Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court

by The Shining Court

The peace of the forest hadn't quite left her by the time she reached the wagons and found Yollana and the stranger waiting for her. She nodded to the stranger, and forced herself to bow— wood still slung over her shoulder—to the woman who sat on the ground.

  "The circle," Yollana said sharply.

  Just as, Margret thought, her mother would have, had her mother been alive.

  The last part of the heart's circle was the easiest. She built a fire of normal wood by her own hand; no one offered to help— and she would have been honor bound to refuse any such offer. The fire started quickly enough—a child could start a fire with relative ease, given the right wood—and once she'd built it, she turned to Yollana. "Matriarch," she said, "I offer you the safety and the protection of the Arkosans. Join me by the fire that I have built for your comfort and your safety."

  "I accept," the older woman replied gravely, "what only you can offer, Margret of Arkosa." Yollana shifted her weight as if to rise; her face froze completely. That was the Havallan Matriarch through and through; she never shared her pain when it was something as trivial as broken limbs.

  Kallandras was by her side in an instant, offering aid without ever giving her a chance to refuse—and she would have, as pride demanded. He carried her into the circle that Margret had offered.

  The eyes of the Matriarchs met.

  "You, stranger," Margret said, her throat tightening, her body tensing with the wrongness of the words to follow, "we owe the debt of future to. I offer you the safety and the protection of Arkosa. Join me by the fire that I have built for your comfort and your safety."

  "I am honored by your offer," he replied gravely, speaking as if he truly understood the honor she conveyed. "And I accept it for the moment."

  They took their places by the fire; Margret held back a moment longer, wondering if the circle she'd offered was as much a fraud as she felt herself to be.

  * * *

  "Your hospitality," Yollana said, "makes you one with the Havallans, Matriarch." She did not speak quietly; indeed, she spoke loudly enough that any casual eavesdropper might hear the words. And if they did, it proved that Margret could not even draw the Arkosan circle. Margret wanted to warn her, to caution her to silence, but she could not quite bring herself to expose her own weakness. "And I am in your debt." Ritual, ritual that. But it eased Margret to hear the formality of the tone. Made her feel less the impostor.

  "The debt," Margret said, her voice lower, the word less prone to be carried by wind's caprice, "is not mine to accept." She turned, then, to where the stranger stood leaning against her wagon, his profile lit by the orange of a fire that was not quite bright enough to illuminate his expression. "Kallandras of Senniel College brought you to us. He intervened to send our children to safety, and he brought my heir home."

  "That much help from strangers," Yollana said wryly, "is too much help. And it's costly. I would far rather you held the debt, my dear."

  "The Arkosans are less of a threat than a stranger with a pretty face and hair a Serra would kill for?" There was a touch of levity in the words.

  "The debt of the Arkosans is a debt I understand," Yollana replied gravely. "And that one—he serves the Lady, and he serves the blue witch who comes like a nightmare and a doom." All humor fled her voice; she stared at Margret intently, searching for the jump, the stiffening of features, that spoke of recognition.

  Only when she saw them did she continue. "The time is coming," she said quietly, "when all debts are due. Your mother understood this, and she paid the price."

  "My mother—" Margret let the silence fold in around her. "Yollana, what is happening on the plateau? What is happening in the city? Have the clansmen gone mad?"

  "Worse," Yollana said softly, "and your mother knew the truth of that. They have fostered an alliance that should have become impossible with the birth of the clan Leonne."

  "The clan Leonne is dead."

  "It is not," Kallandras said, speaking for the first time, "dead. There is a single survivor."

  "We've heard of him," Yollana replied, careful now, her voice as neutral as Margret had ever heard it. "And I will say to you that if the rumors that have carried this far to the South are true, he is more than we expected him to be."

  "But not," Margret added, following Yollana's studied neutrality as closely as she could, "impressive enough, in the opinion of the Arkosans, to carry the war."

  "He is served," Kallandras said softly, "by Ser Anton di'Guivera."

  "So," Yollana replied—Margret having temporarily lost her voice—"that rumor is true. Is it true that he has fought the creatures of the Lord of Night?"

