The Lady of Han-Gilen (36 page)

Gently Elian loosed his braid, combing it with careful
fingers, smoothing the heavy mass of it on the coverlet. She never had given
him his answer.

As if he needed it. Born wanton she might be, but as a
harlot she had this fatal flaw: all her desire turned upon one man. It had been
so since she was too young even to know what desire was.

A small smile touched her mouth. Now that she was an ancient
crone, she was lost completely.

Such a man to be lost for: an utter lunatic who fancied
himself the son of a god. His golden hand lay between her breasts, half curled
about one, burning even as he slept: a pain he had never known the lack of.

He insisted that she eased it. Maybe; maybe he needed to
think so.

Those two, the pain and its lessening in her presence,
helped to set a limit on his pride. He could not exult inordinately in his
lineage when it tormented him lifelong with a living fire.

Nor could he wield his power in a tyrant’s peace, not with a
sun blazing in his sensitive palm. Sword or scepter he could grip, but only if
he wielded them with care. And for what easing the god would grant, he must
rely on a snippet of a child-woman, a maddening tangle of love and resistance
and red-headed temper.

Except that the love seemed to have swallowed the
resistance. The temper, unfortunately, showed no signs of abating. She could
still wish that she had never heard of Mirain An-Sh’Endor, while her heart
threatened to burst and her body to melt with love of him.

She traced the whorl of his ear, pausing where it was
pierced for a ring, an infinitesimal interruption in the curve of it. He
murmured something and smiled, and tried to burrow into her side. She buried
her face in his thick curling hair.

Avaryan, she said in her mind, shaping each word in
red-golden fire, if truly you came to this man’s mother, if you played any part
at all in his begetting, listen to me. He needs you now, and he needs you tomorrow.
Stand with him. Make him strong. Help me to make him live.

There was no answer. No voice; no sudden light.

And yet, having prayed, she felt the better for it. Perhaps
even, after all, she might sleep; and no dreams would beset her.

oOo

After all her wakefulness, it was Elian who woke late in a
tangle of bedclothes. She struggled out of them to find herself alone, the
chamber empty.

For a moment her heart stopped. No. Oh, no. He could not
have.

Voices brought her to her feet. Snatching what was
nearest—Mirain’s riding cloak, voluminous and almost dry—she opened the door.

They were all in the guardroom, all but Cuthan who was gone,
all fully clad, most looking as if they had not slept. A grey pallor sat on
their faces; their eyes were sunken, their mouths set tight.

Elian did not need to ask. The army had not come. They must
face this alone. Win alone, or die alone.

The king stood among them. He had bathed; he was
fresh-shaven; he wore a kilt and nothing else, and his hair, drying, seemed
thicker and more unruly than ever. As a guardswoman struggled with its tangles,
he directed one of his own men in the unrolling of an oblong bundle.

Deftly Elian took Igani’s place. The bundle, she saw, was a
length of leather as pale as fine ivory, tanned to the softness of silk. In the
center of it someone had cut a hole.

Her hands faltered. “So,” she said as steadily as she could,
“you’ll do it the old way.”

His thought caressed her although his body held still. “The
oldest way of all. The shield-circle; the ordered combat.”

The first order of which was that the combatants bear about
them no binding. No knot or fastening, no seam, no woven garment, only the long
tunic of leather, unbelted and unsewn, its sides open to the wind. There could
be no aids to enchantment hidden in one’s clothing, no spells braided into
one’s hair. The victory must come through the purity of power.

Elian laughed shakily. “If that’s so, my love, you’d better
crop your head as close as a desert rover’s, or you’ll be called down for all
your tangles.”

“I’ll chance it,” he said, light and unconcerned. “’Varyan!
I’m hungry. I’ve been wallowing in luxury too long; I’ve lost the knack of
fasting.”

“Think about all you’ll feast on when it’s over.” Igani
lifted the long strange garment. Mirain shed his kilt, pausing a moment,
drawing a deep breath. She slipped the length of leather over his head.

It settled smoothly, its paleness catching the dark sheen of
his skin, its weight falling straight before and behind. For a moment Elian
could not breathe. He was going to fight. He was going to die.

