Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (76 page)

The master had limped out of the room, passing beneath the great arch that led to the rooms occupied by both the masters and the oldest of the Lady's ceremonies.

When he was alone, when he heard no shuffling, awkward step, no slightly labored breath—both wrong, both terribly wrong—he released the ledge and let himself fall, near-silent, to the stone below.

He crossed the ground hesitantly, and stood a moment before the small pool of blood in the room's center.

The Arianni lord was bleeding from multiple wounds. The wind was too wild for the blood to fall; it streamed across cloth and skin, changing the color of both.

Kallandras looked up, looked across; he felt the cold. Serpent's breath.

Serpent's tears.

And his own?

She could not see the boy.

She could not clearly see beyond the tines of the antlers she held, the rain fell so heavily.

Jewel.

She nodded, but for once didn't open her mouth. She had swallowed enough water to last a week; she didn't feel like collecting any more.

/
do not sense your prey
.

She felt the cold then. It spread from the inside out, reaching from heart to fingertips.

What do you mean?

His silence was answer enough.

But she didn't want his silence. And she didn't like his words. And she couldn't ignore them; couldn't just plug her ears and walk away.
What do you mean, damn it
?

You are no fool, rider. But if you will hide behind ignorance, hide a little while longer.

She held her breath. It was a habit left over from youth, when staying
very
quiet meant attracting as little attention as possible. Attention and trouble were almost the same word, back then—if trouble didn't notice her, it might go away.

She exhaled.

Jewel
, the stag said again, its voice strangely hollow.
Do not offer me blood. Do not offer me
anything
if you do not understand its power

What?

Look at your hands.

I'll fall off.

She could feel his snort.
You will not fall if I choose to carry you
.

He spoke with such certainty, she believed him. But she only let go with the right. Brought it toward her face in the heavy rains.
I can't see anything
.

No
, he said quietly.
I had forgotten. You have much to learn, Jewel. Much. Look ahead
.

Something had been trapped at a bend in the river; it had gathered stones, and the heavy fabric of weathered Voyani tenting about it, like a shroud.

Jewel threw herself off the stag's back.

No!

And the water crashed into her legs like the hand of an angry god. She had never understood why the sailors feared the water so—but understanding came to her then, and it would never leave her.

Just as the tents and the rocks had, she stumbled into the body by the bend, carried by current.

He was at her side, and just ahead of her, cursing loudly in a voice that sounded almost human. Before she could tumble, before she could meet the water head on, he had grabbed her robes in his teeth.
Hold on, you stupid, stupid child
!

Her feet left the ground and came back down as she flailed against constraint. If she spoke at all, the words were patina, no more; she was terrified.

Always terrified. Death did that to her.

Her knees had struck something soft and yielding, something heavy and unencumbered by the stiffness of struggle. She knew what it was. Floating, shoved against the rough, hard dirt, he was easy to grab, hard to hold on to. She had caught sleeve and tent; discarded the tent in a fury.
Help me
!

Water raged. She raged back.

High above them both, above them all, oblivious as the rain itself to their struggle, Lord Celleriant pressed the battle, calling for aid that could not come. His brother's.

Three days. Kallandras practiced in the hall; it was empty when the master was not present. He knew reflex was not honed in isolation, knew also that simple repetition did not grant him what he would not take from experience. But he found the weight of steel in his hands a comfort; found that exhaustion gained through physical exertion allowed him both sleep and a false sense of peace.

He practiced with simple swords. Not the Lady's swords, but the Southern swords of the clansmen. He had been born into a world where such a sword denned strength and survival.

Kallatin?

He did not stop. He did not answer. He let the imperative of an arc of steel carry him from one move to the next.

Kallatin?

He knew that Arkady was well aware of his attention, although he did not choose to acknowledge him.

Kallatin!

But Arkady was persistent in a way that defied manners and the careful unspoken agreements that allowed men to both share thoughts and have privacy.

Arkady. What. Do. You. Want.

Where are you?

Don't be… so… lazy.

Fine, make me work.

Arkady's voice was fine and smooth—when he spoke. But when he was forced to use the inner voice, when he was forced to use the power that had been granted the boys who survived the Lady's harshest tests, his voice was different. Louder, more awkward, the voice of a brash young man. It was not a voice that Kallandras would have liked, had he heard it while he lived in the domicile of his father's family.

But it was a voice he could not help but like now. He shrugged. Put the blade up. Ran, as quickly and lightly as possible, up the side of the wall. Momentum carried him halfway up, and gravity brought him down—but he used the gravity and the wall to choose the style and place of his landing.

Kallatin
, Arkady said again, serious now.

When we were told that we would never have to fight alone
, Kallandras said at last,
I envisioned something… different
.

I don't understand you. Mikka is worried sick, in case you hadn't noticed. And the master
—

But he had noticed, of course. He noticed it all; all emotions, all nuances. Fear was strongest; it paralyzed him. Pain was second.

Had he the choice between a brother's pain and his own, his own, visceral and real, was more bearable.

Tell them, Kai.

No. If they don't know
—

They don't know because you can keep it from them. I don't know how. I can't keep anything from anyone. Not in here.

Arkady
— He sheathed the sword. Surveyed the room. Saw narrow, broken trails of training dust spread from the center of the room's heart to the walls that surrounded it in five evenly spaced points, following the path he had run, walked, landed.

He was not satisfied.

Arkady, you noticed. You understood.

It's not the same. It should be.

Should doesn't matter. It's not. Tell them, Kai. Tell them, or
—

Or you will?

Or someone will die
. No threat in the words. Just fear. For him.

