Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (40 page)

And she was tired enough not to fear it.

Avandar had enough warning to leap out of her way, but in truth, that was little warning, and his body covered a stretch of rock and dirt so quickly he left parts of his skin on his shirt. She was a shadow that appeared, streaked in blackness, reddened and whitened by the cast rage lends fair features. Her sword—the sword that both he and Meralonne APhaniel shunned—was in her hand as if it were just a natural extension of her body. She drove it forward into the wall that separated Avandar from his keep.

No wall in the world would have withstood the weight and the force of that sword. Buildings, he thought, would shatter in the wake of the magic that traced the dark arc of its traveling. There was no doubt in his mind, no room for it, that she would fail to do what
he
had failed to do: breach the barrier. Reach Jewel Mark-ess ATerafin.

Certainty was such an odd thing.

He saw her stagger back; saw the air give way, refuse her its support. It took a moment for him to comprehend what he could not comprehend: her failure.

He heard her. From where he lay—lay?—upon the alley's floor, he heard the sound she made as her sword struck the barrier. He wouldn't have recognized her voice at all, except he'd never much liked her voice, and wouldn't have trusted her if it hadn't been for Jay.

And Jay was the word she shouted. Roared.

He opened his eyes to the barrier's darkness; thought he saw it shivering, as if it were alive. As if it were living shadow.

He thought he was beyond pain, but he was wrong; it
hurt
to move. He could see Jay, and in the darkness that he could not move to confront, he could see what attacked her. No way to reach her. No way.

But he thought—he thought that he might do some other thing. Wondered why he hadn't thought of it before.

Living shadow. Living.

He lifted the dagger that Devon had given him. Lifted it in a feeble hand, a shaking one. Propped himself up on an elbow, rolled. Fell over. Didn't matter. He was close enough. He'd heard the stories.

With no strength at all. Angel sliced the barrier's darkness with a thing of light: consecrated by the triad, blessed by the god-born. Too ornate by half to be useful in any other way.

He had not known her for what she was; had had no reason to know it, although his informant must have. Something to remember. But Lord Isladar of the Shining Court knew it now: She was seer-born, and her gift was as strong as the gifts that blessed those who had ruled in the cities of man, before the cataclysm. Before the desert.

More time, more time and he would have had her. More power, and he could have killed her at his leisure—and the desire to do so, this long thwarted, was great.

But time had run out.

He thought he had killed the man. A mistake, obviously, and a costly one. He could not reconstitute the wall that he'd erected. He was lucky that Kiriel in anger was still much like a child; she did not think to do what that man, pale-haired and pale as he hovered on death's gray edge, had done—to climb the building, to go
over
what
Kialli
Lord had made.

The wall was her enemy, and she did not look for anything to defeat it but a display of brute force. Had he taught her that? Perhaps. When one sharpened a weapon as dangerous as Kiriel one tried to make its edge as predictable and straight as possible.

It served her poorly. It served him well.

He turned as the barrier shattered, feeling the shards of his shadow dissolve, absorbed by both his body and hers.

Like shadow, she stood in the alley's mouth.

"I'm afraid," he said softly, with a very slight bow of his head to the seer-born human, "that you will live. For the moment."

And he turned to face his charge.

The wind took her hair, and it was a wind of her own making; the streets were heavy with humidity and the stillness of sea air. Strands far too long for practical battle fell back from her face as if pulled, and not by the gentlest of hands: she was in the grip of an anger that was deeper than anything she had ever felt, save perhaps—save perhaps that at Ashaf's death.

Ashaf's loss.

She had dreamed of this moment, in darkness, at night when the Ospreys slept, or better, when Valedan did, and she was not required to feign sleep, but rather, watchfulness, which was for her the more natural of the two things. She'd dreamed that she would see him again. That he would fall before her—that he would grovel or beg.

And she knew, the moment she saw him, that it was only that: a dream. Lord Isladar—Isladar of no demesne—did not know how to grovel or beg. And he had taught her well enough that she knew she would do neither were their positions reversed.

He bowed. She had not expected that.

"Kiriel," he said softly. "It has been… too long. You have begun to play a game that is greater than you realize. Come home; leave it be. The Lord does not yet fully comprehend the depth of your transgression, and you are his kin, his only kin. Come; if you stand against us for too long, I will not be able to protect you from his knowledge."

The words that she wanted to say would not come; they were not so simple as she had thought they would be. She wanted to cleave him in two and have done, and she brought her sword up for the blow. But she wanted more, too, hungered for it the way that she hungered for pain.

"Why?"

She did not mention Ashaf by name; there was only this one thing that stood between them.

