The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5

by Michelle West

  “Tyr’agnate.” The Captain of the oathguard bowed, sword unsheathed.

  “Are there, among the men gathered here, any who are not Tyran?”

  “None, Tyr’agnate.”

  “Good.” He turned to his brother. “Wake the Tyran, and only the Tyran. Make clear to them the necessity of silence.”

  Ser Fillipo bowed.

  “Tyr’agar,” the Tyr’agnate said, “we will be ready within the hour. If it pleases you, gather those that you trust; what we do must be done in haste.”

  When the Tyr’agnate was gone, silence went with him.

  Duarte contained, by dint of magic, what could not be contained by dint of will.

  Words clashed as Auralis and Alexis filled the vacuum of mannered speech with something decidedly less delicate.

  Duarte let them. The whole of his attention was focused upon Kiriel di’Ashaf. Not even the creature who stood in the lee of her shadow could command some lesser part of it.

  She was young. It was hard to remember, when the power was gathered within her, just how damn young she was. Paradoxically, impossible to forget.

  “Are you trying to lose the war for us?”

  It was not the question she expected. Her brows furrowed. “I am trying,” she said, after a long pause, “to make sure Valedan survives it.”

  “By openly declaring yourself a member of the Shining Court? By allying yourself—however much it might be necessary—with a demon?”

  Her frown deepened, and he was almost relieved to see it; it was the frown that spoke of both confusion and contempt—the earliest of the expressions he associated with her oddly delicate features. “He is not my ally,” she said evenly.

  “No?”

  “No. He is my vassal.”

  Auralis slapped himself in the forehead.

  Duarte struggled a moment to find words. “Do not,” he said, spacing the words evenly, “repeat that again in my hearing.”

  She frowned.

  “Do not repeat it at all. Ever. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” He closed his eyes.

  “Primus.” Valedan spoke quietly. He was the only person in the clearing, besides Kiriel herself, who seemed able to do so.

  “We will lose Mareo di’Lamberto,” Duarte said coldly. “We will lose him, if word of this evening escapes.”

  “He is correct,” a soft voice said. Soft, perfect in its enunciation, the accent a subtlety of intonation, the pronunciation perfect.

  Duarte cringed. Cringed, but without surprise. “Serra Alina,” he said, without turning.

  “My brother is a cunning man, and a powerful one; he is not, however, always practical.” She stood in the cloak of the Ospreys, shorn now of the finery of the Southern Court. When she had arrived was anyone’s guess; she moved as quietly as the damned Astari when she chose to do so.

  “Serra.” Valedan turned to her at once.

  “Ramiro di’Callesta understands the risk he takes,” she told him without preamble, as if the garments she wore now defined her position; as if she were in truth Northern, the dark sister of the Princess Royale upon the Isle. “And he risks much. But it is his people who will be left without protection if the word of such a creature as this can be believed.”

  “It is not his word,” Valedan said quietly, “by which we have chosen to make this decision.”

  “Oh?”

  “It is hers.” He turned to Kiriel di’Ashaf. “Rise,” he told her quietly.

  She rose as bade, her face smooth as steel.

  The creature spoke in a language that defied Duarte’s studied comprehension. Kiriel did not acknowledge him at all, and by the lack, Duarte understood that she had made a choice. The choice itself was opaque to him, but for no reason he could think of, it brought some measure of comfort.

  Kiriel di’Ashaf nodded briefly to the Serra Alina di’Lamberto, a woman whom she had never conversed with. “I am an Osprey here,” she said.

  “I had been given to understand that that name no longer existed.”

  Kiriel’s smile was cold; Northern ice was warmer and more forgiving. Duarte did not retreat; he had seen the expression before, and experience gave him the ability to rise above its subtle menace.

  He wondered what experience had molded the Serra Alina; she, too, stood still in the face of the dark expression, and her stillness was not a rabbit’s stillness; it was the wolf’s.

