The Lady of Han-Gilen (2 page)

With a sharp gesture Elian dismissed her ladies. As the last
silken skirt vanished behind the door, she faced her brother. “You know why I
can’t do as Mother is asking.”

“I know why you think you can’t.”

“I gave my word,” she said.

“The word of a child.”

“The word of the Lady of Han-Gilen.”

He raised his hands, not quite as if he wanted to shake her.
“Lia, you were eight years old.”

“And he was fifteen,” she finished for him, with very little
patience. “And he was my brother in all but blood, and people were plenty who
said he was that too, because no man could be the son of a god, least of all
the son of the Sun. And whether he was half a god or all a man, he was heir by
right to a barbarian kingdom, and when the time came, he went to claim his own.
He had to go. I had to stay. But I promised him: My time would come. I would go
to fight with him. Because his mother left him a kingdom, but his father begot
him to rule the world.”

Halenan opened his mouth, closed it. Once he would not have
been so kind. Once he would have said what he could not keep from thinking.

The thinking was cruel enough between them who were mageborn
and magebred. To Mirain their foster brother, son of a priestess and a god,
great mage and warrior even in his youth, Elian had been the merest infant: his
sister, his shadow, trailing after him like a worshipful hound. Wherever he
was, she was sure to be.

It was certain proof of his parentage, a wag had said once.
Who but a god’s son could endure such constant adoration?

And now he was a man grown, king in distant Ianon and
raising legends about his name. If he even remembered her, it would not be as a
woman who kept her word; it would be as a child who had wept to lose her brother,
and sworn a child’s heedless oath, more threat than promise.

“What will you do?” Halenan pricked at her. “Join his harem
in Han-Ianon?”

“He has slaves enough,” she snapped, the sharper for that
her cheeks had caught fire. “I will fight for him, and wield my magery for him,
and be free.”

“And if he has changed? What then, Lia? What if he has gone
barbarian? Or worse, gone all strange with the god’s power that is in him?”

“Then,” she said with steadiness she had fought for, “I will
make him remember what he was.”

Halenan set his hands on her shoulders. She came perilously
close to laughing. Even in the utmost of exasperation, he took care not to
rumple her gown. That much, husbandhood had done for him.

He glared at her, but half of it was mirth. “Little sister,
tell me the truth. You do all of this simply to drive the rest of us mad.”

“I do it because I can do nothing else.”

“Exactly.” He let her go and sighed. “Maybe after all you
should go to Mirain. He could make you see sense when no one else could.”

“I will go when it is time to go.”

“And meanwhile, you turn away suitor after suitor, and
refuse adamantly to tell even Father why you do it.”

“You don’t, either.”

“I keep my promises.” Their eyes met; his wavered the merest
fraction. He rallied with a flare of Gilen temper. “Maybe I should. Mother
would see the perfect resolution: a match between you and your oldest love.
With the Hundred Realms for a dowry, and Avaryan’s Throne for a marriage couch,
and—”

She struck him with a lash of power.

It stopped his mouth. It did not stop his mind. He was
laughing at her. He always laughed at her, even when she pricked him to a rage.

“It’s love,” he said, “and absurdity. And maybe
desperation.”

“You never were a match for me.”

He bowed to the stroke, utterly unoffended. “Come now, O my
conqueror. We’re late for council.”

The high prince Ziad-Ilarios bowed low before the Lady of
Han-Gilen. When he straightened, he stood still, his eyes steady upon her, a
long measuring look that warmed into approval.

She returned it with no expression at all. He was fair even
for a westerner, his hair like hot gold, his eyes as golden as a falcon’s, his
skin the color of fine ivory; though no taller than she, he was deep-chested
and strong, and very good to look on.

Her stare should have disconcerted him; it made him smile, a
remarkably sweet smile, like a child’s. But no child ever had a voice so rich
or so deep. “My lady, you are fairer even than I looked for, with but songs and
painted likenesses to guide me.”

She had a weakness for a fine voice. Grimly she suppressed
it. “Indeed, highness, you flatter me.”

