Spear of Heaven (2 page)

“I’m going with the mages,” she said. “They’ll go still, you’ll
see. They have to find out what broke their Gate. I can help them. I have a
gift for Gates, and for that kind of magery.”

“So do they,” he said, “and they aren’t heir to the empire.”

“You promised me,” said Daruya. “When you refused me the
right of Journey, when I became a priestess—you promised that I would have one
later.”

“As I recall,” he said, “what I refused you was permission
to run away to sea when you were pregnant with ki-Merian. I very nearly had to
chain you in the temple then.”

“But you didn’t,” she said. “I stayed home. I did my duties
like a proper humble heir to the throne. I delivered my daughter, I nursed her
myself, I raised her and weaned her and taught her what I could. Now she’s old
enough to be separated from me. I’ll leave her here; I’ll surrender her to you.
But I’m going with the mages.”

“No,” said the emperor, impervious to her sacrifice. “Not
since the Worldgate broke.”

Daruya heard a sound behind her. She whipped about.

Vanyi smiled thinly at her. Daruya flung up her hands, the
one that was simple human flesh, the one that flashed gold. “You, too,
Guildmaster? And what did he pay you to keep me in my cage?”

She gave Vanyi no chance to answer. Some time after she was
gone, while the storm of her passing was still rumbling on the edge of awareness,
Vanyi said, “Well. I presume you’ve told her she can’t go.”

“You always were unusually perceptive,” said the emperor. He
was not angry, nor particularly bitter. Wry, that was all, and a little sad. “I
can’t let her, of course. Whether or not she’s been so generous as to leave an
heir to come after me.”

“Which, from the look of you, won’t happen for another forty
years at least.” Vanyi spoke without envy. She had not grown old with excessive
grace. Her hair, once the color of sea-moors in autumn, red and brown and gold
intermingled, was winter-grey. Her pale skin was gone paler with age, the lines
of laughter and of care drawn deep. She looked her threescore years and more.

He, who was but a little younger, seemed a man still in his
prime. He made a gesture as if to deny her, but she stopped him. “No, don’t say
it. We’re what our breeding makes us. I like to see how little you’ve changed,
except to grow into yourself. It comforts me.”

She left the door and came into the room, and sat in the
chair that Daruya had long since vacated. He stood with his hands on the back
of his own chair, staring down at her from his not inconsiderable height. “You
think she should go?”

“No,” said Vanyi. “Not in the least. While the way was open,
while it was a simple expedition to the other side of the world, what better
ambassador than the heir to the empire? But now . . . we don’t
know what we’re going into. We don’t even know what broke the Gate.”

“And yet you’ll go?”

“You can’t forbid me,” she said calmly.

“I wouldn’t try,” he said. “That was our pact from long ago.
The empire for me. The Mageguild for you, and the mastery of Gates. Alliance
wherever we could. But where we could not . . . well. We’ve
never been enemies, have we?”

“Once or twice,” she said, “we did disagree on policy.”

His lips twitched. “Rather more often than that, I recall.
But enmity—we never came to that.”

“No,” said Vanyi. She sat back in the tall chair and sighed.
“I shouldn’t even be here. The Guild is in an utter taking. You’d think it had
never seen a crisis before.”

“It’s got used to having you in command,” he said.

“Don’t flatter me,” she said with an edge of annoyance. “I’m
running out on responsibility, much as your granddaughter would love to. Did
you know that your great-granddaughter spent the night in the Guildhall, on the
threshold of the ninth Gate?”

She had taken him completely by surprise. He looked so
startled that she laughed; and that roused his temper, which only made her
laugh the harder.

He shook her into some semblance of quiet. She looked up
into his face, suddenly so close. He would kiss her, she thought. It was a
fugitive thought, from nowhere that she could discern. It fled as swift as it
had come, as he let her go and stepped back. She could not see that it cost him
any effort.

Forty years, she thought. Forty years since she last shared
his bed, and lovers enough in between, and she could still go all to bits when
he laid hands on her.

