Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (22 page)

Four days.

Four days; long days. Sun too hot, wind not dry enough to take away the sweat of a day's labor. A life's labor.

Jewel ATerafin sat in a room made dark by heavy curtains. Light illuminated the folds of fabric that skirted the ground by an inch or two, as if the window were waiting for her attention.

It was a struggle, for Jewel, not to succumb to its call—even given the weight of what was at stake. She rose, unfolding her knees, tilting her chin to the ceiling and lifting her arms as far as they could uncomfortably go. If she sat for another minute, she'd grow roots and branches.

And not a thing had come to the dark corners of the room. Not a thing to the corners of her vision, the seer's gift.

At her feet there was water; Teller had brought it before Avandar let the curtains fall. She lifted the goblet and drank; the liquid was the same temperature as her mouth; it spilled down her throat as if it were almost nothing.

"Nothing?"

Avandar's voice. Even deprived of the stern expression his face habitually fell into, she couldn't quite pretend his presence was welcome. He always made her feel slightly on edge, slightly uncomfortable, although she trusted him daily with her safety, with more than her safety. She shrugged. Seventeen years of history could do that, although she'd never have guessed it at the start.

"Nothing. Allen's not going to be happy."

She felt, rather than heard, Avandar's more crisp version of a shrug. "Then he'll be unhappy. If he seeks to use you as a reliable source of information, it's best that he learn your limits here, where the risks are few."

Few
. Her neck cracked as she turned her head in a slow, deliberate circle. "They don't want to lose the boy."

"Then they should put their foot down and refuse him his place in the Challenge."

"Avandar—"

"At the least, he should be given no leave to run the gauntlet."

"It's been suggested. You've even been there. Let's give up for an hour or two; we'll eat something, try again."

"As you wish." The line of light beneath the hang of curtains was broken as Avandar stepped in front of them; it wavered further as he began to draw them apart, to let the day in. Here, up in Eagle's Remove—although why this room in particular was given that name, she didn't know—the windows were long and wide, with seats for the room's occupants to sit in, so that they might look down, and down again, and see clearly all they were missing by being stuck here.

There were no shelves, no desk; but there was a grate for the burning of wood, a mantle around it, two comfortable chairs, and enough leaded glass to bankrupt a lesser House.

She had grown to hate the room.

Avandar preceded her to the door, placed his hand upon the old, iron handle, and froze in place. She had seen this only once before. He was not a man given to expressive gestures; all of his movements were economical, spare. It shouldn't have been so obvious when he stopped moving at all—but it was.

Her dagger was out in an instant, her knees slightly bent. What he felt, she now felt; the edge of darkness, a shadow that held ice and death within its folds. He was the only man in existence who would have felt it before she did. And she didn't know, couldn't say, why. Later. "What is it?"

He did not answer her; not with words. Didn't need to. She saw the ripple that surrounded his hands, taking shape and form as it crackled into bands of color: blue and gray.

Blue and gray—

"Avandar, no! "

The light froze, just as he had, held in abeyance not by her words, but by the quality behind them, the force of something that was, and was not quite, Jewel. She sheathed her dagger at once and walked to the door, shunting him urgently to one side.

And then, taking a deep breath, she opened it, half-prayer already dying on her lips. There were guards outside these doors; Chosen by Terafin, Chosen for trust and trust's sake.
Please
, she thought,
don't let them be dead
.

They weren't.

She took the time to notice that they hadn't even drawn their swords; it was a cursory observation, a short one.

"Kiriel," she said, as her eyes met the darkness that waited outside of Eagle's Remove. "Come in."

Kiriel di'Ashaf crossed the threshold as if it were the edge of a blade, and she barefoot. Her teeth showed briefly between dark lips, a flash of white not unlike a hound's. But she did not draw the sword she wore openly, and she did not—did not do whatever it was that Jewel felt certain she could do, even if the details weren't clear.

The darkness that shrouded her golden eyes would never quite leave them; of that, Jewel was suddenly completely certain, and for a moment she felt a profound sense of loss, of compassion, and even of pity. They came in a rush, these things, unexpected and unlooked for. Jewel had learned to school her face well over the years.