  “It is a true name,” Kiriel told the Serra. “Call them anything that the Northerners desire, and the fact of the name will not change. They bear it,” she added, gesturing briefly toward Auralis, Alexis, Fiara—even Duarte himself. “And I . . . have chosen to bear it as well.”

  “It is not what you are.”

  “It is not all that I am.”

  Silence again. Valedan waited between these two women, measuring their silence; matching it with his own.

  “And the rest, Kiriel di’Ashaf?”

  “I am my mother’s daughter,” she said.

  The creature spoke again, the words sharper, the tone different.

  She lifted a hand, as if swatting a mosquito, something that flitted from side to side, seeking purchase and blood. Finding none.

  “And these—the people in these lands—were hers.”

  And then she bowed her head, closed her eyes; her fists tightened. Duarte thought them white beneath the mail of her gloves.

  “Kiriel.”

  She smiled. Turned to Auralis, acknowledging him in a way that she had acknowledged no one else in the broken mass of branches and crushed petals, the bed of glass shards. “I believe I was winning.”

  His brows rose. “Winning?”

  Duarte smiled and shook his head. It eased him. “She was, Auralis.”

  “The Hells she was.”

  “Of the six demons that attempted to assassinate the kai Leonne, she’s taken four.”

  “First blood—”

  “The rules, I believe, were clear; first blood doesn’t seem to faze them—but they pause at the loss of limb. Or life, if they have it.”

  Auralis spit. Duarte knew, by the sudden twist of his lips, that he had money riding on what Duarte had thought of as an informal contest. Saw by the sudden gleam in Alexis’ eyes that he wasn’t the only one.

  He damned them both genially.

  “These Annies,” Alexis said, “are our Annies. The kin want to hunt them, they can damn well hunt among their own.”

  Fiara spit to the side for good measure. “Duarte?”

  “Primus,” he said curtly.

  “Pri-mus Duarte.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m going to wake the others.”

  “You might as well. It was getting crowded here anyway.” A reminder of death.

  He watched her leave, and then listened to her, feet as heavy as horse hooves through the ruins of the path their haste had made. If he was any judge, someone would pay for it; the Serra Amara was not the most forgiving of women, and she had made it clear, in the perfect grace of feminine Southern pride, that these were hers.

  The Serra Alina touched Valedan’s shoulder; he turned at once.

  “The deaths,” she told him.

  He nodded.

  “They must be seen. By the serafs. By the common clansmen. They must understand that what you have brought from the North is death: death for the servants of the Lord of Night. Must understand that you have taken this risk because you value their service, indentured or no.

  “If you can accomplish this without killing the men and women we need as witnesses, the presence of your Northern guards will no longer be an accusation of your weakness and your diluted blood; you will not be—in Callesta—the mere scion of the Northern Generals.”

  “Ah. And the Commanders?”

  “Best to leave them,” she said quietly. “This hunt, if it is a hunt, must be seen to be yours.”

  “Ser Andaro?”

  Silent, the perfect Tyran, Ser Andaro nodded. “
The Serra Alina di’Lamberto is known for her wisdom.”

  “And the unfortunate sharpness of her tongue,” Alina said coolly. But a smile dimpled her cheek, the lines proof that it was genuine.

  “I fear, Serra, that you will be disappointed,” Duarte said quietly. “The Ospreys are not theatrical.”

  “I might have thought so.” No veil hid her face, no fan obscured it; she sought no courtly grace beneath the open face of the watching moon. But the grace that she had been born to did not desert her, and the night gentled the lines that the sun, wind, and time had begun to wear in the corner of lips and eyes.

  “And now?”

  “I have never seen her kneel to you,” she said quietly, gazing at Kiriel. “And if she kneels thus, blade bloodied, and triumphant, it is to you that they will look.”

  Kiriel di’Ashaf, risen, said nothing.

  “It is a risk,” Valedan said at last. “And the risk is great. But—”

  “Tyr’ agar.”

  “Kiriel?”

  “I have never met Mareo di’Lamberto. I . . . do not understand . . . the whole of his significance. But I believe that Lord Telakar will have much to say, even beneath the face of the reigning sun, if the Tyr’agnate can be brought to listen. And what is said, he might find of interest.”

