The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1)

by Kari Cordis

  In her firm voice, she said, “Your quest is ended, Wolfmaster.” She approached, walking toward them in long, bold strides. “You have done better than you know. The road goes on, but there is only one of you who must follow it from here.” She had stopped, and now from a scarce yard or so away, glowing topaz eyes met sea-emerald blue.

  “You have grown up well, Ari.”

  CHAPTER 27

  “Well,” Rodge said briskly, “since we’re all headed home—ey!” He ducked as Loren threw a punch at him.

  “You’re not taking him anywhere,” Loren told the golden-haired woman, “or it’ll be over my dead body.” He stared at her fiercely.

  Rodge, under his breath this time and eyeing the legs, muttered, “There’d be worse ways to die.”

  “Loyal friend,” Dorian murmured. Her eyes had never left Ari’s, who had secretly thought it rather appropriate that there’d be a Whiteblade here, at the site of all those childhood memories of them…but he hadn’t been expecting this.

  “You know me?” he said cautiously, trying not to look too eager.

  “Obviously, Ar, if she called you by name,” Rodge began, not one for long, emotive looks or pregnant silences, but the rest of it was cut off as Melkin pushed past him, the big roan sending Rodge and his dumpy pony bouncing out of the way.

  “The boy’s not going anywhere,” Melkin reiterated bitingly. “Especially as disjointed and uncommunicative as you all seem to be—”

  “He is a man grown,” she overrode him, with surprising ease. “The decision is his.”

  Those glorious eyes had never left his and he wished desperately everyone would be quiet or just go away. There were so many things he wanted to ask her.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, to buy time. He wasn’t sure it was in his ability to deny her anything, especially if it meant a continuation of this quest—with her company. But that was before he heard her answer.

  “Zkag. Our path leads to the Sheelshard,” she said quietly.

  Shocked silence settled over the meadow. Ari’s fingers tightened convulsively on his reins.

  “You’re not taking him there!” Loren cried, but he couldn’t quite summon enough outrage to cover his surprise.

  “It doesn’t even exist,” Cerise hissed from somewhere in the back. “It’s just legend.”

  “So are the Ivory,” someone reminded her.

  “And what possible reason can you have for dragging him into the middle of the Sheel?” Melkin asked coldly. “Do you really think we’ll just let you talk him into this?”

  “Wolfmaster.” Traive’s voice was firm, the one he used to give commands. “There is no evil in the Ivory. If they wish for Ari to accompany them, you may trust there is good reason for it.”

  “I don’t trust,” was the snarled response. “What sort of devilish plan involves a trip to the ’Shard?”

  “The only plan belongs to Il,” she said in her crisp, cool voice. An indefinable air of confidence hovered around her, as if she, too, was used to command. “All this has come to be by His will alone. You, and you alone, are needed…very badly,” she said, softer, and looking so deeply at Ari that he felt his toes tingle.

  “What about the Empress?” Cerise said waspishly. She’d pushed Tekkara up closer to the action. “I thought this was all about her. She’s wandering around human again, if we’re to believe what you say, so does that mean there isn’t going to be a war? And if not, then what do you need Ari for?”

  “The Empress is no longer a concern. She will be where she is needed, when she is needed. And war will come, regardless. The Peace is over.”

  “Then why are you going to the ’Shard?” Banion asked, in a deadly quiet voice that hadn’t even a trace of his normal good humor.

  A lightning streak of mischief flashed across her face, and for the first time she looked away from Ari. “Because it may make a great deal of difference in what kind of war.”

  “Lady Dorian,” Traive interceded, his low, calm voice working its usual charm on the ruffled feathers encircling Ari. “We are loth to let our companion go on alone…”

  Cerise snorted. “That’s one word for it…”

  Both of the Whiteblade’s supple brows arched into the beautiful white span of her forehead. “It is not forbidden that you should accompany him.” She turned again to lock her gaze on Ari, adding softly. “Only not necessary.”

