Michelle West - Sun Sword 01 - The Broken Crown (7 page)

He came that evening, again at the bridge between darkness and
light; dusk. Ashaf was not surprised to hear the knock at the sliding
door of her one-room home. Her husband had built it, with the Tor's
permission, when they'd birthed their third live child. He was proud,
said the Tor, of their fecundity; he hoped that their children would
serve the clan as well as their parents had.

Oh, her husband had been so proud of the praise offered. And
proud, too, of the fact that he could live, almost like a poor
clansman, in a home of his own. Perhaps it was his hubris that angered
the Lord above, although it had not angered the Tor. She would never
know.

You are maudlin
, she told herself.
The
Lady's night is going to be a long one
. She rose, took the
steps necessary to reach the screen. There, silhouetted against the
darkness, she saw him for the second time. No face, no clothing, no
voice—but she knew him by the shadows his lamp cast against the opaque
cloth. She hesitated a moment, wondering whether to feign sleep, and
knowing at the same time that he had
heard
her
quiet shuffle to this entranceway.

She opened the screen.

"Ashaf kep'Valente," he said, and he bowed. He held a lamp
that was burning brightly, some reminder of the Lord's power in the
Lady's night. But she thought that he held it for her benefit, and not
his own, for his eyes were the color of starless night.

She had always been taught that the golden-eyed pretenders
were the demon changelings born to earth, but she felt at this moment
that gold was life and night was death; the echoes of the Leonne wars.

And she was sun-scorched if she was going to let this man
intimidate her in her own home, this one remaining artifact of her past
life. "I don't believe I know you," she told him stiffly. "And
strangers don't cross
this
threshold."

"Very well," he replied, bowing with such perfect grace she
felt old, ungainly, ugly. "I am Isladar."

"Isladar of?"

"Just Isladar." He rose, lifting the lamp in his left hand.
"As you will be just Ashaf, if you so choose. Have I satisfied the
guardian of this abode? Might I be given leave to enter?"

There were old stories about creatures that could not enter,
unless invited—but then could not be forced to leave before they had
exacted their terrible price, if they could be forced to leave at all.
She hesitated a moment, and then, feeling foolish, stepped aside. It
was clear that this man had power, much of it unseen, a thing made not
by birth and blood and rank, but by something other. If he were Widan,
if he wielded the full night of the Sword of Knowledge, he could strike
her down with a gesture, and destroy the timber and wood and cloth of
her husband's making. What point in ill manners?

"But bring the lamp," she added. "We don't get a lot of
tallow, and we don't waste what we have."

"Even so."

He stayed the evening, whiling it away as if he were a chisel,
and time a rock or a piece of wood. But he asked her for nothing.
Instead, he asked about this place, this one-room dwelling. She
demurred, saying little; she did not know this man enough to want to
share the few precious memories she did have. He did not seem
displeased, and turned his discourse to the question of wood, of the
type of wood that could be found in the Averdan valleys, and of the
finishes applied to this tiny home. She listened politely, thinking
that morning was going to be hard; she was not a young woman anymore,
to speak and while away the Lady's hours without suffering during the
Lord's.

As if hearing her, he rose, lifting his lamp and his light and
his regard, as if each were somehow a cloud. "Ashaf kep'Valente," he
said softly, bowing. "The stars are out; the night is not a dark one. I
thank you for your company this eve."

She began to kneel before him, as if he were the Tor, and
stopped; then she said, "And I thank you for yours. It is not… what I
expected."

"Oh? And do you, Ashaf kep'Valente, know what it is, exactly,
that you
did
expect?" And the darkness was in his
eyes, and along the glittering edge of the teeth in his sensuous
half-smile.

She could not speak then. Words would have marred his menace,
and she greatly desired to use them, but she felt his power again, and
it made her feel young, and in youth, she had known the value of
silence, of remaining hidden. The Lady's smile was dark this eve.

He stared at her a long while. Then he said, "Might I return
to visit you again?"

