Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (103 page)

Elena had witnessed all nature of combat before. Some had followed the vine's fruit, when the Voyani, restless, gave in to their anger and frustration; some had followed the movement of raiders who had come seeking slaves for the markets of the Tors; some had been the result of the challenge that followed grave insult.

But although she had seen men fight—and die—she had never seen a battle like this. It was not simply the magic, not the fact that the swords burned trails across the air; it was not the shadows that bound the two together. It was more and less than that.

It was a dance; the swords in their flashing weave were like sculptor's tools, wielded with ferocity and precision so that, between these two, they might carve a tableau that was both terrible and beautiful.

The last cut had been made.

The Lord Telakar pulled himself, audibly, from the tongue of the blade. His sword wavered in the air before it fell, its flame banked.

But it made no sound as it struck the ground. Before Elena could move, it vanished.

Lord Telakar's back approached her.

"You still stand? You are more powerful than you once were, Telakar," Lord Ishavriel said. There was no admiration, no flattery, in the words. "Leave us, or I will send you back to the Abyss."

Telakar did not speak.

If she lifted a hand, Elena could touch his robes. Her hands were still.

Lord Ishavriel turned to her slack-jawed cousin. She could not help it; her gaze followed as well.

There was no petulance in his expression. And no triumph either. He seemed weary. Old. Her breath did not pass her lips. She was numb with a stupid, foolish hope.

But when he met her eyes, she could not bring herself to speak his name.

"Nicu," the creature said, "we must hurry. Our time has been compromised by the actions of our enemies. If we are to gain the Tor Arkosa for your people, we must act now."

Lord Telakar laughed.

"You are too late," he said, his voice thinner and weaker than it had been.

Lord Ishavriel frowned.

"Did you think to offer this mortal the keys to Tor Arkosa?" Telakar coughed. Laughed. Both were bloody sounds. "If the Lord had vision as deep and clear as the Firstborn's, perhaps that would have been a fair offer."

"The Cities were bound to the earth; they were bound at the Lord's whim."

"Oh, indeed. But they were bound because they could not be destroyed. Do you not remember the Cities across the open plain? Can it be that you have forgotten their towers and spires, their brief and painful art, their song, the immediacy of their passion? Can it be, Lord Ishavriel, that you believed that such an offer was within your power to make?"

"Tor Haval, Tor Corrona, Tor Lyserra, Tor Arkosa. Four of the five." He coughed again.

"Telakar," Ishavriel said. He gestured. No sword came to his hand.

"Too late," Telakar said again.

The wind blew across the open plain; it was cool and gentle. A different wind.

Elena looked up, her gaze skirting the blindness offered by the Lord to the careless. He was right. Somehow, he was right.

"The keys to these Cities were never ours, brother."

"Impossible. Had they the means, would they live like slaves across the length of the Dominion? Had they the power, would they have allowed the Tyrs their rule?"

"The answer must be yes," Telakar replied.

Elena reached out, then; touched the folds of his dark, long robes. She felt a shock of pain, a burning cold, enter the palm of her hand, rendering her arm useless. But her fingers, curved, became claws. She knew how to hold on.

The ground spoke, breaking around the syllables of a word that she had used casually for the whole of her life. Silence deserted her as she replied.

Arkosa.

The Lord Ishavriel's eyes grew wide; had he been a man, she would have seen the whites. But he carried only shadow, a vast expanse of growing night. The flame that limned his blade guttered as he turned in the direction that Margret and the Serra had run.

"This is not possible."

Arkosa.

"Nicu, what is happening?"

Nicu shook his head, his eyes upon Elena. He had his sword; it hung, slack, by his side.

"It
cannot
be possible. We have watched the Sea of Sorrows for as long as we have been summoned to walk the face of this plane. The power does not exist that could accomplish this!"

Telakar's laughter was rich and textured. Listening to it, she heard all the things she herself could not wrap words around. The wound he had taken had taken some part of the darkness with it. She did not trust him.

