The Uncrowned King

by Michelle West

  “Then you were alive during the Henden of 410.”

  Daine nodded grimly. “We all were. And we all thought we wouldn’t see First Day.”

  “If not for her, we wouldn’t have.”

  He looked at her, then, as if seeing her for the first time. The ice stiffened in his eyes a moment, and then his resolve faltered. “If you’re lying to me,” he said softly, “I’ll know it. I’ll know it when I heal her.” He frowned. “Why is she dying? Is it the House War?”

  Levec didn’t answer.

  Avandar did. “She was hunting the kin in the streets of the city. She found one, but he was more powerful than any of us expected; more powerful than we were prepared for. You’ve heard of the bodies discovered in the fifteenth holding, no doubt.”

  Daine nodded his slender, pale face. Youth there, now, for a just a moment.

  “They weren’t killed there. She and the mages have hunted them once; they were doing it again, upon the orders of the Kings.”

  “We’ve heard none of this.”

  “There are too many people alive now who were alive in that Henden; it will cause panic, and the panic will serve not our interests, but the interests of the demons.”

  “Enough, Avandar,” Devon said. “You tread too fine a line. Remember that your service requires secrecy.”

  “He needs to know it,” Avandar replied.

  “That is for the Kings to say. Not a domicis.”

  “We are not in Avantari, ATerafin, but in Terafin; it is for The Terafin to decide.”

  “It is now moot,” Alowan said, more curtly than he intended. “Daine, she is worthy of your gift. I have seen her in this House the past sixteen years and more, and she is worthy of mine.”

  “You didn’t heal her,” he said pointedly.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons. Briefly: Her companion was also dying; she feels responsible for him, and had she lived at his expense, it would have broken her. Second, because I am far too old. I cannot guarantee that I could walk a death for Jewel ATerafin and separate myself from her afterward. Not for Jewel.

  “Angel is different enough from the things I admire and the things I desire to protect; I know where I begin, I know where he ends, and I—I have just enough of myself not to want to remain where I don’t belong.”

  He had not yet been as bluntly honest as this; honest enough that Levec would understand it, but not so honest that either Devon or Avandar would. It was hardest, always, to separate oneself from a person one could trust, could—under normal circumstances, love. “I have enough of her companion in me now that I am not above begging you, if that is what you require.”

  But Daine had already pushed Levec aside; had taken his place beside her. “She—she wears a Council ring,” he said. Alowan thought he detected a tremor in the words, a fear.

  “Yes. Therefore you must judge the truth of all of our words for yourself. The ring, she earned by her actions. Not her birth, Daine. Not her ruthlessness; she has precious little of that. Not, we fear, enough—but it is not ruthlessness alone that rules the world. Think of the Kings.”

  “The Kings are god-born.”

  “Yes. But we all come from a beginning that knew gods, or else there would be no healers. No bards. No young women like Jewel.”

  Hands, shaking now, touched her face, much as Levec’s had done. “I will—I will try this thing. For you, Alowan. For Levec.” His smile was ghostly, thin. “For myself, I think. I remember that Henden. I remember that First Day—it was, the first First Day, for me. It marks them all. The screaming and then the silence, the dawn. A miracle.” He closed his eyes. “I remember the darkness, Levec. I’m so tired of darkness.” All arrogance was gone, all ice, although he struggled to speak the words as if against himself, his better judgment.

  And Levec said softly, “I know.” He looked away, and there were, Alowan thought, tears in the folds of his eyes. He was stubborn, proud; they wouldn’t fall.

  The healing began.

  “Will he be able to let her go?” Alowan asked quietly.

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Who was it? Who forced him to this act?” There was no worse thing one could do, to a healer—but only a healer understood the truth of that; those without the power, those who did not and could never pay the healer’s price, could not conceive of the violation.

  “A member,” Levec said bitterly, “of this House.”

  “Who?”

  “It is not of concern,” he replied.

  “Does he live?”

  Levec tendered no reply. It was reply enough. They watched for a while. “Daine is—he was—a soft-headed, soft-hearted idiot.”

  “You’re fond of him.”

  “I’m always fond of the stupid ones. It’s my worst failing.” Levec’s jaw locked. “They caught him using a child as bait. Makes me wish children had never been invented. They threatened to kill her if he did not heal the man they wished healed; they . . . injured her. The noble was dying. The girl was screaming. Daine—what other choice did he have? He’s stupid.”

  “He did it.”

  “Yes. They would have killed him afterward, but the man forbade it.” Levec closed his eyes. “And it scarred my boy. He has seen murder, and far, far worse, and has had to live with and through it to call the man who has committed all of these atrocities back from the Hells.”

  “Will he hold her too tightly?”

  “I think—I think he is stronger than that,” Levec said.

  He was lying. Alowan heard it in his voice, but said nothing. What was there to say? There were few enough who would risk the walk to begin with; she did not, in his opinion, have the time to wait until they found another, Avandar’s magic and Meralonne’s containment notwithstanding.

