He was through.
The building was not so tall, and the ground not so far, that he paused for more than a moment to think about what he was doing, or how. He looked down from the heights, he saw Jay, and he saw someone who was stalking her; that was enough. He pulled his dagger, positioned himself as silently as possible, and jumped.
It was that simple.
What was not simple: To throw himself clear of the hand that flashed out to meet him, mid-fall; to hold back the single cry of surprise as something that looked like fingers came this close to bisecting his chest, and to roll away—all without losing that dagger.
Jay wasn’t a killer; he’d known that. And he knew—and learned again, in case he’d forgotten it—that she wasn’t an easy target. But she could see a death coming when it was meant for her; he couldn’t.
The wound, he knew, was deep; it was not fatal. He thought it wasn’t fatal. He didn’t have time to think all that much more.
“ANGEL, left!”
He rolled with the voice. That much was instinct. Came up on his feet two inches away from the wall that had almost killed Avandar. The dagger, he held in slick hands, his own, where he’d brushed his chest.
There was another person in the alley; he’d been aware of her, but only a bit; it was Jay who’d mattered. She was young, though, by the sound of her voice; she was whimpering.
Take it easy, kid, he thought. Jay’ll think of something.
The alley was awfully dark, and getting darker as he watched. Magic? Pain.
Damn.
She did not come through the crowds, although it was through the crowds that he was frantically, clumsily, calling. She came, instead, above them, walking two feet over upturned, suddenly silent, faces. He froze a moment when he saw her. Thought, stupidly, Jay’s going to kill us. If Meralonne didn’t beat her to it.
“Carver.” She came at once to where he’d stopped the minute he caught sight of her, sprinting as if she already knew what he’d called her for. There she stopped. Her sword, he saw, was sheathed, and he was grateful for it; if she drew it, he thought—was sure—that there’d be sudden panic and people’d be hurt in the crush.
She didn’t bother to descend to his level, and that meant that everyone within easy sight—too many damned people for his liking—was suddenly staring at him.
“It’s Jay,” he told her. He thought he’d have time to explain it, but he didn’t have to.
“Where?”
“Over by the old mill building—”
She cursed. “That means nothing to me. Give me your hand. Hurry.”
He did as she ordered before he’d time to think about it; put his hand into hers. She didn’t wear mail gloves, or any gloves at all; he was wearing half-leathers for grip’s sake—but he was the one who felt completely naked as his hand met hers. He would’ve pulled back, but her hand closed like a trap, and she hauled him to his feet, beside her.
Thank Kalliaris, he thought, we’re not wearing skirts.
It was a giddy thought. He took a hesitant step; followed it by another, firmer one. She gave him that much play and no more, and she didn’t let go of his hand; he had a feeling that when she did his next step would be a long one, straight down.
For some reason that he couldn’t quite explain, he thought of Duster, and his face broke into a grim smile. “This way.”
This was not the way she had run, the first time.
She had no one with her, and no one to carry warning to her before it was too late. What she had, that close to the Lord who had birthed her, was a heightened instinct, an awareness of things that brought pain.
She had not called upon power there. In the stone halls of her father, seamless from depths to height, she had not even run; she had heard the screaming with a curiosity and the intense pleasure that was her birthright. Indeed, she heard it heartbeats before the Kialli in attendance raised their faces, sniffing at the winds as if they were charnel, as if, indeed, they were in the confinement of their home of millennia.
Why, why had she not run then?
Pride.
Survival. Haste—the obvious need for haste—was a sign of weakness, and she had been trained too well to show it to those who might consider that weakness a sign of their advantage.
In the Hells, after all, all advantage was pressed and tested. And she had grown up in the shadow of her human heritage, the weakness of a form that demanded sleep and food and breath. She had envied the Kialli then. She envied them now.
But in this city, in Averalaan Aramarelas, it didn’t matter who thought her weak. She left off her chosen pursuit when the sound of Carver’s voice shattered a concentration that not even the breath of her great beast, Falloran, could, fiery and dangerous though it was.
She was surprised that she recognized him; his voice was not like anything she had ever heard; his fear rode it, but it was a rare fear; there was something vaguely unsatisfying about it.
“What?” Jester had said. “Kiriel, what is it?” He was tense, his dagger—a weapon that she never wished to see employed—wavering dangerously in his hand.
“I think—I think it’s Carver.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“He’s called you. And—and me.”
“He’s—” Jester’s brow puckered, the soft folds of his skin forming deep, lines.
“What is it?”
“What does he sound like?”
“Afraid.”
“Is he running from something?”
She’d paused. “No.” No.
“Kalliaris’ frown. It’s Jay. Or Angel. It’s one of us.” He’d turned then, and she felt a surge of fear in him, as unlike the fear he’d carried as he’d hunted by her side as day is to night. There must, she thought, be another word for an emotion that is so different in texture from fear for one’s safety, and yet just as visceral, just as paralyzing.
