The Lady of Han-Gilen (7 page)

She rode with care, but none molested her. Outlaws sought
fat merchants in their caravans, where the booty might be well worth the
battle; lone riders, armed and well mounted, they let be.

Perhaps her long safety lulled her into folly; perhaps she
thought too much on her journey’s end, which was close now, close enough to
sense with the barest flicker of power. She even fancied that she had found
Mirain: a rioting golden fire, center and focus of his army.

Herself focused upon it, she rode down from the hills into a
wooded valley. The sun was setting behind a veil of cloud; the wind promised
rain before dawn. She was weary and hungry, beginning to think of a camp and a
fire and a haunch of the wildbuck that she had shot in the morning.

On the edge of thought, she took note of the silence in these
woods that should have been alive with birds and beasts. The only sound was the
soft thud of hooves on the track, the creak of leather, the jingle of the bit.
Even the wind had stilled with the sun’s sinking.

Uneasiness grew, rousing her from her half-dream. She looked
back. Already the trees had closed in upon the path. She could see no more than
a few lengths behind, a few lengths ahead.

She was not, yet, afraid. The road was clear enough even in
the gloom. Mirain’s army was no more than two days distant, perhaps less,
camped on the fells beyond the border of Ashan.

Her mare snorted and shied. She gentled the beast and
halted, stroking the bright mane, every sense alert. There was no sound at all.

Softly Elian slid from the saddle. The mare stood braced,
head high, eyes and nostrils wide. At the passing of weight from her back, she
shuddered once and was still.

Something rustled in the undergrowth. A small beast—a bird.

Another. The wood was coming alive.

Somewhere a bird called. Elian eased her sword from its
scabbard.

An insect buzzed. The mare bucked and reared. Blood stained
her haunches. A second arrow sang between her ears.

Elian wheeled. “Cowards! Cravens! Come out and fight like
men!”

They came at her call, more than she could count, figures
swathed in green and brown, with masked faces and strung bows.

The mare whirled into attack. Blades flashed through the
sharp slashing hooves; she fell kicking.

Elian hardly saw. She had her back to a tree, sword and
dagger a bright blur before her.

A shadow fell from above: a net, trapping her, drawing
tighter as she struggled. Steel pricked, her own sword, more deadly now to her
than to her enemies. She loosed her grip on it; it fell through the net. Hard
hands tore the dagger from her fingers.

Two of her captors heaved her to their shoulders. As they
began to walk, she saw her mare rigid in death, and faceless men stripping the
body of its trappings.

There was no room in her for grief. Only for rage.

Twilight turned to darkness. It began to rain, a light drizzle,
warm and not unpleasant. One of her bearers cursed it in a tongue she knew, a
dialect of northern Sarios.

“Go out, she says, lay an ambush, she says, take what comes,
she says. So what comes? One futtering boy on a futtering mare, and now this
futtering rain, and not enough futtering loot to keep a mouse happy.”

“Shut your flapping mouth,” snarled the man behind him, “or
she’ll nail it shut.”

Elian shivered, and not with the rain.
She
. Only one woman that she knew of commanded outlaws, masked men
in woodland colors. After all the warnings and all the foreseeings and all of
Elian’s own fears, the Exile had taken her.

The men mounted a slope with much hard breathing and not a
few curses. From the height of it Elian looked down into a wide clearing. Fires
flickered there in spite of the rain; men moved around them.

Most had shed their masks. She glimpsed a face or two:
Ebran, Gileni, a dark hawk-nosed northerner.

Her captors bore her through them all in silence full of
eyes, to the central and greatest fire. A shelter rose behind it, made of
stripped boughs and overlaid with oiled leather. The leather was dark, perhaps
black, perhaps deep blue or violet, the standard set in the ground before it
dark likewise, without device.

Elian tumbled to the ground, rolled about without mercy as
her bearers freed her from the net. Dizzy, all but stunned, she let them haul
her to her feet. A hand struck between her shoulders, thrusting her into the
shelter.

After the bright firelight, this was nearly total darkness,
the only light the ember-glow of a lamp. Slowly Elian’s eyes cleared. She
discerned the dim shapes of furnishings, few as they were, and simple to
starkness. And in the lone chair, a woman.

