by Melanie Rawn
Pol and Kazander rode in laughing, in perfect charity with each other and the world. Their tired horses were led away to be adequately fed and watered for the first time in days. The soldiers saluted their High Prince and at his nod were released to go take their own ease. But Pol and Kazander bounded up the steps, obviously expecting to be hailed and welcomed and made much of.
“Father, you should’ve been there! They fell flat on their faces when Azhdeen flew over—and before they could get off their knees, we had them! Sorry we’re late, but we chased a few stragglers halfway to Skybowl—they were so scared they went north instead of south!”
“Mighty azhrei, your humble servant bows to you in thanks for such excellent sport and in apology for not coming sooner with news of the victory gained in your noble grace’s name.”
Rohan surveyed them coolly for several moments, just long enough for their happy grins to fade. Sioned held her breath and silently begged her husband, Don’t say it!
He never got the chance. A deep, querulous voice rose from the crowded courtyard: “Where’s that foolish hatchling? Pol!”
Sioned exhaled in relief. Myrdal, ninety-two winters old and more autocratic with it than ever, stumped forward to the steps, her cane prodding people aside. Pol bent and enveloped her frail old bones in a careful embrace. Rohan’s shoulders shifted in an irritated shrug, but the moment for lecturing Pol was gone.
But Pol had not missed the look in his father’s eyes. Later, after the tale had been told—in Kazander’s inimitable style—and the young men had bathed and eaten, Pol sought out his mother. She was alone in the library-office she shared with Rohan.
“Mother, what in all Hells is the matter with him?”
“Here it comes,” she muttered to herself. She pushed aside the lists made by Feylin of stores and supplies—not a comforting total, considering the mouths to feed—leaned back in her seat, and gestured Pol to the chair opposite hers. Rohan’s chair. When he hesitated, she arched a brow at him. “Oh, sit down. It’ll be yours one day. You might as well get the feel of it.”
The sunburn acquired out on the Long Sand deepened, but he sat. “Why is he so angry?”
“You’re a smart boy. You figure it out.”
“Oh, Goddess! Not you, too!”
“No,” she admitted. “But I can see his point.”
“So I was late. Don’t the enemy dead count?” Then he made a face and answered his own question. “I know, I know—not when it was me out there leading the battle. What was I supposed to do, Mother? Let them get away?”
“Of course not. But you must understand how vital your safety is. If anything happened to you, your heirs are little girls barely eight winters old. That’s the political side of it. The other . . . .” She sighed quietly. “I kept an eye on you out there, but—”
“—but why didn’t I keep you informed? Either I’m a prince or I’m not, Mother. Either I lead or I don’t.”
“Rohan let you go against his better judgment, against his deepest feelings—”
Pol frowned. “Let me go? Ah. I understand. Give the prize stud a good run every so often to make him think he’s still free, but keep an iron hand on the reins just the same.” He rose. “Thank you for making it clear, Mother. I’m in your debt.”
“Pol—”
“If the stallion doesn’t behave himself and ride where he’s reined, will you geld him?”
“Stop it!” she ordered. “If you equate manhood with using a sword, then you’ve spent thirty-three years not listening to a word any of us have said! You don’t need reining, you need a curb bit and spurs dug into your stubborn ribs!”
“Why is Maarken allowed to do what’s forbidden to me?” he challenged.
“Because he’s expendable,” she answered brutally. “You’re not.”
“And when the Vellanti army comes here, as we all know it will? Will everyone be sacrificed to my safety? All of Stronghold? All these people, expendable?”
She met his gaze steadily. “Down to your father and me.”
“I don’t accept!” He leaned over, bracing his fists on the parchment-strewn desk. “That’s not what being a prince is. I’ve been well-schooled, Mother. I’ve listened. There hasn’t been a major war since Roelstra died because Father doesn’t fight with swords—he uses himself as the battlefield. His mind, his feelings, his skills as a prince. He fights that way so his people don’t have to take up arms. That’s his sacrifice—don’t think I don’t know what it’s cost him. Well, now it has come to swords. There’s no way to avoid it. Are you saying that after all you’ve taught me, I must be less of a prince than he?”
