Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (81 page)

His head lay in the lap of a stranger; his hair, longer wet than it had ever appeared dry, was strewn across her legs like a blanket. His eyes were closed. Closed.

"Serra." Margret's voice. Harsh; straining beneath the weight of unexpressed pain and anger. But it didn't break. That seemed… wrong to her. It seemed so unlike the Arkosan Voyani. Such control, such bitter silence, was a gift, and a curse, of the clans.

Gift? Curse? No. It was simply wisdom. Show your loss beneath the open sky, and your enemies will know that they have hurt you. They will know how to hurt you in the future, and others will suffer for just that reason: that you have been weak enough to expose that vulnerability at all,

Her hands left Adam's face. She looked up, to Jewel, and then down, to where his hands rested.

She closed her eyes then, because she thought she might have some chance at holding tears—sudden and surprising as the thickness of her throat, the inability to draw breath—back.

Salla lay gripped in his stiff hands.

He saw her look up as he approached, although he made almost no sound as he walked. His legs were stiff, bruised; muscles ached. It had been many years since he had joined a combat so punishing, so demanding. His arm would be useless for weeks, and he would have to take care not to further damage his side. The ribs, however, had not pierced lung.

"Serra Diora."

She did not speak. Did not acknowledge his greeting in any way save this: she looked down. At the boy who lay across the folded legs of Jewel ATerafin.

He looked, as she had, at his face. Saw his closed eyes. Saw his stiff arms.

And then he, too, closed his eyes, but not before he had seen what the boy's hands curled, white-boned, around.

The boy had promised that he would return the lute safely.

It was not comfortable to kneel; he knelt. Physical pain did not linger, and the scars it left he had long since accepted as inevitable. Strange, then, that accruing other scars, as inevitable in nature, could never be so easily accepted.

"Serra Diora." He held out a hand before her shuttered eyes. She had seen much worse than this; would see worse before war's end, should she survive that long.

But he had never been able to read so much in her expression alone; even her voice had become, with time and experience, almost impenetrable. What had the Serra Teresa said? Diora had learned as a child not to cry.

She looked up at him almost blindly. He did not turn away. As he had to the end of his hopes, he bore witness to the end of hers; silent, acknowledging in the full measure of that silence the truth of the loss.

But she surprised him, and he had been trained, in youth, beyond it, to find little surprising. She spoke.

"He brought her to me. To
me
. He knew what she meant to you. But he knew what… the music… might mean to me. You live in the North, Kallandras; I live in the South. There is a border here," her delicate fingertips brushed the cloth above her heart, "that I have never crossed."

"You have known loss, Serra."

"Yes." The corners of her lips became smooth and full; the use of words seemed to bring back strength and dignity. Odd. "But it is not of love that I speak. No man exists— or woman—who is not touched by love. The border cannot prevent that.

"But this boy, this brother of a Voyani Matriarch, was born in the South, and had—has—a Northern heart. He did not come to you for love of me; he did not come to you for pity's sake. He came… for reasons I do not understand. And stayed. And left."

"Do you truly not understand what moved him?"

"Do you?"

His smile was slight; a parry.

"In the North, the gods keep the dead, not the winds, and the dead wait. For us. In the North, where the men are said to be weak, and the blood thin, they have raised champions and armies, and women are—are not—what I have been. Have been proud to be.

"I
hate
these lands. I hate the border." She bowed her head. "But not because of my life. Because of his. Because it is in the South that people who have the grace and strength to be…"

"Gentle?"

"Gentle. Yes. As he was. Those people are devoured by the Lady. By the Lord. They are given to wind, to sun. What other man would have done this for a lute?"

"Serra Diora."

She raised her face.

"It was not for the lute; it was for the vow. Accord him a measure of the respect he is due."

He walked to where Jewel sat. She, as the Arkosans, felt no compunction about tears, and although they robbed her face of necessary warmth, she let them fall.

