Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court

by The Shining Court

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  20th of Scaral, 427 AA

  Tor Leonne

  The streets were busy.

  They were always busy during the Festival season, Sun or Moon, but there was, in the hurried movements of the crowds that streamed through the grip of frustrated merchants, a tension and a furtive silence that was unusual given that the Lady neared Her time. The dawn came; the Lord prepared to give way for the three days that ended with the full Festival Moon. Lady's gift, that final night, although the spill of wildness often began, hesitantly, on the night prior to it. She was, after all, nearest Her ascendancy; She forgave much.

  But the Lady was angry this year; there were dead to prove it. And the Tyr was no Leonne; the streets whispered the truth, the cobbled stones carried the words. No man could be heard to speak them—no clansman—and no one listened to the whispers of the women or the mutterings of the serafs, but the words traveled, wind-borne, like the locusts that occasionally destroyed whole harvests beneath the Lord's careless gaze.

  Even so, the serafs cleaned the founts; they polished brass and silver; they cleaned and repaired the banners and flags, the hangings and tapestries, the tenting and the awnings that were a part of the Lady's Festival. Wine came in barrels and on wagons; merchants—the less timorous, or those with the tacit alliance of one of the older clans—dragged their horses or camels—depending on the direction they traveled into the heartlands from. Some were turned back by the Voyani warnings, but many simply didn't have the luxury; die by the Lady's hand or the Lord's—starvation was starvation—and the Festival season could make or break a small merchant family's fortunes.

  But the large merchant families worried no less.

  Behind the gated entrances to homes that would impress even the Tyrs, surrounded by the best cerdan money could buy, swathed in their silks and surrounded by things which drew the attention of men of quality and power, it could be argued that they had more to lose.

  By some.

  But the worries, in the end, were the same: family first, then fortune. "Maria, I don't like it."

  The Serra Maria en'Jedera bowed gracefully to her husband. In fact, to his great annoyance, and the amusement of her younger son—the carefully hidden amusement—she fell into the full supplicant posture. It looked very strange, coming as it did from a woman dressed as a barely free merchant's mother.

  Mika, her oldest child, was thundering around the circumference of the most private of her chambers, lifting the mats with his heavy thumping stride. "You should listen to Da," he said, the words heavy with an anger that was a thin covering over fear. "Not mock him!"

  "Na'mi," she said gently, lifting herself from her position without her husband's permission, such as it was. These were, after all, her rooms, and in them—in them she was allowed, as all Serras were who did not have the misfortune to have married monsters, some control of her life. And such a small space to have control in. For a moment she pitied the clanswomen. But only for a moment.

  Mika blushed. The rebuke in her use of a child's name was enough, for at least the span of one long breath, to stop his heavy tread. And in truth, the elegance and grace of a Serra was no deception; she disliked the loud and the ugly wherever she saw it.

  It caused her difficulty among her kin. She lifted a pale hand to the chain at her throat; the heart of the Lyserran Voyani beat there more, strongly than her own; it was as if, this night, it absorbed breath, and blood, and spirit: everything she was. Everything she had to offer.

  Or perhaps it was as if it demanded no less.

  But unlike the other three Voyani Matriarchs, Maria's path had led her down a life that was split between the two Dominions: the one ruled by men like the clansman she had married— paler, lesser versions, of course—and the one covered in the crisscrossing web of the never-ending Voyanne.

  "Maria?"

  She looked up at her husband, and tightened her palm around a gem that Ser Tallos kai di'Jedera had never been able to see, although Mika and Jonni could see it quite well, and Aviana, her eldest girl, could sense it when it was within the building. Lorra was sensitive to it as well, but she said nothing; Aviana was Matriarch's daughter and heir, and Lorra adored her; she did nothing to draw attention away.

  Or perhaps, Maria thought, she was like her mother and knew it: she was not quite of the Voyanne, and the clansmen resented what they saw as the obvious domestication of their own. Had Maria not been found by the Lysseran heart—a story in its own right—she would never have been accepted by the Voyani.

