There had been so little freedom in the last few months.
He had thought the sacrifice insignificant; after all, power was the only guarantee of freedom a man could have in lands the Lord ruled. But he better understood the price to be paid now. While he watched the facade of the Festival unfold, he understood that he would never again be part of it. And it pained him.
"Why did Cortano not bring this news himself?"
"He has not yet returned from the Court; the journey was costly enough that he would be at risk were he to travel immediately. He sends word that he will arrive the day before the Festival at the latest."
Alesso nodded quietly. There were spies enough within the Tor that the Sword's Edge—feared far more than a simple warrior who stood with the crown across his brow—could not afford any display of weakness, any obvious lessening of power.
But the Tyr could ill afford to be without him.
"The masks?" he asked.
"They are out there, in the lower city. Quite possibly in the hands of serafs and lesser lords upon the plateau, although we have concentrated most of our recovery efforts there." Sendari bowed.
And with his face still groundward, he added, "The Sword's Edge has been summoned by the Lord of the Shining Court."
"Oh?"
"The masks, Alesso."
Silence.
"He wishes the masks to be worn."
Alesso was quiet. Very quiet. At last he said, "We knew the risks. They will not, of course, be worn."
"Of course. But I believe that Cortano would be much pleased," Sendari said, rising, "if you were to inform the Lord of that fact in person."
In spite of himself, he smiled. "I believe that he would, indeed, be well pleased." The smiled dimmed. "He is… well?"
"He is unharmed for the moment. The Lord's attention was drawn away, fortuitously, by a more dangerous breach in his own plan."
"Oh?"
"Anya a'Cooper is no longer within the walls of the Shining Palace."
Alesso closed his eyes.
"Yes," Sendari said. "We will feed our own to her, and perhaps in greater numbers; she will damage us by her presence because people will wrap her in the Lady's myth at our expense. But her absence has saved us from the greater danger. For the moment."
"For the moment," Alesso said softly. "Where are our Northern enemies? Why have they not gathered? Where are their forces? Without them, we have no balance of power."
No balance.
Sendari rose. "I do not know, Alesso. I have seen nothing but masks for these past several days. The war has become a thing of dream; it lacks substance." He ran a hand across his eyes.
"And what do the masks reveal?"
"Masks conceal," he said, the words tired and graceless. They hung a moment between the two men. Then the lines that exhaustion and sun had carved into Sendari's face shifted, cutting his expression.
"Old friend?"
"Masks conceal," he repeated, but he spoke the words as if they were foreign, the syllables weighted and heavy. "They conceal." He walked to the window, to stand beside Alesso, to stare at the Tor beneath them both.
"Sendari?"
"I am… remembering," he said quietly.
"And you desire privacy?"
"I desire impossible things, but lately privacy is not one of them." He lifted a hand to his beard. Let it rest there.
They're all wearing masks, his daughter's voice said, coming, beloved and perfect, from the remove of more than a decade. He could feel her hand in his. Could feel her weight—not inconsiderable for all that he desired to pick her up and hold her for the eternity of the Festival Moon—in his arms. Her mother, his shadow, dead. Her aunt, as cursed as she, at a safe distance. Nothing to separate them as they walked into wonder, into the Lady's Night.
And what had he said?
Lady's hand on his shoulder, Lady's voice in his ear, the weight of the ruin he had brought upon his daughter—the last woman alive that he had loved, had promised to love—so heavy he could barely breathe beneath its pressure.
And because they wear masks, they can be who they are, as the Lady decrees.
"Alesso," he said, seeing his daughter, "I must go."
"Sendari?"
"From the mouth of babes," he replied quietly. There was no fire in the words; Alesso saw shadows everywhere in his friend's face. Age. Weakness.
"The masks?"
"I must speak with Mikalis. It is urgent."
"And Cortano?"
"You are correct. He must fend for himself. But I believe, before the Festival's end, it is we who will be tested and tried in the Lord's hottest fires."
