Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (65 page)

"You've chosen your master, and I do not think, having made that choice, you will be able to turn from the descent you've begun; your path is steep, and it pulls you down at ever greater speed."

He watched her face for a minute, two, three. "Why," he asked at last, "are you telling me this?"

"Because, having chosen your master, you will still be yourself. You would not lift hand to save my life, but you will not take it, and you will not lift hand to see it taken."

"You are so certain of this?"

"Am I wrong, Brother?"

"Teresa—"

"I tell you this," she said, voice low, "because Alora loved you. And I tell you this because, in my fashion, I loved you as well; of my brothers, you were the one I most favored. You and I—we were ill-loved by the only man in our lives who had power. You were a scholar, a Widan-Designate, not a man. I, I was merely a woman."

"Yes."

"She saw it."

He did not speak the name of his dead wife, but the breeze that stirred as Teresa's words ebbed into silence carried it.
Alora
.

He could almost understand, seeing Teresa stripped of the finery and the mannerisms that had defined her in the eyes of the Dominion, what Alora had loved in her. And that was difficult.

Almost as difficult as what she said next.

"I told you I came for Diora, and do not mistake me; I gave her mother my word that I would watch over her, and death will break that word before I will. But I could have continued that task in the safety of anonymity.

"I came to say good-bye, Sendari."

"We should have let you have a life," he replied.

"Yes. So much harder, then, to walk away." She bowed. A man's gesture.

He could not quite offer her the courtesy that she offered him; he did not bow.

And as she walked away, beneath the changing face of the Lady's strongest moon, he said no farewells. As if, he thought bitterly, hoarding the words would change the truth.

The moon was bright enough to cast long shadows, but none of them were new; he stood in the darkness he had chosen, feeling a peculiar numbness as he listened to the rhythmic movement of water against the dark stalks of rushes.

Diora.

Teresa.

And then, unnaturally,
Sendari
.

427 AA

Stone Deepings

He would not let Calliastra near her.

He did not have the power to send the child of gods away, but he had the power to prevent her from touching Jewel.

Mostly, that was a good thing.

But the road, still bowered by distant stars, was long, and the walk tiring in a way that it hadn't been when she'd had her Oma by her side.

"Jewel," Avandar said softly, when she stumbled and he righted her, "let me carry you."

"You've been walking as long as I have," she snapped, "And you're older. I can take care of myself."

"Or you could let me help you," Calliastra said. There was no menace at all in her voice; there wouldn't be, Jewel thought, until a moment before death, if at all. Death had never had much promise, but when she looked too long at Calliastra's face, she understood the allure of suicide.

Hated that.

Calliastra took the refusal in stride, although there was a delicate shift in her expression at each refusal that Jewel came to understand meant hurt. Pain.

"Jewel," Avandar said softly.

"You could offer me a blindfold."

He laughed. It was jarring to hear that laughter; the path was quiet and suffocating with the presence of Calliastra, and that presence had strangled all mirth. Well, all of hers anyway, not that she'd recently had that much to spare.

"And that was funny how?"

"You are seer-born," the goddess replied. "Blindfold or no, you would still understand what my presence entails; you would be drawn to it. If you could not see me, my voice would become that much more distinctive, that much more compelling; if you somehow managed to deafen yourself, the ground would slope toward me, the air would carry my scent. You, seer-born, must learn to accept what you
do
see; to run from it in any way—"

"Is impossible," Avandar replied.

In perfect synchronicity.

"Is it true?" she asked, although she knew the answer.

"Is what true?" Each word as light as mountain air, but not as crisp, not as sharp.

"Did you feed her your wives and your children?"

He shrugged. Offered her silence by way of response.

The stones beneath her feet grew sharper and taller; she concentrated on walking in the shadows at his side as the silence widened the gap between them.

When she had given up on getting an answer—or rather, an answer that involved words, since the texture of his silence was often answer enough—he surprised her.

