Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (81 page)

The words of a foreigner and a woman. Protocol did not demand that he answer her; politeness did. It was an easy battle. He remained silent.

"In my life," she continued, "I have learned that those injuries that we cannot put aside devour us; they unmake and remake us in such a way that we cannot clearly see ourselves." He started to pull away. "An indulgence," she said softly.

"I am not a Northerner," he replied, but he waited, the sea breeze sudden and strong for just that moment, a reminder that the wind listened.

"It is a common story. An old one; we call it a Lattan tale."

His smile was stiff. "You will tell me," he said softly, "of a young man who faced a creature that could not be killed."

"Indeed."

He could not keep the edge out of his voice, nor the mild contempt. He was not, after all, a child. "Such a young man was a seraf, a common villager. He had wife and child, mother and father, a good lord—all these things, the blessing of the Lady."

"That is not as we tell it. but yes."

"He went to face the monster—a creature twice his height, several times his weight, with sword-length claws and an appetite for human blood."

"You've heard this story before."

"I used to tell it to my son. But perhaps it is not the same. Let me finish, and then you may judge." He could not keep the condescension out of his voice, although he knew she was ACormaris and, because of it, worthy of more. It was night. The Lady's face was full.

"The Voyani matriarchs had come and gone, and they had judged this one man to be the only hope of the Terrean. In the South armies amassed and were slaughtered to a man; the villages were defenseless. But the Havallah Voyani—it matters not which Voyani clan it was, and you can start a war by using the wrong clan name if you're in the presence of Voyani—had looked into the future.

"You are the only one," he said, lowering his voice, "who can do what must be done. Take this sling, and take this rock." He stopped then, bitter, a momentary fire in his regard of the quiet princess. Because, of course, he knew the story. He knew the point she was trying to make; had known it before she'd begun. But he'd thought his irony and his condescension, along with that foreknowledge, would protect him from acknowledging it.

We know ourselves so well ami so little.

"I forget the rest." he said.

"Ah. And I remember it. Might I continue?"

"No. No, I am an old man, with no desire to hear harem tales. Your pardon, ACormaris, but I am weary. My most promising student has been removed from the Challenge rolls, and his partner is aggrieved. I had hoped for a moment of peace in which to reflect."

She bowed again, deferentially and without comment. "I believe," she added softly, "that he is still waiting for you."

And, like a woman, she missed
nothing
. His Mari had missed nothing. She had probably seen the bandits long before the rest of the village. He often wondered why she hadn't fled, although he knew the answer. She had led such a protected life, first with her doting, foolish father, and then with him, with her doting, more foolish husband. She understood that death waited on every breeze or in every gale, and that it was impartial—but understanding it and
knowing
it in your core were different things. No hand had struck her with intent to harm; no man had touched her with intent to kill. As a child, her eyes had been shielded from every death a child can be protected from seeing.

It had made her brave, the way fools are brave.

His fault.

She had thought—he was certain she had thought it—that she might somehow help her son and the other children. They said— they said that she had died
fighting
.

The boy looked on; he had not looked away since their eyes had first met across the thin crowd, and he did not, in fact, look away until Ser Anton came to stand in front of him.

"Aidan," Ser Anton said. "It is good to see you well. I do not see your champion."

"He's not here." Silence. Watching the boy's face, Ser Anton could see him weighing the words and the anger behind them; trying to decide how to throw them.

He could not believe—no, truth now, under the Lady's face— he
had not
believed that a boy could injure him in any way. That a foreigner, blond and red with sun, the dark colors that were a man's legacy in the South watered down by exposure to Northern sea and Northern indulgence, could matter to him in any fashion.

"You heard about Carlo?" he asked, changing the subject.

"Yes." That softened the boy's face slightly. "He's withdrawn."

"Yes."

"And he won't see a healer."

"No."

Silence. Then, "Valedan says it's because he knows too much about the plans to kill him, and he's afraid the healer will tell."

