Hall of the Mountain King (24 page)

He drew back, and they all waited, hardly breathing. He
faced Ymin, held out his hand. “Come,” he said.

There was a stunned silence. Even she had not looked for
this. Surely he was mocking her, taking his revenge for the ordeal which she
had forced upon him.

She said what they were all thinking. “I am more than twice
your age.”

“And a head taller than I,” he agreed willingly, “and no
tender maid, and my chosen. It is permitted that I choose as I will.” Again he
held out his hand. “Come, singer.”

If she shaped protests, she let them die before she uttered
them. Coolly and quietly she dismissed the ladies who had been chosen with such
care and to so little effect, setting Vadin the task of looking after them. The
last he saw as he shut the door, they were facing one another, king and singer,
and it looked more like war than love.

oOo

“Why?” Ymin asked when the rest were gone. She was still
calm, but the mask was cracking.

Mirain’s seemed the firmer for the weakness of hers. He
shrugged and smiled. “I want you.”

“Not the Princess Shirani?”

“She’s very lovely. She’s also terrified of me, although she
calls it love. And tonight I’m not up to a maiden’s holy awe.” His face
darkened. “Is it that I repel you? I know I have no beauty, and I’m too young
to be a good lover, and too small to look well beside you.”

“No!” Her hands took it on themselves to seize his, to hold
them fast. “Never say such things. Never even think them.”

“I was taught to speak the truth.”

“The truth, aye and well. But that is a lie. Mirain my
dearest lord, do you not know that you are beautiful? You have that which makes
even the lovely Shirani seem commonplace beside you. A brilliance; a splendor.
A magic. And a very fine pair of eyes in a very striking face, and a body with
which I can find no fault.”

“What, none at all?”

“Perhaps,” she mused, “if I might see the whole of it . . .”

“Have you not already?”

“Ah, but that was the kingmaking, and I was blinded by the
god in your eyes. I should like to see the man, since he has persisted in
choosing me.”

He freed himself easily, dropped his robe, stood for her to
look at. She looked long, and she looked with great pleasure, and she smiled,
for he was rousing to her presence. “No flaw at all, my lord. Not one.”

“Sweet-tongued singer.” He unbound the cincture of her robe.
His hands were not quite steady. “I hope, my lady, that your modesty is only
for the world.”

“My lord, I am a famous wanton.” She cast aside the heavy
garment, growing reckless now that she had no retreat, and shook down the
masses of her hair. It tumbled from its woven braids, pouring like water to her
feet; his gasp of wonder made her laugh. But when he touched her she gasped
herself, and their eyes met, and she sank down in the pool of her hair.

His arms closed about her; she trembled within them. “My
lord, you should not have done this to me.”

He stroked her hair with gentle hands. “My name is Mirain.”

She raised her head in a flare of sudden heat. “My lord!”

“Mirain.” Gentle, implacable. “The kingdom commands that I
do this, and the god commands that you be my chosen, but I will not be
my lord
. Unless you honestly wish me to
fail.”

Her heart went cold. He had let slip the truth at last. The
god had commanded it. Not his will. Not his desire, nor ever his love. That his
body responded to her beauty, that was mere fleshly desire; it meant nothing.

She knew her face was calm, but he did not read faces. He
stared stricken, and he cried, “No, Ymin. No! Oh, damn my tripping tongue! The
god guided me, I admit it, but only because I would never have dared it alone.
How much easier to take one of yon eager worshipful maids, do my duty, send her
away. You came harder. Because you outshone them all, body and soul.
Because—because with you I would have more than duty and ritual. With you I
would have love.”

She raised her hand, let it come to rest on his cheek.
“Curse you,” she said very softly, “for a mage and a seer.”

He kissed her palm.

“Child,” she said. He smiled. “Insolent boy. I have a
daughter only a little younger than you. I would spank her if she looked at me
as you are looking now.”

“It would be appalling if she did.” His hand found her
breast; he paid it the homage of a kiss. “How beautiful you are.”

“How ancient.”

“And how young I am, and how little it matters.” He kissed
her other breast, and the warm secret space between them, and the curve of her
belly beneath. Her body sang where he touched it; keened when he withdrew;
began to sing again as he led her to the bed.

