A Fall of Princes (11 page)

“No,” he said, not loudly. He bent lower still, singing into
the flattened ear, praising, cursing, willing the mare onward. Up the hill. Up.

She stumbled. He caught her, bearing her up by main force,
driving her forward.

Ulan filled the corner of his eye. The great jaws gaped; the
white fangs gleamed.

The stones. If Hirel could only come to the stones, he could
defend himself. Before he fell. As he must. Damn that unnatural cat to the hell
that had spawned it.

The circle floated before him. Avaryan sat above the tallest
stone and laughed, a great booming roar, filling Hirel’s brain.

Even in his desperation he could reflect that he was at a
sore disadvantage: he had no god to set against this flaming monstrosity. Logic
was a poor defense; philosophy crumbled like a tower of sand. And all Asanion’s
thousand gods were but a tale to frighten children.

The mare veered. Ulan’s jaws clashed shut where her throat
had been. Hirel fought with rein and leg, beating her back toward the west.

She struggled, stiff-legged, throwing up her head. Ulan
snarled. She went utterly mad.

Slowly, leisurely, Hirel wheeled through the air. The earth
was a bitter shock. Sharp cloven hooves flailed about him. He could only lie
and gasp and wait to die.

A blur of fire and shadow became Sarevan’s face. Hirel
sucked in blessed air. Sarevan’s expression, a cool corner of his mind
observed, did not bode well for him. He had seen it once ablaze with temper,
and that had been frightening. But this cold stillness was more deadly by far.

Little by little his lungs remembered their office. The rest
of him was bruised but unbroken.

He sat up shakily. No hand came to his aid. They were all
mounted, staring, save for Sarevan on one knee beside him.

Sarevan watched with eyes that granted him nothing. Not
mercy, not fury, not even contempt.

Hirel rose dizzily, swallowing bile. He was eye to eye with
Sarevan. In spite of themselves, his fists had clenched.

At last the Varyani prince spoke, soft and cold. “You gave
me your word.”

Hirel laughed, though it made his head throb. “I do not
waste honor on animals.”

This silence stretched longer even than the one before.
Longer, colder, and more terrible.

Sarevan stood. He towered like the standing stones, like the
god enthroned upon them. He raised a hand.

The Zhil’ari who came at the signal had no illusions of
gentleness. He bound Hirel’s hands behind him, a tightness just short of pain,
and set him in the saddle of the lathered and trembling mare, and bound his
feet together beneath her belly.

Taking the reins, he mounted his own tall stallion. Sarevan
was astride, waiting. They turned again toward the east.

It was not hurting in the proper places.

Hirel steeled himself to endure his bonds. He had earned
them; he bore them as brands of pride, that he was neither coward nor traitor
to ride tamely into his enemy’s stronghold. After the first grueling hours his
captors relented, securing him by his hands only, and those in front of him.

He could suffer the constant watch by day and by night. He
could face his guards without rancor, the more for that they bore him none of
their own.

Indeed, they looked on him with something close to respect.
They saw that he was fed, that he was clean, that his needs were looked after.

“You tried,” Zha’dan said once. “That’s the act of a man.”

No, it was not his captivity that hurt. It was the chief of
his captors. Only Sarevan never spoke to him or went near him or deigned to take
notice of him.

The others would be enemies if war compelled it, but they
bore Hirel himself no ill-will. Sarevan did not merely hate Hirel; he despised
him.

And what had Hirel done, that Sarevan himself had not
equaled or surpassed? He was a fool and a child to be so outraged; and Hirel
was mad to be so troubled by it. It should not matter. They had been born to be
enemies, the sons of two emperors in a world wide enough only for one. Their
meeting and their companionship had been scarred with contention. They would
come together inevitably in war, that last battle which would raise one throne
where now were two.

Yet it did matter. Hirel did not like Sarevan, had never
liked him. Nothing so harmless or so simple.

This estrangement, this cold distance, with Sarevan riding
always ahead, growing thinner and frailer, fighting harder with each hour to
remain erect and astride—Hirel wanted to burst his damnable bonds and kick his
mare to the red stallion’s side and rail at the fool until he smiled his white smile
and bowed his haughty head and let himself be carried.