"And if we survive?"
Sendari said nothing. His robes swept the spare surface of unadorned, uncovered wood as he turned. When he reached the doors he stopped, his hands upon the frames that had been magicked by Cortano himself to withstand all form of intrusion save that of greater power. He turned. "Sometimes the winds devour us," he said softly, "and all we can do before they tear us from the monuments we have built is to write our names where men can see them; to write our histories where men can be emboldened by them."
He did not turn.
Alesso could not see his face. "Sendari?"
The doors opened. The man who had been captain, General, Tyr, and friend could have ordered him back—but the last title was a title that robbed a man of some of the ease of command. The Widan did not choose to turn, and the Tyr'agar did not choose to press the issue.
"I don't understand," Diora said.
She was so rarely given to any acknowledgment of ignorance that Alana en'Marano, the oldest of her father's wives and the de facto mother of his entire harem, although Fiona was technically Serra, stopped in open surprise.
Diora's frown was slight, and as she met the gaze of her father's wife, it melted into the perfect, flawless countenance expected of a woman who had once been the wife of a Tyr. "Is something… out of place?"
"No, Na'dio. Not anymore." And nothing was. Her hair, beaded with strings of jade and held by three combs that locked together in a triad of intricate golden leaves, framed a face that had been paled by powder and lack of exposure to the Lord's light. Too little light, in Alana's opinion. But that opinion had carefully not been asked.
They all knew that Diora had worked against her father, somehow; that her incarceration was punishment for her betrayal— whatever that betrayal might be.
"Tell me, Alana. Why?"
Alana looked at the face of her favorite daughter. Cupped it in her hands because they were both hidden in the heart of the most private room in her father's harem, with the possible exception of the room in which he practiced his Widan's art. "I don't know, Na'dio. Your father said only—said only that—you needed time to prepare for the Festival of the Moon." She took a deep breath. "We have heard that the Widan Cortano di'Alexes has traveled and will not be in the Tor Leonne for the next few days."
"You 'have heard'?"
Alana said nothing.
"Ona Alana, please?"
"No. No, Na'dio, and that face, that perfect, beautiful face, will not get answers from me. There are some questions that are never asked."
"But my father—"
"He told me himself, child. Be comforted."
She felt Diora stiffen, if steel could be called stiff, and she let her hands fall away. Child, she thought, seeing none of the child she had once coddled in her harem daughter. Your father loves you as much as a man is capable of loving any child.
But how much was that, in the end? He would give her to Garrardi; no one doubted it. And the life she would have?
No one doubted that either. Alana bowed her head to hide the momentary bitterness that twisted her lips. She would have railed on—she did—in the company of any of the other wives. But it was pointless to worry her Na'dio further when they both understood the truth. She waited the space of three breaths, and then forced herself to speak of more pleasant things. "You are to have escort if you desire
it."
"I do not desire it."
"And that escort," she continued, as if the Serra Diora di'Marano had shown the grace of good manners and offered no interruption, "is to be the Radann Marakas par el'Sol."
Diora's perfect eyes widened, and then she bowed her head.
"Na'dio," Alana said quietly. The winds were so strong in the stillness of the room that she wanted to sweep her harem daughter into the momentary safety of her arms. She didn't. All safety was momentary, and Diora did not need a reminder of that fact.
"We must hurry," Alana said, not bothering to gentle her voice. "The par el'Sol will be waiting, and we are under strict orders to waste none of his time."
"Whose?" Diora asked softly, although she followed the woman who had been one of her many mothers with a docility that was uncharacteristic.
Na 'dio, she thought, has your captivity changed you so ? But she said nothing at all; she caught the young woman's hand in hers and fell silent at the ice of it, the chill beneath the summer skin.
"Alana," Diora said, the delicacy, the hesitancy, of her voice a surprise to the older woman. "Where is Ona Teresa?"
