Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (109 page)

"All right. Food and then Yollana."

It was barely the right order to start the morning with, and apparently
no one
had slept well, at least not to judge by the extremely sour expressions on everyone's faces. Everyone's except the Lyserran Matriarch, who merely looked distant and cool.

The wind on the plain was brisk.

"Word came ahead of Kallandras," Yollana said. "The Serra accomplished her task, and if we are to defend the city itself against whatever it is that's a problem, we're to light the fire before the sun sets and then to make our way to the Founts with the masks the timeless one left us."

Margret looked at the wood. "How long is the fire supposed to last?"

Yollana's gaze was piercing, but it did not linger. "The fire," she said, "will last until dawn. That's what you asked for, didn't you?" "I —"

"That
is
what you asked for."

"Yollana, I don't remember what I asked for. Whatever it was, it wasn't that specific."

Yollana frowned. "Enough, then. It doesn't matter; the price was paid. We won't know until the morning after the Festival Moon's fall whether or not it was high enough. Get your things; we take our position at the fire's edge and we prepare."

"What else is there to prepare?"

"Ourselves, girl," Yollana said. "Maybe you're not clear on what has to happen—but the masks that the timeless one gave us—they have to go on. Have you looked at them?"

Margret couldn't answer the question. Yollana's words had hit a weakness she hadn't known she had. "We have to wear them?"

"Did you understand nothing you heard?" Elsarre's voice, thin with the same fear that Margret felt.

"I guess not," Margret snapped back. "Maybe if there was a little less jabbering from other quarters, I might have been able to concentrate."

" 'Gret," 'Lena spoke out of the corner of her mouth. Elsarre's hands lodged on her hips in a gesture that was familiar to
any
Voyani, no matter what the family. But Yollana's harsh bark brought them both to bear. They went toward the fire that had been laid out like the two strokes of an oath, and they took their places before the wood they had anointed.

And Yollana came forward, hobbling, the canes that she used to support her weight the only aid she would accept. She banished the daughters—which in this case meant shooing them off with the length of the hard wood and, as Elena pointed out, it was called a
hard
wood for a reason—and carried the bag that Evayne had given them in uncharacteristic silence.

She walked first to Elsarre, and from the leather sack, she carefully pulled the first mask. Elsarre reached out to touch it, and then cried out—with something that sounded a bit too much like terror for Margret's liking—and leaped back. Yollana, implacable as high summer sun on a cloudless day, waited, the mask in her hand.

Elsarre was very, very pale when she reached out again; she did not speak. But she took the mask. "Must we touch them?"

Yollana said, her voice unusually gentle, "We must
wear
them, Matriarch. There is no way to do the one without doing the other. The masks must be presented to the fire, or they will devour us, and we will fail in our duties.'"

Elsarre swallowed air. Nodded. She walked to the logs that she had anointed with the Lady's wine, holding the mask with the tips of her fingers, and looked at the crushed, flat brush and weeds, at the wood, at the symbolic empty vessel—at anything, in short, but the face.

Yollana came to Maria next, and to Maria she handed a mask. From this distance, it was clear to Margret that both the first and the second mask followed the pattern of the masks the servants of the Lord of Night had made: the simple face, like a child's mask, and the delicate one that might belong to a pretty youth or a pretty girl. Maria paled, but she had had Elsarre's cry as warning, and she had braced herself against what Yollana now offered.

And having braced herself, she started. Visibly.

My turn
, Margret thought. Swallowed. Waited.

Sure enough, Yollana came to her next, mask outheld in weathered hand like a commandment and a doom. And this mask, this was a full face, fine-boned and yet wide enough to be either a man's face or a woman's, hair and details perfect.

Unfortunately, it was also alive.

She embarrassed herself. She screamed in a fair imitation of Elsarre of Corrona. The mask almost fell from her shaking hand. "I can't
wear
this," she said, speaking before thought could overtake her mouth and shut it.

