“He is not—”
“It does not matter what he is; it matters only what they think he is.”
“Alina—I’m in large part responsible for what happened—”
“And you fulfill this sense of responsibility by waiting?”
“I—” he fell silent, and Aidan recognized the silence for what it was. A wall. A decision.
So did she. And she wasn’t going to accept it the way the others had. The way Aidan himself had. “Then give up, Valedan. Give up the title, forsake clan Leonne, give up the claim to the Tor Leonne and the lake within it. Because I tell you now that to hold that throne, even were it given to you in a joyous time of peace—” her words made it clear exactly how likely she thought that was, “—will cost lives. And if you are not willing to spend them, you cannot take the reins of power; leave it to men who understand what the costs are.”
“There has to be—”
“A better way?” Ice. Near silence. “I think,” she said softly, “that it is best that I . . . excuse myself. Kai Leonne.” She knelt again, the stiffness of her body wholly at odds with the posture it adopted.
Everyone was looking at a different corner of wall. Everyone but Aidan himself.
“That’s it, then?” Valedan asked, bitterly.
She was silent for a long while, but in the end, she relented. “Yes. Do you think the Northern Kings wait here, in a room, for news of their trusted servants? They rule. They prepare for a day in the open sun. A day in which they will be under the scrutiny of men and women over whom they hold the power of life and death. They will dress well. They will speak perfectly, regally. They will accept that the most important thing that subjects such as the ATerafin can do is protect them, and they will be above public worry over the fate of a single such guard.”
“But they have to be worthy of that protection.”
“Do you think them otherwise?”
He was uncomfortably silent. When he spoke at last, his voice was muted. “No.”
“Then,” she said, and her voice had quieted, softened, “learn from them. Wisdom, Valedan. Justice.” She lifted her gaze. “Boy,” she said.
“Aidan,” Valedan corrected her.
“Aidan, then. Come, and come quickly. You have your duties, and he has his, and we have very, very little time in which to complete them gracefully.”
For the first time in Aidan’s life, being a king suddenly didn’t look like it would be a lot of fun.
The Ospreys were angry. Not that they’d cared much about the stray boy that Valedan had chosen as his witness, but an attack carried out for the purpose of somehow harming him—and through him, Valedan—reminded them of old actions.
Duarte, of course, was wise enough not to tell them any of the salient details, and anyway, he wasn’t all that certain that he knew them himself. But he’d forgotten about the boy, and they weren’t above using children to get at what they needed; they were Ospreys, after all. The boy told them everything they wanted to know in the five minutes before Duarte gave strict orders forbidding such communication. He expected trouble, and hoped, briefly, that it wasn’t the type of trouble that would force his hand; they weren’t even on the field yet. It was too early to start killing his own.
But to no one’s surprise—or rather, none of the Ospreys—the eight men who had been taken captive by the Imperial guards failed to survive to be questioned. The questions they had answered in the brief first interview were the only questions that would be answered.
It was rumored that the Astari were beside themselves with rage at the clumsiness, the carelessness, of the Imperial guards. The guards themselves did not let any chagrin at the loss show; they stood up as bullishly as possible to the Lord of the Compact. The jurisdictional squabble was tense enough to make itself felt. Bad, that.
Worse, Valedan had arrived late—and the late arrival sealed his fate. He was, of the contenders, to jump first.
But he was political enough, Duarte noted, to accept the placing with enough grace that it was clear he felt he deserved the unspoken rebuke. And that always played well with judges who were far enough away from their own youth to frown at a more natural reaction.
It was hot.
Kiriel stared at the sweat that dampened her sleeves as she lowered her forearm from its sweep across her brow. She was sweating. In the background, as new to her as the fact of this physical infirmity, the Kings’ men were setting up.
Not that there seemed to be all that much to set up; the champions had come, with all due respect and ritual, to a wide field, grassy in all places except for the long pits of white sand. While the bards sang, and they did sing, their words blending into each other in a harmonic chaos of history and emotion, the judges came forward to speak with the would-be champions—or their trainers.
She knew this because such a judge came to speak with Valedan kai di’Leonne. The heat was ferocious, and she felt it so strongly she almost separated the man’s head from his shoulders because he happened to be the only outsider who’d dared to present himself to their over-large group. Unfortunately, Duarte stepped on her foot, and Cook stepped in front of her, and the judge, ill-tempered no doubt because of the same heat that Kiriel faced, was taken to speak with Commander Sivari.
They’d lost the Princess, which was a pity. She was one of the very few women that Kiriel had ever met that she felt almost comfortable around. There was no odd rivalry, no fear, no foolish fixation on beauty as a means of power—although, to Kiriel’s growing chagrin, she realized that that fixation was not entirely as foolish as she had once believed—between them; Mirialyn ACormaris simply was.
And Kiriel?
Was simply hot.
“Sentrus,” Duarte said, after the judge had passed, “What exactly is the problem?”
