Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (73 page)

We don't
, he replied, as if he couldn't hear it, as if it were possible not to.
They do
.

Kallandras raised face to sky. He did not look down, but said, "Lord Celleriant, I fear you will lose your battle if you hesitate."

The Arianni lord spun at once. "What?" Water did not cling to his face or his hair; his clothing carried it, but the weight did not encumber him.

"Can you not hear her? Someone is challenging the creature whose wings are the storm's heart. And… it hears her. I am certain of it."

She heard two things: The voice of her aunt, and the voice of the storm. The storm held sway. The wind was wild, savage; she had been forced to cling to the wagon with fingers, with arms, with the crook of her feet when it was necessary.

It was when she was trying to find purchase against the cabin wall that she found her first comfort: the symbols painted there in russet strokes were glowing faintly.

"Matriarch!"

The comfort was shortlived.

The storm had arrived. It hovered a hundred feet to her left, its wings the span of the horizon that she could clearly see in the downpour. Water did not dare to strike it; it rose above the element the way the Lord's face rose above the Dominion. Black, sleek, it unfolded a slender neck, a serpent's neck.

She saw its face, saw the first glimmering of color; an eye. Blue, she thought. Blue as the clearest of skies—as if it had swallowed all clarity, all sign of day, had subsumed it, and only this glint remained.

That and the white of teeth, the red of tongue.

"Matriarch!"

"Here!" The voice came, thin and reedy compared to the majesty of what they now faced.

Had visibility become so poor? She tried to look, but she could not turn her face away from the Serpent her power had summoned.

"We have its attention!" she shouted. "Should we not flee?"

"We've got more than its attention!" the Matriarch shouted back.

The neck elongated. Drew back. Snakes did that, before striking.

The Serra reached into the drenched folds of her Voyani robes. The rope around her waist saved her life and bruised her terribly when she let go of the rail with her right hand. But those bruises were rewarded when her hand gripped the haft of the dagger given her by Evallen of the Arkosa Voyani a lifetime ago, in the civilized danger of the Tor Leonne. What had the Arkosans called it?

Lumina Arden.

She drew it from its sheath; felt a warmth in her palm that had nothing to do with fire or flame. It spread. The blade shed light like a topaz caught in the sun's full glare as she exposed it to the storm. The edge glittered, she thought, like diamond.

The last time she had used this dagger, she had killed the Matriarch of Arkosa. Evallen.

She waited, hoarding the only power she had: her voice, the gift and curse that had informed the whole of her life.

She must be in the eye of the storm; she felt calm. There were words she had never spoken building behind the soft walls of her lips; when the serpent arrived, she would say them and be free.

And as she watched the serpent's head snake back, as she watched its descent, she wondered what the world would be like if all killings, all deaths, were acts of mercy.

Wondered if all deaths weren't, in the end.

But if they were, she was to be denied mercy.

The jaws of the Serpent—and it was a Serpent—were taller, when extended, than she. Its breath was the storm, the gale; its voice the wind. She saw teeth, saw tongue, saw darkness and felt— the snap of rope. Not jaw.

She cried out, wordless; she struggled to maintain her grip on a rail that had never been intended to support such weight.

The head of the great beast sheared air as if air were a textured, heavy cloth. She felt the heat of its breath, saw the light of one great eye, saw the iridescence of scale as it reflected the sudden bright red of Arkosan wards. She heard something—someone—scream or curse. In Torra. The Matriarch.

But she also saw that while she lived she had power, no matter how insignificant it seemed. She had thought to speak to death, but death eluded her; she accepted the other form of conversation battle offered. Lifting her right hand, her palm now fitted around the hilt of the dagger she had kept wrapped close in sash and silk since the Festival of the Sun, she lunged.

Scale gave way to blade almost too cleanly. Blood spilled across the deck, thinned instantly by rain. She might not have known she struck, but her sleeves clung to blood in a way the deck couldn't. The creature roared.

