"The h.e.l.ls she was."
"Of the six demons that attempted to a.s.sa.s.sinate the kai Leonne, she"s taken four."
"First blood-"
"The rules, I believe, were clear; first blood doesn"t seem to faze them-but they pause at the loss of limb. Or life, if they have it."
Auralis spit. Duarte knew, by the sudden twist of his lips, that he had money riding on what Duarte had thought of as an informal contest. Saw by the sudden gleam in Alexis" eyes that he wasn"t the only one.
He d.a.m.ned them both genially.
"These Annies," Alexis said, "are our Annies. The kin want to hunt them, they can d.a.m.n well hunt among their own."
Fiara spit to the side for good measure. "Duarte?"
"Primus," he said curtly.
"Pri-mus Duarte."
"Yes?"
"I"m going to wake the others."
"You might as well. It was getting crowded here anyway." A reminder of death.
He watched her leave, and then listened to her, feet as heavy as horse hooves through the ruins of the path their haste had made. If he was any judge, someone would pay for it; the Serra Amara was not the most forgiving of women, and she had made it clear, in the perfect grace of feminine Southern pride, that these were hers.
The Serra Alina touched Valedan"s shoulder; he turned at once.
"The deaths," she told him.
He nodded.
"They must be seen. By the serafs. By the common clansmen. They must understand that what you have brought from the North is death: death for the servants of the Lord of Night. Must understand that you have taken this risk because you value their service, indentured or no.
"If you can accomplish this without killing the men and women we need as witnesses, the presence of your Northern guards will no longer be an accusation of your weakness and your diluted blood; you will not be-in Callesta-the mere scion of the Northern Generals."
"Ah. And the Commanders?"
"Best to leave them," she said quietly. "This hunt, if it is a hunt, must be seen to be yours."
"Ser Andaro?"
Silent, the perfect Tyran, Ser Andaro nodded. "The Serra Alina di"Lamberto is known for her wisdom."
"And the unfortunate sharpness of her tongue," Alina said coolly. But a smile dimpled her cheek, the lines proof that it was genuine.
"I fear, Serra, that you will be disappointed," Duarte said quietly. "The Ospreys are not theatrical."
"I might have thought so." No veil hid her face, no fan obscured it; she sought no courtly grace beneath the open face of the watching moon. But the grace that she had been born to did not desert her, and the night gentled the lines that the sun, wind, and time had begun to wear in the corner of lips and eyes.
"And now?"
"I have never seen her kneel to you," she said quietly, gazing at Kiriel. "And if she kneels thus, blade bloodied, and triumphant, it is to you that they will look."
Kiriel di"Ashaf, risen, said nothing.
"It is a risk," Valedan said at last. "And the risk is great. But-"
"Tyr" agar."
"Kiriel?"
"I have never met Mareo di"Lamberto. I . . . do not understand . . . the whole of his significance. But I believe that Lord Telakar will have much to say, even beneath the face of the reigning sun, if the Tyr"agnate can be brought to listen. And what is said, he might find of interest."
"He is Mareo," Serra Alina said bitterly.
The Voyani woman was carried into the Callestan domicile. She did not wake, but she stirred; unconsciousness had given way to sleep beneath the hands of the nameless healer. That man was spent; he had dwindled in size and stature, and he had had little of either before he commenced. He did not allow himself to be touched; accepted no offer of support. Nor did he allow himself to touch the woman again; he gloved his hands and waited.
"Telakar."
"Lady."
Kiriel frowned. "It is not the time for games."
"You do not understand, do you?" Telakar"s slender hands caressed the woman"s brow; strands of her hair, red brown as dried blood, but living, moving in the lift and fall of his fingers, caught light. Caught him. Something in the texture of his voice was familiar. "Games are all we have. Mortals are foolish; if the stakes are high, they cease to acknowledge that what is played is indeed a game.
"Have you become foolish, Kiriel? You are the only student that Lord Isladar has ever chosen to take; I cannot imagine that you have descended into mortal folly. Had you, you would not have survived the Court."
"I do not intend that most of the Court survive me," she told him, blunt now. Angry.
"No. No more do any of the kinlords." He shrugged, bored.
"That was never your game."
"No. It bored me. It bores me now."
"And that brought you here?"
"You are mortal. You will live only briefly, and you will die; you cannot contemplate an eternity of boredom if you can ask that question." Hands stilled; his fingers hovered above the membranes of the woman"s closed eyes. Kiriel wondered briefly if he intended to remove them.
"There were, among the Allasiani, those who did not choose to follow Allasakar into the h.e.l.ls."
"Allasiani?"
"Ah. How odd. Lord Isladar has always evinced an interest in history. Perhaps you ended your tenure as student too early. I am not a teacher; I am not his equal."
Kiriel stared at the Kialli lord.
"But I have always been fascinated by things mortal."
"All of the Kialli are." She could not keep the fury from the words, but her expression was rigid.
"They are fascinated by suffering and death," he said with a bored shrug. "The least of the imps can grant either; it does not speak to power, but to self-indulgence."
Again she stared at him, at his hands upon the face of the sleeping woman, his captive now.
"I will tell you what the Allasiani were," he said quietly. "It is a gap in your education that should never have been allowed."
