Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (75 page)

"Meralonne," Sigurne said, speaking for a moment like a Guard Captain and not a member of the magi.

"'Ah, the lovely Sigurne. Who hunts him?"

She hesitated before speaking. "Kin," she said at last. "Devon is out looking for them. But—"

"Where is Valedan?"

It was Avandar who answered.

The last of the men were hauled out of the water: there were two who gave out in mid-passage and had had to be rescued by boat.

The flag, faltering in a breeze that was not quite strong enough to lift its weighted end, came up in a strong hand. Valedan let his arms drop to his side; let his muscles, shoulders, and back relax. He bent at the knees, feeling the bend itself, sinking into the posture. Breathing.

"The challenge of the sea?"

"Yes. The magi are out in force, patrolling the waters
and
the crowds. But they aren't going to find whatever it is, and it'll kill him." Wasn't a doubt in the words because she had no doubt; she had seen it, had been woken from dream by it, had humiliated herself by asking for Avandar's aid—as if he were her father—to get here to say it.

"Get Sioban," he said urgently to Sigurne Mellifas. "Now. Get her now."

"But—"

"Sigurne."

She left.

"What?" Jewel said, as she lay in his shadow, the length of his hair across her arm as smooth and soft as if fever had no purchase there.

He looked exhausted, far paler than she had ever seen him, and he was not a man whose skin took to sun at all. But his eyes, gray as steel, were clear, and his words, heavy with weariness, surprisingly cogent.

"You need my knowledge of the kin," he gasped, struggling for shallow breath. "It must be knowledge that I have, and that others do not possess; the summonings are against our law and against our edicts of study." He closed his eyes then. "If it is studied, we are doomed, and if we do not study, we are doomed.

"Choose your doom. Jewel," he said softly.

"Tell us."

The flag fell.

The men dove.

Water was broken by the fall of their bodies, the clean position of arms and hands, the thrust of their feet.

Sioban Glassen had come at a run; Sigurne, she had left behind at the moment she'd been given the summons. She knelt by the bed, her face red from exertion, her expression at odds with it. "Member APhaniel," she said.

He was silent a long moment, and then he said, "Call Kallandras."

She started to speak; he raised a hand. "No—do not summon him here: we will lose. Tell him only this, tell him quickly:

"A handful of the
Kialli
, to the best of our knowledge, do not need to breathe."

Her brow creased. "This is an emergency?"

"Please, Bardmaster. Master Bard." He sunk back then, and his grip on the arm of the youngest woman in the room finally failed. But she knew, as it did, that some part of what he had said had been, in fact, a lie.

"Kallandras, it's Sioban."

"I'm here."

"Meralonne APhaniel bids me tell you this: Some of the
Kialli
do not need to breathe. If it's useful, you have to tell me how over a good, stiff drink."

He was already in motion. The first words she'd spoken sank roots and then spines, drawing his blood from heart to surface like metal shavings to magnet. He was not of an age with the competitors, but he knew—who better?—how to move silently, quietly,
quickly
. As he raced across the boardwalk, he spoke, and the words carried to only one man.

The water was in his ears, and it buzzed and tickled.

"Do not stop swimming, kai Leonne."

He recognized the voice; it was the bard's voice. Kallandras of Senniel. A man he trusted, and had reason to trust, for all his magical ability.

It might have cost him time, to hear the words, to process them, to recognize their speaker; but it carried command, to continue, and he did.

"No matter what you see, below or to the side, your duty and your challenge is to pass the test of the sea."

He cut the water like a knife.

Felt it, bracing in its sudden chill, as salt reminded him of the day-to-day scrapes and scratches that were normally beneath his notice. He carried—like a pearl diver—a single blade, but there was no blunt edge to take hold of between his teeth; he held the handle.

The bay was not shallow. Fishing villages along the coast had sand bars and whole stretches in which a man might wet no more than his knees for braving water—but the waters around the isle and the bay itself were not so gentle. They were clear as far as the eye could see.