She remembered her mother’s words, the voice low and sweet
in her mind.
A prophecy can be its own
fulfillment
. It need not be. It must not be.

They were too somber, all of them; subdued, afraid. Even
Mirain. Someone had brought the torque of his priesthood from beside his bed;
he held it for a stretching moment, grey-knuckled, eyes too wide and too fixed.

She snatched it from him and grinned her whitest, fiercest
grin. “Yes, Sunborn, put it on. Show them who your master is.”

“I am not—” He shut his mouth with a snap. “Put it on me,
then.”

Slowly she did as he bade. It was pure gold, soft and leaden
heavy. Yet he wore it always, putting it off only to sleep, and sometimes not
even then; had worn it so since he was a very young man.

Even more than Asanion’s golden mask or the coronet of a
prince in the Hundred Realms, it marked his kingship. The splendor, and the
crushing burden.

And my service to the god. He kissed her hands. Every priest
of Avaryan bears this same burden. No lighter and no heavier.

“Except that they are plain servants of Avaryan, and you are
the king.”

“Is there a difference?”

She looked at him. He was smiling faintly. Strong again,
sure again, whatever terrors stirred in the hidden heart of him. “You make me
strong,” he said softly.

They were nearly of a height. They could stand eye to eye
with a palm’s width between them, bend forward in the same instant, touch.

She clung with sudden desperate strength, yet no stronger
than he, as if he could crush her body into his own, make it a part of him.
They said nothing with mind or voice. There was too much to say, and too
little.

Elian drew back. Conscious of herself again; aware with a
rush of heat that she had lost her covering.

No one stared; no one ventured it. With what dignity she
could muster, she gathered up the fallen cloak and retreated to the bath.

oOo

It was the Lord of Garin who came for the king. And only
the king. Elian, scoured clean, dressed again in coat and trousers and boots,
was briefly speechless.

The Wolf spoke to Mirain quietly, reasonably. “You are to
come alone, sire. I swear on my honor that there shall be no treachery.”

Elian’s voice broke free, lashing him. “That is not the law!
Each combatant is allowed one witness.”

He looked her up and down without haste and without
judgment. “So it shall be. I am to attend him.”

“You!”

Mirain stepped between them. “The law also allows a choice
of witnesses. I choose the Lady Elian. And,” he added, “the Lord Garin.”

The lord paused. Clearly he had not been so instructed. But
he smiled and bowed. “As your majesty wishes. Will it please you to follow me?”

Mirain walked lightly beside the Lord of Garin. If it
wrenched at him to leave his escort behind, he did not show it.

They watched him go with eyes like wounds, open and
bleeding. Elian tried to meet them, to heal them a little, to smile and breathe
forth confidence. She doubted they even saw her.

oOo

In the dark before dawn the castle was very still, grimmer
and greyer than ever, and bone-cold. Elian shivered in her riding gear. Mirain,
barefoot and nearly naked, might have been swathed in furs. But he was never
cold; he had the Sun’s fire in his veins.

Lord Garin led them through a maze of passages. Down out of
the tower, through the keep, up and round by twisting torchlit ways.

Even where the torches failed, he did not falter. Perhaps,
like the Halenani or like the wolf of his name, he could see in the dark.

Mirain’s hand found Elian’s. His grasp was light, fire-warm,
and perfectly steady. She could feel the strength in it, quiescent now,
awaiting its time.

The passage narrowed and spiraled upward. Elian fell behind
Mirain, but his hand kept its grip.

Even for her eyes the way was dark, Mirain’s tunic a pale
blur ahead. The air was cold in her face like the touch of the dead, and dank,
heavy with age and darkness.

Mirain stopped so abruptly that she collided with him. Metal
grated harshly on stone. Hinges protested. A gate swung open with rusted
slowness.

Dawn was still unbroken, the night at its deepest. Yet Elian
blinked, half blinded. All the clouds of storm had blown away. Silver
Brightmoon, just past the full, hung low in the west. The great half-orb of
Greatmoon rode high above, trailing pallid fire; about it flamed the stars in
all their myriads.

