The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5 (84 page)

Across the wilds of storm made now of wind and now of water in a mockery of nature, he met the eyes of an Arianni lord of the Green Deepings.

He could not bow; the fleeting gaze was salute enough. The kin rose to join him, finding easier purchase in the shelf of wind than they had upon the ground.

Kallandras frowned. The wind drove them back, toward ground. Into it.

The water rose as well.

Avandar Gallais struggled to sheathe his sword.

Jewel was aware of the motion although she couldn’t see it; he was behind her. The Winter King’s stride had carried them to the edge of the water’s range—and it was wide.

But she could almost hear the voice of the blade; could feel its weight, and its warmth, in her right palm; could feel the pain of its denial against the scarred flesh of her forearm.

You play a game you do not understand, ATerafin
, the stag said. He had never called her by title before; the rebuke stung.

Avandar
, she said, calling him in a way that diminished distance.

He did not reply.

She looked back. Gray mist radiated outward in a nimbus of light, and at its center, nothing. Avandar was gone.

There was no way to ford the stream. Although the riverbed was dry and cracked—a hint of the desert and its multiple deaths—the water roved freely.

Alessandro kai di’Clemente would never see water again without remembering the destruction of Damar.

But he would see it without fear. He would see it as the Lord’s man. He paused on the periphery of flight’s edge, drew breath, turned back.

There, in moonlight—the lamps had fallen, and lay crushed upon the cobbled stone and broken earth—he saw the Northern bard. Saw what the bard faced: red swords, red fire. Nothing natural. Nothing that the forest birthed.

He had offered the Lady his prayers, but he was of the South; he accepted her answer with a grimace. His men, upon the far bank, were scattered, but he heard the orders and the sounds of steel that spoke of retreat, not rout. Pride, there; pride for just a moment. Clemente produced
men
. The Manelan Toran were either dead or dispersed; they had failed in their sworn charge, but they had not chosen to seek the death that awaited the failure of such profound oath.

He met Reymos’ eyes in the darkness.

Ignored what he saw in them; he could offer his man that much dignity.

But he could not make noble what was ignoble. He steadied himself, found strength remaining in the bend of tensed knees, and ran.

The water struck the ground ten feet before him; he froze and before he could run again, he was caught.

But not by water: the air held him.

“Tor’agnate,” a foreign voice said, the syllables cold and too clear, “not on the West does your battle lie.”

He flailed for just a moment, and then stilled as he rose. The water roared and rumbled as it passed beneath him; tendrils slammed into his legs with enough force to bruise.

And then he was clear of the banks; clear—for a moment—of the water. He heard a grunt at his side, and saw that Reymos had likewise been carried above the din of battle.

Quickheart was lost. He could not hear the horse; could not see him in the darkling night.
Home
, he thought, and it was a prayer. But it was all the prayer he spared.

For he could see, thirty yards away, what his men fought.

Celleriant fought the water. To force the air to accomplish the simple task of setting a commander among his forces had been costly, for the water was its enemy, and it sought nothing but battle. Sought to destroy anything that came between it and its rightful prey.

He was no youth, no stripling; the dawn of the world was beyond him. He could not be shaken by the simple anger, the visceral desire, of elemental air. He understood its heart; it was his own. For he had, by command, no choice but to turn his back upon the red blades of the kin, and they called him, a challenge and an insult that none—not even the Northern bard—could comprehend.

Winter was his heart. Ice. Cold.

In the Winter, the wind was death.

But his lady had commanded him to preserve life; he struggled to forgo the wilderness of the road that had defined him for millennia.

They will die anyway
, he told her, silent, aware that his words would not carry the distance—the many distances—that separated them.

Aware, as his gaze turned to follow Kallandras a moment, that although the words were true, they contained the beginning of a falsehood. Lies were weapons; subterfuge a game. But what grew now was something foreign, something that defied his nature, his birth.

He lost the air a moment.

He paid.

They were like dogs.

Dogs grown in size, dogs whose eyes held the patina of fire’s heart. They had jaws the size of a horse’s head, teeth the length of daggers; they spoke with voices that might—once—have been human.

It was their speech that was, of all things, most disturbing. Ser Alessandro understood it. Felt the exultation that tainted the words and the challenge, the triumph, of the short bursts they made of words. Crossbow bolts were less effective.

They broke ground with their forepaws; severed limbs with their hind legs; they paused only to savor death, and the pause was brief.

He counted seven.

Against one, two, his men might stand, but against seven? He knew. Before he drew horn from sash, before he drew breath to wind it, he knew.

Not for Alessandro kai di’Clemente the madness of battle; not for Alessandro, the Tor’agar of Clemente, the wild exuberance of struggle and death. He stood, unchanged and unchangeable, as his men fought, and when he finally winded horn, they understood two things.

That their Tor was alive.

And that he was at their side.

Ser Amando had been correct in one way: These were men of the plains, and they served their Tor. They drew strength from his presence. They fought.

Where is he
? she asked wildly.

The Winter King was silent. Above them both, the water trembled like a tower made of liquid crystal. She heard its voice; knew where it would fall. Knew who it would kill, although when she spoke the name, it had no meaning to her. A man’s name. A clansman.

But she also knew that it would fall slowly. That it would fall blindly. What it sought, now, was above it, and around it.

