A Fall of Princes

A FALL OF PRINCES

Avaryan Rising, Volume III

Judith Tarr

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition
July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61138-269-3
Copyright © 1988 Judith Tarr

To

The Yale Department of Medieval Studies

The Orange Street Gang in all its permutations

And, of course, all the Faithful

But for whom, et cetera.

Asuchirel inZiad Uverias

The hounds had veered away westward. Their baying swelled
and faded as the wind shifted; the huntsman’s horn sounded, faint and deadly.

Hirel flattened himself in his nest of spicefern. His nose
was full of the sharp potent scent. His body was on fire. His head was light
with running and with terror and with the last of the cursed drug with which
they had caught him.

Caught him but not held him. And they were gone. Bless that
wildbuck for bolting across his path. Bless his brothers’ folly for hunting him
with half-trained pups.

He crawled from the fernbrake, dragging a body that had
turned rebel. Damned body. It was all over blood. Thorns. Fangs—one hound had
caught him, the one set on guard by his prison.

It was dead. He hurt. Some fool of a child was crying,
softly and very near, but this was wild country, border country, and he was
alone. It was growing dark.

o0o

The dark lowered and spread wide, shifted and changed,
took away pain and brought it back edged with sickness.

The sky was full of stars. Branches rimmed it; he had not
seen them before. The air carried a tang of fire.

Hirel blinked, frowned. And burst upward in a flood of memory,
a torrent of panic terror.

Those were not cords that bound him, but bandages wrapped
firmly where he hurt most. But for them he was naked; even the rag of his
underrobe was gone, all else left behind in the elegant cell in which he had
learned what betrayal was.

He dropped in an agony of modesty, coiling around his
center, shaking forward the royal mane—but that was gone, his head scraped bare
as a slave’s, worst of all shames even under sheltering arms.

The fire snapped a branch in two. The shadow by it was
silent. Hirel’s pride battered him until he raised his eyes.

The shadow was a man. Barbarian, Hirel judged him at once
and utterly. Even sitting on his heels he was tall, trousered like a southerner
but bare above like a wild tribesman from the north, and that black- velvet
skin was of the north, and that haughty eagle’s face, and the beard left free
to grow. But he held to a strange fashion: beard and long braided hair were
dyed as bright as the copper all his kind were so fond of. Or—

Or he was born to it. His brows were the same, and his
lashes; the fire caught glints of it on arms and breast and belly as he rose.

He was very tall. For all that Hirel’s will could do, his
body cowered, making itself as small as it might.

The barbarian lifted something from the ground and
approached. His braid had fallen over his shoulder. It ended below his waist.
His throat was circled with gold, a torque as thick as two men’s fingers, and a
white band bound his brows.

Priest. Priest of the demon called Avaryan and worshipped as
the Sun; initiate of the superstition that had overwhelmed the east of the
world. He knelt by Hirel, his face like something carved in stone, and he
dared. He touched Hirel.

Hirel flung himself against those blasphemous hands,
screaming he cared not what, striking, kicking, clawing with nails which his
betrayers had not troubled to rob him of. All his fear and all his grief and
all his outrage gathered and battled and hated this stranger who was not even
of the empire. Who had found him and tended him and presumed to lay unhallowed
hands on him.

Who held him easily and let him flail, only evading the
strokes of his nails.

He stopped all at once. His breath ached in his throat; he
felt cold and empty. The priest was cool, unruffled, breathing without strain.

“Let me go,” Hirel said.

The priest obeyed. He stooped, took up what he had held
before Hirel sprang on him. It was a coat, clean but not fresh, tainted with
the touch of a lowborn body. But it was a covering.

Hirel let the barbarian clothe him in it. The man moved
lightly, careful not to brush flesh with flesh. A quick learner, that one. But
his grip was still a bitter memory.

Hirel sat by the fire. He was coming to himself. “A hood,”
he said. “Fetch one.”

A bright brow went up. It was hard to tell in firelight, but
perhaps the priest’s lips quirked. “Will a cap satisfy your highness?” The
accent was appalling but the words comprehensible, the voice as dark as the
face, rich and warm.

“A cap will do,” Hirel answered him, choosing to be gracious.

Covered at last, Hirel could sit straight and eat what the
priest gave him. Coarse food and common, bread and cheese and fruit, with
nothing to wash it down but water from a flask, but Hirel’s hunger was far
beyond criticism. They had fed him in prison, but then they had purged him; he
ached with emptiness.

The priest watched him. He was used to that, but the past
days had left scars that throbbed under those calm dark eyes. Bold eyes in
truth, not lowering before his own, touched with something very like amusement.

They refused to be stared down. Hirel’s own slid aside
first, and he told himself that he was weary of this foolishness. “What are you
called?” he demanded.

“Sarevan.” Why was the barbarian so damnably amused? “And
you?”

Hirel’s head came up in the overlarge cap; he drew himself
erect in despite of his griping belly. “Asuchirel inZiad Uverias, High Prince
of Asanion and heir to the Golden Throne.” He said it with perfect hauteur, and
yet he was painfully aware, all at once, of his smallness beside this long
lanky outlander, and the lightness of his unbroken voice, and the immensity of
the world around their little clearing with its flicker of fire.

