by S L Farrell
Tecuhtli Zolin laughed mockingly. “Go back? Now? When we’re standing here in the smoke of victory, just as you foresaw? Nahual Niente, you disappoint me. I came here to challenge this Kraljiki who would send his people to steal our cousins’ land but who won’t even lead his own army. Citlali, Mazatl—what do you say?”
Mazatl was already frowning, firelight playing over his marked face. Like Zolin, he still wore his battered and gore-marked armor. “I say that I’m glad to be standing on the ground, even here. To be at sea again?” He spat on the rocks at his feet. “I came to fight, not to sail. I say we give Axat what She has earned here, and go on.” Citlali muttered his agreement, but appeared less convinced.
The nahualli and the warriors gathered nearest the fire had already begun the low, haunting chanting of the prayer to Axat. The moon’s light fell bright and full on the altar stone, glinting on the thick glass tips of the eagle claws. Niente nodded to Zolin.
Two nahualli grabbed one of the prisoners and hauled the man forward. The offizier was blubbering with fright, calling out to Cénzi. The nahualli pulled him onto the altar stone and pushed him down to his knees. He stared up at Niente in terror. “Go bravely to your death,” Niente said to the man in his own language as he picked up one of the eagle claws. He turned the horn at the tip, the ominous click loud as the spell was activated. “Pray to your god. This will be quick. I promise you that much.” Niente nodded again, and the nahualli held the man’s arms tight as the man closed his eyes, his lips moving in silent prayer.
Niente opened his own mind to Axat and the moon glow, and pressed the bone of the muzzle to the man’s stomach. The sound of the eagle claw’s detonation echoed over the city.
Allesandra ca’Vörl
JAN LOOKED ALMOST FRIGHTENED, his eyes so wide there was white entirely around the pupils. “Matarh . . . taking the army against the Holdings . . . I don’t know.”
“I understand the danger,” she told him. “Yes, it is a huge step to take so early in your time as Hïrzg, and I understand how you must feel. I do. You would need to trust Starkkapitän ca’Damont’s expertise; even so, this would test you beyond anything you’ve ever done in your life. But, Jan, I know this is something you can do. Taking the army into battle is something you must eventually do—as nearly every Hïrzg of Firenzcia has done. Even your vatarh would tell you that. Fynn was eighteen, only two years older than you, when he first did so.” She nodded toward Semini, who sat silently in his own chair. They were in Allesandra’s chambers, the three of them. The servants had been dismissed after they had served dinner, the remnants of which decorated the table between them. “Semini knows,” she said. “He commanded the war-téni when your great-vatarh Jan nearly took Nessantico.”
“And he would have succeeded, had that vile heretic of an Archigos not used her Numetodo magic against us,” Semini grumbled. He seemed more like a bear than ever, hunched over on his chair. He tapped his plate, but looked carefully away from Allesandra. She could still remember the shock of that evening: she had been in the tent sitting on her vatarh’s lap. “You are my little bird,” he was saying, “and I love—” Then his voice cut off and—impossibly—she was outside far from the encampment, sprawled on rain-soaked ground in the night as Archigos Ana and some strange man fought each other with Ilmodo magic she would have thought impossible. Yes, she remembered that all too well—and she knew that her capture was the reason her vatarh had failed, and that he blamed her for it. “Oh, there’s much that the Holdings hasn’t yet answered for,” the Archigos continued, looking only at Jan. He pounded softly on the tablecloth with a fist. “I look forward to demanding payment. Hïrzg Jan, I stand ready to be at your right hand, with all the war-téni of the Faith alongside me.”
Jan still looked uncertain, and Allesandra reached out to pat his hand. “Jan,” she said, “ultimately this must be your decision, not mine. I’m not the Hïrzg, you are.”
“You didn’t want this when you could have had it,” Jan said, tapping the golden band of the Hïrzg’s crown on his head. “And yet now you want to—” He stopped, abruptly. Blinked. “Oh,” he said. His eyes narrowed.
