The Riven Shield

by Michelle West

  “Ah. Good. Kai Leonne?”

  Valedan nodded again. His gaze passed between the trees whose branches had been so expertly pruned, passed over the flower beds that had been rearranged, the grass that had been cut back, the stones that had been moved into such a pleasing and peaceful array.

  When his eyes found what he sought, he relaxed; the Ospreys were present.

  You trust them, he thought, surprised. Ramiro had taken their measure in the Northern capital, and having done so, he viewed them as a necessity, no more. They owed loyalty to each other; they swore no oaths to Leonne.

  The North has left its mark on you, kai Leonne. Hide it well. But he said nothing. His Tyran were present.

  The doors opened before them. Serafs cast shadows in the sun’s light, long and thin. Ramiro removed his boots, exchanging them for the simplicity of bare feet. Valedan, without hesitation, did the same. He walked with unconscious grace, adjusting the weight of his step until it fell in near silence, his stride matching his host’s. They were almost of a height, but Valedan had not yet attained his full growth.

  Tyr’agar Markaso kai di’Leonne had passed through the city of Callesta during the disaster of a war that had left its mark upon the two Northern Terreans. He had walked this hall, in a regal silence, surveying all that lay within it as if it already belonged to him.

  He had offered the graces of the High Court, had bowed low before the Serra Amara, had taken refuge in her gardens and her hall; he had spoken, discreetly, with her wives, assessing them, judging the man who owned them by their appearance. He had smiled at the young kai Callesta, the oldest of Ramiro’s many sons.

  “What will you do with the rest?” he had asked, speaking carelessly, casually, about the sons of Ramiro’s concubines.

  Ramiro could see, over the distance of years, the sudden stillness in his Serra’s face.

  The question had not been addressed to her directly; no man of the Tyr’agar’s station would have lowered himself to do so. But it had been said in her hearing, and she, servile in posture, but stiff as sword, had waited upon her husband’s words.

  As his wives had waited—the wives who had born him those sons.

  “They all bear the blood of Callesta,” he had said, cool to the question.

  “The blood, yes. But only one among them has the right to bear the sword. What of the others?”

  “They will all bear swords,” he replied, “in the service of Callesta. They will be brothers, oathbound and trusted, to the kai they will serve.”

  The Tyr’agar had raised a dark brow. “I see,” he said softly. “Is that wise?”

  “My Tyran all bear the blood of Callesta; all save a handful who have proved themselves in other ways. Judge them, kai Leonne, if it pleases you.”

  The Tyr’agar had shrugged and passed on, but Ramiro had lingered a moment to meet the eyes of his wife. His wives.

  There was a bitter pleasure afforded him in the method of the Tyr’agar’s demise, although he had never given it voice.

  He looked now at the son, the one remaining son of his Serra.

  He could not imagine that Valedan would ask so cruel a question. Could not imagine that it would bear asking. He was young.

  And he, already as tall as the father, was infinitely more gifted. He had shown this to the Serra; had shown it to the Tyran who always graced the Tyr’agnate’s presence. Had shown it in the arena of the Demon Kings, when he had forced, from the lips of Ser Anton’s finest student, an acknowledgment of the truth of his title.

  Ser Anton served him. Ser Andaro served him. Were it not for Valedan, a death would decide the silent war between those two. Yet they worked together, for Valedan’s sake, and if Ramiro was any judge, it was a harsh alliance.

  Markaso kai di’Leonne had not been a man who knew mercy. Ramiro himself was not noted for that singular grace; it was considered a weakness among the men of the Dominion.

  And Valedan kai di’Leonne chose to uphold it, again and again, as a strength.

  Almost impossible to believe that the father and the son were of the same blood.

  And that was the heart of the matter. It was almost impossible. There would be one test of its truth, and only one, and if Valedan, in ignorance, failed that test, the war was over. Callesta and Lamberto would be thrown to the Southern Tyr, Alesso di’Marente.

  All of life was a gamble. All gambles presented the possibility of loss. He accepted it with equanimity.

  “Tyr’agnate?”

  He looked up. Smiled slightly, as if at an older son. His own, dead now, a ghost in these halls. “My pardon, Tyr’agar. I remember the last time a kai Leonne . . . graced these halls.”

  Valedan’s face was as serious as youth can be. “You did not admire my father.”

  He trusted this boy. “No.”

  Valedan nodded. “Did anyone?”

  It was not the question Ramiro expected. He laughed. The serafs who lined the hall unobtrusively jumped at once to nervous attention.

  “You do not remember him well, if you can ask that question. He would have been respected had he won his ill-advised war. Had he chosen to heed his Generals, there was some chance that the war itself would have ended in a way that would have saved face, and land.” He bowed. “I mean no insult to your line.”

  “Such as it is,” the boy Tyr said, with a grave smile. “I take no offense. I have asked for your opinion because I desire it; if I desired pretty, empty words, I would ask elsewhere.”

  “Have a care, kai Leonne.”

  “Do I offend?”

  “No. But you take too much on faith; you trust too easily. It is a Northern habit, and one that you would do well without.”

  “Will you war against me?”