"Can you ask me that?" he said softly. "You were far too attached to her, Kiriel. You accepted the investiture. You chose, and yet, having chosen, you sought to retain what you were required to leave behind: humanity." He paused. "Do you not see, now, how she has weakened you? Were they to follow you here, any one of your enemies, even the least of the Lord's Fist, would destroy you with ease."

"You could have let her go!"

"You do not see it," he said softly. "'Kiriel, I have called you weak. You do not refute it. Have you forgotten everything I labored so long to teach you?"

"I would have let her go."

"That is what you would have done, yes. And she would have returned to you, in pieces—but not so many that she would not in some fashion remain alive as a weapon against you. I did not fashion her to be your downfall, nor did I fashion her to be the tool of any other Lord."

"Only you?"

He shrugged. "She was not what you are, Kiriel, and in the end, she would have left you—or worse. Can you doubt that, who could see her soul? She was beginning to know what you were, just as you were beginning to know it, and accept it. Was her death really so difficult?"

"It wasn't her death," Kiriel said at last.

"And what was it, then?"

"I'll kill you," she said.

She was lying. Jewel was certain that, had she been anyone else, she wouldn't have known it—but she felt the truth that Kiriel hid behind the words she was willing to speak, and she knew, suddenly, that she did not want to hear the rest. Knew that Kiriel—this Kiriel, this angry, hesitant girl—would say the rest, and regret it.

Lord Isladar. Shining Court. Allasakar-born child. It made sense only because, as she watched them, girl and man—for he looked the part of a man, sounded it—she saw the ties that bound them; they were ugly, but they were there. Pain. Fascination. Need.

Not to him. I'll keep you. Kiriel; you gave me your oath. And if I let you go
—and she had let members of her den graduate—
it won't be to that bastard
.

Jewel was bleeding now, from eighteen wounds, only the last three of which were life-threatening by her own guess, but she wasn't dead. That she was on her feet at all was incentive to stay that way.

While Kiriel stared at this creature. Jewel quietly bent to the alley floor and retrieved a dagger. It was only that, now. The killing stroke had already been given, and denied.

But Hells, a dagger was better than nothing.

She was wobbly; thought that she would be worse than wobbly in less than a few minutes. As carefully as possible, she took aim, and spared enough of the breath she held to speak a single word, and that a supplication.
Kalliaris
.

She threw the knife.

It struck him. She was good enough to hit a motionless target in the back, especially if it was large enough to be mistaken for a good-size section of barn. The damned dagger—well, the blessed dagger, really—made it as difficult as possible; it was everything that a dagger shouldn't be. Pretty. Ornate. Unbalanced.

But it did its work.

It broke the moment.

"Kiriel!"

They both turned, then—Kiriel and the demon. The darkness of the alley would hide nothing at all from the eyes of the newest member of Jewel's small den. She knew it.

Isladar had time to frown, time to lift a hand in either denial or supplication, before Kiriel's sword bisected him.

Or it would have, gods curse him, had he still been standing there.

"Damn," Jewel said, to no one in particular. And then, as Kiriel reached her side, she added, "Angel. Get Angel." Pause. "And the girl. Don't know whose she is."

After that, there were no more words.

No light, no pain.

But as she slid into oblivion—fighting it all the way because she was Jewel and fighting was what she did best—she saw a familiar face step out of the sun's light toward her. Smiled, or tried to, as Avandar Gallais tried to take her from Kind's arms. Those arms tightened, and Jewel realized that she was being carried. She wondered, before she lost the light entirely, who would win.

Alowan could not speak with Jewel: she had faded into something too heavy to be sleep, and she could not be awakened. The young woman, Kiriel, had delivered her into the keeping of her den-mate, Finch—but only after Finch had assured her that there were healer-born here who could grant life any miracle as long as some life remained.

Kiriel did not desire to see the healer. Reacted as if it were a shock, to hear of him. Maybe it was. But she accepted Finch's word as if the mention of the healer-born was indeed enough proof of a miracle, and she left swiftly. Left before Devon ATerafin came in, bearing Angel.

Finch froze.

Seeing Jay had been bad enough. Angel—Angel was worse, somehow. It wasn't the blood; they were both covered with it, sticky with it. No, it was his hair; his hair—which she'd never really liked—was flat, its spiral broken. The rest of him seemed intact, but his hair—he never gave it up; it was the last of his life on the street. Not really suitable for Terafin, but it was tolerated.

Angel.

Jay.

Here were
two
people that she loved—she wasn't afraid of that word anymore, they were her
den
—and she knew that a healer could barely survive calling one back.

Alowan came at once, and he looked a long time at them. Jay and Angel, unwakeable, barely breathing—but breathing still. They were in side-by-side beds, out of sight of Teller—which she privately thought was stupid—and he stood between them a long time.

"Well," he said softly. "It comes to this. Was this the House War?"