The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5 (32 page)

No
.

So much for privacy.

His smile was dark; she realized as she gazed at the curve of his lips that he was standing just a little too close to her.

You fear what you cannot control. In me. In yourself. I will return
. He bowed, the motion as sardonic as the smile.

You fear
, he added, as he turned his back upon her and began his trek across sand so cold it might as well have been the ice of the Northern Wastes,
what
you
need
.

I don’t need anything
.

You need to eat, to sleep, to breathe. You need what mortals need
.

She didn’t ask him what he meant. Told herself it was because she didn’t want to distract him from the battle he was about to enter.

Didn’t believe it for a minute.

There was a lyrical grace to the dance of the wind; to the sweep of two blades in the arms of a man trained to music’s subtlety. There was a spare elegance to the economy of his motion, the precision of his chosen strike, his chosen retreat.

There was beauty of a different kind entirely in his companion’s wild charge, the sweep of his blade, the grandeur of his gestures. The length of his pale, pale hair swept out and back like the edges of a finely weighed cloak; no mortal man would have been allowed such a dangerous vanity.

But Lord Celleriant was clearly no mortal, and his beauty did not seem to be tainted by anything as petty as vanity; it was a part of him, a part of what made him compelling.

Audience to this, they watched, they bore witness, and they felt, as they did, the weight of hope as it settled around them, precious burden.

They counted, silent, as the demons fell before wind and blade and wild magic.

The Lady’s Night was a strength, a secret place, a dreamscape unlike any other. They welcomed it, shivering, unable to dispel the cold and unwilling to find the blankets and the robes that might do so; they would miss some step of this dance, some part of the gift of its magic.

It was over so quickly.

Lord Celleriant lifted his blade, twisted it, sheathed it in the air before his heart center. “Brother,” he said softly, extending a hand.

Kallandras reached for it, and the gem about his finger dulled as he let gravity claim him. He smiled. “We are three for two,” he said gravely.

A pale brow rose. The lord of the Green Deepings laughed. “A poor competitor? Your words are too pretty and too serious, bard, when they are not wrapped in song.” He laughed again, releasing the hand he held. “Three indeed, and in your favor. But there will be other battles.”

“Yes,” Kallandras replied gravely. “Other battles, and with a less . . . obliging . . . audience. We will lose lives before we set our swords down.”

The Arianni lord raised a silver brow. “Not each other’s.”

Not each other’s. Kallandras closed his eyes briefly. “No,” he said softly. “But neither of us are Moorelas. There are lives, in this war, that will count for more than either of ours if we are to have victory.

“And we might not know, now or ever, which lives those will be.”

“I had almost forgotten,” Lord Celleriant said, “that you are mortal.”

“I . . . had almost forgotten as well.” He bowed. “But that is the nature of mortality; if we are to fight, to face death, to live, we forget what awaits us at its end.”

Lord Celleriant lifted his eyes; they were burning in the deep of the night sky. But he said nothing; all of his denial was in the ferocity of that simple gaze.

It was too soon; too soon to notice such a fierceness.

And yet.

Kallandras, master bard of Senniel College, born to the South and raised by the brotherhood of the Lady’s darkest visage, turned to face the men and women who had become his responsibility. But it was not to them that he spoke.

“I have seen Viandaran,” he said quietly, speaking in a voice that would not carry, no matter how close his companions were. “More, I have heard his voice.

“Do not wish that upon me, brother.”

Arianni lords did not spit.

Therefore, Lord Celleriant was still. Ferocity fell into lines of genuine anger. “Do not lie to me.”

Kallandras was rarely surprised; he was surprised now. “Lie?”

The Arianni lord who had ridden, mounted, in the Winter Host reached out gently with his left hand, and brushed the strands of Kallandras’ hair aside, revealing the lobe of his ear. Although it could not be seen by mortal eyes, Kallandras knew what Celleriant saw: the Lady’s mark. The mark of the
Kovaschaii
.

“The brotherhood has served the Lady for as long as I have served mine. Do not think I am ignorant of what that mark means,” the lord of the Green Deepings said coldly.

