Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (35 page)

"You said, Tyr'agnate, that I should not believe all I have been told."

"Yes, I did. I note that you did not summon the General."

"No. He is what he has always been, and well chosen; he has cunning, but in truth, he has the heart of a Tyran." At this, his lips folded up slightly in a smile. "I mean by that no offense, Ser Fillipo."

"And had you, I would still take none."

"He follows his master, and I believe that he has chosen poorly; it will be his death."

"It has not been his death yet," Ramiro said softly, "and greater odds were against him for that first attempt than you will be able to muster again."

"True enough. I did not say he was a fool, not precisely. He has cunning and wit and determination—but it is coin offered to another and not spent on his own behalf. Enough. I did not summon you to speak to you of Baredan di'Navarre; he will not listen, and you will have your own use for him."

"Very well. What is of urgency?"

"You will, no doubt, have received some intelligence of the… difficulty."

"Yesterday's?"

"The very one."

"Yes."

"I was inclined to think it an attempt at either assassination, manipulation, or both."

Ramiro was silent as he accepted and digested the words, as he built the interior, the political vision, of another man's mind, testing it against his prior knowledge.

"But I understand the foreign tongue." Anton continued. "I have forgotten much of it over time—but I learned it when I came to the Challenge, the first one. Language is part of an enemy's arsenal."

"I have often said the same, but 1 am treated with contempt."

"It was only the language I adopted," Anton replied.

Fillipo bristled slightly: Ramiro did not even darken. It was an old accusation, so oft-considered that it bothered him only slightly more than a discourse about the color of his hair might have in its inanity.

"You heard something yesterday."

"Yes. It appears that the people who chose to attack us were accusing us—and the Dominion—of allying itself with a god the Northerners fear and have fought. Allasakar. They called us
Allasakari
: they claimed to be avenging their dead."

"This is unlike you, Anton. The Northern gods are not our concern."

"They are. Or you do not understand the language so well as you think."

"The language is not concerned with the worship of foreign gods."

"Only commerce, eh?"

Again, Fillipo tensed. "Rational commerce, yes."

"What a man worships or fears
defines
him. I am surprised that you do not remember this."

That was an insult. "I remember it well enough, Anton." He spoke his words on the edge.

"Very well.
Allasakar
is the name they give the Lord of Night."

Silence. Fillipo met his kai's glance and looked away, toward the light streaming in through midday windows. The air was still, although no Northern glass blocked its entrance into the room where the three men stood.

"You know what I speak of."

"No."

"You know what
they
spoke of, then. You understand their accusation."

Again the brothers exchanged a glance. "Yes," Ramiro said at last. "You know of the deaths in the quarter?"

"Peripherally, until yesterday; I am fully apprised of them now. It was not, I think, of those deaths that they spoke."

"I believe that it was. But the men for whom you toil miscalculated as well."

"That is surprising."

"Perhaps. During times of crisis, the Kings of this land meet with their counselors, their advisers, their—
citizens
." He used the foreign word because it was the only word he could use; Torra did not contain the concept well. "Among those are priests." He shrugged. "A demon was sent into their midst during one such meeting, and it slaughtered many before it made its escape." He rose. "If that will be all?"

Anton nodded quietly. "But one question. Tyr'agnate."

"Indeed?"

"Why had the Kings gathered?"

Ramiro said nothing. Fillipo said, "Tell him, Ramiro."

"No."

"Tell him."

"Why? Will it reveal anything that will aid our cause?"

"Tell him, or I will. We owe the boy that much."

"I advise against it, Fillipo."

"Command against it, brother."

Ramiro was silent.

"You were present, no doubt, for the slaughter of the hostages in the Tor Leonne." Fillipo's voice could not—quite—cleanse itself of an angry contempt. "That certainly was the act of true warriors—a paeon to the Lord and his law."

But if he hoped to discomfit Anton—and it was clear that he did—he made no mark; the swordmaster was already parrying, and in silence.

