Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (102 page)

"When the gods die."

She rose. "Gods have already died."

"Gods may kill gods, Sen Margret; that is their covenant; that is their stake in the game that they play. What they kill, they subsume. What they take, they bring a different life to. But when the End of Days begins, it is said that mortals will kill gods, and those deaths will be true deaths; there will be no rebirth, and the lands at last will grow wild and unkept. Then, the Firstborn will know age and decay. Then, the gods will know fear and hunger. Then, the mortals will hold the key to the heart of a far greater kingdom than the Cities of Man." The Oracle drew her hands to her chest.

"I do not understand."

"You understood my words."

"Your words, Firstborn, yes. But… if you speak of the death of the Firstborn, why do you offer me aid?"

"I am the Oracle," she replied quietly. "I stand at the center of all paths. I speak not of the inevitable, but of the possible. And I fear all things equally."

"And at the End of Days, what will there be?"

"Poverty," the Oracle replied serenely. "Poverty of vision, of power, of beauty. All will dwindle." She bowed. "You have your answer. I have paid my debt. What you tell your children now is your choice."

"If we do not… invoke… this history, what will happen?"

"Do you not know?"

"No."

"The Lord of Night will rule."

Beauty. Power. Grandeur.

Vision.

The Sen Margret bowed her head. When she raised it, the Oracle was gone.

Margret of Arkosa stood in an empty room. The voices of her mother, and her mother's mother, were stilled. But her hands were upon the Heart of Arkosa, and her fingers brushed the hands of the Serra Diora.

The past and the present existed, inseparable, in this moment. She did not want to lose either. Or to claim either.

"Margret," Diora said, making a question of her name.

Do you understand now, Margret
? Her mother's voice. Evallen's voice.
Do you understand why
?

No
. Then, grudgingly,
Yes
.

I had to know. I had to see the creatures who served the Lord of Night with my own eyes. And then, when I understood the truth that Evayne a'Nolan had offered me, I had to make a choice. The Heart spoke to me in a voice I had never heard.

And it spoke to me in a voice that I recognized.

If you are here, I did not choose poorly. But if you are here, Daughter, you are faced with a choice that I was too cowardly to make.

If you raise the City, he will come, and it is upon the Arkosans that the force of his fury will fall. Perhaps he will not come in your lifetime. Perhaps he will come in the lifetime of your daughter, or your daughter's daughter; gods do not feel the imperative of time as mortals do. But he
will
come
.

Yet if you fail to raise the City, he will war in the North, and if the North falls, we will fail.

"Why do you say that?"

"Margret?"

Because, Margret, when Sen Margret reached out and captured the blood of the Oracle, she blessed the Heart of Arkosa with it. I will tell you what we did not know while we lived. A boy has been born in the North who has not yet grown to manhood, and an ancient weapon is waking as he grows.

That weapon, the gods would destroy, if they knew how to find it. They do not. Nor does the boy.

The Lord of Night does not know him, yet, but he will. And if his attention falls too soon to the North, and that boy dies, the Cities might stand for a generation. Two. They will not stand forever.

"We are too few," she whispered.

Yes.

"Margret?"

"Can you hear my mother's voice?" she whispered.

Diora was silent for a long moment, her expression completely neutral. Margret hated the silence. The. Sen Margret had been good at waiting; the Matriarch was not. But she would have to learn, she thought bitterly. If she had the time.

"Yes, Margret. I can hear her."

Margret hovered a moment between panic and relief. Her hands were shaking. "Help me."

Diora's eyes widened slightly.

"Help me," she said again. "Not as sister to Sen, whatever that means—that's gone. I never want that back. I never want—" She looked away. "Help me as you helped me in the storm, Serra."

The Serra's expression was inexplicably gentle. "I did not help you in the storm."

"You did. You forced me to acknowledge my duty, to accept it."

"I knew what your duty was, then."

Margret laughed. "And now?"

