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

by Barbara Friend Ish

  When I reached the spot in which we’d fought our most recent engagement, I saw: Amien had thrown up wards, right there in the middle of the road. The shimmering emerald wall circled around to meet itself, stretched up towards the stars and out of sight. What had happened in my absence? I slid from the saddle, opened a little portal in the ward-wall, and slipped through, drawing the horse in behind me.

  Several of the men inside cried out. Amien just turned his head to look at me, his aura of anxious waiting shifting into horrified understanding.

  “What the hell?” Iminor croaked, giving the utterance a rhetorical inflection that I took to be an expression of surprise rather than a real question. I answered it in the only way possible, with a rueful shrug.

  “I assume it wasn’t a secure crossing,” Amien said, voice scraping with pain.

  Appalled comprehension blossomed in Letitia’s and Iminor’s faces; Nuad was suddenly on his feet, striding out as if he might pass beyond the wards. Letitia put her hands over her mouth and burst into a storm of tears that very nearly wrecked my tenuous composure. The trapped howl redoubled inside me, crushing my heart so I could barely breathe; I had to look away, to stare at the energies of the wall slipping from leaf-green to moss to emerald and across every hue of green yet imagined, studying the formless patterns as if I might reduce them to something I could explain in mundane terms.

  “No,” I croaked, too consumed by the truth I couldn’t admit for the shame of my lack of vocal control to touch me at all. “It was not. We need to keep this road. I’d like to move—” My voice gave out. “Now. What’s—” I forced myself to look at Amien. “My lord, you raised wards?”

  The wizard shrugged. “Finally noticed the pattern.” His mouth twisted. “For all the fouzhir good it did. Have you noticed that the mora’s consort always senses when things are about to go to hell on us?”

  In my peripheral vision I saw Iminor’s head snap around to stare at Amien. Letitia was staring at Iminor.

  “What?” Iminor breathed, face fading into a pallor so deep he looked wan even in the green light.

  The wizard shrugged again, looking at him. “Lady Tiaran is your grandmother? It’s not unusual for Talent like that to pass…”

  Iminor shook his head. “But men don’t…”

  Amien put on a pale smile. “Oh, young ouirr, they used to tell Rishan the same thing.” He looked at me again, smile fading, then glanced across the circle of people to Rohini.

  “Well, then, we ride to Laetrif?” the wizard said to her.

  She nodded.

  “Perhaps in the morning I’ll be able to charter a boat,” Amien continued, eyes still on hers. “And we will see if I can summon a wind on a river without our enemy knocking us halfway back to the Ruillin. You’ll join us?”

  Rohini gave him a rueful look and a shrug. “It’s not as if the Moot will accomplish anything before you arrive.”

  28. The Silence of the Circle

  We followed the river road all night. First Telliyn and then Arliyn crossed the sky to hang before us; in my mind, I hung bound to a tree whose branches spread among the stars. Dark energies infiltrated me: winding their ways into my bones, finding those bones had always resonated to the notes they sang. One by one, the people I loved floated away, casting me glances oddly free of reproach and spreading themselves across the sky to become stars. When the last of them had gone, I saw the truth of my solitude, heard the leaves rattle in the branches to which I was bound like the last breath in a dying man’s chest. I would hang here until I achieved understanding, until I had been purged of the senseless human emotions that incited all the costly errors I made. But those emotions clung to me, and even while I saw them for what they were, I could not pull their teeth from my flesh.

  Laetrif’s city gate stood open by the time we arrived. We rode through; no one challenged or seemed to much notice the Essuvians with whom we rode. The energies that had entombed me all night stretched through the gate with me, trailing like an invisible umbilicus to a tree somewhere beyond sight. Even Rohini had never been here and had no useful intelligence regarding the loyalties of any of the inns on the road that ran along the city wall: we just worked our ways from one to the next until we found one that had half a dozen rooms free, saw to our exhausted horses, and stumbled inside.

