The Uncrowned King

by Michelle West

  The Serra Marlena en’Leonne was wringing her hands. Alina wondered idly, and not for the first time, whether or not this woman had been striking in the bloom of youth; she was not at all attractive now. She made of weakness a virtue, but not one to Alina’s liking. For the sake of the event itself, however, they endured each other’s company.

  Short of leaving the box that had been set aside to provide a maximum of privacy to guard the modesty of the Annagarian women, they had little choice. Alina would have made her way to sand and ground and open sea wind—were it not for Ser Anton’s presence.

  Two reasons to dislike him, although she knew that the latter was unworthy of her.

  “Look, look, Alina! He starts!”

  “He is lining up, Serra Marlena,” she replied. “The mages will be brought out first, and then the judges; there is some time yet before he runs.” The older woman’s grip on her arm was astounding in both its ferocity and its familiarity.

  “Look at him—is he not the image of his father?”

  She made no reply. It was both prudent and wise to make none. As always, this silence was taken for agreement. Privately, Alina thought Valedan favored neither mother nor father, although she had seen the Tyr himself only a handful of times in her adult life, and could not in fairness draw a good comparison.

  He was taller than either, and wise enough to know when to accept a limitation; wise enough to know when to challenge that acceptance. She thought he would make, of all things, a good Tyr, and shook her head at her own folly. I show my blood, she thought ruefully. Lambertan, for all the clans to mock.

  Good, after all, counted for little. Powerful was definitive. She believed it; it was, after all, truth. Serra Marlena was rare among the Serras; she clung to half-truths as if clinging was a type of salvation. As if, indeed, salvation could be gained by such pathos.

  And yet . . . and yet . . . she could not name the emotion that she had felt the night the crowns were offered to those men who had braved the test of the sea; to the man who had won it. She had been angry at Valedan’s lack of grace, and she had delivered the rebuke that only she could deliver—but she had not expected him to rise to the occasion in the fashion that he had: With grace, and without, in the end, absolving himself publicly of his private shame.

  Mareo, she knew, would be proud.

  Mareo, the brother for whom she felt such ambivalence.

  Winning, she had told him defines us. As does losing.

  How we win, he replied, seeking the sunlight with his eyes, defines us. And how we lose.

  They had argued, of course. And in the end, he had chosen to relieve himself of the strife in his home by sending her, expendable and in fury, to the North as a hostage.

  A kindness, although no doubt he had intended no such mercy.

  She remembered that day clearly.

  As wars go, the last war between the Empire and the Dominion was a short war, but a costly one; it had divided the Callestans and the Lambertans, guaranteeing a border in chaos for the Northern Lords. The harvest—the harvest had been taken by those serafs who had miraculously survived either side of the closing armies; who had survived the fires and the burning embers carried by wind.

  She had been attended by her serafs; she claimed three, but was allowed none of them in her exile, by the will of her brother, the kai Lamberto.

  “The Northerners do not believe in slavery,” he had said; she could hear it now, as if the words had been trapped by malicious breeze to be carried over and over again when the sun was at this height, “and they will free the serafs to their Northern cities. I will not lose them in such a fashion.”

  She was insulted, of course; those serafs she had chosen and trained on her own, and she knew, she knew that they would never leave her. It was their duty, after all, their reason for existence: to serve.

  Wryness, that. She was not too proud to admit—in the silence of thoughts, beneath Northern bowers where no spy of her brother’s might witness it—that he had probably been right. She had seen it happen, here. And she could not even condemn it.

  Had the North not changed her?

  The winds were sharp today, they carried a chill in the shade that belied the summer heat, the summer humidity. As if she knew what that unlooked for coolness presaged, she looked up, her face half-veiled, her posture perfect.

  Mirialyn ACormaris stepped into the box and bowed, Northern style, to her. “He will run,” she said, “and I thought, if you wouldn’t mind, I might join you.”

  “You are not needed below?”

  “Would I be here, otherwise?”