  “Who can say? I cannot conceive of the circumstances in which such a war might be necessary, but fate and circumstance are seldom clear in the light of the sun.”

  The fading sun.

  He picked up his pace; Valedan followed, his steps perfect, a complement to the Tyr’agnate’s. At his side, the scabbard of the kai’s sword swung; they had shared blood, he and this boy. They had bound their fates together. “We will have apologies to make for our appearance,” he added, as the sliding doors of the hall approached.

  Valedan frowned.

  “We wear the regalia of war, and even if that regalia is clean and prettified, even if it is suitable for public appearance, it is not . . . always suited . . . to the table of a Serra.”

  Valedan nodded, understanding then. It was a reminder of death, of a son’s death. “Will she forgive us if we are late?”

  “She will forgive nothing, if it suits her,” her husband replied. “And we have matters to attend to that require just such dress.” He paused at the edge of the doors, and serafs bowed, head to ground, in total subservience. He nodded, and they slid the doors wide.

  Ramiro preceded Valedan into the hall.

  He took in the table, low and Southern; it had been many months since he had sat in such a fashion. Cushions were placed upon the floor in a cascade of colors meant to soothe—and catch—the weary eye; the table was sparsely decorated with flowers.

  Each of them, lily and ivory spray, were white, their petals opened to suggest life, the height of the bloom. Black lacquered bowls with gold edges lay evenly spaced across the table above flat mats of similar shade; Amara had chosen well.

  As always.

  He looked up; the room was empty.

  “It appears we are not so late as all that,” he said quietly. “We are the first to arrive.”

  “Not so, my husband,” the Serra Amara said.

  From the recessed hanging in the West wall, she entered the room, drawn by the sound of his voice, by the fall of his steps.

  She was tall for a woman, and tonight she h
ad chosen to accept that height, to accentuate it. She wore silks, deep, deep blues, gold falling among its folds like an afterthought, a subtle adornment. Around her wrists she wore white ivory, and in her hair, ivory and gold; she had chosen the colors of mourning, even here, where guests of import were expected.

  But she wore no veil, nothing to hide the lines of her face from the world. Her expression was remote, serene; she was the hostess, the Serra of the hall.

  She was his wife.

  How much did he trust the kai Leonne? He paused, held in place by the sight of her exposed cheeks, her dark eyes, her dark hair that only now showed the traces of age through its length.

  How much did he care?

  He walked across the hall, leaving this most honored of guests in his wake; nor did he fail to notice that Valedan’s step had fallen completely silent.

  He reached her, and stopped a full ten feet from her straight shoulders, the chin she turned slightly up to meet his eyes.

  “Na’amara,” he whispered,

  She hesitated; he could see that indecision play with the lines of her expression, transforming it.

  As if this were the heart of the harem, the Tyr’agnate of Callesta bowed. He did not fall to his knees, although had he been certain of privacy, he would have.

  As it was, he risked much; he closed the distance between them and reached out to take her hands, his own falling from the hilt of his sword for the first time since word of the Southern armies had arrived in the encampment.

  She took his hands.

  Hers were shaking.

  “I have always wanted to meet the Northern Commanders,” she said, serene now, the woman that he had claimed years ago. “And I thank you for the grace of the opportunity.”

  “Amara.”

  “Ramiro,” she said, gentle now, “your guest is waiting. Would you keep him?”

  “I would keep him waiting for the rest of the evening, if you allowed it.”

  “And let my preparations go to waste? And lose the single opportunity a woman of my station will ever have to meet the men and women who will decide the fate—and the boundaries—of my Terrean?”

  But she smiled, wearily, tiredly, letting him see, letting him finally see, what lay beneath anger, loss, accusation.

  The future. His life.

  Holding her hands as if they were anchors, he bowed to her, bowed fully. Exposed all to the man whose respect and whose fear would define his later life, if the war was won.

  She understood what he offered her, then.

  Her eyes widened, and then they shifted; he thought she might cry.

  But she was his Serra, the pride of his harem, the partner he had chosen to hide in the secrecy of his private life. She shed no tears.

  “Tyr’agar,” she said softly, “I bid you welcome to my humble hall.”

  Valedan kai di’Leonne bowed low. “There is not a hall so humble that it would not be graced by your presence or the presence of your husband. You honor me, Serra Amara, and in the future, I will repay that honor in kind,”

  When the serafs came to the rooms set aside for the use of the Northern Commanders, Ellora was ready. Of course, she’d been ready for about an hour, and had taken to pacing the perfect surface of flat wood with the heavy tread of dress boots. Unlike the serafs, many of whom were women, she had brought no dresses, no skirts, no hint of feminine clothing upon her travels; she had dress jacket, dress pants, dress shirt—the standard kit for an officer of importance in the Kings’ army.

  She had been offered—with no hesitation whatsoever—the aid of the serafs who seemed to haunt this place like quiet ghosts, and had refused that offer, with just as much hesitance. She was certain she saw some relief in the faces of these serafs, although it was hard to tell; culture tended to throw up a hundred subtle walls to understanding.