"Now? This is Arkosa. You know what you face, and you know, better than I, what you
will
face. There is power here."

"I don't trust myself to wield it." There. It was said. "I
hate
what
she
was. I hate what this city was. Everything I have ever loved about my life does not belong to a place like this."

"Margret."

"How can I rule a place such as this?"

"You will have the Heart."

"It is
not
my heart, Diora. I understand that now. It was
never
my heart."

"And where is your heart, Margret?"

"With my mother. With my mother's people. With my father, and my father's people. With the open sky, be it ruled by sun or moon. If this is home, I don't want it."

Diora gripped the Heart of Arkosa carefully in her right hand; her left, she slid free.

It was cool and soft against Margret's cheek.

"Where is your home, Diora?"

The Serra's gaze was steady as it met hers. "I have no home."

"And you have no desire to find one?"

"Does it matter? I know what I must do. My path does not end in Arkosa. It travels to Averda, Mancorvo, or Raverra. It ends where it began." She pulled her hand away from Margret's cheek and looked at her palm.

In the Heart's light, Margret saw the gashes wood had made in flesh. Imperfection.

"I do not know what the Cities of Man were. But I know what the Matriarch of Arkosa
is
. Do you despise your ancestors? You have the freedom to choose what of their history you accept, and what you reject.

"Do you dislike what the Cities were? Then change them. Make
this
place your home, and offer it to the people you have chosen to lead."

"I was born to lead them."

"You could have walked away." Diora looked at the ground beneath their feet. Spoke the words, not in the ancient tongue, but in Torra. "We will live as free men, and we will fight as free men; not for power, nor for love, will we again serve the Lord of Night."

"There was more," Margret said weakly.

"That is the heart of the vow. It's a vow you could make, and live by."

"I know." She clutched at the Heart as if she were afraid it would fall. Or as if she were afraid she would drop it.

"Margret." Diora did not move, but her tone alone conveyed the sense of motion; she was closer, somehow. "Not one of the Matriarchs is speaking. Not one."

"So?"

"I have learned something of the Voyani. If they were concerned, they would speak, and speak freely. But their silence can only mean that they do not believe you would turn away from Arkosa, no matter what you have learned today."

Margret looked at the Heart, just the Heart.

"Why do you hesitate?"

"I don't know." She shrugged. "Maybe I'm tired of bleeding." The smile she offered was wan. She looked at the circles beneath their feet, and remembered what she had drawn there, and why. "I hated you so much," she said softly.

"I know."

"When this is over—"

"This will never be over."

"When this part is finished, then. What will you do?"

"Go North."

"And will you find what you're looking for there?"

"I don't know. You found what you sought here, and it was not what you thought you were seeking. Maybe… it will be the same with me."

"What will you do?"

"If," Diora replied, glancing at her hand, "If I am still suitable, if the travel beneath the open sky, upon the open road, has not diminished my value, I will find the kai Leonne."

It was the answer Margret expected, but it stung anyway. "And will you marry him? Will you bear his children?"

"If he survives. Yes. Yes, Margret, I will marry him. I. will be the crown. I will be the symbol."

"You will be the symbol of the Tyr." Margret spat. "I
hate
it. Diora—you can't be happy—" She stopped. Looked more closely at the Serra's face, at the expression of serenity that had settled around her wide eyes, her perfect lips. "Can you?"

"Happy?" The word was remote. But the Serra's expression was not. "I don't know. I no longer know what happiness is. But—"

"Yes?" She spoke too quickly.

Diora's smile was as still as the woman herself. "I will be grateful for the rest of my life for this journey."

"Why?"

"Because the Heart of Arkosa believes that
I
was once the sister to the Sen Margret." She waited, and when Margret did not speak, she continued. "And I believe it as well, because I want to believe it."

"Why?"

"If
I
once lived and died, it means that
my
dead might live again. I might never meet them. I might never know. But the possibility that they are waiting for me…" She bowed her head. Raised it again, her eyes glimmering in the Heart's light. "It is more than I hoped for. When we leave this place, when we finish here, if the sky is waiting and the sun is high, I will listen to the wind. And the wind will be… just the wind."

