Dragon Prince 02 - The Star Scroll (32 page)

“I guess I understand. But it still seems grim sometimes.”

“Well, I suppose so. But we get so much, Pol—I’m not talking about deference or even the chance to outwit an
athri
who thinks he’s outwitted you.” Rohan smiled again. “And it’s not the jewels and fine horses and things that come of being rich. We get the chance to
do
things. Good things, things that matter and will make this a better place for our having been here.”

He crossed his ankles and stared at the toes of his boots. “If you and I were, say, a farmer and his son, we’d make sure our wheat grew tall and hearty, so we’d get the best price and feed ourselves—but we’re also feeding those who buy our grain. Of course, few farmers look at their crops and say, ‘How wonderful that I’m growing such fine grain to feed so many!’ But you see my point. All the crafts fit into the weave. So do you and I. Only what we get to do is somewhat more spectacular on the face of it.” He shrugged. “And it can hurt more, too. Sometimes you have to lead an army against someone who doesn’t see being a prince as the chance to do valuable work, but instead regards it as the chance to make others do as he pleases.”

“The way Roelstra did.”

“Yes. That’s when being a prince is a very hard thing. You have the power to order men and women into battle where many of them will die. That’s the grimness, Pol. There’s no joy in winning a war. There’s only grief, and regret that it had to be fought at all.”

“But we have to sometimes, don’t we? To get the chance to do the good things, help the people who trusted us enough to follow us and fight for us.” Frowning, Pol went on, “But we also have to work hard to make sure we’re not cheated by people we have to protect whether they’ve cheated us or not! It hardly seems fair.”

“Did I ever say it was? Pol, there are many ways of being a prince. One is to enjoy the material advantages and not worry about the responsibilities. You’ll find plenty of examples at Waes. I prefer that type, personally. They’re no threat to anything but their own treasuries. Another way is to enjoy your power to order people’s lives—not for their benefit, but for your own amusement. You’ll see several of that kind, as well. They aren’t very fond of me, because I won’t let them indulge. And then there’s the kind like me, who prefer to exercise their brains instead of their swords. Sheer laziness,” he said casually. “I don’t like going to war. It involves all sorts of inconveniences and I hate being away from my own home—”

“And Mother,” Pol added mischievously.

“That goes without saying.”

The boy lounged deliberately back in his chair, legs sprawled and arms dangling. “I think I’ll be your kind of prince,” he decided, grinning. “As long as my wife’s pretty enough!”

Whatever reply Rohan might have made other than laughter was interrupted by a discreet scratch at the door. Pol straightened up quickly as his father gave permission to enter. A young girl came in, dressed in brown homespun and carrying an empty tray.

“Just here to take away the dishes, your graces—excuse me, please, I won’t be but a moment—”

“Of course,” Rohan said, gesturing to the table where the wine pitcher rested and holding out his cup for her to take.

Pol, primed now to notice everything and draw conclusions, observed the girl closely. Wisps of black hair escaped the severely knotted braids at her nape, and she brushed them back with a remarkably well-kept hand. The dirt beneath her nails was an incongruity somehow, and set him to wondering. As she placed pitcher and cups on her tray, she met his curious gaze quite levelly. Her eyes were a peculiar shade of grayish green, their expression older than her perhaps eighteen winters. He blushed at being caught staring, and rose to stand near his father. The girl bent her knees awkwardly to them before turning to leave, but somehow the gracelessness seemed false as well, fitting her as badly as the brown homespun dress and dull green shawl with its ragged fringe. Her eyes held his again before she went out, and there was laughter in them.

“Father—”

Rohan held up a finger for silence. Pol listened, not knowing what he should be hearing, and then had it. The latch had not clicked. He thought rapidly, then said, “All that wine—which way to the nearest garderobe?”

Rohan nodded his approval and congratulations. “To the left, I think, end of the hallway.”

Pol saw no one on his way there and back. He made sure the door was firmly shut when he came back into the room, and his father grinned at him.

