Wings of Flame

by Nancy Springer

  “It is only a scratch,” he said.

  “It is not. It is a piercing wound, and it was never properly cleaned, and it is starting to swell. You should have the king take care of it.”

  “Auron?” He swiveled around to stare at her.

  “Yes. The king is a healer.”

  “I’d sooner swell.” Kyrem turned back to his washing, finished it and reached for a towel of milky white cotton. He pushed aside a new tunic in the process.

  “Bullheaded,” Seda said. “You will be wearing your old rags next, and refusing his food. Or do you not scorn the king’s food?”

  He gave her a hard look, not failing to note that she wore new clothing which was soft and whole, though plain.

  “I will eat Auron’s food and wear this gaudery and even accept gifts and courtesy if I must.” Kyrem turned away with a gesture of decision. “But I will have no part of any devilish Vashtin magic. And it does not surprise me to hear you say that your dear king is a sorcerer.”

  “A healer!” she protested.

  “It is all the same. One capable of the sending of certain horse-headed birds.”

  He had told Auron the tale of their journey after dinner, grudgingly and only because justice demanded that the Vashtin king should be allowed a chance at vindication of himself and his kingdom. Auron had given orders immediately. Patrols were to go forth, men on foot with donkeys carrying their supplies, to find the mysterious archers. Kyrem cynically expected that they would find nothing.

  “I am going to bed,” he said to Seda, and she went off to her own bunk in the barracklike servants’ quarters—the male quarters of course.

  The next morning, quite early, Kyrem went to fetch Omber from the stables, speaking to no one, not even to Seda. He rode the horse out of the city gates as soon as they were open, and at trot and canter he sped far up the terraced farmland to the hills where sheep grazed and over the rise of the first one, out of sight of Avedon. There he dismounted and let Omber graze and roll and play, himself sitting on a blue boulder patterned with lichens of pink and whitish green, contentedly watching the horse and expecting at any moment to be surrounded by Auron’s retainers come to march him back to captivity.

  The sun reached its zenith and moved past it, and Kyrem’s stomach took up arms against him. No Vashtin came near. Finally, reluctantly, he rode back to Avedon and stabled his horse. In his gold-domed palace, Auron sat waiting at the table as before.

  Kyrem ate hungrily and silently, also as before, feeling cross and somehow outwitted. Auron ate little.

  “It seems I am permitted to go out and exercise my horse,” Kyrem said, keeping his voice as toneless as possible.

  “Of course,” Auron replied rather sleepily. “Take a packet of food from the kitchen next time. There is no need to go without.”

  “And if I ride away?” Kyrem challenged.

  “That is as it comes.” Auron glanced up from under delicate, highly arched brows like those of a well-bred woman. “It is true, you are unhappy here, perhaps you have comrades or a sweetheart in Deva whom you miss, perhaps you dream of yellow cliffs and great spaces. But you know the value of your father’s bond or you would not be here.”

  Kyrem felt startled and angry, for Auron’s words were accurate except concerning the sweetheart. Dismayingly accurate. Still, he would play his game out.

  “And if I pack myself two weeks’ worth of supplies and ride out of here bound for Deva,” he said, “what will you do then?”

  “Why, nothing.” Auron met the youth’s shocked gaze blandly. “Assuming that you would return to Deva by a different route so as to avoid those pertinacious enemies of yours. But you would have your father to deal with when you arrived there.”

  Kyrem applied himself to his meal and said nothing more. Inwardly he seethed, knowing that he had been bested. He spent the afternoon exploring the city, staring with hard eyes at elegant houses, shops, stalls and tile-bordered streets. He took supper in his room, having Seda bring him fruit and bread from the kitchen, and he went early to bed.

  The next morning there was some coinage lying on his washstand, some coppers, a few silvers and a single small gold coin, no extravagant amount but enough to provide some amusement at the gaming stalls, some sweets perhaps, a bauble, a small gift for Seda. Kyrem looked at the coins and let them lie. His shoulder was swollen and sore, hurting him so much now that he found it difficult to move the affected arm. He felt sullen.

