Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (39 page)

Diora almost missed the information the second sentence contained. Almost. "Your pardon, Serra Fiona; the sun is so warm and so bright, I am unused to it. It is… a marvel, and I am dis-tracted." She bowed her head briefly, gathering her thoughts, focusing them. "You spoke of the Serra Teresa?"

"Yes. She has been invited to the Tor Leonne for the Festival of the Moon."

"You must be mistaken."

The Serra flushed slightly, and Diora realized that those words, coolly inflected, were the very ones that she so often used within the confines of the harem when she had been her father's daughter, and Fiona merely his wife. She bowed her head at once, gently, easing the neutrality and passivity of her expression. Vulnerability was often confused with atonement.

Fiona's expression did not change.

"My apologies, Serra Fiona. I was told by my father that the Serra Teresa had been chosen as companion to Adano's Serra, and that she would not be traveling to the Tor Leonne for the foreseeable future." The smile she offered was soft, a thing that hinted at regret; her voice did the rest, tainted by the gift and the curse that she shared with her Ona Teresa. The bardic voice. "But my father owes me nothing; not information, and not truth. Indeed, if you have been told otherwise, I am grateful that you are patient enough to speak with me at all."

The Serra Diora had learned to lie in every conceivable way.

Fiona's eyes widened at the acknowledgment, accepting it at face value. Diora had often wondered at her father's choice; she wondered now, and was as shamed by it as she had been by the desire for company. More, perhaps. Fiona had always played her games, and had Diora been banished, humiliated, or married to an inappropriate man, her father's wife would have offered wine at the Lady's shrines for the rest of her life.

That was gone now; what remained was both a fear and a determination that Fiona had never shown for anything that did not concern her harem or her husband's rise to power—both matters of her own status.

What game
? she thought, as the sun's heat lingered. Sweat trickled down the whiteness of her skin as if it were rain and she a statue.
Fire doesn't have to burn to kill
. Who had said that?

"She should arrive within seven days, well before the Festival of the Moon."

Diora bowed her head again. When she lifted it, her glance was caught and held by the seraf who approached them both, carrying a lacquered tray with two perfect, delicate cups. Water, as Fiona had requested.

Diora was no longer thirsty, not for the water he carried.

She knew every seraf that Teresa had ever trained, and this man was not among them. But something about his eyes—dark eyes in an almost perfect face—was familiar. She did not meet them; instinct spared her that. But she did notice, as he drew closer, that his hands were perfectly smooth, his arms and wrists unscarred.

Fiona, of course, noticed little; he was a seraf. Diora herself would have ignored his presence had she not been searching for eavesdroppers.

"Serra Fiona," she said softly, "might I speak to the seraf a moment?"

Fiona's confusion was genuine. The concern that followed it was genuine as well, although it was more quickly masked. "Of course."

"I think," she said to the man, as he set the tray on the low table between them, "I have seen you serving before, possibly in the house of my uncle. You seem familiar to me."

He did not answer, and that was wise; no seraf did, unless commanded otherwise. But there was about his height and his bearing something… unusual. Familiar, yes.

Of a sudden, she had to hear his voice. She had to
hear
it. "What is your name?" she asked, the four words falling in a rush of sound, as if forced, as if only speed would see them said at all.

He met her eyes then, full on, as unlike a proper seraf as a high clansmen.

"I am called," he replied quietly, "Isladar."

She didn't flee.

His words brought the night; for a moment all she could see was the darkness she heard in his voice, and it was so utter, she forgot about heat and the consequences of fire. Her own voice left her, just as the day did.

Had she ever wondered why demons were creatures of night, but were never connected with the Lady? She ceased at once: such a power could never be under the Lady's Dominion.

Or, she thought, the Lord's.

She didn't flee; she forced herself to sit in the shade cast by the height of the morning sun. She'd had practice, she thought, and the thought was bitter enough to break through the fear.

