The Uncrowned King

by Michelle West

  But he didn’t breathe. He didn’t put the full force of his weight on the flat of his feet, choosing instead to place heel down steadily and let the rest of the foot follow. Quietly, quietly. He didn’t want to be seen, and he knew that if he was heard at all, he would be.

  Had he wondered why there were so many damned guards?

  He stopped. Wondered, instead, where in the Hells they’d all gone. And then he heard the first scream.

  And then he began to run.

  Kallandras froze for a moment, stopping in mid-stride as if men normally stopped that way, and at that, completely gracefully.

  Devon was a second behind him and attuned to him; he stopped as well. The grounds were silent if the normal noise of the grounds could be disregarded—and during the Festival season, that was difficult.

  “We’re late,” Kallandras said softly. He began to move again, quickly.

  He recognized the boy; Valedan’s witness. He hadn’t spoken to him, of course; he’d observed him from a polite distance. All affairs that related to the politics of the realm were observed from a distance of one sort or another, but they were observed. The boy’s white hair caught what scant light there was through the window of the guesthouse’s upper storey. His hands were not so striking as his hair, not so pale; they came up, struck the glass, palm first.

  Devon’s eyes narrowed.

  “Kallandras!” he cried.

  The bard stopped, crouched low to earth, turned, all in a motion. “What?”

  “Tell the boy to get away from the window.”

  Anyone else and Devon would have had to explain. What boy? What window? Why?

  Kallandras raised his head slightly in the silence.

  The boy disappeared.

  Do not touch exterior glass.

  The words came from nowhere and hung in the air like a sword. Like a sword wielded by no one, but sharp enough to kill, and suspended a little too close to the neck at that.

  Aidan pulled his hand back from the window and turned his back to it instead. In the darkness, the torches were swaying. The hall was a long hall, beginning to end, but it was suddenly becoming a lot shorter.

  They didn’t shout for him to stop. That was the weird thing. They made almost no noise as they ran; if it weren’t for the lights, he might not have heard them at all.

  And he knew that was bad.

  There was a bend in the hall, and stairs.

  He took both.

  The doors would not open.

  In Devon’s left hand was a completely useless ring of keys. Oh, the keys slid into the lock, all right; they even turned. But the click of authoritative opening did not follow that movement; it was as if the lock and the key had been somehow sundered, as if they had lost the ability to speak the same language, although they retained the same outward appearance of compatibility.

  Not bolted; not barred; not locked. Anything as simple as that would have been visible immediately in the light that Devon carried. Kallandras waited at his side in silence—and Devon knew it was the silence of the listener. He thought, as he rose from his slow crouch, that not all bards could listen well, even if they were born with the voice—but those men and women born to the voice who could listen, he was certain, could hear heartbeats and interpret them.

  “Who are they after?” he asked, when the bard’s gaze met his.

  “I’m not . . . sure.”

  “What do you hear?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing except the feet of heavy men in the hall above.”

  “The guards?”

  “Dead,” Kallandras said, in a tone that held only fact, no emotion. “Or sleeping. I would definitely say sleeping,” he added, again dispassionately. “Were it not for the scream.”

  “They can’t all be dead.”

  “No, I concur.” Kallandras surveyed the door.

  “There’s this door, three servants’ entrances, and the main set of doors.” The door that they stood before was the door by which the priest left and entered.

  “Let us pretend that whoever our enemies are, they have the same dislike for the priests that they are once rumored to have had. I would try the servants’ entrance closer to the Northern stairs.”

  Devon didn’t ask Kallandras how he knew the lay of the building so well. They ran.

  When Aidan tripped down the stairs, he wasn’t even surprised: he had had it too good, and Kalliaris had noticed him and started to frown.

  But when the blue light fanned out above his head, when it splashed the wall in a flare of light that was—he couldn’t think of a different word for it—sticky, he figured she was just smiling with an ugly edge. Because the light dripped down like some sort of heavy liquid.

  The fall hadn’t hurt him. Hadn’t really slowed him down; he’d actually gotten to the bottom faster. He rolled up, made damned sure that whatever was dripping didn’t touch him, and threw open the stairwell’s swinging doors.

  Above him he heard cursing.

  He couldn’t understand a word of it, but he’d listened to enough of the language over the past week to know it for what it was: Annagarian. He offered a breathless curse—in Weston—which was all he had time for. He had to get out.

  Whoever they were, they didn’t bother to trip down the stairs; they came down it like full-shod horses; heavy and loud.

  Where in the Hells are the guards?

  As he flew clear of the doors, he tripped over his answer.

  And this time, he did lose time.

  If it hadn’t been for the circumstances, Devon would have laughed. This door, simple and almost featureless—inasmuch as any door that stood on the grounds of the Kings’ land could be said to be either—would not come down. Both he and Kallandras, in his own modest opinion, had had the training required to use their strength to advantage; the door was heavy enough, but it was hinged; there should not have been any way that it could stand—completely unperturbed—against two such men working, as it were, in concert.

  But it wouldn’t budge.

