A Fall of Princes

by Judith Tarr

  “Do you believe that, Sunchild?”

  “I do not!” Hirel would have cried, had his body been his own.

  Sevayin said, still calmly, “I know that if I die, they both die. And I love them. Whatever magnitude of idiot that makes me.”

  Hirel’s eyes dragged themselves open. Sevayin confronted the Prince of Han-Gilen: old and young, man and woman, he drawn thin with age, she ripened and rounded with the child; yet, for all of that, blood kin. Red-maned Gileni mages with tempers tight-reined behind the rigid faces.

  Hirel was the foreigner here, half the bone of their contention. The lesser half, he suspected. He saw that she cradled her belly as if to guard it.

  “Let us go,” she said.

  “Your prince can go no farther without healing.”

  “Then give it to him. It was your servant who wounded him.”

  “It was not.”

  She bared her teeth. “Don’t quibble, Grandfather. So it was your ally. Who bore firmly in mind that a man needs very little of his body to beget sons. And who did all he could to leave little else.”

  “Sevayin,” said the Red Prince, “I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Are we deluded? Is this not your summer palace? Did we not come to it from the heart of the Golden Empire?”

  “I knew when you made your gate. I knew where you would come if you were not taken; I feared that you would be in sore straits. Thank Avaryan, you are unscathed and he is but little hurt.”

  “You call that little?”

  “Flesh wounds,” the prince said, “as you would see, were you less blind with fear for him.” He bent over Hirel, meeting the boy’s level stare, unsmiling. To Sevayin he said, “I will heal him.”

  “And then?”

  “We will speak together.”

  Hirel struggled to rise. He came as far as his knees; he held himself there.

  He was naked. He had not noticed. He had no time to notice now. “We will speak before you touch me. You will tell us why we should trust you: a man who would sacrifice his own grandchild in the name of a god.”

  Prince Orsan’s eyes considered Hirel. Reckoned the count of his forefathers. Widened at the sacrifices some had made in the name of a god or a throne or their own pleasure.

  The Red Prince said, “You have no choice but to trust me. The mages could not keep you: they did not know your true measure. I know it, and I know that while I may not be the stronger, I have the greater skill. You will not escape me.”

  “We can try,” said Sevayin.

  “And then?” Her own words, set coolly before her. “What do you fancy that you can do?”

  “Stop the war.”

  “No,” the Red Prince said. “Tell me the truth, priestess.”

  She stiffened at the title. Her nostrils thinned; she would not speak.

  “I will tell you,” he said. “You foresee what I foresaw; what sent me from the Heart of the World. The circle of deaths that must encompass the peace.”

  Still she was silent.

  Not so Hirel. It was all bitterly, brutally clear. “It will be soon. Within days. If it has not already befallen.”

  “Not yet.” The Red Prince looked very old. He lowered himself stiffly into a chair, bowing his head with infinite weariness. “I was to keep you here if you came so far. I thought I had the strength. I thought that I could countenance it all, for the world that will be. Even the murder of my heart’s son.”

  “Why not? Your body’s son is safe enough. He’ll have the regency when the birthing kills me.” Sevayin tossed the fire of her mane, fierce with despair. “Let be, old man. You’ll heal my prince, because you know you’ll get no peace until you do. We’ll do our utmost to get out of your clutches. Meanwhile our fathers will die, and the war will end, and the mages will have their victory. What use to say more?”

  “Yes,” said Orsan, sharp enough to startle her. “What use? Your heart is set on hating me. I am the one you loved most, who betrayed you most bitterly.”

  “Just so.”

  Hirel let himself fall, and a cry escape him.

  At once they were beside him. The fear in Sevayin’s eyes was little more than that in the Red Prince’s.

  He quelled a smile. So then: he was worth a moment’s anxiety.

  He lay on his face, masked in pain, and let them fret over him. The heat of their anger abated, and with it the fire of his wounds.

  It was fascinating. It was pleasant, like the first movements of the high art. Very like.

  Sevayin’s hands stroked where the prince’s had passed. Her kiss brushed his nape; her whisper sighed in his ear. “You were too clever, cubling. You tried the merest shade too hard.”