Avandar warned us
, she thought.

Yes. But in this at least he was mistaken
.

Where is Celleriant
? she asked again.

Where you sent him. ATerafin
.

Take me
.

You are my care
, he replied.

Take me, damn you
.

She had ridden him across the heart of the desert. Had ridden him through the heart of the Serpent’s storm. She had ridden him through the Old Deepings, past the death that awaited Yollana of Havalla should she hesitate. But not until this evening, in the village of Damar, did she understand the force of the Wild Hunt.

Because he leaped up, above the reach of ground, as if gravity and weight were beneath his dignity. His hooves struck nothing; they fell in a silence that spoke of the death that at last ends pursuit.

Nothing escaped the Hunt, she thought, and the ghost of her Oma’s voice remade old legends that memory and peace had fragmented. Nothing escaped, not even the King.

She clutched tines; her throat allowed the passage of air only when she gasped.

The Winter King, silent with the weight of command, took her beyond the reach of water, through the wail of air, and out the other side.

He offered no warning; her knees shook with the force of her grip, although she
knew
that he would not let her fall. Could not. It was some part of his transformation.

But he landed
in
the midst of battle, and she had just enough foresight—and she, gifted, born and cursed with knowledge—to unclench fists from antlers, one did not grab blade’s edge for safety when the blade was being wielded.

What the blades of the Clemente cerdan were too slow, or too dull, to pierce, the Winter King did.

The voices of the kin—for these creatures could be nothing else—were raised now in anger and pain. But beneath it, a testament to the perception of her gift, she heard exultation.

They turned to face the stag.

The
Kialli
lord saw. The water that had taken him spit him out like refuse, a thing beneath its power and its concern. For a moment, anger governed him; anger lasted long enough to be transformed.

He recognized Lord Celleriant, blue fire burning along the fine trail of winter hair. The kinlord summoned blade, and it came, but he did not take to air; flight—even such flight as he had attained when he first woke upon the plain—was denied him.

Envy was a bitter blow; it struck him in a way that the elemental water could not.

His sight was not obscured by liquid, not riven by the debris the gale lifted. The hounds were at play; they would not now be called from battle by any lesser voice, and the Lord was in the Northern Wastes, upon the throne.

He had come to mortal lands with contempt; had worn it like vestment. It left him now. What remained was war, and the command that had been given him by the Lord’s Fist.

The Manelan men were lost, but they were the least significant part of the forces that had assembled.

Shaking, fighting desire and the call to combat, he gathered the seeming that had protected the mortals from knowledge of who—of what—he was; he donned it clumsily, but he
did
don it.

He had expended power; but the power was not yet exhausted. With a snarl, Landaran of the
Kialli
left to gather the army of the man who claimed dominion over all these lands.

She felt the edge of nightmare tug at consciousness.

It wasn’t unexpected. Demons, in all their dark glory, were never a sight that she could be prepared for; not even the worst of her memories—and she bore them all, like scars—could contain the reality of their presence, the darkness of their shadows, the red, red light of their weapons, be those weapons fangs and breath or bright, bloody blade.

The Winter King did not let her fall. Although he leaped, lunged, danced across ground inexplicably cracked and dry, she remained upon the safety of his back.

Discovered that safety, upon his back, was not guaranteed when the claws of one of these creatures slid through the stiff leather of boots, the pale skin of calf, the flesh beneath it.

She accepted the pain. Clung to it.

But the nightmare descended anyway.

The Warlord was upon the field.

And a small field, a pathetic field, such as he had rarely condescended to take. The blade that he had not drawn in centuries now welded itself to hand; it moved as if it were finger, knuckle, flesh. He did not struggle with it; did not reach for skills that in another man might have become slow and painful with disuse.

This
was what he was.

This was what he had not died for, over and over again; what he had given up the gift of the gods to obtain. He drew himself up to a height that he had not felt for so long it seemed an act of transformational magic. And then, with a smile, he turned toward the kin, the mangy dogs that now ran free across the terrain, scattering and killing as they chose.

He saw the stag, and for just a moment, looked for Arianne upon the field. Saw, instead, Jewel ATerafin, dark curls obscuring brown eyes, head bowed with the effort to control her fear. The blade fell a moment as he studied her face.

He had agreed to serve her.

He could not remember why.

But she could.

She did. What she had not said, time and again, she said now.
Viandaran
.

His name.

She had seen a god before, in the ruins of the foyer of the Terafin Manse. She had seen the children of gods in the Stone Deepings.

But what she saw in Avandar moved her in a way that those born to immortality had not moved her. Memory was a poor container. Reality was stronger.

She had seen this man in nightmare. She had seen him kill to exert authority over a wayward son. She had seen him—ah, this, too, in the present, relieved of the haze of memory—stand down to let their greatest enemy destroy one of the Cities of Men.

But she had never
seen
him. She knew it because she saw him now.

He was not Arianne; he was not Bredan; he was not Allasakar. But he was beautiful in a way they were not, for he was broken.

Time, now, to face truth and have done: She had gathered the broken to her, time and again. But she had refused to acknowledge that Avandar Gallais—that Viandaran—was one of them.

Why?

The Winter King spun, lifting hooves from all contact with earth. He was warm beneath her thighs, and his voice was silent. She wanted him to turn around, to turn again, to give her sight of Avandar.