  “Come with me today,” he said to Seda.

  “That is not fitting,” she told him. “You have rank to uphold, and I am a servant.”

  “I need a friend worse than I need a servant,” Kyrem said.

  “You have a royal friend, if you would only notice.” She glanced at the coins. Kyrem scowled at her and stalked out.

  The servant was honest. The coins stayed on the washstand for the next three days, and Kyrem continued as sore and sullen as ever. He was bored most of the time, for there was little for him to do while he was avoiding Auron. One can spend only just so much time with one’s horse, exercising and grooming—though the priests and their boys seemed to be fussing over the sacred steeds constantly, leading and grooming and combing mane and tail and braiding lucky beads into the forelock—but even had Kyrem been inclined to spend all day brushing Omber, his painful shoulder would not allow it.

  “May I do it?” Nasr Yamut asked, seeing Kyrem wince as he attempted to pick up the stallion’s feet for cleaning. The priest sounded eager. It pleased Kyrem that Nasr Yamut so badly wanted what was in his, Kyrem’s, power to bestow. In a more sane frame of mind he would not have thought of sharing Omber with a smiling stranger, but he was in a fit mood to swagger. Also, he hoped Omber might kick the priest.

  “Go ahead,” he said grandly. He placed Nasr Yamut’s hand against the curve of the steed’s neck, giving the man authority to touch him. Nasr Yamut cleaned the hooves deftly, and Omber did not threaten to kick. Watching, Kyrem felt an inexplicable prickling of dismay.

  “Such a beauty,” Nasr Yamut declared, stroking Omber. “So noble, so mannerly. Truly a paragon among horses.”

  Perhaps, Kyrem decided to still his dismay, this priest might be a friend of sorts after all.

  When he was bored thereafter he would go in search of Nasr Yamut, if he had not met him at the stable, and find the priest in the temple teaching the novices or reading the charts for some wealthy suppliant or tending to the spiced barley mash that was always brewing on a gilded brazier for both the priests and their sacred steeds. And Nasr Yamut would greet Kyrem as a friend and an equal, leaving his work to walk and talk with him.

  On Kyrem’s fourth day in Avedon they walked out to the place of fire, the Atar-Vesth, and Kyrem studied the blunt promotory of blue rock and its strange red-leafed trees that were shaped, leaf and tree, like flames or perhaps like a horse’s ear. And they visited the stone Suth, and Kyrem looked warily at the gem in its forehead, but it neither shone nor took on color other than a smoky crystal hue, shadow of the stone Suth beneath it.

  “It is said in the lore that every horse carries the treasure of the world between its eyes,” Nasr Yamut said, “but none of our foals has yet been born bearing such a gem, only the lucky white star.”

  “Is that the meaning of that gem then?” Kyrem asked. “That Suth owns the treasure of the world?”

  Nasr Yamut hesitated. “It is not known exactly what is the meaning of that gem,” he replied at last. “For many years men have feared it.”

  Kyrem had felt that fear, but he chose not to reveal it. “Why?” he asked blandly.

  “People have died of touching it. We priests recite their names on our days of sorrow and fasting. No one nowadays will touch it, and no one comes here except we priests who serve the effigy of the god. Folk used to come more commonly at one time, it seems.” Nasr Yamut pointed at the pedestal, and looking more closely, Kyrem could see a glyphic inscription in the stone, worn nearly smooth with the touch of time.

  “Do
you know what it says?” he asked the priest.

  “Yes, and …” a delicate hesitation, for effect, Kyrem felt sure. “… I dare say I may tell you. It reads,

  “Come hither, pilgrim, bearing

  your heart’s desire.

  See whether your boldness

  will win your desire

  or death.”

  “Grim,” Kyrem remarked.

  “Yon is a dangerous jewel, and an oracular one in some way, we feel. It changes color when great events are in the offing. We watch it with awe.”

  For once Kyrem did not scoff, inwardly or outwardly, at the words of the Vashtin.

  Not far from the stone Suth ran the hoofprint fountain, Ahara Suth, the great crescent curve of blue rock where the river welled up. “Suth must be as big as the world,” Kyrem said.

