Aidan was distinctly glad that no part of his life depended upon the goodwill of that student. It was too bad, though; he was one of the two really good ones.
Talent, his mother used to say, tells you nothing at all about the man. Don’t judge anything by it. It was true, but it was always disappointing when someone who was living his dream didn’t live up to the dream itself.
He glanced to the side and found that the old man’s eyes were upon him. “He doesn’t understand most of what you say,” he said with a wry smile. “He merely dislikes you on principle. He wishes to be surrounded by his peers, and has enough wit to be suspicious of the unusual—you, in this case—without any instinct whatsoever to fall back upon for discretion’s sake.
“He is also,” Ser Anton added, “preparing in his own way for the trials. He likes too many things, too much: food, wine, the company of young women. But he has a sense of respect for his art, and although there is no question at all that he will be accepted as one of the hundred, he will give these trials the same respect as the Challenge itself. That alone sets him apart from the many rather unremarkable young men he resembles. It’s not just about talent, although talent does count. Focus. Concentration. Ambition. Without these, no man amounts to anything.”
“In the eyes of the Lord,” Aidan said quietly, thinking uncomfortably of his father.
The old man raised a solid brow. “Indeed,” he said softly. “In the eyes of the Lord.”
The trial administrators were a bored group of men. They resembled, more than anything, merchants, as they sat in high-backed chairs behind their solid, heavy desks. They even had paper and slate, ink and chalk, before them. Names were taken, and numbers given, numbers written down.
The old man—Ser Anton—smiled a little grimly. “This,” he said, “is where most of our day will surely be spent.”
“Do they do this where you live?”
“They do ‘this’ as you call it,” Ser Anton said, “in every land I have ever visited. Not for the same things, not precisely. But yes. In the Dominion, it is more gracefully hidden. A family must enter—with small fee—the name of their chosen contender or contenders. The Radann perform the office that these magistrates perform here, and they do it within the confines of their temples. They also,” he added, “have the good grace to do so where the rest of us are not forced to bear witness.
“You must excuse me. Few of my students speak Weston well enough to answer these questions—and almost all of them, without exception, take poorly to being asked them.”
Aidan was left alone.
No one chose to question his right to be here; he obviously carried no sword, so he wasn’t trying to sneak in as a contender. He stared at his feet, feeling his size and lack of weight, and almost despising both.
And because his vision was so turned inward, and unpleasantly at that, there was very little to distract him from one of his favorite sounds. Metal. Metal. The clash of weapons. He lifted his head. For the most part—or so he had been told—the men who had come to trial came to prove they had swords, but they were tested in this first round, with wooden swords. Practice blades. They were required to wear their armor, to show their bows, but steel and steel for such a test as this was rare.
He’d wondered about it, because the old man’s students certainly used real swords. And perhaps what his Da said wasn’t true. Wouldn’t be the first time, although it would be the first time he’d been wrong about the Challenge.
He thought the sounds of fighting would stop, but they didn’t and he couldn’t help himself. He was carried by them as if by music; to Aidan, they were. They had their own timing, their own distinct feel, and as he approached them, as the sounds grew louder, as the bodies in front of him became sparser and sparser still, he felt the hair on his neck stand on end.
The coliseum itself was huge, and it was mostly empty—those were the rules—but attendants, such as he, were allowed to sit and bear witness to the fairness of the trial’s many judges. He was aware of the seats, but he did not take one; he walked across the ringed floor to the railing that separated him from the two men who now fought in the circle’s center.
A flag was flying under the open sky, and beneath it, a banner had been driven into dirt. He did not recognize it immediately because he was not familiar with banners that didn’t have something common, like bread, a keg, or a lute sewn across them, but when he saw the gold glinting off the full height sun, when he saw the golden curve of the sword beneath it, he knew that this man was a foreigner.
He crept closer, then froze.
There were two men. He recognized one of them.
Commander Sivari.
The other, he had never seen before in his life—but he would remember the grim set of his face, the dark, straight flat of hair pulled back and bound very, very tight. He wore no helm. His Da would have said that was the last act of a young idiot, the lack of helm.
But Aidan knew, watching him, that it was more than that. He moved. He did not falter, not once. The sun caught his blade, his hair, the curve of his armor; he and the Commander seemed to be, in this dance, in another place entirely. A place where heat and the sea-heavy air could only watch, as Aidan did: without touching.
He did not hear the footsteps at his back, although they were heavy, and there were many of them. He did not see the old man appear at his side. But he heard the old man’s voice because the old man was watching these two through the same window that Aidan was.
“Why do you watch him, boy?”
Aidan felt a curious resentment—a muted echo of the same resentment that he had felt when the old man had asked a similar question the day before. He wanted to see this. He knew that he would never, never have this chance again. To watch even the others—even the two best of the old man’s students—wasn’t quite the same.
But because it was Ser Anton di’Guivera and not just any old man who asked, he answered. “Because, Ser Anton, I don’t think I’ll ever see anyone as—as perfect as he is again.”
