The Shadow of the Sun (The Way of the Gods)

by Barbara Friend Ish

  Letitia stretched languorously, watching me from eyes filled equally with the intoxications of pleasure and uisquebae, then finally rolled up to sit and began dressing as well. After a moment she paused, still only half dressed, looking at me again. Early morning light lay soft on her face, but her expression was suddenly serious.

  “Do you know how far we are from—Teamair? Where the Moot will be?”

  She had shifted back, from the intimate address, into the more formal “you”. For a second the choice stung; but then relief set in. It might be significant of nothing more than unfamiliarity with the intimate forms of Ilesian; whatever her reason, hearing and saying you would help me remember. It didn’t feel right, but I knew it was.

  “Maybe five or six days,” I said.

  She nodded. “And how far to Aballo?”

  “Eight or nine, if things go well.”

  “A person couldn’t get to both places before the Moot, correct?”

  I shook my head. “No. We’re at the decision point.”

  “I have to decide, then,” she said thoughtfully, and sighed. “I have to go.”

  I paused, foot halfway into a boot, looking at her. Fear for her welled in me. “Annu—Letitia, I meant what I said last night: to send anyone who has Talent but not training up against Nechton is insanity. I hope you don’t hear it as an insult, but—you’ve seen what he can do. I’ve seen…” The memory of the arcane storm overtook me again; for a moment it was all I could see. “Even more. Maybe, if you can master whatever Carina knew, then we might talk about how to safely—”

  She treated me to a bitter-edged smile. “Safe doesn’t enter into it, Ellion. We both know that. Iminor’s right: I’ve been given a duty. My clan’s honor requires that I step up.”

  I sighed and pushed my foot all the way into the boot, then walked to the center of the enclave to retrieve my mail shirt. If she couldn’t be dissuaded, I must insist on so much arcane and military support for her that what she could or couldn’t do became irrelevant, must accompany her to ensure she didn’t come to harm. And in the mean time I must renew my efforts to send the whole plan tumbling off the ledge. I shook out the mail, returning to the place in which she sat, watching with half an eye as she worried at some further decision and finally resolved it.

  She fixed me with a direct stare. “I need to tell you something, Ellion. But it is a secret that must go no further.”

  Ah, yes, here it was: in this regard at least, a Tana was the same as a human woman. Now that I had become her secret, all the others she carried would come spilling out between us. It was not only a way of easing the pressure of the transgression: it was a test of my discretion. I had lost track of the number of times I’d performed this little drama: I knew my lines. I was surprised to discover that this morning it felt unfair.

  “All your secrets are safe with me,” I said anyway, with a manufactured smile, and pulled the mail shirt over my head. The extra layer between us helped, just a little.

  “Amien is wrong,” Letitia said.

  “How so?” I said, reaching for my sword belt and buckling it on as I moved: towards the spot in which the thong for my hair and the bottle of uisquebae, which had begun to seem tempting again, lay. A little less pain, a little more clarity: those were what I needed.

  “The mora Carina didn’t defeat Nechton.” The hitch in her voice completely undermined her calm delivery.

  “What?” I said, all but skidding to a halt. The sector of my mind responsible for rational thought scrabbled hopelessly for purchase. My hand closed around the bottle, but it had lost its appeal.

  “I don’t know why that worries me, since with the Spear broken, I’m just going to wind up sacrificed to the goddess anyway…”

  “What?” I said again.

  Letitia closed the distance between us, reached for the bottle, took two healthy swallows and grimaced. I took it back.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, with the sort of calm only uisquebae can bestow. “The Great Spear of Fíana. It’s broken. It’s in my pack.”

  I refused to say the same thing again. I cast around for something slightly more lucid to say instead.

  “Um,” I said finally.

  “Of course you realize I’ll be the last Ériu to wear the Mora’s Torc.”

  “Oh, Letitia,” I said.

  “I am not looking forward to trying to explain myself at the House of Donn.” She sighed, glancing past me to the sacred well. “Assuming they let me in.”

  “Oh, Letitia,” I said again. “Why didn’t you say something?”

  She met my gaze, despair in her eyes. “What, in front of all those people? Ellion, do you realize that even with only seven knights left to me, I still travel with representation of five of the eight great-clans? Let alone all the people from outside Fíana. How could I bring that disgrace on my clan?”

  I swallowed. “But you’re… Are you the one who broke it?”

  Letitia shook her head.

  “Then how can—”

  “I will be the one who arrives for investiture without the Spear. It won’t matter who broke it; the Spear was a gift of the goddess, and—” Her voice caught. “A sacrifice will be required to restore the balance. That sacrifice will be me.”

  It was poor judgment, but I gathered her against me, as if I could somehow ward off the doom that way. Pain welled in me. “Maybe you just shouldn’t go.”

  She shook her head. “That would be a disgrace, too. With all the things the mora Carina did… It’s up to me to make it right.” A tremor ran through

  her; I clutched her more tightly. “Even if Clan Ériu loses the moraship, our honor…”

  “Well, can’t someone fix it?”

