by Judith Tarr
His hands held hers in a fierce grip. “You see? How can they speak to this? Easier to reason with the sword’s edge.”
“What could they say? That my beauty is ruined? That my value on the market has dropped to nothing?”
“They could say that they love you; that they grieved for your absence; that they are glad beyond words to have you back again.”
“Let them say it then.”
“They will.” His eyes met her mirrored stare, his face beside hers, dark and eager. “Go to them. Now. They wait for you.”
She turned her back on him and on her own face. “If they wish to see me, they may summon me.” She pulled off her surcoat and reached for a coat as plain as the kilt he had abandoned. “Will my lord dress himself, or would he prefer that I aid him?”
Walled in the perfection of her coldness, she could not sense either his thought or his temper. She changed from state dress into common garb, in silence he made no move to break. When she passed him in search of her boots, her heart speeded a little in spite of itself. But he did not seize her. His face had hardened to match her own.
“I have no further need of your services tonight,” he said, cool and precise. “If you choose not to do as I bid you, then you had best confine yourself to quarters. I shall speak with you later.”
oOo
Sitting on her pallet with her boots hanging limp and forgotten in her hands, she stared at the wall. Her eyes were dry to burning. He had sent her to bed like a wayward child; and for what? Because she would not abase herself before anyone, not even her father.
Nor would she face her mother and listen to the long, gentle-voiced, relentless catalogue of her sins and shortcomings. Foremost of which was the stain with which she had defiled the reputation of her house. Not only had she shorn her hair and taken on the seeming of a boy; she had traveled alone and unattended through the north of the Hundred Realms, and slain men in battle, and shared the bed of a man neither wedded nor betrothed to her. She was a scandal from western Asanion to the Eastern Isles, utterly, irredeemably.
She would not go to them and weep with them and beg to be forgiven. She could not. She was too proud; or too utterly craven.
“They can come to me,” she said aloud. “They know where I am.”
In Mirain’s bed?
She laughed bitterly. “If only I were!”
With sharp, vicious movements she stripped off her garments, letting them lie where they fell. The mirror gleamed in the outer chamber. She faced it again.
She was too thin; but not everywhere. There could be no doubt at all now that this sullen-faced person was a woman. A gown, a daub or three of paint, and she would outshine any harlot on Lantern Street. Her hair was long enough now to tie back, even to twist into a short braid: the exact length prescribed for a woman of ill repute.
A small knife lay on a table. Mirain’s, for cutting meat at feasts. Its hilt shone frostily, set with diamonds. Yet for all its beauty it was no toy. Its blade was deadly sharp.
She took it up. Carefully, deliberately, she cut her hair, cropping it well above the shoulders.
She let the knife fall. Her hands were shaking. The face in the mirror was green-pale under its cap of coppery hair; and yet it bared its sharp white teeth. “Now let them see how I mean to go on. Han-Gilen may house me, but it cannot hold me. I have freed myself.”
Ah, but from what?
oOo
Elian sat alone in the barren garden, staring at nothing, thinking of nothing.
“Lady.” She started, waking as from sleep. Cuthan stood over her, tall as a tree and vivid as a sunbird in the grey cloudlight. His face and his eyes and his bearing were at once bold and shy; she thought he might be blushing under the black velvet of his skin. “Lady,” he repeated, “it will rain soon.”
Elian looked at him and thought of hating him. “I am no lady.”
The Ianyn captain sat on a low flat stone, clasping his knees, boylike, with a frown between his fine arched brows. “You refuse the name, but you can’t change the truth. You’re still what blood and training have made you.”
“I have cut myself off from it.”
“Have you ever tried to cut a jet of blood with a sword?”
“I have cloven flesh and bone, and taken the life within.”
“It’s less easy to sever oneself from one’s kin.”
Elian’s anger flared white-hot. “Who set you on me? Mirain? Halenan? Or even”—her voice cracked, startling her, feeding her rage —“or even my father?”
