Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (105 page)

"I am sorry," he told his friend, as they approached the kai Leonne and began to slow their frenetic pace.

"He is not dying," his friend replied. 'I will not call the dying."

"And this?"

"For you, Baredan, because the debt between us is no small matter." The man paused, his Southern throat unadorned by the Imperial symbol, the two famous palms that spoke of the healer's presence across the breadth of trie Empire. "And because I am not… unimpressed… with the boy you came North to save." His teeth flashed in a white, white smile. "My foolish wife," he said, in a voice so heavy with indulgent affection it pulled an answering smile from Baredan, even given the grimness of the situation. "Watches from the stands, and she would never forgive me if I denied you what you have not yet asked. She thinks I am fearless, although she should know better; she thinks of me—" he laughed, "as a hero.

"And you know the cost of disillusioning such a wifely fantasy."

That wife had cost him his family in the end; his country. If there were regrets, they were not evident.

Baredan nodded. He straightened his shoulders and approached the kai Leonne. "Tyr'agar," he said, choosing the formal address because it would be witnessed.

Valedan turned. "If you have come to dissuade me—"

"I have not. But I have come, as your first General, to ask you to consider the use of a healer before you enter the circle. It is not undone, in a circumstance of this gravity."

Silence. The refusal gathered around the young man's lips, and stayed there, held in abeyance by something that might, in time, become wisdom. "Do you know what you're asking?"

"Yes."

"The use of a healer is strictly forbidden in the Kings' Challenge. I will have come all this way, and cost—" he fell silent again, struggling not with words, but with the enormity of what they meant. But he did not blanch, and after a moment, he continued. "I will have come this far for nothing."

"Yes."

Silence again.

I don't know you
, Baredan thought, for he had steeled himself for argument.
I wonder if any of us really does
.

The Tyr'agar, Valedan kai di'Leonne, looked across the field; what he saw there, what he sought, was not Baredan's concern.

"I owe my life," he said very quietly, "to a boy. To a boy who has probably never raised a sword in his life, but loves them anyway. But this was a game, a way of catching the attention of the clansmen who were allowed to come this distance.

"And this," he said, quietly, in just such a way that Baredan knew he referred to Anton di'Guivera, "
is
the war. The start of it. Yes, General. I will accept the services of any healer that you trust enough to offer me." His smile was bitter. "I hope Aidan is still watching from some window in the halls of Mandaros. And if he is, I hope he forgives me."

Baredan frowned. "Mandaros?"

"Northern god, Baredan."

"Ah, yes. Death god."

"Lord of Judgment."

Baredan bowed. Nodded a man forward. "Valedan kai di'Leonne," he said softy, "I would like you to meet Ser Laonis di'Caveras." He watched closely, but the name seemed to mean nothing to the boy. Just as well.

"Can you be of aid," Valedan asked, stepping forward, "to another as well?"

It was not the question that either expected. They were silent.

"Ser Andaro di'Corsarro was much injured, and I believe that he, too, will forsake the crown."

"You show a great deal of concern for the fate of an enemy," Ser Laonis said quietly.

"A former enemy. But it doesn't matter. In the end," Valedan replied evenly, "they will
all
be my subjects, enemy now or no."

"A good answer," the healer said quietly. "But I believe that you have been in the North a long time, kai Leonne." Before Valedan could speak, the healer added, "It pleases me to fulfill your request; I will see to Ser Andaro if he will, indeed, permit it. I, too, have been in the North a long time—longer, I think, than even you."

The match was not a part of the event; Ser Anton was not a contestant, and by accepting the aid of a healer, Valedan was no longer one either. But although the challenge—offered and accepted— was no part of the Kings' Challenge, the adjudicatory body fell silent when King Cormalyn gave his Royal assent to the application of the young Tyr'agar.

Fell silent and repaired to the stands as any spectator might, even the Royal ones. There was to be no judgment here, save the Lord's judgment. No rules of fairness, save the honor that the two men, older and younger, brought with them. The circle itself, a thing of dead grass and dry dirt, served no true containment; it was symbolic, and no one watching felt that it would be anything but that: symbolic. Symbols, however, in time of war were often of value.

