Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (33 page)

She found wood easily enough; trees lived and died without falling, and the sun turned them into dried husks of former life, meant for burning and not much else. She carried her ax into a night brightened by a nearly full moon; the cutting of wood, time-consuming and menial, was hers. Had to be hers, if the circle was to be hers.

Thus, her mother taught her, and she'd learned.

This is the simplest of our magics, but it's the most valuable one you'll have, day to day. It proves your power, without actually costing much. You'll need it, if I die young.

Only the good
, she'd told her mother.

The ax shook in her hands.

She buried it in the fork of the fallen tree's branch. The wood was cut in fury because fury was the only comfort she would allow herself to take; she put her heart into the task, pausing only to set the lamp down on the ground so that her feet didn't become victims of her aim.

Wood splintered cleanly; the ax was sharp, her aim true. This close to the moon's height, the wood had its own power—or so her mother had said—but she knew that without the heart in her hands, wood's power was dim and almost impossible to reach. Wood cut during the phases of the Festival Moon always held the strongest essence, the easiest to touch and invoke; they were the longest nights of the year—for the Matriarch—with good reason. Voyani wisdom.

She gathered the fallen wood, dumped it in the cloth sack, bundled it tightly. The stars watched; she hoped no one else did. The cursing that accompanied the lifting robbed the moment of all dignity.

Made her feel a bit better, though.

In moonlight, she made the trek back from the forest, although forest was a poor choice of word for something so thin. The Arkosans traveled the heartland's ring; their road crossed the verdant plains of Mancorvo, the dimpling valleys of Averda where forests were so deep and thick they bruised the leg and scratched the face of men made careless by an evening's drink. She missed those forests now; it was there that she had first cut the wood by her mother's side.

Her mother's side, while her mother's hands curled 'round the haft of an ax that had been passed, mother to daughter, since the beginning of time—or so Margret had believed then. The haft itself was plain, dark wood, and it had been replaced several times; it was the wedge of metal, something that never lost an edge and wouldn't condescend to bear a notch, no matter what wood it was set against, that was the heirloom.

That ax had seemed so very much a part of Evallen that night. Everything had: the starlight, the full moon, the night's landscape, the trees themselves. In the darkness you could best make out the living from the dead, the wet from the dry, by smell, by touch. True then, true now. She'd peeled away bark, under her mother's watchful shadow, listening to her mother's sharp criticism and, more rare, her bare, stark praise—the rhythms of a speech that Margret had never thought she'd miss.

She missed it now; missed the nervousness and the wonder of that first night. It had been important to please the Matriarch, more so for the girl who would become the clan's leader than for any other Arkosan, and she'd offered her hands to splinters and calluses, swallowing pain and failure in the search for success.

She swallowed now.

Because at the end of the first gathering, her mother had drawn the heart of the Arkosans out of the folds of her shirt. No one who did not bear Arkosan blood in their veins could see the heart if Evallen chose to conceal it, but even Arkosans could be shunted aside when the Matriarch chose to practice her power in privacy.

That night was one of the few nights that Margret had been granted more than a passing glimpse of the source of her mother's power.
People want other people's power if it's under their noses
, Evallen would tell her.
They can't think of a single good reason why you've got it and they don't. And frankly, most days neither can I. Don't lord it over your own with anything but force of personality unless you have no other choice
. She'd pause, then.
And any daughter of
mine
had better have enough force of personality that it isn't a problem
.

Wasn't a problem, now. She didn't have the heart to expose.

She took the wood to the edge of the small brook that had been the deciding factor in the location of their encampment. Here, she gathered water in a bowl that she had fashioned out of clay with her own hands, had decorated with gold leaf, had painted with dyes that had been one of her mother's more practical secrets. She took a second and a third such bowl out of the folds of her shirt, unwrapping each carefully and setting it down in the clearing, beneath the open face of the Lady's Moon, three points of a triangle, or perhaps three points along the edge of a circle. Into the second bowl, she poured wine, the harvest of vine; into the third, she poured rice wine, the harvest of grain. She dedicated these to the Lady whose Moon lit her way, speaking slowly, trying to put the same passionate plea into the words that her mother had always managed.