“Your father,” said Cuthan calmly, “is a great prince. In Ianon we would call him a king. And he loves you.”
“He let me go. I have come back, but not to his hand.”
“I said love, not jesses and a lure.”
Elian tensed to rise. She meant to strike with fierce words and flee his unwelcome presence, this mingling of youthful shyness and borrowed wisdom that pricked her almost to madness. But she heard herself say in a voice she hardly knew as her own, “I went to the mews. I thought it would be quiet there. Hawks and the Hawkmaster have no care for the cut of one’s hair. It was quiet, and the master did not care. But she was gone, my golden falcon. After I left, when I did not come back, they flew her, and she never returned. If I had been there, she would have come.”
“Would she?”
Elian did rise then, fists clenched. “Yes. Yes! She was mine. I tamed her. I loved her. She would have come back.”
“You,” said Cuthan, “did not. Or will not.”
“I am not a falcon!”
“But your father is a falconer?”
Elian willed herself to stalk away from this transparent subterfuge, this parroting of words learned by rote from the whole tribe of her kin. Of whom he seemed to count himself one, however tortuous the kinship: brother of her foster brother’s oathbrother.
Later she would laugh. Now she could not even move. Her body seemed rooted here on the winter grass, with the sky beginning to weep great cold tears. “You have no right to sit in judgment upon me.”
“None at all,” Cuthan agreed willingly, “except that of friendship. I thought we had that, you and I.”
“Galan had it. Now you know he was a lie.”
To her amazement, Cuthan laughed, light and free. “I knew all along.” He spread his hands as if to sweep away all lies and disguises. “I only look like a brawn-brained fool; and I trained to be a singer for a while, till my master told me I had a fine voice, a fine mind, and no calling at all to the grey robe. But even with the little learning I had, I knew that Orsan of Han-Gilen would never have gotten a bastard—least of all a boy of exactly the same age, size, and looks as his famous daughter. A good part of whose fame lay in her ability to outride, outhunt, and outfight any man she met.”
“Is there anyone who didn’t know the truth?” Elian asked sourly.
His eyes were wide and dark and surprised. “Who else could have? Except Mirain, of course. And Vadin. Vadin always knows everything Mirain does. We didn’t tell anyone. We didn’t even tell each other till the secret got out.”
“That explains a great deal. All your hanging about. Your fretting over me in the battle.”
He had the grace to look sheepish and the gall to defend himself. “I wasn’t hanging about. I was doing what any man would do for his friend. I never intended to humiliate you.”
“No?” Her mouth twisted. “No, of course not. I’m a woman. Delicate. Fragile. Featherheaded. I can’t be humiliated. Only protected to death.”
“Lady,” Cuthan said with heroic patience, “you wear defiance like a suit of armor. Won’t you take off the helmet at least and look around you? The only one who’s tormenting you is yourself.”
Elian’s hand lifted to strike him. With an effort of will she lowered it. “How much did my kinsmen pay you to say these things?”
The black eyes blazed, swift and terrible as a flame in a sunlit wood. “Barbarian I may be, and no king’s son, but I’m no one’s hire
ling. I saw pain in my king, and in his brother, and in a lord and a lady whom I’ve learned to admire. I saw it most of all in my friend, who simply happened to be a woman. Now I understand that I saw a friend where I had none. Unless that is friendship here in the south, to meet love with tooth and claw. In the north, even the lynx of the wood will not do that.” He stood. His face was cold and hard. He bowed slightly, stiffly, as to a stranger. “I at least will go in out of the rain. Good day, lady.”
The title was like a slap. Elian watched him go, unable to move, unable to speak, while the rain beat her with flails of ice.
oOo
She could have crawled into some dark comer and huddled there, and burned and shivered all alone. But deeper than rage or hate or even craven terror was the pride that had spawned them. Wet to the skin, steady by sheer force of will, she returned to Mirain’s chamber.
He was there, as she had known he would be. He was alone, which she had not expected. A large and busy company she could have faced, effacing herself in it, but that solitary figure in a long robe lined with fur, seated by a brazier with a book in his lap, nearly undid her.
