The Riven Shield

by Michelle West

  “Calculating man,” she said, a hint of amusement and affection in her voice. Only a hint; something lay within the words that was stronger.

  Na’donna was afraid.

  “War has come to the harem,” she said. “But not with your letter. Not with the arrival of Ser Adano.”

  He was still, now. Although Ser Alesso’s letter was not forgotten, he found that he could set it aside. He waited.

  “It is too bright,” she continued, “to speak of these things.”

  “The Lord does not rule the harem.”

  “Aye, no. Nor our hearts,” she added. “But it is not the Lady’s time.” She drew breath, held it, and slowly lowered her shoulders. “The Havallans came to the domis,” she said at last.

  “The Voyani?”

  She nodded. “Not Yollana. But her daughters.”

  “Why?”

  She lifted her head as well. “To speak of war,” she told him quietly. “And to speak of the future. One of the two—I do not know which, so please, do not ask—has lifted the veil and gazed.”

  “What did she speak of, Na’donna?”

  “They will leave our lands,” she replied.

  “The Voyani?”

  “Yes. The Havallans. The Arkosans have already forsaken Averda.”

  “So. Even they.”

  “No. Not because of the war. Not because of the Northerners; they care little for such things.”

  “Then why?”

  “They would not say.”

  “You did not ask.”

  “It is said that it is unwise to know the business of the Voyani. More so, Tyr’agnate, for the men of the clans than their Serras.”

  “Why did they come, Na’donna?”

  “To speak,” she told him quietly, “of the Lord of Night. Of the Lord of Night and his kin.”

  8th of Corvil, 427 AA

  City of Callesta, Terrean of Averda

  Kiriel di’Ashaf stood in the moonlight on the height of the plateau.

  In Callesta—the only city in the Terrean to be named after its founding family—the manor of the Tyr’agnate stood at the height of the city, surrounded by gates that were cleverly placed behind standing trees, bushes, sculptures. The sculptures themselves were larger than life; they did not resemble people except in the fanciful light of day, when sun lit their stone features, their marble countenances. In the evening, serafs walked the length of the Callestan estates, and placed fire in the hands of these carved garden denizens, and that fire, red and orange, lent them menace and an air of threat.

  Valedan had chosen to accept the Tyr’s offer of hospitality while he awaited the arrival of the Commanders; two days had passed. During that time, some attempt had been made to integrate the Ospreys with the cerdan and Tyran that served Callesta.

  In Auralis AKalakar’s admittedly subjective opinion, it had not been a disaster; the Ospreys had acquitted themselves as well as anyone—even Duarte—could have expected. But they were not dress guards, and the exacting standards held up by the Tyran were particularly trying. The heat did not bother the Callestans; the endless repetition of Ser Anton’s training seemed to hold an equally endless fascination for them. They spoke only when spoken to, and seemed content to follow the minimal orders they received.

  The Ospreys tried.

  But in the end, they served best in two capacities. The first was by Valedan’s side. He had Ser Andaro as Tyran, but had chosen no others; the Ospreys—or whatever it was they were calling themselves at any given moment—had proved themselves worthy of their place at his side by their defeat of numerous would-be assassins in the distant North. Demon assassins.

  Unfortunately, there had been no similar attempts in the South with which to shore themselves up.

  So they served in a secondary capacity as well: They guarded the perimeter of the Callestan holdings in key areas, although Duarte had elected to use them only in the evening, when the differences in their uniform and, more particularly, in their gender, would be less easily noted.

  Valedan, however, had declined to remove the women from active duty.

  It bought him respect from the Ospreys; they were suspicious enough to smell politics a mile away, and Auralis had won a tidy sum of money when laying wagers among the more cynical Ospreys about the length of time the women would be allowed to be useful once they had crossed the border.

  Not that Auralis wasn’t cynical; he was simply more competent at being so. Kiriel was part of the heart of Valedan’s defense; would-be Tyr or no, she could not simply be set aside at the whim of Annie sensibility. Alexis, maybe—although Duarte would suffer for it later. Fiara, maybe. Any of the others, certainly. But not Kiriel.

  And Valedan was not generally of a mind to make glaring exceptions to the few rules he set.

  But he was politic enough that, when staying within the heart of the Callestan manor—if such an open, foreign building could be called that—he did not put the women on rotation within the halls themselves.

  Kiriel, therefore, was here, beneath the night sky, the city of Callesta growing still and dark through the slender bars of the fence.

  In the light shed by fire in cupped, stone palms, she cast the occasional shadow; it flickered with wind, as if it were living, and separate, from her.

  She, too, had grown still.

  In and of itself, this was not particularly disturbing; she was on duty; there weren’t a lot of other places she should have been. But Auralis, at a distance of not more than twenty feet—twenty very boring feet—found his attention caught by her, held.

  “Kiriel?”

  She turned to look at him, and the hairs on the back of his neck rose. His hand was on the hilt of his sword before he realized it had moved.

  Her brow rose slightly, and then her eyes widened.

  “Auralis?”

