The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5 Page 4

  “You’re an Imperial?”

  “I’m a free towner. I was.”

  He relaxed at that; it made her smile again. The smile was not a comforting, or a comfortable, expression. “How do you know who I am?”

  “Ask me that in ten years; perhaps in ten years I can answer.” Her smiled was bitter and brief. “Or perhaps in twenty. Or perhaps never.”

  “Where—where are we going?”

  “Would you go to your home, Devlin?”

  He started to nod and his head froze, and he became aware, fully, that he had lost more than Anya, and more than himself, on this afternoon: he had lost all else, all family. He could not return to them with this crime on his head. He could not face them.

  But he had no money, and no gear; everything had been left at the campsite. “No.”

  Her cloak lifted; later, he would remember that she had not touched it at all, but at the time it seemed natural, a throwing off of guises. Nothing about this woman was natural. Beneath the cloak she had three things. The first was a pack. The second was a bedroll. And the third—the third was a sword. Its scabbard was almost unadorned; it was black and long, with a silver tip and a silver mouth. But in its center there was a large, clear stone that caught the light and held it brilliantly. He wasn’t a jeweler, but he thought—he thought it might be real.

  “Is it—”

  “It’s not a magical sword, if that’s what you’re asking,” she replied, with just a hint of wryness. “But if you will make a life for yourself, there is a life waiting. Have you not heard, Devlin? The Empire is at war.”

  “War?”

  “The free towns obviously don’t feel the Southerners at their borders.”

  “With the South?”

  “With the Dominion, yes. The war started a year ago; I fear that it may continue for at least another. These are the games that men play, who desire power.

  “You’ll see what war means, Devlin. Don’t forget the cost of it.” She paused, and set the pack and the bedroll down at his feet. The sword, she lifted in two hands. “This sword’s maker was a man torn by his own past and his desire for vengeance. I believe that you will understand him, or you would have, had you met. Take it.”

  He hesitated, and then nodded. It was easier to obey her than it was to think—to think about what he was, now.

  The blade was bound to its scabbard; he cut the strings that held it, and then, effortlessly, he drew the sword.

  He hefted it, swinging it lightly to and fro, in ever faster arcs. As the son of the village smith, he knew weapons, for his father had come from the Empire itself, with a weapon-smith’s knowledge of arms—and in the free towns, arms were valued, especially in the warm seasons when Imperial bandits thought to take a small “unprotected” town’s merchants.

  This sword was light for all its weight and heft; it turned easily in his hand; its balance was fine. Lifting it to the light, he studied its edge. It was so perfect, he thought it had never seen a forge’s test, never mind battle.

  This was a sword his father would have killed for.

  His father.

  The momentary wonder was guttered.

  “Devlin. Come.”

  She turned and began to walk, and it seemed that her gait was slow and awkward. He followed at once, and offered her an arm—a gesture as natural to him as breath.

  She did not take it. “We have little time, and you must be away, although the gem upon the sword will protect you from his sight unless he himself is close.” And she climbed up the hill, strong and spry for all that she walked slowly.

  There, waiting impatiently in grasses too summer-hard to be good eating, was a horse. It was brown and slender—no plow horse or cart horse this—and its sides still heaved, as if it had just been run, and hard.

  “Take these,” she said softly. “The Imperial army is looking for men, for good men.”

  “Then they won’t take me.”

  “They’ll take you,” she answered quietly. “The war is growing bitter, and they need the men. You come with a horse, a fine one, and a sword that’s finer still. Here,” she added, “take this. Buy yourself a rank, if you’ll find a House that will let you.” Her face was pale. “I know that I’m sending you to the wolves, boy—but learn to be a wolf. It’s all you have now.”

  As if she knew. As if she knew his crime.

  He mounted the horse awkwardly, and she paled. “Devlin—you do know how to ride, don’t you?”

  “Some,” he answered curtly, because it was the truth. But it wasn’t much of a truth; he’d ridden rarely, and more often in wagon and cart than on horseback. He turned the horse around. Turned it back.

  And then he glanced over his shoulder to say something, to offer this stranger thanks.

  She was looking at her hand—at the rings on her hand—with some curiosity. There were four; she touched them, one at a time, and then when she came to the last, a ruby of red fire and brilliance even at the distance that separated them, she pulled it hard. It did not budge. He might have offered to help, but he knew her now as sorcerer, and he wasn’t a fool.

  Just a coward.

  “In time,” she said, although he didn’t understand why. “It is not yet your time.” Before he could speak, she lifted a hand. “Never thank me, Devlin. It is . . . hard on me.” She smiled; it was a bleak expression, a bitter one. He might have spoken in spite of her request, but she took a step forward, and there was suddenly no one to speak to.

  The horse shuddered once, and Devlin began to ease it into a walk.

  But he did not go east, not yet; he went west. To face the truth, and to face himself.

  The lake, in the summer day, was alive with the glitter of dragonfly wings, the buzz of insects, the flight of birds large and small. As he approached, he could see the flat, torn square that had once been the tent that he and Anya had shared. Beside it, like so much refuse, the bedroll she’d been torn out of; it was whole.

