The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5 (79 page)

The divide between the East and the West became clearer; the river seemed almost still in the flat of its bed, glittering like twisted blade. The roads, two, seemed all that Damar had in common.

But they had not been built by the Easterners; they had been built for the use of the West, where the merchants, the craftsmen, and the elders lived.

As if in defiance of the old forest, Damar’s heart lay upon the Western bank, in the form of a market. It was situated farthest from the shadows and bowers of ancient trees, hugging the banks of the Adane. But as the village had grown, the market had grown, its messy half circle widening in time. Old buildings still rose along the streets of the market center, and the tallest of these were reserved for those who had power or money—as such things were defined by a village. In the foreground of those buildings newer structures lay: stalls, small shops, the fount of contemplation in their center, its carvings almost too ornate for the village itself. He often wondered who had commissioned it, for along its surfaces, forest creatures ran, caught in the act of flight, and in its center, a woman stood, a bow in her pale hands. They called her the Lady.

But they did not speak of her often, and never to outsiders. He wondered what the Northerners would make of her, should they notice her at all. They might not; it was true that the statue was unusual, but true also that familiarity robbed it of its grace and its unique power. The villagers went about their business in the hours of dawn, and all of the hours that led to dusk, passing before her arrow without noticing that it was near to flight. The merchants were not troubled by her shadow; the farmers cursed and shouted openly before her chiseled gaze as they battled their way to their stalls, their carts and wagons moving poorly in the clogged streets.

No need for wells, either to the West or the East; the Adane provided all of the water Damar needed.

And when the banks were swollen in spring, the market stood yards away from its currents. Once, perhaps twice, those stalls had been flooded—but they had never been swept away; they endured much.

It was in the market that he would find his cousin; he felt certain of it. It was the only place in Damar in which people habitually gathered in great numbers; the only place in which the whole of the village lay visible. Even at night. Perhaps especially at night.

And on this one? Lights glimmering everywhere? Yes, he thought. There.

Ser Adelos frowned.

“Too much light,” Ser Reymos said. Alessandro nodded. “The column?”

“They’ll clear the forest in ten minutes, Tor’agar.”

“The archers?”

“They’ll like the light.”

“Good. When we arrive at the bridge, call a halt. If there are men in the streets, clear them; make sure they return to the shelter of their homes.”

And let those homes, he added silently,
be
shelter, for the eve.

Quickheart nickered; his forehooves skittered against the ground in a nervous dance. Alessandro leaned over and thumped the horse soundly, hands wide against the curve of dark neck. The words he spoke reached the horse’s ears; they were gentle, even, simple.

Quickheart was slow to take comfort; a bad sign. Ser Alessandro wondered how the others would fare; few were the horses that were so steady in time of crisis, so inured to the sound and the dangers of battle, as Quickheart.

“You sense them,” he said quietly. “You sense them, don’t you? Well and good. Be alert, Quickheart. Be alert, and if necessary, be fleet of foot.”

The village lay before him.

He followed the road, watching the lights. Something was wrong, but it took him a moment to realize what it was. All of the noise that slowly filled the village came from his men; there were no insect sounds, no night birds. Even the river seemed sluggish and meek as it traveled the course of its bed.

He saw a lone dog at the village edge.

Quickheart was so skittish that he reared at the sight of the animal. Alessandro rode the movement, tightening his knees. The dog retreated. Wise, that.

“Reymos,” Alessandro said, when all four of Quick-heart’s hooves were again upon the ground, “I will travel to the Lady’s shrine.”

Reymos nodded.

The Lady’s shrine was in the Eastern half of Damar. It was a small shrine, but even in the glow of moonlight, it looked well-tended. The stones that circled ground hallowed by moonlight were swept and cleaned; the plants that adorned the base of those stones, weeded and arranged with care. He wondered what their colors were; the night made them midnight blue, white, and dark shades of gray. Against the backdrop of night, they formed the perfect colors of mourning.

They would have need of them, before dawn. Ah.

He shook his head; raised his hand and swept his eyes clear of the road’s dust. With it went resignation.

He would not easily surrender to death the men in his care.

Radann par el’Sol
, he thought, with a trace of bitterness,
we are all infected by the blood of Lamberto
. It might have eased the Radann’s mind, had he spoken so openly—but he had no desire to offer that man any peace.

The stone bowls were not empty; in fact were so full, Ser Alessandro was reduced to making the offerings in the ground beyond them. He took water and wine from the flasks tied to Quickheart’s saddle. Unstoppering the skins, he offered the whole of their contents to the Lady, pausing only a moment to taste what lay within. The water must be sweet, and the wine unsoured; the Lady’s favor, this eve, was important. As he did before no other woman, be she fair and terrible, be she wise and powerful, he now offered his full obeisance to the moon’s bright face. Then, kneeling, he drew dagger and offered the last of the supplications, and the most powerful: his blood. The blood of Tors.

I am the Lord’s man, Lady, but even the men of the Lord surrender to you the things that are yours. I have followed the old ways. I have honored my mother and your daughter, my kai’s wife: I have offered shelter to the Matriarch of Havalla. I have shed no blood of yours within Sarel: I have caused no blood to be shed that would dishonor your name
.

Guard your people. If you desire blood, accept the offer of my blood in their stead
.

He raised hand to forehead, bent low; his hair grazed ground before his skin touched it. The earth was cold.

He stayed there for three full breaths, and then he rose. He spoke her name once, aloud. Brought his right arm to his chest in salute before gaining his feet.

