He turned back to the track, and he could see that Andaro di’Corsarro held his head particularly high as he sought—and found—someone in the stands closest the ground itself, and raised his hand in proud salute. First, then. But Valedan, somehow, was second.
His hand curled protectively around the ring that Evayne had given him, but his thoughts were for that young man. Whose hand, he thought, and how? And, unbidden, What price will he be forced to pay for anything he’s granted here?
Ser Anton’s students were louder, by themselves, than the whole of the Northern contingent. They had entered the coliseum for the first of the two events by which real men were known, and they had showed their strength: Andaro di’Corsarro, born to and of the Dominion of Annagar, carried the crown on proud brow. He had placed third in the foot race, but he had placed behind the northern pawn that they had come this far to defeat. Had, in fact, placed behind him in every event but this one.
There was not enough wine in the city for the men who followed Ser Anton di’Guivera. Luckily, they were not given much chance to prove it. Ser Anton was still their master here, and he looked not to the past day’s glory, but to the next day’s event.
The hundred run was so named because the path the runners took led them through every holding in the city, high and low, rich and poor. They would run through a pass made of people to either side, people held back by the flimsiest of barriers and their ancient belief in the authority of the city’s many guards.
Hours. Hours away.
He rose from his silence like a man shedding water after a long dive. Shook himself and made his way out to the edge of night. There, Andaro di’Corsarro, the much celebrated hero of the hour, sat beside Carlo di’Jevre. They were quiet, and between them there was only one glass, and that in Carlo’s hand. Andaro would not risk the run to Northern wine and the excess of celebration.
He had been much like Andaro in his youth, but Andaro in his wisdom attached himself to no helpless woman, no helpless babe.
They looked up as his shadow passed them.
“Ser Anton,” Andaro said quietly.
“You did well,” the swordmaster said.
He was too old to be pleased by praise, or rather, too old to show it. He nodded, kept his head bowed that extra half-second that spoke of respect.
They were silent beneath the face of a moon unfettered by cloud.
“Tomorrow?” Carlo said at last.
“The hundred run, yes.”
It was not the question he’d asked; not the question that hovered beneath the single word. The silence stretched awkwardly between the swordmaster and his students. It was the master who was forced to retreat from them, the brightest of his students, the two of whom he had been most proud.
The moon was high and bright, almost impossible to ignore.
And so he found himself by the fountain, staring into the stone cloth that covered the eyes of the blindfolded boy. The water here was heavy; it was abundant. The sea did not taint it with salt; the winds did not cover it with sand or dirt.
He would not have said he was waiting, had any chosen to ask, but he did wait.
And in time, the waiting was rewarded.
The boy, Valedan kai Leonne, came out of the shadows like a shadow, into the glow of mage-stones and moon. He started as their eyes met, but the surprise rippled over his features and was gone.
They had spoken in the clipped fashion of Southern men in anger; some of that remained in the boy’s bow. The bow surprised him, and he returned it with a nod, much as he might have returned the regard of a—student.
“You ride well,” he said grudgingly. “But you chose your mount poorly.”
“Or undermastered him,” Valedan replied. “As a horse, he is fine, but high-strung.”
“He is Mancorvan?”
The boy shook his head. “Callestan.”
“That, I cannot believe. He was probably Mancorvan originally.”
“He bears no brand.”
“The Mancorvans do not brand their horses. They count on the quality of the beast itself to tell the tale of its breeder.”
The boy stood quietly, awkwardly, in the moonlight. Watching made Ser Anton weary. Where had it gone, the fire of his youth, his younger self? Where did the determination that had carried him through not one, but two, of these Challenges now reside?
To kill a Tyr had been remarkably easy.
To kill this, the least of a Tyr’s seraf-born sons? In the moonlight he lowered his eyes.
The boy cut him. He said: “You must have loved your wife a great deal.”
It was not what he expected to hear. Not what he desired. He did not speak; the shock began to give way to something akin to anger. But when he raised his face, he saw no hint of cruelty, no hint of mockery, in the boy’s face; there was nothing there at all.
“You were raised in the North,” he said at last, but softly.
“Yes,” he said. “And born in the South, in the harem of a great man, to a woman he grew quickly to disdain. If there was love between my father and his wives, he never showed it in a way that we could clearly understand.”
“You were a boy,” Ser Anton said gruffly.
“And a boy knows nothing of love, of course.”
Silence.
“Did any of his wives survive?”
“No. But you must know this.”
Valedan bowed his head a moment. “Yes,” was all the reply he offered.
The silence was thick. Heavy.
The boy threw it off first. “Tell me about your wife.”
“Yours is the line that killed her,” was the swordmaster’s reply.
“And your son?”
“The same.”
His own students might have been put off; they might have read the warning in the cutting edge of the words. Not so this one, who owed him nothing, certainly not respect or obedience. “Did she follow the Lady?”
“No.” He rose. “She followed me. And I led her, in pride, to the Tor Leonne, for my first audience with the Tyr’agar.” He could not call her back; could not unmake the choice that he had made. He could only do this: strike out. Kill. Avenge.