The Arkosans were silent; they had not moved. But they heard the Serra's voice as clearly as they had the day she had offered them the gift of her song. What they could not hear, he heard, for she had dropped the walls behind which she habitually hid.

He did not flinch. Slow and painful death was not enough to force him to flinch. This much he had learned in the youth that seemed closer to him than the present.

Had seemed so, after the battle in the skies. Had seemed more so after the fall. He had stood beside a brother. He had fought, as he might have fought in youth, beside an equal of his own choosing. He had relied on, depended on, a brother to bring him back.

Back?

He had come to the camp to see Salla in a dead boy's hands, and he understood that the past and the present were intertwined in ways that even he, decades later, could not disentangle. Could not understand. Had he been given a choice, he would have turned from the life he led now; he would have walked to the Labyrinths, to the masters who had trained him—of whom only two now survived— and resumed that life.

Or so he would have said.

He knew, now, that he would take Salla with him everywhere he chose to go.

And he knew, now, that should he be forced by the brotherhood to relinquish her, he would hesitate upon the threshold of Melesnea itself. He had not chosen the life of a bard, but like any hostage could, he had come to love his captor.

Boy…

Jewel's arms ached. She'd held Adam for so long, any movement hurt; putting him down would be almost as painful as continuing to hold him. She thought about rolling him gently off her lap. Meant to do it.

But he stayed where she had placed him, neck above the crook of her elbow, eyes closed.

The Serra Diora knelt before her; the master bard of Senniel College stood only a little farther away. She had looked at them, and away, at and away, until the movement was as rhythmic as breath.

Jewel.

Go away.

Jewel, it is time. Give him to his family, and come away.

She had never made a habit of listening to Avandar when his advice did not involve the minutiae of politics.

Jewel.

She knew he was right. The cold had entered the base of her spine and traveled up her back and down her legs; she was shuddering with it.

"Matriarch," she said softly, looking past the kneeling woman whose face surrendered tears.

But the Matriarch was frozen. Jewel called her again, and again she failed to move. She shifted the boy; her body protested the slight movement of arm. Shifted him again.

Let me help.

No.

Jewel
—

Her breath came out in a huff that looked smokelike, solid. As if she were a winter dragon, and he her hoard, she lifted her chin in defiance.

"Matriarch?"

And thought the better of pride; her arms really were too damn cold to move. Wouldn't be the first time she'd fallen flat on her face.

Margret of Arkosa did not move. Jewel squinted; she stood far enough away that the night robbed her features of distinctive lines, of expression. She looked back to the boy in her shaking arms.

Stopped.

"Avandar!"

Three faces swiveled toward hers, hearing in the name she shouted all the edges that she hadn't put into words.

The woman who had been frozen at the greatest distance found feet, found motion, stumbled between the kneeling Serra and the bard who—as he so often did—bore witness.

"What? What is it?" she said, her voice thin and shaky.

She reached for Adam; for his face, his cheeks, his chin; her hands stuttered as they stumbled across features made unfamiliar by stillness. But they came to rest against the side of his throat and stayed there a moment, searching almost desperately for a sign.

There was none.

Jewel
knew
there was none.

But knowing this, she felt her heart beat as hope made her fearful. She reached out and caught Margret's stiff hand. Pulled it away. "Matriarch," she said, putting years of practice at giving orders into use.

Margret did not resist.

"Matriarch."

"Matriarch." Kallandras moved also, quickly and silently approaching her—but from the side, not from behind. He had that much sense.

Margret did not acknowledge him. She looked, instead, to Jewel. Her voice was low and intense; it caught on her words as if they were barbs. "You were sent to us by the Lady," she said. "You came to the heart of the fire. What do you see? What hope do you offer my—my brother?"

"He—he—"

"Yes?" Too quickly.

"Do not bury him yet. Do not mourn him. Help me— help me stand. Help me move him inside."

"But—" She shook her head. "Yes. Yes, at once. Stavos! Elena!"

The tears she had been hoarding blurred her eyes, her dark, narrowed eyes.

