Arrows of the Sun (11 page)

“Who took off my torque?” she asked. Her throat was tight,
had been since she got up, not knowing itself unbound, no more than her womb
until it gave up its burden.

“Sidani,” Estarion answered. “She feared you’d choke.”

“Damn her,” said Vanyi. “
Damn
her.”

He reached for her. She slid away. Her hands trembled as she
lifted the torque. It was deadly heavy, and cold. It locked like jaws about her
neck.

She looked up into Estarion’s face. “She was a priestess,
you know. Sidani. Or whatever her name was then. She turned apostate.”

“She told you that?”

“Would I lie?”

He stiffened as if she had struck him. She should kiss him,
or say something to comfort him. Mind and heart were empty, void of comfort. It
had bled out of her in the long grim night.

She shouldered her saddlepacks. The world spun briefly.
Estarion spun in it, too bleak for anger. She walked away from him.

“You may go,” he said behind her, “but I am staying here.”

She stopped. She refused to turn.

“I promised the priestess that I would sing the tenth-day
rite with her. That is tomorrow. I’ll not leave till that is done.”

“And when did you promise that?”

“Does it matter?”

The doorpost swung toward her. She caught at it.

He was there, hovering. She did not want him to touch her.
“Let me,” she said, thick enough to choke on. “Let me be.”

“Vanyi—”

“Let me be!”

He retreated, too startled for hurt. That would come later.
She did not want to see it.

He had mercy. He left her alone.

o0o

“That was well done,” said Iburan.

Vanyi burrowed deeper into her nest of blankets. How long it
had been, whether it was morning or evening, she neither knew nor cared. People
had come in at intervals. Some had left food or drink. Some had tried to speak
to her. She had shut them out.

Iburan was not to be deterred by anything as simple as
blankets or a magewall. His voice followed her wherever she escaped. “Yes, you
did well, to drive away the one who could best have healed you.”

“The one who caused my pain.”

He heard her. “So. You blame him.”

She erupted from her lair. “I blame myself. I should have
known. I should have prevented—”

“You should,” he said. “Therefore you punish him for your
own failing.”

“No,” she said. She shivered, though the air was warm. “No.
I—” The rest would not come. She cried out through it. “Don’t you touch him.
Don’t you dare! He knew even less than I.”

“Why would I touch him?”

“Time was,” she said, “when you would have taken us both and
bound us to altars of iron, and turned the burning glass on us, and called down
the Sun to sear away the source of our sin.”

“Those were older days, older laws. The Sunborn came to free
us from them.”

“The Sunborn’s descendant is too free altogether.”

“You yourself said he didn’t know.”

She blinked. Her eyes were full of tears. Iburan was a blur
beyond them, a shadow and a gleam. “It shouldn’t matter. Every turning of
Brightmoon this comes to me, to every woman. Why I do want to weep and howl at
the moons?”

“Because this time it took more than the moon’s blood. It
took the child you made, you and he together.”

“No,” she said. “The moon didn’t take that. You took it,
priest of the Sun. You and the magic you wove.”

Not he, not for her. That had been a priestess in the Isles,
raising the great rite over the god’s new-made bride. But he knew what she
meant. “We had no way of knowing that this would happen. This time, when we
weave the bonds anew—”

“You will weave no bonds,” she said.

“You will bear him no child while your Journey endures.”

His voice was soft, but there was iron in it. She met it
with iron as strong. “Nor shall I ever bear him one, if you have your way. His
heir will be a yellow woman’s son.”

“Will you defy your vows?”

She sat stiff. Her body ached, but worse was the ache in her
heart. “Are you binding me?”

“You said that I should not.”

It was too much, this war of wills. Her belly cramped. To
yield to it—to crumple with a cry—that would be a clever diversion, and he
would fall to it.

She would not do it. “At this moment,” she said, struggling
to say it steadily, “when I think of him, I love him with all that I am. And
when I think of him touching me, I shudder in my soul. Something is wrong with
me, my lord. Something broke when the binding went away. Aren’t you glad?”

“Child,” he said. “Oh, child.”

His compassion did not make her want to weep. It made her
want to kill him. “Don’t pity me!”

“That, I never have.”

