Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (42 page)

He said nothing. To praise of that nature, there was nothing to say.

"Would you not—do you not—miss her?"

Silence.

"Can you leave the service to which you have dedicated your life in order to serve another? Or do you serve me because it is another service she demands of you?"

Silence, broken by the cacophony of the Arkosans.

But not by Ramdan. He held the sunshade.

"She will never go back to the Court," Diora said quietly.

"No," he replied. She looked up from the cup in her hands to his face; if she followed the direction of his intent stare, she thought she might find her Ona. She was no longer certain that she wanted to.

What will become of you, Ona Teresa?

Does it matter?

No. Of course, no. What other answer could there be?

"Ramdan?"

He was silent again.

"Have you ever desired freedom?"

With infinite care, he turned to where she sat, protecting her from the sun's grace with one hand while he offered her liquid with the other. It was the only answer he would ever give to that question.

It was the only time she would ever have the temerity to ask it.

Music filled the still, dry air.

Clans' music, mournful, slow, stately—deprived, as they were deprived, of useful things that would allow anyone else to participate in its making: words. Harmonies.

Elena rose a moment as it started, and then bowed, her forehead creased, her eyes narrow. It was not a music she liked—but if she were honest, it was not a music she could ignore. The notes that filled the air were cool, slow, stately—much like the woman who made them. But they were cool in the way river water was in the North; they wound toward something, gathering speed and strength as they moved.

She had once seen waterfalls that could kill a man who was careless. They had gone on forever, clear liquid becoming white foam, trickle becoming a roar over which only shouting could be heard.

Margret shouted, or rather, she cursed.

To make a point.

There was work to be done. Elena and Margret did much of it, or rather, Margret did; she cut the heartwood that they would take to the desert. She held her mother's ax, as she had done a dozen times now, and with each fallen limb of tree, each chip of dead wood from fallen trunk, her mother's memory receded until only two things remained: the ax and the duty that drove Margret to wield it.

Elena gathered herbs, and spent her time at her own mother's side, brewing them into the thick and heavy potions that might also be required. She had peeled bark off the trees that could survive so close to the desert, but they were few, and her wandering had taken her closer to Raverra than she would have liked. She searched in the shade and shadow of tall, old trunks for the mosses that sometimes grew in the North; they were absent.

But she found skyflowers almost everywhere, their tiny blossoms and spider-thin stems a tribute to the Lady's design. She found no nightshade, which was unfortunate, but as she had found skyflowers in abundance, she gathered these by some unnamed impulse, sweeping them into the ever-growing roundness of her satchel.

She had not had much time to speak to anyone, save during the mornings when she clung to the duty of feeding the children as if it were sanity—and in truth, it was. Elena had never liked make-work; if she was to be kept busy, she wanted to be doing something that
mattered
, something that was necessary. This gathering of random herbs and flowers had, perhaps, some use—but the use was murky and poorly defined, full of "maybes" and "ifs".

But she took poorly to isolation; she always had. She knew this because the words she didn't normally speak to herself came out the minute she saw her family—as if her closed lips were simply a dam.

With Margret, the silence was different; like a canker, not an act of momentary denial. The Matriarch—and it was hard seeing her cousin bent beneath the weight of wood and stained with the sweat of sun, her lips compressed into a thin line, her expression as sour as standing wine, to think of her as anything else—crossed the threshold of the caravan as if the caravan itself was somehow responsible for the private task that she performed, day in and day out.

And it was.

This was the end of the second day of such work. It was, if the gathering went well, the last day they would be forced to toil in such thin forests, such poor grasslands, looking for the things that were required for their passage into the Sea of Sorrows.

Margret dumped the heavy sack she carried at the foot of her own wagon and snarled at the first guard to approach it. Luckily, that guard was Adam, used to her moods and the particular tenor of foulness that permeated them whenever she was forced to complete a task that would have been her mother's duty. He did not touch what she had laid aside, but he did not take offense, and did not leap out of her way as if stung or worried that she might do something worse than simply bark.