But she understood a debt when she owed it.

Arkosa.

"Telakar!"

He pulled away from her, or tried.

"Telakar, you
must
leave this place. You cannot survive what is to follow!"

Again he laughed, and the reckless, wild quality of his voice was both sweet and familiar. "What is to follow, little mortal? Do you even know?"

She didn't. But she
knew
that he could not survive it. Not upon this ground. Not so close. She was Tamara's daughter. She paid her debts. She grabbed his cloak with her other hand and pulled, hard.

But he did not move at all; he might have been part of stones that lay buried—that she knew were buried—beneath the earth.

Yollana of the Havalla Voyani rose.

She moved too quickly. Jewel, sitting in an angry, even silence at her side, rose with her, hands braced to catch some part of her weight.

But the single cane was all the support she required for the moment. Her hair was the color of light on water at dusk. Her eyes were Voyani eyes, midnight eyes, but they were sharp and glittering, like new steel.

"Serra Teresa," she said, ignoring Jewel's outstretched arms.

Jewel let them fall. It was petty, but she half-hoped the autocratic old woman would stumble or fall.

Serra Teresa rose at once, as if she were seraf or servant. The arm that she offered, Yollana accepted.

"ATerafin," the old woman added, once she had braced herself against the pull of the ground, "my apologies. But our debt to you is great enough." She lifted a hand and arranged the hood of her robes across her hair. "The wind has changed. It is time."

"Time?"

"Stavos! Tamara! Come. Gather the Arkosans."

Stavos' brows drew together. "Matriarch," he said, forcing due respect into the title, "the ways of Havalla must differ. We are forbidden to follow the Matriarch of Arkosa."

"You were forbidden," the old woman replied, gentling her rough voice. "But Margret will want you. Come."

He hesitated, this bear of a man, and at last looked to his wife for guidance.

His wife nodded.

"But the law—"

"'The absent Matriarch is not as dangerous as the one who sits by your fire,'" Tatia said.

He grimaced.

"Listen to your wife," Yollana added, in grim humor. "The Matriarch of Arkosa is younger than the Matriarch of Havalla, and her heart has not had the chance to develop calluses. Where is Kallandras?"

"I am here, Matriarch."

"Good. Use that sweet voice of yours to talk sense into these people. Or at least use it to make sure they don't get in my way."

He bowed, perfectly and precisely.

"Lord Celleriant?"

The Arianni lord—the only person present unwise enough to stand in the full light of the sun without the obvious protection of Voyani robes—shook his head. His hair danced across the perfect line of his shoulders. "I do not believe my presence would be… welcome."

But the Matriarch shook her head. "There is blood between your Queen and the Matriarchs. Come. You're in no shape to draw that pretty weapon. But if you're tempted, take my advice… don't try."

He glanced at Kallandras. Kallandras did not speak, but he returned the glance; something passed between them. Jewel frowned.

Tamara had already gone to the Matriarch's wagon to retrieve water.

In their hands, as if it were a living Heart, they held the memories of the women who had guided Arkosa. Fallible, poignant, bitter, furious, terrified, all their voices returned, a maelstrom of sound.

It was not worse than the storm Margret had weathered to walk these halls at all. But it was close. It helped that she stood in the eye of the storm. It helped that the only person she could clearly see was the Serra Diora, whose expression, intent and serene, did not waver.

Light washed across Diora's face, brilliant and blinding, as harsh as the Lord's glare. There was no cloud to soften it, no shade to dim its fire. Her robes slapped against her legs as the winds rose.

But the wind could not dislodge them from the heart of the circle in which they had chosen to stand.

She saw the light change; saw orange glow give way to green; saw green deepen until it was blue, emerald giving way to sapphire, both deep and rich. Red joined them, a red the color of sunset across the clear sky; it did not give way before the gray of dusk, the turning of time.

The seven spheres thrummed at her back, at her side, and beyond Diora's back; she could not clearly see them, but she knew that they now burned.

