Arrows of the Sun (3 page)

The lightmage met his gaze directly. “You are strong,” he
said, “but unschooled. Beware of arrogance. It will destroy you.”

Korusan’s lips stretched. It was not a smile. He spoke the
words then as the Master bade him, words that meant everything and nothing
after the touch of magic. The magic had sealed him to this rite; the magic, and
the blood that ran down his scored cheek. The words were for his brothers, his
Olenyai. To serve where he must serve, to command where he must command; to do
battle for lord and land and kin; to show his face never but to his brothers,
and to protect the secrets of his caste— His caste, he thought, half wry and
half in pain. Only while it served him, and until his vengeance was won.

To protect, then, while he lived, and to defend to the
death.

He was warrior born, warrior bred if not to the blood. Their
enemies were his enemies. He was all of their kin, as they were all of his. He
took the robes and the veil, the knife and the swords. He sealed them with his
blood.

Robed, veiled, armed, he danced. The circle opened itself
for him and to him. He danced to the drums, and their beat now was swift, but
that swiftness was joy. He drew his swords. They were steel, and they gleamed
in lamplight and firelight. He spun. He leaped. He sang.
“Ohé! Ohé Olenyai!”

Others sprang into the dance. Steel rang on steel. It was
like a battle, it was like a willing woman. He whirled in its center. He was
all of them, and all of himself. Korusan. Olenyas. Lion’s cub. Warrior born,
warrior raised, born to die young. Lord and weapon of his people. Arrow shot
from the bow: an arrow in the Sun.

Kingship. Majesty.

It was stronger than wine. Stronger than dreamsmoke. More
dizzying even than the scent of Vanyi’s hair, wonderful sea-sweet masses of it,
and she wound in it, gleaming in moonlight and starlight and the nightlamp’s
flicker.

Estarion reined himself in. That was the throne, making him
its own. The fire he carried in his right hand was shrunk to a sunlit warmth:
painlessness after pain so long and so relentless that it shaped the world
about it.

He turned his hand palm up in his lap. Without the price of
pain the
Kasar
was a beautiful thing,
beautiful and improbable and all perfectly the god’s creation.

He closed his fingers carefully over the bright burning
brand and looked up. His people waited for him. Eyes fixed on him, faces a blur
of black, brown, bronze, gold, and one beloved white-bone glimmer. She was
afraid for him. He gave her warmth and a promise.

His mother shifted all but invisibly, reminding;
admonishing. He smiled at her. Grinned, she might have said, though he did try
to damp it down. One grew accustomed to it, she had told him. But it was
splendid, this first heady draught of empire.

He raised his branded hand. The silence, that had been
absolute, shattered in one glorious wave of sound.

They paid him homage one by one, from the highest to the
lowest. They wore the bright edge from his joy, but nothing could rob him of
it.

Vanyi was not in the endless train of his people. When she
came to the throne, it would be to sit beside him in it, empress to his
emperor, mother of his heir. She was gone now about her duties: mage,
priestess, guardian of the Gates between the worlds. Those would not wait for
any man, even a man who was lord of the world.

They came without pause or diminution, to bow at his feet,
to kiss his hands, to murmur the words that made them his people, and to hear
him seal them with a word and a smile. His throat was raw. His face ached with
smiling, his neck with bending to acknowledge bows or tribute. His backside, he
decided, would do much better with a thicker cushion; and that almost betrayed
him into laughter. The stout merchant in front of him received a smile that
made him blink, dazzled, and the freewoman behind looked mildly smitten.

The one behind them, well out of proper order and walled in
retinue, neither smiled nor appeared enraptured with Majesty incarnate.
Estarion went cold.

There had been others of that ilk among the lords and princes.
One could hardly avoid them. They were half of his empire, as his advisors
never tired of reminding him. But he could not abide them. Oily yellow people
with flat snake-eyes, bowing and groveling and thinking scorn at eastern
barbarians. When he could read their thoughts at all. They thought slantwise,
round corners; they made his head ache.

