She had met mortals in the Shining Court. Lady Sariyel, and her lord, the mage; the Imperial humans who kept their visits a secret from the mortal lords they pretended to serve. All of their fighting was done with words, and some little magic; they played games of power without apprehending the cost of those games, and their losses, in the end, were the more profound, for the mortals in the Court, when killed, were often escorted to the Hells, there to be fodder for the entertainment of demons the Lord had not seen fit to return to the plane.
She had cared little for them, had trusted them even less.
There was only one mortal in the Court that she had trusted. Only one. She bowed her head, losing the thread of Duarte’s words, his reasoned caution, his mild frustration.
Ashaf. Ashaf kep’Valente. She pronounced the words in the only place she would ever pronounce them: in silence, the privacy of thought. And she waited for the pain they caused, the terrible, burning anger, the truth of Kiallinan. Instead, she saw an old woman with soft arms, a softer face, a voice that cracked in the wind and wavered in the cold of the Northern tower. No weapons girded her; no power set her apart from the mortals that were said to populate the lands beyond the Northern Wastes.
Instead, she offered song, cradle song, child’s song. She offered stories of tall grass, and small children, of baking bread and casting clay in the summer kilns; of stalks of wheat in fields that the sun made golden. She spoke of rivers that did not freeze, of water that was offered openly beneath a warm sky, of the fall of rain.
And she spoke of love.
Not even the mortal Court had been so bold, and so foolish.
Ashaf had paid the price for her weakness.
And in paying, had gone forever beyond Kind’s reach: for Kiriel might never join her in the lands it was said the mortals reached when at last they knew peace.
And yet.
She stood among these men, these women—the Commanders had come upon them silently—and she saw in them some hint of Ashaf’s weakness, although they told no tales, offered the comfort of no open arms, no folded lap. She saw them converse; saw them, expressions guarded, as they teetered upon the edge of a power that no single one of them could wholly claim, in the end.
They deferred to Valedan. That was his right. But they did not fear him; they did not plot to overthrow him. In his turn, he deferred to their knowledge, trusting their experience, and trusting his instinct, balancing carefully between the two.
No: life in the Shining Court had offered her no preparation for this, this mortal mess.
“Kiriel?”
She shook her head. Decided. “I cannot sense them,” she said quietly.
“Them?”
“The ones who listen.”
But decisions were complex, complicated, things done by halves. She glanced at Lord Telakar to see what he made of the weakness of that confession, aware that his home was the Shining Court, aware that his rules were the laws of the Hells.
She had not bound him. Did not know how. The only binding that lay within her grasp was distinctly mortal: the uneasy alliance that did not quite trust, but could not quite dismiss.
“You found me,” he said quietly. “Is your instinct so dulled that those of lesser power escape your attention?”
Old anger bridled at the accusation in his words. Old lessons returned, and with them, the voice of the Lord she had trusted, in a different life. His name, she could not say.
“I . . . do not know . . . why I found you,” she said at last.
Commander Bruce Allen raised a brow. “Do not know, or are not willing to say?”
It was a fair question. A reasonable one.
But Valedan kai di’Leonne raised a sharp hand, as if it were blade. “She has said that she does not know,” he told the Eagle curtly.
The Commander fell silent. As silent as Kiriel, as surprised by the interruption as she had been.
Lord Telakar’s eyes wavered an instant, crossing the distance between Kiriel’s face and the man she had chosen to serve. “Is he so foolish that he has chosen to trust you?”
“Apparently.”
“And you have become so practiced in the Kialli arts that you are capable of playing at the game of being trustworthy?”
“No.”
Silence. Then, softly, “You have changed, Kiriel. I do not know what to make of it.”
“You have not been asked to judge.”
“Indeed, no. But judgment is a failing of mine; it is the reason that I am kinlord and not servitor. My name is my own.”
She nodded. And then, although she could not say why, she lifted her hand. Her sword hand. Upon it, in the veiled moonlight, in the orange of the lamps the Commanders—or their adjutants—carried, was the pale, simple band she had taken from the ground at the feet of Evayne.
“What is this?” he asked softly, speaking again in the tongue of the kin.
“A ring,” she answered in the same tongue. The syllables, the harshness of the consonants, were somehow pleasing.
He reached out, and she drew her hand back.
“Your pardon, Kiriel. With your permission, I would like to examine the ring.”
She laughed bitterly. “My permission does not seem to be the deciding factor. If you wish to examine it, you must examine it as it sits; it will not be removed.”
He gazed at her, and she knew he was attempting to determine the truth behind the words she offered; the half-truth, the benefit she might gain by lying. It wearied her. It made her feel at home.
“I tried to remove the finger,” she continued, dispassionately. “And the hand. I suspect that not even the removal of the arm would be possible, but I admit that I did not attempt that much injury.”
“The loss of the hand would be danger enough.”
She shrugged. “I would not attempt it now.”
“You accept the ring?”
“I accept what cannot be changed.”
His turn to offer a shrug. “Wise.”
