He held out his hand. The ring gleamed in his palm, band broken from beginning to end by russet etching in a bleached, pale white that Kallandras thought, from the look alone, must be bone. Except, of course, no simple bone could survive as long as this ring must have: it was etched with symbols the like of which he had last seen when the Kings had opened a cenotaph and their armies had descended into darkness, and the darkness beyond it.
"From the hand of Yollana of the Havalla Voyani."
She spit. Not at him, not quite, but the derision, the disbelief, could not be contained by a simple snort. She dressed like a Serra, but that was all that they and she had in common.
"She says the place is—"
"I will know the place," Elsarre snapped back. "If you do not lie, I will know it."
"Matriarch—"
"Dani, watch him. If he speaks another word, kill him." She turned to the woman at her side. "Ona Elisa?"
A volume in those two words.
The old woman met his eyes. "Your weapon," she said to Kallandras, no softness in her voice although she spoke quietly.
"Yes."
"It is the Lady's weapon."
"Yes."
"Swear by Her."
"What would you have me swear, Ona? All vows to the Lady have their price."
"Swear that the Matriarch gave you the ring."
"So sworn," he said softly. His eyes flickered off Dani's dagger hand as he made his decision. He lowered his own blade; let it bite palm. Hoped that the demon within it drew no sustenance from the gesture. "By the Lady."
She nodded grimly. "Trust him."
"But he—"
"You know it yourself, Elsarre. Trust your instincts."
"But a stranger's hand has never borne that ring. How could she take such a risk? I tell you, Elisa—"
"Tell yourself," Elisa replied, her voice firm, "that time is of the essence."
But she was not to be shamed—or corrected—in front of a stranger. She turned on him; he expected no less.
"You are a messenger, no more—and an ill chosen one. Speak of what you have seen, speak a single word of the thing that you carry, and I will have you hunted down and killed for sheer pleasure. Is that understood?"
"Well understood," he replied. He put a hand on Evayne's shoulder as he spoke.
It did no good. "You will have no pleasure from it, but perhaps the Corronans will be led, thereafter, by someone with temperance and wisdom."
"Evayne—"
"Are you threatening me?"
"No more than you threaten him," she replied, voice so cold it burned.
"Evayne," he said, speaking with the bard's gift to the seer's ears alone, "this is pointless. I am not offended by the threat. I am not threatened by it. If it annoys you, let it annoy you on your own time. This is not the only journey we must make this day."
He thought to chasten her, and perhaps it worked. Perhaps not. But she fell silent.
Elsarre's complexion was ruddy, her lips thinning with the effort to leave words unsaid. He recognized the expression. Before Evayne could speak again and break the fragile silence, he bowed.
"I accept the burden of silence that you have placed upon me," he said gravely. "And I understand the burden of trust that the Havallan Matriarch felt necessary, by circumstance, to bestow. I will honor both to the best of my ability; all else leads away from the Voyanne, into shadows that the Lady has never claimed."
"You do not follow the Voyanne."
"No," he said speaking so low she would have to strain to catch the words that left his lips, "But I, too, have walked away from my home for the sake, and the fate, of man."
She was silent. But the color left her cheeks; the flames receded. She said quietly, "Dani." Her acknowledgment of his words. And her command.
Dani sheathed his long dagger.
"We will meet again, you and I," he said quietly.
"Of that, I have no doubt. I do not know what the ring's message is, but it is clearly a summons."
"Dani," Elsarre said sharply, "show them out."
She could not have said shut up any more clearly. Dani grimaced.
But he showed them out.
"I hope," Evayne said darkly, speaking just loud enough to be heard by the men who served Elsarre, "that she grows up."
"I would not say your own response was worthy of you," he replied. "But she has long been the most difficult of the four. She feels her age. This may diminish with the death of Evallen."
"Great. She'll have someone else to push around."
"You haven't met Margret."
"Oh, yes, I have." She grimaced. "Of course, she was eight years old at the time. Or nine. I'm not good at judging the age of children."
"You will see more of her." The sun was bright, but the day was not overly hot; it was the Lady's season. He brought his hands to his eyes.
"Good. As long as I see less of Elsarre."
"Evayne."
"She was threatening you!"
"And I was not threatened. I fail to understand your particular sense of ownership in this case."
She had the grace to flush, and he thought that would be the end of it.
"I don't feel any ownership."
"No?"
"Kinship, maybe."
A cloud passed over the sun; he felt it, although he could not see it. For just a moment he wanted to turn on her, to grab her, shake her, even strike her. Kinship.
She saw it. She saw it in him, although he had become .well versed in hiding from her over the years.
Her face paled. "I'm sorry, Kallandras. It's just that—"
"We have work."
"I forget sometimes," she continued doggedly, "that I forced you to take this road."
He laughed. The sound was more bitter to his ears than he would have liked, and far too honest. When he spoke again, he spoke with the intimate voice, the unassailable privacy. "No, Evayne; that is the fiction I told you—and myself—in my youth to attempt to deny the magnitude of my betrayal.
"But you could not force me to leave my brothers. Nothing could have forced that upon me but my own choice."
