by sun sword
She knew at once that she had done the wrong thing, at a time when the wrong thing could be fatal. For she knew with certainty that Etridian fled the chamber because he could not survive the combined might of the humans— and the god-born—who presided within. What was certain to destroy Etridian was almost certain to destroy Kiriel.
She heard Primus Duarte's angry intake of breath; heard Alexis stop breathing, and heard Auralis chuckle grimly.
Verrus Korama AKalakar moved in the quiet of the hall at her back—she could hear his distinctive step—and whispered, "I told you."
The Kalakar said nothing at all.
"I see," came a voice from within the great room, "that this is going to be a most… unusual interview." It was King Cormalyn. "If the Lord of the Compact will be so good as to order his men to grant free passage, we will overlook this unfortunate incident. And," the King continued, the words quite chilly, "if it pleases The Kalakar, she will maintain order within the ranks of her House while in our presence."
"Your Majesty," The Kalakar said, in as grim a tone of voice as Kiriel had yet heard her use. She stepped past Kiriel without deigning to look at the girl, and walked without incident between the two men who stood guard. Her advisers, Vernon and Korama, followed in perfect step behind her, although it had been a long time since either man had engaged in dress maneuvers. Duarte came to stand beside Kiriel; he was flushed. He lifted a hand, thought better of it, and dropped it again as if it were stone. "We-are-going-to-talk-about-this-later." "Yes, Primus Duarte."
Meralonne APhaniel looked up as she entered the room. Smoke wreathed his face as the tobacco in his pipe burned to ash beneath his nose, forgotten. He said something and gestured, touching his chest, his forehead, and last, his eyes—an exaggeration of form, but one necessary to make clear to the suspicious eyes of the Astari that the spell cast was entirely personal and within the Crowns' accepted canon.
In that, he showed himself to be, well, himself. Very few were the mages, or the bards, or the god-born, who dared to practice their gifts in this chamber, before these people.
She knew at once, although this did not surprise him as his vision shifted and strengthened and he saw what she carried within. Darkness, thick, heavy, living. Saw her face, the slight widening—and narrowing—of her eyes. Her eyes. Impossible.
It was not the first time in his life he had faced the impossible, nor the first time that he had been asked to act upon it.
"Your Majesty," he said, the words clear although the shocked murmurs that rose as the thrown Kalakar House Guard did were not quiet. "This one must not be allowed to live."
That, of course, changed everything.
Duarte Samison AKalakar, known to few of the people in this room and liked by less, stepped neatly in front of Kiriel di'Ashaf, although every muscle in his body tensed with the wrongness of exposing his back to her. He knew that, had she not been dumped on his hands and into his unit, he would have been standing, shoulder to shoulder, with Meralonne APhaniel, a man whom he remembered well—if from the distance differing levels of power and experience imposed upon the members of the Order of Knowledge.
But she had been placed there. She was an Osprey, untamed, untrained, quite solitary. And he knew for the first time, in this hall with too many spectators—all of them people that Kalakar emphatically did not wish to offend—that he intended to keep her, to train her, and to send her out after prey, just as he had the rest of the Ospreys, the too-deadly, too-rebellious men and women who had become his.
"I wouldn't," he said softly, to the mage whose hair now looked like a sheen of ice, "advise it."
It was not a good day.
She should have known, when the horse tried to kill the girl, that the girl was not meant to leave Kalakar. But Ellora was stubborn in her own right, and besides, if not for the intervention of Kiriel di'Ashaf, the boy, Ser Valedan, would be dead at the hands of a creature the likeness of whose voice was buried in the heart of the woman that Ellora had been, over sixteen years ago, when the city of Averalaan lay under siege of a darkness and death that her people—to a man—were unable to stop. To even act against.
Memories dimmed with time; you could fool yourself into thinking that they had finally released all hold. But they remained, and they could catch you and tear at you at the most inconvenient of times. Where were you, she thought, as her gaze skirted across the features of each of the men and women who stood, staring at Duarte and Kiriel di'Ashaf in the wake of Meralonne's words. Where were you during that Henden ?
