“Who are you, Kiriel?”
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “Choice waiting for consequence to occur.” She shrugged; the chain slipped back into the folds of her loose, pale shirt. “But you’re more like I am than anyone here, Auralis. Doesn’t matter what you hide, if you hide it at all. I can see it.”
He shrugged. “What of it? Do you think I care what you think?”
“No.”
“Good. I don’t.” He met her gaze, unblinking. “And it wasn’t me we were talking about. It was the Challenge.”
“Yes.” As if his lack of pain had taken the wind out of her sails, she shrugged and returned to the matter at hand. “Why can’t we cheat?”
Interesting.
“Ask Duarte.”
Said Primus exercised his imagination as he mentally cursed the man who was unofficially his third in command.
Auralis turned, with a sly smile, and Kiriel followed his lead. Duarte was half-certain that the girl had been aware of his presence all along; she rarely missed anything as obvious as a mage shielding himself from easy detection.
“The Primus will say no.”
“The Primus,” Duarte said, with what dignity an eavesdropper could muster, “would indeed say no. And not for the reasons you think.”
Auralis bared teeth in a smile; the sun fell upon them all in the midafternoon heat as if it were the gaze of the Justice-born King in anger. “We’d get caught.”
“We’d get caught. Kiriel, every possible trick in the world has been tried at least once. The magi themselves sit in attendance over the Challenge to ensure that no magic of any variety is used. They handle the weapons that the combatants will take into their combats; they manufacture the javelins for the throw, the poles for the vaulting, the reins and saddles for the riding. Do you understand? There is no way to cheat the Kings’ Challenge magically.
“And to cheat it in other ways is likewise difficult; the mages watch everything.”
“If we knew how to do it,” Auralis said, “We would. We could make a killing.”
She frowned. “Why,” she began, and Auralis held out a hand, palm out, in frustrated, if theatric, surrender.
“I meant, of course, that we could make a lot of money.”
“Why is money so important?”
She meant it. Someone who could pierce the carefully cultured surface of Auralis to see the darkness beneath his mask, who could pinpoint him as the most dangerous, the least honorable—and there wasn’t much honor, all told, in the Ospreys—of them all paradoxically could not understand the concept of money.
Duarte and Auralis exchanged a knowing glance. “I think,” Duarte said softly, “that would be far too complicated a lesson for what’s left of today. Valedan is about to join the Commander for the afternoon session. Your watch, Kiriel di’Ashaf.”
She nodded then, all business, completely at her ease.
As if, Duarte thought, as she turned and walked away into the sharp, short shadows of the afternoon, this watchfulness were the only part of their life that she understood so well—it was, of all things, natural.
Four days.
The Serra Alina di’Lamberto, fingers sweet with the fragrance of some delicate blossom that Valedan could not, sweat-stained and sullied as he was, identify clearly, massaged his shoulders, his exposed back.
“You did well,” she told him quietly. “Mirialyn was watching your bout with the Commander; she was impressed.” Highly impressed.
“‘Well’ won’t be enough,” Valedan said, into the cushion of his forearms. “‘Impressive’ won’t be enough. Sometimes I think that nothing will.”
Her hands stopped their forward motion; she stilled. “Do you wish to turn back?”
“How can I?”
“Withdraw.”
“They’ll know.”
“They might.” She did not lie to him, nor he to her; she was not certain, could never be certain, that he understood what she gave him, because she knew that he did not value enough what he gave to her: his confidence, his trust. If I had had a child, she thought, as she started to knead the muscles just beneath his shoulder blades, would he have been half of what you hope to become?
No. Because her child, had she had one, would have been born and bred to the South, claimed by the ways of the clans.
This boy, this man, this pretender to the Tor Leonne, although dark-haired and dark-eyed, was not. All Southern in birth, the North had ceded him much that the South could not. She glanced to the wall and back; his bow cast a fine shadow, a long one. It rested, unstrung, against the stone of the Arannan Halls.
“Miri says that you will have one challenge on the range, if that.”
She saw his cheeks lift as he smiled; the smile was tired and half-hearted, but it was genuine. Happiness was like that, in the South: too brief, and often not sharp enough to touch and take root. Grief, on the other hand . . .
“She says,” Alina continued, “that in swimming, you will best your Southern kin—save, perhaps, one man, who hails from Callesta. That man has spent time in the coastal villages this spring, and half last summer; he is shorter than you are, but he is older; he has reached his full growth.”
“Wonderful. I’ll better the men from the Northern cities as well—but not the ones from here.”
“She says you are one of ten men who can run the gauntlet to its full length without pause.”
He was silent a long time, waiting.
“In swords, you will face your stiffest competition; you do not have the advantage of size, yet. In a year or two, but not yet.”
“Swords define the Southern combatants.”
“Yes.”
“Alina—”
“Yes?”
“How long has she been watching?”
Alina smiled, well-pleased. “I don’t know. I do not believe she is alone in her concern; she and a few of her advisers or servitors have been watching the practice sessions that have been allowed within the coliseum.”