His eyes were lowered, but the book was closed, its spools bound together with golden cords. Deep in thought as he was, he did not hear her coming.
She wavered in the door, dripping on the carpet, gathering herself to bolt. He looked like Cuthan. Damnably like. But the rain had washed her anger away, leaving an echoing emptiness.
Something roused him: perhaps the chattering of her teeth. The sudden light of his eyes nearly felled her. His hands were burning hot, drawing her into the room, setting her by the brazier, stripping her of her sopping clothes. He flung his own robe about her and fastened it high under her chin, and took her icy hands in his own and chafed them until the pain of life woke within them.
She should pull free. He was the king. It was not fitting that he should do squire service for his squire.
Gently he pressed her into his chair, drying her dripping hair with a cloth from his bath. She suffered it as she had suffered Cuthan’s bitter words, with inward resistance, outward helplessness.
With the worst of the wet wiped away, he reached for the comb he had brought with the cloth.
She blocked his hand. Her own had almost no strength, but he paused. “Say it,” she gritted. “Say all of it.”
“It has been said.” He eluded her grasp and began to comb her cropped hair. He had more patience with its tangles than he ever had with his own.
“Of course,” he said. “There’s less of it.” His palm rested against her cheek, warm now, but not to burning. Yet it was the right, which bore the god’s fire, which had blinded his mother’s murderer.
Elian swallowed around the knot in her throat. “Cuthan told the truth. The whole ugly truth. But I can’t—can’t—”
He was behind her; she could not see his face. His voice was soft. “Elian, my sister. Only the weak refuse to weep.”
“I won’t!” she cried, leaping up, facing him. “You have duties. We both do. And you in nothing but a loinguard. You could perish of a chill.”
“Elian.”
“No.” She fumbled with the fastenings of the robe, pulling them free. “No. Not—not yet.”
That minute concession was, in its way, as cruel as Cuthan’s farewell. Mirain accepted it with more grace than Elian could ever have mustered. Which in turn was its own, subtle, and well-deserved rebuke.
SIXTEEN
“Here,” said Mirain, “I shall build my city.”
The wind was loud on the plain of the river, and knife-edged with cold, but Mirain’s words came soft and clear beneath it. He stood with feet set well apart, head up and eyes alight, with his cloak whipping about him; his own fire warmed him, the fire of prophecy.
He spread his arms wide, taking in the broad hilltop. Steep slopes bastioned it in the north and east; in the west rushed the deep flood of Suvien; southward it dipped gently into the levels of Han-Gilen, looking across the windswept land to the prince’s white city.
“Easy to defend,” said Cuthan. “With a good rampart all around and a good road up to your gate, you’ll be as well served as any king alive.”
“Better than most.” Adjan paced off the edge of the hilltop. “There’ll be water in any wells you sink; and there’s space here for whole farmsteads.”
“And the river to ride on and trade on,” Cuthan said.
Mirain laughed as sometimes he did, for simple joy. “It will be the richest city in the world, and the greatest, and the most splendid. See: white walls, white towers; Sun-gold on the gates, and Sun’s fire in its people, under the rule of the god.”
Elian moved apart from the company about the king, through a city of shadows shaped out of power and sunlight for his servants to marvel at. She needed no such mummeries, who could see in truth as well as he. With a flicker of will she banished the image, leaving only the winter-dulled grass and the empty air and the fitful dazzle of sunlight.
Her feet had brought her to the bank of Suvien. The water ran black and cold, swirling about deep-rooted stones, eating away at the hillside.
The far bank rose sheer and implacable. There stood no wide welcoming hill, no seat of empire, but a jut of naked stone, black as the river, shunned even by the birds.
“Endros Avaryan,” she said to herself. Avaryan’s Throne. A curse lay on it. Curse, or fate, or prophecy. No man might walk there unless he be born of a god; and even he could not tarry lest he go mad and die.