"Could I stop you?"

"With a word." He lifted the lamp; its light lengthened his
face and darkened the shadows around it.

But she nodded. "As you will." And turned, feeling old,
knowing that the menace and the strangeness, the sense of hidden power
and danger, did not change the fact that he had not hurt her, although
he had every opportunity to do so.

When
, she thought,
did I
become such a lonely old woman
?

The earth that lay beneath the silvered moon was silent, and
the silence was all the answer that she had never wanted.

As a concubine in the court of the Tor's father—a man who
returned to her in nightmares for years after she had been
"discarded" —she had been envied by the other serafs in the village;
they knew that she would be taken from their toil and hardship, and
given a wife's name, and a wife's place, at the side of a man of power;
that she would live in luxury, and never again have to face the heat of
the Lord's face, the chill of the wind. And she had thought so herself,
as she was taken and cleaned and clothed and oiled. One night, two, and
the illusion was gone, although appearances had to be maintained. She
learned her manners, her diction, the nicety of movement and the tricks
by which the Tor might be pleased. She learned to sing and play the
samisen. To dance. She would not dance now.

In the harem, she had never slept well. There was always,
beneath the surface of sleep, a certain knowledge that, at any time,
the Tor—or the cerdan he thought to reward—might come upon her
unawares. She bore the old scars, some visible, most hidden; time under
the Lady's skies, with a gentle man whom the Tor's son—upon taking the
clan's title—had seen fit to grant her permission to marry, had slowly
masked and eased the viscerality of those memories. There had been
little love lost between the new Tor and the old.

But that husband had passed, like the pain, and under this
night sky, her sleep was as harsh a thing as it had once been during
those years.

Ashaf dreamed, and her dreams had never been kind.

The sound of the chimes woke her, or she thought it was
chimes; a hint of music lingered in the air. There was no light in the
room; she lay on her side on the worn, wide roll that had served her
for too many years. And she heard the voice.

But where Isladar's voice held the menace or danger of the
not-quite-known, this voice held something familiar. And besides, it
was night, and it was a woman's voice, and after all, night was the
Lady's time.

"Ashaf."

She was disoriented by the nearness of the word; thought, for
a moment, that the harem enclosed her again, and a wife had jostled her
to give her a few minutes of warning, granting her time to prepare, if
such preparation were possible. Kesli had done it, often, before her
untimely death. Kesli. She sat up quickly, stiffly, pulling the
sleeping silks up to cover her shoulders and breasts.

Except that there were no silks; there was a blanket of rough
cotton twill. She was home. Home.

"Ashaf."

"Who—who is it? Who's there?" She hated the sound of her
voice, when it came; it wobbled so much she knew she was making a
child's display of fear.

"Not a friend," the voice replied. "Do you mind if I bring a
little light into this place?"

"Not the Lord's light," Ashaf said, quartering herself with
the sign of the Lady's moon.

"Not the Lord's light, no." And light came, and it was the
Lady's light, a soft, silver glow that did not destroy the privacy of
night colors, but did allow a woman to see by.

Two women.

Not a friend
, Ashaf thought, repeating
the stranger's phrase to herself as she stared at the pale contours of
this other woman's face. She wore blue, a dark midnight blue that made
her seem one with the Lady's intent; the hood framed her face, hid her
arms. There were shadows about her and within her; Ashaf recognized
them at once, for they bowed her as well: old pain. Old fear.

"Who are you?"

"I am Evayne a'Nolan."

"a'Nolan? You are a Northerner, then."

"I have no home," the woman replied gravely, "But if names are
important, then, yes, I was named in the North."

"Names are important." Ashaf rose. "It seems this is a night
for visitors."

"It is night," the other woman said softly, "and in the South,
night is the time of possibility."

"Possibility." She paused. "You told me that you are not a
friend, yet I do not feel you to be an enemy."

