The Uncrowned King

by Michelle West

  And the last man, Ellerson, she often wondered about; the hurt of losing him had dimmed with time. Dimmed the same way the loss of her father had, even though her father had not chosen his death the way Ellerson had chosen his departure.

  “Avandar,” Rymark said coldly. “This does not concern you.”

  Avandar was a domicis. It was not his right to reply. But he folded his arms and said softly, “It seems you are not only imperceptive but graceless. I am not a man with your reputation for prowling—”

  “Avandar, you had a choice.” It was as close as Rymark ever came to open anger. “You made it. You serve, and you serve her. If she does not cry for help, do not seek to interfere in what you do not understand.”

  Morretz, The Terafin’s domicis, would have been deaf to Rymark ATerafin; in fact, he usually was, which Jewel found quietly amusing and Rymark found irritating.

  Avandar showed her again—as he usually did—why he was not Morretz. “The function of a domicis is not mere service, ATerafin—and I rather thought you knew that when you applied for the services of one.”

  Jewel was shocked. Oh, gods, she thought, he’s done it now.

  Rymark paled and then purpled. “That is strictly under the confidence of the guild order,” he said, and Jewel thought a whole lake would freeze at the chill in his voice if one were available. “And you, domicis, have broken that confidence by your words tonight. I will speak with the guild,” he added.

  Avandar now offered a stony silence in return for the truth that Rymark had spoken; he managed to maintain that silence until Rymark turned on his heel and strode out of sight.

  “Avandar,” she said, the concern in her words genuine.

  “It is not—quite—a disruption of guild confidence,” he said, his lips nearly white. “Rymark’s original application came through Terafin, and as it happens, those documents are accessible to us if they still exist. I will argue that the breach and the knowledge occurred at this end.”

  “But I’ve never—”

  “You will.” He shrugged.

  She thought about it for a minute. Thought hard. “I think I can find them. Gabriel’s got to have them filed neatly somewhere. An application of that nature is recorded; refusal would be recorded as well, for future reference in dealings with the guild.

  “Of course there’s a very small chance that Gabriel didn’t keep track of the application. Remember, Rymark’s his blood son.”

  “And that,” Avandar said quietly, “is an insult to both the right-kin, Gabriel, and all those who have become, through dint of effort, ATerafin.”

  It stung when he was right, and he was right more often than she cared to admit. Of course, given his disposition and his unbearable arrogance, once was more than she cared to admit, so she supposed it wasn’t that hard. He’d not yet faulted her for her appearance, and she didn’t want to deal with yet another criticism, so she said, hoping to distract him, “How in the Hells did you know that he’d made that application? He doesn’t have a domicis.”

  “Now that would be breaking guild confidence.”

  “How convenient. I suppose this means you’re not going to tell me.”

  “You suppose correctly.”

  “It was you, wasn’t it? You were offered his service.”

  Avandar said, voice low with warning, “Jewel.”

  She could not imagine how two men—Morretz, who served The Terafin, and Avandar, who served her—could be so different. He was dark and mercurial in temperament; Morretz was patience and stability defined. She knew by Avandar’s tone that she was right, and that he would not elucidate further. Ever. Fifteen years had taught her when to fight and when to give up. She gave up. “Were you following me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. I guess this time it wasn’t such a bad idea.”

  “How graceful of you to acknowledge it.”

  Her cheeks reddened. Jewel hated when they did that.

  “You go to the shrine.” It wasn’t a question.

  She nodded, self-conscious.

  “I will escort you as far as the path will allow.” His offer was grudging; he loathed the exclusion. But The Terafin and the ATerafin who sought the shrine sought it in isolation.

  If the offer was grudging, the acceptance was not less so. Jewel turned and began to walk, her cheeks burning with the embarrassment of the required rescue, her anger directed at Rymark for proving to her, yet again, how necessary Avandar had become to her life in Terafin.

  He had not always been so.

  Vision.

  Torchlight in the darkness. Blue, blue night, scattered across with stars twisting the raiment of moonlight into light, the haze of the heavens. Against that backdrop, leaves and fronds, black—the silhouettes of the puppet theater in the Southern holdings, moving at the hand of the wind, whispering their muted night whisper.

  Sight.

  Terafin burning. Sands where the gates might be, shadows lapping at the grasses and the flat stones that lead to the shrines. She walked in their center, taking careful steps. Afraid to look left, to look right; afraid that her talent would take her eyes again, show her things she did not wish to see.

  Gods, but the visions hadn’t invaded her dreams this strongly since—

  Since the last time they’d been searching for the Shining City. Unbidden, the ghostly vision of a young woman with dark hair and darker eyes smiled at her from across the way—but the smile was dangerous, half-threatening. Duster. Death.

  She had walked this path so many times she could follow it without looking, but she looked anyway, for comfort’s sake. There, the Mother’s shrine, a flat-roofed presence, surrounded artfully by flowers and plants whose colors could be seen in the torchlight of the rings on each of the four pillars. She bowed at the sight of its murky marble, but did not stop to make an offering; she might have once, but this was not a matter for the Mother.