The Asanian lord bowed low. He wore the five robes of a
prince, one atop the other, slender ivory feet bare as befit one who need walk
only in palaces, straw-gold hair uncut and bound behind him with plaited gold.
He bowed to the floor, prostrating himself, and his entourage went down with
him, concerted as a dance.

Their minds were a babble of nonsense. They were warded,
with magery in it. Not that the mage could be a priest of Avaryan, or Estarion
would know it; nor could it be a mage of the old and broken Guild. No: it was
but one half-hidden servant, grey man in a grey gown, with eyes as flat as
coins.

Estarion set his teeth against the pain of that protection.
Some small remnant of his power had come back since he lost it in the time he
could not remember, when he had wielded it like a weapon, and killed the mage
who killed his father; but it had come back flawed. Nothing could test his
shields without his knowing it; and that knowledge was a stabbing pain.

He meant to say the words that set the prince free to rise.
Pain locked his jaw upon them. Pain, and anger. How dare any mage, or any man,
try his defenses here, where he was emperor? It smacked of contempt, if not of
treason.

The moment stretched. The prince and his entourage lay on
their faces, unmoving. The court began to shift uneasily.

“Estarion!” his mother hissed in his ear.

He recoiled from the sound of it, and from the rebuke that
came as much from within as from without. “Get up,” he said. Snapped. In High
Court Asanian; but the inflections were all awry. He had addressed the prince
of five robes as a minor eunuch of the Middle Court.

His lordship rose with grace they all learned in childhood.
The others were less polished, or less composed. Their anger grated raw against
his aching brain.

A prince could not declare death-insult against an emperor,
but Estarion had made no friend in this one. The Asanian spoke the words of
homage in precise, icy syllables, each inflection meticulously and lethally
correct. His entourage did not echo him. That was insult less than mortal but
more than minor.

The prince bowed again to the floor. This time he rose
without Estarion’s bidding, and bent his head a careful degree. Giving the
emperor pardon. Forgiving a barbarian his ignorance.

As he began to back away down the long silent aisle,
Estarion stopped him with a word. He stood stiff and still, and he did a
terrible thing, a thing that no Asanian did to the emperor enthroned. He looked
up into Estarion’s face.

Estarion met the yellow eyes. They fit that face: old ivory,
old gold, carved smooth and sleeked with scented oil. Their stare was bold
beyond belief, as Asanians thought of it, and profoundly, wonderfully shocked.

Estarion smiled. “Am I what you expected?” he asked sweetly,
in High Asanian that had remembered itself and given the man his proper rank.

The Asanian’s gaze dropped, as did he, full on his face, all
grace and dignity forgotten, and in him only fear. He had meant defiance, that
was in every line of him, and contempt for the emperor who would not walk in
the west and yet called himself lord of Asanion. He had forgotten, or chosen to
forget, that there was Asanian blood in the barbarian, blood of the Lion, blood
imperial.

He fled, there was no other word for it. Estarion sat back
in his throne and set himself to be markedly gracious to the Islander who came
forward shakily, almost creeping in the Asanian’s wake.

o0o

Estarion stood in the middle of the robing-room and
stretchcd. No servants beset him. He had locked them out, and bought a few
moments’ quiet.

There was wine on the table. He filled a cup, drank a heady
draught.

He ached, inside and out. Some of that was hunger. But he
could not go to the feast until the servants, tyrants that they were, gave him
leave. He must make an entrance, and so must enter last.

He circled the room, skirting the chests and the clothing-presses.
His mood was odd, unsettled. The Asanian had taken the splendor out of it. The
man had been testing him; and he had not done well. He had let himself be
caught off guard. He had betrayed his weakness.

“I may be young,” he said to the air, “but I am not stupid.
Nor completely ignorant of my failings.”

“Goddess forbid that you should be.”

He whipped about. A locked door was small barrier to a mage,
and his mother was one of rare power.

Likewise the one who bulked behind her. Great tall northern
barbarian in beard and braids and baubles—strangers never suspected the
cultured delicacy of that mind, nor knew him for the great mage and scholar and
priest that he was.