  He saw ash in the sandy pit they’d made for their fire, saw the black soot of burned wood against stone. His hands were heavy on the reins, his breath tight. Minutes passed; the sun rested upon dark hair, heating it, as if in judgment. The horse—the unnamed, too fine horse—was restive beneath him, almost anxious, as if he, too, knew what had been done here. Devlin urged him forward, and the horse went. Barely.

  If he owned the horse, truly, Devlin thought, sliding out of the saddle, the horse was going to have to understand who was master, and who mount. But not now. Not now.

  He took a deep breath and began to search the grass. For her. The blade saw its first use, against tall stalks of green-gray; white tufts flew in the wayward breeze as he cut loose pods of milkweed. Here and there, birds flew up, chattering in fear or frustration, brown wings spread to catch the wind, to use it. They were, all these things, clouds that he moved through.

  He had to find her body.

  We have little time, and you must be away.

  His search grew more frantic as the sun rose. He had left her to die—but he could not leave her to rot. The Mother’s arms had not yet been opened to receive this most precious of her daughters, and he would do this last thing for her because he had failed in every other way.

  But search as he might, this last act of penitence was to be denied him. The grass yielded nothing.

  He was a coward, he thought bitterly, to the end, because he mounted the horse that the stranger had left him instead of pursuing his search into the lake, and the woods surrounding it, as if the search itself were all that mattered.

  No.

  He still wanted life. Had he ever told her that his life had no meaning without her? He wondered, and it hurt him.

  This, then, was the burden he carried with him from these lands that no man owned: A death and a life.

  And he would ride to war, carrying such a burden, and he would ride from war, carrying it, and earn his rank, and accept his decorations, all the while carrying it so naturally and so completely that none but he m
ight be aware of its nature.

  They might call him brave, who couldn’t see how much he had to prove. They might even call him honorable, who did not see just how deep, and how dark, the stains upon his hands could be.

  CHAPTER ONE

  20th of Misteral, 427 AA

  The Shining Palace

  ANYA decided there should be rabbits.

  This realization came upon her while she stood at the height of the palace wing that housed the human Court. While they huddled inside, in their draping cloaks of flat, shiny fur, she stood just beyond the balcony that opened, wind, snow, or sun, into the Northern Wastes, the flat of her feet against the raw stone of a dragon’s swooping neck. That dragon hunched, wings arched, just past the stone rails of the wide, deep balcony, looking down its serpentine nose across the startling white of the morning snow above—and beyond—the City, as if in mid-breath.

  The stone was cold and rough beneath the pads of her feet; she couldn’t decide whether or not she liked the feeling. But even given that indecision she knew this was not the way dragon skin should feel. She knew the old stories; dragons should have scales.

  And those scales should be larger than a man’s arm, and smooth. Definitely smooth. This old stone thing looked more like a giant worm with wings and teeth.

  She hesitated a moment.

  Since she had moved the throne, Lord Ishavriel had been in a bad mood. And although he never raised his voice, and never tried to hurt her, she didn’t like it when he was angry.

  But she did have her throne, now. She could sit in it whenever she wanted, and listen to the colors that glimmered along the shadowed floors, like dangerous old friends, their voices unmuted, their brightness undimmed. She could taste their shades through the tips of her fingers—although admittedly that was rare—and sometimes, when she was very tired, she could speak with them.

  She spoke to them now, but they were distant.

  But that was shadow, and she could think about that anytime. Today she had remembered rabbits.

  She usually hated memory. It was all bad. It took her back to the ugly times, before she had been taught just how special, how powerful, she was. She had considered making a spell that would stop her from remembering anything, ever—but Lord Ishavriel had told her it was a Bad Idea, and she had decided to trust him.

  And the rabbits proved that he was right.

  Today, she had been taken back to a time when colors were something she could see with eyes alone; they had no taste, no voice, no sensation. She could hear conversation as if spoken words had no smells; could touch soft fabrics, hard wood, cold metals, as if they, as they had once been, were once again devoid of taste.

  And when that happened, she treasured the memory and did everything in her power to preserve it.

  Everything.

  She was Anya a’Cooper. There was a lot she could do. But the stone against her bare feet was really starting to bother her, it was just so wrong.

  Across the grounds of the Shining Palace, from the heights of its towers to the depths of its hidden recesses, its cavernous dungeons, those creatures—human or kin—with a sensitivity to magic, lifted their heads in perfect unison, as if struck by the same blow, no matter how many walls, how much physical distance, separated them.

  It had become thus since the Lord’s ceremony; the investiture of His power into the flawed but inarguably powerful madwoman had not perturbed her in the slightest—but it had had the effect of deepening the range of her careless, whimsical magery.

  Had they not had to endure the results, and the resultant hazards, of the blending of immortal and mortal power, there were men within the walls of the Shining Palace who would have found the entire experiment fascinating. Those men now flinched; they were closest to the balcony upon which Anya had chosen to stand.

  Closest to the roar that crushed conversation, stilled movement, filled silence from one end of the Shining Palace to the other.

  The wall that was flimsy protection from the Northern cold cracked like thin ice and fell away from the line of the brilliant blue sky.

