Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (98 page)

Jewel realized that he meant to be out of place at that moment; she had been in a gathering as Kallandras' companion before where even she had had trouble telling him from the crowd when she was
with
him.

She wondered whether or not he would kill the man; she hoped, fiercely, that he would—although some part of her knew that it would be profoundly disturbing to watch; there was something about Kallandras that was so cold-blooded she was afraid to bear witness to his killing. The fear was misplaced.

Death in such a fashion would not have served their purpose, and she
knew
that he chose a purpose and served it with both ferocity of intellect, and the coldness of intellect.

He touched the arm of the man who was beating the youth.

That man, Jewel saw, was not large; he was not particularly muscular. The boy was his equal in strength, in size.

But better to take the beating than the consequences. Better to risk the chance of death than to risk certain death. She said nothing. Avandar's grip did not change. They knew each other that well. For the first time, she was glad she had left her den behind.

"Jewel," Avandar said, voice by her ear, and she realized that she'd turned away.

She turned back; the bard was speaking slowly and softly to the man. She could not hear what he said; could not in fact hear his tone. But the man's heavy hands fell slowly, and the cudgel— or whatever it was—fell with it.

"I understand," Avandar continued quietly, as. the man nodded, again slowly, at the bard's words.

"No," she replied with conviction. "You don't."

He was silent.

"You've never particularly cared if you had to watch a stranger suffer and die. I imagine, with a title like Warlord, you might have even enjoyed it."

"I did," he said, the two words without inflection.

But she heard the truth in them, and she hated it.

Kallandras came back to her. The man barked an order to the slave, and then turned away and left him there. She wanted to intervene somehow; it was a Festival Night.

"Yes," Kallandras agreed, "it is a Festival Night. But it is not
the
night, ATerafin, and the cerdan of the Tyr are between every house in the city, watching and waiting for the extraordinary. Let it go. Let it be. We must see the Founts, and if the circles there are broken, we must repair them. That is our goal, this eve; it is our only goal."

"No. It's
their
goal. Mine is different."

"Do you think," Avandar said, his impatience so familiar she thought she would never dislike it again, "you will see enough in the city streets in
one night
to end the coming threat?"

"Maybe," she replied. "We don't even understand the nature of the coming threat."

"You walked the road," he said, "and it has changed you, Jewel. No one walks that road, claims a part of it, and emerges unchanged. Think."

She was. She was thinking, as she froze a moment, of the last words Evayne had said.
I have swallowed the Winter to travel before the host
.

"They're coming," she said quietly.

"I believe that is so."

"To what end?"

"Who can say?"

"You can. You know more than I do about that Lady and her cursed host."

"Not here, ATerafin, and perhaps not ever. I do not know why she rides, but if you are here, brought by the Oracle; if the seer who travels through time came here, brought by her own curse and her own vow, I cannot believe that you met the Winter Queen on the road by chance. Come."

"But—"

"But?"

"We've—we've lost Elena." Jewel looked from side to side; the crowds were thin in places, and between them, fire and light shone across the surface of gold and brass, dimpling the stillness of water, the offering to the Lady on this night. They would offer her wine tomorrow.

And on the Festival Night? Jewel could see the dead all around her if she closed her eyes for even a second; the vision was
that
strong. Unfortunately, not closing her eyes caused them to tear painfully.

"Elena is not lost," Kallandras said softly. "She is here. But she waits. The Voyani do not risk their lives in open conflict, and you are not of their number. Nor I, nor Avandar. She will join us as she sees that our stop here has brought no unwanted attention."

"They always do this?" she whispered.

• Kallandras turned to face her, eyes clear and dark as water in the night founts. "They are Voyani," he said, as if that explained everything.

"Some allies," Jewel snorted.

Avandar and Kallandras exchanged a single glance; it was as if they spoke in a language that she had heard often enough before she could recognize it, but had never—and would never— master.