Instead, he followed her, at a discreet distance, leaving room between his steps and her shadow—which in the evening was long enough to guarantee safety from the outstretched reach of her open palm or closed fist—to where she walked with deliberate purpose.

Elena saw where she was going and started to follow, but she, too, kept her distance, albeit for reasons other than Adam's.

Others came; Nicu, Stavos, Donatella, even Tamara. There were one or two children, but they were babes in arms, and if there was violence done here, it would pass them by without leaving the shadow of memory.

Margret of the Arkosan Voyani came to stand at the feet of the intruder who sat—who had continued to sit—in the shade provided by a seraf since she had arrived at the caravan. Who wore simple sari, but sari nonetheless; whose hair was bound in combs, whose skin was pale as light on water, whose every movement was so graceful and perfect it was
wrong
… and made every other woman in the encampment feel ungainly, ugly, old.

The Serra Diora had come to them with little, and much of it had been procured by the Serra Teresa, who herself forbore to wear outlandish clothing, to play outlandish instruments, within the encampment. It was the Serra Teresa who gave her niece both fans and combs; the Serra Teresa who brought, from her own satchel, the creams and powders of the High Clans; it was the seraf who carried the samisen that she now played. Not even the Matriarch Maria dared to come, and stay, as a Serra among the Arkosans, although they were all well aware that she lived half her life in that guise.

The mournful strains of samisen music underlined rather than broke the stillness of the cooling dusk. The instrument lay in her folded lap, and her fingers, her perfect, graceful, supple fingers, ran up and down its length, pausing to let a note rise and fall as the vibrations of the strings sustained it.

It hadn't therefore been particularly hard to find the intruder—the woman who kept the Heart of Arkosa away from its rightful owner. No, Elena thought, watching from an angry distance, that wasn't fair. That had been Evallen's choice, not this Serra's.

But everything else about the Serra
was
her own choice. What did she do? She ate little, slept little, and did not lift a finger to help the Voyani in any of their duties.

And would her help be accepted?

Shut up
, she told her conscience. Even if it wouldn't be accepted, the offer would be appreciated. Elena started toward Margret only when Margret had become a still body, rather than a body in motion. But she was the only person to approach; Adam and the others had taken a step back and now stood in a loose semicircle around the woman who had claim, by blood and birth, to lead them.

Margret had gathered the Arkosans, as if they were burrs and she a fine cloak; they had grown in numbers until those who had not joined them felt their passing in the quiet murmuring that rose in her wake.

Serra Teresa—perhaps just Teresa, as Margret was just Margret and Elena was just Elena—rose from where she had been tending the Havallan Matriarch. She shaded her eyes, for this gathering crowd walked into sunset that had not yet finished with the edge of the sky.

Her expression became smooth as Northern glass; she listened carefully. Spoke a word into the wind, and waited again.

But it was only when the sound of distant music—a music that eased her in these new and strange duties by being the single reminder of the grace and beauty of her abandoned life—stopped completely that she turned to the old woman at her feet, dropping as she did to her knees in an automatic gesture of subservience.

"Yollana, please, intercede."

The oldest of the Matriarchs frowned. Her hands were cupped under the bowl of an unlit pipe—a habit that the Serra Teresa privately thought distasteful, although she helped gather the weeds and the herbs that Yollana added to the tobacco she burned.

"How?" she asked.

Teresa did not reply; she had fallen into the posture, and she had let her forehead touch the cooling earth while she kept the silence that posture demanded. It was almost comfortable to rest thus, although in truth she had seldom been forced to do so in her later years.

"That damn girl's temper," the Havallan Matriarch said, to sinking sun or night air. "Don't sit there groveling like a pathetic clanswoman, Serra. Help me walk."