He would not err so far as to bow again. Nor would he oblige
her by speaking as most men did to a lovely woman, as to an idiot child. “I
have an unfortunate flaw, my lady. I tend to speak my mind. You must forgive
me. Should I abase myself at your surpassingly lovely feet?”

Before she knew it, she was laughing. Some people said that
her merriment was like bells; others, that it was much too free for a maiden’s.

They stared now, discreetly enough, to be sure: all her
father’s court, even her father enthroned under his golden canopy with his
princess beside him. He smiled, a softening of his dark stern face.

She looked away, back to her companion. Oh yes, he was a
pleasing young man. She could do far worse than he.

He was smiling again and inviting her, not quite touching
her hand, walking slowly through the glittering throng.

She matched his pace. No one impeded them, though everyone
watched them. “Already they have us wedded,” she said.

He eluded the trap as neatly as if it had never been laid.
“That is the sport of lesser mortals: to make legends of their rulers. Your
legend is fascinating, my lady. In Asanion we cannot decide whether it is a
wonder or a scandal. A princess, yet you have mastered all the arts of
princehood; you challenge your suitors to defeat you in their own chosen
skills, and send them away when you find them wanting.”

“And what is your skill?” she demanded of him.

He shrugged, a minute gesture, barely visible within his
golden robes. “None. Except, perhaps, that of ruling. ‘Kinging it,’ the common
folk would say. I do it rather well.”

“You speak our tongue very well indeed.”

“That is part of it. So much of ruling is in the tongue. Too
much, some might add.”

“Especially here in the Hundred Realms.”

“In the Golden Empire, fully as much. You are eloquent, I am
told, and have the gift of tongues.”

“I like to talk.”

“Why, so do I. But wit is hard to come by, and one cannot
always converse with oneself.”

“I talked a philosopher into the ground once. He sought to
wed me; he wedded with solitude instead.”

“He made a poor choice.”

“Did he? I am thinking of taking a vow, my lord. To take
lovers by the dozen, but never a husband.”

“Surely you would grow weary of constant variety.”

“Do you think I would?” She halted in the midst of the court
and fixed her eyes upon him. “Have you?”

His laughter was as sweet as his smile. “Oh, long since!
Twice ninescore concubines: that is the number allotted to the heir of Asanion.
One for each day of the sun’s year. Alas, I am cursed with a constant nature;
where I take pleasure, there do I most prefer to love. So you see, if I follow
my nature, some few of my ladies are content; the rest either dissolve in tears
or succumb to murderous envy. But if I strive to please them all, I fail
utterly to content myself.”

“So you seek a wife.”

“So I seek a wife. A married man, you see, may free his
concubines.”

“Ah,” she said in something close to delight. “Your motives
are hardly pure at all. I had begun to fear that there would be no flaw in
you.”

“But surely perfection is most unutterably dull?”

“You are not tall. That is a flaw, but one I cannot in
conscience condemn; for you are also beautiful.”

“In Asanion I am reckoned a tall man.”

“And fair?”

“That is not a word we like to use in speaking of men. But
yes, they call me comely. We breed for it.”

“My mother has Asanian blood.” Elian changed tacks abruptly,
fixing him with her most disconcerting stare. “Some said that you would not
come to us; that your borders are beset, and that your father has need of you
there.”

Ilarios was not disconcerted at all. He shifted as rapidly
and as smoothly as she. “He has greater need of Han-Gilen and the Hundred
Realms.” His eyes leveled. They were all gold, like an animal’s, but the light
in them was godly bright. “You know what concerns us.”

“The barbarians in the north.”

“Even so. We have never exerted ourselves to conquer them,
reckoning them little better than savages, too deeply embroiled in their own
petty feuds to unite against us. So they should have remained. But they have
spawned a monster, it seems. A chieftain—he calls himself a king—who seized the
throne of one of the northern provinces—”

“Ianon,” she murmured.

“Ianon,” he agreed with a swift glance. “He usurped its
throne, gathered its clans, and proceeded to do the same to its neighbors. It
was easier than it might have been. He rode—rides still, for the matter of
that—under the banner of the Sun-god; his father, so he claims, is the god
himself, his mother—”

He broke off. For once, Elian could see, his ready tongue
had led him further than he liked to go.

