by Carol Berg
The Prince did not speak again through all the long afternoon, and I would not do so until he gave me leave. Perhaps even enemies and mortal danger needed to wait on grief. But I stayed with him and watched his back. My duty ... and my desire ... was to protect him. It was an unnerving thought that his nearest danger was likely my own hand. I watched that, too.
When the last remnants of the daylight had faded, leaving only the pale circles of lamplight in the smoky haze, Aleksander stirred. He pushed himself up to his knees, mumbling a soft curse as he stretched his shoulders and neck that must have been as stiff as unoiled leather. Then he turned around, sat back against his father’s bier and glanced over at me, running his fingers through his short hair, as near embarrassment as I had ever seen him, more naked without his warrior’s braid than when he was unclothed.
Though my instincts were screaming at me to hurry, I waited for him to begin.
“You’re here to warn me of the kanavar, aren’t you?”
I felt a bit of a fool. “You know of it?”
“In the past three months, my five most trusted advisers have died—one from rotten meat, one from a septic wound, two in drunken falls, one at the hand of his wife, who claimed to know nothing of the dagger in his throat even as she was hanged. During the same time, my three most reliable bodyguards have been discovered in intolerable disciplinary infractions—falling asleep on guard, dicing, thieving. All have been reassigned by their commanders. And the commanders themselves? Kasko has retired to his Capharna estates, suddenly deaf. Mersal has recently found a yearning to guard the frontiers instead of his prince. And when I summoned Mikael from Capharna, a man who would have considered himself blessed to lay down his life for me, he got himself dead in a paraivo. It seems he forgot his childhood lessons and set his tent in the dune path. When the storm came in the night, he was buried alive. Does it not seem a strange coincidence? The Hamraschi are so anxious to see me impotent, they make themselves ludicrous.”
“But none of these deaths are provable as murder, and none can be linked to the Hamraschi.” Derzhi were masters at such intrigues, Aleksander not least of all.
“They’re clever enough. I’ll give them that. They smirk when none but I can see it, while expressing concern to all that I am too whimsical and ruthless with those who dare disagree with me. To stand by me has become a death sentence.”
“What of your wife, my lord?”
“Well out of the way. Once I understood their foul game, I took Baron Gematos’ daughter to my bed and a slave girl or two—alt of them quite willing, you’ll be glad to know. You can well imagine how Lydia took to that. People thought the walls of Zhagad would fall at last. Then I put on my own display of temper. Three years wed with no heir ... everyone was expecting it long ago.” Someone would pay for forcing Aleksander into this. In only a few fatal instances had I heard his voice so soft and deadly. “I named my wife barren in front of half the nobility of Zhagad and dismissed her to her father in Avenkhar.”
“Stars of night... and you didn’t tell her why?”
“It’s safer this way. Her father can protect her better than I at the moment. Kiril is safe, too. My idiot cousin had a brush with a poisoned dagger and a maddened horse before he believed my warnings and contrived a public falling out with me. I ... persuaded ... Sovari to go with him, and they are now guests of some crone of a Fontezhi baroness who enjoys hearing them complain about my cruel humors. Yours is the first friendly voice I’ve heard in months, and you don’t sound too cheerful.”
“They tried for me, too.”
“Bloody Athos. Were you hurt?”
“A good man was killed instead. And others ... it was a close thing.”
Aleksander examined me carefully, and then his fists clenched and his cheeks flamed the color of his robes. “Your son ... ah gods, Seyonne. Not your son.” No one could read a man’s unspoken words as Aleksander could.
“He’s safe for now, and the namhirra are dead.”
“How in Druya’s fires did they find you? I’ll swear I told no one but Lydia, and no matter what she thinks of me, she would never betray you.”
“I never thought it. I understand about palaces and servants, rumors and spies ... a messenger could have followed me when I picked up your message in Vayapol ... any number of slips.”
“I’ll find him ... whoever it was. I’ll have him dead for it.”
“What’s done is done. Blaise has hidden the boy so even I don’t know where he is now.” I leaned closer and dropped my voice. “But you ... this business of your father ... it’s part of it?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head. “No. Not even the Hamraschi could be such fools. Why make me emperor when they are bent on undoing everything I’ve tried to accomplish?”
