The Lady of Han-Gilen (11 page)

He himself would, and gladly, but he had but one lord. Yet
there were some . . .

He turned, stepping softly. She laced her fingers in his
mane.

As the Mad One permitted no man but Mirain on his back,
likewise he suffered no other beast to do that service. Even so, Ianon’s king
traveled with his own stable: the nine royal mounts decreed by custom, and the
mounts and remounts of his household. These held to their own guarded lines,
watched over by grooms in scarlet kilts.

The Mad One paid no heed to the lesser beasts, the least of
them as fine as Elian’s poor lost mare. He passed them in cool disdain, seeking
out the center of the line and the King’s Nine tethered there. Two were
stallions, a black and a grey, sleek with light work and good feeding. The rest
were mares, one of each color: brown, bay, roan, grey, striped dun, and gold.

The ninth, a mare likewise, grazed apart. She had been tethered;
Elian saw a halter empty on the ground.

The Mad One loosed a high, imperious cry. The mare raised
her head, and Elian caught her breath.

Line for line, the young senel was the Mad One’s image. Save
only in color: that was the precise, fiery red-gold of Elian’s hair.

The stallion arched his neck. His daughter, this was:
Ilhari, Firemane. She was young; she was very foolish; she had never yet been
ridden. But she would carry the lady, if the lady wished it.

Ilhari flattened her ears. And what right had he to say what
she would or would not do?

The same right, he responded with a toss of his head, that
the Sunborn had to bring a useless filly to war. One who, moreover, could not
even keep her place in the line, but would slip free at every opportunity and
run wild on the grass.

Precisely like her sire.

Elian laughed, approaching the mare slowly. Indeed Ilhari
was the Mad One’s daughter. She had the same wild ruby eye, the same wicked
temper. Yet she also had his deep and well-concealed core of perfect sanity.
She watched, but she did not threaten, merely lifted a hind foot in warning.

“Princess,” asked Elian, “would you consent to carry me?”

Ilhari’s back quivered as if to cast off a fly. It would
certainly please yon great black bully. For herself . . .

Elian touched the quivering muzzle. The mare was finer than
her sire, smaller, more delicate. Elian stroked aside the long silken forelock
and smoothed the star on her forehead. “I would not bridle you nor tether you.
A saddle I would need, for battle if for naught else.”

No one had ever sat on Ilhari’s back. The Sunborn had not
allowed it. She was the free one, the king’s ninth mount, the Mad One’s
daughter.

“I am royal. The Sunborn calls me his kin. The Mad One has
consented to accept me.”

Ilhari snorted. Ah, the Mad One! He did as he pleased.

“And might not we? Come, stand, so. Yes. Yes!” Lightly Elian
swung onto her back.

For a long moment Ilhari stood rigid. Cautiously she essayed
a step. She felt strange, unbalanced.

“That passes,” said Elian.

She reared. Elian’s knees tightened; her body shifted
forward; her fingers knotted in the long mane.

Ilhari bucked and twisted. Elian only clung the tighter. The
mare reared again, wheeling as she came down, flinging herself forward, plowing
to a halt.

Elian laughed.

Ilhari snorted. Rider, nothing. This was a leech.

Elian stroked the sleek neck. “You’re not angry with me. You
only pretend to be.”

Ilhari extended a forefoot to rub an itch from her cheek. It
was not so very unpleasant. Perhaps. Once she learned the way of it.

“Well,” said Elian, “shall we begin?”

oOo

Caught up in the beginnings of subtle and intricate art,
with the Mad One both mocking and teaching beside them, neither noticed until
very late that they had gathered an audience. Elian had her first hint of it
when, glancing sidewise, she met Mirain’s white smile. He had come up unseen,
smooth as a partner in a dance, and found his way onto the stallion’s back.

She tensed. Ilhari had halted, immobile as a carven senel.
“My lord, she’s yours, I know it, but—”

“Mine,” he said, “she never has been. If her sire sees fit
to bring you two together, should I interfere?”

“But—”

“She has made her own choice.” He saluted them both with a
flourish. “The singers will have a new song tonight.”

“Singers? Song?”

