The Lady of Han-Gilen (22 page)

Suddenly he was hardly taller than she, and changed: his
free hair braided, his throat circled by the torque of his father’s priesthood.
She swayed for a moment in the throes of memory. So caught, timeless, she saw
Mirain-then and Mirain-now, and beyond and about him a sweep of darkness shot
with diamond light.

His hands gripped her, steadying her. “Look,” she said. “The
tower. But who would dare—”

“Tower?”

Was he blind? “Tower! There, on Endros. Someone’s built a
tower—on—”

Her voice died. It was clear, so clear. Tall and terrible
like the crag, black stone polished smooth as glass, wrought without door or
window, and on its pinnacle a sun. Even as she gazed at it, it shimmered and
shrank. There was only the rock and the wind and the empty sky.

Suddenly she was cold, bone-cold. Mirain said nothing, only
spread his cloak over them both.

Her will tensed to pull away; her body huddled into the
warmth. Thoughts babbled around her, orderless and shieldless, bastard children
of minds without power. Some were amused and some were annoyed, and some were
even envious, knowing only what mere eyes knew, dark head and bright one close
together and one cloak between them.

“It’s me they envy,” said Mirain.

“And me they laugh at.” Her shivering had stopped, her
visions faded. Her body was her own again.

Smoothly she slid away from him. He let her go; which,
irrationally, roused her temper.

She strode past him through the knot of guards and friends
and hangers-on, daring them to stare. None did. They were all most carefully
considering the city that would be.

Ilhari was grazing on the southern slope, eyed by a stallion
or two: Ilarios’ gold, Cuthan’s tall blue dun. Halenan’s grey, whom she rather
favored, was not among them. With Anaki so close to her time, the prince did
not like to ride far from her, nor would Mirain ask it.

Elian laid her cheek against the warm thick coat, breathing
in the scent of wind and grass and senel-hide. “Oh, sister,” she said, “you
have all the blessings. No fates and prophecies, and no family to grieve you.”

The mare raised her head, laying back her ears at the dun,
who was venturing too close. Prudently he retreated. She returned to her grazing.

Ah yes, seneldi had sense, though the stallions could be a
nuisance. One came into heat, one mated, one carried a foal. One bore it, one
nursed it, one weaned it, and that was that. No endless two-legged follies.

But then, humans were cursed, were they not? Never fully
weaned and always in heat.

Elian laughed unwillingly. “Straight to the mark, as always.
And when you add power, it’s worse than a curse. It’s pure hell.”

Ilhari snorted. Follies. A good gallop, that would cure
them.

Or obscure them. Elian settled into the saddle; the mare
sprang forward.

They ran abreast of the wind round the hill that would be
the City of the Sunborn, out upon the open plain. Ilhari bucked; Elian whooped.

This was senel-wisdom, beast-wisdom: fate and folly be
damned, cities and kings and the hope of dynasties. Whoever ruled, the earth
remained, and the wind, and the sun riding above them. Elian began to sing.

oOo

When Ilhari brought Elian back to the hilltop, the escort
was gathered in a hollow out of the wind, clearing away the last of the
daymeal. Adjan, whose skill in such things came close to wizardry, had lit a
fire; the wine which Mirain passed to Elian in his own silver traveling cup was
steaming hot and pungent with spices.

As she sipped it, Ilarios set beside her a napkinful of
bread and meat. This was an ill day for her mind-shields. She caught a
guardsman’s vision of her fortune: to be waited on by emperors, when by right,
for abandoning her post, she should have had nothing but a reprimand.

She smiled a little wryly, a little wickedly. Ziad-Ilarios
smiled back. Mirain did not see; he had turned to speak to Cuthan.

Elian’s fingers tightened around the figured surface of the
cup. Her mood was as treacherous as a wind in spring. Perhaps her courses—

She drank deep of the cooling wine. No, she could not lay
the blame on her body. She had been so since the army turned toward Han-Gilen,
and worse since she came there.

“Yes,” Mirain was saying to Cuthan, “it has begun. He knew
it would be today.”

The young lord laughed. “One would think he was the one who
was birthing the child.”