He seemed at last to recall that he was looming over her. He
sat in the chair beside the bed, sighing as he did it, as if with weariness.

Sleights and calculation. She hardened her heart against
them.

His beard was braided with gold this morning, evening,
whatever it was. He stroked it as he sat there, eyes turned away from her,
fixed on something only he could see. He looked nothing like Estarion, except
that he was so dark, and yet she could not get that other face out of her mind.
Callow, beak-nosed, yellow-eyed face. She loved it, she hated it. She wanted to
enfold herself in the memory of it. She wanted to efface it utterly.

“You hurt,” said Iburan, so low it was like a mountain
shifting. “You strike out at anything that approaches you. Time will heal you.
Time, and the nearness of those who love you.”

“Not his,” she said. “You’ll see to that, I’m sure. It’s best
for everyone. He has to make an Asanian marriage. I’m an intrusion, an
inconvenience. You never planned for me or wanted me, or anyone like me. You
were keeping him for his royal bride.”

“He kept himself. Sun-blood are always so. They do not—cannot—love
lightly.”

“And no wonder,” she said. Bitter laughter burst out of her.
“Seed, you men call it? Arrows, the Sun-blood have. Nothing is proof against
them.”

Iburan did not laugh with her. “What will you do, then? Take
yourself away?”

“Wouldn’t it be best?”

“It would give him great pain.”

“Brief pain. Assuaged, I’m sure, by a procession of lovely
ladies. Royal ladies. Ladies fit to be his queen.”

“Do you hold him so light?” Iburan asked her, as if he
honestly wished to know.

She looked him in the face. “Sometimes, my lord, I wonder. I
wasn’t raised to be a Sunlord’s bride. When I told my father I was going to the
temple, he beat me. Loving me, you understand, and determined to save me from
myself. I was to be a wife in Seiun town, marry one of the boys who hung about
making eyes at me, breed his babies and mend his nets and weave his sails. The
temple was for other people, priest-people, people bred to it. The witcheries
that haunted me would go away, my father said, when I had a baby at the breast.
So they’d done for my mother, and she a sea-eyed changeling too. The sea took
her, I told him. Should I let it take me? So I went away, walking straight in
spite of my bruises, and when I took the torque, he wouldn’t speak to me. What
he would say if he knew what I’d gone away to, I dread to think.”

Iburan said nothing. Eloquent, she thought. Subtle.

“You can’t understand,” she said. “You’re all lords and
princes. You don’t know what it’s like not to know for certain who your
grandfather’s father was, or where he came from. You can’t imagine the clench
of hunger in a lean winter, or the stink of fish in the summer’s heat. You’ve
never gone barefoot because you had no shoes, or worn the same filthy shirt the
year round because there was no cloth to make another. And you’ve
never—never—been spat on for a witch, not for anything you’d done, but for that
you looked like a changeling.”

“Estarion has.”

She caught her breath. “Estarion is the highest of all high
princes. He’s as far above me as the sun itself. And he doesn’t know. He
doesn’t think. He thinks he loves me.”

“He does.”

“He’s a fool,” she said. “There. I said it. I’ll go away
now. I’ll set him free.”

“If you leave now,” said Iburan, “he’ll go after you. He
does love you, child. With all his great heart.”

The tears were threatening to come back. She willed them
away. “So I’m to make him stop loving me. Is that it? Is that what you want me
to do?”

“I doubt you could.”

“Oh, it’s easy,” she said. “It’s as easy as a slap in his
face. He’s never been denied anything, never had to do anything he didn’t want
to do. Even this journey to Asanion is his choosing, though he imagines that
his mother forced him into it. He’s always known he’d have to do it. He let her
work her will on him.”

“And you? What will you do to yourself?”

“Do I matter? Do I, my lord, when you consider the empire,
and the man who is emperor of it?”

There, at last: a question Avaryan’s high priest could not
answer. She regarded him in something like pity. “You won’t bind me, my lord.
I’ll bind myself. I can read the god’s will as well as you. I can see that I’m
not meant for the emperor.”

“I can see,” he said, “that you need rest, and healing for
the soul as well as the body. The servant will bring you wine. You’ll drink it:
I’ll mix in an herb I know of. It brings nothing more deadly than sleep.”

