The Uncrowned King

by Michelle West

  “—ill humor. I know.” The younger healer grimaced, sharing some of that expression with Aidan.

  “I’m not blind,” Healer Levec said gruffly. He turned on heel and stalked off, in the direction that Aidan had pointed.

  “He’s not as . . . bad as he seems,” Daine said, wincing slightly. “And he’s had a rough quarter.”

  “Why’d you come with him?”

  “Because I wanted to see him actually heal,” the young man declared. “He’d kill me if I told you this, but he’s got a soft heart buried under that ugly exterior. I—he taught me. He saved my life at least once. He gave me a chance to make something more—much more—out of it. But he’s always seemed uncomfortable as a healer, and when I heard he was going to do this—this healing, I asked permission to come.”

  “I’m surprised he said yes.”

  Daine’s smile was pained. “He said no. But in harsher words, and more loudly.” He looked up then, at the broad, retreating back. “I’d like to go to him.” And he did.

  Made Aidan glad he wasn’t healer-born. It was probably the first time in his life, since his mother’s death and his father’s accident, that he’d any cause to be glad of it. He juggled his embarrassment at his home and his possibly drunk father and his fear of the Healer Levec; embarrassment dropped like a heavy stone.

  He moved.

  First surprise: The stairs were clean and cleared.

  The hall was also clean; no empty baskets, no empty jugs, no garbage to be carted down to the streets. Aidan hesitated a moment as he reached the closed door.

  This time, Valedan said nothing. Levec said nothing. They waited while he put his hand on the door’s tarnished handle, drew a breath as deep as his still-tender lungs would hold, and pulled.

  The room was clean. The chairs—both of them—were tucked neatly beneath a table that held two bowls, two spoons, two forks, and two mugs on either side of a basket full of fruit that was, to Aidan’s jaundiced eye, no more than two days old. The windows were clean; the curtains—curtains?—pulled back.

  He detected Widow Harris’ firm hand in every corner of his home; he hardly recognized it. But it lacked one thing: his Da.

  Valedan and Levec came in, and the younger healer—the self-professed unwanted company—followed; two of the Tyran and two of the Ospreys likewise forced themselves into the vanishing space near the door. The rest of the honor guard were forced to wait on the stairs; there simply wasn’t room for them to move, let alone be effective should the need arise.

  “Ummm, wait here,” he said. Wasn’t like there was all that far to go, after all; there was only one other room, and the door was closed. Aidan walked up to it and hesitated for a long time. Then he knocked.

  “Da?” he called through the closed door. “Da, are you in there? I’ve brought a couple of friends I’d—I’d like you to meet 'em.”

  He wanted to say more, but he couldn’t; his mouth had become completely dry between the first word and the last. What if—what if his father weren’t here?

  But Kalliaris was listening, and, frown or smile—he’d find out which soon—the door to the sleeping room swung open, creaking a bit on its hinges.

  His father was dressed to visit the Mother’s own temple. Not as finely as Valedan, but almost as finely as the Healer Levec—which probably said more about the healer than it did about his father—and his breath was mercifully free of the heavy, sour scent of too much ale.

  Aidan stood there, his mouth half open, staring up at his father’s face.

  “I—I had word you’d be coming,” his father said, both gruffly and lamely. “I’d’ve come to the Palace but I—but I had work.”

  He was lying. They both knew it. But they both knew he hadn’t come because he didn’t want to be embarrassment; a half-whole father to a hero son.

  “She sent a letter, you know. Widow Harris—she recognized the seal.”

  “She?”

  “The Princess. I kept it. She says you saved a King’s life.”

  Aidan shrugged, uncomfortable with the truth now that it was actually in his home. “If it hadn’t been me, it’d be someone.” Before his father could continue, he added, “Da, I’d like you to meet someone.” And he turned to see Healer Levec, arms folded across his chest, sitting on the table top. He wished—he really wished—that it had been the other healer who’d agreed to his request. But that other healer was quiet as a mouse beside a large, angry cat.

