The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5

by Michelle West

  “It’s women’s work,” they would mutter, into their cups or sleeves. He had, of course, a ruler’s means to compel obedience, but the words themselves would not give what he desired: egress into the Voyani world.

  And so, of the peoples who made their living across the vast plains, the ones he could not quite fathom were the Voyani.

  But something, Ramiro thought, was wrong.

  The woman was terrified. She was not as wild and ineffectual as many of the Voyani were wont to be; she hid the fear behind a seemly mask. Could her terror be ascribed entirely to his presence?

  He could not be certain.

  He glanced at her; was certain she was aware of the inspection. She was, if he was any judge of character, accustomed to speaking freely. Was probably accustomed to obedience, if the Serra Aliera en’Callesta was correct in her surmise.

  The Matriarch’s Daughter. Here, in the heart of Callesta.

  The city unfolded in the darkness of a historic night.

  Elena hesitated when the streets began to climb; hesitated again when they reached the flat plateau beyond which—by decree in all such cities of her acquaintance—they were forbidden any further height.

  Both times, she had chanced to look up—if chance were something deliberate, and cruel—to see Lord Telakar, striding in raiment of moon and shadow across the winding road. He seemed a thing out of place, the essential wildness that lay at the heart of a desert tunnel, or the heart of a forest’s fire, when sticks of standing deadwood indiscriminately consumed everything in its path.

  What do you want? she thought, and realized—belated, and stupid—that she had never once asked this. Not of him, of course; she couldn’t trust any answer he’d give her, and she was smart enough—barely—not to want to anger him. But she hadn’t asked it this way, in words that she could shape and test beneath the tight line of closed lips.

  Why?

  Because she’d just woken up.

  Because she’d been carried from the densest growth in the valleys to the height of the Callestan plateau. Because, even in slapping her, openhanded, his eyes intent, he made her feel not like victim, but like Voyani child. Voyani child in dangerous territory, where a misstep is death.

  She’d struck children in her time. Wasn’t proud of it; wasn’t ashamed. When there was time for patience, patience was used. But she knew the difference.

  She took a deep breath. Horse scent filled her nostrils, the insides of her mouth; strands of mane tangled in the rounds of her palms, the stiff curve of her fingers. Night in Callesta held none of the death that night in the Sea of Sorrows did by the simple expedient of existing.

  Instead, it held the death offered by intrigue, the death that always surrounded men of power. Her gaze brushed the length of Telakar’s face.

  Are you alive?

  No. Elena Tamaraan. I am not alive.

  Alive or not, he was beautiful. She hadn’t seen it in the desert. Wondered why she saw it now. He reminded her of the man who followed in the wake of Jewel ATerafin; the long-haired, pale-skinned lordling who defied desert sun, desert heat, and desert cold with the same nonchalance.

  Yet she knew that that lord would have answered her question—had he condescended to speak with anyone save Jewel ATerafin or the Northern bard—very differently.

  And so, she began.

  You will kill the Tyr’agnate of Callesta.

  Silence.

  You will kill the kai Leonne boy who would be Tyr’agar.

  Again, silence.

  You intend no harm by your presence here.

  The words drifted, hollow and tinny, in the silence she had forced upon them. She knew this was a lie.

  And she knew that the gift that she did possess, the gift she was possessed by, did not stoop to answer direct questions.

  She shook her head. Once more. Once more.

  You will carry information to the demons that will cause the death of the Tyr’agnate or the Tyr’agar.

  Again, silence.

  Silence was better than the hollowness of lie, but it was less pleasant than the stabbing viscerality of truth.

  She had her own instinct to go by; all that was left her. That and the certainty that he did intend someone harm by the journey he had chosen to undertake.

  She stood in as Matriarch here. She would be identified as Arkosan. The Serra Aliera en’Callesta—the retired wife, the honored friend of the Arkosans in this city, and the woman to whom such rumors of war and the wayward behavior of the worst of the clansmen were sent, in Evallen’s youth—had marked her as clearly as a woman could be, and still retain any power in a city ruled by clansmen.