So he didn’t see the truest danger. “My lord Prince, in the streets they are saying you commanded your father’s death. They’re saying the Twenty will—”
“These matters are not settled in the streets. I am my father’s anointed heir. It will take more than peasants’ prattling to undo it.” Even on that dismal night, the Prince could not unmake himself. His scorn could wither a healthy oak.
“But you quarreled.”
Aleksander grimaced. “A month ago I was on the Suzaini border. Bandits—damned villains threatening ruin across the whole eastern Empire. Twenty villages already destroyed, granaries ravaged up and down the border, horses stolen or slaughtered. In the midst of the campaign, my father summons me back here to answer ‘unnamed charges.’ If I’d left right then—”
“You refused an imperial summons?” No wonder Ivan had been furious with him.
The Prince was twisting the hem of his mourning robe, a long red cloak, fastened about his neck with a band of silverwork. “We’d lost nineteen warriors already, chasing the cursed bandits. I wasn’t going to waste their deaths to answer some pissing accusations no one would explain.”
And abandoning the mission would have left the Suzaini to starve. Their granaries and horses were their life. When Aleksander was twenty-two, he wouldn’t have considered that.
“So I finished cleaning up the mess, then rode like a paraivo. Got here yesterday at dawn. Found the paraivo was already here.”
“No doubt.” A god-raised desert sandstorm would be nothing to Ivan’s rage.
Aleksander leaned forward, his face ruddy with remembered anger. “And who was with him but Leonid, the Second Lord of the Hamrasch, so concerned at the insolence and insubordination of my delay, the very one who had brought ‘certain matters’ to my father’s attention ... All of it stupid. Contrived. It would have taken only a day to clear it up.”
But the Prince had been tired and angry and headstrong as always. “You weren’t given a day.”
He glanced up sharply. “No. It’s only my neck they want. Murdering my father as well is not going to get them anything. We don’t do things that way. Until I have a son, my heir is my father’s cousin Edik, a puling coward who makes me look scholarly and temperate. But the rest of the Denischkar would fight for him anyway, and the other hegeds would never allow old Hamrasch to say who sits the throne. It would be the end of the Hamraschi; the entire heged would die.”
But of course that was the very problem. Clearly the Hamraschi didn’t care if they died. What in the name of the gods had Aleksander done to raise a kanavar from one of the most powerful Derzhi families?
From outside the room came the droning of a mellanghar and a powerful male voice beginning the Derzhi mourning song, a winding, wordless lament that could make a mountain weep. Rage drained from the Prince’s face. He shook his head slightly and waved his hand, as if to silence his own thoughts, and then got slowly to his feet, turning his back to me. “I’ll be occupied until dawn. Come to my apartments then and we’ll talk. Be discreet, Seyonne. I’d not lose you, too.”
“My lord, I need to go ...” I’d not yet told him all I’d learned. Did he even know that the Frythian had accused him? But the time was not
right to tell him anything. As Aleksander stood beside his father’s body, his broad shoulders grew rigid. Curious, I slipped quietly to the edge of the marble block where I could get a broader view of the hall to see what had alerted him.
No unseemly disturbance or untimely intrusion had caused Aleksander’s tension, however, but his own act. Beneath his red and silver cloak, the Prince wore black breeches and a sleeveless shirt of embroidered red silk, and now he had used his father’s sword to cut three long gashes in his bare left arm. As I watched, he did the same to his right and began drawing circles about his eyes and on his cheeks with the blood. He had already forgotten I was there.
I withdrew into my niche, trying to convince myself that I could manage shifting form again. If I was going to stay through the night, then I might as well be useful and keep up my watch. And no non-Derzhi was going to get near Ivan’s funeral rites. As I sat there in the smoky dimness, trying to summon the will to shift, someone in soft slippers hurried across the vast room.
“Your Highness, the procession is engaged.” The gold-clad chamberlain dropped to his knees behind the Prince, whispering just loud enough to hear. “The bearers await your command ...”
Aleksander, eyes fixed on his father’s body, gave a slight nod. But the chamberlain did not go.