“It means—”

“To you, Kallatin, forsworn. Do not tell me not to wish Viandaran’s life upon you; I
know
what waits you.”

Kallandras bowed his head, and his shoulders, the perfect line of his graceful posture, slumped. And straightened. “It is many years away,” he said at last. “And although this will surprise you, those years do not feel as short to those of us who are confined by them as it must to those who live above them and beyond their grasp.

“Many things can happen in that short span.”

Lord Celleriant said nothing.

When they returned, Stavos and Ramdan were already taking the tents down.

Kallandras turned to Jewel and raised a pale brow.

“Avandar,” she said curtly.

“What of him?”

“He . . . arrived too late. Whoever held the leash of the demons you killed fled.”

He listened a moment to the wind, but the wind was silent. Then he nodded and set to work on his own tent.

In the heart of the desert, beneath the surface of the cold earth, he listened, bore witness, waited.

He heard the claws of the kin scar the surface above as they passed over his chosen resting place; heard the words they spoke to their lord before they joined battle.

He heard the words the kinlord chose to speak after they had traveled beyond his hearing. A moment drifted past; in earth time, it was over so quickly it was almost impossible to absorb the whole of what had occurred.

But if earth had not been his strength, it had not been among his weaknesses; of the
Kialli
, he had been one of the few who had invoked its power with ease. It raged against his touch here, in the heart of lands that had once known the breadth and depth of life seen nowhere but in the Green Deepings; it had raged against him in the bitter stretch of the Northern Wastes.

But he had called it nonetheless, choosing his time and his place to reacquaint himself with its confines, its crushing presence, its slow, slow life. Wild earth. Not ally, now, but not—never quite—slave.

Take the water, snare the fire, demand the movement of air. But the earth? It could be done. Ishavriel had done it, time and again, expending a vast outlay of power in order to exert, to prove, his mastery. That was the way of the Hells.

But the way of the
Kialli
, the way of the chosen servants of Allasakar, before the Sundering, had been different, and it was that path that Lord Isladar had sought. Earth. It would never love him. Perhaps once, and in the bitter darkness beneath its surface, that once gave him pause for regret, for a pain akin to loss.

But if it did not love him, it knew his voice.
Taint
, it whispered, in its rumble, its treacherous crush of stone and dirt, of root, of ancient waterways.

Yes
, he replied calmly.
It is a taint I bear, and no cleansing will expunge it. I am sorry. I have paid
.

The earth’s anger was slight, this eve.

He paid it its due.

Spoke to it of old glory; of the trees that had once reached the heavens, of the flowers that had nestled in the still, hidden ponds, of whole lives lived in the plants whose roots depended upon the soil for nourishment.

Not for Isladar the anger of rejection, the satisfaction of that momentary pain; his was the long path, the patient path. He had, over the course of decades, forced the earth to remember his voice.

His
voice.

It knew him, and it chose, for now, to tolerate his presence. And so he watched, and waited, and learned.

The demons were dead. The kinlord had returned to the Northern Wastes. He would make his report to Etridian, and he would wait instruction—or punishment for his failure—at that lord’s whim.

No one would return to the Shining City to make such a report to the Lord Isladar. Anduvin’s sword had weakened him. Kiriel’s blood had weakened him. He had been unable to completely obscure the marks under which he now labored.

And sensing his weakness, the Lord’s Fist had chosen to remove him. It caused no resentment, no anger, and no surprise; he had lived by the side of the Lord of the Hells for long enough. He knew the laws of the Hells, and he—as they—abided by them: Power ruled.

But he smiled as he thought it.

The vision of the Lord’s Fist was so remarkably narrow; the definition of power so completely predictable. Had it not been for the child, there would have been no risk at all.

But the child had been present, in the Tower that had become a symbol of all things despised and hated. He should have left her. She had no power, no gift, no role to play; victim to Anya a’Cooper’s insanity, she was an afterthought, kin to grass crushed by the hooves of cavalry.

He should have let her die there.