She led him to the end of it. “His mother was a priestess, born
in Ianon but raised to the greatest eminence of her order: high priestess of
the Temple of Avaryan in Han-Gilen. In addition to which, she was prophet of
the realm, and bound in close friendship with its prince.” She smiled, closing
in for the kill. “Tell me more of her son.”

“But surely—” He stopped. His eyes knew what she did, and
dared to guess why. They flickered as a hawk’s will, veiling just perceptibly.
Calmly he said, “Her son appeared in Ianon some few summers past. He was little
more than a child then; he is, so they say, very young still. But he is a
skilled general, for a barbarian, and he has a knack of gathering men to
himself. Hindered not at all by the parentage he claims and the destiny he has
revealed to any who will listen. The world is his, he proclaims. He was born to
rule it.”

“Simply to rule it?” asked Elian.

“Ah,” said Ilarios, “he says that it is not simple at all.
He is the trueborn heir of Avaryan, the emperor foretold, the Sword of the Sun;
he will bring all the world under his sway, and cast down the darkness and bind
it in chains, and found an imperishable empire.”

“He says? Have you spoken with him?”

“Would the son of the Sun deign to speak with a mere high
prince of Asanion?”

She regarded him sidelong. “If he were anywhere within reach
of you, he might.”

“Soon he may be. However mad his ambitions may be, his
generalship is entirely sane. With an army no larger than the vanguard of our
own, he has set all the north under his heel. Since winter loosed its hold, he
has begun to threaten our northern satrapies. We suspect that, should he fail
there, he will move east and south into the Hundred Realms.”

“We in turn suspect that he will move first against us,
thinking to forge an alliance, and with our strength to advance on Asanion.”

“So he might,” Ilarios said. “And so I am here, rather than
in the north of the empire. We have much more to fear from a barbarian allied
with you than from a barbarian alone.”

“That would be a deadly joining, would it not? A hundred
realms, a hundred quarrels, we say here, but at need we can band together. Not
easily, not for long, but long enough to drive back any enemy. The Nine Cities,
the last time. I was very young, but I remember. Have you ever fought in a
war?”

He seemed no more disturbed by this latest barb than by
anything else she had said. “There has been no war since I was a child.”

“But if there had been?”

“I would have fought in it. The heir of the empire commands
its armies.”

“The Sunborn has been a warrior since his childhood. He
rides always in the van, with scarlet cloak and plume lest anyone fail to know
him. And under him a demon in the shape of a black charger, fully as terrible
in battle as its master.”

For the first time, Prince Ilarios frowned. “He is a demon
himself, they say, a mighty sorcerer, a shapeshifter who may choose to be seen
as a giant among his northern giants, or as a dwarf no taller than a nine days’
infant. But in his own flesh he is nothing to look at, little larger than a
child, with no beauty at all.”

“What, none?”

“So I have heard.”

Ehan looked at him, head tilted. “You would be delighted if
he were hideous, would you not?”

“Women sigh at the thought of him. Young, barbarian, and
half a god—how wonderful. How enchanting.”

“How utterly exasperating. You, after all, were born to be
emperor; if you become a great conqueror, you but do as your fathers have done
before you. Whereas this upstart has but to gather a handful of mountain tribes
and he becomes a mighty hero.”

“Who is blasphemous enough to name Avaryan his father. They
call him An-Sh’Endor: God-begotten, Son of the Morning.” Ilarios sighed and let
his ill temper fade. “He vaunts; but more to the point, he conquers. Much to
our distaste. We prefer our world as it is, and not as some young madman would
have it.”

“Oh, yes, he is mad. God-mad.” She smiled, but not at
Ilarios. “His birthname is Mirain. He was my foster brother. One morning before
dawn he left us. I saw him go. I like to think I helped him, though what could
a small girlchild do when her brother would leave and her father would have him
stay? except follow him and get in his way and try not to cry. The last thing
he did was cuff me and tell me to stop my sniffling, and promise to come back.”
And the last thing she had done was to swear her great oath. But that was no
matter for this stranger’s pondering.