Arrows of the Sun (41 page)

“You said you’d never have more than one. It’s a longer step
from one to three than from three to a thousand.”

“Not likely,” said Estarion. “I can be as Asanian as this,
with you to show me the way. Even nine of you—that’s within the realm of
possibility. But no more.”

“I would like it, of course,” said Ziana, “if there were
never more than nine. I’d see more of you then.”

He kissed the smooth parting of her hair. “I should hate to
see less of you than I do.”

She mercifully did not point out that he had not visited her
in a hand of days. First there had been obligations. Then evening Court. Then Korusan.

He sat up abruptly, startling them both. “I have to go,” he
said.

Neither protested. That piqued him a little. Surely if they
loved him they would beg him to stay.

Ziana brought him his coat, Haliya his trousers. They did
not play with him, not much. Not enough to tempt him to linger.

But as Ziana fastened the last jeweled button, as Haliya set
his foot in her lap for the boot, they both paused. Golden eyes and amber met,
parted, fixed on him.

“Take us with you,” said Haliya.

He did not think that he looked angry. He even laughed.

Ziana flinched. Haliya went stiff, and her hands on his foot
tightened to the edge of pain.

“You know I can’t,” he said. He took care to be gentle. “You
gave your word,” said Haliya.

“I promised that I would take you to Keruvarion. I’m not
going there. I’m going south, and then maybe west, wherever need takes me.”

“You will go to Keruvarion,” Ziana said. “Once you’re away
from Kundri’j, nothing will stop you.”

“Nothing but duty and necessity,” said Estarion, “and a
matter of rebellion in the provinces.”

“I can ride,” said Haliya, “and shoot. I won’t encumber you.
Your mother is going. She has women with her. Would one more be so great a
burden?”

Ziana, who could neither ride nor shoot, was silent.
Estarion spoke to her. “I promise you. When at last I go to Keruvarion, I’ll
take you, or send for you.”

Her head bent. She did not weep. Tears were not a weapon she
would use, if others served as well.

He caught her hands that smoothed his coat, smoothed and
stroked it. “You can’t ride to war, my love. We’ll all be on seneldi; the
wagons will be only for baggage, and those we’ll leave behind if we must.”

“I ride,” Haliya said at his feet. “I can fight. Take me
with you.”

Oh, he had trapped himself neatly, with Ziana to melt his
heart and Haliya to bend his will. Ziana at least had sense to see the truth.
“If you promise,” she said, too low almost to hear. “If you send for me when
you come to Keruvarion.”

“On the Sun in my hand,” he said, raising it to her cheek.
She bore the touch of it, though her eyes went wide with terror.

Maybe she feared that it would brand her. He kissed the
cheek where it had rested, flushed over pallor, unmarked and unscarred.

Haliya was not so easily put off. “Take me,” she said.

“Why?” he demanded with deliberate brutality. “What can you
do that a dozen others can’t? I don’t need you for my bed. I don’t need you in
my army.”

He had struck, and struck deep, but she had her fair share
of steel. Most of it was in her spine, and some in her voice. “Maybe you need me
to remind you of what you’re fighting for. Of what you have to come back to.”

“I can’t be trusted to remember it?”

“No.”

His teeth clicked together. He could flatten her with a
blow. Or he could laugh and pull her up, and keep his hands on her shoulders,
and say to her, “You are impossible. And so is your whim. What will it do to
your honor if I take you with me to war?”

“My honor is your honor,” she said steadily. “I want to go,
my lord. I won’t make trouble for you.”

“Your coming with me isn’t trouble?” He lowered his brows.
“If you come with me, it won’t be as my bedmate. You’ll ride in my mother’s
company, and you’ll answer to her, and wait on her if she asks. If she bids you
ride without a veil, you obey her. Do you understand?”

“Perfectly.” She met his capitulation with admirable
restraint. Her breath came quickly, but that might only have been discomfort.

He unclamped his fingers from her shoulders. She kept her
eyes level with his: one of her more interesting arts. “Is that the price, my
lord? Not to see you at all?”

“You’ll see me,” he said. “I’m leading the march. But you
ride with my mother.”