It wasn't there. She
knew
it; the heart that defined the Matriarch lay in the grasp of a clanswoman. How was she to continue without it?

Yollana was cruel—but that was part of her character that was known by and to all. It would not be beyond her to set Margret a task that would end in failure because she'd decided that dealing with failure was
also
a test that needed passing.

Was that what this was?

Maybe.

Margret's mother had laid the heart in the center of the three bowls, and it flashed a moment as it lay against earth, the Lady's element, drawing power and granting it. She spoke in a language that was Arkosan to the core—ancient and hidden and shadowed— before she touched forehead to earth. It was the first thing she'd done all evening that had shocked Margret because it looked so much like abasement, and the Matriarch was the source of all power.

Her mother ignored her stiff-jawed open mouth. Lifting the heart, Evallen of the Arkosa Voyani placed the wood where the heartlight still burned the vision. Her prayers lapsed into silence, then, but they continued.

Silence, Margret could manage—although it would have surprised most of the Arkosans who knew her.

I
have no heart
, she thought, and for just a moment it meant something other than the Matriarch's stone. She did not know as much of the old tongue as her mother had; her mother's learning had been courtesy of Yollana of the Havallans, and it had come in bits and pieces when the Matriarchs met at Moon's height in the Tor Leonne.

I
have accepted all responsibility, and I have already begun to fail it. But I will not let that failure break me, Lady. We are not always lucky. The winds howl. The sun burns the shadows into last night's pleasant dream. The clans hunt us, the families war with us. We lost children to the harems and the houses of the powerful, and we endure. We lose our parents long before they've had the time to pass on the truth and experience of their lives, and we endure. We lose our loves, our lovers, our partners, and we endure
.

But we die before we abandon the oaths we make with our blood.

I have no heart to bespeak you, Lady, no power to be certain I have your attention. But I have this: and it is of me, part of all that I am, and that my mother was, and that my daughter, when she is born, will be.

I vow, tonight, that we
will
endure
.

Margret of the Arkosa Voyani reached a shaking hand to the side of her hip and unsheathed her dagger. She ran it along the fleshy part of her palm, biting carefully enough to draw blood that would run without injuring muscle or reaching bone.

The blood, she offered to earth, at the exact center of the triangle made by the spirits of the Lady's night.

She'd hoped for some flash of light, some recognition of her offer. There was nothing but night and shadow, starlight and moonlight.

Her hand stung as she lifted the wood, block by block, and placed it where her blood had been spilled.

Her head began the long descent to earth, and when it reached the cool, moist dirt of evening forest, she inhaled deeply. Abasement.

Yes, but more: Here, she could smell the dampness and the greenness of the forest floor, the sweet sharpness of wine, the fullness of cut wood, as if they were a part of her. Almost against her will, her back relaxed, and her arms; she fell into the posture of supplicant, completely devoid of the usual powerlessness it implied.

And then, when she had swallowed the whole scent of a forest's peace and the Lady's libations, she emptied the three bowls carefully, taking a sip of each for herself, and offering the rest to the wood.

"All right," she said. She was startled into silence at the sound of her own voice. She slung the wood over her shoulder; it settled there, a comfortable burden—for at least thirty yards. It was a lot longer than that to reach Yollana of the Havalla Voyani.

The peace of the forest hadn't quite left her by the time she reached the wagons and found Yollana and the stranger waiting for her. She nodded to the stranger, and forced herself to bow— wood still slung over her shoulder—to the woman who sat on the ground.

"The circle," Yollana said sharply.

Just as, Margret thought, her mother would have, had her mother been alive.

The last part of the heart's circle was the easiest. She built a fire of normal wood by her own hand; no one offered to help— and she would have been honor bound to refuse any such offer. The fire started quickly enough—a child could start a fire with relative ease, given the right wood—and once she'd built it, she turned to Yollana. "Matriarch," she said, "I offer you the safety and the protection of the Arkosans. Join me by the fire that I have built for your comfort and your safety."