Sioned knew she was too angry and frightened to find the correct reply. Pol was right. So was Rohan. And damn them both for it.
“I was never educated in the fine points of cowering in a corner,” Pol said quietly. “Don’t ask me to learn now.”
She drew in a deep, almost painful breath. “I must ask something of you. It won’t be easy but it’s the one chance to make peace with your father. If you—”
“I know what you want,” he interrupted. “I can’t give it to you. I won’t swear your oath, Mother. I need all I am to defend my people and my princedom.”
She bent her head. “Then there’s nothing more I can say.”
“I suppose not.” He started for the door, his bootheels emphatic. She glanced up as he hesitated, saw him turn, his blue-green eyes shadowy. “Mother . . . you must have known what you did when you took me from Ianthe. You must have known what I’d become. You made me, you and Father and Urival and Chay and all the others—all I’m asking is that you have faith in what you created.”
“Never think that I don’t.”
“Then let me be what I am.”
She had never asked that for herself. In childhood she hadn’t known what she was. After she found out at Goddess Keep, marriage had given her another identity, one that clashed with the faradhi, one that Andrade deplored even though she had been its cause. Princess or Sunrunner? was always the Lady’s question. Both, Sioned always replied—but princess first, the princess Rohan had taught her to be. But Pol was prince, Sunrunner, and sorcerer, all three.
“Mother,” he was saying, “do me and yourself the honor of believing I can use what I am with wisdom.”
“It’s not that. It’s—” She stopped, helpless.
“What, then? Help me understand. Is Father angry because he thinks I was in danger—or because he perceives another disobedience? I never swore the oath and I never will. It’s not childishness or spite. I can’t give up anything that gives me a weapon to use against these people.”
“You can’t use it alone.”
“There must be other gifted people somewhere who understand necessity.”
She tried one last time. “Rohan knows how to make war. As you pointed out, he hasn’t for the length of your life. There must be another way for you, too. There has to be a way that doesn’t twist the faradhi part of you. Please, Pol—I won’t ask a formal swearing, just a promise to me and your father in private. Please.” Sioned was trembling with the effort at control. “I’m frightened for you, my dearest—I don’t want the joy of being a Sunrunner to turn bitter for you, with the memory of deaths—”
“Andry doesn’t seem bothered.”
“Andry is not my son!”
Pol gave her a thin smile. “So. Somebody finally admits that Andry is expendable, too.”
“Pol!”
But he was out the door, heedless of her frantic cry. Sioned slammed both fists hard on the desktop, rattling inkwells and loose pens and the boxes containing their various seals.
“Damn,” she said wearily, all the strength gone out of her. “Oh, damn.”
• • •
Their speech was so thick Andry could barely understand them. None had more than a few gold tokens in his beard, though one of those beards was liberally streaked with gray. There had been eight of them originally; on the way through the forest, Andry
saw the corpses of the three Oclel had killed.
The Sunrunners were herded along at swordpoint. None of their captors dared get closer than that—not after two Andrys faced them in the clearing.
Andry mimicked Rusina’s limp as they walked. Her changing was perfect, down to the color of the eyes. They both wore riding gauntlets, which effectively hid their rings and his wristbands. There had been some argument among the Vellant’im, difficult for Andry to follow, that Rusina must be the true and he the false image, for she had on the white cloak by which they had identified Andry from the trees. But nothing had come of it. Their prize, the Lord of Goddess Keep—whichever one was really he—was too valuable to make guesses. They would wait and see which lost the shape during sleep.
They were taken to the north edge of the woods, where seven horses were tethered. Three of them belonged to Goddess Keep. Andry glanced at his own blue eyes and saw his own head nod bitterly. No riderless mounts would gallop back home to alert Torien to danger.