  "You know the answer to that, Yollana, and I will not be trapped in your testing games for another moment."

  She smiled. "So be it, then. Yes, I know it for truth. But the Voyani take no sides in the war of one clan against another."

  "No," Kallandras said softly, "they don't. But you know, you must know, that this war is not that war. I will not lecture you, Yollana, but I have stood at the side of the blue-robed witch, as you call her, and I know as much of your ancient histories as it is safe for one who is not controlled by the Voyanne to know. Your captivity must tell you that you are already at war."

  "It must, must it?" But she folded her arms across her chest. "Tell me, then, Northern bard. Tell me what is happening in the city."

  "Margret, with your permission?"

  She started like a wild creature, and then blushed; that made her angry. Shoving her hair out of her face, she almost said, "You need my permission to speak?" But she stopped herself, because it was her circle, and she was the Matriarch, and technically, as a man who had no blood ties to either of the women sitting in that circle's ring, he was required to ask her permission.

  She nodded; it was graceless, but it was enough.

  Kallandras began to speak, quickly, of the masks of the Festival of the Moon.

  She was silent a long time; first, while she listened. Second, after she asked him for details. As if silence were contagious, he caught hers a moment, transforming it by expression and stillness. After he'd accomplished this, he turned to Margret and spoke a word or two. She raised a brow, and then nodded, and he vanished into the cover of starlit night.

  "Who is he, Yollana?"

  "He is as cursed as any of us. I was… intemperate. He serves Evayne a'Neamis, but he serves her as any of us do: by seeing the death that she stands in the gateway of, by helping her, in any possible way, to be the mortar that seals that death out."

  "Pretty words," Margret said.

  "They are, aren't they? And they impress, where they must. But they also have the benefit of being the truth. I am not sure that I like him—"

  "You do."

  Yollana's smile was a rare, rare gleam of teeth. "Very well, then, I am sure that I like him, but I am also certain it is not the wise choice. I trust him in this battle, and this battle will devour my life. It devoured your mother's, and it will work its way through the older generation of the Voyani before it is at last laid to rest. But your generation? Yours, I cannot see. He moves at the bidding of the only woman I have ever met who has found her way to the first road, and beyond it, to the first seer. Imagine," Yollana added softly, reflectively, "being asked to slowly cut off your own hand, and then use it, always, as your most effective weapon.

  "She has been asked; she has accepted the price. But she is less whole than I am, than Evallen was, than Kallandras is. I try to remember that, when I think of what she has cost me. Sometimes it helps."

  "It doesn't help me."

  "No. I suspect it won't help my daughter either. But there are choices we make that drive us because they are the only choice we can make. We—ah, never mind. He returns."

  He carried with him four masks. Four finished Festival masks. Margret noted that his hands were gloved, and that he did not choose to set those masks upon a single blade of grass; instead he arranged them upon a silk that would separate their clay from the earth beneath
it.

  Yollana's frosted brow went up in the darkness; her gaze leaped from masks to mask—the former, the craft of an unknown worker, the latter, the completely neutral expression the foreigner wore. "You are versed," she said quietly.

  "I have traveled with the Voyani before," he replied, and if his face was neutral, it was nothing compared to his voice.

  "We do not give our secrets away so lightly."

  He shrugged. "Knowledge," he said, "is often a thing that slips between closed fingers. It is more like water than gold; it cannot be held."

  Yollana laughed; Margret was shocked. It was a Voyani saying. "And will I say, in return, that only a fool displays his riches in two cupped palms?"

  "Indeed." This unknown Kallandras relented, offering a smile to the oldest of the Voyani Matriarchs. "But will you pardon me if I do not then fall into a discourse about the nature—and the power—of the fool?"

  "I will pardon you," Yollana replied, "and challenge you, Northern wise man. When the time comes, and we can sit in a circle wider and deeper than this, you will sing your discourse and I will speak mine, and we will have witnesses who will decide which of us—you or I—better evokes the Lady's truth."