Yollana glared at her. Margret was grateful that the old woman didn't find the words to express what she was obviously feeling. Instead she waited, patiently, while Margret gathered enough of her wits—and her grim determination—to take firm hold of the mask. Then she nodded and moved on.

Elsarre to the West, Margret to the South, Maria to the East, and to the North, where all their enemies lay, Yollana. She grimaced with distaste and took the last mask out of the bag. It was by far the finest, and at this distance, it was impossible to tell whether or not it, too, was alive.

Or perhaps it was impossible to tell without touching the mask itself. Margret stared at grass and wood and water, at anything but the eyes that watched her, bulging in pain or fear or plea—it was hard to tell without closer examination, and she didn't think she could get through the ceremony if she stopped to look at the face.

And then Yollana of the Havalla Voyani, the oldest and the wisest of the Matriarchs in this generation, knelt at the foot of the fire. She set the mask down upon her lap, and stared at it, and as she did—meeting the eyes that were present and moving, she said, in a voice that no one could avoid hearing, "Anoint the masks as you anointed the wood, Matriarchs. Lady's daughters. And then, when you have finished, anoint yourselves likewise. You will then be able to hear their voices, even where they have no mouths to speak with."

Elsarre and Margret exchanged a very panicked glance; Yollana had not looked up. She was now a rock at the pinnacle of a quartered circle. An anchor.

"You will do them this honor because, after the fires are written in wood, the lives that have been written in flesh will be offered in the stead of our children's lives. Whether they died willingly or no—and you will know, for they will tell you—they are our people, our flesh, and our blood, and the debt we owe them is a kin-debt that will know no end. It is not written in sand, nor spoken in wind; it is written here, in wood, as oaths are written between equals.

"And if you think to avoid this, do not. This
is
the price that we will pay for their sacrifice, and until we know or understand the whole of what
they
have lost, we cannot offer their lives as our own. Do you understand? You will give them their due."

Margret stared dully at the face that she propped in her lap. At the eyes that followed her every movement. She reached for her dagger, twice, and missed both times. A sign of cowardice. Or a sign from the Lady. She didn't much care which. Although she was Matriarch by bloodline, she had not yet completed the pilgrimage which would define her; nor had she retrieved the heart which would succor her.

She had never been asked the question which she knew lay at the end of the road:
What would you do to save the children
?

But looking at this face, this living mask, this life crushed into a space far too small for the living, and trapped there, she thought that she was too squeamish to give
this
answer.

She found the dagger on her third attempt; by this time she had lost sight of the others; she was alone, by a fire that had not yet been started, this face, this mask, awaiting the gift of her blood. The cut that she made this time was not too deep. But it was sharp, and she felt the sting of metal just that little bit too far beneath the skin.

She took her bleeding palm and pressed it against the forehead of the mask. She hesitated a moment; she did not want to hear the story behind the face; did not want to suffer the pain and the guilt of being—even indirectly—the cause of it. But could she do less? Could she do less when in the end, the sacrifice itself was important and no one else might know of it? No one else might carry the story, and make it a part of their history?

She swallowed; she had always disliked intense pain, especially if it happened to be her own. Then she pressed her bleeding palm into her own forehead, for the sake of symmetry.

The mask was a man's face. She knew this because she heard his voice, a thin, leathery sort of thing, the type of voice you'd expect from a man who'd taken a throat wound and had lost all ability for forceful speech, but who was still trying to bark out a command.

He said,
My name is Andaru, and I am of the Arkosa Voyani
. And inexplicably, Margret began to weep, tears of rage and fear and sorrow. If Evayne had been standing before her now, she might have tried to kill her. This man was one of Margret's own, but he was still a stranger. She listened as he spoke of his life: his birth—a story that came from his mother, for he certainly didn't remember it on his own; his youth in the wilds of the Averdan valleys, where the Arkosan caravan had chosen to stay for several years running; the raid by the clansmen that had robbed him of a father and a brother, but had made him a man in the eyes of those who survived.