She held out her hand. He reached out to touch it, and the ring flared, brilliant in the shard-scattered clearing, a warning that seared the fingertips of the kinlord, driving him back.
He did not so much as grunt with the pain, and she knew that the pain was fierce. Knew also that it was beneath him; the whole of his attention was now absorbed by what could not be touched.
“Kiriel,” he said quietly. “Do you know what it is that you bear?”
“A ring.”
“Yes. One of five, if I am not mistaken. One of the five. I have . . . heard of them, of course. The Lord has heard. In the distance of the Northern Wastes, he has felt the echo of their brief awakening, but it is tentative; they slumber. If they had not, he would have found them years ago.
“All, I think, save this one.”
“Indeed, you are correct in your surmise,” a new voice said.
Kiriel turned. They all turned.
It was to Kiriel that Meralonne APhaniel offered a low bow. “Well met,” he said softly. “Well met, Kiriel di’Ashaf.” Rising, he added, “Well met, Lord Telakar.”
Lord Telakar turned to the Member of the Order of Knowledge. “Illaraphaniel,” he said softly, and his face was transformed.
“I wondered if you would be summoned,” the magi said quietly. “And I wondered if I might encounter you in the heart of the South. I had not expected to find you here, so close to the Northern border.” He paused. “Word has reached the Order of Knowledge. Word, and rumor, although I confess that rumor means little to most of my brethren.”
“And what word?”
“The Cities of Man,” Meralonne said quietly.
Telakar smiled.
“A young man of Arkosa resides within the High City; he does not speak Weston well, but it is our belie
f that he traveled with his Matriarch toward the Tor Arkosa.”
“Our?”
“Mine, then. And I see that there must be some truth in that belief, for you are here.”
“I am here,” Telakar said smoothly, “in service to Lord Kiriel.”
“Lord?”
“Kiriel di’Ashaf,” Telakar replied, correcting himself.
Kiriel knew the slip had been no accident.
Meralonne turned to Kiriel once again. “I offer advice,” he said wearily, “and only advice. Lord Telakar is not your enemy—but he is not, by the nature of his service to the Lord of Night, your friend. What you have done, what you have revealed, is a danger to you—a danger that you cannot understand.
“I would counsel you to destroy him.”
“He serves me.”
“Indeed. Let me accept, as truth, that premise. But in the presence of the Lord of Night, what does such an allegiance count for? If he is commanded, he will speak of all that he has learned from you, and what he has learned cannot be measured in simple words. If commanded, he will return to the North.”
“Enough, Illaraphaniel,” Telakar said, his voice thin and cool.
“And if he delivers word that you wear the fifth of Myrrdion’s rings—the only ring forged in such a way that it might remain invisible forever to the Lord of Night and his endless gaze . . .”
“Yes?”
“It was said that not even a god could unmake what Myrddion forged,” Meralonne said softly. “But I would not test it, if I had the choice. Because if the ring itself cannot be unmade, its bearer can.”
“What is the role of the ring, Illaraphaniel?”
“In truth? I do not know. But did I, I would not share that information with one who could be so easily compelled to part with it. It is some part of Myrddion’s vision, some part of his great plan. We were privy to the necessity of the creation, but not the insanity of the vision itself. We cannot say.”
Telakar shook his head. The motion was strange enough that it drew the whole of Kiriel’s attention. Her eyes widened; his expression made him look like a different creature. “This . . . ah. I thought . . . this was an impoverished age,” he said softly. “So empty of the grace and the fire of man’s magic, so gray and so lifeless. But now I see that legends are waking. We may see a return to power of the heroes of that era.”
“Heroes,” Meralonne said coldly, “are vastly overrated.”
“Perhaps. But in the end, was it not a mortal hero who rode into the heart of Vexusa? Was it not a mortal hand that lifted sword, that dealt the crippling blow to the Lord of Darkness?”
“So the bards sing, who sing of that time at all.”
“And you?”
“I am no bard. I offer your lord my warning, that is all.”
Telakar turned to Kiriel. “He is correct.”
She frowned.
“He is correct, Lord.”
“Do not—”
“Kiriel.” He corrected himself with far too much ease; it was as if he no longer had interest in the facade of power. “He does not speak with enmity. He speaks pragmatically.”
“Ah. And as the first of my lieges, what would you advise?”
“My destruction.”
She was shocked into stillness. His expression was an expression, but she hadn’t the tools to interpret it. Still, she had no intention of destroying Lord Telakar. “I am not . . . as my compatriots are. You have given me advice as I have commanded; do not trouble me with it again.”
He hesitated a moment, and again, his face wore an open expression that made no sense to her. But he bowed.
“The ring binds me,” she said quietly. “And if that was a part of this Myrddion’s plan, then he must have seen me at the head of my—of the Lord’s armies.”
Meralonne said nothing.
“But of late, the ring is not as strong as it was; there are times when I can almost hear the voice of the Lord in the North; I can see the towers. I can feel the ice of Northern wind. And when that happens, I can see as I once saw, feel as I once felt. Only then. It’s how I saw you.