  “He is Mareo,” Serra Alina said bitterly.

  The Voyani woman was carried into the Callestan domicile. She did not wake, but she stirred; unconsciousness had given way to sleep beneath the hands of the nameless healer. That man was spent; he had dwindled in size and stature, and he had had little of either before he commenced. He did not allow himself to be touched; accepted no offer of support. Nor did he allow himself to touch the woman again; he gloved his hands and waited.

  “Telakar.”

  “Lady.”

  Kiriel frowned. “It is not the time for games.”

  “You do not understand, do you?” Telakar’s slender hands caressed the woman’s brow; strands of her hair, red brown as dried blood, but living, moving in the lift and fall of his fingers, caught light. Caught him. Something in the texture of his voice was familiar. “Games are all we have. Mortals are foolish; if the stakes are high, they cease to acknowledge that what is played is indeed a game.

  “Have you become foolish, Kiriel? You are the only student that Lord Isladar has ever chosen to take; I cannot imagine that you have descended into mortal folly. Had you, you would not have survived the Court.”

  “I do not intend that most of the Court survive me,” she told him, blunt now. Angry.

  “No. No more do any of the kinlords.” He shrugged, bored.

  “That was never your game.”

  “No. It bored me. It bores me now.”

  “And that brought you here?”

  “You are mortal. You will live only briefly, and you will die; you cannot contemplate an eternity of boredom if you can ask that question.” Hands stilled; his fingers hovered above the membranes of the woman’s closed eyes. Kiriel wondered briefly if he intended to remove them.

  “There were, among the Allasiani, those who did not choose to follow Allasakar into the Hells.”

  “Allasiani?”

  “Ah. How odd. Lord Isladar has always evinced an interest in history. Perhaps you ended your tenure as student too early. I am not a teacher; I am not his equal.”

  Kiriel stared at the Kialli lord.

  “But I have always been fascinated by things mortal.”

  “All of the Kialli are.” She could not keep the fury from the words, but her expression was rigid.

  “They are fascinated by suffering and death,” he said with a bored shrug. “The least of the imps can grant either; it does not speak to power, but to self-indulgence.”

  Again she stared at him, at his hands upon the face of the sleeping woman, his captive now.

  “I will tell you what the Allasiani were,” he said quietly. “It is a gap in your education that should never have been allowed.”

  She could have demanded his silence.

  But curiosity had always been a failing. Unbidden, she heard Isladar’s voice, felt his hands upon her brow, felt the heat of his anger, and beneath it, something she had mistaken, in her foolish youth, as concern. Several times in her childhood, curiosity had almost killed her.

  No comfort there. It had failed.

  “The servants,” he continued quietly, “and the allies of Allasakar.”

  “That name is not spoken here.”

  “Indeed, and perhaps that is wise. I forget myself.”

  She did not believe it. He knew she did not.

  “Some among us are called kinlord,” he continued, his eyes upon this woman’s face, upon the rise and fall of chest made by shallow breath. “And some Kialli.”

  “I . . . understand . . . what Kiallinan is.”

  “Ah. He gifted you, if you understand that much.”

  “And the other?”

  “It is what we were,” he told her, looking up for the first time. “When we walked this plane. When we knew life, knew birth, and even, in our time, death. You see us as the plane permits us to be seen. Those who are too weak to negotiate with the primal force of the ancient earth bear forms that were never ours: talons, blades, bodies of chitin and bestial faces. Yet among those, some memories still burn.

  “I was Allasiani. I was counted young. Among my brethren . . . many were lost to the Lord’s Hells.”

  “Not you.”

  “No. In my youth, I was passionate. Although I was fascinated by the flaws and the imperfections of the short, short lives of the mortals, I loved the Lord. Perhaps you can see what we saw in him then. I do not know; it is lost to me now. Lost in the Hells; in the boiling rivers, the charnel winds, the sensuous cries of the damned.” He lowered his face again.

