The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5 (91 page)

Ser Alessandro kai di’Clemente counted the fall of his men. Spoke their names, one after the other, as if naming were a thing of legend, and had power. It was the Lady’s time, and if there was a time for such a power, it was now: he surrendered to her the things that he valued: his men. His horse. His sword.

He sat astride a horse not his own, and honored his rider in so doing, although the rider had not lived to see or acknowledge the honor; he lay beneath the moving water.

A calm was upon the Tor’agar; a calm made of names, of inevitability. A spray of pebbles, dusted with dry earth, clattered against the shoulders of turned armor. The Marente forces still had their Widan, but although Clemente forces had never dallied long with the Sword of Knowledge, they were not helpless.

Not yet, and not while they stood.

He spoke another name, the fingers around the hilt of his sword growing numb with the ferocity of what seemed idle grip. Soon, he thought, he would join them. But not soon enough; there was no room upon the bridge, no worthy death there. Still, death, he thought, would come, did come.

He heard the shortened cry of the only woman upon the field, and he did not even turn to acknowledge what it presaged; he knew. One wall, one at least, had fallen.

And a miracle, he thought, raising sword to the light of the falling moon, the grace of the Lady’s brightest face, that it had not fallen sooner; that it had, in fact, stood at all.

He lifted his horn in his left hand, brought it full to lips; tasted cold silver, as if it were the very Lady’s kiss. He called his men to him, those who remained, and they came, injured or whole, the clank of metal against metal, the labor of breath, the only honor offered him.

More than enough.

He spun horse around on short rein; saw that one wall had, indeed, been breached. But the breach was narrow, and in the gap stood the two Northern men, both fair of face, both dancers whose weapons seemed to add to their grace, their deadly steps. He could not recall the exact moment they had deserted the bridge.

He sounded horn again and urged his horse forward.

Horn answered him. A single long note.

And following it, others, lesser, shorter, but distinct: a song, a war song unlike the clamor of drums.

His gaze grazed moon, his horn fell slowly from his lips; just as slowly did his men look up to see his face, to see that the horn was now, once again, in his lap.

Reymos hesitated for a moment, but only a moment; he raised horn now, and in reply the Clemente call sounded across the rise and fall of the gathered huts and dwellings. Alessandro was surprised that Ser Reymos had breath left with which to make the urgent call of horn so loud.

The Clemente cerdan turned to him, turned away, listening for the play of distant horn, the sound of distant hooves.

As if, Alessandro thought, they did not walk in a dream of the Lady. As if they were upon a clear field, upon the open plains in the heart of Mancorvo. As if the notes they had heard had been, could be, real.

But when they sounded a second time, he, too, turned, reins in hand, sword in hand, horn once again idle at his belt. Not for the Tors or the Tyrs the song of that call; no man of worth sounded his own praise.

From the North, where no wall had been erected, the first of the horsemen appeared, their gait slowed by the fall of buildings and the bodies that adorned the slender road. And the foremost of the men carried, with pride, a banner that even in moonlight no clansman could fail to recognize.

He bowed his head.

The Tyr’agnate, Mareo kai di’Lamberto, had come.

Steel is a miracle.

Fire is a miracle.

Horses are a miracle.

Cloth, the weave of something grown from plant or worm; gold, from stream or Northern mine; silver, border of chained links that stop wind from furling the banners away from mortal sight.

The sunlight seen through moon is a miracle. Blood, when it flows, and when it stills; breath, when drawn, and when it ceases to be drawn.

Miracles. Offerings.

Who can say that in the Dominion there are no prayers, and no answers, that power alone decides who is fit and who will fail?

Men. And men say much.

Even in silence, wielding blade, they speak.

The walls fell in concert as the forces of the Tyr’agnate streamed past the wounded and the dying. Silence—if silence could be the thundering of hooves, the sound of drawn blades—reigned, and ruled; no words were spoken, no threats exchanged. Threats were idle pleasantries in the South, and the time for pleasantry—if it existed at all—had vanished.

They brought the sun with them. One man wore it openly; orange flame fanned the sheen of golden surcoat above his breastplate, and his sword spoke the language of Day.