  All cities were.

  Had been.

  Margret.

  Therefore anything that came out of the meeting to which they traveled would rightly be laid at the feet of the Arkosan Voyani.

  The only way that Margret could distance herself from any tragedy or betrayal that occurred would be to disavow Elena Tamaraan; to choose another Daughter from among her younger kin.

  And such a betrayal was only answered in one fashion, among the Voyani of any clan.

  Not that, Elena thought. Not that; poor Margret. Not my death, too.

  And knew, the moment she thought it, that Nicu was indeed dead.

  She sucked in air at exactly the wrong time; it was too dry and it scoured her throat, some tendril of malicious wind, of wayward breeze. She choked, losing her grip a moment on the mane of the horse; her knees locked in place and held her steady.

  Nicu was dead.

  Margret had killed him.

  Aie, and where was she? Where was Elena, the only person who could truly understand what such a loss, such a death, must mean?

  Here, at the side of a demon, the words Arkosan Voyani spread before her like a lie.

  She rode.

  They gained the plateau before Elena could think upon how she might extricate herself from her situation. Gained it before she could be certain to keep some room between Lord Telakar and herself. Only the horse guaranteed his distance; he traveled in front of the palanquin and behind the main body of horsemen; the Tyr’agar, the Tyr’agnate, and their two Tyran.

  She wondered bitterly what the gatekeepers had said in their message to the Tyr; never in her life had she heard of two such important men traveling in such negligible numbers. Did not have long enough to wonder.

  The Tyr’agnate himself came to stand by her side, dismounting with the ease of long practice. He paused for just a moment, and then he offered her a hand; it was gloved, but open; he carried no dagger, no other weapon.

  The Tyran at his side stood, hand on sword hilt, in a posture with which Elena was much more familiar.

  She hesitated, wondering if accepting his help was an act of weakness. Think, idiot. Women don’t ride. Of course it would be construed as an act of weakness. But such an offer, to a rider, would also be construed as insult, and it was clear from the way he stood that he intended none.

  She was practical. She had tired, the horse was large, and her legs were shaking; she accepted his hand. Did her best to make sure that her dismount was not as clumsy and awkward as it should have been—or as it would have been without his support.

  He said nothing, however. He allowed her to gain her feet and then stepped back, dropping his hand to his sword side, all hint of the gesture gone in that instant.

  The boy Tyr dismounted, as did his man. The cerdan who had carried palanquin through the dark city streets deposited it with care and then retreated, retracing their steps back to the gatehouse. She wondered how long it would take those men to fall back into the boredom of nights punctuated by cricket, hunting bird, and starlight.

  When Aliera en’Callesta had emerged from the palanquin, their party was complete; the Tyr’agnate bid them enter doors—the main doors—that had been drawn wide for just such purpose. The grounds of Callesta lay before them, a sea of shadowed trees, of captured light in transparent globes, of the flutter of insects draw
n to fires that could not, by presence of glass, consume them. Elena paused for a moment, and drew a sharp breath.

  Too audible; she knew it.

  She saw the Tyr’agnate look down, a slight smile turning the corners of his lips skyward. “It is possible,” he said gravely, “that you will encounter the Serra to whom responsibility for these gardens belongs. No doubt you will be more schooled in expression at that time; in my limited experience with the Voyani, it is women who command their attention and their caution.

  “Do not think poorly of me, however, if I recount your first expression upon seeing what she has labored over these past weeks.”

  She smiled. For just a moment, the smile was genuine. Although the Tyr’agnate’s words were inflected in the manner of the High Courts, the meaning behind them was clear: He loved his wife, and he wished her to be honored.

  It surprised Elena. She had not expected it, although in truth, she had not thought much about it at all.

  “If I had time,” she said quietly, “and she considered my presence an honor, I would honor her gardens for the full three days before I took my leave. They must be beautiful beneath the Lord’s gaze.”