They were together more often than not, priestess of the
dark and priest of the light. It was a jest in some quarters that they were
like the old Guildmages, matched in their magic, darkmage and light. They had
shared Estarion’s regency, and shared his raising once his father was dead;
they were not always of a mind, but they never failed to come to an
accommodation, one way and another.

The Lady Merian settled herself in the room’s one chair. She
never looked less than queenly, but her eyes were tired.

Estarion set a cup in her hand. She wrapped long fingers
about it, gratefully maybe, but she did not drink the wine that was in it.

Avaryan’s high priest in Endros betrayed no such hesitation.
He drained his cup and set it down, and sighed.

Estarion looked at them both. Anger pricked. He was emperor,
and these two not only invaded his solitude, they reduced him to a child.

“I cry your pardon,” his mother said, reading him with
maddening ease. “There is too much to say, and too little time to say it.”

“Is it nothing that can wait until the morning?” Estarion
demanded.

“I think not,” said Lord Iburan. He was unwontedly quiet,
almost grim, though his eyes on Estarion were gentle enough.

Not angry, then. When Iburan was angry, mountains trembled.

Iburan laughed. “Do they? Come now, youngling, tuck in your
thoughts. They’re flapping like flags at a feast-day.”

“Maybe I want them to.” But Estarion shored up all his walls
and slammed shut the gates and locked himself in the keep. Iburan winced.
Estarion was briefly, nastily glad.

“Estarion,” his mother said. Her tone was a warning.

He bit his tongue, then said it in spite of her. “Was it all
a sham, then? Shall I be your puppet still, and you the empress regnant?”

Her eyes narrowed: the only sign she gave that he had struck
the mark. “You will learn to rule yourself. Or so one may hope. You are young
yet, and I have raised you ill, maybe; protected you too well, and shielded you
from good as from harm.”

“What, the good that’s in Asanion?” Estarion met her stare.
“It comes to that, doesn’t it? I’m emperor of Asanion, too.”

“So,” she said. “You do remember it.”

“I never forget.”

“You never fail to regret it, either.” She set down the
untouched cup and pressed fingers to her brows. “Ah, child, I did ill and worse
than ill to keep you here in Keruvarion. You should have gone long since to
Asanion, and conquered your fear of it.”

Estarion reared up. “I’m not afraid of the west!”

“No,” she said too gently. “Only of the people in it, and
the memories it may hold.”

Estarion opened his mouth. No words came out. He shut it
with great care.

“You cannot continue to shun Asanion,” his mother said, “or
to offend its lords and princes. We have spoken for you through the years of
your youth. That now is over. You must speak in your own name, for your own
honor.”

“You must rule all of your empire,” said Iburan, “not only
the east or the north. The west should know you, and know you fair. And not as
one who loathes all that it is.”

“I do loathe it,” said Estarion, breaking in on their antiphon.
“I’ve seen it. I know it. I despise it.”

“You remember nothing of it.” Merian’s voice was as calm as
her eyes. “One fool passed all our guards and protections and destroyed your father.
It could have been a northerner, or a man of the Hundred Realms. It could have
been anyone at all.”

Estarion’s heart set hard and cold. “You never loved him,
did you? He gave you a throne and an empire. He, himself, man and lover, was
nothing to you.”

Her hand was so swift, the blow so sharp, that he never saw
it, or even felt it, till it was done. His own hand flew up. But he could not
strike her, no matter the heat of his temper. So well at least she had reared
him.

“Never,” she said, soft and still. “Never say such a thing
again.”

Iburan’s voice was deep and almost harsh, but there was
calmness in it, and peace. “There now. Be still. You’re on the raw edge, both
of you.”

“So we are,” said Merian. Her voice for once had forsaken
its sweetness, and its grace that set an empire in awe of her. “So we must
continue to be. That one who faced you, Starion, came out of Asanion to defy us
all, and not you alone. Keruvarion is yours by right and by choice. Asanion is
a conquered kingdom. Thus it reckons itself. It chafes at the rule of
barbarians and mongrels. My dear lord did ill when he took me to wife and
refused the woman his council had chosen for him.”

“An Asanian woman.” Estarion shivered through the dregs of
his temper. “Then I would never have been; or been far other than I am.”