Honor bound, he was called, this lord of Lamberto. Honor bound, and as one bound, lessened by stricture, weakened by it.

But strengthened by it as well.

He moved through the ranks of Marente cerdan as if they were already dead. His blade shattered blades; nothing stood in his way. He was not a young man, but the age that rested upon his face had hardened it, granting it the lines and fullness that no youth could own.

Ser Alessandro kai di’Clemente watched a moment, hand numb, the names of the dead lost to the rush of the living, and he realized that he had seen this man before.

Not in the Court of Amar, not within the vast expanse of the circle, the domis within which resided the most powerful clan in Mancorvo. Not in the Tor Leonne. Not in any of the dwellings within which the rich and the powerful resided.

But in a village in the Torrean of Manelo, wielding the
same
blade, and in the same cause: Justice. Honor.

He bowed his head a moment.

Kai el’Sol
, he thought.
Fredero kai el’Sol
.

Alessandro had loved his cousin, Ser Franko kai di’Manelo.

He bowed his head, leaning into the wind, into the roar of a battle he had not yet joined. Yes, he had loved his cousin. He had hated the man who had killed him over a single, willful
mistake
.

But men make mistakes. And some mistakes end them; the truth of the Dominion. Costly. Clear.

The night air was cool and clean; he drew it into his lungs, held it a moment, and expelled, straightening the line of his shoulder, guiding the horse beneath his knees.

“Come!” he called, lifting sword, rallying the cerdan who remained. “Let us not leave
all
of the Lord’s glory to Lamberto!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

N
OT for the first time, she was trapped within the confines of a harem, waiting for armed men to finish their night’s work.

The circumstances were different.

No one turned their last spoken words into the deadliest of all the weapons ever to be wielded against her.

Her wives were dead; her son dead; her father, alive, but taken by wind. She had thought she had nothing left to lose; had fashioned the whole of her life into a weapon on that premise.

But her hands lay against the damp skin of the Dominion’s foremost Serra, giving lie to that: she learned, this eve, and bitterly, that there was
always
something to lose.

She did not cry; she did not struggle; she did not unfold the delicate bend of her knees. But she spoke three soft words to the woman she did not look to.

“Where is Ramdan?”

Remembering, as she said it, that not all losses were hers.

The outer rooms of the harem—three—were open to sky, and although the wives of the Serra Celina did not fear the Lady’s gaze, they knew the cost of exposure to the Lord’s; they retreated into the harem’s heart as the pale pink and blue of dawn added color to the sky, changing the pallor of wood, the pale, jagged edge of column’s broken heart.

But here, too, they found destruction, and at last, they gathered in the gardens that were, in theory, surrounded by rooms occupied by the wives of the harem. They were a pretty whirl of cluttering noise and plain silks, and they shivered and clung to one another in either youth or fear.

Serra Diora di’Marano watched them ambivalently.

They were not her father’s wives; not hers. They could not see when death had passed them by; they were caught by the fascination and fear of its shadow in the failing moonlight, and they asked the Serra Celina for words of wisdom.

But the Serra Celina held fast to her charge, and although she clearly held her wives in regard, the force of her affection was blunted—as it should be—by the presence of strangers; by the Havallan Matriarch, by the Serra Diora, and by the woman who huddled in the throes of seizure upon the damp ground.

Teresa lay like shadow between two standing stones in the garden; they provided no shelter, and no shade, for they were set in the garden’s center, like tall, stone sentries; the carved faces turned outward on either side bore no witness, made no judgment.

Serra Diora would not leave her aunt’s side. She labored, the waterskin slowly emptying, the power in her own voice becoming thin, as she bespoke the Serra Teresa. As companion, she had Yollana, and Yollana offered no words, no interference, no misplaced kindness. Instead, the wreath of slowly moving pipe smoke gathered in the air like cloud, dense and familiar; she watched, and she stood guard in her fashion.

There was some comfort in that; there was comfort in nothing else.

The sun could not be seen; the horizon was denied the harem garden. But its effects lightened the sky by slow degree, presaging the passage of the Lady, the advent of the Lord. What was hidden by night and silver light was now to be exposed; the damage done the domis was not light.

But it was nothing; it could be rebuilt.