  "I will accept that offer, Yollana, if Only because I know how stubborn you are: Once you've offered a challenge, nothing will stop you from taking it up—not even the threat of death."

  Her smile was fond, a momentary self-indulgence as she met the smoother face, the prettier eyes. "You go straight to my head."

  But they both saw the steel beneath her smile; they judged for themselves the truth of her words.

  "The masks, Matriarch."

  "Indeed."

  She reached for the first of the masks that Kallandras had so carefully arranged. Her hands hovered above it, fingers delving into the eyeholes, the places where breath passed mouth and nose. Her palms passed above the swell of simple cheek, pausing a moment over the tip of chin, the anonymity of nondescript forehead, a nose that could have been anyone's nose, and yet had its own distinct shape. Delicate in seeming, it seemed to draw the hand.

  She did not touch it.

  The second mask was a half-mask, a thing that covered eyes and forehead and nose. Like the first, it suggested anonymity; it blended elements of the first mask, but made them somehow more workaday. She paused. "Are they evenly distributed?"

  Margret frowned. "Pardon?"

  The Matriarch's gaze slid past her to Kallandras.

  "I do not know," was his quiet reply, but he drew breath, and he continued, "but I believe they are indeed evenly distributed."

  She frowned.

  "You would have guessed otherwise?"

  But she had gone back to her work; the dance of hands in the air above the clay masks changed in tone and texture as she reached the gaudily colored leather hide. The movements became jerkier, lost all echo of caress, of fascination.

  She worked in silence. She asked no questions. But her hands lingered longest over the third mask, and when they left, it seemed to Margret that she had to tear them away.

  The fourth mask, then: the gaudiest, the richest, the most unusual. It was shaped of clay, as the first two had been, but it was not shaped with a human face as a model; it was almost birdlike in its extension—but its ferocity was its own. Clansmen wore masks such as these. Rich ones, or powerful ones.

  Even at the height of the Lady's Moon, Margret could feel power.

  "Yes," Yollana said faintly.

  "Do you know what they are, Yollana?"

  "Masks," she said at last.

  Margret grimaced. "Thank you. I meant—"

  "Will they be worn?"

  "That is the edict and the intent," the Northern bard replied. His gaze was leveled at her as if it were a crossbow.

  "No," she said softly. "It is not Voyani magic, if that's what you've been hoping to hear."

  "I hope for very little, Yollana. Information, however, would be valuable."

  "As in, whose magic?"

  "As in," he nodded gravely.

  Thought had taken her where healing could not; she started to stand, to pace the periphery of the fire's circle, to cast her shadows back. But her legs had been scored and injured, and were it not for the interference of the bard—again—she would have fallen.

  She said, at last, "I don't know."

  He heard it: In the voice, in the tremor beneath the surface of the words itself. He couldn't see beyond it; couldn't catch the current. Yollana was canny; she was as aware of his power as one not schooled in the North could be, and she could deflect it.

  But twisted 'round the three words she had spoken were words that she could speak and preferred not to, and they held knowledge. Not certainty—that, he would have heard—but fear.

  She was afraid that she knew the answer to his question.

  Unblinking, her eyes met his in the darkness.

  "You will take word," she said, "to my people. They are camped—much as the Arkosans are camped—outside of the city. If they weren't fools." The momentary irritation promised dire consequences if they were, and given her shifting mood, he almost pitied them.

  "I will carry word for you, if that is your desire." He paused delicately, considering his next words, his next offer. "I will carry you, if you will permit it."

  "They'll be skittish enough, thank you. They won't want to see their Matriarch in the arms of a pretty foreigner." She laughed. "All except the young girls and boys; they'll think it's romantic. Even at my age."

  Margret snorted. "You aren't old enough to play the age card, Yollana."

  "Aye, maybe not. But I like to try it every once in a while. No, Kallandras of the North, I ask you to carry word—and I will give you the signs by which my word will be known—but with the permission of the Matriarch, I will stay with the Arkosans for a time." She paused. "I intend," she added softly, "to send the Havallans back to my daughters."