She could have demanded his silence.
But curiosity had always been a failing. Unbidden, she heard Isladar"s voice, felt his hands upon her brow, felt the heat of his anger, and beneath it, something she had mistaken, in her foolish youth, as concern. Several times in her childhood, curiosity had almost killed her.
No comfort there. It had failed.
"The servants," he continued quietly, "and the allies of Allasakar."
"That name is not spoken here."
"Indeed, and perhaps that is wise. I forget myself."
She did not believe it. He knew she did not.
"Some among us are called kinlord," he continued, his eyes upon this woman"s face, upon the rise and fall of chest made by shallow breath. "And some Kialli."
"I . . . understand . . . what Kiallinan is."
"Ah. He gifted you, if you understand that much."
"And the other?"
"It is what we were," he told her, looking up for the first time. "When we walked this plane. When we knew life, knew birth, and even, in our time, death. You see us as the plane permits us to be seen. Those who are too weak to negotiate with the primal force of the ancient earth bear forms that were never ours: talons, blades, bodies of chitin and b.e.s.t.i.a.l faces. Yet among those, some memories still burn.
"I was Allasiani. I was counted young. Among my brethren . . . many were lost to the Lord"s h.e.l.ls."
"Not you."
"No. In my youth, I was pa.s.sionate. Although I was fascinated by the flaws and the imperfections of the short, short lives of the mortals, I loved the Lord. Perhaps you can see what we saw in him then. I do not know; it is lost to me now. Lost in the h.e.l.ls; in the boiling rivers, the charnel winds, the sensuous cries of the d.a.m.ned." He lowered his face again.
"But when we . . . lived . . . I was among the few who were given stewardship over the mortals who served. Because I was one of the few who could be trusted to winnow their numbers with care."
He lifted his hands.
"It was not an easy task."
She said, cruel now, "You attempted to heal her. Tonight."
He did not deny it.
"Why?"
"Because I am still enc.u.mbered by memory," he replied bitterly. "It is not an act . . . that I have attempted since the pa.s.sage from the h.e.l.ls; not an act that I have attempted since last I walked these valleys. The desert was no desert then; it was the heart of the power of Man. There, among the mortals, I found one or two of interest; they were seen as my pets; they were seen as creatures of value to me." He shrugged.
She knew, by the shrug, that it was true.
"I learned their art, in a fashion. I learned the workings of the frailty of mortal heart, and lung, and bone, of blood, of the tissue that binds the whole."
She shook her head.
"It is lost," he said quietly. "I should have known. I did not intend to endanger her life. I merely wished to show that it was of little value to me. Things of little value are seldom threatened. I a.s.sumed that I could . . . repair . . . the damage done." He stared at his hands, at the hands that were twined in her hair, a binding of her own, unconscious as she was. "But that gift, so bitterly won, is gone."
"Bitterly won?"
He raised a brow. "You ask too many questions," he said without rancor. Or judgment.
He turned to her then, and his eyes were the color of fire. "I have forgotten nothing," he said, and it was a vow.
"You will leave her now."
"Yes." Very slowly, he disentangled his hands.
"She will be safe here."
"You promise safety, Kiriel, when you must sleep, must eat, must breathe?" His laugh was bitter. Unkind.
It made her long for home.
The Tyr"agnate came. He came as kings must come, his armor fine, his sword fine, his helm unblemished by dint of war.
Artifice, that. The Serra Alina understood that though the helm itself was new to battle, the man beneath its confines was not. In the North, in the history of the North, Commanders lay trapped behind their lines of mastery; the faceless and the nameless legions were driven forth before them, to fight and die at a distance that made the individuals insignificant. The map of their deaths, the length of the line their combined bodies made, counted for much, and each man stood as the link in a chain, a mesh, armor of a different caliber.
Thus had Mirialyn taught her in the long, empty halls of Avantari, beyond the stretch of the Arannan Halls in which Southern women were expected to be Serras. In grace. In silence.
She had surrendered silence for the sake of the Princess; had surrendered distance, distrust, the caution that comes with a life lived in the High Courts of Lamberto. And in return for that surrender she had taken knowledge.
The knowledge was theory.
The theory was empty now, but she might see it played out for her inspection by night"s end; the Ospreys had been summoned.
In the Dominion of Annagar, the Ospreys defined the ferocity and the power of the North. Not even the Callestan Tyr understood how little loved, how little respected, the Ospreys were by the Imperial army; they, outsiders all, had won from the South the respect that the North had been denied-and had won none of that for themselves in the North, by their ferocity, their brutality, their pragmatism.
They were few. Thirty men and women, dressed in armor that was not nearly as fine as the Callestan Tyr"s. They did not stand in lines; they did not stand abreast; they did not master the watchful stillness that informed the Tyran.
Instead, they spoke among themselves, the silence of their language a movement of fingers in air, against shoulder, against chest. Few of the Ospreys wore shields; Cook did, and Sanderton, a scattered number of the men. The shields were defaced; the bird of prey that plunged to earth at their center painted over in the sedate colors of House Kalakar-colors muted by night, even in the lamplight.
They looked to their Captain.
He alone was worthy to serve, and he stood with the grace and attention denied his impatient troop.