Daughter of Blood

by Helen Lowe

  “And you,” he replied. “I am honored to have you both as my seconds.”

  The warriors nodded, acknowledging that, before Jad moved to open the door while Taly stepped back, waiting as Kalan retrieved the oriflamme and folded it across his arm. He looked toward the tapestry one last time, taking in the detail of the lovers and the crow, caught within the hounds’ eternal circle. But the element that stayed with him was the trust in the hind’s eyes as she watched him go.

  32

  Death Name

  Kalan and his seconds were as quiet on the walk to the Field of Blood as they had been during the initial arming, and the escort also kept silence. The surge of the crowd as they reached the muster ground reminded Kalan of the ocean, booming into the outer walls of the Sea Keep during his brief time there. “The beast is hungry,” Jad said, as they passed beneath the hydra gate.

  “For blood and death,” Taly muttered.

  Kalan clasped her mailed forearm, exactly as he would have done with any of his Normarch friends. “Whatever the circumstances, we all come to this in the end.” He had almost said that everyone came to Imuln in the end, but checked the Emerian reference in time.

  Taly nodded, although her face remained set as they approached the heavy curtain that marked their designated entrance into the arena, with the Storm Spears’ device worked in gold on the garnet cloth. Jad’s gaze fixed on it, his expression hard to read. “If you give me the oriflamme,” he said finally, “I’ll see it’s raised above the field.” His voice, too, was unrevealing, but he folded the pennant carefully before turning away.

  The escort took up position to either side of the entrance, so only Taly followed Kalan inside. The crowd’s noise increased immediately, because the body of the tent was pitched on the Field of Blood. At present, the entrance onto the arena was still tied shut, but Captain-Lady Hatha sat at a trestle table beside it, with Garan and Nerys standing to her right, and two dour-faced Blood warriors on her left. A black cloth covered two long narrow shapes placed in the center of the table—Asantir’s swords, Kalan thought automatically—with a rolled scroll to one side, and food and drink set further down the board.

  Outside, the crowd’s background surge swelled into a roar. “That’ll be Parannis’s colors going up,” Hatha observed, “or your oriflamme.” She was seated at her ease, with one booted ankle crossed over the opposite knee. A lazy gesture invited Kalan to partake of the food and drink.

  He contented himself with a cup of water, for courtesy’s sake, and regarded Earl Sardon’s eldest daughter across its rim. “Why are you here?” he asked, careful to keep his tone respectful.

  Hatha grinned. “Don’t hide your teeth, Storm Spear. What in the name of all the Nine am I doing here, is what you really mean.” She eyed him, her gaze shrewder than her reputation in the muster grounds would credit. “Anvin will be standing with Parannis on the other side of the field, and the Battlemaster and I felt the ruling kin must be seen to honor the Bride’s champion as well. The House needs to see that we value such service, especially after the business in the stables.”

  Kalan interpreted that as meaning that the unease caused by the wyr pack’s howling must have been widespread, but inclined his head as Hatha nodded toward the Night guards. “The Commander of Night also honors you. And you have worthy seconds.” She paused, studying Taly’s rigid, straight-ahead expression, before the broad mailed shoulders shrugged. “Although you,” she added, addressing Jad as he ducked inside, “have been unlucky.”

  Jad saluted, conveying irony without a noticeable change in expression. The Captain-Lady chuckled and waved Garan forward. “Discharge your duty, Honor Guard.”

  Garan bowed, first to her, then to Kalan, before lifting the black cloth clear of Asantir’s blades. “Asantir, Commander of Night, pledged you the use of her swords.” The Night guard spoke as formally as if he had not spent hours training with Kalan the day before. “She asked me to say that she is honored to fulfill her commitment today.”

  Soberly, Kalan took up the blades, clicking each sword clear of its sheath in turn. As expected, both had been honed to the same killing edge as his own weapons. His bow to Garan was deep, acknowledging the magnitude of the gift. “Thank the Commander of Night in my name, and tell her that I am proud to bear her swords and champion her honor.”

