The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5 (65 page)

And Kallandras of Senniel College was a bard without peer upon this poorly traveled road.

His voice joined theirs. Serra Teresa heard it instantly, and she gave over some part of her melody to its power, choosing harmonies that might better bring his voice to light. But she was shaken. She had heard him sing before; in the Court of the Tyr’agar Markaso kai di’Leonne, a man who had become a simple part of the complexity of Annagarian history, and in the Eastern Fount of contemplation. Then, he had chosen cradle song, overpowering her with her own desire for safety and simplicity.

Now, he chose to speak to the heart of loss, and his loss was the wind’s sharpest voice.

Had she been better prepared, she might not have faltered. Indeed, she faltered only for a moment.

But were it not for her niece, that moment would have been her death. The dead moved in the gap between the fullness of her offered musical phrases, seeking an opening.

They were no longer a distant audience; they had found the strength to move, and move again, with each verse she offered. She laid her heart bare, and they slowed, but it was costly.

She sang of Alora, her brother’s dead wife. She sang of the bitterness of their parting. She sang of her failure, her profound failure, and again, the men faltered. But they did not stop; they were close enough to Yollana of the Havalla Voyani now, and she drew them forward.

The strongest of the men reached them first, and stood at the feet of the Havallan Matriarch. Yollana, crouched to ground, lifted a face carved by wind and darkened by sun; her eyes met his, and she saw in those eyes something that Teresa herself could not see.

“The time has come, Andreas. The time has come at last.” She made to rise, and Teresa rose with her, struggling with the weight of both song and Matriarch.

He nodded, grim, and the dagger he held shifted position in the palm of his hand.

Wordless, he came, and wordless, he remained. But the dagger itself moved; it struck Yollana full in the chest.

The Matriarch grunted, stumbling. Teresa almost lost song as she pulled Yollana to her feet, and held her swaying there. The hilt of the black knife protruded from her chest.

“You are free,” Yollana whispered, choking on the words. On the words and more. Blood trailed from the corners of her mouth, darkening the wind’s cracks, the sun’s lines.

The man smiled.

The boy came next. Teresa could not look away; the whole of his face seemed absorbed by the shadow that had taken up residence in the hollow of his eyes.

“You betrayed us,” he said, the sibilance of the last syllable louder than the Serra Teresa’s voice. He lifted a slender dagger.

The Matriarch said nothing.

And the Serra Teresa’s song faltered. If Yollana had chosen to armor herself against the gift—and the curse—that had forever defined the Serra’s life, the boy felt no such compunction. She heard what lay beneath the surface of his words clearly, and she was stunned into silence by it: it was dark, terrible, a thing that might belong to the servants of the Lord of Night.

It was a costly mistake, that silence; the boy darted forward, the dagger swinging in a wide, a wild, arc.

But if she had lost song, she had not lost wit; her arm tightened around Yollana’s midriff and she pulled the old woman back, unbalancing them both. A tree root caught the heel of her boot; she fell back and over it.

But the dagger had made its mark in the old woman’s flesh; a dark, dark line appeared across the folds of her desert robes—robes that had been separated cleanly by the blade’s edge.

Teresa looked up: the dagger was vanishing into the dusk, its shadow diminished by Yollana’s blood. The boy looked at his hand, at the ghost of a blade that was already insubstantial. He howled in rage and fury.

All of the stories of the wolves that lived in the darkest and the deadliest of the Western forests came back to her then. She had come, in time, to understand that even the most simple of children’s tales bore some element of older truth, and she wondered if the howling of those distant tales belonged, in the end, to men such as these.

But Yollana, wincing, pushed herself up from the dubious haven of the earth. Her hands were shaking, and her arms; her legs were buckled at an odd angle. She needed Teresa’s help, and the Serra responded instantly, as if she were a puppet master in the silent plays of the High Court.

“Sergio, you . . . are . . . free,” Yollana said.

He came at her then, at a run, his dark eyes growing until they consumed half his face. But his hands were ineffectual; they passed through her chest, her neck, her face. She flinched, though; the Serra Teresa felt the desert night in the passing arc of his arm.

The old man stood silent in the face of the boy’s fury. He stared at the Matriarch. Of the blades she had faced, his was longest, darkest; it seemed to swallow all light until it remained in his hands, the symbol of the absence of all things that the Serra had ever valued.

She tried to find her song, and realized, belatedly, that although she had lost voice, lost strength, two others had not.

Kallandras of Senniel College came out of the tree’s shadows, and stood upon this slender, open road, his lips moving in the fullness of his song.

And the Serra Diora di’Marano joined him, coming from around the trunk of a different tree; she lifted her hands to rough, linen hood, and drew it back from her delicate, white face. Had she not had eyes that were perfect, lashes that, in the dawn’s gray, were full and thick, she might have been one of the three, a ghost, an ethereal vengeance visited upon the people who had dared to come to this place.

Yollana was bleeding. The blood was both dark and real; it was warm to the touch, although it had dried to stickiness where it nestled between the Serra’s fingers. Had Yollana been a young woman, the wounds would have been serious. But the dagger that remained in her chest had missed its mark; it did not reside in the heart’s center. And the boy’s blow, a jagged cut, seemed clean.

If such a thing could deliver a clean blow.

The old man gazed at Yollana; he was far more restrained than the boy had been, but more than that was hard to glean from the emptiness of his eyes.

The Matriarch of Havalla looked up at him, met his gaze as if it
were a
gaze. “Marius,” she said, her voice as cold a voice as Teresa had yet heard.

The old man nodded.