It was hard, watching the eldest of the men climb into his own Tibaza’s saddle. As Rusina was prodded toward another horse, she stumbled on her bad ankle and cried out—but her voice was low and deeper than her own, not quite a man’s but not wholly a woman’s, either. Andry marveled at the liquid ice that must run through her veins.
They descended the cliffs and rode along the beach. The Vellant’im were smug and excited, despite the shock of two Andrys. That they had not fled in terror told him they were familiar with diarmadhi tricks. Yet no sorcery had been used in battle—thus far—and the puzzle of it would not form a logical pattern in his mind.
What he did know was that the Goddess had in a bizarre manner put him by way of some answers. As the enemy talked among themselves, he learned that they had been left behind after the battle at Goddess Keep, and had been surviving ever since by stealing. They must move more silently than the sunlight, he thought. Then again, with all the people crowding around the area these days, who would notice a few thefts?
They came to a narrow cave and dismounted. Within, cold and sea-damp, Andry and Rusina were gestured to sit on flat rocks circling a dead fire pit. The horses were urged back into the darkness, and ropes slung around stones to keep them penned. There was the smell of fish and salt, and, from the back of the high-ceilinged cavern, human and equine waste. Rusina nearly gagged as a gust of wind from an unseen chimney blew the stench over them.
The Vellant’im then left them, one man remaining by the cave mouth as guard. Andry looked himself in the face.
“Quick thinking,” he said with hardly any voice.
She shrugged beneath his white cloak.
“I’ll get us out of this.”
“Until you do, give me the dranath.”
He passed over the little scrap of parchment. She choked down half the drug and within moments he felt the impact of a strengthened illusion. She was delicately made and not a tall woman, but now there was not the slightest difference in their forms. Except that she was shivering.
He conjured Fire and warmed his hands at it. After a little while the convulsive tremors left her. She bent her head, but not before he saw the gleam of tears.
“I’m sorry. He was dear to me, too.”
She made no reply.
“Take off your gloves and rings.” He stripped off his own, and the wrist bands. She tore off a piece of her undertunic to tie them in along with her own. “We have to escape before either of us gets too tired.”
“With this much dranath in me, do you think I could sleep?”
“But we have to learn as much as we can,” he went on. “They’re left-overs from the battle, cut off from the main army’s retreat. They don’t think I can understand their language. They might let something slip.”
“By all means.”
“You know why I have to stay as long as I can, don’t you? I may learn something I can use, something about their plans, their origins—”
“You don’t need to justify yourself to me.”
He bit his lip. “Why did you do this?”
The eyes that stared at him were his, but the incredulity in them was her own.
“You didn’t want the daughter I gave you. You don’t have much use for me at all, in fact. Why save my skin?”
“Because you are what you are.”
Simple answer, implying more loyalty than he’d ever expected from this prickly woman. But not to him personally, as was the case with Torien and Nialdan and the others of his devr’im. He was Lord of Goddess Keep. Had he been Rohan or Pol, the loyalty would have been for him alone, out of love. But this would do. It would have to.
• • •
The Vellant’im had found the little spring, just as Maarken hoped. They would have been blind not to—he had practically led them by the beard. His own people had watered there the previous day, and according to the plan ought to have been far away by now, back across the Long Sand headed toward Stronghold. But during the rare moment of ease and coolness in the midday heat, Maarken had first toyed with and then presented the idea of an ambush. His two senior warriors, one from Radzyn and the other from Remagev, considered, glanced at each other, and nodded.
Chay’s man, Abigroy, said, “It’ll spare us having to look over our shoulders so much, my lord, if we’re rid of them now. I say we do it.”
“Yes,” drawled Catla, idly stroking the embroidered blue and white badge of rank on her sleeve. “Never much fancied bearded men, myself—saving my Lord Walvis, that is.”
As new Battle Commander of the Desert, Maarken could have ordered anything he pleased. But he knew the way his father had done things, and could not imagine any improvement on Chay’s style of asking how his people felt about a tactic rather than informing them of the course they would follow. Besides, he didn’t have an autocratic bone in his body; all Tobin’s taste for absolute command seemed to have gone to Andry.