Instead, he had come South, and in the South he would reside until he had seen the outcome of the battle for the Dominion.

Ariel
. It was not the name she had been born to; she had been unwilling to part with that, and he had chosen to gift her with another. She was like, and unlike, Kiriel. She was devoid of the strength that came naturally to Kiriel; could not withstand cold, would be scorched to death by fire. She had no easy joy, no bright curiosity, no heated, bitter fury; she had no cruelty. She was almost a flicker of life, robed in form—but behind her fear, she waited. If he was patient, she would shed it; he had been certain of that.

And patience was his defining strength.

The mortal woman, Jewel ATerafin, was no less predictable than the Lord’s Fist; no less manipulable. To him. To the kinlords, she would be a mystery, for it was clear that she possessed some degree of power—and if, as it appeared, she counted the Warlord among her servants, that degree must be vast.

He smiled.

The meaning of power among mortals was delicate; it shifted and changed, impurities arising in the stretch of short years that caused it to be examined and defined over and over again.

She would preserve the child until the day of his return. Of that he was certain.

And what then?

He closed his eyes, and the earth closed its eyes; he rested in the darkness of death.

And then, across the miles that separated them, he felt a sudden shift in the landscape, a sharp, bitter pain.

His brow lifted in surprise, and although he could not speak, he turned to the North. To the North, to the Terrean of Averda, where she now resided, her companions so distant they were invisible to him.

Kiriel
.

He smiled softly.

CHAPTER NINE

8th of Corvil, 427 AA

Terafin Manse, Averalaan Aramarelas

F
INCH cringed as she stared at the flickering lamp. Although she was a member of House Terafin and, at that, a member of some standing, she had never forgotten the years she had spent in the streets of the twenty-fifth holding. Jay had occasionally found candles, and, preserved for either emergency or celebration, they would burn in the small rooms the den had squeezed into a lifetime ago. They had been luxuries; fire had been meant for warmth or food. The den had faced whole seasons where both were in jeopardy.

But frugality was no longer an acceptable choice; she had work for days in piles that had once been small and neat. At the moment, her concentration—such as it was—was absorbed by a simple letter. Letters always confounded her; they consigned her words to a type of permanence over which she had no control once the letter left her hands, and the act of composition made clear to her the poverty of her own expression. She struggled with each sentence, hating the powerful.

There was a gentle knock at the door, and because it had been preceded by silence, she knew it was Teller or Ellerson on the other side. She rose quietly, accepting any excuse to set quill aside, and opened the door.

She was surprised to see Devon ATerafin in the shadowed halls. “Devon?”

“Finch,” he said, bowing, the gesture completely unnecessary. “May I?”

She moved out of the way instantly.

“My apologies for disturbing you.”

She shook her head, gazing ruefully at her work. “To be honest, I’m sort of looking for any excuse not to have to work. Uh, any excuse that doesn’t involve death, dismemberment, or more work.”

He laughed. The sound was rich and deep, entirely out of place in the confines of her chosen office. She did not entertain people. Not here.

“Now,” he said, stepping into the room, “You sound like a member of the Imperial Trade Commission. You’ve grown into your rank.”

At the mention of rank, her shoulders slumped. “I’ll never grow into my rank,” she told him.

“If you wait for the magical moment at which you feel that all work is inconsequential, and all labor is easy, you’ll wait a long time. In House Terafin, the work itself is a sign of the confidence of its governing body.”

She cringed. “You heard.”

His hesitation was visible, and of all reactions, the most telling. “Yes,” he said at last, “I have. You and Teller are to join the Terafin House Council when it convenes on the morrow.”

She bit her lip. “If you’ve heard, everyone’s heard.” And was rewarded by the startling lift of a dark brow.

“Perhaps. I was informed by The Terafin.”

“W–why? She told us that we were to tell no one but our guards—well, and each other—until we arrive at the Council meeting itself.”

His silence was unsettling.

“What else has she told you?”

Supple shrug of shoulder. Telling shrug.

“You know.”

“Yes,” he told her quietly. “I know. But . . .”

“But?”

