Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court

by The Shining Court

  Ritual, then. Ceremony. These things defied sense and logic.

  "What—what do they do?" Lady Sariyel's voice was quiet. Steady.

  "They line the way," Cortano replied.

  The Lady started to speak, and the great beasts roared. She lost all words, and all ability to speak; they seemed to drain from her along with all color. Cortano's hand tugged beard; he did not speak until the shaking of the balcony had passed.

  She closed her eyes. "You do not fear them," she said softly.

  "I? Any sane man would fear them, Lady Sariyel. And were I to be fed to the great beasts of the Hells, I would certainly… show fear." He shrugged. "Perhaps, for the first time since the Lord built this Palace, He will let the beasts rampage. But I believe He will let them go in the streets below, and not within the Court. We, you and I, are too valuable."

  The trace of bitterness in the words did not escape her notice.

  A knock came at the door. A third man joined them. His hair was dark with white streaks, his face as pale as Lady Sariyel's. "Sword's Edge," he said, bowing in a passable imitation of Southern grace. "Lady."

  "Are we summoned?"

  "Merely to dine," the man said.

  "Krysanthos—I do not think I am hungry."

  "Very well. But I would suggest that we eat. Remember, Lady Sariyel, where we are, and who watches. Our fate is not sealed until the Full Moon rises on the morrow." Krysanthos bowed. "I would be honored to be your escort. Sword's Edge?"

  "Indeed," Cortano returned the very polite bow. They were not friends, but that was the nature of the Court; friendship could be a costly luxury when this much power was involved. But if they were not friends, they were, at the moment, compatriots by the very grim circumstance in which they found themselves.

  "Have any others returned to the Court?"

  "No. I believe the summons has gone out—but extricating themselves from their positions would place them in jeopardy, and I believe the Lord is unwilling to expend his power in the opening of the portals necessary to bring them here.

  "There are, as you know, very few who can travel as you travel, Widan."

  Cortano shrugged off the compliment. "It is unfortunate. Come. Let us eat."

  They did not make it out of the room before Krysanthos said, "You have had no word?"

  The Sword's Edge smiled grimly. "Yes," he said coldly, "but none that will please any of us. Let us eat. I believe on the morrow we will be… summoned. There is an anointing ceremony that is to take place before we can be adequate vessels in the Lord's service."

  21st of Scaral, 427 AA

  Tor Leonne

  Ramdan watched the Serra Teresa in silence. It was a familiar perspective in many ways. He looked at the line of her nose as he watched her bend her face to her hands a moment beneath the clear sky over which the moon reigned.

  "Will they forgive me, do you think?"

  He did not answer, and after a long moment, she said, "Or is forgiveness, as usual, a thing one can only grant oneself?"

  His bow was enough of an answer; her lips curved up in a smile. But she heard an answer, and she rose at once at the sound of the familiar voice.

  "Serra," Kallandras of Senniel College said, offering her the most exquisite bow a woman of her station—her previous station— could hope for. "I do not think they will question you, or even notice the slight deception."

  She looked up. In the moonlight she could see blood on his shirt. He did not however seem willing to acknowledge injury or wound, and she was, as his bow reminded her, the Serra Teresa di'Marano. She did not ask.

  They were silent as they stood together; it was easy to be silent. The crowd—thinned but not nonexistent—was emboldened by wine and Festival, and they filled the cracks between words with their unhurried noises.

  After a few minutes Kallandras said, "The Tyr'agar has generously announced his intent to allow revelers upon the plateau during the actual evening of the Festival Moon."

  "Yes," she said softly.

  He smiled; the smile was very gentle. "Tell her, Serra."

  "Tell her?"

  "Tell the Serra Diora to be ready when you arrive."

  She closed her eyes; he understood the nature of the deception in its entirety, and he accepted it. Nothing she had done had been done for the approval of anyone save perhaps one dead woman who slept restlessly in every memory that contained her. But she felt her throat close over the words that she might have spoken; pretty words, empty words meant to soothe or dull.