  The noise from the crowd intensified again, and Kalan guessed that the serjeants must have completed preparing the duelists’ circle. Hatha cocked her head, listening too, but pushed the scroll forward. “This is from the Sea envoy.”

  Twinned cords of indigo and sea green bound the parchment, their ends weighted with silver seals. One seal was stamped with a ship, the other with a mer-dragon. Once unrolled, the scroll depicted another mer-dragon, this time curled around a shrine that Kalan recognized as the Great Gate memorial within the Sea Keep. Characters were brushed down the left and right sides of the page in flowing curves of sea green and charcoal, indigo and silver. Only the final character looked blotched, as though the hand that drew it had wavered, or the ink had run.

  Kalan’s gaze lingered on it before he let the scroll roll closed. Beyond the enclosed world of the pavilion, the crowd’s ocean voice swelled again, and he could visualize the provosts moving to their places across the swept-smooth sands. Setting the scroll down, Kalan drew the black-pearl ring from his finger and threaded it onto the cord with the ship seal. He took care over retying the cords into their original, intricate knot, then placed both the scroll and ring inside his jupon. His heart was beating out his pulse in hammerstrokes, as it had since he unrolled the parchment, but he took care to keep his face as steady as his hands.

  “What is it?” Taly asked finally. “Could you read those strange characters?”

  As it happened, Kalan could, because Brother Belan had taught him the rune-script once learned by all those born with the Derai powers. “I know what it is,” he temporized. “The Sea mariners carry such scrolls with them when they venture the deep ocean.” He paused, then added quietly, “It will contain my death name.”

  Hatha’s brows rose almost to her hairline, and both Taly and Jad looked shocked. Garan and Nerys also exchanged a look, although it was harder to interpret. “It’s a gift,” Kalan reassured them all. Che’Ryl-g-Raham had explained the practice when she showed him the Great Gate memorial, saying it had begun with the navigators the shrine commemorated. Now the Sea mariners regularly carried either scrolls or cloth banners, inscribed with a rune name that connected their essence to the memorial, so if a ship foundered or a mariner’s body was lost, the soul would still find its way to Hurulth. So, too, if Kalan died today and Blood discarded his body without even their new observance of Kharalth, as they well might, his name would appear on the Sea Keep memorial and his spirit pass to the Silent God.

  A great gift, Kalan thought—but outside, the voice of the crowd had subsided. The provosts would all be in their places, and the beast in the galleries waiting to have its thirst for blood sated. Employing the same deliberation with which he had retied the scroll, Kalan unbuckled his belt and set his own sword down on the table, before replacing it with Asantir’s blades. Only then did he meet Hatha’s speculative stare. “I’m ready,” he told her.

  Lord Parannis’s visor was shaped into a smiling mask of his own face, cast in crimson and black. He came in hard as soon as the provost’s baton fell, shifting fluidly through a series of attacks that moved from high to low, left to right, with a speed many opponents would have found overwhelming. The Son of Blood was also as strong as Taly had suggested, his battery of blows designed to break Kalan’s guard from the outset, pushing him onto the back foot.

  But Kalan, too, was strong, his physique hardened from years training for war in the heavy armor of the Emerian knights, and Asantir’s longsword gleamed as he answered Parannis’s whirlwind assault with a blur of counter and riposte. The fine sand the serjeants had laid down was even beneath his boots, the crowd’s roar banished to a background murmur by t
he surge of his blood and the cut and thrust of the weapon in his hand. His vision was narrow, concentrated on the lethal figure in crimson and black, the smiling visor, and the blade that rang against his own and drove forward, seeking an opening.

  Parannis’s eyes were little more than gleams seen through his visor’s eye slot, but Kalan could read the story his body told, particularly the telltale carriage of head and neck that heralded intention as surely as an opponent’s eyes. He caught the minute change that signaled the Son of Blood’s feint to his right, ahead of a two-handed sweep toward the knees. The blow would have broken Kalan’s stance if not his armor, if he had not blocked hard and forced the blade away. His reverse cut drove toward Parannis’s neck—and now it was the Son of Blood who leapt clear, before recovering and prowling around to Kalan’s left.

