Hall of the Mountain King (18 page)

oOo

Imeheni women were raised to be modest, but they were not
cloistered, and they certainly were not guarded by eunuchs. That was an
affectation for barbarians and for Marchers.

Vadin, face to face with Odiya’s unmanned guard, found
himself briefly bereft of words. The creature was as tall as himself and even
more elongated, and his face was too smooth and his hair was too rich and his
eyes were too deadly flat. They took in the young lord in his festival clothes
and his vaunting maleness, and gave nothing back.

Vadin drove his voice at that mask of a face. “I come in the
name of the throne prince. I would speak with the Lady Odiya. Let me pass.”

The eyes shifted minutely. Vadin gathered himself for a
second assault. The guard raised his lowered spear and stepped aside.

Vadin’s spine crawled. He was admitted. So easily. As if he
were expected.

This was an alien world, this eunuch-warded fastness, full
of strange scents, a-murmur with high voices. Not only Odiya dwelt here. Others
of the king’s ladies held each a room or a suite or a whole court, and most of
those were free to come and go; Vadin had seen them sometimes in hall or about
the castle, elderly ladies as a rule, mingling with kindred and courtiers.

There were nine of them altogether, highborn and low,
beautiful and not, chosen by custom and by the king’s favor, that in his union
with them he should make the kingdom strong. But the tenth was First Lady of
the Palace. However exalted the others might be, however noble their lineage
and their titles, it was she who ruled here, and she ruled absolutely.

Vadin, let into her domain, might have wandered for a long
while without guidance. But he was a hunter, and hunters learned wisdom: to
stop when lost, and to wait. In a little while one came, another eunuch, very
old and withered, with eyes as bright as the other’s had been dull. “Come,” he
said, and his voice was almost deep enough to be a man’s.

Vadin went. He felt as if he were caught in a dream, and yet
he was intensely alert, aware of every flicker of sound or movement. The box,
light in his hand, held the weight of worlds.

People passed him, coming and going. Servants, a lady or
two, once a pretty page who stopped to stare.

In envy, maybe. This was no place for a male, even for a
child of seven summers, even one with the almond eyes and the red-brown skin of
the southlands. His owner, whoever she was, was kind, or fastidious; she had
replaced the iron slave-collar with a necklet of copper.

The eunuch led Vadin past the child up a long stair. At its
summit stood another guard, a monster, a great hairless slug of a creature. But
the worst of it was not its size or its smoothness; it was white, as white as
the woman the talespinner had told of, but its eyes were grey as iron. Vadin
shuddered in his own, warm, dusk-and-velvet hide, and took great care in
passing, as if the eunuch could infect him with that maggot-pallor.

His guide was smiling with an edge of malice. “What, my
young lord, do you not approve of Kashi? He is rare and wonderful, a son of the
uttermost west, where folk are the color of snow. My lady paid a great fortune
for him.”

Vadin did not deign to respond. Bad enough that those bitter
eyes had seen his revulsion; he would not give them more to mock at. Was he not
the heir of Geitan? Was he not the throne prince’s envoy?

His haughtiness carried him almost to the end. The Lady
Odiya sat in a chamber of broad windows, and those open to wind and sun; and
after all the guards and the tales and the seclusion, she was not even wearing
a veil. Her long hair was braided like a man’s, its raven sheen touched only
lightly with silver, and her body was clad in a gown as plain as a servant’s,
and she wore no jewel; and her beauty was as piercing as it had been in the
Wood of the Goddess.

There was no softness in it, nothing gentle, nothing he had
ever thought of as womanly, yet she was woman to the core of her. Woman as the
goddess was woman, female incarnate, sister to the she-wolf and the tigress,
daughter of moons and tides and darkness, relentless as the earth itself.

Pain startled Vadin out of his stupor, the edges of the box
sharp as blades under his clenched fingers. A spell—she was casting a spell. He
looked at her, and he made himself see an aging woman in a dark gown, her body
thin under it, almost sexless. Her hair was dulled, her face carved to the bone
by the bitter years. But she was still beautiful.

His body, trained, had brought him to one knee and bowed his
head the precise degree due a royal concubine. His limbs felt even more
ungainly than usual, his ribs more prominent, his beard more ragged. How dared
he inflict his unlovely self upon this great queen?