But not from this: vision, a thing not felt that
would be
felt—in an unnamed, distant future—about the almost sullen young woman who stood uneasily before her. Dark eyes narrowed to slits; Kiriel backed away.

"Kiriel," she said again, holding out a hand, realizing the gesture meant nothing. She let it drop, and then spoke again. When she spoke, she abandoned Weston entirely in favor of Torra, the Tyrian tongue. "I'm sorry—I mean you no ill will, and no mockery. I'm—I have to admit that I didn't expect to see you here."

The younger woman's eyes widened in such a way that it almost hurt to see them. Tyrian.
di 'Ashaf
was a Tyrian form. And what line, Jewel thought, was Ashaf? No clan name that she recalled, but that wasn't saying much; her knowledge of the clan hierarchies was abysmal.

"I didn't expect to come," Kiriel said, in such a way that it was clear she begrudged every word. She drew breath.

"Then why," Avandar said, uninvited and as unexpected in his interruption as Kiriel had been in her arrival, "did you?"

She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time—which, Jewel thought, she might well be doing; it was hard to remember when Avandar did trail her and when he did not, so much of a shadow had he become. "Does he speak for you?" she said at length, coolly.

"No." Jewel's reply was less friendly than Kiriel's question.

Avandar did not seem to react at all to the less than subtle hint. She stopped hinting. "Avandar, leave."

"I don't think it wise."

"I don't care what you think. Leave."

"Jewel, I'm not certain if you understand what it is, exactly, you face—but it is not what it appears to be. You—"

"Avandar."

"I-will-wait-outside-the-door."

"Good."

He opens his mouth again
, Jewel thought,
and I'll kill him
. She folded her arms, her lips pressed into a tight line.

He walked out the door, slamming it shut behind his back.

Kiriel looked from one to the other—the door that seemed to reverberate with the force of its closing, and Jewel, as if what had just occurred was the only thing, so far, that made any sense. As if the desire for sense and stability was so strong she could suck the scene out of the air and hoard it.

Her hair was dark, her eyes dark; when she lifted an ungaunt-leted hand to brush the one from the other, Jewel expected the hand to be dark as well, wreathed in cloud and black shadow. It wasn't. Of all things, it was the only part of her body that seemed human, free from shadow and shadow's claim, from the darkness that had devoured the Allasakari, in their time, one by one.

Shining there, faintly luminescent, a star in the depth of night sky and not the radiant, warm sun, sat a simple, unadorned ring. Jewel felt the ground beneath her feet shift; she took a step back.

Kiriel immediately began to lower her hand, aborting the gesture. "I mean you no harm," she said, moving slowly and steadily, bringing the hand, palm up, to the level of her waist, where Jewel might better see it.

"I—know. It's—I'm sorry. I wasn't expecting you."

There were two chairs in the room; Jewel hesitated before one, but did not choose to take it; she knew that Kiriel would stand, and did not want to lose the advantage of equal height.

"Where did you learn to speak?"

"Torra?"

"Is that what you call it?"

"That's what it's called in the Empire, yes." Jewel turned away from her visitor, although every instinct in her screamed as she exposed her back. Deliberately ignoring instinct was difficult for the seer-born; she steadied herself by letting the visual panorama provided by the open window distract her. A little. "I learned it from my mother."

"You were born there?"

"No. Here. There are Southerners—and those, like me, descended from them—across the hundred holdings. But mostly," she grimaced, "in the poorer ones."

"Was she a seraf?"

"No!" And then, realizing not what she'd said, but how, Jewel added, "No. There are escaped slaves in the city; enough of them. But my mother was an insignificant member of one of the Voyani lines. She was free."

"Free." Kiriel came slowly to join her; they stood side by side, appreciating the view, as if they were two visitors to the House with nothing better to do. The sea breeze was laden with salt, heavy with moisture. The open windows let it in, where it curled the ends of Jewel's hair. Kind's hair seemed heavy enough to be impervious to weather.

"Where did you learn the Tyrian tongue?"

"In the Court," Kiriel replied. "And Weston as well, but later."

"Kiriel—why did you come?"

"Because if I speak to anyone else, I—" She stopped, bent her chin almost into the length of her neck. "Because of what you said," she replied, quietly.

