Dragon Prince 03 - Sunrunner's Fire (50 page)

“Sioned, I can’t let Riyan and Ruala fight that battle for me. I delayed too long in killing Masul nine years ago. I won’t let—”

“There’s more,” she interrupted. “And worse.”

He laughed harshly. “Of course there is. There
always
is.”

Sioned hesitated, not looking at him. “I went in to see Meiglan. Edrel met me outside her rooms and asked if she was all right after last night. I thought he meant when Marron’s false shape vanished.” She wrapped her arms around herself, trembling. “I told him it seemed she’d been helped to sleep shortly after it happened and had been sleeping ever since. And he—he said that wasn’t possible because he found a lace veil belonging to her in Pol’s room this morning. But she
couldn’t
have been the one who left it there.”

“Rohan’s throat closed as if a fist gripped it.

“Can you possibly imagine that pitiful child sneaking into a man’s chamber, even on direct threat from her father? Besides, she was taken away in hysterics last night and I can’t see her making a quick recovery.”

“You . . . have evidence,” he managed around the terrible constriction of fear.

She nodded. “I know some medicine. Tobin knows more, and Feylin more than both of us combined. Her mother was a physician. I had them confirm what I suspected. The amount of drug in Meiglan’s wine produces identifiable levels of unconsciousness as it works. When I left her, she was in the last stages. The drug
must
have been given only a little while after her so-called maidservant got her out of the Great Hall. Pol didn’t leave us until much later than that.”

“It won’t work, Sioned.” He heard the desperation in his voice and tried to control it. “You can’t be sure whether or not the amount of drug was changed, added to since—”

“Both Tobin and Feylin confirmed it!”

“All three of you could be wrong!”

“But you know we’re not.” She wilted into a chair. “You know it as well as I do, Rohan.”

“Gentle Goddess,” he whispered with no voice at all.

“Ianthe couldn’t change her shape, so she changed your perceptions with
dranath,
” Sioned told him in lifeless tones. “This woman Mireva—what she must have done—would Pol have sensed sorcery? Even if he didn’t, once he finds out about Meiglan, he’ll put it together. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to protect him.”

“We can’t. Not anymore.” He knew it now for certain, and there was a strange relief in the knowing. “He must be told who he is.”

She sprang to her feet, terrified. “No! Please, Rohan—please!”

“It’s time. It must be tonight.”

“No!”

“Would you see him die because he can’t use power he doesn’t know he has?” he lashed out.

Green eyes blazed in a face the color of chalk. “We could tell him he gets the
diarmadhi
blood from one of us, we could—”

“Lie to him? Again? When do the lies stop, Sioned? Who are you protecting now—Pol or yourself?”

“And what happens when he finds out the man who wants his death is his own brother?”

“He’ll just have to accept that, won’t he!” Rohan turned for the door, but her next words stopped him in mid-stride.

“The way you accepted him when you returned to Stronghold that winter? You could barely look at either of us! I’d brought you a son you didn’t want, and Pol was living reminder that you weren’t perfect! Shall we tell him that, too?”

He heard his voice become the chill, brittle one he used when forced to address someone he loathed. “He will be told who is he tonight. You may attend or not, as you choose. But he
will
be told.”

B
y sunset Stronghold had been turned inside out. The guards and Sunrunners scoured the area around the keep while light lasted, reporting nothing out of the ordinary. Rohan expected as much. Ruval and Mireva would assume there’d be a search of this kind, so he had to provide it. He hoped the show would satisfy them so that his next gambit would come unanticipated.

But before he began it, there was Pol.

They met in the library again at Rohan’s request. Pol had just arrived when Sioned entered and sat down on her side of the double desk. Rohan would have bet half his princedom that she wouldn’t come, especially after their clash today—that she would flee this thing she had dreaded for so long. But she met his eyes squarely, unflinching.

Pol had pulled up a chair near Sioned’s desk, curious at his parents’ tense silence. “What is it you wanted to talk about?”

Rohan locked the door and leaned back against it. He had struggled with the words a thousand times, trying to imagine this moment, to find the right way to say it that would spare Pol and Sioned any pain. But the words escaped him, and there must be pain.