  As it was, they were uneasy around her, as if she might break with a loud word, a badly drawn breath. And she had learned to put an edge into her words; to reveal more of herself; to be open with her grief and her anger—but to hide, to always hide, all scent or trace of fear. In that, at least, the clans and the Voyani were alike.

  The heart steadied her. It brought back the memories of the childhood that lay buried beneath the memories of her induction into the graces of the Dominion's high society. "Tallos," she said,, in a voice that was rougher than he liked, and gentler than she should have been, "what choice do I have?"

  "You know what I want, Maria."

  "And you know, my love, that you cannot accompany me. The summons was clear."

  "What summons? I heard no word, I saw no magic; I saw a bone ring. That was all. What would make you risk this night, these streets? The Tyr is looking for the Voyani Matriarchs."

  "And he has found one, and she escaped him. She escaped the Widan, and the Tyran, and the cerdan; she cannot be found. Who will mistake me for Voyani? My own do not," she added, keeping the trace of bitterness out of her voice. "My hair is like the mountain peaks, and my skin, almost the same, and I am too thin and I speak too little and when I speak, it is too softly." She smiled a moment, and the smile was cutting, "Yet I am not merciful enough." She bowed to her husband.

  "Your boys—"

  "No. The only person with a right to attend is Aviana, and I will not risk her."

  "Maria, please."

  She stood. Straightened out the dress that she wore, a service-able sari of a heavier fabric than she was used to. "I have my guard," she said.

  "Oh?" Her husband's demeanor changed. She had angered him. "Who?"

  She bowed her head. "Enter," she said, not even pitching her voice to carry. Her husband was nonplussed.

  But the stranger entered the room anyway. He bowed, very low, to Ser Tallos kai di'Jedera, as if this meeting occurred not in the heart of Ser Tallos' harem, but rather in the main chambers in which dignitaries of lesser note were gathered.

  "My apologies," he said smoothly, as he rose. "For presuming, but I offer you my word, Ser Tallos, that I will guard your Serra with my life."

  Ser Tallos di'Jedera had gone from concerned to grim with a twitch of a few muscles. He stared, unblinking, into the face of Kallandras, the Northern bard. His Serra waited, lips moving up in a pained, fond smile that was absolutely genuine. "Tallos," she scolded gently. "Was this not what you requested? Has he not proved the ability that you doubted?"

  "Maria—"

  "If I do not go, we will all die, and I will not risk my husband and my sons." She had no wives; it was not the Voyani way, and in that, blood had proved stronger than upbringing. "Not to that certainty."

  "And he is to be given you what you what you deny your own family?"

  Kallandras raised a brow, turning to face her, the expression his question.

  She chose to answer it. "Protection," she said quietly. "It is not only their duty, but their right."

  "Serra," he said, bowing. "It is early yet, but I am not certain how long it will take us to arrive at our destination; if there is difficulty at all—"

  "Understood. Wait a moment beyond the hanging; I will join you." He bowed, accepting the command so gracefully she felt he must have followed the orders of women all his life.

  When he was gone, she simply said, "Na'mi, come and hug your mother. Na'jon, you, too."
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  The older boy held back a moment, as if incapable of believing that she intended to go on without him. But the younger son, her boy, came quietly and put his arms around her slender shoulders. "You'll come back?" he asked.

  "Yes," she replied softly, "although I wish your father would take my advice and leave the Tor."

  "Mother," Jonni said, reasonably, "he has his duty and you have yours; he cannot leave the Tor without losing all hope of position within the new order."

  "And what good is position without life?" she countered, but with neither fire nor edge. She accepted with grace the risk that she asked her husband to accept. In that, they were different.

  He accepted gracelessly.

  When her oldest son had finished his fierce, brief, wordless hug, her husband proved that he and Mika were cut from the same cloth.

  "Where would I find another wife like you? You drive me to madness, you make a fool of me, you unman me in a way I'm certain no clansman would be unmanned; you let your blood relatives turn my daughters into useless harridans—and it doesn't matter. If you are this Voyani Matriarch, then you are what you are. But let it cost your life, and Jedera will war against the Voyani until there are none of either. Do you understand?" His grip on her arms tightened. He shook her to punctuate each of the last three words.