  His father’s eyes narrowed and then, seeing the symbol around the man’s neck, widened. Aidan had done the same—for different reasons, though. It was hard to think of Levec as a healer.

  “This is Healer Levec.”

  His father limped forward, struggling with crutch that he rarely, if ever, used in the confines of his own home. “Stev Brookson. Pleased to meet you,” he added, sounding anything but. Still, he held out a hand, and Levec gripped it easily.

  “You probably won’t be after we’re finished,” Levec replied.

  His father’s head whipped around.

  Aidan didn’t say anything; Valedan, waiting in silence, did. “I owe your son a great debt. I offered him money, of course, because money is the way most debts are paid, in either Empire or Dominion.”

  “You—you’re that Southern King!”

  Valedan’s easy smile was years older than this face. “Aidan didn’t want money. He figured you could make that on your own. But he did ask for the services of a healer.”

  Aidan’s father frowned, and then his entire face froze. Aidan knew exactly what that meant, but this time he didn’t cringe. The healer’s grip on his father’s hand whitened as he attempted to pull away. “Aidan—”

  “Da, he says—he says it’ll hurt ’cause it’s old. The break, I mean. But he says that, swear to Mandaros himself, he can fix your leg.”

  “You asked for that? Without asking me?”

  “Da, I—”

  “You just went out on your own, just asked for charity for me?”

  “It’s not charity. I earned it!”

  His father was that shade of red-purple that was ugly for so many different reasons. Aidan stopped a minute, caught between a cringe and the silence that he so often hid behind when his father was angry. Stopped a minute longer, angry himself, angry in front of the healer and the Ospreys and the Tyran and Valedan.

  It had been easier to stop the demon. Easier to make that damned decision than this one. Easier to act. And that was just stupid.

  “That’s what I want, and I’m the bloody hero,” Aidan replied fiercely, aware that all eyes were on him. “I want my father back.”

  “And what if that’s not what I want?”

  “Then,” Levec said, speaking for the first time, “I will knock you over and sit on your chest and heal you without your permission.” He was among the largest men in the room, even unarmored. Had his father been whole, it would have been a good fight. But he wasn’t, so it wouldn’t be.

  “Levec—” the younger healer said.

  “Aidan—” his father said, at the same time.

  Aidan said nothing at all. He stood, mute, the triumph of his homecoming exactly what he’d been afraid it would be. In time, maybe in time, his father would forgive him.

  But this time, his father’s face slowly lost its red, ugly color, lost its frozen, growing anger, lost almost everything.

  He said, “You come then, boy. You come here, and you give me your hand. You’re my son, you’re my only son. You stand by your Da while he does this.”

  EPILOGUE

  SER ANTON DI’GUIVERA

  6th of Seril, 427 AA

  Averalaan Armarelas, Avantari

  Kallandras came upon him in the full light of the Seril moon. Moon at full, a time of mystery and promise, a hint of wildness
and hunger.

  Yet although he knelt beneath the moon—the Lady’s Moon—Ser Anton di’Guivera showed no wildness, no hunger. No movement.

  The Arannan Halls were quiet; the Hall of Wise Counsel in Avantari proper was not. Valedan kai di’Leonne, Ramiro di’Callesta, Baredan di’Navarre, and the Kings and Queens were sequestered with the Flight—Eagle, Hawk, and Kestrel. Voices had been raised, voices had fallen; there was a rhthym to the heated anger that was carried by breeze and night air when the words themselves had been carefully obliterated by the magi who served the Kings directly. Only a bard would catch it.

  There would be no drawn swords; no direct challenges. Not yet, not here. But Kallandras knew that the blood between the Callestans and the Kestrel was bad; sooner or later that rift would open, and that blood spill. Sometimes it was considered wise to bleed a patient. He would see.