After an angry moment, Fillipo continued. "We were meant to be slaughtered for the slaughter, a convenient instrument of vengeance. We were gathered in an open courtyard like so much cattle, and left to wait upon death.

"But Valedan kai di'Leonne chose to assume the title that his father's death, and his kai's death, dropped upon him, and he sent both a summons and a challenge to the Kings' Court."

At that, Anton raised a brow. "And you will tell me that this was not your doing?"

"No. I will not insult your intelligence, although it is tempting. It was, indeed, my intent."

"Then—"

"He took the title, and he took our oaths beneath the open sky."

"And you had weapons with which to offer it?"

"Of a kind." Fillipo shrugged. "He was granted his audience, and that audience was not before the Kings alone, but before their counselors; the mighty of the realm. He spoke for us, and against their action, and in the end, the Kings granted him his life, and his line's life."

"I see. Obviously, yours as well."

"No. Our deaths were mandated."

"The condemned are not given free run of the city," Anton said dryly.

"They are not. The kai Leonne refused to stand apart."

"What?"

"He refused to stand apart. Granted his life, he chose to stand with the men whose oaths he had taken."

"Ah. I see. Another fool."

Fillipo fell silent. His face was reddened, but the words that might have accompanied the anger did not follow in the presence of his brother. "Yes. A fool. He held
Bloodhame
when the Tyr'agnate came into the hall as witness, as proof that not all of the Tyrs supported the slaughter. He held
Bloodhame
when the servant of the Lord of Night came up through the marble floor as if it were a thin layer of water or oil; he stood his ground when that creature attempted his destruction.

"Do you remember your history, Ser Anton?
Bloodhame
was created for another war, by a greater swordsman than even you. And
Bloodhame
knows the truth of it; that the kin of demons was sent against Leonne, and it failed, as it did when Leonne first rose against the darkness at the Lord's behest. Had we not chosen to follow the kai Leonne before, what choice have we now? The Lord of Night works against him, and we will not turn Averda over to the Lord of Night again. Not while a single Callestan still bleeds.

"You are the fool," he said at last, but coolly now. "For you serve the Lord of Night, whether or not you wish to acknowledge it. Go down in darkness, Anton, and let it devour your body; it has already devoured the rest of you."

He turned then, and made his way to the small door that stood in place of hangings.

"Ser Fillipo?"

"Yes?" he answered, although he did not turn.

"You speak with a great deal of passion, and yet if I were to guess, I would say that it was not you, but your brother alone, who was in that hall."

"You would guess poorly," Fillipo said. "1 was not in that room, not present—but the Tyran were, and they are as much a part of me as my sword is. What they saw, they spoke of, and what they spoke of was truth." He did not turn. "Lord's light," he said softly.

Ramiro heard the rest of the curse.
Scorch you
. He did not call his brother back; it was a dramatic, even a reasonable exit—for one who did not have the duties of Tyran to uphold. But he would not humiliate his brother in public if his own actions had not already achieved that. Judging by the expression on the sword-master's face, they had not, by some miracle.

Ser Anton di'Guivera was silent a long time.

At last he rose, stiffly and heavily. "I thank you," he said, "for your attendance."

"I have one other duty, Ser Anton."

"And that?"

"I have been asked to convey an offer of hospitality to you and the men whom you train."

"And that?"

"You are to be given a hall upon the grounds of
Avantari
, the home of the demon kings. There are training grounds there, and ample protection against—distraction."

Anton's smile was thin. "And a chance, no doubt, to observe us before the fact."

"No doubt. Although if you think you have been unobserved here, you are almost as naive as you would have Baredan be." Ramiro di'Callesta rose. "I hope that you will consider what the captain of my oathguards has said. And I hope that you will consider the offer made to you."

Anton said, "I have. And I believe, Tyr'agnate, that I will do you the discomfort of accepting it."

Serra Alina was quiet.

It was not, as it would be with many of the younger ladies of the Imperial Courts, a bad sign in and of itself, but the Serra had taught Valedan, by both instruction and the far more valuable example, that every silence had about it a quality of its own, a hid-den portent if one knew the person well enough to know how to look, and how to listen, to the things that were not said.

