Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (50 page)

"Do you know," Meralonne said, still speaking to Evayne, but turning his gaze toward Kiriel, who still seemed to stand in a state of shocked grace, "what those rings were? Do you know what went into their making, and how many lives were sacrificed to the process?"

"No," Evayne said, "and it would ease my heart
not
to know it. I know too much already that I must both accept and ignore, and it becomes harder to do what must be done with each bit of such knowledge gleaned.

"I will not ask you," she added softly, "How you have come to know it, oh, historian of the antiquities."

"This was his pride, his darkest hour," Meralonne said softly. "Of all the rings, unnamed, unadorned. The fifth."

Kiriel turned then, and it was clear from the shift in her expression that she had listened to them, let their words pass through her and yet remain. "I would give it back.

"Take it, if you can."

He shook his head. "No. It is yours, for better or worse, although you would satisfy a lifetime of bitter curiosity were you to tell me what the ring's power is."

She stared at it. Smiled, although the smile was bitter and much older than her face. "It burns me," she said, so softly that even Kallandras had to strain to catch the words.

"It burns me, and it steals my power."

He stared at her a long time, and then he said, "perhaps, Kiriel, the theft is a gift, and you have not yet had a chance to realize it." The words were kind, and the voice itself, kind as well, but alloyed with a terrible pity. Kallandras met the silver-gray eyes of one of the few men in the Order of Knowledge that he was privileged, felt privileged, to call friend.

"We are all tested," Meralonne said softly, turning his gaze, again, upon the girl, "and we are all tempered." Silver-gray was lost to the closing of eyelids, and when that color returned to his face again, his expression was neutral.

His voice, if he spoke, would be neutral as well. Meralonne, as many of the members of the Order, could rob his voice of the power that the bard-born were born to hear.

"What in the Hells happened to you?" The lights came on. Duarte, holding them in the cusp of his hand, fueled them with his magic. Quite a sight, especially in the dark of a night that had gone on far too long.

Unfortunately, Auralis had seen the sight enough to find it neither impressive nor intimidating. The palace itself, with its enforced quiet, its expanse of space, the height of its ceilings even in these, a wing given to guards and soldiers and not to paying guests, as the political members of the patriciate were called by the servants all over
Avantari
, was more intimidating than the lights clenched in Duarte's hands.

The change room was empty, and he was pretty damned certain the stewards would have his balls if he woke them up and demanded a bath—but his bed was still his bed, Duarte notwithstanding. All he had to do was get to it, and he'd worry about the rest later.

"Not now, Duarte." Auralis doffed his armor, scratching ineffectively at dried blood. He gave up after a while as he always did; he wasn't a patient man.

"No, not
not now
. Now."

That tone couldn't be ignored. Auralis tried for a full minute and a half before he gave up and met the eyes of his very tired leader. "I was in a fight."

A thousand sarcastic expressions flitted across the face of the Primus of the Ospreys. They were, judging from the silence that followed, inadequate. Which meant that he was in a bad mood.

Poor Primus.

"Where were you in this fight?"

"The Cock and Bull."

"Ha ha."

Auralis shrugged; it hurt. "The Yellow Finch, then."

He was surprised when Duarte hit him. Too tired to be angry, although the anger came up and went down before he'd gained his feet. "Take a hint," he told his Primus. "I was on my own time. I don't owe you any answers." He rubbed his jaw reflexively.

"Don't even think it."

"I wasn't." It was truth. "I was thinking of bed. Sleep. Alone, even."

"Auralis—"

"I'm not going to tell you. You want to know, you can ask her."

"Ask who?"

Auralis turned to look over his shoulder.

"Ask who?"

"Kiriel," he replied thoughtfully. "When she gets back."

Duarte's eyes shuttered. Bad sign. Worse than being punched, cursed, or demoted. "Duarte—"

"You're on duty," Duarte said.

Auralis cursed. Loudly. He was wounded, although none of the wounds were deadly, and he was tired. But he knew that Duarte had fallen into Primus behavior, and wasn't about to fall out of it for the sake of his well-being.