  He nodded. Forced his hand down.

  “I can see you.”

  Something about the way she said the words made them significant. “What do you mean?”

  “I can see . . . you. The way I used to see.”

  He didn’t ask any more questions. He knew what she meant.

  But instead of backing away, he walked closer; close enough that he was aware of her slightest move; the rise and fall of breath, the slight turn of her head, the way her lips quirked up in a dangerous, edgy smile.

  “Does it matter?” he asked, with a shrug. No nonchalance, not here; she wasn’t an idiot.

  She looked nonplussed.

  “Does it matter,” he said again, “what you see, whether you see it?”

  Her eyes were an odd color in the fire’s dim light. “Doesn’t it matter to you?”

  He stared at her for a long time. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  There was a sharpness to her genuine curiosity; an expectation of pain.

  He shrugged. “Can you change what you see?”

  “Change it?”

  “Sure. Change it. Can you make it something it’s not?”

  “No. I can tell you what it is.”

  “So what. I can tell you what it is. Maybe your vision upset someone back wherever it was you used to live, but maybe they were stupid. I know what I am, Kiriel.”

  “And you’re proud of it.”

  He laughed.

  It was Kiriel who took a step back.

  “Are you proud of what you are?” he responded, half snarling.

  “I don’t . . . know what I am.”

  “You can’t see yourself the way you see me?”

  She shook her head; her hair curled around her shoulders as if it were alive.

  “Then how in the Hells can you trust what you see in anyone else? Have you ever thought that maybe it’s all just a mirror?” />
  She stared at him for a long time, and as she did, Auralis watched her eyes change color. It was slow, deceptive; a trick of the light and heat she had moved away from.

  But his hands relaxed as he watched.

  “Maybe you’ll be lucky,” he said softly. “Maybe you’ll never know what you’re capable of. Maybe you’ll never have to live with it.”

  The Serra Alina was given a room adjacent to the rooms Valedan occupied. It was far smaller than the rooms she had occupied when she had lived in her brother’s harem, but in every other respect, it was a Southern room. The hanging across the doors was weighted; no wrinkle, no fold, marred its blue background, its brilliant sun, each ray embroidered in such a way that no one seeing it could mistake it for any rank but Ramiro’s. It fell like steel, like an ordinance. Mats were laid against the floor; upon them a low table that had been decorated with fruit, twin fans, a spray of small, white blossoms which hung like silent bells toward the east.

  She looked at them critically, but all commentary was silent.

  To the West, a set of sliding doors, paper opaque but thin enough to suggest external light, lay. Beyond them a seraf crouched in the stillness of born servitude. All of her formative years had been spent with such living shadows. But they felt strange to her now.

  And why should they? Servants in number had attended the Southern hostages in the Arannan Halls. They had come from the South, as gifts from the families that had been forced to surrender their kin; at the border, they had been granted their freedom in a land that made no more sense to them than the language it claimed as its own. It was a formality; she had known it; they had known it. Only serafs of worth had ever been given leave to attend the families of the ruling Tyr’agnati.

  But formality or no, over the decade subtle changes had been wrought; they had been slow in coming, slow to take root. For the most part, they had been beneath notice; the former serafs served, as perfectly and obediently, as they had always served.

  But there was a difference.

  She acknowledged it now.

  How could there not be? In the North, no death waited disobedience. More: no hunting parties went in search of those serafs who disappeared. If they chose to serve—and all but a handful did—they chose.

  But in the North, Mirialyn ACormaris was among the Kings’ most trusted advisers, and when difficulty arose, it was the Princess who often mounted horse and rode through the streets of Averalaan, attended by soldiers, but clearly in command.

  In the North, it was Mirialyn who had given Valedan his earliest martial lessons, first with sword and then with bow. In the North, the Queens slept with their husband’s fathers, and were revered for doing so. And in the North, the golden-eyed ruled the Isles.

  Anyone who had met them, these men who would have been exposed at birth across the South, discovered the first of many lies: for no one, seeing them, could believe them to be demonic. And no one, hearing them, could fail to believe that they carried the blood of the gods in their veins, for they commanded more than simple attention, and they saw truths, in a glance, that were so deeply buried they might well have been dead.

  The Serras were slow to adapt to these new surroundings; they had children they hoped to return to their home in the Dominion, and they feared that the contamination of the North would forever separate them from the people they were born to preside over.

  All save the Serra Alina di’Lamberto. Considered too difficult to be a dutiful Serra—and therefore no asset to the clan Lamberto—she had never been offered as wife to any of the men who might have been of suitable rank; she had never left the confines of her father’s, and later her brother’s, harem. She had attended her mother, and after the death of her father, had also attended the Serra Donna en’Lamberto, Mareo’s very proper, very dutiful wife. If they had been friends, it would have been easier, but Alina was sharp of tongue within the harem’s confines—too sharp to be a comfortable companion to the Serra.

  Her brother had sent her, as insult, to the court of the Northern Kings, and in that court, she had found a freedom that she, unlike the serafs, had not been promised when she had crossed the border, that invisible line between trees and rock that somehow bore the ideology of nations.