Margret bowed her head. "I want you to stay."

"I know."

Margret had asked for truth. Diora had asked for duty. Margret closed her eyes. She had never been good at farewells.

"Ruatha would have loved you, had she ever met you."

"Ruatha?"

"One of my sister-wives. The least graceful. The most fierce." She lifted her hand again. Three bands lay across her fingers, simple bands that Margret had never really paid much attention to. "Can you hold the Heart a moment?"

Margret nodded.

The Serra Diora hesitated. Then she lifted her pale hands, her perfect hands, scarred or no; they disappeared behind the nape of her neck. She removed a single strand of gold; it was finely crafted, the links interweaving leaves and tiny blossoms.

Her hands shook a moment as she lowered the chain, and then she said, softly, her gaze cast groundward, "I would be honored if you would wear this."

"But—"

"It is not of great value; you might sell it, if you desired, and receive some small compensation for it. But it has significance to me."

Margret paled. "I have nothing to give you in return."

"You have already given me something that no one, no matter how wise, or blessed, no matter how powerful, could have given me." Her hands still trembled as she held the chain. Margret wanted to touch them, to still them, but she held the Heart of Arkosa now. "I wore this chain at the Festival of the Moon. The last true Festival."

"Diora, if it is special to you—"

"It is. I wore it in the cloistered garden of the Tyr'agar's harem. It was not special then, but I wore it because I could carry three rings around its links and no one would be wiser. If I had time, if I had skill, I would craft you a ring like those: a heart of emerald, and beside each, a pearl.

"But I do not have the time. You do not have it." She reached, very carefully, across the Heart of Arkosa; her feet did not move. "You would have hated life in the harem."

She fumbled with the clasp, the Serra who never fumbled with anything. Margret felt the flutter of her fingers beneath wild Voyani hair. "It's too delicate," she mumbled.

"I carried the best of my hopes around this chain that night. I wanted to change the way the world was, I hoped—" She stopped speaking for a moment.

Margret could see her face so clearly she could not speak.

"And the world changed. It
did
change. I hated the change for months afterward. I hated the Lady, for giving me what I desired."

The Matriarch of Arkosa looked into the eyes of the Serra Diora en'Leonne, and saw the desert in them, the desert at night.

She did not know why, but the words of the cradle song came to her, then—words that she had never understood as a child. "The heart, the heart is a dangerous place."

Diora's eyes were now luminescent. Trails of light swept across her perfect cheeks. Margret could not breathe; in that moment, in this terrible room, the burden of all Matriarchs ever to be born within the cradle of her hands, she realized that she had never in her life seen anything so beautiful as that face, those tears.

But the Serra had not yet finished speaking.

"I do not hate it now. I thought that the world had died when they died. It did. But it was my world, not
the
world. Ruatha would have liked you. You are so much like her. I have known you for so short a time. If I could stay…" She shook her head. But she did not touch her eyes. "But I cannot stay, and you cannot leave. I do not want the only binding between us to be the Heart of Arkosa. I do not want the only binding to be a binding of women long dead. I must make my stand against the Lord of Night. But it will bring me comfort to know that a sister brings life to the barren lands in order to make that same stand." She straightened then, grace returning to her movements.

"I never thought I would walk in such a dangerous place again."

She lifted her face slowly, and pressed her lips against Margret's rough cheek. Margret returned that brief kiss.

It was funny, how much like blood tears tasted.

It was over.

It was over with the simple thrust of a blade.

All noise, all thunderous roar, faded; the earth ceased its trembling rumble. Cracked and broken ground at last grew still, and above its newly opened fissures, the two creatures who served the Lord of Night stood.

But Lord Telakar had become the awkward sheath for the Lord Ishavriel's sword. Shadow seeped from the wound, not blood; it was cold in the light of the sun.