Arrows of the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

to cast a net.
    The seas were calm. Nothing swam there but what belonged in
that place. Mages about their workings. Lesser folk dreaming, asleep or awake.
Spirits of air and fire at their incalculable pursuits. No threat. Nothing to
fathom that instant of horror.
    She pulled in the net. Her heart had ceased its hammering.
Her knees were steady again. The sweat dried on her body. She went down on her
face before the Gate, and began the prayer of the sun’s descent.
    o0o
    Estarion came to his chambers much earlier than Vanyi had
expected. It would have been like him to leave the lords’ feast and go down
into the city and pass the night with his people, drinking their beer and
singing their songs and showing them why they loved him.
    He never calculated that, or thought of it as politic. He
liked them, that was all.
    He had been in the city: the beer-scent came in before him.
He was in plain city-walking clothes, his court robes long since laid away. She
heard him calling goodnights to the battalion of his friends, and them chaffing
him for turning lily maid while the night was young.
    “ Maid !” someone
cried. “And what’s he got inside, then? Maybe he’s got the right of it. Who’s
for a fine warm woman to while the night away?”
    They roared at that. Estarion laughed and shut the door on
them.
    Vanyi looked up from the book she had been staring at for
longer than she could reckon. Estarion was a shadow beyond the lamp’s glimmer.
She mustered a smile for him.
    He moved into the light. There was no laughter in him, no
sign that she could see of the face he had shown his friends. This was somber,
almost grim.
    “Troubles?” she asked him.
    “No,” he said. He gave himself the lie: snatched the rings
from his ears, flung them at the wall. They clattered to the floor.
    Carefully, precisely, she rolled the book shut and fastened
the cords. “Disasters, then,” she said.
    He dropped his coat more gently than he had the rings. “When
Brightmoon is full, I’m going to Asanion.”
    She stared at him.
    “Surely someone told you?”
    His tone was nasty. She ignored it. “I came direct from the
temple. Everyone else was in the hall or elsewhere.”
    His long mouth twisted. She wanted to kiss it. He said, “I
looked for you after your Gate-duty should have been over. I thought you would
come to my banquet.”
    “I wanted to.” She shivered. It was cold in the room, she
told herself. She had dismissed the servants when they came to light the
brazier, then forgotten it and them. “I was more tired than I thought. I slept
a little.” And waked to nightmares, and sought refuge in a book of which she
remembered nothing, not even its name. “By the time I could have come, you were
gone into the city.”
    He pulled his heavy plait over his shoulder and tugged at
the bindings. They were stubborn. His brows knit.
    She worked her fingers under his. They were stiff, quivering
with tension. He let his hands fall, let her unwind the cords, loosen the
braid. His hair was his great beauty, thick and curling yet soft and fine as
silk, so black it gleamed blue. She filled her hands with it.
    His body was taut. She kissed the point of his shoulder. He
barely eased. “Why?” she asked. “Why exactly now?”
    He told her all of it, words honed to a bitter edge. The
Asanian, the test—he made little of it. Too little, maybe, but she was not
ready to solve that riddle tonight. But his mother’s command—
    “I’ll go west,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’ll face my
demons. I’m no coward. But I won’t—I won’t —be
stud bull to a herd of yellow women.”
    “It need only be one,” Vanyi said. Her voice was steady. She
was proud of that. “So. It’s a long way to Kundri’j Asan. Long cycles of the
moons. A year, maybe, at the pace of a royal progress.”
    “A year and three days?” His smile was thin. He kept count,
too. “Not likely, my love. They’ll have me over the border as fast as the court
can