Half a year in the septarchy had left its mark on him. His face was gray and his left eyelid drooped, I suppose from exhaustion. He held his lips tightly compressed and stood in a rigid way with one shoulder higher than the other. Though only two years separated us in age, I felt myself a boy beside him, and marveled how the cares of office can etch a young man’s visage. It seemed centuries since Stirron and I had laughed together in our bedchambers, and whispered all the forbidden words, and bared our ripening bodies to one another to make the edgy comparisons of adolescence. Now I offered formal obeisance to my weary royal brother, crossing my arms over my breast and flexing my knees and bowing my head as I murmured, “Lord Septarch, long life be yours.”
Stirron was man enough to deflect my formality with a brotherly grin. He gave me a proper acknowledgment of my greeting, yes, arms raised and palms turned out, but then he turned it into an embrace, swiftly crossing the room and seizing me. Yet there was something artificial about his gesture, as though he had been studying how to show warmth to his brother, and quickly I was released. He wandered away from me, eyeing a nearby window, and his first words to me were, “A beastly day. A brutal year.”
“The crown lies heavy, Lord Septarch?”
“You have leave to call your brother by his name.”
“The strains show in you, Stirron. Perhaps you take Salla’s problems too closely to heart.”
“The people starve,” he said. “Shall one pretend that is a trifling thing?”
“The people have always starved, year upon year,” I said. “But if the septarch drains his soul in worry over them—”
“Enough, Kinnall. You presume.” Nothing brotherly about the tone now; he was hard put to hide his irritation with me. He was plainly angered that I had so much as noticed his fatigue, though it was he who had begun our talk with lamenting. The conversation had veered too far toward the intimate. The condition of Stirron’s nerves was no affair of mine: it was not my place to comfort him, he had a bondbrother for that. My attempted kindness had been improper and inappropriate. “What do you seek here?” he asked roughly.
“The lord septarch’s leave to go from the capital.”
He whirled away from the window and glared at me. His eyes, dull and sluggish until this moment, grew bright and harsh, and flickered disturbingly from side to side. “To go? To go where?”
“One wishes to accompany one’s bondbrother Noim to the northern frontier,” I said as smoothly as I could manage. “Noim pays a call on the headquarters of his father, General Luinn Condorit, whom he has not seen this year since your lordship’s coronation, and one is asked to travel northward with him, for bondlove and friendship.”
“When would you go?”
“Three days hence, if it please the septarch.”
“And for how long a stay?” Stirron was virtually barking these questions at me.
“Until the first snow of winter falls.”
“Too long. Too long.”
“One might be absent then a shorter span,” I said.
“Must you go at all, though?”
My right leg quivered shamefully at the knee. I struggled to be calm. “Stirron, consider that one has not left Salla City for so much as an entire day since you assumed the throne. Consider that one cannot justly ask one’s bondbrother to journey uncomforted through the northern hills.”
“Consider that you are the heir to the prime septarchy of Salla,” Stirron said, “and that if misfortune comes to your brother while you are in the north, our dynasty is lost.”
The coldness of his voice, and the ferocity with which he had questioned me a moment earlier, threw me into panic. Would he oppose my going? My fevered mind invented a dozen reasons for his hostility. He knew of my transfers of funds, and had concluded I was about to defect to Glin; or he imagined that Noim and I, and Noim’s father with his troops, would stir up an insurrection in the north, the aim being to place me on the throne; or he had already resolved to arrest and destroy me, but the time was not yet ripe for it, and he wished not to let me get far before he could pounce; or—but I need not multiply hypotheses. We are a suspicious people on Borthan, and no one is less trusting than one who wears a crown. If Stirron would not release me from the capital, and it appeared that he would not, then I must sneak away, and I might not succeed at that.
I said, “No misfortunes are probable, Stirron, and even so, it would be no large task to return from the north if something befell you. Do you fear usurpation so seriously?”
“One fears everything, Kinnall, and leaves little to chance.”
He proceeded then to lecture me on necessary caution, and on the ambitions of those who surrounded the throne, naming a few lords as possible traitors whom I would have placed among the pillars of the realm. As he spoke, going far beyond the strictures of the Covenant in exposing his uncertainties to me, I saw with amazement what a tortured, terrified man my brother had become in this short time of septarchy; and I realized, too, that I was not going to be granted my leave. He went on and on, fidgeting as he spoke, rubbing his talismans of authority, several times picking up his scepter from where it lay on an ancient wood-topped table, walking to the window and coming back from it, pitching his voice now low and now high as though searching for the best septarchical resonances. I was frightened for him. He was a man of my own considerable size, and at that time much thicker in body and greater in strength than I, and all my life I had worshiped him and modeled myself upon him; and here he was corroded with terror and committing the sin of telling me about it. Had just these few moontimes of supreme power brought Stirron to this collapse? Was the loneliness of the septarchy that awful for him? On Borthan we are born lonely, and lonely we live, and lonely we die; why should wearing a crown be so much more difficult than bearing the burdens we inflict upon ourselves each day? Stirron told me of assassins’ plots and of revolution brewing among the farmers who thronged the town, and even hinted that our father’s death had been no accident. I tried to persuade myself that hornfowl could be trained to slay a particular man in a group of thirteen men, and would not swallow the notion. It appeared that royal responsibilities had driven Stirron mad. I was reminded of a duke some years back who displeased my father, and was sent for half a year to a dungeon, and tortured each day that the sun could be seen. He had entered prison a sturdy and vigorous figure, and when he emerged he was so ruined that he befouled his own clothes with his dung, and did not know it. How soon would Stirron be brought to that? Perhaps it was just as well, I thought, that he was refusing me permission to go away, for it might be better that I remain at the capital, ready to take his place if he crumbled beyond repair.
But he amazed me at the finish of his rambling oration; for it had taken him clear across the room, to an alcove hung with dangling silver chains, and at the end, suddenly bunching the chains and yanking a dozen of them from their mountings, he swung round to face me and cried hoarsely, “Give your pledge, Kinnall, that you will come back from the north in time to attend the royal wedding!”
I was doubly pronged. For the last several minutes I had begun to make plans on the basis of staying in Salla City; now I found I could depart after all, and was not sure I should, in view of Stirron’s deterioration. And then too he demanded from me a promise of swift return, and how could I give the septarch such a promise without lying to him, a sin I was not prepared to commit? So far all that I had told him was the truth, though only part of the truth; I did plan to travel north with Noim to visit his father, I would remain in northern Salla until winter’s first snow. How though could I set a date for my coming back to the capital?