  She had thought to feel at home in the South.

  Proof, if it were needed, that one’s knowledge of oneself did not keep step with one’s life.

  The sun was setting. She faced the prospect of sleep as if it were an executioner, for in the dark, the clean, spare lines of the table and its decorations, the color of the hanging, the squares of paper in the screen door, could not distract her from the sight of the dead assassins; the men who had killed Ser Ramiro kai di’Callesta’s oldest son.

  She knew those men.

  Even in death, she knew them. They were older; they wore their years with far less grace than she bore her own—but they were unmistakably her brother’s men.

  Mareo, she thought, clenching hands.

  The hanging shifted in place, folds of cloth gathering shadow and reflecting light as it rose. She forced her hands to open and knelt carefully, placing them palms down in the silk of her lap.

  Valedan kai di’Leonne entered the room. She lowered her head to the ground; felt the spill of her hair on either side of her face. From this posture, her back curved, her hands hidden, she listened.

  He approached; she heard no other footsteps but his.

  “Alina.”

  She rose when she was certain that no one else had accompanied him.

  He was staring at her. “I . . . am sorry. It must be very difficult for you here.”

  It was not what she had expected to hear; not in the South. Not from a man. She waited.

  “Must I give you permission to speak?”

  She nodded.

  He closed his eyes, and the line of his shoulders shifted subtly. “Then speak. Speak freely.”

  “Valedan, what have I taught you of the South?” She cast a glance toward the closed screen doors, and spoke quietly. He followed her glance; acknowledged the still form of the seraf who knelt without, waiting a signal—any signal—that his presence was required.

  “That there is no freedom of speech.”

  She was silent.

  He approached; humbled her by kneeling, by diminishing the distance between them.

  Waited for her, as if he knew the question she longed to ask.

  He was young; he was too young to be wise. But when she met his gaze, she knew that that was exactly what he waited for. “Kai Leonne.” Formality rested in the syllables of that title; a formality that put a physical distance between them.

  He ignored it.

  “Serra Alina.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” He waited, and when he realized that she would not continue, he offered her mercy, of a kind. “Why did I make my vow to the Tyr’agnate of Callesta?”

  She nodded. “You asked me to identify the . . . assassins. You know that I recognized them.”

  He nodded.

  “Perhaps you came to the North too young. Perhaps you spent time observing the High Court of the Isles; spent too much time in the company of those who share a family name without blood to bind their loyalty and their service.”

  “The Ten,” he agreed.

  “The Ten would not rule here. Could not. Their existence is . . . anathema . . . to the South. They leave their families, they disavow their history, they break ties with the parents who bore them, nurtured them, raised them; they leave brothers without a backward glance to join the Houses that rule at a distance.

  “But you know this. I have said as much. Mirialyn ACormaris has certainly said more.”

  He nodded quietly.

  “Ramiro di’Callesta will make no peace with my brother. Perhaps you cannot understand this; y
ou are young; you have fathered no children. His kai is dead. His voice is the wind’s voice now, and it will drive him. Why did you not leave the dead in peace? Why did you ask me to identify the fallen?

  “If you had not—if you had not asked a Lamberto to identify Lambertans—you might have been able to play the political game; Ramiro di’Callesta, of all the Tyr’agnati, is the man most known for his pragmatism. Had you said that the dead wore the clothing of the Lambertan Tyr solely for the purpose of preventing any concord, he may have chosen—in public—to believe you. To at least allow for the possibility.

  “But through me, you have denied him that option.”

  “I believed that that option was . . . not an option,” he said, after a pause, his face smooth as Northern glass, but far less clear. “I believed that the dead were, as they appeared, Lambertan.”

  “More reason not to summon me. The word of a woman, even a Serra of the high clans, is little valued in the South.”

  He shook his head. “It is valued by me,” he said quietly, reaching for her hand. She did not withdraw. “And it is valued, clearly, by Ramiro di’Callesta; his wife is no adornment, no silent, obedient shadow. I asked you to identify the fallen because I had to know.”

  “And now you know.”

  He smiled. “Yes. Now I know.”

  The smile was gentle; she found it, of all things, infuriating. How very Northern of her.

  “I know,” he continued, his hand upon hers, his palm warm, “that Mareo di’Lamberto would not stoop to this particular form of assassination.”

  She lifted her head sharply, gracelessly. “Did you not understand what I said? Did you not understand what I acknowledged? Those were his men. I knew them.”

  “I understand that those were his men,” Valedan said gently. “But that was not what I needed. It was you. You are of the South; you choose which expression to offer those who observe you. And the expression you offered there was unguarded; you were shocked.”

  She raised a dark brow. The use of the word “shock” was harsh, but it was accurate. That he used it not as criticism, but as simple fact did little to still the sense of humiliation she felt; she had been in the presence of . . . her brother’s enemies. Her smile was brief; bitter. Family it seemed, complicated and full of its own special rage, was something that could neither be denied or avoided.