  Not an answer. Never an answer with her, although she was counted wise and spoke truth when she chose to speak directly. Serra Alina frowned as the Serra Marlena began to speak. She raised a sharp, slender hand as if it were blade, and the older Serra subsided, although her irritation was plain to see.

  Plain, and an embarrassment. Ser Fillipo’s wives did not deign to notice her lack of grace; neither did Ser Kyro’s wife. Graceful manners required no less than such feigned ignorance. Therefore Alina’s response was almost as rude—although it was welcome, she had no doubt of it—coming as it did in front of a foreigner. An outsider. A stranger.

  She rose. “I would be pleased to join you a moment while we watch the Tyr’agar,” she said. Miri offered her a hand, and she accepted it; the dress that the Serra wore did not reward quick movements with grace. They walked to the front of the box and sat at its farthest edge, briefly exposed to sun as they gazed down upon the ground of the running field.

  There, men lined up in a single row cast long shadows. They had run several races each today; this would be the last.

  “ACormaris,” Serra Alina said quietly.

  “Serra.”

  “Four days.”

  “Yes. Four days, and there will be an end to this, one way or the other.”

  “You are prepared for the hundred run, as they call it in the city streets?”

  “The marathon? Yes; as prepared as we can be.”

  Silence was awkward. Profound. “Ah,” the ACormaris said softly. “The mage is finished.”

  “The ten men?”

  “Will run. Look. The adjudicator has taken up his position.”

  The noise that had blanketed the coliseum lifted like a curtain; there was silence, tense and anticipatory. The men knelt. Lowered their heads. Touched the earth with both hands—she did not understand the significance of either the hands or the kneeling. In the Dominion, men who hoped for victory did not abase themselves in the eyes of the Lord.

  But this was the North; how could she think otherwise, who stood beside Mirialyn ACormaris in the salt-laden air of the High City?

  The adjudicator lifted a hand; a woman came up to the podium to stand beside him. Her hair was gold and gray, the color of wealth and wisdom. She opened her lips. Spoke. The entire coliseum could hear her as clearly as the contestants.

  Bard-born.

  “Prepare.”

  The men shifted almost in unison.

  “Hold.”

  They were tense; she could see that now. To start before her given word was an offense in the eyes of the adjudicatory body, and that body held all power here to athletes whose lives depended upon their success. She played out the moment, as if inspecting them at a safe distance. Waited. The silence dragged on.

  They were holding their breaths, and they two grown women, and not young girls to be impressed by a foot race. Mirialyn ACormaris had doubtless never been that young girl, but Serra Alina had been, and if she struggled, she could remember it clearly. It was humiliating in its fashion, as all weakness was; she rarely struggled that hard.

  “Start!”

  Sound returned in a rush as fleet as the men who now covered the ground with shadow and foot.

 
; Don’t look back.

  He leaned forward, bent into the run, let his knees take his weight; he used his arms almost without thought, keeping time with the movement of his hips, his legs, the length of his stride. The sound of all breath was lost to the roar of the crowd, and he heard his name, time and again, made fuzzy by the number of voices that carried it.

  Valedan.

  The shadows fell the wrong way, though; it was later in the afternoon. He could see them across the ground, although they were distorted enough that he couldn’t—quite—attach them to the runners themselves.

  Didn’t matter.

  Nothing mattered but this: Run. Fast. Faster. Faster.

  It was closely run.

  Close, but not so close that it couldn’t be called.

  Serra Alina would have liked to think that the Northern men were bred and trained only to this purpose, there was nothing else that might excuse Eneric of Darbanne. But she knew, having seen him between events, that he was not a decoration—and this contest, in the end, this pitting of skill against skill, was a decorative contest.

  No wars were decided here. No power given or granted; no armies destroyed or created. Pride was served, be it national or personal, but that was all.

  And Eneric of Darbanne was no one’s decoration.

