The Uncrowned King

by Michelle West

  Accident, illness—these took lives, where the healer-born or the Mother-born chose not to—or could not—interfere. Age did the same, regardless of choice or decision. But willful death, murder . . .

  “Devon?”

  He was almost embarrassed, but it didn’t show; very little did unless he chose to reveal it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was—remembering.” He felt a twinge of guilt when he saw her expression shift.

  Between them, the mutual memories of kin and their ravages were strong, profound. To use those memories, to invoke them, to hide a more natural emotion, was probably wrong.

  To use them, with Jewel ATerafin, was also foolish, but it was easy to forget, with Jewel, that the future existed: She was a woman who seemed to live in the present, with earth-deep roots, a practical, unsentimental mind.

  He saw her eyes narrow, and he shrugged in response, remembering that there were some lies that never got past her.

  Some did. She rarely called him on either.

  “What do you need from me?” he asked her quietly.

  “Your support,” she replied, softly, so softly, he almost lost the words. Would have, if a sudden breeze hadn’t picked them up and carried them to his ears.

  “Jewel—”

  “I know. You can’t. Or the Kings will get involved.”

  He heard the bitterness in the words.

  “I’m not one of your den,” he told her softly. “And you’re not—quite—one of mine. But I promise you this: Not a single one of the heirs presumptive, as they style themselves, will be foolish enough to touch you.”

  “They couldn’t anyway,” she answered starkly. “My death, I’d always see in advance. They’re ambitious, Devon. They’re not stupid.”

  He lifted a hand to touch her arm, and she stepped away, “You think I care, don’t you? You think I care about all of this?”

  “About Terafin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” he replied, carefully, neutrally, “I do. Will you try to tell me that you don’t?”

  “No. But what Terafin means to me and what Terafin means to the rest of you—it’s not the same. Do you think I care if the Kings intervene, do you think I care if they stop this stupid war before it takes the lives of our own? It’s only our own that’ll die in it.”

  “Terafin is not a collection of children, to cry into the pleats of their parents’ robes,” Devon told her stiffly.

  “No. It’s a collection of murderous thugs with fancy accents, fancy clothes, and a better class of hidden dagger.”

  “Terafin is Teller,” he told her. “Angel. Carver. Finch. Jester. Even Arann. It is me, Torvan, Alayra, and even Alowan, although he, like Angel, has never chosen to take the name that has been offered to him. More than that, it is you, Jewel.”

  “And if it were me, would you still give me the same damned answer?”

  He didn’t answer the question for a moment, because he almost didn’t understand it.

  And when understanding dawned, his mouth went dry; his face lost—for just a few seconds—the neutrality that the Astari so highly prized.

  “Is that the game?” he said softly, bitterly. “Is that the game you desire to play?” He was disappointed. Worse, but the rest of it would come later. The silence was awkward between them, foreign. “The years have changed you.”

  “Maybe,” she said, offering him the shrug that passed for nonchalance among her den. Their eyes met, and she looked away. “I want you to get me a writ of execution.”

  “For the kin?”

  “No, for the rodents in the holdings,” she said, sarcasm shaky, but definitely hers. “Yes, the kin.”

  “Done.”

  “I need a writ of execution for those who attempt to aid and protect the kin.”

  “You know we can’t grant that. We can evaluate the crime itself behind closed doors in the Hall of Wisdom, but for that, you know we need to call in one Mandaros-born to judge.”

  She shrugged. She’d known. “I also need a writ of exemption.”

  “That is less quickly done. The Mysterium grants the writs of exemption in conjunction with the Magisterium and it—”

  “That’s not my problem,” she said curtly, even angrily. “We’re not going kin-hunting without the ability to use the magic we’ve got.”

  “And you’ve got a mage traveling with your den now?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Who?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Jewel—”

  “No. I mean it. You’re no part of my den,” she told him angrily, throwing his words back at him as if she’d aimed each one. “You want the kin out of the holdings before the Kings’ Challenge—more particularly, before the gauntlet is run. We can do it, but we can’t do it with ceremonial daggers—we need to be free to use what we’ve got at our disposal.”

  “We?”

  Her lips pressed themselves into the line he least liked, thin and white-edged. “No,” she said, at the same time as he said, “I’d like to join you.”

  “Jewel—” he said, starting over.

  “You don’t trust me, if you can think that I want what Haerrad wants.”

  To the point, and cutting. There was nothing of the delicate sadist in Jewel ATerafin. Nothing of the diplomat either. “I trust you with the hunting of the kin,” he said. “We’ve done that before.”

  “We were on the same side before, Devon.” She turned then, to face the altar that had been supporting her weight. Showing him, with stubborn finality, the flat of her back.

  “We’re not on opposite sides now,” he said, the heat of anger permeating each word, no matter how measured he made them.

  She bent, placing her hands against the flat of the altar; he could not see the expression upon her face, although perhaps that was better.

  Anger. And then: Wonder.

  The altar began to glow, softly at first, but more and more brightly; the sky lost the patina of silvered moon, of night color. He knew that this was not a magic of Jewel’s creation; she did not have that ability.

