Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (84 page)

Lightning left silence.

Into the silence, Arianne spoke as if she were a god and this were some strange dreaming over which her power was growing. "Celleriant, if you will be of mine, you will follow my orders."

"Lady."

"Serve this girl as if she were, indeed, your mistress in all things. Suffer this humiliation with honor and in a manner that only the Arianni can, and when she is dead, if you have acquitted yourself with dignity, I may yet choose to find you a mount and a place in my Hunt."

The man who had called himself Mordanant bowed his head. It was a very subtle movement, and easily missed; Jewel would have missed it but for the edge of his helm, which caught the light of Jewel's sun, Jewel's waning sky.

What if I won't take him
? she thought, but she found herself mute.

Avandar spoke unexpectedly. "You set a high price for his return, Arianne."

"Oh?" The word was the cool Northern wind, rolling in from the mountain's height. Night was falling, even in the streets of Averalaan. "A mortal's span of years is very short in these diminished times."

"Four Princes were set just such a task, and for greater cause, and they failed in far less than the span of years you would have him serve."

"Viandaran," Arianne said, in the silence that followed his words, "you are indeed still the Warlord; you seek the weakness you perceive, and you strike where you can. I dislike the reminder of past failures, as you must. I will not, however, return the favor by asking about your consort—any of them. The curse that guides you still shadows your brow if one knows how to look.

"I have never lied; it is not my nature; a lie is beneath me; it is a tool of those whose truths are not powerful enough. I promise what I promise and I honor my oath; it is the willfulness of mortality that seeks to make of my oaths something that they are not."

He bowed. He bowed low. "Indeed, Lady, mortality is willful. But I, too, understand the power of oath. I serve my Lady, and I accept, in her name, all that you have offered in return for passage."

"Too many," Jewel said.

"But I believe," he continued, as if she hadn't spoken or as if he hadn't heard her, "that even with gifts such as your personal mount and a lord of Celleriant's worth, you undervalue the worth of your host. You may, of course, pass; in that, my Lady is like you: she does not lie."

A complaint of his. A frequent one. Funny to hear it praised, and in such company.

"But you have gathered a Hunt such as the world has not seen since the divide," he said quietly. "And where roads have been held by my kind, no such host has ever been granted passage, save once." He rose from his bow. "This is not that time."

"Warlord, I forget your roots, you have been almost one of us for so long. But you are in part what you were. Can you not feel His shadow? It stretches from one end of the road to the other, growing and gathering strength. We swore, and we were divided, the immortal from the mortal, gathered and pressed into places small and wild… and limiting.

"But for the sake of my father, we swore, and we abide by the oaths that were given." Her smile was sudden, beautiful; Jewel literally could not breathe in the face of it.

Jewel knew what the oaths were.

She
knew
it.

"Yes, seer-born, little disciple of the eldest. We swore that we would cleave to the old and hidden ways just as the gods themselves did."

The words settled slowly, starting at the top and finding depths in Jewel that she hadn't suspected existed. She did not say the name aloud, but it came to her as a perfectly aimed arrow might have.
Allasakar
.

"The tide is turning, and not in your favor. Our ancient enemies are rising; they gain power over the earth and the wind, the fires and the waters, while we treat like beggars or children upon a road that will soon have little meaning."

"Understood," Jewel said softly. "But understand as well that it makes no difference to me who does the killing—you or the
Kialli
. Because the dead will still be dead." She paused a moment to look at the stag that the Queen had so casually thrown against Avandar's barrier. "And the living don't look like they're much better off."

"Perhaps not," Arianne replied, as the night at last descended, "but think on this: is it better to give me the one life to take or enjoy as I see fit than it is to give
all
life to our enemy?"

Jewel looked at the stag. "I don't know," she said at last. "Maybe we should ask him."

"You may. But he will never answer." She inclined her head. "You are surprising; perhaps your sight is clearer than you know, or perhaps you are foolish because we have been absent from the world for so long. It matters little. The winds are coming, mortal. But this is the first Hunt of this scale that we have seen and I am loath to miss even a moment of it. I will take the smaller party.

"And I will remember your face. Keep your name hidden, and hidden well, or perhaps you will carry a greater burden than you carry now."

Jewel understood. She'd won.

But winning had never felt so dangerous, so empty. She made to step aside, but paused a moment as Avandar began to draw his magic in a tighter, more personal net. With a gesture—for drama's sake, because it really didn't make any other difference she could see—she dissolved the image of home: the streets of Averalaan faded into mountain's pass, cold and lifeless beneath the perfect glitter of evening stars.

"Why?" Avandar asked her softly, as the Arianni began to gather at their Queen's back, to be chosen or discarded.

