Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court

by The Shining Court

  He was ashen, gray as bark that has served the flame fully. But he couldn't bear the thought of her death, so he reached out and took the flask she offered.

  And Margret and Elena watched.

  First death.

  Every child saw both deaths.

  Margret of the Arkosan Voyani would face the third. Her mother would hardly speak of it, but she understood why: it was this. This killing of kin. The Matriarch was the mother of them all, and she was harsh as Lord's Sun, cold as Lady's Night. Into her hands fell justice, and it fell in the shape of a sword, a whip, a noose.

  This last of the three deaths was the only one that she had never faced. And it was the only one that she felt, as the whip came up, as the stranger, speaking in a private voice that only her ears and his would ever hear, counted the strokes, that she could not face.

  The killing of kin.

  And the three brothers, who loved each other as kin must love or else be forsworn, sat down at a low table together with wine that Nicu had brought them. Elena did not touch the wine set before him, but Margret—who was wise, after all—did, lifting the goblet swiftly and easily to his lips.

  "To your victory, Nicu," he said softly, "no matter what the cost."

  Nicu lifted the cup as well.

  Lifted it in shaking hands, and then, before Margret could drink, threw the cup across the table. The unexpected blow knocked Margret back, and his own cup flew wide, the contents spilled across both the coarse fabric of his shirt and night's grass.

  She could not face this last first death.

  "Ten," Kallandras said. She lifted a hand; wiped the sweat from her forehead, her eyes. Looked at the length of the shadow she cast. At anything but the bleeding mess of her foolish cousin's back.

  She knew she should kill him.

  Knew it, hated it, denied it.

  And the three brothers embraced.

  Nicu went to his wife, and told her the deed had been done, and he claimed her for a single night, for she thought him so simple that it never occurred to her that he might be lying.

  And in the morning, when the Arkosans left the Tor Leonne, they left this half-used wife abandoned at the palace gates, where all might see her and know that she was no longer fit as wife to any other man.

  "And for that reason," Evallen would say, finishing the story, "the hatred of the Tyrs for the Arkosans has always been strong."

  "Eleven."

  "We are brothers," Margret would say, or Elena, or Nicu. "We are brothers, and Lady bear witness, nothing will come between us but death."

  They would cross hands, right hands, one on top of the other, a jumble of childhood skin and childhood oath.

  "Twelve."

  Her favorite story, sitting upon her mother's knee. But her mother was dead, and the gift of title now rested upon Margret's aching shoulders.

  She lifted the whip for the last stroke. Brought it stinging across his skin. Lifted it again.

  Threw it, although she knew it would be seen as the weakness it was, across the length of the open circle where it fell at the feet of an older Voyani woman. Caitla. Stavos' sister.

  The expression on that woman's face froze Margret in place. Elena's hand, a sudden weight on her shoulder, provided her the same steadiness. She wanted—Lady, she wanted—to drop to her knees at Nicu's side, to beg his forgiveness and his understanding, to wash the blood off his injured back and bring the salves that would both soothe pain and stave off infection.

  And she could do none of these things.

  None of these things for her brother.

  She would never sit at her mother's knee again. Never choose that story, never hear it spoken aloud. And she would never trust him enough to drink from a goblet he offered her in the Lady's Night, with the object of his desire as the prize for her death, no matter what they had promised so intently, and so honestly, as children.

  Margret of the Arkosa Voyani did not weep. The closest she would allow herself to come was to lift her heavy, heavy hand and grasp her cousin's—Elena's—as if nothing else would provide an anchor for the wind's aching howl.

  * * *

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  15th of Scaral, 427 AA

  Tor Leonne

  He thought to have more warning.

  Teresa, although she was a mere Serra, was accounted wise by men of higher station than he, and she traveled—at their kai's insistence—in a fashion that suited that unspoken, unspeakable regard.

  At Festival season, such fashion dictated a procession that would, in earlier years, have beggared Sendari di'Marano. Cerdan in great numbers—and worse, their horses—preceded and followed the serafs that bore her palanquin and the caravan that followed with her saris, her sandals, and the other strange accoutrements that were a part of a woman's mystery when they weren't examined too closely: scent and color among them.

  As so often happened when a woman of import arrived, be she at the side of her husband or no, the streets of the Tor Leonne would become dense with the idle: small children, their elderly watchers, the women and men who were just free enough they had been born on the right side of the clan-seraf divide. They would point at the flapping clan colors the standard-bearers were responsible for, and they would speak the name of the occupant so carefully hidden from the damaging glare of the Lord's heat as if it were part of a guessing game.

  It was, often enough.

  And such a caravan might take an hour to pass through the streets of the Tor Leonne; it might take more, depending upon the graciousness of the occupant who held the highest rank. And by the time that occupant arrived at the gates of the plateau, her name had been carried, by wind and the poor alike, as if the multitude of blended voices were better heralds than their own.

  Yes, Sendari expected to have more warning.

  But the Lake was silvered by the Lady's Moon, the sky broken by the rich, pale light of Her veil, and he, broken in a different fashion, was utterly alone.