“Tell the bard to stop singing,” Yollana whispered, a hint of irritation breaking through the surface of her words.

“Is that wise?”

“No.”

“I do not think you can survive another such blow,” Teresa replied softly.

“If I’m lucky,” Yollana replied, and again, some crack in the facade of smooth voice let Teresa hear her terrible bitterness.

He moved forward; Yollana stood her ground, putting most of her weight against the Serra Teresa. “The road is closed,” he said.

The Serra was surprised; the younger man had not spoken a word; the boy, few. But there was an intelligence in this last creature.

“The road,” Yollana told him quietly, “is waiting. Step from it, Marius. Return to the winds, at last, if that is your desire.”

“My desire,” the old man replied coldly, “is simply this.” He raised the blade.

And Kallandras of Senniel College stepped out into the road before him. He carried the Lady’s weapons, one in either hand, and he crossed their blades before his chest, bowing briefly, offering this much respect.

“Have you not told them?” the dead man said.

“We do not speak of things Havallan to outsiders.”

“Nor to insiders,” was the cold reply.

She did not waver. “Not even to Havallans was it safe to speak of this.”

“You trusted us so little?”

She was silent. The Serra Teresa arranged her weight with care, stepping to one side so that she might better judge her expression. To her surprise, she saw that the old woman’s eyes were closed.

“I am . . . sorry . . . cousin. Believe that I have carried the weight of this. Believe that the stains have never left my hands.” She lifted her head, opened her eyes, and met his again; his face was white. Dead.

Only the Serra Diora sang now, and her voice was soft.

“Why?”

She flinched. “I had not thought . . . enough of you would remain . . . to ask that question.”

“I am not Andreas. I am not Sergio.”

“No. Of the three, you were—” She closed her eyes again. “You were my cousin. The closest kin to the bloodline that could be spared.”

“For this?”

“For just this.” Her words were bitter. “Against this night, against this coming day.”

“You saw it.”

“Yes.”

He drew closer. Kallandras let his arms fall to either side.

“Tell him, Yollana.”

“Bard,” the Matriarch said, “stand aside. You cannot harm him, but if you do not step aside, he will harm you, and all of our losses will mean nothing.”

“We cannot afford to lose you.”

“You can,” the old woman replied curtly. “There are other Havallans, and if I fall, my daughter will rise to take my place. We must reach Mancorvo, and we must reach Lamberto soon, or we will have lost the war.”

Lord Celleriant stepped forward, and placed his hand upon the bard’s shoulder, drawing him gently, and inexorably, to one side. “I understand now,” he said softly. “She is right.”

The Master Bard of Senniel College turned toward his companion.

“He can harm you. And although she does not understand it, you have the power to harm
him
. But that was not the price she chose. These three have hallowed the way; they have made it hers. But she must pay the price she bargained for, or we will be lost in the Deepings.”

“The . . . Deepings?”

“The Dark Deepings,” Celleriant replied. “The heart of the oldest forest in this world. I may find my way out, in time—but time is a luxury that you do not possess. Stay, and the forest will devour you.” He turned to the Matriarch. Gazed at her, his brows furrowing slightly.

Kallandras bowed.

The old man drew closer to the Matriarch; the last obstacle had passed. “I could kill him,” he told her coldly.

“Yes.”

He lifted his dagger. “Havalla?”

“Tor Arkosa has risen,” the Matriarch said simply. “And Tor Havalla must follow in the years to come. But there is no way home for you, Marius. You are doomed to the freedom of the dead. I had hoped—”

“That I would be Andreas, or Sergio, wild with anger and pain.”

She was quiet.

“And I
am
, Matriarch.”

He lifted the dagger and before she could speak another word, he plunged it, with care, into her left eye.

Teresa cried out in horror.

But the blade sank an inch, no more, into the curve of that eye.

Yollana did not grunt; did not cry out in pain. She stared at him now, from the eye that was left her, and in the growing light, Teresa saw the tears that trailed from it.

The dagger grew insubstantial as morning mist.

“You are free,” Yollana whispered, choking on the words.

“And you,” he said, with malice, “are not.”

He stepped back, weaponless now; he had done his damage.

The boy was beside himself with rage. But the younger man watched in a cold silence, waiting until the oldest had joined their ranks.

As one, they lifted their arms, their fingers pointing toward her in accusation, and then the dawn came at last, and the rays of Lord’s light that could penetrate the forest heights fell upon the ground, speckled and broken by branch and swaying leaf.

That light, scant and meager, took root. The footprints that had served as guide along this hidden path reached for it, broadening, lengthening, covered the surface of earth and the rounded curve of roots with a long, thin stream of light that stretched forward—and back—as far as the eye could see.

The Radann Marakas par el’Sol, absolutely silent until that moment, walked the path until it brought him to Yollana. He knelt before her, as supplicant, and offered her the open flat of two weaponless palms.

She understood what he offered, but lifted her left hand to her eye and turned away, forcing Teresa to turn as well if she wished to continue to bear the older woman’s weight.

“I have healed the Arkosans in my time,” he said softly, “and I have never spoken of what passed between us. There is a covenant between the healer and the healed that is not easily broken.”

“Aye,” she said, pressing palm into wound, accepting a blindness that would never pass. “But there are things that I would not burden anyone with, no even a man who has given his life in service to the Lord.” She clutched her chest; blood trailed from her lips. “And there are things that cannot be healed,” she continued quietly. “A price to be paid that cannot, in the end, be revoked.

“The road is open to us now. We must follow it while the light lasts; it will not last long, and if we are not quit of this forest before it fades, we will never leave it.”