The Uncrowned King

by Michelle West

“Julia summoned me,” he said.

  “But you’re in armor—”

  “Jewel, it’s not that late. But you, you, not any other ATerafin, don’t go running hellbent through the halls for no reason.”

  “You were—”

  “I was. I’m back. What’s wrong?”

  “Alayra’s dead,” she said. Lifting her ring, showing it although it wasn’t absolutely unnecessary, she added, “and Alowan’s going to be if you don’t go to the healerie now.”

  The ring gave her words authority and command.

  Or something. She wasn’t certain; her throat closed after they’d left her mouth and she couldn’t have spoken them again had she wanted to. She turned, and she heard them at her back.

  “Jewel?”

  “Arann and a man you won’t recognize are fighting four of the House Guards. And—and at least two of my den. Girl, armed, our side. Probably Angel.”

  They left, then.

  House Guards were trained by the same people. Same way. They were good, these two. Younger, older. Good. He was wounded. Twice, a gash across the cheek, a strike, heavy enough to send him back, across shoulder. Two swords sought entry between the joints of armor, or through the armor itself; could be done. He’d seen it.

  But it hadn’t, Kalliaris‘ smile, been done yet.

  At his side, the stranger fought. Arann didn’t have thought to spare beyond this, but he prayed, briefly, that the stranger could hold his own. Because he thought it was just a matter of time, and if the stranger fell, he didn’t even have that.

  Four men against two.

  Four men against three. Kiriel smiled.

  And for the first time in her life, the result of her smile was this: one of the four men turned to another and said simply, “Kill her.”

  There was no sudden cessation of motion, no hesitation, no subconscious deference to felt power; there was unadorned order, as if she were of less consequence—obviously less consequence—than either Angel or Teller. One man—one man—broke away from their attack, his sword firmly, confidently held, his expression just a shade off bored.

  “Don’t you know who I am?” she cried, swinging her sword in a slow arc that was level with her chest.

  “Doesn’t matter,” the man said. She heard the weariness in his voice, and that made no sense to her either. Weariness.

  The ring on her hand was flat, lifeless; it had betrayed her once and had gone to sleep. But she knew—she knew that beneath its sullen, flat platinum, she had power, she was what she had always been. Hadn’t Meralonne’s ring proved that?

  When you fight, Kiriel, you always have something to prove.

  Not his voice. Not here. She parried the man’s first blow as if it were a fly.

  But if you fight as if you have something to prove, you will fail. The reasons for beginning a fight must be left outside of the fight itself, or they will devour what you need: concentration. Control.

  And she had always followed his advice. Because she trusted him. Had trusted him.

  Trust no Kialli, Kiriel. Not even me.

  She roared and the sound was a whimper, a failure of power, a weakness of breath. Human. But her enemy had been expecting no such thing and he paused a moment, stepping back from the engagement as if she were mad, as if the madness demanded an attention that her sanity was unworthy of.

  He died, that expression still upon his face.

  If Kiriel was not all she had been, the sword hadn’t changed.

  When he took the third wound, his left leg almost buckled beneath him. Almost. He held it straight, but the effort cost him: fourth wound. Glancing slash. He could feel the sweat running down his brow; hoped it wouldn’t reach his eyes. He was tired. The minutes were as intensive now as hours; he wasn’t certain that he could actually—

  Ah. Fifth blow.

  He fell back, staggering, parrying.

  Lifted his sword as a sword caught the light; caught it, although his swing was wild enough he had luck to thank, not skill. He was going to die.

  He didn’t want to die.

  He had prayed to Kalliaris, the only god any of them really did pray to when they stared death in the face. But this was beyond that; death was too close to him to even see clearly. And that close to death, that close, he forgot prayer entirely.

  Prayer, after all, had never done him as much good as she had.

  “Jay!” he cried, half-plea, half-pledge.

  Metal slid off metal in a long, slow blur that ended with the hilt of his sword. It was a good sword. But so, too, were theirs; they were Terafin swords.

  Jay answered.

  To either side of him, the shadows silvered and moved; he blinked, blinked again, wiped a gauntlet across his forehead—which did exactly nothing—and then lifted his sword, almost renewed by what he saw: The Chosen of Terafin.

  For the first time since they’d arrived in the healerie he had a chance to actually look at the stranger who had come with Jewel—and he saw, to his surprise, that a dead man lay on the floor at his feet. He fought one on one with a Terafin House Guard—and Arann thought he was winning.

  Would have put money on it.

  He didn’t feel her hand on his shoulder—not through the armor—but he heard her voice and turned toward it. It was surprisingly gentle.

  “Do I look that bad?” he said, or tried to.

  “Don’t speak,” she replied, which was as much an answer as he needed. She led him, and because he had always followed her when things were darkest, he followed her now, giving over the responsibility of action and decision.

  And shortly thereafter giving over the light, the greenery in the arborium, the sound of water’s gentle fall, close enough now to be heard above the din of sword.

  He heard a scream, something shrill, from the rooms where the beds were. Bolted up; she pushed him down. “I said lie back.” More like the Jay he was used to. She pulled the helmet free from his head and he felt water, blessed and cool, across his forehead.