She’d looked up at him, at the etched lines of his sour expression, and she’d said—before she could stop herself, “I’m sweating.”
He stared at her blankly, as if the answer and the question were completely unrelated. Waited, while his shadow grew shorter in the rise of the midday sun. “You’re . . . what?”
“I—I’m sweating.” The dampness between her skin and her underpadding was so terrible she wanted to strip herself of its protection entirely.
Alexis and Duarte exchanged a single, long glance. Duarte lifted a hand to his forehead. He did that, Kiriel knew, when confusion kept him from being furious. Almost. “And this is new to you?”
“Yes.”
The tenor of their second glance was different.
“Cook,” Duarte said.
“Primus.” He lifted his hand and belted his chest soundly. Duarte winced; Kiriel wasn’t sure why.
“Please keep an eye on the Sentrus. I believe she is feeling . . . ill.”
“Sir.”
“I told you,” Alexis whispered. If there’d been any sibilants whatever in the short sentence, she would have been hissing loudly enough for venom to have appeared on the flat edge of her teeth. “I told you that sonofabitch wasn’t telling us everything.”
He sincerely hoped that Auralis, usually quite healthy, had the money stashed away to see a healer after the previous evening’s escapade, and more, the wisdom to do so—because no one took Alexis on when she was at full-strength and they were almost dead. “Decarus,” he began.
“Don’t start, Duarte. We can’t afford to be ignorant, not here. He can play his games when there isn’t so much at stake.”
Which is true. But he knew, watching the white lines around her thinned lips, that wasn’t all that was bothering her. “Alexis.”
She didn’t look at him. Wouldn’t, not when he used that tone of voice. He did not know how to be gentle with Alexis. He wondered if any man did. If anyone did. Not a comfortable thought. “She’s one of us,” he said at last. “And Aural
is looks after his own.”
“And what are we?”
“We’re officers, love,” he replied, half-coldly, which was as coldly as he could. “They’re not.”
“He was.”
“He was never an officer. Killing got him the rank, the first time. Killing lost it. Nothing owns Auralis. Especially not something as intangible as rank. Alexis—”
But she was already gone. She’d mastered that skill, to be absent while standing an inch or less away and he—he was suddenly aware, was Duarte AKalakar, that he’d lost it. Love, he thought, made fools and weaklings of them all, and always when they could least afford it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
18th of Lattan
Averalaan Aramarelas, the Test of the River
She couldn’t see anything. Oh, she could see bodies, living ones; she could see the rise and fall of chest that spoke of breath and breathing. She could hear voices, could see the exchange of words that passed from man to man. But all she could see was the color of hair and eyes and skin, the height at which the body stood, the attitude it adopted on the outside. She could see clothing.
“Kiriel?”
Cook’s voice. She remembered that she hated it. “What?”
“Valedan’s ready for his practice.”
“They’ve barely started!”
“They’ve started. He drew early. He gets three attempts.”
“At what?”
Cook’s skin lost color. It meant—it meant that he was afraid, although he didn’t look afraid. Her nails bit her palms as she balled her hands into fists. She couldn’t see anything but the face. Not the colors that twisted beneath its surface. Beneath any of their surfaces.
“Kalliaris, Kiriel! You told Duarte that you’d read what he’d given you.”
“Auralis told him that,” she said curtly. It was true; Auralis had said it. He was lying, but he’d said it.
“This is the river’s test. River vaulting?” His eyelids compressed into a fine line before he managed to pry them open again. “Kiriel, I can’t believe that of all the Ospreys to imitate, you chose Auralis. The man’s got a death wish written all over his face, and in enough languages that no one misses it. Okay, pay attention. You see those long, thin frames that are set up over the sand pits?”
She squinted, feeling the brightness of the light. Hating it, because it caused her eyes to tear. Her eyes. Sweat ran. “Yes?”
“See that long pole on the grass, there?”
“No.”
“There, right underneath—you see the guy with the flag? He’s straddling it at the moment. What an idiot.”
She couldn’t see it. She, who’d been able to see almost anything, could not see this. Her fingers were white, and around one of them, like any harmless piece of precious metal, a thing that could not be removed. Not even by removing the finger.
She’d tried it, cutting the finger off; had had to steel herself to the act. She could still feel the ice of blade’s edge, the call for blood, but it was more distinctly separate from herself than it had ever been. The sword was as it had been made. The sword’s master was not. And the sword knew it.
She was afraid of very little—she would be damned if she’d be afraid of wielding her own sword. But although the sword had been willing, the flesh was not; the ring protected the area of her body around which it had found purchase.
She notched the blade.
So, she was here, a defender of an earthly lord. She had one sword that would aid her, and very little else. No vision. No shadow. Her power had been the only thing about herself that she’d understood.
Not true, Kiriel, a voice from the past said. You have more about you than power. You have curiosity. You have honesty, of a kind. You do not seek pain for pain’s sake.
But I do, Ashaf. I force myself not to seek it for your sake. And how is that honest?
