Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (43 page)

* * *

"What is she doing?"

"I am sorry, Yollana," Teresa said softly. "I… do not know."

Yollana was moving as quickly as she could. Unfortunately, speed was relative; her gait, awkward and broken, was slow. She had lost all care for dignity; speed was the only essential. If she could have left Teresa behind, she probably would have—but she was hampered by injury and dependency, and she was too used to accepting the judgment of the Lord and the Lady to rail against infirmity.

"At least we don't enslave our own."

"No. You kill them when it suits you, which is no different from the clans; you sacrifice your sons instead of your daughters, which is."

"Shut
up
."

But Diora's silence, when it came, was no more welcome to Margret.

Elena came up behind her. Close enough to touch, but not stupid enough. "'Gret," she said, as softly as she could.

Margret held out a hand. It was still a fist. Still shaking. It was also a command. "Don't presume to judge us."

"I do not judge you, Matriarch," the Serra said, sitting, regal, her face red in only one place, her hands across the samisen strings as if they were her only labor. "And I do not particularly care if you judge me."

"You should."

"Perhaps. And perhaps I will care when I no longer have anything that you require. But in that, you are no different from any powerful man who has held my life in his hands."

Yollana was almost there. She elbowed her way past Arkosan Voyani because—for perhaps the first time in Serra Teresa's experience—presence alone did not move them. Their backs were toward her; Margret and Diora held them all.

Na'dio
, Teresa thought. She did not speak, although she might have. But the plans her almost-daughter made were, in the end, her plans. The loss that drove them was her loss. Hard, to be denned by loss.

And in this world, beneath this sky, with these gods, impossible to be denned by anything else.

* * *

She
knew
that she could not afford to lose face, not here, not to this interloper, this stranger. She
knew
that this was not a fight she should have started, and having started it, it was not one that she should continue. She was Matriarch of Arkosa.

Bitter, that.
No
.

She wasn't Matriarch because her mother, in secrecy, had decided to go to the clansmen, to die at their hands, and to give the Heart of Arkosa to… this… this pale, perfect stranger. Even in death, Evallen's plans meant so much more to Arkosa than Margret's.

"Do not compare me to the clansmen," she said, trying to rein in the anger that was driving her tongue.

The Serra inclined her head in a manner that was calculated to look subservient while maintaining the spirit of defiance. She offered silence. Her hands had not moved as they lay against the samisen strings.

Before Margret could stop herself, she lashed out; her boot slammed into the side of the instrument, driving it off silken lap.

It landed on the sparse grass with a dull thud; the strings thrummed in unison, a quiet cacophony that sounded wrong even to Margret's ears. Had the Serra been one of hers, had she been an Arkosan, Margret would have stepped back. She wouldn't have apologized—a Matriarch wouldn't have been expected to—but the retreat would have served the same purpose.

Why does she make you so crazy? Why do you want to spit daggers every time you see her face? Because she's beautiful? Because your stupid cousins and uncles and yes, even your aunts, are captivated by her every time they walk by? Because they think her brave just for condescending to be
here
living the life of a
guest
when they all walk the
Voyanne
until they die
?

No.

Evallen. You trusted
her.

For a moment—for just a moment—a ripple of expression marred the Serra's perfectly composed face. But it was gone quickly. Her empty hands fell, like weightless, delicate leaves in a dance of breeze and wind, to a now empty lap; she folded them, as if they were two halves of a fan, and waited, the posture as much of an accusation as anything that perfect could be. Margret's shadow had grown longer.

"'Gret," Elena said, her voice harsher, her grip more painful.

"Not
now
, Elena."

The Serra Diora lifted her chin. Met the eyes of the Matriarch. "You think the clansmen—or women—cold-blooded. You think that to strike out in anger, to shout in frustration, to weep in pain, somehow makes the Voyani human." She turned a moment and deliberately looked at the now silent samisen. Although no words accompanied the glance, silence was her weapon.

