Till Human Voices Wake Us (33 page)

He struck a few notes with unsure fingers. “It was like this,” he said, and played for a while what it sounded like in his memory, the wind in the grass, and the beech leaves like green fans, and the white flowers like stars, and the water like silk to the touch.

His hands slowed on the remembering, as his thoughts drew near the unfathomable glory in their centre, and he tugged words out from silence with the hands of his heart. “I was sitting there, bathing my feet, I think, when I saw … Someone … walking towards me out of the sunrise.”

“Someone …”

“The One.”

Kasian’s amazement was a burst of golden light. Raphael looked out into the darkness, but he saw light: sunlight and magic, and before and behind and through it the radiance of the living intellect, the light that came before all darkness, the light that lets light be seen.

“She came towards me. I was too awestruck to do more than stare, and worship. She walked the avenue from the morning to me, with the trunks of the beeches silver pillars and the roof above her blue and green and the grass lit with stars. I … I remember thinking … I had thought I heard the world singing, before. But it was nothing to the song that accompanied the One Above.”

His hands wandered over the strings, playing pieces: the tree-trunks, a single flower in the grass, the light on the water, the wind blowing through his hair.

“When I was somewhat recovered I saw she stood waiting … waiting for me to be able to pay attention, I suppose. She said, ‘Come,’ and I came, around the pool. I fell on my knees before her; I remember that.”

Kasian breathed so deeply the candle flame flickered low. The light caught traces of tears on his face, as if someone had brushed gold leaf across his cheekbones.

“She laid three things before me: a sword, and a crown, and a lirin. Then she asked me which I would choose, were I to choose one only.”

“The sword of the Lord Phoenix,” Kasian said, looking at it. “The crown—the crown of
 
Ysthar. And the lirin?”

Raphael gathered words together out of the insistent singing of his memories.

“The lirin was—is—the lirin of the Morning Star, before he was unnamed, before he fell. I didn’t hesitate—why should I? I knew full well the sword was not for me, and the crown … I had never wanted power or its responsibilities. But the lirin …”

He stroked the smooth wood of its curving belly. “I chose it. I didn’t know, not really, what it was. I didn’t think about the stories about the Morning Star, why he fell. I just wanted the music. She asked me why, and I replied that it was to play the song I heard then, the song of songs it was, the song of creation. That was all. Just to play it once would have been enough. I thought. It was almost enough. No. It has been enough. It has. I survived …”

Kasian was politely silent, while the fire arched in the hearth like a cat.

Raphael raised his eyes from the fire, found words. “She told me I should have the other two if I would have the lirin, and I accepted. Then I played for her …” He could not help but smile at this memory, of a perfect moment, though he dared not fumble with that music, with his fingers as unpractised as they were. “And she said my playing was good.”

Kasian said nothing, though his face was illuminated with wonder.

“Then she went away from that place. Or at least I couldn’t—I didn’t sense her any longer. Neither sight nor magic nor music.”

He fell silent, thinking of the resounding praises that the world had sung after her departure, the hymns and hosannas and hallelujahs. Then, a while later, he added, “So that is why I, of all people, am the Lord of
 
Ysthar. In return for a musical instrument. Da would not be impressed.”

“Is that truly the lirin of the Morning Star before he fell?”

Raphael nodded solemnly, and he saw from Kasian’s face that his brother was remembering that he was the Lord of
 
Ysthar. With a sense that if tonight he could touch the phoenix cloak his brother the king could touch the God’s gift he said: “Here.”

Kasian took the lirin gently, running his hands across the wood, reverent, wondering, almost awed. He pinged one string and winced. “Not exactly what it’s meant to sound like,” he said, returning it, smiling wryly “I’d be better with the sword. I’m not sure about the crown.”

“They would suit you better than they do me.”

“Ah, but then I am not generally considered to be the greatest magus of the nine worlds.”

Raphael shook his head. “I don’t feel great at the moment. I feel very tired.”

Kasian smiled more lightly. “Where is your crown? I’ve always wanted to see it.”

That struck him as an odd desire. “Why?”