Spells.
The voice
in his head sounded exactly like Mirain’s.
Give
her the box, Vadin.

He was doing it. He was saying the words which Mirain had
given him to say. “The throne prince sends this gift, great lady; what you have
lost, he has found and now returns to you.”

She took the box. Her face betrayed nothing. In that, it was
like Mirain’s, or like the king’s. Royal.

“I am to see you open it, great lady,” Vadin said.

Her eyes lifted. He could not have moved if he had wished
to. She took in every line of his face from brow to chin. She said, “You are .
. . almost . . . beautiful. You will be fair indeed when your body grows into
itself. If,” she said, “you live so long.”

“Open the box,” said Vadin. Or Mirain wielding Vadin’s
tongue, or terror leaving no wits and almost no words. His mind saw a dark
chamber far from help, a knife raised and glittering, a new guard at the door.
A young one who could remember what it was to be a man.

The lady’s eyes released him so abruptly that he swayed. Her
long fingers found the catch, raised the lid. She gazed down without surprise,
but her calm had broken. That was rage which glittered beneath her brows, which
bared her teeth. Two were missing, unlovely gaps, breaking the last of her
spell.

With sudden violence she flung the box away. Its contents
gleamed dully in her hand: the black dagger of Umijan’s priestess.

Vadin gaped at it. He had last seen it buried to the hilt in
Ustaren’s heart.

“Tell your master,” said Odiya, and her voice was as harsh
as that of a carrion bird, “tell your mighty prince that I have received his
gift. I will keep it until the time comes for it to drink his blood. For my
servants have been weak, but they will grow strong; and the goddess hungers.”

“I hear,” said Vadin’s throat and tongue and lips. “I am not
afraid. Let the goddess lust after Sun-blood, but let her be warned. Its fire
consumes all that comes of darkness.”

“But in the end, it is the fire which is consumed.”

“Who can know what the true end will be?” Vadin bowed again,
again with precision. “Good day, my lady Odiya.”

Moranden rode into Han-Ianon in the light of a blazing noon,
with his men in their ranks behind him and his banners flying.

“Bold as brass,” someone said as they clattered through the
market.

“Hush!” another warned her fiercely. “Ears can hear.”

“And so they should! Why, I’ve heard tell—”

Ymin edged her way through the press. She knew what the
woman had heard. Everyone was hearing it.

“Tried to murder the heir, he did, or so they say.”

“When they’re not saying that he saved the prince’s life.”

“Saved it! Why, he lured the young lord away and tied him to
an altar, and actually offered him up to the—”

“Be a good thing if he had. Mincing little foreigner. At
least the other’s proper Ianyn.”

The singer pressed her lips together. That refrain would not
die for all her singing and the king’s proclaiming and Mirain’s own great magic.
With Moranden gone it had faded somewhat; now it would grow strong again, and
the lines would draw themselves more firmly than ever. She shivered in the
sun’s heat, and cursed that clarity of her mind which could come so close to
prophecy.

A sudden tumult drowned out all but itself. Ymin, crushed in
the crowd, saw Moranden’s company pause.

A second troop was riding down from the keep, no banner over
it and no great order to it: a company of the king’s squires on holiday with
hawks on wrists and hounds on leads. One of the hounds had escaped and was
wreaking havoc among the stalls; two or three of the young hellions had spurred
after it, baying like hounds on a scent.

Yet in the center of pandemonium was stillness, in the
summer heat an island of cold. Mirain faced his mother’s brother, he and his
Mad One motionless but for the glitter of eyes. Moranden’s weary charger
fretted and stamped and fought to lower its horns.

A whoop and a yelp heralded the hound’s capture. It was loud
in the spreading silence.

Ears strained; breathing quieted. The squires had drawn
themselves into a line at Mirain’s back, and their eyes were bright and hard.

“Greetings, uncle.” Mirain’s voice was clear and cool and
proud, distinct in the stillness. “How goes the war?”

Moranden grinned, a baring of white teeth. “Well, prince.
Well indeed.” He leaned on his high pommel, the image of lordly ease. “Better
by far than it was going when you left it.”