“Most of the Annagarians haven’t set foot within the coliseum.”
“I was wondering if you would catch that. Very good, Valedan. No, none of the Annagarians have chosen to accept the time offered them. But there are ways in which their worth might be measured that do not require their entrance upon lands owned solely by the Crowns.”
The Tyr’agnate Ramiro di’Callesta was not a welcome presence within the great hall situated at the heart of the fifteenth holding in the old city of Averalaan. He might have been less unwelcome, but one or two of the men who had traveled to the Empire’s greatest city recognized the crest upon both his cape’s clasp, which was not significant, and upon the black length of his sheath.
Which was.
Set in red, simple in design, the crossed strokes of the Callesta clan near glowed in the magelights that provided brilliant day to a building closed to the sun’s light. The sight, Ramiro thought, of the Lord.
It would never have occurred to a Tyr to leave his sword behind, not even this most practical of Tyrs; he acknowledged the truth with a wryness that did not reach his face. For leaving the sword behind would have made his work easier by declaring far less, and less openly. Bloodhame was a name better known in the Empire than his own—and it should be; the sword had existed for centuries, through the rise and fall of the Callesta fortunes.
Two of the men here were Averdan, and if they were young, they were not fools. They were trained—well-trained he thought, by the look of them—and immediately ill at ease in his unexpected presence. Such a lack of ease transmitted itself more quickly than disease through the ranks of these men who, like himself, were foreigners upon this soil.
They did not speak, but they offered him no violence and no disrespect. It wouldn’t have been wise. He came, as befit his rank,
with the Tyran of his choosing; there were, in total, eight. And if these men who trained before him were among the best the Dominion had to offer, they had come for what was, after all, display; the Tyran had experience, and more, the will to use it, and they had come with their sole purpose in mind: his safety.
“Well?”
Ramiro di’Callesta shrugged. The men here were from diverse Terreans, and they were uneasy, but they were clansmen enough to desire not to display that lack of comfort where anyone could see it for the weakness it was. He had hoped they would all be young, and they were.
If the men who trained them were not taken into account.
“I recognize two.”
“I recognize more than that.” Baredan’s face was hooded, neutral. His hand never touched the hilt of his sword—that might have been too much of a provocation. But in everything else, he stood on edge, ready for combat.
Just as, Ramiro thought with amusement, he had always done when he faced the Tyrs who ruled under the Tyr’agar. It must irk him, to know that the threat, in the end, had not lain with the ambitions of the Tyr’agnati, but rather with one of the three men who had been appointed to guard the Tyr’agar Markaso kai di’Leonne against their predations.
“The trainers?”
A nod.
“I believe that man is Anton di’Guivera.”
Another nod, a grimmer one. They were both silent as they watched the one man in the building who seemed to take no notice of their presence. He was working with two men, both wielding naked blades, and both much at ease with their weight and heft. Unlike many men who worked at such a discipline, he felt no need to raise his voice, no need to emphasize, with heat or volume, the points that he made. He would raise a hand, and nine times out of ten they were so attuned to his measure they would stop, in mid-swing, to better hear his quiet correction. He was not a man in the habit of repeating himself.
Baredan knew him well; as a young man, it had been his privilege to see Anton in his prime. He was past that now; they both were. But he remembered.
Anton di’Guivera was the only man in the history of the Dominion who had come to the Northern empire and taken from the hands of the demon kings the wreaths which symbolized victory. The pride of the Dominion. The proof of its strength.
As if Ramiro could hear the youthful yearning in the momentary thought, he said, “I was there the year that he was declared the Lord’s Champion. It elevated clan Guivera.”
“Were you there the following year?”
“When he became only the second man in the history of the test to repeat his victory?”
They both smiled, each smile edged in its own way by a past that was both precious and bitter.
What neither man said was that this man, Anton di’Guivera, and not kai or par, for all that he was the only man of Guivera to distinguish himself at all, had been responsible for the training of the previous kai Leonne before his death.
“How long has he been here?”
“He arrived with the men from the Terrean of Raverra. The two he trains with now are two of twelve; they left before the end of the Festival, with the Lord’s blessing, and arrived in haste. Alesso—and it must have been Alesso—has sent a greater number than has been sent to the Empire for many years.”
“To prove a point?”
“Or to make one.”
“And these?”
“I would have said that they were not of the highest caliber; no clan would waste the chance to perform well in the Lord’s Test, but they might send those sons who were competent to do what they could here.”
“You no longer believe it.”
“Would you?”
Ramiro was silent for a long while. At last he said, “No. Not while Anton di’Guivera travels with them.” He shrugged his cape back and crossed the length of the hall, dragging his Tyran with him as if they were shadows cast by the lights above. With them came the General, as reluctant as Ramiro had ever seen him.
