“You can’t.”
“Why?”
“Daine—you’ve done it twice now. You’ve walked where even I won’t walk. Serve her—serve this House, and you’ll be called upon to do it again and again. Look at what it’s done to Alowan; look at what it’s cost him. We are not so very different in age, he and I.”
“After Corniel,” Daine said quietly, “I thought I would never, never heal again.”
“But you—”
“No, you don’t understand. Never heal. Not walk to the dying, not go into the darkness—but deny the rest as well.”
“I . . . I know. I know,” Healer Levec said, as he said all things. Gruffly. Shortly. “But you recovered.”
“And now I see her,” Daine continued, paying his master’s words no mind, “and I see that I can’t not heal. She’s here,” he added, thumping his chest. “I know what she has to do. Because I saw what she was running away from. And I know her well enough to know that she can’t run, not forever. She needs me. And I—I need her. I need to do this, Levec. I need to do more than heal the results of a war caused by men like . . . like Corniel. He’s part of me, still. He calls to me, still. There are days I wake up, and I’m already burning in the Hells.
“How do I deny him? How do I deny a man who walked right through my soul and left marks in places I didn’t even know existed? You can heal. You know who you are. You know who you were. You might even know who you want to be. Let people come to you, take their money. You know you’re doing the right thing.
“But I don’t. If I serve her, now, I lay him to rest. Do you understand? If I serve her, I deny, by action, what he wanted, and what he was. I’ll be doing something to prove to myself that I can do something.”
“You don’t just serve until you feel better,” Levec said. “Not a House like this. You don’t think Alowan felt the same way?” He was shouting now. On the other hand, it was a minor miracle that he’d prevented himself from shouting for this long. “Look what it’s done to him! He’s isolated here, he has no peers. He has a little garden in the middle of a pit of vipers. Is that what you want?”
“I think,” Alowan’s voice said, from some distance away, “that that is not a fair question, Levec.”
Levec didn’t have the grace to be flustered. “Tell him! Tell him the truth!”
“He’s right,” Alowan said serenely to the young man. “As are you. And he has not said, although it bears saying, that in the early years, there were several attempts upon my life. None, as you can see, were successful.”
“They didn’t have to be,” Levec said bitterly. “They had you anyway.”
“Did you heal her?” Daine asked.
“I was arrogant as a youth. You were not. It was my choice to embark upon the healing; choice was taken from you. But, yes, Daine. I healed The Terafin, and I think I know what you see in Jewel because I think it is stronger in her than it was in Amarais at that age.
“Levec is right. This is not a salve, not a way of easing yourself or comforting yourself. It is a life, and it will be the only life you lead. And there is no guarantee—not now, not from where we stand—that you will succeed in what you intend. Or that she will.”
“She saved us, you know,” Daine said, although it was forbidden to speak of the healed and the knowledge gleaned by the intimacy of that act.
“I know.”
The young man closed his eyes tightly, shutting them both out. Losing, for a moment, the halls of the manse, the torches, the lamps, the crystal chandeliers that both caught and cast light. Then he turned, just as suddenly, and looked into the tall silvered glass that showed such a stark reflection. His own.
“I can’t leave,” he said, meeting only his own eyes.
“I know,” Alowan said. “I am sorry. Come. Let me show you where you will live.” He paused, waited as Daine continued to stare at his image in the mirror as if he couldn’t easily discern which of the two of him were the real one. At last Alowan turned, to meet Levec’s eyes. To meet Levec’s anger.
“I am sorry,” he said, in as deep a voice, as sincere a tone. “But the boy was lost anyway, and we both knew it.”
“I did not know that you knew.”
The old man bowed, and when he rose, his lips were turned up in a bitter, old smile. “I have lived my years in a House built upon traditions of the patriciate, old friend. And I . . . have performed a healing for a young man who has literally lived to serve and protect Jewel ATerafin for all of his adult life. Forgive me this.”
“If he survives it. And if you do,” was Levec’s bleak reply.
When he returned to the healerie’s fountain, exhausted and satisfied—if satisfaction could have such a bitter tinge—he found Avandar waiting for him. He had never been fond of Avandar Gallais, not in the way that he was of the woman he protected, of the men and women she harbored, but there was respect between them.
Avandar bowed. “The boy has chosen?”
It irked him, to be so transparent. “Yes.”
“Will he be your match?”
It was not the question that the healer had anticipated. After a moment, he offered the slightest of smiles. “I am arrogant enough to think that no one can watch as I watch, or offer what I have offered.”
“That is not arrogance,” Avandar replied. “Or rather, it is a pleasing arrogance, for it is based in fact, and not fancy.”
“He does not need to be my match. Young Jewel has gifts of birth that The Terafin does not possess, and they will protect her well.”
“It is not Jewel directly whom I fear for.”
“No.” The healer bowed. “She will be gentle with him in a way that Amarais could never allow herself to be with me. She will ask him to save no lives that she does not value personally. Not yet.