She bent her head, but not her eyes. “And if you ask for me
and she refuses, I am to obey her?”

“I could still leave you behind,” he pointed out.

That quelled her, for the moment. She would whoop, maybe,
when he was gone, and dance round the room. Or maybe not. There was Ziana
still, watching and listening and saying nothing.

Haliya was the bolder, no question of it. Ziana, he
suspected, was the braver. She accepted what she could not change. She had his
promise, which he would keep. Her hand rose to her cheek, where he had sealed
the vow.

That, when he left Kundri’j Asan, was what he would choose
to remember: Ziana straight and still in the harem’s heart, holding his heart
in her hand.

It should have felt less like flight; and Estarion should
have felt less like an earthbear dragged out of its burrow. He was persuaded to
sleep, if briefly. As he woke to a raw cold dawn, a palace in tumult, and for
all he knew, armies gathering to cut him down, he reflected that maybe he had
moved too soon.

It was winter, the feast of the Long Night well past and the
sky closed in with clouds and cold. Armies would go if he sent them, to put
down the rebellion. He had no need to go with them. On a bare day’s notice,
none but his own outland Guard and his Olenyai were ready: tenscore of each,
and the hundred of his mother’s guard, pitifully small for an army, barely
enough to defend him if he was beset. If he waited a hand of days, he could
have ten times that number; a full cycle of Brightmoon, and ten times that
would follow him, out of the imperial levies.

There were armies where he went, under lords who were his
vassals. And he was not going to fight if he could help it. They said that
Sarevadin alone, without her consort, could ride from end to end of the empire
with a company of guardsmen, and no one would touch her or offer her harm; and
everywhere she went, her people learned to love her.

He was arrogant and more than arrogant, to dream that he
could do the same. He was not Sarevadin but the last and least of her
descendants. And when she rode, she had left a son under guard in Kundri’j, and
a consort of impeccably Asanian lineage.

The consorts he had, eight of them, and the ninth ready, no
doubt, and waiting for him to ride. The son he would get, god and goddess
willing, when he came back.

He was not going to his death. He was going to preserve his
empire. And, he admitted, here alone in the dark, to save himself.

Asanion had lost its horror. Its people were people to him
now, lovers, even—maybe—friends. He could not rule in this palace as the old
emperors had ruled, as prisoners of their own power. But he could rule this
half of his empire.

He had gained something, then, from his sojourn in the
Golden Palace. Even his magery seemed a little less blunted by the walls about
him, his mind a fraction less blind.

He lay in something resembling content, counting his aches
and bruises. Korusan had not been there when he came out of the harem. He had
been disappointed, enough almost to snap at the Olenyas who waited to fill his
shadow, simply because it was not Korusan.

He had held his tongue. It was as well, he told himself as
he calmed. He had much to do still, and then he should rest.

But if the boy had grown angry at the time Estarion spent
with the women, if he had gone and would not come back . . .

Nonsense. Korusan had gone like a sensible man to prepare
for the march and then to sleep. Estarion would find him in the ranks of the
Olenyai, one pair of lion-eyes amid the simple human brown and amber and gold.

If his captain allowed it. If he was not commanded to remain
in the palace.

He would come. He did as he pleased, that one. And he would
please to ride with his emperor to war.

o0o

Korusan was not asleep, nor was he resting. He was facing
the Master of the Olenyai yet again, for once without the mages or their
master.

Master Asadi had done an unwonted thing when Korusan entered
his chamber, offered him food and drink to break his night’s fast. He took
them, aware of what they signified. From master to brother of the second rank
it was high honor. From Olenyai commander to emperor in exile, it was the seal
of an alliance.

Korusan was hungry, but he ate carefully, and drank
sparingly of the well-watered wine. He was aware of Asadi’s eyes on him. The
Master was eating as lightly as he, and with as much sense of ceremony.

Custom forbade that they speak of anything but trifles until
the bowls and cups were taken away, the wine replaced with a tisane of spices
and sweet herbs, hot and pungent, to warm the blood for the cold journey ahead
of them. Korusan sipped gingerly but with pleasure.

