The mockery left Bydarra’s seamed face. He came closer, his lean countenance utterly sober, pale eyes intense: tall, the halflings, so that Vanye found himself meeting the old lord eye to eye. Light fingers touched the side of his arm, urging confidentiality, the while from the edge of his vision. Vanye saw Hetharu leaning against the table, arms folded, regarding him coldly. “Hnoth is upon us,” Bydarra said, “when the floods rise and no traveling is possible. This Chya Roh is anxious to set out for Abarais now, this day, before the road is closed. He seems likewise anxious that you be sent to him when he is there, directly as it becomes possible; and what say you to this, Nhi Vanye i Chya?”
“That you are as lost as I am if ever you let him reach Abarais,” Vanye said. The pulse roared in him as he stared into that aged qujalin face, and thought of Roh in possession of that Master Gate, with all its power to harm, to enliven the other Gates, to reach out and destroy. “Let him ever reach it and you will find yourself a master of whom you will never free yourself, not in this generation or the next or the next. I know that for the truth.”
“Then he can do the things he claims,” said Hetharu suddenly.
Vanye glanced toward Hetharu, who left the table and advanced to his father’s side.
“His power would be such,” Vanye said “that the whole of Shiuan and Hiuaj would become whatever pleased him— pleased him, my lord. You do not look like a man that would relish having a master.”
Bydarra smiled grimly and looked at Hetharu. “It may be,” said Bydarra, “that you have been well answered.”
“By another with something to win,” said Hetharu, and seized Vanye’s arm with such insolent violence that anger blinded him for the moment: he thrust his arm free, one clear thread of reason still holding him from the princeling’s throat. He drew a ragged breath and looked to Bydarra, to authority.
“I would not see Roh set at Abarais,” Vanye said, “and once your own experience shows you that I was right, my lord, I fear it will be much too late to change your mind.”
“Can you master the Wells yourself?” Bydarra asked.
“Set me at Abarais, until my own liege comes. Then—ask what you will in payment, and it will go better with this land.”
“Can you,” asked Hetharu, seizing him a second time by the arm, “manage the Wells yourself?”
Vanye glared into that handsome wolf-face, the white-edged nostrils, the dark eyes smoldering with violence, the lank white hair that was not, like the lesser lords’, the work of artifice.
“Take your hands from me,” he managed to say, and cast his appeal still to Bydarra. “My lord,” he said with a desperate, deliberate calm, “my lord, in this room, there was some bargain struck—your son and Ron and other young lords together. Look to the nature of it.”
Bydarra’s face went rigid with some emotion; he thrust Hetharu aside, looked terribly on Vanye, then turned that same look toward his son, beginning a word that was not finished. A blade flashed, and Bydarra choked, turned again under Hetharu’s second blow, the bright blood starting from mouth and throat. Bydarra fell forward, and Vanye staggered back under the dying weight of him—let him fall, in horror, with the hot blood flooding his own arms.
And he stared across weapon’s edge at a son who could murder father and show nothing of remorse. There was fear in that white face: hate. Vanye met Hetharu’s eyes and knew the depth of what had been prepared for him.
“Hail me lord,” said Hetharu softly, “lord in Ohtij-in and in all Shiuan.”
Panic burst in him. “Guard!” he cried, as Hetharu lifted the bloody dagger and slashed his own arm, a second fountain of blood. The dagger flew, struck at Vanye’s feet, in the spreading dark pool from Bydarra’s body. Vanye stumbled back from the dagger as the door opened, and there were armed men there in force, pikes lowered toward him. Hetharu leaned against the fireplace in unfeigned shock, leaking blood through his fingers that clasped his wounded arm to his breast.