  There was a split second pause. “Then I’m going!” Loren said staunchly.

  “I, too,” Traive said, looking satisfied.

  “Not you,” Melkin growled at him angrily and Dorian spared him a stern glance from her glowing eyes.

  “It is not for you to deny anyone, as it is not for me,” she chided quietly.

  “Don’t suppose there’ll be any fighting?” Banion asked, a little wistfully, doubtless thinking of the duties calling him in Merrani.

  Because he was staring into her eyes, Ari was probably the only one who saw it, a flicker of some strong emotion that never reached her calm face. “There will be such a battle as has never before been and will never be again,” she said, low-voiced.

  Banion’s face glowed through his hair. “Oh, aye, well then, the lad shouldn’t be without his friends…I’d say I’m needed more here than at Kane’s side,” he added defensively when Melkin turned to look at him in dark disbelief.

  “I’m, uh, I’m not so good with a sword,” Rodge started deprecatingly.

  Cerise interrupted him sarcastically, “Are you going back to the University alone?”

  He stared at her. “YOU’RE going?”

  She tossed her head just as her mare did the same. “I am the Queen’s emissary. I’m certainly not afraid of ghost stories and a little sand.”

  Rodge’s jaw dropped. “Well, I’m not afraid either!”

  “Ari,” Dorian’s persuasive voice murmured under their wrangling. He swallowed. She was so beautiful it made his throat hurt. What she might know about him made his chest hurt.

  “Will you answer my questions, Lady Ivory?” he dared, hoping no one had heard him. There were some private things he’d like to get ironed out without them being shouted about all around the campfire.

  “I will answer what I can,” she agreed.

  It wasn’t like he had anything to lose, he told himself rationally, while his guts churned with anticipation. “Then I’ll go.”

  Dorian nodded once, slightly, and then with a completely different look on her face, swept the group around him with an all-encompassing sort of glance. “Know that you have chosen this Way in full knowledge of its dangers,” she warned them. “Once we start down this trail, it will soon be as dangerous to turn back as it will be to go on.”

  A vague guilt crept through Ari’s conscience. None of them would be going into this, facing yet more dangers on this long trail, if it wasn’t for him. He somehow felt not quite right about that. It was one thing for him…

  “Technically,” Rodge observed, “we’re not really in full knowledge—”

  “Our decision stands,” Melkin snapped, his hostility edged with wariness now. He was watching her, as if trying to divine her motives. She stood slim and straight under his gaze, ready as a spear and eyeing them all as if they were the questionable ones in this equation. Her mannish dress, worn, fitted leathers, a loose blouse, and a long hunting knife, she wore with such composure it somehow didn’t seem outlandish at all.

  “Well,” she finally said, “let us make what time we can then.” And turned smartly away, her long legs making short work of the little meadow. Traive and Kai both moved out promptly and unquestioningly after her, but for a moment the Northerners all hesitated, looking around at each other rather seriously.

  “If it’s dangerous, maybe…” Ari started.

  “It’s not like we haven’t been in danger before today,” Banion said blithely. He was stroking his beard with an anticipatory gleam in his eye.

  “No one is obligated to continue,” Melkin rasped out, looking d
irectly at Rodge. “Despite what I said. She’s not in charge here.”

  Rodge, looking woeful, said, “You think we’ll ever get any answers?”

  Melkin curled his lip, for once in complete agreement, and after another round of looks, he touched his heels to his horse and led off across the clearing.

  All the angst and patent uncertainty of the last day or so might as well have never existed. They were back in single file, walking down pleasant, sunlight-dappled paths, birds and bees humming around them…the only difference was the statuesque blonde of commanding air that was now in the lead, striding as confidently and rapidly down the path as if she’d been using it every day of her life for years. There had been, of course, no path out of the clearing when they’d all looked for it, but that didn’t even surprise anyone. The whole journey was becoming absolutely surreal. This latest little revelation especially.