He seemed long since cured of her. There had never been any
hope in it to begin with, a fisherman’s daughter from Seiun Isle dreaming that
she could wed as well as bed the Lord of Sun and Lion. They had parted long
ago, and properly enough. He had taken nine concubines in Asanion, half in
obedience to the custom of that ancient empire, half in defiance of it.

The obedience was in the taking. The defiance was in the
setting free, in giving them to choose whether to marry or to go where they
would. In their own western country they would have had no choice but to remain
in his harem; but in his eastern realm they could take the freedom he gave and
do as they pleased with it.

Most had chosen to marry among the lords and princelings of
the east. Vanyi had reason to suspect that not all of them had gone maiden to
the marriage bed; but none of the husbands had objected that Vanyi ever knew
of.

One of the royal concubines had desired no husband. She had
gone away to rule a princedom in the east of the world, had prospered and grown
old and adopted a daughter to rule after her.

Only one had remained with the emperor, and that was exactly
as he wished it. She had borne his son and heir, and held in great honor the
name and the title of empress. She was aging sadly now in the way of her
people, but she was still alive and still hale, and he was devoted to her. Of
that, Vanyi had no doubt at all. She had only to read it in his eyes.

He took no notice of her abstraction. “Where is the child
now?”

She had to stop and remember Kimeri and the Gate, and the
nurses’ snoring as the child crept through the door into her own chambers. “I
brought her back,” said Vanyi, “and put her to bed, none the worse for her
night’s wandering. There’s a binding on her now, and I called one of the palace
ul-cats to enforce it. She won’t go anywhere again until morning.”

“God and goddess,” said the emperor. “She’s as bad as her
mother.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Vanyi said. “She was sleepwalking, it
seems. She doesn’t remember coming to the Guildhall. The Gate’s fall brought
her, I think—she’s got Gate-sense.”

“All the Sun’s brood do,” he said. He sounded faintly angry,
though not at Vanyi.

“Poor Estarion,” she said with rough sympathy. “It always
ends in your lap, no matter where it begins. It’s your doom, I think: to be the
one who holds it all together.”

He shrugged. Self-pity, Vanyi knew, was an indulgence he had
given up long ago. He had been emperor since he was twelve years old, when he
saw his father dead of poison in the palace of what had been the western
empire, when western Asanion and eastern Keruvarion were united only by force and
by ancient enmity. He had spent his youth and all his manhood uniting those two
hostile realms into one empire, building his city on the border between them,
bringing their courts together, making their disparate peoples one people. Now
he had his reward. For five whole years he had had no call to war; for three
seasons, no assassin had tried to take his life.

Strange how little he showed of all that. He had scars in
plenty, but his coat and trousers hid them. His face was still more young than
old. He kept from his youth a kind of innocence, a resilience that never seemed
to fail or to harden, no matter how sorely he was tested.

If he was aware of her thoughts, he gave no sign of it. He
sighed and said, “She’s punishing me, you know. For letting her father die and
her mother go away as soon as she was born. So she had an heir without a
father, and meant to leave the heir as she was left, but I was cruel: I wouldn’t
let her.”

“That was brutal, yes,” said Vanyi, dry as winter grass. “You
left Varuyan to find his own way as all sons must, even princes. If that was
into marriage with a pretty fool, and into an aurochs’ horns while that fool
was pregnant with his daughter, that was his fault. Not yours.”

“I know that,” he said a little sharply. “Not that Salida
was—or is—as much a fool as you insist. She’s Asanian; she’s practical. She
didn’t have the will or the strength to raise a Sunborn daughter. She knew it.
She also knew that if she stayed in the palace, she’d be immured there,
condemned to be nothing more than a dowager princess. If she gave up the child,
surrendered her rank and her dowry, went back to her kin, she could marry
again; she could have children that honestly were her own, and not the get of a
god.”

“Granted,” said Vanyi. “But she could have spared something
of herself for her firstborn: a word, a letter, some intimation that she
remembers the girl’s existence.”

“We decided, she and I,” said Estarion, “that it were best
if she did no such thing. Less pain for her. Less difficulty for the child whom
she so wisely gave up.”

“That wasn’t wise,” Vanyi said.

