Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (7 page)

The old man's laugh was a brief, angry bark. "I know well whose it is," he said curtly. He started to say something else and then became completely still. He was angry; that much was clear to Aidan: perhaps this young man and his own students were somehow rivals.

"He is—not what I thought he would be." The old man reached out with both hands, dwarfing the railing in them. It was only then that Aidan realized that the old man was actually very large. "I came to the Empire to make his acquaintance. He is Valedan kai di'Leonne, the last living member of the clan that once ruled the Dominion of Annagar." He spoke again, something soft, and raised his face to the sun.

"What are you saying?" Aidan asked quietly.

"I? I am telling the Lord," the old man replied, "that a worthy enemy is not always a warrior's blessing. Now come; we have seen what we were intended to see, and we are required to ready ourselves for the judges."

He turned, the old man, in a quiet that wasn't quiet, and spoke in a tongue that Aidan was grateful, just this once, that he couldn't understand. Ser Anton di'Guivera and his students began to walk away, but Aidan turned to watch the man that the old man had called
Valedan kai di 'Leonne
. The distance between them was larger than the length of the crowded coliseum; it was vast as the distance between the harbor and the merchant ships at the farthest edge of the horizon on the days when he watched for the sea winds.

And as he watched, this man, this Valedan kai di'Leonne, turned to look into the empty seats that surrounded the fighting ground.

Their eyes met; Aidan felt a shock of something that he couldn't even name. They stood staring in silence until two men came to break their regard: Ser Anton di'Guivera and Commander Sivari.

Aidan watched the old man's—
Ser Anton, you idiot
—students as they performed for the trial judges. They were uniformly better than he had ever seen them, and he thought he knew why; they had seen a rival, and they knew that they had to live up to his performance. Not for the sake of the judges—even Aidan wouldn't have been that stupid—but for the sake of the man who taught them. But there was a self-consciousness about them all that day, and he knew that he could watch the entire trial, and he wouldn't see Valedan kai di'Leonne again.

And he wanted to.

Not much
, he thought, as he felt the familiar refrain that was the prayer to Kalliaris start up in the back of his mind.
I wouldn't have to see much—just a little. A bit. Let him ride past me on the way to the isle. Just that much
.

He promised himself that he would find a spot by the road that the challengers would travel; he knew the whole route. Anyone who paid any attention at all did. He was going to hold that spot, sit in it, and keep it for himself, as he hadn't done since he'd been eight and his father had let himself be wheedled into it.

He was going to watch the procession.

And maybe—
Kalliaris, please
—if he was very, very lucky, he might, once in this lifetime, be chosen as Challenger's Witness. There were a hundred challengers, after all. One hundred chances.

Out of tens of thousands. Get real, Aidan.

Still, he made his plans. And after he made them, he went to talk to Widow Harris about both food and errand running during the Challenge itself.

Evening of 4th of Lattan, 427 AA

Averalaan, Terafin Manse

He knew, by the quality of the younger men's silence, that he would arrive too late; that death had come and gone and taken with it the patient that they sought his care for. This late in the eve, there were those among the six who stood in the hall, weapons drawn, who could use his time and attention—but the House member for whom they had come at a run, to judge by the rise and fall of their mail-plated chests—was beyond him.

But Alayra, semiretired captain of the best House Guards in the Empire, waited just beyond the rank of six bone-weary, bloodied men, and her face was an expressionless, steel mask, save for the slight whitening around the edges of old scars. She had never had a pretty face; had gone out of her way to make sure that she never would. A glimpse of her younger self shone through a moment in eyes that saw less well with each passing day; a glimpse of his younger self responded.

They had fought in a war together, the healer-born Alowan who, although he had served Amarais Handernesse ATerafin, had never chosen to take the name she offered him for his service, and Alayra ATerafin, trusted above all among the Chosen hand-picked by The Terafin at the time of her ascension.

Sleep left him completely; he straightened his back, reach for the cane that supported his weight, and said only, "A moment." Turning, he shouted a single name. One of his young assistants, the one first roused by the banging of the mailed fists, came peering out from around the healerie's fine plants. "Terrisa," he said softly, "wake the others; have them bring the stretchers and meet me—"

"Aka ATerafin's rooms," Captain Alayra said quietly. She turned away then, the steel of her face cracking as if under great or sudden pressure. He lost sight of it a moment as his eyes closed.

Terrisa's eyes were still round and unblinking when his own opened. "Terrisa," he said, his voice thick and foreign to his own ears, "now is not the time. Be quick."