  Before he could speak, she cried out, wordless, and stepped back, and back again; her back hit his chest with a soft thud. She froze, there, the circle of his arms not yet closed. Not closing. You couldn’t close her in, couldn’t trap her, couldn’t offer her safety that she didn’t ask for.

  That had always been the rule.

  “I don’t want this,” she said softly, and he was certain that she didn’t speak to him, although—if one ignored the distant presence of Avandar—he was the only other person present.

  “What does it mean?”

  “I won’t do it.”

  “Jewel—Jay . . .”

  But she did not even look at him. Instead she turned, ran down the steps of the altar, trailing past a startled Avandar in her flight. He knew, then, that she was as afraid as she had ever been.

  What would you give, to protect the Kings?

  The silent night held no answer but the echo of her last words. His own accusation.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  13th of Lattan, 427 AA

  The Shining City

  Serra Diora di’Marano.

  Close his eyes, and he could see the perfect stillness of her face. He could even think it lovely, in the way a perfect sword was lovely when it was held by an enemy’s hands and turned, in silence, against him. And she, barely a woman, had lifted sword against him, against them all. The Sun Sword.

  If the power existed in a Widan’s hands to destroy that Sword, it would have been destroyed long ago; if the power to steal it existed, it would have been stolen, hidden, copied. But it rested, luminous and defiant, in the Swordhaven that the first Leonne had built for it in ages past, after the end
of the Shadow Wars.

  As if there could ever be an end to such war. As if, he thought grimly, fingering the long, fine strands of his pale, peppered beard, that bloody, murderous battle had been anything but a skirmish, a pale shadow of the war to come.

  The mountain winds came in through the open arches, lifting his cloak and his hair in the strength of its grip. Such arches as these had never existed in the whole of the Southern Dominion while he lived, and only the whispered echoes of a history before the gods themselves gave hint that such structures as this—this stone work, this scion of mountain and magic and shadow, this Shining Palace, was not unique in the history of the world. It boasted no gold, no wood, no Northern masons. Only the hand of a God could have accomplished this: the stone was of a piece. End to end, depth to height, it was seamless; embellishments added for the human court had been added with the Lord’s permission, as after-thought, that did not, ever, diminish or add to the grace and strength of his achievement.

  The mage stood, planted there by spell and Southern defiance, as the winds at the height grew stronger, and stronger still; the Northern Lords repaired at once into the great chamber, drawing their furs and their magics and their cloaks tight about their bodies, forgetting, in a moment’s discomfort, that the kin watched and waited, circling weakness in the way that vultures circled above the dying in fields made fallow by battle’s end.

  Cortano di’Alexes neither forgot the watchers nor fled the cold; he had lived with the wind all his days, and in a Dominion where the wind and the sand scoured the soul in perfect harmony, the Northern wind was not so much to be feared; it was a fact, the wind, and it comforted him to feel its threat so far from home. The comfort was, as the wind, cold.

  Serra Diora en’Leonne.

  Oh, she was more than her father’s daughter, that pale-faced, black-eyed child. And he, surrounded by men who defined manhood by three things, war, riding, and women, had been outmastered by her maneuvering; outmanipulated by her helpless facade; almost undone in the sweep of a few well-placed words, at a ceremony that he had been the original architect of: The crowning of a new Tyr.

  Not even the death of the Radann kai el’Sol was a death he could take pleasure in; for it had been used against them all, a reminder that the only way to truly disarm a warrior born was to kill him, and brook no delay.

  Very few of the women in the Dominion were born warriors. Still, he should have seen it. They all should have seen it.

  The wind drew tears from his eyes, and those tears struggled down the folds of his skin, freezing slowly in the cold air. Soon, he would have to leave this perch; a show of strength was one thing, but it could be . . . overdone. Almost disdainfully, he stepped forward to the stone rails, and stood there a moment, between the folded wings of a stone dragon in flight. His gaze rolled down the length of its neck and beyond: for in the distance made of height and wind, he could see, clearly, the gate. Demons guarded it, standing at each of its five points, invoking its magic—mind, heart, spirit, body, and place—with theirs as sustenance. Hours from now, they would be replaced, and hours from then, when the sun was well and truly hidden, the Lord himself would take to the pit and begin to call forth the kin.

  He had their names.

  Each and every one.

  Turning, his hands edged in white, he made his way back to the great hall in which fires would be burning.

  Burning.

  For a moment, just a moment, the Widan Cortano, Sword’s Edge, the most powerful mage in the Dominion of Annagar, paused. He was beside himself with rage, and that rage, concealed behind a necessary mask, was like the fire itself, and the wood; it consumed. She was a girl and he a Widan, and she had taken, in silence and meekness, the weapons that she required to injure them all.

  No, it was not that she had taken them; it was that she had used them, to advantage. She had won. Had he been a political fool—or a man to take those chances—the girl would be horribly, terribly dead, a sure warning to any who thought to follow her example. Cortano di’Alexes was not a man who lost at anything. Ah, he was angry; he was angry, still, and he dared not show it, not here.

