But if Andaro’s hand had been stopped short of gripping his sword, he could fence with his eyes, the gravity of his expression, the accusation it contained. He did not, however, demean them both by begging.
“The adjudicators gave their order,” Ser Anton said softly, seeing the wreckage of splintered wood upon the water, the corpse of a single mage—the others had somehow survived both the weight of their robes and their underwater enemies, and had made it ashore. “The magi will act when the waters are clear; they cannot risk magery in the water; it may well kill the challengers.”
Andaro made no reply. Nor would he.
He stared out into the still spot in the water where he thought Carlo must have dived.
Watched as, less than a minute later, that familiar—completely drenched—head bobbed up, seeking air.
It was not enough.
Kallandras lived through the pain, offering it to the demon like a drug; he used himself, as he had been taught to use himself, mercilessly.
Kallandras saw the expression, so appropriately glassy, that held his enemy’s face; saw him slow and shudder a moment. But the assassin was accustomed to pain, and in the end, so, too was the Kialli; he looked up, and saw as Kallandras did: the passing of his intended victim. He smiled, he only paused to smile, and then the water took him beyond Kallandras’ reach.
Air wrapped him round; enveloping him, like a stream too thin to be seen, it answered his call. He followed, but not quickly. Not quickly enough.
But there was one other in the water, with a single crescent sword, a sword that moved too slowly given the water’s pull; a sword that dragged him down with its weight. He struggled, but he kept himself near the air that was his life.
Saw the first of the swimmers.
Waited, in the water, and then, with one last breath of air, gave in. Slid beneath it.
He saw, as clearly as he could, the man who had come out of the water, followed by the unholy water itself—only this time, the positions were reversed.
No question; none whatever. The creature was here to kill the kai Leonne.
Lord of Day, Carlo di’Jevre thought. Gripping his sword, he waited. Beneath him, beneath the approaching kai Leonne, the man whose golden hair now filled the water with strands not unlike the legendary mermaid’s suddenly pursued; he carried something too small to be a real weapon in his right hand, and in his left, nothing.
The creature turned, lifted a hand that was slender and long, and hurled something, something unseen—but not unfelt.
The water rocked with its sudden unfurling. But the target, the man, had somehow stepped aside. As if water were something that offered him purchase.
“HOLD!” that man cried, and Carlo froze. So did the creature; or rather, it slowed, as if waking to water for the first time and realizing that it had weight.
The creature’s snarl was carried by wave; he raced up now, up toward the kai Leonne.
Carlo waited. Held his sword. Readied it—as much as he could in water like this.
He would regret it later—if ever—but the creature’s back was toward him, its attention divided between the kai Leonne and the man who pursued him. Carlo was certain that such a thing must realize that he was there—but perhaps not, or perhaps he was only another swimmer, another fragile, easily killed man, with no magery to protect him.
But it didn’t matter; he did not call the creature; did not demand the right to face him in honorable combat. This was no creature of the Lord’s, no creature meant to stand and fight beneath the open sky. Night here, night in the depths; all men fought a night such as this. He heard its terrible gurgling; saw the kai Leonne pass above them both, and struck, as true as he might, the creature’s transparent spine. Then, because his body wished air more than he wished the sword, he rose up, leaving its weight behind. Leaving his sword.
And because he did, its claws cut his calf to bone, drawing blood, but not life’s blood.
He had the privilege of knowing that his strike was not wasted; the man struck, with the dagger that seemed so beneath notice, and even surrounded by water as it was, the creature began to burn.
Lord of Day, Carlo thought, as he reached for air, gasping. Lord of Light. He made his way to the open boardwalk, reached up, and was hauled onto his feet by two angry men.
He laughed before his leg collapsed. Laughed in the face of their silence, their anger, their concern.
“What does it matter,” he told Andaro’s grim, white face, “about the Challenge? What will they do? The Challenge is a game, Andaro—but I—today I have faced the first true enemy.”
“And was it worth your life?”
“I’m alive.”
“You might not have been.”
Carlo grimaced as Andaro lifted him. “What do you think?” And he laughed.
“I think,” Ser Anton said, looking into the water’s deeps as if all that lay beneath its moving surface had been laid bare to him, “you’ve lost your sword.”
The third heat made it to the boardwalk. The fourth heat was delayed.
And perhaps because of the delay they swam poorly when they did at last receive permission to swim. So, too, did the fifth heat.
Valedan kai di’Leonne was, against all odds, the winner of the event. And no victory, not even the fight with the young boys of the Essalieyanese court, had ever been so galling, so contemptible, so empty to him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Serra Alina came to him in the humid, cramped waiting areas adjacent to the open glory of the coliseum. The Princess brought her; the two women cast long shadows as the sun left the sky. It had been years since he had believed in the Lord and the Lady, but he yearned for the night now as if, indeed, it were that mythical Lady’s bower, a place for peace.
Not yet.
