I could not, in all courtesy, take my eyes off the Prince of the White Steppes, but I would have given much to see the look on Prince Elana’s face when our host gave the full name of the Storm. Tal Thannuu was known in the south as the Demon God, ever at odds with the Sun Lord, a grudge that predated the formation of this Younger World. To Sun-cultists like Initiates of the Tirumvirate, his name was almost synonymous with that of the Leviathan.
In retrospect, I should have warned her. I had not known of this tradition, and we almost never spoke the proper names of our gods. We had spent months passing by apotropaic images of the Storm Lord, with his three terrible eyes and snarling fanged maw. Never once had Elana appeared to connect that image to the lightning-crowned figure that threatened from the face of Orland Borgon’s shield, and from the shields of half the fighters in Vencar. Eventually, I had forgotten that we had never discussed it.
To Elana’s credit, though, her cough and hesitation was so brief that they could easily be attributed to the liquor we had all just downed. Certainly I would have struggled to speak at all, let alone eloquently, if I had been called upon to do so at that moment.
“O Prince of the White Steppes,” she said, standing. “We are grateful for your hospitality, and the hospitality of these archons, and of all the archons who have sheltered us as we have crossed your great Holy Empire. We came to you uninvited and unknowing, and we seek only what we sought when we accidentally crossed into your lands. We seek to descend the Great Ice Wall and return to our own nation that we might complete our quest and reclaim my throne.”
The Prince of the White Steppes nodded slowly. Elana remained standing. The moment of truth was upon us at last.
“This is the boon we anticipated,” said the prince, “and, on behalf of the Emperor, I am honored to grant it. The archons of Ghol Vidar will see you outfitted for the journey. Inladat, my own xian g`ul companion, will guide you to the border.”
“Thank you, your grace,” Elana said. I think that she was about to sit when the Prince of the White Steppes continued.
“It is the ancient and lawful custom of our Empire to remain aloof from the affairs of the mortal world,” he said. “To that end, I must impose a gaes on each of you that you will never speak or write a word of what you have seen here.”
There it was. I took a deep breath and waited. The first of my two great conflicts of loyalty had just come to a head.
“No.” Elana said the word simply, without volume or rancor.
“Why should you be exempt from this ancient law?” The Prince of the White Steppes did not raise his voice, either, but I could detect a bitter coldness to it. “Are you greater than the Dragon Bard who came before? Or all the priestesses of Illustria?”
“Yes,” said Elana, adopting her most regal tones. “I am. I am the rightful heir to the Rorgoth Throne of Vencar. You, yourself, have acknowledged me your as equal – one prince to another. To accept such a gaes, such a binding, would be to make Vencar a client state of your Holy Empire, and I would sooner die.”
“And die you may, if you refuse.”
“So be it,” said Elana. “But I argue that killing me is no more in the interests of your Empire than binding me. As I have crossed your lands, countless of your subjects have spoken to me of restoring trade between our peoples. If I am bound, or dead, I cannot propose such treaties.”
The Prince of the White Steppes glared down from us. They eyes of the archons and the priestesses bore into us from the sides.
“Yma Rinlo,” the prince said after a long moment. “Will you not speak sense to your companion? Did you not know that this was the only possible outcome of coming into our territory?”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“I know that the gaes is customary and lawful,” I said. “But I know also that it is not required by law. I know that you have not said that the Emperor demands it. So, no, your grace, I know no such thing.”
The Prince of the White Steppes hissed in displeasure, and his xian g`ul companion tensed at his feet, ready to leap into action.
“Yma Rinlo, do you forget to whom you speak?”
“Yma Rinlo left the Holy Empire as a restless youth. That hopeful djuunan priestess yet lives, but it is the jaded wizard” – I emphasized that half-misused word, trying to warn him and the priestesses that I was capable of far more than they guessed without making any overt threat – “Derrek Rowan who stands before you, now, and he has sworn to see Elana Traiana safely to her ultimate confrontation with the usurper.”
