by sun sword
"Serra Diora di'Marano," he replied. "It is late, and it is not seemly that a woman of the clans should be seen, alone, with a Radann of the Lord. You will forgive me, but I have taken the liberty of assuring your privacy, and I believe it is best that we retire immediately."
That way.
The words came on the crest of a warm summer wind.
"As you say," she replied, but she could not stop herself from glancing over her shoulder. Moonlight silvered shadowed trees; the Tor Leonne seemed to be sleeping within the Lady's night.
He pulled her along, and after a moment, noticed how her hands were clasped. Marakas was not known for his attention to detail, either among the Radann, or among clansmen who were powerful enough to have to be wary of them. "Follow," he told her softly, releasing one wrist. "Speed is of the essence."
He did not tell her where she was going, and she did not care to argue; she could hear what he could not: the movement of the kinlord; the words of the Widan; the curses, quiet but heartfelt, of the Radann Peder par el'Sol. And although the listening was exhausting, she could not stop.
So she listened, sparing only enough of her attention that she might walk in the Radann's wake while clutching the pendant's warm crystal in the folds of her palms. And because of this, she did not recognize where their retreat took them until she lifted her face to the wide doors that guarded the sanctuary of the Sun Sword.
The Radann Marakas par el'Sol opened them and led her in.
There were servitors within: four, each armored and armed as if for combat and not the duty of guarding a highly placed official. They were watchful, but they took a moment to pay the Lord's Consort her due; they bowed, very low, and held that bow a fraction of a second longer than etiquette demanded. Respect. Why?
"We were not followed," the Radann told his servitors.
"My apologies, Radann par el'Sol, but I believe that we may well have been followed," Diora said softly.
"I saw nothing," the Radann par el'Sol replied, but he watched her face intently and took no insult from her contradiction.
"You knew," she said, her wide, dark eyes narrowing into slender crescents.
"Yes. I had you followed."
"But I—"
"I had your seraf followed each of the last four nights. Tonight, I followed personally." He paused, and then added, "No man who looked at your face could mistake you for even a fleeting moment for Serra Fiona's child."
"But why—"
"Because, Serra Diora, I did not trust you."
She was stunned, and she was not used to being stunned. It was summer, but the air was as chill as the sharp sea winds in the rainy seasons on the Northern coast.
"Who follows us?"
Silence.
He stepped forward and caught her by the arms. She thought he would shake her, but he did not; he closed his eyes instead and she felt—she felt a warmth in the palms of his hands. "Serra," he said gently, "please. You must answer the question."
"Radann par el'Sol," one of the servitors said, "I believe that it is not necessary to question the Lord's Lady."
They both looked, the Lord's Consort and the Lord's Radann. Glowing fiercely bright beneath the window that gazed out at the Lady's night was the Sun Sword. And the light that flared was a clarion call, a call to battle—if there were a hand that could wield it.
Leonne legend told of a light that harsh, and it shone for one thing alone.
"Tell me," Marakas said, his voice gentle but insistent.
She had, for the moment, no fear of him. Later she would marvel at herself; later she would deride her lack of control, the weakness that such immediate trust—that any trust, here, in this place, showed. "The Widan Cortano, the Radann Peder par el'Sol, and—and a servant of the Lord of Night."
She had not thought his face capable of anger, but it was, and the anger was cold and implacable. "Why were you there?"
She looked at her hands. Tried to open them.
"Serra Diora?"
"I was there," she told him softly, although she did not meet his eyes, "to kill the Voyani woman." She added, as if in defense of the action, "She had information which could harm us all."
He nodded. "I would have done no less, but she had been under guard for the day." He paused. "And I would not see her suffer the three days. Clansmen are cruel, where they are given the lawful right to be so."
"She died," Diora told him softly, "without revealing anything."
"How?"