She was alone. She seemed oblivious. Thin and frail, her
hair white, pulled back from her face and knotted at her nape. Her eyes were
lowered as if to contemplate the creature nestled in her lap. It was of
cat-kind, silken-furred, purring as she stroked it.

The purring stilled. The cat’s eyes opened. Elian shivered.
They were white as silver, pupils slitted even in the dimness, fixing her with
intensity that spoke of no dim beast-mind. It knew her; and it laughed, knowing
that she knew.

“So,” her tongue said for her. “You turned to the
Mageguild.”

The Exile raised her head. She had aged little since she
slew the god’s bride; her beauty had deepened, the ravages of bitterness
smoothed, fined, transmuted. As if she had yielded. As if she had come through
cruel battle to acceptance of her suffering. “I am mageborn,” she said. Her accent
was Elian’s own.

“Mageborn,” said Elian, “and Guild-trained. I know that
robe. But why do you require a familiar? Did Mirain take more from you than
your eyes?”

“He gave more than he took,” the Exile said with something
very like serenity.

Elian looked about. Her fear had faded not at all: she was
stiff with it. But scorn was a potent weapon. She wielded it with reckless
extravagance. “What have you gained? I see a bandit queen with a demon in her
lap. She is blind; she is old; she has no name and no country. To her kin she
is as if she had never been. Even her Guild—why are you here? Did they too grow
weary of your arrogance, and drive you out of the Nine Cities?”

“I cannot fault you,” the Exile said without anger. “You are
too young to have known the truth of it.”

“I know all I need to know.”

The Exile smiled. She was not gentle—she could not be that.
But she could indulge a child’s innocence. “Do you, O Lady of Han-Gilen? You
dream that you ride in fulfillment of an oath. Yet what was that oath? What was
it truly? Was it to fight beside the priestess’ son? Or was it to be his
queen?”

Elian bit her tongue, hard. The Exile wanted her to cry out,
to deny the twisted truth. Yes, she had sworn that she would marry none but
Mirain. But not at the last. Only when she was very young, hardly more than an
infant. Never when she knew what vow she was taking.

“Wise,” said the Exile. “Most wise. Perhaps after all you
knew. In Asanion they mate brother and sister. In Han-Gilen they shrink from
it.”

Still Elian held her tongue. It was a bitter battle, and it
was no victory. The Exile knew what she struggled not to say. Knew everything;
and toyed with her, for amusement, before the headiness of the kill.

“No,” the woman said. “It need not be so. We are kin, you
and I. As you are now, so was I once: the beauty and the high heart, and the
reckless bravery. For them I fell. Had I held back, waited, seemed to submit to
my brother’s son and his northern paramour, I would have spared myself much
suffering. I could have slain not only the mother but the monster she bore.”

“Mirain is no—”

Elian bit off the rest. The Exile forbore to smile. “He is attractive
enough, they tell me. In body. It is the spirit I speak of. I am not the seer
that you will be, kinswoman, but a little of the gift is mine. I have seen what
he would make of the world. No greater danger has ever beset it.”

“He will save it. He will bring it to the worship of
Avaryan.”

“He will cast it into the Sun’s fires.” The Exile rose. Her
familiar wove about her feet, tail high, gaze never shifting from Elian’s face.
The woman held up her hands, not pleading, not precisely. Her blind eyes seemed
to look deep into Elian’s own, with such a shimmer on them as lies in the
pearlbeast’s heart.

This, Mirain had made. This, he had done, scarcely knowing
what he did.

“He is not evil,” the Exile said. “I grant him that. Perhaps
truly he believes his mother’s lies. But he is deadly dangerous. Mageborn as he
is, bred to be king, with the soul of a conqueror, he cannot do aught but what
he does. Nor in turn can I. He threatens the chains that bind the world. So I
saw before ever he was born.”

“You saw a threat to your own power.”

“That also,” the Exile admitted without shame, “and for my
sin I fell. Now I am given grace to redeem myself. I live, and I am strong. I
have conquered hate. I have learned to serve justice alone.”

“And in the name of justice you command the reivers of the
roads.”

“It is necessary.”

“Of course,” said Elian with a curl of her lip. “How else
can you buy traitors, unless you steal the wherewithal?”