Sioned folded her hands atop her desk, her shining head bent, the graceful lines of her throat and shoulders highlighted by candle-glow. Rohan had lit the candlebranch earlier, knowing that if she had done it by Sunrunner means, the flames would leap and flare with her emotions. Refracted light from the emerald ring on her left hand trembled slightly, the only sign of her terror.

Aware that he was delaying the inevitable, he glanced around the room. Tapestry map, books, parchments piled on the desks, boxes containing the seals of their princedom—perhaps he should have chosen another place. This was, after all, a political room. But it was too late to move to a private chamber, one in which they could be people and not princes.

Drawing in a deep breath, he began. “Pol . . . you are everything we ever wanted in a son.” The young man’s head tilted to one side in a gesture of puzzlement. “You know your own strengths. You’ve explored your abilities as a prince and learned how to use your
faradhi
gifts with confidence and wisdom. You
are
a Sunrunner.”

“That’s made painfully obvious every time I cross water,” Pol said, smiling a little. “What are you trying to say, Father? That my Sunrunner skills can defeat Ruval’s sorceries? If so, keep talking—because I’m dreading it, even knowing what’s in the Star Scroll.”

Sioned murmured, “You have no cause to fear, Pol. You
are
everything we ever dreamed you would become.” She hesitated, glancing once more at Rohan. “And you are everything you always were, no matter what you might hear about—about who you are.”

Blue-green eyes widened. “Mother! Don’t tell me you’re worried about that old rumor?”

“What rumor?” Rohan asked, sharp-voiced.

“I heard it first while I was at Graypearl. The gist of it is that I’m not really your son—that Mother couldn’t have a child with you. Some say my real father is someone here at Stronghold, and others say a Sunrunner was brought here in secret. It was merely insulting until they got to the part about Mother only marrying you because Lady Andrade told her to, and that she never loved you at all.
That
made it ludicrous! I always laughed it off—and so should you,” he added with gentle chiding to Sioned.

“I never heard that one,” Rohan mused.

“There are others. All of them just as ridiculous. Mother, don’t concern yourself with—”

“Pol, please!” She shied to her feet like a nervous cat and paced to the other side of the desk. “Just listen. Don’t make this any harder.”

Obviously bewildered now, Pol looked to his father for an explaination. Rohan said softly, “There’s no easy way to tell it. Pol, do you believe that possession of
diarmadhi
power is inherently evil?”

“I’ve already been through this with Riyan. If I ever did believe that, which I don’t, he’s ample evidence otherwise.” He shifted impatiently, flinging a look at Sioned. “Will you please just tell me whatever it is you feel you have to tell me?”

Her shoulders straightened as though she was bracing herself. She stood behind Rohan’s desk chair, gripping its carved wooden back. She drew a slow breath—but Rohan spoke first.

“You are a Sunrunner, Pol,” he said. “But you are also
diarmadhi.
You are my son, but not hers. Your mother was Princess Ianthe, youngest daughter of High Prince Roelstra and his only wife, Lallante.”

Shock froze the young face. His eyes went blank, his skin colorless. Rohan watched confusion, denial, suspicion, a hundred emotions play across his son’s features. At last Pol’s lips moved in a deathly whisper. “Why would you tell me such a lie?”

Rohan could hardly breathe. Sioned clung to the chair so hard her hands were bloodless.

“How?” Pol’s voice was harsh, hollow.

Sioned answered. “I lost every child I ever carried. All failings of a princess are forgivable but one: failure to bear a son. But I—I saw myself in a vision of Fire and Water. I was holding a newborn. You. So much your father’s son that there could be no doubt you were his. Yet I knew I would never conceive again.” She stood very still, staring down at her hands. “You know that Ianthe held your father captive at Feruche. I was there, too. When she was certain she was pregnant, she let us go.”

“I do not excuse myself, Pol,” Rohan said quietly. “I—”

“The first time,” Sioned went on as if he had not spoken, “she went to him while he was drugged with
dranath
and fevered from a wound. She . . . pretended to be me. She wished an heir to Princemarch and the Desert both, her vengeance on him for Choosing me instead of her.”