Alana's shrug was a lie. The words were a lie as well, and although she had not been able to lie successfully to this strangest of daughters, she said, "Your Ona Teresa is with her kai in the Terrean of Mancorvo, and a good thing, too. There is much that is strange about this Festival, and the Festival of the Moon was always of great import to the Serra."
The younger Serra had often accepted such lies. The older one met the wavering gaze of the harem's oldest wife, held it a moment, and then let it go. "Come," she said, voice now as cool as her flesh had been, "we have scant hours before the dressmakers arrive with the gown I am to be wed in; the kai Garrardi has made it most clear what the price of their failure to create the perfect setting for me will be."
Has he made most clear, Alana thought, what the price will be if you fail to be the gem that lives up to that setting?
The sunlight everywhere was astonishing; there was a newness to it that defied all shadow. She felt as if she had not seen it in months, perhaps years; that the shadows and darkness at a remove from sun's light had sunk roots and taken nourishment from her. It was not the truth; this feeling—as feelings often were not. She had but recently met with the Serra Fiona, had spoken beneath the open sky at the grace of Fiona's ability to plead prettily with her father. But she had felt—that day—the confines of her father's bitter anger.
No—Lady, no, she had felt the confines of her own. The desire for death, his, hers, everyone's, as a way of ending the horrible sound of her name screamed in accusation by the distorted voice of the woman she had most loved.
That memory cast its shadow now, working at wounds that had never closed, and by the grace of the Lord, never would. Diora bowed her head, seeking anger, and seeing—seeing the rippling dance of the light on the Lady's water. Seeing, because she so desired to see them, the floating blossoms, out of season, of the lilies on the Lady's Lake, their perfect white petals unmatched anywhere across the breadth of the Dominion. She hated her weakness, for just that moment; the desire for beauty so strong she could feel it rise above all other desires, even the desire for death, for justice—as if death and justice could be separated in the Dominion.
A Northern wind blew the artfully arranged strands of loose hair across her flawless skin. She bowed to the Lady's Lake. "Alana," she said softly.
"Serra Diora," Alana replied, bowing as low as the difference in their ranks publicly demanded. "Your escort is here." She fussed a moment—a departure from the strict etiquette their public excursion demanded—arranging and rearranging the wide-brimmed hat across which hand-painted silks were stretched as a protection against the covetous eye of the Lord—and also, always, as a statement about the worth of the Serra beneath them.
Then her hands fell. She stepped back, falling at once to earth in a position that was not different from that a seraf would have adopted.
A reminder of a painful truth: Alana was a seraf, no matter what freedom she had found for herself behind the broad back of Sendari di'Marano. Sendari di'Sendari.
"Thank you," Diora said, seeing not the rich silks with which Sendari's wives were now always burdened, but rather, the bent back beneath it. "Will you accompany us?"
"No, Serra. I have matters to attend to with regard to the Festival; the Serra Fiona has, in the absence of a wife for the Tyr, been put in charge—mere days ago—of the appearance of the Tor Leonne, and she cannot do without me."
Her father was cruel in his fashion. A younger Diora would have smiled and derived some satisfaction at the discomfiture of a rival. There was no smile now. She saw the rising of the sun and the slow march of time toward darkness, toward the day when the sun would both rise and fail to rise.
"Na'dio?" Alana whispered softly. "Please. He is coming."
And he was. She could see him, resplendent not in the ceremonial robes that she expected but in armor, and at that, armor that had been blackened and scarred in ways that cleaning could not repair. He wore two swords, but he had done her the grace of raising his helm.
She saw his eyes, and wondered who he was, although Alana had called him Marakas par el'Sol. For a moment, just a moment, she knew fear.
/ am not the person I was, Diora thought bitterly. How could she be? She had saved her father's life. And now, as if she were a favored pet, some small, wild creature who had soiled an item of value without understanding or intent and had only just been forgiven, he granted her this—while his own master was away on some errand. Freedom. Freedom and the only escort in the Tor that could be absolutely trusted not to be in the pay of the Sword's Edge.