“And the first time that she does, she will break a trust between them, and she will break it because of the cost she sees in doing otherwise. But he will be older then, wiser, and I think he will see it as she does. I hope.
“I am tired, Avandar. Perhaps it is true that I overplay my age to spare myself hardship, but my age is a fact. I did not dream—I did not hope. But it appears that a god watches over me, and has seen fit to grant me a successor.”
He did not say, and Avandar did not, that he feared the god was Cartanis. God of Just War. Of war.
“I am in your debt.”
“No. You are in her service. You have not been tested, Avandar. But I believe that this is what you’ve chosen to devote your service to, and you will have your chance.”
Avandar was completely still. And then he offered the healer a smile, one that was, if cold, quite genuine. “We are all more obvious than we would like to be. I have chosen to serve power. But we are all changed by the service we take and the service we perform. It is never what it seems at a distance, no matter how great our knowledge, how certain our power.
“She is not like The Terafin. Not like any ruler of any House that I have seen, not among The Ten. She was not raised among the patriciate. She knows enough of their manners to get by when she can be bothered to exercise them, but even that has been an uphill struggle.” He offered a rare smile. “We value what we fight for, Healer.
“Perhaps, if she must fight for Terafin, she will learn to value it as highly as your master did.” His smile deepened before it vanished. “And perhaps not. I am in your debt, as I have said. I—am grateful that the healer was found.”
Jewel Markess ATerafin had finally given in to sleep. In the dark, a honeycombed room away from where Angel struggled noisily in the grip of a nightmare that did not—quite—force him to wake, she was utterly still; only her hands, clenched fistlike around gathers of blanket, gave any hint to the two who watched that she was not peaceful.
But neither were they.
They were both powers
within the realm they had chosen, and they had come this distance to speak with a woman who was two steps away from being in the prime of her power. Had come, if they were honest, to take advantage of the weakness that Jewel herself would not own up to, to press her to take the last of those steps.
But they could not bring themselves to wake her, because the sleep robbed her face of all armor; it was a child’s sleep, and she was, at least to one of the witnesses, much like a child.
“Do you travel,” The Terafin asked her unexpected companion, “as you always do?”
“Yes,” the woman in midnight blue robes said softly. “Always.”
“Then you did not have the burden of slipping past the healerie staff.” Her smile, in the poorly lit darkness, was genuine.
“No.” She turned, this Evayne, and The Terafin, who had met her now a handful of times, saw that they were almost of an age; Evayne was perhaps a handful of years younger. It was hard to tell; her cape’s hood had folds long enough to cast shadows that softened harsh lines. “Terafin, a question.”
“Ask.”
“I can see only so far in the life of this young woman.” She reached into her robes and drew out the heart of her power, the glowing orb that rested between her hands like living light. “I have seen her here. I have seen that she has gathered to her, at last, the third—the last—of her pillars. If she can grant them the strength they’re due, she’ll stand.”
“Not a question,” The Terafin said softly, “but it answers mine, and I am comforted by it.”
“Don’t be.”
“Why?”
She turned, then, the ball gripped in her palm. Started to speak, and then stopped, searching The Terafin’s face. The silence stretched out between them, punctuated by Jewel ATerafin’s breathing. And then, of all things, Evayne laughed. “I should have known,” she said quietly. “He is at work here, even now.”
“The Terafin spirit?” It was barely a question.
“Yes. He is not the harshest of taskmasters, but he spares you nothing once he knows you can carry the burden that must be carried.”
“The same can be said of all good masters,” The Terafin replied. But she felt it now: the edge of her death. “You cannot see beyond my death, can you?”
Evayne’s gaze rose. “I can see,” she said at last, “beyond it. I can see this young woman at the path that must be walked, one of the supplicants who must walk it if we are to find the first paths and face the coming war.” Her violet eyes were wide, unblinking; The Terafin could believe, watching her, that she did indeed see it unfolding as she spoke. Like Jewel, and unlike.
“But I cannot see what she does; the choice offered her, I cannot witness. I cannot witness any of the decisions made. The first path can only be walked once.”
“What is your question, Evayne?”
“She is like your blade—your House blade, the sword by which you proclaim your office when war or ceremony demands such proclamation. But she is being tempered now, and she has never been sharpened. Will she hold her edge?”
The Terafin’s laugh was short, brief. Then she turned to the seer. “I do not understand you, but I understand that the burden you carry has become your life. What will you be when you set it down?
“I,” she added softly, “have the comfort of knowing that I’ll be dead. Absent. I came to ask Jewel ATerafin to take up the burden that ends with my life. But your presence here marks a larger war; it always has. The demons that run in the city streets and the ATerafin that sleeps in that bed are not separate; they are part of the same war.
“Will it end?” she asked quietly. “If that war takes her, and the best that she has found in this House, if I accept the risk to House and kin and do nothing to stand in your way, will the fight at least end the war?”