One or two of the squires, the lad from Geitan foremost,
started forward. Mirain raised a hand; they stopped short. He smiled. “When I
left,” he said, “there was no war at all. Only”—he hesitated, as if he did not
wish to say the word—“only treachery. I am glad to see that you are free of
it.”

Ymin’s breath caught. The eyes around her were avid.

Moranden bowed over his charger’s neck. “I have always been
loyal to my rightful ruler.”

“I do not doubt it,” Mirain said.

The Mad One danced around Moranden’s dun, the point of a
spear that clove a path through the company. Moranden’s men followed it with
their eyes. With a bark of command the elder prince brought them about,
spurring his stallion up the road to the castle.

A sigh ran through the crowd. Of relief, it might have been,
that the rivals had not come to blows. Or, more likely, of disappointment.

oOo

There was little enough time for anyone to feel himself
cheated. Moranden had returned a few scant days before the greater of Ianon’s
two highest festivals, the feast of High Summer that was consecrated to
Avaryan. And this one would be more splendid than any before it; for the
central and holiest day of the festival was also Mirain’s birth-feast, his
first in the castle and his sixteenth in the world. Every lord and chieftain in
Ianon, and many a commoner, had come to look on the heir to the kingdom; most
bore gifts, as rich as each could afford.

Mirain woke early on the day itself, the solstice day, first
of the new year, well before dawn. Yet Vadin was up before him, and more
remarkable still, the king. When his eyes opened they fell first upon his
grandfather’s face, that bent over him, regarding him with a steady, patient
stare.

He sat up, scowling slightly, shaking his hair out of his
eyes. “My lord, what—”

“Gifts,” the king said. All his sternness melted; he loosed
his rare and splendid smile. “Gifts for the Throne Prince of Ianon.”

Gifts indeed. Vadin brought them one by one, an honor he had
fought for; he fought less successfully to keep the grin from his face. Full
panoply, made to Mirain’s measure but with room for him to grow in: armor wrought
as only smiths in Asanion could make it, light and strong and washed with gold,
the breastplate graven with the rayed sun of his father; a tunic of well-padded
leather to wear beneath, its skirt cut for ease and comfort and strengthened
with gilded bronze; and a helmet of bright and burnished gold graven with
flame-patterns and surmounted with a scarlet plume. And with these, baldric and
scabbard likewise of scarlet and gold, and a sword of precious Asanian steel,
its blade keen enough to draw blood from the air; and a cloak of scarlet
clasped with gold, and a round Sun-shield, and a spear, and a saddle of scarlet
leather inlaid with gold.

Mirain stroked the soft tooled leather and looked up at the
king. Vadin had never seen him so close to speechlessness. “My lord,” he said.
“Grandfather. This gift is beyond price.”

“Should the Sun’s son defend his realm in less?” The king
beckoned to the one servant Vadin had not managed to dispose of. “But that is
for the time to come. This I give you for your festival.”

It was a robe of honor, a royal robe of cloth of gold. The
servant dressed Mirain in it, braided his hair with gold, weighted him with the
treasure of the mountain kings. Mirain stood erect under it, meeting the old
man’s smile with one of his own.

“A fine prince you make,” the king said.

“Cloth of gold,” Mirain answered, “and a coronet. And,” he
added with a wicked glint, “a fine air of arrogance.”

The king laughed aloud, so rare a thing that even Mirain
stared astonished. He held out his hand. “Come, young king. Sing the sun into
the sky for me.”

oOo

Mirain sang the sunrise rite from the altar of Han-Ianon,
chief among the priests, shining with more than gold and new sunlight. Vadin
was there for once, with everyone else who could crowd into the temple, and he
gasped with the rest of them when Avaryan, rising, struck the crystal upon the
temple’s summit and cast a spear of white fire upon the altar.

That was not magic but art, a wonder of the yearly festival,
familiar as the dancing fires at harvest time. But Mirain stood before the
shining altar, and he raised his hand, and Avaryan himself came down to fill
it.

For a searing instant Vadin knew that he would be blind.
Then he realized that he could see. He stood in the heart of the sun, in a
world of pure light, and for all its blazing brilliance it lay cool and clean
upon him. It was singing, chanting in a voice he knew, in words he had heard
every High Summer since he was old enough to stand in the temple.