“... and, Your Highness, please forgive me for carrying any other message than those required by this most mortal ... most dreadfully grievous ... and I would not speak it if not commanded by my lord High Chamberlain, who was himself commanded by His Highness, who waits outside ... demanding ... insisting ... most kind lord that he is—”
I winced. The servant’s craven, crawling stuttering was just the quality to put an edgy man violently out of humor. And Aleksander was a very edgy man. The Prince did not raise his voice, but might have bitten the words out of the stone floor. “Speak or I’ll rip out your useless tongue.”
“I am bade to tell you that His Highness, Prince Edik, has arrived in Zhagad and says he must see his beloved Emperor and cousin laid out before the rites begin.”
Before Aleksander could answer, a clattering of boots and un-muted voices violated the reverent stillness of the temple. No servants this time. I could hear the clink of gold chains around their necks and feel the steel menace of their weapons. The very air carried the assurance of royal privilege. The newcomers stood on the far side of the bier, just out of my line of sight.
“Shades of Druya, Aleksander. You look like some barbarian priest calling up gods to protect his village. No one’s done this kind of silly blood-marking in three hundred years.” The visitor had a lilting voice that curled around its edges, as if he were forever on the verge of sneering laughter. “One might think you were actually mourning the old devil’s passing.”
“Have you come to lick at the trough now he’s dead, Edik? Do you think I’ve forgotten that he forbade you to stand or speak in his presence?”
“Ah, my young cousin, this is the time to draw up the ties of blood, not—”
“On your knees, Edik, and hold your coward’s tongue! You are in the presence of your Emperor, and until he is ash, you will obey him.” Aleksander strode to the end of the bier. “Bring in the bearers!”
No one in the palace could have failed to hear Aleksander’s scornful rebuke of his visitor. But only I, with a Warden’s hearing, could have heard the visitor’s whispered response, buried as it was beneath the shuffling clamor of those who came to carry Ivan to his pyre. “And afterward, dear cousin Zander ... once my cousin is burned and only you are left ... then what?”
I crept along the floor far enough to glimpse the three on the far side of the empty bier, and the odor of danger was so strong, it almost gagged me. Two Hamrasch lords stood smiling at Aleksander’s back, and before them, kneeling on the floor, was a middle-aged man. His sleek blond braid fell to the side of his placid face. No anger twisted his full lips; no offense or indignation marred his wide brow or glinted in his narrow-spaced eyes. But he had ridden into Zhagad with a troop of Hamrasch warriors, and he propped his hands and his chin on a stick of polished wood, still stained with the blood of a clumsy slave.
CHAPTER 5
Derzhi inheritance was strictly through the male line. Horses, land, titles—and in the case of the Denischkar heged, the Lion Throne—passed from eldest son to eldest son. Fortunately or unfortunately, the most recent generations of the royal branch of the widespread, powerful Denischkar family had produced few children of either sex. Aleksander was Ivan’s only child. Ivan’s only brother Dmitri, Aleksander’s harsh and well-loved likai, had been childless when he was murdered by the Khelid. Aleksander’s closest cousin Kiril was of the female line, the son of Ivan’s widowed sister Rahil and therefore unable to inherit, dependent upon the Emperor for his position and fortune. And so to find the man who stood next in line to Aleksander, one had to look back another generation, to Varat, a younger brother of Aleksander’s grandfather. Varat himself was long dead in some Derzhi war, as was his youngest brother Stefan, but Varat had left an only son, Prince Edik. It appeared that the Hamraschi had no intention of wresting the throne from Aleksander’s family ... only from Aleksander.
Though I had served in the Emperor’s summer palace in Capharna for some five months, I knew little of Edik. One of my previous masters, an elderly Derzhi baron, claimed that Edik had once abandoned fifty warriors to be slaughtered by the Basranni, and was therefore a proven coward whose braid should be shorn. Perhaps true, perhaps not—the baron was not always the most accurate in his history. But I knew that Edik did not change expression when he beat a helpless man.
I did not leave Aleksander that night. There were few enough honorable people in the imperial court. I knew of none save his wife, the Princess Lydia, his personal guard captain, Sovari, and his cousin Kiril who understood Aleksander well enough to truly love him. No others could he trust to guard his back.
