Somehow it never quite came off her arms, which was unfortunate, because it made her look not unlike a servant woken for some household emergency at a late hour.
And at a late hour, at such an obvious disadvantage, was not how she would have chosen to meet Rymark ATerafin.
Of the Terafin Council, he was the man she least trusted— possibly because he was, in Finch's estimation, the prettiest, and Jewel had never been one to trust a pretty face. She almost managed to avoid him, but the cloak was heavy and more cumbersome than anything else she normally carried from one end of Terafin to the other, and it didn't fit into the convenient alcove beneath the torch rings that separated the wing that had been her home for fifteen years from the main hall. That hall, wider from side to side than the small tenement in which she and her den had once lived, was well lit, with silvered glass and towering windows at even intervals from end to end.
If you didn't want to be seen, the great hall was not the place to be. Unfortunately, it was also the fastest way to get out to The Terafin's private grounds, and the four shrines that it harbored.
She knew that he'd seen her when she saw him approaching her. And she knew who he was because he had a distinctively graceful way of walking; he was almost as catlike as Devon ATerafin could be. And a helluvalot less pleasant.
"Why, Jewel—what a pleasant surprise. I'd hoped to be able to speak with you before the next Council meeting." He crossed his chest with his hand in a civil greeting that lacked nothing. He even bent his head, granting her a measure of respect that she could only dream he'd show her in an actual Council meeting. Lamplight made the sheen of his greying auburn hair look like warm, contained flame.
Fire. She shuddered in spite of herself and rather too obviously; his face took a chill expression for a moment. But only a moment. He stepped closer, smoothing his thin-lipped silence into a friendly one. "Have I… interrupted an assignation of some nature?"
"Yes."
The curt, short word stopped him cold; it was not the way people with rank or station often responded to innuendo. If she were honest with herself, it wasn't the way Jewel usually responded either. But she wasn't a sixteen-year-old girl in the first blush of youth anymore; she was over thirty, and she wasn't to be thrown off-balance by anyone, let alone this particular ATerafin.
But she took a step back, into the wall, as she thought it. Ry-mark was one of three ATerafin that she knew wore not only the House symbol but also the symbol of the Order of Knowledge: the three phases of the moon, with the full moon quartered by elemental symbols. That platinum medallion reflected the burning flame as he bent to speak to her; he was a tall man, and made the most of the difference between their heights. "I see. I assure you that this will only take a moment of your time. I have no desire to interfere with affairs that are not of my concern."
Mages always made her nervous. The only mage that she halfway liked was Sigurne Mellifas, and that because there was something about her that reminded Jewel of a grandmother who was almost—but not quite—made gentle and perfect by memory.
It was not Sigurne she faced, but Rymark.
She sighed and resisted the urge to massage her forehead, a gesture that she often used when either bored or irritated. Instead, she shoved her curls out of her eyes. "What, exactly, did you want to speak to me about, and can't it wait until tomorrow?"
He shrugged.
"This is not a discussion you want to make an appointment for."
"Perceptive, Jewel. But then again, I would expect that of you."
She had always been given a choice of two behaviors in response to her talent: awe or nervous humor. Rymark added a variant that she didn't particularly like: Possessive humor. "What do you want?" The words came out shorter than she would have liked, too clipped by far, given how close he was.
His eyes narrowed, changing the contours of his face ever so slightly. "I want," he said coolly, "what at least four members of the Council—or members of the House who are not yet privileged with a position upon the Council—will want before this is over."
"Which is?"
He smiled, leaning over again, leaning into the edge of the boundaries that she defined as personal space. She really didn't want to take another step back, but by presence alone he almost forced it; the wall hit her hard, made her look even more awkward than she already did in her soft cotton nightdress and soft-soled night shoes.
If he touches me, she thought, I'll cut his fingers off.
Except that her dagger was in her room, with the rest of her clothing.
"Jewel, play no game. If you will not choose a side intelligently, do not choose sides."
