Fiona's confusion was genuine. The concern that followed it was genuine as well, although it was more quickly masked. "Of course."
"I think," she said to the man, as he set the tray on the low table between them, "I have seen you serving before, possibly in the house of my uncle. You seem familiar to me."
He did not answer, and that was wise; no seraf did, unless commanded otherwise. But there was about his height and his bearing something… unusual. Familiar, yes.
Of a sudden, she had to hear his voice. She had to hear it. "What is your name?" she asked, the four words falling in a rush of sound, as if forced, as if only speed would see them said at all.
He met her eyes then, full on, as unlike a proper seraf as a high clansmen.
"I am called," he replied quietly, "Isladar."
She didn't flee.
His words brought the night; for a moment all she could see was the darkness she heard in his voice, and it was so utter, she forgot about heat and the consequences of fire. Her own voice left her, just as the day did.
Had she ever wondered why demons were creatures of night, but were never connected with the Lady? She ceased at once: such a power could never be under the Lady's Dominion.
Or, she thought, the Lord's.
She didn't flee; she forced herself to sit in the shade cast by the height of the morning sun. She'd had practice, she thought, and the thought was bitter enough to break through the fear.
"Isladar. An… interesting name. Was it given to you by your master?" Hard to speak the words. But she had been trained by a master; her voice was her sole power. She would not be deprived of it.
"No," he replied, the veneer of his words soft and deferential. He bowed to her; she caught the sweep of his shadow upon the grass because she would not meet his eyes.
Would not?
And why? Her shoulders, never stooped, stiffened imperceptibly. "No?" He must play his game; he was trapped in a guise that she would never have thought could suit him.
"No, Serra Diora. I was not born a slave."
He faltered, with a single word. Slave was a very Northern term, and seldom used, if at all, in the South. She looked up, as if this single weakness was enough to make him fallible. Mortal.
"No? But you bear no scars."
"A wise man knows when struggle is futile and preserves dignity in the stead of a freedom he cannot have."
And she looked up because, in truth, she desired to see his face in the unforgiving harshness of the day's light; to deprive it of essential mystery; to destroy her single memory of Lord Isladar. At night, his visage just strange enough to be other than human, he had been so very, very beautiful.
It had surprised her; it surprised her now, although it shouldn't. What, after all, was more beautiful than power?
"And do you look forward," she said, "to some day when you are not a slave?"
He smiled as she met his eyes, as she saw the whole of his face. "Very clever." He turned then, as she did; they both glanced at the Serra Fiona.
But Diora's glance faltered; Isladar's did not. She could almost feel his eyes rest against the sudden rigidity of her own expression. Serra Fiona had not moved at all. Her eyes were wide and round; they stared ahead at a spot just beyond the Serra Diora's perfect, plainly clad shoulder.
Fear was not as distant as it should have been. But it was not nearly as close as it would have been, had she been wiser. She was cool; she did not choose to dissemble or to play at being helpless.
"Well met, Serra Diora di'Marano." The seraf bowed. "You cost me much when last we met, and if I had known then whose flesh housed the spirit that slipped the Voyani woman past my bindings, you would not have aggrieved your father or your Tyr in the days to follow.
"You are called the Flower," he added. "And in Kialli eyes, you are aptly named: In your season, there is an astonishing beauty about your delicacy. It will fade. You will wither." The lack of malice in the words made them the more chilling; she saw the ages in his eyes, and understood then just how little mortals suffer age.
He was beautiful, although the night had left his features, but his beauty was the beauty of distance. The mountains in the North of Mancorvo, the ocean at the height of the rainy season, the desert after the storm—they were beautiful in just such a way.
But she was certain that they were less deadly, or rather, that the bodies that littered the passes in winter, the ocean floor after the height of a storm or the desert's hot, hot sands, proved only the indifference of nature and the foolishness of man.
"I am called the Flower of the Dominion," she said, as harshly as she ever said anything, "by the romantic, the ironic, or the foolish." The sun shifted across the sky, and as it did, light lit the folds of silk across her perfectly folded lap.
As if it were water.
"And of the three, I am which?"
Silence was her answer; her face was almost as still as Fiona's.
"She cannot hear us," was his reply.
"I… thought not. If you will continue to play at servitude, I must tell you that you are failing in your chosen role."
"Oh?"
"The sun is rising, and the shadows cast by the bowers above are becoming too short for the comfort of the wife and daughter of your Lord."
She was not certain why she'd said the words once they'd left her lips; was not certain why she had spoken in such a clear, unfettered tone. But she thought it was because he was beautiful and deadly and outside of the experience that had so harshly shaped the whole of her life.
Or perhaps it was because she feared no death. Everything her enemies might have used to threaten her with they had already destroyed.
To her surprise, the creature who had captured Evallen of the Arkosa Voyani, and who had so successfully seen to her torture, moved elegantly, gracefully, perfectly as he set about arranging the poles and pegs above which cloth would be draped. The cloth itself was a white silk, painted by the hands of Sendari's wives within the walls of their suddenly powerful harem. She saw Illia's work in the leaves of the lilies that were otherwise implied by the silk itself, rather than painted.
