I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
Not that an Asanian could believe it; but Haliya was kind enough not to say so. “I may ride every day?”
“All day if you want to. I’ve given orders. They will,” said Estarion, “be obeyed.”
The eunuch on guard did not speak, but Estarion knew he heard.
Haliya took her time in responding. That was Asanian, that restraint. He had stopped thinking that it was coldness.
She stood all at once, with an air of resolution, and stepped forward. She folded her arms very carefully about Estarion’s neck. He sat still, not daring to breathe. She was warm; she smelled of spices. Her lips were cool on his.
He drew back as gently as he could. “Do I take it that that is payment?”
She did not slap him. That would have been predictable. She caught his face in her hands. They were not cool at all now; not in the least.
He was gasping when she let him go. So, to his surprise, was she. He wondered if he looked as wild as she did.
Her hands were trembling. She let them fall to his shoulders. “You burn,” she said. “Like fire.”
“They say I’m the Sun’s child.”
Her fingers tightened. She looked ready to fall over; he steadied her about the middle. She was a pleasant handful, small but not as a child is, and sweetly curved.
He did not even care that she was a yellow woman. Gold, rather, and ivory, and that sheen of dust from the sun: brighter since she came to the riding court, and touched with rose.
“We burn,” she said, “when the sun touches us. Some of us change, and learn to bear it. Some of us are flayed alive.”
“You go golden,” he said.
“Oh, I burn, if I stay in it long enough.”
“Do I frighten you?”
“Yes,” she said.
She did not sound afraid, nor did he sense it in her. And yet it was the truth.
He had forgotten everything but the light in her eyes. She swayed toward him. Her hair was the color of wheat in the sun. The scent of her was dizzying.
They were alone in the room. He did not know at first how he knew that. Here in the circle of her arms, the world was clearer than it had been since he was a child. And yet when he looked past her, he saw no more than a blur.
If he asked now, she would give him anything he asked for. Anything he wanted. And cycles since he held a woman in his arms, since he knew that sweetness above all others.
She did not love him. He was a mage here; even shielded, he sensed what was to be sensed. He interested her greatly. She liked him: that was clear to see. It warmed him. She would give him her body as she had given him her face, willingly, even proudly, without regret that it was he and not another who must be her master.
Very gently he freed himself from her embrace. It was cold without, and grey, and the clarity of his seeing was gone. He set a kiss on her brow, chaste as if she had been his sister, and said, “Child, you are honey-sweet. But I’m no woman’s master, nor are you my slave.”
Her eyes narrowed. “It’s that woman, isn’t it? The commoner. You want her to bear your firstborn.”
Estarion’s heart clenched. “How did you know—”
She laughed, bright and hard. “We may live in chains, but we have ears. Everyone knows about the Island woman. She didn’t want to share you, did she? She’s selfish.”
“Everyone doesn’t learn to be as generous as an Asanian woman,” Estarion said, trying to be light.
“She’s not beautiful,” said Haliya. “You don’t like beautiful women. Except your mother. You like them to be interesting instead.”
“I don’t see faces,” Estarion said. “Or I didn’t, before I came here, where faces are so hard to see. What is in this place that trammels mages?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not a mage.”
“Aren’t you?” He shook himself. “No. You have it in your blood, clear enough. You wouldn’t know what you have, without another power to strike sparks from you.”
“Oh, I know that,” she said. “That’s not magery. It’s only being Vinicharyas.” One of the gifts of which line was to strengthen a mage’s power with the touch of her body on his. Even if he had but a trickle of power left.
The quality of his silence alarmed her. “Is it something I should be afraid of? Have I hurt you?”
“No,” he said quickly. “Oh, no. I never meant to scare you. I was only marveling at you. Will you forgive me?”
She took her time about it, but in the end she did. “You’re so interesting, you see,” she explained. “And really, once one grows used to you, rather beautiful.”
24
“‘Rather beautiful,’” Estarion said. “She called me that. It can’t be for my face.”
“The warrior-patterns wouldn’t show on you,” said Godri.
Estarion laughed. It was rusty: he was forgetting how. “Your father thinks they would. White paint, he told me, and gold. He thought gold would suit me very well.”
“They’d cost you the beard,” Godri said—with, Estarion noted, no little pleasure. Godri, good desert tribesman that he was, could not approve of the northern fashion.
“They might be worth it,” Estarion said. “They’d shock Asanion to its foundations.”
He sighed and stretched. He had found a room with a window that faced westward, and disposed of the lattice with three very satisfying blows of a throwing axe. The axe was ancient and long resigned to exile on a wall, but it had been pleased to do its duty again, albeit without due sacrifice of the enemy’s blood. Nothing but dust and dead wood in that damnable lattice.
He folded his arms on the window-ledge and leaned out. The sun slanted long over the roofs and spires of the palace, and beyond them the descending circles of the city, and beyond those the river and the plain.
