Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (57 page)

"Hey, you!" Elena shouted. "Jewel!"

Jewel's gaze slid from the Matriarch to her cousin.

"Don't stand there sweating for no reason—help us!"

"I—I can get help if you need it—"

"Help with your own hands."

"They're not very strong."

It was Margret who laughed, the sound halfway between mirth and derision. "They're strong enough. You walked through the Lady's fire to reach us. You—if rumor and story is true—faced the Lady down to save her Lake."

"That's not as hard as pulling a wheel from a wagon. Trust me. I've traveled with a merchant caravan a time or two, and I've been 'helpful.' And most of them are still speaking about it."

"This is no merchant caravan. This is no task for a merchant. Lend us your hands here, Jewel ATerafin, and I'll count myself in your debt." Her voice had lost humor and gained intensity; it was worse for the exchange.

But she spoke the truth.

"Voyani debt is not undertaken lightly."

"So I've heard." The Matriarch moved to make room for the member of House Terafin.

"Neither is accepting that debt."

At that, the Matriarch smiled. "You've got good sources, whoever they are."

"I don't understand what you want."

"No," she said softly. "You don't. Most Arkosans outside of this caravan don't understand it either. Yollana might. I don't know. Each of the Voyani families make their crossings in their own ways, and while it's not forbidden to watch it—if you're here—it
is
forbidden to speak of it." She picked up the wrench.

"And you want my help?"

"Yes," Elena answered softly.

"Why?"

"Because," it was Nicu who answered, drawing his arms across his chest. The petulance that she associated with him had left his face; he was an attractive man with shoulders that were broader and stronger than they seemed. "It's a binding."

"Binding?" She hesitated.

Elena laughed; the laugh was not without barb.

"Adam! Have you found it yet?"

"Maybe!"

Margret snorted. She turned to Elena and said, "You tell her. We're never going to get off the sand if I don't help Adam." She accepted the hand that Nicu offered, pushing herself through the open doorway and into the depths of her home.

"Elena?"

"I don't know why she asked you to help," the Matriarch's heir began.

It was Jewel's turn to snort. She did. "You brought me here."

Elena shrugged. Had the grace to look embarrassed. "True enough."

"You don't want to answer the question."

"I—I don't know how to answer it. This part—" she said indicating the wheel with a lift of her right shoulder, "this part isn't all that important. It's just hard work."

"That's why they let me help," Nicu added. But again, there was a lack of petulance in the words that made them easy on the ears. He was, Jewel thought, happy. Excited. She was surprised at just how young he looked—although she shouldn't have been; she knew from personal experience that struggling with the weather could age a person damn fast. "Come on; once Margret finds her witches' brew, she's going to get serious. Let's get the last two wheels off before then."

Jewel rolled up her sleeves. Elena frowned. "Get out of that habit, Jay," she said, using the name as if the other words that might apply—stranger, outsider, ni'Voyani—had been considered and barely tossed aside. "Once we enter the Sea, you'll be asked to do work, but you'll suffer if you roll up your sleeves to do it."

Jewel nodded. Let her sleeves fall again.

When Margret and her brother came out of the wagon, the third wheel—which was much heavier than the Terafin's merchant wagon wheels in Jewel's admittedly subjective recall—had been grounded; the fourth stubbornly clung to the axle until Margret pushed Elena out of the way and bent her own shoulders to the task.

Between Margret, Nicu, and Jewel, the wheel came off the wagon's side and after teetering a moment in protest, was laid to rest against the ground with the other three.

Adam peered out of the elevated door. "Was that the last one?"

Margret apparently didn't have the energy for sarcasm, although in her position Jewel would have been greatly tempted to employ it, given her expression. The Matriarch nodded.

"I'll tell Stavos."

She nodded again. He leaped out of the upper room, landed, and took two steps—then he hesitated and turned his head toward them. "Will you wait for me?"

"I have to get started. But," she added, as he opened his mouth in what was clearly the start of a protest, "it'll take a while."

"It doesn't take that long!"

