The Uncrowned King

by Michelle West

  Kiriel lowered her arm.

  Meralonne said, “Kialli.” It was not a question.

  The younger woman nodded, shadowed, and Jewel knew then, knew then, that she was more of a danger than any demon could ever be.

  “We will follow, Kiriel. I only ask that you take care to remember who runs behind.”

  Her smile was grim, but genuine, dark, but warm. “I’m half what they are, APhaniel.”

  And if that means you’ve got more in common with us than with him, Jewel thought, and let the thought wander off; she wasn’t certain where it had been going. What she was certain of was this: Kiriel di’Ashaf took to the streets of the city at a measured run; Meralonne paced her. Behind these two, Jewel’s den ran, and the bustling crowd of midmorning merchants and workers alike were carried to either side in their wake.

  The past grew a shadow that was longer and darker than Kiriel’s receding shroud. Jewel knew how to navigate the city streets. And she knew more than most people in the city of Averalaan should ever have to know about the kin. It was the combination of these, kin and running, that drew her back across years.

  Almost involuntarily she looked to the side, and saw that Devon had dropped into Kiriel’s place beside her. He drew a pained smile from her by offering one in return. Fear was a taint that pulled their lips down, but it gave them the strength that running requires, and they made use of it.

  After all, it wasn’t as if fear was something that she wasn’t going to have to get used to, one way or another. The House War. The Southern War. And now this: Demons in the hundred holdings. It was as if time was twisting backward, and a doorway into a past that she never wanted to return to had opened to swallow all her pretensions of wisdom and experience, to strip them clean away and leave her as lean and hungry as she had ever been.

  She knew that if they ran very quickly, they might just be in time. But she didn’t know in time for what.

  The fear bit her, and she bit it back with a fierce, brief grin. Bravado, but what the hell; you took what you could get at times like these.

  This was the first time she’d ever run toward a demon.

  She didn’t know where they were running to until they came across the crowd. It did not, at first glimpse, seem so very different from the crowds that they had slipped through as they traveled—but it became clear, and quickly, that the difference was significant: This crowd was angry, anticipatory—and it was knotted and dense as thick undergrowth. It did not part for their passage.

  “What’s going on?” she called to Angel, who was taller than either she or Carver.

  It was Avandar who answered. “I believe we’ve found a mob.”

  She started to say something sarcastic—at least sarcasm was the gloss that she would have put over the words—but a crackle of blue light and black fire caught her attention.

  It caught everyone’s. The crowd’s intent shifted around the edges that contained Jewel Markess. Problem was, although she had no idea where the fireworks had come from, she had a bad feeling—and if she was right, the writ wasn’t going to be a lot of use.

  The humans standing in a bunch, like tightly penned cattle bound for slaughter—which Kiriel had watched with fascination as a child, beginning to end—did not move. Did not, in fact seem interested in moving. It angered her, and she reined the anger in, but she did not want to hold it. Because she knew that these people formed a ring, a protective wall of curiosity and savagery and flesh, in the center of which hid one of the kin.

  The kin itself was not her concern, not exactly; she struck the master she was certain it served. No more, no less. But she had to strike quickly. It was too much, to be surrounded by these, with their taste for violence, their hurt and their anger, their smugness, their superiority—their savagery ready to be unleashed, barely contained at all—and not feel it herself; the desire to see violence done. To see suffering.

  But she was no human to want to hide behind the guise of justice done. There was a blackness in them, gray and dark all, a fear and a desire, that she knew well. And she felt at home in it a moment.

  She hated that.

  She cried out—snarled—a guttural warning, but only three or four of those who crowded there heeded it, and she would not, could not wait; her blood bucked against her, and she rode the impulse, but only barely. She had to unleash it soon or it would devour her, and there was only one safe way to unleash it. She had to reach the kin.

  She drew sword.

  And Meralonne APhaniel grabbed her left shoulder.

  The light flared and traveled; the darkness answered. The storm had started.

  The snarl became a roar; she felt it, rather than heard it, a complexity of muscles in the length of her throat, the depth of her chest. How dare he? She turned.

  And heard the voice.

  “KIRIEL! No!”

  It stopped her; opened her eyes. She saw white light and gray, felt the welcome horror of disgust and fear, and felt her own disgust and fear reply.

  She was what she was.

  And she was more.

  Ashaf!

  She had to be more, or the death meant nothing. She would not allow the death of Ashaf to mean nothing.

  Swallowing her rage, choking on it, Kiriel di’Ashaf lowered her blade.

  And as the rage released her vision, she realized that Meralonne APhaniel had never drawn his. His face was the color of stone; it had that hardness beneath it that goes from surface to depth without change. But his silver eyes flickered as they met hers, golden now, and glanced off, as much of a strike as either would make.

  He turned as Devon reached him, and pulled out two things: the first, a medallion that she recognized: The triple moon, the whole moon quartered by the symbols of the elements, and the second, one that she did not recognize: Crossed swords. Light glinted off them, obscuring them as he raised them into sun’s light. As the brilliance passed, she saw that she had been wrong; the medallion’s cross was formed by sword and staff or rod. It was bounded by crowns.