Which was the price you paid in the army for saying pretty much what you felt like saying. A reminder that they were going South, which had all sorts of meanings to the Ospreys, one of which was this: you were about to put one foot across death's line and spit in its eye while wielding a dagger and wearing a thin undershirt.

It didn't stop him from using the full range of his vocabulary to curse the bastard—but he did it under his breath until he was certain that said bastard was well out of earshot.

And he made his shift on time.

Valedan kai di'Leonne was not sleeping. He had slept earlier in the evening, only to wake with the quiet changing of the guard. The moon was not quite full, but there were lights here, mage-lights and lamplights both, in plenty—a staving off of darkness and the meaning of darkness, both sleep and death.

Serra Alina sat beside the flat, low mattress that the Southerners used as a bed. He saw a faint, glimmering line as her hair caught lamplight. Her skin, powdered as a protection from sweat and oil, did not. Here, in the North, the beds were higher, and until he had chosen to declare himself—or had been chosen, the distinction no longer mattered—he had attempted to live in the style of the people that had not been his people since his father had chosen to offer him to the Imperial Court. A long time ago. More than half a lifetime.

"You can't sleep," he said.

"I do not need to," she replied. "It is not I who faces the beginning of the Challenge on the morrow."

"You will not attend me?"

"I will watch, of course, with the women. But attend you? Not even Baredan will be able to do that, and he is beside himself with rage."

In the South, those words had different meaning than they did in the North; Baredan spoke gently, softly; his voice and his actions betrayed no rash temper, no immaturity of control. But, yes, he thought she was right: Baredan was angry.

"I will walk a bit, Serra Alina."

"Do you wish company?"

He thought about it a moment. Shook his head. Rose. She brought him night robes, something to fend off the chill of an evening in the Tor Leonne. Here, of course, with the humidity that forced the height of summer's glare to linger long after the sun had given way, they were not necessary, but he wore them without comment. She was teaching him to do this; to accept with apparent ease all of the niceties of a life that would be offered to him.

Should he win here.

Should he survive to win in the greater war, the true test. She fitted him with his sword, and this, too, he accepted. Perhaps sleep had not released him whole into the waking world; it happened, sometimes, that dream lingered, sapping him of the edge that a sword needed.

The walk helped.
Avantari
did not know sleep, and although it was almost silent, there were signs of the life of the palace; servants, its arteries and its veins. He would miss the palace. He did not think of it as home. It was unwise, having made his decision.

And yet, taking such care, he found himself again by the fountain beside which so much of his later youth had been spent. Silence and magelights reigned here, not Valedan, not Cormalyn or Reymalyn; night was peaceful.

On impulse, he cupped his hands and slowly lowered them into the ripple of fountain water, gently pressing the backs of those hands into the surface until, at last, a little trickle of water hovered on the edge created between the two, flesh and liquid. He held himself still for as long as the moment lasted; he had done this, time and again, as a small boy. Did not. in fact, remember the first time, or the last, it was so minor a freedom.

Water seeped into his palms: they sank beneath the surface until he chose to withdraw them. There, cupped, liquid trickled between the cracks of his fingers. He turned, hands still cupped. Knelt above the stones. Bowing his head, he whispered a benediction and a prayer; the one for the Lady Moon, the other for himself.

"Touching," a voice in the shadows said.

He did not freeze or pause: he continued to speak. To himself, for himself. Only when he had finished did he condescend to look up; to share his expression with a man who had meant to mock it, and who meant him more danger than that, although in the South, that was danger enough.

He thought he saw a glimmer in the eyes of Anton di'Guivera, faint but unmistakable, as he rose. "Ser Anton."

"Ser Valedan."

"You are prepared for the morrow?" Valedan touched the hilt of his sword, pulling his shoulders back slightly.

"You are a youth," the old man said. "You are a mere boy if you think that you can ever be prepared for battle. They did you no service, the Northerners who trained you."

Another insult. But it came from an enemy: he did not expect better; indeed, would have been thrown off his stride had better been offered. "I am," Valedan said, with a quiet dignity, "what I am, in the Lord's sight and in the Lady's. If you are more, or less, in either's sight, you must make peace with yourself, not with me."