"Why what?"

"Many things. But for now, a simple question. The land; you let it go. Why?"

"Because whether or not it's illusion, I couldn't bear to watch her ride with her host through the streets of
my
city." The wind, indeed, was rising. She lifted her head and let it shove unruly curls out of her eyes. "Come," she said softly. The stag obeyed her so silently if she closed her eyes she would not have heard his movements.

"And the other?" Avandar said, uncharacteristically gentle.

She started to say something sarcastic; she was good at it, after all. Years of practice.

But when the rider looked up and met her eyes, his expression inexplicably dulled the edge of the words she might have spoken. Still, she was surprised when she said, just as softly, "Come."

He rose, silent as the stag, and together, Avandar, Jewel, and the two gifts that would be her lasting legacy from the Winter Queen, stood by the road's side and watched the Hunt ride into the darkness of the unknown.

Only after they had passed did Jewel realize that the Oracle was nowhere to be seen.

19th of Scaral, 427 AA

Tor Leonne

He did not choose to allow the serafs to enter his personal quarters. Food and water, when they were desired at all, were brought in basins designed and blessed by the strongest of Widan's craft and left beyond the simple, sliding doors that it had become death for all but a few to pass.

Alesso di'Alesso, the Tyr'agar of the Dominion, was not, however, shut in: the walls opened to grant him a view of the world without; one made splendid by the hands of gardeners and carpenters, of master weavers and painters, in preparation for the Festival of the Moon. Here, the sheen of fabric catching the Lord's dying light, he could see white and gold and deep, deep blue; Her colors. The Lady was coming.

And with Her, in the cover of Her night, his allies. His enemies. It had been a long time since he could easily separate them.

"Alesso."

But, as always, such sweeping statements demanded their exceptions. He turned at once, almost pleased at the interruption. Sendari di'Sendari waited in the span of the open doors. He had aged ten years in the course of the last ten days, his beard streaked with the white blanket that served as both warning and shroud. "Come," he said, nodding. "But the door—"

"It is secure."

"Good." He gestured.

Sendari, as any other visitor, went immediately to the low table, a stark, flat block in the center of the room, its surface interrupted by only two things: A perfect clay vessel, its thin walls bearing three strokes that suggested the long, slender leaves that bore rushes, and a matching cup.

He poured, as carefully as the Serra Teresa herself might have done, and when he was finished, he drank.

The waters of the Lady's Lake touched his lips; Alesso watched him swallow and then turned back to the view, the breadth of the plateau upon which the Tyr's power depended.

"She has vanished," he said softly. "Thirty people dead in her wake. They are speaking about her now: She has become either the Lady or the Lady's avatar, come to show her displeasure at the changes the new Tyr is making. They are saying that—"

"That a Tyr of Leonne blood would not be in this position."

Sendari fell silent.

"Old friend," Alesso said quietly, "they are correct. Markaso kai di'Leonne would never have been in this position. His power was his by right of birth; no strength or weakness marred it."

"Alesso—"

"Not here. We must plan, and we must plan with care."

"You believe that Anya was sent?"

Alesso's laugh was brief and dark. "No more than any rabid beast can be sent or commanded. Her role as the opener of the way is of tantamount importance to the Lord of the Shining Court; I do not think He would willingly give her up so that she might kill a handful of clansmen and their serafs. The least of His demons could do so with ease."

Sendari nodded, his face carefully neutral. "That was my thought."

"Can Ishavriel be made to contain her?"

"We do not know. Cortano traveled in haste to the Shining Court, and to no one's surprise, that Lord is not in attendance. Nor is he expected before the end of the Dark Conjunction."

The latter surprised him. "Where did you come by this information?"

"The Lord Isladar."

"And you believed him."

"Cortano believed him. Lord Isladar has little to gain from the lie."

"The
Kialli
lie as a matter of course; they speak truth when they have something to gain. And they see into a future that contains our grandchildren or great-grandchildren; our own fates are, of necessity, of limited import. We cannot see what they have to gain; our own lives will not encompass it." There, the Lady's banners were being laid out against a field of green. Grass was the most difficult of things to grow and tend; it died with ease in weather too dry, but if left to grow even half an inch too long, it coarsened. The flowers that had been planted a year, or two, or three previously blossomed and died, growing in place but moving by tendril and leaf so that the whole drifted in a pattern that suggested the freedom of life within the containment of order.

There had been so little freedom in the last few months.

He had thought the sacrifice insignificant; after all, power was the only guarantee of freedom a man could have in lands the Lord ruled. But he better understood the price to be paid now. While he watched the facade of the Festival unfold, he understood that he would never again be part of it. And it pained him.