'More than you could know,' he said.
Sorweel found many things in Zsoronga's company, much more than he was willing to admit to himself, let alone anyone else. The friendship he could acknowledge, as this was a Gift prized by men and gods alike, particularly with someone as resolute and honourable as the Zeьmi Prince. His relief was something he had to admit, though it shamed him. For some perverse reason, all men found heart in learning that others shared not only their purpose, but their grief as well.
What he could not acknowledge was the relief he found in simply speaking. A true Horselord, a hero such as Niehirren Halfhand or Orsuleese the Faster, viewed speech with the high-handed distaste they reserved for bodily functions, as something men did only out of necessity. Sakarpus found its strength in its solitude, in its lack of intercourse with other babbling nations-it was not called the Lonely City for nothing-so its great men affected to do the same.
But Sorweel had found only desolation. Ever since joining the Scions, his voice had been stopped in the jar of his skull. His soul had turned inward, becoming ever more tangled in the hair of unruly thought. He had wandered about in a stupor, as if suffering the circling disease that sometimes afflicted horses, forcing them to walk around and around in senseless spirals until they collapsed. He too had been on the verge of collapse, pressed to the brink of madness by remorse and shame and self-pity-self-pity most of all.
Words had saved him, even if he could only speak around the fact of his pain. His single greatest fear leaving Zsoronga's pavilion that first night was that the Zeьmi Prince, despite all his displays and declarations to the contrary, found him as crude and as disagreeable as his name for Norsirai, 'sausages,' implied.
That he would be returned to the prison of his backward tongue.
As it turned out, Zsoronga invited him to ride with his retinue the following day, where thanks to Obotegwa's tireless voice, Sorweel found himself a part of the sometimes strange and often uproarious banter of Zsoronga's Brace, as the Zeьmi called their boonsmen. The day might have been his first good day in weeks, were it not for the sudden appearance of the Scion's commander-a campaign-grizzled Captain named Harnilias, or Old Harni as they called him. The silver-haired man simply rode into their midst, heavy with armour and airs of authority, searching and dismissing faces with a single sweeping glance. He addressed himself to Obotegwa without so much as a glance in Sorweel's direction. Even still, the young King was not at all surprised when the old Obligate turned to him and said, 'The General wants to see you… Kayыtas himself.'
Sorweel had seen the Prince-Imperial many times since his last summons, but only in glimpses through thickets of cavalrymen, his head bare and bright in the prairie sun, his blue cloak shimmering about its kinks and folds. Each time he caught himself craning his neck and peering like some Sagland churl, when he should have done no more than sneer and look away. Sorweel was always skirmishing over small points of dignity, always losing, but this was different. The sight of the General's battle-standard, which was well-nigh perpetual for some legs of the day-long march, drew his gaze like a lodestone. It was like some unnatural compulsion. He would ride and look, ride and look, and when the intervening masses parted…
There. A man who should be a man like any other.
Only that he wasn't. Anasыrimbor Kayыtas was more than powerful-more even than the son of the man who had killed King Harweel. It was as if Sorweel saw him against a greater frame, a background deeper than the endless emerald sweep of the Istyuli Plains.
As if Kayыtas were more an expression than an individual. A particle of fate.
Walking the short distance to the white-tented complex that formed the General's command, Sorweel struggled with a skin-tingling sense of exposure. A kind of anxious reluctance balled like a fist in his chest. He could hear the Prince-Imperial's declaration from their last meeting: 'I need only look at your face to see your soul, not so clearly as Father, certainly, but enough to sound the measure of you or anyone else before me. I can see the depth of your pain, Sorweel…'
This was no mean claim, the kind men make when 'measuring tongues,' as the Sakarpi said, attempting to cow others with boasts and breast-beating. It was-and Sorweel knew this without reservation-a fact. Anasыrimbor Kayыtas could see through his arrogant posture, his feeble mask of pride-through him.
