The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5

by Michelle West

  Their voices joined air, a howl of anger, a hint of fear, blended into the harshness of a language he barely knew. And harmony to it, harsh and beautiful, wild with the promise of death, a brother’s voice.

  Allele.

  Across the wilds of storm made now of wind and now of water in a mockery of nature, he met the eyes of an Arianni lord of the Green Deepings.

  He could not bow; the fleeting gaze was salute enough. The kin rose to join him, finding easier purchase in the shelf of wind than they had upon the ground.

  Kallandras frowned. The wind drove them back, toward ground. Into it.

  The water rose as well.

  Avandar Gallais struggled to sheathe his sword.

  Jewel was aware of the motion although she couldn’t see it; he was behind her. The Winter King’s stride had carried them to the edge of the water’s range—and it was wide.

  But she could almost hear the voice of the blade; could feel its weight, and its warmth, in her right palm; could feel the pain of its denial against the scarred flesh of her forearm.

  You play a game you do not understand, ATerafin, the stag said. He had never called her by title before; the rebuke stung.

  Avandar, she said, calling him in a way that diminished distance.

  He did not reply.

  She looked back. Gray mist radiated outward in a nimbus of light, and at its center, nothing. Avandar was gone.

  There was no way to ford the stream. Although the riverbed was dry and cracked—a hint of the desert and its multiple deaths—the water roved freely.

  Alessandro kai di’Clemente would never see water again without remembering the destruction of Damar.

  But he would see it without fear. He would see it as the Lord’s man. He paused on the periphery of flight’s edge, drew breath, turned back.

  There, in moonlight—the lamps had fallen, and lay crushed upon the cobbled stone and broken earth—he saw the Northern bard. Saw what the bard faced: red swords, red fire. Nothing natural. Nothing that the forest birthed.

  He had offered the Lady his prayers, but he was of the South; he accepted her answer with a grimace. His men, upon the far bank, were scattered, but he heard the orders and the sounds of steel that spoke of retreat, not rout. Pride, there; pride for just a moment. Clemente produced men. The Manelan Toran were either dead or dispersed; they had failed in their sworn charge, but they had not chosen to seek the death that awaited the failure of such profound oath.

  He met Reymos’ eyes in the darkness.

  Ignored what he saw in them; he could offer his man that much dignity.

  But he could not make noble what was ignoble. He steadied himself, found strength remaining in the bend of tensed knees, and ran.

  The water struck the ground ten feet before him; he froze and before he could run again, he was caught.

  But not by water: the air held him.

  “Tor’agnate,” a foreign voice said, the syllables cold and too clear, “not on the West does your battle lie.”

  He flailed for just a moment, and then stilled as he rose. The water roared and rumbled as it passed beneath him; tendrils slammed into his legs with enough force to bruise.

  And then he was clear of the banks; clear—for a moment—of the water. He heard a grunt at his side, and saw that Reymos had likewise been carried above the din of battle.

  Quickheart was lost. He could not hear the horse; could not see him in the darkling night. Home, he thought, and it was a prayer. But it was all the prayer he spared.

  For he could see, thirty yards away, what his men fought.

  Celleriant fought the water. To force the air to accomplish the simple task of setting a commander among his forces had been costly, for the water was its enemy, and it sought nothing but battle. Sought to destroy anything that came between it and its rightful prey.

  He was no youth, no stripling; the dawn of the world was beyond him. He could not be shaken by the simple anger, the visceral desire, of elemental air. He understood its heart; it was his own. For he had, by command, no choice but to turn his back upon the red blades of the kin, and they called him, a challenge and an insult that none—not even the Northern bard—could comprehend.

  Winter was his heart. Ice. Cold.

  In the Winter, the wind was death.

  But his lady had commanded him to preserve life; he struggled to forgo the wilderness of the road that had defined him for millennia.

  They will die anyway, he told her, silent, aware that his words would not carry the distance—the many distances—that separated them.

  Aware, as his gaze turned to follow Kallandras a moment, that although the words were true, they contained the beginning of a falsehood. Lies were weapons; subterfuge a game. But what grew now was something foreign, something that defied his nature, his birth.

  He lost the air a moment.

  He paid.

  They were like dogs.

  Dogs grown in size, dogs whose eyes held the patina of fire’s heart. They had jaws the size of a horse’s head, teeth the length of daggers; they spoke with voices that might—once—have been human.

  It was their speech that was, of all things, most disturbing. Ser Alessandro understood it. Felt the exultation that tainted the words and the challenge, the triumph, of the short bursts they made of words. Crossbow bolts were less effective.

  They broke ground with their forepaws; severed limbs with their hind legs; they paused only to savor death, and the pause was brief.

  He counted seven.

  Against one, two, his men might stand, but against seven? He knew. Before he drew horn from sash, before he drew breath to wind it, he knew.

  Not for Alessandro kai di’Clemente the madness of battle; not for Alessandro, the Tor’agar of Clemente, the wild exuberance of struggle and death. He stood, unchanged and unchangeable, as his men fought, and when he finally winded horn, they understood two things.

  That their Tor was alive.

  And that he was at their side.