"I accept," the older woman replied gravely, "what only you can offer, Margret of Arkosa." Yollana shifted her weight as if to rise; her face froze completely. That was the Havallan Matriarch through and through; she never shared her pain when it was something as trivial as broken limbs.

Kallandras was by her side in an instant, offering aid without ever giving her a chance to refuse—and she would have, as pride demanded. He carried her into the circle that Margret had offered.

The eyes of the Matriarchs met.

"You, stranger," Margret said, her throat tightening, her body tensing with the wrongness of the words to follow, "we owe the debt of future to. I offer you the safety and the protection of Arkosa. Join me by the fire that I have built for your comfort and your safety."

"I am honored by your offer," he replied gravely, speaking as if he truly understood the honor she conveyed. "And I accept it for the moment."

They took their places by the fire; Margret held back a moment longer, wondering if the circle she'd offered was as much a fraud as she felt herself to be.

* * *

"Your hospitality," Yollana said, "makes you one with the Havallans, Matriarch." She did not speak quietly; indeed, she spoke loudly enough that any casual eavesdropper might hear the words. And if they did, it proved that Margret could not even draw the Arkosan circle. Margret wanted to warn her, to caution her to silence, but she could not quite bring herself to expose her own weakness. "And I am in your debt." Ritual, ritual that. But it eased Margret to hear the formality of the tone. Made her feel less the impostor.

"The debt," Margret said, her voice lower, the word less prone to be carried by wind's caprice, "is not mine to accept." She turned, then, to where the stranger stood leaning against her wagon, his profile lit by the orange of a fire that was not quite bright enough to illuminate his expression. "Kallandras of Senniel College brought you to us. He intervened to send our children to safety, and he brought my heir home."

"That much help from strangers," Yollana said wryly, "is
too
much help. And it's costly. I would far rather
you
held the debt, my dear."

"The Arkosans are less of a threat than a stranger with a pretty face and hair a Serra would kill for?" There was a touch of levity in the words.

"The debt of the Arkosans is a debt I understand," Yollana replied gravely. "And that one—he serves the Lady, and he serves the blue witch who comes like a nightmare and a doom." All humor fled her voice; she stared at Margret intently, searching for the jump, the stiffening of features, that spoke of recognition.

Only when she saw them did she continue. "The time is coming," she said quietly, "when all debts are due. Your mother understood this, and she paid the price."

"My mother—" Margret let the silence fold in around her. "Yollana, what is happening on the plateau? What is happening in the city? Have the clansmen gone mad?"

"Worse," Yollana said softly, "and your mother knew the truth of that. They have fostered an alliance that should have become impossible with the birth of the clan Leonne."

"The clan Leonne is dead."

"It is not," Kallandras said, speaking for the first time, "dead. There is a single survivor."

"We've heard of him," Yollana replied, careful now, her voice as neutral as Margret had ever heard it. "And I will say to you that if the rumors that have carried this far to the South are true, he is more than we expected him to be."

"But not," Margret added, following Yollana's studied neutrality as closely as she could, "impressive enough, in the opinion of the Arkosans, to carry the war."

"He is served," Kallandras said softly, "by Ser Anton di'Guivera."

"So," Yollana replied—Margret having temporarily lost her voice—"that rumor
is
true. Is it true that he has fought the creatures of the Lord of Night?"

"You know the answer to that, Yollana, and I will not be trapped in your testing games for another moment."

She smiled. "So be it, then. Yes, I know it for truth. But the Voyani take no sides in the war of one clan against another."

"No," Kallandras said softly, "they don't. But you know, you
must
know, that this war is not that war. I will not lecture you, Yollana, but I have stood at the side of the blue-robed witch, as you call her, and I know as much of your ancient histories as it is safe for one who is not controlled by the
Voyanne
to know. Your captivity must tell you that you are already at war."