Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (24 page)

"Finch—"

"C'mon, Jay. We're here. We can find Alowan."

They opened the door together because their hands found the handle at the same time, overlapping in both purpose and urgency. It made them both smile, if briefly, as the door opened outward and they stepped across the threshold into the arborium. There, surrounded by the greenery and silence of momentarily stilled birds, they followed the simple path that led from the door. Winding beneath and around the leaves and the vines and, yes, the birds who began their fluted chirping the moment the doors were closed, the path led to the fountain, the simple, quiet fountain, that stood at the heart of the arborium. Jewel remembered when the fountain had been completely visible from the door. But that, Alowan had told her, was the nature of life—change, growth, an unpredictability that comes only with absence and time.

The fountain was still there, still the same; stone, and not life. The chalice, held by stone hand and stone arm from the water's surface, overflowed gently, brimming as if it were Moorelas' and could raise the dead with a trickle of its liquid light.

A young woman, seated at the fountain's edge, looked up and smiled; she seemed far too young to be stationed here, where the injured and the sick were routinely brought.

"Hello," she said. "Are you Jewel?"

"Yes, I am. This is Finch; she's with me."

"Alowan told me to expect you. He's in the healerie at the moment, but he says it's safe for you to visit him there. If you'd follow me?"

She didn't wait to be asked twice.

Teller was in a bed, and that bed was stained in two places with the russet trails of dried blood: his. He was awake.

Jewel felt her legs lose all ability to carry her as she reached his side, as if, having reached the destination, all strength gave way to the face of fear's fact. She locked her knees.

"Jay?" His left eye was dark with bruising, swollen enough that it distorted the look of his face, his slender face.

"Daydreaming again?"

"If you call
this
dreaming." He looked up at her face as she touched his with a shaking hand. To see how it felt; to see if it was cold or warm, hot with fever or damp with sweat.

"What happened?" Her voice almost broke; it was a near thing. But she didn't want him to see how worried she'd been, so she kept her voice lean, the words spare.

And it would have worked on anyone but Teller. He met her eyes for a long time, and then said, "I was ridden down, I think. I thought—I thought it was an accident."

She cursed inwardly, knowing Teller
always
caught her lies, even if they were lies of omission.

"I was hit and thrown."

"He fell well," Alowan said, his voice neutral. "And no, before you ask, the fall wasn't fatal, or near fatal. He broke ribs, and his left arm and leg; I think that if he weren't one of yours, his head would be softer and easier to damage." It was said in a tone that was gentle, teasing even; if Jewel had said the words, they'd've had humor in them, but they'd be harsher.

"Did you—"

"No. The left leg is barely fractured, and will heal in a matter of a week or two. The arm, we can keep immobile without risk," the healer said quietly. "I'm not a young man, Jewel. He is. He can get though this well enough on his own, unless you need him."

"I can't think of a place he'd be safer."

"Jay."

She turned back to Teller, her hand now warmed by his cheek. "Don't ask, Teller. You always know when I lie."

"All right. Finch?"

"Haerrad," Finch said, without blinking.

"
Finch
. This-is-not-a-matter-for-the-healerie."

But Finch shrugged a still-slender shoulder. "He'll find out anyway."

"I believe," Alowan said, clearing his throat, "that it is not Teller's delicate sensibilities that she wishes not to offend, but my own."

"Yours? But—" Finch shut up then, and about time.

"If I might speak with you?" the healer continued.

Jewel sighed. Nodded. "You'll take care of him, right?" "Of him, yes." Alowan's face adopted stricter, darker lines than she'd ever seen it take. "Come. No—-not to the fountain. The plants have ears, or the birds do. Follow."

Jewel had never been invited to the quarters that Alowan called home; few of the ATerafin actually had, although it was rumored that Alowan did entertain visitors from time to time—healers on the odd occasion, children of the Mother, bards.

It hadn't occurred to her to wonder what his life outside of the healerie might be like. The moment one stepped across the threshold that separated the rest of Terafin from the healerie, one stepped into another world: Alowan's world, a place of peace and tranquillity, of rest.

She thought his rooms might be like that, somehow; that they might be similar to the mixture of finery and simplicity that Amarais so preferred. She waited patiently for the keys in hands that shook ever so slightly to reach the door to see if she was right.

She wasn't.

Alowan's pale brow furrowed as he watched her expression change—slightly, as she'd managed to absorb something resembling manners over the years.

"It's not what you expected?" he asked, as he took hold of a slender, simple cane that stood propped by the door.

"No."

"It never is." He opened the door wide and Jewel took a careful step into the room itself. It had to be careful, there was so much on the floor. There were crates piled high in the corner, obscuring what she assumed was still a serviceable chair, clothing dropped in a pale pile that had expanded into the room's center, a plate, or two plates, both meticulously clean, on a small, almost perfect table beneath the low, wide window.

There was, she thought, a lute in the corner of the room; it had a chair to itself, and frankly, from the scratches that were evident at this distance, it had seen unfriendly use—or cats, as was more likely, given the room's slightly musky air.

"Don't you—"

"No. No one cleans these rooms but I or my assistants."

You need new assistants
, she thought, keeping the words, with some struggle, to herself.

"Please," he said, as he lifted the lute, "take a chair."

"There's only one."

"I prefer the window seat, myself."

"How can you find it?"

He raised a white brow.

She had the grace to blush. "This isn't—"

"What a man who commands as much money as a healer should have?" He laughed. "It's funny, that
you
should say that to me. I've heard from too many of your den over the years; they say that the fanciest desk you actually use is the kitchen table; Not the dining room table, which has the advantage of making sense— but the kitchen table. The young girl there, Finch, has even said that you'll work while she's cooking."

