The Uncrowned King

by Michelle West

  She turned to Sigurne, for mages knew how to speak in silence, just as bards did when one could be found. But she fell silent again as the old woman—and she looked it now, looked old—raised both of her shaking, lined hands.

  Raised them as if in supplication. Except that when they reached their height, the open fingers furled in toward palm, leaving shaking fists. Around those fists, light, the light a muddied brightness that Jewel ATerafin had come to understand, over time, her particular vision—and not natural sight—made clear to her.

  There was orange light, and around it, a patina of golden brilliance—but although it had been more than fifteen years since she had seen that particular gold, neither concerned her; she knew orange well enough to know that Sigurne had woven a protection of some sort. There was green light, deep and dark as fine emerald, and it was lovely, a color that Jewel rarely saw when magics were summoned; it felt cool, a coolness that the fires above wouldn’t damp or destroy.

  Yet even this did not stop her. What did was the color she saw beneath the green, for it shed no light, but rather seemed to devour it.

  Sigurne Mellifas was calling the shadows.

  Or being used by them.

  Her hand was on the dagger that the Mother’s Daughter had given her; darkness did that to her, when it was this darkness, this magic. But contained as it was by the fragile form of Sigurne, she stayed her hand, incapable of believing Sigurne Mellifas some practitioner of forbidden arts.

  As if her sight—hers of all—could deceive her.

  “Stay your hand,” a voice said, and she turned, willing to look at anything that was not Sigurne, her dagger hand trembling. She was alone, but she recognized the voice.

  “Evayne.”

  “Yes, and I am not close to you; not close to where you are. I . . . cannot travel. This is costly enough. Sigurne Mellifas has seen darkness that you have only dreamed of, Jewel. Of all here, save Kiriel—and perhaps notwithstanding—she understands the nature of the Hells, and the force that drives men to it, willingly, life after life.

  “Ask her, ask her if she survives what she intends—for she is no young woman—who her first master was.”

  “She won’t answer; she’s never answered that question.”

  “But do not doubt her motivation any more than you doubt your own, Jewel ATerafin, and guard what you see here wisely, for only you will see it.“

  The dagger fell; the sun rose.

  And Sigurne Mellifas spoke.

  She spoke syllables, but they were syllables that Jewel clapped her hands to her ears to avoid hearing; there was something about them, like an animal roar, but somehow darker and older and deeper, that contained a horror worse than one’s own death. Worse, in fact, than death.

  No human voice could speak like that; no human voice—but Sigurne Mellifas was undeniably human.

  She spoke.

  Kiriel di’Ashaf froze.

  Flanked by Auralis and Alexis, on patrol in the ninety-seventh and ninety-eighth of the hundred holdings, she raised her head as if waking from a dream or a reverie.

  “Kiriel?”

  She turned, put her hand to her hip, gripped the haft of her sword. The sun had lost all warmth, all light; there was shadow upon the horizon, a spill in the sky like a cloud gone awry. And she knew its name.

  A hand gripped her arm, pulled her round; she almost drew the sword before she recognized Alexis’ face.

  “Kiriel, I asked you a question.”

  The syllables of the name faded, but the echo still traveled the length of her spine. For a moment—just a moment—she felt shadow; she felt at home.

  The moment passed. The sun returned, and with it the weakness that plagued her. Glowing in the reflected light, the band upon her hand—the ring that protected itself from this immortal-forged sword, caught light. “I—I think someone’s found our demon,” she said quietly.

  Alexis and Auralis exchanged a look over the top of her head.

  “Where?”

  She said, “You didn’t hear it?”

  “Didn’t hear what?”

  “His name.”

  The second look that traveled between the two senior Ospreys was more pointed, but it answered her question. Which was good, as Alexis wasn’t going to bother. She knew the Decarus well enough to know that.

  “Where, Kiriel?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know the city well enough. It’s that way,” she added, pointing.

  “Can we get there in time?”

  There was a stillness in the air; even the fire seemed to freeze at the chill of the magi’s shadow-bound syllables. The magi herself was stiff as steel; was standing, in fact, except for raised arms, in exactly the posture she’d assumed when Jewel had first set eyes on her.

  “Allaros,” Sigurne said, through gritted teeth, her voice raised as much as a voice could be raised that had spoken a name not meant for mortal throat.

  The demon turned his gaze to earth. “Do you dare?” he demanded, his voice the thunder.

  “Yes,” was her tired, tired response. “That, and more, if it is necessary.”

  Fire flared, erupting from his hands as if he were ornamental font, and it, liquid. But it fanned around her—and Jewel, for which the younger woman thanked Sigurne—in a circle; it melted ground, but did no damage.

  “I have,” Sigurne said softly, “some purchase upon your form. While you wear it, I have your name.”

  Meralonne APhaniel came then, riding the crest of air that seemed to still echo the syllables Sigurne had spoken with such difficulty.

  The demon parried, but it was slowed, slowed by the weight of something that Jewel could not see.

  “This . . . is . . . not . . . possible . . .” the creature snarled, parrying, striking, parrying. “The hells have no purchase over me! I did not traverse the ways through the circles or the mages. I am here, I exist in the now.”