The cane was necessary to take him from the narrower halls the healerie occupied to the grand halls that separated the manse into its wings; he asked no questions. She offered no information. On all sides, the heavy, even steps of men who were used to walking—and working—in unison set the tone of their journey: grim, certain.

He, who had seen his share of deaths, was never prepared for it. The healer's blood cried out against it, an accusation of a type, but to whom, and of what, no healer was ever fully certain. They defied death where
any
hint of life remained at all—if they dared. The cost was high.

Healer Alowan had dared, and dared, and dared.

And his bones—or something akin to them, something buried within the flesh and the blood, buried within the moving body-ached with the memory of all of those lost half-selves; the healed, the people that he had had to love to bring back to light at all.

Four of the Chosen stood guard outside of the closed double doors; he recognized two of them at once: Arrendas, still dark-haired, still unruffled by the passage of a decade and a half, and Torvan, grayer, paler, but unfettered and unbowed. They stopped him; it was perfunctory. Alayra gave them a nod sharp as a knife's edge—a knife that she'd own—and they stepped aside at once.

He paused, hand on door, hand on door handle. It was cold to the touch, but a soothing cold, a comforting cold; nothing about brass and iron was meant to move, to breathe, to speak with the rhythms of movement and breath. His head found the fine, heavy density of wood that was older than anyone present: he pressed his forehead there a moment.

He thought,
I am too old
.

The captain of the Chosen took her place beside him, as if to offer comfort, or receive it; hard to say. They had seen a war together, and it had scarred them irrevocably, but they'd fought it so they would never have to fight it again.

Thus the hope and the fire of the young.

Alayra said, her lips barely moving, her hand against the closed door, "I'm too damned old for this."

Their eyes met.

Alowan straightened out a white-crested head, unbending at the shoulder. He pushed the door in, steeling himself. Taking the blow; absorbing the shock of sight, of vision.

Five bodies lay in the room.

Three fully armored, but all armed. He didn't recognize the three armored men, but they wore the crest of the House Guard.
Imposters
, he thought, but no part of him believed it; they would take these three dead, and when they were presented to The Tera-fin and the captains of the House Guards, they would be identified as part of the Terafin Guard, no more, no less.

One of the Chosen lay dead as well; he was not so well armored as the three men in regular guard uniform, but better armed. He paused as he stepped over the body, his glance enough to tell him what he already knew.

It was not for their own that the Chosen had made the summons.

Alowan the healer knelt by the side of the bloody bed where the remains of Alea Rose ATerafin had been laid to rest. He reached out—he could not help himself, although the answer was writ clear in the way that the neck was half severed.

Ice, beneath skin; the coldness of a question asked that will never, never be answered.

He did not look up, seeing in the trademark attempt to separate head from shoulders—failed though it was—more than an echo of an earlier war. It was the harbinger.

"Alowan?" Alayra's voice. Over his shoulder and a step back.

"She—she has to be called," he said softly.

"I know."

Bleak, these two. The Chosen who bore open wounds, sweaty weapons, dented armor—they were silent; the battle had exhausted them and tempered their surprise.

It was Arrendas who was sent to wake The Terafin.

The Terafin wore the black and the gold.

Over the years, she had been forced to it many times, and they were colors that she had come to loathe because of it: the colors of respectful mourning.

The dress was perfect; it always was.

He saw to that, when the details were too petty or too small to occupy her time. It was the life he had chosen when he had reached the age of his majority, although it had not been the life that he had foreseen for himself in his youth: service, servitude, silence.

Of the latter, it was silence that he had achieved at the highest price, and silence that he set aside when service demanded it.

She' stood in front of her mirror, and he, behind her, saw only her back; her reflection was taken by the dark folds of cloth and the perfect positioning of her back. Not, he knew, an accident.

"Terafin," Morretz said. He was one of the very few men who could come, unannounced, into her presence, and perhaps the only man she allowed to approach her vulnerable back. Especially now. He was aware of it as both an honor and an inevitability: he was domicis, she was master. Nothing but trust could exist between them if they were to hold this relationship.

She turned.

The silence between them was taut with his disapproval. Strange, that in her youth at the helm of this great House she had seen so much of his disapproval, and in her prime, so little. She had become used to its lack.

Or perhaps she was tired. For she
was
tired. She let it show.

The lines of his frown softened slightly; they would have smoothed away completely had he not been required to hold the sword for her. To gird her perfect dress with its ungainly weight. She knew him that well.

And he, in his fashion, knew her. He knew, of course, that she allowed him some hint of her vulnerability to forestall the argument to follow. But he also knew that such a tactic was almost beneath her dignity, and used so rarely that it could not be disregarded. Not entirely.