“They like an underdog in the North,” he added.
“But—”
“Winning is almost everything, Valedan—but you yourself now know it isn’t everything. If it were, you would never have chosen to share that podium. You’ve declared yourself, like it or not. It isn’t a declaration that Eneric of Darbanne—that any of these contestants—could have made, but having seen it, they’re impressed. Now come. We’re testing the patience of the adjudicators as it is.”
Valedan nodded.
And stopped again, in front of a waiting Southerner. Andaro di’Corsarro. They bowed to each other stiffly, and if Valedan rose first, the bow was not shallow. Andaro was, with the withdrawal of Carlo, the best horseman in the palace. No exceptions made.
This man, he thought idly, is here to kill me. But it didn’t matter—not at this moment. The track mattered, and the men who tended it were nearly done. The horses mattered. The race itself.
He said softly, “I would wish you luck, but you require none.”
Andaro shrugged, and they both turned to their tasks. But as he walked away, he heard a soft voice say, “Carlo is watching us both.”
The sun was not to the liking of the horses; not in the early morning, and not in the afternoon. But they were run, and run the way the men had been the day before: without pause, if they won or came close to winning. Of the races, there were ten in total, and the track at the end of the day was smooth by the artifice of those whose responsibility it was to tend those things.
Eneric did not progress to the finals; did not, in fact, place at all in his heat. He seemed content, his horse, upset. They looked an odd pair, this Northern barbarian whom everyone secretly bet on to win the Challenge, and his frost-haired, slightly-too-short-in-the-leg mount, but they did, in Valedan’s opinion, suit each other in a way that made no sense to him.
His horse, standing over seventeen hands tall and covered head to foot in a gray-blue coat that was broken only at boot and forehead, was named Lightning—probably one of a hundred horses so named in the Empire—fared better, far better than that; indeed it was hard not to let the horse lead the race, let the horse make the decision. The animal did not desire to be left behind; he knew what he was doing. Racing, and at that, to win.
Valedan had thought him built for war, not for running; he seemed heavy when examined beneath a bridle. But in motion his weight was the muscle that propelled him, and he knew it, too.
He wasn’t as certain that he would want this animal beneath him in a pitched battle, but in a race, Mirialyn ACormaris’ choice proved, as if there were ever any doubt, wise.
Valedan knew that Aidan was in his glory. It was almost as if, building up to the final event, everything had weight and meaning. This horse was no normal horse in the young witness’ eyes; it was a noble horse, a beast of great power and strength, a suitable mount for a hero. He could almost hear the words that Aidan never embarrassed either of them by actually saying.
Still, awe had its uses; Aidan was afraid of the horse, and stood well enough back from it, which was probably wise; Lightning had no use for the timid, and made it plain by snapping at air with a speed that matched his name, or worse, by bringing his head round like a giant fist. It was between the races—leading up to and afterward—that Valedan’s real work was cut out, for the adjudicators allowed no fighting between the stallions, and if the rider could not control the horse, the horse was banned. As simple as that.
He counted the riders who were banned on two hands.
The kai Leonne watched his Southern enemies, the width of the field dividing their camp, and he saw that Andaro di’Corsarro and another man, a younger one, had horses as fine as his own—neither of whom seemed to need the force of control that Lightning did. He envied them their easy handling, their complete ease.
It made him feel truly foreign. Truly Northern.
“Valedan,” Commander Sivari said softly. “The line-up begins. This is where you will make your mark against Eneric; his only true weakness is this test. He will run in the marathon, and he will probably win it; you will have a chance to best him at archery, although that contest is by no means foregone.
“Ride well.”
“Ser Anton.”
“Ser Pedro.”
“You’ve been inordinately silent lately.”
“I speak when I have something to say.”
“And you have nothing to say? A change, I fear, and not for the better. I see that your students have fared well at this particular test.”
The urge to kill the man and have done had not been as strong as this for a number of days, a sure sign that he had been in the so-called merchant’s presence for far too long. “They fare well at this test, yes. They will fare well at the test of the sword, and they did well, given the field, at the foot race. They will fare less well at the marathon, and will probably fail to place with the bow.
“Is there any other information that you require?”
Ser Pedro shrugged easily. “You have not yet chosen to call the test of the sword—the only test that really matters, as we both know.”
“No,” Ser Anton said curtly. “I have not.”
“The Northerner, then?”
“You may call—and bet—as you’d like.” He shrugged, the movement too stiff to be called graceful. Anger did that, when it was ill-contained, and it irked Ser Anton to be so obvious. “I hear rumors,” he said, changing tack.
“Rumors?”
“Apparently there was an attempted—and failed—assassination.”
Ser Pedro’s easy silence became sharp at once, edged and frosty.