The eye, in this case, couldn't see far enough.

The sand beds weren't flat; there were rocks here, large and smooth, which overlapped and stood atop each other. He cast his glance in two directions, first up, to where the swimmers passed above him, their bodies floating in a layer of water that seemed, from his vantage, clear and white, like liquid light. Beneath him, as he turned his gaze down, the rocks, and their shadows, a darkness cast by lack of light in the ponderous movement of water.

He started to swim up for air, and felt a stab of pain. His hand. His left hand.

In the element of water, the elemental ring was sun seen through diamond, made painful by the lulling shadows of the ocean. He grimaced. Grimaced and understood the call of air. He did not hesitate; he drew breath, and water did not pass his lips.

The air had claimed him, after all.

Clutching the knife in hand, he began to swim in the water beneath the swimmers, pacing them as he could. Guarding them.

Had he been in the element to which he'd been trained, he would have been in no danger at all, but movement in water was different. What he could see—and he
could
see, for night was as much a part of his training as day had been, and the light here was much like it—he could react to. But his reaction time was
wrong
.

And because of it, he could not turn and face the enemy that passed by him like a shadow—not quite.

Sharp pain, stinging salt, and a billow of murky cloud.

The cry went up from the isle.

Blood. Cormaris' Crown
—
there's blood in the water
!

Devon heard it, heard the voices that carried it; they stood out in a shrill, a sharp relief against the blurred murmur of the crowd. What the watchers saw, the crowd would see soon enough.

He tensed slightly, but even in this proved true to his own training; the glance that he cast toward the merchant, Pedro, was furtive. And it was unseen.

The merchant's face had gone smooth as fine steel; he was as tense as Devon, and as casually nonchalant about it as a man with much practice could be.

"Your pardon, Merchant," the ATerafin said quietly, bowing. "But it seems there's to be some unauthorized form of excitement this Challenge, and I for one am curious."

"You've money riding on it?" the merchant asked.

"And more," Devon replied.

He made his way to the seawall, and no one—although the crowd was thick with bodies large and smalls-attempted to stop him.

He adjusted.

This was at the foundation of every lesson he had ever learned: flexibility. He took no time to argue with the facts, or to panic because they did not correspond to what he knew; they were facts. He had been cut to bone, and had he been slower—had he, in fact, been one of the swimmers above—he would be dead from the casual strike of a claw that seemed almost invisible in the water's swirl.

Or not.

The ring seared his flesh as the claw had cut it. Like a slap across the face, it braced him, cleared a vision obscured by too much water.

He could see, in the movement of the current above him, and in the blood that eddied within it, the slender figure of a creature that seemed made of glass. Glass—sharpened, streamlined.

There were no rocks beneath his feet. But the ring was on his hand, and he felt it burning there; he leaped up into water as if, for a moment, it were air.

The blood caught his attention because he had to swim
through
it. There was a moment, a single moment at which the men to his right and left gave ground at the shock, and to his shame, Valedan kai di'Leonne did not. He passed by it, thinking of the seawall, of the rise and fall of his arms, the straight line of his leg, toe to knee, the way his limbs sliced water with as little resistance as possible.

He didn't have to think of breathing; breathing came naturally. He didn't pray. He didn't wonder whose blood it was. He swam.

Just as Kallandras had… asked.

Devon saw the kai Leonne break ahead of the heat; it surprised him. Eneric was not favored to win this challenge, but he was a strong swimmer for a Northerner, and he had stuttered a moment. Four of the fifteen had—the four who were swimming in blood.

Whose blood?

He jumped up to the seawall's height and stared down at the waves not ten feet below. The desire to order Valedan out of the water—to order them all out of the water—was strong; so, too, was the knowledge that to use that authority, for he had it, was to expose himself to the merchant who also watched and waited.

Valedan
, he thought.

And then,
whose blood
?