In my peripheral vision, I saw the eyes of the priestesses flicker wider. They, at least, had heard me. Was that a smile playing about the corners of the Flame priestess’s mouth? Not all those who served the Flame were as anarchist as their goddess, but I thought that one might be.
The Prince of the White Steppes stared at us all in naked disbelief. He clenched a fist and sat up straight and I believe that he was about to rescind his hospitality, or at least our permission to leave the Empire, when Khanaarre stood.
“Your grace,” she said, drawing his attention. “May I speak on our behalf?”
The prince visibly composed himself.
“Speak, Khanaarre of the llamenan,” he said, more graciously than I had anticipated.
Khanaarre stood, regal in the full and formal regalia of her order. Oh, how I wished that the Prince had any way of knowing – without our reducing ourselves to theatrical threats – the amount of sheer destructive power represented by a master of the Order of the Black Mask. I had raw power and a perverse mind, but she had been trained to fuck shit up.
“You spoke of a debt between our peoples,” she said. “Were those but hollow words? Mere political theater?”
“No,” said the prince, shaking his head slightly.
“You have already compounded that debt,” Khanaarre went on, “by failing to recognize Dano`ar the Dragon Bard as one of us, and by binding him. Would you compound it further by binding me? Would you prevent me from returning home and speaking of the fine hospitality I have known in this Holy Empire?”
And there it was. She had nailed him to the wall. The only question was, would his pride win out, or his honor?
The prince stared at her, his face hardening.
“You have presented me a bitter pill,” he said at last. “I must consider my next actions carefully.”
Khanaarre bowed, and sat.
I thought we would be dismissed, but before the prince could raise his hand, the Oracle of the Flame spoke from her seat at his right hand.
“You will consider nothing,” said the Oracle. “These children have heard your words, and they will hold you to your word. You will send them south as you have promised. You will honor the debt you have admitted to the llamenan, and you will honor this djuunan prince as the equal you have acknowledged her to be.”
“And the dragons who drove them here in the first place?”
“We have no word of dragons waiting at our border,” said Archon Rhinaloa.
The priestess of the Flame nodded agreement.
“They have diviners as good as I, and my companions. Either the passage of time has already averted the fate they wish to avoid, or they are laying in wait beyond our sight. In either case, their worries are not ours.”
The Prince of the White Steppes nodded slowly.
“So be it,” he said, ice dripping from his tone.
“So be it,” he repeated, then turned to meet my eyes. “You, then, be you Yma Rinlo or Derrek Rowan, have claimed the power of an exile. I will hold you to your word as you hold me to mine: I banish you forever from this Holy Empire.”
I should have anticipated that. I had not. I drew breath to speak, but the Prince of the White Steppes had already turned his attention back to Elana.
“Now, o prince of Vencar,” he said, “let us speak of trade…”
===
Banishment. A vanishingly rare punishment for a priestess, regardless of her crimes. But I had claimed the title of exile, even though it was clearly a linguistic compromise, and that had made me vulnerable. The weight of it settled on me slowly while the princes spoke of trade and embassies – all contingent, of course, on our victory over Aemillian.
I had been gone from the Empire for decades, but in the back of my mind I had always intended, some day, to come home. Now, for the sake Aemillian’s machinations and the promises I had made to further them, promises which were mutually exclusive except in the most technical, legalistic sense, I was banished. The journey to the Great Ice Wall would be my last view of the Holy Empire. I would never see Starview again.
Eventually, we were dismissed. The palanquin ride was quiet, a silence thick with swirling tensions.
Back at the house of Vol Mak Khan, I made it as far as our common room before I collapsed into one of the couches, too stunned and deflated to even to go back to my room and remove my heavy formal robes. Elana went immediately to the bath, clearly exhausted. Khanaarre and Rennin hovered in the commons.
“You brought us to a kingdom of demons,” Rennin said, after a long silence. His voice was icy and tight. “And you did not even tell us what our hosts were?”
I should have expected a confrontation over the revelation of the rhu xian’s relationship with Tal Thannu. I had expected it, for a moment, until the Prince of the White Steppes had pronounced my banishment and drove all other thoughts from my mind.