Old tales gave Greatmoon to the powers of the dark and
Brightmoon to those of the light, calling the huge blue-pale moon the Throne of
Uveryen, its god her lover; and singing of the love of the silver goddess for
her lord the sun. Some people of late had begun a new naming, and called the
brighter moon Sanelin, and set the priestess there, sharing the heavens with
the father of her son.

Elian dragged her eyes and her mind from the vault of the
sky. There was myth. Here was living legend.

She stood on sere grass in a deep bowl rimmed by mountain
walls. In its center glimmered a lake, a pool of ice under Greatmoon, and in
the lake a dark curve of islet, a tall shape of shadow: a standing stone.

Lord Garin led them round the lake. Its water lapped upon
the shore, infinitely lonely, infinitely sad.

Shadow rose on the far side. As Elian drew closer it grew
clearer, taking shape in the moonlight. A building, it had been once; ruined
now, no more than a ring of roofless pillars, some tall and straight, some
half-fallen like broken teeth. Framed within them lay a pavement of stone.

There waited the Exile. To the eye she was a darkness on
darkness, one of three cloaked and hooded shapes. To the power she stood forth
in utter and terrible clarity.

As Mirain set his foot on the level stones, his power
stirred and woke. A shimmer of pale light ran upward from sole to crown, and
outward through the broken pavement.

Elian’s gasp was loud in the silence. The stone seemed not
stone at all, but sky in the waking dawn, silver flushing to rose and palest
gold.

Before the light reached the Exile, it stopped, sharp and
clean as if cleft with a knife. That beyond seemed darker still for the
brightness so close, a darkness as limitless as the void between stars.

Mirain smiled in the strange light. “Dawnstone,” he said
with a touch of wonder, a touch of delight. “My keep in Ianon is made of it.
And this—would it perhaps be nightstone, that holds the night as dawnstone
keeps the glow of morning? I have heard of it in old tales, but I have never
seen it.”

“It is nightstone,” the Exile answered him. “And this is a
place older than legend, fane of a people whose works are all vanished from the
earth: older than Han-Ianon, older than the Cavern of the God, older even than
gods, though not those we serve. Can you perceive the power in these stones?”

It throbbed in Elian’s brain, immense, slumbering, yet
stirring uneasily in the presence of these small intruders.

“A place of power,” said Mirain. “I have never come upon one
so mighty.”

“Nor shall you or any man, unless you come to the Heart of
the World where lie the chains that bind the gods. There are no chains here.
Only power. It will not aid us in our battle; it will seek to hinder, and even
to destroy, if in disturbing it one of us lacks the strength to soothe it. Do
you think still to challenge me, priestess’ child?”

“How not?” He advanced a step. “Shall we begin?”

Mirain spoke freely, even eagerly, welcoming whatever must
come. His enemy stood tall and let fall her cloak. Beneath it she was clad as
was he, white hair falling long and free over the shoulders of a tunic as dark
as his was pale.

Her familiar was gone: fled, hidden, subsumed into her
power. For she was strong. She had never pretended to weakness, but her
strength now was greater than Elian remembered, filling her, mantling her in a
shimmer of mingled darkness and light.

The witnesses faded back, retreating from the pillared
circle. Well before the shadows took them, Elian had forgotten their existence.
She too retreated, but only to the joining of earth and stone.

There lay the remnant of a column half-buried in earth and
grass and the dead brittleness of a vine. She sank down on it, her toes almost
touching the edge of the dawnstone.

Its gleam caught at her eyes; its power sparked her own. In
its pale depths she saw the circle shrunken to the breadth of her hand, and two
figures upon it, one erect and triumphant, the other fallen utterly. The image
shifted, blurred; now white hair spread across the stone, now raven-dark.

She tore her eyes away. The greater circle opened wide
before her, dawn and deepest night. Over it the moons wheeled. Brightmoon sank
beneath the mountain wall; Greatmoon thinned and paled.

The sky’s darkness greyed. Avaryan was coming.

Power gathered. The air hummed and sang. Mage in white, mage
in black, both spread their arms.

Mirain’s voice rang on the first note of binding. The
nameless one took up the second, a high eerie keening. The two notes quivered,
distinct and dissonant; eased; softened, drawing together, meeting, merging
into a terrible harmony.