Those, and others.
They had demeaned her.
For a while.
Her hand became fist. Closed. It had been months since she had felt the loss so sharply. She was not the power that she had been when she had dwelled within the Shining City—but her tenure there had taught her that power alone did not give her the ability to defend the things she most valued.
Aie. Loss, and here. What had her answer been?
To value nothing. To value nothing so highly that its loss could cause such a terrible, profound pain.
“Kiriel?” Auralis. Face long, almost gaunt in the evening shadow.
How weak had she become? How weak? Her first impulse had been to send the Ospreys away. But why? Without the certainty of her power, she needed the Ospreys. Or whatever it was they were now called.
She looked to Auralis, looked away. The Voyani woman’s knees had buckled; were it not for Telakar’s hands, she would have crumpled to the ground, struck it with chest and forehead, and lain there, still against the earth.
She wanted to tell Auralis the truth.
She had no idea how she’d been allowed to find Lord Telakar, although in the Shining City, such recognition had been the second nature upon which her life depended. Worse, she believed that he had come—for his own reasons, of course, always those—to deliver warning about the Kialli; believed implicitly that they existed, as he said, within the city of Callesta. Believed that he knew where they were to be found.
And worse, worst, knew that she would not be able to find them. Before she destroyed Telakar—if, indeed, she could in her weakened state—she wanted the information that he had come, in secrecy, to deliver.
Not for the first time, she cursed herself for her impulsive—or compulsive—behavior. She had, in triumph and joy, revealed herself too soon. Isladar had always—
No, no, no. Not here. Not here.
Valedan stepped toward the fallen woman.
Kiriel lifted a hand; touched the center of his chest. She never touched him; felt the contact as a small shock, although her hand was gloved and his chest, mailed.
“She’s dying,” he said sharply.
And she nodded. She had, after all, seen mortal death before. She knew the look of it. “Give him no other easy hostage,” she said coldly.
“I am not certain that it is as hostage that she is here,” he replied.
She shook her head. Wait.
And he, Tyr’agar, ruler of this vast, abundant place, nodded.
Lord Telakar frowned. His grip shifted, falling from shoulder to arms as he attempted to lift the Voyani woman to feet that had long since ceased to be able to bear her weight.
“I see that we conversed overlong,” he said quietly. “I am afraid, Kiriel di’Ashaf, that this conversation is at an end. Find the kin—or ignore them—as you choose; they are not a threat to you, and they will hardly prove a threat to those you guard. If you are vigilant.” His smile was a thing of beauty, all edge and glitter, all teeth. “Of course, if I am not mistaken, you do require sleep. How inelegant.”
Her turn; her turn to smile.
He saw it, and the ring, if it denied her all else, did not deny her this. She smiled.
And he, lord, kinlord, free as any of the Kialli could be, took a step back, shifting his grip upon his chosen burden.
“Before you flee, Lord Telakar, you might attempt what it is now clear you intend to attempt.”
He was still; he could afford to be still for only a few moments longer.
“Kai Leonne,” she said quietly, “if there is a healer who travels with you, if there is a doctor of note in the Tyr’s domicile, summon him.”
Lord Telakar growled.
Of all sounds, it was not one she expected. “I will kill them if they touch her.”
“No,” Kiriel said, the softness of the word a mockery of gentleness. “But you will kill her if they don’t.”
He hesitated. Laid bare, she reveled in his weakness. And there was more to follow: Lord Telakar touched the stranger’s face with the open palm of his hand; he took care not to pierce her skin, although his fingers left their mark. He gestured. Gestured again. The frown that grew upon his face was not so beautiful as his smile had been.
And it was. To Kiriel’s eyes, it was.
He knew, of course, but he did not choose to acknowledge it; the whole of his attention was now focused upon this stranger, this dying woman.
His left hand flew back, flew up, his palm cupped night air, moonlight, and shadow. There was a glow about it, a darkness that was beautiful as he was beautiful.
Kiriel waited.
And then, although she could not say why, she forced the smile from her lips. “Lord Telakar,” she said coldly.
His hands were in flight. His lips moved. He spoke words that should have held power; they held none. They were words, no more, and in a foreign tongue, a language that Kiriel could not understand.
Valedan moved again, steel shadow, and bright.
“Tyr’agar,” she said, remembering herself now. “Tyr’agnate.”
“Kiriel, what is happening here?” Valedan’s question was devoid of command.
She did not answer, not directly. “Lord Telakar.”
The Kialli lord’s hands stilled. The woman, pale and motionless, made no reply to the conversation of his movement, did not acknowledge the command in it, the insistence of its intensity.
His eyes met Kind’s over the face of the dying.
“Give her to us, and we will see to her care.”
“No.”
“Then keep her, and see to her burial.” She turned. Timed the turn, the movement of heels against the soft grass, the delicately laid stone, of the Callestan grounds. All around her, in a silence punctuated by breath, the Ospreys waited.
“Kiriel!”