Or at least until he acknowledged Hirel’s existence. And let
someone, anyone, bolster his waning strength.

o0o

Sarevan entered the Hundred Realms like a shadow of death,
but he entered them alive and breathing and guiding his own senel. In one thing
only he had yielded to necessity: he had bidden his Zhil’ari to tie him to the
saddle.

They did not like it, but they obeyed. They understood that
kind of pride.

Hirel had it. It had held him aloof and silent, royalty
imprisoned but never diminished. It brought him at last to a crux. If he must
go in bonds to Endros Avaryan, he would not go with Sarevan’s contempt on his
head.

Fool or madman or no, Sarevan was a prince. That much, Hirel
would grant him. Princes could be enemies, could hate one another with just and
proper passion, but scorn diminished them both.

Greatmoon, waning, still filled the sky. Though this was a
richly peopled country, the company had camped at a distance from the last
town.

Sarevan had no wish to be slowed by the duties of a prince.
He wore again his paints and his finery, and such a welter of gauds in his hair
and beard that their color was scarcely distinguishable.

Riding in the midst of his savages, with Ulan wandering
where he would, even on the highroad the prince was scarcely remarked. Hirel
won far more stares, with his High Asanian face and his Zhil’ari fripperies and
his bound hands. People ogled the wild barbarians; they spat on the yellow spy.
Sarevan they did not know at all.

o0o

Even so, he did not test his disguise in inn or hall. This
night they had fish from the swift icy stream, and bread which they had had of
a farmwife going to market; and Zha’dan made a broth of herbs and grain and the
long-eared
kimouri
that Ulan brought
from his hunting, and coaxed it into Sarevan.

Hirel watched from across the firepit. Sarevan could not
feed himself; he could barely swallow.

He was no more than skin stretched over bone. As he lay
propped against his saddle, only his eyes seemed alive; and those were dim,
clouded. He was not fighting his nursemaid. He had no strength for it.

Hirel stood. Rokan was his guardhound tonight, he of the
crimson paint; the Zhil’ari watched but did not hinder as Hirel skirted the
fire.

Sarevan did not see him. Would not.

He sank down beside the prince, letting his bound hands rest
on his knee. Zha’dan acknowledged him with a glance. Sarevan was as still as
before, but the air around him had chilled.

Zha’dan lowered the bowl. It was scarcely touched. His
finger brushed the bandage on Sarevan’s shoulder. It was new, clean,
startlingly white.

“It’s festering,” he said, not trying to be quiet. “He’s
been hiding it. Keeping anyone from looking, till I noticed that the wrappings
hadn’t been changed in days. It needs cautery; he won’t let me. He’d rather
lose his arm than chance a little pain. Maybe he figures to die first.”

“Only cautery?” Hirel asked, reckoning days, and the little
he knew of such wounds, from when a slave had pierced himself with an awl in
the stable. The man’s arm had swelled, and streaked red and then black, and
begun to stink; he had lost the arm, but he had died. The surgeon had waited
too long to cut.

One could not see the poison’s spreading on skin the color
of nightwings. But one might be able to feel the heat of it.

Bound, Hirel was awkward. He did not try to unwrap the
bandage. His fingers searched round about it. The skin was dry, taut,
fever-hot, but fevered everywhere the same. It did not flinch away from him.

“If it has spread,” Hirel said to Zha’dan, “it has not
spread far.”

“Must you discuss me as if I were already dead?”

Hirel was careful not to start or stare or blurt out
something unwise. He favored Sarevan with a cool regard, and rebuked his heart
for singing. “Would you rather we went away and whispered?”

The dark eyes were clear and perhaps not altogether
unyielding. “I do not fancy hot iron in my shoulder. My father will heal it
more gently and much more completely.”

“Your father will heal everything, it seems. If you get so
far.”

“I mean to,” said Sarevan.

“He will fulfill your expectations, or he will answer to
me.”

The eyes widened. “What right have you—”

Hirel held that burning stare and made it fall. “There is,”
he said levelly, “a debt or two. And the issue of . . .
comradeship.”

“Great value that you lay on it,” said the cool bitter
voice.

“What would you have done in my place?”

Sarevan pondered that, which was a victory in itself. At
last he sighed. “I would have found a way to avoid giving my word.”