  But it was not of Valedan’s council that he had come to speak, and not of war, although war was the order of the hour, the day, the month.

  He waited, the shadows his cover and his counsel.

  But Ser Anton di’Guivera did not move. The moon cast a soft shadow, hard to see at this distance, of the blindfolded boy who graced this courtyard in the Arannan Halls. That shadow touched the swordmaster like a benediction, it fell so gently.

  The water from his cupped hands did not.

  We were both trained, Kallandras thought, to bring death. Not pain, not torment, not freedom—but death, the simple fact of it.

  He stepped into the moonlight. Before he had moved five feet, the Southern swordmaster had risen, turned, drawn his blade in near-perfect silence, and frozen, becoming as much a thing of stone as the boy carved by maker-born hands at his back.

  And around the stone, beneath it, within it, the waters of life. They were alike, the fountain and the swordsman; it was no wonder that he was drawn here to find peace.

  Peace.

  Kallandras held it in his hand, roughly made and still flecked with baked clay. He bowed.

  “Ser Anton.”

  “Master Kallandras of Senniel,” the swordmaster replied, returning the fiction of the bow politely but maintaining his grip on the sword.

  Silence, then. A meeting of equals.

  “You are . . . astute, Ser Anton.”

  “You are a bard of the North. In the South, I do not believe we would suffer you to live.”

  “Ah?”

  “A man cannot tell men what to do by voice alone. Or so it is said.”

  “It is said. It is not true even in the South where no bard is suffered to live, of course, but it is said.”

  “Not true?”

  “The Tyr’agnate of Callesta orders a death, and his Tyran obey, regardless of what they deem correct.”

  Anton’s smile was dim with night colors. “You are right, and you are wrong. Of the Tyrs, Callesta is the most dangerous. He sees too sharply, and he understands his people too well. The binding he places upon them works both ways. He would kill to a man any man who did not follow the orders that he gave—but he would die before he gave orders that would destroy that binding, and he knows their measure well.” But the swordmaster seemed to relax. He did not, however, sheathe the sword. “If you have come to find the kai Leonne, he is not present at the moment.”

  They both knew that Kallandras had not come to speak with Valedan. But the bard understood manners, especially Southern ones. “I did not come to speak with the kai Leonne, Ser Anton.”

  “Ah.”

  Silence. At last Kallandras said, “I am not a young man, not anymore.”

  “I would be surprised, Bard, if you had ever been a young man.”

  “The young, if protected, have the luxury of vulnerability.” He shrugged, a deflection of the truth in his opponent’s words. A parry. “The old have the luxury of wisdom.”

  “Hard won luxury, that.”

  “As is any crown.”

  Silence, broken by the falling patter of water, the ripple of wave against stone. Kallandras raised a curled fist to the scant light and opened it slowly. Something small glinted in the flat of his palm. “My apologies, Ser Anton. I was . . . asked . . . to give you this during the test of the Sword.” He curled his hand into a fist again. “But I hesitated at the appointed moment.”

  The older man’s curiosity was nowhere in evidence, and he did not speak for a long moment. When he did, the desire to know more was a hint at the farthest edge of his voice. Ser Anton obviously knew how to be careful when he spoke, but he was so rarely that careful. “And that moment?”

  “The moment before you challenged the kai Leonne to a combat that any Southerner in the coliseum knew must end in a death.”

  “And would it have stopped me, Bard?” The swordmaster asked, a fine vein of genuine amusement evident in the rigidity of his voice.

  Kallandras inclined his head noncommittally. “It is not, in the end, for me to say; I am messenger only.”

  “But you chose not to deliver the message.” Greater curiosity here, and sudden suspicion, the latter of which he took no trouble to hide.

  “No.”

  “Kallandras of Senniel, you are unlike any bard I have met in the North, and I have met many. You walk like a killer, move like a killer, speak like a man who knows death at least as well as song—perhaps better.”