  Valedan kai di’leonne had to settle for second, and second was not without value. Interesting, to her, that Ser Anton’s student took third. Two Southerners on the podium, a miniature war in the making, and each standing behind the Northern Champion.

  I must not, she chided herself, make analogies out of everything. But she had been raised in the South, and in the South, all such detail had significance.

  She noted—how could she not—that Valedan kai di’Leonne was greatly pleased with the second-place finish; more pleased to her eye than he had been with either the tenth place or the first.

  Mareo, she thought, with apprehension, for she knew what his objections to Valedan kai di’Leonne would and must be, you would like him. You would honor him, if you met him, if you took the time to watch him.

  You would come to understand that he is no Northern pawn. Or you would come to understand that your concept of Southern honor is Northern to the core.

  And that, he would not do.

  But to watch the boy, to watch him run and take second and be proud of it because his first place win had been so tainted gave her her first hope.

  They did not need her brother’s support, no.

  But she knew well that if they did not have it, they would be forced to destroy the reigning clan of the Terrean of Mancorvo.

  23rd day of Lattan, 427 AA

  Terafin Manse

  They faced each other, The Terafin and her domicis. Years had passed; years had marked them in ways that they barely knew themselves until they stopped to look and to question. The sun was a pale luminescence across the sky’s edge; dawn soon.

  Morretz carried a lamp, one glassed-in and therefore protected from the caprice of breeze or wind. Not that either existed in plenty at the height of this sullen, still season, but he took precautions with fire regardless; these were old habits, and old habits, for Morretz, had acquired a strength that was akin to a force of nature.

  They sat in silence, bowed by the weight of things unsaid.

  At last, she spoke. She would speak first, or no one would, and Morretz had perfected the art of waiting. Especially at times like this, when she chose to don the worn cloak of her dead grandfather, the blood relation of whom she had been so fond. It was too hot for such a cloak.

  As if she knew what he was thinking, she said, “It still smells like him.”

  In the darkness, her voice might have been a young woman’s voice.

  He said nothing, knowing that this was not the time. And knowing well that she had paid a great deal of money to a mage of the Order to preserve the cloak in just such a fashion, to keep it as a living memory when her own memory failed as all memories do.

  After a moment, she said, softly, “Alowan.”

  “Yes.”

  “How will I die, Morretz?” So cool her voice, so calm, the meaning of the words were almost lost to the tone.

  You could not comfort this woman. You could try, but you could not do it, and he had long since given up the awkwardness of trying. He brought her the cloak when she desired it, or more often put it away when she had finished with it. She exposed so little, it was impossible to believe that she was afraid.

  “Morretz,” she said quietly, her hands settling into stillness in her lap.

  How to answer such a question? He had not asked it of himself, because he had chosen to serve her, and her death was, literally, the end of the life he lived. Perhaps the end of his life; he could not see it.

  “You are my most trusted servant,” she said, “and one of my wisest. And before you speak to me of Gabriel—and I know you are thinking of him—I will only say that I regret the weakness that allowed him to persuade me to grant Rymark ATerafin his entry here. Rymark is Gabriel’s blood son, and proof—if any had ever been needed—that blood does not run true.

  “Yet he is the boy’s father, with all that that implies, and he was close to the mother, who is dead. He sees . . . less clearly at the moment than I would like.”

  “And that leaves me?”

  “That leaves you, Morretz.”

  “You are wrong,” he told her firmly. “You should ask this of Jewel.”

  Her silence was long, and broken by a rueful laugh. “I should, yes. But I won’t. To ask you is to ask a man of some cunning and some intellect to guess at what I guess at, to reach a logical conclusion in some fashion that I understand.

  “But to speak to Jewel is to have an inexplicable, unreachable answer writ in stone—if she answers at all. I want an answer that I can reach, Morretz. An answer that intellect, confidence, or knowledge will take me to. I am not looking forward to death,” The Terafin added quietly, “But I have seen my own death in at least three places in the last month—and in nothing so clearly as the attempt upon Alowan’s life.”

