The Uncrowned King

by Michelle West

  Aidan shrugged.

  “Who do you think will win when Andaro and Valedan finally face each other?”

  Another boy would have answered with boastful pride. Aidan grew thoughtful, and this distance in his expression gave way to the compulsion that had, in the end, drawn him to Ser Anton’s camp.

  “I think,” he said carefully, “Andaro has the best chance of beating him. Andaro’s skill is always the same, no matter who he’s fighting. Valedan—Valedan seems to get weaker with weak opponents and stronger with strong ones.”

  “As if the fight itself were a conversation, some sort of give and take, rather than an absolute skill set?”

  Aidan frowned.

  Anton suppressed a smile. “Never mind, Aidan. I understand what you said. It is a habit of the old; they make everything as difficult as possible when they choose to discuss it—and if something is stated simply, they cannot help but adorn it with more words.

  “Do you think Andaro will win?”

  Silence. Then, “No.”

  Ser Anton nodded quietly. “We shall see,” he said. “But I would concur with your evaluation. Valedan kai di’Leonne has an instinctive response and a fluidity of style that I have only rarely had the privilege of seeing in action. He is not what I expected, Aidan.

  “And you are not what I expected. I had forgotten how surprising the North could be. Come; I believe it is two Northerners who are to compete next, and I would be very interested to hear you speak of the difference in style between my own students and Master Owen’s.”

  He shouldn’t have been speaking to the old man. He knew that the old man was an enemy.

  But did it really matter now? There were so many guards and mages all over the damn place a fly couldn’t get through to Valedan—and there wasn’t ever much harm done by watching.

  He remembered being angry with Ser Anton. If he worked hard at it, he could be angry now—because Ser Anton had, dammit, been a hero, not just another Southerner. But if he watched the swordplay, he didn’t have room for anger, and the moment the anger left him, he was standing beside the only man in the audience who probably felt the same way that he did.

  So he said nothing.

  When Ser Anton moved closer to the field itself, he followed, standing closer to the old man than the man’s shadow, which at this sun height was pretty damn close. The guards were perfunctory; they examined Aidan’s medallion and looked carefully at both Ser Anton’s and Aidan’s rings. But they knew both Aidan and Anton by now—who wouldn’t know Ser Anton once the fight had started?—and they were willing to allow him to be as close to the fight itself as the judges.

  After all, the contestant was his student.

  The only uncomfortable moment for Aidan was in the chance meeting with Commander Sivari. Also King’s Champion, although once to Anton’s twice, he had come as Valedan’s trainer. He raised a brow when Aidan’s glance skittered guiltily across his face before he bowed very respectfully. Bows were good for that—they hid your face if you did ’em properly.

  “Ser Anton.”

  “Commander Sivari.”

  They bowed as formally as the contestants themselves would have; Aidan could almost imagine that these two, and not their students, were the combatants. They took each other’s measure while he watched in awkward silence.

  “I was going to send for young Aidan here, but I see that you’ve saved me the trouble. Will you join me, or will you join your own camp? They’ve lined up as close to the circle as the judges will let them; two, in fact, have been disciplined.”

  “Crossing the line?”

  “In the opinion of the guards; the adjudicatory body was not called.”

  “My thanks, then.” Ser Anton nodded. “I will, of course, take my place with the rest of my students.” He turned to Aidan. “You are welcome to join me; I would welcome your observations. But I would welcome those observations at Challenge’s end just as happily if you chose to remain here.”

  He wanted to go.

  He wanted to watch the two men meet at the side of the only other man who he was certain heard the same song that he did when the swords finally met. The desire made him miserable.

  But Commander Sivari laughed. “You have a student in this one, Ser Anton.”

  “He is old for a student,” Ser Anton replied, but there was a glimmer in his eyes, a softening of the line of his lips, “but if circumstances were different, I believe I would take him and make a swordsman out of him that even your student today would have trouble besting.”

  “Then if you want my blessing, you have it, Aidan. Valedan himself would be pleased for you—and proud of you, if he heard Ser Anton’s words. Go if you want.”

  He almost reached for the old man’s hand, just as if that old man were the father of his younger years, or the grandfather he’d lost to death. Did—and then froze, and then forced his hand to his side. He hoped that Ser Anton hadn’t noticed it, but he knew that Ser Anton noticed everything.

  But the old man shook his head, said nothing.

  The distance to the coliseum wasn’t far.

  She’d taken Angel and Carver with her. Kallandras waited patiently throughout. If he heard The Terafin’s private words—and it was said that some bards could hear the spoken word more than a mile away—his face betrayed nothing. Face like that never would. It was beautiful, in its way, but it was impenetrable; better armor than the Terafin Chosen were given when they were selected for their duty.

  She found Kallandras of Senniel intimidating, although he had rarely been anything other than charming and polite. Of all the master bards she had met—and she was willing to allow that, even as a member of the Terafin House Council, she’d not met all that many—he was the most dangerous.

  To a seer, danger had its own feel, and the men and women who wore it, wore it like a translucent mask. A warning. A statement. A fact.