  On the best of days, Devon could find two good words to say about mages if he struggled. This was not the best of days. Kallandras stiffened; his eyes, even in the darkness, took on that peculiar flatness that meant he was listening, he was giving something beyond Devon’s hearing his full concentration.

  “I think,” he said softly. “I have an answer.”

  “To which question?”

  “You wanted to know who they’re after.”

  Devon took in some of the bard’s stillness.

  “They’re after Valedan’s witness. Aidan.”

  The guards were dead.

  Or at least he thought they were dead; living men didn’t usually lie in wait across the length of the floor. But these did. His foot caught on the unexpected underside of ribs, and he fell flat across two men.

  Two men who, far from having fallen in a heap, seemed to be laid out, side by side, arms and legs straight. As if they were statues on the tops of those fancy cenotaphs that rich people bought by dying. Except they weren’t statues. As his face grazed the floor, he could hear the whuffling snort of breath: sleeping. They were sleeping.

  He desperately wanted to believe that they’d just fallen asleep on duty. Gods, he wished he were stupid.

  But he wasn’t, so he knew damned well that he didn’t want to join them. His palm found cold links of cloth covered chain; he pushed himself up, stopping for just long enough to steal a long knife from the sheath of the nearest guard. It was big enough to be a sword to Aidan.

  Awkward and heavy, but better than nothing.

  He gained his feet. He started to run.

  “Stand back,” Kallandras said.

  He wasn’t Astari, but he was an equal, and in this, as much a comrade at arms as
the Astari were. Devon asked no questions. He stood back.

  Stood back while the bard stepped forward. Stood back while the bard lifted his hand, his right hand, and placed it palm first against the door. The line of his body stiffened, as if in pain. No, Devon thought; in pain.

  “Be ready,” the bard said, through visibly clenched teeth. “They know we’re here now.”

  “They—”

  From a clear and cloudless sky, lightning fell—and Kallandras was the conduit.

  The door buckled, shivering under the flare of light, the heat of it, the weight of it. But it buckled the way a tent wall will; the way something flexible will; undulated in the darkness of night, in the light of Kallandras’ hand.

  For the first time in years, in more, Devon heard Kallandras of Senniel swear. He said nothing; offered no aid. Instead, he saw to his weapons.

  In the darkness—and it was dark, even with the huge windows and the moonlight—the great hall looked different. Different enough that Aidan lost his bearings. He found it hard to run because the long dagger he held was ungainly, and the bodies that were lined up, neatly and evenly, in the hall couldn’t quite be ignored. He had to know where they were.

  But he knew there was a door here somewhere. Sam had pointed it out—she was a nosybody, noticed everything—and because he thought it was so stupid, he remembered it.

  He wondered—because he couldn’t stop himself from wondering—whether or not that scream had come from Sam’s room. Because he didn’t remember where her room was. Hells, he’d barely remembered his own. She had.

  He didn’t know her well enough to recognize her scream.

  Door. He had to think. The door. Breath was painful, hard to take. He wasn’t sure why; he’d run a helluvalot faster than this, and he’d certainly run for longer.

  Someone shouted something. Foreign words.

  But the meaning was clear enough.

  They’d seen him. They knew where he was.

  Kalliaris, Kalliaris, please—please let me get there before they do.

  What did he owe her already?

  The footsteps at his back stopped; the room fell into a silence that he didn’t realize was silence over the sound of his own breath, the intensity of his internal prayer. No one moved. He should have been happy. He should have looked at it as a gift from the goddess.

  But it was too quiet. It was just wrong.

  He made the door with more than enough room to spare. Grabbed the handle, pulled for all he was worth. Which apparently wasn’t enough. The door didn’t budge.

  “Well,” someone said, and it took him a minute to realize that he understood the word, “you’ve led my associates a fine chase, but I believe, Aidan Cooper, that your dalliance is at an end.”

  He turned, the dagger clutched in both hands—both shaking hands. Standing in the middle of the hall, coming quickly toward him, was a very tall, very large man.

  A man with hands as black as mourning, both outstretched, and both filled with something that seemed to be blue light, thickly pooled in palms and around fingers. “If you make this more difficult, you will suffer,” the man said. “Suffering is not, however, required.”

  As the light he held grew brighter, Aidan could see that the man wore gloves, supple and dark beneath the moving flow of whatever it was he carried.

  “What—what is that?”

  “It is . . . a gift,” the man replied smoothly. “It will do you no more harm than was done to the men who sleep here. You will feel no pain.”

  That’s why you’re wearing the gloves?

  He turned to the side, either side, and saw that the foreigners—he recognized them now, and felt, of all things, betrayed—had come upon him. They did not seek to hold him—but they wouldn’t let him pass.

  He weighed the worth of the dagger against a man who was—who must be, although he didn’t bear the marks—a mage, and men who were probably just thugs. Made his decision.

  “Aidan, hit the floor. Now!”

  And unmade it. His knees buckled almost before the words made themselves understood.