"What I said?"

"That I'm a killer, but—"

"Yes?"

"It's not all I am." She toyed with a slender chain that encircled her neck as she spoke; the gesture was a nervous one. "I've never had to hide what I am; only what I'm capable of. Knowledge is power."

" 'Knowledge is power.' You sound like Meralonne." Jewel touched the younger woman's shoulder. "I told you, Kiriel: Tell me that I
can
trust you, and I will trust you."

"Does it matter? Does it matter, if I've already decided to go with you, to fight this war?"

"You tell me."

Kiriel turned to face Jewel, her eyes golden, like light, like sunlight. "Yes. It matters," she said simply. She lifted the chain, and from its end fell a large crystal; it was surrounded by a lattice of light that moved so quickly Jewel couldn't quite see the color of it, the colors that made it solid. "I'll fight this war, but I have to fight it my way. My father—"

Silence.

"I don't love him," Kiriel said, as if forced.

"I don't care if you love him," Jewel replied, as if she were unaware of how singular a statement Kiriel had made. "I don't care if you hate him. I'm not Mandaros, Kiriel; what he decides, he decides. I don't judge you."

"Neither did she."

This time, Jewel did not ask. She wanted nothing to interrupt the words, the shaky trickle of them, that Kiriel so haltingly, clumsily offered.

"I spoke to Valedan," Kiriel said. "About you. He says, if you want to travel with us, you can."

"Thank you."

"Do you?"

"Yes."

Silence again, Kiriel's, not Jewel's. The moment was broken for Jewel when she realized that no birds had come by this window at all since Kiriel had approached it.

"I don't want to go to Duarte yet, because he'll have to tell The Kalakar."

"Tell her what?"

Hesitation, fine and edged. For a moment she poised at the window as if she was bunching and gathering her muscles for sudden flight. And then it left her, that tension, in a little sigh of breath, of uncertain commitment. She reminded Jewel of the dead, the much loved, the much remembered dead. "There are kin in the streets of the city."

"Kin? You mean—" She stopped, knowing exactly what Kiriel meant. "You've seen them?"

"No."

"Then how do you—" Jewel stopped at once, as elusive understanding finally stood still long enough to be caught. "You won't say how."

Kiriel shook her head. "Can't," she whispered, as if it were true. "But
you
don't have to. They've come to kill Valedan." Absolute conviction in those words. "You tell them where the kin are, and they'll believe you without question because that's your gift." .he turned her eyes groundward through the wide, stone sill to greenery and life. "I'll go with you, when you hunt them. If you do. I'll be your whatever it is—adjutant, assistant, Verrus. I'll take you to where they are. No one has to, know who leads who."

"Kiriel, no one understands the abilities of the kin well enough.

Tell them that you can magically sense each other and they'll believe you."

But Kiriel looked at her and said a single word. A name. "Sigurne."

Jewel couldn't argue with that. "All right. I'll do what I can." She paused. "We've got four days to hunt them down."

"If you wait until the Challenge, they'll be easy to find."

"If we wait until the Challenge, we probably won't be able to reach them without carving our way through spectators, most of whom will be utterly helpless in the face of kin magic. I'll do what you ask, Kiriel; I won't ask questions. IT you need me to lie, like this, for you—I'll do it. It seems harmless enough." A lie, all right. "But I won't risk those deaths. Not the innocents. Not the children. I've seen enough of 'em. I won't risk more, ever."

Kiriel met her eyes and stared at her for a long time, and then, of all things, she smiled. A real smile, almost devoid of her natural intensity.

"You can," she said softly.

"Can?"

"Trust me."

You couldn't lie to a seer.

Teller told himself that, as his hand dipped quill slightly shakily into inkstand.

It wasn't one of the many truths about seers that was widely spread, like children's stories and overblown fables, across the wealth of bardic songs or ancient texts, but it was true.

Or sort of true. You couldn't lie about much that was important to the seer herself. Little things—what you thought of her clothing, for instance, or what you thought of the meal she'd prepared with her own painstaking labor on one of those days when she and Avandar had had enough of a disagreement that he'd been banished from most of the wing—those you could get away with. But not big things. Not truth.