Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court

by The Shining Court

  Avandar, damn him, turned slightly and raised a brow; she thought he was amused. If she'd been certain, she'd've hit him. Just as well.

  "The objective observer," the woman said softly, "is Calliastra. And you, child?"

  "No, I'm sorry," Jewel managed to say, "but child is ten years ago." Her voice sounded thin and shaky to her ears; she cringed when she thought of what it must sound in comparison to the stranger's.

  "You are in the Deepings. Time does not have the same meaning here." She had dimples in the pale white of perfect skin. "My dear, you are… worried. And in such capable hands; how unusual." Gods, Jewel could see the rot beneath the surface of her perfect face, her perfect teeth, her perfect skin; she could see the cruelty and the ice, the heavy weight of earth over the dead. But seeing it, seeing made no difference. She could not look away.

  The woman laughed, and the sound was—was so heartbreaking in its beauty Jewel raised her hands to her ears without thinking.

  Not without thought, Na 'jay.

  Yes, Oma.

  The laughter tightened, becoming stronger and deeper in a way that denied beauty while encompassing it.

  "The objective observer," the woman said, "is Calliastra. Come, Jewel Markess. I don't believe we've met, and I miss human company."

  He caught her wrist, his hand plain and rough in comparison to Calliastra's, nails short and blunt, fingers just too ordinary. She pulled away. Or tried to.

  "I'm afraid," he said, tightening his grip, "that I must advise you against what would be so brief an acquaintance."

  She pulled. Pulled hard.

  Na 'jay, her Oma said, and she heard the voice, understood the warning in it, and still couldn't stop herself. For the first time in her life she not only understood the progression of compulsion, addiction, death, she felt herself pulled into the rush and current of its passing stream.

  She didn't like the understanding; in fact, she was barely aware of it: she had to move forward, and Avandar Gallais stood in her way.

  Jewel, no.

  Avandar's brows rose fractionally. The subtle transformation of his face was instant: She had surprised him. But she'd surprised herself, too. She recognized the knife in her hands. The last time she'd seen it, it was in the process of being buried in her chest by the ghost of a girl she'd once—

  Loved.

  Long blade. Thin and wavy. Duster had liked to think of its form as a Southern conceit, and although Jewel knew that Southerners carried more practical daggers, she'd never seen fit to correct her friend. They'd built a life on the things they shared: Southern blood, a life in the tougher streets of Veralaan's grand city.

  But they were separated by other experiences. A father. Family. The ability to control both temper and desire.

  Duster's dagger.

  "Jewel," the woman said, and she turned, and she saw in the eyes what she'd seen in Kiriel: Duster, some part of Duster come back to her, death notwithstanding. Those eyes, those perfect, black eyes, narrowed slightly. "Impossible," she said softly, drawing back a moment, losing the velvet that clothed the steel without once losing the appeal.

  "No," Jewel said faintly, "I know who you are."

  She laughed, the laughter thawing the chill of her expression. "And who is that, exactly?"

  "Allasakar's kin."

  The silence was slow and smooth; the surprise on the woman's face replaced by a gradual pleasure. Jewel felt her cheeks warm with the approval, and hated it. "Viandaran," she said, "I should have known you wouldn't bring a mortal of little note or worth when you traveled this path." She sauntered—there was no other word for the casual, hypnotic way she walked toward them—as if she owned the path, and the Deepings, as if she had waited for this opportunity and no other.

  Nonsense. You've a head, girl. Use it.

  Yes, Oma. For the first time in living memory, Jewel wondered if her life would, in fact, have been any better had her grandmother survived.

  Put the dagger away.

  Jewel stared at the knife, and beyond it, at the man she had almost threatened with its use. He was expressionless; bad sign. It meant he was preparing for a fight.

  "I'm sorry," he said, as she hesitated just that little bit too long.

  She wanted to tell him the hesitation was because she had no idea how to put the damn knife away, but she was Jewel; she didn't lie easily, and that was only enough of the truth to be plausible to anyone who hadn't laid eyes on the woman who called herself Calliastra.