  Kalan steadied his breathing, his concentration stretched tight as he and Parannis revolved about each other. Friction burned along the edge of his wards, and when Parannis sprang forward, assailing him with another succession of lightning-fast strikes, a torrent of fear surged behind every blow, battering at Kalan’s will to resist.

  The Son of Blood was using the old Derai power. Kalan could sense the spate of terror building every time their blades crossed. Parannis’s blows also felt increasingly powerful, as though he were drawing strength out of the earth underfoot—exactly as Kalan had reinforced Audin’s failing strength in Emer, when Orth came close to killing him in the sword ring. Now he retreated before the barrage, parrying for time as he absorbed the true source of the Son of Blood’s undefeated record. The battery of old power matched the accounts of Parannis sapping his opponents’ strength—although Kalan, retreating again, remained wary of poison on swordtip or blade’s edge.

  Despite the wards muting Kalan’s psychic sense, Parannis’s onslaught screamed of an instinctive use of old power, rather than a conscious one. The Son of Blood, raised amid the Red Keep’s prevailing ignorance, probably considered the power a reserve of natural strength, one he drew on automatically when challenged by another’s forcefulness or skill. And no one the wiser, Kalan’s pulse hammered: no one the wiser, despite the swathe of power he unleashes. Kalan might have appreciated the irony, given Sarein’s revelations, if every reserve of sinew and will had not been deployed, fending off a renewed assault.

  Parannis’s blade blurred, cleaving to sheer through armor and neck. Kalan twisted aside just in time, deflecting the strike off the rim of his buckler. If the blade had hit square, the sheer force behind it could have split the shield; as it was, the impetus drove him back. The Son of Blood’s laugh was euphoric with power and anticipation of the kill. The enhanced strength of his attacks was already an ache up Kalan’s arms and into his shoulders, and together with the psychic offensive’s drag on his physical strength, he was tiring fast. Grimly, he fought down panic and beat aside another strike, his own blow designed to jar—then whipped his swordtip back toward the eye slot in the smiling visor.

  Parannis’s recoil was slight, but allowed Kalan to break off and circle again. The roar of blood and breath thundered at him to abandon his wards and shield out Parannis’s psychic offensive—but if he ripped out the interwoven layers of suppression and concealment, he might not be able to control the ensuing spike of released power. And he would betray himself to his enemies.

  Kalan evaded again as the Son of Blood sought to close, and Parannis reversed direction, aiming a strike that could have scored either throat or eye if Kalan had not managed to spin clear. But his whole body was pain now, and darkness flecked his vision.

  “Black blades.” The moth’s spiral from his vigil was a phantom whisper as Parannis stalked forward, power and terror billowing ahead of him like a Wall storm. Kalan drew a deep, tearing breath and prepared to cut his wards loose—but the moth flutter brushed his mind again: “Black blades; paired blades. Darkness draws darkness, Kalan-hamar-khar.”

  Darkness draws darkness. Parannis laughed a second time as he lifted his blade, intent on making an end.

  Black blades; paired blades. Kalan hurled his shield into the face of Parannis’s advance, drew Asantir’s second sword and closed again with the Son of Blood.

  Myr gasped with everyone else as Khar of the Storm Spears cast his shield at Parannis and drew his second sword. He fought Bajan’s glaive with a sword and dagger, she reminded herself, and a glaive has far greater reach than a sword. So Khar dispensing with his shield was not necessarily the act of desperation it might appear at face value, although Myr was as aware as any of the surrounding warriors that after an initially promising start, the Storm Spear had been giving way before her brother’s assault.

  However much she might know that Parannis always won, it did not make watching her champion’s defeat any easier to bear. She could not look away, though, not even to glance to her right where she knew Sarein would be wearing the same sleek, satisfied look as her twin when he made a kill. Myr did not want to look left either, to the next gallery along where Faro sat, white faced and rigid, among the Sea emissaries. They should not have brought him: that had been her immediate reaction when the Sea contingent entered—only to ask herself how she would feel, knowing someone she cared about was fighting for his life on the Field of Blood. She would want to bear witness, too, not pace and wait, caught between dread and hope until someone else, whether friend or stranger, finally brought word of the outcome.