She knew that each and every man and woman in the room could answer. Where they were when they first heard those attenuated screams. And where they had been when the last of the cries, like the flickering flame of a candle, had died into a silence that should have been blessed.
Then, the darkness had reigned.
Almost. Her hand fell to her sword a moment; the gesture was so natural she had to force it down and away.
* * *
But King Cormalyn turned a cool glance to Meralonne APhaniel. "Your advice, Member APhaniel, is noted. It would please us if, in future, you might tender that advice in a less dramatic fashion." He turned to The Kalakar. "There will be no incident, Kalakar, but there will be explanation." Last, he looked upon the man who wore Primus' marks. "Primus," he said distantly. "Because of the respect we bear the Commander, we will not have your marks for the audacity you have shown in this room."
Duarte looked momentarily nonplussed, and then he had the grace to flush. Very awkwardly, he sheathed his weapons, trying to remember exactly when he'd drawn them. I warned her, he thought. The Ospreys are not dress guards. Of course, he'd thought himself to be above their usual displays of inappropriate temper and awkwardness.
He lowered his hands, and then, under the royal glare, stepped out of the way, falling into the proper posture and exposing Kiriel fully to the golden-eyed regard of King Cormalyn the Wise.
"You are not," King Cormalyn said after a moment had passed in stiff silence, "of Essalieyan."
Kiriel nodded warily. She had been told how to behave in the presence of the Kings, the Exalted, the Queens, the Heirs, and The Ten, but although she remembered the words, the actions did not come to her at all. Her legs stiffened, as the silence did; she bent slightly at the knees. No one, not even Dantallon, could have mistaken that posture for bow; she was almost in a defensive crouch.
Duarte was at her side, and she could see him wince; he knew her well enough—had observed her in the Kalakar training circles—to know that she was on the edge of a fight. He didn't know her well enough to know how close she was to falling off.
Because Kiriel knew fear—knew, better, that there was only one safe way to show it. She struggled against the fabric of her life, and won, but it was close. She knelt.
"Kiriel di'Ashaf," the King said quietly, as if aware of the struggle and its result. "We wish to see what magic governs."
Duarte said something, and The Kalakar; it was clear immediately that many of the people in this too-crowded, too-large room did not understand what the King meant. But she did. And she met his golden eyes, seeing a truth in them that Ashaf would have wept to know.
Ashaf.
Almost, she pulled her sword. It was there, beneath all her resolve, the memory surfacing like a corpse too hastily thrown into deep water to properly sink. She had learned all of Ashaf's lessons, and all of Isladar's; she had taken her father's mantle. Power? She understood power. Understood its use, its allure, its imperative. And what good had it done her?
She had survived.
If that meant anything.
She felt the thrum in her throat before she heard it, but she knew that she was growling. Why did it return to her this way? Ashaf. Memory.
She could not afford to be caught by it now; not when the eyes of this King were upon her—this King, and all of the men and women who served him.
Because he knew, of course, just as she had known it of him. She was god-born. Turning her f
ace slightly, she could see that glimmer of recognition in the eyes of the Exalted as well. Yet she knew that they were not peers; they were not kin. In this empire, they held power; they defined it.
Ashaf returned; Ashaf's admonition, her fear. In this south, Na'kiri, they will kill you if they can see the color of your eyes.
But they are the color of the sun.
No, Ashaf had said, that same sun coloring her pale hair and adding minute lines to the skin around her eyes, her lips, her cheeks. They are not the color of the sun; what color could be so harsh and so important? They are, Ashaf added, with a slight pursing of lips, the mark of demons, of tainted birth. Remember, she said, quartering herself with the moon's sign, That the sun makes deserts.
Tainted birth.
Kiriel could not remember how old she had been when she had first been told this; could not remember how old she had been when she had last heard it.