She looked at the Heart.

Felt its weight grow in their trembling hands. It was no larger than a cupped palm, but women had died under its burden, and she felt as if she knew them all, as if she could contain them.

Become them.

Look
, they said, and she listened. It was not a command, but neither was it a request; it teetered on the thin edge between the two.

The Heart was growing.

The golden glow at its center thinned, spreading across the field of her vision, like mist in the morning of the Averdan valleys.

Margret had loved the mist as a child, when the care of the wagons, the horses, and the people who depended upon them were not her burden. Not for distance was the mist intended; it hid things from the casual view, from the sight of people who had no desire to approach it.

She had, as a child; she loved the early mornings and the late evenings, when the blanket of fog would roll across the lowlands, like grounded clouds.

Even when she had passed beyond childhood, she had Adam as an excuse to return to its joys, and she would take his small hand and drag him through the undergrowth, looking for things made new and interesting because they were now concealed. Trees loomed suddenly out of nowhere; bracken and ferns grew around the width of hollow, fallen trees; thickets tall as whole forests appeared as they took careful steps across the hidden ground.

The fog had never been golden.

But because it was fog, she approached it, waiting to see what she might find, what might be made new, by the grace of its mystery.

She saw Adam.

Not a boy, not the child who had willingly offered a hand much smaller than her own; not even the boy who found horses so fascinating at a distance, so unnerving up close. He was taller than she by a good six inches; she could meet his eyes only by lifting her chin.

But his hesitant smile was still gentle, and if he stood with an authority that youth had not yet granted him, there was enough about his expression, his unguarded affection, that she could recognize the boy she loved in the man.

But as he grew closer, she saw that he wore a thin circlet across his brow and the mark of Arkosa across his chest; that he carried a sword as easily as he had ever carried water or food at his mother's command; that he held a book in one hand, and a cup in the other.

She knew that she would one day see him this way. That a window had been opened between the now and the then that separated them. A fierce joy tightened her throat as she nodded.

"Sen Margret," he said.

She looked away.

When she found the strength to look up again, he was gone. But the mists continued. She saw the side of a building, a great stone edifice whose height was swallowed by fog. She passed its side until she came upon doors that bore the symbols of Arkosa, and these swung open, silent, as if to beckon her. She saw within that building the light of gold and silver, the gleam of steel, the light of a hundred, a thousand, candles; she heard music carried by voices unaccustomed to song, harsh and beautiful.

Men came out of the doors as she stood. They were silent, or rather, they did not speak; their armor spoke for them, a cacophony of metal against metal, a song and a vow.

They passed to either side of her; they did not speak her name.

She was profoundly grateful.

Yet she felt Adam's presence, as memory, as comfort, as the mists changed again.

And she was happy, for a moment, for she stood at the heights above the Averdan valleys. The Voyani called no place home; that was their law. But if they had, Margret would have tempted the wrath of Tyrs by locking her wagon's wheels here.

But not today.

She recognized the standard of Callesta. It grew upon the ground like a wildflower, brilliant, intimidating. Men surrounded it. Averdans. Cerdan, she thought.

Then, as she looked more carefully at their surcoats, at their horses, she swiftly revised her opinion. Tyran. The Callestan Tyr was on the field.

She had never seen him. She had no desire to see him now.

/
have
, a familiar voice said.
He is present. There
. The voice fell silent. But, so much like her mother, it did not continue to maintain that silence. In a hush, a woman who had
never
willingly answered her questions said,
He bears
Bloodhame,
Margret. Aiee. We will see deaths, this war
.

We always see deaths in a war, Mother.

Don't be stubborn. Look at the cast of his face.

She looked. And looked away.

But he was not on the field alone. Another standard flew in the wind. The sun, she thought. The sun ascendant. She knew that the fog had a will of its own, but she pushed against it with hers, as if it were solid, a hanging, a curtain that she could grip and force back.

Because only two men in the Dominion could raise that standard: the kai el'Sol and the Tyr'agar.