How? How did one war against such men?
A kind of panic welled through his thoughts as he approached the General's Horse-and-Circumfix standard. He did not want to be known…
Least of all now, and least of all by him.
A mixed cohort of soldiers crowded about the austere tent, some wearing the armour and crimson uniform of the General's Kidruhil guard and standing at attention, others garbed in silk-green beneath corselets of the finest chain and milling at ease-Pillarians, Sorweel would later learn, the personal bodyguard of the Imperial Family. A fair-haired Kidruhil officer barked senseless words at him as he approached, then nodded at his obvious incomprehension, as if there could be only one such fool.
Within heartbeats he found himself inside the command tent. As before, the interior was spare, almost devoid of ornament, and the furnishings severe. The setting sun flared across the westward panels, illuminating everything in white-filtered light. The contrast to Prince Zsoronga's pavilion with its gloomy corners and elaborate trappings could not be more complete. 'Our glorious host,' Sorweel remembered the Zeьmi Prince saying, 'does not believe the rewards of rank have any place on the march.'
Only what was needed. Only what was necessary.
Kayыtas sat as before at the same sheaf-covered table, only this time he stared at Sorweel with mild expectation instead of reading. A beautiful woman, her flaxen hair braided and bound about her head, sat to his immediate right, dressed in a gold-and-charcoal gown: Kayыtas's sister, Sorweel realized, glimpsing the familial resemblance in her face. Kayыtas's dark-maned brother, Moлnghus, hulked several paces away, fairly bristling with weaponry. There was a taut humidity in the air, the kind found in the wake of heated arguments.
The woman stared at him with the amused boldness of an aunt finally laying eyes on a sister's vaunted child. 'Muirs kil tierana jen hыl,' she said. Though her gaze never wavered, the way she tilted her head told Sorweel she had directed her words at Moлnghus behind her.
The dark Prince-Imperial said nothing, simply glared with eyes like chips of sky. His brother Kayыtas snorted in laughter.
Sorweel felt the blood rise to his face. They were scarcely older than him, he realized, and yet he was the boy here-unquestionably so. Was it the same with Zsoronga? Did they have this impact on everyone who came before them?
'How is Porsparian treating you?' the General asked in Sakarpic.
'As well as can be expected,' Sorweel replied, though the words felt false on his lips. The Shigeki slave had tended to his modest needs with diligence-this much was true. But the old man's religious zealotry unsettled him: Porsparian was forever praying over the small mouths he moulded in the earth, continually feeding warm food to cold dirt, and forever… blessing the young King.
At least there had been no more episodes like that first night.
'Good,' Kayыtas said nodding, though for the merest sliver of a heartbeat, a shadow crossed his face. 'My father has at last chosen your tutor,' he continued in a you-must-be-wondering tone, 'a Mandate Schoolman named Thanteus Eskeles. A good man, I am told. He will accompany you throughout the remainder of the march, teach you Sheyic while you ride… I trust you will defer to his wisdom.'
'Of course,' Sorweel said, quite at a loss as to what to think. Moлnghus and the nameless woman continued staring at him, each with their own variety of contempt. Sorweel found himself looking to his feet, fuming. 'Is there anything else?' he asked with more heat than he intended.
He was a king! A king! What would his father say, seeing him like this?
General Kayыtas laughed aloud, said something in the same language spoken by the woman moments earlier. 'I'm afraid so,' he continued in effortless Sakarpic. He spared a droll glance at his sister-whose name Sorweel suddenly recalled: Serwa. Anasыrimbor Serwa.
'As you might imagine,' the fair-haired General continued, 'the line between insolence and sacrilege is a rather hazy one in an endeavour such as this. But there are those who… watch such things. Those who keep count.'
Something in his tone pried Sorweel's gaze upward. Kayыtas was leaning forward now, his elbows on his knees, so that the white silk of his robe hung in a series of luminous arcs below his throat. Behind him, his brother