"Yes."

It wasn't the type of surprise she liked. And what was worse was this: She wasn't certain if she was surprised because she had hoped to believe that Calliastra was lying, or because she had never expected him to willingly surrender that much knowledge about his past and his personal life.

He's got nothing else to lose
, she thought, silent in the face of the implications his words made.
I've seen the place he called home. I might have been party to enough of a change that he loses it entirely. What is there to hide
?

Another voice spoke, so much like her own she would have thought she was continuing her dialogue if her thoughts hadn't been headed in a different direction.

Everything.

She thought it would be impossible to sleep. She fought it for as long as she could. But in the end, stone or no stone, night or no night, goddess or no goddess, she was drawn to a place that Avandar and Calliastra could not—directly—touch. She slept.

"You keep interesting company," a voice said, stretching the word "interesting" so that it sounded feline and unpleasant.

She opened her eyes. Shrugged. "Goddess. Whatever Avandar is. I don't have much say in the company I'm keeping."

A stone paw came down gently on top of her foot. She felt the growing weight of stone. "I wasn't talking about
them
," the gargoyle said. "I was talking about me."

/
hate cats
.

"The Winter King and the Firstborn are enemies," he continued conversationally.

"I listen better when I'm not in pain," she replied, staring pointedly at his very large, very stone paw.

"Everybody else's pain is always more important," the creature replied, rolling its eyes, its face a study in exaggerated disgust. "I was sent to tell you that Calliastra will not help you."

"How surprising."

The big cat hissed.

"She is the enemy of the Lady of the Hunt."

"Oh. And she is?"

A louder hiss. "The Lady," he said. "The Winter Queen. You are not at
all
the right sort of human. You have bad manners, and you are scrawny and stupid. But I'm not allowed to eat you or even play with you a little bit until the door is open. So pay attention."

She snorted.

Laughed.

"If you want me to help you, offering to make me a cat's toy isn't exactly incentive."

"But we're bored," the creature complained, lolling its massive head in a circle as if easing itself of some hidden tension. "And the Winter King is impatient. We can't have
any
fun until the Hunt begins."

She started to speak, and found herself flying through the air. The ground at her back was hard, and the flight winded her.

The cat took off, muscles carved in stone fluid beneath stone's surface. She couldn't imagine the enchantment that had created this creature; couldn't imagine the strength it took to move that much weight into that flight.

But she found that she could imagine the effect that much weight would have when it landed; she cried out and rolled as quickly as possible into the lee of a large stalagmite.

That rock snapped like a thin icicle as the cat clipped it and continued to circle. "We don't like being bored," it said, its voice as irritating as ever, its presence a danger now, not an annoyance.

"She will help the enemy," he continued. "Do not speak to her, do not speak of her, and do not give her any part of yourself. You are too valuable."

Right
, Jewel thought,
until I open that stupid door
.

"Very good," her Oma said.

The cat snarled. Her Oma frowned. "Get away, you impudent creature. What she had in mind when she granted permission for your existence, I don't know."

The cat's hiss was different. It didn't land, and Jewel realized that the hesitation had something to do with the presence of her Oma.

"You
do
know," the cat miauled back.

Her Oma shook her head. "No, I don't. Oh, I know what the effect'll be, but I don't know what she was thinking. I can guarantee she won't be happy with the results." Her Oma's smile took on that spicy, Southern edge. "Of course, neither will you, little cat. She'll play with you the way young boys play with flies."

The cat's hiss was a full-throated sound that was
so
unnatural Jewel thought it would end in a hacking, awful cough—which was deserved. It didn't.

The cat left, and quickly.

"You just have to know what to say," her Oma explained, rubbing her hands on her apron the way she did after she'd finished any job worth doing. That apron, old and graying, worn and patched, was like a map to the woman's life; a bit of food here, sweat and dust there, dirt, creases from her lap, from the bend in her knees when she worked on her hands. It also wasn't what she had been wearing when she'd first appeared in the mountain pass.

