Dragon Prince 03 - Sunrunner's Fire (59 page)

With the first stars came the call of dragon horns. Ruval stood, brushed off his hands, and smiled. He needed no one. He was alone, but it was better so. Everyone would see that his were the greater powers, and bow to him as sorcerer and prince. It was the moment his mother had craved and been cheated of. He would kill Pol with her name on his lips.

 

 

The setting sun blooded the Desert, turning the swells and hollows of flower-strewn sand to waves in a dark crimson sea. Sioned rode with her husband behind their son, watching the light redden Pol’s hair until it was almost the same firegold as her own. She could sense other presences behind her, riding by twos—Chay and Tobin; Maarken and Hollis; Tallain and Sionell; Walvis and Feylin. Miyon rode with Barig, Arlis with Morwenna. Rialt and Edrel brought up the rear. Ruala and Riyan were missing—she was still shaken and though he fiercely wanted to witness the battle, Pol had ordered him to stay with her. Andry and the Sunrunners Oclel and Nialdan had also stayed behind. Meiglan, like Pol, rode alone. She had been the subject of a heated discussion that afternoon between Sioned and Rohan.

“Well, he can’t marry her.” They had just seen the pair from their windows, strolling the gardens.

“Has it occurred to you that he may actually love her?”

“Impossible! She’s not what he needs. Look at her, keeping him wandering around down there when he ought to be reviewing the Star Scroll—if she cared for him at all, she’d—”

“Sioned, it’s in her eyes whenever she looks at him. And he looks at her—”

“Oh, yes, I’ve seen it,” she said derisively. “He plays the big, strong, protective male with her. Goddess preserve me from imbecilic masculine fantasies! Pol doesn’t need some delicate little flower who’d be crushed by the first stiff breeze. He needs a wife and a princess. And he knows what kind of woman he ought to Choose.”

“You mean the kind of woman you think he ought to Choose.”

“Why are you defending her?” she exclaimed. “Meiglan could never comprehend even the smallest part of Pol’s work as a prince!”

“Did you ever think that perhaps he doesn’t need what I did in a wife? I may have required a living flame—but not every man needs that kind of woman.”

“You’ll never convince me he needs some shatter-shelled little fool who never opens her mouth except to whimper!”

“From what you yourself said, it seems to me she did pretty well against her father this morning.”

She scowled. “That has nothing to do with it. She’s wrong for him.”

“Pol’s not five winters old anymore, Sioned. He’s a grown man entitled to make his own decisions.”

“And his own mistakes?” Sioned swung on him furiously. “I won’t let him do something that would ruin his life!”

He replied with the deceptive mildness that would ordinarily have been warning enough. “My father would probably have considered
you
a mistake. But my life has hardly been ruined.”

“I won’t allow it, Rohan. He’s not going to marry her.”

At last his patience gave out. “If he does, you’ll damned well have to get used to it! And don’t make him choose between you,” he finished. “You might not like the result.”

Now she stared down at her gloved hands on the reins, ashamed and afraid. She knew there had been women in Pol’s life—unimportant ones, known in pleasure but never in love. They didn’t matter. But his Choice of a wife mattered desperately. She could have given him to Sionell, or someone like her. Had he Chosen a woman of strength and intelligence and ability, she could have let him go—not gladly, for no mother ever relinquishes an adored son without regret. Much as Tobin loved Hollis, she had privately confessed twinges of sadness at no longer being first in her son’s heart. Sioned assured her that this was only natural. Now she was feeling the same things. But it would not have been so bad if only he had fixed on a woman worthy of him.

Meiglan was not. She was not worthy to take Sioned’s place either as the most important woman in Pol’s life or as the next High Princess. And Sioned was terribly afraid that the girl would indeed become those things.

She fretted at her emotions as she would at a sore tooth all during the ride—until she realized that this was exactly what she should not be doing. All her thoughts and energies must be directed toward what would happen at sunset. There would be time later to dissuade Pol from a disastrous marriage.