  There was nothing so sweet in his life to date as the sound of splintering wood.

  Devon stepped past Kallandras through the shattered door, the splintered frame. The boy lay aground at his feet, his back harbor to wooden splinters; blood had been drawn by the force of the door’s opening. He saw that, although he spared the boy the second of recognition, no more.

  “Do not interfere in what does not concern you.”

  Devon was not short, but the height of the man who spoke those words forced him to look up. The whole of the building was dark; he was haloed in a light that was unpleasant and cold; it drew the eye and repelled it at the same time.

  Had he been almost anyone else, the whole of his attention would have been absorbed by this. He was Devon ATerafin. He counted four men to either side of the door; they had not drawn weapons.

  Nine in total. How surprising.

  Steel’s rasp completed the thought. Not his, of course; when Devon wanted to draw a blade, he didn’t give himself away so carelessly.

  “You’ll pardon me,” he replied, “if I decide for myself what my concerns are.” In the night beyond the words, the bodies of the Kings’ Swords had been laid out against the floor. The heat of his momentary anger surprised him.

  Why? Because war hadn’t been declared yet?

  “I would pardon you,” the man replied, in flawless, uninflected Weston. “But I feel that my companion is less likely to be patient.” Blue fire, shot through with shadow that was fine enough, delicate enough, to be black lace, writhed in his hands, illuminated his face. “I will offer one further warning because I am feeling generous and because I am at heart a peaceful man. Leave. Now.”

  Magic had its own particular smell, its own taste. Devon ATerafin had spent much of his adult life studying it. There was a particular feel to a magery gleaned by years of developing talent; the man who carried magic in his hands didn’t—quite—have it.

  There was no denying magic itself. Many men who were not mages were versed in crafts similar in seeming. Few of those worked with allies of the Shining Lord—and this man did not look insane enough to be Allasakari. A puzzle.

  Devon never appreciated mystery when lives were at stake.

  The darkened great hall of the guesthouse could have been a cathedral. The ceilings were tall enough to disappear into night’s shadow; the window, crossed by lead and filled by colored glass, was built to catch the sun’s rise and fall, from ground to beam.

  The only fight he’d ever been in in a cathedral had nearly killed him.

  As if to remind him of that night, the large man—the only man he was certain would not be among the roster of challengers’ witnesses—nodded. The movement was minimalist enough to be significant. Devon crossed his arms, the movement a quick snap of forearm and elbow.

  Two men fell.

  “I’m afraid,” he said softly, “that I will have to disappoint your less patient—and less visible—friend. Boy.” he said, speaking to the vicinity of his feet without once looking down, “I believe it’s time for you to leave now.”

  “A pity,” the man replied. “Believe that my regret is genuine. The matter, however, is now out of my hands.” And as he finished the last word, Devon realized that he had, in a fashion, a sense of humor.

  He threw the blue fire.

  Afterward he would be certain it only took a second to recover; he could judge time by feel; they had trained him that well. But the ring obeyed its own laws. He had learned over time that it was not a tool, it was a wild ally. It did not negotiate. If you needed its power, you took it; it took what it required in its turn.

  Time. Which was bad.

  He had not called the lightning in years. Not the lightning, wh
ich was difficult enough, and not the wind. The wind’s voice was a terrible thing. It scoured him. It emptied him from the inside, and he understood, as he stood in the emptiness of the wind’s voice, what the wind meant to the Southerners. Why damnation was an eternity in the wind’s wake.

  But he was already damned.

  And because he was already damned, he could return to the world when he heard a familiar voice. Could recognize it, although he had, in fact, never heard Devon ATerafin scream before.

  Devon ATerafin wore two rings; a gift of the magi. Wore as well a vest that weighed less than gauze, less, he thought, than the webs out of which it was woven, it was that fine, that supple, like captured light. However, none were remarkable to the eye; indeed, the rings were plain and of a quality rivaled only by the offerings of apprentices to questionable goldsmiths. No matter; they were not meant to adorn.

  They were meant to protect, to ward, to guard.

  To guard against fire, mage-fire, the magelight that brought not illumination, but death—or worse.

  Devon moved. That came more naturally than breathing. As did seeing the boy, half-crouched, in the mage’s path, his dull shirt almost white in the glow of traveling light. What did not: breaking the flow of the jump itself; halting the motion; changing its course.

  Devon stood.

  He was the wall behind which the boy might survive the blast.

  Until the light struck, he thought it was light—some artifact of magery, dangerous yes, but not more so than a well aimed quarrel or swordmaster’s weapon. He had seen mage-fire before, had, in fact, been burned by it. This had not looked that strong.

  But when it struck, it clung not like fire, but rather, webbing—and it whispered in his ears as it climbed up his face in a moving, liquid sheet.

  Devon ATerafin, it said. Just that. His name.

  But he knew, hearing it, just how visceral a power the name of a demon held for the demon in whom it was rooted.

  Because as the light entered him he felt that name begin to dissolve.

  He could not stop himself: he screamed. Just once.

  The light wrapped around him laughed.