  She was growing paler by the second. She spoke anyway. “You gave up your life. Such a decision cannot be revoked by mere presence, or the existence of an open passage between that world and this.

  “Did he tell you otherwise? You will not be the first to believe the words of a Lord who decries such credulity. Look at yourself,” she said. “Look at the form you have been granted. No summoner’s trick, this, no burden of circle and passage, no mage’s rapture. Look!”

  And the word was a command.

  Jewel knew it.

  She wondered if Meralonne would strike then, while his enemy was held in the grip of another’s compulsion. Of the many things that she admired about Meralonne, pragmatism was one: He was not a man to waste his life on a point of honor.

  And yet he stayed his hand.

  As if seeing himself only truly at the force of her word, the creature’s gaze dropped. She waited a moment, and then saw that something else dropped as well: his shield. It flickered, as if struggling for life, before its fire went out completely.

  “It will not be the same,” he said softly; the wind carried the words away from her ears, but she heard them all the same. She’d wonder how later.

  “Allaros—”

  “Did you know it, Illaraphaniel? Did you humor me?”

  The white-haired mage said nothing.

  “Or did you think that I knew it?” An obsidian profile that was suddenly achingly beautiful in its momentary vulnerability gazed out, out beyond the city to the sea itself. “Do you know what I most miss?”

  “No.”

  “The worthy foe.”

  Silence. “And . . . I,” the mage said.

  “And second?”

  “No.”

  “Life. In all its aspects. I miss ending it. There is no death in the Hells, no satisfying closure; although the pain of the damned is intoxifying, i
t is also endless.” He bowed his head a moment. “And I miss beginning it.”

  “Allaros—”

  “Meralonne!” Jewel cried out, sudden in her panic. “Now! Kill him now—Sigurne is almost past holding him!”

  And the creature’s lips turned up in an unpleasant smile. Ugly, but respectful. “But victory is better than failure, and you will fail, and if we have no life in the Hells, and no life here when we leave it, we will at least end yours.”

  He struck, then, and Meralonne struck as well; their blades passed through each other as fire was finally consumed by lightning.

  Jewel barely saw it; she had turned her back to the fight with just enough time to spare that she managed to catch Sigurne Mellifas before she hit the ground.

  Kiriel came round the corner far in the lead of Auralis or Alexis. Her sword was unsheathed; she held it a moment as she looked at the bleeding magi, at Carver and Angel, at Jewel—here!—and the woman whose weight she struggled with.

  Of the demon, there was no sign.

  She sheathed the sword. Stood in the open road a moment, waiting.

  Jewel ATerafin raised her head, as if that silence were a question. In a fashion, it was. “Kiriel.”

  The younger woman nodded.

  “Help me.”

  She walked across the open ground, and as she approached, saw who Jewel was struggling with. The old woman. Sigurne Mellifas. Without thinking, she put out both arms, caught the whole of the old woman’s weight, and hefted her as if she were an infant and Kiriel, her mother.

  “So,” Jewel said softly.

  “What?”

  “You’ve still got your strength.”

  She almost dropped Sigurne as weight returned to her arms. Almost—but not quite. “I—I didn’t,” she said softly.

  “Doesn’t matter. We’ve got to move. The runners will be here, and the magisterians have to have enough time to clean up.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The isle,” Jewel replied. “The isle or Avantari.”

  Meralonne joined her, bowing stiffly to Kiriel, his brow still slick with blood. She’d missed this fight, and now wished she hadn’t. “You must have—fought well,” Kiriel said, awkwardly.

  “Did you know the Kialli?” he asked.

  “Not personally, no. But I—I knew his name when I heard it.”

  Steel-gray eyes met hers; held them a long time before he deigned to let them go. “Take her to the Palace,” Meralonne ordered. “If she survives that far.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Valedan came in third. Eneric came in second. Andaro di’Corsarro came in first, driven as if by the demon that Meralonne had faced. He was a surprise to them all, judging by the look on his trainer’s face; a surprise, that is, to all save one man. Carlo di’Jevre looked on with a pride that had no bounds as Andaro found the speed necessary—somehow—to cross that margin, that narrow, man-made boundary, first.

  He collapsed immediately, his legs spasming, his body twisting into stone and dirt as it struggled for air. The crowds along the street took up his name with a roar that only the ocean in fury could match; they understood what they saw—both victory and collapse—and they appreciated the effort.

  Neither Valedan nor Eneric were so indisposed, and both men must have wondered what it would have taken to push them across that line first.

  Commander Sivari wondered it, but he wondered dispassionately. He had watched the race, riveted only in the last fifteen minutes; his thoughts were still anchored to numbers, to the probability—the possibility—that Valedan might walk away with the crown that Sivari himself had once claimed.

  To that end, Valedan’s position crossing the line was all that mattered; he could not go back in time and reclaim the race. He could only go forward. Tomorrow: archery, and of that, he felt more confident.

  The day after, the test of the sword.