Margret saw that now, clearly. She could not stop her hands from curving into fists, but they were loose fists now. Kicking the samisen had somehow crossed a line that striking the woman herself had not.

"Matriarch, you are wrong, and you expose yourself to the judgment of others by the fallacy of your judgment. Do you think that the man who sheds no tears at the death of his son is weak? Do you think that it is weakness that prevents the pain from showing?" Her eyes, her perfect eyes, lost some of that large, round beauty as they narrowed. "Then you understand
nothing
."

The Arkosan silence was sudden.

Into it, the Serra continued to speak. "You are angry. You strike. You have perhaps
once in your life
had to hide what you feel; perhaps once had to ignore your impulse to react. Once. Imagine, Matriarch, a lifetime of such perfect control.

"We
choose
what we share, and who we share it with, and like the Voyani, we do not share what we are with outsiders. But to assume that what we are is simply what you are witness to… is unwise. What you see is almost never the whole of the truth."

"What
I
see? They say that the Flower of the Dominion sat and watched the slaughter of all of the wives in her harem without raising a cry. I have not seen this for myself, but having seen you, I don't doubt it."

The Serra Diora di'Marano became still as only stone could be. For a moment, breath seemed to elude her.

Silence. Margret felt a vicious, a curious, satisfaction; she also felt something else she had no desire to name.

"And having seen you," the Serra said, speaking so coldly it seemed that she had swallowed desert night and transformed it into words, "I understand why Evallen of Arkosa chose not to trust you to do the necessary and the wise."

Margret
did
pale.

"You want truth, Matriarch? Very well. We all want others to be vulnerable while we protect ourselves from the things that make us flinch. She gave me what I carry without once speaking to you about her intent because she knew that if we could not stand together against the Lord of Night, we would fail separately. But she was afraid that your temper and your prejudice would never allow you to see that, so she enforced it." The Serra turned her hands over, so they were cupped in her lap; she did not otherwise move. "We do each other no kindness here. How much more of the truth must be said?"

Perhaps none. The silence was heavy, the way a storm laden sky is. The Serra looked at the harsh, dry ground in the distance, and her skin deepened in color.

"What do you know of
truth
?" Margret spit back.

"Ruatha, don't—" The Serra froze, the words deserting her as they almost never did. There was no expression on her face; the anger that had been there—and it
had
—was locked away from the eyes of the strangers who bore witness.

Margret's hands were shaking; she could not ease the shape of fists, so she lifted them and sat them on the slight shelf of her hips. "What do any of the clans know as truth?
We
saved the South—and you—"

"
Be silent
/"

Both women stopped. Yollana's voice was unmistakable. The oldest of the four Matriarchs had been, until this moment, cautious, even diplomatic, because she stayed in the caravan of another Matriarch. She was wise, in her fashion, but in age much like the Voyani Matriarchs tended to become: increasingly short of temper. She had never suffered fools gladly, but in Arkosa had managed, with effort, to overcome her natural impulse to smack the ones she came across; they were, after all, Margret's problem.

That the biggest fool was their leader had come as a surprise. Yollana was of an age and position where surprises were almost never pleasant.

But she was Voyani; she had both temper and a sense of responsibility. There were no betrayals so profound that anger and fear could not conspire to produce them—but there were some that could not be forgiven.

And the Havallan Matriarch did not desire the death of all of the Arkosans who might bear witness to what fell out of Margret's foolish mouth if she were allowed to continue.

But she knew that such interruption could prove costly later. Any display of overt power in the wrong territory often did. The wind made no sound on these plains; it was still. But she heard the echo of its voice in the whispers of Arkosa as the uncles and aunts, the cousins, the brothers and sisters, slowly realized what had happened: She had given an order. The Matriarch of Arkosa had obeyed.

Margret did not move. She had not turned to see who had spoken. She had not offered her acknowledgment in any way save obedience—but obedience was enough.

The stillness stretched.