  She felt particularly uncomfortable with him today, and put it down to the harried way she’d stepped from bedroom to meeting room with a pause—at Avandar’s absolute insistence—to add the finishing touches to clothing that might, just might, be seen by royalty who would judge the House by it. But she noticed that this day of all days, Kallandras the bard was shorn of his famous lute. He carried daggers and a slender sword so naturally she had failed to understand their significance at first sight.

  As if understanding the thought and the direction, he nodded, offering no smile, no easy camaraderie.

  Kalliaris, but she hated battle.

  They were given a carriage; both Avandar and Kallandras could live on a horse if need be—Hells, Avandar looked like he’d been born to it—but although Jewel’s den had learned to mount and ride, they’d never taken well to it, and the horses—damn them all—knew when they carried nervous riders. Jewel was the best of the lot—she could manage just fine as long as there weren’t many people underfoot. She thought of the typical streets at Challenge time. Snorted.

  Just how in the Hells you were expected not to be nervous when you had a couple of thick hunks of rope and leather as your only method of controlling something that probably weighed ten times as much as you and could crush you flat with iron-shod hooves, Jewel had no idea. But Avandar managed with annoying calm.

  Unfortunately, Jewel found the carriage ride to be the far more comfortable of the two methods of travel—which wasn’t saying much given the speed of the driver and the roads beneath the wheels. The streets themselves were, of necessity on this last Challenge Day, packed; it was hard to negotiate them without having to come to a halt.

  Too many halts.

  “Jay?”

  Angel’s voice, tense with sudden knowledge.

  Her sudden knowledge.

  “ATerafin?” Kallandras’ voice, asking the same question that her den-mate had, but with an edge to
the word that brooked no silence, no time to gather thoughts.

  “We’re late,” she said, her eyes caught by the edge of a ghostly vision that was torn from her by sunlight and movement and color.

  They all froze, but in different ways. Carver and Angel drew breath, but Avandar and Kallandras seemed to settle into the edges that made them dangerous men. If they were afraid of any possible outcome, they hoarded their fear jealously.

  “Someone’s already dead,” she added, “and he doesn’t know it yet.”

  “ATerafin—”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know who. They’ll kill the boy—”

  Kallandras reached for her; Avandar’s hand was in his way in an instant. Their hands met, bard and domicis. Jewel knew that she could not have moved as quickly as either man had in response to her or each other.

  They did not argue. “Which boy, ATerafin?”

  But while the certainty was not fleeting, the details were. She looked at him, and then looked out into the streets that now seemed more impassable than the twenty-fifth holding had when it had been littered with magisterians looking for her den. “I don’t know,” she said, in helpless frustration.

  And then, Kalliaris smiled.

  “Aidan.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The voice came to him on the wind.

  “Aidan, I do not know where you are, but you are in mortal danger. If you are not with friends, flee if you can hear me at all.”

  No identification followed the words, but he didn’t need it—he’d heard the voice on one other night, and the events of that night still lived in the depths of the type of sleep a dreamer can’t escape. Kallandras the bard, the master bard of Senniel College.

  Voices at a distance—especially raised ones—were a matter of fact in his daily life, a life which seemed so far away from him now he could almost forget he had one. But voices like this—voices that spoke in a whisper so close to his ear he leaped up and back at the shock—were like childhood stories—the ones that give you the dreams you can’t escape from.

  “Aidan?”

  “Aidan, we are coming as quickly as we can.”

  He looked up to see the concern in Ser Anton’s face. Am I with friends? No. No, he wasn’t. He was just with a man that he wanted, desperately, to have as a friend. An old, a very tarnished, hero. Gods, but he was being stupid. Hadn’t Ser Anton already as much as said he knew about the attack on the Witness House? Hadn’t he already admitted that he knew about the demon? “It’s—it’s nothing.”

  “But not for long,” Ser Anton said. “Look. That is definitely the Leonne standard, rendered in the Northern style.”

  “And in the Southern. Over there. I think it’s being carried by General Baredan.”

  “Bold boy,” Ser Anton said softly. It took Aidan a minute to realize that he spoke not of Aidan, but of Valedan kai di’Leonne himself. He didn’t see what was so bold about carrying a standard; gods knew that Andaro, when he did show, would be carrying—would, rather, have carried—a standard of his own.

  But then he looked up at the old man’s expression, saw that the focus lay at a distance. He remembered to breathe as he followed the old man’s gaze.

  Sure, he could run. He could listen to Kallandras. But he’d miss it. He’d miss the start of the fight. He’d miss the fight. And the only person who was anywhere close to him now was Ser Anton di’Guivera. He could not believe—would not believe—that Ser Anton would personally harm him.

  Not when they had this thing to share: A testing of the two men whose skill they both valued.

  The adjudicators and the magi moved in, in greater number than Aidan had yet seen. He exhaled. It would be a few minutes yet.

  But the swords were being unsheathed; he could hear the metal. Light helms were being raised, donned, visors lowered. Heat—and there was heat—was being denied. They girded for war, these two, and they accepted the terrain that had been chosen for them almost as if it were beneath notice. Almost.

