A Fall of Princes (18 page)

The Sunborn laughed. “Honeyed wine it shall be, and fine
company, and for yet a while, honest friendship. Whatever may come after.”

Sarevadin Halenan Kurelian Miranion iVaryan

Sarevan had never reckoned himself a seer. That burden was
his mother’s, and in lesser measure his father’s. They could raise the power at
will and at need, and sometimes it would yield to their mastery.

He had no such gift. He had one dream only; but that dream
was true. It shifted and changed, but its import was always the same.

It began in peace. A green country, sunlit, quiet. Yet
slowly he saw the lie beneath the serenity. The green withered. The earth
shriveled, and the sun slew it, beautiful, benevolent, relentless. No cloud
dared veil its face.

See, it sang, how fair am I, how splendid, how merciful. No
night shall come to torment my people. No cold shall wither my lands. It sang;
and endless day destroyed them, and heat unceasing seared them to the root.

It haunted him, that dream. From the time he first became a
man, it had beset him. It had come perilously close to driving him mad.

Time and teaching had given him, if not mastery, at least
endurance. It had not blunted the edge of the vision.

What was veiled came ever clearer. What began as simple
nightmare swelled into the full fire of prophecy.

The sun took on his father’s face. The land became his own
Keruvarion. He saw its cities ravaged, its people slain, its dominion given
over to the carrion crow. And his father sat above it and smiled, and stretched
out his hand.

Westward the sun sank; westward was peace, however flawed,
and a man in a golden mask, aging and mortal and indomitable.

It was madness, that twisting of the world’s truth. It was
maddening. To look for peace to raddled harlot Asanion with its thousand lying
gods; to find destruction in the hands of the Sunborn.

Even on death’s marches Sarevan had seen it. Had broken and
bolted from it, and fled, and found his father’s face; and recoiled in mindless
horror.

It was not Mirain who had won the battle for his life, nor
Vadin whose name and love he bore, nor even Elian who was soul of both their
souls. Han-Gilen’s Red Prince had brought him back, and taught him anew to bear
the pain of his foreseeing.

And before Prince Orsan, another. A face beyond memory; a
voice he could not name, though he struggled, waging war against forgetfulness.
That will without name or face had turned him to the light, and sent him forth
into Mirain’s hands.

He did not remember all of it. He had fought. He had lashed
his father with hatred. He had called him liar and murderer and worse. He had
wielded the full force of his seeing; and he had fallen. Mirain was stronger.

“It will not be so,” the Sunborn said with the force of a
vow. “I will not let it be so. I bring peace and plenty, and the victory of
light over the ancient darkness.”

And Asanion?

“Asanion will see the truth I bear. She is not blind but
blinded. I will give her the clarity of my vision.”

It was truth, that promise. Sarevan yearned toward it; and
yearning, yielded, and plunged at last into healing sleep.

And dreamed. No horror, now; but this was kin to the black
dream, and to memory. Nothing so clear as prophecy had led him to a fernbrake
on the marches of Karmanlios, and shown him a wounded child: a child who by fate
and birth and necessity must be his greatest enemy.

And yet, foremost, a child, and sorely hurt. Hirel would
never know truly how close he had been to dissolution, or how bitter had been
the battle to heal his body and his mind. There was no magery in him, but there
was something, a will or a power for which Sarevan had no name, and it was
strong in its resistance.

It had found its way into Sarevan’s own healing, and somehow
made it stronger. It was like Hirel its master. Fierce, heedless, haughty, but gentle
in spite of itself. It neither knew nor cared where it dealt wounds, but it was
swift enough to heal them, if only for its own peace.

It shaped for Sarevan a vision, a young man’s face. Hirel’s,
perhaps, shorn of its youth and softness. It was a stronger face than Sarevan
might have expected, and more truly royal, with its pride pared clean.

Sarevan could not like it, nor truly trust it. But love—yes,
that would not be difficult. Neither did he like or truly trust his father.
Mirain was above such simplicity.

The golden eyes opened; the vision raised its chin. Oh,
indeed, it was Hirel. No one else had quite that spark of temper.

“I am the key,” he said. His voice was deep, and yet
indisputably Hirel’s. “For war or for peace, I am the key. Remember.”