“I do as I must.”

Elian stilled. That was madness, that calm fixity. It turned
on her. It seized her.

“Kinswoman,” the Exile said. “I have waited for you. I have
prayed that you would see what for so long I have seen. If my men have handled
you ill, I cry your pardon. They are men; they do not know subtlety. Come now,
sit, be at ease. Grant your sufferance at least to my words.”

Elian would not obey her. Could not. Must not. Not though
that face spoke ever more to her of her own; though that voice entreated her
ears with the accents of her own kin.

“You weave me about in lies,” she said tightly. “You think
to seduce me. You know how strong Mirain will be, if he has me to stand beside
him and fight for him and be his prophet. You dream that I can sway your
enemies, even my father. Especially my father. But much though he loves me, he
loves his realm more. He would never destroy it for my sake.”

“You would be its salvation. Think you that his intent can
be secret? He has forged alliances throughout the Hundred Realms. He toys with
Asanion, to ease its suspicions. Yet his purpose is clear to any who can see.
When the Hundred Realms are firm in his grasp, he will give them as a gift to
the conqueror.”

“If the conqueror proves worthy of them.”

“By his existence he is worthy. He was bred to rule under
your father’s hand.”

“Old lies,” said Elian, “and old spite. How can I credit a
word of it? You who were high priestess of Avaryan—you wear the robes of a
black mage. You stink of darkness.”

“It is all one,” the Exile said. “Light and dark, all one.
That is truth, kinswoman. To that, your father is blind; and with him the one
whom he wrought for empire.”

“So then must I be. I am no slave of the goddess. I will not
yield to you.”

“I did not speak of yielding. I spoke of taking arms for the
truth.” The Exile sighed as if weariness had overcome her. “Time will be your
teacher. Time, and your clear sight, which in the end you cannot deny.”

oOo

Torment, Elian could have borne. There was no ambiguity in
it. This was subtler. She had a tent to herself. She was bound, but lightly,
with a tether long enough that she could move about. Food and drink waited for
her to deign to notice them.

She refused. It would be a yielding; and she must not yield.
She crouched by the tent pole and shivered, weeping a little, child-fashion,
less for fear than for humiliation.

Something watched her.

She froze. The Exile’s familiar sat in front of her where
had been empty air, washing its forepaw with perfect and oblivious innocence.

Her eyes narrowed. The beast nibbled a claw. No stink of the
hells lay on it. It seemed but a lady’s pet, harmless, absorbed in itself. Yet
it was here, and it had not come through the sealed door.

Mageborn, she had studied little of the sorcerer’s art. She
needed neither spell nor familiar. Her power ran deeper, closer to instinct.
But her father had taught her enough, or tried to teach her, if she could but
remember.

It came to her in a flicker of vision: three magelings
before the master, and two were red Gileni and one was Ianyn-dark, and the
youngest was small enough to sit on the master’s knee as he spoke, and set her
ear against his chest, and fill her head with the drum-deep cadences of his
voice. “A familiar,” he said, speaking as much to her as to her brothers, “like
a staff or a grimoire, is a vessel of power. It need have none in itself. It
can be eyes and ears and feet, and it can guard what the mage wishes it to
guard.”

“Useful,” said Halenan. His voice, which was breaking, wavered
even on the single word; Elian was too interested to laugh at him.

“Useful,” Mirain agreed, “but cumbersome, and maybe
dangerous. What if the familiar is captured by another mage? Or killed? What
happens to its master then?”

“That depends on the depth of the bond,” answered the Red
Prince. He stroked Elian’s hair, idly. It was pleasant; she let him do it,
slitting her eyes to make the world go strange. Mirain’s face blurred into a
shadow.

“I would never so divide my power,” he said.

“You need not,” said the Red Prince. “It is born in you. But
if you were a simple man, and you had come to magic through spells and long
art, a familiar would not lessen your power: it would focus it, and nurture it,
and make it strong.”

“But I would always be vulnerable,” said Mirain.

Elian drew a slow breath. The familiar coiled bonelessly
upon itself, scouring the base of its tail.

She tugged at the thongs that bound her wrists. The creature
raised its head, turned its eyes on her. She set teeth to her tether.