Kallandras stepped away.
“She knew, or thought she knew, what to look for, it had been so carefully described.”
In the moonlight and the magelights, something flickered. Something caught Ser Anton’s eyes. As Kallandras cleared the fountain, the older man turned. He froze, and he did not speak, and Kallandras was glad of it.
“But she found, in a room preserved as if it were a shrine, the three things she sought, and she broke them. Because she was told that something of value had been left in a casement of clay, wept over, and kept as a reminder of things valued. Things loved.”
Ser Anton di’Guivera touched the ring that lay exposed to night and moonlight. It was too small for any of his fingers; that much was clear. In the darkness it was still possible to see the tremor take his hands. The shaking. Harder to tell whether it was due to rage or something else.
“She was told—my compatriot was told—that no one else knew of this, and that no one else knew that of all possessions, save perhaps your sword, this was the one you most highly valued.”
The swordmaster turned then.
Turned, his hand a fist around the delicate, inexpensive ring, an inseparable joining of jade and a twist of gold: two bands. Two lives made one.
“I am sorry,” Kallandras said softly, “to expose what was so well hidden—but proof was needed.”
“Proof?” A single spoken word. An accusation. A cry of—grief? Anger? Loss?
“Mandaros is a Northern god, but perhaps your wife was a Northern woman, born into a land of harsh sun and harsher people. I cannot say. You have heard—no doubt you have heard—that there are places where those born to gods, and those who in truth worship them, might meet the gods themselves, and speak, and be heard.
“The message is from Mandaros, and delivered because there is a woman in his halls who natters at him endlessly, and who has finally worn away his patience—but not his affection.
“This woman begs leave, through the living, to deliver a message to the swordmaster of the Dominion.”
Ser Anton looked away. “Continue.”
“She wishes him to know that she loves him, and she waits for him in the halls of Mandaros. That as she can, she watches him, and that she does, as he suspects, like the boy. She guesses that he will know by the actions taken here—by myself, by my compatriot, by the Lord of Judgment—that she is still not a very patient woman, and that she will not wait for more than a lifetime—so she respectfully requests that he not do so much in this life that he has to live through another one in atonement. He’ll have only himself to blame, after all.”
The swordsman did not speak.
Kallandras bowed in the darkness. “Ser Anton,” he said. “Marianna en’Guivera says that you are not jade and not stone, and that she was not gold. But I believe she desires happiness for you, or peace.”
He walked away into the night.
And because he was a bard, a master bard, because he was Kallandras, he heard the whisper of a voice at his back.
“Bard.”
He stopped. Spoke across the distance without breaching it. “Ser Anton.”
“Is this true?”
“Yes.”
He left then, because there are some things that brook no witnesses.
The moon’s face was high and full in the Seril night, and it rose over a lone man in an empty courtyard beside a quiet fountain.
The Finest in Fantasy from MICHELLE WEST
THE SUN SWORD:
THE BROKEN CROWN (Book One)
THE UNCROWNED KING (Book Two)
THE SHINING COURT (Book Three)
SEA OF SORROWS (Book Four)
THE RIVEN SHIELD (Book Five)
THE SUN SWORD (Book Six)
THE SACRED HUNT:
HUNTER’S OATH (Book One)
HUNTER’S DEATH (Book Two)
The Uncrowned King Page 82