But before he had cleared a courtyard whose meaning he attributed to the malice of the Lady, the boy spoke again. “Ser Anton.”
“Yes?” He did not turn. Something in the boy’s tone told him he would like the question no more than any of the other questions he had asked this eve.
“The hundred run tomorrow.”
“Yes?”
“Will there be more assassins?”
Wind take the boy. None of his own students had dared to ask the question so boldly. “I don’t know,” he said, offering the boy ignorance. It was truth, after all; he could not be certain.
“Thank you.”
Lord scorch him. He turned, thinking to catch the boy’s back. Caught his eyes instead, and held them. “Take care,” he said quietly. He himself was not certain whether or not he meant the words in warning or threat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“I’m sorry, Devon,” Jewel said for about the twentieth time. “But you can’t just point me in the right direction and expect me to start seeing for you. Doesn’t work that way.” As you should damned well know. And he did know, that was the Hells of it; he knew, but he obviously felt he didn’t have much choice.
There were a hundred holdings in this city, some older than others to listen to the residents bicker, and she’d come nowhere close to traversing all of them. But Devon ATerafin had somehow managed to get her a horse—she wasn’t comfortable on horseback, probably never would be, and the damned creature knew it—and permission to trace as much of the route as the runners would be following in advance of their actual run. Where permission was sort of like
an order, but less easy to refuse.
Not that she would have tried. Because she knew what Devon didn’t: that Kiriel couldn’t sense demons anymore, the way she had with the first few.
Kiriel was as certain as she could be—which wasn’t very—that they’d destroyed all of the ones she’d pointed out to Jewel what seemed years, but was in fact weeks, ago, but they both knew that the creature that had come close to killing both Jewel and Angel hadn’t been detected at all—whether or not because he hadn’t been there Jewel couldn’t say, and Kiriel wouldn’t.
Beyond the slim barricades, people gathered. They stood beneath awnings and wide-brimmed hats, huddling, when neither were available, beneath the shade of trees, as if sunfall were much like rain. At this time of year, it was worse.
She shook her head. Smiled jaggedly. “It’s the twenty-fifth,” she said. She’d traced the route on horseback, seeing the same crowds as the hours dwindled and the sun rose; there were more people visible than cobbled stones. Challenge season.
Devon nodded quietly.
She shrugged, almost embarrassed. “It’s different for you,” she said at last, lamely. “You get to go home if you want to.” Not, if she were honest, that there was much to go home to: lack of food, shelter, and safety; a lot of hiding from magisterians and trying desperately to become good enough at theft that you could survive another week or two; the one friend she’d had outside of her den was long dead, and her den whittled down to bloody size before they’d managed to make their escape. But desperation had its own rules, its own stark simplicity. Nothing at all like life in Terafin.
Her hands stopped on the reins; the horse stood a moment beneath the sun, as if she had finished her journey through the city, rather than just interrupting it. She sat up straight, seeing the past in the thin arms and thin faces of the watchful spectators; seeing herself at their backs, her shaking hands attempting to pull money from their pockets, food from their baskets, anything at all that might help her den survive another day.
Dreaming, she remembered, of a day when they’d have enough, and she’d never have to be less than her father would have approved of again.
“Jewel?”
“Nothing here,” she said softly. “Nothing.”
“Member APhaniel,” Sigurne Mellifas said, in the tone of voice she usually reserved for pronouncing sentence on rogue mages, “I caution you against use of magic—in fact, use of anything at this early time.”
“It’s been six days, Sigurne,” the member so lectured replied.
“And must you do that?”
“We are in the open air.” But in deference to the mildest member of the Order of Knowledge, Meralonne APhaniel ceased to stuff the bowl with fresh leaf and tucked his pipe—with obvious regret—back into his satchel. “Sigurne,” he said gently, “it’s been six days. Most mages are taken with fevers for a good deal less time before either recovering or succumbing. Age and infirmity don’t really change that.” He paused for effect. “Dantallon himself pronounced me fit for . . . exercise.”
“At the knifepoint of the Astari,” she replied pertly, “and against his better judgment. You know he thought you’d be abed until at least the end of the Challenge.”
He grimaced. “I feel much better,” he began.
“And I suppose—”
His gaze flickered a moment over the crowd; his expression lost that long-suffering frown that spoke of rare friendship.
And hers, that vaguely maternal air.
He crossed the empty street to the barricade itself; Sigurne stood back, a lone old woman beneath a wide-brimmed hat—a practical hat that somehow seemed perfect for her, as most practical things did—arms crossed, eyes open. He had never been in a fight that involved Sigurne before, but he did not feel uncomfortable with that member of the magi at his back; her frailty was physical, if it existed at all; it was hard to tell with Sigurne.
He was met at the barricade by guards. They were, almost to a man, Southerners. Their gathered presence invoked the magisterial guards that had been assigned this section of road, and their presence called the attention to the youthful core of inexperienced mages sent by the Mysterium. They, he’d been instructed, were to be his power; his recovery, such as it was, was suspect, and fragile.