"Isladar. An… interesting name. Was it given to you by your master?" Hard to speak the words. But she had been trained by a master; her voice was her sole power. She would not be deprived of it.

"No," he replied, the veneer of his words soft and deferential. He bowed to her; she caught the sweep of his shadow upon the grass because she would not meet his eyes.

Would not?

And why? Her shoulders, never stooped, stiffened imperceptibly. "No?" He must play his game; he was trapped in a guise that she would never have thought could suit him.

"No, Serra Diora. I was not born a slave."

He faltered, with a single word. Slave was a very Northern term, and seldom used, if at all, in the South. She looked up, as if this single weakness was enough to make him fallible. Mortal.

"No? But you bear no scars."

"A wise man knows when struggle is futile and preserves dignity in the stead of a freedom he cannot have."

And she looked up because, in truth, she desired to see his face in the unforgiving harshness of the day's light; to deprive it of essential mystery; to destroy her single memory of Lord Isladar. At night, his visage just strange enough to be other than human, he had been so very, very beautiful.

It had surprised her; it surprised her now, although it shouldn't. What, after all, was more beautiful than power?

"And do you look forward," she said, "to some day when you are not a slave?"

He smiled as she met his eyes, as she saw the whole of his face. "Very clever." He turned then, as she did; they both glanced at the Serra Fiona.

But Diora's glance faltered; Isladar's did not. She could almost feel his eyes rest against the sudden rigidity of her own expression. Serra Fiona had not moved at all. Her eyes were wide and round; they stared ahead at a spot just beyond the Serra Diora's perfect, plainly clad shoulder.

Fear was not as distant as it should have been. But it was not nearly as close as it would have been, had she been wiser. She was cool; she did not choose to dissemble or to play at being helpless.

"Well met, Serra Diora di'Marano." The seraf bowed. "You cost me much when last we met, and if I had known then whose flesh housed the spirit that slipped the Voyani woman past my bindings, you would not have aggrieved your father or your Tyr in the days to follow.

"You are called the Flower," he added. "And in
Kialli
eyes, you are aptly named: In your season, there is an astonishing beauty about your delicacy. It will fade. You will wither." The lack of malice in the words made them the more chilling; she saw the ages in his eyes, and understood then just how little mortals suffer age.

He
was
beautiful, although the night had left his features, but his beauty was the beauty of distance. The mountains in the North of Mancorvo, the ocean at the height of the rainy season, the desert after the storm—they were beautiful in just such a way.

But she was certain that they were less deadly, or rather, that the bodies that littered the passes in winter, the ocean floor after the height of a storm or the desert's hot, hot sands, proved only the indifference of nature and the foolishness of man.

"I am called the Flower of the Dominion," she said, as harshly as she ever said anything, "by the romantic, the ironic, or the foolish." The sun shifted across the sky, and as it did, light lit the folds of silk across her perfectly folded lap.

As if it were water.

"And of the three, I am which?"

Silence was her answer; her face was almost as still as Fiona's.

"She cannot hear us," was his reply.

"I… thought not. If you will continue to play at servitude, I must tell you that you are failing in your chosen role."

"Oh?"

"The sun is rising, and the shadows cast by the bowers above are becoming too short for the comfort of the wife and daughter of your Lord."

She was not certain why she'd said the words once they'd left her lips; was not certain why she had spoken in such a clear, unfettered tone. But she thought it was because he was beautiful and deadly and outside of the experience that had so harshly shaped the whole of her life.

Or perhaps it was because she feared no death. Everything her enemies might have used to threaten her with they had already destroyed.

To her surprise, the creature who had captured Evallen of the Arkosa Voyani, and who had so successfully seen to her torture, moved elegantly, gracefully, perfectly as he set about arranging the poles and pegs above which cloth would be draped. The cloth itself was a white silk, painted by the hands of Sendari's wives within the walls of their suddenly powerful harem. She saw Illia's work in the leaves of the lilies that were otherwise implied by the silk itself, rather than painted.