Once again, she was transfixed by the storm's voice, by its promise of death. Or perhaps not; she could move. She could move now. If her hands weren't so cold and the rail weren't so slippery. Her legs sagged as the beast pulled back, pulled up.

"Diora!"

Her name. It sounded like her name, but her name shorn of affection, of title. There was only one woman who could use it so roughly.

"Diora, damn you!"

She said clearly, the words for the Matriarch and the Matriarch alone, "You wanted to capture its attention."

There was no silence in this thunder, but the Matriarch's voice was lost to the storm. For a moment. When it returned, it offered a strangled, angry—and yes, terrified— laugh.

She thought it would be the last thing she heard. She could not find the twine that the Matriarch had used to bind her to the wagon's upper side. She held the rail with her left hand, and the knife with her right, and the ship careened, weaving in and around the snapping jaws of an enraged creature of the storm.

She could not hold on forever. She was surprised she had held on this long.

Something—someone—caught her hand.

It was not, could not be, the Matriarch. She looked up. Saw nothing. Felt the hand that encircled hers. Her right hand.

"Let go. Let go, Serra Diora."

It was not a request. Her fingers obeyed almost before she understood the words wrapped around the power of bardic voice.

She had been prepared for death—but it was a different death—or perhaps preparation and calm were simply illusion. Regardless, her body struggled against the death that approached; she lost resignation as easily as she had lost anything she had ever cared to hold.

But she did not cry out; the words that she had trapped remained where they were. She nailed a moment, wet robes flapping like injured, soiled wings.

It seemed that struggle might count for something; she passed from storm into silence, and the silence was so sudden, so all encompassing, it was overpowering. The wind did not brush her cheek; the rain did not strike her skin, her eyes. Suspended a moment, she looked up; saw the clouds in turmoil above. And below?

The eye of the storm passed; she fell through it into the maelstrom.

The ground approached. At least she thought it was ground; it was marginally less dark than the clouds above, and there were no points of light in it, no glimmer of silver moon beyond the edge of raven wings.

It was only when the ground receded again, only when the storm somehow found a way to cradle her, to succor her, that she understood whose voice she had heard, whose command she had, without thought, obeyed.
Kallandras
. Who else had the power to speak with such force the wind itself obeyed? She danced a moment in air; found grace in the icy blast of night wind. Gained composure.

"Are you safe?"

"Yes …"

"First blood is yours. My companion is profoundly upset. Take the
Matriarch to safety,"
he said.
"Her ship fights the wind, and it cannot
face wind and Serpent both. Without Margret, Arkosa will fall."

"And you?"

The only answer was the movement of wind past her ears, but that was answer enough. The wind found the deck of the Arkosan wagon. It was not the first time that she had been grateful for the wind's voice—but remembering that first time, she wondered what the price of this one would be.

"Diora!"

She spoke through rain and wind. "Matriarch—we must flee."

"We can't flee—"

"We have led the Serpent from the tunnels; the water falls, but—but the wind shunts it away while the Arkosans escape." She had lied with certainty in the past. She had lied as gracefully as she had wielded fan, worn silk, adorned the court of powerful men. But the hesitation was profound, present. She did not understand it.

She could not hear the Matriarch's reply, but the ship circled around the Serpent's head. Diora had sheathed her dagger, had planted it firmly in the water-drenched sash at her waist. She found purchase upon the ship with aching arms, aching hands.

"Matriarch," she tried again, "Why do you think they've attacked? Why do you think the Serpent pursues? If they destroy you, they have destroyed Arkosa. The war starts now!"

The boat froze a moment. Had it been a bird, it would have plummeted; the magic of the Arkosans was stronger, Diora thought, than any of the clans had realized.

"Na'dio!"
Her aunt's voice.
"Preserve the Matriarch! Leave now!"

It was not a request. It was a command.