No man but Mirain, who had been little more than a child when he ventured it: young and wild and armored in his lineage, and mad enough to dare even that great curse.
And Elian. He had not known that she was following him until he stood breathless on the summit. She, climbing to within a man-length of him, set her foot on a stone that gave way beneath it, and fell with a sharp despairing cry.
She had not fallen far: another length down the sheer cliff to a sliver of ledge. But he, in rage that was half deadly fear, plunged down to catch her.
Between her own fear and her own young, erratic magery, she shot out of his hands, up the last of the crag onto the bare cold stone. There she lay gasping until he dragged her up. “Fool!” he cried. “Idiot! Lunatic! You’ll die here!”
His voice, which was breaking, cracked from a bellow into a shriek. She could not help it; she began to laugh. She roared with it, rolling on the top of Avaryan’s throne, with the sun himself glaring down at her sacrilege.
Mirain snatched her up and shook her until at last she quieted. She looked up at him, blinking, hiccoughing. Somehow she managed to say, “I won’t die.”
“The curse—”
“I won’t.” She knew it as surely as she knew that the curse was real. It thrummed in the stone. “It can’t touch me. I’m not a man.”
Suddenly he was hardly taller than she, and changed: his free hair braided, his throat circled by the torque of his father’s priesthood. She swayed for a moment in the throes of memory. So caught, timeless, she saw Mirain-then and Mirain-now, and beyond and about him a sweep of darkness shot with diamond light.
His hands gripped her, steadying her. “Look,” she said. “The tower. But who would dare—”
“Tower?”
Was he blind? “Tower! There, on Endros. Someone’s built a tower—on—”
Her voice died. It was clear, so clear. Tall and terrible like the crag, black stone polished smooth as glass, wrought without door or window, and on its pinnacle a sun. Even as she gazed at it, it shimmered and shrank. There was only the rock and the wind and the empty sky.
Suddenly she was cold, bone-cold. Mirain said nothing, only spread his cloak over them both.
Her will tensed to pull away; her body huddled into the warmth. Thoughts babbled around her, orderless and shieldless, bastard children of minds without power. Some were amused and some were annoyed, and some were even envious, knowing only what mere eyes knew, dark head and bright one close together and one cloak
between them.
“It’s me they envy,” said Mirain.
“And me they laugh at.” Her shivering had stopped, her visions faded. Her body was her own again.
Smoothly she slid away from him. He let her go; which, irrationally, roused her temper.
She strode past him through the knot of guards and friends and hangers-on, daring them to stare. None did. They were all most carefully considering the city that would be.
Ilhari was grazing on the southern slope, eyed by a stallion or two: Ilarios’ gold, Cuthan’s tall blue dun. Halenan’s grey, whom she rather favored, was not among them. With Anaki so close to her time, the prince did not like to ride far from her, nor would Mirain ask it.
Elian laid her cheek against the warm thick coat, breathing in the scent of wind and grass and senel-hide. “Oh, sister,” she said, “you have all the blessings. No fates and prophecies, and no family to grieve you.”
The mare raised her head, laying back her ears at the dun, who was venturing too close. Prudently he retreated. She returned to her grazing.
Ah yes, seneldi had sense, though the stallions could be a nuisance. One came into heat, one mated, one carried a foal. One bore it, one nursed it, one weaned it, and that was that. No endless two-legged follies.
But then, humans were cursed, were they not? Never fully weaned and always in heat.
Elian laughed unwillingly. “Straight to the mark, as always. And when you add power, it’s worse than a curse. It’s pure hell.”
Ilhari snorted. Follies. A good gallop, that would cure them.
Or obscure them. Elian settled into the saddle; the mare sprang forward.
They ran abreast of the wind round the hill that would be the City of the Sunborn, out upon the open plain. Ilhari bucked; Elian whooped.
This was senel-wisdom, beast-wisdom: fate and folly be damned, cities and kings and the hope of dynasties. Whoever ruled, the earth remained, and the wind, and the sun riding above them. Elian began to sing.