"It didn't take Momma that long. It'll take
me
a while." She rolled up her sleeve.

Jewel shot Elena a look; Elena smiled cheerfully. "You want to tell her she's being a fool, go right ahead. It's her skin."

And I hadn't noticed it was particularly thick.

The Matriarch was intent on her work now, and her work—to Jewel's untrained eye—seemed to involve a large, cylindrical jar, her left hand, a paintbrush that had obviously seen better days, and the walls of the wagon itself.

"Do you need help?"

Margret paused for just a moment. Then, without a word, she handed Jewel the jar and the brush. "What will you offer Arkosa?"

The phrase had the feel and weight that words gathered when they had been said once a year for generations. Had they been said flippantly or angrily, Jewel's reply would have been different.

She bowed to the Matriarch, the gesture reflecting the unusual gravity of the other woman's tone. "I have so little of value to offer Arkosa," she replied, following the cadence of Margret's voice with words that were far less practiced, less bent to the form of ritual.

But she knew what to offer. She
knew
. Keeping the grimace off her face, she bent and lowered the jar carefully to earth. Rising, she held out her left hand, palm up. "But what I have, take; use what you must in the defense of Arkosa."

"What do you offer Arkosa?" Margret said again. Her gaze was level.

"Water," she replied. "Water of life, of my life."

The shape of Margret's eyes changed significantly. "You understand what you offer." No question in the words.

Jewel nodded.

"But your family forsook the
Voyanne
."

It was, Jewel knew, one of the deepest insults one Voyani could offer another—and it was usually offered on the open road between squabbling Voyani families—although squabble was probably the wrong word for something that claimed so many lives, year round.

"There are many ways of forsaking a thing; many ways of deserting. Perhaps, Matriarch of Arkosa, if what you say is true, and my family did forsake the open road, the
Voyanne
did not forsake my family."

It was Elena who spoke. "Well answered," she said softly.

"I've had to learn to be good with words."

"It's not your words we want."

"I know. But heritage betrays me. With the Voyani, you get words no matter what."

Margret's laugh filled the silence that Jewel's observation had left. "Give us your words, Jewel of Terafin. Give us your blood. We will take whatever you offer, no matter how meager. You came to us in the fires."

"And she'll leave us that way as well," Elena said softly.

Both Jewel and Margret turned to look at her.

"'Lena?"

Jewel said nothing. Although she had never seen her own face when she was possessed by the peculiar certainty of a vision that masquerades as instinct or knowledge, she knew the look immediately when it adorned another's.

She did not want to ask. She was completely certain that she didn't want to know. But the gift had never been kind.

"A visitor will come from a long way off to die. With you. And his death will burn," Elena said, her wide eyes fixed on a spot that was both farther and closer to her than Jewel, Margret, or Nicu could ever be. "It will take you away from us when we need you the most."

Jewel
? Avandar's voice.

Go away.

I assume that means you're fine.

She didn't answer.

Jewel reached out to touch Elena.

Elena looked up and the moment was lost. The words, and the memory, were not—but Jewel was used to swallowing memory whole; if it ate at her from the inside, it would have company. "I think," she said evenly, wondering if
this
was what the subjects of her own visions felt like, "that's enough. The Matriarch is waiting, and the Arkosans cannot leave until the Matriarch is ready. They have waited—we have waited— counting on the scant shadows the Lady provides across this open plain, for too many days as it is."

Elena shook herself. She pulled her hand—slowly—from Jewel's. "Yes. You're right." But she did not meet Jewel's eyes. Which meant, no doubt, that there had been more.

Why not just hear it out?

Because there's not a damn thing I can do about it
. Knowledge settled around her like chilly Northern water. She pulled it close enough that she didn't have to inspect it, wondering why Elena had had such a vision when she herself hadn't.

The Matriarch climbed back into the recesses of the wagon, and when she returned, she carried a wide, deep bowl. It had been carved, with care, from a dark, heavy wood; its lip was a relief of symbols that might once have been language. Although the Voyani spoke Torra as fluently as low clansmen, they did not use that language for their rituals. Nor did they use symbols such as the one that lay, in relief, at the bowl's center. At first glance it looked like the full moon or the naked sun, but across its face were markings that she had never seen.

