Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court

by The Shining Court

For she could tell, from the timbre of his voice, if not his build, that he was a boy. On the edge of manhood, to be sure, and with only a little time needed to push him over, but nonetheless, a boy.

  It explained much.

  Serra Teresa and Ser Karras exchanged a brief glance.

  Karras stepped forward. "We are passing through Raverra to Mancorvo."

  "You fly the colors of the clan Marano."

  The cerdan nodded, neither well-pleased nor ill, although the Voyani did not always attend to the colors of the clans well enough to know them. Certainly not the Arkosans. The Havallans, perhaps.

  "My sister sent me to offer you the hospitality of our wagons and our family," the boy continued.

  Serra Teresa froze a moment as she studied the lines of the boy's face, seeing them as if for the first time, although she missed little.

  "Your sister is?"

  "Margret," the boy replied, with just a touch of pride. "Margret, daughter of Evallen, Matriarch of Arkosa."

  Teresa closed her eyes then; it was a momentary reflex, and the pain passed quickly beneath the heat of the Lord's regard. Ser Karras, however, had turned to seek her permission, whether desirous of acceptance or flat refusal, she could not—quite— tell; she met his eyes as hers blinked open.

  "Tell your sister Margret that the Serra Teresa di'Marano would indeed be honored to accept the offered hospitality. Tell her—tell her that the Serra is well aware of the honor offered."

  He brightened, this boy, and she added—because she could not help but add it, "And who is her brother?"

  His cheeks shifted slightly in color, although with the Voyani's sun-harsh skin it was often hard to tell, and he smiled; his face lit, side to side, with the undamaged and unfettered charm of a child who has not yet been broken or yoked. "I'm Adam," he said. "Adam, Evallen's son."

  She bowed—it was acceptable etiquette when the only mats beneath her were formed of earth and dust—and then nodded to the captain.

  It was clear that he did not trust the Voyani; he was not paid, after all, to trust. He chose three men—more than that, and the lack of trust would be an open insult—and accompanied them himself.

  Serra Teresa began the descent from the roadside to the small curve of grass that a desert dweller would call a valley and an Averdan would hardly deign to notice. Where the land lay lowest, there was some hesitant greenery; if the rains came, she thought the golden dryness of the sun's reign would be cast off by undergrowth like so much ceremonial clothing.

  She admired the Voyani their ability to maneuver, and keep, their wagons, and as she approached the wagon ring, she saw, standing above them as if it were a palace at the heart of a wheeled city, a wagon that she knew, if not well, then well enough to never mistake.

  This was no merchant wagon, no van meant to carry creature comforts from one end of the Dominion to the other; it was a home, or as much of a home as the Voyani were allowed to make. Canvas was supported in two places by carved lintels that were oiled and tended; the canvas itself was not the only protection the wagon dweller was offered, for the sides of the wagon were built up with a fine wood, and broken on either side by panes of clear, thick glass, and bars of lead. Cloth twined and fell to either side, ribbons of decorative color, and the wheels themselves were jointed in such a way that they absorbed some of the rigors of wagon travel well.

  Many a merchant would have paid the Voyani for the secret of this construction, but the Voyani and the merchants were not often friendly; death and time had given suspicion a hold that goodwill did not dissolve. And that, she thought grimly, was for the best, for goodwill rarely stood the test of the wind.

  The Voyani had no manners, or so it was said, and for the most part, it was true. They were a lazy people with regard to the niceties of formal interaction. As if to prove her thoughts true, several of the older men who attended the Matriarch appeared to either side of the Matriarch's large wagon; they took up their places by crossing their arms in front of their chests and lounging against the wagon's side, staring at the cerdan who accompanied the Serra, measuring them.

  Sunlight aged them, as did the wind. They wore no armor, or little of it, and three of the eight carried swords; they all carried daggers, and Serra Teresa was certain that half of them were of the throwing variety; the Voyani did not often like to close in a fight with strangers, although amongst themselves the thrown dagger was considered an act of cowardice that stained the honor of the family.