  He offered her a hand, and she accepted it, dressed as she was. "I must keep watch," he said quietly. "But find what you purported to seek, and return before the ATerafin panics and sends Avandar, or worse, chooses to travel on her own. It is late enough now that they will not seek camp; they will stay in the Tor and they will travel with you at the appointed hour."

  She said, "Thank you."

  And because she spoke to Kallandras alone, and in a language that only he would hear and understand, she knew that he heard her; but he did not acknowledge the words in any obvious way.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  22nd of Scaral, 427 AA

  Arkosan Camp

  Dawn. Margret woke to the sound of a distant argument; she listened with one eyelid open in the darkened wagon, heard a few telltale phrases—about food and time and marriage—and turned over on her side again. That type of argument no one smart interfered with; in the end, the shouter and the shoutee—both women—would make up and forgive each other, but at least one, if not both, would be angry at your interference for the next ten years.

  Men could get that wrong on occasion. Some leeway was granted them.

  "'Gret!"

  No leeway, on the other hand, was granted the Matriarch.

  "Go away!"

  Light flooded the wagon. "I'm sorry you were too tense to sleep last night," 'Lena said, without any trace of sincerity, "but you can't make up for it this morning. The old witch is after all of us, and I'm not saying no to her. You want to tell her to piss off, you can do it in person."

  "If I tell her in person," Margret said, trying—and failing—to cover herself with blankets faster than 'Lena was tossing them aside, "it would kind of defeat the point; I'd have to get up."

  "Well, then, I guess you suffer."

  Margret glared at her cousin; her cousin laughed. This much was ritual. But there was an edge to 'Lena's laughter that Margret had never heard before, and the circles under her cousin's eyes were very dark. "Didn't you sleep at all?"

  "Yeah. Like a rock."

  "Great." Margret shrugged herself into clothing while 'Lena waited. "So we can both fall asleep during the most important night of our lives."

  Elena laughed. "Every time I fell asleep, I started dreaming, 'Gret. Every time."

  "Me too." Margret struggled with her boots and then gave up and let Elena put them on. "I dreamed that people were standing over my coffin and they didn't bloody well listen while I screamed myself hoarse."

  "Screamed?"

  "I wasn't dead, but it escaped their notice." She forced herself to laugh. It felt… fake. Lady, she was tired. "What about you?"

  "I dreamed about Nicu."

  "I think," Margret said, not meeting 'Lena's eyes, "I'd rather dream about being buried alive."

  "You would," 'Lena replied, lifting the back of her hands to rub the sleep out of her eyes. "And we'd both rather have the dreams we had than be late to meet Yollana; come on. Donatella made us food—"

  "But she's feeding the children!"

  "She says, today, feeding us is feeding the children, because if we don't… because."

  "All right. Food and then Yollana."

  It was barely the right order to start the morning with, and apparently no one had slept well, at least not to judge by the extremely sour expressions on everyone's faces. Everyone's except the Lyserran Matriarch, who merely looked distant and cool.

  The wind on the plain was brisk.

&
nbsp; "Word came ahead of Kallandras," Yollana said. "The Serra accomplished her task, and if we are to defend the city itself against whatever it is that's a problem, we're to light the fire before the sun sets and then to make our way to the Founts with the masks the timeless one left us."

  Margret looked at the wood. "How long is the fire supposed to last?"

  Yollana's gaze was piercing, but it did not linger. "The fire," she said, "will last until dawn. That's what you asked for, didn't you?" "I —"

  "That is what you asked for."

  "Yollana, I don't remember what I asked for. Whatever it was, it wasn't that specific."

  Yollana frowned. "Enough, then. It doesn't matter; the price was paid. We won't know until the morning after the Festival Moon's fall whether or not it was high enough. Get your things; we take our position at the fire's edge and we prepare."

  "What else is there to prepare?"