“Very nice,” Rohan approved. “See anybody?”

Pol shook his head. “Do you really think she wanted to listen?”

“I don’t know. It might have been carelessness, leaving the door unlatched. But I think I’ll watch Lord Morlen even more carefully. For now, though, I don’t want to watch anything but the insides of my eyelids.” He turned to the huge bed in the corner. “Do you know, I haven’t slept beside anyone but your mother in longer than I can remember. I do hope you don’t snore.”

“Snore! Mother says that sometimes you rattle the windows!”

“A vile and insulting lie, for which she will pay dearly the next time she kicks all the covers on the floor.”

Pol stripped and slid into bed, feeling a bit muddle-headed—not from his father’s revelations about Rezeld or being a prince, but from the potent wine. He was gratified that no comment had been made about his taking a cup. Several cups, actually, enough to have made the garderobe really necessary; his ploy hadn’t been entirely the inspiration it had seemed. Now, with the torches snuffed and only the soft starlight glowing through the windows, for it was one of those infrequent nights without moons, he felt as if his brain was slowly awhirl inside his skull.

After a considerable time in an unsilent darkness, he turned onto his side and fixed an accusing look on his father’s sleeping face. “You do so snore!” he whispered, and got out of bed.

No one stirred down below in the small courtyard. He peered through a broken pane of glass and mused on what else besides tapestries and candles Lord Morlen might be hiding. His father would find it, whatever it was. During childhood Pol had always looked on Rohan as the source of all knowledge and wisdom. Nothing he had seen had ever disabused him of the notion. He simply could not conceive of his making a mistake.

But Pol began to think that he himself had as he saw a single figure hurry through the courtyard, heading for the postern gate. The starlight showed him a bulky dark gown and fringed shawl—and he blinked in surprise. Why would a servant girl be out at this time of night, and leaving the manor? The obvious explanation, a lover, occurred to him. He shrugged. But then the girl abruptly stopped, swung round, and looked straight up at Pol.

A slight, biting breeze came through a broken pane. Pol drew back, his gaze fixed on the woman’s upturned starlit face. Not a girl’s face; a woman’s. Its shape was the same in arch of brows and line of the mouth. But this was the face of a mature woman of fifty winters, probably more. She was smiling, the laughter that had been in her eyes earlier finding expression in a malicious, mocking curve of lips and quirk of brows.

Then she drew the shawl up over her head and melted away, out the postern gate and into the night-dark forest. Pol shivered and turned away, deeply troubled.

“What is it?” his father asked softly, sitting up in bed, the stars glinting off his fair hair.

“Nothing.” Pol made an effort to smile. “Maybe Meath is right, and I
am
too young for that much wine.”

 

Mireva reached the brookside tree where she had left her own clothes, and shucked off those she had stolen from a drying line at Rezeld Manor. Excitement warmed her cheeks and her body; she felt nothing of the night’s chill as she redressed in her own garments.

So that was young Prince Pol, she thought. An intriguing face, just like the father’s, but with the aura of more than princely power about him. More than Sunrunner power, as well. Mireva laughed aloud as she loosed her hair from its confining braid and shook her head wildly. She had not been mistaken about the sensation of being with her own that had come at proximity to the youth. She knew it in Ianthe’s three sons, and in all others who were of
diarmadhi
blood. But whereas with Ruval, Marron, and Segev, she knew the power had come from Princess Lallante, she had no idea which of Pol’s ancestors had carried the gift. Sioned’s people were readily traced on her father’s side back to the
faradhi
invasion of the continent; no source there. Of her mother’s people before the marriage of a Sunrunner to a Prince of Kierst, nothing was known. Perhaps Pol got his doubled talents from her.

But there was Rohan as well. Again, his paternal ancestors were firmly established—but his mother Milar’s forebears, who were also Andrade’s. . . . Mireva tied her skirt around her waist, grinning. What perfect irony if the Lady of Goddess Keep herself was
diarmadhi!

