Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (86 page)

She said nothing.

He held out his hand again, and he waited. The time stretched, the silence became uncomfortable, and it was her duty or her responsibility to alleviate the tension; she was, after all, the woman. But she remembered: He had, under the guise of offered help, attempted to reach what she hid beneath the surface of skin through the powers with which he had been gifted, or perhaps cursed: healing. To ascertain what her motivations were. To reach her thoughts.

There were some walls that she would not allow to be breached.

She
knew
that Alana was close to fainting, and that thought amused and steadied her, leeching the edges of her anger into something calmer and smoother.

"Serra," he said softly. "Meet my gaze. I will not be offended or judge you unworthy for boldness."

She stared up at his face, lifting her head slowly, her hands unnaturally still in her lap. She saw a face that she had seen in shadow and the unnatural light of the Sun Sword on an evening that she had also seen demon and death. It was the same face, but it was not; there was an edge to it and a fire to it that she was suddenly aware could burn.

There were worse things than fire.

"I will never again attempt to take what you will not offer. The war is larger than that." He bowed his head to her. Lifted it again.

This time, when she saw his face, she saw a different man: the only man who had been close to tears—although those tears remained unshed—when the man she must always think of as
the
kai el'Sol—Fredero, born par di'Lamberto—gave himself to the Lord's cause by drawing the Sun Sword where all might see the power of the Lord's edict: that only those born of Leonne blood had the right to wield it.

That
man, fire reflected, rather than internalized, she understood. And that man had been chosen by Fredero kai el'Sol, as par, against the advice of the rest of the Radann; she knew this because her husband's mother had made certain that information trickled down into her harem.

The harem that had been such short glory, such perfect happiness.

She took his hand.

It was strong and dry as it closed around her slender fingers. "My gratitude, Radann par el'Sol," she said, lowering her eyes. But as she rose, she felt a sharp pain between her breasts; a hardness and a heaviness that almost dragged her down. Because her aunt had trained her, she did not stumble; did not in any way expose awkwardness of movement. This man might be her ally, but what was an ally in the Lord's eyes? A man of power who desired power and in the end, might find use to make of yours.

"Where do you wish to travel?" the Radann par el'Sol said.

Serra Diora di'Marano did not answer immediately; the freedom of such a choice had not been a possibility and she had not planned for it. Silence, when such lack of foresight became a difficulty, was the wisest course, and Diora had always been pronounced and judged wise for her age.

She was surprised when she spoke.

"To the Swordhaven," she said softly.

"To the—" He bowed, then, his silence more awkward and less practiced than hers. "You will be watched."

She nodded. "And I will be watched, as well, when I venture to the Lake, and when I venture beyond Lake and plateau into the merchants' palace to find the mask and the dress that I will wear for the moon's full face."

"I am," he said softly, "the cerdan to the Serra's command for this day; the kai el'Sol himself has ordered no less. Come. Let us pay our respects at the Swordhaven; the day is short."

She opened the doors herself.

Marakas moved to aid her, but there was something solid about the feel of old wood against the flat of her palms that she desired, and in as polite a way as one could possibly be rude, she waved him away and put her own slender shoulders into the work of opening the door.

There were eyes upon her back; the Lord's, and perhaps the Lady's. She pushed and the doors slid inward, creaking slightly on hinges that had once been perfectly silent.

Dust rose at the eddies of the sudden breeze; it settled again, but the accusation of neglect had been made. Wind's voice. Here.

As if he could hear her disapproval, the par el'Sol said, "We have been busy, Serra Diora. There are demons in the streets of the city, and we have lost men to them."

Demons. Servants of the Lord of Night. She closed her eyes a moment. Nodded. She did not need to straighten out the lines of her shoulders, the lift of her head; they were perfect.

Nothing about the haven had changed; the braziers still stood astride the steps that led to the case itself; the doors, heavy, were still open to those who had either the rank or the temerity to view the sword. They were few; the reigning Tyr'agar had little use for the sword and the viewing of it by clansmen who visited the plateau had become a political gesture. Few indeed were the men who wished to risk the wrath of their new ruler; a new ruler had no choice but to be brutal and swift in reprisal. And complete.