Sioned calmed herself just in time; the dragon horns sounded at the canyon mouth, startling her. She hadn’t even noticed that they had arrived at Rivenrock. Quickly she scanned the area, looking once again for traps. There were none that she could see. She considered searching the area by the light of Sunrunner’s Fire, but Rohan had been adamant: this battle must be Pol’s from beginning to end. She accepted that. She had to.

Chay and Maarken rode forward to repeat the call of the horns. Pol sat his stallion like a statue as they passed him, barely nodded when they turned their horses smartly in unison and bowed to him. Chay came to a halt next to Rohan, and Sioned heard him murmur as he slung the horn over his shoulder, “Damned thing always leaves me winded. But, Goddess, the
sound
of it!”

He was sixty winters old and his dark hair had gone silvery, and a tight grin emphasized the lines scoring his face. But out of his eyes looked the fierce young warrior who had fought beside Prince Zehava and won his daughter, who had ridden with Rohan to defeat Roelstra’s armies, who had been Battle Commander of the Desert for thirty-eight years. Sioned felt her spirits lift slightly. Power was in Sunrunner skills and sorcery, in gold and in cunning, but most of all it was in the quality of the people who had been given to her and Rohan and Pol.

A shadow appeared high on the canyon wall: tall, lean, the shape of a man blacker than the cavern he had emerged from. In his hand a sword gleamed like steel lightning. He paused, making sure he possessed the attention of all, then made his way lithely down the slippery stones.

Pol gestured with one hand, and Edrel sprang off his horse, running forward to hold the great stallion’s reins while Pol dismounted. The others rode up to form a half-circle. Hollis’ braids shone like plaited gold; Tallain’s smooth shock of fair hair glinted like a mail battle coif; Meiglan’s curls clouded pale and misty around her white face. But the tinge of red clung to Pol’s hair, and as he approached his parents his eyes were entirely blue without a hint of green—and he looked like Rohan and Sioned both. Not like Ianthe at all.

And yet as he stood between their horses, looking up at them with calm and confidence, the clarity of innocence was gone. Replacing it were knowledge and purpose—grim things, both of them. Mourning, Sioned reached down to touch his cheek, the place where her own face wore a scar.

Rohan was the one who remembered the rules. “Insist on the traditions that will help you—and don’t allow any of the rest.” He gave Pol the wineskin strapped to his saddle. “
Dranath
.”

Pol nodded. He looked steadily up at Sioned, wanting to speak but just as obviously unable to find the right words. She summoned a smile and brushed back his hair—gesture from his boyhood, inappropriate to a man. She did it anyway. He caught her hand between his palms for a moment before pressing a kiss of loving homage to her fingertips.

He left them to speak soft words to Edrel. Then, after taking several steps toward the canyon, he paused once to look back over his shoulder. Not at Sioned or Rohan: at Meiglan.

The sudden glinting smile was for her, no one else. The look he received in reply was of such glowing translucence that it lit the sunset.
“You’ll damned well have to get used to it!”
echoed Rohan’s voice. Abruptly Sioned remembered Pol’s description of a vision in Fire and Water near the old Sunrunner keep on Dorval.
“It was just my face, Mother—I was expecting to see someone else with me, the way you saw Father. But it was only me, wearing a prince’s coronet. In a way, it was a little lonely.”
And perhaps that was how he was meant to rule, even
wanted
to rule: alone. If so, Meiglan was the perfect Choice for him. She tightened her grip on the reins as Ruval’s boots crunched through the rocky soil at the canyon mouth. Pol should not be thinking of Meiglan. He should be concentrating on the battle. Yet he loved her, and she him. Just as Miyon had planned.

Pol turned to face his half-brother with his perfect calm intact. What he had seen in Meiglan’s face had evidently reinforced his confidence. Sioned had seen it, too: innocent faith, blind trust. No striving, no blaze of a brilliant mind, no real strength. Only love. Sioned hoped it would be enough.