Her mind, letting go its resistance, took up the descant.
Its refrain was perfect in its purity: simply and endlessly his name, with no
lord or king to taint it.

He saw; he knew. His fire flooded over her and drowned her.

oOo

Vadin yawned and stretched and grinned at the ceiling of his
new chamber. Bold-eyed Jayida had gone back to her mistress, who had been one
of the old king’s ladies; but she had promised to visit him again. Nor had she
seemed to find him a poor second to the king. After all, she had said, the king
was half a god and all a priest, and that did not bode well for him as a lover.
Whereas the king’s squire . . .

Still grinning, he sat up, tossing back his loosened hair.
No sound reached him from the king’s bedchamber.

He opened the door with great care and peered within. And
jumped like a startled thief.

Mirain stood in the opening and laughed, as bare and tousled
as himself but somewhat wider awake. “Good morning, Vadin,” he said. “Did she
serve you well?”

Vadin flinched. It had occurred to him that he was usurping
a woman chosen for the king. She had scoffed when he said it. But there were
places where he would have paid in blood for his night’s pleasure.

Mirain embraced him with unfeigned exuberance, dragged him
to the bath that was blessedly empty of its maidens, pushed him in and leaped
after him in a cloud of spray. Vadin came up spluttering, not ready yet to join
in the game. “My lord, I—”

“My lord, you are forgiven, she is yours, you may have your
joy of her. Shall I free her for you? I can do that.”

Mirain was alight with it, knowing that he was king, that he
was free, that he could do whatever he pleased.

Vadin blinked water out of his eyes. “I don’t think—she was
just for a night. If I were asking for anyone I’d ask for Ledi. But—”

“But.” Mirain had sobered. “You don’t want gifts. When I
hold Great Audience today I’ll take the liege-oaths of all the lords who are
here, and of the fighting men, and of the pages and the servants. And of the
squires who served my grandfather. Would you like to go back to them? You no longer
need look after me all alone; you can be a squire among the squires again, only
taking your turn with me when it suits you. If it suits you at all.”

Vadin stood very still in the warm ever-flowing water.
Mirain waited without expression. Hoping, maybe, that Vadin would accept.
Looking for an escape from his most reluctant servant.

Except that the reluctance had got itself lost somewhere,
and the resistance had dwindled to a ritual, a saving of face. And the thought
of going back to the barracks, of being plain Vadin the squire again, held no
sweetness at all. Seeing someone else at Mirain’s back—knowing that someone
else would stand here dripping, enduring Mirain’s gentle chaffing, sharing bath
and breakfast—

Vadin swallowed hard, half choking. “Do you want me to go,
my lord?”

“I don’t want you to stay in a place that you dislike.”

“What—” Vadin swallowed hard. “What if I don’t dislike it?”

“Even though people call you my dog and my catamite?”

Vadin thought of the names they had called Mirain. Which, if
he could but hear them—

“I have.”

“You’re walking in my mind again. After all I’ve said. You
used my body when you sent me to that unspeakable woman. Who knows what you’ll
do to me next? But I’m getting used to you and your wizard’s tricks. Life in
the barracks would bore me silly.”

“It would win your wager for you.”

“Sure it would. And who’d nursemaid you when you got into
one of your moods? No, my lord, you won’t get rid of me now. I said I’d stay
with you, and I’m a man of my word.”

“Beware, Vadin; you’ll be admitting to friendship next.”

“Not likely,” Vadin said, scooping up a handful of cleansing
foam. “Turn around and I’ll wash your back.”

Mirain did as he was told, but first he said, “I know
exactly what I’m going to do with your soul when I win it. I’ll house it in
crystal and net it in gold and hang it over my bed.”

“Fine sights it will see there,” said Vadin unperturbed,
“now that you’re allowed to live like a man.”

Mirain laughed, and that was answer and to spare.

In the grey light before sunrise, a lone rider sent his
mount through its paces. He rode superbly well, wrapped with his stallion in a
half-trance of leap and curvet and sudden swift gallop, challenging the targets
set here and there on the practice ground of the castle: that art of princes
called riding at the rings. Three circlets of copper glinted on his spearpoint;
as Ymin watched, he turned his mount on its haunches, striking for a fourth.