  He would have argued with her. He wanted to. But he saw as she saw. He bowed his head in the dawn’s colored light, exposing streaks of gray.

  “Will you not change your mind,” he said at last. “Will you not prevent Jewel from going South?”

  She waited until he raised his face to meet hers. “I would,” she said, “but I believe in the end that to call her back is to destroy the House; to let her go is to destroy only a single ruler.”

  “But the House—”

  “The Terafin spirit,” she said softly, softly, “gave her permission to travel South; indeed, he gave her the responsibility of it.”

  He knew her. He knew her, and he hated this in her: That she was the House Ruler, and that everything—everything, gods curse her—was done for the good of the House. He saw as she saw.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  23rd day of Lattan, 427 AA

  Avantari, Coliseum

  This was the only test at which Eneric of Darbanne was certain to fail. And not to fail in a minor way, not to take second or third or fourth, but to fail, period. He would not make tenth unless some catastrophe occurred; he would be lucky, in the estimation of Commander Sivari, to break twentieth.

  But he came, and he prepared, the same as any of the other contestants. Valedan admired that. He rode a horse that was, on sight, inferior to at least fifty of the horses that Valedan had himself glimpsed or inspected; it was too old a horse for such a race as this, and it was, simply, too short in stride, although it seemed rock stable, a dependable mount in a crisis. It was a gray, bleached by time of color.

  Eneric of Darbanne smiled as Valedan’s pace slowed.

  “She’s a good horse,” he said.

 
Mare. “You don’t—you don’t take a mare—”

  Eneric laughed. This man, this man who was favored to win the Challenge, knew he was going to lose this race. And he didn’t seem to care.

  “Valedan,” Sivari said, bowing brusquely in acknowledgment of the Northerner. “Your horse—”

  But Valedan stopped in front of Eneric. “Why?” he said.

  The Northerner could have ignored the question, or he could have misunderstood it; it was, after all, a single word. But he shrugged instead. “I bought a new sword for the competition,” he began, and then laughed when he saw the Southern shock spread across the younger man’s face. “And a new shield. I had new armor made. New clothing. Even this,” he added, hands momentarily tugging at a leather pouch that hung from a broad belt, “I had made new.”

  “But—”

  “But none of them are alive, kai Leonne. None of them have seen me through battle and skirmish against bandit and encroaching noble the way she has.” He scratched her broad head with a proud affection. “She’s not what she used to be when she was a filly. But I’ve had her eight years, and she’s never faltered and never failed me.

  “I won’t win with her,” he said, acknowledging the truth that Valedan had not—and would not—speak. “But winning without her just wouldn’t be the same. But truth—this is the truth—be told, I’d take another horse to race with if I thought I’d come close to the front, but there are too many damned Southerners here for that, and I won’t slight her for less than victory.” He paused. “Your own horse is a fine beast. True Southern blood there; I’d be surprised if she wasn’t Mancorvan.”

  “I’d be surprised if she was,” Sivari replied, before Valedan could. “You know how the Mancorvans feel about the North.”

  “True enough. But he’s a fine horse, and he’ll give the others their only real challenge.” He leaned forward, held out a hand. “Good luck, kai Leonne. You’re our Southerner. Win.”

  Valedan nodded almost absently, staring at the dark eyes in the white head. And then he followed Sivari.

  When he said, “I don’t understand,” for the fifth time, the Commander laughed. Here, under the open sky, over a bed of flat grass that had been sheered into something so fine it felt like cloth, he said, “Eneric is a Northerner. First, they value the loyalty of living things. Second, and if you’re a cynic, more important, horses are rarer, and more expensive in the Northern clime. To buy a beast like yours would beggar all but the high nobility, and Eneric, for all his worth, doesn’t approach theirs in wealth. He might, in time, should he win here.” He shrugged. “They have a rough honor and a rougher sense of justice—but you’ve managed to impress him, or he’d have spit just as soon as answer your question.