Then she sobered. Whoever and wherever it had come from, this second legacy of power was a new wrinkle and possibly a dangerous one. Sunrunner alone was bad enough, but Mireva could have dealt with that. Pol’s inheritance of her own kind of power presented several alternatives.

She started the long walk back to her own dwelling, mulling over her choices. Killing Pol tonight had not been one of them; nor was drugging him or interfering in any way with his mind or body. She had only wanted a look at him, to judge what kind of man he would grow into. There was much of his father about him, not only in looks and the way he held himself but in the clear-eyed, intelligent, curious way he had looked at her. No, killing him was not what she had come for, not why she had assumed her guise of youthfulness—and then shed it, knowing he watched. To explore his face with her eyes, to intuit his
faradhi
strength, to set an uneasiness into his mind: those had been her purposes. Killing him would have to wait some years yet.

But this business of his being
diarmadhi
was a thing to give her pause, and perhaps to rethink the future. What if she let it be known and demonstrated somehow that Pol was descended from those Andrade feared so much, those the
faradh’im
had worked so hard to destroy? The other princes were nervous enough about his Sunrunner status as it was; might they object so strongly to having him trained in the arts that Rohan would have to back down on Pol’s
faradhi
education in order to save his throne? What if she threw her own support behind the boy, instead of Ianthe’s sons, and made him her pupil? That thought held a great deal of charm, but she rejected it with a shake of her head. There was too much in Pol’s face of his honorable fool of a father to make Mireva’s games of ambition and power palatable to him.

But what if she told nothing about Pol’s other gift—and taught Ruval methods the
diarmadh’im
had used to discipline, even kill, their own kind? Their greatest tragedy was that these had no effect on
faradh’im
; while fighting off the Sunrunners so valiantly, they had learned this to their final defeat. Of course, teaching the willful Ruval such potency was a calculated risk; he might use it on his brothers or even on her if she could not control him. She knew Ianthe’s sons, and trusted none of them.

Mireva slowed her strides as dawn slid over the mountains, and stopped as she watched the last stars fade before another day of blinding summer sun. Uncharacteristically indecisive, she worried the problems for some time as the air heated around her and made even her thin gown too warm. Then she shrugged. She would wait and see whether Ruval would need such methods against Pol. There were many years ahead to plan the boy’s death—and she reminded herself that Sunrunners had their own special vulnerability, one that her people did not share. Pol’s
faradhi
blood made him susceptible. It would be an interesting choice of deaths for him—through his proud Sunrunner heritage or through his unsuspected Old Blood. But for the present she had other concerns.

She had not heard from Segev since his departure for Goddess Keep. Soon she would have to reach him on starlight, find out if he was close to successful theft of the precious scrolls. Soon, too, she would have to discover what had happened to Masul, who had killed four of her strongest minions in escaping from what would have been his surest path to triumph. She had heard rumors about him for years, of course; Dasan Manor was only a mountain or two from her home. She shrugged again, irritably. If he was too stupid to grasp at the kind of power she could offer, he deserved to fail. Whether or not he was Roelstra’s son made no difference to Mireva; she only wanted to use him to find out what sort of approach would be best when it came Ruval’s turn to challenge Pol.

But this led her back to the vexing question of exactly what she ought to teach Ruval. How much she dared teach him. How far she could trust him.

Mireva trudged on through the growing daylight, cursing the necessity of having others do her work for her. At a time when she had been ready to abandon all hope of ever restoring her people to their rightful place, Lallante’s grandsons had given her renewed purpose. But still she wished that they were not also Roelstra’s get. The man had been impossible to control. She wondered suddenly if that was why Lallante had married him. Her kinswoman had always been a puling ninny, frightened of power and declaring that it was not for nothing that their people had been defeated so long ago. Roelstra, High Prince, most powerful man of his generation—until Rohan had come along—had provided Lallante with a haven utterly safe from any other influences, including those of her own kind. Roelstra, who had been as ungovernable as his grandsons would be if Mireva was not very, very careful.