There was no surrender here, except a surrender unconditional.

Valedan kai di'Leonne took his sword back when the healer finished. He was pale; however the Lord had touched his skin during this competition, it was nothing compared to the healer's touch. He did not speak; not to offer thanks, nor to offer the court pleasantries in which so little can be said with so much.

Baredan had never subjected himself to a healer's touch before, and seeing the kai Leonne withdraw from Ser Laonis so quietly, seeing Ser Laonis lurch forward, almost as if to prevent the separation before realizing where he was and what he was doing, he reconfirmed his silent commitment. There were some things a man risked; death was one.

But there were some things that were too great a risk.

Valedan took a breath, steadied himself, and lifted the sword. The sword seemed to give him strength. He met the healer's eyes only once, and when he did, he offered a wordless nod.

Ser Laonis, not the most silent of men, returned that nod. Returned it with the fullest bow, the most proper Southern respect, that a clansmen of power can offer. Baredan was almost shocked. Not that the bow had been offered—although it was a shock to see it, so correct, from a man who had forsaken the Dominion— but that it had been offered with such sincerity.

A moment later, it didn't matter.

Nothing but training did. Training, experience, and the will of the Lord whose merciless gaze covered every sky, Northern or Southern, in its judgment.

Two men stood alone in the coliseum. Their attendants stood far enough to either side that they vanished from the view of intent spectators. Not everyone understood what had transpired; not everyone understood who the old man was, although they knew that the young man had recently fought—and beheaded— some type of mage or magebound man.

But the Southerners understood two things: that the rules of this fight were not the rules of the combats that had preceded it in the circles across the coliseum, all of which had been emptied during the fight with the Lord of Night's servants,' and that this fight, unlike the others, was no pretty test of superficial skill; it was bloodsport.

It was honor, and there would be a death to seal it.

Two men stood, waiting, taking each other's measure in the silence of stillness and tension. The older man was obviously a man of experience and worth; those who recognized him as Ser Anton di'Guivera—and they were many—knew just how much that experience and worth counted for.

But the younger man was the man who would be first among Tyrs. The man behind whose banners armies would fall in, or in front of whose banners armies must fall. He was the scion of a weak clan, but he had proved himself, in the fight with the servant of the Lord of Night, and in the Challenge itself, to be worthy of regard.

But not necessarily worthy of the title.

This fight,
this
fight would decide that for many, many of the observers.

For Fillipo par di'Callesta. For the Tyran who served his kai, Ramiro, the Tyr'agnate of Averda. For Ser Kyro di'Lorenza, for Ser Mauro di'Garrardi. For the men who followed these men.

But more: for the students of Ser Anton di'Guivera. For the merchants who traveled under the banner of the clans of the South, all the way from Oerta and Raverra.

Significant, then, that it was the younger man who made the first move.

Two swords were raised in the circle below.

One fell; the other rose; the clash of steel was the defender's reply.

The next move was slow; testing. It, too, ended in that metallic conversation; attack, parry. Subtlety was introduced into the interplay of blades—feints, high and low, and evidence that both Valedan and Anton were capable of fighting with the hand that they did not favor.

Ser Anton landed the first blow, but it was glancing; the tip of the blade escaped the near impossible parry to land, to touch. Experience.

Valedan changed styles unexpectedly, he moved from the intensely ritual deliberation of the Dominion to the frenetic—the deliberately frenetic—attack of the Imperial North. Eneric's strength. Mirialyn's gift. Sivari's edge.

Ser Anton reacted as if he expected no less. But here, his age and experience were blunted by Valedan's youth, and a loud intake of breath escaped the crowd as Valedan replied.

Two swords were raised in the circle.

Two shadows cast, by sun, against the dead grass. Those shadows, just as the swords, met and parted, met and parted, stood and staggered with the force of attack and defense, a play within a play.

No one spoke; not even the Ospreys.