Elian looked beyond him. She had completely forgotten Vadin.
He stood near the lines, foremost of a mob of watchers. Even at that distance
she could see his smile and the hand he raised in salute. All about him, a
cheer went up, high and exuberant.

She acknowledged them without conscious thought, a bow and a
smile they could see, and words they could not hear. “Sun and stars! How long
have they been there?”

“A good hour, I should think.”

Elian dismounted hastily and ran her hands over Ilhari’s
flanks. The mare was sweating lightly but otherwise unharmed, and scarcely
weary.

She danced a little, nuzzling Elian’s hair. That had been
delightful. When could they do it again?

“Tomorrow,” Elian promised her.

oOo

The king’s council was less an affair of state than a
gathering of friends. Splendid as the evening was, warm and clear, with a
sunset like a storm of fire, they sat as they pleased before his tent, eating
and drinking and conversing at first of small things.

Elian did squire’s duty for the king until the wine went
round, when he drew her down beside him. One or two kilted chieftains looked
askance. The others, Geitan’s lord conspicuous among them, took no notice.

She settled herself as comfortably as she might in her stiff
new livery, and toyed with a cup of wine, resting its coolness against her torn
cheek. The flow of speech had shifted. Hawks and hounds and women, fine mounts
and old battles, passed and were forgotten.

“We have a choice,” said a man who had once called himself a
king. He decked himself still with a circlet of gold, although he was lavish in
his homage to his conqueror. “We can strike south into the Hundred Realms. Or
we can turn west. There’s a wide land between here and Asanion, full of tribes
ripe, and rich, for conquest.”

“West, say I.” The accent was Ianyn, and proud with it.
“Then south, with whole force of the north behind us.”

Another man of Ianon spoke from across the fire. “Why not
head south now? We’re in Ashan already, or as close as makes no matter. There’s
easy pickings here by all accounts, and easier the farther you go: fat rich
southerners gone lazy with peace.”

“Not that lazy,” said one with the twang of Ebros and the
garb of a mercenary captain. “They can fight when they’re roused. They drove
back all the armies of the Nine Cities not so long ago, and kept them back.”

“Talked them back, I hear,” a northerner drawled.
“Southerners and westerners, they talk. We fight.”

oOo

Someone came up around the edge of the council. With a
small start, Elian recognized Cuthan. He flashed her a glance that took in her
place and her livery, and saluted her with a smile, even as he bent to murmur
in Mirain’s ear. She opened mind and ears to overhear.

“Nothing, sire,” Cuthan was saying. “We found evidence of a
fair-sized camp, and not an old one either, but it was completely deserted,
with nothing to show where the reivers had gone.”

“Might they have scattered?” Mirain asked.

“Maybe. If so, they went to all the dozen winds, and covered
their tracks behind them.”

“How many might there have been?”

“Hard to tell, my lord. Say, half a hundred. Maybe less, not
likely more, or they’d have left some traces.”

Mirain bowed his head. “You’ve done well. Go out again for
me, and search further. If you find even the smallest thing, see that I hear of
it.”

“Aye, my lord. The god keep you.”

Cuthan grinned at his brother, and again at Elian. With a
scout’s skill, he merged himself with the twilight and was gone.

Mirain reclined as before, propped up on his elbow, eyes
hooded as the council continued about him. Elian knew better than to think that
he had missed a word of it.

Voices raised, cutting across one another. “And I say the
north is enough! What do we want with a pack of barbarians, southern, western,
whatever they may be?”

“What do we want? Damn you, we want to rule them! What else
are barbarians good for?”

“Yes.” Mirain spoke softly, but he won sudden silence. “What
are we good for? For I was born in the south.”

“Your mother was heir of Ianon,” said the man who had spoken
last, with a touch of belligerence.

“Her mother was a princess of Asanion.” Mirain rose. He
could use his height exactly as he chose, to tower over the seated captains,
yet to make clear to them that he lacked much of the stature of Ianon. “My
lords, you speak of choices. South or west; east no one seems to think of, but
that’s only wild lands and the sea. Well then. West are our kinsmen, tribes who
serve the god as we serve him, and past these the marches of the Golden Empire.
South lie the Hundred Realms. Another empire, one might say, though none of the
people there would choose to call it that.”