We all desire things that we feel in our hearts we should not desire. It isn’t the desire that defines us, Kiriel. Never that. It’s only the action.
Today, she stood very still beneath the sun whose heat she could suddenly feel. Because her whole life had been defined by those words, that exchange: to struggle against desire, to win through, to beat it, so that—and this was the truth—Ashaf would not be hurt. It was cowardice of a type; she had been afraid to hurt Ashaf.
The struggle itself hadn’t ended with Ashaf’s death, and perhaps it should have. Perhaps she should have accepted the truth and learned to live, in the city that was her only heritage, the life that she had been born to, or would have been without Ashaf’s interference. She hadn’t. She’d fought herself, pushed against herself, every day of her life. It had become so very much harder when she’d knelt at her father’s feet to accept his gift; when she’d risen, literally a changed person.
But she knew the struggle.
What she did not know was this: What she should do, what she must do, when the thing she’d fought against simply gave up, rolled over, and died. There was no desire, now. For anything.
“Kiriel?”
And the sweat was running down her forehead. She’d never really understood the bands that the Osprey. wore beneath their hair, and above their eyes; that it had been practical hadn’t really occurred to her. How much of human life was like that? Practical in ways that hadn’t occurred to her?
Sivari watched his charge. Watched the boy—no, that wasn’t the right word, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to think of Valedan kai di’Leonne as a man—as he lifted the long, slender pole that would be his first challenge. It was heavier than it looked; hard and stiff with just enough flexibility to carry his weight in an arc several feet above ground—if they were lucky. He’d drawn poorly, but the draw was what it was. He had three chances to clear that stupid stick. If he did, he progressed. If they all did, they all progressed—but Sivari knew they’d lose at least half—if not more—in the first round. He just prayed that one of them wasn’t Valedan.
“Are you nervous?”
General Baredan di’Navarre. Sivari gave him a half-nod; it was all the attention he was willing to spare. The more correct Southern General did not choose to feel slighted. The Tyr’agnate, Sivari thought, was that hair’s breadth less practical. But the South was bred into them both.
“From here, he’ll go on to the river’s banks.”
“And that’s safe?”
Sivari snorted. “General, we are not in disagreement here.”
Baredan clearly did not believe this, which was just as well; it wasn’t—quite—true. Admit it, Sivari, the Commander thought, with just a twinge of shame. You know the boy’s almost good enough. Hells, he might be good enough. He’s no Anton di’Guivera—but he’s maybe one or two years away from being that good.
And you want to be a part of it. You miss this.
River vaulting was a Northern trial; Commander Sivari said it had come into being as a time-honored way of crossing a river when the people involved in such an enterprise were too barbaric to have developed an understanding of the simple concept of bridges.
Valedan, having spent some time at court in Avantari, understood that this was exaggeration, a thing said because the Northerners were the men who set the trial’s standard; the men to beat. Alina, however, found it graceless, tactless, and untrue.
Why is it, she said softly, that the Northerners feel a need to belittle their opponents? A worthy opponent, and the ability to master him, is the rank of one chosen by the Lord; to beat weaklings and fools is the sport of weaklings and fools.
Spoken, Sivari had countered, like a person who’s never had their life saved from the wrong edge of a sword because the person who was wielding it was stupid. You thank Kalliaris for whatever saves your life.
This is not a contest about life, Commander. It is a contest of displ
ay and challenge.
And then she had stilled, remembering even in the privacy of their odd war council that she was Southern. Or so Valedan thought, until she spoke: No, you are right. This contest is about life. Your pardon.
But he felt, as his hands gripped the pole, that the argument was already beyond him; that he was, in their eyes, a child, to be advised, to be coddled, to be protected where possible—and, as all children of power, to be feared in some small way.
He prodded sand with pole, putting his weight against it.
Looked into the stands for sight of Alina and Mirialyn. The former, he could not see, but the latter sat with the Kings in attendance, waiting, her eyes clear and steady across the vast gulf of grassy field.
I cannot take the test for you, she had said.
I don’t want you to. But he knew that she would fly where he might fall; that she would remain steady, where he might falter. He took a breath; filled his lungs with sea air that seemed more natural to him than the dry stretch of harsh land that had surrounded his home.
He cast a shadow as he walked to the starting position.
Cast a shadow as he ran, steady, bending slightly into his knees as he approached the lip of the long furrow of white sand. He leaped before pole touched ground, almost anchored by it; the sun was in his eyes, and the crossbeam—the height was before them. He twisted, flat in the air; passed over the beam.
He remembered—as he had not done the first dozen times he had tried this—to let go of the pole. The sand was hot when he hit it, and he hit it with poor grace, grazing face and forehead as he rolled in it.
At this rate, there won’t be a pit—just a bunch of would-be champions carrying sand in the folds of their clothing. He rose, shook himself, and made his way back to Sivari who stood, arms folded across his chest, lips pressed into a thin line.
“Well?” Valedan said.
The Uncrowned King Page 46