They watched the swordmaster. They watched the pretender. And more than one wondered what they would have been like, these two, as master and student, as liege and lord.

There could be only one lord in the Dominion, save the Lord of the Sun. That was the unwritten law; the truth that men understood.

In the light of the Lord's law, Valedan kai di'Leonne began to extend the fight, choosing stamina over experience, choosing, as he would become known for, the ability to wait out the enemy.

To make of waiting an art, an action rather than an inability to act. Sweat graced his brow, and blood from the third of Ser Anton's glancing blows.

But the third blow had been a lucky blow—and if luck counted, it counted only if absolute, and Valedan still stood, still lived. There would be no fourth blow, no fifth; but the blood drawn by the third would mark the Northern-raised, Southern-born Leonne, as no crown, no title, given by Northern Kings, could.

Ser Anton di'Guivera began, under the heat of the open sky, to tire. Valedan kai di'Leonne pressed him, pressed him hard. It seemed that he, too, was flagging.

But it was, as so many of his opponent's attacks had been, pretense, a feint. He found energy; he found strength. He pressed his attack, this last round of blows, with a stinging fury, a sudden passion, a driving, precise anger.

The unthinkable happened.

Ser Anton di'Guivera lost his sword and fell in a single motion.

One sword was raised in the circle. One hand.

Kallandras nodded quietly.

The first test had been met, had been passed. But the second, and perhaps the greater, had only just begun, and it would be passed or failed in a sword-stroke.

Ser Anton had fallen outside of the circle; his body lay half on green grass and half on brown, marking the division by its crossing.

He saw the swordmaster lift his hand, not in supplication—for that was neither his way, nor the way of the combat he had chosen— but as a shield, the only one he had chosen to carry.

And Valedan kai di'Leonne carried the sword, the single weapon remaining them. Carried it in a combat in which a death had been promised. He paused a moment, the sword raised in sunlight, the man unarmed beneath it no longer an opponent, just a defeated enemy. Just the man who had become the sword that killed Tyr'agar Markaso kai di'Leonne; the man who had shown no mercy at all, and therefore deserved none.

Kallandras did not speak. No one did.

But he was surprised to find that he was holding his breath.

There was one sword raised.

Ser Anton di'Guivera would not speak for himself.

He did not ask for mercy; he did not offer surrender. But he did not scramble away, did not choose to end his life without the dignity with which he had lived it. Life and death were the sword's edge. It was strange, that a man could offer death to so many, and could meet it only once.

There was no triumph in the face of the first man in history to best him. But there was anger there, and not a little of it.

Ser Anton wondered, as he watched, if the sword was suspended in time, if time indeed had stretched out the last second of his life beyond imagining, or if the kai Leonne was still fighting some struggle of his own.

He said, because he felt compelled to say it, "Kai Leonne, this is not an execution. It is combat; it is the Lord's work. No fault accrues to you—and no guilt—by my death."

The younger man's face darkened; his knuckles whitened. Ser Anton drew breath.

He faced the man who had killed his father, and he found, as the sword began its descent, that he could not strike for his father; not his father. Not that man. But there were other reasons to kill.

For Carlo di'Jevre, who had served Ser Anton faithfully and had, by his choices, been betrayed.

For Andaro di'Corsarro, who had lost Carlo to the
Kialli
, and who would be scarred by the loss forever.

For Aidan, whose family name he could not recall ever knowing, whose life had been lost because he was stupidly full of romantic notion and a belief in the nobility of
this
—this trial by combat, this test of steel. What had it proved? Nothing. There was no nobility in it.

But death. There was death. And he had chosen to face it, thinking—stupidly, as stupidly as Aidan had—that he could face the war and be the only one to pay the price for it. Idiot. Child.

He was no child now.

He was the victor.

He was the
Tyr'agar
, the
kai Leonne
, the last of a line. And he knew, because he could be honest with himself if no one else, that the real reason he wanted to kill this man was because this one man had been a hero to him, and it was his action, here, that had destroyed his ability to believe in the heroic.