“You demanded my word. You did not stipulate that it embody
my honor.”

Sarevan stared. Suddenly he laughed, hardly more than a
cough. “Asanian oathtaking! Cubling, when I told Baron Ebraz that you were
incorrigible, I never knew how right I was. Will you swear again, now that
we’re so close to Endros? This time,” he added, “with honor in it.”

Hirel’s silence was long enough to trouble even Sarevan’s
complacency. But his pride had had enough of trying to force nature’s relief
while a painted barbarian looked on and smirked. He held out his hands and
said, “I give you my true word of honor, as high prince to high prince, that I
will not attempt to escape until I stand before your father in Endros Avaryan.”

“And I give you mine,” said Sarevan, “that we will accord you
all honor, and return you to Kundri’j Asan as soon as we may.” He raised a
spider-thin hand. “Cut the cords, Zha’dan.”

He did it quickly, with a swift smile. Hirel leaped up and
stretched wide, exultant.

Sarevan’s grin was a white flash in the firelight. Hirel
answered it before he could help himself. “Now,” he said, dropping down again,
“what is this I hear of your dainty stomach? Here, eat. I command you.”

Rather to his surprise, and much to everyone else’s, Sarevan
obeyed. But of course; it took a prince to compel a prince.

o0o

When the Zhil’ari in council reckoned that they were two
days’ ride from Endros, Hirel left his mare to run with the rest and swung onto
Sarevan’s crupper.

Sarevan cursed him in a hiss, but he took no notice. The
body that so brief a time past had seemed so heavy was as light as a bundle of
sticks.

Hirel was in the saddle behind it, unbinding the lashings,
before anyone could move, Zha’dan came when he called, and took the Varyani
prince in his arms.

Thereafter the Zhil’ari took turn and turn. “Consider it my
revenge,” he said to the smoldering eyes. By then he was back on his mare
again: she did not take kindly to infidelity.

o0o

That night there was a battle. The Zhil’ari would have
them lodge in a town called Elei; they were curious, and they had discovered a
great liking for southland wine. But Sarevan would not have it.

“The temple will know,” he said in the whisper that was all
the voice he had. “They will come for me. They will drug me to keep me quiet.
They will try to heal me themselves before they send me to my father.” He
struggled feebly in Gazhin’s arms. “Let me up, damn you. Let me ride. I can
come to Endros sooner by myself.”

“But—” Gazhin began.

“No.” They all stared at Hirel, except Sarevan, whose effort
had robbed him of his last strength. “Better that he rest tonight and ride
another day, and gain the tending he needs.”

o0o

It was not so simple, and at times it was acrimonious, but
in the end they rode through Elei without stopping. Beyond the town the land
rose in a long ridge like a breaking wave. Trees clothed the ridge and crowded
into its hollows, yet high up, almost to the summit, they found a haven: a
green meadow, golden with the last long rays of Avaryan, starred with flowers.
From a rock near its eastern edge bubbled a spring.

It was early yet. Ulan had come as he always did, bringing a
gift for the pot; he dropped it by the half-dug firepit and sought his lord.

Sarevan, lost in a dim dream, knew nothing and no one. The
cat nosed him from head to foot, growling on the edge of hearing. Sarevan
stirred, but at random, unconscious.

“Tomorrow, Ulan,” said Hirel through the tightness in his
throat. He was not certain, but he thought that he had found a long tongue of
greater heat on arm and side beyond the bandage, and the flesh was taut,
swollen, unpleasant to the touch. “Tomorrow the Sunborn will work a miracle.”
He turned away too quickly, striding he cared not where.

The clamor of the camp faded behind him. The way was steep
and stony, but trees clung there, gripping the rock with clawed fingers.

He welcomed the pain, the breath beaten out of him, the
earth that, though strong, yielded before him. He was dwarfed here, but only as
all men were made small by the immensity of the world.

A shadow sprang past him. He cried aloud in the anger of
despair. But Ulan had not come to herd him back to his captivity. The cat
climbed ahead of him, sometimes outstripping him, sometimes circling back,
bearing him company.

Yes, they were in the same straits, they two. Did Ulan’s
anger match his own, that he could care so much, and come so close to grief,
for a redheaded madman?