Then he turned and made his way back to Quickheart. Reymos stood to one side of the horse, his face turned toward the village’s many homes.

He looked back only when Ser Alessandro was almost beside him.

“I have made the offerings,” Alessandro said quietly. “Gather the Toran; we will ride across the bridge when the men are assembled.”

“Tor’agar.” Reymos bowed.

The leaves were thick and the branches, low-lying, seemed to reflect not moonlight, but night; they were dark and cool as they brushed Jewel’s face. She took care not to break or damage them as she pushed them aside. They seemed, to her, living things in a way that not even the great trees in the Common were: rooted in place, they seemed a cold audience, a severe crowd.

She hated crowds, but she did what she could not to invoke their anger, for the mob lay at the heart of every gathered crowd she’d witnessed.

As a child—and she would have hated to be so described—she had learned to skirt the edges of such gatherings, slipping hands into pockets, sliding dagger’s edge along leather thongs in order to retrieve the purses that held silver and copper crowns. But she had taken only what the den needed, no more; she had learned to cause no other harm.

Funny, that such a furtive, desperate life could feel so much like the right one in this place.

She was aware of Lord Celleriant’s regard, for he paused often—to wait for her to catch up—and watched her progress through the thin woods.

“Have you walked the Green Deepings before?” he asked her.

She jumped at the sound of his voice, for he had come upon her where the trees were thickest. “Yes.”

“When?”

“You were there. Yollana led us.”

“Ah. My apologies. I meant, perhaps, at some earlier time.”

“Oh. No.”

“Yet you walk with such care.” He reached out; his hands touched leaf and branch as if caressing them. They seemed to bow and shiver with unseen, unfelt wind; they rose above the line of her brow, the unruly strands of her tangled hair. “Why?”

“I don’t think the trees here would take kindly to anything else.”

He lifted his face and spoke; the words were complete gibberish to her—but they were musical gibberish, beautiful and complex in the rise and fall of fleeting syllables.

“What did you say?”

He offered no answer, pretending not to hear the question.

But after silence once again descended, the branches seemed to rise, and although leaves brushed the skin of her face, the rise of her cheeks, the exposed back of her neck, they did not cling or tangle.

“Remember this,” he said quietly. “If you ever have cause to walk the Deepings again.”

“Remember what?”

“Your caution. The trees have little love of men.”

She nodded. She wanted to be flippant, but she knew that anything she said would come out in a thin and shaky voice.

“Could you make it safe?”

“Make what safe, Lady?”

“The forest.”

“I am safe within the forest.”

“For others. For the villagers. Could you do for them what you just did for me?”

“You misunderstand me,” he said quietly. “What I said was not said for your benefit, but theirs.” His gaze lingered a moment upon the great, standing trees. “I am not their master. Not even the Winter Queen would make such a claim.”

“But you—”

“I merely drew their attention to your passage; what they gleaned from their attempt to observe you is entirely their own.”

She stared at him, and he turned. The smile he offered her was a dark one. “Do not think of me as a gardener, as the keeper of tame trees and tame, silent plants. If the
Kialli
make their home in the Northern Wastes, we make our home in the wild places, and in the wild places, you have no friends. Not even these,” he added, his gesture taking in the forest’s many trees. “Perhaps especially not these.”

She wondered, then, if she would ever understand him.

The forest was still dark, but it was silent now. No ghosts intruded upon her passage through the Deepings. She wondered if they had been laid to rest. Or if, like any other living presence, they required sleep and shelter before they gathered the strength to return.

Here and there, the trees broke, opening a window into the plains beneath moonlight. She saw no village, although a lone building sometimes suggested itself in the pale gray of landscape. No lights, though; no sign of movement. Funny that she found the lack disturbing. In the desert, the endless heat and cold had demanded her full attention. But here, in the Torrean of Clemente, the weather itself was not a threat, and she felt the absence of Averalaan keenly. City girl.

Or perhaps she missed the simplicity of her old life, even its darkness and its violence, for it was not the Terafin Manse that she longed for; not the Terafin manse that she missed. It was the streets of the twenty-fifth holding.

Memory, she thought. We choose it. We let go of the things that don’t suit us.

She had never imagined, in the spare, terrible struggle of life with her den, that there would come a time when she yearned for its stark simplicity.

What I would tell that girl now, she thought, as she continued to tread her careful path. If I were Evayne. If I could walk between then and now.

“ATerafin.”

She looked up. Met Avandar’s shuttered gaze. “What?”

“Damar.”

Verragar’s
voice was strongest in the citadel of the Tor. Marakas had feared to find as much. He and the Radann who had chosen to accompany him walked with quiet deliberation through the streets of Sarel, their steps lighter and more certain than the heavy fall of cerdan boots across a curve broken by wall and fount, by gate and building. But after some distance, broken and awkward as it was, their steps traced a circle whose periphery enclosed the heart of Clemente’s power.

The Radann felt no love of, and no responsibility for, the Tor’agar. He had made his interests clear, and the past that existed as wall or gap between them would not, by the action of an evening, be bridged, although it might be forgiven.

But he had left his domis in the care of the Radann par el’Sol and had led his men to night’s war, when the only Lord that lay in watch was the one they both hated and—in the privacy of moonlight—feared.

“Santos,” he said, his grip upon
Verragar
too tight.

The Radann bowed head once.

“We can afford to offer no warning.”

“You think the servant of the Lord of Night is within the Tor’agar’s domis.”

“I think he must be. But we have heard no sounds of battle; no sounds of slaughter. None of the serafs have fled.”