“It was Jewel who chose to inform me. The Terafin’s wishes have not yet been made known.”

“When? When did she tell you?”

“Before she left.”

Finch bit her lip. It was a habit that she had worked very hard to lose, and although she had had some success, it returned at awkward moments.

“You know we’re being watched.”

“Of course.”

“Then you know that everyone will know you’ve come to visit.”

He nodded again. “But you are not the only member of the House that I have visited this eve; I have spoken to all of the House Council.”

“Why?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

He laughed again. “You are not politic yet. Very well. There are matters of import to the House which might affect the Kings.”

The night grew colder. “He sent you?”

“Not per se. But I am here with Duvari’s consent, yes.”

“Why?”

He hesitated for another moment. “This issue is unlikely to be raised in the open, and it is of import that it remain hidden.”

She nodded.

“The Terafin’s mage discovered a demon among the House staff.”

Her eyes rounded, her lips fell open. “But—but he said that things were in order. Before he left. For the South.”

“Please do not take this the wrong way, but we’re aware of what was said. Understand that this is not the first time that a demon has been found in The Terafin’s presence.”

“I . . . know.” She closed her eyes. All of her darkest memories were waking in the face of the man who stood before her.

“Indeed,” he said softly. “You, and your den, know a great deal about the kin.”

“No. We don’t. We just—”

“You know enough. Do you understand the significance of its presence here?”

She shook her head.

“Think a moment.”

Think. She bit her lip again, kneading it between her teeth. “You think that the kin are involved in the . . . succession race.”

“Very good.”

“But that means—”

“Yes. It does.” He walked across the room and took the chair closest to the desk, sitting in it. Seated, he robbed himself of the advantage of height—but not by much; Finch had never been tall. Would never be tall. The legacy of an early life in the hundred holdings.

“The kin attempted to kill The Terafin years ago. They attempted to kill Jewel ATerafin months ago. It is possible—just—that the latter attempt was solely of relevance to the war in the South; the demons came to the Hall of the Kings when the Kings themselves presided over The Ten in regard to the question of the hostages. But the former attempt stands on its own.”

She nodded.

“It is considered possible that the attempts were unrelated, but we believe that they were part of a larger war. It is for that reason—and that alone—that the armies were sent to the South.”

Finch nodded again. She understood what the significance of loss in that war meant: She had lived through the Henden of the demon voices, and she would never, ever forget it.

“It is not in the interests of the Kings to play favorites among the candidates a House fosters for its succession,” he told her quietly. “Nor is it in the interests of the Empire. How much of the history of The Ten do you know?”

She shrugged. “As much as anyone does.”

“Tell me.”

“The Lady Veralaan was the sole surviving child of the ruler of the Empire. Her brothers had killed each other, somehow, and her father was dead. The Blood Barons thought to gain her hand in marriage, and with it, the Empire. But her father had given her into the keeping of the Mother, and in the halls of the temple, she had been trained as a priestess. So she knew what that marriage would mean for the people who weren’t born to power.”

“Go on.”

“She prayed. She asked for help. And the Mother interceded, summoning her into the Between, where she met the Lords of Wisdom and Justice. Time passes differently there, and she stayed with them. In the Between, the Twin Kings were born to Veralaan, the heir to the Imperial throne.”

“Indeed.”

“Although she was gone a few days—or a few months, the story isn’t always the same here—when she returned, the sons she bore were of age. They were presented to the assemblage of the patriarchs, the scions of the Blood Barons. She abdicated her throne to her sons.”

He nodded.

“The Blood Barons weren’t really thrilled. But the people were. Veralaan’s sons, Cormalyn and Reymalyn the first, made it clear that they were willing to wage a war for control of the Empire which was theirs by right of birth. They traveled the Empire, and survived many attempts on their lives, seeking the support of the nobility in their war. In the end, ten of the most powerful of the families who governed the Empire chose to lend them their support. The Ten,” she added softly, “who rule now. They came from the West, and the East, from the North and the South, and they came bearing arms, at the head of small armies, to lay their swords at the feet of the god-born.

