The Lady of Han-Gilen (19 page)

“No.” She seized his hand. Its palm was hard with calluses,
its back surprisingly silken, warm and strong and very much alive. “I didn’t
mean that. I’m not—you do surprise me. I’d hate you if you were I, sneaking
little interloper that I am, and in trousers, too.”

That warmed him; his smile gleamed from the shadow of his
face. “But,” he said, “I never thought you were a boy.”

Her jaw dropped. She picked it up with care. “You—”

“Oh yes, I would have resented a swaggering little
cock-a-whoop who thought he could take my place. You only wanted your own back.
You got it, and it was wonderfully amusing to watch you hoodwink the army.
Stone blind, all of them. Even in a kilt you’d walk like a she-panther. And
you’ve got breasts. Not much yet, and in all honesty you’ll never match my
lady, but breasts you’ve got. Didn’t anyone ever tell you about strapping them
flat?”

Her free hand flew to them, flew away. Her cheeks flamed. “I
tried for a while. It was ghastly uncomfortable.” Dark though it had grown, she
glared at him. “You are presumptuous.”

“Is that all?” Laughter rippled in his voice. “I’d say I was
skirting the edge of the unforgivable. Or I would be, if I weren’t so
disgustingly close to being your kinsman. Has anyone told you lately that
you’re beautiful?”

“No!” she snapped. “Yes. I don’t know.”

She was still holding his hand. It gripped hers; it drew her
to him. He was a shadow and a gleam, and a warmth as much of the mind as of the
body. “Listen to me, Elian. I have to go away. There’s no help for it; Mirain’s
god is leading him into the south, and someone has to keep the north strong
behind him. I know we’ll be part of one another wherever we go, and I know
he’ll never be alone while he has Hal to stand beside him. But he needs more.
He doesn’t know it; if he did, he wouldn’t admit it. He’s proud, too, that one,
and sometimes he’s as blind as any ordinary idiot.”

Elian was stiff in his grasp, breathing in the scent of him,
the sheer foreignness of his presence. But his mind was not foreign at all; and
that disturbed her more than any of the rest. One word, one flicker of the
will, and they would be bound, brother, sister, kindred as he had named them:
kindred in power.

“Look after him,” said the outland voice in the outland
tongue. “Take care of him. Don’t let him be any more of a lunatic than you can
help. And if you need me, send your power to me. I’ll come. Because,” he said,
both solemn and wicked, “I also keep my promises.”

Her eyes narrowed; her fists clenched. “After all you’ve
said and done to me, you can ask me to take your place with him?”

“I’m asking you to choose as you have to choose, but not to
break him in doing it. You love him enough for that, I think. Even if you bind
your body to the Asanian.”

She could not speak. He rose, drew her into a swift
inescapable embrace, let her go. He towered against the stars.

“What—” she whispered. Her voice rose. “What do I tell
Mirain?”

“If you’re wise,” he answered, “everything. Or nothing.” He
bowed and set a kiss in her hand. “Avaryan’s luck with you, Lady of Han-Gilen.
We’ll meet again.”

Vadin was gone. Well gone, Elian wanted to think. He knew
too damnably much, and understood it all, and refused—adamantly refused—to
despise her for it.

Mirain without him was no less Mirain. It was Elian who
found herself looking for him. Missing his eternal and exasperating presence,
and his scathing wit, and his talent for saying what no one else dared to say.

However much she had resented his presence, she resented his
absence more deeply still. It had nothing to do with liking him. It had
everything to do with needing him.

She did not see him off. Would not. She had lain awake
nightlong, watching Mirain sleep, as if suddenly he would wake and cry, “Choose
me!”

If he had, she would have fled. It had been so simple when
she did not know: when he seemed content to be her brother, and she was content
to be his squire. Now she must lie, or she must tell him what she knew, and
lose her brother, and gain the burden of a lover.

Familiar
, Vadin
had said. Mirain was that. Too familiar. She could as easily lust after Halenan
as after Mirain. He had known her since she was born. He was part of her, blood
and bone.

“Ziad-Ilarios,” she whispered in the deeps of the night, and
shivered.