She worried at the look on his face. “Think of what we could accomplish together, Jan,” she told him hurriedly, “with the same family on the Sun Throne and on the Throne of Firenzcia. We could bind the Holdings together and create a greater, more peaceful empire than Marguerite’s.”
He said nothing. He looked from Semini to Allesandra, then rose from his seat and walked quickly to the door. “Jan?” she called after him, and he paused there. He spoke without turning around to her.
“I’m beginning to understand some of what Vatarh said about you before he left, Matarh,” Jan said. “He told me that you use people for your own purposes; he said that was exactly the way your own vatarh had been, so it wasn’t all that surprising. He said that was what had made Great-Vatarh an effective Hïrzg, but a dangerous friend. I wonder if I can ever be such a good Hïrzg. I wonder if I would ever want to be.” Jan knocked on the door and the hall servants opened it.
Allesandra rose to her feet and pushed back from the table; she started after him as plates clashed and goblets shivered. “Jan, stay. Please. Talk to me.”
He shook his head and left without another word, the door closing again.
Allesandra stood in the center of the dining room and could not hold back the sob that came. I never meant to hurt him. I don’t want to hurt him. At the same time, she wondered at his declaration: had she made a mistake placing him on the Hïrzg’s throne? Was she seeing Jan with a matarh’s eyes and not those of truth? She felt Semini’s hands on her shoulders and realized that he had risen to stand behind her. “Don’t worry, Allesandra,” he said to her. His words were a low growl in her ear. “Let the boy alone for a bit—and remember that in many ways he still is a boy. He knows you’re right, but right now he’s feeling that you gave him the crown of the Hïrzg as the consolation prize.”
“It truly wasn’t that way.” Tears threatened, and she sniffed and blinked them back. “I love him, Semini. I do. He doesn’t realize how much. It hurts me to see him angry with me. This wasn’t what I intended.”
“I know,” he whispered. “I’ll talk to him. I can convince him that you’re right.”
She shook her head, staring at the door. “I need to go after him.”
“If you do that, the two of you will just end up in a worse argument. You’re both too much alike. Give him time to calm and think about things, and he’ll realize that he was overreacting. He may even apologize. Give him time. Let him be angry now.”
His hands kneaded her shoulders. She felt his lips brush the hair at the nape of her neck, and let her head drop forward in response. “He’s my son. It hurts me when he’s hurting.”
“If you get what you’re after, then that’s something you might have to accept. The Kralji of Nessantico and the Hïrzgai of Firenzcia have always had their differences and their separate agendas. If you don’t want a struggle between the two of you, then you should give up this idea of yours.”
She stiffened under his kneading hands, and he chuckled. “There, you see. Jan’s not the only one who gets irritated when someone tells them what they must do.” He continued to work the muscles of her shoulders. “There’s another matter we should discuss, the two of us,” he said to her. “I am with you in this, my love, but I have ambitions, too. I would be Archigos of a unified Faith, and I would sit on Cénzi’s Throne in the Archigos’ Temple and be your Hand of Truth. And I would be more than that, Allesandra. I would be Archigos ca’Vörl.”
She turned to him, and found his face close to hers. She kissed his lips without heat. “Semini . . .”
“You told Jan to think of what the two of you could accomplish together as the same family on two thrones. I would ask you to consider what might be accomplished if the same family held not only the political thrones, but that of the Faith.”
“What you’re suggesting isn’t possible
,” she told him. “There’s Pauli. And Francesca. Yes, I enjoy the stolen time we have together, and I wish it were otherwise, but it’s not. Semini, how would it seem if the Archigos were to dissolve his own marriage and that of the A’Hïrzg, for his own convenience? What would the ca’-and-cu’ say, if only privately? What damage would that do to the Faith and to the Sun Throne?”
“I know,” he growled, stepping back. “I know. But my marriage to Francesca was political from the beginning—there was never any love between us, nor much intimacy at all after the first few years and her miscarriages. Orlandi insisted that I had to marry his daughter and he was the Archigos, and your vatarh thought it would be good as well, and you were . . .” He paused. “I know I’m much older than Pauli, Allesandra, but I thought . . .”