  In return, she lifted her hands, framed his weathered face between them, and kissed his brow. It was her promise, or as much of a promise as she would make and be bound to. And he closed his eyes after a moment and leaned into the kiss, defeated by it.

  "Tell the bard," he said, as she turned to go, "that I'll kill him or have him killed if you are harmed." Cold voice now. No doubt at all that he meant those words.

  As she left the room, Kallandras joined her. They walked some distance in the silence of that good-bye; she was certain he had heard all that was said; equally certain that the truth and the vulnerability that had been expressed had been absorbed into his silence, to remain there, undiscovered by even the strongest of winds. She was that comfortable instantly; a poor sign.

  But the fact that Yollana favored him with her trust was a reasonable one, and it excused some of her ease.

  "How shall we proceed?" she asked.

  "Cautiously," he replied, and then he said, "expect trouble, Matriarch."

  And she said, "I know."

  Over her heart, pressed into flesh as if it had grown spines, the Voyani heart burned.

  But trouble did not dog her steps, or his; in the open air the worst of the difficulties they encountered had more to do with frayed temper and poor wine than any machinations of their chosen enemy. She paused to look at their reflection in the still water of the Western Fount, and she smiled at what she saw there. He was patient; she was grateful.

  "It is… hurried for a Festival."

  "Yes."

  "But even so, I think the spirit of the city cannot be suppressed, fear or no. Feel it: Timidly, or no, the people of the Tor are beginning to blossom."

  "You have a touch of the bard in you," he said with a smile.

  "The early bard," she replied, her words lifting in question, "whose love of words is perhaps as gratifying to an audience as a small child's love of attention?"

  His smile caught her by surprise, for he seldom smiled. "There are bards who love the florid, Serra Maria, and bards who love the spare; and they speak, each, to their audience."

  "And you, Kallandras of the North, who have somehow earned the trust of the most suspicious of the Voyani Matriarchs, which do you love? To whom do you seek to speak when you speak as a bard does and not as—" She stopped.

  "I have… sung… before at the Festival of the Sun," he said softly. "At the behest of the wife of the Tyr. And it may be, Serra Maria, if you were not of rank to have heard me sing then, that you will be when this situation is resolved."

  She nodded gracefully. Two children ran past her, knocking each other roughly into the folds of her skirts. She caught one by the ear and shook him sharply, her lovely smile still fixed upon her face. "Put it back, child, and my companion will allow you to keep your ear."

  The child squawked something rude, took a closer look at her companion and became completely still. Her companion had his friend by the throat, and his friend's face was changing color.

  She shook her head softly. "You know the penalty for robbing a clansman," she said softly.

  "You're no clansmen," the sullen boy said, "and he ain't neither." He shrugged. His friend's hands were clawing at Kallandras' hand with no visible effect. "It's Lady's Festival, Serra," he said, changing his tone and striving for the near-groveling politeness that would save their lives.

  "Indeed," she said. "My things."

  He returned the small pouch in which money was usually kept; returned as well, the powdered silks that were meant to dry the skin and face if the sweat became a visible problem.

  She let him go.

  He sized up Kallandras; she watched him a moment, surprised that he didn't immediately flee. Then, keeping her eyes on the boy, she said softly, "It is the Lady's Festival, and boys will be… boys."

  "As you say, Serra," the bard replied, dropping the young would-be thief. "Although thieves generally learn the error of their judgment in a more permanent fashion."

  The two boys ran; she noted that the older boy—the boy she'd caught—stopped to grab the younger boy's hand and pull him to the safety of crowd and distance.

  She wondered if they were her own, or Yollana's, Elsarre's, or Margret's. Or if they were the sons of very poor clansmen, or worse, orphans who narrowly escaped becoming serafs in a greater man's home. "Lady be merciful," she whispered, drawing the Moon's quarter circle across her heart. "As we desire, so shall we be."