“He is far from perfect,” the old man said, his eye the more critical, the more intelligent, his experience the more telling.
“Look at his eyes,” Aidan replied. “Look at his face. The sword—it’s so much a part of him, I don’t even think he knows that the sword is there.”
Ser Anton said nothing; they watched together, in a silence born of awe on Aidan’s part, and of something else on the old man’s Another voice spoke—in the Southern tongue—and in it, Aidan heard a hint of what he himself felt.
The old man’s reply was sharp. No one spoke again.
They watched; they waited.
In the end, the judges intervened; they called the halt. Commander Sivari heard them immediately, but Aidan wasn’t so certain that the young man did. He stopped only when Sivari stepped across the thin stone circle that had contained them both within the fighting ground.
The old man’s words were Southern, foreign, and soft.
At once, as if that were a signal, the men at his back began to speak, their words clashing and colliding in a cacophony of tones.
“Do you know who he is?” Aidan asked. “That banner—it’s Southern.”
The old man’s laugh was a brief, angry bark. “I know well whose it is,” he said curtly. He started to say something else and then became completely still. He was angry; that much was clear to Aidan; perhaps this young man and his own students were somehow rivals.
“He is—not what I thought he would be.” The old man reached out with both hands, dwarfing the railing in them. It was only then that Aidan realized that the old man was actually very large. “I came to the Empire to make his acquaintance. He is Valedan kai di’Leonne, the last living member of the clan that once ruled the Dominion of Annagar.” He spoke again, something soft, and raised his face to the sun.
“Wha
t are you saying?” Aidan asked quietly.
“I? I am telling the Lord,” the old man replied, “that a worthy enemy is not always a warrior’s blessing. Now come; we have seen what we were intended to see, and we are required to ready ourselves for the judges.”
He turned, the old man, in a quiet that wasn’t quiet, and spoke in a tongue that Aidan was grateful, just this once, that he couldn’t understand. Ser Anton di’Guivera and his students began to walk away, but Aidan turned to watch the man that the old man had called Valedan kai di’Leonne. The distance between them was larger than the length of the crowded coliseum; it was vast as the distance between the harbor and the merchant ships at the farthest edge of the horizon on the days when he watched for the sea winds.
And as he watched, this man, this Valedan kai di’Leonne, turned to look into the empty seats that surrounded the fighting ground.
Their eyes met; Aidan felt a shock of something that he couldn’t even name. They stood staring in silence until two men came to break their regard: Ser Anton di’Guivera and Commander Sivari.
Aidan watched the old man’s—Ser Anton, you idiot—students as they performed for the trial judges. They were uniformly better than he had ever seen them, and he thought he knew why; they had seen a rival, and they knew that they had to live up to his performance. Not for the sake of the judges—even Aidan wouldn’t have been that stupid—but for the sake of the man who taught them. But there was a self-consciousness about them all that day, and he knew that he could watch the entire trial, and he wouldn’t see Valedan kai di’Leonne again.
And he wanted to.
Not much, he thought, as he felt the familiar refrain that was the prayer to Kalliaris start up in the back of his mind. I wouldn’t have to see much—just a little. A bit. Let him ride past me on the way to the isle. Just that much.
He promised himself that he would find a spot by the road that the challengers would travel; he knew the whole route. Anyone who paid any attention at all did. He was going to hold that spot, sit in it, and keep it for himself, as he hadn’t done since he’d been eight and his father had let himself be wheedled into it.
He was going to watch the procession.
And maybe—Kalliaris, please—if he was very, very lucky, he might, once in this lifetime, be chosen as Challenger’s Witness. There were a hundred challengers, after all. One hundred chances.
Out of tens of thousands. Get real, Aidan.
Still, he made his plans. And after he made them, he went to talk to Widow Harris about both food and errand running during the Challenge itself.
CHAPTER ONE
Evening of 4th of Lattan, 427 AA
Averalaan, Terafin Manse
He knew, by the quality of the younger men’s silence, that he would arrive too late; that death had come and gone and taken with it the patient that they sought his care for. This late in the eve, there were those among the six who stood in the hall, weapons drawn, who could use his time and attention—but the House member for whom they had come at a run, to judge by the rise and fall of their mail-plated chests—was beyond him.
But Alayra, semiretired captain of the best House Guards in the Empire, waited just beyond the rank of six bone-weary, bloodied men, and her face was an expressionless, steel mask, save for the slight whitening around the edges of old scars. She had never had a pretty face; had gone out of her way to make sure that she never would. A glimpse of her younger self shone through a moment in eyes that saw less well with each passing day; a glimpse of his younger self responded.
They had fought in a war together, the healer-born Alowan who, although he had served Amarais Handernesse ATerafin, had never chosen to take the name she offered him for his service, and Alayra ATerafin, trusted above all among the Chosen hand-picked by The Terafin at the time of her ascension.