He rose with the warm air, fell with the cold. This time, he avoided the Serpent's tail for long enough to deliver a shallow wound along its left flank, a trailing cut that looked like a signature.

Funny, that a creature of such size could move with such grace, such elegance. Such speed. Kallandras leaped, sprang from foothold to foothold, while the elemental air he had summoned taunted the Serpent and struggled for supremacy, pulling the clouds this way and that, as if they were ropes in a child's rough game.

The Serpent was not young enough to be distracted by such a ploy, and not weak enough to lose control over what it had taken.

The ring that had been taken from the earth of an ancient, dead city began to burn Kallandras' finger.

He felt the Serpent's claw.

He remembered.

* * *

Three days.

Shadows masked his face as he passed beneath the archway into the training room. He noted that dust had been laid down across the floor in a spiral pattern instead of the fine, near invisible blanket to which he had become accustomed. Without a word, he stepped over the spiral lines, touching stone with the supple bottoms of soft leather shoes.

He bowed to the man who stood, still as that stone, and as imperturbable, in the center of the vast room. His master returned the bow stiffly and stepped aside.

There was a small, three-legged brazier behind his back. The air above its rounded mouth was still; no fire burned within or beneath its smooth, simple surface.

"Today," the master said quietly, "we will learn something new. Come."

Kallandras did not hesitate. He wanted to. He was young. He was not well versed in all of the mysteries of the brotherhood. And the master's voice told him
nothing
.

He had thought, before this, that he had met men expert at hiding themselves behind their voices and words; that they had returned no emotion, no hint of the thought that lay beneath what they said. And it had been true, in a fashion. But this…

Seeing his first corpse had been almost the same; some essential element had fled the body, and he found a sudden, sharp understanding of what the element was by its absence, by the nature of its absence.

Arkady!

For a moment, all breath, all movement, deserted him. He listened, and just as the master's voice returned nothing, so, too, did his brother's. His hands were shaking as his fear grew too suddenly to be easily controlled. Or controlled at all.

Arkady!

Kallatin
? The most familiar of all his brothers' voices came, joining and enjoining the chaos of his fear. He struggled for calm, for quiet, and found it less easily than he had the ledge beneath the curvature of ceiling.

Kallatin, what's wrong? Where are you?

He is with me
. The master's voice was as friendly as enemy steel. Arkady was no fool. He fell silent at once.

Kallandras let him go, secure in the knowledge that he was alive, that he could be reached; the winds had not taken him.

"You are… strong," the master said quietly. "Strong enough that you have failed the first test. Or perhaps I have failed it. The brother who brought you to us was guided by the Lady."

"The Lady guides the dead," the student replied. It was not wise.

Smile's ghost touched the master's lips and vanished. "Indeed. If you are lucky, you will not discover to where. Not today." He lifted his hands, bringing his open palms parallel with the surface of the floor.

The lamps that lined walls guttered. In the darkness, nothing moved.

The master spoke, disturbing air with the flattest of syllables. "Your weapons," he said.

Kallandras' reply was the simple action of curling his palms around their hilts.

"Choose them wisely. You will have no chance to choose another."

"Your weapon, Master?"

"Is not relevant."

Kallandras unsheathed his blades as he inhaled. He was not certain which movement made more noise. "When a challenge is issued among brothers—"

"This is not a challenge, Kallatin. This is merely a lesson." His voice was the voice the dead might have used, if they spoke at all.

But they reminded Kallandras of a brother's first lesson in the artificial night of the Labyrinth. He was not yet certain how they chose their students; not certain of whether or not it was an annual occurrence, or something that happened entirely at the Lady's whim. But he did know that it was not uncommon for all of the young men so chosen to die before they were given a chance to come before the Lady. He bowed.

It helped him hide the sudden stiffening of his features that spoke, clearly, of anger.

Orange light, pale heart of gold at its center, was the master's reply. Fire fell from his palms in graceful, brief arabesques—a prelude to the brilliance of their unexpected dance. For they touched the floor and rose, a wall, an unexpected mystery.

Behind the translucent slender flames, the master was pale as fine ivory. Or perhaps paler. He had not moved but he had become harder and harder to see. The flames that had curled in a leisurely splendor from hand to floor neither grew nor dwindled—but instead of casting light, they seemed to leach it from the room.

He saw a glimmer of it across the unusual pattern the dust made along the floor before he lost the ability to see anything but the flame itself.

"You know how to listen. None of the brothers I have taught have had half the skill you've shown in the past few months. Listen carefully, Kallatin. That is the only gift that will save you."

The stag was not so graceful, not so fleet of foot, so easy to startle, as his form suggested. As Jewel raged, so, too, did he, but in a different way. He could not release her or she would vanish, as the boy had; he could not force her to relinquish the burden that she had chosen to carry.

He had faced death in the Hunt; had faced the Arianni before it. He had commanded kingdoms, long dust, when he had last walked the mortal realms as a man.

She
knew
this.

And what was she? Scion of a great House, a young woman on the verge of more power than she had dreamed possible when she had been—

When she had been the age of the boy who was slipping from beneath her fingers into the water's grasp.

Between them, if they could not pull one boy to safety, they weren't worth the titles they might have carried, might one day carry. What did they matter?

She had to think. She could not think.

Could not do anything else.

Let go of me
, she told the stag, trying to take the wildness out of the words.
Let go of me. Grab the boy. Do it
.

There was anger, hesitation, and acceptance in the space of time it would have taken to nod.

She felt the anchor leave her collar, braced herself against the ground over which the water flowed, and leaped, up, hands flailing and bleeding—she felt it now— as she reached for his antlers, the scruff of his neck, anything that would hold her.