  Ser Amando had been correct in one way: These were men of the plains, and they served their Tor. They drew strength from his presence. They fought.

  Where is he? she asked wildly.

  The Winter King was silent. Above them both, the water trembled like a tower made of liquid crystal. She heard its voice; knew where it would fall. Knew who it would kill, although when she spoke the name, it had no meaning to her. A man’s name. A clansman.

  But she also knew that it would fall slowly. That it would fall blindly. What it sought, now, was above it, and around it.

  Avandar warned us, she thought.

  Yes. But in this at least he was mistaken.

  Where is Celleriant? she asked again.

  Where you sent him. ATerafin.

  Take me.

  You are my care, he replied.

  Take me, damn you.

  She had ridden him across the heart of the desert. Had ridden him through the heart of the Serpent’s storm. She had ridden him through the Old Deepings, past the death that awaited Yollana of Havalla should she hesitate. But not until this evening, in the village of Damar, did she understand the force of the Wild Hunt.

  Because he leaped up, above the reach of ground, as if gravity and weight were beneath his dignity. His hooves struck nothing; they fell in a silence that spoke of the death that at last ends pursuit.

  Nothing escaped the Hunt, she thought, and the ghost of her Oma’s voice remade old legends that memory and peace had fragmented. Nothing escaped, not even the King.

  She clutched tines; her throat allowed the passage of air only when she gasped.

  The Winter King, silent with the weight of command, took her beyond the reach of water, through the wail of air, and out the other side.

  He offered no warning; her knees shook with the force of her grip, although she knew that he would not let her fall. Could not. It was some part of his transformation.

  But he landed in the midst of battle, and she had just enough foresig
ht—and she, gifted, born and cursed with knowledge—to unclench fists from antlers, one did not grab blade’s edge for safety when the blade was being wielded.

  What the blades of the Clemente cerdan were too slow, or too dull, to pierce, the Winter King did.

  The voices of the kin—for these creatures could be nothing else—were raised now in anger and pain. But beneath it, a testament to the perception of her gift, she heard exultation.

  They turned to face the stag.

  The Kialli lord saw. The water that had taken him spit him out like refuse, a thing beneath its power and its concern. For a moment, anger governed him; anger lasted long enough to be transformed.

  He recognized Lord Celleriant, blue fire burning along the fine trail of winter hair. The kinlord summoned blade, and it came, but he did not take to air; flight—even such flight as he had attained when he first woke upon the plain—was denied him.

  Envy was a bitter blow; it struck him in a way that the elemental water could not.

  His sight was not obscured by liquid, not riven by the debris the gale lifted. The hounds were at play; they would not now be called from battle by any lesser voice, and the Lord was in the Northern Wastes, upon the throne.

  He had come to mortal lands with contempt; had worn it like vestment. It left him now. What remained was war, and the command that had been given him by the Lord’s Fist.

  The Manelan men were lost, but they were the least significant part of the forces that had assembled.

  Shaking, fighting desire and the call to combat, he gathered the seeming that had protected the mortals from knowledge of who—of what—he was; he donned it clumsily, but he did don it.

  He had expended power; but the power was not yet exhausted. With a snarl, Landaran of the Kialli left to gather the army of the man who claimed dominion over all these lands.

  She felt the edge of nightmare tug at consciousness.

  It wasn’t unexpected. Demons, in all their dark glory, were never a sight that she could be prepared for; not even the worst of her memories—and she bore them all, like scars—could contain the reality of their presence, the darkness of their shadows, the red, red light of their weapons, be those weapons fangs and breath or bright, bloody blade.

  The Winter King did not let her fall. Although he leaped, lunged, danced across ground inexplicably cracked and dry, she remained upon the safety of his back.

  Discovered that safety, upon his back, was not guaranteed when the claws of one of these creatures slid through the stiff leather of boots, the pale skin of calf, the flesh beneath it.

  She accepted the pain. Clung to it.

  But the nightmare descended anyway.

  The Warlord was upon the field.

  And a small field, a pathetic field, such as he had rarely condescended to take. The blade that he had not drawn in centuries now welded itself to hand; it moved as if it were finger, knuckle, flesh. He did not struggle with it; did not reach for skills that in another man might have become slow and painful with disuse.

  This was what he was.

  This was what he had not died for, over and over again; what he had given up the gift of the gods to obtain. He drew himself up to a height that he had not felt for so long it seemed an act of transformational magic. And then, with a smile, he turned toward the kin, the mangy dogs that now ran free across the terrain, scattering and killing as they chose.

  He saw the stag, and for just a moment, looked for Arianne upon the field. Saw, instead, Jewel ATerafin, dark curls obscuring brown eyes, head bowed with the effort to control her fear. The blade fell a moment as he studied her face.

  He had agreed to serve her.

  He could not remember why.

  But she could.

  She did. What she had not said, time and again, she said now. Viandaran.

  His name.

  She had seen a god before, in the ruins of the foyer of the Terafin Manse. She had seen the children of gods in the Stone Deepings.

  But what she saw in Avandar moved her in a way that those born to immortality had not moved her. Memory was a poor container. Reality was stronger.

