The Uncrowned King

by Michelle West

  “You don’t know this woman,” Kiriel replied, in a voice as close to the darkness as she’d used since she’d lost all her precious magic.

  “I know her better than you’d think,” Jewel replied. “We’ve met before, and under darker circumstances than this.”

  “She doesn’t save anyone’s life for free.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I—I know.”

  So did Jewel, suddenly. “The fight’s worth fighting,” she said tiredly. Not sure who she was trying to remind—herself or her den-kin.

  “Kiriel,” the seer said. “I give you back your den-kin. She is your responsibility now. The kin are not hunting her this eve, but the brotherhood of the Lady is.”

  Kiriel’s grip on Jewel tightened.

  Great, Jewel thought, as Evayne took a step into nothing and simply ceased to exist—in front of about a hundred people. Luckily, in the noise and the clouds of gathered smoke, only about twenty of them now stared at her with that wide-jawed curiosity that can get ugly really quickly.

  “Who are the brotherhood of the Lady?”

  “Hells if I know,” Jewel answered. “But I think we can discuss that somewhere else.”

  Kiriel nodded. “Wait a minute,” she said quietly—which meant that Jewel could see her lips form the words but couldn’t actually hear them without an active imagination. “Auralis!”

  One of the quiet strangers separated himself from the long tables that were used for overcrowding during the Challenge season. He eyed Jewel with the same trust one offers a dog with a foaming mouth who hasn’t done anything remotely aggressive—yet. She returned his regard; he was a tall man, bronze with sun, copper-haired, blue-eyed. Attractive, she thought, and he knows it too damned well.

  She hated that in a man.

  “Kiriel?” he said, speaking to her but pinning Jewel with his not-quite-glare.

  “We’ve got to go. I . . . owe you money, I think.”

  “You do,” he said, folding his arms across his chest. “Where exactly do you think you have to go?”

  “Somewhere,” Jewel replied, “where a hundred people aren’t getting ready to report illegal use of magic?”

  He laughed then, although the edge of suspicion still hardened both stance and feature. “In this part of town?”

  “Even here,” Jewel replied. “I know this ‘town’ like the back of my hand.

  “Hands like that?”

  She looked at her hands involuntarily in the light. They were paler than they had been when she’d made a life for herself—barely—in the twenty-fifth. And on the left ring finger, she wore, thick and heavy and shining with craftsman’s perfection, the signet ring of her House—the jeweled and platinumed gold ring that marked her as part of its Council.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Hands like this.”

  “Jay, do you know who the brotherhood of the Lady is?”

  “Of course. I always pay attention to orders of assassins.” She bit her lip, and before Kiriel could speak said, “Sorry, Kiriel. No. I have no idea who they are. I don’t really care either—I just want to know which bastard was responsible for hiring them.”

  But Auralis had gone deathly still. “What did you say?” he said softly, his gaze demanding Kiriel’s reply.

  “The brotherhood,” she said quietly, “of the Lady.”

  He turned to face Jewel ATerafin then. “You’re wrong,” he told her quietly, all hostility muted. “You do care who they are. We call ’em the Kovaschaii here. Ring any bells?”

  “No.”

  “They’re an elite bunch of assassins. They cost the worth of a small barony—an old-style barony—or so it’s rumored.”

  “Fine.”

  “They don’t fail.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Assassin,” she said. “Meet seer.”

  His eyes widened. “You’re that ATerafin!”

  She flushed. Ego had gotten control of her mouth. She felt young again—and she remembered, her cheeks hot, that she hadn’t particularly liked being young. “And you must be one of Kiriel’s Ospreys.”

  “Good guess.” His face had lost a little of its glacial quality; none of its danger. “Duarte told us about you. You’re the former thief.” Measured words.

  Some men could say them with honesty; certainly they were true. But this man was using them as a weapon—or rather, he was handling them the way he would handle something unfamiliar but quite probably dangerous. Testing. Trying to cause discomfort or embarrassment.

  “Yes,” she replied distantly, as if acknowledging a truth that bored her, or worse, a truth that only children toyed with in such a fashion.

  Very little got through to Jewel when malice was behind it. Honesty could hurt her, but even then, only from those she already valued and respected—something she was pretty damned certain she’d never feel for this particular man. She turned to Kiriel, her expression softening slightly. “You can stay here if you want, or you can follow. But I’m leaving. I have to get home. If that bastard thinks he—” She stopped speaking, albeit with some effort.

  “I’m leaving with her,” Kiriel told Auralis quietly. “She’s—she was confined to the royal healerie. If she’s here, it’s not because the healer gave her permission to leave.”

  He shrugged. “Well,” he said, “it’s hot and boring here, so I might as well tag along.”

  “Wonderful,” Jewel said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Ser Anton di’Guivera waited. The courtyard was full of the men and women whose power and authority granted them easy access to Avantari, fragrant with the scent of new sweat and rich wine; the lamps and the magelights that the Empire was so fond of imparted a color to gown and tunic, to shirt and surcoat, that hinted at the revelries of day.