“The second time, I raped her.” Rohan heard the revulsion he’d sworn he would never reveal, and cursed himself. “I prefer to believe you were the result of that first—” He stopped, swallowed hard. “When—afterward—I joined our armies already in the field. Sioned stayed at Stronghold and emptied it of all but a few servants. Tobin and Ostvel were here as well.”

Pol flinched. “Then . . . they’ve always known. Who else?”

“Chay. Myrdal. Maeta.” She pronounced the names slowly, reluctantly.

“And the servants?”

“All dead now, but for Tibalia.” Her eyes, liquid with anguish, beseeched him. “People who love you, Pol. Who—”

“—don’t hold it against me?” For the first time there was an edge to his voice, a strange spark in his blue-green eyes.

Rohan said softly, “She kept watch. She waited just as if she was the one carrying you in her body. You were
hers,
Pol. Do you understand? She’d seen you in her arms.
Our
child.”

“I watched Ianthe grow big with the son she had stolen from me. From him. Her time came early. Ostvel and Tobin and I rode to Feruche.” She looked up then, memory swirling in her darkened eyes. “I took you from her in secret, reclaimed what was mine. I brought Feruche down around itself with Fire. Everyone thought that the child she bore died with her. But he did not.
You
are that child, Pol. We went to Skybowl. Few saw us there—the workers had all become warriors in defense of the Desert. Skybowl was nearly as empty as Stronghold. For those who did see, there was . . . an explanation.”

“A lie,” Pol said in a toneless voice.

“Yes,” she agreed steadily. “That I had expected the birth of my own son to occur in midwinter. That I had started for Skybowl on whim, Tobin and Ostvel in attendance. I . . . was not myself that summer and autumn. I don’t remember much about that time— not from the night Ianthe took me, put me into a cell without light . . . I think perhaps I went a little mad.” Her hands twisted around themselves. “My actions were understood to be part of this. It was plausible. Women with child have strange fancies sometimes.” A deep breath to calm herself, and she went on, “We told them at Skybowl that you were born along the way. That night I Named you with Ostvel and Tobin witnessing. And also that night—”

“I killed Roelstra,” Rohan said curtly. “You’ve heard how it happened. A dome of starfire constructed all the way from Skybowl, catching into it every
faradhi
-gifted mind there and at the battleground—including you. Roelstra knew you had been born. He didn’t know his daughter was dead.”

“Wh-who killed her?”

Rohan met Sioned’s haunted eyes.

“Oh, Goddess,” Pol breathed. “
Mother
—”

“No!” Rohan exclaimed.

“I didn’t kill her.” Sioned looked at Pol and her eyes were hard. “But I wanted nothing more in the world. She imprisoned us, tortured your father, shut me away from the sunlight—and she would have raised you to be as foul as she was. I couldn’t let that happen, Pol. She had the bearing of you, but you were never her son.” Her voice held a note of pleading now. But Rohan recognized that even in her anguish she had managed to avoid revealing another truth: that Ostvel was the one who had killed Ianthe. They could never tell Pol that.

“Then . . . then Ruval is my half-brother,” Pol said slowly, as if awakening from a long sleep to find that even words were strangers. “And my life is a lie.”

“Pol!” Rohan went to him, grasped his shoulders. “You are no different now than you were before you knew! What’s changed? You were born of princes, you are
faradhi,
and you are my son. And Sioned’s.” He stared into his son’s face, willing Pol to say words that would free Sioned of her terror.

“No different?” the young man asked incredulously. “Knowing I’m
diarmadhi,
that I’m the child of rape, that my father killed my grandfather, that my mother—” He gave a small, choking laugh. “
Which
mother?”

“Pol—”

“No
different?
”

“Are you anything less than you were before you knew?” Rohan snapped.

“I’m
more,
” he replied in soft, deadly tones.

Rohan stood away from him. “This can only change you if you let it. Ianthe may have birthed you, but you were never her son.
Never.
Do you feel any kinship to Ruval? Any pull of brotherhood? Who was it who nursed you, raised you, loved you, taught you—”

Sioned moaned low in her throat. Rohan turned to her, stricken by the look in her eyes. What she had always feared had come to pass. Pol was blaming her, rejecting her—for something Rohan had done.