“The rhu xian are no more demons than dragons are,” I told him, as calmly and compassionately as I could. “Or the Children of Enhyl. They are born. They live. They die. And in the process of living, they build cities, love their friends and families, make art, and honor their gods, just as do any of the people of the Compact save that they do it for much, much, much longer.”
Rennin loomed over me, his hand on the hilt of the Blade of Xadaer.
“The Writ of the Sun teaches us that the Lord of Storms is at war with the Lord of the Sun.”
Khanaarre stood off to the side, just at the edge of my peripheral vision.
“There is an enmity there,” I acknowledged, “going back to before the first age of this world. But have we not travelled and lived among the rhu xian for months, now? Have not the overwhelming majority of them shown us nothing but the utmost courtesy? Better courtesy, in fact, than they could expect to find if our positions were reversed?”
Rennin shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Was he going to attack me? Or was he just holding the sword like that for lack of something better to do with his hands?
“Yes,” he conceded. “But we have also traveled under the protection of the archons.”
I closed my eyes. An act of trust. An act of defiance. If this conversation turned violent, at least that would make my path forward clear. Or I could be dead. But that would be simple, too.
“So we have,” I said. “And I will not pretend that there are no people in the Empire who fear and hate that which is strange and unknown. But, as you say, we have traveled under the protection of the archons. The courtesy we have been shown is far greater than the laws of hospitality strictly demand, either here or in Vencar. Have we not been showered with such gifts that Khanaarre and I have had to build new and better wizard’s chests just to contain them?”
Rennin grumbled.
“How can we trust them, though? How can we trust you?”
I sighed, dry-washing my face with my hands.
“Back in Khrigo City,” I said, “when Khanaarre and Elana were enraged that I had not told them who and what awaited us in the Lightning Plains, was it not you who understood the sincerity of my oath to keep my people’s secrets while living in the Compact?”
I wished that I could bring myself to look up, to see his face and better judge his mood. To turn and look at Khanaarre, to try to gauge her reaction to this conversation. Was it my imagination, or had she moved a step closer?
“That was before I knew that these people, these rhu xian, were the descendants of the Demon God.”
Merciful and merciless gods. Such childish drama. I looked up again, at last, and met his hard, dark eyes.
“Sir Rennin Ösh,” I said. “Consider this. If any single thing you knew about Tal Thannuu and his Children was not wrong, wouldn’t you have recognized them for what they were?”
To his credit, Rennin took the time to parse what I had just said to him. When he did, though, he stiffened and his face turned red. I smiled then, and not nicely.
“Perhaps I could or even should have tried to explain the larger truth of the rhu xian and their father god,” I went on. “But what could I have said that would have been heard?”
I was angrier about this confrontation than I had anticipated. Had I not just been banished for standing up to the Prince of the White Steppes and refusing to endorse the gaes he wished to lay upon them? Had I not just given up my home and my people for his prince and this quest?
“I promised you all that I would do everything in my power to see you through this quest as safely as I could. Despite my best efforts, we have still lost Master Veralar Tann and Lord Sir Orland Borgon. So, yes, Rennin, I withheld information from which you would only draw incorrect conclusions and based upon which you would put us all in even greater danger.”
Rennin loomed over me. His eyes were wide and his mouth a thin line. He had a white-knuckle grip on the hilt of the Blade of Xadaer, and for a moment I thought that he really would draw on me. Then he let out a shuddering breath, released the sword, and scrubbed his face with both hands.
“Damn you, wizard,” he croaked. “Why can’t anything ever be simple with you?”
I disdained to answer that rhetorical question. After a moment, Rennin turned and disappeared into the room he shared with Elana. I sighed and collapsed more completely into the couch. My mind whirled and drifted, reeling from the day’s events.
A hand on my shoulder startled me back to reality. Khanaarre.
“You should sleep,” she said softly. “Or at least get out of these robes.”
I sighed.
“Let me help you up,” she said.
I did.
One hand on my shoulder, the other on my arm, she guided me to my room.
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