Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (71 page)

And she was wise enough to be suspicious of freedom, although she desired it. She was wise enough to be suspicious of any desire that she did not fully understand or fully control.

"Here," Margret said, her movements masculine, truncated, decisive. Ruatha might have moved that way, had she been born to freedom. "Here, we can talk. What did the Heart say?"

Why did the living make her think so much of the dead?

She composed herself as she drew breath; took comfort, took strength, from the concentration she required to speak to Margret, and Margret alone. She had become bold with the voice as she waited on the periphery of the desert so feared by the Voyani.

"Serra?"

The Serra Diora, lost in the robes of the desert walkers, nodded. She lifted a hand to her throat, and touched the chain that nested there, against her ivory skin. Lifted it, but only enough that she might touch the Heart, not enough that she might expose it to the night sky, the watching stars.

It was beneath the night sky that she had lost her life.

The Heart .was warm beneath her fingertips; warm against her skin. For just a moment, she wanted to pull it out, to cup it between her palms, to absorb all it had to offer. She was that cold. But she was used to suffering physical pain and indignity with dignity; it defined her. She began to listen to the Heart itself.

Was it called a heart for a reason? It did not beat. It did not pump blood. It could not be pierced—and stilled—by steel, wood, or time. But it could speak. It could contain the darkest of memories, the most insidious of whispers. It had, she was certain, borne witness to evils that had scarred and shaped both the Heart itself and the women around whose neck it rested.

Who better to understand the scarred heart, the swallowed darkness? She let its voice be heard as if she were its kin. Sound came at first like the faintest of breezes through the artful wilderness of the Tor Leonne's tallest trees, a ripple of life against life, a small cascade of quiet. But it grew; it grew as both the sense of word and the sensation of it at the tips of her fingers.

Margret was impatient. Envious. Silent.

The Serra Diora began to speak, her voice retrieving the sounds of an old tongue, cobbling them together, syllable by syllable, her cadence exact as she groped for the subtle space that existed between words, the pause that divided syllabic noise into language, aware that as she watched Margret's face, the effort was pure self-indulgence. Pause or no, she spoke in a way that the other woman understood.

And she knew, the moment she saw the changing shape of the older woman's mouth, the rounding of the corners of her eyes, the lengthening of her jawline, that she should have come in haste.

Margret whipped around, as if spun roughly in place by unseen hands. Her gaze fell upon the darkness in the South; she lifted her head and whispered. Invocation? Plea?

The former. The ship lurched beneath their feet. Serra Diora stumbled and righted herself; the Matriarch did not appear to notice the instability of the narrow wooden planking. The ship moved away from the tenting beneath it and began a steep descent.

"Matriarch!" Diora said, reaching out with only her voice. "What is it saying?"

"Zahar Serpensan."

"What is that?"

"Serpent's tears," she said hoarsely. She was almost immobile. Her hands were rigid, like claws or clumsy weapons. "Wake them, help me wake them." But if she was immobile, her voice was not; it shook, like plates of earth. She fumbled at her waist for something that she no longer carried.

She was terrified.

The Serra Diora responded at once. She spoke to the wind with the wind's voice, bringing her curse to bear.

"Ona Teresa,"
she said, invoking command with air the urgency one born to wield voice could force into the containment of words.
"Kallandras, come. I call you: Wake."

Before she could draw breath, before she could speak again, his voice returned in the ice and the cold.
"I am awake, Serra Diora. I have been watching. What news do you carry with such urgency?"

"Serpent's Tears."

Only silence answered, and after a second, the sounds of footsteps.

She woke to the sound of screaming. Sleep that ended this way was not rare; it was a part of her nocturnal life; the screams were her own.

Avandar was not there; in his absence, light was absent; there was no flickering shadow, no orange of fire contained in glass; she was confined in a small, dark space. When she bolted upward, the rough, scented weave of tenting pressed against her face, like a hand.