He had not yet offered this boy a He. He tried now. "No, it is because, in the South, it is unmanning to be touched by a healer. They take from you, boy. just as the wind does. They expose you, they read what they like out of your life."

Credulous, the boy replied, "You mean the death call."

"Is that what you call it here?"

"Isn't that what it's called everywhere?"

"No."

"A healer—the Princess says a healer can't betray the healed. Not if they both agree to it."

"And you believe her," was the unguarded reply, "because you are a Northerner. In the South, we understand war."

He had not meant to say it. But the anger was back in the boy's face. "You don't understand
war
," he said, and his hands, smaller than Ser Anton's because of years and possibly the scarcity of nourishment in his background, curled into fists and shook with the effort of containment. "You understand
murder
. It's not the same thing."

"Is it not?" Ser Anton said softly. "Men are paid to follow orders, and they are ordered to kill. They kill until there are either no more men to be killed or their leaders come to terms. Do you think you understand war from watching
this
?" He raised an arm, to take in the Challenge, its revelers, this palace of politeness and invisible weapons.

Aidan took a step back, his white hair suddenly brighter beneath the halo of magelights. And then he said, coldly, "You were all about Southern honor. You came here out of love for your wife and your son, and you won two crowns because of it.

"But you don't love anyone now, and if you're what Southern honor is, then Southern honor is a lie." He stopped. "Except for Carlo's. Because he knew—he knew that he couldn't just let you murder Valedan. That killing him, and having him killed by a— by a
demon
—isn't the same thing.

"Do you know that you killed a
girl
? Do you know that you killed her horribly, because your men helped to feed her to a demon? Do you even care that she was someone's daughter, just like I'm someone's son? You were the
defender
of the helpless. You—and your fight—and the bandits—" He dragged a sleeve across his eyes. "It was a lie, I guess. A lie, like anything else."

A boy of his age was not as young in the Dominion.

"I admired you, Ser Anton," the boy said, and tears mingled with anger, shaking the voice yet making it stronger at the same time. "I thought you were so—"

Ser Anton surprised both the boy and himself. He heard the slap as if he were the clapper and the boy the bell—or perhaps the other way around; it resounded in him, the act of striking a weaponless young boy.

They froze; he watched the white mark on the boy's face gradually redden. His hand. He expected guards to rush in to the boy's defense, but Aidan straightened himself to his full height. "Why are you doing this?" he asked. He said it quietly; the tears were gone. It was as if that blow bound them.

And it was an act of intimacy, that slap. Only intimate anger could force the hand of a man like Ser Anton to something other than lethal violence. No; not true. But this, this strike of hand across face—this was reserved for errant children. His own.

He bowed. Bowed to the boy whose company he wanted, and whose company he now knew would be far, far too costly.

You are the only one who can do what must be done. Take this sling. Take this rock.

And what good, the young defenseless man had asked, would a rock do, where horses, swords and arrows had failed?

Oh, yes, he knew it. He knew the story well.

The creature has three eyes. It sees all that happens around it. Only aim, hit true, and you will turn one—just one
—
of those eyes inward
.

So he'll be blinded. They
tried
that
.

No. He will not be blinded. He will be forced to see what the chaos of fighting and death has allowed him to escape
—
why else do you think he kills and kills and kills? In the fight for survival, only the sword counts; the warrior's trance is everything. Why do you think he chooses a life in which he can do little else
?

Take the rock, boy. Aim true.

Because this creature was a man once, and made foul by the sorceries of his choice and his desire.

And the boy took the rock, and faced the monster.

And the monster's eye turned inward.

And he died of what he saw there.

They were quiet, these two men. Wine had come their way, and it was of a very, very fine vintage; so, too, had fruits, chilled somehow against the summer heat—and cream, something thick and rich and sweet that had no equal in the Terreans they made their home. No equal in Raverra.

Even women—and in the North, women were by their very nature both repellent and exotic in their forwardness—had made it clear that they were available.

The food, they accepted, but the women they merely flattered by gentle rejection.