He spoke of his favorite stones; rocks, flat and smooth, that he had gathered the one time they had passed close enough to the ocean that he could taste nothing but dry salt against his lips and on his skin for weeks afterward. She could not understand how he could speak of these things when the fate that they wound their way toward was this: entrapment in what remained of his face.

/
am Andaru, Matriarch
, he said softly,
and it is my honor to serve you; to protect the children. To preserve the
Voyanne
against our enemies. I came to you willingly, and I will go with the winds when they come. But I wish you to know my life, for when the winds come, there is no one else who will remember its final moments
.

And she wept again because his voice was gentle and she had thought that all that remained to him would be fear.

He told her about the girl that he hated on sight, she was so rough and rude and pushy. She laughed out loud when he told her about their wedding night. He told her about his children, and when he spoke of them, his voice grew somber, and she knew why: even if he had taken this extraordinary step to save their lives, they would know loss. Not death; he had, he said, just disappeared. They would know
loss
. They would wonder why he had left them.

He had been given no opportunity to explain, and had he, he would not have taken it.
Because my wife, you see, she is so brave and so terrified at the same time, and she would have taken my place if it meant that it saved the children from my loss
.

"And loss of her?"

It would never occur to her that she could be so important; when they were babies, yes, but not now. They are boys, and they make great show of not needing their mother anymore.

"I give you my word," Margret told him, "that I will return to the valleys in which you live; only tell me where they are, and I will bring you—bring word of you—back to your own."

He did not speak to her of death.

She did not have the courage to ask.

But when she finally looked up, the sun had touched the lowest edge of the horizon.

Anya did not like the masks. People wore them in the streets, covering their faces as if they were playing a game. She didn't
like
them.

"Anya," Lord Isladar said, "it is Festival in the Tor, and they do things differently here. The masks are meant not to hide them or to fool you—because fooling you would be very, very difficult; they are meant to fool the Southern gods. To divert the wind and the sand; to protect the face from the gaze of the sun."

"But it's hardly sunny."

"Indeed. But the people believe that the Lord—the sun—gazes down upon them until the last of His face has fallen beneath the western coil."

She frowned and shifted the burden of the sleeping child. The girl stirred, and Anya hushed her, with magic powerful enough to draw the attention of anyone remotely acquainted with its use, back into that state of restful slumber. "And you say
I
need a mask?"

"No, Anya. You are special. If you choose to visit the Lake, I am certain we will be allowed to pass without a mask. It will be faster, and it will make you less angry, if we have a mask to show the men at the gates, but it is not necessary."

"ANYA."

She looked up and frowned. "We'd better hurry," she said.

"Why?"

"Didn't you hear him? He's using his grumpy voice."

"Hear who, Anya?"

"My Lord Ishavriel."

"I am afraid that I find the crowd quite loud. And the music quite lovely. But I did not hear the Lord Ishavriel's voice. Perhaps it is time to answer him."

"Not
yet
, Isladar," she replied, tightening her grip on the girl. "I
promised
, don't you remember?"

"Ah, yes."

"/ keep my promises. No demon will hurt her. No one will hurt her again. I promised. I promised her."

Her grip tightened. "He ran away," she said.

"I know, Anya."

"How do you know?" .

"You've told me."

"Oh." Pause. "I have?"

"Yes, Anya."

"Oh." She smiled suddenly. "And you remembered?"

"I remember everything you tell me," he replied gravely.

"Can I test you?"

"If you'd like. But here, let us stand in line with our child and you may test my memory until I have proved to you that I always listen to what you say."

She bounced along beside him, liking him greatly, and wishing that she trusted him enough to let him carry the child; she was getting very heavy, and Anya's arms had never been quite strong enough. She thought about this for a long time, and then said, "Isladar?"

"Yes, Anya?"