The creature was a water creature, or so it seemed to Kallandras; it moved with the easy grace of something familiar with water's lift and weight. It had a face; the lines of eyes, of high cheeks, of slender face and long jaw, could be made out as if the movement of light had been caught in just those places and frozen there. It also had two arms, two legs, and a swirling cloak that seemed made of the water itself.

At any other time, it might have looked like a man, displaced by an element, and handsome for it.

But it was death, merely death, and he was not yet ready to face his Lady; not this way.

The creature raised a glass brow. "You
are
impressive," it said mockingly, the words more of a sensation than a sound. He cast a glance upward, to the receding bodies of the swimmers above, and then to the shore.

When he smiled, he froze water. Or he should have. "They will take their time returning," he said lazily. "Come, then. Come and play."

Kallandras was prepared, this time, for the sudden, swift motion of the creature. After fifteen years together, he and the ring had an uneasy understanding of each other's limits—but it was imperfect. He moved before the creature did, and the water sizzled at his hand. But the pain was gone; he thought the price the ring would exact would not be too high this day.

If he survived.

Survival was everything. He took a breath; the air was so sharp, so sudden in its rush he might have been flying—or falling.

He gave himself over to the dance, to the fight.

Valedan touched rock and rolled, head over foot and side to side, aiming himself at the isle. He was arrow straight by the time the movement was finished, his hands above his head in a point, the tops of his feet flush with the line of his leg. Someplace between touching the rock and using it to give himself momentum, he cleared the water enough to take in the air.

He did not hear the roar of the crowd, or the hush of it. He did not see the ATerafin who stood upon the wall itself.

But he saw, clearly, in the depths of the water below, a man whose voice he had heard before he touched water this day: Kallandras of Senniel.

Not all of the men who had been granted permission to enter the Kings' Challenge entered all events. It meant, of course, that if they won the single event, they claimed the crown for that event—but they could not win the title of Champion, regardless of how they progressed in the events they chose as their own.

Ser Anton di'Guivera had, after some minor consultation with his students, chosen two men to face the test of the sea. These two: Andaro and Carlo. Carlo had, after all, come from the Averdan lands closest to the waters, and knew them well enough to have taken some boyhood ease there.

They stood on the edge of the pier, watching; they witnessed the sudden spill of pale crimson rise up, as if carried by the dying gasp of some huge, unseen creature, from the ocean's depths.

If it gave them pause, they showed nothing; it was not in their nature, and their training—in this, Carlo was acceptable—was to deny any display of weakness, such as surprise.

But when the man rose, bleeding, from the water's surface, shedding salt and sea and blood as if all liquid were one thing, one of the two men froze in place.

The adjudicator bid them hold at once; the mages—and the mages were ever-present, turned in their crafts of heavy wood, their hands raised as shields and weapons, the words breaking their silence, leaving their lips, in much the same way as the man broke water.

Wood splintered and shattered in that moment.

Screams now. Screams that did not quite carry to the men who, trapped in the third heat, toiled under cloudless sun and shadow.

The man who rose fell, his flight cut short by some ill wind.

The Southerners understood better than any the caprice and the malice of the wind. But Carlo cried out to his brother, lifting a bronze arm.

Ser Anton followed the direction of that pointed hand, and he saw—as Carlo did, curse the quickness of his vision—the water creature that stood, momentarily, like a pillar in the air. Easy enough, to miss such a creature; easy enough to assume that the water had risen in the wake of the bleeding man.

Easy enough, Ser Anton thought grimly, for a student that he had not trained.

The man broke water again, and behind them all—behind the standing tableau of fifteen naked or near-naked men, the Kings' men were coming, their voices both raised and controlled, army voices. Fighting voices.

He shaded his eyes against the sun's light; looked beyond the dispersing blood and the gush of breaking bubbles to see that the front-runner, the man by far in the lead in this contest, was indeed the kai Leonne.

Helpless target. Unarmed.

With just this ease, he thought, cold in the summer's heat, the fight was over. He had all but vowed that it would be
his
hand that ended the line; had, in fact, were he honest, vowed it.