  Such as it was.

  Some of the men shaved, although they retained either beard or mustache; a smooth face was considered a boy's face by Voyani men. Serra Teresa did not understand the rank that Voyani men actually held, and wasn't certain if she wanted to dignify Voyani pecking order with the word. It was the women she came to, after all, and the women who entertained outsiders such as she stood apart from their kin, if not above.

  Margret of the Arkosa Voyani had not yet reached the age where she knew how to maintain that distance. She did not understand the use of mystery, the use of silence, the use of sparing truths. But she understood death; they all did, clansmen and Wanderers alike. These were the Lord's lands, and the Lady's, and perhaps life was not such a mercy that it should be mandated, and guaranteed.

  Serra Teresa waited outside the large wagon for a full five minutes before she realized that Evallen would not emerge to greet her. Oh, she'd known it, of course; it was partly to convey word of that woman's death that she had come into this dell. But knowledge of death and acceptance of it are often separated by time and experience, and she had had little time since the death itself had become known to her.

  She lifted her head slightly.

  "The Matriarch?"

  "Is not with the caravan, as you should well know," a clear, strong voice said.

  The Serra Teresa froze. And then, without another word, she turned. "Captain," she said quietly.

  "No."

  "Ser Karras—"

  "I will not leave you with these," he replied, his tone low, his meaning unmistakable.

  She hesitated a moment, afraid for him and now, because of this single sentence spoken by a woman who was always a little bit too obviously angry, afraid of him. But she did not choose to use the voice upon him, to force him away.

  "Margret," she said softly, and she bowed her head.

  The young, dark-haired woman paused, her mouth already half open as if to speak. It was grudging, this pause, a thing that the Serra Teresa was certain she had struggled for. "Come with me."

  Karras was not pleased by the tone Margret took; he bristled, but not obviously—he was too well-trained to embarrass or endanger her that way. Although they were better armed than the Voyani, they were also outnumbered, and there was no question of surviving a fight started here, among these people.

  He escorted Serra Teresa to the wagon in which Margret and her brother lived. Margret mounted steps whose upper hinge creaked with either age or want of oil, or perhaps both, and then flung open the small, perfect door. Inside, it was both shadowed and empty; the windows that graced the mother's wagon graced the child's as well, but they were smaller and allowed for less light.

  "In here," Margret said curtly, "we can speak."

  Such rudeness as this, Serra Teresa had witnessed once before in her life, from the mother. For a moment daughter and mother looked so alike that she felt, that she could feel, young again herself, on the brink of a mystery that she didn't—quite—believe in, and a mystery, herself, that Evallen couldn't quite believe in.

  Perhaps, she thought, as she saw Ser Karras' small frown, you will do well enough.

  * * *

  Shadows provided mercy, of a type. Light was often harsh when sorrow intruded; it allowed for no privacy, no illusion of the strength of expression that dignifies either a man or a woman who understands that life ends, that death is inevitable.

  "Where is my mother?" Margret said, as she found a seat in the high wagon, and offered the Serra her choice of worn but sturdy
pillows.

  The Serra was silent.

  "She was to leave before the Festival's end, Serra. She was to meet us in Mancorvo."

  "She—she told you this?"

  It was the Voyani's turn to fall silent. When she spoke, her voice was flat, as inflectionless as the Serra might have preferred. "She told you different."

  "Margret, your mother and I knew each other—"

  "For longer than I've existed, yes, I've heard it before. But I'm her kin." She stood, and the flatness left her voice and her expression.

  Evallen, Teresa thought, I warned you against this: you have raised a wildness in your family.

  "What, exactly, did she tell you?"

  "None of your secrets," Teresa said softly, folding her hands in her lap, taking up a posture that she was certain would both impress and offend the younger woman. "She told me nothing, Margret, that did not pertain to what little privacy a Matriarch is granted."

  "What did she tell you?"