  "You, Serra, are a surprise to me."

  "And if I believe that," she said softly, watching the human wave the boys' flight made through the crowd until even that evidence of their existence was gone, "I would not be the wife of one of the richest of the merchant clansmen." Her smile was, as her expression, sad.

  "I would feel no pity for them," she said, "but it is clear that they understand family. That boy was terrified but he was afraid for his own, not for himself."

  "He was afraid for himself," Kallandras replied. "There are sacrifices we cannot make and face ourselves again in the quiet of any evening the Lady keeps."

  "Indeed," she said. "But you think deeply, and I think they do not; they respond from the heart."

  "And their own needs, yes. But how is that different from what we do? Come. We have at least an hour's travel to the gates, and beyond."

  The sound of singing was not particularly pleasant. But it was loud, and it would get louder still before the Festival's abrupt end. Maria felt comforted by it. The shadow of Yollana's sum-mons had made all shadows seem menacing and dark, and the very ordinary activity of the rough men of the Tor eased her.

  Kallandras kept them at bay, providing her a casement through which to view the world. She could smell the food and the fire in the air; could see glimpses of the jugglers and acrobats as they prepared for the following day, marking the way to their various platforms. She could see—and she stopped for just a glimpse before Kallandras ushered her on—two men, trapped in the dance of the blade, oblivious, or so it seemed, to all others.

  "This city," she said softly, lifting a hand to her pale throat, "is important to me."

  He nodded.

  "It is not important to any of the others; perhaps the opposite. I think there will be some argument about its fate."

  "I believe you are correct. But perhaps the argument will not be as clear as you think it. The clansmen so despised by the Voyani have made the Tor Leonne their seat of power—but if you destroy the Tor Leonne, or allow it to be destroyed—"

  "So much more than the clansmen will be lost," she replied. But it was of the clansmen, not these desperate, traveling merchants and performers, that she thought.

  She had seen the streets of the city strewn from
one end to another with their broken bodies; fires had gutted whole buildings. The Voyani gift was strong in Maria; much stronger than any but her husband knew.

  She stopped a moment in the broad, wide streets the lesser sellers used. Froze there.

  "Serra?" The bard's voice, like a breeze, brisk and cool.

  She answered him when she would not have answered any other, not even Tallos. "I saw a child's ball, there. It was a first year toy, one that grandmothers make for their grandchildren to celebrate their survival. It was not a fine ball; made of scraps of clothing but seamed with enough care that it was dirty and worn and still in one piece. A bit flattened."

  "Serra—"

  "And it was on the ground, beside the child—" she turned to look at those stones, as if memorizing the crowds that now milled across them would somehow erase the deeper vision. "Not everything I see comes true," she said, and this time she turned to him, to meet those clear eyes, to look at skin that, beneath some thin paint, was paler than her own, "And I will do whatever I can to make that vision a false one."

  "Even if the child is not your own?"

  "I am a Serra," she said softly. "I see death everywhere. Among the serafs I was taken with, only a handful have survived, and not one has reached a station equal to my own." She gazed up at the face of the indifferent sun. "And I hate the Lord for it. I am the Lady's in all possible ways. If not for the grace of Tallos, I might be that child's mother—"

  She closed her eyes, smiled weakly. "I could never bear to listen to my own cry. It is such a weakness."

  "Serra," the Northern bard said, unexpectedly, "do not speak of it as weakness. I have seen your sons, and I have—although I will not tell you when—seen your daughters. Your children are what I believe the Dominion's children might one day be: of both the Lord and the Lady, the Sun and Moon. But perhaps in a different land, where the power that you have is not granted by husband, and by husband taken away."

  Her smile was bitter. "Power wears odd faces."

  "Yes, and this Festival it will offer odd faces: the masks."

  "Yes." She shivered. Seeing a woman, face made of the clay that she had donned, blood everywhere, and beside her, confused and terrified, holding that first year ball as if it were all that she had in the world, a pretty child in a Festival dress.