She drew her dagger, her limbs shaking, clumsy; she accidentally cut her palm, drawing beads of blood from beneath the thin surface of skin that were dark enough to be seen when the rising tent flap let the light in.

"Jewel."

She hated the darkness. Her hand became a fist, smearing blood, hiding it. Then she nodded.

"Kitchen?" he said softly.

He had never asked. It was Teller, or Finch, or sometimes Angel, who could judge the intensity of the dream, and who would lead her, still sweating, still caught in its mesh, into the relative safety of the place she had always chosen to gather her den in. To Avandar, the kitchen was a place for servants, not masters; he had always disapproved of her choice of council halls, her place of doing business.

And yet he had asked that, who had never asked that, here.

She was awake now. Thunder was in her ears, and it wasn't the simple heartbeat that usually resided there, pounding, after the nightmares had relinquished her to the waking world, the way a bored cat might a mouse.

"We—we don't have time for the kitchen," she said, shaking. Thinking that, even among the Voyani, she had spent so much time on the edges of the place where children were fed. Grateful for the fact that the children were gone; that she had not had to see their bodies carried by rushing water through the narrow, hard enclosure of the dry tunnels in which the tents were pitched.

Avandar lifted his head.

"Thunder," he said quietly.

"And rain," Jewel snapped, rolling her way out of silks and heavy blankets into a very cold night. "
Celleriant
!"

Elena woke. She could not have said what woke her, but her body was moving before her mind understood that she was, indeed awake. Power there. Lady's power or Lord's— in the desert, it didn't matter. Everything led to death.

She came out of the wagon that she so reluctantly occupied, into the first mist of rain.

In the night, no one was pale, no one dark. But the warmth of sleep drained from her. Against her skin she felt the first touch of water; the drop was heavy.

Serpent's tears
, she thought. She could not find her voice; the walls of her throat were closing, like some vast, impenetrable doors. What was important? What was important now?

The Matriarch. The Matriarch alone.

No, not only the Matriarch.

She murmured the commands that might invoke flight, and the wagon lurched off the uneven ground like a drunk bird. "
Margret
!"

It was not the Arianni lord who answered Jewel's rough summons.

Kallandras of Senniel College came out from the jumbled chaos of huddled tents as if he had run across them from peak to peak, unperturbed by either his own weight or the darkness. His hair was bound, and beneath the loose drape of desert robes, he wore black. The glint of his weaponry caught the torches that had been lit—they were few—and reflected them in bright red and orange; other than that, he had no color.

He paused before Jewel. "ATerafin."

"I—" Thunder. Thunder, here, and a clap of something too inimical to be light. She shouted over the rumbled, broken syllables of the storm's voice, "Call the wind, Kallandras. Break the storm, or weaken it."

Thunder.

Water.

He lifted a hand; she saw—
saw
—the wind twisting around his finger, his wrist, his arm, like the trunk of a great snake. But he did not speak.

Instead, he met her gaze for a full ten seconds, and then he bowed. Bowed, lifting his arm.

Any other man, she thought—even Avandar, especially Avandar—would have asked her how she knew what she knew. Not about the future; anyone with a brain knew that. But about his ability to speak with the wind, the air; about his ability to take the fight to the heart of the storm that raged well above the earth.

Any other powerful person would have wondered if she had crossed the line between being an ally and becoming a threat. She had become adept, over the years, at hoarding knowledge for just that reason.

But never in an emergency; never in a situation in which the cost would be writ in lives. Other people's lives.

It is a skill you
must
learn
.

She did not choose to argue with Avandar because she did not have the time. "Don't lecture me!" she shouted. "
Move
!"

"Move?"

"We've got to get these people out of the tunnels or we'll lose them!"

"Does it matter, Jewel?"

She turned then, and before she could think, before she could become aware of what her hand was doing, it left a mark across his cheek. It stung her. He did not appear to have felt it, although she could see the whitening of his skin.

He held her wrist.

"Never ask me that," she said, as evenly as she could. "Never ask me that again."