  “What is the Devan belief concerning the shape of the world?” Nasr Yamut asked him.

  “Belief?” Kyrem shrugged. “We know little enough. Our own land is the center, and beyond it lie places where souls go or where gods dwell or where the Old Ones went when we drove them out. Perilous places. And a great river surrounds it all, and then the edge of nothingness. But no one really knows except from dreams.”

  “There is a great river at the edges of Vashti,” said the priest. “Lore tells us that beyond that bourne the soil is black instead of red, and black lilies grow there, beyond the deep water. The river is called Ril Melantha, and it is always hidden in mist. That is a magical stream. No one crosses that river except the white-robed ones, the atarashet, those who are beyond the fire, to enter upon their life of meditation, and they never return.”

  “I do not understand this matter of the atarashet,” said Kyrem. It sounded like none of the customs of his land.

  “When fire-masters go beyond, they cross the Ril Melantha to the Untrodden Land, the place of powers, of the numina and the puissant dead. From that moment they are atarashet; they become as if dead to this world. They speak with the spirits of potent kings of old, of seers out of the past. They meditate amid the black lilies. They grow wise.”

  “Are they not wise, then, before they go?” asked Kyrem. This seemed to him to be an odd way to make a mystic.

  “We hope all fire-masters are wise.”

  There seemed no safe answer to this.

  “Are mystics honored in your land, Prince Kyrem?”

  “Of course,” he replied automatically. “The mystic is the third eye of being, that eye through which the world beholds itself and knows itself divine. Of course we honor our mystics.”

  Behind his back the jewel in the forehead of the stone Suth winked and glittered as he spoke. Nasr Yamut saw and stiffened and opened his mouth as though to speak, but thought better of it. If the jewel was the third eye of Suth, then what was this prince?

  “And do you honor priests?” he asked Kyrem instead.

  “Of course. But not—” Kyrem smiled sourly. “Not as much as you are honored here.”

  “How do you mean?” Nasr Yamut spoke smoothly, and Kyrem, who had begun to trust him, did not notice the tension around his eyelids.

  “Priests serve the god. Rulers and warriors tend to the real business of the world.” Kyrem shrugged, smiling, then grimaced as the shrug reminded him of the wound in his shoulder. “In Deva we raise men of might to rule,” he added obliquely, saying nothing more scornful of Auron.

  The king of Vashti was no warrior, no ruler to Kyrem’s way of thinking. He did no mighty deeds, uttered no proclamations, received no ambassadors, made no appearances of state. He did not ride forth, nor even walk. Indeed, to Kyrem’s knowledge, he had not yet set foot outside of his own palace. But within it he busied himself with councils and accountings, with the thousand petty affairs of his kingdom and city and servants; no detail was too small for him, Seda had said.

  And sometimes for hours on end Auron would simply sit, as passive as so much pastry dough, and stare. Nasr Yamut, on the other hand, always seemed to be concerned with something important, even when he was not. He took command, gave orders to underlings, brushed aside the trivial, strode away to pace and brood, dynamic. Kyrem stood somewhat in admiration of the intensity of the man, the force of his intelligence, the scope of his conversation. Nasr Yamut made a superb teacher, he felt sure, he who had always had small use for teachers. Yet the priest honored him by asking him his opinions.

  “Do your priests not prophesy, then?”

  “In Deva,” Kyrem answered promptly and with feeling, “prophecy is the province of old women who delve for the bones of murdered children. We of the blood take things as they come.”

  Nasr Yamut stood silent for a while. “Well,” he said at last, “I must return to my duties. Do not come here alone, my prince. This is forbidden ground except on the great occasion of a sacrifice.” He accompanied Kyrem back to the temple, then left him.

  The prince went back to the gold-domed palace at the hub of Avedon to find Auron waiting at table for him as usual. And as usual they ate their dinner in silence—until Auron broke silence.