  She gave voice to a bitter laugh. “It’s wrought of findargat. The men who do the maintenance on the city windmills in Irisa have been trying to figure out how to work with findargat for years; they can’t move it. No matter how hot they get the forges…”

  “Findargat,” I said. Memory hovered just out of reach.

  “Remember those sculptures in Arian?” Letitia said. I remembered, finally: the immense, graceful harp and the huge improbable scales looking out over the destruction of what had once been a breathtaking city. The sad contrast between the beauty of the energies I’d tasted in the collapsing tavern and the boundless grief and anger outside.

  “Everything else shattered…” I said.

  Letitia nodded and tucked her head into my chest. A horrifying wave of tenderness raced through me. I needed the uisquebae, but I needed to be able to think even more. I must re-cast everything, must find a way to change Amien’s plan without explaining why.

  “What happened?” I said.

  She shrugged. “It was Nechton, I think. He and the mora Carina seem to have been engaged in… magical warfare…” She swallowed and reached for the bottle again, and I let her take it, sensing the shame the admission had cost her. Their goddess had forbidden magic, and yet the mora of Fíana had been practicing in secret. And losing.

  “You found her journ—her grimoire,” I said. Pieces of a puzzle whose existence I hadn’t even suspected were falling into place.

  “And the room in which she…”

  “Practiced,” I supplied. What had it been for Carina to grow up with magic as a birthright and then be expected to abandon it through no fault of her own? Was Nechton the reason she kept practicing after the Deluge, in defiance of the word of her goddess? What humiliation it must have been to battle such a master when she could neither seek aid nor admit what she did; to let people think she had won a battle whose outcome was clearly much less well-defined, to accept the shame of upholding the lie in order to protect the honor of her clan.

  “What did you find?” I asked.

  Letitia glanced at me, humiliation in her gaze.

  “Withdrawn,” I said. “I don’t need to know, do I?”

  “I don’t think I really understood all of what I saw,” she said in a small voice. She pursed her lips. “Th
ough you probably would.”

  Oh, gods. I kissed her forehead and withdrew, overcome by the need to pace. The outcome of Carina’s encounter with Nechton had been ambiguous at best: no wonder she wouldn’t talk about it after it was over; no wonder she laid the talisman aside, withdrew to Fíana, refused to even tell her compatriots where she had been. I wondered what injuries she and Nechton had inflicted on one another, how much of the truth Rishan suspected or understood.

  She hadn’t been completely ineffectual: after their encounter, Nechton had no longer been able to provide his armies with arcane support, and he had fled Macol for some deeper lair in which to lick his wounds. And, apparently, continued to battle Carina in secret. It must have been almost entirely aetheric.

  I had glimpsed his capabilities in the extramundane. If Carina had held him at bay for centuries, she must have had more Talent and understanding than anyone recognized. Maybe Amien was right, and there was some hope of Letitia becoming the one thing Nechton couldn’t handle. Certainly Nechton seemed to entertain the possibility. Maybe the problem was only one of giving Letitia time and opportunity to develop.

  But how long would it take, and how bad would things get while we waited?

  How was it possible I was even contemplating this? Expecting Letitia to develop a level of practice analogous to Carina’s was naïve—assuming my conjecture about Carina was right at all. Carina had come of age during the era of which I had learned from countless songs: with magic as every Tanaan’s birthright, to be used in whatever ways suited his or her talent and conscience. She had absorbed with the very air she breathed a level of understanding it would take Letitia years of intensive training to develop, if it came to her at all. And Carina had been no more than marginally effective.

  No matter what anyone feared or wanted to believe, Letitia was not the answer to Nechton. I must protect Letitia’s honor, but I must also ensure that any serious effort was spearheaded by the wizards.

  I stopped pacing, looking at her. “This only makes me more certain. You should be heading for Aballo, not Teamair. Macol is the last place you should go. We should consider taking Amien, and Amien only, into confidence—”

  She shook her head vigorously. “Don’t you understand? I’m dead anyway. Don’t make me take the Ériu clan’s honor with me.”

  I shook my head, too. “There has got to be a way.”

  She smiled, just a little. “If anyone could find it, it would be you.”

  26. Hidden in Broad Daylight

  Out beyond the sheltering branches of the trees at the sacred well, Presatyn glared with too much sunlight. The streets of the little town stretched quiet, blindingly bright and littered with the trash of the previous night’s revel. The squeaking of wheels on early-morning milk-men’s wagons made my skull threaten to split open. I hadn’t even reached the stage of true hangover yet: I was still more than a little drunk. I wasn’t looking forward to a day on the water.

  Letitia and I walked without speaking, oddly comfortable in our silence: as if everything that needed to be said between us had been, and now only the battles remained. The first battle loomed at the edge of the dock, rocking disconcertingly on the too-brilliant water and looking far more threatening than so small a boat had any right to. The people on the deck were already staring at us.