  "Ourselves, girl," Yollana said. "Maybe you're not clear on what has to happen—but the masks that the timeless one gave us—they have to go on. Have you looked at them?"

  Margret couldn't answer the question. Yollana's words had hit a weakness she hadn't known she had. "We have to wear them?"

  "Did you understand nothing you heard?" Elsarre's voice, thin with the same fear that Margret felt.

  "I guess not," Margret snapped back. "Maybe if there was a little less jabbering from other quarters, I might have been able to concentrate."

  " 'Gret," 'Lena spoke out of the corner of her mouth. Elsarre's hands lodged on her hips in a gesture that was familiar to any Voyani, no matter what the family. But Yollana's harsh bark brought them both to bear. They went toward the fire that had been laid out like the two strokes of an oath, and they took their places before the wood they had anointed.

  And Yollana came forward, hobbling, the canes that she used to support her weight the only aid she would accept. She banished the daughters—which in this case meant shooing them off with the length of the hard wood and, as Elena pointed out, it was called a hard wood for a reason—and carried the bag that Evayne had given them in uncharacteristic silence.

  She walked first to Elsarre, and from the leather sack, she carefully pulled the first mask. Elsarre reached out to touch it, and then cried out—with something that sounded a bit too much like terror for Margret's liking—and leaped back. Yollana, implacable as high summer sun on a cloudless day, waited, the mask in her hand.

  Elsarre was very, very pale when she reached out again; she did not speak. But she took the mask. "Must we touch them?"

  Yollana said, her voice unusually gentle, "We must wear them, Matriarch. There is no way to do the one without doing the other. The masks must be presented to the fire, or they will devour us, and we will fail in our duties.'"

  Elsarre swallowed air. Nodded. She walked to the logs that she had anointed with the Lady's wine, holding the mask with the tips of her fingers, and looked at the crushed, flat brush and weeds, at the wood, at the symbolic empty vessel—at anything, in short, but the face.

  Yollana came to Maria next, and to Maria she handed a mask. From this distance, it was clear to Margret that both the first and the second mask followed the pattern of the masks the servants of the Lord of Night had made: the simple face, like a child's mask, and the delicate one that might belong to a pretty youth or a pretty girl. Maria paled, but she had had Elsarre's cry as warning, and she had braced herself against what Yollana now offered.

  And having braced herself, she started. Visibly.

  My turn, Margret thought. Swallowed. Waited.

  Sure enough, Yollana came to her next, mask outheld in weathered hand like a commandment and a doom. And this mask, this was a full face, fine-boned and yet wide enough to be either a man's face or a woman's, hair and details perfect.

  Unfortunately, it was also alive.

  She embarrassed herself. She screamed in a fair imitation of Elsarre of Corrona. The mask almost fell from her shaking hand. "I can't wear this," she said, speaking before thought could overtake her mouth and shut it.

  Yollana glared at her. Margret was grateful that the old woman didn't find the words to express what she was obviously feeling. Instead she waited, patiently, while Margret gathered enough of her wits—and her grim determination—to take firm hold of the mask. Then she nodded and moved on.

  Elsarre to the West, Margret to the South, Maria to the East, and to the North, where all their enemies lay, Yollana. She grimaced with distaste and took the last mask out of the bag. It was by far the finest, and at this distance, it was impossible to tell whether or not it, too, was alive.

  Or perhaps it was impossible to tell without touching the mask itself. Margret stared at grass and wood and water, at anything but the eyes that watched her, bulging in pain or fear or plea—it was hard to tell without closer examination, and she didn't think she could get through the ceremony if she stopped to look at the face.

  And then Yollana of the Havalla Voyani, the oldest and the wisest of the Matriarchs in this generation, knelt at the foot of the fire. She set the mask down upon her lap, and stared at it, and as she did—meeting the eyes that were present and moving, she said, in a voice that no one could avoid hearing, "Anoint the masks as you anointed the wood, Matriarchs. Lady's daughters. And then, when you have finished, anoint yourselves likewise. You will then be able to hear their voices, even where they have no mouths to speak with."