"I have failed him," Carlo di'Jevre said quietly.

Andaro di'Corsarro said nothing. There was nothing to say.

"Do you think he'll forgive?"

"I don't know. I would have thought—I would have said, had you asked me this a month ago, that he would have killed you for interference. Now… I just don't know." He was older; the two years had seemed so vast a gulf when they had first met under the old man's tutelage. Now it was nothing. Twenty-one. Twenty-three. Nothing.

"It is the kai Leonne," Carlo said, breaking silence—for they had found a silent place.

"You think of him because of where we are," Andaro replied, and it was in some ways true: they sat in the small courtyard in the Arannan Halls, their backs pressed up against the rounded curve of the fountain's short wall, the alabaster Figure of a boy, a sightless boy, behind them. Water fell from his hands, a continual thin downpour, an offering or an obeisance. They knew the value of water. And even if the kai Leonne had been raised here, in the weak wastelands of the North, he knew it as well. His blood knew it.

"No," Carlo said softly. "I don't." He lifted a hand to the wreath that he could not quite bear to be without. He had sacrificed the full use of his leg in exchange for it, and he bore it like a scar: proudly. "We helped him," he continued quietly. "We helped him kill the Tyr'agar."

"And that?"

"It was not the same."

"His wives and his daughters were with him."

Carlo shrugged. "Neither you nor I were wasted on the women; we fought his Tyran, and we bested them. That was clean."

"And he fought the Tyr'agar." The words that left him next were quiet, soft words. "Beneath the Lady's Moon. She judged. Carlo."

"We're beneath the Lady's Moon now," Carlo replied. "Or I would not tell you what I think."

Andaro smiled in the shadows because Carlo, of the two, felt the need to express everything. Not always with words; indeed often words were an impediment and a waste of his time—but by action, reaction. He was wild, impetuous, his court skills at very best half-formed—in all things, unlike Andaro di'Corsarro.

"Then tell me what you think," Andaro said. "I will not speak of it to Ser Anton, and I will not be offended."

"I think that the kai Leonne would never stoop to the use of demons. I think the kai Leonne serves the Lord of Day, whether or not he has the Radann creeping up his backside with their commandments."

Andaro laughed, but quietly. "You've had too much of that very fine wine."

"Or not enough, is that it?"

"Or not enough. But you can drink more than any man present; enough would beggar them." His smile fell away like clothing at day's end. "Carlo, we've come here to serve Ser Anton. Not the new Tyr, or his new Tyrs."

"Yes." Carlo picked up the glass—for glass was everywhere in
Avantari
, or so it seemed to the two men—and drained it. "But had you asked me—had you asked me, even that night of slaughter, I would have said that Ser Anton served the Lord of Day.

"But he knew about the demon, and the demon is no part of the Lord of Day, and no part of the Lady; the night that is falling is His, and I—" He stared at his hands. "And if the death of the Leonne clan is the final stone that brings the wall down… maybe I'm happy to be a cripple."

"You're hardly a cripple," Andaro replied, but he was troubled. "We made our choice."

"Based on what we knew."

"And now?"

"Now, the only thing that would keep me here is you."

They stared at each other a long time in the darkness.

And then Andaro turned, the movement sudden, a snap of neck and shoulder. His sword made more noise than he did as it left his scabbard.

Carlo rose at once; they were a single person in time of danger, and the injury was forgotten. No; that much pain could not be forgotten. Ignored.

"What is it?"

"We were heard," Andaro replied quietly.

"By who?"

"I'm not sure. I saw him leave. He was too large to move that quietly." He sat on the fountain's edge.

"Ours," Carlo said, "or theirs?"

Tonight, under the moon's open face, Andaro said, "I don't know. But I think—I think we would be safer if, this one time, it was one of theirs."

It was not.

Pedro, the merchant who was not a merchant, could move silently when he chose, and he had so chosen. That one of the two was aware of him at all said much of Ser Anton's training.