  “Screw it,” I muttered. “Let’s go back to the well.” The remaining uisquebae, which I had whimsically poured out as a libation for the gentle goddess Who hosted us in safety last night—refusing to think about what such an action meant, from a man sworn to the true gods—suddenly seemed a terrible waste. Letitia laughed, as humorless as I felt.

  By the time we reached the gangway, our entire party stood on deck. Even the crew seemed to be staring. It all felt too familiar, though this moment usually occurred when I walked back into a party or a ballroom from which I’d slipped away in the company of someone else’s wife. Too often it was the beginning of the endgame I hated; sometimes, though less frequently as the years wore on and my reputation developed a life of its own, it could be defused by simply behaving as if my conduct had been above reproach, by looking my would-be rival dead in the eye. It occurred to me that this was not Ilnemedon, and the people on that boat most likely knew little or nothing of my reputation. It was definitely worth a try.

  I handed Letitia onto the gangway and followed her across. Iminor stood within arm’s length of the other end, blue eyes fairly blazing. All the pain I glimpsed behind his neutral mask was my fault, and I didn’t even have the excuse of tactical necessity this time. Fleetingly I wished he would challenge me, so I could let him slice me open.

  “Mora,” he said, entire armies of conflicting emotions running beneath his even tone.

  She answered his stare with a cool, remote regard. “My lord.”

  I met his gaze as I stepped onto the deck; he didn’t bother trying to contain how much he hated me this morning. Either I had misunderstood the rules under which the Tanaan operate or he had forgotten them.

  “Good morning,” I said: not pleasant, precisely, but more than civil.

  The Tan recoiled, still staring at me. “How drunk are you?” he demanded, a month’s mounting resentment turning his voice into the bite of a snake. My self-loathing eased, just enough for me to adopt the time-tested shield of irony.

  I shrugged, stepping past him with a manufactured smile. “I’ve been drunker. Still far from easy prey. You’ll note the mora’s still alive.”

  For a few seconds he stared as if formulating a truly withering response; finally his mouth twisted and he stalked off.

  “Where is the captain?” Letitia said, to no one in particular.

  A man stepped out from the staring knot of crew, pulled off a weatherbeaten blue hat and sketched a bow. “My lady.”

  Letitia nodded, then looked as if she regretted the motion. “How far can we sail on this river?”

  The captain glanced at Rohini, who still seemed to be staring at me and not much appreciating what she saw. He squinted at the chief as if weighing profit against the cost of stretching the truth, and returned his attention to Letitia.

  “Ya c’n sail all th’ way to Lake Nanno, if ya’ve a mind, Lady. But it’s slow goin’ after Nemetona.”

  Letitia looked as if she would nod again, then decided against it. “How far to Nemetona?”

  “Th’ day, Lady.”

  She glanced at me. I sighed and ruefully nodded.

  “When can we sail?”

  Again he glanced at Rohini and Letitia, and then at me, clearly wishing for the familiar rhythms of business among men. “If ya’re ready, now.”

  “Yes,” Letitia said. “Let’s go.” The captain bowed again and began issuing orders to the crew. Letitia turned and walked to the back of the boat, settling with her spine against the charthouse wall and her gaze on something beyond the rear rail. I crossed the deck to the prow and looked out: I had long since learned that my only hope of comfort or even dignity after too much strong drink was to look forward as the boat sailed, with the wind in my face. I offered up a brief prayer for smooth sailing, then realized the only sensible recipient was a goddess with Whom I should not engage in contact.

  Longing for the time, not so many months ago, when Lady Tella was all I saw welled in me. I wanted to ask Her to turn Her gaze on me again, to help me find all I needed in Her as I once had; but after everything that had happened, the request was too presumptuous. Her intervention for me at Tyra seemed impossibly long ago.

  The boat launched in short order, into a mercifully-smooth current. I kept my gaze firmly directed on the river ahead. Before long my mind was running over the puzzle of Nechton, Carina, and her seemingly less-effectual heir. Was it possible the subtle, delicious energy that hung on Letitia, which lit me up when we made love, might somehow become a weapon? That it could defeat the master capable of the working in which I had nearly lost myself last night? Free of last night’s insanity, I couldn’t believe it. Beautiful as that energy was,
deep as my sudden, unexpected ache to taste it again might be, I couldn’t imagine it packing sufficient force to do more than make a wizard hunger for more.

  No, Letitia must not be sent anywhere close to Nechton. I must get either her or Amien to give up this senseless plan. I must fit together a strategy for wresting the Shadow of the Sun from Nechton without her; then one or both of them might begin to see reason. Amien had been right in one regard: the mission would be best accomplished under cover of a full-scale military assault. I would need intelligence about the terrain and current situation in Macol.

  After some uncounted span of time I noticed Amien standing beside me at the rail, evidently waiting for me to emerge from thought. The need for blood grabbed me by the throat again; my head was already spinning past reason, toward readiness for a duel. I grasped the rail and fought it down. What was needed now was persuasion.

  “What?” he said, in a passably calm voice.

  I decided to take the question at face value. “Need to know more about the situation at Macol.”