But the Radann could make no statement more political than the kai el'Sol had made by dying with this sword in his hands; they were expected to at least pay polite respect to the Sword and its haven.

"There is no fire," Diora said quietly.

"No."

The braziers were dark, and almost empty. The torches were guttered.

But from the windows above, light streamed down on the Sword, accentuating its lines in the shadows windowless walls made.

"Please," she said softly, "wait here."

He bowed. Bowed. To her.

She walked to the steps that led to the sword, and she knelt there, knowing the dust would leave its mark on her knees, but willing to be so marked.

She could not easily remove her hat, or rather, she could remove it, but could not replace it; the pins and combs were intertwined in such a way as to seem a natural part of her hair except where gold and jewels were meant to make a statement of their own about her father, or her husband, or her owner. She hesitated a moment, and another, and then, with shaking hands, she began to remove what Alana had, with such care, placed there.

She was surprised to hear the footsteps at her back. Surprised when she turned to see Marakas par el'Sol, standing as Alana might have stood, as Ramdan had always stood for Ona Teresa.

"Here," he said, "let me help you."

"But you are—"

His expression was strange; she could not be certain that she saw it clearly, the light on everything but the Sword was so poor. "Serra," he said quietly, "I was a clansman, one step above seraf." He bid her, by movement of hand, turn her back to him, and something in his face made her comply.

Sorrow, memory; things that demanded privacy.

Yet although she had turned her back, she could not give him the gift of her deafness; she heard what he did not say in the cadence and the texture of the voice he offered his words with. She might have asked him to be silent, but she did not.

"My wife," he said, as his hands gently touched not the hat's rim, but the binding combs, "had such lovely hair. She was not so fine a Serra, and would have been a poor seraf for your Ona Teresa or your father, but she had a rough grace, and a wildness I fostered.

"We could not afford serafs. We could barely afford not to become serafs."

The wife was dead. She heard it in the words; dead but not dead, as her mother had been for most of her father's life: dead but not dead. She hadn't understood it before she had lost her own wives, lost Deidre's beautiful baby,
her
first baby, the child Diora had dared to call son.

You could learn to hate the living, if you had to. You could learn to force them away, or force yourself away, from the things they stirred. Not so the dead. The dead would never again irritate by ugliness or pettiness or simple change and age; they were like the steel of the Sun Sword, tempered in fire.

For just a moment, his hands on hat and hair, she wondered if there would ever be a time, again, when the living drove her, not the dead.

And she hated herself for wondering it.

Because she had saved her father's life.

"I used to do this, for her, because we had no serafs," he said; she had missed some of his words, but none of the feeling behind them. "I used to tell her that I was her seraf." He laughed.

"And she would tell me that I was a clumsy oaf; her hair, unlike yours, was so very fine and so easily broken or tangled." His hands were gone. He had lied, of course; she had never called him clumsy, or an oaf. He had done for Diora what Alana had done, but swiftly and almost unnoticed, his hands healer's hands, light and certain.

She wanted to ask him about his wife, because she suddenly wanted to know who had been graced by his devotion; who he had thought worthy. But the Sword beckoned, and there would be time for questions—if time existed at all after the passage of this terrible Festival—later.

She lifted a fold of the winding cloth of her sari, and dutifully began to drape it over her hair, her face. She bowed, once to the East, to the Lord's beginning, and once to the West, to the Lady's; both were proper; she was proper.

Marakas par el'Sol stepped back from the stairs, granting her privacy, and after a pause to take a breath, to still the questions his action left her, she began to mount the stairs.

It had always taken effort to mount those stairs, but this was different. No smoke burned in the braziers as an offering of some theoretical respect or obedience; no Radann waited in the silence of their attendance upon the Sword. She had nothing to offer but the intensity of her inspection.