He raised a brow, and his lips thinned, curved in a distinct smile. "At your command, ATerafin."

Before she could reply—had she the words to reply with—Celleriant chose to grace them with his presence. He knelt; his braid fell across his shoulder as his forehead bowed almost to earth. "Lady," he said quietly.

"Didn't I tell you not to call me that?"

He said nothing.

"You feel the storm."

He nodded.

"Get up, Celleriant. If you have to prostrate yourself, now is
not
the time."

He lifted his face then, and she took a step back. She had not realized, until she saw his expression, that he had been living like an animal in a cage until this moment.

And it was the storm that spoke to him.

"Yes," he said softly, with something that might have been menace had it deigned to acknowledge her at all. "This storm is no mortal storm; something living coils within its heart."

"Can you speak to it?"

He laughed. Something that beautiful should never have been so cold.

What did you expect? Didn't he come to you from the host of the Winter Queen?

"Celleriant?"

"Yes, I can speak to it," he said. Thunder. "But I fear that my voice is not the only voice it will hear."

"Then
make
yours louder," she insisted urgently. "Celleriant, you were ordered to serve me, to follow my wishes and my commands."

He nodded.

"The lives of these people are of value to me. I want them safe."

He turned to Avandar. "Viandaran, you chose a path that we could not have foreseen when you chose to offer service to this one. Is she as she appears?"

"She is that. More, certainly, but not less."

The Arianni lord had eyes that were round, she thought, and beautiful—but it was only after he drew his sword that she realized why he seemed so strange: he was happy.

Joyful.

"Will you not join me, Warlord?"

A wind had risen in the depths of the tunnels, taking his hair; it streamed back from his perfect face in strands of snow and ice, curling, as it did, around the edge of his blade. The braid, Jewel thought inanely, had come undone.

She felt Avandar's answer before she heard it.

It was not simple; could not be conveyed in any words that she had yet heard him use. Ferocity of desire was rarely expressed in words, and his deprived her of words as she stood before him. His hands clenched; he drew his shoulders back, forgot breath; he raised his chin and looked into the clarity of a night sky that—as yet—held no answers to the questions raised by the nightmare of vision.

She felt fire.

She opened her eyes—when had she closed them? Had she?—and saw that he, too, carried a blade. But where Celleriant's was blue and white, silver and ice, his was—of all things—gold and light.

He raised the blade.

And then, with the thin, thin edge of a smile, he lowered it. "No," he said quietly. "I will not join you."

He sheathed the sword; she heard the rasp of metal against metal. But she could not see where the sword went when the sound ended.

"As you wish," the Arianni lord replied. But the bitter disappointment lingered a moment in the shape of his brows, the turn of his lips.

"Celleriant," Jewel said.

He turned, almost unwillingly, to face her. "Lady?"

"Are all your desires so simple?"

"Simple, Lady?"

"So unalloyed. So absolute."

He laughed. "They would hardly be
desires
if they were muddied. Such a battle as this vanished from the mortal realm when the gods forsook it. And such a battle as this, we did not fight alone. There are glories," he said softly, "That must be shared. Warlord—I will ask again."

"And the answer," Kallandras of Senniel College said softly, "will be the same. Can you not hear it in his words? He has chosen his duties; he has accepted the responsibility of his choice." He lifted a hand. Smiled. "As have I. Come, Lord Celleriant. If you wish a comrade, you will find no other."

"You?" The Arianni lord said, only barely able to contain his scorn.

Kallandras was impervious to it. His hand shed light.

Shed enough light that the Voyani response to its presence could be heard in a widening circle beyond them, in the earthy and very real language of the South.

"You—you—" Lord Celleriant's eyes were gratifyingly wide. Jewel felt—knew—that she was being childish. But it was more than that; without the look of wild, cold arrogance that almost always informed his features he seemed almost approachable.

"Yes," the bard replied.

"Upon your finger—that is one of the five—"

He nodded again. "Myrddion's work."