Elena joined them, walking with the polite and hampered gait of a lowborn—but free—clanswoman as if it were natural for her. Jewel had seen Elena casually slap a youth who'd gotten just a bit too familiar—and had seen that youth, face reddening in an area the size of her palm and fingers. She couldn't believe the easy way she took to the role of a meek clanswoman, cramming her hair and her expressive movements into this drab bundle of heavy, almost colorless sari.

Avandar gave her the look that clearly meant:
If someone like Elena can accomplish this task so easily, you should be able to do better
, and she tried very hard to meet that expectation. She did try.

But she cursed under her breath—or as under her breath as she ever did—while she walked through the city streets. Avandar, behind them as always, cast a long shadow.

Margret had been in fine fury—and Jewel understood it so well she'd have caved in an instant to her demands—when she was ordered to remain in the confinement of the circle. But Yollana, the Matriarch of the Havallans, made it clear that her responsibilities lay with the children, and with the fire that they had been told to hold, and hold at ready, for the three days.

She was worried, was the old woman; Jewel knew it, looking at her face. The lines lay heavily across it, pulling her eyes down so that they looked closed. Margret, mutinous, had opened her mouth to argue, and it was Jewel who found herself saying, "They need you here because you're the heart of the fire.

"The fire should have come tonight. It's waiting. It'll try to come tomorrow. You'll have to hold it back."

And the four Matriarchs had stared a long while at her in the silence that followed her words. It occurred to her, walking in the streets of the Tor Leonne, hundreds of miles from home, that those four women had taken an awful lot on faith.

She tried to imagine how she would have reacted to her own appearance in the center of that wooden crucible, Avandar dressed in gaudy, expensively jeweled clothing at her back, and she as herself, whatever that might mean to the four ruling members of the Voyani families. Nothing she had ever heard about the Voyani from her merchants led her to believe that they were particularly trusting.

Especially not the women.

But they accepted her as omen; and they
were
superstitious.

"You've walked a hard road," Yollana said at last. "But you see truly. I name you, as I name Kallandras, roadbound; you are not of the
Voyanne
, but you have in truth walked it, and if I see well, you will walk it until it ends."

The striking, dark-haired woman gasped.

The pale woman, equally striking, but in a much more understated fashion, became utterly still; Jewel realized that she had stopped breathing.

"Margret," Yollana said, her expression taking on a sharpness that Jewel wouldn't have liked at all had it been directed at her, "when you walked your path to the fire's heart, did you ask for a sign? Did you pray, did you pray to the Lady?" She slapped the leather loop she wore for emphasis; herb pouches lifted and fell, punctuation.

"And you didn't?" Margret snapped back, whip-crisp, hands finding her hips.

"Oh, I'm sure we all did," the old woman said. "But you're the fire's heart because this is Arkosa.
Your
prayer was answered. Now live with the answer, you ungrateful wretch, even if you don't like it."

"And how is this the answer, that I'm supposed to stay here?"

"You heard her. You heard what she said. You have to contain the fire.
You
." The woman, fingers now tucked into that wide, long loop, turned some of her sour attention toward Jewel Markess ATerafin. "What happens if she goes?"

"Goes?"

"Goes with you."

"Goes with me?"

"Are you an idiot, you don't understand Torra? Goes with you
there
." She jabbed her finger in the direction of fire in the night sky; the Tor Leonne, lit at the center beneath their view by Festival lights. "You look at me, girl. Look at my eyes."

"I would if you'd stop squinting," Jewel said.

Silence.

Long silence. It was broken by laughter, which in turn was broken by a longer silence.

"If you were one of mine," Yollana began, but she let the rest of the threat go. It wasn't clear to Jewel that she was actually angry. "What happens if she goes?" she said again, lowering her voice.

And this time, Jewel let herself relax into the question because she could
feel
the answer there, something unpleasant and heavy, like the residue herbal brews often left on the tongue. She was very glad, as she met the lined and wrinkled face of the Havallan Matriarch, that she wasn't Havallan.

" If Margret doesn't stay, the Fire will come. "

"And?"

