Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (48 page)

"What," she said, her voice low, as cold and colorless as her skin, "are you doing?"

"Look at him!" Auralis shouted, stepping back from the force of her words. "LOOK AT HIM!" He thought, as she raised the sword, that she would strike him. Knew that if she did, it was death, his death, no way to run from it this time.

He met her eyes; saw nothing at all in them but the darkness, the ice. Her lip curled in contempt as she looked at him, through him; where she was impervious to
his
sight, he knew, then, that she saw everything about him.

Why he did what he did next, he couldn't say, would never be able to say; it was the last act of a stupid man, and he would tell himself that again and again for months afterward, when he woke, with a half-scream choking his throat, from the nightmare of this tavern, this woman.

He dropped both daggers.

No
Kialli
would have disarmed himself in the face of such danger unless he meant to give up his name. And even then, to disarm oneself this obviously was to render oneself useless; it was more than a simple act of suicide. Much more.

It gave her pause. She stopped. Stopped for long enough to
see
him, to know who he was. The shadows had taken her vision to the fight; the fight had controlled it. What had Isladar said? Never let your attacker choose the method and the means of the fight. Never let him dictate the how, and if you can avoid it, the where.

"What," she managed to say, "are you doing?"

"
Look at him, "
Auralis said. He was shaking. She could smell the fear as if it were old sweat, but it was an acrid fear, an unpleasant one. She shied away from naming it. "You're attacking a boy, Kiriel. I don't care what you think he is—look at him. Look hard."

She turned, then.

Turned to see the creature waiting, a cool smile at play across his lips. Could feel his power, the taunting that lay beneath it. The dare.

"I know the kin," she said, her voice far darker than his. "I know what I do here."

"You
don't
."

The human was inconvenient. He was inconvenient and he was a threat to the plan that Lord Isladar had crafted. He was also not under protection, any protection.

But to kill him was to alert the girl to his presence, his true presence, and that, too, was a threat. He thought a moment as he heard their speech, the interaction of it, as he saw Kiriel tainted by human concern in a way that both pleased and surprised him.

And then he lifted his voice, and wrapped it in power, and said, "
There! Beside her. The man who controls the demon. The mage. Kill him and they will both be gone
!"

Auralis heard the death in the words: it was for him, after all. The whole tavern would know that Kiriel was a demon, and untouchable—but he, he was only human. The first dagger's blow glanced off his shoulder blade, driving chain and leather into his skin. Drawing blood. Would've been worse, but he knew how to move. How to run.

Auralis knew how to run.

There was one safe place in the tavern; he found it, hiding behind Kiriel di'Ashaf, a girl half his age. And behind Kiriel was the boy, the youth she had singled out for slaughter. It was not coincidence; he was now certain of it. One of these men, in this tavern, was no man—but if she couldn't see it, he was damned if he could. He didn't know how to look.

Don't do this
, he thought.
Don't play into their hands. We'll have to hunt you down, or kill you ourselves. Don't give them that weapon
.

He was surprised when another blade glanced off his cheek. Her shadows hid the light he would have used to judge its trajectory. Strange, how one required light for so many things, and yet didn't notice them until it was gone. Sort of like breath, like breathing.

He raised a hand; felt another blow, something strike his ribs.

He saw her turn. He knew that she was going to protect him. It was the wrong thing. The wrong thing to do.

But he didn't want to die. That was the crime, knowing that she was being set up, and being unwilling to die to save her the trouble.

He fell forward, to knees, exposing his back and hiding his face. Wondering, briefly, when he had become so vain.

And she saw that they intended, all of these little humans, to kill Auralis. That they intended to kill
her
, which was laughable.

"How
dare
you?" she cried, and her voice reverberated in the tavern as if the tavern were far too small for its depth and its grandeur, her anger. She raised the sword she held, she brought the shadows with it; she called upon her birthright and it came.

Two men, the closest two, the two who had dared both her sword and Auralis' theoretical magic, stood frozen before her, disarmed, although it hardly made them more helpless than they had been.

They were his tools. Auralis was hers. She defended what she owned; those were the rules of the Hells.

Her blade rose, and her blade fell—

And light singed the air in front of her eyes; light blazed across the back of her hand, a burning white line of flame, a whip's crack up her arm. She screamed in a shock of terror—terror of what, she could not say—and the sword
went out
.

She was too well-trained to drop it. She held it, the way a man who's lost a hand will hold that hand, as if by holding it, he can somehow make himself whole. She did not forget the two men, the two unarmed men, but they had been rendered harmless—they were as frozen in shock as she by the light, by the pain, by the sense of terrible, terrible loss.

