by Melanie Rawn
The High Prince smiled, and the squire took an involuntary step backward. “Against whatever you like, vein of my heart,” Rohan drawled. “You’re the gambler in the family.”
“Thank you, dearest. You’re so generous to me.” She looked again at the squire. “My lord husband is a great believer in innovations. We have a project or two in mind that require large amounts of iron. Say, about five hundred silk-weights.”
The squire gulped at her casual mention of this colossal quantity. “I-I am ordered to accept whatever terms are offered, your grace. I shall inform my master at once.”
“Do that,” she purred.
Riyan looked a question at Sorin, received a bewildered shrug in reply, and sighed. Whatever Sioned had in mind, it was known only to her and Rohan.
Maarken was still toying with Masul, trying to loose the anger that could only help defeat the pretender. The crowd began to shout its preferences, cheering a well-aimed blow or an artful parry. As Riyan followed each attack and counter, he came to realize that whatever else he was, Masul was no fool. Too much depended on this for him to be tricked into losing his temper. Maarken seemed to sense this as well; his face set into grimmer lines and his sword swung with more ferocity, seeking not to taunt but to kill.
There was blood now on both men, gashes cut in arms and thighs, gouges taken out of leather harness and the skin beneath. Riyan tensed as Masul’s blade sought to bury itself in Maarken’s skull; the young lord swayed back just in time, but not quickly enough to avoid a glancing slice on his cheekbone. He riposted swiftly with a nasty cut to the pretender’s already bruised ribs, where his earlier blow had laid open part of Masul’s armor. The man gasped loudly and drew back, one hand clutching his bloodied side. This time Maarken followed through with a long step forward and a vicious swing of his sword designed to dissect the tendons behind the knees. Masul lurched out of his way at the last instant and fell to the grass.
Riyan’s four rings dug into his flesh as his hands clenched in anticipation of the final blow. But it did not come. Maarken staggered slightly, shaking his head. And suddenly he raised his sword to strike at something that was not there.
Nervous laughter and derisive shouts surged through the crowd, quickly followed by exclamations as Maarken again thrust his blade at empty air. Riyan gave an incoherent cry as he felt trembling heat circle his fingers. He looked down at his hands, half-expecting the rings to glow, giddy with relief when he saw they did not. But they alerted him to a subtle and menacing prickle of the same heat in his mind. Maarken was struggling against some enemy seen only by himself—and his real enemy was recovering from shock and pain, heaving himself to his feet. Riyan closed his eyes, concentrating. An oddly familiar flare on the edge of his thoughts, intense fire just out of reach—his breath caught and he remembered when he had felt it before.
The assassin’s death. The ancient power of his mother’s family had responded to the use of sorcery then as now, answered through the burning of his faradhi rings. So he was of the Old Blood, he thought, fighting back panic as that blood allowed him to glimpse things that threatened Maarken’s life as surely as Masul’s sword.
Sioned clung to Rohan’s arm, watching in horror as Masul rose up to renew the battle. But Maarken was flailing his sword at nothingness, whirling to attack things that were not there. “Sweet Goddess, what’s wrong with him?” she gasped.
Tobin screamed her son’s name. Masul, careful of the wildly swinging sword, approached and got in a telling blow with the flat of his blade on Maarken’s spine. The young lord reeled, turned to slice a gash in Masul’s arm. But it was as if he fought not one but two or more men, only one of them visible to the stunned crowd. Only his vast skills as a warrior trained to anticipate a dozen swords at once kept him alive.
“Sioned—it’s them, someone’s here who knows the old ways—”
She barely recognized Pandsala’s voice, didn’t even notice that for the first time the regent had addressed her by name. “What? What are you saying?”
Pandsala looked ill, her face as gray as her gown, her eyes nearly black. She was rubbing her hands, twisting the rings on her fingers as if they hurt her. “I don’t know, I can’t—oh, Goddess!”
Rohan and Sioned supported her as she swayed. “Sioned—if she’s right, someone has to protect Maarken.”