  And that was all.

  The silence from the healerie was awful. She wondered, as she cleared the arborium and headed toward the beds, whether she’d ever be able to come here again and find the quiet peaceful.

  Probably. People had memories like sieves.

  Kalliaris, she thought. Smile. Smile, Lady.

  The three beds closest to the open arch had been slashed by two blows; sheets had been torn back and exposed. A body lay here, on the floor, a sword still gripped in its hand. She didn’t recognize it. So far so good.

  She stepped through the arch, passed beneath it, and steeled herself.

  Kiriel stood a few feet away, cleaning her sword with a bed sheet. Alowan would have been furious.

  “Kiriel?” she said briefly.

  “They’re alive,” was Kiriel’s terse reply.

  She took two steps, two quick steps, and then stopped six inches away from the youngest member of her den. She was always shy of touching this one. “Kiriel?”

  The girl looked up, warily. Blood flecked her cheeks, her forehead—none of it, on first inspection, her own.

  “Thank you.”

  But Kiriel looked away, turned away. Not much she could do to change that.

  She left her. Deeper into the room, to the left, she found Angel attempting to bind Teller’s wounds. Both men were as white as the sheets they were using, if you didn’t count the green tinge to their skin. Or the blood.

  “What—what happened?”

  Angel didn’t look up from his work—and Teller didn’t look up either. They seemed to be absorbed by this simple attempt at doctoring.

  “Teller,” she said.

  He shook his head. Closed his eyes.

  It was Angel who answered, and he answered with a jittery, a s
ingle, motion. Pointed.

  Beyond them both, beyond them were the dead. But they weren’t simply bodies; they had lost arms, legs, half a head; they lay strewn across the breadth of the room as if they were dolls an angry child had destroyed in a fit of berserk rage. Armor was rent as if it were cloth, and there were two blades that were sheared in half.

  She closed her eyes.

  Squared her shoulders. Opened her eyes again. “What happened?” she asked, taking a breath. “Not—not that. I can see that with my own eyes. But I heard swords—”

  Angel nodded.

  “That woman,” he said. “The one that came during our fight with—with the Allasakari. In these halls. She came tonight. She had two swords and a warning. Dropped the swords on the bed and disappeared.

  “We had enough time to hide; to make mock bodies under the sheets. I think they thought—Hells, of course they did—that they could just walk in quickly and kill us all.”

  “They sent a lot of men for a quick kill.”

  He shrugged. “Guess you can’t be too certain.”

  “Jay—” Teller said softly, eyes still closed.

  “I know,” she said just as softly. He reached out for her hand and she gave it to him—but her attention was with the youngest member of her den. Kiriel.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “All right,” Jewel said, knocking at what remained of the door—and there wasn’t much of it. Swords weren’t effective axes, but they’d almost got through.

  “I don’t know who built these doors,” Auralis said, his syllables blending into a long, slow drawl, “but if I ever build a fortress, I want him.” He bent, touched splintered wood, and whistled. “They should have been able to knock the damned thing down.”

  She hit the door, and then kicked it; both sounds were curiously flat. “Alowan!”

  “Jay—”

  Finch. Finch had come from somewhere to lay a hand on her shoulder. It should have been comforting; it was a touch she couldn’t have mistaken for anyone else’s. But she shrugged it off.

  Because Alayra was dead.

  Had it been so long since she’d seen death? So long since she’d felt its presence, and worse, the lingering shadow it left in its wake?

  Yes. Too long. They weren’t even her dead; they were just dead. She drew breath, sharply. Answer the door, Alowan, she thought, curling her hands into knuckled fists. I won’t have had it all be for nothing. As if the eight dead men were sacrifices; not hers, and therefore lives she could offer up.

  Squeamishly. Get a grip, she told herself. No one else would have dared.

  And then she heard it, something grunting and creaking, the sound of something heavy being dragged or pushed across the floor. She almost laughed. But it would have been too close to the edge of hysterical, and she didn’t want to go there. She bit her lip and smiled instead.

  “Jay?”

  The noise continued, and before it was finished, The Terafin joined them in the healerie. She came with six of her Chosen, and her domicis; the former were armored and weaponed. The Terafin herself was dressed very, very simply—in a pale gown, something that the light bleached of color. Which seemed fitting. Morretz was in the loose but perfect robes of a servant, albeit a highly valued and valuable one. If he was armed, it wasn’t obvious.

  Nothing about the man was.

  “You’d be best,” Jewel said to the Chosen, “to leave your weapons outside.”

  One of the Chosen was Arrendas; she hadn’t remembered him leaving.

  “I believe,” The Terafin said, “that the healer will forgive us this trespass.” She stepped forward then. Knelt a moment beside one of the fallen. Arrendas knelt and flipped the corpse over.

  “Do you recognize him?” The Terafin asked.

  “Yes,” her Chosen replied, his voice carefully neutral. His glance strayed to Auralis, Kiriel’s friend. Osprey. AKalakar.

  The Terafin’s followed. She nodded and rose.