  Now, as the spectacle unfolded, Myr was forced to admit that someone she cared about was fighting for his life in the arena below—and so gasped with the rest as Khar’s shield went spinning into Parannis’s path and a second, shorter blade flashed in his left hand. Rather than evading again, as Myr felt sure Parannis must have expected after their recent encounters, the Storm Spear was taking the fight to her brother.

  “Two swords, eh,” Kharalthor said, very much at his ease. “Now we shall find out if there’s more to him than we’ve seen so far.”

  As if it’s all sport, Myr thought, still unable to look away as the two figures in the center of the field clashed. She was conscious, too, of her father’s impassivity, his demeanor more that of image cast in stone than a flesh-and-blood Earl. Does it mean nothing at all to him, she wondered, that one of those whose life is at stake is his son? Parannis might never have lost before, but Blood was a warrior House: they all knew no combat was ever certain.

  The adversaries were locked in a tight, trampling wheel of cut and thrust that made it impossible to decide who was winning or losing now, although Khar’s use of the two blades did appear to have counteracted Parannis’s previous dominance. Soon, Myr thought her brother might be starting to give ground as often as he pressed an attack. Kharalthor leaned forward. “It looks,” he observed, “as if we have a fight on our hands, after all. Better,” he added, speaking past her to Asantir, “than the pallid fare we’ve endured these past few days, eh, Commander?”

  Myr did look around then, an involuntary sideways glance at the warrior seated, cool as a shadow, on her left. The Commander of Night inclined her head, acknowledging the remark, but the gesture could have meant anything at all. Myr did not understand how Kharalthor could address his fellow judge so lightly, knowing it was her honor at stake, not to mention a man’s life. And my prestige, Myr supposed, although that was of little account when set against a life.

  Commander Asantir had given Khar the use of her swords; that alone suggested she was fully aware of what was at stake. Myr stole another glance the Commander’s way and thought her face, gazing down into the arena, was as inscrutable as the visage masks in Ise’s stories, the ones worn by the ancient lords of the Derai. Myr shivered at both the image and the savagery of the combat, as Huern spoke for the first time since the duel began.

  “A fight indeed, my brother,” he said, in his smooth, dark way. “I think Myrathis’s champion may actually be going to win.”

  Darkness draws darkness . . . Wielded together, the black blades were absorbing the bulk of Parannis’s power and deflec
ting the remainder to either side of Kalan. The effect felt like fighting inside a cocoon of clear air while the storm crackled outside its perimeter. When Kalan had trained against the Night honor guards, with no challenge of power to answer, the swords’ power must have lain dormant. But with his life threatened by an opponent wielding old power, the magic concealed within them had flared into life as soon as Kalan drew the second blade.

  Steel clashed against steel again as Parannis hammered his way forward. For a split second, Kalan’s counterattack locked the Son of Blood’s blade, his eyes boring into the narrow eye slot—and he felt Parannis’s momentum falter as the buffer of power was leached away. An instant later the Son of Blood wrenched the trapped blade free, recovering his equilibrium. Even without his reserve of old power, he remained a strong and agile swordsman. But Kalan had fought agile and strong opponents before and flowed back into the rhythm of blade and body, breath and mind, a gyre of life and death in which the paired blades forced Parannis to keep his shield in play. Steadily, inexorably, he drove his opponent into a defensive pattern.

  The Son of Blood was not used to losing the offensive; Kalan perceived that through the way his swordplay tightened. Mentally, as well as physically, Parannis was being driven onto the back foot. His counterattacks became more ragged, and his attempts to regain the initiative wilder. The jerk of his head was more noticeable this time, signaling the same feint and sweep toward Kalan’s knees that he had attempted earlier—only this time it was a double feint, with Parannis poised to flow into a counterstroke. Spinning to meet it, Kalan blocked Parannis’s cut with Asantir’s longsword. Simultaneously, he extended the shorter weapon in a stop thrust to the throat. The blade slipped between Parannis’s body and his shield, now too far offline, and although the Son of Blood leapt back it was too late. Kalan’s swordtip scored his gorget and tore mail.