  He yawned. His foot itched; he rubbed it. It was healed. So too his back. It could be convenient, this magic.

  “I shall remember,” he said drowsily to Sevayin, “when next you quarrel.”

  She nipped him. He only laughed, and that for but a moment. Her kinsman was watching. Hirel said, “I do not trust you, Red Prince. I do believe that you will let us go. My lady is in no danger while she carries the child; and she may work a miracle: end the war without ending the lives of its principals.”

  “You are clever,” Orsan said, “and cold, and wise. If you did not have the grace to love my grandchild, I would crush you as I crush a scorpion.”

  Hirel smiled. “And I detest you, old serpent. I do not make the error of despising you.”

  They understood one another, as true enemies must. The Red Prince vouchsafed the glimmer of a smile. Hirel saluted him as a warrior will who grants his opponent due respect.

  But no quarter. Not now, not ever.

  PART FOUR

  Sevayin Is’kirien

  TWENTY-TWO

  No one would ever know how much she hated this body. Hated and loved it. Its softness. Its roundness. Its downy skin. Its heavy swaying breasts; its grotesquerie of belly; its limbs like a spider’s, thin and strengthless.

  It knew what it was made for. To receive a man’s seed. To carry his children.

  To carry this child, this alien, this stranger growing and dancing and dreaming within her. She hated him as she hated the body that had conceived him. She loved him with an intensity that made the Kasar’s fire seem a dim and warmthless thing.

  When on the road she had nearly lost the bonds of her being, and her son with it, she had known surely that if he died, she could not bear to live. She still reached often for him with hand or mind, assuring herself that he was well; that he had not suffered, that he was prospering.

  She loved only Hirel more. She loved her body but little less. Because one of them loved it, and one of them waxed within it, and she had chosen it in full awareness of what she did.

  As full as it could be, when she was he. She did not know the whole of it yet. She was too new to it.

  The heart of the matter was purest simplicity. The shape had changed; the self remained the same.

  She laughed in the darkness, knowing it. There was no escape from the tangle of loves and hates and fears and joys and flaws and perfections that were Sarevadin.

  She hated it. She loved it. She was beginning, slowly, to accept it.

  o0o

  She lay beside Hirel, that last night before they faced their fathers, and watched him sleep. There was no sleep in her. She had done all her shaking; she had caged her multitude of terrors.

  She was calm, resting her eyes on his face. He looked like a child.

  She could go. Leave him there, safe and hidden, and soothe his anger after. She did not need him. It was not his father who would accept no end but his own and utter victory. She only needed herself as she was now, carrying the heir of the empires.

  He stirred, seeking her warmth. His hand found her middle. Even in his sleep he smiled. His dream saw a bright-headed manchild, nightskinned, with startling golden eyes.

  She buried her face in his hair. No. She was lying to herself. She could not leave him. She needed him.

&nb
sp; Her dream had seen it long since. He was the key to her power. She could not even hate him for it: there was too much else to hate.

  Prince Orsan would not ride with them. He had turned his coat too often; this last turning had broken him. The man who faced them in the dark before dawn was become a stranger, ill and old, leaning heavily on a staff.

  He was their servant in spite of their resistance. He fed them; he led them to bathe. He offered them clothing: garments fit for princes who must face their people, splendid to garishness but practical enough under the crusts of gold and gems.

  The eightfold complexity of Hirel’s robe went on all together, like his wedding garment; this was divided for riding, its folds as supple as good armor. Its diamonds adorned his every point of vulnerability; a broad collar of gold and diamond warded his throat, and his coronet was of an ancient style, shaped as a crowned helmet. He smiled when he put it on, an edged smile.

  Sevayin’s own finery was less warlike, if no less antique. Men and women both had worn it a hundred years ago in Han-Gilen.