  He nodded. “The face they wear is very different in the day, but, yes, I find them beautiful.”

  He turned and set off down the path; she followed, aware that Telakar had joined her.

  “He is not a fool,” Telakar said quietly.

  “He couldn’t be. He is Tyr’agnate.”

  “And none of the five Tyrs are fools?”

  “Not one. Well, perhaps Garrardi—if rumor is to be believed.”

  “But not this one?”

  She was irritable; it was almost comfortable to be so. “No. Not this one; not the one who rules Mancorvo, and not the one who will rule the Terrean of Raverra.”

  “These three?”

  “They are the fertile lands. They are the richest. It is seldom that people starve here; seldom that they suffer from the lack of rain, the lack of water in the riverbeds.”

  “It makes them soft.”

  She shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  “Ah, yes. The armies will clash here.”

  She said nothing.

  Was trying to think of something to say when the world changed.

  Swords were drawn beneath the night sky; the stillness of the garden was broken by the teetering dance of glass globes, and the bleeding flicker of spilled light as those globes fell groundward and shattered, scattering glass among the foliage, and wounding the leaves and the grass over which they passed.

  She was afraid; sharply, deeply afraid.

  She had no weapon to draw. The dagger was gone. She wondered if it would ever be replaced, or if it—like so much else that had been her life, had been replaced by the sharp edges of ice that hid in the shadows of the Lord of Night.

  “Ramiro! Run!”

  “Tyr’ agar—behind me!”

  Those two voices, haunting, distinct, an overlay of syllables that didn’t match, and urgency that did, were clear as birdsong in the morning valleys. Clear, and welcome. They drew swords, and although the lights in the garden had wobbled, some falling and some finding their balance, there was enough to lend an orange-yellow glow to the flats of their blades, the height of their cheekbones, the line of their foreheads.

  She was certain death waited in the approaching shadows, the approaching swords; she felt the shadow as keenly as she had in the stark, stark brilliance of the open desert, when she had stood between Lord Telakar and Lord Ishavriel.

  She was shocked when the Tyr’agar’s voice rang out, clean as steel.

  “Hold!”

  Everyone froze.

  Everyone but Telakar. He closed the distance of a careful, casual walk in the instant of stillness the Tyr’agar’s voice created, placing his hands gently on both of her shoulders and holding her forward like a shield.

  The Tyr’agnate stepped into the line of Elena’s peripheral vision. His brother stepped in front of him, lifting Jus arm in warning: Stand back.

  She saw a ripple of annoyance spread across the Tyr’agnate’s neutral expression. In this, without his direct order to the contrary, the Tyran was correct.

  He gave no such order.

  Nor did he draw his sword; instead, he waited. She wondered why; could not believe that he could face a threat without arming himself; there were very, very few of his men in the garden. Two, she thought. Two more.

  But the Tyr’agar snapped out the order that caused his Tyran to step to the side; the Tyr’agar drew his blade.

  There were men on the garden paths that led from darkness into this well of traveled light. No; four men. Two women.

  Women. With swords. They were scarred; the oldest was darkened by sun. She stood like a Voyani Matriarch, or at least a Matriarch’s Daughter, and if it were not for one simple detail, Elena would have assumed that that’s what she was—Matriarch’s Daughter. But the detail was large. Armor.

  She turned to stare at the Tyr of Callesta, her jaw slack. Northerners. Here.

  “Decarus,” the kai Leonne said, speaking to a tall man with hair the color of bronze as he stepped onto the path hidden by the fronds of leaves and the shadows of night. “Decarus,” he said again, nodding to the older woman. She could not catch the rest of his words; they were spoken too quickly, and they were not spoken in Trade, the universal tongue that had been cobbled together by the men who crossed borders in search of new ways to enrich themselves.

  It was frustrating, to be trapped in this ignorance. Elena knew the traders’ tongue at least as well as she knew her mother tongue. She knew some of the tongue of the old thieves in the Tor Leonne as well.