She lifted her cupped, stiff hands, and he took them, and with care pried them loose. Blood ran then, from the cuts in her hands that matched, exactly, the facets of the large gem. The crystal itself bore no sign of the stain; it was clear and bright as the Sun Sword itself.
"This killed her?"
She did not reply.
"May I?" he asked her, as he looked at the crystal.
She stepped back, and he bowed.
"As you wish," he told her softly. "But I believe that this is one of the Voyani artifacts. Families are defined, among the Voyani, by the old magics that they keep. Do you know who she was?"
Diora shook her head; wild strands of dark hair clung to her face. She felt exposed, dressed as she was, with no finery and no paints behind which to hide.
"She was Evallen of the Arkosa Voyani; the matriarch of the family."
It was expedient to feign ignorance; it was also honest. Diora knew very little about the wanderers. They did not affect the politics of the realm, and it was in the politics of the Dominion that the Serra Diora di'Marano was steeped.
"Evallen served the Lady," he continued. "And she has passed that burden to you, and you have accepted it, whether you know it or not." He turned to face the Sun Sword. "There is one Leonne left alive," he said quietly. "And until he is either united with the Sword, or dead, this Sword will not be raised in war against our enemies." And then he smiled, and the smile was sharp. "But I wander, as always. The pendant that you carry exacts a blood price, and you have paid it, aware or no. You will be weakened for the next week, and the Festival is only one day old." He unfurled her fingers, and they battled him with a will of their own while she watched. "We will be safe here; if they have followed, they will not follow into the swordhaven. The Sun Sword protects us from that much.
"They will know that these magics were used if they are following. But they will be looking, I think, for these." He touched the wounds upon her hands. "And these are deep enough, and clear enough, that you would not be able to hide them."
"He saw me," she said. "The creature. He saw me."
"When?"
"When I killed her."
"He was there and you escaped?"
"I wasn't—physically—there."
"What do you mean?"
"I—forgive me, Radann par el'Sol. I babble like a child. I was not physically present. I approached upwind of the gates, and I heard their voices. I could not kill the woman in the presence of witnesses, for I would be acting against the orders of the kai el'Sol himself. But as I sat in hiding, awaiting the right moment, I heard two voices I recognized, and a third I did not. I don't know why, but I picked up the crystal, and held it between my palms.
"And it took me to them—but not in the flesh. I looked, in my own sight, a spirit, a ghost. They were—questioning the Voyani. She could see me; they could not. She asked me to kill her before he had a chance to bind her, for she feared what he would do in the Three Days that he could hold her spirit. I—did as she asked. But as I did, he turned to face me, and he saw me."
Marakas smiled with a weary relief. "What he saw, Serra Diora, was your spirit. And the Dominion's women have housed the spirits of Tyrs in the frail flesh of lambs. The only way they will know you is by your wounded hands, although they will not know exactly what they seek until they see it."
She raised a brow, motioning with that minute gesture to the four who stood guard and bore witness to the words that had passed between them.
He was not a subtle man. "
These men are my personal servitors. I trust them absolutely."
"Then you are—you are not a man who has many wives." She smiled; the smile was shaky, but genuine.
His face darkened, although he returned her smile bitterly. "I had one," he told her. "And I only ever wanted one." She wanted to know how he, not of the Widan, knew so much about the Voyani arts. But Marakas' background had always been hidden; he claimed no great clan, and no Terrean, and no matter how her sources had searched, she had never unearthed his secrets.
And now, she knew suddenly, he was going to give them to her. And she wasn't certain if she wanted to know.
He closed his eyes and then took her hands. The movement was so sure that it took her a moment to realize that it was subtly wrong. The hands that now held hers were warm, and they grew warmer, although she knew that they would not become uncomfortably hot; they reminded her, in some ways, of the pendant; they offered protection, comfort.
Comfort.