He was alien and beautiful and desirable. She had seen all
of Mirain that there was to see. Of Ilarios she had seen the face and the hands
and a glimpse of shapely feet. She could only guess what lay between. Beauty
carved in ivory, with dust of gold.

Ebony slept oblivious, obstinate in its silence, and woke as
if she had never been more to him than sister and servant. She was soul-glad;
she hated him for it. She held her tongue and veiled her eyes and let him have
his peace. In a blessedly little while, she had found a scrap of it for
herself; she tended it, and schooled herself to think of naught beyond it.

oOo

When Mirain began his riding into the south, her joy in it
could be almost as unalloyed as his own. The sun blazed upon him in all the
splendor of autumn, the leaves of the woods as golden as the Sun on his banner;
and he rode under both as light as a boy, with all his drudgeries packed away
in the clerks’ wagons far down the line.

Men sang behind him, a marching song of the north that the
southerners had taken a fancy to. The Mad One danced in time to it; Mirain
laughed with the simple joy of it, that he was alive, and king, and riding in
the sun before the cream of his newborn empire.

His glance drew Elian into his delight. She could resist
him, but not when all the earth seemed to conspire with him. She flashed him
her brightest grin, and set Ilhari dancing likewise, matching the Mad One step
for step.

oOo

They crossed Ilien and entered Poros with Prince Indrion
in the van, guiding his emperor through his brother realm. It was indeed the
royal progress Mirain had looked for; night found him in the heart of the
princedom, feasting in its palace, surrounded by its people.

Its women, Elian noticed, were enchanted with him. She
noticed also that he betrayed no interest in any one in particular, though some
were very beautiful, and some were very charming, and a few were both.

To her he had not changed at all. Not even when she
surprised him with a glance or a smile, daring him to begin the siege. Not even
when the demon in her sent her to Ilarios’ side and kept her there, and made
her bold and brazen, and brought her close to hating herself.

Until Ilarios turned his golden eyes upon her and smiled,
knowing what she did, and forgiving her. She had kissed him before she knew it,
there where everyone could see.

She started back, blushing furiously. “I—” she began.

His finger silenced her, not quite touching her lips. “I
know,” he said. And began to speak of something else entirely.

When at last it struck her, it struck hard. Ilarios had won
a victory. She had forgotten Mirain. She looked, and he was gone; and she had
not seen him go.

oOo

He was in bed. Alone. Sleeping as a child sleeps, in
blissful peace.

She cursed him, but whispering, through gritted teeth. “You
are no thwarted lover. He lied, that great lanky shadow of yours. Or I dreamed
it all.”

He never stirred. She hissed at him. “
Damn
you, Mirain! How can I know if I want you, if you won’t even
ask?”

oOo

The king’s progress continued in a splendor of sunlight.
But the nights seemed doubly dark for the brightness between. Elian dreamed,
and her dreams were fearful, but when she woke she could not remember them. She
began to fight against sleep.

It was not her little tangle of lovers. This ran deeper,
down to the heart of power, where prophecy had its lair. Fear was in it, and a
darkness of the soul; and something terribly like yearning.

Something wanted her. Something strove to draw her to it, if
only she would lower her defenses, if only she would yield. Only a little. Only
enough to know what summoned her.

She would not. She dreamed; and there was a black and
crooked comfort in it. Dreaming, dreading sleep, she had less leisure to fret
over a man who would not admit that he wanted her, and over a man whom she wanted
but not—quite yet—with all that was in her.

oOo

When autumn was well advanced but the trees wore still
their scarlet and gold, Mirain paused near the border of Iban in the forests of
Kurion. Having seen the army settled in a wide field, almost a plain, within
the wood, and his own household established in a forest manor of Kurion’s
prince, he rode out hunting.

The air was like wine, the quarry both swift and crafty, the
golden deer of the south. Elian, daring a long shot from Ilhari’s saddle,
brought down a splendid hart; its flesh made their supper, its hide she gave to
Ilarios, who had lent her his bow for the shot. Its crown of ivory antlers she
kept as a trophy.