She was silent for a long time; the streets, roughly packed dirt giving way to the stone of the wider roads, passed beneath their feet as she kept her voice from him. She had learned, over the years, that her voice was the window through which he examined all her fear and motivation. At last she said, "I was offered a similar choice." He heard it; she so rarely spoke of the beginning at this age that he was surprised by the depth of the anger in the words. "So I know how little choice there really was."
"Evayne—"
"We all have to live with ourselves. We all have to live. If someone says to you, 'Do what I say or I'll slit the throat of this infant,' and they happen to have a knife at the throat of an infant, you have a so-called choice. But I'm not sure you can be judged by the quality of the choice you make in those circumstances."
He wanted to be gentle with her. That surprised him, as it so often did. He remembered the night, three months ago almost to the day, that she had come to him, bloodstained, and so very, very young. She knew that he was her enemy, or that he had been, but her fear and her anger were greater than that knowledge.
Kinship.
He had offered her comfort then. She had been too weary and too terrified to refuse it; familiarity, in that case, had meant more than the actual history that created it.
He closed his eyes. In the darkness, he heard a name he did not recognize, each syllable rich. Resonant. Silent. Someone had been sworn to a death, in the Lady's name.
This was no memory; it was event. What he had sworn decades past at labyrinth's end, when he had passed the last of the tests and had finally proved himself worthy, had given him the world of the Kovaschaü, and not even his betrayal could sunder the ties the Lady built that day. Only his death would, and perhaps— perhaps not even that. For She would not come to return to him the name She had taken when he had offered Her his obedience.
Or so the Lady had promised.
And without that name, he had no way of finding the Halls of Mandaros. Would he scream? Would he weep? Would he hover on the edges of the Kovaschaü forever, a grim warning to all who pledged their service?
Would he, in the end, succeed so that there might be brothers to whom one could give such a warning?
"If someone held a knife to an infant's throat," he said, pausing a moment, the name of a dead man passing from event into memory, "and they offered me a choice, I would continue without pause. Unless," he added softly, "prevention of that infant's death was our goal at that time and place."
"Kalian—"
"Remember what I was," he said, words cool in the day's heat. "Remember what I am."
"I've seen what you are."
"Yes and no. A knife was held to the throat of the only thing that would either move me or force me to hold my hand." He turned, in a daylight shorn of cloud, and met her eyes. The wariness had returned to her face, her posture; she knew she had offended him in some fashion.
They walked a while in the silence of the Lord's light; the streets widened and narrowed. Twice, he pulled her into courtyard or fount as the wind carried the heavy footfalls of armored men. He expected her to vanish at any time; to be gone between one step and the next.
But an hour passed as he searched for the Voyani who would lead him—or point him—to the Lyserran Matriarch, and she still walked at his side, in his shadow.
"You're the only one," she said, her voice muted, a harshness beneath the softness of the tone.
"The only one?"
"I've seen you at so many ages, I know you don't die."
"Evayne—"
"You're the only one I'm certain I don't destroy—and you're the only one who was smart enough to hate me. Maybe they're connected." She swallowed. "Maybe it's why I feel as if I—as if we're—" Looked away. "We're working toward the same end, Kallandras. And you know as much as I do, maybe more."
He had thought it odd that she had stayed, to saunter along this path on his search for Voyani.
He understood, as she could not, why. It was time.
Twenty-five years.
He wondered if his life as Kallandras, bard of Senniel College, might have been enough to satisfy him if the bonds that defined the Kovaschaü had died with his obedience. Certainly the anger and the loss would have sustained him for years. Two. Five. Ten. But a quarter of century?
The name of a man who was dead and who did not know it echoed in the still, hot day.
"And in the end," he said softly, "it was not your hand that held the knife. You showed me the truth. I blamed the messenger. I am not… proud of that. But it was…" Worse than death. "Kinship?" He caught her hand; pulled her to a fountain's side, where he knelt and began to polish brass and marble.
"It wasn't a good choice of word," she said, joining him, her robes shifting in shape and shade until they looked very much like the robes of a seraf owned by high clansmen.
The cerdan who passed not ten yards to the North spared them a glance, if that. Serafs of note at the time of the Festival Moon were as worthy of attention as the stones of the streets themselves; they were so much a part of the scenery they were hard to distinguish from the background.
"No, Evayne," he said softly, almost to himself.
Her robe, alive a moment with magic and movement, reformed in its own image, shaking as if the deception was unpleasant. "I know. I'm sorry—I wasn't thinking. I know that we don't—"
"Not yet, but soon."
He turned.
Saw her, frozen in place, her eyes widening slowly as hope— he could see it so clearly now—stripped her of defense. In her youth, her anger almost as harsh and all-encompassing as his own had been, she had been so hard to hurt. He had tried. Perhaps that was why he had seen so little of her as youth, so much as older woman.
"Kallandras," she began, looking up.
She took a step toward him.
She was gone.
* * *
Elena's shadow was longer than it had been; so was her face. She caught a glimpse of it as she passed by the mirror that Voyani Matriarchs possessed, but seldom used. She suspected the mirror was part of a stage act, a way of convincing the gullible—and even among her own, she was willing to admit that fools were legion—that the Matriarch had special powers without resorting to the powers in question. She did not want to speak to Nicu.