At length he set down the cup. He kept his hands wrapped around
it, for warmth, and looked into Asadi’s bared face.

“Do you approve of what the Sunlord does?” Asadi asked him.

He nearly laughed. “I disapprove of his existence. As for
this, I think that he may be wise.”

“To leave his guarded palace? To walk into the net?”

“Better to walk into a trap than wither in a cage.”

“You love him.”

Korusan kept his face expressionless. “You can judge that?”

“I can judge my Olenyas.”

Asadi sighed, gazing into his emptied cup. Korusan wondered
if he had magery after all; if he could scry in the dregs of his tisane.

Absurd. Insulting, to look on the Master of the Olenyai as a
village soothsayer. “It will come to a crux, my prince. Then you will be forced
to choose.”

“What choice is there?” Korusan demanded with a flash of
heat. “I am not a traitor. I do not forget what I am.”

“But how will you prove it, my prince?” asked Asadi. His
voice was gentle. “Our allies will force you to a conclusion. I hold them off
as best I may, but my strength is hardly infinite. They wish this Sunlord dead.
They will kill him, or break his mind, unless you move before them.”

Korusan’s stomach knotted and cramped.

He should have known it would do that. But he was master of
it, just. “All of you have plans and purposes, plottings that you labor to
bring to fruition. So too do I. Are you as a great a fool as the mages are, to
think me a brainless child, incapable of choosing my own times and places?”

“Hardly,” said Asadi, “or we would never have yielded to you
in this. And now the quarry leaves the lair. It will be more difficult for the
spells to bind him while he rides under the sky.”

“But also easier for death to take him,” Korusan said,
“where his defenses are dissipated, and any man may come at him. And he goes
straight into the rebellion that the mages have fomented.”

“So I argued,” said Asadi, “and so I was permitted to
conclude. But our allies are not well pleased.”

“Let them be displeased,” said Korusan, not without pleasure
in the thought, “if only they grant me my will. Bid them loose their spells. We
have no need of them.”

“They will call it arrogance,” said Asadi.

“And you?”

Asadi shrugged, one-sided. “I think that you may have more
power over him than they believe, but less than you might hope. He goes where
his whim moves him. Can you guide him?”

“I have no need,” said Korusan. “He goes where I wish him to
go.”

“Into the fire, aye. And then, my prince?”

“And then,” said Korusan, “we take him.”

Asadi inclined his head. He did not quite believe it,
Korusan could see. And if he was doubtful, the mages must be reckoning Korusan
a traitor to all their cause.

Korusan lifted his chin and hardened his heart. So be it.
Hate was older than love, blood stronger than the bond of flesh to flesh. He
would do as he had always meant to do. Whatever it cost him.

o0o

The escort was waiting at sunrise. The emperor must be the
last of them, for when he came, they would ride.

Estarion did not find it difficult to drag his feet. Maybe
he should wear the mail. Or the corselet. Or the full parade armor. Maybe his
hair should be plaited, or knotted for the helmet, or—and at that his servants
howled—cropped to the skull. Maybe he should go back to his bed and rise for
morning Court, and forget that he had ever dreamed of escape.

In the end he wore mail, a glimmering gold-washed coat over
supple leather, and he wore his hair in a priest’s plait, with his torque for a
gorget. He had a cloak for the people to wonder at if they ever looked up so
high, white plainsbuck leather lined with golden fur—not lion, it was too clear
a gold. Sandcat, the servant said: a lithe sharp-nosed creature the length and
breadth of an Asanian’s forearm, that lived in cities like a man.

Estarion doubted that it went to war. Only men did that.

He pretended to break his fast. He drank the honeyed wine,
picked at something that maybe had been roast plowbeast before they spiced and
stewed it and wrapped it in thin unleavened bread. When it was well
dismembered, he reached for the winejar to fill his cup again.

There was a hand on it before him, and eyes above that.
Golden eyes.

The breath left him in a long sigh, even as Korusan said,
“You grow too fond of the wine. If you will not eat, then drink this.” He
poured out warm thornfruit nectar, thinning it with water and a fistful of
berries from a bowl.