She knew at once what he was asking. She had shielded him from treachery years ago during his battle with Roelstra, weaving starlight at an impossible distance into an overarching dome through which arrows and knives could not penetrate. But this was different. He was asking her to pit her Sunrunner arts against something she knew nothing about. And there was no sunlight to work with, nothing to weave into a thick fabric of protection. Even if she could, would it be effective against sorcery?
Maarken twisted and fought, sometimes evading Masul’s thrusts and sometimes staggering under their impact as he battled specters only he could see. The deep red of his battle harness and the orange-red of his tunic were darker now with another red, an ominous red. Like living flame he writhed and spun from visible and invisible warriors.
Living flame.
She let Rohan take Pandsala’s weight. “Pol! Andry! Urival!” she cried out, and they were at her side even as the first blaze of conjured Sunrunner’s Fire sprang up from the ground. She heard the screams, Miyon’s furious shout that faradhi tricks were forbidden, and ignored all as she gathered in the colors of those around her. Sapphire and ruby and emerald and diamond and a dozen other gem tints dazzled and shone within the red-gold flames as they rose higher, higher, running up walls that were not there, meeting in a fiery arch that spread until it encapsuled the battlefield. People shrank back, faces crimsoned by the Fire, terrified by its intensity. Sioned grasped for every shred of faradhi power she could find around her, heedless of the soft despairing cries of Sunrunners already exhausted. But she kept Maarken out of it, cordoned off from the weave that must protect him.
The flames flickered, unsteady, as the sorcerer who had wrought Maarken’s visions assaulted Sioned, battered at her with powers like yet unlike faradhi ways. It was as if their hands met on either side of a fine mesh screen, palms and fingers matched, the warmth of skin to skin tangible—yet never really touching. She fought back, drew even more from reeling Sunrunners until they had no more to give.
The Fire held, obscuring all view of the combatants within its dome. She could not know if her weaving had canceled the sorcerer’s working. She wanted to believe that the frantic attack on her defenses meant she was succeeding. But she knew that the sorcerer must be found, must be. There was not enough left in the Sunrunners or in herself to sustain this for long.
Sioned felt a sudden loss, a retrieval of portions of power and color back to the faradhi who owned them. She could not stop to reclaim lost strength; she sought for and found more, moaning as she recognized the brilliant, nearly limitless force that was her son, offered up for her free use. As she had done once before when he was barely a day old, she drew on the raw power of him, and thanked the Goddess for his gifts even while begging her to keep him safe.
Pandsala struggled to rise from her knees, where Rohan had abandoned her when Sioned began her work. She was still a part of that work, could feel Sioned’s imperious demand for her strength. Yet it was not like years ago, when she had been helpless in the Sunrunner’s powerful grip. She could reclaim the larger portion of herself, and with it her conscious will.
She staggered a few steps, paused to catch her breath, and swept her gaze around firelit, frightened faces beneath the cloudy gloom. Who was it, where, how? Her rings burned her flesh. Her mind was ablaze. Yet for the first time there were two distinct sensations of power, overlapping in some places and remarkably similar, but different in subtle ways. One of them she could easily identify as the faradhi discipline, seized by Sioned. The other was strangely free of the High Princess, drawn instead toward another, matching power.
Suddenly she knew its source, knew h
im as instinctively as she knew how to breathe. Fierce eyes in a fire-stained, feral face—a face that had seemed eerily familiar to her before. The eyes were the wrong color, but the face was suddenly an echo of one hated for half her lifetime, a face that laughed at her in nightmares that had been true. Ianthe’s face.
Pandsala almost screamed with the agony of knowledge, Ianthe’s face, Ianthe’s son, Ianthe’s victory. She tasted blood in her mouth, sorcerer’s blood shared with him, and knew her teeth had bitten her flesh. Her lower lip was on fire, like the circles of gold and silver around her fingers. Sunrunner’s rings screaming in the presence of sorcery. Physical pain snapped some thread of tension in her, but instead of igniting fury she felt icy calm.
He was only a short distance from her. She pushed past Chay, who held his nearly senseless wife in his arms, shouldered aside Volog and Ostvel and the wide-eyed Alasen. The boy didn’t see her. He held onto the young Sunrunner Maarken wanted to marry, his gaze intent on the fiery dome. She moved closer, every muscle in her body flowing smoothly and silently as water. Sioned’s demand for her strength in the Fire-weaving siphoned off a little more of the faradhi-trained part of her, but she kept the Old Blood for herself, felt its silken shimmer in her veins like the trickles of sunlight seeping now through the gray clouds.