  “I am Meralonne APhaniel of the Magisterium and of the Order of the Magi.”

  His words did what her sword had not been allowed to; they parted the crowd.

  People drew back as if they were curtains, and there, upon the stage, men were fighting for their lives. Blood ran in the cracks between hard dirt and planted stone; there were dead here already, although in what number Jewel could not immediately say. She drew sword, although the sword was not her weapon.

  Angel and Carver did likewise; Jester drew long dagger and disappeared. Devon now carried the colors of the Magisterium, and besides that, carried a sword with an ease that spoke of practice, experience, and the casual will to use both. His glance at Jewel burned; his glance at Meralonne she couldn’t quite catch. Just as well.

  Kiriel and Meralonne vanished into the fight; Devon began to secure the crowd, to disperse it. It was to Devon, in the end, that Angel was sent; Jewel took out the colors of her own House—for she carried them, and made much of the signet ring up on her hand, the ring that denoted her membership upon the House Terafin Council itself. Governing body. It was the first time she had deigned to wear it since Alea’s death.

  She’d never thought to return to the streets as an authority. And she blessed the privilege, although it took her away from the fight, from Angel and Carver, from Meralonne, and especially from Kiriel.

  She’d seen that Kiriel was a killer, but she hadn’t seen, until the black and the blue, the light and the storm, how big the game had gotten, how complete. Against her, Duster was nothing, and nothing to control.

  Later she’d remember that it was one of the few times that she’d forgotten to worry about whether or not the rest of her den would survive.

  She had two goals, only two: the first was to save the lives of the onlookers by scaring them t
he Hells off the streets. The second was to stop Kiriel from cutting down everyone who held a sword in the circle the crowd had made.

  Devon recognized the livery of the Annagarians the moment the crowd had parted at Meralonne’s threatening command. This in spite of the rents therein, the blood that disfigured them. They had arrived, however, in time; they were not all dead, although of the six, he was certain that two would never walk again.

  He didn’t recognize the attackers; they wore nothing that identified them as anything more than citizens of Averalaan. He was certain they were citizens.

  He casually slapped a man, hard, his mailed glove giving the blow an authority which sent the man flying. He disliked a mob of spectators in the same way that soldiers disliked vultures, but vultures at least had the intelligence to remain circling until the dislike had been dissolved by death.

  Devon commanded as if he had been born to it; he had certainly been trained to take control of almost any situation should the need arise, and he was old enough now that there was no question about identifying the need, and none whatsoever about resolving it. But even he found himself distracted a moment when he heard the roaring that filled the streets and set the shingles that hung from the buildings closest to the crowd to swinging.

  The roar, on the other hand, stopped only him; the crowd, it set to flight, accomplishing his chosen task in the space of perhaps ten seconds.

  Ten seconds was more than enough time to kill a man; he knew it for a fact, although experience removed none of the urgency of death’s hovering.

  To the south, perhaps ten yards away, perhaps less, Angel, Carver, and Jester; Jewel and her domicis were carrying the last of the fallen Southerners to join them. It was not only the Southerners who had fallen; the Essalieyanese had perished, and in far greater numbers from the looks of the scattered bodies, than the two Annagarians.

  Three of the Annagarians appeared to be tending, with caution, their fallen companion; Jewel joined them, speaking quickly and with the animation that urgency provoked in her. They responded in kind, in their fluid, foreign tongue, seeking reassurance from this child of expatriate traitors or Voyani settlers. They couldn’t know which, and it was clear that they didn’t care; they turned, after her reply, to watch Anton di’Guivera.

  Devon followed their gaze—after all, it was only the responsibility of the moment that had taken him away from the source of the roar—to see four people. Kiriel, Meralonne, Anton di’Guivera, a man he’d much admired in his youth, and something that could not, could never, have been mistaken for a human.

  Devon ATerafin had been in the Great Hall when the creature that Kiriel had called Etridian had collapsed the ceiling and destroyed by living fire the priests the Court held in highest esteem.

  Kiriel knew that to lose control here was to lose what she had built, what little of it there was, in this complicated city, with its weave of lies and rich deceptions, and the truths that shone so brightly in spite of—or perhaps because of—them. Jewel watched her, and she hated the fact, but she accepted its truth; She did not want the den leader who trusted her to understand the truth, the whole truth.

  And besides, this demon, this one’s name spoke to her across the arc and the curve of their crossed swords. His was the subtle art, but she could sense the ties that bound him. Blood ties. It shocked her, muted some of her anger a moment—a demon of this one’s power was never bloodbound; destruction was preferred. To bind the blood was to bind the whole. Only one creature controlled the Kialli against their stated whims, and he, the Lord of the Hells.

  Her father.

  He recognized her, this creature, and she him: Abarak. Named, his own, a lesser lord.

  Whose blood? Who could force such a thing?

  As if he could hear her question, he spun, and the whole of his focus was devoured by her: even Meralonne APhaniel, even he, fell beneath the range of his notice.

  “You,” Abarak said. He laughed. “When I send your head back to your master, he will be ill-pleased.”