“I think he would if he could. But Anaki knows her business.
She bears well and easily, and as serenely as she does all else.”

“A very great lady, that one.”

“Greater than most people know. She could be a queen if she
chose.”

“An empress?”

Mirain tossed back his heavy braid and laughed. “Her lord
might allow it, under duress. But she never would.”

Carefully Elian set down the empty cup. She could sense what
Mirain spoke of, that the birthing had begun.

It would not go on long, as such things went. With Anaki it
never did. By the time the riders reached the city, the banners would be
flying, green for a royal daughter.

The wine’s warmth had faded. Elian was suddenly, freezingly
cold.

oOo

As the last light of Avaryan touched the turrets of the
city, no banners flew there, either princess green or princely gold. Ah well,
thought Elian, it was early yet. And she was a fool for thinking so much of it.

What did it matter to her how long Anaki lay in childbed?
She was no part of it. She had sundered herself from her kin.

Neither prince nor princess took the nightmeal in hall.
Mirain, alight still with the dream of his city, was inclined to tarry,
spreading thick rolls of parchment on a cleared table, bending over them with
brush and stylus. When Elian withdrew, he was deep in colloquy with a small man
in blue, her father’s master builder.

“When he dreams,” said Ilarios beside her, “he dreams to the
purpose.”

She walked with him down the lamplit corridor. “Mirain has
no dreams. Only true visions. Even when he was a child, he never said
if
. He always said
when
. ”

“Superb in his confidence, that one.” The high prince
clasped his hands behind him, studying her. “Lady, are you troubled?”

Her brows knit. “Why should I be?”

He shrugged slightly.

She turned with the sharpness of temper, striding down a
side passage. After a moment’s hesitation he followed her. She did not look at
him, but she saw him too clearly, a golden presence on the edge of vision. “Why
do you always wear gold? Is it a law?”

“I thought it suited me.”

“It does,” she said.

“Should I try another color, for variety? Green, maybe?
Scarlet?”

“Black. That would be striking.”

He bowed, amused. “Black it shall be, then. An incognito.
Have you ever marked this? If a man wears always one color or fashion, he has
but to change it and no one will know him.”

“Everyone knows you.”

“Yes? I venture a wager, lady. Any stakes you name.”

She stopped. He was laughing, delighted with himself. “What
would you venture, my lord?”

“I, my lady—I would wager the topaz in my coronet, against . . .”
He paused, eyes dancing. “Against a kiss.”

Her lip curled. “Then you are a fool. If I win, I gain a
jewel worth half a princedom; if I lose, I lose nothing by it.”

“Well, two kisses, and a lock of your hair.”

“And this knife to cut it with.”

“Done, my lady.” He bowed over her hand, half courtly, half
mocking. “Shall I escort you to your chamber?”

“My thanks,” she said, “but no.”

He knew her well, now. He did not try to press her.

oOo

She watched him go, turning then, letting her feet lead
her as they pleased. Where she wished to go, she did not know. Some of the
palace ways teemed with people; she sought those less frequented, winding
through the labyrinth, yet with no fear of losing herself. No child of the
Halenani could do that, not in this place that the Red Princes had built.

At last she paused. The door before her was different from
the others, richly carved with beasts and birds. It opened easily to the touch
of her hand.

Within, all was dark, with the hollowness of disuse. She
made a witchlight in the palm of her hand and advanced slowly.

Nothing had changed. There was the bed with its green
hangings; the carpet like a flowery meadow; the table and the tall silver
mirror; and her armor on its frame like a guardsman in the gloom. Over it lay a
silken veil, flung there she could not remember when, and left so because it
suited her whimsy.

Setting the light to hover above her head, she took up the
veil. Its fineness caught and rasped on her callused fingers. She draped it,
drawing it across her cheek.

The mirror reflected a paradox: a royal squire with the head
of a maiden. She laughed, an abrupt, harsh sound.

Her gowns lay in their presses, scented with sweet herbs.
Green, gold, blue, white. No scarlet. Red gowns and red hair made an ill match.

She drew out a glow of deep green, splendid yet simple,
velvet of Asanion sewn with a shimmer of tiny firestones. Prince Orsan had had
it made for her, the princess and her ladies stitched the myriad jewels, a gift
for Elian’s birth-feast.