Derzhi custom required the disposition of a corpse no more and no less than one day after death. Desert life demanded quick resolution, but the gods had to be served, too, and by allowing the sun to rise on the lifeless body, one allowed the gods to see clearly what had come to pass. Perhaps it gave them a chance to intervene if they desired.
Such speedy disposition precluded most of the powerful from attending Ivan’s rites, as it would take weeks for the principal heged lords to travel from their widespread holdings. But every heged was required to maintain a household in Zhagad and to have at least one male relative in direct line of its first lord living there at all times. These were not hostages, of course; the idea of hostages from their own houses was repugnant to the Derzhi. They were informants, conveyors of the Emperor’s pleasure to their honored families. And each household had its own garrison, sized in proportion to the importance of the house and available to serve at the Emperor’s command. But whatever the reasons and explanations, as a result, all Derzhi families were represented in the funeral procession. As soon as I had shifted into falcon’s form and made accommodation yet again with altered senses, I flew through the deserted palace toward the sound of the singing, hunting for those I needed to know.
A torchlit procession wound slowly through the streets of Zhagad toward the desert. Following a row of singers and priests rode troops of Derzhi warriors, from grizzled lords to youths with new braids, all of them wearing the patterned scarves or colored tef-coats of their hegeds. Small groups of red-robed women walked or rode alongside the men, as was their heged custom. At the front of the procession came representatives of the Ten—the most venerable of the two hundred or more Derzhi families—the kayeet-crested Fontezhi, the highly traditional, blue-coated Gorusch, the despicable Nyabozzi, who controlled the slave trade, the Marag in their long green-striped scarves, and the rest of them. The Marag were the family of Aleksander’s wife, and it was the Princess’s downy-cheeked, sixteen-year-old brother, Damok, who led the Marag warriors. Behind the Ten rode the remainder of the Council of Twenty, hegeds not so ancient as the Ten, b
ut some of them even wealthier and more powerful, like the Hamraschi. The Council had little true power; the Emperor’s word was absolute in every instance. But every heged had its legions of warriors, and strength was everything to the Derzhi.
After the Twenty, some fifty or sixty people marched chained together—one for each of the lands and peoples subject to the Empire. The sullen prisoners—some young, some old, all gaping stupidly at the crowds—were people of no significance. The kings and nobles, wisewomen and chieftains of the conquered lands had all been slaughtered, their noble lineage vanished into history. Many of the long-defeated peoples like the Suzaini, the Manganar, and the Thrid were no longer enslaved, and now formed the working heart of the Empire. But the Emperor kept one prisoner of each race, picked at random and held until death in his dungeons as a symbol of his domination, and they were paraded through the streets on occasions such as this.
The Emperor’s heged, the Denischkari, followed the prisoners. Beside Edik rode the short, square-shouldered Kiril, his face like stone, and a handsome older woman dressed in flowing red—Kiril’s mother, no doubt, the Princess Rahil. Rahil had married for love, so Aleksander had told me, to the younger son of a minor house. The marriage was an intolerable disgrace to her family. On the day Kiril was born, Rahil’s brother, the Emperor, had sent her husband into a battle where the young noble was certain to die. Rahil had never spoken to Ivan again, though the Emperor had lavished on Kiril the father’s fondness he had withheld from Aleksander. Kiril was permitted to ride with the Denischkari, as a concession to his royal blood, rather than being consigned to the roadside, as were other nobles of minor houses.
Behind the Denischkari came Ivan, laid out on a gold-draped wagon pulled by ten fine horses. Ivan’s own mount, a magnificent bay, followed riderless, nervous, as if he knew he was to be slain and burned beside his fallen master. And after them all strode Aleksander, tall and proud, his red cloak billowing behind him in the chill night breeze risen off the desert. His feet were bare, his blood-marked face cold and haughty, his gaze wavering not one mezzit to either side of him. He might have walked right off the etched and painted stone tablets that decorated Derzhi halls. No bodyguard rode beside him or behind him, yet I doubted anyone would dare strike at him directly. For that moment the Prince wore the mantle of empire, given him by the fierce old warrior still very much in view. As long as Ivan existed in Derzhi eyes, any hand that touched Aleksander must surely risk the gods’ wrath.