  Auralis showed himself to be only half a fool. The Terafin and The Kalakar were not a study in opposites—not the way The Kalakar and The Berriliya were—but they were very different women. What the Osprey rarely offered the ruler of his own House—if reputation was anything to go by—he offered The Terafin. He brought his hand to his chest, sharply. Smartly. Bowed.

  “I owe you a debt,” she said quietly.

  He smiled broadly, but the smile faltered. “I was . . . pleased to be of service,” he said at last. “But I like a debt as long as it’s not mine.”

  “And I,” she answered. She turned, then, to Jewel herself. “ATerafin,” she said.

  Jewel nodded.

  “The healer?”

  “Whole, I think.”

  “Whole,” the healer said, as what was left of the door swung open. There was, in fact, a thinning of wood that allowed the light to shine through. Jewel wondered, idly, what the swords looked like. Forgot about it the minute the old man stepped beneath the arch of his doorway and into the brighter light of mage-stones that rivaled sun for the clarity of their glow. He had aged—and she had always thought him ancient.

  He bowed to her. Bowed low. “Forgive me, Jewel,” he said.

  “Forgive you—but why?”

  “I—had enough warning to move the armoire into the arch to block the door.” He did not look up. “But not enough time—not enough to leave my rooms in search of your kin.”

  “Then be at peace,” Jewel said quietly. “Those kin are my den and my responsibility. If you’ll forgive them for having swords in the healerie, I’ll tell you that they’re alive and whole.”

  “Swords?”

  “They had enough warning to pick up the arms that were left them.” She paused. “Teller’s bleeding, but I think he’ll survive.”

  “Who left them arms?”

  Jewel hesitated.

  “Jewel,” The Terafin said, “I would be interested in the answer to that question as well.”

  When she’d first come to the House, she’d been afraid of The Terafin; when she’d been given her name and had settled in—had become as much a friend as the woman who ruled the House allowed herself—she’d found this quiet way of giving orders a contrast to the surliness of merchants or magisterians in the streets.

  But she’d learned that there was a steel behind those words that surliness or temper couldn’t hope to contain.

  “Evayne,” she said quietly.

  “So,” The Terafin said resignedly. “It’s started. At least in our day we had the decency to wait until the corpse had cooled.”

  “Or at least until there was a corpse to add to,” Alowan said gravely. “No one of you stood still, Amarais.” He bowed. “Let me go to see to my two patients; we will have time to talk later. Whoever the attackers are—or were—they’ve failed, and they will not try again this eve.”

  He left the room, and The Terafin let him go because he was Alowan, and because his name was his own. He did not serve the House; he served her, and that choice was his own, had always been his own, to make. Or to walk away from.

  But Jewel put a hand on his shoulder. “Alowan,” she said softly.

  “Yes?” He froze; he did not look back, either to Jewel or her Lord.

  “There were four men in front of your door. There were four in the healerie. They are—dead. But not pleasantly.”

  “Oh?”

  “I—no. Please wait—I’ll have Teller and Angel brought to you.”

  He shrugged himself free of her hand. She knew better than to stop him.

  Because she wasn’t The Terafin, she tried anyway. “Alowan, please—”

  “Do you think I haven’t seen death?” he asked, and this time, he peeled her hand away. “I’m old enough, Jewel, to need no protection. A healer is a man whose to
uch heals the injured; the act itself is merely talent, like song or dance or even love—it says nothing whatever of what else these hands have done.”

  But the healerie was his heart; it was here that he worked his craft in peace. He adored the arborium, adored the light that shone through the windows at its heights—the costly, costly windows—the fountain whose voice could only be appreciated in the near-silence of a place of healing.

  “It’s not you I’m trying to protect,” she said.

  “Who, then?”

  Jewel lifted her head. Let it fall to her side. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. Because there was only one name she could fill his silence with, and she didn’t want to use it. Kiriel.

  He walked away from her, from them, and into the healerie itself.

  She listened for his words, but there was only silence.

  For the first time in her life she wondered exactly what he had seen in the House war that had propelled Amarais Handernesse ATerafin to the high seat.

  The Chosen brought Alayra to rest in his healerie, laying her upon a bed over sheets downturned by Alowan out of habit. He touched her face, which was slack-jawed now and quite cool, given the weather. The veins of his eyelids were green-blue and purple under the white of his skin; he seemed for a moment a thing of foreign marble, shot through with cracks of color, bright and dark.

  When he spoke, they were almost surprised to hear it, but he did speak. Alowan was one of a handful of healers that could get the body to reveal the truth of a death hours after all life had passed.

  “Poison.”

  “Thank you, Alowan,” The Terafin said. “Arrendas.” The Chosen bowed. “Accompany me. Jewel, I require your presence as well. I thank you for your intervention, Auralis AKalakar; your needs will be tended here by those who are in a better position to fulfill them.” As she turned back to Jewel, she frowned. “Where is Torvan?”

  “Avantari.”

  “You left without him?”

  “Alowan wasn’t the only one she visited tonight.”

  Silence. Then, “Arrendas, send for Torvan at the Palace at once. Tell him his presence is requested.”

  “Terafin.”

  “They’re—they were—Haerrad’s men, every one of them.”