  “But when we . . . lived . . . I was among the few who were given stewardship over the mortals who served. Because I was one of the few who could be trusted to winnow their numbers with care.”

  He lifted his hands.

  “It was not an easy task.”

  She said, cruel now, “You attempted to heal her. Tonight.”

  He did not deny it.

  “Why?”

  “Because I am still encumbered by memory,” he replied bitterly. “It is not an act . . . that I have attempted since the passage from the Hells; not an act that I have attempted since last I walked these valleys. The desert was no desert then; it was the heart of the power of Man. There, among the mortals, I found one or two of interest; they were seen as my pets; they were seen as creatures of value to me.” He shrugged.

  She knew, by the shrug, that it was true.

  “I learned their art, in a fashion. I learned the workings of the frailty of mortal heart, and lung, and bone, of blood, of the tissue that binds the whole.”

  She shook her head.

  “It is lost,” he said quietly. “I should have known. I did not intend to endanger her life. I merely wished to show that it was of little value to me. Things of little value are seldom threatened. I assumed that I could . . . repair . . . the damage done.” He stared at his hands, at the hands that were twined in her hair, a binding of her own, unconscious as she was. “But that gift, so bitterly won, is gone.”

  “Bitterly won?”

  He raised a brow. “You ask too many questions,” he said without rancor. Or judgment.

  He turned to her then, and his eyes were the color of fire. “I have forgotten nothing,” he said, and it was a vow.

  “You will leave her now.”

  “Yes.” Very slowly, he disentangled his hands.

  “She will be safe here.”

  “You promise safety, Kiriel, when you must sleep, must eat, must breathe?” His laugh was bitter. Unkind.

  It made her long for home.

  The Tyr’agnate came. He came as kings must come, his armor fine, his sword fine, his helm unblemished by dint of war.

  Artifice, that. The Serra Alina understood that though the he
lm itself was new to battle, the man beneath its confines was not. In the North, in the history of the North, Commanders lay trapped behind their lines of mastery; the faceless and the nameless legions were driven forth before them, to fight and die at a distance that made the individuals insignificant. The map of their deaths, the length of the line their combined bodies made, counted for much, and each man stood as the link in a chain, a mesh, armor of a different caliber.

  Thus had Mirialyn taught her in the long, empty halls of Avantari, beyond the stretch of the Arannan Halls in which Southern women were expected to be Serras. In grace. In silence.

  She had surrendered silence for the sake of the Princess; had surrendered distance, distrust, the caution that comes with a life lived in the High Courts of Lamberto. And in return for that surrender she had taken knowledge.

  The knowledge was theory.

  The theory was empty now, but she might see it played out for her inspection by night’s end; the Ospreys had been summoned.

  In the Dominion of Annagar, the Ospreys defined the ferocity and the power of the North. Not even the Callestan Tyr understood how little loved, how little respected, the Ospreys were by the Imperial army; they, outsiders all, had won from the South the respect that the North had been denied—and had won none of that for themselves in the North, by their ferocity, their brutality, their pragmatism.

  They were few. Thirty men and women, dressed in armor that was not nearly as fine as the Callestan Tyr’s. They did not stand in lines; they did not stand abreast; they did not master the watchful stillness that informed the Tyran.

  Instead, they spoke among themselves, the silence of their language a movement of fingers in air, against shoulder, against chest. Few of the Ospreys wore shields; Cook did, and Sanderton, a scattered number of the men. The shields were defaced; the bird of prey that plunged to earth at their center painted over in the sedate colors of House Kalakar—colors muted by night, even in the lamplight.

  They looked to their Captain.

  He alone was worthy to serve, and he stood with the grace and attention denied his impatient troop.

  Kiriel came last, and by her side, the stranger; the man she had called kinlord. He was tall, the line of his face long and patrician; his eyes were dark, and his hair dark as well. But it was long; unfettered by braid, uncut. Young men might take such a risk when they faced battle, and those men were often carried from the field in pieces.