She knew, then, exactly what he wanted. She'd always known it, but she'd ignored it until now.
"The Terafin," he said softly, "has… begun to speak openly of choosing her heir."
Not the interpretation she'd have put on it, but she wasn't the politician. "She's not likely to die tomorrow," Jewel snapped, unable to think—although she had given it much thought over the years—of anyone else at the helm of the most powerful House in the Empire. When she'd been younger, she'd thought it might be her. Youth was stupid. Seeing the way it aged The Terafin, understanding what it meant, had taken time. Had offered her a truth she didn't particularly want to see about a responsibility she no longer dreamed about shouldering, although nightmare once or twice had brought her close.
He smiled, his lips turning up in what seemed an infinitely lazy gesture, a self-indulgence of an expression. "Your loyalty is to be commended. You've never been made one of her Chosen, but you're infected by the same spirit. I admire it. Jewel. I would like very much to be able to count on it in the future." He lifted a hand, palm up, his fingers slightly curled.
"You can count on my loyalty to The Terafin," she replied curtly, lifting her chin slightly to avoid the tips of his fingers.
"Jewel, my dear," he said, and the coolness was suddenly matched in his words by a kind of awful heat, "you cannot always be the girl who says 'No.' You are no longer the child, although perhaps in your current attire that would not be so obvious."
"I told you," she replied, quelling any heat with the ice of her words, "that I'm already otherwise occupied for the evening."
"Ah. And if it's not something as simple as an evening that I desire?"
"Then you can make an appointment, same as anyone else." She lifted her hands, placed them as quick as she could in the center of his chest and pushed. There were a hundred other things she might've done—but they'd all cause damage. She didn't like Rymark—but for that matter, she thought him better for the House, although it was hard to imagine at this particular point, than at least one of the other four members of the Council to which they were both jointly appointed: Haerrad.
And that meant that she would do her best not to get involved in the type of fight that she knew well at close quarters. Or the type of fight that she now knew at any quarter.
He didn't make it easy, though, the bastard. He grabbed both her hands by the wrists and pulled her suddenly close, yanking her hard enough that she lost the flat of her feet, and the protection of the wall at her back.
If he tries to kiss me, she thought, although her breathing quickened, I'm going to bite his tongue so badly even Alowan won't be able to save it. "Rymark, treating me like you treat the household servants is not likely to endear you to me." Icy, keep it icy.
He only laughed. "The girl who says no to the end. In the North, my dear, they would respect this provincialism. You are not in the North now. Do you think, when the Terafin dies, that you will have no need of support? Or would you see Haerrad raise his little army and slaughter half the House to bring it to heel?"
"Not even Haerrad would be that stupid."
"You don't speak with conviction. Jewel."
No, because she didn't have it. Haerrad, gods curse him to the Hells with no further lifetimes of atonement, was, she suspected, much like the ancestral ATerafin it was forbidden to name in his open des
ire for power and his ruthlessness in his quest to obtain it. That The Terafin had not chosen to have him killed was something that she did not—not quite—understand, legality aside. Instead, to neutralize him, she'd made him part of the Council, and answerable to it. "What do you want?"
"You know it, little seer. I want your support in the Council. When the discussion of the heir is raised—and it will be, for The Terafin believes it is time—I want your vote of confidence. Or I want you to abstain from a vote at all." His grip on her wrists tightened as he smiled again. "But perhaps I am not only interested in the business of politics: there are many more things in this life."
He bent, again, and she'd had enough. Brought her knee up, suddenly, and found that it was hampered by folds of a too heavy cloak. He laughed, caught the back of her head in one hand, twisting his fingers into her hair. "Lady," he said, his lips a hair's breadth from her own.
And then he cried out in pain: his hands were scoured by a brilliant, brief light, a light that burned blue and then orange before his grip was broken. He turned at once, all pretext of charm— and it seemed to Jewel that there was little enough of it—gone. "You!"
