He looked exhausted, far paler than she had ever seen him, and he was not a man whose skin took to sun at all. But his eyes, gray as steel, were clear, and his words, heavy with weariness, surprisingly cogent.
“You need my knowledge of the kin,” he gasped, struggling for shallow breath. “It must be knowledge that I have, and that others do not possess; the summonings are against our law and against our edicts of study.” He closed his eyes then. “If it is studied, we are doomed, and if we do not study, we are doomed.
“Choose your doom, Jewel,” he said softly.
“Tell us.”
The flag fell.
The men dove.
Water was broken by the fall of their bodies, the clean position of arms and hands, the thrust of their feet.
Sioban Glassen had come at a run; Sigurne, she had left behind at the moment she’d been given the summons. She knelt by the bed, her face red from exertion, her expression at odds with it. “Member APhaniel,” she said.
He was silent a long moment, and then he said, “Call Kallandras.”
She started to speak; he raised a hand. “No—do not summon him here; we will lose. Tell him only this, tell him quickly:
“A handful of the Kialli, to the best of our knowledge, do not need to breathe.”
Her brow creased. “This is an emergency?”
“Please, Bardmaster. Master Bard.” He sunk back then, and his grip on the arm of the youngest woman in the room finally failed. But she knew, as it did, that some part of what he had said had been, in fact, a lie.
“Kallandras, it’s Sioban.”
“I’m here.”
“Meralonne APhaniel bids me tell you this: Some of the Kialli do not need to breathe. If it’s useful, you have to tell me how over a good, stiff drink.”
He was already in motion. The first words she’d spoken sank roots and then spines, drawing his blood from heart to surface like metal shavings to magnet. He was not of an age with the competitors, but he knew—who better?—how to move silently, quietly, quickly. As he raced across the boardwalk, he spoke, and the words carried to only one man.
The water was in his ears, and it buzzed and tickled.
“Do not stop swimming, kai Leonne.”
He recognized the voice; it was the bard’s voice. Kallandras of Senniel. A man he trusted, and had reason to trust, for all his magical ability.
It might have cost him time, to hear the words, to process them, to recognize their speaker; but it carried command, to continue, and he did.
“No matter what you see, below or to the side, your duty and your challenge is to pass the test of the sea.”
He cut the water like a knife.
Felt it, bracing in its sudden chill, as salt reminded him of the day-to-day scrapes and scratches that were normally beneath his notice. He carried—like a pearl diver—a single blade, but there was no blunt edge to take hold of between his teeth; he held the handle.
The bay was not shallow. Fishing villages along the coast had sand bars and whole stretches in which a man might wet no more than his knees for braving water—but the waters around the isle and the bay itself were not so gentle. They were clear as far as the eye could see.
The eye, in this case, couldn’t see far enough.
The sand beds weren’t flat; there were rocks here, large and smooth, which overlapped and stood atop each other. He cast his glance in two directions, first up, to where the swimmers passed above him, their bodies floating in a layer of water that seemed, from his vantage, clear and white, like liquid light. Beneath him, as he turned his gaze down, the rocks, and their shadows, a darkness cast by lack of light in the ponderous movement of water.
He started to swim up for air, and felt a stab of pain. His hand. His left hand.
In the element of water, the elemental ring was sun seen through diamond, made painful by the lulling shadows of the ocean. He grimaced. Grimaced and understood the call of air. He did not hesitate; he drew breath, and water did not pass his lips.
The air had claimed him, after all.
Clutching the knife in hand, he began to swim in the water beneath the swimmers, pacing them as he could. Guarding them.
Had he been in the element to which he’d been trained, he would have been in no danger at all, but movement in water was different. What he could see—and he could see, for night was as much a part of his training as day had been, and the light here was much like it—he could react to. But his reaction time was wrong.
And because of it, he could not turn and face the enemy that passed by him like a shadow—not quite.
Sharp pain, stinging salt, and a billow of murky cloud.
The cry went up from the isle.
Blood. Cormaris’ Crown—there’s blood in the water!
Devon heard it, heard the voices that carried it; they stood out in a shrill, a sharp relief against the blurred murmur of the crowd. What the watchers saw, the crowd would see soon enough.
He tensed slightly, but even in this proved true to his own training; the glance that he cast toward the merchant, Pedro, was furtive. And it was unseen.
The merchant’s face had gone smooth as fine steel; he was as tense as Devon, and as casually nonchalant about it as a man with much practice could be.
“Your pardon, Merchant,” the ATerafin said quietly, bowing. “But it seems there’s to be some unauthorized form of excitement this Challenge, and I for one am curious.”
“You’ve money riding on it?” the merchant asked.
“And more,” Devon replied.
He made his way to the seawall, and no one—although the crowd was thick with bodies large and small—attempted to stop him.
He adjusted.
This was at the foundation of every lesson he had ever learned: flexibility. He took no time to argue with the facts, or to panic because they did not correspond to what he knew; they were facts. He had been cut to bone, and had he been slower—had he, in fact, been one of the swimmers above—he would be dead from the casual strike of a claw that seemed almost invisible in the water’s swirl.