Close enough to touch him now, to see the shadows swirling in his eyes. Their shape and the thickness of their lashes and the set of them in his face were all Ianthe’s. Their color, blazing green now with no hint of gray, was Roelstra’s. Pandsala’s hands lifted to claw them from his skull.
He saw her then, thrust the other woman away from him. Pandsala lunged for him, an incoherent cry clotting in her throat. This was one of those who wanted Pol’s life, his power, his destruction. Ianthe’s youngest son, Segev, who would want those things all the more, even though and especially because Pol was his own brother. The Old Blood screamed within her to let him finish his work, promising powers undreamed of if she would only side with her mother’s people from whom she had received her power.
Pandsala dug her nails into her nephew’s shoulders. He gave a small whimper of pain and tried to free himself. She shifted her grip to his neck, pressed her thumbs to the hollow at its base.
Agony knifed through every nerve in her body. Her hands dropped from his throat to the blade’s hilt embedded in her thigh. Her fingers groped through the slippery silk folds of her gown, already wet with blood.
It was not a thrust that should have killed her. It should not have hurt so much. Her mind knew that. But the knife was a thing alive, a steel snake slithering through her, severing all connection between brain and body, mind and power.
He shoved her down to the grass, smiling. “Dearest aunt,” he whispered. But then his voice changed, deepened. Long ago she had seen Andrade demonstrate the arcane art of speaking through another person, using other eyes and ears. It was not Segev’s voice she heard now. “It’s the faradh’im who’re feeling the pain—through you—and the diarmadhi in you that’s keeping you alive. But not for much longer. Can you feel it in the knife? Iron doesn’t kill us, only hurts. But anything cast with Merida poison kills.”
She had no flesh, no voice, no will. Segev kept on smiling, kept on speaking in that other voice.
“They’ll die through you. You’re connected. All of them, all the weakling foolish Sunrunners. But not Pol. He’s one of us. Did you know that? He belongs to us. Through Rohan, through Sioned, it doesn’t matter. He’ll survive this—and die a much more satisfying death. You won’t be around to see it, but I thought you should know.”
And Segev laughed quietly, gleefully.
Pandsala heard faradhi screams, felt their pain. Because of her. Smelled the blood pulsing from her veins. Felt the knife hilt warm and slick in her palm. Had no strength to pull it out, remove the iron poison that was killing Sunrunners or the Merida poison that was killing her. Saw the boy’s face turn white as power flared in his eyes and shuddered through him. He smiled and this time it was Ianthe’s smile as the red-gold flames died, and Pandsala with them.
The piercing shriek rose as if from a single throat. Sunrunners howled in agony as spell-caught colors flared to unbearable intensity, pulsed along already shredded nerves, threatened to explode their minds from the inside out. The fiery dome collapsed. The water clock, set on its stand nearby, burst in a shower of crystal shards. Sioned, writhing in her husband’s arms, used her last strength in a frantic attempt to find order and pattern. But the cloudy sun-threaded sky above her was abruptly sharp-edged, the steel-gray of shadowed knives.
All of them—even Alasen in her ignorance of faradhi arts—all of the Sunrunners felt the slashing pain. But of them all, only one found enough strength to act.
Hollis lay still, glassy-eyed as she watched Sejast murder Pandsala. Her head was bursting, her lungs stabbing with each shallow breath, her body a mass of incandescent needles that bled flames. She did not understand Pandsala’s scream, could not comprehend why her own agony coincided precisely with that scream. She saw Sejast kneel down with the other fallen Sunrunners around them, as if he, too, was dying.
Hollis looked at Pandsala’s limp form just beyond him, at the knife protruding from her thigh. Everything had rough, snagged edges. She traced the angles of that shining knife, shining so brightly that it sank fresh pain into her eyes. She wondered why she was not dead, why she could still think—as the faradh’im around her could not. Part of her functioned quite normally, felt strong and in perfect control of her body and her colors, felt nearly as well as when Sejast came each night with his offering of hot, wonderful taze. But the rest of her knew this was illusory; for whatever reason, she knew she was close to death.