Have care, Ser Anton thought, but whether as warning to the merchant or himself, he was not certain.
“That,” the swordmaster added, “is commonly known; that is not the interesting rumor. What is interesting is this: the assassin, apparently, was killed in the commission of the crime.”
He turned then, giving the field his attention.
Ser Pedro offered his back a complete silence. One turned one’s back on a man of his kind very, very seldom—and usually only like this: as a blow, to make a point. What Pedro might have replied—and the merchant was so rarely at a loss for words there was, doubtless, a reply coming—was lost: the horns were sounded across the field. There were no gates here, although in the North, gates were sometimes used to contain horses. Nothing separated the horses from the running field but an indelible, wide white line that every eye, be they on the ground or in the farthest remove of the coliseum, could see clearly.
There was a penalty for crossing that line early, and several riders had paid it during the runs leading up to this one. It was notable, and expected, that none of the better riders would fault in such a fashion.
None did.
The horses moved.
Just as they had when he sat among them, so many years ago.
“This has been a long time coming,” she said, and Kallandras stiffened at the familiar sound of her voice.
She was old, this time. Old, wise now, and gentler for it—but no less resolute. She was certain of her power. And when he saw her, at this age, when he saw her at all, she was like the gathering storm; a whisper could make the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.
“What do you think of the boy, Kallan?” She gazed out into the field where the horses were being prevented—some poorly, and Valedan’s among that number, but prevented nonetheless—from jockeying for position in a way that would disqualify their riders.
“I think,” he said, his voice subdued and for her ears alone, “that he has been a surprise to all of us.” His eyes narrowed; the words that he had spoken were, he realized not true. But speaking them to her brought out the flaws, the cracks between their whole facade. “Every one of us but you.”
She smiled. There
was no blood on her hands, this moment; no blood on her face, no repairing rents in the fabric of a cloak that her father had given her when she had come of age in a world that he did not know.
“I would not have suspected,” he said quietly. “I thought it perhaps the intervention of Kalliaris.” And perhaps it was.
“I had no hand in him,” she said softly. “Not even to influence the ACormaris when she chose to begin his idle training so many years ago. She pitied him, I think, and she has often been fond of those who carry their quiet with them.”
“You speak as a woman who knows her.”
“I know her better now than I did in my youth, yes.”
“Whose hand, Evayne?” he asked softly. Almost without conscious thought—to an observer who did not know him—his gaze flickered to the Ospreys, and to the demon-child who stood on duty among them. “Whose hand had part in the boy, then? We’ve enough shadow and shade for this battle, I think.”
“Yes,” she said as softly. “He is not god-born; you would see it. Had he been, he would have been drowned at birth, in the waters of the Tor Leonne, a fitting tribute to the Lord of the Sun.”
“Say, rather, to the ignorance of the Southerners.” But he turned to face her; to catch the violet of her eyes with the blue of his own, pale now; they both had steel in them that the light exposed, no matter how they might try to hide it. Kallandras was better at hiding, of course, when he so chose. “Whose hand, Evayne?”
“Let me ask you, instead, a different question, Kallandras of Senniel.”
“I am almost done with your questions,” he said, the mildness of his tone belying the edge the words themselves contained. He felt it; the weariness. He did not hate her, however, for the death of one of his oldest brothers. Did not, in fact, blame her, as he would have in the anger and heat of youth. But he wanted the luxury of mourning, and during the Festival, he would have no privacy for it, beyond what he had already taken.
“Ask a question yourself, then. Whose hand shaped me?” And for an instant, she spoke with weight, with depth, with a feeling that she displayed so rarely in her years of power, as if feeling itself was the thing that she had finally managed to extricate herself from.
“How?”
“For myself, I am not yet permitted to answer you—and I feel that I will never be permitted an answer to that question, not while you live to hear it.” She spoke without bitterness, but her lips were thinner. “And for Valedan, I do not know.”
“Then how do you—”
She only shook her head, and he subsided. “I have a request, Kallandras; a request.” She opened her hand, and in it, gleaming beneath baked, white clay mud, a single ring. It was not a fine ring, and not a Northern one; it was made of jade and gold, an intertwined coupling of bands.
Poorer men gave such a gift to their wives in the Dominion; poor, but free, men.
“What is this?” he asked.
“It is what I have been sent to give, and I have been sent to give, obviously, to you—although you would not have been my first guess.” She paused. “Let me tell you a story.” She was seldom so expansive; he was wary at once. “And let me answer a question in the doing.
“There was a young woman who was adored by the husband who had chosen her. She had been raised free, although poor, and she was of some will; she had neither the perfect grace nor the perfect manners of women of high birth, although she had been born no seraf. She disdained the wearing of shoes, and her nails were often split or dirty.”
