Rana walked up the narrow way till she was so close to Aliyander that she might have touched his sleeve if she had not needed both hands to hold the flagon. Then, at last, Aliyander broke away to look at her; and as he did she lifted the great jug, and with a strength she thought was not hers alone, hurled the contents full upon the man before her.
He gave a strangled cry, and brushed desperately with his hands as if he could sweep the water away; but he was drenched with it, his hair plastered to his head and his clothes to his body. He looked suddenly small, wizened and old. He still looked at her, but she met his gaze fearlessly, and he did not seem to recognize her.
His face turned as grey as his jewels. His eyes, she thought, were as opaque as the eyes of marble statues; and then he fell down full-length upon the floor, heavily, without sound, with no attempt to catch himself. He moved no more.
Inthur leaped up then with a cry, and ran to his fallen friend, and Rana saw the quick tears on his cheeks; but when he looked up he looked straight at her, and his eyes were clear. “He was my friend,” he said simply; but there was no memory in him of what that friendship had been.
The King stood down stiffly from his throne, and the courtiers moved, and shook themselves as if from sleep, and stared without sorrow at the still body of Aliyander, and with curiosity and awe and a little hesitant but hopeful joy at Lian.
“I welcome you,” said the King, with the pride of the master of his own hall, and of a king of a long line of kings. “I welcome you, Prince Lian, to my country, and to my people.” And his gaze flickered only briefly to the thing on the floor; at his gesture, a servant stepped forward and threw a dark cloth over it.
“Thank you,” said Lian gravely; and the Princess realized that he had come up silently and was standing at her side. She glanced up and saw him looking down at her; and the knowledge of what they had done together, and what neither could have done alone, passed between them; and with it an understanding that they would never discuss it. She said aloud: “I—I welcome you, Prince Lian.”
“Thank you,” he said again, but she heard the change of tone in his voice; and from the corner of her eye she saw her father smile. She offered Lian her hand, and he took it, and raised it slowly to his lips.
The Hunting of the Hind
PART ONE
THE HUNTS continued as they always had, for the game they killed was necessary for food; but there was no joy in them now, and few people attended, or rode with the Master, except those who must. There could be no pleasure in the chase while the King’s only and much beloved son lay sick on his bed, paler and weaker with every day that passed, and raving always about the Golden Hind.
The Prince had ridden often with the Hunt; his horses were always fine and sleek and proud, and he sat them well; and he himself was as kind as he was handsome, and everyone loved to look at him, and loved more to speak with him. He had a word for everyone, and he remembered every man’s name whom he had once met, down to the last village girl-child who gravely presented him with a fresh-picked daisy and her name, wise in all the dignity of her four years of age.
It was but a month gone by that the tragedy had occurred. The sighting of the Golden Hind had troubled the Hunt several times in the past two years; troubled, because the sight of her ruined the dogs, deerhounds tall and fleet and rabbithounds resolute and sturdy, for the rest of the day of that sighting. The dogs would not then follow her, nor any other game, but cowered to the ground, or ran in circles and howled. Thus it was that all realized that this Hind, although she was of a color to bring wonder to the cruelest eyes and tenderness to the darkest heart, was not a canny thing; and so men feared her, and feared that sight of her might prove an omen for more ill than just of that day’s hunting.
But as the legend of her grew with the months that passed, some men saw the following of her as an adventure by which they might test their courage; and so the boldest men of the country rode their swiftest horses to join the Hunt, in the hope of a glimpse of her.
Twelve of them in the space of a year had their wish. Ten came home again, weary and footsore, and grim with a depression that seemed to be of something more than mere exhaustion or failure of a simple chase; their clothes in tatters and their faces cut by branches and thorns. And their horses were often lame and more often nervous, with a thin edge of fear that never again dulled, so that some of the finest horses in the land could no longer be ridden trustfully, for they shied and neighed at nothing, or ran suddenly away with their riders, their dark eyes white-ringed.
The other two of those twelve men who rode away in pursuit of the Golden Hind were never seen again, nor anything heard of their fate.
But a thirteenth joined the Hunt on a day that the Golden Hind was seen when the Hunt had barely left the city gates and entered the forest; and the Hunt had to turn and go back into the city, taking the shaking fearful dogs back to the kennels they had only just left, while the thirteenth man set spurs to his horse, and the Hind fled light-footed away from him.
The thirteenth man returned that evening after sunset, his horse covered with pale foam and a broken rattle in its throat; the rider was mad. They had to drag him out of the saddle, and he fought them, shouting words, if they were words at all, in a language that none could recognize, till they had to bind him, to protect not only themselves but this man from his own madness. Nor did he recognize his wife when they brought him to her; and she wept helplessly for him.
The Prince was a brave man, and as bold as a man confident in his courage might be; and he declared that he would hunt the Hind. But his father forbade him, and when he forbade him, he turned so white that the Prince, who loved his father, reluctantly agreed to obey; for he was capable of going against his father’s wishes if his own desires were strong enough. But he continued as before to ride sometimes with the Hunt; and once he rode on a day when one of the twelve men rode too, and they saw the Hind, and the Hunt saw this man ride away in pursuit while the Prince had to remain behind, reining in his high-blooded horse, which was not accustomed to watching another man’s horse leap away from him and run alone and unchallenged. The Prince remembered the King’s command and his own promise, and he watched only, and then turned his fretful stallion’s face toward home. But it did not go down well with him, for he was a proud man as well as a good and kind and brave one, and some of his horse’s restiveness may have been the fault of the rider’s mood.