Teresa rose at once, the movements as graceful and perfect as those that earned her niece so much contempt. But she wore the wide skirts and shirt that the Voyani women almost always wore when they did not wear pants made for riding, and she no longer had a seraf to tend to her needs. The sun had darkened her skin a shade, and there was evidence that it would continue to do so; if salves and creams had been offered her, they had been offered in a privacy so absolute that no Voyani save the one offering could bear witness.

"Damn her temper," the Havallan Matriarch said again. "And damn my pipe. It never stays lit when I want it." She handed the bowl to Teresa, who took both pipe and the older woman's weight and managed them in silence. "And damn your niece."

"You know why she is forced to choose the actions she chooses."

"Yes. But when you traveled with us, you managed to blend in without ever losing the elements that made you Serra, and therefore alien."

Serra Teresa said nothing.

"Your niece has that gift, Teresa. She has that ability. The fact that she is feared or despised is therefore her choice."

"It is… not… simple choice. She has learned too much in too short a time. I am not certain that she is even aware of it," she added, stepping over a large stone so that Yollana could hobble around it, "but I believe that she keeps the others at a distance because of those losses."

"Your niece does not understand. Among the Voyani walls are only meant for one thing: to be brought down. She has built a wall that is thicker and wider than any I've seen; not even the clansmen who approach us when they want a favor—or an ally in one or another of their wars— have approached us with such ice and distance."

"Yollana—"

"Don't talk. Move."

Serra Diora di'Marano looked up as Margret's shadow crossed her. Her hands were still against samisen strings, which had also stilled. But she did not remove them; the contact between string and skin was welcome, familiar. The only contact she desired.

Ramdan stood between the Serra and the Matriarch, but to one side. He was not cerdan; it was not his duty to protect her from anything but thirst or sunlight.

"Go away," the Matriarch said coldly. She glared at the Serra, but it was clear to anyone who stood at her back—and there were not an inconsiderable number of Voyani, backs to sun, arms across chests—that she spoke to the seraf.

The seraf bowed to her, his movements almost as graceful as the Serra's, his dignity somehow less reproachful, less isolating. He turned to the Serra.

She did not speak, but she inclined her head, and he stepped back, behind her. Over her head, over the face that would have been exposed to sunlight were it not for the looming presence of Margret of the Arkosan Voyani, he still held the sunshade.

"She has no right to compel you," Margret snapped. "She's among the Voyani, and we own no serafs, we take no slaves. You're free, do you understand? You're free to do what
you
choose."

The Serra Diora, face now upturned, said quietly, "You take poor clansmen as slaves; you sell them to their own when you find them; you prey on them as. much as their own do. If you do not own serafs, Matriarch, you are just as responsible for making them as the clans."

Teresa stilled. Yollana, not expecting this, took a step that nearly overbalanced them both; they teetered as Teresa caught both herself and the old woman. Pipe embers fluttered down to dry dirt and dry, wild scrub, undisturbed by the movement of air. She crushed them with the heel of her traveling boots before she drew another breath.

"
What
is she doing?" Yollana demanded, when they were both on solid footing again—or as solid a footing as two women could be who had two good legs between them.

"She is… opening… a sally port in the wall."

"What?"

"It is a Northern term," the Serra said softly—and her voice, her pitch, the line of her neck, the remote smoothness of her expression, were suddenly kin to the Serra Diora's in every way. "She is angry."

"That's your idea of anger?"

The Serra Teresa's smile was thin and brief. "Yes."

"It won't mean a damn thing to the Matriarch."

But Yollana was wrong.

Margret's hand snaked out, found the upturned cheek— pale, perfect cheek—of the interloper. The only sound in the flat, quiet space was that contact—the first contact— between them.

Color rushed to white skin—not the red of sun's blister, nor the red of labor and contribution and community; this was the red of anger, and it held the shape of a woman's hand, fingers splayed, palm open. But it would do.

"That's not how you speak to a Matriarch," she snarled.

"The Voyani only pride themselves on truth among their own?"