Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court

by The Shining Court

  For a moment, surrounded by these, jostled on all sides by those too careless to actually meet his gaze, he felt like the brass or the stone; unchanged, unchanging, the life moving around him like a halo or an aurora of its own. He felt a fascination, a hunger, that had no possible existence in the Hells; the dead were dead, and as unchanging in their fashion as those who had chosen to accept the responsibility of long justice.

  For a moment, that hard fruit in his hand, that young woman's hesitant face before him, he could remember a time before this time; a time when that sense of justice had meant something other than pleasure and indulgence and joy at the pain of the damned—

  He killed her quickly. Efficiently. Her basket fell, scattering fruit along the cobbled road.

  One nameless red item rolled along the ground, caught in the crevice worn by feet and wheels between the stones, until it came to rest at the base of the Western Fount.

  Water caught light's reflection; it would be some time before her body was discovered. His magics had made certain of that. But he found himself by that Fount, bent over, his hand around the redness of a food that he had been promised he need never eat again.

  And he cursed Isladar as he had not cursed an enemy in millennia.

  Festival Night.

  There were festivals in the Empire. The Challenge season, with its merchants, its would-be heroes, its barbaric Southerners and its aloof Northerners, was perhaps the closest to this mix of bodies—but the atmosphere in the Tor was very different from Challenge time: It reminded Jewel of the last six days of Henden, called the six dark days, a commemoration, in ritual, of the devastation of the Empire in the wars of the Blood Barons before the return of Veralaan with her sons: Cormalyn and Reymalyn, called the Twin Kings. Jewel suspected they'd never particularly looked alike, and weren't born at the same time. History left these details to the imagination.

  Many things were left to the imagination.

  She walked behind a silent woman, a woman who, in gait and movement, might have been a slender man, hair pulled taut and slicked back in a warrior's knot; sword half visible beneath the swell of cape, pants wide for ease of movement, boots flat, ugly, practical. She walked slightly ahead of them, cocky, an arrogance to the freedom of her movement that spoke of rank and power. She had it; the clothing that she wore was simple but costly. Jewel's favorite kind of clothing. She had no doubt that the sword was the same, although she only caught a glimpse of it. Wondered if the woman—introduced by Kallandras as Serra Teresa di'Marano—knew how to use it. It was hard to imagine, watching the ease with which she navigated the crowds—mostly by staring down her slender nose until the people unfortunate enough to be standing in her way moved—that there was anything she couldn't do well.

  And that type of person always made Jewel feel either sick or inferior. Or both. It would have been easier if the Serra was friendly; she was not. She was cool and distant and her manners, whether woman or man, were elegant and refined. She made Jewel feel clumsy and awkward without saying a single word.

  Jewel navigated—a pretty overstatement which meant that she was dragged along—the streets behind Kallandras. She had been given two choices: bind her breasts—a painful but swift process— or travel as a poorer clanswoman. Jewel had chosen to travel as a clanswoman and spare herself the pain, but she decided, the fifth time that Kallandras gently corrected her position so that she was walking slightly behind him, that she should have gone for the binding and passed, in the faded evening light, as a young man.

  Then again, she'd suffer by comparison to the Serra Teresa, and she wasn't much interested in that.

  She had originally planned on traveling as one of the Voyani women; she was good at that, and her Torra, imperfect when it came to dealing with the high nobility of the Dominion, was much like the Torra the Havallan Matriarch spoke. But she hadn't counted on that being unsafe in the city; the Voyani always journeyed to the Tor Leonne for the two Festivals. Or they did in the tales her Oma used to tell her when she perched on the lap bent legs made.

  The streets here were both exotic and familiar. The buildings, flat and white from ground to oddly tiled ceiling, looked nothing like the brick or wood that she was used to; there were no grand trees, no merchant Common, no large temples to the various deities who did not make their home on the Isle. But there were votive offerings, she thought, and small fount-stones, which bore fruits and flowers in deliberate, delicate array; she assumed these must be places where the Lady was worshiped. Night places.