Serra Alina publicly prostrated herself before him, as befit his rank and her own; it made the Ospreys uncomfortable—or worse, made her the objective of their insinuations, their colorful innuendo. She was a Serra, of course, and rose above it.
But he was Valedan. “Primus,” he said, in as formal a voice as he ever used, “if you cannot teach your men to speak respectfully of a woman who is the ACormaris’ equal in every way, I will kill them.”
Silence, there. Decarus Alexis whistled softly under her breath, but her smile was sharp with approval—or with what came as close to approval as she ever offered Valedan.
“Tyr’agar,” the Primus said at last.
“Dismissed.” Valedan turned to Alina and said, more shortly than he had intended, “Rise.”
She rose. Lifted the veils that separated her skin from the Lord’s view. “Valedan,” she said quietly. “You won.”
He made no reply; she glanced at Mirialyn.
At last she said, “You joined this contest to win; to take the title. This is your first victory.”
“If this is victory,” he replied, his voice a low snarl, “I wish I had never entered the Challenge to begin with.”
Mirialyn and Alina exchanged glances again; the glance told Valedan that Mirialyn had summoned the Serra.
“How so?”
“To win,” he said, “I kept swimming. A man was fighting for his life against a creature that wanted mine . . . and I kept swimming. I offered no aid, no resistance, no battle.
“To win.” He spit.
She frowned, a ripple of lines around mouth, eyes, forehead.
“And worse—worst of all—one of the men I believe was sent here to kill me did intervene. On my behalf. He struck the creature, and probably saved not only my life but Kallandras’ life as well.”
“Had Kallandras not been present,” the princess said, speaking for the first time, “that man would have perished. As it was, he was injured badly enough we believe he will now no longer be a conte
stant in any of the remaining tests.” She was silent a moment. “He was favored,” she said at last, the words oddly hesitant, “to win the test of the horse.”
He knew what she was telling him, and hated it.
“Valedan,” Alina said quietly, “you must come to the podium; they will call for you shortly. And when you go, you must honor the spirit of this competition.”
“Is that why you came?” He turned away from her then.
“Yes,” she said, unflinchingly. “You made your choice. You must now live with it, with grace. That is the mark of a man.”
“You have come here to tell me that?”
“I had hoped,” she said coolly, “to offer merely my congratulations.” Reproof.
He was angry with her; angry with them both. But he valued her enough—barely, this one afternoon—to hear the truth when it was spoken, no matter how little he liked it.
The crowds that opened up before him shook with applause as the challengers entered the arena. The voice of the ocean itself seemed to run through the benches in waves, rippling and breaking against unseen shoals. Fitting, here.
Witnesses.
They had seen the blood, they had seen the shattered wreckage of both a mage’s craft and a mage’s life—and they had seen that the challengers themselves continued on boldly and without apparent fear of the dangers beneath them. This was the stuff of champions and legends, the place where the one met the other and stayed wed.
And the man at the lead of the third heat—the heat which marked the turning point in the challenge, that made of it a blood sport—was Valedan kai di’Leonne. He was called last, and his name was lost to the crowd, taken by it, and carried on its tremendous voice. That such a thing could be formed out of disparate splinters—old voices and young, soft and harsh, male and female—seemed to the young kai Leonne a thing of wonder. He stood a moment, as if the voice of a god had been turned upon him.
And then he remembered why he had earned it, and the wonder left him completely; if a god’s attention was upon him, the judgment rendered could not be favorable.
He walked the narrow path made of honor guards and witnesses. At the head of that path, Aidan, a young boy. Had he dreamed of heroes at Aidan’s age?
Of course he had. He turned away from the boy’s regard. Took his place upon the podium. Lifted his hands in twin fists.
The “merchant,” Pedro, was beside himself with rage. It was a quaint phrase, that—a Northern phrase. It was also accurate; he seemed to have somehow stepped outside of himself and left only the anger behind. In the Dominion, the cost of such a display was not easily measured—or rather, it was measured by the power of the men in front of whom you chose to expose such a lack of control. And power was something that ebbed and flowed, a thing whose future could not be predicted.
Or so it had been in Ser Anton’s experience.
Who, after all, could have foreseen the death of the Tyr’agar, and the fall of the clan Leonne?
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
Foolish, to ask that question here. The crowd’s roar was broken a moment as the kai Leonne took the podium; as the officiants in their brightly colored yet somehow somber robes began their crossing from podium to Kings.
The man Pedro referred to with such ire stood stiffly, his left arm slung over something the Northerners called a crutch. He had been offered something far less dignified—a chair, with wheels, as if he were merchant offal and it a tiny wagon—and had in the end chosen the rounded curves of hardwood. He could support himself, and he did; not even Andaro was allowed to publicly offer him aid.
The sword was awkwardly worn, and the leg bandaged in gauze that had just been dressed and changed. He would scar, of course—but with luck, he would not limp or lose the use of the leg; the bone had been chipped—or so the physicians said—but not broken.
The Kings had offered them the use of a healer, and Carlo had refused it. Because he knew too much of what they had planned for the kai Leonne, and he could not allow that information to pass into enemy hands.