The priest shifted minutely, drawing Hirel’s eyes. Both of
his brows were up now, but not with surprise, and certainly not with awe. “So
then, Asuchirel inZiad Uverias, High Prince of Asanion, what brings you to this
backward province?”

“
You
should not be
here,” Hirel shot back. “Your kind are not welcome in the empire.”

“Not,” said Sarevan, “in this empire. You are somewhat
across the border. Did you not know?”

Hirel began to tremble. No wonder the hounds had turned
away. And he—he had told this man his name, in this man’s own country, where
the son of the Emperor of Asanion was a hostage beyond price.

“Kill me now,” he said. “Kill me quickly. My brothers will
reward you, if you have the courage to approach them. Kill me and have done.”

“I think not,” the barbarian said.

Hirel bolted.

A long arm shot out. Once more a lowborn hand closed about
him. It was very strong.

Hirel sank his teeth into it. A swift blow jarred him loose
and all but stunned him.

“You,” said Sarevan, “are a lion’s cub indeed. Sit down,
cubling, and calm your fears. I’m not minded to kill you, and I don’t fancy
holding you for ransom.”

Hirel spat at him.

Sarevan laughed, light and free and beautifully deep. But he
did not let Hirel go.

“You defile me,” gritted Hirel. “Your hands are a
profanation.”

“Truly?” Sarevan considered the one that imprisoned Hirel’s
wrist. “I know it’s not obvious, but I’m quite clean.”

“I am the high prince!”

“So you are.” No, there was no awe in that cursed face. “And
it seems that your brothers would contest your title. Fine fierce children they
must be.”

“They,” said Hirel icily, “are the bastards of my father’s
youth. I am his legitimate son. I was lured into the marches on a pretext of
good hunting and fine singing and perhaps a new concubine.”

The black eyes widened slightly; Hirel disdained to take
notice. “And I was to speak with a weapons master in Pri’nai and a philosopher
in Karghaz, and show the easterners my face. But my brothers—”

He faltered. This was pain. It must not be. It should be
anger. “My dearest and most loyal brothers had found themselves a better game.
They drugged my wine at the welcoming feast in Pri’nai, corrupted my taster and
so captured me. I escaped. I took a senel, but it fell in the rough country and
broke its neck. I ran. I did not know that I had run so far.”

“Yes.” Sarevan released him at last. “You are under your
father’s rule no longer. The Sunborn is emperor here.”

“That bandit. What is he to me?”

Hirel stopped. So one always said in Asanion. But this was
not the Golden Empire.

The Sun-priest showed no sign of anger. He only said, “Have
a care whom you mock here, cubling.”

“I will do as I please,” said Hirel haughtily.

“Was it doing as you please that brought you to the west of
Karmanlios in such unroyal state?” Sarevan did not wait for an answer. “Come,
cubling. The night is speeding, and you should sleep.”

To his own amazement, Hirel lay down as and where he was
told, wrapped in a blanket with only his arm for a pillow. The ground was
brutally hard, the blanket thin and rough, the air growing cold with the
fickleness of spring. Hirel lay and cursed this insolent oaf he had fallen
afoul of, and beat all of his clamoring pains into submission, and slid into
sleep as into deep water.

o0o

“Well, cubling, what shall we do with you?”

Hirel could barely move, and he had no wish to. He had not
known how sorely he was hurt, in how many places. But Sarevan had waked him
indecently early, droning hymns as if the sun could not rise of itself but must
be coaxed and caterwauled over the horizon, washing noisily and immodestly
afterward in the stream that skirted the edge of the clearing, and squatting
naked to revive the fire.

With the newborn sun on him he looked as if he had bathed in
dust of copper. Even the down of his flanks had that improbable, metallic
sheen.

He stood over Hirel, shameless as an animal. “What shall we
do with you?” he repeated.

Hirel averted his eyes from that proud and careless body,
and tried not to think of his own that was still so much a child’s. “You may
leave me. I do not require your service.”

“No?” The creature sat cross-legged, shaking his hair out of
its sodden braid, attacking it with a comb he had produced from somewhere. He
kept his eyes on Hirel. “What will you do, High Prince of Asanion? Walk back to
your brothers? Stay here and live on berries and water? Seek out the nearest
village? Which, I bid you consider, is a day’s hard walk through wood and
field, and where people are somewhat less accommodating than I. Even if they
would credit your claim to your title, they have no reason to love your kind.
Golden demonspawn they call you, and yellow-eyed tyrants, and scourges of free
folk. At the very least they would stone you. More likely they would take you
prisoner and see that you died as slowly as ever your enemies could wish.”

“They would not dare.”

“Cubling.” It was a velvet purr. “You are but the child of a
thousand years of emperors. He who rules here is the son of a very god. And he
can be seen unmasked even on his throne, and any peasant’s child may touch him
if she chooses, and he is not defiled. On the contrary. He is the more holy for
that his people love him.”

“He is an upstart adventurer with a mouthful of lies.”

Sarevan laughed, not warmly this time, but clear and cold.
His long fingers began the weaving of his braid, flying in and out through the
fiery mane. “Cubling, you set a low price on your life. How will you be losing
it, then? Back in Asanion or ahead in Keruvarion?”

Hirel's defiance flared and died. Hells take the man, he had
a clear eye. One very young prince alone and naked and shaven like a slave—if
he could win back to Kundri’j Asan he might have hope, if his father would have
him, if the court did not laugh him to his death.