  Nor was it a matter for Reymaris, and that grieved her, because Jewel Markess—the girl she had been before Terafin had both saved and swallowed her life—had believed in that justice, without reservation; the reservations were ones she had learned as ATerafin, and having once learned them, she discovered them to be like spiderwebs, and she the fly; she could not turn back.

  Still, she held what she could of her old beliefs. Bowed a moment at the plaque that graced his presence on the grounds of Terafin, wondering how angered he might be at the end of the succession. Wondering if, indeed, there would be a succession war.

  War. Although she did not speak the word aloud, it echoed, lingering in air and on the tip of her tongue as if she’d shouted it. Her arms stiffened a moment; she forced them to relax and then remembered that the bundle she was pressing more and more tightly to her chest was a cloak, and proof against this unseasonably cool evening. Hands shaking, she donned it, and then drew it tight, treating it as if it were more blanket than apparel.

  To Cormaris’ shrine she went; if one followed the path set out by a long-dead architect, there was no choice—it took you to this shrine, this lit and guiding place, and made you stop there, for the path surrounded the shrine in a circular ring.

  Cormaris, the god of wisdom, was worshiped, if privately, by more of the older Terafins than she could count, and not all of them the men who made of their lives political tools and weapons. His presence secured more in the way of offerings than the Mother and Reymaris combined, although it was the Mother’s name that was most often spoken across the Empire’s breadth.

  Just behind the gleam of the eagle swooping there was an offering bowl, hidden by the height of the plaque so as not to be too garish, too obvious—but obvious nonetheless to any who knew to come here. Jewel bowed, and as she shifted into a momentary obeisance, light caught her eyes; the torches were flickering across shining brass. The rod, and the ring, each caught
beneath the eagle’s claws, in bright relief. The ruler and the servant. The ruled and the master.

  For most of House Terafin, the path ended here.

  But Jewel ATerafin had not come this way to seek the wisdom of Cormaris, blessed though that might be. She took a breath as she rose, expelled it and drew a deeper one, and then brushed her straggling curls out of her eyes.

  The path went one shrine farther; there were four shrines in the gardens of Terafin.

  It was to the shrine of Terafin, that round-domed, marble structure beneath which lay the altar upon which so many dreams and oaths were offered, that Jewel ATerafin repaired in a darkness that she had not once thought to alleviate by lamplight or torchlight of her own.

  She came, bearing the fading reality of a dream that only a seer could know, and climbed the concentric marble circles that made stairs and a plateau upon which the simple, smooth stone of the Terafin altar sat.

  There, in the light of lamps that were never allowed to dim completely, she knelt before the stone itself and began to pray. And if she leaned her forehead into the stone itself, more for support and comfort than to offer respect, no one was there who would comment on it.

  And yet, someone did.

  “Terafin has no strength to give you. If you have strength, offer it and it will be accepted. But the ways have begun to open; there is nothing to take from the altar once you have placed your life there.”

  She withdrew at once, as if the cool stone’s touch had marked her, burned her. As if she could withdraw what she had, in honesty and truth, offered years ago. Taking a deep breath, she rose, unfolding one knee and then the other, feeling her weight upon both. Standing seemed hard.

  “Not so hard as it will, Jewel Markess.”

  She recognized the voice, and she did not; she kept her back to the light, away from the night and the night’s solitary visitor. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been called that.”

  “Yes.”

  She heard no sound of motion, nothing at all, but she knew that the spirit of Terafin, the spirit of The Founder, had drifted closer and closer to her exposed back. She waited without turning.

  “Why are you using that name?”

  “Because, Jewel, it is who you are. The years have given you wisdom, of a type, but they have not changed your nature. You are ATerafin in times of peace.”

  She turned then, bleakly, her dark eyes the color of night, but wider. And what she saw stilled her completely. For the last time she had spoken alone with the spirit of the Founder, he had worn the face and flesh of one of the Terafin’s Chosen, Torvan ATerafin.

  Tonight, he wore the guise of someone so different she drew breath: a woman whose face defined Terafin, hair paled by time’s touch, but body still slender. Bent, she thought, and oddly fragile, although not until he came to her thus had she recognized any sign of the weakness of age; The Terafin was the signal example of age’s strength.

  Almost grim, she smiled. “You realize,” she said lightly, “that she’d probably kill you if she saw you.”

  His smile was not The Terafin’s smile, although it was The Terafin’s lips that framed it. “There are worse fates. I speak from experience.” The smile dimmed. “And, although she will not thank me for it, I will tell you now that not only has she seen me in this guise, but she understands what it presages, for her House, that I appear thus to her. Do you?”

  “Not her death,” Jewel said softly. “Torvan didn’t die when you wore his face.”

  “No. But Torvan was not The Terafin.”

  Silence. Then, “Are you telling me—are you telling me that she’ll die?”

  “She is a ruler without an heir. What have you learned of our history, of the Weston history upon which it is founded?”

  Jewel bridled slightly. “Enough.”