“Why does it happen this way?”

Rohan’s whispered bitterness startled her out of her own. His face was as composed as Pol’s, but his eyes were open wounds. “What do you mean, beloved?” She made her voice gentle, forbidding fear to scrape the words raw.

“This,” he repeated. “Always. One man battling another.”

Himself against Roelstra, Maarken against Masul, Pol against Ruval. Whole princedoms distilled down to two men. “Better one battling one than thousands battling thousands,” she answered softly. It was the High Princess speaking, not the woman who had watched husband and nephew and now son go forth to their small, private wars.

He glanced at her, murmured that she was right. But one look at his eyes and she knew she was wrong. There was another combatant here, one who could not join in the actual fight but who would nonetheless participate in every attack and counterthrust—even though the battle would be conducted with powers he did not possess. Rohan would feel it all, take it into himself as if this small war between two men was being fought inside his own flesh. His bones and his blood and his brain would become a battleground, for he was the kind of man and the kind of prince who pulled conflict into himself, who was willing to make his own being its focal point. He internalized war, as if he had swallowed fire.

Sioned ached for him, for the impulse that made him bring battle unto himself for resolution. It was the price of his vast patience. He waited for the fire to be brought to him, then absorbed its violence into himself. It was the measure of his vast strength that no war had yet broken him.

But Pol would never be that way. His battles would rage externally, treated as invading enemies who might storm his citadel of self but would never batter him down. He would not swallow the fire; he would
become
fire.

Shadows darkened the canyon and the first stars appeared in a deep blue sky. Pol walked forward, the colors of him so strong they were almost an aura around him.
Aleva,
the Star Scroll called it; the circle of fire proclaiming power.

But the same shone around Ruval’s dark head. Amethyst and ruby and dark sultry garnet, they were opaque colors, lightless though not lifeless. As surely as Pol’s bright pale colors accented by emerald shimmered just on the edge of her Sunrunner’s vision, so did Ruval’s darkness swirl in subtle patterns of force. Sioned reached one hand instinctively to her husband, felt his firm grip, and silently pleaded that he would not let go until it was over.

Pol had not seen the sunset scarlet of the Desert as Sioned had. Instead of blood, he was reminded of fire. In his imagination it rippled across the dunes, making the flowers and tall dry grasses separate small torches. When the sunlight vanished over the Vere Hills to the west, the flames did not die out; they only paled on their leap into the sky. The stars ignited one by one—the first ones far away in the near-blackness over the Long Sand—then spread like wildfire. Much as he loved the verdant valley of Dragon’s Rest, he sometimes hungered for this desolate sweep of sand and sky, this land his ancestors had fought for and kept. He wondered if their spirits hovered about him on the slight breeze, watching as he approached his own battle for their Desert.

Ruval strode a few more paces toward him, then stopped. He wore a flowing russet mantle, clasped loosely around his narrow hips by a belt of heavy linked gold circles. His blue eyes had picked up the blackness of his high-collared tunic. Pol sized him up quietly—not for strength or speed or skill of the body, but for the qualities of mind and power. But those things were forgotten as Ruval lifted both tanned, long-fingered hands.

He wore Sunrunner’s rings. Ten of them, set with jewels.

The blue-black eyes laughed as Pol stiffened in outrage, the mocking glint in them saying,
And who’s to deny me, princeling?

But for just an instant, there and gone so fast Pol barely knew it had happened, it was not Ruval he saw standing before him. It was Andry.

A casual flick of one finger, and flames blossomed from a boulder on Pol’s left to light the space between them. He looked into his half-brother’s eyes, searched his face for any hint of similarity between them—and thanked the Goddess that his father’s blood was so strong in him that there was no resemblance at all. He felt no call of kinship, no pull of shared origin. He wondered briefly if echoes of his own face in Ruval’s would have made this harder.