Hall of the Mountain King Read Online Free

his eyes to
the sun that had begotten them. “So, my lord,” he said to it, “you led me here.
Drove me, rather. What now? The king grieves, but he begins to rejoice, seeing
in me the rebirth of his daughter. Shall I heed my fates and prophecies and his
own command, and stay and be his death? Or shall I take flight while yet there
is time? For you see, my lord, I think that I could love him.”
    Perhaps he gained an answer. If so it did not comfort him.
He drew a long breath that caught sharply upon a wordless sound. A cry, a gasp
of bitter laughter.
    “Oh aye, I could have refused. Han-Gilen would have kept me.
I was no foreigner there for all my foreign face, eagle’s shadow that it was
amid all the red and brown and gold; I was the prince’s fosterling, the
priestess’ child, the holy one, venerated and protected. Protected!” That was
certainly laughter, and certainly bitter. “They were protecting me to death. At
least if I die here, I die of my own folly and naught else.”
    He turned from the sun. His eyes were full of it, but it had
no power to blind them.
    As they caught Vadin he started, as if he had forgotten the
squire’s presence. Probably, Vadin thought, he had hardly been aware of it at
all, no more than he was aware of the floor under his feet.
    Unless, of course, it rose and tripped him. His scrutiny was
both leisurely and thorough, taking in the squire as if he had been a bullock
at market. Noting with due interest the narrow beaky face with its uncertain young
beard; the long awkward body in the king’s livery; the spear grounded beside
one foot, gripped with force enough to grey the prominent knuckles.
    Mirain’s eyes glinted. In scorn, Vadin knew. His body was hardly awkward at all, and
he acted as if he knew it. He had a way of tilting his head that was both
arrogant and seeming friendly, and a lift of the brows that a courtesan should
have studied, it was so perfectly disarming. “My name is Mirain,” he said, “as
you’ve heard. What may I call you?”
    Dismissed , Vadin
wanted to snap. But training held. “Vadin, my lord. Vadin alVadin of
Asan-Geitan.”
    Mirain leaned against the casement. “Geitan? That’s in
Imehen, is it not? Your father must be alVadin too; my mother told me that
Geitan’s lord is always Vadin, just as Ianon’s king is always Raban like my
grandfather, or Mirain.”
    Like this interloper. Vadin drew himself up the last
possible fraction. “It is so, my lord.”
    “My mother also taught me to speak Ianyn. Not remarkably
well, I fear; I’ve been too long in the south. Will you be my teacher, Vadin?
I’m a disgrace as I am, with a face like mine and a Gileni princeling lisping
out of it.”
    “You’re not staying!” Vadin bit his tongue, too late. Adjan
would see him flogged for this, even if the foreigner did not.
    The foreigner did not even flinch. He took off the band of
his Journey and turned it in his hands, and sighed faintly. “Maybe I should
not. I’m an outlander here; my Journey is hardly a year old. But,” he said, and
his eyes flashed up, catching Vadin unawares, “there is still the geas that my
mother laid upon me. To tell her father of her glory and her death; to comfort
him as best I could. Those I have done. But then she commanded me to take her
place, the place her vows and her fate had compelled her to abandon, for which
she bore and trained me.”
    “She placed great trust in blood and in fate,” a new voice
said.
    Its owner came forward in the silence. A woman, tall and
very slender, robed all in grey with silver at her throat, the garb of a sacred
singer. Her face was as beautiful as her voice, and as cool, and as unreadable.
    “So she did,” said Mirain as coolly as she. “Was she not a
seer?”
    “Some would say that she was mad.”
    “As mad as her father, no doubt. As mad as I.”
    The woman stood before him. She was tall for a woman, even a
woman of Ianon; his head came just to her chin. “My lord gave you her