  Alone, as all men were alone when they chose to visit the Lady's shrine. Leonne, for all that it was a weak clan—perhaps because of it—had had a better, a deeper, appreciation for the Lady's service than Alesso did, or would. Under Leonne's care, Her shrines, small and hidden as they were by carefully cultivated trees and bushes, by flowers and rock formations, had had an aura of privacy. Each man who made his evening trek to such a place was asking for, and was granted, the isolation of Her audience.

  And of his own thoughts.

  Under Alesso's care, if care was a word that could be so applied, they had become merely hidden places, little wildernesses of neglect rather than oases of privacy. Yet for all that, sweet water glimmered in offering bowls, reflecting, in their total stillness, the lines of her changing face.

  Diora.

  He knelt. It was comfortable to kneel; the Lord could not see the gesture of supplication, and he therefore could not judge it. But the Lady's gaze was keener, sharp enough to make a man bleed if he hoped to keep his secrets from her notice.

  Sendari had learned, long ago, that the Lord's lack of mercy was simple death; the Lady's, complex and terrible, was much, much less pleasant. He therefore bowed to the greater power when that power was displayed.

  And he had heard it.

  In Diora's voice.

  She had saved his life.

  Ah, Lady, Lady, she had saved his life. Had spoken with a power that had done what shield and sword could not: it had stopped the blade of the Tyr'agnate of Oerta.

  He should not have been at the shrine.

  He should have been with Cortano. With Mikalis di'Arretta. With Alesso di'Alesso. The Festival closed upon them like an enemy army, and the masks were as yet unmade, their mysteries unresolved, their danger held at bay by a deception that, privately, Sendari thought unlikely to work.

  Somewhere in the Tor, he was certain, the Kialli spies gathered in ones and twos, assured of safety by both their own power and the power of the Court that ruled them; if he was not at the side of the men w
ho made masks their study, he should have been with the Widan who made secrecy theirs. They had been working, under Cortano's merciless—and tireless—direction, upon a magic that might, with the Lady's dark blessing, grant them the vision necessary to detect the demonic beneath the human visage.

  The death of Cortano's Widan in the capture of the Voyani woman had damaged the research of that fragile magic almost beyond repair. But it had provided the Sword's Edge with a burning, a terrible, incentive, and Sendari thought it likely that Cortano di'Alexes would find the power to reveal the essence of the Kialli before any of them would piece together the puzzle of the masks.

  He should have been at Cortano's side.

  But he was here, in this shrine, bent before a bowl of water drawn from the Lady's Lake, his daughter's name a silent motion of lips.

  And when the light of the Lady's face was disturbed as it lay against the surface of water that men killed and died to claim as their own, he knew that time had run out.

  Because, warning or no, as inevitable as the dawn that must grow from the heart of the Lady's Night, the Serra Teresa di'Marano stood by his side, shattering the privacy that the Lady's shrine promised. The promises of the Lady.

  He was not bitter. The time for bitterness had passed. Rather, he was numb.

  She dropped to her knees at once; abasing herself before the water, the moon, and her brother; he turned to acknowledge her presence only after long minutes had passed in the treachery of her silence.

  And he was shocked into his own by what he saw. Shocked into the speechlessness that he so often used as his only defense against the power that had destroyed not only Teresa's life, but his daughter's as well.

  Serra Teresa di'Marano, the Serra whose refinement was valued by the high clansmen and clanswomen who would form not only Alesso's court but all courts across the Dominion, was dressed not in sari and fine, fine jewels, but rather in soft leathers. Her scent was not jasmine, not wild rose, not moon water, but rather the dust and sweat of the open road, and her hair, long and fine and defiant of a thing as inevitable and debilitating as age, was pulled so tightly back from her face it might have been a warrior's knot.

  But her eyes, her eyes as she sat up and turned her face toward him, were no eyes but hers; nothing diminished them—and nothing warmed them. That had not always been the case, but Sendari was now at a remove from the anger that had driven his relationship with this most difficult of sisters. As it so often did, weariness had seeped in to take its place.

  The Festival of the Moon was coming, and it cast long shadows.

  "Serra Teresa," he said stiffly.

  "Ser Sendari," she replied. She was as cool as desert twilight.

  "There is no war between us." He bowed his head. Light glimmered off lake water; the weariness was greater now than at any time he remembered in his life. Not even the test of the Sword of Knowledge, from which he had emerged bleeding and barely victorious, had been so completely exhausting, so numbing.

  It had been almost six months since Diora's betrayal.

  It had been over six months since she had spoken a word to him that had not been cool and quiet and completely proper.

  At least, he thought bitterly, she grants me that. She knew he was not a fool.

  But the Serra Teresa lifted her head. "No war, Brother?" she said softly. Knife's edge, those words. He did not understand it.

  "My… wife is long dead," Sendari replied, eyes on the light. "And her daughter—my daughter—is beyond me. If I lost the mother to you, the daughter was, I believe, my own doing. It was not my intent." The words were his words; the voice, his voice. He recognized neither, in this moonful night, this darkness of the Lady's making.

  "Would you have let her perish with Leonne?"

  Silence. Then, "Did she summon you?"