Or not.
The ring seared his flesh as the claw had cut it. Like a slap across the face, it braced him, cleared a vision obscured by too much water.
He could see, in the movement of the current above him, and in the blood that eddied within it, the slender figure of a creature that seemed made of glass. Glass—sharpened, streamlined.
There were no rocks beneath his feet. But the ring was on his hand, and he felt it burning there; he leaped up into water as if, for a moment, it were air.
The blood caught his attention because he had to swim through it. There was a moment, a single moment at which the men to his right and left gave ground at the shock, and to his shame, Valedan kai di’Leonne did not. He passed by it, thinking of the seawall, of the rise and fall of his arms, the straight line of his leg, toe to knee, the way his limbs sliced water with as little resistance as possible.
He didn’t have to think of breathing; breathing came naturally. He didn’t pray. He didn’t wonder whose blood it was. He swam.
Just as Kallandras had . . . asked.
Devon saw the kai Leonne break ahead of the heat; it surprised him. Eneric was not favored to win this challenge, but he was a strong swimmer for a Northerner, and he had stuttered a moment. Four of the fifteen had—the four who were swimming in blood.
Whose blood?
He jumped up to the seawall’s height and stared down at the waves not ten feet below. The desire to order Valedan out of the water—to order them all out of the water—was strong; so, too, was the knowledge that to use that authority, for he had it, was to expose himself to the merchant who also watched and waited.
Valedan, he thought.
And then, whose blood?
The creature was a water creature, or so it seemed to Kallandras; it moved with the easy grace of something familiar with water’s lift and weight. It had a face; the lines of eyes, of high cheeks, of slender face and long jaw, could be made out as if the movement of light had been caught in just those places and frozen there. It also had two arms, two legs, and a swirling cloak that seemed made of the water itself.
At any other time, it might have looked like a man, displaced by an element, and handsome for it.
But it was death, merely death, and he was not yet ready to face his Lady; not this way.
The creature raised a glass brow. “You are impressive,” it said mockingly, the words more of a sensation than a sound. He cast a glance upward, to the receding bodies of the swimmers above, and then to the shore.
When he smiled, he froze water. Or he should have. “They will take their time returning,” he said lazily. “Come, then. Come and play.”
Kallandras was prepared, this time, for the sudden, swift motion of the creature. After fifteen years together, he and the ring had an uneasy understanding of each other’s limits—but it was imperfect. He moved before the creature did, and the water sizzled at his hand. But the pain was gone; he thought the price the ring would exact would not be too high this day.
If he survived.
Survival was everything. He took a breath; the air was so sharp, so sudden in its rush he might have been flying—or falling.
He gave himself over to the dance, to the fight.
Valedan touched rock and rolled, head over foot and side to side, aiming himself at the isle. He was arrow straight by the time the movement was finished, his hands above his head in a point, the tops of his feet flush with the line of his leg. Someplace between touching the rock and using it to give himself momentum, he cleared the water enough to take in the air.
He did not hear the roar of the crowd, or the hush of it. He did not see the ATerafin who stood upon the wall itself.
But he saw, clearly, in the depths of the water below, a man whose voice he had heard before he touched water this day: Kallandras of Senniel.
Not all of the men who had been granted permission to enter the Kings’ Challenge entered all events. It meant, of course, that if they won the single event, they claimed the crown for that event—but they could not win the title of Champion, regardless of how they progressed in the events they chose as their own.
Ser Anton di’Guivera had, after some minor consultation with his students, chosen two men to face the test of the sea. These two: Andaro and Carlo. Carlo had, after all, come from the Averdan lands closest to the waters, and knew them well enough to have taken some boyhood ease there.
They stood on the edge of the pier, watching; they witnessed the sudden spill of pale crimson rise up, as if carried by the dying gasp of some huge, unseen creature, from the ocean’s depths.
If it gave them pause, they showed nothing; it was not in their nature, and their training—in this, Carlo was acceptable—was to deny any display of weakness, such as surprise.
But when the man rose, bleeding, from the water’s surface, shedding salt and sea and blood as if all liquid were one thing, one of the two men froze in place.
The adjudicator bid them hold at once; the mages—and the mages were ever-present, turned in their crafts of heavy wood, their hands raised as shields and weapons, the words breaking their silence, leaving their lips, in much the same way as the man broke water.
Wood splintered and shattered in that moment.
Screams now. Screams that did not quite carry to the men who, trapped in the third heat, toiled under cloudless sun and shadow.
The man who rose fell, his flight cut short by some ill wind.
The Southerners understood better than any the caprice and the malice of the wind. But Carlo cried out to his brother, lifting a bronze arm.
Ser Anton followed the direction of that pointed hand, and he saw—as Carlo did, curse the quickness of his vision—the water creature that stood, momentarily, like a pillar in the air. Easy enough, to miss such a creature; easy enough to assume that the water had risen in the wake of the bleeding man.