  And there were serafs, marked and unmarked, who bent back under the watchful eye of overseers to do the real work this Festival demanded. Polishing brass and cleaning tile, their clothing simple but of a quality that reflected the status of their owner, they seemed much like any laborer to Jewel; some harried, some quiet, some happy.

  It made her wonder about the nature of freedom.

  Until she saw the young boy being beaten. She could not see the boy's face, but she could hear his whimpering pleas, and she wasn't about to walk away from it. It had been a long time since she'd had to.

  She was wrong, of course. But the memories it brought back were the least pleasant of all her memories. The helplessness. What was the point of having power if you had to stand back and watch people being beaten or killed? What was the point? Kallandras caught her arm as she started toward the man with the cudgel. She knew by the type of grip he used he would not let go.

  And that he was right, damn him. She was a clanswoman of low birth, and that man had every right to do as he wished. Festival or no. She hoped, come the Night of the Festival Moon, the seraf had the right to slit his master's throat, if they had Festival at all.

  The Serra Teresa returned, stopping a moment before she came to stand beside them. It was the first hesitation that Jewel had seen, and she didn't like what she thought it meant. But the Serra offered no criticism; in fact, all she said—when she chose to speak at all— was, "These are the Lord's lands. On every day, every night, but the one we approach, the laws that govern our lives are His."

  She spoke flawless Weston, and in the mix of that flawless voice, Jewel thought she heard, faint and distant—and cool as desert night was supposed to be—pity. For her. And gods knew, Jewel wasn't the one who needed it.

  "But that boy—"

  "Not here," Avandar said, and she knew no one else would hear his words. What she wanted to say in reply, on the other hand, would probably be heard by the entire Tor. She bit her lip until it bled. She'd done it once or twice at very irritating political meetings—a comparison she felt instantly guilty making. "Make him stop," she said, as quietly as she could, "Or I will."

  "At your command," Kallandras replied, and his voice was so smooth, so incredibly soft, that she wasn't certain if it held sarcasm or not.

  He left her side. She stopped; Avandar came to stand just in front of her, hiding her from the easy view of unscrupulous men— or at least, she thought that must be the so-called reasoning behind this stupid half step behind movement that was so unnatural she had to work to maintain it.

  Kallandras walked quickly to where the boy alternated between sobbing and screaming beneath the shadow and the arm of the man who clearly owned him. In the evening light, she saw no mark across his face—no brand except the bruising, the split lip, the bleeding. Brand enough.

  She started forward again, convulsively, and Avandar caught her arm as Kallandras had done. Exactly the same grip. She wondered if killers so confident in their ability that they didn't need to strut like peacocks were all alike; steel and silence.

  "Watch," Avandar said, shaking her. "Understand subtlety. You are capable of it on occasion."

  "But I—"

  "Jewel," he continued, "you will never learn to lead if you cannot trust those you give orders to follow them. You have given an order. Learn to rule."

  "That's leadership?" she hissed, pressing him, pressing herself. "Telling everyone else what to do while you do nothing?"

  The
look he gave was contempt mingled with something that she couldn't quite name. "No," he said at last. "It is partly choosing the men and women who will follow the orders you have given, but will perform them in a way you could not.

  "Watch," he said quietly.

  What else could she do?

  But she wondered, as she watched Kallandras depart, if Avandar's words and his almost unquestioning acceptance of her command were part of the same lesson. Wondered if, in fact, he knew what she had accepted as her last order from The Terafin. He probably did.

  What have you seen? she thought, not of the bard but of the woman who was arguably his master. What have you seen for me and mine, and when will I know it?

  He stopped, Northern bard, hair darkened by Margret's swift work, skin colored, but still somehow a thing out of place in the Tor. It was his movement, she decided; graceful and lithe, he was completely silent. His feet against the uneven ground gave no hint of his approach; he hoarded all information that might grant an enemy any leeway.