It was broken not by Margret, not by the Arkosans, not by Yollana of the Havalla Voyani. And if these two could not move, the rest of the Voyani could not, although Elena's hand had once again found its way to the familiar perch of Margret's shoulder.

Only the Serra Diora di'Marano seemed free to move, and she did—with the same grace and delicacy so despised by Margret. She reached to the side. There, from Ramdan's shadow, she retrieved the samisen that Margret had dislodged from its place in her lap.

She cradled it as she lifted it, her fingers carefully inspecting the flat of the surface that rested on her lap for any crack or gouge. She had chosen to leave all instruments behind, but someone had found this; someone had delivered it to her seraf.

Kallandras?

Ona Teresa?

Did it matter? It was here, reminder of the life she had forsaken, and she clung to it in her fashion. The samisen strings thrummed as her fingers passed across them, dancing now, light but certain. She listened and heard only silence; lifted her head and saw, as a response to the music, the face of uncertainty in the men and women who watched.

She had done this. She felt a bitter, bitter shame. Not since she was four years old, not since she was a child in fact, and not merely impulse or desire, had she lost control so completely.

In her adult life she had only argued so boldly with one other woman. Even with her Ona Teresa, her strikes and parries were the acceptable nuances—and edges—of polite words and silences.

Her hands were shaking. The strings echoed the quiver of flesh in a way that she was certain only Ona Teresa or Kallandras himself would catch.

Why? Why now when she had not—

Ruatha.

Her fingers danced like leaves in a strong, strong wind. Music stumbled after them. She had entered the storm. The storm had entered her.

The world had died around her. It had died screaming. It had died whimpering. It had died in the silence of bone being broken at a distance. She had not raised her voice. She had not lifted her head. Nothing she had ever done had prepared her for the death that had awaited her in that room—but everything she had ever done had prepared her to leave it; to leave it, alive and whole, her face as perfectly composed as it had been the day she had arrived as adornment for the kai Leonne.

Every word Margret had spoken was true.

She had been unable to think. But afterward—after, in a stillness of clean silk, the unsightly blood gone at the hands of her father's serafs, along with the sari that had been stained by the carelessness of the Tyran—she had thought it would be the hardest thing that she, that
anyone
would ever face.

But there was worse: memory.

In the face of the Lord, she was impassive, but when the Lady's time began, so did the bitter regret. It was sharp and terrible in its unexpected ferocity.

Her sister-wives had seen her use her gift, and her curse; they understood the strength of the gift that they had never once named. They had died believing that she had betrayed them.

She had.

They would never have cared about vengeance.

Ruatha. Faida. Deirdre. Serafs, all. Serra Diora en'Leonne was clanswoman. In the harem, there had been so little difference between the two, the most accomplished of the High Court's Serras could believe that difference merely a word and a slight lack of polish. In the harem, with the child she had saved—and for what fate?—in her arms, she could believe that they were family in a way that defied blood, birth, and time.

They were gone.

She remained. She had thought if she were strong enough not to die with them, she could make their killers pay. And she had begun; she had maneuvered the pieces with a skill that General Alesso di'Marente could not match for subtlety and timing. Her hands on the strings faltered again, skipping and losing a beat.

The dead did not return. And in dreams, they granted her no benediction for the victory she had won.

They were serafs. They did not understand that to
win
was everything. In the end, everything. The Lord had no patience for the weak, but he granted his strength to the victor—no matter how long, how subtle, how costly the battle.

And everything was empty.

Her gift caught the stutter and hesitation of shaking hand and made out of it a current, an eddy, some artifact of emotion. She played around it, transforming a flaw into a strength; her strength. Was it not always so?

If she had had the ability to walk across the face of time, to make a track of small and even footprints, delicately spaced in just the way she had been raised to space them, she would have gone back to the harem and the darkness and the fire, and when the Tyran had crossed the boundary from the outside world into
her
world, she would have done everything in her power to stop them.