Easy enough, Ser Anton thought grimly, for a student that he had not trained.
The man broke water again, and behind them all—behind the standing tableau of fifteen naked or near-naked men, the Kings’ men were coming, their voices both raised and controlled, army voices. Fighting voices.
He shaded his eyes against the sun’s light; looked beyond the dispersing blood and the gush of breaking bubbles to see that the front-runner, the man by far in the lead in this contest, was indeed the kai Leonne.
Helpless target. Unarmed.
With just this ease, he thought, cold in the summer’s heat, the fight was over. He had all but vowed that it would be his hand that ended the line; had, in fact, were he honest, vowed it.
He felt no anger as he contemplated the death; no heat. Just the chill, perhaps of water, perhaps of true night.
He was slow; that was it. Slow, his gaze turned to the interior landscape and not the exterior; the battle within and not the slaughter without. Whatever held his attention, it kept him from seeing the obvious until it occurred.
Carlo di’Jevre broke the line that comprised the fourth heat. He spun, neatly, took five steps, kicked aside the robes and the tunic that passed for Northern modesty as if he couldn’t stand the sight of them. He bent, turned, faced the water again, and leaped.
Ser Anton cried out. Andaro cried out. Both voices blended in words of denial that only the water heard.
Carlo di’Jevre had taken his sword into the watery domain.
He had never enjoyed the kill.
That was the truth, and it was the assassin’s truth: Men who enjoyed the kill too much were wed to the death, not the Lady, and the Lady was jealous by nature. Such men as those, she did not take in, and if she did, she did not keep; they joined a different brotherhood, and served a darker purpose. In the darkness of sun striated by the movement of heavy water, he remembered that truth.
And although he couldn’t afford it, he remembered more: The tenth time he had woken in the night at the brotherhood’s home in the deep South. One of the soft-spoken boys he had—hesitantly—allowed himself to become close to, lay awash in so much blood the silks and the mats couldn’t swallow it quickly enough.
All that was left of the moment following it were impressions. Hand on a dagger, in the darkness. Dripping, bloody dagger. Lamp, poor light, on a face. Another boy’s. Grimness there, and deep satisfaction. That boy, like Kallandras, had been taken off the streets of a Southern city, a place where a seraf was not quite a seraf, and a clansman not quite free. Then.
Now.
The Kialli moved, sensing the things that the bard could keep off his face, out of his movements, out of his voice entirely—but never, never out of his thoughts. It was a mercy, to strike at him, if not an ease; it had been years since he called upon the power of Myrrdion’s ring. Years since it had called upon him, and he was comfortable with its absence.
The creature moved lazily out of his way.
So, too, had that young man moved. Lazily. Easily.
He waited, with that dagger, with that death. The masters had come, bearing light to alleviate night’s cover. They witnessed the work of the boy they had thought to take in, and to teach.
In silence, they had listened to his claim: I have proved myself worthy of you.
Kallandras felt the grieving anger that he had felt then, even now. That he had risen, from ground and mat-side, to speak, to give voice to before the turn of robes and feet carried these men from him—they, so elevated, he so desperate.
“You have killed your brother!” he cried. “And the brotherhood is the only thing that separates us from common killers. We have each ot
her!”
Something in his voice, even then. Something in his voice caught them all, masters and would-be Kovaschaii alike. Maybe that’s when they had first realized what his voice could mean to them.
“What is this brotherhood that you speak of?” the oldest Master said softly. “We have the Lady.” But he bowed to Kallandras, not yet novitiate, not yet initiate, just a child a step above serafdom.
Then. Now.
The creature struck him, and he—he missed; his blade made a wave, a swell of water, that fanned out across his cheek. He knew that he had caught the creature’s attention; that his anger, unearthed and somehow still alive although it had been more than three decades laid to rest, was a hook. That and his pain.
Assassins don’t enjoy killing. The truth.
But they use whatever weapon they have at hand when a killing must be done.
The old man had bowed to Kallandras, and when he rose from that bow, his lips were curved in an odd smile. “See,” he said softly, “to your brother.”
He had been left with the dead then. Left there, with no idea of the honor, oblique and painful as it had been, that the old man had conferred upon him.
He had understood the value of the brotherhood, the desire for its society and no other, before they had taken him into their number and made him one with it. He understood it now, and it burned him; the pain made him careless—or as careless as one can be who has been trained by the Kovaschaii masters.
Did they curse him now? He knew that one, only one, of those masters remained alive; the others, age had taken.
He knew the loss, of course, but today he let it in.
Beneath the moving waters, beneath the theater of their sun-harsh light, he let it in.
Above them both, the assassin and the kin, Valedan kai di’Leonne was in motion.
He reached Andaro in time.
Caught his wrist in the grip of a man who was both older and undaunted by that difference in age. The sun had darkened him, the wind had hardened his skin; he took from time; time did not take from him.
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