And she knew that the fear he felt was the fear that Carver felt. Knew it because it suddenly invaded her, as if it had a life of its own, as if it were a human disease, and she only mortal, and already laid low. Jay.
She listened; heard Carver’s shout grow slowly. Jester had already started to move. The crowd was a maze, and it closed round his back; she couldn’t follow where he led because the path disappeared when the arms and shoulders of strange humans touched.
She tried to follow; she almost drew her sword—but hacking her way through the crowd, as she suddenly desperately desired to do—would not get her to Carver as fast as she felt, suddenly, she needed. So she did what she did not do, in this strange place, with its laws and its ordinances and its meekly accepted penalties. She called her magic, draped herself in its shadow, and took to the air, made of it a solid plateau, made it serve the weight of her feet.
She passed Jester with a grim smile. Even in this, in a mutual goal, she felt pleasure at being first, at being—yes—more powerful. And then she forgot it; she saw Carver, saw his face.
She ran, because she had not run this way in the Shining Palace and she remembered too clearly what it had cost her to walk.
It cost her something, to take the boy’s hand; to take it, feel the small leap of suspicion and fear as he hesitated, and hold on because she needed his help. But she did. She did not know where they were going, how they were to arrive. She only knew what he knew—that they must arrive, and soon.
She tried not to snarl at his speed, or what little there was of it. She held onto his hand although she hated the feel of it. She even let him lead without speaking, because she knew that he was struggling with his own reactions. She could taste it, he was so close. The discomfort, the fear. She had gotten used to the peculiar shade of his soul, the odd darkness, the odd light, both so strong, and both so separate. Uneasy alliances there, easily broken.
But they had not been broken yet; she reminded herself of that. Humans were not what they had been in her youth in the Shining City.
“It’s there!” he shouted, although shouting wasn’t necessary. His breath interrupted his words; he strove for air, and air’s weight in his lungs, between his lips.
She let go of his hand, although she hadn’t meant to until the moment she turned to follow his shaking finger with her gaze. He fell at once; there was space beneath them, and she heard his surprised grunt as he struck stone and dirt.
She didn’t care.
How had he done this? How?
She opened her lips and the words wouldn’t come; there were too many of them, they were too painful. But pain didn’t last for Kiriel di’Ashaf; not here, not in the face of his power. Like lead in the hands of the fabled alchemists, it became something infinitely more valuable, more precious to her: Anger. Fury.
“Isladar!”
They all heard it.
Jewel, who was clutching her side now, clutching the first deep wound. Angel, who was on the edge of a sleep that held no waking. The child who was insensate, driven by fear beyond fear’s reach.
And the demon himself.
Jewel saw his expression shift as he froze, as the sound of the single word seemed to destroy his momentum.
Isladar.
“I see,” he said quietly.
She was aware of his movement before he made it, of course. Of every movement toward her, before he made it. Because every single blow he struck was meant to be her death, and her body didn’t want to die. But she was tired now, bone tired, dead tired. What her body knew, and what it could do, were two different things. He cut again, and cut deeply; she was out of his way only enough to stop the blow from being fatal.
As if he knew that she was flagging, that he no longer needed to distract her or tire her, he left the child and Angel behind; there was only Jewel. Only Isladar.
Death. Death here.
And she was tired enough not to fear it.
Avandar had enough warning to leap out of her way, but in truth, that was little warning, and his body covered a stretch of rock and dirt so quickly he left parts of his skin on his shirt. She was a shadow that appeared, streaked in blackness, reddened and whitened by the cast rage lends fair features. Her sword—the sword that both he and Meralonne APhaniel shunned—was in her hand as if it were just a natural extension of her body. She drove it forward into the wall that separated Avandar from his keep.
No wall in the world would have withstood the weight and the force of that sword. Buildings, he thought, would shatter in the wake of the magic that traced the dark arc of its traveling. There was no doubt in his mind, no room for it, that she would fail to do what he had failed to do: breach the barrier. Reach Jewel Markess ATerafin.
Certainty was such an odd thing.
He saw her stagger back; saw the air give way, refuse her its support. It took a moment for him to comprehend what he could not comprehend: her failure.
He heard her. From where he lay—lay?—upon the alley’s floor, he heard the sound she made as her sword struck the barrier. He wouldn’t have recognized her voice at all, except he’d never much liked her voice, and wouldn’t have trusted her if it hadn’t been for Jay.
And Jay was the word she shouted. Roared.
He opened his eyes to the barrier’s darkness; thought he saw it shivering, as if it were alive. As if it were living shadow.
He thought he was beyond pain, but he was wrong; it hurt to move. He could see Jay, and in the darkness that he could not move to confront, he could see what attacked her. No way to reach her. No way.
But he thought—he thought that he might do some other thing. Wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.
Living shadow. Living.
He lifted the dagger that Devon had given him. Lifted it in a feeble hand, a shaking one. Propped himself up on an elbow, rolled. Fell over. Didn’t matter. He was close enough. He’d heard the stories.