It was
gone
. The shadow; the power—it was gone.

And without it—without it. she was nothing. She was less than nothing. She turned, at once, the sword now steel that housed no spirit, no blood, no essence.

Auralis lifted his face and stared at hers. But she didn't see that. What she saw stood behind him, stood in the center of the circle she had carelessly forced the floorboards to surrender. A boy, not much older than Valedan kai di'Leonne. but. infinitely less wise. His shaking hands clutched a dagger; his lips were so gray they were almost the color of death.

She reached out to touch him, because she couldn't—not quite— believe he was real. He couldn't be real. He had no color. None of the light and the dark, the swirl and the movement, that
all
humans had, who had choice.

Shaken, she looked down; saw Auralis. Saw the empty shell of him, the familiar comfort of darkness, the closeness of twisted anger, loathing, fear—all gone. Fled.

And yet—she reached out—

And it was then that she saw it: The ring. The ring that had fallen from the hands of the seer-born witch, Evayne. Evayne a'Nolan. It almost hurt her, to look at that band, but once she did look, she wondered that she had not seen it before; it was burning with a white fire that at once scoured and tantalized vision. No gems in it; no engraving; nothing whatever to mar the perfection of its line.

No beginning, no end.

Just the ring itself.

The mantle was gone.

She grabbed the ring and almost cried out; she could not move it, and the attempt was more painful than any of the lessons that Isladar had tried, successfully or otherwise, to teach her in her youth.

"Boy," she said, biting back the pain, forcing herself to show none of it, "leave. Now."

He clambered sideways, between the distinctive edges of newly-cracked wood. Stopped. Unlaced the pouch at his belt and threw it at her feet as if he couldn't quite believe that she would let him go, and wanted to distract her for long enough that it didn't matter whether or not she'd changed her mind.

The tavern had drawn collective breath. Kiriel offered Auralis a hand—the hand that bore the ring—and he groped about as if in darkness before taking it. It did not burn him. He did not even notice its touch, he who was, of all the Ospreys, the darkest, the most lost. "I think," she said, "we'd better leave."

He was going to say something sarcastic. She saw it in the lines burned by sun and time into the set of his lips. But before he could speak, someone else did.

"What a clever, clever illusion."

And she looked up, across the room and the three tables that Auralis had told her the gamblers used. Looked across the empty chairs, the upended flasks and tankards, the low flat boxes that dice were thrown into.

He bowed, and she recognized him by the gesture. Auralis, she let fall; an afterthought, and a necessary one.

The sword that she carried was no danger to anyone now, expect perhaps an unarmed mortal. She lifted it anyway, lifted it in the hand that did not bear the ring, because it was the hand that was not on fire.

"You."

"But I believe." the
Kialli
said, "that the truth of your nature has made itself felt in this holding. We will put an end to your schemes and your murders."

"No," she said. Just that. "You will die." She leaped.

His laughter was slow and lazy: he moved far more quickly than she.

It shouldn't have been possible.

It wasn't possible.

Her hand was on fire.

Humans, once gathered together, often pooled their voices, made of cacophony a consensus, lumbering, larger than it had the right to be, a single thing. These humans, in their muted fear, were no exception. They spoke now, the cascade of indistinguishable words a whisper of anticipation. Sensing blood, death, defeat, they watched. Safe things to witness, when they were someone else's to experience. Humans were, in that respect, not unlike the
Kialli
.

Wood splintered in the distance outside of the immediate circle she had made by splintering wood herself; something heavy cracked as if struck by force. The door. Was he abandoning the spell that sealed it?

"What is this, little Kiriel?" the demon whispered, for her ears alone. "Am I so contemptible a target that you have chosen to divest yourself of
all
defense?"

Fear. Fear then.

She hated fear. But she lived with it, gathered it, beat it back; had always done just that, more than that. The arrogance in her enemy's voice was a warning and she had not always been a power in the Shining Court, although she had always been a fighter. What else was there to be? She could fight, or she could die.

His hand came down in an arc that ended with wood. Wood was weak; it splintered and flew—and this sound, this she paid heed to it; it changed the ground beneath her feet; it changed the lay— and therefore the law—of the fight.

She had no power.

It was not the same as having no weapon; she would have to show him that, should she survive. She
would
survive, to show him that. She swung, low, keeping the sword's play as tight and controlled as possible.

Do not fight in anger. You become anger's weapon; it is
never
yours
.

His voice spurred her on; the wildness of this helpless state seemed a harmony to the memory of the teacher that, had he been here, would have saved her life only after she had proven that she was worthy of the salvation. Only then.

Never, never, never.