Thus did he prove himself.
“Had it not been for his interference, we would not have failed! Do you even understand the cost of his action?”
Ser Anton stared at the profile of one of his two most promising students, aware—well aware—that in the South, healers were not trained to the same use as they were in this, this huge ancient city; that they, in fact, would not have the skill to repair this injury if too much time passed.
Was he aware of the cost of the action?
Oh, yes.
This man would never be his best, or his best student, again.
And they both knew it.
“Ser Anton—”
“Pedro,” he said. “I know the cost.” He would have said more, but the silence that fell made him realize how exposed the words they exchanged were; there was an unnatural silence, in a coliseum of this size.
And it had been called for by the kai Leonne.
No fists of victory, no Northern gesture. He called for silence, and he received it.
But what he did with it robbed Ser Anton of words. Of more.
“The test of the sea is the test of Averalaan,” Valedan said, pitching his voice so that it might carry to the heights as well as the depths. “And men have proved themselves through it since this great city was founded.
“The first men to lend themselves to the sea’s mercy were warriors; men who had fought and survived the Baronial Wars. They fought on land and they fought in mountain passes; they fought in great vessels upon the ocean’s face.
“Today, I took the test of the ocean, and before you all, before my chosen witness,” and he smiled at Aidan, “I was judged first among challengers. And for that, for that I am grateful.”
He let them in, then, and they came, filling the space between words with his name.
“But if the spirit of the warrior is a part of the test of the sea, then I will tell you now that if I won the race, I cannot—will not—stand alone.”
He took a breath, thinking now, balancing his desire to behave honorably with his desire not to insult the men and the women who had judged, and would judge, the challenge; to offer gratitude, to expose to light the excellence of, yes, an enemy—without exposing to ridicule the heart of the championship itself.
“For while I swam above the blood, the blood itself was spilled.
“Honor Tallosan, the mage whose life was shattered alongside his small vessel.” He bowed his head. “Honor Kallandras, the master bard of Senniel College, whose skill with song and word is unchallenged, unchallengeable; whose dance in the depths rid the depths of danger.
“And honor, last and most, a man who had nothing to gain and everything to lose; who came to the Challenge from the South, the far South, and will return that way without facing the rest of the Challenge in which he hoped to prove himself.
“This is a warrior’s test, and the man who proved himself worthy of it is the man who dared the waters with a sword and no hope of reward, although the responsibility to protect the challengers was in no way his.”
He turned, then, seeking the face in the crowd and finding it, slack-jawed, almost stunned.
“Honor Carlo di’Jevre!” He stepped down from the podium then, and held out his hand, not in command, but not in supplication either.
And then Carlo di’Jevre straightened out, gaining inches and something else: pride. He did not look back at Ser Anton, although he cast one glance at one of his comrades. He stepped into the coliseum from the side, and the people answered his step, and Valedan’s request.
He heard the name of his enemy, and he smiled; he began to chant it himself. To offer honor where honor had been offered; to offer it where it was due.
The Southerner drew even with Valedan, although it was a
slow process, the movement hobbled by injury and stiff pride.
He did not speak to Valedan, and perhaps that stung, but when Valedan mounted the podium again, Carlo di’Jevre allowed him to do what he allowed no other: offer him a hand.
Clasped, their hands were a knot of dark and light, sun-stain and pale nobility. They were of a height, and their hair and eyes of a color; they might have been brothers, separated at birth, and returned to the fold shaped by two different hands—whose intent, in the end, could not eliminate the similarities that were there.
The crowd came to life as if it had been a slumbering, single creature, and the roar it raised went on and on, deafening, frightening, and comforting by turns.
The officiants returned from the Kings’ box, and as they returned, they carried not one cushion but two, and on it, two crowns. Two wreaths.
Baredan di’Navarre offered no name, and no adulation, as the words of the crowd washed around him. Neither did the Tyr’agnate, who stood beside him in the box. But the Tyr’s men, even the much admired and much respected Fillipo di’Callesta, had been carried away by the tide and the moment—and in that moment, Baredan could see that Fillipo was the younger of the two men. It had not been obvious to him until now.
They waited, the General and the Tyr, until the applause and the approbation came to an end; they waited a long time. But as the Kings finally rose to speak, for they spoke after each event—both to congratulate the winners and, in Baredan’s practiced eye, to remind the spectators of whom their rulers were—the crowd gave up its voice, and there was room in which two men might speak.
The Tyr’agnate said, “He is not the boy we were led to believe he was.”
Baredan replied, “He is not the boy he was led to believe he was. But he is not yet what he must be to lead armies.”
“No?” The Tyr shrugged. “Not armies, perhaps. But twice now, twice, General, he has proved that he can lead men. And few indeed are the boys who lead men.” His frown, subtle, was still evident. “They will see it,” he said softly.
It was not the turn in conversation that Baredan had been expecting, but he followed it. “His enemies?”
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