  Jewel realized that he meant to be out of place at that moment; she had been in a gathering as Kallandras' companion before where even she had had trouble telling him from the crowd when she was with him.

  She wondered whether or not he would kill the man; she hoped, fiercely, that he would—although some part of her knew that it would be profoundly disturbing to watch; there was something about Kallandras that was so cold-blooded she was afraid to bear witness to his killing. The fear was misplaced.

  Death in such a fashion would not have served their purpose, and she knew that he chose a purpose and served it with both ferocity of intellect, and the coldness of intellect.

  He touched the arm of the man who was beating the youth.

  That man, Jewel saw, was not large; he was not particularly muscular. The boy was his equal in strength, in size.

  But better to take the beating than the consequences. Better to risk the chance of death than to risk certain death. She said nothing. Avandar's grip did not change. They knew each other that well. For the first time, she was glad she had left her den behind.

  "Jewel," Avandar said, voice by her ear, and she realized that she'd turned away.

  She turned back; the bard was speaking slowly and softly to the man. She could not hear what he said; could not in fact hear his tone. But the man's heavy hands fell slowly, and the cudgel— or whatever it was—fell with it.

  "I understand," Avandar continued quietly, as. the man nodded, again slowly, at the bard's words.

  "No," she replied with conviction. "You don't."

  He was silent.

  "You've never particularly cared if you had to watch a stranger suffer and die. I imagine, with a title like Warlord, you might have even enjoyed it."

  "I did," he said, the two words without inflection.

  But she heard the truth in them, and she hated it.

  Kallandras came back to her. The man barked an order to the slave, and then turned away and left him there. She wanted to intervene somehow; it was a Festival Night.

  "Yes," Kallandras agreed, "it is a Festival Night. But it is not the night, ATerafin, and the cerdan of the Tyr are between every house in the city, watching and waiting for the extraordinary. Let it go. Let it be. We must see the Founts, and if the circles there are broken, we must repair them. That is our goal, this eve; it is our only goal."

  "No. It's their goal. Mine is different."

  "Do you think," Avandar said, his impatience so familiar she thought she would never dislike it again, "you will see enough in the city streets in one night to end the coming threat?"

  "Maybe," she replied. "We don't even understand the nature of the coming threat."

  "You walked the road," he said, "and it has changed you, Jewel. No one walks that road, claims a part of it, and emerges unchanged. Think."

  She was. She was thinking, as she froze a moment, of the last words Evayne had said. I have swallowed the Winter to travel before the host.

  "They're coming," she said quietly.

  "I believe that is so."

  "To what end?"

  "Who can say?"

  "You can. You know more than I do about that Lady and her cursed host."

  "Not here, ATerafin, and perhaps not ever. I do not know why she rides, but if you are here, brought by the Oracle; if the seer who travels through time came here, brought by her own curse and her own vow, I cannot believe that you met the Winter Queen on the road by chance. Come."

  "But—"

  "But?"

  "We've—we've lost Elena." Jewel looked from side to side; the crowds were thin in places, and between them, fire and light shone across the surface of gold and brass, dimpling the stillness of water, the offering to the Lady on this night. They would offer her wine tomorrow.

  And on the Festival Night? Jewel could see the dead all around her if she closed her eyes for even a second; the vision was that strong. Unfortunately, not closing her eyes caused them to tear painfully.

  "Elena is not lost," Kallandras said softly. "She is here. But she waits. The Voyani do not risk their lives in open conflict, and you are not of their number. Nor I, nor Avandar. She will join us as she sees that our stop here has brought no unwanted attention."

  "They always do this?" she whispered.

  • Kallandras turned to face her, eyes clear and dark as water in the night founts. "They are Voyani," he said, as if that explained everything.

  "Some allies," Jewel snorted.

  Avandar and Kallandras exchanged a single glance; it was as if they spoke in a language that she had heard often enough before she could recognize it, but had never—and would never— master.