  She had seen this man in nightmare. She had seen him kill to exert authority over a wayward son. She had seen him—ah, this, too, in the present, relieved of the haze of memory—stand down to let their greatest enemy destroy one of the Cities of Men.

  But she had never seen him. She knew it because she saw him now.

  He was not Arianne; he was not Bredan; he was not Allasakar. But he was beautiful in a way they were not, for he was broken.

  Time, now, to face truth and have done: She had gathered the broken to her, time and again. But she had refused to acknowledge that Avandar Gallais—that Viandaran—was one of them.

  Why?

  The Winter King spun, lifting hooves from all contact with earth. He was warm beneath her thighs, and his voice was silent. She wanted him to turn around, to turn again, to give her sight of Avandar.

  But she wanted to live, and she knew that the blood that fell, absorbed instantly by parched ground, drew the kin. That and the pain.

  The fear that she felt was a fear that the kin could not use; she had learned that much of their nature.

  Twisting, holding, she tried to see through the wild strands of unkempt curls.

  But Avandar was gone.

  Alessandro kai di’Clemente drew his men back. He had lost some quarter of their number; would lose more before the battle’s end. But it was a battle now. The stag that had leaped into the midst of the creatures had killed one, and injured another. Hard to say if the injury was mortal; there was blood, but it was dark beneath the night sky; he could not say with certainty what its color was.

  He raised a hand, bringing horn to lip. He knew that over the din of arms his voice would not carry, but the horn song would.

  Archers came at his call, their ragged line forming up into something more graceful. Their bows were strung; they had arrows ready. He raised a hand and let it fall.

  The strings quivered.

  The creatures snarled, as if pricked by insects. Two turned to leap into the line of men.

  Alessandro joined those men, pushing through the ranks to stand at their head; the line wavered a moment.

  Reymos came, sword given over for the greater burden of the banner he now carried. Unfurled, silver and gold caught moonlight, marking the presence of the Tor.

  The men held their ground. The moon looked on.

  The foremost of the beasts drove into the line, and it broke, not by flight, but by impact.

  Run, the creature roared.

  Stand, the horn replied.

  Of such a conversation are stories born.

  But legend is born from something else entirely.

  As the creature tensed, as its jaws snapped around the metal gorge of an armed cerdan, a strange silence fell, and into it walked a man wielding a sword the color of the sun.

  For a moment, it seemed that Leonne had returned from the grasp of the winds to offer support and succor.

  But the man’s eyes were dark, and they passed above Clemente as if it were beneath his notice.

  He spoke in a language that Alessandro had never heard, and had no desire to hear again, and the beast swiveled, turning to face his death.

  And the man said, “The Warlord has taken the field.” For the benefit of Clemente.

  The Warlord.

  Lord Celleriant held the water. He did not argue with the elemental air, but instead gave it the play it desired. Only when it swept across the paths of men did he nudge it back toward the oldest of its three enemies, and although it grudged him even this interference, it heeded the warning.

  He did not attempt to protect the dwellings along the river’s edge. If men were foolish enough to hide in them, they earned their grave. But he contained the combat, forcing the water’s reach to the heights; what had been a several-tendriled foe was now a pillar.

  It struck at him, and the air was only barely quic
k enough to respond. He was not grateful; he was not afraid. Instead, he felt something that he had never felt when he had chosen to enter combat: uncertainty. The rules of this battle were not the rules that had governed the whole of his existence, and he discovered that the Arianni were not as . . . flexible . . . as mortals.

  Although he took no joy in death, the wild exultance of the Hunt had been solace and pleasure; these were gone. Gone, too, the worthy foe: the battle was beyond him; he held its fraying edges, no more. He bore witness, he made boundaries; his hidden sword was a weight and a decoration, like unto the banner now held, at such personal risk, by the Clemente Toran.

  But he understood the importance of such a conceit, and at some cost to himself, forbid the wind to carry it out of their grasp.

  Avandar was gone.

  What remained had little in common with the man she had known; little in common with the man he had slowly become over the passage through the Stone Deepings and beyond. His hair was dark, his skin pale, but even these were of a hue that defied recognition.

  He walked into the kin and they parted, jaws snapping, voices raised in something she had never really expected from them: fear.

  Two fled.

  Or tried to flee; light blazed from the sword as he swung it. He swung it yards from where they leaped; yards from where they fell. But the arc of the sword was larger than the sword itself, and the light, golden, was a corruption of every summer that Jewel had been graced—she knew it as grace now—to see. The kin were cut in two, and lay twitching and crawling upon the open ground.

  The Winter King had gored a third, crippling its hind legs; its jaws were danger enough, for its neck was prehensile. It snapped at its foe, but the King, unwounded, was faster, leaping lightly into the air and touching ground only long enough to strike.

  She wondered if he had ever held a sword like the Warlord’s.

  Yes.

  She could see its ghost in the play of his limbs, the supple bend of his neck; his fur was warm armor beneath her hands.

  She heard the fourth cry, the fourth mewling sound of a creature being consumed—and slowly—by flame, and although she had seen what the kin had done here, she flinched. It seemed to go on forever, blending with the howl of wind until at last she could no longer separate the two.