She brushed matted strands of hair from her Ona’s face; felt the heat beneath the clammy surface of skin, the terrible asymmetrical shaking, like heartbeat gone askew and traveling to the outer reaches of the body in its wild flight.

She heard the wives raise voice; heard the sudden absence of their muted whispers. Fear came and went; she was sensitive because she listened for any sound—any sign—that the Serra Teresa might somehow wake whole into the world. Only then, she thought, would she know that the night had truly passed.

And then she heard the sound of armor, and interposing herself gracefully in the gap between the standing stones, she rose, lifting chin and dropping hands in a semblance of courtly grace. Yollana did not trouble herself; she lit her pipe and inhaled, watchful now, her one eye more menacing than both would have been.

Men entered the garden, but they were few.

Three, four, five. She counted them by the sound of their boots, for she could not look up to meet their gaze; she wore no veil, and she had no desire to see what she feared in their faces.

Two men approached, the length of their stride broken by grace and silence. She knew them for serafs by the fall of their step, and waited. Ramdan bowed to ground before her, and he did not rise. She closed her eyes.

“Serra Diora,” he said. Just that. What she heard in his voice was night. She had never thought to wonder just how much he understood, how much he knew; she did not wonder now. Instead, she accepted the smooth surface of his impenetrable voice as the answer to that unasked question. He knew.

He held out his hands, palms up, as if in plea. Her answer: she passed the waterskin that held the waters of the Tor Leonne into his keeping. There were no other hands that she trusted with the task; no other eyes that she would willingly expose the Serra Teresa to. She did not speak; she did not step aside.

It was awkward.

But the man by his side was not known to her; not known to the Serra Teresa; she offered her aunt what meager protection she could.

Discovered that she was wrong when the second seraf also fell to his knees; fell low enough that she could see the stylized—and indistinct—halo of sun’s ray upon his right breast. No seraf, this. Radann.

Servitor.

As he knelt, his head bowed, she waited; absence of breath informed her posture, made of her a living stone, a living monument.

His hair was a pale sheen of white over something that had once been black; she could see the sun-darkened skin of exposed neck as it fell to either side. She knew him, then. Although he had never bowed this way to her before, although he had never offered obeisance in such a way to any woman in her memory, she knew him.

“Jevri,” she whispered.

He lifted his face.

Jevri el’Sol. Jevri kep’Lamberto.

It was the latter name that owned him, although he wore Radann’s robes. No slave could serve the Radann. No slave could serve the Lord.

And no man, she thought, could be free of a lifetime of service to the kai el’Sol that Jevri had served.

“Serra Diora di’Marano,” he said, bowing his head again.

Gently, she said, “Radann do not bow to a simple Serra.” It was not her place to speak so, but although he wore the robes, they did not, at the moment, fit.

He rose in silence, and offered her not a smile, but something akin to it. Some quiet crinkling of skin around eye, some lessening of the grim silence that held his face so smoothly in its grip. “It is not the Lord’s time,” he said softly. “Nor, by the light, the Lady’s. And in man’s time, Serra Diora, men must do what they must.”

She was not careful, this eve. Or rather, she was, but all of her care was turned toward the Serra Teresa; she had little left for herself.

“Do you travel with the kai Lamberto?”

A gray brow rose; he bowed head again, a quick and graceful dip of chin, so unlike the movements of the lesser Radann, the men culled from poor clans.

“Is he here?”

“He is in the garden,” Jevri said quietly. He turned a moment, but she could not see where he looked; the breadth of his shoulder was wall, not window. “The Serra Celina speaks with him now.”

“The Tor’agar?”

“Has returned. He is injured, but the injury is minor; he fails to acknowledge it, even now, to the rue of his young kai.” His smile was brief. “The physicians will suffer greatly if they fail in their charge; I have never seen a boy take such desperate command in an infirmary.”

“And Marakas par el’Sol?”

“He, too, has returned.”

She hesitated. He marked it. They were still a moment, resting in the safety of the web of deceit the powerless often spun. But she was not without power; nor was he. And she knew, as perhaps few others did, just how much knowledge a seraf could have, and hold in silence. “Send him to me,” she said at last.

Jevri bowed head to ground and rose. And he was perfect, she thought, as she watched him walk away; the perfect seraf; the Lady’s man.