  He felt a sharp pain in his hand. Brought it up to his face in surprise and saw the knuckles were so white, he’d somehow managed to drive at least one of his flat little nails through the surface of his palm.

  “Aidan?”

  “It’s—it’s nothing.”

  Ser Anton nodded, and then his gaze fell upon the circle that the magi circumscribed. Aidan was certain that he wouldn’t look away again.

  She had seen the bardic voice before, but she had never seen it like this. Kallandras of Senniel College bowed to her, a drop and lift of head. “With your permission, ATerafin,” he said, in a voice that brooked no refusal—and no questions.

  Her gaze glanced, skittishly, off the side of Avandar’s face, but the domicis seemed to understand what Kallandras was about; he said and did nothing.

  The bard swung the carriage door wide, and in the same motion, rolled out of the cab and up, where he disappeared from view.

  “What is he—” Carver began, but the bard himself answered their question in a voice that might have rolled in during an ocean storm so strong it could have broken the seawall, it hit the crowded street in such an undeniable wave.

  “Get out of the way of the carriage.”

  She had time to steady herself given her gift, but only just; Carver and Angel came out of their seats and landed rather gracelessly as the carriage lurched into sudden flight.

  It began.

  Not with a blow, not with a strike, not with a sudden rush of movement—although both Andaro di’Corsarro and Valedan kai di’Leonne had used both tactics in their previous bouts. No, it began in silence and stillness; not even the breeze cared to move through the sluggish humidity of the sea air. The circle that contained these two men contained the world in microcosm; the South and the North, the echo of old wars, the premonition of new ones.

  They took each other’s measure in the subtle things, waiting, waiting, waiting.

  Sivari watched as Ser Anton’s student broke the tableau. It surprised him; Andaro was perhaps six years older, and therefore more experienced, than Valedan, and it had seemed to him, as observer, that the first contest within a contest would be decided by who struck first, or rather, who moved last.

  “Remember to breathe,” someone said at his side. For a lesser man, he would not have turned.

  But the man who addressed him—in a fashion that bordered on the familiar—was the Tyr’agnate Ramiro di’Callesta. Dangerous ally. Deadly enemy. Not friend and not foe, because no Southern man of power could be trusted enough to be called the former, and no man in his tenuous position in the Dominion would make himself the latter. Not yet.

  “I’ll breathe,” he said, irony weighting the words. “And you?”

  “The Lord watches,” the Callestan Tyr said. “And I. I will tell you now that even my par is much impressed with the kai Leonne’s showing today. Ser Kyro is beside himself.”

  “Ser Kyro watches?”

  “It took some effort to gain both permission and space, but yes—the entire hostage contingent has been present from the start of the day. A gift,” he added. “A Callestan gift.” He raised a hand, his expression wry, even—although it was hard to be certain with a man such as Ramiro di’Callesta—self-deprecating. Upon his finger, glittering in a thin band of maker-worked gold, the magic of the North that he had refused to don. Until now. The test of the sword made its own demands, and they spared no one.

  Sivari had spared the time he could. He turned back to the sound of glancing steel. Strike and parry, but the parry was a sliding movement that ended in a strike of its own. Low movement, and fast.

  In earnest, the two men closed.

  Serra Alina di’Lamberto sat on the edge of the witness box, surrounded not by silent women—although all the women were present—but rather by Callestan cerdan and even
Tyran. They had rightfully taken up the position best suited to guarding the married women from the eyes of the idly curious. They had also, and this did not escape her attention, chosen the best vantage points from which to watch the combat that unfurled below.

  Not the last combat, no.

  Not the one that would decide the Kings’ Challenge.

  That was to come, and that featured the very prominent Eneric of Darbanne, an oddly pale giant of a Northerner with frightful manners and a bearing that any mother might secretly be proud of. The Lord would love such a warrior as he, if the Lord knew love at all.

  Her face she obscured by spread fan, but she had lifted the veils that were so often worn in public; her brother would have been irritated at least, beside himself with rage at worst, for the public display she made of herself, the momentary disregard she showed.

  Today, it did not matter.

  Southern eyes—and they were, after all, the only judgemental eyes that she need fear in this crowd of gathered spectators—were all turned groundward, to the two men who fought within the confines of the prescribed circle, beneath the eyes of judges both earthly and more.

  Because this combat decided much more than the Challenge; it was the banner that would be carried into the war by one side or the other.

  And the hostages had, by the evil of circumstance, been forced to choose a side in that war, or perhaps been chosen by one. Their lives unfolded here, with the slashing and striking of light scattering steel.

  Valedan.

  First blow, and probably first blood. The kai Leonne staggered back, gaining his feet—and his sword arm—before Andaro di’Corsarro could take advantage of his luck. General Baredan di’Navarre watched, unblinking, as the boy side-stepped the brunt of the attack, also pirouetting out of the danger; almost using the momentum of the blow itself to carry him.

  His hands—the General’s—were fists.

  He had seen dancers who were less well-matched than this.

  But the dancers were fighting for the same goal; they drifted on sword’s edge—and death’s—seeking a precarious balance.