She saw the word written in elegant script hundreds years old. Den: death. But another word was superimposed upon it, a word heading a section of the Star Scroll. Chian’den: death by treachery and treason. The page wavered, became a sheet of Fironese crystal splashed with black ink. It shattered on the ground before her. She picked up a shard, read on it chian’den, and wondered which was illusory, her hands or the shaving of crystal.
Sejast knelt close to her, breathing hard, black hair framing his white face in jagged strands like strokes of ink on parchment. He was watching the combat avidly, fierce eyes laughing. Chian’den, Hollis thought. She had helped Andry translate those words, and Sejast had helped them both.
She heard a despairing cry, knew it had come from Maarken. He seemed very far away, struggling to rise as his enemy, whose name she could not quite recall, loomed over him and laughed. But the sword shining in that enemy hand was very close, immediate, ready to claim Maarken’s life. Hollis breathed hard, part of her marveling at the magnitude of her fury that had seemed to fill her skull but had now narrowed to an incandescent needle sunk into her heart.
That calm, strong part of her rose up. Her rings were cold, brittle gold and silver circles around her fingers, filmed with dust as she crawled across the ground. They cut her flesh as she put both hands around the knife. She pulled it from the princess-regent’s body, held it cradled for a moment between her breasts like a secret.
She was growing more comfortable with the renewal of power. Perhaps it was the cup of strengthening, sustaining wine Sejast had urged her to drink before coming here. She nodded, understanding at last and unsurprised. That, and all the other cups of wine and taze and fruit juice and even simple, innocent water he had brought during the spring and summer. All the sweet and potent drinks he had given her, laced with dranath.
She saw that her sister and brother faradh’im were no longer twisting in the grip of ferocious pain. She wondered briefly if Sejast had noticed it, too, had heard their weakening whimpers quiet as they caught their breath. She saw that to get to Pandsala, she had crawled around behind him, and that his back was to her as he crouched on his heels, arms extended toward Maarken.
Maarken. . . .
The tall, bloodied figure reeled as one dead drunk, sword wobbling in his un
certain grip. Masul stood back, grinning, as Maarken tried to gather himself for attack. The pretender took a step back, laughing outright as a half-blind thrust missed entirely. A contemptuous slap to one shoulder with the flat of his blade, a kick, and Maarken toppled again.
Hollis heard him cry out again—not in pain or fear but in utter desolation. He came to one knee and swung wildly at thin air, not even looking at Masul. And Sejast shook with silent laughter.
She put the blood-slicked blade between his ribs, forced it deeper and deeper until she fancied she could feel it pulse with the beat of his heart. Then she twisted. Thick redness spurted out onto her hands, her breast, her face. She turned the knife within his body until the heartbeat stopped.
The Sunrunners’ abrupt collapse—and with them, the fiery shield—set even Rohan’s rudimentary faradhi senses to jangling with pain. Sioned slumped to the ground, her breathing sketchy and her green eyes dark and wild. Pol, Tobin, Alasen—all the Sunrunners curled around their agony on the dry grass, frighteningly silent after the first terrible scream, as senseless as if a gigantic fist had crushed them.
Masul laughed and kicked Maarken down into the dirt. Rohan saw his nephew’s sword come up again, aimlessly. The pretender seized the blade in one gloved hand, tossed it aside. Maarken cringed away from something unseen, fumbling for the knives in his belt. He lunged upward, sheer luck directing one of the blades into Masul’s leg. The man grunted with pain, kicked Maarken over onto his back, and brought one boot down on Maarken’s wrist. The second knife jerked as bones snapped. Masul straightened then, taking his time about positioning himself as if posing for the sketch of a commemorative tapestry. Holding his sword in both fists, he raised it point down, ready to plunge it into Maarken’s chest.
Rohan’s boot knives balanced lightly in his fingers for a fraction of an instant before they slipped through the air, too swift to see except as a single long, glittering silver thread. Each embedded itself in Masul’s throat, so close together that as they quivered with his startled movement, Rohan heard the click of the hilts against each other.