It took her a moment to realize what he was saying.
"I'll worry about me, all right? You take care of yourself."
She found Avandar almost as soon as the great hall released her. And it was a release; until the moment she stepped from beneath its vaulted ceilings, its magelights, its statues—which had started, in her mind, as an homage to life and had ended as worse than mockery—she had not realized how much like a prison it had felt.
She might have taken a moment to appreciate freedom; to be glad of the fact that her feet were not attached to a pedestal, her life not burdened by that involuntary service. But she saw him instead, and the sense of exultation vanished.
In its place something uncomplicated enough—but barely—to be called anger.
He stood, vivid in blue and gold, the crown a mark across his brow, one that caught light and returned it. At his back, the mercifully less golden, gently curving wall that marked the boundary of the room she had entered. To either side, doors that led into a distance that hinted at visual splendor by casting it into half shadow.
She raised her arm as if it were a weapon. The sleeve—jeweled edges torn now—fell to her elbow and rested there like a gaudy flag.
Between them, the mark in red and gold and silver.
"You'd better have an explanation for this," she said, her voice so quiet any of her den would have ducked for cover. "And you'd better get it off."
He was not, had never been, part of her den; she now understood why in a way that she'd never put into words. He wasn't a servant. He didn't need her, not the way a servant needed a master. And more, buried beneath the half lifetime they'd spent together, the most important of the little truths: She didn't trust him.
She was certain, now, the mark twining like a serpent on the pale inside of her arm, she never would.
The rest of her den weren't servants, not like the dozens of men and women who swept and cleaned and stabled and cooked for the great House Terafin. But they served her. The understanding itself was as much a surprise as the mark.
It wasn't that they did what she said—they did, if you didn't count Carver's incessant need to sleep with anything that moved and spoke half-intelligibly—it was that they did so because they understood what the stakes were, and why the choices were made.
They stood at her back or at her side, depending on what she needed. They let her take care of the big things, and they filled in the cracks between one crisis and the next, waiting with the patience of—well, maybe that was stretching it. But they were patient.
They were hers.
Teller. He'd known. What it would cost. What she was leaving them to. He had never once questioned her. He had never once confronted her about the choices she'd made. The accusation, you're leaving us could sting and cut and bite because it was true—but only Jewel herself had ever made it, and only at night when sleep refused to alleviate her guilt and anxiety.
Ellerson had been like them. They'd all known it, pretty much the minute he'd corrected their poor manners and forced them to take a bath before they gathered round the dining table. There was a safety about him that in simpler times meant he was trustworthy.
In complex times? Trustworthy as well.
Morretz was.
Avandar was not.
As if he could hear her thoughts—and perhaps he could; it had always been rumored that some mages had that capability, although the Magisterium itself had dryly and precisely denied the accusation time and again—he spoke.
She didn't understand the language, and she recognized at least five, spoke two fluently.
She waited.
He spoke again, and again the language made no sense; it was an ugly complex of snarls and clicks. But she was certain it con-tained meaning. He lifted a hand. Pointed; she saw a light take the outline of his finger as if he were oil and it, fire.
Unfortunately, he was pointing at her.
She knew he wouldn't harm her. If it weren't for that instinct, the one that overrode every lesson and every experience that together comprised the wisdom she'd managed to attain, she would have leaped to the side to escape what left his hand: fire. Light.
Instead, she waited as it touched her skin. Was surprised at how warm it was, how mild and pervasive its heat.
"Jewel," he said.
She wore no crown. If it hadn't meant parading around the halls almost entirely naked, she wouldn't have worn the dress either. But the halls were cool, and the shifts and undercoat meant to be hidden between skin and jewel-stubbled silk were not proof against the temperature. She almost always chose practicality over pride.
"You didn't have any problem saying that before."
"Before?"
"When I—when I woke up. In my—in your—in that room."
"Ah. No."
"Why?"
He shrugged. "Does it matter? I have no problem now."
"If that was a spell you just cast, and I was the recipient, then yes, it does matter."
He turned away from her by the simple expedient of shifting his gaze. "This is my home," he told her softly, his words strangely slow. "But it was built by many hands, and some of them belonged to very talented men whom I found intriguing, and whom you, I fear, would find mad. They created works I had barely dreamed of, and even the dreams were the type that linger in shadow at the first edge of morning." His gaze rose as he spoke, eyes tracking the vault of the ceiling. "I gave them freer rein than I had realized. I set few conditions on their work.
"But understand," he said softly, "that I desired privacy above all else; a place hidden from all of the visions that even the gods possessed. To enter is… never easy. I find these visits disorienting, but I generally recover."
"Oh, good. I suppose that's more than you could say about Aristos."
He hadn't been smiling, and given the sudden narrowing of his eyes, there wasn't a chance in the hells he'd start now. "Do not meddle in what does not concern you."
"You sent him to me."
"I? Alas, I—previous commandments ruled his presence in your chamber. My apologies for the discomfort he may have caused."
"Discomfort?"
"Jewel."
"No, don't take that tone with me—what do you mean discomfort? As far as I can tell, he's a living man and someone's done something—you've done something—to turn him into a convenient block of stone!"