"I can at least
see
the top of my table."

Alowan shrugged, the smile still at play in the network of lines around his lips. She suddenly wanted it to stay there; some instinct told her that it would be one of the last of its type that she would see upon his face.

But her anxiety must have been obvious, because he sat, heavily, upon the stone sill, crossing his legs and letting the cane carry the brunt of his forward weight. "Haerrad," he said, looking oddly like a mage, and not the healer that he had always been.

She tried not to meet his eyes; it wasn't easy. "I don't want to lie to you, Alowan."

"You don't have to. Jewel, what have you seen for The Terafin?"

She was silent, as she often was; at length she said, "I don't ask you to tell me what ails your patients, great or small, unless that information is information that is necessary."

"Or unless the injury dealt has been dealt to one of your own."

She nodded.

"Jewel. Let me tell you what I've heard, even kept away from the thick of the political infighting as I am.

"There is going to be a succession war. It will be started by one of four people: Elonne, Rymark, Marrick, or Haerrad. You might be familiar with these people; you sit on the same Council." He drew breath, and before she could speak—although there wasn't much chance of it, really—he started again. "The skirmishes have already started. There were three more. Alea, Corniel, and Courtne."

"Yes."

"The Terafin has not recovered from the loss of Alea. I should not say this, but I will. I do not think she
will
recover from that loss. Nor will Cormark, of the Council. Gabriel supports The Terafin, but he does not look too closely at the alliances being formed because one of the four is his blood son; he is abjuring his duty as right-kin, whether he knows it or not—and Gabriel ATerafin is not a stupid man.

"Who will we have as Terafin? Who will be heir to the most powerful House in the Empire? Will we bow before Elonne ATerafin, Rymark ATerafin, Haerrad ATerafin, or Marrick ATerafin?"

"You know… a lot for a man who stays out of politics."

Very bitterly, Alowan leaned back into the window, pulling his staff from the ground as if it were rooted. Perhaps it was; Jewel thought she could detect the vaguest aura of magic traveling round its girth in a shimmering ring—but the daylight was bright enough at the old man's back that it could have been a trick of the sun, no more.

"Because, my dear, a healer doesn't stay out of politics during a House War. The only way to leave it is to die." His expression grew grimmer, paler. "Not just this healer, my dear. If we are not careful, or not well-protected enough, the unscrupulous will involve us all. But I digress, and if I choose to follow that road, there will be no conversation—only silence in the face of the wrongs we do each other for the sake of power, whatever that means." He closed his eyes; she watched him count, could almost hear the numbers that did not pass his lips before he spoke again.

"Corniel and Courtne. I was called across this threshold far too late to save either. But not too late that it wasn't completely clear to a man who's seen one succession war already what their deaths presaged. They died the death that will undoubtedly and undoubt-ably take all but one of the Council who desire the title. A death they deserved.

"But Aka… desired no such power. She was a lesson, I think."

She was almost shocked, to hear him say the words so bluntly. "Alowan," she whispered. "A healer—"

"Reveres all life. Yes." He bowed his head into his hands, and then raised it. "Forgive me, Jewel. I am tired, and I am—worse— weary. When I was younger—and I was never a young man in the service of the Terafin—I could join the fray; I did. I refused the services of these hands—" He lifted them; they trembled as if the memory of his denial could not be expunged. "I refused the services of one born to offer them to any of the factions involved in the war save one."

She took the seat that he'd cleared for her then, because her knees were weak. "You—"

"Yes. For The Terafin."

"Why are you telling me this?"

Even before he spoke she'd half lifted her hands to cover her ears; a child's gesture—a way of denying a truth that one doesn't want to hear—visceral, instinctive. "Because," he said quietly, "I will not survive this war."

She wanted to shout at him, to tell him that it wasn't true.

But she wasn't a good liar. Had never been one. She
felt
the words sink into her as if they were her .own, and she'd swallowed them, and they were never going to be released again. "Alowan—"

He was serene, as if, having said this, the turmoil had been given over to one who could better deal with it.

"I am an old man, Jewel. If not for my gift, I would have died twenty years ago, maybe a bit less. I am weary of this; I should have died before Alea's body crossed my threshold. Alea was one of three people that Amarais trusted on the Council. Gabriel was another, but he is… compromised. Rymark is his blood son. I never considered the appointment of that one to be wise, for just that reason."

"This is a
House
, Alowan. Blood counts for nothing."

"You say that as if you believe it, and I believe, given your background, you probably do. But there's a reason that we swear blood oaths, that we become blood brothers, or brothers under the blood. And there is a reason that, from the dawn of time to now, parents have let kingdoms fall to preserve the lives of their children. A reason, young Jewel, that the Kings are born to the gods, and not to men.

"Enough. I have not asked you in to debate this with you. The Terafin trusted Alea, and Alea, trusting and foolish, is dead. She trusted Gabriel, but he is involved, and distant because of it. There is only one person that The Terafin can trust."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I don't think that you want to think about it yourself. Do." He turned to look out the window. "I am not the only person who will not survive this war."

She sat too still.

"I will not heal for Haerrad or his faction," Alowan said softly. "I will put the word out. I will not heal for Haerrad, or for anyone who contests the heir The Terafin chooses."

"You know," she said, "who The Terafin will choose?"

"No. But I know that under no circumstance will she choose Haerrad."

He rose. "I am tired. Jewel Markess ATerafin. I would sleep. Think on what I have said."