Jewel made haste to stumble around him out of the alcove that had proved such a poor choice of hiding place. She had to scrape skin against stone to do it, but she didn't wait for Rymark to move; he wasn't likely to just to be convenient. She won free quickly, as if the opportunity was going to be a very, very short one.
And there, arms hanging deceptively free at his sides, was the man she least wanted to see: Avandar. It couldn't have been anyone else, of course. It had to be him. He did her the grace of not speaking his mind, although she could see it in the momentary narrowing of his eyes; he never criticized her in any company save that of her den, where he, like only one other outsider in the last fifteen years, had made a half-place for himself by his dogged persistence.
And the last man, Ellerson, she often wondered about; the hurt of losing him had dimmed with time. Dimmed the same way the loss of her father had, even though her father had not chosen his death the way Ellerson had chosen his departure.
"Avandar," Rymark said coldly. "This does not concern you."
Avandar was a domicis. It was not his right to reply. But he folded his arms and said softly, "It seems you are not only im-perceptive but graceless. I am not a man with your reputation for prowling—"
"Avandar, you had a choice." It was as close as Rymark ever came to open anger. "You made it. You serve, and you serve her. If she does not cry for help, do not seek to interfere in what you do not understand."
Morretz, The Terafin's domicis, would have been deaf to Rymark ATerafin; in fact, he usually was, which Jewel found quietly amusing and Rymark found irritating.
Avandar showed her again—as he usually did—why he was not Morretz. "The function of a domicis is not mere service, ATerafin—and I rather thought you knew that when you applied for the services of one."
Jewel was shocked. Oh, gods, she thought, he's done it now.
Rymark paled and then purpled. "That is strictly under the confidence of the guild order," he said, and Jewel thought a whole lake would freeze at the chill in his voice if one were available. "And you, domicis, have broken that confidence by your words tonight. I will speak with the guild," he added.
Avandar now offered a stony silence in return for the truth that Rymark had spoken; he managed to maintain that silence until Rymark turned on his heel and strode out of sight.
"Avandar," she said, the concern in her words genuine.
"It is not—quite—a disruption of guild confidence," he said, his lips nearly white. "Rymark's original application came through Terafin, and as it happens, those documents are accessible to us if they still exist. I will argue that the breach and the knowledge occurred at this end."
"But I've never—"
"You will." He shrugged.
She thought about it for a minute. Thought hard. "I think I can find them. Gabriel's got to have them filed neatly somewhere. An application of that nature is recorded; refusal would be recorded as well, for future reference in dealings with the guild.
"Of course there's a very small chance that Gabriel didn't keep track of the application. Remember, Rymark's his blood son."
"And that," Avandar said quietly, "is an insult to both the right-kin, Gabriel, and all those who have become, through dint of effort, ATerafin."
It stung when he was right, and he was right more often than she cared to admit. Of course, given his disposition and his unbearable arrogance, once was more than she cared to admit, so she supposed it wasn't that hard. He'd not yet faulted her for her appearance, and she didn't want to deal with yet another criticism, so she said, hoping to distract him, "How in the Hells did you know that he'd made that application? He doesn't have a domicis."
"Now that would be breaking guild confidence."
"How convenient. I suppose this means you're not going to tell me."
"You suppose correctly."
"It was you, wasn't it? You were offered his service."
Avandar said, voice low with warning, "Jewel."
She could not imagine how two men—Morretz, who served The Terafin, and Avandar, who served her—could be so different. He was dark and mercurial in temperament; Morretz was patience and stability defined. She knew by Avandar's tone that she was right, and that he would not elucidate further. Ever. Fifteen years had taught her when to fight and when to give up. She gave up. "Were you following me?"
"Yes."
"Well. I guess this time it wasn't such a bad idea."
"How graceful of you to acknowledge it."
Her cheeks reddened. Jewel hated when they did that.
"You go to the shrine." It wasn't a question.
She nodded, self-conscious.