“Well, so are we,” said Vadin, speaking for the first time.
“The empire of the north. And hasn’t your father given you the world to rule?”

Mirain’s smile was wry. “
Given
is hardly the word, brother, and well you know it. Offered for my winning,
rather.” His eyes flashed around them. “What next, then? South or west? Who
will choose?”

“You, of course,” said Vadin. “Who has a better right?”

“Someone may. Galan!”

She started. Mirain faced her, suddenly a stranger, fierce
and fey. “Galan, where would you have me go?”

She spoke her thought, unsoftened and unadorned. “When
you’re done with your jesting, you will do exactly as you always meant to do:
pass the border your scouts have already pierced, and march upon the south.
Halenan knew. He gave me a message for you. He called you a damned fool; he
said, ‘If he sets foot in my lands, it had better be as a friend, or god’s son
or no, I’ll have his head on my spear.’”

Anger flared within the circle. But Mirain laughed, light
and wild. “Did he say that? He can say it again when we meet. For southward
indeed I will go, with the god before me. What of you, Red Prince’s kin? Will
you ride at my right hand?”

He wanted a bold brave answer. Elian gave him one; though
not perhaps the one he had expected. “I will ride at your right hand,” she
said. “And see to it that it is indeed friendship in which you come. Or—”

“Or?” He was bright, laughing, dangerous.

She grinned back. “Or you will answer not simply to me or to
Halenan. You will answer to the Red Prince himself.”

“I think I need not fear that.”

“You should,” she said, surprising herself: because she
believed it. “But as for me, I have given you my oath. While I live I will keep
it. I will ride south with you, Mirain An-Sh’Endor.”

The son of the Sun took Ashan without a blow struck. As
his army passed the forest that was the northern march of the princedom and
entered its maze of stony valleys, riders came to him under the yellow banner
of the prince.

They laid themselves at Mirain’s feet, sued for peace, and
called him king, beseeching him to receive their lord’s homage in his own
walled city. Themselves they offered as hostages, and with them an open-faced
young fellow who, but for the distinct red-brown cast of his skin, might have
been Ianyn; he was, he said, close kin to the prince.

Not the heir, Elian took note, but close enough. Old Luian,
who might have waged a long and deadly war among his crags, had cast in his lot
with the conqueror.

And, having made his choice, he stinted nothing. His castles
lay open to the army; his people hailed them as victors; his vassals came forth
with gifts and homage. It was no invasion but a royal progress that brought
Mirain to Han-Ashan where waited the prince.

oOo

He was old. Too old, his messengers said, to venture his
bones on the mountain tracks. He received Mirain at the gate of his own hall,
leaning on the arms of two stalwart young men, the most favored of his twoscore
sons; yet he left his living props to perform the full obeisance of a vassal
before his king.

Mirain received it as he had received all else in Ashan,
with gracious words, royal mien, and the expressionless face of a god carved in
stone.

His king-face, Elian called it. His mind yielded nothing at
all to her, blank and impenetrable as the walls of Luian’s castle.

She served him at the feast in Prince Luian’s hall, squire
service much eased by the courtesy of the host; there was in fact little for
her to do but stand behind Mirain’s seat and see that the servants kept both
his cup and his plate filled. He ate little, she noticed, and only pretended to
drink.

She thought she knew why. Ashani women lived like women of
the west, veiled and set apart from men, but the highborn dined in hall at
festivals. Luian’s chief wife shared his throne, a woman of great bulk and yet
also great and imposing beauty; many of his lords and commons kept company with
wives or mistresses. Of unwedded women there were few, and those only the
highest: a tall lithe woman with a priestess’ torque who was the prince’s daughter,
and the daughters of one or two of his sons.

One of whom, child of the heir himself, had been set between
Mirain and her father. This, Elian well knew, was somewhat out of the proper
order.

Most of the royal ladies tended to favor their grandsire: Ianyn-tall,
nearly Ianyn-dark, and strikingly handsome. This one was smaller, slight and
shapely, her delicate hands and smooth brow unmarred by any taint of southern
bronze, her eyes huge, round, and darkly liquid as the eyes of a doe.