  Night was a time of peace.

  But not here. Not in this palace, and not in this city. He found it vaguely distasteful that the city itself chose not to sleep. And chose, in its wakefulness, to treat every night with the abandon reserved, in his homelands, for the Festival of the Moon. The Lady’s time.

  Perhaps it was understood that he felt this discomfort, perhaps not. But it was the Princess of the Blood—the only true child of the men who ruled this Empire—who came to him in this sea of friendly distances. She spoke Torra; that he expected, but she spoke it flawlessly. Had she offered him more than the respect of a fluid, formal, and very Imperial bow, he would not have been surprised.

  But then he remembered: Alina.

  “ACormaris,” he said quietly.

  “You are unescorted this eve.”

  “I have—I had a wish for—privacy. In this city, it appears that the courtyards of the Crown halls are as private an open space as one can find.”

  “There are quieter spaces,” she said secretively. “And the moon’s face is almost full. Come, if you will.”

  He watched her, unblinking, for a full minute. And then the bards began anew, and although their voices were hypnotic and compelling, they sang about war in a tongue that war was not meant for: Weston.

  I am old, he thought, and he felt it: the fear that experience exposes. Younger men—men like Carlo or Andaro—see costs measured in their lives alone. Nobility in that. Freedom.

  And what of Ser Anton? Was not the cost of this measured in his life? Ah.

  “Forgive me, ACormaris,” he said softly, “but I see a person I wish to speak with.”

  Her eyes followed his, seeing as he saw, and with just as much comment. But before she acceded with her customary grace, she touched his arm. It surprised him; he looked at her; met eyes that were a little too brown to be golden, and a little too bright to be entirely comfortable. “Ser Anton,” she said at last, “we have all, in our time, been asked to put aside the injuries done to us by our enemies.�
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  The words of a foreigner and a woman. Protocol did not demand that he answer her; politeness did. It was an easy battle. He remained silent.

  “In my life,” she continued, “I have learned that those injuries that we cannot put aside devour us; they unmake and remake us in such a way that we cannot clearly see ourselves.” He started to pull away. “An indulgence,” she said softly.

  “I am not a Northerner,” he replied, but he waited, the sea breeze sudden and strong for just that moment, a reminder that the wind listened.

  “It is a common story. An old one; we call it a Lattan tale.”

  His smile was stiff. “You will tell me,” he said softly, “of a young man who faced a creature that could not be killed.”

  “Indeed.”

  He could not keep the edge out of his voice, nor the mild contempt. He was not, after all, a child. “Such a young man was a seraf, a common villager. He had wife and child, mother and father, a good lord—all these things, the blessing of the Lady.”

  “That is not as we tell it, but yes.”

  “He went to face the monster—a creature twice his height, several times his weight, with sword-length claws and an appetite for human blood.”

  “You’ve heard this story before.”

  “I used to tell it to my son. But perhaps it is not the same. Let me finish, and then you may judge.” He could not keep the condescension out of his voice, although he knew she was ACormaris and, because of it, worthy of more. It was night. The Lady’s face was full.

  “The Voyani matriarchs had come and gone, and they had judged this one man to be the only hope of the Terrean. In the South armies amassed and were slaughtered to a man; the villages were defenseless. But the Havallah Voyani—it matters not which Voyani clan it was, and you can start a war by using the wrong clan name if you’re in the presence of Voyani—had looked into the future.

  “You are the only one,” he said, lowering his voice, “who can do what must be done. Take this sling, and take this rock.” He stopped then, bitter, a momentary fire in his regard of the quiet princess. Because, of course, he knew the story. He knew the point she was trying to make; had known it before she’d begun. But he’d thought his irony and his condescension, along with that foreknowledge, would protect him from acknowledging it.

  We know ourselves so well and so little.

  “I forget the rest,” he said.

  “Ah. And I remember it. Might I continue?”

  “No. No, I am an old man, with no desire to hear harem tales. Your pardon, ACormaris, but I am weary. My most promising student has been removed from the Challenge rolls, and his partner is aggrieved. I had hoped for a moment of peace in which to reflect.”

  She bowed again, deferentially and without comment. “I believe,” she added softly, “that he is still waiting for you.”

  And, like a woman, she missed nothing. His Mari had missed nothing. She had probably seen the bandits long before the rest of the village. He often wondered why she hadn’t fled, although he knew the answer. She had led such a protected life, first with her doting, foolish father, and then with him, with her doting, more foolish husband. She understood that death waited on every breeze or in every gale, and that it was impartial—but understanding it and knowing it in your core were different things. No hand had struck her with intent to harm; no man had touched her with intent to kill. As a child, her eyes had been shielded from every death a child can be protected from seeing.

  It had made her brave, the way fools are brave.

  His fault.

  She had thought—he was certain she had thought it—that she might somehow help her son and the other children. They said—they said that she had died fighting.

  The boy looked on; he had not looked away since their eyes had first met across the thin crowd, and he did not, in fact, look away until Ser Anton came to stand in front of him.

