Read A Strange and Ancient Name for Free Online

tried to kill him! Of course he had destroyed her, but with sincere regret. But this timid little thing—“Fight me!” he ordered, slapping her again. “Come on, fight!”
    But the slave went limply submissive instead, whimpering, mossy-green eyes dark with pleading. Her meekness enraged him, aroused him, and suddenly he threw himself on her, forcing her thin legs apart, taking her savagely, frantic with the need to prove himself alive and real and in control.
    At last, exhausted, he rolled aside, drenched with perspiration. The slave’s muffled sobbing annoyed him, and Serein snapped, not looking at her, “Go on, get out of here.” He reached out blindly to give her a rough shove. “Go on! Get out!” Still sobbing, she scrambled up and out.
    Serein hardly noticed. Terror as sharp within him as ever, he lay amid the crumpled bedclothes and stared bleakly into space.

III
    THE MIND OF A CHILD

    It was not yet halfway into the next moon-cycle after the celebration of Hauberin’s Second Triad, and gifts and polite congratulations were still pouring in from neighboring lands, but the royal court was in session once again; festivals or no, life must go on.
    Hauberin, by this point totally weary of ceremony, had refused any elaborate court robes. His silky gray tunic and cloak, simple of design but soft and comfortable, were close enough to royal silver to pass, and the beautifully curved silver circle of the everyday coronet was a relatively lightweight burden on his brow. But he couldn’t avoid the chair of state on its slightly raised dais; his people insisted on some splendor.
    Splendid the chair undoubtedly was, silver wrought in elegant little ripples like the waves of the sea. Unfortunately, though, it had been all too evidently designed more for style than comfort.
    His discomfort wasn’t eased by the half-finished Word of Power, lacking only the final syllable that he was holding in his mind. It was a traditional means of royal self-protection, the theory being that a ruler could complete and shout out the Word faster than any would-be assassin could move. But it was also a prickly thing to hold, prodding at his thoughts for completion, uneasy as a mental itch.
    So Hauberin sat within the spacious council hall with its shining walls of amber and nacre, struggling not to fidget, surrounded by sages and courtiers and the merely curious, and tried his best to keep his patience.
    Before him stood the co-complainants (combatants, is more like it, thought the prince): Lietlal, Lord of Cyrran, and Ethenial, Lord of Akalait, grand titles for two whose bordering lands could be walked from end to end in a day. Old rivals, Lietlal and Ethenial, though they could just as soon have been brothers to look at them, nearly alike in youthful-seeming hawk-fine features and silvery hair. Only their slanted Faerie eyes betrayed their age, dry with too much life, too much boredom.
    And so, out of boredom, they fought. In fact, they had been fighting over land, over horses, over whatever excuse came to mind, for longer than Hauberin had been alive. But this time the quarrel had turned bitter. Hauberin leaned forward in his elegant, uncomfortable chair and asked Ethenial bluntly, cutting into the man’s flowery, empty speech: “Did you kill the man?”
    Ethenial blinked, offended. “My prince, the land is mine. Any who enter onto it without my permission trespass and—”
    “Yours!” Lietlal interrupted. “That land has been mine since before the days of—”
    “Yes, yes!” shouted Hauberin before they could start their argument all over again. “But did you kill the man?”
    “I am not a murderer, my prince.”
    The prince took a calming breath. “Lord Lietlal has brought complaint before me that you slew his servant.”
    “A slave. Only a foolish old hu—” Ethenial broke off sharply, fair skin blanching, and Hauberin guessed that the unfinished word would have been “human.” “Only a slave,” Ethenial finished