“Well done!” she applauded him as he lowered his lance.
Three rings rolled from it; the fourth spun through the air into her hand. She
smiled and sank down in a low curtsey. “All thanks, my knight, for your
tribute.”

“It is given where it is due.” Mirain doffed his helmet,
shaking his braid free from its protective coil about his head. His face was
damp; his eyes glittered. He slid smoothly from the Mad One’s back and ran his
hand down the sleek sweat-sheened neck; and turned more quickly than her eye
could follow, and drew her head down, and kissed her.

“My lord,” she protested, as she must. And when he glared:
“Mirain, this is no fit place—”

“I have decreed that it is.” But he stood a little apart,
decorous, with glinting eyes. “Walk with me,” he said.

They walked for a time in silence, he at the Mad One’s
shoulder, she at a cool and proper distance. At length she asked, “Would you
ride to war as you do now, without a saddle?”

“That would be foolish even for a child king.”

She glanced at him. “So bitter, my lord?”

He brushed a fly from the Mad One’s ear, caressing the
tender place beneath it. “In one thing,” he said, “Moranden’s man spoke the
truth. The sheen has worn away. Ianon has the king it asked for, but now it has
paused to think upon the asking.”

“Wisely, for the most part. No one in town or castle seems
to regret the choice.”

“Ah,” he said, “but Ianon is much more than a single city,
or even a single mountain-guarded vale.”

“True, my dear lord. But have you heard none of the old
songs? Time was when a king had to fight his way to the throne, and fight to
sit in it, and leave as soon as he had taken it to put down a dozen risings.
The day after your grandsire claimed his kingship, the whole of eastern Ianon
rose against him, led by two of his own brothers.”

“And I should hold my peace, should I not? Central Ianon is
firmly sworn to me, and I have no more to fear than a rumbling in the Marches.
With, of course, enough slighting rumors to set my teeth on edge; but no open
threat, as yet, of cold iron.” He sighed. “I’ve waited so long to be king. Now
I am, and the end is the merest beginning. I find myself wishing that I could
live my life like a hero in a song, striding from peak to peak, paying no heed
to the dull stretches between.”

“Surely it would grow wearisome, always to be at the summit
of one’s attainments.”

“You think so?” he asked. “How much simpler it would be if I
didn’t have to endure all this waiting, if I could pass from my enthronement
straight to the heart of war and there find an end. Whether my enemy’s or my
own.”

“That will come soon enough,” she said levelly.

“None too soon for me. My nerves are raw, and people are
whispering. Do you know that I’m supposed to have been the Red Prince’s boy?”

“Were you?”

He stopped as if struck.

She laid a hand on his arm. “My lord. Mirain. They are only
words.”

“So are your songs.”

“Certainly. And I sing the truth. What are all the lies and
foul tales to that?”

“Moranden cursed us all.” He began to walk again along the
wall that bordered the field. “I can think of a worse curse than his. That he
actually gain what he longs for.”

“To be king?”

“It would be fitting. A throne, a title, a kingdom full of
subjects all eager to serve him—those are only trappings. The truth is a wall
and a cage and fetters of gold. My people are my jailers. They bind me; I can’t
escape them. Courts and councils and the cares of a kingdom . . . even in my
bed I’m not free of them.”

“Am I so much a burden?”

“You,” he cried with sudden force, “no!”

“Ah,” she said sagely. “Prince Mehtar’s daughter.”

He scowled; suddenly he laughed. “Just so. And Lord Anden’s
niece. And Baron Ushin’s ward. Not to mention half my maidens of the bath.
Young I may be, undersized and no beauty, certainly foreign born and arguably a
bastard, but I have one asset that far outweighs the rest: Ianon’s throne.”

“I thought I had taught you not to underrate yourself.”

Mirain smiled his swift smile. “Prince Mehtar was quite
blunt,” he said. “I’m no great marvel of manhood, or so he informed me, but I
am royal. More than royal if my claims be true. House Mehtar would be quite
pleased to ally itself with me. The girl, they tell me, is well worth the
trouble.”

“She is a beauty,” Ymin agreed. “They call her the Jewel of
the Hills.” She paused, regarding him. “Will you consider the offer?”