  He had seen Valedan fight. Had wondered, the first time, how he’d ever missed the boy’s singular skill; had even been surprised that Mirialyn ACormaris had not. But having seen Valedan in action, he also knew that battles that counted were different in subtle ways from the battles that didn’t; Valedan had never really been in a battle that counted. There were too many men who came to this competition with the sword as their chief strength; who struggled to take only that crown, of the ten, and not the crown for the event itself.

  The Southerners, for instance.

  He could not help himself; he glanced across the enclosure to Ser Anton di’Guivera, feeling it: The pang of loss. Idiot, he told himself. But there had been about Ser Anton that patina of nobility—a nobility of spirit that birth and circumstance could never duplicate—when the Southerner had taken the Crown. Not once, but twice, and in the name of love.

  Much is done in the name of love, he thought, and looked away.

  “Valedan.”

  The water played through his open fingers as he held his palms up in supplication beneath its fall. He knew the voice; knew by the near soundless fall of perfect steps that the Serra Alina was drawing closer to where he knelt. He wanted to order her away; he almost did.

  But the fact that he could order her, and she—Southern-born and -bred—would be forced by some nicety of law and custom to obey, where in the North she might laugh or stand her ground with ease, silenced him.

  “Valedan.”

  He did not look up. He knew what he would see; could hear it in her voice. She was silent a long time, and at last he spoke. “An old woman is almost dead,” he said, each word flat and uninflected. “And a dozen more are dead, because they were standing in their windows, watching the streets below. Hoping for a sight of the runners.”

  “Valedan, you take too much upon yourself. It is a type of arrogance.”

  Palms became fists. “Arrogance? There would be no demons on the streets, Serra, had I not chosen to join this contest.”

  He waited for her denial; there was none. What could she say? She was no fool, and no liar; she knew the truth when she heard it.

  “And did I choose to join it so that others might fight while I run or play at fighting?”

  “That is your arrogance,” Serra Alina said, but not as unkindly. “That you think that raising sword in a battle you are not yet equipped to win is somehow more noble than letting men fight and die who are capable of doing so.

  “Do you think you will lead an army and defend each man, each common soldier, with your own person? Do you think that because your cause is the noble cause—and it is that, Valedan, and I do not mistake it—no one need die in its service? Do you think that whole villages won’t be slaughtered, in either your name or your enemy’s?”

  “No!” He turned, then. Rose in a single motion to face her, to face the words that she alone could speak aloud to him. “But I think,” he said, through teeth that were clenched so tight it was hard to speak at all, “that they should not be dying while I am playing. That they should not be facing death and darkness, while I run for gold-plated leaves beneath the Lord’s gaze!”

  She did not take a step back. Did not, in fact, appear to notice his anger, the obvious lack of control that he showed by expressing it so openly.

  His mother would have fled in tears.

  “Valedan, I am not your mother, and I am not a part of your mother’s harem; nor am I—nor can I be, to my regret—a part of yours. I say this, then, as an outsider, and you must take it for what it is worth.

  “You made your choice. You made it with what wisdom and knowledge you had at that time. You knew what the risks were.”

  “I knew they’d try to kill me,” he said.

  “And you thought that that wouldn’t cause deaths outside of your own? You have been too young, Valedan. You are gaining wisdom now, as any of us must do: by experience. You n
o longer have the comfort of such naivete. Your choices will always cost lives; you are pawn to power, but if you succeed, you will be Northern King, Southern Tyr. Men will kill for you, and die for you, on days when you do nothing more than drink the waters of the Tor Leonne.”

  Stillness, an utter economy of motion, fell like a mantle on his shoulders as he met her unblinking gaze. “And am I, who rule, to have no say in this?”

  “What do you think, Valedan?” She asked, softly, surrendering some of her harshness because—and he knew it—she had spent too long in the North.

  “I think,” he said softly, “that I can’t stop making choices, so it doesn’t matter. Is that what you wanted me to say?”

  “I? No. I want you to come to your rooms. I want you to sleep. Commander Sivari says that you must do well tomorrow.”

  “In the games,” Valedan said, bitterly.

  “Even so. Perhaps this is the most important lesson you will learn from this, kai Leonne. You have made the commitment, Valedan; you must continue it now, with grace, and if you are not pleased with the commitment itself, learn from it for the future.”

  Jewel ATerafin sat beside Meralonne APhaniel and Sigurne Mellifas, or rather, sat between them; they had both been laid out in the healerie by a rather short-tempered Dantallon.

  “You again!” he said, when Meralonne walked, washed in blood, through the healerie’s modest arch.

  But he’d fallen silent when Kiriel had come bearing Sigurne Mellifas. And his silence had become more dour when he realized that the cause of her ailment was beyond his ability to cure.

  He’d seen to Meralonne’s wounds—inasmuch as Meralonne, who loathed healers for reasons that Jewel couldn’t fathom, but would never have argued with, would allow him to. He’d brought cloths and blankets for Sigurne, and had sat by her side, carefully wiping her damp brow, until Jewel had offered to take over for him.

  “It’s just make-work,” he told her quietly.

  “I know,” she said. Their hands met, and he smiled wryly.