She stood before the Sword on its golden platform, the light from the Lord above creating an echo in this, His weapon, and His scepter of judgment.

Stood, and then began to unwind the sari that hid her face, that protected her hair, that kept her from the full force of the Lord's judgment. She heard a sharply drawn breath and she froze, but the Radann Marakas par el'Sol said nothing, and into the strange quality of his silence, she made her first gesture of denial, although she did not know it for that until later.

She stood.

She said, "I have a warrior's heart; I have dealt my enemies a blow; I will die fighting your greatest enemy. Judge me, if you will, Lord. Find me wanting. The wind claims us all in the end, and no wind can come that can hurt me, no death that can scar me, as I have already been scarred." She took a deep breath and uttered words that she had heard not from her father, but from grandfather, long, long dead: his stories to the sons of the kai, had been there when she chose to catch their edge. They had never been for her; he had never had the desire to make a man of the women in his family—because that would have been its own shame.

But she had been stirred by the stories of daring and sacrifice and tragedy, and in the end—in the end, whose life was more bitterly marked by the Lord's gauntlet? She was the Serra Diora di'Marano, and in her heart, words meant to guide young boys into the ferocity of battle were the only words she could find to say. "I will face any death you offer, gladly, if it be over the corpse of my enemy." She reached out with the flat of her palm.

And she felt pain, like a spreading blossom, start at a point between her breasts where, hidden from sight, another burden lay: the pendant given her by a woman whose death had been an act of mercy—by the hand of the Serra Diora di'Marano.

"Radann par el'Sol," she said, pitching her voice, reckless now, so that only he might hear it.

He came at once, as if his name were a summons or a command. "Serra Diora."

"The Sun Sword—has it been tampered with?"

"The Sword itself could not be tampered with." He spoke with certainty. She was comforted by it; there was no doubt at all in his voice. "The scabbard?"

"It, too, was a gift from the Lord." But there was less certainty in those words.

"And the stand upon which both rest?"

"I… do not know." He closed his eyes. "Serra Diora," he said quietly, without opening them, "we are now involved in a war; my Lord and the Lady against a Lord whom the Radann will never willingly serve again. What you see here you must never see, do you understand?"

She nodded, the perfect Serra, and then realized that he could not see the gesture. "Yes, I understand."

Fire grew in his hands, left and right, as if an artist of exquisite skill had chosen to paint a representation of the Lord's strength where His earthly power resided: in the hands of the Radann. But it did not stop; it grew, brightly, darkly, until his hands were of the fire and not of flesh.

His face was
white
.

He reached out to touch the scabbard in which the Sun Sword lay, and the fire guttered at once, doused as if shadow and darkness were liquid.

He curled his hands into fists and drew them close; she had no doubt whatever that had she not been present he would have screamed. But he—even he—could not be so unmanned. He held the pain until he could speak through it. She was certain a candle would have burned down by half before the first word came.

"You are… perceptive, Serra Diora. And we… are lax. Come; before we continue our errands, I must deliver a personal message to the kai el'Sol."

Her expression of concern—and it had been there because she chose to reveal it was gone; she was the Serra who had once been wife to a Tyr; cool and distant and perfect. She bowed low.

The Serra Diora di'Marano had vowed that she would never think of Peder par el'Sol as kai, for by his treachery—redeemed, in the end, by the grace of the kai el'Sol and the par el'Sol's commitment to God, if not to honor or loyalty—Fredero kai el'Sol had gone to a death he might well have avoided.

But when he was brought from the confines of the temple the Radann occupied at the behest of Marakas par el'Sol, she did not recognize him as the same man. There was a leanness to his face, and the presence of three wounds, two of which, in her opinion, would leave scars. Both of these, that gaunt look, those wounds, transformed him: he had become the Lord's man. Gone, the political games by which all men—perhaps even Fredero, although she could not conceive of how—achieved power at this pinnacle of power in the Dominion. He wore his sword by his side, and the scabbard, red with blood, was unadorned by so much as a leaf of gold, facet of gem.