"I will escort you as far as the path will allow." His offer was grudging; he loathed the exclusion. But The Terafin and the ATerafin who sought the shrine sought it in isolation.
If the offer was grudging, the acceptance was not less so. Jewel turned and began to walk, her cheeks burning with the embarrassment of the required rescue, her anger directed at Rymark for proving to her, yet again, how necessary Avandar had become to her life in Terafin.
He had not always been so.
Vision.
Torchlight in the darkness. Blue, blue night, scattered across with stars twisting the raiment of moonlight into light, the haze of the heavens. Against that backdrop, leaves and fronds, black— the silhouettes of the puppet theater in the Southern holdings, moving at the hand of the wind, whispering their muted night whisper.
Sight.
Terafin burning. Sands where the gates might be, shadows lapping at the grasses and the flat stones that lead to the shrines. She walked in their center, taking careful steps. Afraid to look left, to look right; afraid that her talent would take her eyes again, show her things she did not wish to see.
Gods, but the visions hadn't invaded her dreams this strongly since—
Since the last time they'd been searching for the Shining City. Unbidden, the ghostly vision of a young woman with dark hair and darker eyes smiled at her from across the way—but the smile was dangerous, half-threatening. Duster. Death.
She had walked this path so many times she could follow it without looking, but she looked anyway, for comfort's sake. There, the Mother's shrine, a flat-roofed presence, surrounded artfully by flowers and plants whose colors could be seen in the torchlight of the rings on each of the four pillars. She bowed at the sight of its murky marble, but did not stop to make an offering; she might have once, but this was not a matter for the Mother.
Nor was it a matter for Reymaris, and that grieved her, because Jewel Markess—the girl she had been before Terafin had both saved and swallowed her life—had believed in that justice, without reservation; the reservations were ones she had learned as ATerafin, and having once learned them, she discovered them to be like spiderwebs, and she the fly; she could not turn back
.
Still, she held what she could of her old beliefs. Bowed a moment at the plaque that graced his presence on the grounds of Terafin, wondering how angered he might be at the end of the succession. Wondering if, indeed, there would be a succession war.
War. Although she did not speak the word aloud, it echoed, lingering in air and on the tip of her tongue as if she'd shouted it. Her arms stiffened a moment; she forced them to relax and then remembered that the bundle she was pressing more and more tightly to her chest was a cloak, and proof against this unseasonally cool evening. Hands shaking, she donned it, and then drew it tight, treating it as if it were more blanket than apparel.
To Cormaris' shrine she went; if one followed the path set out by a long-dead architect, there was no choice—it took you to this shrine, this lit and guiding place, and made you stop there, for the path surrounded the shrine in a circular ring.
Cormaris, the god of wisdom, was worshiped, if privately, by more of the older Terafins than she could count, and not all of them the men who made of their lives political tools and weapons. His presence secured more in the way of offerings than the Mother and Reymaris combined, although it was the Mother's name that was most often spoken across the Empire's breadth.
Just' behind the gleam of the eagle swooping there was an offering bowl, hidden by the height of the plaque so as not to be too garish, too obvious—but obvious nonetheless to any who knew to come here. Jewel bowed, and as she shifted into a momentary obeisance, light caught her eyes; the torches were flickering across shining brass. The rod, and the ring, each caught beneath the ea-gle's claws, in bright relief. The ruler and the servant. The ruled and the master.
For most of House Terafin, the path ended here.
But Jewel ATerafin had not come this way to seek the wisdom of Cormaris, blessed though that might be. She took a breath as she rose, expelled it and drew a deeper one, and then brushed her straggling curls out of her eyes.
The path went one shrine farther; there were four shrines in the gardens of Terafin.
It was to the shrine of Terafin, that round-domed, marble structure beneath which lay the altar upon which so many dreams and oaths were offered, that Jewel ATerafin repaired in a darkness that she had not once thought to alleviate by lamplight or torchlight of her own.
Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King Page 9