  Serra Teresa turned her face to the window, lifted the fan that was wrapped, by a golden chain, around her wrist, protection against loss on the road. "She told me," the Serra said, pitching her voice as carefully as she could, "that she had come to the Tor Leonne to die."

  The silence, as always, was terrible.

  "She—she—" The attempt to speak was worse.

  For Serra Teresa di'Marano was gifted and cursed, and where she could lend dignity to another by somehow refusing to see the weakness they could not help but show, she could not refuse to hear it. The voice conveyed a complexity of emotion that a word did not, no matter how good the speaker was at dissembling, at hiding emotion. Margret was not such a one, and oddly enough, that made it easier; she was not the eavesdropper, or worse, the soul's voyeur, she was the bearer of bad tidings to a woman barely more than girl and not schooled enough to hide what she felt.

  "I wish you were someone else," Margret said, and it surprised the Serra.

  "Why?"

  "Because if you were, I'd accuse you of lying." The voice broke three times, as if the words were rocks it could not pass over, but must flow round. Bitterness, there. And beneath it, certainty.

  "You suspected."

  "Yes." She was tired, was Margret, and angry. "But I didn't have—what my mother did. I couldn't be certain." She began to pace the confines of the wagon, her long stride making it seem small indeed to the woman who was trapped there with her.

  At last, she stopped. "How?"

  This was harder. "I was not there, Margret."

  "Was anyone?"

  "Yes."

  She fell silent again. "Who—who found the body?"

  Teresa closed her eyes. "You are asking me if someone removed something from your mother's corpse. I can answer that question: If they did, it was not a thing of value. She knew, Margret; she knew what she must do."

  "Then you have brought her home," Margret said formally, the words strange to the Serra's ears.

  Teresa looked away again, wondering when the woman's voice had drawn her eyes from the Lord's light. "No," she said at last, knowing from the tone of the words, rather than from their content, that the younger woman spoke not of a corpse. "I have not."

  "But—" For the first time, there was a fear about her voice, a loss of certainty. "You must have—have done what she asked."

  "She did not ask it of me," Serra Teresa replied, coming at last to the second part of her duty. "She asked it of a young woman whom she met in the Tor Leonne. The young woman who—who witnessed her death, who was the only witness."

  "You're lying."

  She did not smile when she said, "You accuse me of something that you have just said—"

  "This is your way, isn't it? This is your way of drawing us into your intrigues and your stupid battles. I told her—I told her not to listen to you—"

  I know, Teresa thought. You are much like your mother at this age; any plagues or curses we must suffer are our own, and we

  are welcome—at your pleasure—to suffer them with neither cease nor your aid. But she did not say it.

  "What is it, Teresa? What do you want from us? You've taken Evallen—and I have no way of knowing whether or not anything you've told me is true."

  "You have the same method your mother had," was Serra Teresa's reply. She was curious, and she was not, for although she had always suspected that the pendant that Diora now held in her possession was a thing of more than just monetary value to the Arkosa Voyani, she also knew the price of sharing their secrets. There were places one did not, one could not, pry.

  "Where is this—this other woman?"

  "In the Tor Leonne. She cannot travel; even the freedom of daylight is almost prohibited her."

  "But you travel. You could have—"

  "I could not ask her to break her oath to Evallen of the Arkosa Voyani."

  Truth, in that. Margret's sullen silence was acknowledgment enough. "What do you want of us, Teresa?"

  "The young woman that she gave this great task to was the Consort of the Lord of the Sun."

  "So?"

  "Perhaps I betray myself; the court is my home, and has always been. You knew her, I think even you must have known her, by the name she once held: Serra Diora Maria en'Leonne."

  Margret sat down, hard.

  Into the silence, the sun fell, its shadows lengthening as its rays were broken by objects; tin cups, candle holders, lamps red-brown with rust around handle and base. Margret was white with the things she must leave unsaid; they were many.