  Her rooms were adjacent to The Berriliya’s and Commander Allen’s, but there were no doors adjoining them; no easy way to gain access to the two sides of their triad. She understood that this was because of the odd conservatism that informed the whole of Southern attitudes toward their women, but she found it cumbersome and annoying nonetheless. Upon the battlefield, such nonsense had no place, and here, in the citadel of Callesta, the battlefield was foremost in her thoughts.

  A knock at the door alerted her to the presence of Verrus Korama. She swept out of the sliding doors before they were fully open, and narrowly avoided tripping over the flat of a perfectly exposed back in her haste.

  Korama winced. “Kalakar,” he said, bowing studiously. He had always been a graceful man, but that grace was in evidence in this place in a way that it was not in her own.

  “The others?”

  “Are waiting.”

  “Good. I’m starving.”

  He laughed. “You’re always starving.”

  “A fact, clearly, that spies have neglected to feed to our hosts.”

  “You are not of a rank where hunger has ever been a threat,” he replied, with just a hint of reproof in his perfect words. He did not offer her his arm; he waited until the seraf upon the ground felt it safe to rise.

  They followed the girl’s silent movements; she was to lead them to the dining hall.

  “Is the Tyr’agar present?”

  She nodded, abjuring speech. Ellora suspected this was due to the fact that she could speak no Weston at all; she could answer the question because she recognized the mangled pronunciation of Valedan’s title. It was a significant title in the Dominion.

  Be honest, Ellora; it was a significant title in the North as well; for a lesser title, fifty thousand men would not have weathered sea and storm and the hazards of encampments in a land that was not designed around the movement of a large body of men.

  Perhaps that was unfair.

  The Commanders had gone to some lengths to hide the details of the logistics behind the movement of their armies; they had no reason to suspect that Ramiro di’Callesta was not equally canny, equally reluctant to expose information when it was not critical to do so.

  The halls were not as tall as the halls of The Ten; they were poor indeed in comparison to the stone grandeur of Avantari. In the Tor Leonne, stone was in fashion; in the Northern Terrean, wood was the building material of choice. The floors, the walls, the multiple doors with their opaque screens, were all of perfectly oiled wood, and the ceilings, much lower than those to which Ellora had unconsciously become accustomed, were as dark, their beams unmarred and unknotted. There were no obvious hangings, no grand mirrors, no great glass windows; in their place, a flower, a vessel, a stand that contained water bowls or great brass bells, inverted upon cushions.

  But here and there, doors had been rolled back upon their grooved resting places; the night, in its falling splendor, had been exposed for the eye to see. The lack of windows brought the sound of nature into the halls with a keen immediacy lacking in the Northern structures of Ellora’s home, and she paused a moment, reflectively, as she gazed out upon the spare vista of the Callestan gardens; their simple standing stones, the movement of slow fountains, the hidden pathways that led into the night.

  The seraf waited every time she paused, as if attuned to her movement and her mood.

  Not even Ellora’s servants were as skilled as this. She found her ability to accept and admire such a trait disturbing, and forced herself to concentrate on the simple task of walking without pause to their destination.

  When they reached the last set of doors, she noted that words had been carved in the wood above them; they were Torra, but old Torra; the ability to glean meaning from their spare strokes was beyond her.

  Korama, however, was not saddled by such ignorance. He stopped at the doors, and knelt, bowing before them.

  The seraf smiled for the first time, and spoke softly to The Kalakar’s adjutant.
<
br />   His reply, grave and sober, passed just beneath the range of Ellora’s hearing, a sign of her advancing years. She didn’t need to hear them to understand that he had offered a gesture of respect that was at home in the Dominion. She waited a moment, and then bent stiff knees, mimicking his stance, his sobriety.

  It did not particularly suit her, but nothing about this country did.

  She rose when he rose, and found that the doors had silently opened before them, revealing the subservience of their posture.

  She looked up, gaining her feet with markedly less grace than her adjutant.

  Seated about a low, flat Southern table, were men whom she recognized and a woman she did not.

  It was the woman that held her attention, for her eyes were keen and sharp, and they seemed to be fixed upon Ellora with an intensity that belied simple curiosity.

  Women had no power in their own right in the Dominion. Any schooling at all in the affairs of the South made that clear as the cathedral’s dolorous bells. But power was subtle, in any country—in any House—and she knew that in the case of this woman, power was present.

  Having gained her feet, she let her gaze wander.

  Ramiro di’Callesta was seated to the right of the Serra, which would make her his wife.

  To the left, a young man with a grim expression that almost robbed his face of its likeness to the woman. Son, she thought, and about as interested in an awkward dinner engagement as any Northern patris would be. No, there was more to his expression than sullen boredom; there was a very real resentment there.

  She filed it away, but she did not forget it.

  To the left of this boy was Valedan, the kai Leonne, the man for whom the course of the war had been planned. He nodded gravely when their eyes met, but he did not speak.

  And to Valedan’s left, knees obscured by the flat of an exquisitely spare table, Duarte AKalakar. She lifted her hand, ran three fingers through the pale strands of her hair.

  He placed two fingers flat upon the table’s surface. But she noticed the hesitation, subtle and short, before he made that gesture. That stung, but she was old enough not to be surprised that it did.