Hall of the Mountain King by Judith Tarr

flesh and bone.
    Vadin, bowing at his feet, wondered if he had always been
like that. An iron king, ruling with an iron will, loving nothing that lived.
    Except Mirain. Vadin rose at the king’s command, roused at
last, beginning to be afraid. Princes did not often pay for their insanities.
Their servants often did, bitterly.
    The king stood close enough to touch. Vadin swallowed. Part
of him was surprised. He did not have to look up by much. Two fingers’ breadth.
Three.
    He had never been so close before. He could see a scar on
the king’s cheek, a knife scar it must have been, thin and all but invisible,
running into the braided beard.
    There were few lines on the king’s face. It was all pared
clean, skin stretched taut over haughty bones. Mirain’s bones.
    But not Mirain’s eyes. These were hooded, deep but not
bottomless, studying Vadin as he studied the king.
    No god flamed in them. No madness, either. But of magecraft,
something. A flicker, low yet steady, strong enough to see a man’s soul, too
weak to walk in his mind.
    “Sit,” the king said.
    Vadin obeyed without thinking. The chair was the king’s own,
high and ornate. The king would not let him find another. His tired body made
the best of its cushions; his mind waited, alert for escape.
    The king revived the dying fire, squatting on his haunches,
tending the fragile new flames with great care. Vadin counted scars on the bare
and corded back. Every man had scars; they were his pride, the badge of his
manhood. The king had a royal throng of them.
    The old man’s voice seemed to come out of the fire, his
words born in Vadin’s own thoughts. “I fought many battles. To gain the eye of
the king my father. To earn the name of prince. To become prince-heir, and to
become king, and to hold my kingship. By the god’s mercy, I had no need to
wrest it from my father. A seneldi stallion killed him for me: a stallion and
his own arrogance, that would suffer no creature to be greater than he. Of that
beast’s line I bred the Mad One. It was revenge, of a sort. The sons of the
regicide would serve the sons of the king. The stallion himself I took and
tamed and rode into every battle, until he died under me. Shot, I think. I do
not remember. There have been so many. It has been so long.”
    He sounded ineffably old, ineffably weary. Vadin said
nothing. It seemed to be his curse that kings confided in him. Or else and more
likely, he was not going to live long enough for his knowledge to matter.
    The king sat on his heels with ease that belied both voice
and words. “It perturbs you, does it not? To know that I was young once. That I
was born and not cast up armed and crowned from the earth; that I was a child
and a youth and a young man. And yet I was all of them. I even had a mother.
She died while I was still among the women. She had enemies; they said she had
lovers. ‘And why not?’ she cried when they came for her. ‘One night a year my
lord and master grants me of his charity. All the rest belong to his wives and
his concubines. He casts his seed where he pleases. Am I not a queen? May I not
do the same?’ She paid the price of her presumption. My father made me watch as
they flayed her alive and bathed her in salt and hanged her from the
battlements. I was royal. I must know how kings disposed of their betrayers. I
was not seven summers old.
    “I learned my father’s lesson. A king must endure no threat
to his rule. Not even where he loves, if that love turns against him. The
throne is a dead thing, but its power is all-encompassing. It knows no human
tenderness. It suffers no compassion.
    “And on that day of my mother’s death, with the screams of
her dying ringing in my brain, I swore that I would be king; because for me to
take the throne, my father must die. I know now that he was a hard man, cold
and often cruel, but he was not evil. He was merely king. Then and for a long
time after, I knew only that he had murdered my mother.”
    Vadin