The hunt had been good, but hers was the best kill; for
that, as champion of the hunt, she had the place of honor at table. Mirain made
her put aside his livery—“My scarlet does your hair no justice,” he said—and
gave her a gift, a coat the color of an emerald, edged and embroidered and
belted with gold. It was a man’s coat, but when she put it on over long fine
tunic and silken trousers, there could be no doubt at all that she was a woman.

Her first instinct was to strip it off and snatch for her livery.
But he was watching, his eyes for a moment unguarded, and he said, “Sister, if
I had only you to think of, I’d change my livery to green, and keep it so.”

She waited. Her heart hammered. Now—now he would speak. But
he only set a casket in her hands and went to his own dressing.

She opened the casket. It was a royal gift, but not of
necessity a lover’s. A thin circlet of gold to bind her brows, and emeralds set
in gold for her ears, and a collar of gold set with emeralds. She put them on
with hands that wanted desperately to shake.

Mirain was gone already. She made herself follow him.

Strange as her mood was, her entrance into the hall won all
the stares she could have wished for. It was almost like old times: the hungry
eyes, the smitten faces, leavened now with a large portion of startlement. Few
might have guessed that livery could hide so much.

Mirain’s face betrayed nothing. He smiled as she sat by him,
no more or less warmly than he ever did, and greeted her with empty words. His
nearness was like a fire on her skin.

It must be that, for the first time since she came to him,
she both looked and felt a woman. And he was close, and he was a man; she had
never thought before how very much a man he was. It made him a stranger. It
made him almost frightening.

He brushed against her in reaching for his wine-cup. She
shivered. He wore scarlet tonight, but its fashion was the fashion of the
south, very close to her own, ruby to her emerald. His northerners were
learning, slowly, not to be appalled when he put on trousers.

She tried to distract herself. He was not going to speak,
now or ever. And she could not. She could not say,
Be my lover.
No more could she say,
You will never be more to me than a brother.

His profile fascinated her. The purity of it; the fierce
foreignness that yet was utterly familiar. The ruby in his ear glowed against
his darkness, begging her to touch it.

She tore her eyes from him. She was beginning to comprehend
the common lot of males: the prick of passion, sudden, urgent, bitter to
refuse. There was no logic in it, and very little sanity; it knew nothing of
times and seasons. Save that this was her time and this her season, springtide
of her womanhood, when blood sang to blood, and fire to banked and shielded
fire.

She took refuge in Halenan’s face. He was splendid to see,
but his beauty only warmed her; it did not burn. He sat oblivious, deep in
speech with the Kurionin prince, smiling suddenly at a turn of wit.

Beyond them at the table’s end sat Ilarios. It might have
been chance that set him so far from her. It might have been calculation.

His eyes lifted, warming as they caught hers. She could not
hold them. Her glance slid aside, restless, uneasy, alighting on comfort. Of a
sort.

Cuthan had been her friend, or so she had thought, before
the truth of her womanhood built its wall between them. Sensing her gaze, he
looked up.

Without its white grin his face was as haughty as any in
Ianon. His eyes were black, like his brother’s, like Mirain’s, and steady,
taking her in as if she were a stranger. She could not tell what he thought of
her.

Suddenly both eyes and face were transformed. He grinned and
saluted her as he had in the battle, offering for this little while all that
she had lost.

Her throat was tight. But she did as she had done then: she
returned his grin.

Cobbled courage, but it bore her up. And it distracted her
most admirably.

oOo

This dream she would remember—must remember. Darkness and
whirling, and a face, the face of the woman called Kiyali. Close, coming
closer, drawn by her own desperate denial.

The Exile’s eyes in the dreamworld were not blind at all but
terribly, bitterly keen, piercing Elian to the heart. Perceiving all her hidden
places, her flaws and her secrets, her lies and her cruelties and her follies.

And understanding, and forgiving. Kinswoman, the low voice
said. Blood of my blood. Why do you fear me? Why do you flee?

“No kin,” Elian willed herself to say. It was a gasp.
“Never. Enemy—”

I am not your enemy.

“You are Mirain’s.” Elian’s voice was stronger, her
resistance firmer. Because she must resist. Blood knew blood. Kin called to
kin, however bitterly sundered.