  "But—" Margret bit back the words.

  Kallandras was no fool; he saw the significance of the gaze that passed between them.

  "I—we—would be honored."

  He almost laughed then, but it was not his way; he did chuckle.

  The two women turned to stare at him at the same moment, the gesture almost identical. "You must forgive me," he said quietly. "I have traveled, as I said, with the Voyani—and I cannot think of many who would willingly journey at the side of not one but two Matriarchs." He laughed. "There is a phrase about two Matriarchs and a war—"

  "There is also," Yollana said, with a chill that only the far North could embody, "a phrase about the wisdom of offending a Matriarch."

  "Ah." He bowed, the smile firmly attached to his face. "But there is also the truth of expedience, and I have not yet delivered your message."

  Margret laughed. "But you deliver no message for me."

  "No, Matriarch," he said, and the smile did slip away from his face as he turned toward the plateau. "But I know where your heart lies."

  Silence then. The crackle of fire and snapping log, the breeze of a cool, cool night.

  Mikalis di'Arretta rose. The Widan Sendari di'Sendari and the Sword's Edge were waiting in the open courtyard before which lay the bodies of the fallen, and beside them, stiller than the corpses of the dead, the man who had taken the crown for himself, and now waited to lay claim to the Sun Sword: Alesso di'Alesso, the Tyr'agar.

  But beyond them, beyond the confines of the building which housed the Sword's Edge and the studies of the Sword's Edge— the shadows were strong. He was frightened, and he had walked the long and the deadly road to become Widan so that he might also become a man of power and escape fear's grip. A fool's dream; he realized it the day he was elevated to Widan after years of struggle—and hours of it.

  But he had not understood then that his struggles would bring him to the heart of his fears, and expose him in a way that not even the Lady's harshest nightmares could. He had thought to learn ancient ways, to walk ancient roads, to better understand the whole
of the Dominion's ancient history. That had been his moonlight prayer from his earliest memory to his latest.

  But this, this was too much knowledge.

  "Mikalis?"

  He bowed at once, gravely. "Sword's Edge." Bowed again, no less gravely. "Tyr'agar." By small gestures, he made it clear that he was not comfortable in the presence of such illustrious men, and by small gestures, they accepted that lack of comfort as their natural due.

  Only Sendari watched with narrowed eyes.

  "Tell us."

  "I… am not certain. I cannot be certain, you understand this? The magic here is not my magic, it is not a thing of my making, a thing I could imitate." The frustration in his voice was genuine.

  "I doubt," Cortano said quietly, "that it is a magic that any of us could imitate. I accept this; you are not being tested by the steel, Mikalis. You are here for your opinion and the intuition that you may have developed in your travels with the Wanderers."

  Mikalis bowed again. When he straightened out, he left hesitancy behind. "The magic that destroyed the inner and outer room was—and of this I am certain—Widan's magic. I would say it bears your mark, Cortano."

  "Oh?"

  "It is too powerful and too sudden to be almost anyone else's, and it is of the fires. These are also known to be your personal chambers; I doubt the Sword of Knowledge combined could lay such a spell in your domain without your instant knowledge."

  The Sword's Edge nodded. "Continue."

  "These," he said quietly, turning to look at the fallen, "were not the work of your magic. And here," he continued, turning away from the corpses as if the sight of them burned—and it did—"in the outer chamber, there is a hint of a magic that almost feels like our magic but… isn't."

  Two sets of eyes narrowed immediately. Sendari and Cortano exchanged a glance. The silk of Sendari's simple, fine robe rippled as his shoulder rose and fell in a shrug. "I told you," he said quietly, "I am not as sensitive. I know the Voyani artifacts— such as they are—and their uses, if I have seen them before. But this—this is not my dominion."

  Cortano nodded; it was what he expected to hear. "What would you say it is, or was?"

  "I would say," he said quietly, "that it was the element freed from the magic that binds it." His hands moved across the air in an elegant gesture that seemed to take in that air itself, to mold it, to call it. "Here," he said softly.