A Fall of Princes by Judith Tarr

Author:Judith Tarr [Tarr, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Judith Tarr, Fantasy, Avaryan, Epic Fantasy
ISBN: 9781611382693
Publisher: Book View Cafe
Published: 2013-07-30T07:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

Alchemy; but mageborne. Their hunters had found them, and were not minded to let them go.

Sarevan did not remember all of it. He saw the mages, the dark and the light. No doubt he gave them defiance. They gave him nothing.

Zha’dan was there. They looked closely at both; they were not pleased. Their armed companions pried hands from sides, fingers from palms.

The Kasar startled even the mages, although surely they had been looking for it. Perhaps they had not known how brightly it could burn.

They left Zha’dan to drugged dreams. They stripped Sarevan, though they did not take his torque; they scoured him without mercy.

His body howled with the pain of cleanroot and ashes on his raw skin. They finished with something that was purest agony, and then it was blessedly cool, with a scent of herbs and healing.

They drugged him again. He fought it: the bruises lingered.

Useless enough. They were too strong.

o0o

He woke at last from a black dream. He was cold and sick, and he hurt wherever a body could hurt. The earth rocked; he clutched at solidity.

Walls, closing in upon him. They rattled and shook.

Cushions narrowed the narrow prison. He was naked on them, his hair loose and tangled, and for a moment he did not understand why he was startled. It was as copper-bright as it had ever been.

He was not alone in that hot and breathless space. Someone else strove with him for what air there was. Someone as bare as himself, as pale as he was dark, coiled in apparent comfort at the utmost end of the box.

Only Hirel’s face held Sarevan to sanity. It was calm to coldness; it was entirely conscious, and sane, and princely proud. It was not the face of one whose will had broken.

Sarevan struggled up. He could sit; he could kneel, if he crouched. He could not stand.

Light came through intricate lattices, one on either side of him. It shifted, changing. They were moving.

He pressed his face to the lattice. Air brushed it, warm, heavy, but cooler and cleaner than what filled the box. Shadows passed. Trees, perhaps. Towers. Mounted men.

He dropped back. He wanted to claw the walls. He drew himself into a quivering knot and glared at Hirel.

The boy uncoiled, stretching. “You look like a panther at bay,” he observed.

Sarevan snarled at him. “You did this. You led us into this.”

Hirel’s ease shattered. “I was tricked and trapped. I was”—he choked on it—“bespelled. I knew what they were doing to me. I could not stop it. Because—because I had seen what I would be, if I did not run then, run as far and as fast as I could.”

“You may be a eunuch yet.”

“I may die for this, but this much I have been promised: I will not die unmanned.” Hirel had calmed himself again. “We are in a litter,” he said, “like ladies who must travel swiftly. You see how we are prevented from escaping.”

Sarevan did not. He found a door. He set his nails to the crack of it.

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