“Bloodhame,” Ramiro replied.
“You are not like Baredan di’Navarre,” Anton di’Guivera said, rising. “His folly is not your folly. Yet you stand by his side, with that sword; it is clear that you have made your choice.”
“We all make choices. Some of them are irrevocable.” And as he spoke, he placed his hand upon the hilt of the Sword of Callesta—the surest symbol of his commitment, and the only one, in truth, whose declaration meant much.
“Yes.” Anton replied, distant and distinct. He bowed, again, and turned; where he might fence with the General, he did not seek to cross words with the Tyr’agnate. Anton di’Guivera had never been a fool.
But as he turned, he spoke. “I hear a rumor, in the holdings, that we are not the only men of the Dominion who seek mastery of this Challenge.”
“Rumors are always a dangerous thing to put faith in.”
“Indeed.”
“We will see your best upon the field.”
“And I, General, Tyr’agnate, will be most interested to see yours.”
“Anton—” Baredan began, but Ramiro cut him off with a slight gesture. The gesture that he gave his waiting Tyran was less subtle; it snapped the attention that they had been giving the legendary Anton di’Guivera as if it were thread that led directly from them to the swordmaster. As a man, they took their positions.
“Ser Anton,” the Callestan Tyr’agnate said softly. “Do not always trust what you have been told.”
The man’s head snapped around in the most gratifying of fashions. As did Baredan’s. The swordmaster took a single step forward, as if drawn. “And will you tell me,” he said, his eyes a sudden dark fire, “that Alesso lied to me?”
“You are what the Lord made you; you are what you have chosen. You have always made weapons. It is, and has always been your calling—to be the best; to make the best. Judge for yourself.”
“I want,” Anton di’Guivera said, his face hardening into a neutrality that did not quite sink roots deep enough to take his voice as well, “what the wind wants.”
“Then stand against us, Anton, and you most certainly will receive it.”
Declaration. Movement. Commitment.
Baredan di’Navarre and Ramiro di’Callesta left the great hall. But only Baredan looked back.
Later, in the questionable comfort of the Arannan Halls, the two men sat alone. It was odd, to sit thus; Baredan di’Navarre had yet to become accustomed to the lack of serafs in the rooms in which they sat. A man of his station had few, but he had them, and they were a constant presence, like weather, or breathing—a thing only noticed if it caused difficulties, but never otherwise questioned.
There was food here, and it was obviously made by the hands of a Southerner—but again, there was something in its flavor, some herb or spice, some barely discernible difference, that made him realize that the most the North could offer a man from the Dominion was the facade of familiarity, not the depth.
He wanted to go home.
But he said none of this; instead he noted, with some residual bitterness, that Ramiro di’Callesta was affected by none of these things. He was at home here, as at home as he had been in Callesta, with a foreign tongue spilling from his lips just as frequently as the Tyrian court tongue, and just as smoothly. Not all that was said about the Tyr’agnate of Averda was merely the rumor of the envious.
“It is not so lovely a view here,” Ramiro said, as he sat back on a chair—a chair, of all things, in this hall, a hard piece of dark wood and fine cloth that could not, in Baredan’s opinion, ever be as comfortable as good, solid mats and cushions.
“It’s a better view than I ever had.”
“Ah. Well.” The silence was uncomfortable; there was, between them, a single question that Baredan di’Navarre had spent the better part of two hours wondering how best to ask. Two hours. He shrugged. He was, after all, expected to be a General, not a ruler.
“What,” Baredan said, as he lifted foreign wine in a thin goblet to his lips, “did Alesso tell Anton di’Guivera?”
He thought that Ramiro might smile, but in this he was mistaken; the Tyr’agnate’s lips pressed into a line thinner than the rim of Baredan’s glass. “What did Alesso tell him, or how do I know?” He lifted wine, but did not drink it; Baredan noted that although he accepted hospitality wherever it was offered, the acceptance, like much about the man, was a facade. “Baredan, you are a General; you will serve Valedan kai di’Leonne in this war. And if he somehow succeeds in his intent to claim the Tor Leonne, you will serve him as Tyr’agar.
“The interests of the Tyr and the interests of Averda seldom coincide completely. We will not be such good friends then, such willing allies.”
This was the Tyr’agnate that Baredan knew so well. He smiled. “True.”
“But there must be some trust between us, a gesture if nothing else; we will fight this war with everything we have, and many things that we do not know we have.
“Therefore, while I will answer your first question, I do not choose to tell you how I know what I know. Although I’m surprised that you don’t know. Perhaps you know it already, but have not thought to make the connection.” He set the goblet down, untouched.
“This is only a story, Baredan. A rumor, you understand, a thing that cannot be verified at this remove.”
“Anton is no fool. A rumor that was only rumor would not have—”
“Would not have this effect? Baredan, he is the swordmaster, if the Dominion has one—but he is not the lofty nobility of Leonne’s once great height. He is a man, just as I am—and just as you should be.”