Great. Ghosts need clothing
? But she remembered both things clearly, and wondered how much of what she saw was fabricated, was fabric, of that memory.

"Let it go," her Oma said.

"I can't. History makes me what I am."

"Yes. But you know the price of making that history an excuse for what you
can
be."

"It's not just my own history I'm concerned with," Jewel said softly.

"Of course not. I didn't raise an idiot. But if you can't cleave to the Warlord's shadow, other shadows will devour you. There is no light on
this
road, and you've chosen to walk it."

"Not much of a choice," another voice—a voice she had never heard before—contributed. She looked up to see a woman sitting in the v made of twin rock formations. There were flowers in her hair; leaves that trailed like willow swatches down the side of her face. "Not much of a choice at all if she wasn't told the nature of the road before the walking."

"Busybodies everywhere," her Oma said, turning just as Jewel had done. "You're not wanted here."

"No?" She stepped onto the path, and where she walked, stone gave way to earth and earth to flowering plant. "You must be Jewel," she said.

"You know me?"

"I didn't. But Calliastra has been calling you, loud and long, and we all have ears to hear with. There hasn't been this much activity on these paths since the gods walked." She smiled, and her smile was beautiful in a way that Calliastra's wasn't. There was nothing to compel in it; nothing to attract; nothing to make a person uncomfortable with the unsaid, unacknowledged sensuality of a first meeting. "I'm Corallonne."

"And Corallonne is?"

"I'm Calliastra's… cousin," the woman said with a smile. "And not all roads lead to where you are going."

"Her road
does
," Jewel's Oma said emphatically.

"Well, then, I guess that's that," the woman replied lightly. "I never argue with an old woman. I hope to see you again, Jewel, or your kin; the road shouldn't be traveled, but since it will be, let it be traveled well. Take from my garden, or rather, from the garden that will grow where I have ventured, and be comforted."

"I'm not in need of comfort."

"But you are, child." Her smile was reminiscent of Finch's. "Let me tell you something you would know if you were willing to think about it: The Warlord gave his wife and his children— some of them—to Calliastra."

"I already know that, but thanks for the thought."

"It was a death they earned when they attempted to bring about
his
death, and it was a kinder death than he would have suffered.

"But," she bent down, reached out with her hands, and came up carrying round fruits that looked a lot like apples, "all things grow, if they know life and if they are mortal. All things change."

"He's not, strictly speaking, mortal," Jewel's Oma said.

"He is," Corallonne replied. "Mortal through and through, with no ability to acknowledge it anymore, not in a way that counts. You know it, and I know it."

"Mortality, by definition, involves death," her Oma snapped, sharp as vinegar.

Corallonne frowned slightly. "He is not the man he was."

"He has been many men."

"Indeed."

"And he's failed at being all of them."

Corallonne's frown deepened. "And
we
can judge? What is failure? What is success? There is birth and death, and the Halls of Mandaros, where we—you and I—will never go." She turned to Jewel, who was bound by their words as if her life depended on them, although indeed both women were calm and peaceful. "Judge him if you will, but judge with hope."

"Hope?"

"Where there is damnation," Corallonne said quietly, "there is also redemption."

"Na'dio."

She sat, composed, in a darkness alleviated by nothing but the memory of the moon.

Sleep had proved elusive, but this was common. Uncommon, and more painful, was the reason. She had saved her father's life. Of all deaths, his had been the one she had least desired. But she had desired it. The dead, her dead, spoke with the voice of a wind that scours rock to smooth facelessness.

The screens that slid by day to admit food and the rare, rare visitor would remain closed this night, as they had all nights since the death of the kai el'Sol. But there were some things such doors could not keep out.

"Ona Teresa,"
she replied, matching words of power with words of power, smoothing the guilt and the anger out of the voice that spoke them.
"I had not heard that you had arrived."