“You’ll never lose your arrogance, will you?” Sarevan
observed.

The dream-image frowned at his levity. “I am no man’s pawn.
Yet I am the crux. Remember.”

Remember. Remember.

“Remember!”

o0o

Sarevan started awake. His mind roiled. He clutched
desperately at clarity. At memory.

Not Hirel’s face. Not dreams, not prophecy that must be
false or mad. Clear daylight. His own bed, his own high chamber, his own
half-mended body. His power—

Nothing. Silence. Utter absence, edged with agony. In dream
at least, however terrible, he was whole.

He dragged himself up. Morning flamed in the eastward
window. By sheer will he won his way to it.

The city spread below, his father’s city, his own. Above its
roofs, beyond the broad flood of Suvien, loomed the rock from which the city
took its name: Endros Avaryan, Throne of the Sun, and on it the tower that the
Sunborn had raised in a night with song and with power, his own and his
empress’ and his oathbrother’s.

They had faced together all the million stars, and cried to
Avaryan beyond them, and made a mighty shaping of magic. All night the rock was
veiled in a mist of light, and when at last the sun rose, it rose upon a
wonder. The lofty hill had grown more lofty still, and its upper reach was
polished like black glass, edged and chiseled into a tower of four horns, with
a fifth rising high from their center, and on this tallest spire a crystal that
flamed like a sun.

No window broke those sheer walls, no gate divided them. The
tower might have been a deception, an image sculpted in the stone of the hill.

It was no simple image, nor stronghold, nor monument to
imperial pride. It was a temple of its own strange kind, raised to bear witness
to the power of the god. While it stood, the tales said, the city of the
Sunborn would never fall. A potent comfort while the son of the Sunborn lay yet
in his mother’s womb.

Sarevan stood by his window, leaning against it, staring at
the black tower. Even so early, with Avaryan barely risen, the crystal blazed
bright enough to blind a man.

Sarevan fixed his eyes full upon it. That much at least he
had still, the power to bear the sun’s light without flinching. Once he could
have drunk it like wine, and fed on it, and gained life and strength enough to
sustain his body for a servant-startling while.

It was only light now, bright but endurable. As the earth
was only earth, lovely but muted, oddly lifeless; as the air was only simple,
mortal, summer-scented air. As living creatures were only bodies, and men no
more than their outward seeming: hands and voices; eyes that mirrored nothing
but his own face.

Ulan leaned against him, purring. Sarevan looked down.
Shadow-grey cat-shape, slitted green eyes. A mute beast that, sensing its
master’s trouble, strove to comfort him with its body.

He watched his fingers weave their way into the thick fur.
They were very thin. “Tomorrow,” he said, “I call for my sword.” His voice,
like his eyes, had changed little. It was still—almost—his own.

He straightened. He was not strong, not yet, but he could
stand and he could walk, and the rest was coming swiftly enough to make a
simple man marvel. He began to walk.

“My lord called?”

Sarevan, caught between window and door, nearly fell. He
braced his feet and stilled his face. He did not know this nervous young
creature in his own white livery. A new one, fresh from some desert chieftain’s
brood from the look of him.

Sarevan did not know that he had done it until it was done:
the flick of his mind just so, the gathering of name and lineage, the skimming
of thoughts unwarded by power. He had done it from instinct since before he
could remember, as a simple man might judge another in a quick sharp glance. He
kept doing it, from instinct; he could not school himself to forbear. When
nothing came, and then the lancing agony, he almost welcomed them.

One thing he was learning. He did not fall into darkness,
though the boy cried out in dismay. “My lord! Are you ill? Shall I fetch—”

“No.” Sarevan drew himself up again. The pain was passing.
He put on a smile and said lightly, “I must be going to live. I’m down to a
single nursemaid. What are they punishing you for?”

The boy’s tawny cheeks flushed beneath the patterning of
scars, but his narrow black eyes had begun to dance. “My lord, it is a high
honor to serve you.”

“Two hundred steps high.”

Sarevan completed the journey he had begun. The squire moved
aside, a little quickly perhaps.

Sarevan looked out on the landing and down the long spiral.
He knew what had possessed him to live in a tower. High air and young muscles
and power that could give him wings if he had need.