When she saw the Radann Marakas par el’Sol, she recognized him.

She had seen him thus once before, at the side of the Radann Peder par el’Sol, come new from battle, and reborn in flame. The Lord’s man.

It was not the Lord’s man she wanted now.

She bowed to him, shedding the unnatural stiffness that she had donned for the Serra Teresa’s sake. He knelt before her, skin smooth and glossy with sweat, with lack of hair, new and pale like the face of the moon. She said nothing, and after a moment, he rose, aware of other eyes in the courtyard, be they at his back and distant.

She listened for words, and heard none.

“Serra Diora,” he said. He did not rise, but the position lost the mien of subservience.

She had played many games in her scant years at court. So, too, had he. But the time for such games had passed. She allowed him to observe the Serra; it was Ramdan who at last chose to curtain Teresa by interposing his back between them.

“What happened?” Marakas par el’Sol asked quietly.

So many years of caution. So many years of silence. She had commanded his presence, and he had come, abasing himself before her, all nicety of form and title set aside. But she could not bring herself to speak the truth. Her own secret, she might choose to offer, but this was not—quite—hers.

Yet an answer was expected. Words slid past; she grasped at them, but coherence fled with them. This was to be an evening of awkward silences, awkward pauses; she had no strength to fill them.

Failing in the one duty, she waited.

And then, after the pause had grown almost exquisitely painful, she reached out and caught his ungloved hands in her own. His eyes widened; she thought he would pull back as she felt the muscles of those hands tense in hers.

But they tensed to hold, and she remembered the only other time he had touched her. He had healed wounded palms; wounds made by the sharp edges of the Heart of Arkosa. And he had tried, in that brief contact, to better glean an understanding of her thoughts, her intentions. He had angered her then; she had retrieved her hands, and she had never raised them where he might touch them.

As if he remembered that single contact, and the reasons for it—all of them—he waited until she met his eyes. She was mute, still mute; all that she offered him was the contact of two palms. But in hands, much could be read: hers were pale and soft; uncallused, unmarked in any obvious way, although the scar that she’d taken in the desert was there if one stood close enough to look.

His hands were rough; darkened by sun, cracked by wind; they were older than his face. Laborer’s hands. They surprised her.

“A demon,” she said quietly, surprising herself. “She faced a demon.”

“It injured her?”

She shook her head. Lifted the hands she held with care, turning at last toward Ramdan’s unbowed back.

Perfect seraf, he stepped aside. The Radann par el’Sol shifted his weight, easing his scabbard to one side. It lay against the flat earth, the smooth stone, becoming darker as the sun rose. There was so little time.

She surrendered his touch to the Serra Teresa, placing his palms against the older woman’s face. “Help her.”

“If it is within my power, Serra Diora.”

And if it was not, then whose? She placed shaking hands in the fold of her lap, and waited, her knees catching sun and light.

He touched the Serra’s face.

He was gentle; could afford to be gentle; her eyes were closed, and her body shuddered at fever’s whim. What she saw, what she noted, he could not say, but he knew that the fever itself was strange: her skin should have been dry and hot to the touch. It was not.

She had taken no wound.

None. But she had defeated the creature of the Lord of Night; that much was evident by the Serra Diora’s closed, cautious expression.

How?

Ah, he thought, as his own hands took some of the warmth from her face. So much was hidden in silence. So much, hidden beneath the perfect seeming of a Serra of the High Court. She was not, could not be, Widan.

Was not healer, for if she were, she would not lie here.

What power might see the death of a Servant of the Lord of Night? She carried no obvious weapon; no great sword, no blessing of the Lord of Day. She was small and delicate, even clothed as she was in the rough wear of the Voyani.

Serra Teresa
.

She moved, as if to avoid the touch of his hands. He hesitated.

And then the Serra Diora joined him, her hands touching his, pressing against joints, knuckles, the rounded veins of dark skin. She did not speak. And he, now caught in the healing trance, could not.

She watched his face.

His lashes were gone; his eyelids, white, blue, and green, flickered as if at the behest of dream. The line of his jaw, shorn of beard, grew pronounced, although his face was long of line, and not given to width.