  But he knew, then, that the man whose servants had forced the healing must have been Corniel ATerafin. The only man who had died far enough away from the Terafin manse that his body had not been brought to the healerie. Alowan had not regretted his death then; he did not regret it now.

  But he bowed his head a moment, in prayer to the Mother that he might not feel such a vicious, such a terrible, sense of triumph at another man’s murder.

  He was tired, so very, very tired. Angel burned him; he could not separate his fear for Jewel from the younger man’s. I misjudged you, he thought, not for the first time.

  They watched the boy.

  Avandar interrupted Alowan’s reverie three times, and each, to ask—by gesture alone—if he might somehow interfere. He understood the risks of a healing, to both the healed and the healer. Each of the three times, Alowan shook his head: No.

  Alowan understood, then, why Levec cultivated such a dour, grim appearance; no one noticed, who did not know him reasonably well, when it was genuine and when it was not. Today, it was genuine. He kept putting his hands behind his back, pulling them away, wringing them, pulling them apart. It was odd; he was a big man, a man who projected a certain strength, a force of immovable will. The gestures themselves, unconscious, suited him ill.

  He heard Finch, as if she were her namesake, fluttering and whispering in a high voice. Thought he should tell her that lower voices carried less of a distance.

  And then he heard it. Over the mutter, the questions, the whispering between members of Jewel’s den, over Levec’s heavy step, Devon’s light one, and the merciful stillness of the man whose calling it was to watch and to harbor, the domicis.

  “Jay.”

  They started, all of them. The voice was so labored it was hard to tell who of the two had spoken: Jewel ATerafin, or Daine of Levec’s House.

  Interesting, Alowan thought, slightly surprised. Jay. Not Jewel.

  “Jay,” the name came again. Stronger this time. Definitely Daine’s voice.
She did not respond.

  They drew breath then, collectively; they had become, in the intensity of their observation, one person, with one hope.

  “Jay.”

  Too late, Alowan thought, almost numb with the certainty of it. Aware that it was his risk, that he had taken it, as a gambler might. He bowed his head; there was enough of Angel in him, would always be enough of Angel in him, that he knew either way—Jewel or Angel—there had been no way to separate the choice made, the cost of failure.

  “Jay—I’d let you stay where you’re safe,” Daine said, his voice low, intense. “I’d stay there with you myself, and gods be cursed, healers be damned.

  “But you know what you have to do. And I know it. You know what was done to me. Death doesn’t change it.”

  Alowan began to cry. It was not loud; indeed, it was completely still, and the tears were lost in the folds of his skin, lost to light, lost to discovery.

  “I won’t leave you,” he continued, his voice hoarse. “But I can’t leave you there. Kalliaris curse you, Jay—I’ve been there. I’ve been there with Corniel ATerafin. I’ve been living with him for two months. I’ve been mad with it. I am mad with it. You want to die? Tough. Tough shit.

  “Come home.”

  He had never heard a calling so violent. Never heard a calling so angry. And he had never heard a calling so fraught with respect and intent and purpose. But he thought, as he listened to the tenor of the young man’s voice, that he might have heard the last of these three things if he had listened to his own voice on a cool, sea-heavy day, over thirty years ago.

  Her eyes opened slowly, separating lash by lash into the harsh glare of light, any light. She saw the man who had called her, and she did not shrink from the anger in his voice; instead, she reached up, she reached up to where his hands were gripping her face so tightly her skin was white beneath his fingers.

  He thought she would cry.

  She did not.

  He thought she would be too overwhelmed to speak.

  But perhaps, Alowan thought, he had never understood the particular demands of being seer-born. Perhaps this finding, and this losing, was not so new to Jewel ATerafin as it had been to a young Alowan, a young Amarais ATerafin, in a House as much—more—under siege than this House.

  “All right,” Jewel said. “I’m back.”

  But she gripped his hands with hers; held them tight.

  Youth and renewal, Alowan thought, caught between bitterness and a brief relief. The wars return and recede, like the tide. And we have to fight them; it’s how and what we fight that defines us. Hones us.

  And of course what was he thinking about? War. Weapons. Death. He was older now, but still remembered what being too young had truly been like; he could see the edges of youth, the pain and the passion of it, carved in the damaged lines of Daine’s face.

  As if she could hear him, Jewel ATerafin sat up in bed, her hands still gripping the man who had healed her. As if he would leave her. As if, Alowan thought, he could. He marveled then at the things that the seers could see, and the things that were hidden from them; the truths, old and odd, of the heart.

  She held him thus a long time, and then Finch—it was often Finch—approached her, tentative as she always was with the injured, the sick.

  “Jay?”

  They both turned, Daine and the girl whose name she spoke, as if they were one. Finch stopped, awkward now, knowing what she was interrupting. Uncertain, Alowan thought, about how much the healer knew.

  “Don’t stand,” that healer told Jewel, as he ignored his own advice. Levec was there before Alowan could be, and before him—before him, Avandar, his hands under the arms of the collapsing, pale man who had saved his vocation, his chosen master.

  Their eyes met; Avandar looked away first.

  “Give me my charge,” Levec said, when that moment was broken—but not, Alowan noted, before.