“The Kings accepted their pledges of allegiance.”

He nodded, his eyes never leaving her face. He didn’t seem to blink at all; his eyes were luminescent in lamplight, in darkness.

“We celebrate those vows every year,” she told him quietly.

“Indeed. In Henden, in the darkness, and in Veral, in the Spring. But understand that the offer of The Ten was not so simple an offer as the High Days make it out to be in story; that if it involved nobility of purpose—and it must have—it also involved the brokering of power.

“The Kings accepted conditions to the rule of The Ten when it accepted their pledges. The Ten were to be first among equals in the new world; they were to have their seats of power within the grounds of
Avantari
; they were to be left to their own devices in ‘internal affairs.’ In essence, the Kings were to allow them rule of their own. The laws that bind the Ten and the laws that bind the rest of the Empire are somewhat different.

“It is not, as you might guess, to Duvari’s liking.”

“Nothing is.”

He smiled. She had forgotten, until then, how handsome he was. Finch, like Jay, distrusted handsome men. “The oaths that were made to The Ten were binding. They are recorded, even if they are not examined often. In a House War, the Kings’ hands are tied by those pledges; they will not intervene unless the war itself is of such a magnitude that it encompasses those who are not allied with the Houses.”

She nodded.

“If The Terafin chooses to kill you,” he said evenly, “and you are incapable of defending yourself, the law will not intervene on your behalf.”

She nodded again.

“And if a member of the House chooses the same course,” he continued, “the same law applies.”

“But—”

“There is no but.”

“But—”

He smiled. “There is a reason that the death of Alea, among others, was not reported to the magisterial guards.”

“But there have been cases, in House history, where members of the House have been turned over to the magisterial. Uh, the magisterial guards, I mean.”

“Indeed. On all occasions in which the crime committed has been committed outside of the jurisprudence of the House. If a House member murders an outsider, or commits an act of treason, the House member forgoes the protection of the House. This, too, is written in the covenant between The Ten and the Kings. But in cases in which the wrongdoing is entirely internal, justice is an internal affair.

“The Terafin, in order to ask for Royal intervention, would have to cede to the Kings what has never been ceded in the History of the House: her sovereignty. I understand that you grew up within the warrens of the hundred holdings; that the force of law does not therefore seem sacrosanct to you. You have lived with the limitations of men, not the rule of the law, for the whole of your life. But the theory of your life in the holdings and your life here are different.”

“Does it matter? It’s all just words.”

“It matters,” he said softly. “We believe that the first would-be assassin did not intend to make the death of The Terafin obvious; that he in fact intended the opposite: To replace her, to assume her form and her role.”

“If that had happened, the Kings would—”

“The Kings,” he said softly, “would rely solely upon the Astari.”

“The Astari? I . . . I don’t understand.”

“I know,” he told her gently. “It is why I came this eve. I thought it might be preferable to a visit from Duvari.”

She nodded.

“Had the control of the House devolved in such a fashion, the Kings would rely upon Duvari and the men and women who serve him. They would rely upon shadows, Finch; upon a war waged in those shadows. In order to move openly against the House itself, they would have required proof of a type that would be hard to obtain, if not impossible, without the direct consent of the other Nine.”

“But surely The Nine—”

“No. That is what you must see, and see clearly. The Nine would know, when approached by the Kings, that by granting them this tacit permission they would be endangering their own power in the future. Even if the House itself were aligned with the worst of our enemies, they would turn a blind eye until it was impossible to do otherwise. If the City itself were under siege, if the armies of the enemy were at the gates, the Kings would have their full cooperation.

“But until then, they would insist that the matter reside within the power of the Houses, by the laws written at the beginning of the Kings’ reign, centuries ago.”

She absorbed this quietly. After a moment, she said, “But if the Astari moved against the House, The Nine would know.”

“Indeed. They would know. But unless they were forced to acknowledge it, by some clumsiness on our part or some threat on the part of the creature who ruled Terafin in human guise, they would turn a blind eye. They understand the necessity of such a delicate operation.