  Elena joined them, walking with the polite and hampered gait of a lowborn—but free—clanswoman as if it were natural for her. Jewel had seen Elena casually slap a youth who'd gotten just a bit too familiar—and had seen that youth, face reddening in an area the size of her palm and fingers. She couldn't believe the easy way she took to the role of a meek clanswoman, cramming her hair and her expressive movements into this drab bundle of heavy, almost colorless sari.

  Avandar gave her the look that clearly meant: If someone like Elena can accomplish this task so easily, you should be able to do better, and she tried very hard to meet that expectation. She did try.

  But she cursed under her breath—or as under her breath as she ever did—while she walked through the city streets. Avandar, behind them as always, cast a long shadow.

  Margret had been in fine fury—and Jewel understood it so well she'd have caved in an instant to her demands—when she was ordered to remain in the confinement of the circle. But Yollana, the Matriarch of the Havallans, made it clear that her responsibilities lay with the children, and with the fire that they had been told to hold, and hold at ready, for the three days.

  She was worried, was the old woman; Jewel knew it, looking at her face. The lines lay heavily across it, pulling her eyes down so that they looked closed. Margret, mutinous, had opened her mouth to argue, and it was Jewel who found herself saying, "They need you here because you're the heart of the fire.

  "The fire should have come tonight. It's waiting. It'll try to come tomorrow. You'll have to hold it back."

  And the four Matriarchs had stared a long while at her in the silence that followed her words. It occurred to her, walking in the streets of the Tor Leonne, hundreds of miles from home, that those four women had taken an awful lot on faith.

  She tried to imagine how she would have reacted to her own appearance in the center of that wooden crucible, Avandar dressed in gaudy, expensively jeweled clothing at her back, and she as herself, whatever that might mean to the four ruling members of the Voyani families. Nothing she had ever heard about the Voyani from her merchants led her to believe that they were particularly trusting.

  Especially not the women.

  But they accepted her as omen; and they were superstitious.

  "You've walked a hard road," Yollana said at last. "But you see
truly. I name you, as I name Kallandras, roadbound; you are not of the Voyanne, but you have in truth walked it, and if I see well, you will walk it until it ends."

  The striking, dark-haired woman gasped.

  The pale woman, equally striking, but in a much more understated fashion, became utterly still; Jewel realized that she had stopped breathing.

  "Margret," Yollana said, her expression taking on a sharpness that Jewel wouldn't have liked at all had it been directed at her, "when you walked your path to the fire's heart, did you ask for a sign? Did you pray, did you pray to the Lady?" She slapped the leather loop she wore for emphasis; herb pouches lifted and fell, punctuation.

  "And you didn't?" Margret snapped back, whip-crisp, hands finding her hips.

  "Oh, I'm sure we all did," the old woman said. "But you're the fire's heart because this is Arkosa. Your prayer was answered. Now live with the answer, you ungrateful wretch, even if you don't like it."

  "And how is this the answer, that I'm supposed to stay here?"

  "You heard her. You heard what she said. You have to contain the fire. You." The woman, fingers now tucked into that wide, long loop, turned some of her sour attention toward Jewel Markess ATerafin. "What happens if she goes?"

  "Goes?"

  "Goes with you."

  "Goes with me?"

  "Are you an idiot, you don't understand Torra? Goes with you there." She jabbed her finger in the direction of fire in the night sky; the Tor Leonne, lit at the center beneath their view by Festival lights. "You look at me, girl. Look at my eyes."

  "I would if you'd stop squinting," Jewel said.

  Silence.

  Long silence. It was broken by laughter, which in turn was broken by a longer silence.

  "If you were one of mine," Yollana began, but she let the rest of the threat go. It wasn't clear to Jewel that she was actually angry. "What happens if she goes?" she said again, lowering her voice.

  And this time, Jewel let herself relax into the question because she could feel the answer there, something unpleasant and heavy, like the residue herbal brews often left on the tongue. She was very glad, as she met the lined and wrinkled face of the Havallan Matriarch, that she wasn't Havallan.