  Its ornateness bespoke the Asanian fashion. Its simplicity was of the east. Boots heeled with gold, their soft leather dyed deep Gileni green. Trousers cut full, cloth of gold lined with Asanian velvet. A breastband, which she was wise enough to put on in silence. A shirt of fine linen. A tunic, knee-long, stiff with embroidery. A glittering overrobe, half coat, half cloak, which would pour beautifully over a senel’s back, and ward off arrows with all its gemmed embroideries, and merely in passing disguise both her sex and her condition. Her torque guarded her throat; for crown she had her hair, woven with strings of emeralds and coiled about her head in the helmet braids of the Ianyn kings.

  Hirel helped her: she would not let Orsan touch her. She almost pitied him, such pain she gave him, and he grown too feeble to conceal it. But she could not stop herself.

  Mounts awaited them in the court of the green silences. At sight of the smaller, Hirel nearly forgot his princely hauteur. Time had done little for her beauty and less for her temper, but the Zhil’ari mare had gained back all her strength.

  She greeted Hirel with the air of one who has waited much too long for a dawdling child; her nostrils trembled with the love-cries that she would not utter. He greeted her with a tug of the girth and, under lowered lids, a shining eye. They were made for one another, they two.

  Sevayin forced herself to walk forward. Ulan was waiting, soul’s kin, and no foolish man to care whether she was one who bore children or one who begot them. Bregalan stood prick-eared beside him.

  The stallion wore no bridle; his saddle was a tooled and gilded offspring of the flat training saddle, no high pommel to mock her ungainliness. His gladness sang in her. Come, his eyes called to her; come and ride, run, be free and together, soul and soul and soul, beast of prey and beast of the field and mage of the bright god’s line.

  He was a poet, was Bregalan, though he scorned mere rattling words. She smiled and thought warmth at him, but her heart was cold.

  He stood in the center of a guard of honor. Nine Zhil’ari in the full panoply of their people. Nine proud young men who had known the Prince of Keruvarion. Their eyes glittered in their fiercely painted faces. Fixed on her. Level, bitter-bright, relentless.

  “We are yours,” said Gazhin. Great hulking Gazhin-ox who never lied, because he never saw the need; who never bowed, because a true king knew who revered him and who did not. “You are the great one: the Twiceborn, the dweller in the two houses, the mystery and the sacrifice. We are yours. We would die for you.”

  Sevayin laughed like blades clashing. “Don’t. I’m not worth it.”

  Nine pairs of eyes refused belief. Zha’dan said, “We belong to you.”

  He was wearing his best air of innocence, the one with the wide liquid stare. “And what does your grandmother say to that?” she demanded.

  The mageling’s eyes held fast. They had laid aside their innocence. “Sometimes,” he said, “one has to make choices.”

  She paused a breath, two. She bowed to that, to all of them.

  Bregalan pawed the turf lightly, barely scarring its mown perfection. Before she could think, she was on his back.

  No one troubled to marvel at her feat. She was not maimed or ill or too old to master her body. She was simply with child.

  Self-pity was a curse. Her grandfather had taught her that. She would not look at him as she rode past him, or bid him farewell. It was Hirel who did both, rebuking her with his graciousness.

  At the gate she turned back. Or Bregalan turned. Orsan stood alone on the trampled grass, bent and frail but mantled in his power.

  It held open the mage-way into Asanion. It asked nothing of her. Not understanding, not acceptance, and certainly not forgiveness.

  “Not now,” he said. “Now is not the time for that choosing. Go with the god, Sarevadin.”

  She could not answer him, either to bless or to curse him. She raised her burning hand. Bregalan spun away.

  o0o

  The Army of the Sun and the Ranks of the Lion stood face to face across a field of desolation. It had been a city once: Induverran, the City of Gold, which guarded the gate of Asanion’s heart.

  Mages had cast it down, warring over it: a blast of fire; a wind out of the dark. Its towers were fallen, its walls laid low. The shrines of its gods were smoking ruins. Its men were slain; its children were dead or wandering or wailing in the emptiness. Its women lay in the ashes and wept.

  Sevayin paused at the summit of a low hill, drawing a cloak of power about her company. The air was heavy with the reek of death.

  Death, and magery. They had loosed the power; it had tasted blood. It roamed like a living thing, hungering.