So Maarken’s soldiers crouched behind the escarpment above the spring while the enemy drank so much water that they sloshed when they walked. Maarken had left his horses half a measure away, intending to collect them riding the recaptured Radzyn mounts of the enemy. His father would appreciate that. Sometimes he thought Chay was more upset by the loss of his treasured horses than of Radzyn itself.
Bellies full, the Vellant’im stretched out for a brief rest in what little shade was provided by overhanging rocks and exactly four dry, stunted trees. The spring barely merited the name—a feeble burble perhaps the size of a man’s circled arms—but to a traveler through the Long Sand, it was as wide as Lake Kadar. Rohan had said the Desert would do their work for them, that they knew this land and the enemy did not. Maarken nodded to himself and ran his thumb lightly along his sword blade. The Desert offered only this miniscule spring and handspan of shade, but it had also provided measure upon measure of barren sand that made them seductive out of all proportion. No shimmer-vision could have done the work as well.
A heat-dazzle was exactly what the Vellanti warriors thought they saw when Maarken’s troops appeared suddenly on the opposite side of the spring.
Later, when the little spring and the sand around it was dyed red, Maarken gave Catla the lightning bolt badge taken off the Vellanti leader. It was enameled gold, fine work and very valuable. “Souvenir of how much fun you had—don’t try to deny it.”
They collected anything else that might be interesting or useful, gathered the horses, left the corpses in the sand for the Desert that had given them the victory, and started for home.
• • •
Neither Andry nor Rusina had any trouble staying awake that night. She had the dranath in her blood, keeping her restless and at times jumpy; he had his conjured Fire to maintain, keeping his mind occupied and his body warm.
Long after midnight, as near as Andry could judge, the Vellant’im came back in excellent spirits. Nervous eyes still glanced sideways at the doubled image seated by the fire pit, but not even this could dampen their enthusiasm.
&n
bsp; Andry listened, keeping his expression neutral, as they talked among themselves about the journey to be undertaken at dawn. They would go north, find a suitably isolated spot in Grib where a signal fire would be lit, and their ships in Brochwell Bay alerted. The shame of having been left behind would be canceled by the glory of having captured the Lord of Goddess Keep. They intended to present him—the real one of him—to the High Warlord.
Andry mulled that over while the horses were saddled. Absolutely insane even to consider allowing himself to be taken that far—but it was tempting. To meet at last the sorcerer, for sorcerer he must be, responsible for this carnage. To execute him personally with his own people’s spells. The stuff of which legends were made.
His lips twisted wry acknowledgment of his own stupidity. What did he think, that he could battle this man as Pol had fought Ruval?
One of the men approached the fire pit. He hesitated, brows bunching above black eyes wary of the Sunrunners. Another strode up beside him and snarled, “Faradh’im!” and spat into the flames. Then he hauled Andry up—the first time either of them had been touched by these people—and held a sleek steel knife to Andry’s throat.
His pockets were emptied. Then the same was done to Rusina. The parchment of dranath was thrown into the fire, where it flared crimson. The rings were distributed among the Vellant’im but not tied into their beards. Instead, they were jammed onto thick fingers—Rusina’s not going past the first knuckle—silver and gold gleaming with reflected firelight. Andry’s armbands were claimed by the leader, who slipped them on and admired the rich glitter of their gems.
Then a very strange thing happened. A man began rubbing at the finger wearing one of Rusina’s rings. He frowned and chafed the gold. Andry glanced at his devri and caught his breath. These people were sorcerers—some of them, at least. And in the presence of Rusina’s spell, the Sunrunner ring burned.
The man grunted in pain and shook his hand free of the ring, throwing it onto the fire. His gaping companions cried out as flames spat white light the breadth of the cave. Horses squealed, jostling each other as chill Fire from Sunrunner’s gold lashed the darkness in the shape of a raging dragon.