The wind was almost clean up here, and almost cool. Summer, that had seemed so endless, was ending at last. Three days, and the sun would cycle round to Autumn Firstday.
His father had died on the night of that feast. Ten years ago, less three days.
He flexed his burning hand. “Who’d have thought I’d stand here again,” he said.
“You remember?” Godri asked. “From before?”
Estarion shrugged, almost a shiver. “Sometimes I don’t know what I remember. What’s dream, what’s real, what’s delusion. None of us is entirely sane, you know. We can’t be. Not and be what we are.”
“Mages?”
“Kings.” He met the sun’s glare. It was life, but it was death, too, as all fire was.
The Sunborn did not understand that. He tried to cast down the dark, naming it death and enemy. And so it was; but it was sleep also, and rest, and ease for the weary.
Nothing was absolute. Asanion was his prison, and yet he ruled it. He hated it; but he was learning in spite of himself to admire it. Even, in some part, to love it.
He turned abruptly. The room was dark after the brilliance of the sun. Godri was a shadow in it.
“There’s something,” Estarion said, “I have to do.”
Godri
followed in silence. Estarion had made these rooms his own, but one suite of them was locked, its door barred. He laid his branded hand flat on the carved panel. Wood and gilding, carved caravans bearing tribute, memory that darted close and then away.
He did not have the key. That was in the keeping of the chamberlain. But he did not need it. He bore in his hand the key to every door. It was a power that tales did not tell of, and songs only hinted at.
The pain of the Sun’s fire mounted almost beyond endurance, then suddenly subsided. The lock fell in shards.
Estarion drew a shaking breath. “That was hardly necessary,” he said to the air, or perhaps to the god.
The door opened to his touch. The hinges were oiled, the air within clean, touched but faintly with the taint of disuse. Death’s stains were long since disposed of, Ganiman’s body embalmed with spices and borne away into the east, to lie in the tomb of kings under Avaryan’s Tower. The floor where he had fallen was clean, the bed mounded in cushions, no mark of his dying throes.
He had not died easily or quickly. Estarion had been there. Others remembered: they had told him. How he stood, how he would not speak, nor move, nor suffer any to touch him, but fixed his eyes on Ganiman’s face.
He had no memory of that. His mind had been far away, hunting a mage who was a murderer. He had not seen what the poison and the sorcery did to his strong beautiful father, withered and shriveled him, robbed him of voice and strength and wits, made of him a mindless mewling thing.
There was mercy, maybe, in that bar to his memory. When he saw his father, he saw him as he had been: tall robust handsome man, stern enough before his people, but lighthearted as a boy, and apt for mischief.
“The night before he died,” Estarion said, “he led a whole regiment of his Guard on a raid against the queen’s palace, abducted my mother and carried her away to this room, and held it against all comers. The uproar went on till dawn. People thought the palace was invaded; the eunuchs shrieked and wailed, and all the guards came out in arms. It was splendid.”
Godri inspected an image that stood in a niche. “That’s himself?”
Estarion did not need to look at it. “That’s the Sunborn. Father was handsomer than that. Pretty, he said. He cultivated a beard and a severe expression. They only made him the more beautiful.”
“You look like this one,” said Godri. “Interesting face. He wasn’t a tamed thing, was he?”
“And I am?” Estarion asked coldly.
Godri glanced over his shoulder. “Did I say that? You’ll see reason now and then, when you’ve had your nose rubbed in it. Look at the eyes on him. Nothing reasonable about him at all.”
“That was the god in him, I was always told.”
Estarion stood by the bed. He did not feel anything. It was not numbness, not exactly. More as if he had felt all that there was to feel, and there was nothing left.
Godri wandered on past the carving of Varuyan on senelback, thrusting a spear into a direwolf’s vitals. When he paused again, it was in front of a painted portrait. “Hirel and Sarevadin,” he said. It was not a question. “Was his majesty really that young?”
“He’d not turned sixteen when his son was born,” Estarion said.
“Well,” said Godri after a pause. “The yellowheads don’t live long. I suppose they have to get in their breeding while they can.”
Estarion stood very still.
Godri did not seem to notice. “The lady was beautiful, wasn’t she? That Ianyn face, and that hair, like new copper. They say your father looked like her as she was before she was a she.”
Estarion had no difficulty in untangling that. He eased by degrees. “That’s the Gileni blood. Not like the royal Ianyn. All beak and bones, those.”
“You’d be less of both if you fed yourself better.” Godri came round to Estarion’s side and looked up him, black eyes bright in the swirling patterns of his face. “Is it bad?” he asked.
“No,” Estarion said, too quickly maybe. But when he thought about it: “No. He was on the throne when I came to it. He’s round about the palace, sometimes. But not here. This is only where he left his body behind.”
Godri shivered but held his ground. “You’re healing.”
“If you want to call it that,” Estarion said.
“It was well you came here, even if it makes you ill. Some fevers are necessary. They burn away old scars.”