And why are you here, Ramiro? But he did not speak. Instead, he sat back, feeling the uncomfortable hardness of the curved chair’s top along the line of his shoulders. Sun came in through windows open to the light of the courtyard; the leaves of plants too numerous to name—and Baredan was not a court clansman, to name all variety of plants such as these—caught that light and made of it a colored vista, a landscape in miniature of a world that was too varied to be quite real.
“Do with this story what you will; if Alesso has spoken it openly, it is open.”
“Tell me,” Baredan said, as patient as he could be.
“The story goes thus: That when Anton di’Guivera was a young man, his skill with the sword came so easily that he came to the attention of the kai Guivera. Guivera is not a well-known clan, and for good reason; Anton di’Guivera, at that time, had already chosen the one wife his own labor could support, and had by her one child.”
Baredan picked up the goblet again. “Ramiro, I am familiar with the basics of Anton’s early life. He lost that wife, and that child, to bandits; it is for that reason that he chose to become the warrior that he did.”
“Humor me,” Ramiro said, adding with a smile’s edge, “if you’re aware of this basic conversational courtesy.” It was not a comment that he could make in a room that contained serafs, or women, or Tyran or cerdan; only here, with one witness, and that the man being so prodded, did he have that luxury.
“He was foolish about the wife, as many men often become, and she had not grown so wind-worn that she did not find his prowess flattering. She was, indeed, proud that he had been called by the kai Guivera. Prouder still to find that he had been noted by the man who, at that time, trained the Leonne heir.
“But it was not just the trainer who noticed the skill of the young Anton di’Guivera; it was the Tyr’agar himself.”
“That would have been Maredan kai di’Leonne.”
“Yes. Valedan’s grandfather. He wished to see the young man trained to the full extent of his ability, and so he relieved him of his duties as cerdan to the clan Guivera, paying both the man and the clan that had nurtured him handsomely. The young wife, and their son, he brought to the capital.
“And ther
e, the work began.”
Baredan waited.
Ramiro turned away, to look at the finery and splendor of growth that the Kings chose to call the footpaths. His voice changed subtly, although later Baredan could not quite have said how. “But the trainer watched the young man and although he was impressed, he was also, it is said, concerned. He saw, in Anton di’Guivera a weapon—but a weapon without an edge. He approached the Tyr’agar—remember, Baredan, that this is story and rumor—and he told the Tyr, “this man will be the Lord’s Chosen twice over if he but devotes his time and his attention to the discipline.”
“And the Tyr’agar said, ‘He devotes all of his time now to just that; the mornings to riding and the afternoons to the sword.” It must be said that he was not, coming as he did from a clan one step from serafdom, well-versed in riding.
“‘He devotes his time, Tyr’agar, but only his time. When he leaves my circle, he leaves it; he goes to his home.”’
Baredan paled.
“‘What will this young man be, if he gives you what he gives you now?’ the Tyr’agar is said to have asked.
“‘A champion, perhaps; there are no certainties.’
“‘And if I grant you the student that you desire?’
“‘He will be two things: A swordsman beyond compare.’
“‘And?’
“‘And the only man to go North and return with the cursed wreath of Kings.’
“The Tyr’agar heard these words, and reflected on them a long time. At last, he said, ‘I will give you the warrior that you desire. Deliver, for this, the champion that you have promised, and the Lord will consider our work here well done, and judge it accordingly.’
“Six months later, Anton di’Guivera and his young family returned for a visit to the clan Guivera. There, in the small township that Guivera administered, his young wife and his child were killed by raiding bandits, along with half of the villagers.”
Baredan leaned forward in the chair; leaned forward so that he might momentarily cover his eyes, his face, with the comforting shadow his palms might provide. For the Lord had judged, and he did not wish to betray his own judgment of that judgment to the light that streamed in through the windows; the eyes of god.
But Ramiro had not yet finished. “Anton di’Guivera lost everything he valued in life but his skill, and it was to his skill that he turned the whole of his attention. He has never turned away. The winds have scoured him almost clean. There is no new wife; there are no new children. He exists outside of life, almost outside of time.
“His only regret, the only failing in his long life, was that he never found the bandits responsible for the death of the family that had been his life. He led many raids against many bandits—I believe he still does from time to time—but he never found their killers.”
Baredan rose because he had to. Some men, when they receive ill news, are frozen with shock; some become stricken, dumb and cold as stone. And some are moved to act, to do something, long before they know what it is they must do.
“Alesso told him this.”
“Yes.”
Neither man questioned its truth. Truth had its own ring, even spoken as it was by a man famed for his ability to bend truth to suit whim.
“What does a man do,” Ramiro said softly, “when the last of his demons have been confronted?”
“Have they?”
“They were, with the death of the Tyr’agar.”
“The clan is not dead. The boy remains.”
“Perhaps.”
Sunlight grew warmer in the still air; Baredan longed for the wind of the plains. Home. “I’ve known Anton di’Guivera for most of my adult life,” the General said quietly. “Certainly since the Tyr’agar accepted my service, and gave me my rank after the Imperial war. He is a swordsman, but he is not a butcher. He’s not a young man anymore, Ramiro; the passions of youth cannot drive him so long or so hard.”