He had flown straight up more than once, and not always from
the inside. One of the gardeners still went about with one eye cocked upward
lest he lose his hat to a swooping wizardling.

Sarevan eyed the ul-cat and the sturdy young squire, and
counted the steps again. Two hundred and two.

He drew a breath. With a word and a gesture he had them
moving, the cat going before, the boy beside him. He walked every step of the
two hundred and two, and he did not lean once on his companion.

At the bottom he had to stop. His knees struggled to give
way beneath him. His lungs labored; his eyes blurred and darkened. Sternly he
called them all to order.

The boy faced him directly, a head shorter than he,
breathing with perfect ease. The black brows were knit. “You look unwell, my
lord. Shall I carry you back up?”

“What is your name?”

The boy blinked as much at the tone as at the question, but
he answered calmly enough. “Shatri, my lord. Shatri Tishri’s-son.

“I know your name, my lord,” he added, like an idiot, but
his eyes had filled with mischief.

Sarevan studied the bright eyes until they went wide and
veered away. Shatri was blushing again. When Sarevan touched him, he started
and trembled like an unbroken colt. “Hush now, lad, I won’t eat you. Which name
of mine do you know?”

“Why, lord, all of them. We are required to know. But we
must call you
my lord
and
my prince
.”

“Why?”

“Because, my lord. You are.”

“Ah, simplicity.” But Shari was not simple at all. He would
walk as Sarevan bade him, and he would offer his shoulder for Sarevan’s hand,
but whenever Sarevan spoke to him, he suffered a fit of shaking.

It was often like that with the new ones. It had little to
do with the terrors of serving mages, and much to do with the terrors of serving
kings.

o0o

They stopped in the stableyard beside the largest of the
stone troughs. Sarevan sat on its edge.

For a long while he simply sat, and his sitting was a prayer
of thanksgiving that he need not force himself forward another step. His sight
swelled and dimmed, swelled and dimmed. His body would not stop trembling.

Yet he smiled at Shatri, and somewhere he found the voice to
say, “My senel. Do you know him? The oddity, the blue-eyed stallion. Bring him
to me.”

The boy hesitated. Perhaps at last he was considering other
orders than Sarevan’s. But he bowed and went away.

Ulan stayed. Sarevan sat on the damp grass that rimmed the
trough, half lying on the warm solidity of the cat’s flank. Ulan began again to
purr.

People came. They remonstrated. Sarevan smiled and was
immovable. Then someone shouted, and darkness burst from a stable door.

Bregalan was no simple lackwit of a senel. He was of the Mad
One’s line: he had the mind of a man, a brother, a kinsman born to the shape
and the wisdom of a beast. He did not suffer fools, or ropes, or doors that
dared to shut him off from his two-legged brother; though for once he had
suffered someone to saddle him, for Sarevan’s sake.

He was black, like his grandsire. He was beautiful, which he
knew very well. He was, as Sarevan had said, an oddity. His eyes were not
seneldi brown or silver or green, nor even the rarer ruby of the Mad One and
his get.

When he was at peace, they were as blue as the sky in
autumn. When he was in a rage, they were the precise and searing blue that
lives in the heart of a flame.

They found Sarevan. They rolled. Bregalan scattered the
presumptuous few who stood in his way; one, slow to retreat, he very nearly
gored.

Having cleared the stableyard, he approached Sarevan with
perfect dignity marred only by a snort at Ulan. The cat responded with a lazy
growl. Bregalan disdained to hear it, lowering his head to examine Sarevan with
great care.

Sarevan reached up, wound his fingers in the senel’s mane.
Bregalan sank to his knees. He had never done it before. Sarevan fought the
easy tears, mustered the rags of his strength, dragged himself onto the
familiar back. “Up,” he whispered into the ear that cocked for him.

It was easier by far than walking. Bregalan had soft paces:
they were bred into him. He softened them to silk, and he wrought a miracle. He
reined in his wild temper, although he could not forbear from dancing gently as
Sarevan woke to something very like joy. He could still converse with his
brother, a wordless, ceaseless colloquy, body speaking to body with nothing
between. He was no cripple here, no invalid, no precious prize wrested from
death. He was a man, and whole, and riding free.