The things that were not said, today, were wrapped about her like the finest of silks.

"Alina," he said at last, when it was clear that her silence was not for the gathering of words, but for the keeping of them, "what's wrong?"

She did not like to lie to him, or so he believed; she said nothing.

"Serra Alina?"

But she could not choose to say nothing forever—not without offending the rank she was trying, by example, to teach him to honor. "It is Ser Anton," she said quietly.

"You do not want him in
Avantari
."

"I would be happy," she replied, "if he had perished in the fighting. Happier still if he had perished before he brought his chosen students to the North." She rose then, lifting a crystal decanter, a thing she said was different from the niceties of life in the home he would return to.

"Why?"

"It is clear to me that he has been sent, as he was before, to prove a point. But it is not to prove that point to the Empire: here, he has nothing to gain. He has been sent with men of quality to take the Crown of the Challenge. To prove that it was Leonne weakness, and not Annagarian training, or its lack, that has always been at the heart of our poor performance here."

"Alina," Valedan replied softly, "that much is obvious to me."

"Then think, Valedan," she said, with a hint of her old sharpness, her scratched pride, "what it means. He has these men, the best, and they did not perform in the Lord's Test. Think: He has been training them in the tasks of the
North
. For how long?"

He started to speak, but having begun, he saw that she meant to continue.

She turned away from him to the open window, to the sunlight of the late afternoon, the lengthening shadows. "He is there among them, even now," she said softly. "He speaks to Mauro and to Kyro, he courts them; he talks with Ramiro's Tyran, with Fillipo— with everyone but you."

Valedan shrugged. "He serves a different man, Alina. We did not expect that he would come to us to pay his respects."

"No. But he is respected, Valedan. He has that in the Dominion, and he will always have it. He is no Court politician; he is more dangerous than that. It is not to the head that he speaks— not the rulers, not the Tyrs or the Tors. It is to the heart. He is an enemy, Valedan."

"Alina, I know this."

She turned to face him again, white as the Northern Queen. "It was his hand," she said softly. She waited for the understanding, but it did not come; her pupil, and her lord, waited patiently for the words the silence did contain.

"It was his hand," she repeated at last, "that killed the Tyr'agar, Markaso kai di'Leonne."

He rose, then. Bowed stiffly. "Serra," he said gravely.

He left.

The sun in the North was hotter than he remembered it, and he was no stranger to sun; the heat alone didn't even darken his skin. No, it was the sea that bothered him. Days, he had been in this foreign city, and the salt touched everything, turning even the innocuous gesture of licking dry lips into something unpleasant and distasteful.

He was old, to be here.

He had thought never to subject himself to this place again. But twice, twice he had done; had come with swords strapped to his back, and himself strapped in turn—loosely—to the back of the finest horse it had been his privilege to ride, before or since. He had practiced with the three men sent for just that purpose, each of them bitter at their exclusion from the
true
test, at the height of the Lord's Festival, and he had quietly entered himself into the Northern ledgers, making a mark that was only graceful in comparison to the crude symbols drawn by many another, all barbarian.

He had been tested, briefly; had been chosen. It had never been in question.

And he had won that year; he had been the first, the only, man to take the wreath from the North and bear it to the South.
Kings'
Champion. For her. For Mari.

The next year he returned, riding the same horse, bearing the same swords, and facing the same Challenge. And that, too, he had won. For Antoni.

He had thought, the day that he rose from his bow to face the crowded amphitheater a second time, that he had paid his wife and son the highest tribute that he could; he had given, to the South, the gift of his skill in their names.

That they might be at peace.

He had failed them in life. In death, he meant their names to be
remembered
. And gaining the twin wreaths was. he thought, the only way he might achieve such remembrance. Because they were of the Dominion, he, his wife, and his son, and in the Dominion, only the names of men counted. His son was so far from being a man that had his father been a greater clansman, he would never have been seen outside of the harem. His wife—Mari—