  And because the truth was complicated, and because she barely understood it herself, she didn't get her words out before he spoke his. She forgot about trying.

  Fire answered his call in a way that breathing answered hers; naturally, inevitably. Red ringed by blue, it circled her arm, singeing skin so quickly the mark left was white.

  Jewel screamed.

  The fire had come not from Avandar, but from her: from the mark she bore. She understood what his mark meant then, and she would—in a fury that was inarticulate because words were too simple to express them—make it clear later.

  Now?

  The dagger fell from her hands as if her hands belonged to him. Her fingers opened, her palm dipped; light struck stone and glittered as the metal rang its odd, skittering chime. She took a step back; another; and a final one; her back came to rest against the chest of the man who was pulling the strings.

  If she could have killed him then, she would have.

  She'll kill you, her Oma said, voice completely devoid of sympathy. And you, you fool, you'd walk straight into her arms.

  She said nothing. Calliastra continued to walk toward her, hand outstretched in an offering of something that wasn't quite friendship and wasn't quite sex. Jewel knew both well enough. She tried to look away. She couldn't. She didn't even know what Calliastra was wearing, because she couldn't look away from her face, but the impression of a long, simple dress that circled a long, perfect body and fell straight to the ground stayed with her in the shadows.

  Avandar's arms closed around her, crossing at the wrists just above the hollow of her neck. She had always known he was larger, but she felt dwarfed by him, shunted back into an age she had never particularly liked—not quite woman, definitely not child. She opened her mouth to bite him, and her teeth snapped shut.

  There was worse. Far worse.

  He said, I'm sorry, Jewel. Believe that I am sorry.

  But she didn't hear it with her ears; she heard it in the same way that she heard her dead grandmother's voice.

  As if it were a part of her, as if it resided where both guilty and treasured memories did. She had never shared anything that personal with Avandar before. She would not have chosen to now.

  Calliastra approached them, Jewel now as silent and still as stone, and just as warm. She reached out with a hand that was not a child's hand, and not a young girl's for all that it was smooth and unblemished. It was a woman's hand, in much the same way that The Terafin's hands, placed palm down on the tables in her vast library, were. Power in them.

  "Calliastra."

  "Viandaran, do you think to threaten me?" She didn't even sound angry.

  "No, Lady."

  "Good. I have a fondness for you that would not prevent me from behaving in a manner appropriate to your station."

  He said nothing; she drew closer. "Jewel," she said thoughtfully, "what a perfect name. I imagine that children ridiculed you when they first heard it."

  "Not more than once," Jewel murmured.

  She laughed. "You are wasted on this one. What did you call him? Avandar? Come."

  "She cannot," Avandar said.

  "Truly?"

  Magic was thick as fog in the valleys her grandmother had once called home. Thicker, and colder as well. Magic had a color in Jewel's particular vision; watching it take shape and form—as halo, as glowing orb, as flickering ethereal flame—told her much about the nature of the spell, and the nature of the caster.

  There was literally too much information in what s
he saw now; she froze, trapped by vision, by color, by a sense of textures that moved so astoundingly fast she only barely held on to their essence at all, piling one impression upon another until all she understood was the power that lay behind the structure of the magic itself.

  Avandar's arms tightened. His knuckles came up as he pulled her closer; his hands, hard now and fistlike, rested so tightly against the base of her throat she felt hostage to his desire. Whatever that desire was.

  "She is already claimed," he said.

  Jewel opened her mouth: silence followed the movement of lips and air. She could not speak. And she knew he had forbidden it. Her body resonated with a command so deep it didn't need words.

  The subtle sensuality of this woman's expression shifted on an edge; the danger came out to play. "Then release her."

  "No."

  "You are being tiresome, Viandaran, and I have spent long enough in the godforsaken Deepings, that any company, no matter how pathetic or weak, should have novelty value enough that I am not bored by it." She stepped forward. He made no move to avoid the hands that she laid against Jewel's exposed cheek.