  Teresa made to rise, and the young woman stirred, restless as a caged beast—and as dangerous, Teresa thought, to a woman who had made the choice to enter its cage. She sat again, unmindful— if a Serra of her stature could be—of the darkness, the meager-ness—of her surroundings. She felt oddly hollow as she watched this child pace; Margret was older than Diora in all things but experience, and loss.

  Even this loss.

  She had not thought to feel it, because she had felt it so little in the confines of the Tor Leonne, during the heat and the danger of the Festival Sun. She had seen the body; they all had; it was displayed prominently, and over the course of two days, it caught the wind unkindly, gave it the scent of early decay, of blood. They had taken it down as an offense to the grandeur of the grounds on the third day, but she did not know where it was buried; she was certain that no ceremony had attended the corpse.

  She knew, as well, that the Voyani did not put much stock in the proper burial rites; bury the dead, by all means, but don't worship the corpse; the spirit, after all, had been freed from the burden of constant wandering, a homelessness decreed by fate, upheld by even the laws of nature.

  Evallen.

  But she had not thought, after seeing that body, to sit in this wagon, of all wagons. The grand wagon, that she could have brushed aside as easily, as nonchalantly, as serafs did the summer flies. But not here; it was in this wagon that she and Evallen had first met, when Evallen's mother, Violla, had been the Matriarch.

  The circle closes. Yes. Around them all, an ambush.

  "Teresa?"

  She was embarrassed to be caught out, to be caught with no control, momentarily, of her expression. She knew the lines of her face were neutral because no loss could destroy that mask; it was part of everything she had been raised to be. But she also knew that it was vacant, that expression; she had gone, for a moment, into a past that contained Evallen and Teresa, a young woman who would rule the Arkosa Voyani as mother of them all, and a young woman who would never be a mother, no matter that either woman desired a different destiny.

  She had seen the end of so many lives, but she felt, suddenly, the Lady's Night was falling, finally; that there would come a night so black that the inevitability of dawn could be struck forever from human memory.

  And then she knew why, for she was not a woman given to the darker fancy of the Night's thoughts, especially not during the Lord's tenure. She heard it in a voice.

  "I believe," she said, her
own voice smooth as the silk that she wore, "you have a visitor, Margret. Or rather, your van does."

  Margret turned at once, as if glad of the opportunity for action, or reaction.

  Pitching her voice in the manner that she had been taught so long ago by a bard-born man, she said, "Margret—please."

  The younger woman turned.

  "Caution. Make no promises to him, give him no hint of your intent or your secrets."

  "As if," Margret said, with a faint bitterness and angry but muted contempt, "we ever give outsiders anything of ourselves."

  It was meant as a blow, and because it was meant that way, the Serra found it difficult to be offended. A difference, she mused, between the ghost of her younger self and the woman that she was now. So many differences—surely not all the product of age—but she knew how to do one thing well, at that age, at this one.

  She knew how to listen.

  In the artificial darkness of the wagon's confines, alone for the first time since the Festival of the Sun itself—for Ramdan's invisible presence was a presence, a comfort and a responsibility both—she closed her eyes and let the line of her shoulders dip, ever so slightly, groundward.

  She shut out color and shadow and edges of light; shut out, as she could, the scents confined within the still cabin, and listened.

  "I have come," this stranger's voice said, "to speak with Evallen, who protects the Arkosa Voyani on their voyage." Inflected slightly, the address was archaic and stilted—but there was, in the words, a respect that was truer than they were.

  "She's not here." Margret's voice was thin and reedy when compared with the richness and the depths of this stranger's. Teresa could not help but compare the voices; indeed, the differences seemed to demand no less.

  Grandeur, there. Power. Not Margret's.

  If, Serra Teresa thought, folding her fan in the stillness by playing with its familiar edges, you were a woman, you might even present a small threat. But the Voyani men don't follow men.

  "I… see. I am, perhaps, mistaken about the color of the flag that you fly. I was given to understand that such a flag was flown only in the camp of the Matriarch."

  She heard the play of unruly hair against cloth that was the Voyani shrug.