“Why? I find crowns interesting. And I’ve never been able to visualize what ‘three rose branches twisted together’ looks like.”

“It adds up to ‘uncomfortable’,” Raphael murmured, and hauled himself upright by dint of leaning on Kasian’s shoulder. He sent his magic out in a gentle wave, which was really all he could manage, and found the telltale glimmer of power. “Ah. It’s in the library.”

They walked there slowly. Raphael’s ribs were hurting and his shoulder throbbing; playing the lirin had certainly not been good for either. He didn’t feel exhilarated now that he had stopped. He felt rather numb, with his mind echoingly empty, and, after his small defiance of the inevitable, tired and depressed.

“You’re going quiet again,” Kasian observed as he opened the door. “Please don’t—What a lovely room this is!”

The unconsidered exclamation lifted Raphael’s heart. He did like the library, a room he’d originally built in the Georgian period, with rich blue draperies and stained-glass windows between the tall built-in bookcases. The furniture was from a house he’d had in Edwardian Piccadilly, comfortable leather and brass chairs interspersed with plants and art. A jasmine sprawled halfway up one wall and across some of his less frequently read books. The room was two stories high, the roof a semicircle painted blue with stars on it, not a Georgian (now that he thought of it) but a later fancy.

Kasian looked up at it and then grinned at him. “My bedroom ceiling is painted like that.”

Raphael crossed the room to where the sandalwood box containing the crown rested on the lectern shelf. He stood there for a moment, feeling wobbly, and when he picked up the box it was heavy in his hands. He sank down into the nearest chair and watched his brother turn about the room.

“You’d like my palace,” Kasian murmured. “It’s like this room. But surely these aren’t all your books? Or is there magic to the shelves?”

“There are some hidden recesses. Most of my books on magic are in my study upstairs, and the rest are in the attic. These are my favourites.”

“You read so many languages. I’m envious.”

That reminded him of what Kasian had said, as they walked the streets of London before the end of the Game. “Do they really say Tell the Lord of
 
Ysthar in Ixsaa as an idiom?”

Kasian started and then laughed uproariously. “Yes they do, you doubting fool. I wasn’t just prodding you. Ask your friend Scheherezade. She tells true stories.”

Raphael opened the box, something—another emotion, thought, idea he could not identify, something momentous and quiet—coming together softly, like the first two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The white-gold crown of Ysthar, which he had only ever worn that once, on Wednesday for the duel.

“This is the crown of
 
Ysthar,” he said to Kasian, whose jaw had dropped, though Raphael wasn’t sure why, unless it was for its great and terrible beauty. “I took on three things, not just the lirin: there was the sword and this crown as well. The sword, I thought, for justice; the crown, for duty; and the lirin … the lirin was what I wanted. Beauty, perhaps, or creation, or … I don’t know. I’ve always thought of the sword and the crown as going together, with the lirin separate. Those two belonging to the Lord Phoenix; the lirin to his brother.”

“Power and authority. But creation shouldn’t be separate from them, surely? Otherwise it’s sterile. Me in my palace rather than me in Ixsaa.”

“Justice and duty keep power and authority sweet. I think I made a mistake about the lirin. It wasn’t given to me over, or instead of, the others. They were all three given together. To take the lirin I had to accept the others.”

“And when you met the Shadow King?”

Raphael looked at his brother with sudden understanding. “I should have remembered that along with equilibrium and entropy there is creation. Along with all the strife, there is—”

“Love.”

Raphael stared. “What do you mean?”

“Your magic isn’t bad, Raphael, no matter how terrible its beginnings were for you. You’ve made it something good. You love Ysthar, the way you love your music.”

“I haven’t had music for years,” he replied uncomfortably.

Kasian smiled with wry humour illuminating his face and reminding Raphael forcibly of their mother. “No, I suppose you haven’t. You lost it when you met the Eater of
 
Worlds. But you never abandoned Ysthar. Look how you have broken yourself but never faltered this week. And you played for me just now.”