  Against it, for those who cared to look, stood the mad, mad mage, conversing with an angry dragon, a creature of stone and glittering scale.

  Anya, the dragon said, its voice rich with the heavy scent of newly turned earth, its words a deep, deep blue. She could feel each syllable crawling across the backs of her hands as they furled around air that was suddenly cold; there was magic here. The sensations were always sharpest in the presence of magic.

  She withdrew her own power without thinking, and the soles of her feet, protected until then—because she liked bare feet—from the bitter cold, now shrieked in protest. She could hear their voice like the rush of a thousand sibilant whispers.

  She didn’t like it when her feet spoke.

  But the dragon roared again, distracting her from her pain.

  “But they look so much better!” she shouted. “Everyone knows real dragons have scales!”

  Thus did the Lord of Night converse with the most powerful, and the least sane, of his many servants, and it must have amused him to do so, for although the outcome of such an argument could never be in doubt, the fact that it existed at all said much.

  20th of Misteral, 427 AA

  The Terafin Manse

  The moon was bright, the air still, the starlight lessened by the presence of thin clouds that huddled, shroudlike, before its silvered face.

  A man stood alone beneath the delicate light of the Averalaan night. The sea’s breaking rumble was a constant rhythm, the heartbeat of the High City; it could be heard in the distance because so many other sounds were absent: the movement of people, their breath broken by laughter or the harsh, sharp bark of angry syllables; the clipped, steady pace of the horses that drew carriages and coaches from manse to manse along the Isle; the heavy tread of the Kings’ Swords as they patrolled the High City with a vigilance not found in the Old City.

  True, those sounds were of necessity distant even during the height of day, but he had become aware of them.

  Had found it necessary to become aware of them; Amarais, named before her rise to power Handernesse, and then Handernesse ATerafin, had become as silent as stone. Yes, stone, Morretz thought bleakly, avoiding the other comparison that was so colloquial and inelegant.

  The Terafin was careful, during the hours of day, to tend her House and the affairs of her House as if nothing troubled her. As if she had had no warning of her impending death; as if death itself was the distant eventuality it would be for the rest of her House. But in the evenings she allowed the full weight of that knowledge to descend upon her, and shrouded by it, protected by it, she sought the solace of the Terafin Shrine—although judging by her expression, both before and after, it was meager solace indeed.

  He waited. He found it increasingly difficult to wait at a distance, although he had always waited here, at the edge of this path, for the lord he had chosen to serve so many years ago. That service now counted for more than half of his life.

  Amarais.

  She would die. She had accepted it with a peculiar, angry grace that Morretz himself had failed to achieve. He hid it; he hid it well. But his days were absorbed by the question of her survival; his mornings—when he had ascertained for himself that a simple thing like the morning meal would not kill her—began, and often ended, with Devon ATerafin.

  Devon, who understood the routines of assassination better than any other member of the House, up to and probably including the man—or woman—who would in the end successfully employ them against The Terafin. He had to. He served the Lord of the Compact as a member of his Astari, and he protected the Twin Kings.

  The Terafin had not, of course, specifically told Morretz to keep his peace—and his silence—in this affair.

  Nor should she have had to. In all things, Morretz of the Guild of the Domicis was her loyal servant. Hers, not House Terafin’s. He had spent the better part of a decade using the two—The Terafin, House T
erafin—as synonyms. That was gone; what remained was a bitter, simmering resentment, for it was the latter that would destroy the former, and she would offer herself up to it with a willing, terrible grace.

  The privilege of power.

  He was surprised when she returned to him early, for he had sat this vigil night after night for almost a month, and he knew the hour of its ending almost as intimately as he did the minute of its commencing.

  “Morretz,” she said quietly.

  He bowed, waiting until she stepped off the path before he spoke. Or intending to wait. But she stood, her feet to one side of the line that divided the tended stone walk from the inner recess of the garden, awaiting his acknowledgment.

  “Terafin,” he said at last. He looked up, the grace of the movement marred by the hesitance, subtle and deep, with which he met her gaze.

  She was standing in the shadows between the contained light of two glass lamps, and as he lifted his chin, she smiled. It was a weary expression, which did not alarm him, but it was also unusually gentle, which did. “Terafin—”

  She lifted a hand. “I am not yet finished for the evening, but before I am, I must ask a favor.”

  He waited.

  Her smile lessened, ebbing from the familiar terrain of her face as if it were tide. “Please summon the men and women who serve Jewel ATerafin.”

  “Summon them?”

  “Yes. I will meet them here.”

  “Terafin—”

  “Don’t ask,” she said quietly.

  He bowed, but he did not move. They both knew that the only time men and women were summoned to this place was to give their oaths of service to the House, and even then, it was rare for any but the Chosen to be so called. “Did the House demand their presence?”

  “No.”

  He looked at her face; she had chosen to stand where the shadows—in a garden where light was scattered in artful abundance—were strongest. Funny, that.

  “What will you do?” she asked him, as the silence stretched.

  He chose—as he rarely chose—to misunderstand her. “My pardon, Terafin, I will fetch the den.”