  Jewel screamed.

  The contact was done in an instant; surprised, the woman pulled back.

  "Apologies, child," she said, tilting her chin down to examine the lines of Jewel's face. "The pain… was illusory, and it was not of my making."

  Jewel struggled to breathe. The air came in quantities that didn't quite reach the bottom of her lungs; she fought with it, and with the tears that marred her vision, that rippled the perfect face of pain.

  "She is not for you," Avandar said.

  "Why? She is not the first you have brought upon this path."

  He said nothing.

  Jewel thought she couldn't feel worse, but she did; some ground had fallen out from beneath her feet when Avandar Gallais had used his magic to take complete control of her body. What very little sense of stability had been left was completely destroyed by the words she knew would follow.

  "It's been such a long time since you've tired of a wife or a child—I thought you had given up on them altogether."

  He said nothing at all.

  "You do know what I do, don't you, child?"

  Jewel said nothing, not in mimicry of Avandar but because she had no choice. She would have sworn in the name of seven different gods had she just had her voice.

  "I am the daughter of, as you guessed, Allasakar." Her smile was gentle and soft. "You are talent-born; that much is clear. But it surprises me that you see the darkness and think of the god; he has had very little presence in the world of man, and the memory of men is notoriously short."

  "She means," Avandar said quietly, "that she is forgotten."

  "Yes, I am. But I will not remain so. The paths are crumbling, their edges fraying to reality. I hear the horns and the Hunt, and they are being called this Winter, with a power that I have not heard since the fall of Moorelas.

  She lifted her perfect, her beautiful, face, and glanced to the North—to what, in the darkened night of the Deepings, should have been North—and said, "I am my father's daughter, and my mother's. Her hand is not so easily seen, is it?"

  "Gods died," Avandar said conversationally.

  For the first time, Calliastra was angered. "Viandaran," she said, speaking to Jewel although the words were clearly meant for the man who held her, "has the distinction of being the only mortal lover I have ever taken who has lived to speak of the experience."

  "And I did not."

  "His survival was a… surprise to me," she said quietly. "And I am so. unused to surprises. Imagine it, the daughter of Allasakar and the daughter of Laursana."

  Jewel knew the name; she'd heard it often enough in the halls of the Terafin Manse, in the breathy whispers of young women, young girls, in the mournful prayers of awkward young men. At that age, Jewel had prayed to Kalliaris, and trusted to herself. But she'd had that practical bent about her: food was more important than love. Clothing was more important than love. She'd had both, and while lack of love had made her want to die, lack of food had almost killed her.

  She understood why people prayed to Laursana, but she'd learned the hard way that loss wasn't really worth the momentary happiness. It wasn't being alone she was afraid of. It was what would happen to leave her that way. Better not to take that risk. Always.

  All this passed as she stared at the woman's enormous eyes, at her perfect skin, at the expression—one of complete attention— that she turned upon Jewel. Somehow it managed to sink in.

  "You're the daughter of two gods."

  "Yes."

  It was vaguely disgusting, like finding out that your parents did more than just sleep in their bed. She almost couldn't conceive of the union between two gods. Then again, she couldn't really conceive of the union between a god and a normal person, and she was living under the reign of two of them.

  "Viandaran was the only one of my many lovers to survive the night."

  Avandar still said nothing. Jewel had often found his silence frustrating; it was a wall that, short of losing her temper and doing something childish and intemperate—like, say, throwing a pot or a large tureen—she couldn't breach, and in his foulest mood, he retreated there, beyond reach.

  He was not in a foul mood now, but she had no way of reaching him.

  Not true.

  All right, she amended, her grandmother's sharp words forcing a different truth from her, she had no way of reaching him that she was willing to attempt. Not here. Not in this place. Not when she couldn't even move—and best not to think about that. Truly.