  They’d just been told the entire reason for their trials and wanderings and heightening sense of anxiety over the past few months …didn’t even exist. Who knew how long the Statue had been ‘gone,’ as she put it? And, all biological issues with that concept aside, what did it mean?

  And why in all the Realms were they going to the Sheelshard?

  No one could deny the sense of expectation, though, now. It was impossible not to feel like they’d accomplished at least part of their goal, and now there was a Whiteblade—hopefully one who knew what was going on—attached to their party. And an even more definite goal ahead of them.

  The sun and the moon stared at each other that twilight, the sky a radiance of pink and blue and white trails of clouds. They got to see it all, because they were still in the saddle. Rodge had just asked bitingly if they were going to sleep there, too, when the column came to a halt in a cleared spot on the trail. Kai and Dorian were talking quietly together when Ari dismounted, and he felt a flash of jealousy. What he’d give for a nice, quiet, so-tell-me-my-life-story moment with her.

  They were all pretty efficient at trail duties by now—even Rodge could gather a mean armful of kindling—which was fortunate, as it was so dark everything had to be done by feel. But the camp was definitely different with that presence there. There was something strange, almost mystical, about her when you were on the ground with her, in the moonlight, with those uncanny eyes seeming to know everything you were thinking.

  But she sat with them companionably enough, graciously accepting trail food from Traive, and once their ravenous appetites had been beaten into submission, the conversation started. Perhaps, more accurately, one should say the inquisition.

  “Are you going to tell us what happened?” Melkin asked, his eyes boring into her calm ones. Traive frowned at him, to no discernible effect.

  She finished chewing, imperturbable, and said, “I assume you are speaking of the Empress?” Nobody answered, but a rather palpable resentment flared from several pairs of eyes at this reminder of the trick pulled on them. In the firelight, her golden hair and eyes glinted with light, the perfect skin of her face a soft gleam.

  “A little over five hundred years ago, the Empress captured Raemon at the Battle of Montmorency—this much you know from the Addahite Shepherd,” she began, and was immediately interrupted.

  Cerise demanded suspiciously, “How do you know we talked to a Shepherd?”

  One of Dorian’s slender brows arched toward her hairline. “There is much I know. Do you want to hear it?”

  “Let her talk,” Melkin growled, though the possibility of finally having things explained mellowed his usual savagery remarkably.

  “What happened on that battlefield was a surprise to everyone but Il. We had been warned that something would be different at this encounter, and indeed it almost had to be. This was the last stand of the Realms, for they had been defeated and overrun on almost every front. When the body of the Empress began to turn to stone, she was in the process of drawing Raemon’s power—not on purpose,” she added wryly. “He was somehow drawn into the transformation with her…and that is all we know of it. Even the Empress, who lived through it, cannot tell us more.”

  “Then how did you know the Statue would bring peace for Five Hundred years?” Banion asked, as if he’d caught her in a slip.

  She looked at him, then slowly at the rest of them, as if weighing whether or not she should tell them. Finally, she said, “A Shepherd came to our camp a couple of nights before the Battle. He had with him one of their Battle Horns, and in the course of the conversation it was revealed that that horn had been around five hundred years. It was last blown at Ramshead, when a small force of five hundred of the Ranks had driven a huge assault force off the beach. The Horn was fissured, of course, and could no longer be blown, but it was still carried for sentimental reasons.”

  She paused, glancing around at the blank faces, most of them not following this trail of evidence at all.

  “At Montmorency, it sounded again, a call to arms as the Empress and Raemon were being transformed.”

  “You said it couldn’t be blown,” Loren said, confused.

  “Yes,” she said with a patience they would all come to know very well. “That’s why we felt it was significant.”

  A profound silence, rich with unsaid comments, suffused the group. It was difficult to know where to begin, several of them felt, breaking such nonsense into bits that could be dealt with. And there was something a little intimidating about Dorian’s vast self-composure, her utter confidence, that made the silence stretch on for a minute. It would be unrealistic, however, to expect her little tale to pass completely without comment.