It fit still. She had grown no taller and certainly no
broader, though the bodice was somewhat more snug than she remembered.

Now the strangeness was reversed: boy’s shorn mane, maiden’s
ripening body. Her face hung between, more maid indeed than boy, with a drawn
and discontented look.

“Life,” she said to it, “seems not to agree with you.”

She sank down. The full skirt pooled about her.
Unconsciously she smoothed it, as a bird will preen even in a cage, gazing
beyond it at the heap of scarlet that was her livery.

Here, exactly here, she had begun it all. And here in the
end she had returned. To sneer at what she had been; to exult over her victory;
to huddle on the floor, too bleak to weep, too empty to rage.

This then was her oath’s fulfillment. A closed door and a
dark room, and no one to care where she went. No one to ask, no one to tell—

She flung herself to her feet. “Gods damn them all!”

oOo

The prince was not in his chamber nor the princess in her
bower; the bed they shared was empty, their servants meeting Elian’s fire with
carefully bland faces. Having humbled herself so far, she could not bear to be
so thwarted. “Where are they, then?” she snapped.

It was her father’s body-servant who answered, perfect in
his dignity; but when she was very small he had played at hunt-and-hide with
her. His eyes upon her were warm and brimming, radiating welcome. “Surely my
lady knows: they are with my lord Halenan.”

Who was with his lady in his own house, in a shell of silence.
No royal child of Han-Gilen could be laid open at birth to the sorceries of an
enemy; so was each born within the shield of its kinsfolk’s power. In her
preoccupation with her own troubles, she had forgotten.

She paused. Surely her errand could wait. Shame was creeping
in, and shyness, and some of her old obstinacy. The morning would be a good
time, a glad time, better and gladder than this. No one needed her now. She
would only be in the way.

Somehow she had a mantle about her and a page before her
with a lamp, and the gate-guards were letting her pass, bowing before her.

Halenan’s house under the sun was high and fair, set in the
lee of the temple, with gardens running down to the river. In this black night
it loomed like the crag of Endros, its gate shut and barred, all within as
silent to the mind as to the ear.

The guard was long in coming to her call, longer still in
opening the gate. He did not forbid her the entry, although he eyed her in what
might have been suspicion.

There were shields within shields. This that caught her on
the threshold had a dark gleam, a hint of her father.

She flared her own red-gold against it. Slowly it yielded. A
moment only; firming behind her, on guard against any threat.

Even in her cloak of fur, she was cold. But was it not
always so? She had never been outside it before, but in its heart, lending her
own power to the rest. She gathered her skirts and pressed forward.

Twice more she was halted, twice more she proclaimed her
right to pass. Then a door was open before her with a woman on guard, and
within, the birthing.

Her father sat on the ledge of a shuttered window, eyes
closed yet seeing all about him with the keenness of power. Her mother, lovely
as always, elegant as always, rested beside him with a lamp above her and a bit
of needlework in her hands. On the bed lay Anaki, Hal’s bright head bent over
her and the birthing-woman intent upon her. It was like a vision in water,
silent but for the rasp of Anaki’s breath; and in the mind, nothing.

The prince’s eyes opened. The princess turned her head.
Halenan looked up.

Elian stepped through the door and staggered. Pain—there was
always that. But this was worse—worse—

She never remembered crossing the room, but she was there,
beside the bed. Anaki’s sweet plain face was streaming wet, distorted with
pain, but she managed a smile, a word. “Sister. So glad—”

Halenan silenced her with a caress. His smile was less
successful than hers, but his voice was stronger. “Yes, little sister, we are
glad.”

“What,” Elian said. “What is—”

“Our daughter,” he answered almost lightly, “takes after
you. All contrary, and fighting us into the bargain.”

Contrary indeed. Elian, unfolding a tendril of power, found
the child head upward, feet braced. And being what she was, magebred, she fought
not only with her body but with her infant power, struggling against this force
that would compel her into the cruel light, striking at her mother in her blind
and blinded terror. Anaki had power of her own, both strong and quiet, but this
battle had sapped it; she could not both bear her body’s pain and soothe her
child.