"What is it?"

The old moon
, a voice said, whispering so quietly in her ear she almost bent to catch the words. Avandar. Avandar's voice. The sun was getting awfully chilly in these parts.

"We call it the Lady's secret face, although," Margret said, with a flash of a smile, "as you're looking at it now, it can't be all that secret. It can't be invoked except by blood. And we cannot leave without invoking it."

"Do you ever use your own?"

"My blood? I would use my blood in a heartbeat," Margret replied with unusual earnestness, "but it's forbidden."

"Voyani blood cannot be used?"

"The blood of the. Matriarch cannot be offered," the Matriarch replied. "Not here, although it… will be, later."

"Is it bloodline dependent?"

"No, although the blood of my brother could not be used with great success, and the blood of my heir with less."

Jewel asked, "And the blood of a stranger?"

"If willingly offered, and willingly accepted, it is the strongest," she replied.

"Isn't that ironic? The Voyani are almost legendary for their dislike of outsiders."

"We don't kill them all," Margret countered, shrugging.

"Maybe this is why—they have a use."

"Maybe. You ask questions like a merchant who is fully aware of the value of what he sells."

"I
am
a merchant; if someone wants something I have to offer, no matter how highly I prize it—or how little—I know it has value." She tried hard not to wince when Margret drew a large dagger. She didn't bother to suppress the reaction when the dagger's edge bit her; it did not cut the fleshy palm that she'd offered; it hit vein.

"Yours is not the only blood we will spill." The Matriarch's heir spoke as she watched Margret cut not hand, but the vein that led to it. She had the grace to wince.

"Perhaps not," the voice that Jewel least wanted to hear said. "Although that
can
be arranged."

Avandar Gallais reached for Jewel's wrist. Her right wrist.

He was
furious
.

His face was expressionless, his voice about as warm as desert night. But his eyes were like the flat of a steel blade; they reflected the light.

Jewel wasn't sure what was worse: the throbbing pain in a wrist that presented the possibility of severe blood loss, or the throbbing pain in the other wrist, where the mark on her arm—his gift—had begun to burn. Avandar no longer surprised her, but when she glanced from his face to the face of her Voyani companions, she realized that that complacency was a gift of long acquaintance.

The three had formed a tight knot, and the dagger that had been used to cut her wrist was now held out as a weapon. Held warily.

She watched her blood fall across the cracked leather of her favorite boots; it was absorbed by the faded stain, but not quickly enough to prevent its spill into the hard sand that settled beneath tenacious, wiry scrub.

Red dust rose in its wake, as if her sacrifice had allowed a ghost or a spirit trapped beneath the hard earth to take form and shape, to vie for freedom beneath the unforgiving glare of the Lord.

Although she felt the heat of Avandar's anger—and his anger had never
felt
heated from the outside—more clearly than she felt the sun, she looked up at the glinting steel of Margret's dagger.

It had come out of the sheath very quietly.

"Matriarch?"

They both turned at the word.

"Give me the bowl."

There was a moment of total silence which was followed almost seamlessly by a moment of total panic, and although neither was broken by words, the flurry of sudden activity spoke clearly enough. The bowl flew toward the small rain of blood in Elena's shaking hands.

Avandar's anger, if anything, grew deeper.

"There's no point in being pissed off," Jewel heard herself say, although in truth the pain in her wrist was now unpleasant. "It was
my
choice."

"If a two-year-old accepts the poison offered it in the form of sugar, should I then blame the child?"

"If casting blame makes you feel better, go ahead."
Really
unpleasant. "But I forbid you to—"

"To what?"

She looked up; met Elena's panicked face. "Is this supposed to happen?" The blood in the bowl was moving. Writhing.

"I—I don't know. The only person who's seen it is Margret, and she—"

"No." Margret's ashen pallor was answer enough. It wasn't the answer Jewel was hoping for, but it would have to do. "What is it doing?"