  Silence again. But the quality of the Serra Teresa's silences were matched only by the quality of her voice; they were immaculately timed, and they said what she intended them to say.

  Yet he saw her lower her head; saw her, in the darkness that pale fire illuminated, lift arm and hand to see the road's work, and not the weaver's. "I have come, this eve, for just one purpose," she said at last, "It is night and I will be… honest with you."

  "In a fashion."

  "In a fashion."

  He wondered, not for the first time, what she would have become had she been born a man.

  "Diora did not summon me; she has no power with which to do so."

  "She bears your gift and your taint."

  "Yes."

  "And from what I understand, you could speak to her now and she might hear you."

  Silence. She broke it with his name. "Sendari," she said. "You've been studying."

  "Yes."

  "But without the aid of the bards."

  "They are not… bountiful in the capital at the moment. They were not present for the Festival of the Sun, and it is unlikely we will see them, except perhaps as spies, for the Festival of the Moon. Next year; perhaps the year after. Perhaps never."

  He saw the straight lines of her perfect profile. The road could not take that from her. In truth, it could take nothing from her if one knew how to look, and Sendari had seen this woman all his adult life. One cannot judge a blade when it is housed within its scabbard, but if it is the right blade, once seen its edge is never forgotten, no matter what scabbard adorns it.

  "She cannot summon me across such a great distance."

  "She could have asked the wives to—"

  "The Serra Fiona summoned me, Sendari, as I believe you must know. There has been no great love between us. She would not lie."

  He felt, suddenly, that he did not wish the honesty she had offered, and he rose, letting his lap fall away as his knees lost their bend. Silk, heavy and full, rippled with the Lady's light; the night was unseasonably chill.

  "I will aid the Serra Fiona as I am able, on such short notice. I came quickly, I journeyed in haste."

  Her words made no sense; he let them sink in, examining them in detail until he understood their essential wrongness. "You did not travel with Adano's permission."

  "I could not afford to ask it," she replied, and her eyes were as dark as night. He saw the effort of the journey then, because she let him see it. Immediately wondered why she had chosen to expose that much. They had their strengths and their weaknesses. His eyes fell from hers; there was, about her stare, a strength that he found disturbing.

  But not so disturbing as this: her hands were bare. She wore no rings at all.

  The emerald had always been Alora's gift, an oath ring, a symbol of—

  Love.

  And Teresa did not wear it.

  The desert night was falling. The Festival of the Moon, like a sweet and a terrible doom, had already opened to envelop them both.

  "There is," his sister said, "war between us, Sendari."

  He wanted to ask her what that war was, but he was afraid, suddenly, of her answer. "Do not," he said, his voice as heavy with menace as he could force it to be. "Do not enter this fray."

  "What choice have you left me?" she countered. "What choice have you left even the least of us?"

  "The least of you?" He felt an old anger rising. Interesting. He had thought it dead. "You have offered me honesty, Serra Teresa. Do me the grace of offering less insult with it. You have spent a life hiding behind the facade of powerlessness; it has never been more than facade."

  "Not true," she replied. "I have never been able to escape the gift and the curse that my father and my brothers found such a useful weapon at their convenience. And I was powerless to save Alora's life, the one life I would have exposed all to save."

  "You did not try."

  "I knew it would fail. A healer cannot be forced to that healing."

  "It was within his nature!"

  "Does it matter?" Her voice was desert night, his day's height.

  It did. It did. Because if Teresa no longer loved and honored that memory, no one did. He acknowle
dged it, beneath the Lady's Moon. In every way that he could be, he was forsworn. The Alora of his youth, the Alora of his early life, would look at him now and see nothing at all to stop her gaze, to hold it, to catch it.

  Unless it be the man who would harm her daughter, her only child.

  "Are you forsworn, Teresa?"

  Her eyes narrowed. "I?"

  "You—" He turned away. Anger, he could give her. But this was too complicated to be anger.

  She had offered him honesty. "I do not wear the ring in fact, but it has never left me in any way that matters. She was only your wife, Brother," she added. "To me, she was everything."

  "I would have given up my life for her."

  "But not for her memory. Not for your word to her memory."

  "If her memory were not so sullied by you, perhaps I might have." But as his words left his lips, they had, for the first time, a bitter, bitter taste, a cloying texture, a defensive quality that robbed them, in the end, not only of strength but also of truth. He was lying. And he knew that she would hear that lie even had she not been gifted. Cursed.

  "I have come," she said quietly, as he knew, as he suddenly knew she would, "for Diora."

  He was silent.

  The weight of the Lady's hands were upon his brow and around his throat; he could not speak. Had he stood? He no longer clearly remembered when.

  She was his sister.

  He had hated her in his time. But the ties that bound them, blood ties all, had stayed his hand. He had never willingly exposed any weakness that she might exploit, but he had never feared death at her hand.

  Death might have been easier.

  He knew her well. "Serra Teresa," he said, striving for formality.

  "Ser Sendari," she replied, bowing her head to the ground a moment in perfect grace.

  He thought to escape, but the moon's light was as sharp as the Lord's blade. Colder.