She knew, then, that she could trust him. Knew that he was of the clans, but of a clan so minor there was little difference between it and a family of serafs. Knew that he had loved his wife, and knew that he felt her loss as keenly as any bereaved husband, although the loss was not a new one. She knew that he valued the serafs, that the servitors that he had said he could trust were trustworthy, that he served the Lord's cause because he valued the Dominion, but that he did not value the Radann overmuch, and that he saw, always, a profound role for the Lady and the Lady's night. That he valued things lost, and valued them profoundly.
His anger was not hers; it was not so cold and so absolute; it allowed for grief. But Faida, Ruatha, and Deirdre were a loss that not even he could begin to feel. How could she—
She cried out then, and pulled her hands away.
"Healer," she whispered, her face pale with both loss of blood and shock.
"Yes."
"You didn't—you didn't warn me."
His eyes were lidded; his expression was suddenly neutral. "No."
"Because you didn't trust me."
"Yes."
"And you thought to—to read this from me, while you healed these?" She raised her hands in anger and before he could reply, she struck him. He caught her hand before she could strike again; it would have been hard to say which of the two was more surprised by her action— the Radann or the Serra herself. The silence between them stretched out in the darkness until one of the Radann's servitors coughed.
"It was wrong," Marakas said. By that open admission to an inferior, he once again set himself apart from the clansmen. "But these are not times in which the right and the wrong done to one man or one woman may rule us. I apologize."
"And are you satisfied?"
"No, Serra, I am not. But I will heal the hands, and you will be forewarned enough to keep your thoughts upon what you will; the injury does not require a deeper communion."
The Serra Teresa di'Marano sat alone in the garden beneath the face of the open moon. In her lap the Northern harp's strings resonated with the dance of her fingers, and her voice rose and fell in an Imperial lament for a wildness and time long past. At least, that was what the bard who gave her the song had said; she sang in a tongue that was both foreign and old. She understood the Imperial court tongue, but was less well-versed in its variants.
And she believed the bard, and sang with that belief. Wondering, as she did, whether or not two people who had the voice could lie to each other at all.
She was surprised to see Diora step from between two barely opened screens into the lambent moonlight. Her almost-daughter's hair was drawn back in combs and pearls, and she was dressed for the day and not the night, yet she seemed a shadow, a thing not meant for sunlight.
"Ona Teresa," Diora said softly.
"Na'dio," her aunt replied,' stilling the music of the strings with the gentlest touch of a hand. "Join me, if you like, but remember that you must greet the dawn with the Radann."
Diora nodded. She made a place for herself on the cushions that lay upon stone smoothed by the passage of water, wind, and time. And then she drew her legs up, sitting with her chin upon her knees, the very picture of a child.
"What," Serra Teresa said, resuming the play of finger across taut string but giving her attention to other matters, "has happened?"
"Ona Teresa," her almost-daughter said, and Teresa knew, then, that one never wondered an idle question beneath the full face of the Lady's Moon. "Did you know that my father was in league with the servants of the Lord of Night?"
They both spoke in the voice, with the voice; they bound their words as tightly as they dared. Teresa thought, if the light were sharper, that she would see the signs of it in Diora's face—and they were signs that the Consort to the Lord could not afford to expose to the clansmen. The Flower of the Dominion was expected to be exactly that: perfect when in bloom.
"Did you not?"
"No."
Of course she hadn't known; Teresa herself had not known it until the night that a lone seraf had come to her, in darkness, praying that all of the rumors that surrounded the unmarried Marano sister were true.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because the voice is no guarantee, Diora, that we will not be discovered. To know what I knew—and what you now profess to know—is death."
Her Na'dio turned to face her then, and she played something brighter, something softer, than the Northern dirge. Because her daughter's eyes held more than simple knowing; they held understanding. Vision.
"It is worse than death, I think," Diora said at last.
"Tell me. Tell me, if you will."
"I went to kill the Voyani woman."