Raphael focused on the jasmine, which had put out a few dozen sprays of delicate white-and-pink blossoms at some point since they had entered and was surreptitiously opening them as if it didn’t want him to notice it was perfuming the room. “The blackbird’s singing inspired me. It wasn’t anything else.”

His brother laughed. “You keep telling yourself that, Raphael, just keep telling yourself that. Will you play for me again? There’s so much of yours I’ve only heard rumours of.”

The air fell close about him. “Not now,” he said. “My shoulder’s hurting.”

“But soon?”

Raphael had dreamed of this day for years, wanted this question to be asked all through his childhood and even long past the time when he had spurned his name and its memories, all the way to the moment when he had seen his path split between the lirin and the crown and the sword, and had not realized that those three paths were all deceptive, that the split was in his mind, that the shadow that flies before the dawn had known him too well.

He looked out the window and saw faint greenish hints of dawn behind the walls of his garden.

To have to say no—to be able to say yes—His feelings were too strong for his bruised heart. More easily than he would ever have expected he claimed the third route, the one he had not known to look for when the choice had last come upon him. “If you’d like,” he said shyly. “Once my shoulder’s better.”

He closed the lid on the crown and set it on the shelf beside the First Folio edition of Will Shakespeare’s works, and then he went to bed.

Chapter Seventeen

That Which Moves the Sun

People always said there were irrevocable steps. They cross the Rubicon, burn bridges, take one step too far.

Perhaps that was so, Raphael thought, waking unexpectedly from confused dreams of music and roses to those fully articulated thoughts and even more unexpected sunlight streaming through the window directly onto him. He regarded the square of light on the counterpane suspiciously before realizing the unaccustomed brightness in his face was because he was in bed at an unaccustomed hour, and this was how the light fell then.

He swung himself out of bed with much stiffness and soreness but less actual pain than the previous night. He contemplated the day, and realized there was nothing urgent to be done. There was that twinge in western Canada, but that could wait for a few more days. That was all: the magic of the world was otherwise quiescent, the lull after the Game.

After the Game
. This was
after
.—He could take a holiday.

The thought was as unexpected as the light in his bedchamber. It opened too far for his mind to grasp, this sense of freedom from the constraints of the Game. He balanced himself with practical thoughts. It was morning, not night, and—

—
he had played his lirin for Kasian
.

That opened up other avenues of terror, until he narrowed his thoughts to a smaller space of time and steadied his lurching imagination on it: right now. Right now he had nothing requiring his activity. Right now no duties were calling him. Right now Kasian was asleep. Right now he could take a bath.

Getting into the tub required a number of painful contortions and judicious use of magic to manage, and also drove all thoughts away but pleasure in the physical sensation of warm water and cleanliness.

It was while he stood drying himself afterwards that his thoughts circled back to his waking idea, about the importance of second steps.

The only large mirror in his house was in the bathing room; he didn’t much like mirrors for a variety of reasons, a few magical but most of them simpler forms of discomfort. He knew his face well enough to shave without looking, and knew his clothing fit (and which items suited his various roles best), and outside of requirements as a film star he found that sufficient. He’d been contentedly ignoring the one in the bathing room until his thoughts came round to the high demands his friends had made of him.

Remembering Will’s remarks about the mirrors of reason and vanity he let his glance steady on his reflection.

Dark blue eyes, pale blond hair, rather pallid skin after a London winter, a few scars old and new, spectacular bruising.

The entire right side of his torso was a spreading column of bruises, yellowing on the edges and still dark purple along both sides of the snaking white and red lines of magefire that led in a shallow diagonal from shoulder blade to ankle.

Magefire that both Kasian and Robin had recognized, and, so seeing, had recognized the depth of secrets he was keeping.

Last night he’d played for Kasian. A personal Rubicon, he thought. He traced with light fingers the edge of the bruises he could reach, feeling the lingering traces of Robin’s helping magic from Thursday night.

It was Saturday, he thought suddenly: the play was over as well as the Game. This was
after
, when Sherry’s new stories began. He’d crossed the Rubicon. He’d taken off his masks. He’d played for Kasian.