“Maybe I have a drug of my own.”

“That is too strong in you. It makes you say things you
never mean. Lie down now, and grieve if you must. It will help you mend.”

Estarion knew when he crossed the border into Asanion. It
was more than the softening of wild country into towns and tilled fields,
forest tracks into roads, black or bronze faces into faces more truly gold and
ivory. It was a thrumming in the blood, a quiver in the senses. Recognition—he
did not want to call it that. Some part of him knew this earth, this air, this
face of the world. It was not memory of his coming there half his life ago. It
went deeper than that.

Half a day past the border, he stopped and dismounted and
laid his hands on the earth. It was not so very different from the land he had
left behind: rich black earth, fragrant with the rain that had fallen in the
morning. It trembled under his touch. It knew him.

His companions were watching him as if they feared that he
would break and run shrieking back to Keruvarion. He straightened. His right
hand burned and throbbed. The earth that clung to it could not stain the gold
in its palm.

He vaulted back into the saddle. “On,” he said, snapping it
off short.

The land knew him, welcomed him. But it lay crushed and
flattened beneath the feet of the men who lived on it. There were no wild
places. Even the woods were lords’ possessions, their trees counted and
reckoned for their worth, their beasts and birds preserved for the hunt or for
their owners’ pleasure. The rivers flowed in chains: locks and quays and
bridges. The hills were tamed things, crowned with cities.

Worse still was the silence. People lined the ways to see
him pass; came, it was evident, from many days’ journey to look on their
emperor. And when he was before them, they would not meet his eyes. They would
not look at him at all, or cheer his passing, or speak when he spoke to them,
but fell mute and bowed to the ground.

o0o

“All I see of them are their rumps,” he said. “Their
rumps, and the backs of their heads. How am I supposed to learn to know them?”

There would be no camps under the stars in the Golden
Empire. On this, his first night in the west, he lodged with the lord of a town
called Shon’ai. The man was endurable as Asanians went: old enough and secure
enough not to be unduly touchy in his pride. Nor did he seem dismayed to be
guesting the emperor himself.

“But he won’t look me in the face,” Estarion said. “What
does he think I’ll do to him if he does? Blast him with a glance?”

“It’s their courtesy,” Sidani said. What she was doing in
the rooms he had been given, he did not know. She went where she would, did as
she chose. Guards seemed to mean little to her, or princely privacy. She was
adept at ignoring both.

Estarion was glad of her presence now: it gave him someone
to storm at. Servants were no good for that. They cringed and fled. Godri was
seeing that the seneldi were properly looked after. Vanyi was nowhere that
Estarion could find, which was as well. She had been impossible since she lost
the baby, would not open her mind to him, would not let him approach her, would
accept nothing from him, no comfort, no anger, not even bleak endurance.

Sidani was the same as she always was. She sat in a chair
like a throne, feet tucked up, hands folded in her lap, and watched him snarl
and pace.

He came to a halt in front of her. He was breathing hard,
somewhat to his surprise. The air was wrong here. Suffocating, even under the
sky.

“You have a horror of closed spaces,” she said. “You’ll
loathe Kundri’j Asan.”

“What choice do I have?” he demanded.

She shrugged. “You could have been born a peasant’s brat.”

He dropped to the carpet at her feet. “No,” he said. “I
would have hated that, and wanted more. I wasn’t made to be anything less than
I am. Am I growing wise, do you think? Or simply arrogant?”

“You were born arrogant. Wisdom . . . you’ll
have it someday, if you live so long.”

“Not now?”

“Now,” she said, “you are a spoiled child. A dusty, dirty,
sweaty one, who would profit from a bath.”

She failed to make him angry, though she had made a noble
effort. He bared his teeth at her. “I know why I keep you. To keep me humble.”

“No man keeps me. I stay because I choose. To keep you
humble.”

He laughed. He did not get up at once, though a bath was a
glorious temptation. “You keep me sane too, I think. Everyone else is so
strange. Walking soft as cats, as if I’ll go wild and tear them to pieces.
Vanyi . . .” His throat tightened. “Vanyi shuns me. Because my
body betrayed her.”