  This was worse than dream. The sounds of it. The carrion stench. The beast that walked the ruins, neither shadow nor substance, fed by the hatred of warring mages.

  They had ceased their open battling. The emperors who wielded them had reined them in. The bonds of royal will strained sorely: the beast snarled as it stalked the domain it had made.

  Sevayin saw them all with eyes and power. She saw the armies arrayed on the smoldering field. Asanian gold, Varyani gold and scarlet, brave and splendid.

  They stood ranked and ready, poised on the edge of battle: that moment when all rituals were done; when the heralds had withdrawn from the game of threat and parry and the companies taken their places, alert, braced for the signal.

  The generals played at patience. Even the beasts—seneldi ridden or yoked to chariots, warhounds, fighting cats, eagles of battle—even they were still, waiting.

  It was like a game upon a board. Perfect, frozen, comprehensible.

  Ziad-Ilarios had chosen the classic opening of the west: the Three Waves of the Great Sea. First his infantry, serfs and slaves and half-trained, half-armed peasants, driven like cattle before scythed chariots.

  They would die to hinder the enemy’s knights, while the chariots mowed down friend and foe alike, and the archers in the second wave sent down a hail of arrows. Third and last and irresistible would ride his princes: cataphracts in massive armor on stallions as huge as bulls, and the swifter, lighter Olenyai lancers on racing mares, and a wall of the terrible chariots.

  Before that formidable precision, Mirain’s army seemed scattered, each company setting itself where it pleased. Sevayin, who had been born and raised in his wars, saw the order in the careful disorder.

  Three wings of manifold talents, three armies trained to fight as one, taking their shape from the necessities of the battle. Against the Three Waves they offered a shieldwall and a wall of mounted bowmen and a shifting fringe of foot and knights and chariotry. The center beckoned, its line a shade thinner, with a flame of scarlet waiting in it.

  His crowned helmet caught the sun; his black stallion fretted, goring the air. Green glowed beside him, green knight on red-gold mare: his empress riding as ever at his right hand, and behind her, her warrior women.

  Sevayin’s eyes were burning dry.
The Lord of the Northern Realms commanded the right under Geitan’s crimson lion; the left looked to the flame and green of the Prince-Heir of Han-Gilen. How brave they looked, those mighty princes, with their knights about them and their panoply glittering and their armies straining to run free.

  Brave fools. Children gone mad in the wreck of worlds.

  Hirel sat his senel knee to knee with her. His hand closed about hers. He was half a child who pleads for comfort, half a man who comforts his woman.

  She could not find a smile for him. He kissed her fingertips. “Consider,” he said with royal Asanian steadiness. “We are not—quite—too late.”

  Not quite. She glanced at the Zhil’ari. They waited, patient. On the field below, a horn rang.

  “Now,” she said. Bregalan plunged down the hillside.

  o0o

  Hirel rode still at her knee, his mare defending valiantly the honor of her sex. The Zhil’ari fanned behind. Ulan wove through them, settling at last on Sevayin’s right hand. He laughed his feline laughter, drunk on the sweet exhilaration of danger.

  Her own fear had burned away. The child was quiet within her, but his soul was a white fire, exulting, exalted.

  She looked about her and knew that the battle had begun. A sound escaped her, half laughter, half curse. She cast aside all concealments.

  The armies surged toward one another. Arrows fell in a sparse rain. Horns blared, drums rattled. Men sang or shouted or howled like beasts.

  Where the air had bred nine Zhil’ari and two princes, the battle eddied. But like the storm and the sea, once it had risen, it knew no mortal master.

  She was no mortal woman. They were hers, all her barbarians. She drew their wills together and set her power above them, burning through the glass that was her prince. She forged a weapon like a blade of fire.

  It clove the armies and flung them back. It swelled, billowed, grew.

  Arrows fell in a shower of ash. Beasts veered and screamed and fled. Men struck the wall and could not pass. Could not pierce it, though Varyani pressed face to face and all but sword to sword with Asanian warriors.

  The melee ground to a halt. Both sides collapsed into chaos. Men had died, were dying still, crushed in the confusion.