But she remembered sitting at the gray-covered, bent, chubby knees of Ashaf, the smooth stone beneath her, and above it, a rug, a thing that Ashaf had made of rags and cloth and twine, with no sense of color or texture to mar it. She felt the warm touch of hands across her hair and the line of her cheek; she closed her eyes and she could smell dough, butter, sugar, sweat, and even dust—the things that made Ashaf unusual among the humans at court.
And she said, Yes, Ashaf, and the old woman clucked and murmured as if the thing in her lap were a child and not—
And not Kiriel.
There should have been anger. Or pain. She felt it building, like a wildling, inside of her throat. But before she could give it voice, give it vent, she felt something else. Looking down at her left hand she saw the ring that she had picked up from the earthen path that Evayne trod. It was glowing softly—so softly that she might have thought it a trick of the light, if not for the fact that it warmed her hand.
As if—
As if someone were holding it.
She tried to pull free, and it followed her, and the action, the reaction, brought back other memories.
With something approaching a sigh, she lowered her head a moment, as if in human prayer. Then she let it go.
The darkness dissolved, like tears, from her irises, trailing down the perfect, pale curve of her cheeks before evaporating, and as she lifted her face, those eyes were golden, and glowing in the room's odd light. The line of her shoulders fell slightly; it seemed to those who watched that she relaxed as the mask left her face.
Dark-haired and golden-eyed, Kiriel looked up into the face of King Cormalyn, as if his gaze were the only thing in the room.
"Who is your parent?" the King asked softly. "And does The Kalakar know that you are god-born?"
"No," Kiriel said quietly. She took a breath. "I was told to hide my birth because golden eyes are the mark of demon blood."
"You are from the South." It was not a question.
And because it was not a question, she did not need to offer a lie in return.
"And the answer to the first question?" another voice said. Both King and Kiriel turned; the slender, pale-haired mage had moved quietly, and now stood, arms at his sides, eyes a silver, unblinking gray, not twenty feet away.
"I—do not know."
"Kiriel di'Ashaf," King Cormalyn said, "it is unnecessary to hide your past, or the truth of it, here. I am Wisdom-born, and my brother, Justice-born. But we have seen the Luck-born, and the Mother-born, and in our time, we have even seen Miara's brood, although they survive only a short time before the Mother claims them. You are born of a god, but you are not a god, and you will not be held accountable for the actions of your parent, unless you have chosen to follow in their footsteps."
"Majesty, with all due respect, I must tell you that you are being… unwise."
"Oh?"
Kiriel had heard that word before, said in exactly that tone. She smiled at the familiarity of the anger in the King's tone.
"What counsel does a member of the Order offer the son of the Lord of Wise Counsel?"
"Just this: There are gods whose children we should not suffer."
"I have said, Member APhaniel," was the King's steely, patient reply, "that this is not the case. How will you gainsay me?"
"I will tell you, if you will hear it, whose daughter she is. And then, Majesty, you will judge for yourself."
"Very well," King Cormalyn said. "Tell me, if you deem it necessary."
"No. If that information is to be revealed, it will be because she chooses to divulge it."
King, mage, and god-born girl turned in the direction of a voice that was familiar to each of them for different reasons. Standing in the room's center, already surrounded by men and women who had walked, like shadows, between the standing members of this powerful, exclusive court, was a hooded figure who wore robes of midnight blue.
Lifting her hands, she pulled the cowl of those robes away from the gaunt lines of her face. Her cheek was awash in blood, her eyes dark with exhaustion. And her hair was a peppered darkness, pulled tight and held by a knot that could not, quite, be seen.
"I know you," King Cormalyn said, the first to recover his voice. "You have aged… well."
"And you," was her quiet reply. She spoke as if the force of her first statement had drained what little strength remained her. "Majesty, what I have said—it is of more import than I can tell you without revealing what cannot be revealed. Let me say only this: This war, the coming war, and the battles that will link them—they are defined, for each of us, by choice, by the freedom to choose." She sagged, her shoulders curling inward.