"If a man is driving a wagon, and the weather is poor, and he
does not see the child that runs out into the road, the child is still
dead. That man, if you are the mother of the child, is no friend,
although he intended you no ill. An accident."

Ashaf felt the cold, then, but this Evayne did not stop
speaking; she merely paused a moment.

"And if a man is at the till of a ship, be it Northern or
Southern, and it is being pursued by pirates or vessels of war, and a
child falls overboard, and he
sees
this clearly,
but raises no cry because to stop is to lose the lives of the rest of
his passengers—although there is no guarantee that the ship will
escape, regardless—that man is less your friend. And that accident
becomes a choice.

"And that choice…" The woman in midnight blue lowered her face
a moment. "I have made that choice. And I have come to you to ask you
to make a choice as well."

"What choice?"

"I will not tell you, Ashaf; you will know it soon enough."

The older woman snorted. "Speak plainly."

"Very well. I would come to you in dream, but your dreams are
so distant and so troubled that the path has brought me here, instead,
where words are harder and much more solid.

"Ashaf kep'Valente, if you choose to leave your home, you will
journey to a place that defines darkness, and you will see, in the time
remaining to you, things that will make the days of your youth seem
easy by comparison."

Ashaf waited in silence, knowing that such an obvious choice
was not that: obvious. How could it be, and be called a choice at all?
She was patient now.

"And if you choose to leave your home, you will be a warrior,
but you will be unsung, and the war that you fight will have no reward
for you. Make no mistake; you will die before the battle is fully
joined. You will never see its end, and you will never know whether or
not your life and your effort made any difference at all. No one will
find your body; no one will say the rites by which the Lady's blessing
is conferred. Your story ends here, in this village; there will be no
one to tell it, to carry it on, to bring it to light."

It was the stranger who paled as she spoke, her eyes
darkening, her gaze falling; Ashaf kep'Valente thought that this Evayne
would feel more at ease speaking of her own death. She waited, still,
feeling detached.

"But if," the stranger said, and Ashaf thought,
ah,
now it comes
, "you choose this task—and it must be willingly
chosen—then you will begin the battle, and you will define some of the
rules by which it is fought. You will step into a war that started
before the birth of man—before the birth of the Firstborn—and your
presence will count for much. With or without you, the battle is
coming, and with it, the darkness that clan Leonne fought so long and
so hard against."

The clan Leonne. The clan that, by right of battle and
bloodshed, now ruled the Dominion of Annagar from beside the waters of
the Tor Leonne. Clan wars were clan wars, and they happened; Ashaf had
seen two in her life. The lot of a seraf changed little, except when
the raiding and reprisals were fierce—in which case, the serafs died.
When the war was over, they had either the old master, or a new one,
and they toiled, as ever.

But Leonne was made by no petty clan infighting. Ashaf knew
the old stories, although she was simple seraf. That the founder,
Leonne, had been given the Sun Sword by the Lord himself; that he had
fought to preserve the Lady's domain, in the name of the Lord. And
that, of course, he faced the priests of the so-called Lord of Night to
do so. Children's stories. True stories. So often, they were the same,
if you know how to understand what lay beneath the words. "I don't
understand."

"Don't you?"

"You're telling me if I choose to go on Lady knows what
journey, that I will be forgotten and unmourned."

"No, Ashaf—you will
never
be forgotten
and unmourned."

"And I'm to do this to save the—the world?" The old woman
laughed. "I am not a warrior, Evayne a'Nolan. Even in my youth, I could
not wield a clansman's sword. You ask me to fight? Then the darkness of
the night had befuddled you."

"Has it? There are territories over which battles are fought
in this world in which no sword is raised."

Ah, yes. How could she have forgotten, who had fought—and
lost—so many? And why was it that to win was to prepare for another
battle, but to lose was to lose all? Oh, she was tired, was Ashaf
kep'Valente. It was only when she was weary that the dead were so
strong.

"You wish me to make this journey."

"I wish you to know and understand that the price of it will
be, in the end, your death." There was no softness at all in the words.