He raised a brow, but he did not interrupt her.
“She had a father who adored her, foolishly and openly, and she found a man not unlike him, but much younger, whose open adoration made her father’s seem placid and distant by comparison. In and of herself, she might have become many things, but the love of these two men protected her in a land where so few are protected.” She turned to the South a moment, and then resumed her telling, her face to the shadows cast by the combination of sun and hood.
“She was a vain girl, as girls are at the dawn of adulthood, and she desired him to prove that he loved her, much to the disgust of everyone except her father. The young man was a poor man, and he killed bandits for her, and defended her father’s clan against the Voyani who raided in that season, but she was interested in nothing that had been looted or taken as just payment for crimes; she wanted something that came from him.
“He had no money. He was not the head of his clan, and he was an honest man; the things that were looted were turned over to the kai of his clan.
“But he desired her happiness, and he was young enough to want to prove to her that he did love her.”
The horses were in a line; the judges were waiting beyond the edge of Evayne’s tale. His eyes saw that, but his ears heard only the soft cadence of her voice, the truth in it.
“So he went to a jeweler, and finally found one who would consent to make him a ring. He had wanted a necklace, of course, one fine enough that she might publicly wear as a token of his great affection—but short of killing the jeweler and absconding with his pieces, which would have touched off a long and bitter feud, that was not an option.
“So he had a ring made, of jade and gold, twined just so. And when it was ready, he took it to her, and offered it. At first, she was disdainful of it, as she had been of much else, but he said, “I am what I am, Mari, and this—this is a symbol of our lives, for I am the jade and you, you are the gold that gives my life value—see, here, the bands cannot be separated.
“And she was touched by that, and the sentiment won what the ring itself would not and did not. Approval. Trust. Faith. She had set him a young woman’s cruel test, and he had passed it.”
Horns blew across the field, and the coliseum crashed and thundered with names, as they were called in louder and louder voices. But he was bard-born, and he could hear her as she continued to speak.
“And so she was happy.
“But one day, while she was working with the clays—for this is what she did to help her family—the ring itself was lost, and only after she had finished tossing the last of three fine jugs and had set them to bake did she realize that it had left her finger; that it was probably buried in wall or base of one such creation, and baked there.
“She could not afford to lose the time and the labor, but she felt as if she had given her heart away, and when he returned, she was inconsolable. But he had returned with fine news, fine news indeed: he, and his wife, had attracted the notice of the sword-master of the realm, and they were to travel—at the expense of the clan Leonne, and in a style fitting the clan’s expense—to the Tor.
“She was shocked, and then overjoyed; she told him what had become of her ring, for there was now no reason why she might not destroy her work to retrieve it. But he caught her hands—ringless now—and he told her that, if she was willing, he might take these three jugs with them, for one—one alone—held their hearts, and in a secret place that no malicious wind, nor sun, nor moon might disturb; that they were the product of her hands and her labor, the last work of its type that she might do unless she otherwise desired; the last tie with the old life that had brought them together. And these vessels were treasured in his house above all else, and filled with the waters of the Tor, when the Tyr’agar chose to show his generosity.
“And of course, she was given finer jewels, as befit her rank.”
He looked across the field; the horses had lengthened from a line that ran the width of the track to one that ran its length. And at their lead, the Southerner, and at his hooves, and closing, Valedan. Clods of dirt and stone flew at their feet; they were bent into their horses, into the winds that swept past them.
He spoke, softly. “This is that ring.”
“Yes.”
“And you have yourself discovered it and removed it from one of those vessels.”
“Yes.”
“No wonder,” he said softly, “you were required now, at the height of your power.”
“Yes.”
“But this story—if it were commonly known—”
“It was known only to the man and his wife; it is now known by four, and not two, for I was told, and I have told you.”
“And who told you, Evayne a’Nolan? The man? I doubt it. And the wife is dead.”
“Yes. The wife is dead. But the gods guard and shepherd the dead,” she said softly, “and the gods speak. They speak in a language that occasionally we are given leave to understand. From Mandaros, at the behest of this woman, this story came to the hand that has fashioned so much that is so bitter about my life. And from Him, to you.
“Take this ring, and tell him. Tell him that she loves him, that she waits for him, and that she does—as he suspects—like the boy. Tell him that she says she’s still not very patient, and she won’t wait for more than a lifetime, so she respectfully requests that he not do so much that he has to live through another one in atonement.”
He turned then, to see her face, and before she pulled the hood low, he could see the faintest glimmering in her eyes. He felt it in his own. They, neither of whom were moved at death or causing it, were moved at this—this act of sentiment.
Of love.
He missed the race’s finish, although he heard it announced in a roar that shook earth, it was so loud. Anger there, and jubilance.
The Uncrowned King Page 68