"It will devour you all. It has no target. It has no… enemy. Not yet."

"And we—the rest of the Matriarchs—won't be able to stop it?"

"
No. You are four and you have called the fires from the quarters; you have implied your oath. But
she
has paid the heart and the blood price
."

"The children?"

Jewel looked away. She looked away and did not look back, and she closed her lips on the answer and her eyes on the vision.

"You're not going," Elena said quietly to a very stiff Margret. "But I'll go. I know what you're thinking. That Evallen died there. That this is Arkosan business. Okay. It is. But I'll hold up your end."

Margret, face as red as the fire she was supposed to contain, seemed to have missed whatever the other two had heard in Yollana's earlier words. She stormed about the small clearing cursing in a broken Torra that Jewel only half understood. Half was good enough. When she'd stopped, she said to her cousin—in Torra, but quick and sharp, "You better come back in one piece. You're all I have, and I need you here."

And Elena shrugged. "Lady's Moon," she said, her voice softer than her cousin's and infinitely less angry, "how could I not come back?"

" 'Lena—"

"Learn to live with it. The children are here," she added, her voice taking gravity as if it were a weapon. "What else do you need to know?"

Margret had nodded.

And here they were, in the middle of a crowded city, streets alive with both wonder and something like fear, but unnamed, unacknowledged. Acknowledgment, after all, had its costs.

The Serra Teresa was their guide. Jewel thought that Kallandras had more than a passing acquaintance with the streets of the Tor Leonne, but he seemed content to let the Serra lead; he followed, Jewel behind him, and behind her Avandar and Elena.

Teresa stopped twice at the fount-stones that were tucked into rounded curves in the walls; kneeling until her chin rested just above the water, her nose near the blossoms that had been so carefully cut and placed. Jewel was used to private prayers, but there was very little privacy in the Tor. It was not as big a city as Averalaan, but she felt the crowd much more keenly.

"Come," Teresa said softly, rising. "Tonight, I think it best that we find the Northern and the Western Founts." She lifted her head and then stood; lowered her gaze until it fell across the still water in the fount-stone. Jewel nodded.

She had thought there would be more drama. There was about the night a sense of storm, something dense and invisible that hovered in the air. But there was also a solidity, a reality, to the stones beneath her feet—flat and perfect in a way that the stones of Averalaan's old city seldom were—that refused to give menace easy purpose. There was continuity in her life. She did not lurch from waking moment to waking moment and wonder where the sleep had gone, and when it had taken her.

The wind, when it came, was fresh; it held a scent that the mountain pass had lacked. Unfortunately, not all of that scent was pleasant—with this much wine, and this many people, it couldn't be—but the night was cooler than it ever got in Averalaan, and it was drier as well.

She turned when Avandar placed a heavy cloak around her shoulders. Started to thank him and frowned. "This isn't what you were wearing," she said softly.

"No." He had changed his attire from the gaudy and the impossible to something that suited a subdued clansman—a gift of sorts from Margret, and by extension the Arkosans—but there was something about Avandar that just didn't subdue easily.

"Avandar…"

"You will have to learn," he said in perfect, flawless Torra, "to accept kindness with more grace."

"I don't expect kindness from you," she replied. But she was cold and she was practical. She'd get angry about his flagrant use of magic later—if they even had rules about flagrant use of magic here, which, come to think, she highly doubted.

She watched as Serra Teresa examined first the Fount itself and then the markings across the ground around it.

"I don't understand," Jewel said, speaking out loud. Speaking in Weston.

"No." Avandar replied in Torra.

She took the hint, switching between the two languages with ill ease. Her mother's language, and her Oma's language, were tools that she used, but they were no longer as natural a part of her life as Weston had become. The language of thought, for Jewel, and she thought aloud. "No what?"

"No, you don't. I do not think any of us do. But the Serra Teresa, although she is not of the Voyani, has been sheltered by them, and taught in some fashion by Yollana. That one," he added softly, "has more power than a Voyani Matriarch has had in some generations. And vision. Be wary around her."