Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (108 page)

They both knew that Kallandras had not come to speak with Valedan. But the bard understood manners, especially Southern ones. "I did not come to speak with the kai Leonne, Ser Anton."

"Ah."

Silence. At last Kallandras said, "I am not a young man, not anymore."

"I would be surprised. Bard, if you had ever been a young man."

"The young, if protected, have the luxury of vulnerability." He shrugged, a deflection of the truth in his opponent's words. A parry. "The old have the luxury of wisdom."

"Hard won luxury, that."

"As is any crown."

Silence, broken by the falling patter of water, the ripple of wave against stone. Kallandras raised a curled fist to the scant light and opened it slowly. Something small glinted in the flat of his palm. "My apologies, Ser Anton. I was… asked… to give you this during the test of the Sword." He curled his hand into a fist again. "But I hesitated at the appointed moment."

The older man's curiosity was nowhere in evidence, and he did not speak for a long moment. When he did, the desire to know more was a hint at the farthest edge of his voice. Ser Anton obviously knew how to be careful when he spoke, but he was so rarely that careful. "And that moment?"

"The moment before you challenged the kai Leonne to a combat that any Southerner in the coliseum knew must end in a death."

"And would it have stopped me, Bard?" The swordmaster asked, a fine vein of genuine amusement evident in the rigidity of his voice.

Kallandras inclined his head noncommitally. "It is not, in the end, for me to say; I am messenger only."

"But you chose not to deliver the message." Greater curiosity here, and sudden suspicion, the latter of which he took no trouble to hide.

"No."

"Kallandras of Senniel, you are unlike any bard I have met in the North, and I have met many. You walk like a killer, move like a killer, speak like a man who knows death at least as well as song—perhaps better."

Honesty. Complete honesty. "The Lady is strong," Kallandras replied softly.

"Tonight, yes. She is strong. And you, you stand like one of the brotherhood who serve her darkest face."

Kallandras took a step back, and then smiled almost ruefully. A genuine expression, although he did not believe Anton would recognize it as such. He knew that Anton did not accuse him. And yet. "We are both revealed by our talents; you to me by your voice, and I to you by your gift."

"Then by the Lady's grace, I will be blunt. I am tired, Bard, of politics and games; I am tired of the cost of the choices I have made, and I bear their burden—and will—until I am at last carried by wind to the winds.

"You have come to speak, and I will listen, but I will not listen for long. Deliver your message, or explain yourself if you desire it; leave if you do not." He turned his back, although the sword was still in his hand, and faced the fountain.

Easier, then, to speak to Ser Anton. The vulnerability of facial expression was difficult between two strong men, and something that was often not forgiven.

"I did not choose to deliver the message because you were about to test your own resolve, Ser Anton. To be tested, to find your own limits. To set them."

"Tested?" the swordmaster said. "And tell me, Bard, did I pass?"

"Oh, yes," Kallandras said, his voice so soft that the only man who would ever hear it was Ser Anton himself. "I watched you fight the boy. I watched you cut him. But before that, I watched you take his measure during the long day of the test of the Sword. He is almost miraculously good with a sword, but you, Ser Anton, were better.

"
Are
better."

The older man stiffened. Stiffened and then raised the sword slowly, almost casually. To a lesser observer it might appear that he was preparing to sheathe it.

"Do not," Kallandras said, and the warning edge was in his voice. It was not his intent to perish here. "You will protect no secret by my death. I do not speak in a way that others may hear, and I will not."

"Then why have you come with this… interesting supposition?"

"Because you are Ser Anton di'Guivera, and the legend that attends you attends you for a reason." He bowed. "I offer you that respect, Ser Anton."

Silence, and against a bard, silence could be a weapon.

But Ser Anton di'Guivera was used to taking the measure of his enemy; used to making life-or-death decisions based on his estimation of that measure. He sheathed the sword in one easy motion. But he did not turn.

"I could not be certain," he said softly, "that the kai Leonne would accept my offer of allegiance. I could not be certain. There was only one way that I could give him my support that
was
certain. The challenge, witnessed by all, and lost. By me."

He shook his head, still facing the statue named
Southern justice
.

"He almost killed you."