  Don't judge her, a different voice said. Avandar's. She is the victim of her nature: her mother seeks and grants love and her father seeks and grants death, of a type. She can no more change what she is than either of her parents can: they are eternal. We are mortal. She stiffened.

  Get out, she told him, or hoped she did, the words as distinct as she could think them. Get the Hells out.

  Silence.

  "He brought them to me," Calliastra said softly. "When he stopped loving them, he let me love them a while."

  There was malice and madness in the words, and beneath both a terrible hunger, not only emptiness—vast and perfect and completely natural—but a fear of emptiness, a desire to fill it. Imagine it, the goddess had said—for what else did you call the child of two gods?

  Avandar's unwelcome answer hit her like a crossbow bolt: The Firstborn, yes. That was what they'd been called. Imagine being born to darkness and born to love. Imagine that love always ended, and always in death, before any of its promise had been fulfilled. Better a god of lust as a parent than one of love. Better, she thought suddenly, any other god.

  Jewel was speechless with something that was akin to pity but larger. And pity? Gods, why pity? This woman was a monster, she could see that, nature or no. We are all so much slower to judge, she thought, when beauty is involved.

  15th of Scaral, 427 AA

  Tor Leonne

  Sendari stared at the bent head of his wife as sunlight dappled her hair, lending it silk's sheen. That hair trailed down her shoulders, pooling like liquid against the surface of outdoor mats. She had chosen, this morn, to wear white, white and gold with a touch of a lovely turquoise that removed the colors from the Lord's Dominion. He should have been suspicious, then. The Lord knew that he had suffered all his adult life from the intervention of women he could not trust.

  Wearing a sari that had been his gift when he had been granted a clan's name, she had seemed particularly lovely. She still did; the supplicant posture was absolutely correct.

  But Sendari was a man who could appreciate loveliness without being moved by it at all.

  The rocks in the garden, the small stunted trees, the flowers whose tints were delicate, rather than gaudily brilliant, moved him more at this moment than the Serra Fiona.

  He had never been so close to killing a wife. He might stand on the other edge of that act but for two things: Fi
rst, he had learned, over time, not to act in anger. Second, and more relevant, he had promised himself—in a youth that was so distant from him there were times when he could not believe it was his own—that he would never make killing an act of passion. The seeking of knowledge, yes. Love, yes. Not death.

  "How dare you?"

  She spoke to the mats when she finally spoke.

  "I am sorry, my husband. I am truly sorry. I did not realize that the Serra Teresa was not welcome in your harem."

  "How dare you invite her—from Mancorvo no less—without my explicit permission?"

  "I have no excuse, my husband. I am sorry. I judged poorly."

  "And she is to arrive when?"

  "This evening, if the roads permit; tomorrow, otherwise. She sent word."

  "Not to me."

  He watched as her pretty, feminine fingers curled slightly around the handle of her closed fan. She had taken to ground so quickly she had not divested herself of her adornments.

  "I am sorry, my husband. Forgive me. Forgive me. But the Festival draws near, and it is my duty—because the Tyr'agar has no wife and he has chosen to grace your house with the responsibility—"

  "I-am-aware-of-my-responsibilities."

  "Yes, my husband. Forgive me. I—I—there is so much to do for the Festival of the Moon; so much has changed in the Tor. The Tyr'agar has cut down the trees and widened the paths; he has changed the pavilions and the platforms by the Lake. What was designed for perfect beauty and privacy has become… more open.

  "I am not worthy," she continued. "I have tried to prepare the Tor, but my skills—" She swallowed. He heard it, rather than saw it.

  Eyes narrowing, he said, "Fiona, you may rise."

  Nothing in his voice offered comfort; he knew it when he saw her lovely face. He wanted to see her speak.

  Tears had darkened the corners of her eyes where kohl gathered in the creases sun had worn there, year after year finding some minute purchase that spoke of time's passage.

  "Continue," he said softly. "And Fiona? Do not attempt to lie to me."

  "No, my husband."