Teresa nodded, unsurprised. Although Diora was ice and shadow to the clansmen and women who watched her with envy or desire, her aunt could not help but hear the horror and pity that had colored the words that she spoke when the Voyani woman had been led away, words whose meaning had nothing at all to do with pity. In that, at least, she was well-trained. But Teresa had more than half-expected, after Diora's attempt to find an assassin, that the young Serra would attempt to kill the woman herself.
And she knew that, no matter what her almost-daughter might say, pity and mercy were no small part of her motivation. Weakness.
"I had to kill her," Diora continued, hearing the unspoken, unvoiced criticism. "Because she knew too much. About the Radann kai el'Sol—"
"Diora, I told you, he is already doomed—"
"And me."
Serra Teresa froze. "You met her."
"Yes."
"You did not inform me."
"No. It appears, Ona Teresa, that we have both been playing our own games. How very like my father we both are."
"Like his General, perhaps," the older woman said. "Here. Play the harp a while, Diora, if you wish to continue speaking. My hands tire."
Her niece played the Northern harp as if she'd been born to the North, and for one weary moment, Teresa wished it had been so. "When did you meet Evallen?"
"You knew her."
"Oh, yes," her aunt said, keeping everything she felt out of her voice; schooling it, so that Diora might know for certain that she was offering privacy and asking for it at the same time.
"Am I anything but another pawn to you?"
"Yes," Teresa said, holding her heart's words back. "Diora—when?"
"Festival eve."
"And did she—give you anything?"
Surprise. Anger. Resignation. Even a hint of admiration. "Yes."
"Will you tell me what it was?"
"No."
"Ah. Then let me hope that she has not laid the responsibility of the Family upon you, for if she has, you will be forced to bear it, or you will pay the price."
"What price? What price could possibly be more costly than the price I have already paid?"
If Teresa offered privacy, Diora offered none; although her expression did not change, her voice did.
Teresa bowed her head, feeling the sti
ng of another woman's tears, the endless ache of another's loss. Diora's voice was very, very powerful. "Nothing," she said at last. "I forget myself, and you, in the warning. Diora—"
"You called her here."
Teresa did not answer.
"And she perished for it."
"Evallen's path was decided long before it crossed yours, Na'dio," Teresa said coolly. "She is dead now. We are not. You killed her?"
"Yes. But not—but not immediately. The Sword's Edge was there. The Radann Peder par el'Sol. And one other. Ona Teresa, he was not just a servant of the Lord of Night. He was a vessel. One of his kin."
"And does it change your course, Na'dio? Does it change the plans that we have crafted?"
The silence of music played without heart, a curtain behind which the actors prepare for the play, uncertain of whether or not there will be an audience, but certain that an unfavorable audience is death.
"I don't know. I don't know what your plans were, or are—and I think you understand now that you don't know all of mine.
"But if the Lord of Night was the hand behind the Sword and the General, then I will take him into account, and there will be a reckoning." She lifted her youthful face, and the moonlight whitened it, hiding any imperfection, robbing it of any expression that was not grim and cold. "I swear it, by the Lady. I swear it by Faida, by Ruatha, by Deirdre."
"Diora—"
"Help me, Ona Teresa. This has grown beyond me, and I cannot allow that. I have sworn."
And what of my oaths, Teresa thought, as she carefully caught her almost-daughter's icy hands and stilled the singing of the harp for the evening. What of my oaths to protect you, to watch over you, to keep you safe? What of my oaths to my own ghosts, my own dead?
But she nodded, not trusting herself to speak with a voice that Diora would accept as truthful.
Alesso di'Marente stood shoulder to shoulder with Sendari di'Marano as they faced the Widan Cortano di'Alexes—the Sword's Edge—and his two companions, the kinlord, Isladar, and another emissary from the Shining Court, one whose human seeming was superficial enough that no one, on second glance, could mistake him for anything other than what he was: kin to the Lord of Night. Cortano had dispensed with the pretense of procedure and summoned them, from their sleep, to his personal chambers.