“The differences in our ages mean nothing,” she told him. She reached out to touch his face, his graying beard surprisingly soft under her fingers. “Semini . . . I do have affection for you. I love what we have, but it has to be enough. What you’re suggesting . . . It would be a terrible mistake.”
“Would it? I don’t believe that, Allesandra. If you knew how much I’ve wrestled with this, if you knew the prayers I’ve sent to Cénzi . . .” He shook his head under her fingers. “It would not be a mistake,” he said. “How could it be if there are true feelings between us? Can you tell me that the feelings are one-sided and our affair is simply a matter of convenience to you. Is that what it is, Allesandra? Tell me. Tell me the truth.”
She stared at him, his face cupped in her hands. “One-sided?” she whispered. “No.”
He breathed a long exhalation, nearly a word or cry. And then he was kissing her, and she was kissing him back, and she lost herself and her worries about Jan and what might come in the heat that enveloped her.
Jan ca’Vörl
JAN LET THE SWEAT POUR from him as he jabbed and parried with his sword against an invisible opponent. Sometimes it was Semini, sometimes it was his matarh, sometimes it was the ghost of Fynn or ini, sometimes it was his matarh, sometimes it was the ghost of Fynn or his great-vatarh. Jan let all his anger out into the practice. He slashed, he spun, he thrust until all the ghosts were dead and his muscles were burning.
Finally, he sheathed his sword and stood with his hands on knees, panting. He heard faint, ironic applause behind him, and he turned—beads of sweat flying from damp hair—to see Sergei ca’Rudka standing at the door of the practice room, with two gardai standing behind him. “How—?” Jan began as ca’Rudka smiled.
“I asked your aide Roderigo where you might be. I wasn’t allowed to come without my friends, though,” he added, gesturing to the grim-faced and solemn gardai flanking him. Sergei entered the long, narrow room, with its polished bronze walls and the narrow row of seats along the other side, the wooden practice swords in their holders in one corner. “You’ve had a good weapons teacher,” Sergei said. “Though that’s worth less than you might think.”
Jan took a towel from the rack near the swords and wiped at the sweat on his brow. “What do you mean, Regent?”
“You can have all the technical skills—and you do—but they mean little when you actually face an opponent who’s willing to kill you.”
The way ca’Rudka made the comment, in a lecturing, superior tone, ignited Jan’s anger again. They were all acting superior to him. They were all telling him what to do as if he were too stupid to understand anything himself. Jan sniffed. He tossed the towel in the corner. “Show me,” he said to Sergei. “Prove it.”
“Hïrzg . . .” one of the gardai hissed warningly, but Jan glared at the man.
“Be quiet,” he said. “I know what I’m doing.” Jan nodded his head toward the rack of wooden swords. “Show me, Regent,” he said again. “Platitudes are easy.”
Sergei bowed, as if to a dance partner. Glancing once at the gardai, he strode to the rack. Jan watched him—the man had the gait of an elder, and there was a grimace when he bent over to pull out one of the practice blades and examined it. “The great swordsman cu’Musa once said that experience is often better than raw skill,” he said to Jan. “There’s a tale that in a duel, cu’Musa once killed his opponent with only a wooden blade. Just like you, his opponent was armed with steel.”
The gardai both started forward, reaching for their own weapons and putting themselves between Jan and ca’Rudka, but again Jan motioned them back. “You’re not cu’Musa,” Jan said.
“I’m not,” ca’Rudka answered. He flicked the wooden blade through the air. It was a clumsy stroke, and Jan saw how ca’Rudka held his hand on the hilt, turned slightly underneath—his old teacher back in Malacki would have immediately corrected the man, had he seen that. “With your hand like that, you have no reach,” he would have said. But Sergei had already taken a stance—blade down, his legs too close together. “When you’re ready, Hïrzg Jan,” he said.