She turned again. “Lord Telakar.”
“This woman is of value to her people. And if I understand her people at all, they are now of value to the men you stand among.”
She nodded.
“I . . . will allow . . . the interference of your healers.”
“Why?”
He weighed silence; weighed the passage of time. “She is mine,” he said softly.
“Ashaf was mine,” Kiriel replied. “And she was Isladar’s. And in the end, death was the only blessing granted her. I will not give this stranger to you. I will not give her over to the three days of containment.” She swallowed the harsh night air; it hurt her throat. The words were swollen there; she could not speak.
Telakar was still for a moment. Still, tasting pain, testing aura. She knew it. Braced herself for the cruelty of smile as she found her voice. “I will never again cede mortals to the kin.” The words contained a different type of shadow, a different power, than any she had spoken before. They were truth. Her truth, her chosen truth.
“Ah. And why, Daughter of Darkness? You know as well as any who have lived in the rivers of the Hells what joy lies within such a reaving.”
Time. They had no time. Kiriel shook her head; she had seen the edge of a larger truth and she wished to grasp it before it eluded her. It was almost hers. She had only one way of containing it; one way of holding it captive.
She drew the sword.
And the night was bright compared to the flat of its blade, the dark, moving surface of the things written in steel and forged by the Swordsmith. Her name was upon that blade; she saw it for the first time, although the weapon had been hers since she had stood upon the threshold of adulthood.
She drew blood; her own. The blade absorbed it; no evidence was left of the wound in either the mound of her palm or the subtle serrations of its edge.
His eyes widened.
He recognized the blood-binding;
he was the only witness that would. He waited while she swore the oath that would, if broken, kill her.
“I will never grant it. Never again.”
“And the dark communion?”
“I am done with it,” she said, spitting the words into the night. Speaking them not to Telakar, but to a kinlord who was all of her history.
And then, of all things, Lord Telakar laughed, drawing the unconscious woman closer to his breast. “You think that I am interested in such paltry games? That I am so starved for the charnel wind and the song of the damned? You think that I would play such a game with her?”
Kiriel’s turn to frown. Valedan said something to Ramiro kai di’Callesta, but she lost the muted hush of his words; sensed only movement. Retreat.
“I am not a fool,” she told him, her hand upon the hilt of her sword. “Why else, Telakar? What other value have the mortals to the kin?”
He said, simply, “They burn.” Just that.
She spoke his name. His true name.
His eyes widened. The name itself was a whisper.
But he did not fight her. Instead, he gave her the whole of his attention, his form shifting subtly, his hold upon the stranger tightening. He bowed his head.
“I have seen the rise of the ancient Cities,” he said, speaking now in a tongue that no one but Kiriel might understand. “A gift, a gift unlooked for. They are diminished, these scions of that glory, but they are its heirs. The Cities are whole, Kiriel. They wake slowly, but when they wake, they will be a force to be reckoned with, even by the Lord we must serve.”
“He does not know where you are.”
“He has not turned his attention toward me,” Telakar replied. “But he has turned his attention to you, and you have somehow escaped his grasp.”
She shook her head. “What is mortal,” she said quietly, “cannot be bound by the mantle that the gods created. It can be killed. It can be tortured. It can be preyed upon by the powerful. But the nature of mortality—”
“Lord Isladar’s words.”
She almost lost her composure then.
“Ah, Lord Isladar,” Telakar said then, “I begin to understand.”
She didn’t. She didn’t, but she had been raised in the Shining Court, and she could not—for the paltry sake of enlightenment—expose the weakness of ignorance to the kneeling lord.
“She is mine,” he said again. “Accept that. She is mine, or she is no one’s.” The edge of his hand gleamed like steel beneath the moon’s bright face.
“And if I grant her to you, what will you offer in return? Think quickly, Lord Telakar.”
“That is not the way, Kiriel.”
“It is, here. It is, now.”
“What would you have of me?”
“Be part of my court,” she told him, speaking before she could think. “Be part of my court, Lord Telakar; be the first of my lords.”
“I will not be bound.”
“You are already bound.”
“Not by you, mortal. Never by you.”
Thought caught up with words. She heard movement at her back.
“Kiriel,” Valedan said, speaking in a foreign tongue, an interloper now, and unwelcome. “The healer has come.”
She lifted a hand, a call for silence. The Tyran saw her; saw Valedan fall silent. She had injured him by the simple action, and knew it.
“You served Isladar,” Kiriel told Telakar, delaying the healer, playing at death’s edge.
The kinlord was silent.
“Isladar did not see fit to force that binding upon you. What he risked, I will risk. Isladar could not offer you what I offer now.”
“And that?”
“Her life,” she said simply. “Her life, and the future of the Cities.”
“She is mine,” he said.
“Yours,” she replied, “but not to harvest. Choose, Telakar.”
He was silent for a long moment. Silent. And then, at his leisure, he rose, carrying the stranger as if she were weightless.
