She was surprised the comparison pleased her.
She addressed herself to Yangchen, bowing her head a little as in respect. If Samarkar was a once-princess, Yangchen was Empress-in-Waiting, and though Samarkar was older, their ranks were not so dissimilar than that. And of course now Samarkar was also a lowly newly elevated wizard, and if Yangchen could force her into that role, all hope of wresting some advantage from this situation would be lost.
“Honored Sister,” she said. “Do you know why it is that your elder husband wished to speak with me? And so urgently that he came when I still lay in my sickbed after initiation?”
Yangchen looked down, too, seemingly consumed by the process of shifting her son the prince to the other breast. She might have demanded wet nurses—Samarkar had been raised by a string of them—but a show of devotion to a firstborn son was considered womanly. Yangchen would never lose a chance to stroke the lute of her own regard.
And, Samarkar thought more charitably, nursing would likely keep her from conceiving again soon.
“I am sure I don’t know, Honored Sister,” Yangchen murmured. “But I am confident he will see you, if only you wait a while. As I am certain you know he is exceedingly busy.”
Samarkar knew it very well. She’d been her father’s only heir for seven long years before he or one of his brothers managed to get Songtsan on a different mother, and she remembered the endless preparations, the tutorials, the history and language and tactical lessons—in case he should not get a son. She smiled and picked her tea up again, cradling the bowl in her palm. “Then there is no remedy but patience,” she said agreeably. “Were you reading?”
Gently, Yangchen lifted the rustling scroll from her lap. The two halves of the case were blue-enameled and weighted, so despite the baby, she could hold it open easily with a section of the case in one hand while the other rested in her lap. She said, “I was just about to read of the Carrion-King.”
Of course you were, Samarkar thought patiently.
* * *
This is the tale Yangchen told:
There was a prince among the horse peoples in the west who learned sorcery at his mother’s knee, for his mother had been stolen by her husband from a clan even farther west, where the people have blue eyes like devils and white skin like ghosts. And there in the outermost and foreign west, their magic is not like the good, homey magic of our wizards, who bring rain with black-powder rockets and knit poisoned wounds with silk thread and the soft blue-gray mold that grows in soy curd left too long.
The prince’s mother did not teach him wizardry. Instead, what he learned at her knee was sorcery, the reddest sort.
He learned to cast the evil eye. He learned to curse with pennies and with oats. He learned spells to turn an enemy’s ankle; to throw him from a horse; to make the wombs of his women and his cattle go dry. He learned spells of drought and downpour, spells of fire and flood. He grew into his manhood, and as well as a prince, he became a sorcerer, and eventually a king. He raised the dead up to do battle for him, and so some called him the Carrion-King.
Such was this Carrion-King’s renown, both on the battlefield and in the ways of magic, that all his neighbors feared him. They believed no god could protect them from his wrath. They believed no blessing could avert his ill will.
His father’s empire grew and grew, for this Carrion-King conquered every land he set his hand against. And the Carrion-King’s power, too, grew and grew, until even his father and mother feared him a little. What would happen if he were not content to wait for the throne of his people? What would happen if he decided to overthrow his father’s reign?
No one brought these whispers to the Carrion-King, for while he was feared, he was not loved in equal measure. And as his empire burgeoned, and his troops in their horse-hoof armor rode out to conquer every city of the Celadon Highway, the good people of Rasa heard the rumors of war in the wind and grew afraid.
As well they should, because although Rasa—girdled in its mighty pillars of stone, walled away from the wars of the world—was a mighty empire, it was also wealthy, and the Carrion-King craved gold. The emperor of the Rasani decreed that a Citadel be built, then, and wizards found from all over the empire to defeat the Carrion-King.
So it was written; so it was done. The wizards of Tsarepheth—for so they came to be called—researched and consulted. They experimented and delved. And finally they came back to the emperor and told him, “There is nothing we can do that will defeat the Carrion-King.”
“That is unacceptable,” said the emperor. “I will have you beheaded and your order disbanded.”