"You are clever," he said as he worked, his hands taking to labor as if they were made for it, and no more, "and I admire clever. To a point."

"And you are here because you admire clever? I had thought that you were the ears and the eyes of your Lord."

"I am," he replied mildly, "both of those. But not, perhaps, this day. I am curious. I have been experimenting in my own fashion with humanity. You have evoked the anger of the Sword's Edge; he is not a mortal who is easily angered. Nor easily frustrated in his ambition." He stepped back to assess the success of his work. Frowned, the expression a ripple of lip and eye that passed above his face and was gone. "I was given to understand that the women of the South were not powerful."

"We serve," she said quietly.

"As do we," he replied. He bowed. "We will meet again, if you survive."

"I half thought you were sent to kill me."

"They do not send me to kill. I am not reliable." He smiled, his eyes narrowed, and for an instant he
was
the demon she had seen at the Festival of the Sun. "And you, little one, believe you desire death. We do not grant the desired without reasons of our own, and your death would serve no purpose of mine at the moment.

"In time, perhaps, but I have learned, when dealing with mortals, that indulgence of that particular hunger is… costly."

Truth, in the words; truth and darkness. She wondered, as the Serra Fiona suddenly began to breathe again, her pink lips shifting subtly with the rise and fall of her delicate chest, whether her curse and gift was capable of discerning truth from the lips of a creature who had served the Lord of Night before Leonne the Founder had graced the Dominion with his sword and his death.

Night was the Lord's time; darkness the Lord's element. Or so humans believed. They took elements of reality and made myth of it. In turn, time eroded myth and left story behind, and story was good enough gruel only for the minds of the young.

But if the minds of the young outgrew those stories, the hearts did not, and in the corners of memories as old as life—if any mortal span could be considered "old"—stories and shadows became one. Demons were the darkness, the darkness the only domain they possessed.

But the truth—as all truths were—was less simple and vastly less romantic than that. The kin walked the earth. They had always walked it in one form or another, no matter how small their summoned number, although only the
Kialli
could remember a time when the earth itself was alive with wild magics, all long since tamed.

Lord Ishavriel walked the earth in the heat of the midday sun. He cast a shadow decreed by the height of his body, no more, no less; he dressed finely, in the manner of the humans of the High Court, but not so ostentatiously that he drew attention or suspicion, and he loitered near the water's edge, as most people did who were occasional visitors to the Tor Leonne proper.

Only the last was difficult. The Lake—as natural at its source as he—caused him pain when he chose to approach it. He had chosen once to consume the waters when they were offered; proof, in deed, that no curse and no magic were his match. But he had been wise enough to test his measure, and theirs, in the Shining Palace, where any revelation of what the mortals so quaintly called his true nature was hardly likely to harm his plans.

A costly display.

But he had proved his point. These waters were among the strongest of the magics remaining in the Southern lands, and he was their match. He would be more than their master.

Provided, of course, that his plans went smoothly.

It was not in the nature of plans to run smoothly. Not in the demesne that he had ruled by dint of strength and power, and not upon the earth that had changed so much in the millennia that his feet did not burn at the power beneath them.

And so he watched. Across the width of still water, two women sat in a silence of breeze and midday heat. They were, by the standard of the Court, quite lovely; they were also the wives or daughters of men of power, such as human power was. They were both young, both delicate in seeming, both dark-haired and pale as the Northern snows.

But one of them spoke, and the other did not actually listen; she was frozen in place, unmoved by what she saw or heard—if she saw or heard anything at all. The speaker, her back toward him, her face therefore unreadable, moved deliberately and gently; he could not tell by the delicacy of her movements whether or not she was afraid.

Or rather, he could not tell
what
she was afraid of. That she was afraid, he could see clearly. He could smell it, it was so strong.

But although he had cast the spells and expended the necessary power, he could not hear a single word she spoke. Syllables were so muted and hushed that one was indistinguishable from the next; all that was left to him was the cadence of her speech. Interference.