  She saw his shadow as he saw hers, and he drew back, falling behind the sword and the sword’s defense, as he began in earnest. With his shield, he shunted Meralonne aside; a mistake, but not costly enough.

  He came bearing down upon her; she felt the shadow’s edge devour her waiting, her desire for anonymity—and then he answered her question; he cried out in a terrible fury, a trembling of lips over perfectly formed teeth.

  “He wants you . . . alive.”

  She did not name his master, but said, through this creature that had been made his, “Come then, and get me.” And swung.

  It was Jewel who saw it coming; the loss of the Kiriel that she knew to the Kiriel-that-was. She cried out to Kiriel, and knew that Kiriel was beyond her voice’s reach, beyond caring for the words the voice held.

  But Kiriel was a girl; she was Jewel Markess’, and she had chosen. Jewel didn’t give up so easily. She turned, her voice clipped and perfect, to Avandar, to Avandar who hovered above her like a shield, so unlike her den, and yet so much a part of her life.

  “Hide her!” she cried.

  He started and then he understood; he understood what she could not put into words in the face of the watching Southerners. Hide her.

  She saw the distaste take his features and transform them; she was certain that asking him to slowly torture a small infant to death would have been preferable to what she had asked. But he drew on his magic, and she had seen enough of it over her life to know the color of illusion. Violet light shrouded his body with the crackle of its aura.

  She trusted him, but it was a trust that had come with time; it was not what she felt, odd though it might be, for Teller or for any of the rest of her den.

  The Southerners, unless they were mages themselves—and none of them bore the marks—or seer-born, saw nothing but Avandar’s unnatural stiffness, and he was of such a condescending disposition that they probably wouldn’t notice. Hells, most of her den wouldn’t.

  She had to give him one thing: He was fast.

  The shadow bloomed for her eyes, for hers, and Avandar’s and Meralonne’s; she knew that Meralonne’s eyes would pierce any illusion that Avandar could create. But she thought that Devon, that the lone Annagarian who fought, on his feet, by Meralonne and Kiriel, that Carver and Angel and Jester, would see the snarling fury of a crazed, a lunatic, killer, nothing more.

  Glancing over her shoulder, she wondered if they’d even see that; they were transfixed all right, but not by Kiriel; it wasn’t the familiar that tempted or held the vision.

  For just a moment, as Jewel turned back to the whirling of a dark cruelty that was blade and more, she could see what they saw: the terror of the kin, and the beauty, the perfect, unutterable power that he held over life and death. He held her gaze that moment, and held the others for the duration of his shadow’s bloom.

  But she could see what they could not: what Kiriel was, at that moment. For the first time in years, Jewel ATerafin began to weep, quietly, in awe and fear.

  She cried out his name, pinning him with it, as he cried out hers; she had no intention of leaving the site of this chosen battle until she scattered his ashes right to the doors of the Abyss itself. She saw the gray one, saw the other, darker, torn in his little human way by the life he had chosen; she threw up her hands in a final motion: this was her battle. Hers.

  Meralonne APhaniel was not so young that he did not understand what the crying of the names meant; nor so young that he did not recognize a naming when he heard it. He was old enough to know himself a Power, and wise enough to know that power’s limitations, or at least wise enough not to test it unless the cost of doing otherwise was great.

  And he was wise enough to know that the lone Annagarian who stood, stunned a moment, by the twin cries, sword catching no sunlight, as if no sunlight could touch these streets again, w
as not a man he could sacrifice to the battle of two such as these. He was tempted; he knew what Anton di’Guivera signified by his presence at this Festival. He knew the harbinger of war.

  And he knew, oddly, the duties that he had come to accept. Shielding himself from her coming wrath, he leaped above the battle to the kin’s flank, and there, rolled into Anton di’Guivera, taking care to protect himself from the certain edge of the sword-master’s reflex. The sword-master’s steel.

  He carried them both to safety—such as it was—before the cobbled stones erupted in a spray that shattered glass and pocked wood and masonry down the length and breadth of the street.

  They were smart enough to leave her alone when she cried. Angel. Carver. Jester. Even Avandar. They knew.

  She watched, her vision blurred by sheen of water, as these two fought, seeing no swords now, no physical blows; seeing in their movements the movements of oceans, of mountains. It was over; she knew it must be over; she held her breath a moment as the hum of names—for there were two, twining round the fight in a circle made somehow of sound, some twisted, bardic working—broke and faded until one remained.

  She had never doubted which name that would be.

  Kiriel.

  Kiriel roared, and the streets shook.

  Now, Jewel thought, weeping, and wiping her eyes with the folds of a shirt she’d thought too heavy for the summer’s humidity. Now. She straightened out at the knees, rising, as the name began to grow in volume.

  Now.

  Still, she hesitated.

  And so it was that the half-god in glory met the gaze of the slender, fragile woman who moments ago had been her only concern. She stood, the outline of her sword coalescing slowly as the sun reached its height, stood wavering, as if the sunlight at its height was still a thing to be denied.

  It was good to be here and to be victorious, and to let that victory be known. It was good because there were others, and she meant them to understand her intent.