They came to stand behind Anton di’Guivera. He had aged, certainly, from his twin moments of glory both in the Dominion and in the Empire; the sun had scorched an enduring darkness into the cast of his skin, and the wind had etched lines there, year by year, that nothing would erase. Yet this particular di’Guivera was like the mountains; he endured all changes as if they did not and could not touch his essential nature.
And part of that nature was this: his ability to concentrate. To insult a member of the Tyr’agnati was no small risk, but Anton di’Guivera undertook it as a matter of course. The only man to whom he paid the obeisance that was his due was—or rather, had been—the Tyr’agar Markaso kai di’Leonne.
But Ramiro sometimes suspected that this was more due to the fact that the Tyr’agar had enough respect for his own dignity that he did not attempt to interrupt his premier trainer when he was at work. Because, of course, a refusal to acknowledge a man of his rank in the Tor Leonne would be met with—must be met with—death, but no one threw away a man of Anton’s caliber without cost.
They were not in the Tor at the moment.
With cold respect, Ramiro di’Callesta folded his arms across his chest and waited.
As if that were a signal, the men slowly resumed their bouts, reluctant to stare at a Tyr’agnate, but equally reluctant to expose the weakness of their training mistakes—if indeed they made many this close to the competition itself. They did not, Ramiro noted, seek to take the title; they sought, rather, to take the single rod upon which the man-to-man combat depended. Or so it seemed; no man lifted a weapon that was not a sword within the confines of the hall.
But the two men with whom Anton worked continued without pause that was not caused by their master, until in the end they were slick with the sheen of summer heat in a building that hid them from both the sight of the Lord and the cooling touch of the sea-laden wind. Even then he pressed them, watching their feet, their feet’s placement; correcting their shoulders and the arc they made when they swung. At last, when it was clear that they could do no more, he stepped in, drawing his blade in perfect silence.
The younger of the two unknown men grimaced; the older readied himself.
Anton di’Guivera was an older man. Against two who were new to the fight, he was no longer guaranteed an easy or a complete victory. But against these two, tired with training and the rigors to which they were subjected, he was a joy to behold, a thing of almost perfect grace.
And he taught them in this way; by being what he told them to be. Ramiro could see that the line of his arm and the extension of the blade were perfect; that the only time the edge of the blade wavered was when it turned, edge to flat; that Anton di’Guivera, twice chosen by the Lord, was still blessed by him. No doubt they would bear scars, these students, but Ramiro could believe, watching the flat of this man’s blade play against the light, that those scars would be deliberate gifts or medals, not the chance slip of the blade, not the misstep of underconfident youth.
He disarmed them both.
And then, as if that were his introduction, he pivoted. Bowed, not to the Tyr’agnate, but to the absolutely silent man who stood by his side. “Baredan.”
“Anton.”
“Have you come to compete?”
The General’s smile was as narrow as the edge of the master’s blade. “Yes,” he said softly.
“And I, I think.” He lifted his sword; held it a moment parallel to the straight line of his body. “I did not think you would survive, but I am not . . . unhappy to see you.”
Ramiro glanced to the side in time to see the color of the General’s face seep away into that peculiar paleness that was often called white, although it wasn’t.
“You were a part of the assassination?”
“I?” The older man’s smile was as thin as the General’s. “Baredan, had you been a decade younge
r, you would have been among my students, I think. And I would have served you better than your previous master by beating out of you the sense of loyalty that drives your life.
“You are not Tyran. That was not the life you chose. Nor,” Anton di’Guivera said, sheathing his sword almost—but not quite—as silently as he’d first drawn it, “was it mine.”
“You trained the kai Leonne.”
“What of it? You supported Alesso di’Marente.”
Stung, Baredan snapped, “Not in this, Anton. Never in this.”
“Oh? And why?” Anton di’Guivera had never been a small man, but he rarely chose the arrogance of making those about him feel his height. He chose it now, crossing arms that no amount of time would soften across the breadth of his chest.
“Because the clan Leonne—”
“The clan Leonne was a weak clan,” Anton said coldly. “Not a single member of that clan survived the culling of a simple night’s work.”
Silence. And then Baredan smiled, brightly as a sword in sun’s light, fencing with his expression. “You know.”
Fencing, sadly, with a master. “I know that the son of a concubine remains alive in this Imperial City.”
“Not even you could deny him the legitimacy the waters—and the Tyr’agar—granted.”
“Does it matter, Baredan?”
“Of course not,” the General replied. “I’ve traveled to this city only to watch your half-trained men lose the foreign challenge.”
“General,” Ramiro di’Callesta said, breaking the cadence of their conversation before Baredan could embarrass himself, “I believe that we have as much answer as we came to receive.” He bowed. “Ser Anton di’Guivera.”
“Tyr’agnate.” Anton di’Guivera bowed. And then, as he rose, his eyes widened ever so slightly. Ramiro noticed that they remained at the level of the brilliant crest that broke the simplicity of black and gold. “Bloodhame,” the older man said faintly.
The Uncrowned King Page 15