  “Aidan,” Ser Anton said. “It is good to see you well. I do not see your champion.”

  “He’s not here.” Silence. Watching the boy’s face, Ser Anton could see him weighing the words and the anger behind them; trying to decide how to throw them.

  He could not believe—no, truth now, under the Lady’s face—he had not believed that a boy could injure him in any way. That a foreigner, blond and red with sun, the dark colors that were a man’s legacy in the South watered down by exposure to Northern sea and Northern indulgence, could matter to him in any fashion.

  “You heard about Carlo?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “Yes.” That softened the boy’s face slightly. “He’s withdrawn.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he won’t see a healer.”

  “No.”

  Silence. Then, “Valedan says it’s because he knows too much about the plans to kill him, and he’s afraid the healer will tell.”

  He had not yet offered this boy a lie. He tried now. “No, it is because, in the South, it is unmanning to be touched by a healer. They take from you, boy, just as the wind does. They expose you, they read what they like out of your life.”

  Credulous, the boy replied, “You mean the death call.”

  “Is that what you call it here?”

  “Isn’t that what it’s called everywhere?”

  “No.”

  “A healer—the Princess says a healer can’t betray the healed. Not if they both agree to it.”

  “And you believe her,” was the unguarded reply, “because you are a Northerner. In the South, we understand war.”

  He had not meant to say it. But the anger was back in the boy’s face. “You don’t understand war,” he said, and his hands, smaller than Ser Anton’s because of years and possibly the scarcity of nourishment in his background, curled into fists and shook with the effort of containment. “You understand murder. It’s not the same thing.”

  “Is it not?” Ser Anton said softly. “Men are paid to follow orders, and they are ordered to kill. They kill until there are either no more men to be killed or their leaders come to terms. Do you think you understand war from watching this?” He raised an arm, to take in the Challenge, its revelers, this palace of politeness and invisible weapons.

  Aidan took a step back, his white hair suddenly brighter beneath the halo of magelights. And then he said, coldly, “You were all about Southern honor. You came here out of love for your wife and your son, and you won two crowns because of it.

  “But you don’t love anyone now, and if you’re what Southern honor is, then Southern honor is a lie,” He stopped. “Except for Carlo’s. Because he knew—he knew that he couldn’t just let you murder Valedan. That killing him, and having him killed by a—by a demon—isn’t the same thing.

  “Do you know that you killed a girl? Do you know that you killed her horribly, because your men helped to feed her to a demon? Do you even care that she was someone’s daughter, just like I’m someone’s son? You were the defender of the helpless. You—and your fight—and the bandits—” He dragged a sleeve across his eyes. “It was a lie, I guess. A lie, like anything else.”

  A boy of his age was not as young in the Dominion.

  “I admired you, Ser Anton,” the boy said, and tears mingled with anger, shaking the voice yet making it stronger at the same time. “I thought you were so—”

  Ser Anton surprised both the boy and himself. He heard the slap as if he were the clapper and the boy the bell—or perhaps the other way around; it resounded in him, the act of striking a weaponless young boy.

  They froze; he watched the white mark on the boy’s face gradually redden. His hand. He expected guards to rush in to the boy’s defense, but Aidan straightened himself to his full height. “Why are you doing this?” he asked. He said it quietly; the tears were gone. It was as if that blow bound them.

  And it was an
act of intimacy, that slap. Only intimate anger could force the hand of a man like Ser Anton to something other than lethal violence. No; not true. But this, this strike of hand across face—this was reserved for errant children. His own.

  He bowed. Bowed to the boy whose company he wanted, and whose company he now knew would be far, far too costly.

  You are the only one who can do what must be done. Take this sling. Take this rock.

  And what good, the young defenseless man had asked, would a rock do, where horses, swords and arrows had failed?

  Oh, yes, he knew it. He knew the story well.

  The creature has three eyes. It sees all that happens around it. Only aim, hit true, and you will turn one—just one—of those eyes inward.

  So he’ll be blinded. They tried that.

  No. He will not be blinded. He will be forced to see what the chaos of fighting and death has allowed him to escape—why else do you think he kills and kills and kills? In the fight for survival, only the sword counts; the warrior’s trance is everything. Why do you think he chooses a life in which he can do little else?

  Take the rock, boy. Aim true.

  Because this creature was a man once, and made foul by the sorceries of his choice and his desire.

  And the boy took the rock, and faced the monster.

  And the monster’s eye turned inward.

  And he died of what he saw there.

  They were quiet, these two men. Wine had come their way, and it was of a very, very fine vintage; so, too, had fruits, chilled somehow against the summer heat—and cream, something thick and rich and sweet that had no equal in the Terreans they made their home. No equal in Raverra.

  Even women—and in the North, women were by their very nature both repellent and exotic in their forwardness—had made it clear that they were available.

  The food, they accepted, but the women they merely flattered by gentle rejection.

  “I have failed him,” Carlo di’Jevre said quietly.

  Andaro di’Corsarro said nothing. There was nothing to say.

  “Do you think he’ll forgive?”