“Otherwise, I see as mortals see. If there are Kialli present, I do not hear their names.”
“That,” Meralonne said softly, “is why I chose to be sent to the South. And I will tell you now, Kiriel, that there is indeed such a presence, such a name, upon the plateau. But it is newly come.”
“Whose?”
“I am not so familiar with the Kialli as it might appear,” he said cautiously, “but I believe that we are visited, at some distance, by the Lord Ishavriel.”
Shrouded in the darkness of city streets too poor to own any light but moon, Lord Ishavriel gazed toward the Callestan palace. Word had come to him; he had received it and departed the camp of the human Tyr in haste, and without permission. The word simmered uneasily in thoughts that already grew wild with leashed anger.
Silabras was gone. Lord Ishavriel had called him, in the softest of the voices he possessed, and his liege had failed to answer the summons. That failure was death; only death would prevent obedience.
And the death of Silabras was significant.
Isladar, he thought, and forced himself to be still, listening to the wind, to what the wind carried. But the wind carried no hint of Lord Isladar’s presence.
He hesitated. Although he had been fully apprised of the intent of the Lord’s Fist, he had not been present, and he knew—incompetence, utter failure—that Lord Isladar had escaped the trap set for him by Etridian, Assarak, and Nugratz. He had been injured in the battle; few indeed were the kinlords who might have escaped, once so engaged, uninjured.
But Lord Isladar was unique. Incomprehensible. The Shining City no longer contained him. And the plans he had made—in silence, in the millennia of existence in the Hells—were not plans that Ishavriel was privy to. Did they include this treachery?
Silabras had not been blood-bound. His role in the heart of Callesta had been one that required subtlety and cooperation; it required initiative, the ability to wait. He had been given permission to feed only upon the grief that the mortals might offer their dead, and he was capable of gaining sustenance from that pain.
He was gone.
How? Ishavriel drifted toward the plateau. He took care to mask himself from the eyes of the strays that lingered in the streets of the city. The mortal, Alesso di’Marente, chosen as puppet and figurehead, claimed to have his spies among the Callestans—but it galled Ishavriel to rely upon them. Their words would be slow to travel, unadorned by magic; they would cross the valleys and rivers, the plains and forests, in days. And they might come to him if he waited like a patient beast of burden, a lowly soldier, at the whim of a man who defined himself on a mortal field of battle.
It was not to his liking.
He had failed in the desert, and that was costly; Etridian’s servants had failed him again, on the desert’s edge. This third failure was more than he could willingly bear. And had Silabras been given leave to operate without constraints, had he been allowed to walk, uncloaked, in Callesta, that third failure might never have accrued. The edges of shadow frayed about the Kialli lord. He gathered them carelessly.
Lord Telakar raised his head, listening. After a moment he met Meralonne APhaniel’s gaze. Kiriel watched them both with ill-concealed hunger. What they had, she had once possessed. It had been months since she had missed it.
“I believe you are correct, although I would not have sensed it were I not alerted,” he said at last.
Kiriel drew her blade.
And Meralonne raised a hand. It was a polite gesture, but it was an imperious one. “I do not understand your place within the Shining Court,” he told her, his voice gentle, his eyes, steel. “But I believe that if you have not been revealed to Lord Ishavriel’s sight
, now is not the time.” He threw back his mage’s cloak. Beneath it, glittering with absorbed and hoarded light, he wore chain, a thin, thin mail that conformed to the lines of his body as if it were silk.
“But my place within the Court is quite clear,” he continued.
Telakar’s shadows grew deeper.
Again, Meralonne APhaniel raised a hand. Shook his head, the pale skein of his hair falling wild around his shoulders, an ivory mantle. No Osprey would have been allowed the vanity of hair as unfettered as his; no soldier, if Kiriel understood the dictates of the Kings’ armies well enough.
“Not you,” Meralonne said. “Do not draw attention that you will be unable to escape. Not yet.”
“You intend to hunt him alone?”
“I intend to see the streets of Callesta by moonlight,” the mage replied. “But the streets of the South are not as tame and tended as the streets of my Northern home, and I may require the weapons I have long carried.”
He waited; Telakar’s silence was grudging.
“Tyr’agar?” the mage said softly.
Kiriel started; she had forgotten, for a moment, that Valedan, his Ospreys, and his Commanders, now waited.
“Callesta is not my city, but inasmuch as it is within the boundaries of my country, you have my permission.”
Meralonne bowed. “I will return,” he said quietly.
“Hold.”
They turned at once, the Tyr’agar, the Ospreys, the Commanders.
Ramiro di’Callesta stood in the moonlight beneath the forked branches of perfect trees. His weapon was unsheathed and unblooded in the pale light. He stood alone.
Ser Fillipo par di’Callesta and Ser Miko di’Callesta approached him; the Tyr’agnate sent them back with the simple gesture of a raised hand.
“Tyr’agnate,” Meralonne APhaniel said, bowing with a perfect respect that he never offered Northern Commanders.
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