The older man's eyes widened. "You are… bold," he said at last.

"I am honest," Valedan replied. "It is a failing of my upbringing." He bowed. "Unless you wish to detain me, or to prove yourself the better swordsman here, in the privacy of the Lady's night. I will leave you.

"But I would warn you against such a contest, Ser Anton. You serve not the Lady, but the Lord—and he the Lord of Night—and unless you believe the Lady to be a lie, as the Northerners do, you would do better to put your faith in the sun's hours. The Lord." Valedan continued, the first hint of bitterness in his voice, "favors brute strength and few causes."

He left, exposing his back.

Anton di'Guivera felt old. Just a moment, and the night's weight rested heavily, too heavily, upon his shoulders. He touched his sword, for strength. Pulled his hand away, as if that strength was not the strength he desired. He waited, until the boy was long gone, and the courtyard emptied of all but the relic of the fountain and the evidence of the Widan. And then he, too, stepped up to the fountain. The face of the statue in its center was blindfolded, and he found it a peculiar mercy.

There was something about the boy—the Leonne boy—that he could not face. Not easily.

The men that he had chosen for the test were sleeping, or if they were not, they were not so foolish as this young boy, to openly flout his wishes. Who were his trainers? Who was his master?

It was a weakness, to acknowledge such a lack of sleep's ease.

And both he and the boy had been lettered by the same ink, the same brush; they wore the same character. He knelt by the fountain's water, as if this were a circle of contemplation. It had served a would-be Tyr.

You came to kill the bow
he thought, dispassionately. There was truth in those words, and it, like his sword, was made of a tempered steel, hard enough to keep an edge.

But it troubled him. These few days—he'd been distracted, like a fool—as if he were the boy he accused the boy of being. His eye wandered, always, to where the kai Leonne trained. To the Northern men, the Northern
women
, who trained him; who bruised him, who advised him, in louder or softer tones.

He watched the Serra Alina. hovering like a protective wife, the boy's constant shadow. He wanted to have her killed, and did not dare, not yet. She was known for the danger that she had been to Mareo di'Lamberto, and no witless woman was a danger to that man. Only a wise and cunning one; a treacherous enemy.

He wished them all dead, but he faced the truth, because it was night, and because the boy had already seen it. He had lost the desire for the death itself; for the boy's blood on his hands.

Last of the Leonnes
, he thought, plunging his aged hands into cool water, taking it up, spilling it almost wildly,
I made an oath and I
will
keep it
.

And then, perhaps. Then, peace.

The North was beguiling. The Northern gods, even more so. He listened to those of the Imperial Court who would speak, and he'd heard of his personal favorite:
Mandaros
. Lord of Judgment. Keeper of the Dead. They did not believe in the winds, in the North; it was another hand that guided them and killed them, beneath the sun's gaze. They did not believe in justice, not the true justice of death for death, life for life. But they believed in this: That the souls of the dead went to these—these
halls
, these things of carved stone that went forward and up on all sides, a great heaviness of age and weight, like the palace itself.

And there, the dead lingered who had loved ones who still lived. They watched, from their place by his throne, if they were deemed worthy enough to be granted such a place, and they waited.

Mart
, he thought. And then, because he was old, he offered water to the Lady, and he prayed that it was the Gods of the North who had found his wife when she had been betrayed, so completely, by the man he served, and the Lord
he
served. For the gods of the South had failed her utterly, as he had.

Until now.

He walked away from the fountain less peacefully than the boy had, because a thought had been building in his mind, and he had turned away from it until this, the night before the contest, the last threshold to cross: That Mari, his Mari, would have liked the boy.

Winds scour him. Sun scorch him.

It rained.

The air had been heavy with rain all day, and Kiriel knew— because she'd seen it now, a dozen times, each one less shocking to her than the last—that the rain would give over to clear skies and heat in a matter of minutes; that these great, rounded blobs of water would fall into bubbles, puddles and nothing before she could make a dash for cover.