Sleep left him completely; he straightened his back, reached for the cane that supported his weight, and said only, “A moment.” Turning, he shouted a single name. One of his young assistants, the one first roused by the banging of the mailed fists, came peering out from around the healerie’s fine plants. “Terrisa,” he said softly, “wake the others; have them bring the stretchers and meet me—”
“Alea ATerafin’s rooms,” Captain Alayra said quietly. She turned away then, the steel of her face cracking as if under great or sudden pressure. He lost sight of it a moment as his eyes closed.
Terrisa’s eyes were still round and unblinking when his own opened. “Terrisa,” he said, his voice thick and foreign to his own ears, “now is not the time. Be quick.”
The cane was necessary to take him from the narrower halls the healerie occupied to the grand halls that separated the manse into its wings; he asked no questions. She offered no information. On all sides, the heavy, even steps of men who were used to walking—and working—in unison set the tone of their journey: grim, certain.
He, who had seen his share of deaths, was never prepared for it. The healer’s blood cried out against it, an accusation of a type, but to whom, and of what, no healer was ever fully certain. They defied death where any hint of life remained at all—if they dared. The cost was high.
Healer Alowan had dared, and dared, and dared.
And his bones—or something akin to them, something buried within the flesh and the blood, buried within the moving body—ached with the memory of all of those lost half-selves; the healed, the people that he had had to love to bring back to light at all.
Four of the Chosen stood guard outside of the closed double doors; he recognized two of them at once: Arrendas, still dark-haired, still unruffled by the passage of a decade and a half, and Torvan, grayer, paler, but unfettered and unbowed. They stopped him; it was perfunctory. Alayra gave them a nod sharp as a knife’s edge—a knife that she’d own—and they stepped aside at once.
He paused, hand on door, hand on door handle. It was cold to the touch, but a soothing cold, a comforting cold; nothing about brass and iron was meant to move, to breathe, to speak with the rhythms of movement and breath. His head found the fine, heavy density of wood that was older than anyone present; he pressed his forehead there a moment.
He thought, I am too old.
The captain of the Chosen took her place beside him, as if to offer comfort, or receive it; hard to say. They had seen a war together, and it had scarred them irrevocably, but they’d fought it so they would never have to fight it again.
Thus the hope and the fire of the young.
Alayra said, her lips barely moving, her hand against the closed door, “I’m too damned old for this.”
Their eyes met.
Alowan straightened out a white-crested head, unbending at the shoulder. He pushed the door in, steeling himself. Taking the blow; absorbing the shock of sight, of vision.
Five bodies lay in the room.
Three fully armored, but all armed. He didn’t recognize the three armored men, but they wore the crest of the House Guard. Imposters, he thought, but no part of him believed it; they would take these three dead, and when they were presented to The Terafin and the captains of the House Guards, they would be identified as part of the Terafin Guard, no more, no less.
One of the Chosen lay dead as well; he was not so well armored as the three men in regular guard uniform, but better armed. He paused as he stepped over the body, his glance enough to tell him what he already knew.
It was not for their own that the Chosen had made the summons.
Alowan the healer knelt by the side of the bloody bed where the remains of Alea Rose ATerafin had been laid to rest. He reached out—he could not help himself, although the answer was writ clear in the way that the neck was half severed.
Ice, beneath skin; the coldness of a question asked that will never, never be answered.
He did not look up, seeing in the trademark attempt to separate
head from shoulders—failed though it was—more than an echo of an earlier war. It was the harbinger.
“Alowan?” Alayra’s voice. Over his shoulder and a step back.
“She—she has to be called,” he said softly.
“I know.”
Bleak, these two. The Chosen who bore open wounds, sweaty weapons, dented armor—they were silent; the battle had exhausted them and tempered their surprise.
It was Arrendas who was sent to wake The Terafin.
The Terafin wore the black and the gold.
Over the years, she had been forced to it many times, and they were colors that she had come to loathe because of it: the colors of respectful mourning.
The dress was perfect; it always was.
He saw to that, when the details were too petty or too small to occupy her time. It was the life he had chosen when he had reached the age of his majority, although it had not been the life that he had foreseen for himself in his youth: service, servitude, silence.
Of the latter, it was silence that he had achieved at the highest price, and silence that he set aside when service demanded it.
She stood in front of her mirror, and he, behind her, saw only her back; her reflection was taken by the dark folds of cloth and the perfect positioning of her back. Not, he knew, an accident.
“Terafin,” Morretz said. He was one of the very few men who could come, unannounced, into her presence, and perhaps the only man she allowed to approach her vulnerable back. Especially now. He was aware of it as both an honor and an inevitability: he was domicis, she was master. Nothing but trust could exist between them if they were to hold this relationship.
She turned.
The silence between them was taut with his disapproval. Strange, that in her youth at the helm of this great House she had seen so much of his disapproval, and in her prime, so little. She had become used to its lack.
Or perhaps she was tired. For she was tired. She let it show.
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