Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (26 page)

Ah.

She said her prayers again, her thanks, her anger, mingling like fire and oil, fire and wood. She poured wine from the skin that she habitually wore at her waist, invoking the Maiden Moon, invoking the wise darkness, and invoking, steadily, the brightness, the Mother Moon, the Lady in Her Power.

Because she needed these things to calm her.

She was going to
kill
her cousin.

"Margret."

She knew her aunt's voice in any of its multiple guises; recognized this one immediately. It was soft, neutral in a way that Tamara only ever managed when there were strangers about.

She took a deep breath. Looked up at the veil that draped itself lazily across the clarity of the sky above. Lady's veil, lacy stars, open moon. She bowed stiffly; anger made her stiff and graceless, as it did so many of her women.

"Ona Tamara."

"Elena has returned."

She met her aunt's eyes; the tinge and cast of skin beneath precious oil lamp seemed pale. Hard to tell. "Not alone."

"No." Tamara drew a breath. "Nicu and his closest men are with her. Ilia as well. And the stranger I told you about."

"The one who cleared the streets of the eight cerdan—without killing a single one of them?"

She nodded quietly.

"Who is he, Tamara?"

"I think—" she started to answer. Stopped. "I think you'd best talk with Elena."

"I will speak with Elena," Margret replied evenly. "But deal with the stranger until we're finished. He knows where we are," she added.

"He is not a threat to us, Margret."

"Anyone who isn't kin is a threat to us right now."

Tamara's lips compressed into a sharp, thin line. "He saved our future," she pointed out, the words as sharp as the line of her mouth. "We owe him."

Margret shrugged.

Elena stepped out of the shadows at the back of the wagon.

"Were you followed?"

"Hard to say." Elena shrugged. "But Kallandras said no, and I'd trust him to notice."

"Kallandras? He's the kinless one?"

Elena nodded.

"Would you trust him with anything else?"

"Like, say, our location?" Elena's smile was as sharp as her mother's frown had been, but infinitely more attractive. She shrugged. "Yes, but I'm biased."

Which meant at the very least the stranger was pretty. "What's that?"

Elena's face lost its attractive smile; lost, in fact, most of the play around its edges. She glanced up to the Lady's face, down to the grass the wheels had compressed. "It's a sword," she said at last.

Margret snorted. Waited. Waited another minute. "I can
see
it's a sword. Why are you bringing it to me?"

"It's the sword Nicu was wielding when he—when he was fighting the cerdan in the streets of the Tor Leonne." She paused. "When he was killing them. You have to see his clothing, Margret."

" 'Lena—"

"You didn't see his face. I did. I've seen men burn with the Lord's light, but I've never seen the light look so much like darkness."

"And you think it's this sword?"

"I don't know, I don't know," Elena replied. "But he—the stranger—he told me, he
asked
me, to bring it to the Matriarch. He said—he said 'it is said that it is difficult to fool Voyani eyes.' "

"
But the Voyani heart, never
." She was quiet a long, long time. "You haven't drawn the sword."

"No. Not after that."

"Nicu?"

"Angry, but—but he's grown more subdued. He—" She bit her lip. "He disobeyed my order; he tried to kill another clansman in the open street. The stranger stopped him." She took a deep breath.

"You might as well tell me the rest, Elena. How much worse could things be?"

"The stranger was fighting with the Lady's weapons." She paused. "And I think—although only the heart would expose him for certain—that he bears the Lady's marks. The night marks," she added, although it wasn't necessary. She walked over to Margret and placed the sword at her feet. "I'm sorry, Margret."

"You realize," Margret said softly, "what he's done?"

"Nicu? Yes," her cousin replied grimly. "If the heart is in the city, the chance that we will ever find it now has all but vanished.

"But think, Cousin, think: someone placed that weapon in Nicu's hands. Did they know? Did they know that the heart has no body?"

Margret looked up the gentle slopes of a city that led, on all sides, to the plateau and the Lake. "I don't know. I don't know that they care. They have Yollana," she added. "And although I would never have said this to my mother—to any of the Voyani Matriarchs—Yollana, of the four, was the most powerful, the most dangerous."

Elena came to stand beside her cousin; she looped an arm over her shoulder and drew her close. "That," she whispered for her cousin's ears alone, "is why you are Matriarch, Margret, and why I am 'Lena. Because when you say it, just so, I
know
it for truth, but I would never have placed her above any of
my
kin."

"Ai, well," her cousin replied, staring into the night sky above the cityscape, wondering if the smell of burning wood and incense, the hushed prayers, the mix of boiling potions and thick unguents that would be used, eventually, to treat the wounded, would be carried by wind to an unseen enemy. "Truth hurts, or it isn't truth."