Luckily, such a gathering of men wielding authority—or at least swords and magic—had the end effect of pushing anyone of relative sanity as far to either side of the roadside as they could go. Unluckily, in a gathering for an event of this nature, there wasn’t all that far they could go without actually losing their long-defended places streetside, and only the actual use of said swords or magic would cause them to abandon their positions entirely.
“Is there a problem?” a voice from behind the Southern guard rang out.
“Preferably not,” the magi replied softly.
The voice switched over to Torra, and one of the guards turned to face it. The exchange was quick and short, and obviously held on one side by a man who expected to be understood. He was, of course.
“Magi? You idiot! Get out of the way!”
Huffing as if from great exertion, a rather portly merchant appeared between the ranks of his guards, who moved to either side of his girth, but did not choose to forsake their ground—or their point.
They had become inconsequential the minute the merchant appeared. He bowed theatrically. “Ser Pedro di’Jardanno.” The bow was Northern in style; the affectation existed beyond national boundaries.
Meralonne offered a clipped bow in return; a thing of relatively little substance. As if lack of show could balance overt showmanship.
But power recognized power; that was a rule older than anything but time. Their eyes locked a moment before the member of the Order graciously requested permission to view the merchant’s supplies.
“You must understand,” Ser Pedro said, with an apology that fair gleamed, although it was made up of the usual parts: insincere expression and over-pronounced word and gesture, “that I did not come here to sell. I came to witness the hundred run, one of the few events that a common merchant has easy—and inexpensive—access to.” He did not wring his hands, for which Meralonne was grateful.
The magi nodded quietly. “Of course,” he said, with about as much force of meaning as the merchant’s words contained. He followed the merchant, and the Southerners closed at his back.
The merchant’s stall was impressive, given the lack of space the marathon usually afforded anyone, guards or no. It was not quite a wagon—too small for that—but not for want of trying, and it had enough fabric strewn this way and that a careless man might have mistaken Ser Pedro for a cloth merchant. Velvets, silks, heavy cottons, and fine spun wools, were artfully arranged within the stall’s protected interior; there were cushions here. Food. Two decanters, one filled with water in the Southern fashion, and one with wine. He wondered if the merchant would claim that the waters came from the Tor Leonne itself. He did not ask; there was a tension in the air that forbade it.
But although he examined the stall itself with care to detail, and with the magic that was his birthright, he found nothing out of place, nothing remiss.
“Your pardon,” he said softly to the merchant.
“Of course,” the merchant acknowledged, bowing in return.
He left the stall, wondering what had called him to it, through the crowds and the rows upon rows of men. Wondering what he had responded to, what inside of him, beneath open sky, had felt that momentary twinge of danger.
One step. Two steps.
The third step did not fall; he turned, his hand flying back, palm open, his lips, wordless, calling the only defense he had—or needed—as the answer came.
The stall exploded; fragments of wood, burning cloth, ruined food followed. People screamed, but it was not the explosion that invoked those cries; it was what follo
wed. And they fled, where they had not fled for guards or swords or magic.
Writhing a moment in sunlight, smoke from the fire grew dense and dark, a black maelstrom. He called—he almost called—his shield; felt the emptiness of its loss, a reminder of a recent battle. And then the darkness solidified, took shape and form—a shape and form that he had never seen before, but knew intimately regardless.
“Illaraphaniel!” the creature roared.
“Allaros,” he replied. His sword shivered and crackled like blue ice on fire. His eyes scanned the crowd, but the merchant had dissolved with it, carried by its fear, sheltered from vision. Decanters, he thought. We should have known.
In the distance, he heard, of all things, horns. For a moment he stiffened in exultation, and then he remembered: the run. The hundred run.
The Kialli was caught by the same fancy, and the same realization, as if they were part of the same storm. “We will play the game of mortals and the game of gods,” the creature said, folding great wings behind his obsidian shoulder blades, “but at our leisure. Come. This has been too long denied us.”
And from the center of his palm, red fire flared and took form, even as he himself had done. Sword. It was followed by shield. Full shield, fully formed. The mage did not waste time or breath cursing, although the desire to do so proved that his time in this city had taken its toll.
“You made the wrong choice, Allaros,” Meralonne said, measuring the strength of his enemy—and the time it would take for the last of the people closest them to flee. Yes, he had been in this city a long time, if he could spare thought to them, but it did not concern him; once they joined combat in earnest, he would be lost to it.
“Speak to me of choice,” the creature replied, its visage twisting into runnels of expression that seemed almost—but not quite—natural. “When this is done.”
Meralonne opened his mouth to speak, and fire came in the wake of the Kialli words. The time for hesitation was destroyed in the blast.
Meralonne APhaniel moved.
Valedan leaped forward, into his knees; he could not—not quite—force himself to give up the burst of speed that the competitors chose to put on at the run’s beginning. He knew better than to be left at the back of the pack, but he also knew better than to attempt to pull out in the lead—not from the beginning. No one here knew his full strength, and their ignorance was his advantage.
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