  “These buskins of mine are ridiculous, as you’ve thought many times,” he said, his voice quite gentle, though not at all apologetic. “But I do not wear them as an affectation, to make myself appear taller. They are royal footgear. The heel of the Vashtin monarch is never to touch the floor or the ground, not even in the privacy of his own chamber. And these silly things keep the royal heel from even coming near it.”

  Kyrem tried not to gape. To be sure, he had made no effort to keep his face from showing his thoughts, but it startled him that Auron should have guessed them so accurately.

  “In the days of my grandfather’s reign,” Auron went on rather dreamily, “they lamed the king as well. Though I can hardly understand why.”

  “In Deva we do not hobble our kings,” Kyrem said automatically. He felt dazed, and uneasy.

  “That shoulder of yours,” Auron said, his eyes suddenly keen. “It should not still be so sore. It troubles you, I know. Will you let me tend to it?”

  Kyrem stood up, backing away from the table, shaking his head. Then he turned and fled, leaving his dinner unfinished.

  The next day he awoke feverish. He rose anyway, ignoring Seda’s entreaties to the contrary, and rode Omber out to the river and let the horse bathe in it, and he spent most of the day in the water himself, numbing the ache from his wound, trying to wash the fever from the rest of him. He arrived very late to dinner and found that Auron did not await him, to his surprise and somewhat, oddly, to his discomfiture. He ate little, finding himself queasy, and went early to bed. In the morning he was too ill to arise.

  “Ky, let me bring the king. Please,” Seda begged.

  “No. For a certainty not,” he muttered thickly. “Are there no other healers here in Avedon?”

  “Midwives. I trust you don’t want them. King Auron—”

  Kyrem flung himself upright to face her. “No!” he roared with a force that turned his feverish face purple and started blood running from his nose. Seda jumped to staunch the flow with whatever cloth came to hand.

  “All right, all right,” she soothed, easing his head back onto the pillow and cooling his face with a wet piece of toweling. “Bullheaded.…” She sat by him until the bleeding stopped and he lapsed into a troubled sleep. For the sake of his pride she could do no more for him that day, and after dark she went first on a private errand and then to her own bed. She did not sleep. By herself she could not tend Kyrem in the nighttime, for if it ever should become known that she was a woman, he might be dishonored in the minds of all Vashtins—she was a shuntali, after all. But he would not die overnight. She had already seen to that.

  That night the faraway other dreamt that she was a servant, a manservant, living in the crowded servants’ quarters of a great king’s dwelling. The other servants teased her, the shy young newcomer, often but not unkindly. She was a shuntali—what did that mean?—but they made nothing of that, for Auron would never have allowed it. Auron was
the wisest, kindest king Vashti had ever known, and his ways of dealing with matters of the judgment hall had already become legendary. The servants knew all things about him, and they found no fault with him. Was Auron the comely youth with the black curly hair? No, that one lay abed, as sore in spirit as in body. Would Auron heal him? My king, heal him, please. He should not be like this, he is not like this inside; he has a nature as generous as yours, only younger, more ardent, less wise, and some things it is hard for him to understand. Already you know these things of him? My king, you will help him? Then must I slip away through these crowded barracks in the silent mid of night, slip away for the prince’s sake, hushed, creeping. And look, King Auron awaits me near the prince’s chamber door; he would have come without my pleading. Kyrem sleeps, I have checked, and Auron allows me to hold his candle—

  The other awoke and lay staring at the darkness, puzzled and afraid, as usual. Auron’s name at least she knew—but only as that of an enemy.

  Kyrem awoke in the morning feeling as well as he ever had in all his youthful life, as though sunrise sang within him, and he sat up in wonder. His fever was gone, and so was the ache in his shoulder. Raising his arm, he tested the joint, flexing it in every direction, and he could feel no pain in it; as far as he could tell, the wound was dry and healed. He stood up and for once did not call for Seda, but dressed himself thoughtfully. Seda was late in coming, and when she entered his room, she said nothing, only glanced at him with a shy smile, almost a wary smile, wary of too much show of gladness. He stared at the lad, not answering her smile.

  “Has some one been in here to see me during the night?” he asked her, his voice low, toneless.