It hurt. Kiriel herself had been carried in just such a fashion. Had not thought to miss it, here.
He stroked the underside of the woman’s chin. Blood followed his fingers, his hands, as ink follows quill across a blank page. He spoke, and this time his words had power enough to raise the hairs on the back of Kiriel’s neck.
A binding. A binding such as she had never seen.
“I will serve,” he said quietly.
“Who?”
His smile was sharp. “Clever girl. I will serve Kiriel di’Ashaf, the Queen of the Hells.”
The healer came. He was a quiet man with a severe face, and when he approached the woman, his hands trembled. He looked to the Tyr’agnate, and saw no escape in the aloofness of his expression.
“You will allow this,” Kiriel said quietly.
Telakar met her eyes; his were all of the night. But he nodded bitterly. “There was a time,” he told her quietly, “when I could have offered the necessary sustenance to one such as she.”
Confession.
Kiriel’s brews rose. “Impossible.”
“Now, yes.” He waited. The man’s hands touched the stranger’s face and held it, as Telakar had held it, but without drawing blood. “But I was not always . . . as diminished . . . as I appear to have become.”
She heard the anger in the words; he revealed that much.
“We knew life,” he said softly. “We were your distant kin.”
“You were never part of—of—”
“Us?” Mockery there, the edge of it cutting. “Do you number yourself among the cattle, you who were born to—”
“Enough. Enough, Telakar.”
“You expose too much.” His eyes were lidded now, serpent eyes.
She had no time to frame an answer; there had only ever been one among the Kialli who had cared to criticize her for her weaknesses.
In the silence, Auralis moved. When he did, she realized that he had stood by her side, utterly still, his hand upon the hilt of his great sword.
“Kiriel,” he said quietly, “we have a problem.”
She laughed. “Only one?”
His shrug was most of his answer. “When it’s this big, we only need one.”
She turned from Telakar then.
Saw the ring of drawn swords held by the Tyran of Callesta; saw the bright blade in the hands of the sole man who served Valedan kai di’Leonne.
Beyond him, the Ospreys stood: Alexis, with two daggers, Fiara with a sword, and Duarte, hands stretched wide, his weapon more subtle and therefore more dangerous. She had not seen Duarte arrive.
Only the Tyrs were motionless.
Telakar’s laugh was rich and dark; she felt it run the length of her spine; felt the hair on the back of her neck rise, and with it, anger.
It was the anger she struggled with now.
Struggled with, and won, if victory could be measured in such a complex thing as simple obeisance.
She sank, in front of the Tyran, the Tyr’agnate, and the Ospreys, to her knees. “Tyr’agar,” she said.
“I have accepted the rules that govern the Ospreys,” he said quietly. “I accept them now. Your past is your past, Kiriel di’Ashaf,”
She lifted her head; met the brown of his unblinking eyes in the bob and sway of lantern light.
“I have lost count of the number of times you have saved my life; I am in your debt, and I acknowledge it in the hearing of the most trusted men of Callesta.” He spoke in Torra now, and there was no hesitation, no crack or break, in his voice. Just youth, but the youth was buried beneath the midnight sky.
“But you have named this man our enemy. If you will not destroy him—and it is clear to me, although the tongue you spoke was foreig
n, that you have reached some understanding, you injure our cause immeasurably.”
“Tyr’agar,” Auralis began.
Ser Andaro was between the Tyr’agar and the Osprey in that instant.
“Decarus,” Duarte said, his word a clipped, cold command. “You will be silent.”
He almost always was. Funny, that.
Kiriel did not rise. The hair that had unfolded about her like a shroud or a great pair of wings fell slowly toward her shoulders; her face lost the ice and the white of winter, the paleness of the dead. She lifted it again. “In the Court of the Tyr’agar who was assassinated,” she said quietly, “were all men of one thought, one mind? Were their goals so similar?”
Valedan kai di’Leonne lifted his arms; drew them across his chest. “I am not so old that I remember clearly the maneuverings of the High Court of Raverra. Tyr’agnate?”
“I would say that the death of the Tyr’agar Markaso kai di’Leonne is answer enough.” Was there a faint hint of amusement in the words?
Kiriel could not be certain.
“Very well, Kiriel. You have your answer.”
She bowed her head. “The High Court of Raverra has much in common with the Shining Court.”
She heard Auralis’ breath; it was heavy, a rush of air. But he did not choose to speak again. She wondered dispassionately if Duarte would kill him otherwise. Was certain that he would try.
“The greater kin vie for power in their own right. They play games, and if the games are not familiar to those of us who fight against them, they are motivated, in the end, by the desire for power.
“The proof of power,” she added softly, “being the ability to hold it. Only that.”
“And this . . . man?”
“I believe that he has come to offer warning, as he said” she told them all.
“And you would vouch for this belief with your life?”
Silence. And in it, the beginnings of a new respect for the man who would be Tyr.
“Yes.”
Telakar said nothing.
“Good. Because nothing less would be acceptable. What warning does he offer?”
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