He did smile then. It wasn't pretty.
What he spoke next was not Weston; was so far from being Weston she didn't recognize it immediately as the language he had first spoken when she slid out of the great hall and into his vision. "It was not for my convenience that I so chose," he said, and the language hurt. But she understood it.
She stepped back. She knew it was the wrong thing to do, but there was suddenly something about him that spoke of death. Hers. Everyone's. She stopped before she could take the next step, and took a deep breath instead.
"It was," he said softly, "for the convenience of my faithless, cunning wife. A reminder." He turned. Turned back. "If you follow the gold-encased lights, you will find dinner served."
"I won't—"
"I suggest you eat. You will find that you are much closer to starvation than your body thinks you are." He left her standing there, clenching her fists, surrounded by tapestries in an anteroom that obviously led to the lord of the manor.
Later she would look at them; she promised herself that. She would look at them, try to glean some hint of the future from the obvious past the tapestries were made to commemorate.
7th of Scaral, 427 AA
Tor Leonne, Annagar
"There's trouble," Benito said, nodding casually toward the gently sloping streets that led up to one of about six merchant compounds.
"What trouble?" Kallandras replied, moving heavily in the heat of the afternoon sun. Feeling the extra "weight" that he had adopted, like so much personality, as he made his way home at Benito's side. He waited; Benito, as usual, was expansive. The loud, half-friendly cha
tter of the merchant demanded no response. Better, it allowed for none.
"Those four men, you see 'em?"
He did, of course. "No. Wait—those ones?"
"No, those ones. Armored, with drawn swords. Over there!"
One of the four men looked up; Benito's words, spoken against the wind, were easily loud enough to carry. It was one of the traits that would have endeared him to many of the Northerners he knew—none of whom would be in attendance at the Tor Leonne during the Festival of the Moon.
Kallandras recognized both the man's interest—unfriendly— and the crest he wore: Tyrian cerdan. He spared him a glance, no more; spared his companions less. They were exactly what they appeared to be: Men sent, judging by their direction, to weed out the Voyani among the merchants and bring them up to the plateau for questioning.
"Benito," he said, huffing and puffing with the exertion of movement, his thoughts as far from his facade as they could be, "I think we want to be somewhere else."
"Where else, eh? You think there's so much room in the Tor Leonne at Festival time?" The merchant swatted him heavily across the arm. "Use your head!"
But he could see, beyond the obvious four, another four men, and he knew as he watched them that they were far too confident in their numbers to be just eight. The clansmen and the Voyani clashed frequently on both the edges of wilderness the Terreans boasted and in society itself, and they had only one rule when facing each other: No quarter. None given, none asked.
Among their own, the Voyani infighting was fierce, but unless an actual clan war had been declared—and it had happened twice in his lifetime—there were niceties and rules that were observed most of the time. Not here. Not among these.
He guessed that the Voyani had had word from the plateau. Guessed that they were scattering even as the merchant, Benito, continued to drone on and on to his left, a sort of toneless, heavy chatter that might have become musical if uttered by a different voice. Benito's daughter's, perhaps. Or his son, a lad as sharp as Imperial steel, but hotter in temperament.
"You, you two!" The Tyrian cerdan whose gaze had passed over them shouted.
Benito froze. "Us?"
"You! Come here!"
Kallandras shrugged; he waited for Benito to move, and then, when the merchant finally found his feet, followed to his right and behind.
"Who are you with?"
"With?"
"Whose caravan?"
Red rose in the merchant's cheek. "My own." he said, his chest inflating with a bit too much air. "I am Benito di'Covello, and I—"
"Have you been to the plateau?"
"Yes. We just—"
"Do you carry the medallion?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said, do you carry the medallion? You were required to make an oath," he added, speaking as if to a simpleton or a fool. "And that oath was made over a medallion of the Tyr'agar's manufacture."
"I am not used to discussing the oaths I make," the merchant replied, heat giving way to Northern ice. "Oaths are between men. You have an oath you wish to force on me, then try."
The cerdan stared at him for a long time. Kallandras was mildly surprised when the armed and armored man looked away. Nodded. "We've had complaints," he said, "about Voyani thievery. This Festival is important to our Tyr, and we're about to end the offending behavior. I suggest you mind your manners and remain close to your personal caravan for the next several hours."
Before Benito could reply, one of the cerdan lifted his voice.
"Attelo!"
The man turned. "You see them?"
"Some. There!"
"Men?"
"No—it's the women."
The line of the cerdan's jaw compressed into square disgust. "My apologies," he said to Benito. It surprised Kallandras. "It's hard on a man, to be sent hunting women." He lifted his sword. "Don't stand there gaping, stop them!"
They were almost out. Elena had seven of the children under her wing—and her wing was expansive. They were young, these; not a one had seen more than five Festival Moons, and two at least had seen far less than that. She carried one bundled under her arm; her mother, Tamara, carried the other.
This was her most important duty, to get the children to safety— or as much safety as the streets allowed for. And she knew her ability to handle duty was about to be sorely tested.