With no strength at all, Angel sliced the barrier’s darkness with a thing of light: consecrated by the triad, blessed by the god-born. Too ornate by half to be useful in any other way.
He had not known her for what she was; had had no reason to know it, although his informant must have. Something to remember. But Lord Isladar of the Shining Court knew it now: She was seer-born, and her gift was as strong as the gifts that blessed those who had ruled in the cities of man, before the cataclysm. Before the desert.
More time, more time and he would have had her. More power, and he could have killed her at his leisure—and the desire to do so, this long thwarted, was great.
But time had run out.
He thought he had killed the man. A mistake, obviously, and a costly one. He could not reconstitute the wall that he’d erected. He was lucky that Kiriel in anger was still much like a child; she did not think to do what that man, pale-haired and pale as he hovered on death’s gray edge, had done—to climb the building, to go over what Kialli Lord had made.
The wall was her enemy, and she did not look for anything to defeat it but a display of brute force. Had he taught her that? Perhaps. When one sharpened a weapon as dangerous as Kiriel one tried to make its edge as predictable and straight as possible.
It served her poorly. It served him well.
He turned as the barrier shattered, feeling the shards of his shadow dissolve, absorbed by both his body and hers.
Like shadow, she stood in the alley’s mouth.
“I’m afraid,” he said softly, with a very slight bow of his head to the seer-born human, “that you will live. For the moment.”
And he turned to face his charge.
The wind took her hair, and it was a wind of her own making; the streets were heavy with humidity and the stillness of sea air. Strands far too long for practical battle fell back from her face as if pulled, and not by the gentlest of hands; she was in the grip of an anger that was deeper than anything she had ever felt, save perhaps—save perhaps that at Ashaf’s death.
Ashaf’s loss.
She had dreamed of this moment, in darkness, at night when the Ospreys slept, or better, when Valedan did, and she was not required to feign sleep, but rather, watchfulness, which was for her the more natural of the two things. She’d dreamed that she would see him again. That he would fall before her—that he would grovel or beg.
And she knew, the moment she saw him, that it was only that: a dream. Lord Isladar—Isladar of no demesne—did not know how to grovel or beg. And he had taught her well enough that she knew she would do neither were their positions reversed.
He bowed. She had not expected that.
“Kiriel,” he said softly. “It has been . . . too long. You have begun to play a game that is greater than you realize. Come home; leave it be. The Lord does not yet fully comprehend the depth of your transgression, and you are his kin, his only kin. Come; if you stand against us for too long, I will not be able to protect you from his knowledge.”
The words that she wanted to say would not come; they were not so simple as she had thought they would be. She wanted to cleave him in two and have done, and she brought her sword up for the blow. But she wanted more, too, hungered for it the way that she hungered for pain.
“Why?”
She did not mention Ashaf by name; there was only this one thing that stood between them.
“Can you ask me that?” he said softly. “You were far too attached to her, Kiriel. You accepted the investiture. You chose, and yet, having chosen, you sought to retain what you were required to leave behind: humanity.” He paused. “Do you not see, now, how she has weakened you? Were they to follow you here, any one of your enemies, even the least of the Lord’s Fist, would destroy you with ease.”
“You could have let her go!”
&
nbsp; “You do not see it,” he said softly. “Kiriel, I have called you weak. You do not refute it. Have you forgotten everything I labored so long to teach you?”
“I would have let her go.”
“That is what you would have done, yes. And she would have returned to you, in pieces—but not so many that she would not in some fashion remain alive as a weapon against you. I did not fashion her to be your downfall, nor did I fashion her to be the tool of any other Lord.”
“Only you?”
He shrugged. “She was not what you are, Kiriel, and in the end, she would have left you—or worse. Can you doubt that, who could see her soul? She was beginning to know what you were, just as you were beginning to know it, and accept it. Was her death really so difficult?”
“It wasn’t her death,” Kiriel said at last.
“And what was it, then?”
“I’ll kill you,” she said.
She was lying. Jewel was certain that, had she been anyone else, she wouldn’t have known it—but she felt the truth that Kiriel hid behind the words she was willing to speak, and she knew, suddenly, that she did not want to hear the rest. Knew that Kiriel—this Kiriel, this angry, hesitant girl—would say the rest, and regret it.
Lord Isladar. Shining Court. Allasakar-born child. It made sense only because, as she watched them, girl and man—for he looked the part of a man, sounded it—she saw the ties that bound them; they were ugly, but they were there. Pain. Fascination. Need.
Not to him. I’ll keep you, Kiriel; you gave me your oath. And if I let you go—and she had let members of her den graduate—it won’t be to that bastard.
Jewel was bleeding now, from eighteen wounds, only the last three of which were life-threatening by her own guess, but she wasn’t dead. That she was on her feet at all was incentive to stay that way.
While Kiriel stared at this creature, Jewel quietly bent to the alley floor and retrieved a dagger. It was only that, now. The killing stroke had already been given, and denied.
But Hells, a dagger was better than nothing.
The Uncrowned King Page 30