“Begin,” Jan said.
With that, ca’Rudka started to bring his blade up: slowly, almost awkwardly—an amateur’s move. Jan sniffed in disdain and slapped the man’s blade aside contemptuously with his own. But the expected resistance of blade against blade was missing: ca’Rudka had opened his hand. He heard the wooden blade clattering against the tiles of the floor, saw it skittering away to hit the bronzed wall. Jan’s strike took the weapon from ca’Rudka, yes, but without resistance his own strike swept farther to the left than it should have, and Jan saw a rush of dark clothing and felt ca’Rudka’s hands slap him lightly on either side of his neck before he could react. The man was directly in front of him, the metal nose so close that Jan’s face filled its reflective surface. Ca’Rudka’s hands gathered in the collar of Jan’s tashta and the man took a step, pressing Jan against the wall. Jan’s sword was useless in his hand: ca’Rudka was too close.
“You see, Hïrzg Jan,” ca’Rudka nearly whispered, “a person who wants to kill you won’t worry about rules and politeness, only results.” His breath was warm and smelled of mint. “I could have crushed your windpipe with that first strike, or I might have had a knife in my other hand. Either way, and you’d already be gasping your last breaths.”
He stepped away, releasing Jan as the gardai grabbed him roughly from behind. One of them struck ca’Rudka in the side with a mailed fist, and the older man crumpled to a knee, gasping. “But you’re a better swordsman than me, Hïrzg,” ca’Rudka finished from the floor. “I’ll admit that freely.” The garda brought his fist back for another strike, but Jan lifted his hand.
“No!” he snapped. “Leave us! Both of you!”
The gardai looked at him startled. They began to protest, but Jan gestured again toward the door. As they bowed and left, Jan went to ca’Rudka and helped the man back to his feet. “Are you really that poor a swordsman, Regent?”
Ca’Rudka managed to smile as he held his side, leaning forward and trying to catch his breath. “No,” he answered. “But I made you think I was.” He took a long breath in through his mouth and groaned. “By Cénzi, that hurt. I trust that my point’s obvious enough?”
“That people might lie and deceive me in order to get what they want?” Jan laughed bitterly. “You’re not the only one trying to teach me that lesson.”
“Ah.” Ca’Rudka seemed to be considering that. He said nothing, waiting.
“My matarh and the Archigos seem to think that now is the time to attack Nessantico.”
Ca’Rudka shrugged, then grimaced again. “Do you want to be admitting that to a potential spy in your midst, Hïrzg? Why, I might send a note back to the Kraljiki.”
“You won’t.”
Nothing moved on ca’Rudka’s face at that. He blinked over his silver nose. “Have you considered that your matarh and the Archigos might be right?”
“You’d agree with them?”
“Honestly, I’d rather that there be no war at all, that we settle our differences another way. But if I were your matarh . . .” He shrugged. “Perhaps I’d be thinking the same.”
“So yo
u think I should listen to them?”
“I think that you’re the Hïrzg, and therefore you should make up your own mind. But I also think that a good Hïrzg listens to the message even when he has difficulty with the messenger.”
Jan looked away from the man. He could see himself in the bronze mirrors of the hall, his image slightly distorted in the waves of thin metal. He was still holding his sword. He went to the wall where ca’Rudka’s wooden sword had come to a rest. He leaned down and picked up the practice weapon, tossing it to the man.
“Show me something else,” he said. “Show me how experience beats raw skill.”
Ca’Rudka smiled. He took the sword, and this time his movements were fluid and graceful. “All right,” he said. “Take your stance . . .”
Nico Morel
AFTER SPENDING SEVERAL DAYS with the woman, Nico decided she was very strange, but also fascinating. She was good to Nico. She fed him well, she talked to him—long talks in which he found himself telling her everything about his matarh and Talis and how he and his matarh had left Nessantico, and how he hated his onczio and his cousins and left the village, and how the Regent and Varina had helped him. . . .