"You are clever," he said as he worked, his hands taking to labor as if they were made for it, and no more, "and I admire clever. To a point."
"And you are here because you admire clever? I had thought that you were the ears and the eyes of your Lord."
"I am," he replied mildly, "both of those. But not, perhaps, this day. I am curious. I have been experimenting in my own fashion with humanity. You have evoked the anger of the Sword's Edge; he is not a mortal who is easily angered. Nor easily frustrated in his ambition." He stepped back to assess the success of his work. Frowned, the expression a ripple of lip and eye that passed above his face and was gone. "I was given to understand that the women of the South were not powerful."
"We serve," she said quietly.
"As do we," he replied. He bowed. "We will meet again, if you survive."
"I half thought you were sent to kill me."
"They do not send me to kill. I am not reliable." He smiled, his eyes narrowed, and for an instant he was the demon she had seen at the Festival of the Sun. "And you, little one, believe you desire death. We do not grant the desired without reasons of our own, and your death would serve no purpose of mine at the moment.
"In time, perhaps, but I have learned, when dealing with mortals, that indulgence of that particular hunger is… costly."
Truth, in the words; truth and darkness. She wondered, as the Serra Fiona suddenly began to breathe again, her pink lips shifting subtly with the rise and fall of her delicate chest, whether her curse and gift was capable of discerning truth from the lips of a creature who had served the Lord of Night before Leonne the Founder had graced the Dominion with his sword and his death.
Night was the Lord's time; darkness the Lord's element. Or so humans believed. They took elements of reality and made myth of it. In turn, time eroded myth and left story behind, and story was good enough gru
el only for the minds of the young.
But if the minds of the young outgrew those stories, the hearts did not, and in the corners of memories as old as life—if any mortal span could be considered "old"—stories and shadows became one. Demons were the darkness, the darkness the only domain they possessed.
But the truth—as all truths were—was less simple and vastly less romantic than that. The kin walked the earth. They had always walked it in one form or another, no matter how small their summoned number, although only the Kialli could remember a time when the earth itself was alive with wild magics, all long since tamed.
Lord Ishavriel walked the earth in the heat of the midday sun. He cast a shadow decreed by the height of his body, no more, no less; he dressed finely, in the manner of the humans of the High Court, but not so ostentatiously that he drew attention or suspicion, and he loitered near the water's edge, as most people did who were occasional visitors to the Tor Leonne proper.
Only the last was difficult. The Lake—as natural at its source as he—caused him pain when he chose to approach it. He had chosen once to consume the waters when they were offered; proof, in deed, that no curse and no magic were his match. But he had been wise enough to test his measure, and theirs, in the Shining Palace, where any revelation of what the mortals so quaintly called his true nature was hardly likely to harm his plans.
A costly display.
But he had proved his point. These waters were among the strongest of the magics remaining in the Southern lands, and he was their match. He would be more than their master.
Provided, of course, that his plans went smoothly.
It was not in the nature of plans to run smoothly. Not in the demesne that he had ruled by dint of strength and power, and not upon the earth that had changed so much in the millennia that his feet did not burn at the power beneath them.
And so he watched. Across the width of still water, two women sat in a silence of breeze and midday heat. They were, by the standard of the Court, quite lovely; they were also the wives or daughters of men of power, such as human power was. They were both young, both delicate in seeming, both dark-haired and pale as the Northern snows.
But one of them spoke, and the other did not actually listen; she was frozen in place, unmoved by what she saw or heard—if she saw or heard anything at all. The speaker, her back toward him, her face therefore unreadable, moved deliberately and gently; he could not tell by the delicacy of her movements whether or not she was afraid.
Or rather, he could not tell what she was afraid of. That she was afraid, he could see clearly. He could smell it, it was so strong.
But although he had cast the spells and expended the necessary power, he could not hear a single word she spoke. Syllables were so muted and hushed that one was indistinguishable from the next; all that was left to him was the cadence of her speech. Interference.
Isladar.
He waited. Waiting was simple, although to fill the time with the disguise of human motion was not. Mortals did not stand and wait; they did not observe for any length of time. They lived by the night and the day, in their short, short hours. It was almost a curiosity to mimic them, but curiosity in the end was Isladar's curse, not Ishavriel's.
Isladar, who had bred the half-human godling and lost her for reasons not a single one of the Generals understood. Only Ishavriel made the attempt, and only because of the five he was the most suspicious.
For millennia, Lord Isladar, truly Kialli, had graced the side of the Lord's throne like an ornament, like a human thing of precious metal and jewelry. He had no demesne, no lieutenants, none of the unnamed; he took part in none of the duels that had shaped, scarred and defined the changing face of Allasakar's domain since its beginning. Of all of the Kialli to serve the Lord so closely, only Isladar had survived. Only he.
Why?
To watch him as he was now made him a creature almost beneath contempt. He dressed as the least of the blood-bound kin did, and performed a service—or so it seemed—that the blood-bound might be too good for: spying on a captive girl.