  Elsarre and Margret exchanged a very panicked glance; Yollana had not looked up. She was now a rock at the pinnacle of a quartered circle. An anchor.

  "You will do them this honor because, after the fires are written in wood, the lives that have been written in flesh will be offered in the stead of our children's lives. Whether they died willingly or no—and you will know, for they will tell you—they are our people, our flesh, and our blood, and the debt we owe them is a kin-debt that will know no end. It is not written in sand, nor spoken in wind; it is written here, in wood, as oaths are written between equals.

  "And if you think to avoid this, do not. This is the price that we will pay for their sacrifice, and until we know or understand the whole of what they have lost, we cannot offer their lives as our own. Do you understand? You will give them their due."

  Margret stared dully at the face that she propped in her lap. At the eyes that followed her every movement. She reached for her dagger, twice, and missed both times. A sign of cowardice. Or a sign from the Lady. She didn't much care which. Although she was Matriarch by bloodline, she had not yet completed the pilgrimage which would define her; nor had she retrieved the heart which would succor her.

  She had never been asked the question which she knew lay at the end of the road: What would you do to save the children?

  But looking at this face, this living mask, this life crushed into a space far too small for the living, and trapped there, she thought that she was too squeamish to give this answer.

  She found the dagger on her third attempt; by this time she had lost sight of the others; she was alone, by a fire that had not yet been started, this face, this mask, awaiting the gift of her blood. The cut that she made this time was not too deep. But it was sharp, and she felt the sting of metal just that little bit too far beneath the skin.

  She took her bleeding palm and pressed it against the forehead of the mask. She hesitated a moment; she did not want to hear the story behind the face; did not want to suffer the pain and the guilt of being—even indirectly—the cause of it. But could she do less? Could she do less when in the end, the sacrifice itself was important and no one else might know of it? No one else might carry the story, and make it a part of their history?

  She swallowed; she had always disliked intense pain, especially if it happened to be her own. Then she pressed her bleeding palm into her own forehead, for the sake of symmetry.

  The mask was a man's face. She knew this because she heard his voice, a thin, leathery sort of thing, the type of voice you'd expect from a man who'd taken a throat wound
and had lost all ability for forceful speech, but who was still trying to bark out a command.

  He said, My name is Andaru, and I am of the Arkosa Voyani. And inexplicably, Margret began to weep, tears of rage and fear and sorrow. If Evayne had been standing before her now, she might have tried to kill her. This man was one of Margret's own, but he was still a stranger. She listened as he spoke of his life: his birth—a story that came from his mother, for he certainly didn't remember it on his own; his youth in the wilds of the Averdan valleys, where the Arkosan caravan had chosen to stay for several years running; the raid by the clansmen that had robbed him of a father and a brother, but had made him a man in the eyes of those who survived.

  He spoke of his favorite stones; rocks, flat and smooth, that he had gathered the one time they had passed close enough to the ocean that he could taste nothing but dry salt against his lips and on his skin for weeks afterward. She could not understand how he could speak of these things when the fate that they wound their way toward was this: entrapment in what remained of his face.

  / am Andaru, Matriarch, he said softly, and it is my honor to serve you; to protect the children. To preserve the Voyanne against our enemies. I came to you willingly, and I will go with the winds when they come. But I wish you to know my life, for when the winds come, there is no one else who will remember its final moments.

  And she wept again because his voice was gentle and she had thought that all that remained to him would be fear.

  He told her about the girl that he hated on sight, she was so rough and rude and pushy. She laughed out loud when he told her about their wedding night. He told her about his children, and when he spoke of them, his voice grew somber, and she knew why: even if he had taken this extraordinary step to save their lives, they would know loss. Not death; he had, he said, just disappeared. They would know loss. They would wonder why he had left them.