But her Ona Teresa was not Kallandras of Senniel College; she spoke with power but not with the wind's own voice. Diora heard the command in the shockingly graceless words, and she deflected it, with effort. She understood the nature of the command, but also understood that to use her voice against the Matriarch here was to lose all possibility of—

Of what?

She grimaced; rain followed the line of the foreign expression. She hated the cold. In the morning—should they see morning again—she would be thankful for the heat, and that thankfulness would be both genuine and ephemeral.

As almost all gratitude was, in the end.

"Matriarch!" She used enough power to make herself heard, no more.

"And am I to watch while they die?" Margret shouted back.

"How will your death serve a purpose? How will it serve
any
purpose but His?"

The boat listed. Diora stumbled, but that did not stem the flow of her words; she had learned to use what power she had in the most adverse of circumstances, and words were the only power she now possessed.

"Na'dio."

She wanted to parry her aunt's voice. Wanted to waste power, effort, and time to say,
Leave me alone
.

Because she understood the discussion she had begun with Margret of Arkosa.

She understood why, by the Lady's grace, she had to be the one to start it, to finish it. She understood why Kallandras had ordered the wind to bring her not to the safety of the earth, but back to the storm and the battle. Suddenly, she understood, and she desired as much distance between comprehension and herself as possible.

But she had been the good wife, the good daughter, the
good Serra
for so much of her life there was no way to gain that distance. She understood.

And so, too, did the Matriarch of Arkosa.

Her laughter was terrible. But it was short.

"That's what you did."

She could not speak.

"That's what
you
did. You watched while your own were murdered."

"No. Worse." She found words. "I listened." She raised her face. She controlled her expression; she controlled the shaking of her hands. She did not, however, fold her knees. She could not, with grace. To do so, she would have to let go of the rail in the storm.

And the storm would sweep her aside like so much dust, so much flotsam.

Would that be so very terrible? She was
so
tired.

"You want me to watch my people die. You want me to fail them. As you failed yours."

The words would not come. For a moment, they simply would not come. When she found them again, it was a struggle to make them heard. Anger could do that to a voice. Or pain.

She was not the Matriarch of Arkosa. She was not the woman whom everyone else called Margret. A Serra of the High Court, she had spent a life beneath the shade of bower or fan while the Lord's glare passed her by. But when she spoke again, when she found the power to force words past the thickness in her throat, she was no longer certain for whom they were intended.

"No. I want you to
live
with the responsibility you so clearly desire. I want you to understand that living is
hard
. Dying is easy. Death is easy compared to this."

At that moment, she loved the rain. Because the storm was loud, she could hear the scream of the Serpent more clearly than she could hear the screams of the dying. Because the rain fell in heavy drops across every exposed inch of skin, she could let her tears fall with it, certain of privacy.

But it hurt her throat, to contain the emotion beneath the veil of words. Her hands were shaking. She wondered— as the boat careened wildly, as the Serpent's
breath
seemed to turn the rain into small, hard pellets—if she would be able to hold on.

And she almost didn't care what the answer was.

The boat faltered again, the perfect expression for the mind of the woman who was its rudder.

"You're the Matriarch of all of Arkosa, not just this handful of men and women. You're the mother to the Family."

"Shut up! I know who I am!"

"Then live with the guilt, Matriarch. This is not the first time you will feel it. Not the last. Do what must be done."

"They trust me! How can I—" And then she fell silent.

Diora could not know what passed through her thoughts in that absence of words. Did not care to guess. She waited, her hands numb, her throat numb, her memories terrible, even now.

"All of Arkosa," she said again, into the storm. She felt the warmth of the Heart spread from the hollow between her breasts; it was like a fire across dry brush. "
Past and present. Remember the vows of the first Matriarch. Remember
."

"They're
not
my vows!"

"No? Have we not journeyed all this way so that you can make those vows and become what your mother was? We have no more time, Matriarch. Leave this battle, or leave the title."