  Delicately, Cerise asked, “You were there, I suppose. Saw all this for, er, yourself.”

  “No,” Dorian averred, and a quick flash of triumph swept across Cerise’s face. “The Followers had split their camp, supporting different flanks of the attack.”

  “Who are the Followers?” Rodge asked absently, not having been paying too much attention the past months.

  “They are,” Banion grunted exasperatedly.

  “But,” Ari protested, feeling like they were getting off subject, “how did you KNOW?”

  She shrugged liquidly. “That is the way Il works. Such knowledge is His to give.”

  “You told an entire warring world they’d have centuries of peace based off a stream of coincidences and a highly unlikely event that you didn’t even witness?” Melkin summarized with barely suppressed acrimony.

  She looked at him steadily. “Il is not a man, who comes to us in person and sits down for conversations. His Ways are not ours. Before you came to know the woods, did a scuff of dirt or an overturned leaf mean anything to you? No, they were nothing but part of the scenery. But after you could read the signs of the wild, you could say clearly that an animal had passed here or a wolf made its kill there. Like the forest, Il is not a book to be read, whose pages can be flipped and whose purpose is to answer the questions of His creations. He becomes known through His ways, and by the grace He imparts.”

  Who knows how long the stare-down between her and Melkin may have gone on if Banion hadn’t asked, “What happened to the Statue after the, uh, transformation?”

  “For a while she stood in the Palace courtyard at Archemounte, guarded closely, but as the centuries wore on, the memories wore off, and she was moved into a side yard in the Western Gardens. We took her from there, bringing her back to southern Cyrrh and hoping the secrecy of the jungles and forests would serve as better protection than all the publicized pretensions of the Realms.”

  “What would have happened if the Sheelmen got to her?” Melkin asked. Dorian, to everyone’s further amazement, shrugged. “We don’t know.”

  Eyebrows went up around the fire. “We chased that Statue all over the Realms like the waters were coming in from the Eastern Sea—for no reason?” Melkin said, low and tight.

  “I didn’t say there was no danger. I doubt the Tarq would have destroyed the Statue with the risk of destroying Raemon with it, but for them to be in pos
session of it would have been grave enough. That means the Empress would have awoken….in their hands. Besides, your sense of urgency brought you here with extraordinary timing.”

  “How long has she not been a statue?” Banion asked in a resigned sort of sarcasm.

  “Quite some time,” was the poised and unapologetic answer.

  As they readied slowly to bed down that night, Rodge admitted, “I’m not sure things are all that much clearer, now that we know everything.”

  “It’s ridiculous,” Cerise half-hissed. “This elaborate deception and over-involved storyline to explain what I’m SURE is a reasonable explanation for five hundred years of no conflict—one that doesn’t involve broken horns and teenage girls out saving the world. Something a little unwholesome about a bunch of girls hanging out together…”

  “Let them play their roles,” Loren chided her mildly. “You can’t tell me there’s anything unwholesome about Dorian, or that one we met in Merrani—”

  “Adama,” Ari supplied absently. He was wondering how to get Dorian alone. Maybe if he offered her his cloak to sleep on…

  “Adama,” Loren said easily. “They ooze goodness…”

  “They’re not painful to look at, either,” Rodge added, and he and Loren exchanged contented glances.

  Dorian was nowhere about, and Ari finally, reluctantly, turned in. She had informed them all that there was no reason to post guard shifts, and Kai, tellingly, had bedded down with the rest of them, an almost unprecedented event. So perhaps she was standing guard. Traveling through the jungle, Ari had missed the thick padding of the greatcloak to sleep on, but he would have gladly given up a pile of down mattresses for a chance to ask a few questions of that Whiteblade.

  It was pitch black when Ari opened bleary eyes the next morning, wondering for a minute what had woken him. What with the late night, they’d barely been asleep even a few hours. Then the soft sound of voices and rattle of pans over the fire made him sit up in surprise.