Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (80 page)

"Jewel."

"Evayne," she replied quietly. Her hands stilled; they'd been rearranging the thin coverlet into something small rivers might travel—peaks and valleys, twists of cloth that caught shadows and light from the lamps on the wall.

"You are in dagger."

"So what else is new?" She looked up then, feeling the difference in their ages. As if she were still sixteen, still ignorant, and still powerless. There should have been humor in the words; she'd meant to wedge it between them somehow, to make the statement flippant, a proper armor. But the words came out unadorned, and she was exposed by them.

"You must go South," the woman in the midnight-blue robes said, raising a hand to the hood that framed—that hid her face.

"You aren't telling me anything I don't already know."

"No." She bent, this older woman, this living mystery, and reached into the folds of her robe as if they were a closet.

Jewel knew what she'd see. The orb. The sphere. The crystal which was said—in children's stories so old they were almost never told anymore—to be a splinter of a seer's soul.

It hung between Evayne's hands, a silver glow in the coming night.

"Go South, Jewel Markess ATerafin.

"And when you have discovered what you must discover, answer the call."

"What?"

"You have started so many lives, and finished none of them. When the time comes, you must walk a path I walked when I was barely sixteen. Face the same doors. Jewel, and pass the same tests."

"Why?"

She held aloft the shard; it flared white, a terrible light that made of the rest of the world a darkness. Transfixed, unable to look away. Jewel ATerafin heard the seer say, "Because if you're to have the ability to control what you see, you must expose everything you are to her, and let her slice and cut what she will."

Bitterness there, and pain that seemed so much a part of her that Jewel suddenly couldn't imagine she'd ever lived without it. "Who is this she?" She asked softly.

"The Oracle," Evayne said softly. "And now, Jewel, if you will?"

"Will?"

"It is time for you to leave."

She started to speak. Not even to argue, because to argue with someone required some shared knowledge, and it was clear that Evayne held all the cards. But before words left lips, she felt it, sudden and sharp; saw the ghostly spill of blood just left of the center of her chest.

"
Quickly
," Evayne said.

Jewel reached out with a hand; the seer gripped it.

She spoke two words as the window shattered. The lead that had held the beveled glass crumpled as a figure emerged from the wreckage; a dagger flashed orange in lamplight and flew the length of the healerie's room.

But its intended victim was gone.

She appeared in a well-lit hall. It was an old-city hall; the ceiling was flat, rather than arched, but it was tall, with a catwalk around its perimeter and windows around the catwalk. The lights were far too bright, and the ground a little too uneven; she stumbled, her knees apparently having been left behind in the healerie.

"Jay!"

Before she hit the ground, an arm caught her around the shoulders; the arm was slender, but it shored her up more easily than Arann's would have.

"Kiriel?" she asked softly!

It was Kiriel. But the girl's gaze went past her—hard to do considering how closely they stood—to the woman at her side. Impossible not to see the hostility in the glare. "Evayne."

"Kiriel," the seer said, her voice heavy, even tired.

"What are you doing with Jay?"

"Saving my life," Jewel said, more shortly than she'd intended.

"So she can do what with it?"

Hard, that question. Angry.

"Kiriel," Jewel said, in her best den leader voice.

"You don't know this woman," Kiriel replied, in a voice as close to the darkness as she'd used since she'd lost all her precious magic.

"I know her better than you'd think," Jewel replied. "We've met before, and under darker circumstances than this."

"She doesn't save anyone's life for free."

"How do you know?"

"I—I know."

So did Jewel, suddenly. "The Fight's worth fighting," she said tiredly. Not sure who she was trying to remind—herself or her den-kin.

"Kiriel," the seer said. "I give you back your den-kin. She is your responsibility now. The kin are not hunting her this eve, but the brotherhood of the Lady is."

Kiriel's grip on Jewel tightened.

Great
, Jewel thought, as Evayne took a step into nothing and simply ceased to exist—in front of about a hundred people. Luckily, in the noise and the clouds of gathered smoke, only about twenty of them now stared at her with that wide-jawed curiosity that can get ugly really quickly.

"Who are the brotherhood of the Lady?"

"Hells if I know," Jewel answered. "But I think we can discuss that somewhere else."

Kiriel nodded. "Wait a minute," she said quietly—which meant that Jewel could see her lips form the words but couldn't actually hear them without an active imagination. "Auralis!"

One of the quiet strangers separated himself from the long tables that were used for overcrowding during the Challenge season. He eyed Jewel with the same trust one offers a dog with a foaming mouth who hasn't done anything remotely aggressive— yet. She returned his regard; he was a tall man, bronze with sun, copper-haired, blue-eyed.
Attractive
, she thought,
and he knows it too damned well
.

She hated that in a man.

"Kiriel?" he said, speaking to her but pinning Jewel with his not-quite-glare.

"We've got to go. I… owe you money, I think."