“Maybe,” said Estarion.
o0o
The fever that was in him would not let him rest. He went to his mother for a while. She tried to comfort him, but she had her own burden of memories, and her own troubles.
The harem was waiting on his pleasure. One was very fine upon the lute; another had a wonderful voice. None was importunate, or tried to lure him to the inner chamber.
Haliya was not there. She was tired, her sister said, and had gone to bed. “But if my lord wishes . . .”
“No,” he said. He listened to the singer and the lute-player. He said polite things to the others. When enough time had passed, he sent them away.
Ziana was last and slowest to go. He almost called her back. It did not matter that she had no love for him. Her beauty pleased him, and her calmness soothed his temper.
And if she conceived his son, what then? Did he want her for his empress?
o0o
He returned to his chambers in a mood as black as the sky. No stars tonight; no moons. Clouds had come up while he tarried; there was rain in the wind.
Guards hovered. Varyani, no Olenyai. Those were hidden in shadows. “Go,” he said to the ones he could see, those who had been his friends, while he could have friends, before he was emperor in Asanion. “Go, rest, carouse in a tavern, do something that isn’t fretting over me.”
“But,” said Alidan, “it’s our duty to fret over you.”
“I command you,” Estarion said. And when they would not move: “I’m strangling with all the hovering and the watching, and knowing how you hate it. Some of you at least, be free for me.”
“And if anything happens?” Alidan persisted.
“What can happen?”
Alidan refused to answer that, and rightly. But Estarion was in no mood to be reasonable. He drove them out, even Alidan, who needed main force.
o0o
His chambers were full of shadows. Some of them had eyes. He rid himself of them by dropping his robes and baring his teeth. Whether for fear of his armament or horror of his shamelessness, they vanished with gratifying speed.
There was always wine on the table by the bed. Godri insisted on tasting it. “Dreadful,” he said, “but nothing deadly in it, that I can tell.”
Estarion knew that already. That was another magery he kept, to know what was in the wine he drank.
Or maybe it was only a keen nose. He downed a cup, and then another. Godri combed his hair out of its tangles.
“Do you notice,” Estarion asked him, “what the Asanians do? They don’t comb it, except on top. They let it set into a mat.”
“So could you,” said Godri, “if you didn’t want to wear the king-braids again.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I ever will.” Estarion poured a third cup. The wine was strong, but it barely blunted the edge of his mood. Godri was no lady’s maid: sometimes he tugged too hard.
The pain was welcome. Less so the brush of his fingers as he plaited Estarion’s mane into a single braid, bound and tamed it for the night.
Estarion’s skin was as twitchy as his temper. He almost wheeled, almost seized those tormenting hands. But they went away. Godri smoothed back the coverlet of the great bed and bent to trim the lamp.
Estarion let his body fall into the bed. Godri drew up the coverlet gravely, but with the flicker of a smile. “Good night, my lord,” he said.
Estarion’s growl made the smile brighten before it vanished. Godri went lightly enough to his own bed in the outer room.
Fortunate creature. His moods passed as quickly as they came. He was even rec
onciled to Kundri’j; or close enough to make no difference.
Estarion lay on his face. The wine soured in his stomach. The coverlets were heavy, galling. He kicked them off.
Cool air stroked his back. He rolled onto it, then onto his side. Canopy and curtains closed in on him.
He covered his eyes with his hands. The dark was no more blessed than the nightlamp’s glow. He ran his hands down his face, neck, breast.
His fingers clawed. He clenched them into fists, pressed them together in his middle, knotted himself about them. He was not weeping. That much fortitude at least he had.
The dreams would be bad tonight. He had no power to turn them aside. The wine worked in him, dragging him down into the whispering dark.
o0o
Fear. Terror. Panic.
Estarion clawed toward the light. His breath shuddered and rasped. His nose twitched with the sharpness of sweat. His body could not move.
He willed his eyes to open. Slowly the lids yielded. They were like stone. A thin line of light pierced the darkness.
He was not alone. His head would not turn, his hands were dead things. But he knew.
There was someone else in the room. Breathing. Watching.
Magery?
A drug? And how, if not in the wine?
His power was as numbed as the rest of him. It could not lift itself, could not batter down the walls that it had raised. He was locked within. Trapped.
Laughter shivered through him. Oh, he was a fine image of an emperor, trapped and spelled and stinking of fear. Rats faced death with more grace.
That it was death, he had no doubt. It stalked him through the dimness of the chamber, breathing faster as it drew closer, though it tried to be silent. It could not know what senses he had, when he troubled to use them.
He gathered all of himself that there was. He did not try to open his eyes further, or to flex his fingers. When the blow came, he must be ready. He must move. Must. Move.
Under the world-weight of lids, through the veil of lashes, he saw the shadow that crept across him. Veils, draperies. A woman?
No. That scent was male: strong with fear-musk, and something else, cloyingly sweet. Dreamsmoke and honey.