He said nothing. She could not tell if he agreed, or if he
was being stubborn, or if he had simply tired of the subject. He wandered back
to the window. There was something of the caged beast in the way he stood, but
a beast resigned to its captivity, its yearning shrunk to a dull ache.

“You were all the father she ever needed,” Vanyi said, not
to comfort him, but because it was the truth. “Haliya has always been a mother
to her. But that’s never enough for the young. They’re the strictest
traditionalists of all.”

She could not see his face, only the broad line of his
shoulders, and the heavy braid that fell between them. His mood to the touch of
her magery was surprisingly calm. He said, “If Haliya loses the child of her
heart, I don’t know that she’ll recover.”

It was calm, then, over grief. No use to say that he had
known it when he married. His line lived long, if sudden death did not take
them, and he had taken an Asanian wife, of a people who blossomed early and
died young. It had been necessary, one of the many necessities that bound two
empires into one.

Vanyi gentled her voice as much as she might. “Is she so
frail?”

“You should know as well as I. You saw her yesterday.”

She ignored the snap in his voice. “She’s grown old, to be
sure, and I’m sorry for it. But I think she’s stronger than you imagine.”

“Strong enough to withstand the cruelty of a child?”

“That’s what mothers are for. Grandmothers, too.”

He carefully did not observe that Vanyi had never been
either. She would have borne his son, if she had not miscarried. There had been
no children after, of any of her lovers.

Her choice. Her grief, when she had leisure for it. Which
mostly she did not. The Gates were her children, the mages her kin.

“And I should go back to them,” she said. He was a mage, if
not of the Guild. She did not need to speak aloud the thoughts that were clear
for him to read.

He turned in the window. “You will go?”

She almost smiled. “O persistent. Of course I’ll go. I’ve
watched my mages girdle the world with Gates, walking or riding or sailing from
each to the one that must be built after. Now I want to see for myself what’s
on the other side of the world.”

“And what broke the Gate there.” He spread his hands, the dark
and the golden. “I have no power to stop you.”

“Of course you do,” she said. “But you won’t use it.”

“Because I promised,” he said, a little wearily, a little
wryly. “I’m cursed with honesty: I keep my word.”

“There are worse things to be cursed with,” she said. She
rose from the chair, creaking a little.

“Thank you,” he said.

She blinked.

“For bringing ki-Merian home,” he explained—not even a hint
of rebuke that she, the mages’ Master, should fail to read a simple thought. “She’ll
have better nurses after this. More wakeful.”

“Less susceptible to her sleep-spelling.” Vanyi caught the
flash of his glance; she smiled. “Yes, I know they’re all mageborn, and those
that aren’t, are ul-cats, with magic in their blood. Maybe she needs a simpler
guardian: one too mindblind to notice when she’s working her magics.”

“I’ll think on that,” he said.

He would, too. That was the great virtue of the Emperor
Estarion. He listened to advice. He might not take it—but he did listen.

Once Daruya’s temper had carried her out of her
grandfather’s sight, she calmed as she always did, into a kind of sullen
embarrassment. She went to lair in her safe place, the stable that housed her
own seneldi, the herd that she had bred. There in the dark and the hay-scented
quiet, she slipped into the dun mare’s stall and sat on the manger, elbows
propped on knees, chin on fists. The mare, accustomed to Daruya’s presence at
odd hours, chewed peacefully on the remains of her supper.

Daruya let the mare’s peace seep into her mind, blunting the
sharp edges of anger. “I don’t know what it is,” she said. The mare flicked an
ear, listening. “Whenever I stand in front of my grandfather, I shrink till I’m
no bigger than Kimeri, and no wiser, either. And then we fight. Or I fight. He
just smiles in that way he has, and lets me howl, till he decides it’s time to
shut me up.”

The mare nosed in the corner of her manger. Daruya stroked
the black-barred neck, ruffling the mane with its stripes of black and gold.
This was a queen mare: unlike the bulk of her kind she had horns, though not
the ell-long spears of a stallion; hers were a delicate handspan, straight and
sharply pointed.

Daruya brushed one with a finger, pricking herself lightly
on the tip. “I wish,” she said, “that he could see anything of me but my worst.
He thinks I’m an utter child, spoiled and irresponsible.”