"Hold her there a moment," another voice said.
"Is the entire court to feel free to interrupt an interview of this nature?" It was King Reymalyn, speaking for the first time, an edge of humor in the stiff words. He rarely showed humor, but then again, this was his brother's hall.
"Not the entire court, Majesty." A slightly built man stepped around the Kings' poorly armed guards. "But certainly the healer. Hello, Evayne."
"Hello, Dantallon."
"You know each other as well?" Meralonne asked, the words sharp.
"Oh, yes," Dantallon replied. "I first met her years ago, under the auspices of a man who recognized the early signs of my talent and thought to train and develop it." His smile was grim. "And I saw her regularly throughout my training. It seemed that we barely released her, and before we could turn around she was walking—or crawling—through our doors again."
"How is Levec?" she asked wearily.
A shadow passed over Dantallon's face.
An answering shadow crossed hers. "I see," she said quietly. "I do not have time, Dantallon." Her eyes were wide and round, her face unnaturally pale. "I cannot stay."
"Of course not," he replied, and held out his arms just quickly enough to catch her before she collapsed. He cursed then, unmindful of who might hear him. "I'm sorry, Majesty. But she must be taken to the infirmary."
He glared at the back of one of the men. "Devon," he said, between clenched teeth, "I mean now."
"I see," Member APhaniel said softly, as the doors closed upon the two men and their ungainly burden. "Majesty, let me withdraw my qualified advice. You are the King of Wise Counsel, and I am but a mage."
"I am not so certain that I do not wish to hear your advice," the King replied, equally thoughtful.
They both turned to look at the young woman. Her eyes were upon the door.
"You know her," Meralonne said.
Kiriel di'Ashaf nodded without turning. "She brought me here. To Kalakar." Bitterly, she added, "I owe her my life."
"You don't sound as if you think much of the debt." It was Meralonne.
"She shouldn't have interfered."
"No," he replied, as he stared at her. "But she always does. And although I do not claim to understand all of her motivation, she chose her risk when she chose you. I have been—we have all been—the beneficiary of many of her risks. Keep your counsel, Kiriel. For my part, I apologize." He paused, and then
his voice grew quite cool. "But I would give much to know how your human parent and your immortal parent… met. And where."
Kiriel did not reply.
"Which leaves us," King Cormalyn said, "with a problem of a different nature. Kiriel di'Ashaf, you wear the colors of the Kalakar House Guard. You drew weapon, without Our permission, in the Great Chamber, and your House will be measured and fined accordingly. If we accept this as a given," he added, glancing at The Kalakar and waiting just long enough to see her quiet nod, "and we dismiss, for the moment, the question of your birth, we are left with a few facts.
"You were aware of the creature before it made its attack. You faced it, upon the chamber floor, and you recognized it. I believe that it recognized you."
Kiriel did not reply.
"You were able to stand against its attack—and you injured it before it left."
She nodded.
"Are you aware of what the creature is?"
"He is one of the kinlords," she said softly, her golden eyes narrowing. "He is the weakest."
"Why did you recognize him?"
"We've—we've fought before."
"Why did you call him Allasakar-Etridian?"
At that, she smiled, and the smile was cold. "To insult him," she said softly. "He is called Lord Etridian. To call him Allasakar-Etridian is completely correct—but it stresses his weakness and his subservience."
"I see."
Her mouth fell open; she paled.
"Does he, indeed, choose to serve the God we do not name?"
"Y-yes. He's kinlord. But the kin serve the King— serve their Lord. They don't have a choice. The Lord of the Hells bears the mantle."
"What did you say?" It was Sigurne who spoke. She stepped into the conversation like a frail, kindly old woman. But her eyes were clear, and her voice was strong.
Kiriel's shoulders tensed. "The mantle," she replied.
"And this mantle is?"
"It is the crown of the Lord of the Hells. It is the god-right by which He rules." She braced herself.