  “As much, I imagine, as most of the House Terafin.” It was clear that he did not mean it to be a compliment. “And if you could recite our history, end to end, from the first day to the last—and, if it will ease you, I cannot—it would still mean nothing. It is not the event, but the experience that comes out of the event, that defines a man; it is not the experience, but the wisdom that comes out of a full range of experiences, the ability to draw a conclusion from experience, that defines the ruler.”

  “All right. You’re saying that I’m not a historian, and that because of it, I can’t draw conclusions.” She shrugged. “I won’t argue with you. Do you know that I don’t even know your name? You were always The Terafin. The Founder.”

  “What is The Terafin’s name?”

  “Amarais, born Handernesse.”

  Her expression—his expression—darkened. “No, Jewel, born Markess, that is not her name. She is The Terafin.”

  “And I’m Markess.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you come here tonight?”

  “Should it not be I who asks that question of you?”

  Jewel shrugged. Turned away from the knowledge that she saw in eyes that were dead, and yet somehow alive with it. “The dream,” she said at last.

  He said nothing. He, wearing the form of the woman she respected more than anyone in the Empire. Respected and feared, if only a little. Shadows wavered as the lamps flickered in a cool sea breeze; the winds were stirring. Storm? She lifted her head a moment.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “The storm is coming.”

  “You told me to go South.”

  “I told you, child, go South if South calls, and do what must be done.”

  She didn’t much like being called a child, and he knew it, but she was old enough now not to bridle at a slight that was not offered with intent. She looked back again, and then, although it wasn’t, strictly speaking, correct behavior, placed her palms on the altar’s cool surface, and rested her weight against them. “And you’ve changed your mind?”

  “I?” It was the eyes, she thought, as she met them. The eyes were not The Terafin’s eyes, just as they had not been Torvan’s, or the man named Jonnas, whose appearance he called upon when he offered counsel to the ruler of the House. “No, Jewel.” His voice was grave. “Have you?”

  The weight on her hands increased. “How much do you know?”

  He did not reply. Not directly. But at the last, he said, “I had hoped to spare you this because you are young. But in this generation, no one will be spared. That is the way of it; that we treasure the young and the young at heart, and to preserve them, we sacrifice our own youth. There are deaths, Jewel, that must be faced. Love is not proof against that fact—in fact, love, in times such as this, is the root of all weakness and all strength; it is not the battle, but if you surrender to its impulse, it is the end of the war, and not in your favor.”

  “I’ve sacrificed those that I loved before,” she replied bitterly.

  “Yes.” He drew closer, the lines of his face blurring in the torchlight, becoming as indistinct in her vision as the edges of her dream. “But never knowingly. Imagine this, if you will, an indulgence that I beg of you.”

  She nodded, wordless because she did not trust her words not to give too much away.

  “You are standing on the edge of the field of battle. The time is our distant past, during the baronial wars. Two sides are readying for a battle that has been long coming, and upon this battle, the fate of the Empire rests.”

  “Our Empire?”

  “Our very Empire,” he said softly. “For out of the last of the baronial wars the Kings rose like birds of fire, and they spread their word, and their law, with the strength of the blade, and the blessing of the Mother. Ah, but you lead me astray, Jewel, and I do not have that luxury of time.

  “You stand upon the edge of the field in that battle; you have seen skirmish, you have seen war; you have both ridden and marched as a soldier.”

  She
nodded.

  “But you are not a soldier now; you have a rank, and a responsibility. Into your keeping the standard has fallen.”

  Privately, Jewel ATerafin had always thought that standards on the field of battle were an artificial mess. A flag, a thing that people made into something that it wasn’t, a way of prettifying something that should never be made pretty.

  “You know,” the spirit of The Founder continued, blurring even more in form, taking on a shape that had never belonged to Amarais Handernesse, “that if the standard falls, the hope of the regiments fall with it. That you are, while keeping this piece of pretty cloth, and its bearer, safe, succoring those men who cannot see you, those thousands who will never even know your name.

  “With you, in this war, is your young adjutant. Teller ATerafin. He sees well; he always has; he watches the periphery of the boundaries set out as your responsibility.”

  She did not like where this was going at all. Lifted her hands from his altar again, almost—but not quite—leaping away from the name.

  “A small group of men, with a mage and the use of two demons, is about to spring its trap upon your standard. You have the vision, Jewel, and because of this you see clearly.

  “You also see, clearly, that you have two choices: You can go, now, to warn the mage—in which case, the flag will not fall to this attack—or you can ride, in haste, to that stop thirty yards away, in which your adjutant is pacing out his nervous attention so as not to disturb you; he has always been considerate.

  “You cannot do both.”

  The spirit of Terafin stood before her, not as The Terafin, not even as Torvan, but rather as a shade, a passing fancy whose voice was still as sharp and cold as a blade’s edge.

  “Jewel Markess would ride to the aid of young Teller.

  “Jewel ATerafin would summon the mage.

  “You do not have the luxury, now, of being both, and for this, I apologize. Amarais would know her way to the only choice available, and she would accept it. But it is not her war, Jewel; it is yours.