"If I were to guess, I would say that someone is already listening."
"And the spell?"
"It is not a powerful one," he replied. "With spells of this nature, it is best to expend little power."
"Oh?"
"Power has its signature, and it draws the attention of the powerful, if they are aware and they are looking for it. What I cast . . . is not a major magic. There are those with skills far greater who could breach its barrier with ease."
"With pathetic ease," the kinlord at Kind"s side offered quietly.
"Telakar?"
He looked at her for a moment, eyes narrow. "I am not a mortal," he said stiffly. "I will not be tested."
She hesitated for just a moment; the hesitation caught their attention, drawing all eyes. And she was aware of the weight of each stare. She had lived her life in the Shining Court, in the presence of the Kialli and the kinlords of note; nothing in that life had prepared her for this one. Not even for this war.
Telakar waited.
They all did, but it was his gaze that brought the past back, that defined her in its light.
When the Kialli went to war, battle was a thing of light and fire, a dance of ferocity, a movement that ended only in the destruction or subjugation of the combatants. They might bring their servants into play, the blood-bound, the creatures who had chosen slavery over death-but those deaths counted for little.
Here, upon the heights of Callesta, those wars seemed small and distant, and their cost, negligible; in the end, they were simply another expression of the laws of the h.e.l.ls: Power ruled. There was no regret at the deaths of the weak; the h.e.l.ls absorbed them, fed on them, sometimes caused them to be reborn in a fashion, weaker by far than they had been, and destined to serve.
She looked at the kai Leonne, a man who had chosen to stand against the forces of the Shining Court in defiance of all advice she had offered-would have offered-when they had first met. And yet, having chosen to join a battle that he half understood, he did not flinch or waver. Nor did he approach it as the Kialli did. He was mortal; he was surrounded by mortals, by those who could either seek death or wait for its approach, but could never rise above it.
She had met mortals in the Shining Court. Lady Sariyel, and her lord, the mage; the Imperial humans who kept their visits a secret from the mortal lords they pretended to serve. All of their fighting was done with words, and some little magic; they played games of power without apprehending the cost of those games, and their losses, in the end, were the more profound, for the mortals in the Court, when killed, were often escorted to the h.e.l.ls, there to be fodder for the entertainment of demons the Lord had not seen fit to return to the plane.
She had cared little for them, had trusted them even less.
There was only one mortal in the Court that she had trusted. Only one. She bowed her head, losing the thread of Duarte"s words, his reasoned caution, his mild frustration.
Ashaf. Ashaf kep"Valente. She p.r.o.nounced the words in the only place she would ever p.r.o.nounce them: in silence, the privacy of thought. And she waited for the pain they caused, the terrible, burning anger, the truth of Kiallinan. Instead, she saw an old woman with soft arms, a softer face, a voice that cracked in the wind and wavered in the cold of the Northern tower. No weapons girded her; no power set her apart from the mortals that were said to populate the lands beyond the Northern Wastes.
Instead, she offered song, cradle song, child"s song. She offered stories of tall gra.s.s, and small children, of baking bread and casting clay in the summer kilns; of stalks of wheat in fields that the sun made golden. She spoke of rivers that did not freeze, of water that was offered openly beneath a warm sky, of the fall of rain.
And she spoke of love.
Not even the mortal Court had been so bold, and so foolish.
Ashaf had paid the price for her weakness.
And in paying, had gone forever beyond Kind"s reach: for Kiriel might never join her in the lands it was said the mortals reached when at last they knew peace.
And yet.
She stood among these men, these women-the Commanders had come upon them silently-and she saw in them some hint of Ashaf"s weakness, although they told no tales, offered the comfort of no open arms, no folded lap. She saw them converse; saw them, expressions guarded, as they teetered upon the edge of a power that no single one of them could wholly claim, in the end.
They deferred to Valedan. That was his right. But they did not fear him; they did not plot to overthrow him. In his turn, he deferred to their knowledge, trusting their experience, and trusting his instinct, balancing carefully between the two.
No: life in the Shining Court had offered her no preparation for this, this mortal mess.
"Kiriel?"
She shook her head. Decided. "I cannot sense them," she said quietly.
"Them?"
"The ones who listen."
But decisions were complex, complicated, things done by halves. She glanced at Lord Telakar to see what he made of the weakness of that confession, aware that his home was the Shining Court, aware that his rules were the laws of the h.e.l.ls.
She had not bound him. Did not know how. The only binding that lay within her grasp was distinctly mortal: the uneasy alliance that did not quite trust, but could not quite dismiss.
"You found me," he said quietly. "Is your instinct so dulled that those of lesser power escape your attention?"
Old anger bridled at the accusation in his words. Old lessons returned, and with them, the voice of the Lord she had trusted, in a different life. His name, she could not say.
"I . . . do not know . . . why I found you," she said at last.
Commander Bruce Allen raised a brow. "Do not know, or are not willing to say?"
It was a fair question. A reasonable one.
But Valedan kai di"Leonne raised a sharp hand, as if it were blade. "She has said that she does not know," he told the Eagle curtly.
The Commander fell silent. As silent as Kiriel, as surprised by the interruption as she had been.
Lord Telakar"s eyes wavered an instant, crossing the distance between Kiriel"s face and the man she had chosen to serve. "Is he so foolish that he has chosen to trust you?"
"Apparently."
"And you have become so practiced in the Kialli arts that you are capable of playing at the game of being trustworthy?"