“Neither are we.”
“True enough. Very well. What would you do if your demons were dead?”
“I think that if the death of his wife’s killer had been the sole focus, the sole force, in his life, he would have seen the Tyr’agar dead, and then he would have laid down his weapons, disavowed their use; it was for his talent, after all, that his family was slaughtered.
“But he cannot quite deprive himself of that talent; it is what he is. I spoke no lie. Therefore, he must do one of two things: He must make peace with what he has become, and accept the history of his forging, or he must continue the war that he has already begun.”
“You believe that he will try to kill the kai Leonne.”
“I believe,” Ramiro said bleakly, “that is what he came North to do.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Four days.
Four days; long days. Sun too hot, wind not dry enough to take away the sweat of a day’s labor. A life’s labor.
Jewel ATerafin sat in a room made dark by heavy curtains. Light illuminated the folds of fabric that skirted the ground by an inch or two, as if the window were waiting for her attention.
It was a struggle, for Jewel, not to succumb to its call—even given the weight of what was at stake. She rose, unfolding her knees, tilting her chin to the ceiling and lifting her arms as far as they could uncomfortably go. If she sat for another minute, she’d grow roots and branches.
And not a thing had come to the dark corners of the room. Not a thing to the corners of her vision, the seer’s gift.
At her feet there was water; Teller had brought it before Avandar let the curtains fall. She lifted the goblet and drank; the liquid was the same temperature as her mouth; it spilled down her throat as if it were almost nothing.
“Nothing?”
Avandar’s voice. Even deprived of the stern expression his face habitually fell into, she couldn’t quite pretend his presence was welcome. He always made her feel slightly on edge, slightly uncomfortable, although she trusted him daily with her safety, with more than her safety. She shrugged. Seventeen years of history could do that, although she’d never have guessed it at the start.
“Nothing. Allen’s not going to be happy.”
She felt, rather than heard, Avandar’s more crisp version of a shrug. “Then he’ll be unhappy. If he seeks to use you as a reliable source of information, it’s best that he learn your limits here, where the risks are few.”
Few. Her neck cracked as she turned her head in a slow, deliberate circle. “They don’t want to lose the boy.”
“Then they should put their foot down and refuse him his place in the Challenge.”
“Avandar—”
“At the least, he should be given no leave to run the gauntlet.”
“It’s been suggested. You’ve even been there. Let’s give up for an hour or two; we’ll eat something, try again.”
“As you wish.” The line of light beneath the hang of curtains was broken as Avandar stepped in front of them; it wavered further as he began to draw them apart, to let the day in. Here, up in Eagle’s Remove—although why this room in particular was given that name, she didn’t know—the windows were long and wide, with seats for the room’s occupants to sit in, so that they might look down, and down again, and see clearly all they were missing by being stuck here.
There were no shelves, no desk; but there was a grate for the burning of wood, a mantle around it, two comfortable chairs, and enough leaded glass to bankrupt a lesser House.
She had grown to hate the room.
Avandar preceded her to the door, placed his hand upon the old, iron handle, and froze in place. She had seen this only once before. He was not a man given to expressive gestures; all of his movements were economical, spare. It shouldn’t have been so obvious when he stopped moving at all—but it was.
Her dagger wa
s out in an instant, her knees slightly bent. What he felt, she now felt; the edge of darkness, a shadow that held ice and death within its folds. He was the only man in existence who would have felt it before she did. And she didn’t know, couldn’t say, why. Later. “What is it?”
He did not answer her; not with words. Didn’t need to. She saw the ripple that surrounded his hands, taking shape and form as it crackled into bands of color: blue and gray.
Blue and gray—
“Avandar, no!”
The light froze, just as he had, held in abeyance not by her words, but by the quality behind them, the force of something that was, and was not quite, Jewel. She sheathed her dagger at once and walked to the door, shunting him urgently to one side.
And then, taking a deep breath, she opened it, half-prayer already dying on her lips. There were guards outside these doors; Chosen by Terafin, Chosen for trust and trust’s sake. Please, she thought, don’t let them be dead.
They weren’t.
She took the time to notice that they hadn’t even drawn their swords; it was a cursory observation, a short one.
“Kiriel,” she said, as her eyes met the darkness that waited outside of Eagle’s Remove. “Come in.”
Kiriel di’Ashaf crossed the threshold as if it were the edge of a blade, and she barefoot. Her teeth showed briefly between dark lips, a flash of white not unlike a hound’s. But she did not draw the sword she wore openly, and she did not—did not do whatever it was that Jewel felt certain she could do, even if the details weren’t clear.
The darkness that shrouded her golden eyes would never quite leave them; of that, Jewel was suddenly completely certain, and for a moment she felt a profound sense of loss, of compassion, and even of pity. They came in a rush, these things, unexpected and unlooked for. Jewel had learned to school her face well over the years.
But not from this: vision, a thing not felt that would be felt—in an unnamed, distant future—about the almost sullen young woman who stood uneasily before her. Dark eyes narrowed to slits; Kiriel backed away.
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