  Honesty. Complete honesty. “The Lady is strong,” Kallandras replied softly.

  “Tonight, yes. She is strong. And you, you stand like one of the brotherhood who serve her darkest face.”

  Kallandras took a step back, and then smiled almost ruefully. A genuine expression, although he did not believe Anton would recognize it as such. He knew that Anton did not accuse him. And yet. “We are both revealed by our talents; you to me by your voice, and I to you by your gift.”

  “Then by the Lady’s grace, I will be blunt. I am tired, Bard, of politics and games; I am tired of the cost of the choices I have made, and I bear their burden—and will—until I am at last carried by wind to the winds.

  “You have come to speak, and I will listen, but I will not listen for long. Deliver your message, or explain yourself if you desire it; leave if you do not.” He turned his back, although the sword was still in his hand, and faced the fountain.

  Easier, then, to speak to Ser Anton. The vulnerability of facial expression was difficult between two strong men, and something that was often not forgiven.

  “I did not choose to deliver the message because you were about to test your own resolve, Ser Anton. To be tested, to find your own limits. To set them.”

  “Tested?” the swordmaster said. “And tell me, Bard, did I pass?”

  “Oh, yes,” Kallandras said, his voice so soft that the only man who would ever hear it was Ser Anton himself. “I watched you fight the boy. I watched you cut him. But before that, I watched you take his measure during the long day of the test of the Sword. He is almost miraculously good with a sword, but you, Ser Anton, were better.

  “Are better.”

  The older man stiffened. Stiffened and then raised the sword slowly, almost casually. To a lesser observer it might appear that he was preparing to sheathe it.

  “Do not,” Kallandras said, and the warning edge was in his voice. It was not his intent to perish here. “You will protect no secret by my death. I do not speak in a way that others may hear, and I will not.”

  “Then why have you come with this . . . interesting supposition?”

  “Because you are Ser Anton di’Guivera, and the legend that attends you attends you for a reason.” He bowed. “I offer you that respect, Ser Anton.”

  Silence, and against a bard, silence could be a weapon.

  But Ser Anton di’Guivera was used to taking the measure of his enemy; used to making life-or-death decisions based on his estimation of that
measure. He sheathed the sword in one easy motion. But he did not turn.

  “I could not be certain,” he said softly, “that the kai Leonne would accept my offer of allegiance. I could not be certain. There was only one way that I could give him my support that was certain. The challenge, witnessed by all, and lost. By me.”

  He shook his head, still facing the statue named Southern justice.

  “He almost killed you.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were prepared to die.”

  Ser Anton shrugged. “Any man who lifts a sword is prepared to die. Or should be. But you spoke of a message, and you’ve obviously come to deliver it now.”

  “Yes.” Kallandras walked to the fountain’s edge. He did not look at the swordmaster, not directly. But he bent by the stone, placed his curled fist upon it, and then relaxed each finger slowly. Carefully.

  “We say, in the North, that love binds the living. We say, when we sing, that love can bind the dead, hold them in the halls of Mandaros, where they wait and wait and wait until their loved ones join them.”

  “In the South,” Ser Anton whispered, “we talk of the winds that sweep the howling dead across the deserts. The dead rage against the living, against their loss. Only the Lady can intervene. And I have prayed, Master Bard. Could you,” he continued softly, without looking to the side upon which the bard stood, “lift your voice to the heavens itself, so that the Lady might hear it? I would count any debt paid, and all debts owed you, if it were possible.”

  “It is not.”

  Silence.

  “But I am from the North,” he said lightly, “and in the North, the tradition is different. There is Mandaros, who sits in judgment, and there are the dead, who seek what he has to offer. A woman told me a story, and I hope you will forgive us our presumption, for I may not reveal her nature, or her name, and you will want both.”

  “Continue.”

  “She traveled to the Tor Leonne, and spent some time in your home. She came to take an item of value from it.”

  The swordmaster stiffened with real anger. “I . . . see.”