The cost. The cost of it.
She knelt, carefully folding her knees into dry grass; automatically preserving the illusion of folds of silk as she arranged the fall of her sari in her lap. Her hair, so carefully, intricately bound, cast shadow upon grass at the feet of the Radann Marakas par el'Sol, where it escaped the rich shadow of silk, the brim of a hat fastened by pin and comb to her hair.
He offered her a hand.
It was unmailed.
She lifted hers, and then let it fall, remembering the last time she had been touched by this man. He must have remembered it as well, for he said, in a voice that was barely a whisper, "There is no lack of trust between us on my part, Serra Diora di'Marano. What is yours, is yours; my word that I will not use the Lady's gift against… the Lady's servant."
She said nothing.
He held out his hand again, and he waited. The time stretched, the silence became uncomfortable, and it was her duty or her responsibility to alleviate the tension; she was, after all, the woman. But she remembered: He had, under the guise of offered help, attempted to reach what she hid beneath the surface of skin through the powers with which he had been gifted, or perhaps cursed: healing. To ascertain what her motivations were. To reach her thoughts.
There were some walls that she would not allow to be breached.
She knew that Alana was close to fainting, and that thought amused and steadied her, leeching the edges of her anger into something calmer and smoother.
"Serra," he said softly. "Meet my gaze. I will not be offended or judge you unworthy for boldness."
She stared up at his face, lifting her head slowly, her hands unnaturally still in her lap. She saw a face that she had seen in shadow and the unnatural light of the Sun Sword on an evening that she had also seen demon and death. It was the same face, but it was not; there was an edge to it and a fire to it that she was suddenly aware could burn.
There were worse things than fire.
"I will never again attempt to take what you will not offer. The war is larger than that." He bowed his head to her. Lifted it again.
This time, when she saw his face, she saw a different man: the only man who had been close to tears—although those tears remained unshed—when the man she must always think of as the kai el'Sol—Fredero, born par di'L
amberto—gave himself to the Lord's cause by drawing the Sun Sword where all might see the power of the Lord's edict: that only those born of Leonne blood had the right to wield it.
That man, fire reflected, rather than internalized, she understood. And that man had been chosen by Fredero kai el'Sol, as par, against the advice of the rest of the Radann; she knew this because her husband's mother had made certain that information trickled down into her harem.
The harem that had been such short glory, such perfect happiness.
She took his hand.
It was strong and dry as it closed around her slender fingers. "My gratitude, Radann par el'Sol," she said, lowering her eyes. But as she rose, she felt a sharp pain between her breasts; a hardness and a heaviness that almost dragged her down. Because her aunt had trained her, she did not stumble; did not in any way expose awkwardness of movement. This man might be her ally, but what was an ally in the Lord's eyes? A man of power who desired power and in the end, might find use to make of yours.
"Where do you wish to travel?" the Radann par el'Sol said.
Serra Diora di'Marano did not answer immediately; the freedom of such a choice had not been a possibility and she had not planned for it. Silence, when such lack of foresight became a difficulty, was the wisest course, and Diora had always been pronounced and judged wise for her age.
She was surprised when she spoke.
"To the Swordhaven," she said softly.
"To the—" He bowed, then, his silence more awkward and less practiced than hers. "You will be watched."
She nodded. "And I will be watched, as well, when I venture to the Lake, and when I venture beyond Lake and plateau into the merchants' palace to find the mask and the dress that I will wear for the moon's full face."
"I am," he said softly, "the cerdan to the Serra's command for this day; the kai el'Sol himself has ordered no less. Come. Let us pay our respects at the Swordhaven; the day is short."
She opened the doors herself.
Marakas moved to aid her, but there was something solid about the feel of old wood against the flat of her palms that she desired, and in as polite a way as one could possibly be rude, she waved him away and put her own slender shoulders into the work of opening the door.
Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court Page 61