"No."
Silence. Then, softly, "You have changed, Kiriel. I do not know what to make of it."
"You have not been asked to judge."
"Indeed, no. But judgment is a failing of mine; it is the reason that I am kinlord and not servitor. My name is my own."
She nodded. And then, although she could not say why, she lifted her hand. Her sword hand. Upon it, in the veiled moonlight, in the orange of the lamps the Commanders-or their adjutants-carried, was the pale, simple band she had taken from the ground at the feet of Evayne.
"What is this?" he asked softly, speaking again in the tongue of the kin.
"A ring," she answered in the same tongue. The syllables, the harshness of the consonants, were somehow pleasing.
He reached out, and she drew her hand back.
"Your pardon, Kiriel. With your permission, I would like to examine the ring."
She laughed bitterly. "My permission does not seem to be the deciding factor. If you wish to examine it, you must examine it as it sits; it will not be removed."
He gazed at her, and she knew he was attempting to determine the truth behind the words she offered; the half-truth, the benefit she might gain by lying. It wearied her. It made her feel at home.
"I tried to remove the finger," she continued, dispa.s.sionately. "And the hand. I suspect that not even the removal of the arm would be possible, but I admit that I did not attempt that much injury."
"The loss of the hand would be danger enough."
She shrugged. "I would not attempt it now."
"You accept the ring?"
"I accept what cannot be changed."
His turn to offer a shrug. "Wise."
She held out her hand. He reached out to touch it, and the ring flared, brilliant in the shard-scattered clearing, a warning that seared the fingertips of the kinlord, driving him back.
He did not so much as grunt with the pain, and she knew that the pain was fierce. Knew also that it was beneath him; the whole of his attention was now absorbed by what could not be touched.
"Kiriel," he said quietly. "Do you know what it is that you bear?"
"A ring."
"Yes. One of five, if I am not mistaken. One of the five. I have . . . heard of them, of course. The Lord has heard. In the distance of the Northern Wastes, he has felt the echo of their brief awakening, but it is tentative; they slumber. If they had not, he would have found them years ago.
"All, I think, save this one."
"Indeed, you are correct in your surmise," a new voice said.
Kiriel turned. They all turned.
It was to Kiriel that Meralonne APhaniel offered a low bow. "Well met," he said softly. "Well met, Kiriel di"Ashaf." Rising, he added, "Well met, Lord Telakar."
Lord Telakar turned to the Member of the Order of Knowledge. "Illaraphaniel," he said softly, and his face was transformed.
"I wondered if you would be summoned," the magi said quietly. "And I wondered if I might encounter you in the heart of the South. I had not expected to find you here, so close to the Northern border." He paused. "Word has reached the Order of Knowledge. Word, and rumor, although I confess that rumor means little to most of my brethren."
"And what word?"
"The Cities of Man," Meralonne said quietly.
Telakar smiled.
"A young man of Arkosa resides within the High City; he does not speak Weston well, but it is our belief that he traveled with his Matriarch toward the Tor Arkosa."
"Our?"
"Mine, then. And I see that there must be some truth in that belief, for you are here."
"I am here," Telakar said smoothly, "in service to Lord Kiriel."
"Lord?"
"Kiriel di"Ashaf," Telakar replied, correcting himself.
Kiriel knew the slip had been no accident.
Meralonne turned to Kiriel once again. "I offer advice," he said wearily, "and only advice. Lord Telakar is not your enemy-but he is not, by the nature of his service to the Lord of Night, your friend. What you have done, what you have revealed, is a danger to you-a danger that you cannot understand.
"I would counsel you to destroy him."
"He serves me."
"Indeed. Let me accept, as truth, that premise. But in the presence of the Lord of Night, what does such an allegiance count for? If he is commanded, he will speak of all that he has learned from you, and what he has learned cannot be measured in simple words. If commanded, he will return to the North."
"Enough, Illaraphaniel," Telakar said, his voice thin and cool.
"And if he delivers word that you wear the fifth of Myrrdion"s rings-the only ring forged in such a way that it might remain invisible forever to the Lord of Night and his endless gaze . . ."
"Yes?"
"It was said that not even a G.o.d could unmake what Myrddion forged," Meralonne said softly. "But I would not test it, if I had the choice. Because if the ring itself cannot be unmade, its bearer can."
"What is the role of the ring, Illaraphaniel?"
"In truth? I do not know. But did I, I would not share that information with one who could be so easily compelled to part with it. It is some part of Myrddion"s vision, some part of his great plan. We were privy to the necessity of the creation, but not the insanity of the vision itself. We cannot say."
Telakar shook his head. The motion was strange enough that it drew the whole of Kiriel"s attention. Her eyes widened; his expression made him look like a different creature. "This . . . ah. I thought . . . this was an impoverished age," he said softly. "So empty of the grace and the fire of man"s magic, so gray and so lifeless. But now I see that legends are waking. We may see a return to power of the heroes of that era."
"Heroes," Meralonne said coldly, "are vastly overrated."
"Perhaps. But in the end, was it not a mortal hero who rode into the heart of Vexusa? Was it not a mortal hand that lifted sword, that dealt the crippling blow to the Lord of Darkness?"
"So the bards sing, who sing of that time at all."
"And you?"
"I am no bard. I offer your lord my warning, that is all."
Telakar turned to Kiriel. "He is correct."
She frowned.
"He is correct, Lord."