  Avandar nodded, passing the young man to the older one as if he were both precious and a burden. Levec took hold, and only when his hands were firmly attached to Daine’s forearms did the tension leave the line of his shoulder, the set of his large jaw.

  “Come, boy,” he said, the gruffness surrounding the two words without the slightest ability to penetrate them. “You’ve done good work here. It’s time—it’s time to be home.”

  “It’s time,” Alowan said suddenly, “for all of you to leave.”

  Finch started to object. The eldest man in the room chose to wield his age as authority, rather than weakness. As wisdom. As command. “No, Finch. No argument. You will all leave this room. Devon. Avandar. Carver. Jester. Follow Healer Levec out.”

  “But we can’t—”

  “You can.”

  They looked to Jewel, but she did not meet their eyes; indeed, she met no one’s; her eyes fell flat upon the pale sheets that rested against new skin, old skin, dried blood.

  “Jay?”

  Alowan felt a moment’s anger—surely the result of weariness. But the anger was just that: momentary. Finch, of all the den save Teller, he had a weakness for, a soft spot. Stunted in youth, she would never reach full height, and she seemed to him very like the ideal youth, for all her thirty or more years.

  He caught her by the arm. “Finch,” he said softly. “We must give her privacy. It is not an act of desertion, but an act of kindness. She will not thank you for staying.”

  “We’re her den,” Finch said.

  “Yes. But there are things that Jewel has never really shared well with anyone. Come.”

  She could not be driven away by his words. She could be brought away by his hand, by the pull of his arm.

  I am sorry, he thought, but he did not look back.

  She was alone.

  She had always known it, and she had never known it, not until now. Even so, she waited, counting each footstep’s echo as if it were a curse. Holding breath. Clenching fists and forcing them, forcing them to relax. She did not dare to look up. She did not want to see him leave. Because if she saw him—saw him leave her, she might say something unforgivably stupid. Weak.

  You promised you’d stay.

  Oh, she’d done with that. She’d done with that when she was ten. And twelve. When she realized that her parents were never coming home. They’d gone to wherever it was that her grandmother had gone, some dark shadowy halls that didn’t open for young children like her.

  She remembered how much she’d hated Mandaros then.

  How much she hated Kalliaris.

  How much she hated the Lady.

  And it was nothing to this. Or it felt, at years of remove, as nothing to this. Not a child now, no. She wasn’t a child. But she felt this pain that was a child’s pain, couldn’t be anything but a child’s pain, this entirety of emptiness, this horrible sense of absolute desertion.

  Is this what I did to you, Arann? You must have hated me, then. I never promised you that I’d spare you the pain. But I will. I’ll never let you get that close to freedom again and force you home to nothing.

  She was weeping.

  She was weeping because she could, now that they’d gone and left her. It had been so long since she’d wept, she’d thought she’d left it all behind.

  Daine.

  She saw him as clearly as if he were standing before her. She could feel his hands in hers, and she knew where they were callused from writing and weaving—the tasks he’d set for himself as a way of recalling his youth in a noble’s house. As a way of separating himself from the longing he felt for Corniel ATerafin. Longing for him, loathing himself for the longing.

  She could see, through the lens of Daine, the distorted image of that man, and she thought—she thought that had he lived, she would have had him killed. She, who had never assassinated anyone, had never really conceived of doing so.


  She felt that she could protect Daine; she felt that he could protect her; there was a circularity and a completion in the desire.

  And it was a lie, and she knew it because she was Jewel and she didn’t flinch from knowing the truth; real pain, after all, had the benefit of at least being real. What else did she know?

  She was alone.

  She hated to be alone.

  She needed to be alone.

  He did not reach the front gate.

  Oh, he tried. He put one foot in front of the other. Allowed himself to be led by Levec, as he had always been led by Levec. There was a comfort there, a familiarity, that allowed him to be carried above circumstance. Almost. But the halls were long. Had he been brought to a small dwelling, had the healerie been closer to an exit, an entrance, he would have made it out, into sunlight—if sunlight indeed remained, given the flickering glow of torches and lamps—or the moon.

  He had been brought to Terafin.

  “Levec,” he said.

  He felt the older man shudder to a stop, as if the name took time to reach his ears. “What?”

  “I can’t leave.”

  “You can’t stay,” Levec said. “You can’t stay with her. Not yet. You know the danger.”

  “Yes. I—I won’t go to her. Not, not yet.”

  “Then come home. Come back to the house. Gather your thoughts—and if you’re still decided, gather your things then. Take time, Daine.” Levec’s dark hair, dark beard, were the shadows across his face that made the paling of his skin seem extreme and sudden in comparison. “You’ve gone through this once, boy.”

  “I knew you would say that,” Daine replied, stung, but struggling with his anger. He had not struggled so in two months; the anger had rein. “But it’s not the same.”

  “It’s never the same.”

  “She’s not what he was.”

  Levec nodded. “But she’s still a member of the patriciate. She’s still a member of the Council of this House. What do you think to do?”

  “Serve,” he said, simply.