"Yes."

"You were prepared to die."

Ser Anton shrugged. "Any man who lifts a sword is prepared to die. Or should be. But you spoke of a message, and you've obviously come to deliver it now."

"Yes." Kallandras walked to the fountain's edge. He did not look at the swordmaster, not directly. But he bent by the stone, placed his curled fist upon it, and then relaxed each finger slowly. Carefully.

"We say, in the North, that love binds the living. We say, when we sing, that love can bind the dead, hold them in the halls of Mandaros, where they wait and wait and wait until their loved ones join them."

"In the South," Ser Anton whispered, "we talk of the winds that sweep the howling dead across the deserts. The dead rage against the living, against their loss. Only the Lady can intervene. And I have prayed, Master Bard. Could you," he continued softly, without looking to the side upon which the bard stood, "lift your voice to the heavens itself, so that the Lady might hear it? I would count any debt paid, and all debts owed you, if it were possible."

"It is not."

Silence.

"But I am from the North," he said lightly, "and in the North, the tradition is different. There is Mandaros, who sits in judgment, and there are the dead, who seek what he has to offer. A woman told me a story, and I hope you will forgive us our presumption, for I may not reveal her nature, or her name, and you will want both."

"Continue."

"She traveled to the Tor Leonne, and spent some time in your home. She came to take an item of value from it."

The swordmaster stiffened with real anger. "I… see."

Kallandras stepped away.

"She knew, or thought she knew, what to look for, it had been so carefully described."

In the moonlight and the magelights, something flickered. Something caught Ser Anton's eyes. As Kallandras cleared the fountain, the older man turned. He froze, and he did not speak, and Kallandras was glad of it.

"But she found, in a room preserved as if it were a shrine, the three things she sought, and she broke them. Because she was told that something of value had been left in a casement of clay, wept over, and kept as a reminder of things valued. Things loved."

Ser Anton di'Guivera touched the ring that lay exposed to night and moonlight. It was too small for any of his fingers; that much was clear. In the darkness it was still possible to see the tremor take his hands. The shaking. Harder to tell whether it was due to rage or something else.

"She was told—my compatriot was told—that no one else knew of this, and that no one else knew that of all possessions, save perhaps your sword, this was the one you most highly valued."

The swordmaster turned then.

Turned, his hand a fist around the delicate, inexpensive ring, an inseparable joining of jade and a twist of gold: two bands. Two lives made one.

"I am sorry," Kallandras said softly, "to expose what was so well hidden—but proof was needed."

"Proof?" A single spoken word. An accusation. A cry of—grief ? Anger? Loss?

"Mandaros is a Northern god, but perhaps your wife was a Northern woman, born into a land of harsh sun and harsher people. I cannot say. You have heard—no doubt you have heard— that there are places where those born to gods, and those who in truth worship them, might meet the gods themselves, and speak, and be heard.

"The message is from Mandaros, and delivered because there is a woman in his halls who natters at him endlessly, and who has finally worn away his patience—but not his affection.

"This woman begs leave, through the living, to deliver a message to the swordmaster of the Dominion."

Ser Anton looked away. "Continue."

"She wishes him to know that she loves him, and she waits for him in the halls of Mandaros. That as she can, she watches him, and that she does, as he suspects, like the boy. She guesses that he will know by the actions taken here—by myself, by my compatriot, by the Lord of Judgment—that she is still not a very patient woman, and that she will not wait for more than a lifetime—so she respectfully requests that he not do so much in this life that he has to live through another one in atonement. He'll have only himself to blame, after all."

The swordsman did not speak.

Kallandras bowed in the darkness. "Ser Anton," he said. "Marianna en'Guivera says that you are not jade and not stone, and that she was not gold. But I believe she desires happiness for you, or peace."

He walked away into the night.

And because he was a bard, a master bard, because he was Kallandras, he heard the whisper of a voice at his back.

"Bard."

He stopped. Spoke across the distance without breaching it. "Ser Anton."

"Is this true?"

"Yes."

He left then, because there are some things that brook no. witnesses.

The moon's face was high and full in the Seril night, and it rose over a lone man in an empty courtyard beside a quiet fountain.