  But the Northern words she understood were not up to the fluency of the Tyr’agar.

  What did she know about this boy? This boy whose claim to legitimacy must come from the strength of Ramiro di’Callesta? Nothing. Nothing that the Arkosans did not know: the rumors of the Sun Sword. Not even the Voyani could fail to be moved by the story of the kai el’Sol’s death.

  And she knew that this boy would face that death, and fail if the Sword did not know his blood. It was enough.

  “What are you doing here?” Valedan did not raise his voice. Perhaps because he had spent his life around a mother who did nothing except raise hers. Had he, the entire city of Callesta would have heard the words that he wisely chose to speak in Weston.

  Alexis said nothing. But she turned her hawkish profile—as if it were a dagger, and at that, a thrown one—toward Auralis AKalakar. She had lowered her sword, but she had not sheathed it, a fact not lost upon Valedan.

  He knew why they were there; knew why they had walked with such thundering, clumsy steps through the Serra Amara’s night gardens, shattering glass and light as if to mark their trail. He had seen just such certainty of motion in the Arannan Halls, in another life, in Averalaan Aramarelas.

  What he did not see was the demon that they were hunting.

  And here, in the foreign city of Callesta, surrounded by the people they had once slaughtered, they could not run freely.

  Auralis stared straight ahead; his gaze, unlike Alexis’, did not waver.

  And because Auralis was no dress guard, because his gaze was so deliberately fixed, Valedan knew that he was protecting someone. Auralis protected no one. That was a truth that the Ospreys acknowledged, and took some pride in.

  But it was a broken truth, a half-truth, a thing in the process of being rewritten or unmade. Valedan, keen-eyed and silent, had watched the progress of the unpredicted, unpredictable friendship that had grown between Auralis and the Osprey’s almost-outcast, and he turned immediately to meet the gaze of Kiriel di’Ashaf.

  And took a step back, the first.

  “Kiriel,” he said softly, in a voice that was heavy with respect. With caution.

  Her eyes were golden. It was the only thing about her face that suggested light; the pale white of her skin seemed a thing of death; the length of her hair had escaped fr
om the workaday braid that bound it, and it spread, unfurling like great wings, terrible wings, across the night sky.

  Stars were lost to it. Vision.

  He had seen this woman before, but never like this. Not even in the Arena of the Kings had he encountered this darkness, although he had been told, much later, that it had existed.

  He would have taken another step, but he was now braced for the difficulty. He stood his ground.

  Ser Andaro was at his side, blade drawn.

  “Kiriel,” Valedan said again. “Why are you here?”

  She looked at him, and then past him.

  “Telakar,” she said, her voice as cold as Northern Winter. As clean.

  Lord Telakar looked up. His fingers grew thin and long; Elena felt them as claws against the mesh of Voyani cotton, around the curve of collarbone and the thin skin that covered it.

  The girl stepped forward.

  The Tyr’agar said a single word. “Kiriel.”

  Her name, Elena thought. She heard each of three syllables as if they were spoken beneath the domed ceilings of the Merchant Court in the Tor Leonne; they passed through her as if she were insignificant, out of place.

  In comparison, the voice of the man who had spoken seemed thin, youthful, foolish.

  But the girl hesitated, lowering her blade.

  “Kiriel,” the Tyr’agar said again:

  Her skin was as pale as the skin of women harem-born and confined; her hair was darker than Lady’s Night, her eyes wide and large, her cheekbones high. She might have been lovely.

  She was not.

  “Telakar,” Elena whispered, “who is she?”

  “If you are very unlucky,” Lord Telakar replied, “you will have an answer to that question.” He shook her, as if by doing so, he could shake free any further stupidity.

  “She knows,” Elena told him.

  He chuckled. It was not the sound Elena expected. She could not have summoned mirth in this cold night, in the face of this unknown woman.

  Kiriel stepped forward.

  The Tyr’agar lifted a hand.

  Interesting, to watch her hesitation, the muddle of her changing expression.