  For he stood within the great stone halls—the cold stone halls—of the Shining Court, and here, such an expression was almost an open admission of weakness. He was not a fool; a foolish man could never have both wielded, and been, the Edge of the Sword of Knowledge. He knew that the Kialli watched, always; that no human lord of this Court was ever safe; the Kialli’s memories were long and near-perfect.

  And why should they not be? The Kialli were truly immortal. Kill them here, and the Hells opened in the distance to draw their essences home to the winds of the Abyss. Their bodies, made by some pact between the sleeping earth and its ancient children’s names, burned to ash, and less, like discarded clothing.

  At least, he reflected, this was how a Summoning worked. But the gate that the Lord of the Shining Court built, with the aid of Cortano, Isladar, Krysanthos—a man Cortano respected and disliked in equal measure—and the Lord Ishavriel and his strange, wind-scoured child-woman Anya, was not a summoning of that nature; it was a bridge. It made, slowly, a single place of these two worlds: The Hells, and the lands of man. And if these two places were one, then what?

  Cortano let curiosity eat away at the edges of anger, for he was known for his curiosity; it was a weakness that he was, conversely, proud to own.

  The sun was in position. The meeting was about to start. He played no games of waiting here; his power was understood, and it was valued.

  “Lord Assarak, Lord Etridian; your objections in this matter are trivial and must be overlooked. I need not remind you that you were invited—and accepted that invitation—to show your vaunted prowess by seeing to the destruction of a boy. Not even a man, but a magicless, powerless boy.

  “Your failure there—and our enemies’ ability to use our weakness to advantage—has placed us in a more delicate position. The plan that I’ve outlined is the only plan we will consider.”

  The saying of the words afforded Cortano di’Alexes a certain amount of pleasure. He turned toward the shadow that waited patiently by the door, and that pleasure diminished greatly.

  The shadow bowed. “Sword’s Edge,” he said softly.

  “It is . . . not common . . . to bring a guest to these meetings.” Lord Isladar rose.

  The shadow sauntered into the light that was brought as a subtle accusation of weakness into the council hall; the Kialli, after all, did not require it. “I am hardly a guest, Lord Isladar.” He bowed, but not to the Kialli with whom he spoke; instead he turned to Lord Ishavriel of the Fist of God.

  Cortano was not pleased, but the presence of this particular man—and by extension, of the men with whom he served—had never given the Sword of Knowledge pleasure. In the Empire, the Order of Knowledge—a weaker and less focused body—did one thing that Cortano desired to emulate: They destroyed mages who were not under their auspices and their quaint law. Somehow, that destruction of the so-called rogues had not brought the Order to its knees, and it had started no long and bloody war between rival factions. Power in the North was a strange creature.

  Not so, not here.

  The shadow rose, shedding magical disguise, and adding it. Bold, here. “I am . . .the humble merchant, Pedro di’Jardanno.” Humble. Older. Rounder. The beard that suddenly graced his face was streaked with white; the rings that adorned his fingers were tight around overly soft flesh. “I have been granted permission, by the Tyr’agar’s new edicts, to travel North for the Festival season; I am late to arrive, sadly.”

  “Is this meant to impress us?” Etridian said, with studied contempt.

  “No,” Pedro replied genially. “But the Brotherhood of the Lord will test its mettle against the coterie that protects one simple human boy. Perhaps,” he added, equally genially, his smile a studied fold of flesh, “it will impre
ss the Lord, where his Fist has failed to do so.”

  Etridian rose like the fall of lightning.

  Pedro crossed his arms; there was a clash of something that sounded almost like steel, and lightning, indeed, did come. “We are not Allasakari,” he said, with some contempt. “We do not seek to be the Lord’s vessels. I have no doubt that should you decide upon it, you will kill me—but your own survival might then be at question; it will be a costly kill, Lord Etridian.”

  The Brotherhood of the Lord.

  Cortano understood much then. It was not a title that had been claimed in centuries—not a title, in fact, that Ser Pedro had dared to claim when they first began their negotiations. Something had changed, was changing, and Cortano liked it little.

  What, he thought, have you been promised? He did not ask; he would, later, but indirectly as was his wont. The brotherhoods—Lord’s or Lady’s—did not take kindly to direct questioning.

  Etridian’s hand left claw marks in the surface of stone and wood; it drew the Widan’s attention and ended the unfortunate silence.

  Of the five Generals—the fist of God—he preferred Lord Ishavriel, who had the advantage of being subtle. He had no other advantage, however; he was, as were all of the Kialli—with the notable exception of Lord Isladar—condescending and arrogant when dealing with the merely mortal, so the preference was slight, and had he the upper hand over that General, he would not hesitate to apply it. Cautiously.

  “You will not take my kin,” Etridian said. “When we were instructed to do away with a so-called magicless, powerless ‘boy,’ you neglected to inform us that we would be facing the darkness-born.” He turned his neutral expression upon the Lord Isladar, who had until this point kept his own counsel. “You gave your word,” he said softly, “that she would not be a threat to us.”

  “I gave my word,” Isladar replied, softer still, “that she would not defy our Lord’s command.”

  “It is his plan that we follow.”