Lord Ishavriel knew it for fact: He had ordered the girl watched. But not by a kinlord.
The girl stiffened a moment; Isladar bowed with a subservient human's perfect posture. Then the other woman, the enspelled human, came to life. When she did, he walked away, skirting the water's edge.
Across the water, the eyes of the Kialli met.
"I did not expect to see you here," Ishavriel said, twisting his words into the wind and forcing the element to carry them clearly.
"I came," he replied, "to deliver a message and to satisfy my curiosity."
"At my expense?"
"It costs nothing," he answered softly, "and may yet serve your purpose."
Ishavriel waited. The shadows lengthened. But waiting served them both ill within these lands, beside these waters; the sun was setting, and their stillness would be marked. It angered him, to speak first.
"What message do you choose to deliver?"
"Just this: Anya a'Cooper has moved her throne."
"Impossible."
"Indeed, that is what we would have said. She is exhausted, and only through my intervention did she survive the… rearrangement. She is not popular among the Kialli."
"Your intervention? Then I am in your debt."
Isladar's smile was dark and sharp; they both knew the value of the words when no blood had been spilled to bind them. "She suffers the fevers."
"In the Shining Palace?"
"No. I did not think it wise to leave her there; I was not in a position to protect her."
"Because of your curiosity."
"Indeed."
Silence. Ishavriel mastered his fury with effort, none of it visible.
"There is more."
"More?"
"She moved her throne," he said, "because she was tired of standing."
He felt certain that he would not like what followed. He was absolutely certain that Isladar found it amusing, although he kept all trace of it from voice or face. Rare, that, in the face of a rival's discomfort. He expected to hear at least a cold chuckle, a quiet laugh; open scorn was more common but unlike Isladar.
"Where is the throne?"
"It is at the head of the pentagram."
"The—" the kinlords did not pale; that was a trait left to mortals, a trick of their blood and their weakness. No; the kinlords lost all movement; they became as still as the stone out of which the Lord had carved his Great Hall.
"The—not the ground upon which the mages channel their power at the Lord's behest?"
"Indeed," Isladar said, his voice a whisper, a sinuous motion of air within air. "She has broken the gate's containment. For the last mortal day, not a single one of the kin has been summoned from across the rift.
"He is not pleased."
Without another word, Ishavriel turned into the shadows the sun cast and vanished.
Only when his shadows were gone did Isladar offer what every other kinlord would have given openly: A smile.
Had he seen it, Ishavriel would have acknowledged that it was perfect.
9th of Scaral, 427 AA
Evereve
She did not leave her room.
Not because she was no longer curious; the curiosity was strong enough that it forced her to rise, time and again, and walk to the closed door that led to the rest of the dungeon of wonders. But each time, through dint of a will and patience that she would never have had as the young girl who had first come in through Terafin's front gates, she returned to the desk that she occupied.
Her lip was no longer swollen.
Her temper was no longer heated. Unfortunately, it hadn't cooled; it had chilled.
You seduce my wife—well, that's what he had thought—and I rape your daughter. Gods, I hate men. Be fair, she added silently— the whole conversation was silent, which was uncharacteristic—he had taken out what was left of his anger on Aristos himself.
She counted to ten.
Well, that was enough fairness.
Unfortunately, nothing happened to take her mind off her anger; she blunted it slightly by throwing a few very heavy things—what exactly they were supposed to be wasn't clear—at the door.
They were, surprise, surprise, gold. They didn't break. She had never detested gold so much in her life; had, in fact, never dreamed she could. Gold, after all, was an important source of power.
Well, so was liver if you listened to her grandmother. She was sharply aware that she probably hadn't. Not enough. But then again, she'd been a child when her grandmother had gone to Mandaros' Halls, and what child listens well? She'd heard mystery, and danger, and adventure, all in the safety and warmth of her grandmother's arms and lap.
The smell of cinnamon and sweat came back to her; she stood a moment, eyes closed, thinking about old stories. During the day, she'd play them out: She, the wily hero, the brave mage, the healer, the bardic wonder, and the shadows her enemies, her forest of wonders, her ancient, twisting passages at the heart of which her enemy waited for the final confrontation. But at night, at night, without the control of her grandmother's stories to bind them, those shadows had come to her, jumped between the thin barding of make believe, laughing at the ill-fitting guise of hero or healer as they pushed it aside.
Five years old, maybe four, she had huddled, trying to work her voice up to a scream so that someone would wake her. A smarter person would probably have taken the nightmares as a hint and stopped playing at the heroics night's terror so thoroughly disgraced. But the night couldn't rob the day of strength. She had still played at being the hero.
She wondered if it were night now; there was no window to oblige her by offering her a glimpse and an answer. Her stomach, however, ever helpful, growled.
And she'd be damned before she went down to the hall for dinner. The one thing about years on the street: Hunger was a known evil, and she knew how much of it her body could take before it was dangerous.
Perhaps the room knew. She had an uneasy sense that it was alive and watching her, preparing a report to take back to its master, Avandar. Or whatever it was he was called here.
Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court Page 28