From out of nowhere, a question came to Jewel, and she asked it without thought, without control. "Can you do without him, Matriarch? If he lives, can you send him North, into the unknown, an
i
away from the
Voyanne
that you must travel?"

"If he lives, I would send him to the High Courts themselves to serve the clans if that was your price." She drew heat from somewhere, some reserve that the night had not destroyed. Spoke with it. "If he lives, I promise the Lady—"

"The Lady doesn't need your promise, but Adam will."

"
Yes
. Yes, I can send him from the
Voyanne
if that is all that will save him. He—" Her voice broke again. "He does not breathe, Jewel. He doesn't
breathe
. Can you force the winds to relinquish what is theirs?"

"No." She looked past Margret. Squared her shoulders. Spoke. "I was wondering if we would see you."

Margret's hand was trapped by Jewel's, but she too turned.

"No," was the quiet reply. "You weren't. Well met, Matriarch. Well met, Jewel ATerafin." Evayne a'Nolan, in robes the color of the clear night sky, inclined her head. She took a step forward.

In the wake of cloth that moved to an unfelt, unseen wind, came another man. Jewel recognized him at once, although the last time she'd seen him had been in the healerie of Terafin, a place so different from the desert and the Southern lands that the only thing she could clearly recall of it was the old man who was its heart. The first healer she had met; the man who had saved her denmate, who had offered her a peaceful place to go within the chaos and turmoil of House politics.

A man as different from the one before her as a man could be who still followed the same tenets. Or, she thought dubiously, professed to.

Kallandras bowed. "Healer Levec," he said softly, speaking in Weston. "You have traveled far from your home."

"I was told," the healer snapped, his voice as brusque as a voice can be without—quite—managing rudeness, "that it was urgent."

"I offered you the choice of accompanying me," his companion said.

The healer snorted. Ran a hand through dense beard. "You could have told me to bring furs."

"We will not, if I judge the situation correctly, remain here long enough to require them."

No one could see her face. The hood hung low and long, and although the hems of sleeve and gown moved almost of their own accord, the cowl's folds seemed frozen in place. But the voice was unmistakable.

"Matriarch."

Margret rose. "What do you want?"

"We have come for your brother."

"You can't have him."

"Margret—"

"'Gret—"

Jewel had struggled to get her feet out from beneath her thighs without dumping Adam on the cold, frozen sand. Some circulation had returned; she could unfold her knees without cursing or crying out in pain; she could move her arms. She got to her knees and sat over the balls of her heels, Adam on the incline of her lap.

"Matriarch," she said, "you have no cause to love Evayne a'Nolan. But the man by her side is one of the healer-born."

The Matriarch lingered a moment longer in the path between Evayne and her brother, but chose—grudgingly—to give ground.

Evayne swept past her, dragging Levec in her wake. He looked about as happy as Jewel would expect.

But he was the only healer she had ever met who was known across the breadth of the High City for the quality of his temper.

"If you've wasted my time," she heard him mutter—but he saw the expression on the face of the Matriarch, and thought better of the rest of the sentence. He approached Jewel, turned a glare upon both the Serra and Kallandras, which both ignored, and knelt.

"It is
damned
cold." His breath was dragon's breath, like Jewel's. Warm and solid. "ATerafin," he added gruffly. "Your people—"

Her own heart quickened. "My—my people—"

But his attention wavered. Fell. And nothing Jewel could ask would make it rise again; she knew this, and bit her lip.

Finch. Angel. Teller.

His hands, browned with sun, but corded with the muscles of a man who made physical labor his life's work, were gentle as they cupped the face of the boy in her lap. With infinite care, he attempted to pry the lute from Adam's grasp, but he accepted failure there with uncharacteristic grace.

"How old is the boy?"

"I—I don't know."

His frown was immediate, but at least it wasn't followed up with,
you idiot
. Instead, it was followed by something almost as ungraceful: Levec speaking Torra. Jewel had thought he sounded unfriendly in Weston. "You, how old is this boy?"