7th of Scaral, 427 AA

Evereve

She came to the dining hall by following the trail of the lights that were, as Avandar had said, encased in gold. Not encircled by it, but truly encased; the light and the gold had somehow been blended together, and each gave luster and luminosity to the other. In shape, they were simple enough: quartered, flat circles. Along the lines that quartered them, light welled alone.

As Jewel approached, the few nearest her would blaze like a natural fire, passing on the intensity of their brilliance just ahead of where she walked.

She tried, twice, to get lost; the effect was a gradual darkness. The lights simply faded the farther she walked from the path that he had commanded her to take, until she was surrounded by something that felt like night. Like night in the gardens of Terafin.

She wondered how much darker it would get, and wondered, too, if it would make much of a difference. Remembered the talking, moving statues and the old stories her grandmother had told her about wizards who lived in—well, wherever it was this was—and their penchant for preying on the young and the helpless.

Neither of which she was.

Gods, she
hated
this clothing.

She hated these halls. She hated these lights.

She hated the
lack
of light.

Following halls lit by light and gold, she realized that she hadn't once seen a window, and she knew, then, exactly how dark it could get. She'd been underground before when the lights were nonexistent. The memory drove her to the light, and the light drove her forward.

The food was not simple.

She was used to simplicity when she dined in her own wing; fancy food, with its complicated courses and the etiquette that governed which men and women of which rank ate which of the dinners—early or late—and how, was a political statement. Eating fancy food was therefore a political act.

Facing Avandar across the length of a table so fine she was almost afraid to pick up the strange utensils that framed her plate for fear of scratching its perfect surface, she didn't wish to descend to politics. Not yet.

She waited.

He waited.

After a moment she realized that this was the act of a
host;
he couldn't—if he had manners—begin to eat until she had. So much for the crown and the jewel-studded silks; so much for the gold leaf and the gold lights and the platinum inlay across doors so gaudy with artwork and filigree they seemed to be made of something other than wood. She sat back in her chair.

He looked across the table as if he could see through her, and his eyes, darkened by semicircles that spoke of sleep's lack, were a black that absorbed light, that denied it.

He spoke a single word in a language she didn't recognize. Spoke again. Again.

The fourth time, he shook himself. "Jewel," he said quietly.

She picked up the sticks by her plate; they were longer than the ones she had often used at her grandmother's home; they were finer, lacquered black and gold—it was a theme—with a very sharp end. There was no point in refusing the political when you were eating with a man who seemed on the edge of collapse.

Or madness, and she preferred collapse.

He watched her eat.

Minutes passed in a silence that teetered precariously, as if it were some precious object that was almost certain to break.

At last she saw something shift in the lines around his mouth; saw a few familiar lines suddenly wedge themselves into the space between eyebrows and hair.

"That," he said, in his most irritatingly superior domicis voice, "is a complete disgrace."

All hesitation, all foreign syllable, was washed away by his familiar disdain. "
What
are you talking about?"

He rose at once, walking with that stiff elegance that she so hated it usually made her grind her teeth. The crown was on his brow and the robes that looked so out of place—no, admit it, the problem was that they looked
perfect
for him, she was the one who was out of place—became, for a moment, simple accoutrement, a statement not of power but of fashion.

He rarely touched her. In fact, he had only really touched her for two reasons in their sixteen years together. First, for safety's sake: he never trusted her not to do something stupid—and when she was in danger, he somehow felt that his title and his position gave him the right, no worse, the
duty
, to interfere. And second, for etiquette's sake, when he was at the end of his tether and had neither the patience nor the time to explain in small words—and words got smaller and more cutting as he got more annoyed, a habit of speech she detested.

He caught her hands as she stared up at him in very real confusion, met her eyes and rolled his. "This is simple enough," he said, in the clenched jaw sort of way that always made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, "that most children past five of the Lady's Summers can manage with grace." And he grabbed the utensils from her hands and began to demonstrate their proper use.

"I've been using these since
I
was past those five summers, thank you very much."

"You've been using them barbarically. You'll be in the South and you can't afford to offend—" His voice trailed off. His brow furrowed. Almost as an afterthought, he set the slender sticks down beside her plate.

And he looked at her as if he was seeing her for the first time.

"Avandar?"

Looked through her.

"Forgive me, Lady," he said quietly, and turned, and left the room.

The food was awfully cold by the time she got around to eating it.

Evening of the 7th of Scaral, 427 AA

Tor Leonne

Yollana of the Havalla Voyani sat in a darkness stripped of light, of the ability to bring light. She was not young, not by any stretch of the imagination, but until the moment she first met the Widan Cortano di'Alexes, she had not felt her age; it settled around her now, an ailment and an affliction that she feared—in
this
night, unblessed by the Lady's radiance—she would never be healed of.