Why?
Because she was afraid she knew what he was going to say, and she didn't know what she'd do if she heard it.
It's not my fault, she thought fiercely. She'd been having the argument, in all its variations, since she'd agreed to speak with Nicu. Rehearsal. She knew Nicu well enough to play his part.
So did Margret. But Margret did not mention Nicu and Nicu was not mentioned around Margret. It was almost as if he had died. Maybe it would have been better.
And would it? What would you have done if she'd called for his head? No answer, there. Or an uneasy answer she didn't want to look at, which was pretty much the same thing.
She and Margret shared blood, but they weren't cut from the same bolt. Elena knew, on some fundamental level, that she could deal with the hard things when they came up. She could wield a sword. Could birth a difficult baby. Could take a life, either in anger or as an act of mercy. Could sell herself, if that was the price of survival.
She had done it all.
If she was faced with Nicu's death, she would find the strength to deal with that as well, but there were darknesses one didn't go into gladly, or at all, unless one were forced.
And Margret?
Elena's hands did a slow, tight curl until they were shaking. She remembered, on the edge of anger, the days when she and Margret used to fight for Nicu's attention. She remembered the days—she, just off her mother's knee—that she thought they would all grow up and get married, take vows, be inseparable. She remembered the earnest vows they had made then.
"'Lena?"
She was angry.
She didn't want to be angry, but she'd swallowed the rage; it was inside her. She didn't want to pay the price of keeping it there.
Her hands would not unclench; they tightened at the sound of her name in his voice.
They stayed that way until she saw his face.
" 'Lena?" His voice broke between the two syllables. His face, his too-beautiful face, was yellow and purple where he'd been ungently handled, but no lasting damage had been done.
"Nicu—"
"I know you're angry," he said. "I—"
"Nicu—"
"I wasn't thinking. I know she's the Matriarch, but—"
"But what?"
"But she's Margret. She's always told me what to do. I've never had to listen." His eyes were wide as cat's eyes, broken only by the spill of dull hair.
She was still angry, but he'd managed to break the back of the worst of her temper by exposing his throat. If she could've been certain he'd done it on purpose, she'd've hit him, hard. But this Nicu, this Nicu she knew well. The contrition and the fear—of her disapproval, of Margret's—was as real as the temper and the hubris and the arrogance. That was Nicu's problem. He did everything with his whole heart—and nothing with his head.
"Nicu—"
"I know. I know. I—"
"What did you want to talk about?"
" 'Lena, don't be mad at me. I—you don't understand."
"No. I don't."
"We're always on the bottom. The clans rule everything. This was our chance."
His eyes shifted slightly and his glance strayed groundward. "Nicu," Elena said sharply.
"Never mind."
"Nicu, if you're really sorry, you'll tell us exactly where you got that sword."
"I did tell you."
"You just took a sword from a man you've never laid eyes on? You accepted an unblooded blade from someone who isn't even kin?" She couldn't keep the scorn and the disbelief out of her face—or she assumed she couldn't; she
didn't try very hard.
He flushed. "Do you know how many clansmen I killed?" He said, voice low, chin slowly rising. "They would have been ours."
"We weren't in danger—or we wouldn't have been if you hadn't started killing them in their own home!"
"I was tired of hiding and mewling like a weakling!"
She felt her jaw lock. She raised her hand. Lowered it. "Nicu,". she said quietly. "We don't have anything to say to each other." She turned on her heel.
He caught her by the arm and then leaped back when she spun on him. As if he expected the fist to be wrapped round a dagger's shaft. "Don't ever do that again." She turned away. Thinking. Not wanting to think. Hoping to escape before he said the words she didn't want to hear.
"But I did it for you—don't you understand?"
Lady, please, not this, Lady, not this. She kept walking.
"Elena!"
She turned. She almost hated him, but something buried deeper than affection made his pain unbearable.
"I did it because I love you."
"Nicu—"
"I did it because you deserve better than this!"
She started to speak. Stopped herself. Something twisted at her stomach with claws as sharp as any knife that had ever broken flesh. For just a moment, less, the scenery, shifted, breaking and regrouping as if it were a vessel and it had been shattered and rebuilt by hands that had a deeper understanding of clay.
She saw Nicu's face, eyes sightless but open, robbed of expression, of the ability to express itself. Circling him, dark shadows, burning him—although he was well past sensation—the unadorned face of the Lord.
And weeping, weeping into the desert, voices that she could not bear to listen to, because one of them was her own.
He'll do it, she thought, numb because to feel at all was suddenly too dangerous. She closed her eyes to hold back tears, and when she opened them again, he was standing before her, ruddy faced, bruised, defiant. Young and—Lady help him—so very, very stupid. Had they let him be so stupid? How?
But the stupidity was precious because it was Nicu's, and because it meant he was still alive.
She opened her arms. Just as she had when they had been younger. She saw him, suspicion withering almost before it had a chance to take root—stupid, stupid, Nicu—greed overcoming sense as he swept in to take what he desired most.
Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court Page 56