"You do," he said, folding his arms across his chest. "Where exactly do you think you have to go?"

"Somewhere," Jewel replied, "where a hundred people aren't getting ready to report illegal use of magic?"

He laughed then, although the edge of suspicion still hardened both stance and feature. "In this part of town?"

"Even here," Jewel replied. "I know this 'town' like the back of my hand.

"Hands like that?"

She looked at her hands involuntarily in the light. They were paler than they had been when she'd made a life for herself— barely—in the twenty-fifth. And on the left ring finger, she wore, thick and heavy and shining with craftsman's perfection, the signet ring of her House—the jeweled and platinumed gold ring that marked her as part of its Council.

"Yeah," she said. "Hands like this."

"Jay, do you know who the brotherhood of the Lady is?"

"Of course. I always pay attention to orders of assassins." She bit her lip, and before Kiriel could speak said, "Sorry, Kiriel. No. I have no idea who they are. I don't really care either—I just want to know which bastard was responsible for hiring them."

But Auralis had gone deathly still. "What did you say?" he said softly, his gaze demanding Kiriel's reply.

"The brotherhood," she said quietly, "of the Lady."

He turned to face Jewel ATerafin then. "You're wrong," he told her quietly, all hostility muted. "You
do
care who they are. We call 'em the
Kovaschaü
here. Ring any bells?"

"No."

"They're an elite bunch of assassins. They cost the worth of a small barony—an old-style barony—or so it's rumored."

"Fine."

"They don't fail."

She rolled her eyes. "Assassin," she said. "Meet seer."

His eyes widened. "You're
that
ATerafin!"

She flushed. Ego had gotten control of her mouth. She felt young again—and she remembered, her cheeks hot, that she hadn't particularly liked being young. "And you must be one of Kiriel's Ospreys."

"Good guess." His face had lost a little of its glacial quality; none of its danger. "Duarte told us about you. You're the former thief." Measured words.

Some men could say them with honesty; certainly they were true. But this man was using them as a weapon—or rather, he was handling them the way he would handle something unfamiliar but quite probably dangerous/Testing. Trying to cause discomfort or embarrassment.

"Yes," she replied distantly, as if acknowledging a truth that bored her, or worse, a truth that only children toyed with in such a fashion.

Very little got through to Jewel when malice was behind it.

Honesty could hurt her. but even then, only from those she already valued and respected—something she was pretty damned certain she'd never feel for this particular man. She turned to Kiriel, her expression softening slightly. "You can stay here if you want, or you can follow. But I'm leaving. I have to get home. If that bastard thinks he-—" She stopped speaking, albeit with some effort.

"I'm leaving with her," Kiriel told Auralis quietly. "She's— she was confined to the royal healerie. If she's here, it's not because the healer gave her permission to leave."

He shrugged. "Well," he said, "it's hot and boring here, so I might as well tag along."

"Wonderful," Jewel said.

Ser Anton di'Guivera waited. The courtyard was full of the men and women whose power and authority granted them easy access to
Avantari
, fragrant with the scent of new sweat and rich wine; the lamps and the magelights that the Empire was so fond of imparted a color to gown and tunic, to shirt and surcoat, that hinted at the revelries of day.

Night was a time of peace.

But not here. Not in this palace, and not in this city. He found it vaguely distasteful that the city itself chose not to sleep. And chose, in its wakefulness, to treat
every
night with the abandon reserved, in his homelands, for the Festival of the Moon. The Lady's time.

Perhaps it was understood that he felt this discomfort, perhaps not. But it was the Princess of the Blood—the only true child of the men who ruled this Empire—who came to him in this sea of friendly distances. She spoke Torra; that he expected, but she spoke it flawlessly. Had she offered him more than the respect of a fluid, formal, and very Imperial bow, he would not have been surprised.

But then he remembered: Alina.

"ACormaris," he said quietly.

"You are unescorted this eve."

"I have—I had a wish for—privacy. In this city, it appears that the courtyards of the Crown halls are as private an open space as one can find."

"There are quieter spaces," she said secretively. "And the moon's face is almost full. Come, if you will."

He watched her, unblinking, for a full minute. And then the bards began anew, and although their voices were hypnotic and compelling, they sang about war in a tongue that war was not meant for: Weston.

I am old
, he thought, and he felt it: the fear that experience exposes. Younger men—men like Carlo or Andaro—see costs measured in their lives alone. Nobility in that. Freedom.

And what of Ser Anton? Was not the cost of this measured in his life? Ah.

"Forgive me, ACormaris," he said softly, "but I see a person I wish to speak with."

Her eyes followed his, seeing as he saw, and with just as much comment. But before she acceded with her customary grace, she touched his arm. It surprised him; he looked at her; met eyes that were a little too brown to be golden, and a little too bright to be entirely comfortable. "Ser Anton," she said at last, "we have all, in our time, been asked to put aside the injuries done to us by our enemies."