Fail this, and every other success meant nothing; she knew, had known as a child, that the children were the only real future the Voyani had.
Donatella was with her. "Dona," she said, handing the wine-sleepy child to her aunt. "I've work here."
Donatella nodded grimly. She was older now, although no Voyani woman was so old that she couldn't fight. "The streets here twist; we'll find our way out."
"I'll join you. Mother—"
"I'm staying."
"You're going."
"Elena—"
"That's not a request." Her sword, shorter than Nicu's, but sharper and lighter, came out of the scabbard that rested easily across hip and thigh. "Ilia!"
The other woman her own age nodded grimly. Drew sword as well. "Over there, Elena."
"Shit."
The children said nothing. But they knew how to count; they'd have to, if they were old enough to beg or steal, and most of them were.
Four men. Four armed men. Swords. "Mama, now."
Her mother took a breath. Elena wanted to smack her. Not now, she thought. You hold the future, right behind your skirts. You protect it, damn you. There were no wagons to hide behind; no stalls; they were exposed. "RUN!"
Tamara of the Arkosans hesitated. Past her prime, she had never been one to run from a fight, and she left behind her her child—adult or no, still her child—facing four armed cerdan. But she knew Elena was right. Knew what she herself would have said to her own mother, had her mother dawdled like a sentimental idiot and somehow failed in the duty—the foremost duty, the important duty—of protecting the future of the family. The children.
She swallowed. Two to one.
No joy there.
"Mikala," she said, to the child who had almost crossed the boundary of five, "I need all your help now, with the rest of the children."
"I'm not a children," Polio said; it was the phrase he used most often this particular month. It was also said quietly and without vehemence. His mother was gone; gone with the men and the women whose duty it was to carry the few items they valued to safety. He was alone with Ona Tamara, and Ona Tamara was frightened.
Mikala, bless her, grabbed his hand. Tamara shifted an infant in her arm, picked up the second. Took two steps.
And a man she had never seen before in her life, a man who wore no armor, and whose hair was the color of Northern demons, stepped into the cobbled roadway. "There is… no one to bar your way, Tamara of the Arkosans. The road to the East is clear from here to the Easternmost Fount of Contemplation. It will be clear for perhaps half an hour.
"If you are concerned with the well-being of the children, I suggest you move quickly."
She was stunned a moment. "Who are you?" she asked, sharply and quickly.
"I? I serve the Lady," he replied, speaking in Torra as if Torra were something that, like the finest and softest of silks, could be donned. He turned to look down the street, to look beyond Tamara's bent back. Paused. Knelt. "You are Mikala?" he said, to the five-year-old Voyani girl.
She nodded, unafraid, the suspicion that was completely automatic for Tamara waived in the case of this stranger.
"You are a brave girl," he said. "You will grow up to be part of the Voyani pride." He smiled. Lifted his head, so that he could see all of the children. "Listen well to Ona Tamara. Do as she tells you until she tells you you are safe."
They nodded, all seriousness, the youngest child barely walking, the oldest nervously glancing at the men who were drawing closer, closer still. He rose then. "I regret," he told Tamara softly, "that I cannot accompany you. But my skill is better used."
"We'll be in
your debt," the older woman said gruffly. Wondering, as words laden with personal meaning and fraught with difficulty escaped her lips, if she was the older of the two. "They don't—they don't usually hunt the children. If we'd known, we would never have sent the others away. The children—"
"They are not hunting children," he replied, turning toward the causeway where her daughter and Ilia now hid in what little cover there was, swords drawn. "But women."
Donatella, silent until that moment, reached down and picked up one of the children whose feet had given out on him. "Tamara," she said softly. "It is time."
"They don't usually hunt women; they aren't that smart."
"No." The stranger shrugged. "But the Voyani—especially the Arkosans and the Havallans in this generation—usually know better than to take the Tyrians on in a street fight. They melt into the shadows they can find—and they can almost always find the Lady's shadow, even in the brightest of the Lord's light.
"Today, a handful have sought the Lord's light, and there is blood in the streets; the cerdan have called for reinforcements, and the men are out in greater numbers."
"Who would be such a fool—"
The words froze in Tamara's throat.
Her best friend, her closest cousin, bent her head. "Dona—"
"Enough, Tamara. The children."
Tamara nodded. Who was she to criticize one of their own in the presence of a stranger? Especially when that one, as she suspected, was the son of her good friend?
But she whispered a benediction to the Lady as she began to lead the children down the gently sloped road.
Their advantage was a simple one, but it had two faces. The clansmen didn't like to fight women. The first type of clansmen would happily kill them in village slaughters, rape them, enslave them, sell them—but fight them, that was beneath their station as men of the Lord. The second type of clansmen looked at fighting women in the same way the Voyani women themselves looked at fighting their children in earnest: It was killing the weaker, the helpless, the people in life who must be protected.
She couldn't tell, looking down the road, which face the four men wore; most likely it was some sort of combination. But they didn't look gleeful, hunting the Voyani—and their children, Lady's blood—and that was something.
Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court Page 16