“I came,” Evayne said softly, answering a different question, “to ask Jewel ATerafin to walk the path when it opens for her, regardless of what the House requires.” She bowed her hooded head. “Not an answer, I fear.” Turned, but before she took a step, turned back. “But I believe, Terafin—believe, and do not know—that when the war ends, for good or ill, it will end.”
“That,” The Terafin said quietly, “is all I require. My own battles, it appears, are destined to be fought again and again.”
“The gods value finality, of a sort.”
She was gone in a step; Amarais was alone.
In the darkness, robbed of a splinter of a seer’s soul for light, she stared at the bed’s sole occupant, and then bowed deeply and walked away.
And in the bed, Jewel Markess ATerafin slowly unbunched her fists.
CHAPTER TWELVE
16th of Lattan, 427 AA
Avantari
Two of the kin still walked the streets.
She could scent them on a wind that carried nothing but shadow, but they were far enough away that she could not name them, could not summon them and challenge them.
Jewel was alive.
She did not know how to react.
She had known Isladar for all of her life, had watched him, had learned from him, and had—and she could say this only to herself, and only now, in the dead of night, when the darkness made her as sure of her power as she could ever be—fled from him.
But she had never known Isladar to fail, and he had intended to kill Jewel ATerafin. She should have felt triumphant, because for the first time in her life she had bested him, and this was not the first time in her life that she had tried.
But those had been schooling games, and in the end, they had always been under his control. The world had, until now.
She was free.
She was free, and an emptiness so entwined with anger that she could not separate one from the other drove even the facade of sleep from her reach. There were no languages in which she could curse him, or damn him; he was Kialli, and willfully, voluntarily damned—if damnation was the burning wind, the vast expanse, the song of those who have finally made their irrevocable choice. She would not think about that here.
Could not; it was an ache. Like anger, like the thing that fed anger, it turned in upon her. Demanded action.
Her sword, in the Shining Court, spoke for her. This was not that Court, not that Palace; in this palace, the only prey was human; the only fight, a fight that was layered with human weight, human desire, human strength and weakness. If there had been anyone that had marked her as enemy, she might have chosen this night to carry the fight to its inevitable conclusion. But to make real enemies, to make enemies whose end was satisfying enough to ease the building shadow, took time, took the intimacy of jealousy or hatred.
She was restless.
But she wasn’t the only one.
She heard him before she saw him, and she knew who he was because the particular fall of the step, the timing of it, had become familiar enough to be distinctive, even over the clinking chime of chain mail. That, and the smell of him, the mixture of sweat and scent and—in her heightened state of awareness—steel, old leather.
She did not turn when he came upon her back because she knew that he knew she was aware of his presence; not a single one of the Ospreys had yet managed to come upon her unaware, and most of them had stopped trying—not that many of them had bothered to begin with. They were an odd group; they’d probably die defending her right to be one of them, but they were aware that she wasn’t one of them. Couldn’t be.
“Kiriel.”
“Auralis.”
Silence. Awkward, unleavened by ale or wine as it often was with Auralis. With the Ospreys. He waited for her to say more; she didn’t.
At last, he broke. Unusual. Usually he walked.
“You had no luck today.”
That stung. The shrug she offered was her only answer.
“You’re going out hunti
ng tonight.”
Have I become that obvious?
“Look. I know that officially it’s the Terafin girl who’s responsible for finding and tracking the demons. I know that the white-haired mage is supposed to augment her ability. You want me to play that game? Fine. I’ll even pretend I believe it.
“But when you go out tonight, I want to come with you.”
At that, she did turn. “You?”
In the darkness, his face was shadowed, the line of his chin lost to the long line of neck. There was light enough, though, to see his eyes; fire was reflected there, caught, as it was offered, by torchlight, but made brighter. He bore two swords, one strapped across his back, one in the grip of a hand bound by the half-gloves that the Ospreys favored for fighting in what they called this season. She knew he carried at least two daggers, water; that he could—but seldom did—don helm when the mood to fight struck him.
He had often dressed just like this and gone out into the city streets, refusing the company of his chosen companions since his defeat—public and costly—by the younger Valedan kai di’Leonne. Kiriel was aware that the loss of youth was a fear that most mortals labored under once they reached an age. She was also aware, as no other member of the Ospreys could be, that it was not the defeat itself which had humiliated Auralis; not the fact of the defeat which drove him to seek his solace in fighting, in the streets of the city’s hundred holdings. No; it was the comparison; it was looking at Valedan as if he were the mirror held up to Auralis.
But she did not understand precisely what it was that he’d seen in the mirror that had that effect. Only that it had less to do with Valedan and age than it had to do with his own fear and the past that all humans—that all creatures—hid behind the supple lines of the facades a life helped them build.
She could see the pain, of course. She could even appreciate it. But she couldn’t see what caused it. No more than he could see hers, this night. The past. Loss. Isladar.
“What does the Primus say?”
He said something that was meant to be rude, and she understood it as such, but it did not move her.
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