  Rohini’s men were only one less than an even dozen: there was no reason for Amien and me to take any of them as roommates. Nuad and Iminor had lost the companions with whom they had been sharing rooms, too, of course; Amien cast a long look between me and Iminor, sighed, and let a separate room for the Tans. Letitia glanced at him, met Rohini’s eyes, and said, “With respect, Chief, I’d prefer to be alone tonight. Today.”

  Rohini nodded, looking none too disappointed. “I understand, Mora. I’ll send a couple of my men to watch your door.”

  Letitia shook her head, grief and exhaustion writ large in her face but mouth set in a way I had long since learned meant danger to the unwary. “Alone. Thank you.”

  “Letitia—” Rohini began, glancing at Amien for support. But the wizard disappointed her again.

  “You’ll let me ward your door,” he said to Letitia, making the statement into a question.

  That prospect pleased her hardly more, it was easy to see. But she gathered her composure sufficiently to say, “Thank you, my lord.” Rohini shook her head, scooped up the lock in Amien’s hand, and stalked off.

  Amien and I followed Letitia upstairs. He saw her settled in her room, cast a subtle binding over her door that would be invisible to any but a wizard but which would both secure her door and tell him if anyone tried to pass. I stood at the door of the room we would share: watching, feeling the too-regular lattice of the binding jar against the flowing energies that surrounded the place. When he was done I opened the door to our room and let him precede me inside. The binding down the hall still pricked like a burr at the edge of a cuff.

  Inside, the wizard paused only long enough to kick off his boots and fell headlong into the bed. Within seconds his breathing had shifted into sleep. I recognized that I was exhausted, too; but I couldn’t settle sufficiently to lie down. I spent a few minutes staring out the narrow window, looking down at the street and beyond the city wall to the docks at the foot of the bluff. Most of the boats I saw had the look of vessels preparing for a day on the water. I wondered what choices Amien would find for us when he went down there this afternoon.

  I unbound my hair, pulled off my sword and mail shirt and sodden boots, and set them all beside my harp case. I realized I hadn’t done more than load and unload the harp since Dromineer. Fierce, deep longing for the release of playing raced through me, but I was afraid to open the case and look inside. For a moment I just stood there staring at it. Finally I opened the clasps—and a weight settled in my chest.

  I’d ruined it. Three days ago it seemed I might rescue the harp with careful attention; now the beautifully-carved frame lay covered in mildew, and the front of the sound chest had warped. The inside of the speckled-hide case bore a fuzz of black mold.

  I sank to the floor, leaning my forehead on my knees. There was no point in carrying the harp further; the only decent thing would be to give it a pyre. Assuming it would even burn. How terrible that the ard-harpist would do such a thing; what a lie my election to that position was.

  What a lie I proved every commitment this month. What sort of commander let the knights entrusted to him take a blade meant for his own heart? Enough swordsmen might defend Letitia against all the Básghilae Nechton ever crafted, but nothing could protect her from the danger I brought inside her boundaries. I was no true champion: if I could not sever the binding between us, I must make her understand well enough that she would dismiss me of her own will.

  Down the hall, a new flavor of power blossomed. Yet another shortcoming cut into me like a dull knife: I focused instantly on all the energies I must not touch, yet I could not hold my responsibilities sufficiently in mind to give them even the minim
um of their due. But this untouchable bloom told me Letitia remained as wakeful as I: it was her gentle power teasing my edges, raising a storm of need in my chest. I must confess to her, while I had the strength to do it; I must be gone before the rest of them woke. I closed the case again, the way a man will shut the eyes of a murdered friend; I hauled myself to my feet and slipped down the hall. I eased my hand through the lattice of Amien’s wards: feeling his attention on me for a moment as he registered the contact and then recognized me; feeling him relax under the mistaken impression that Letitia would be safer with me in the room. And I knocked on the door.

  “My lord?” Letitia said from the other side, sounding surprised.

  “It’s me,” I said, then fought down the temptation to laugh at my own presumption. Me. As if there were no question she would recognize my voice. But Letitia opened the door immediately, stood staring at me through the arcane lattice: hair unbound and armor off; Amien’s wards smudging her delicious energy and his talisman dangling across the front of her shirt; a lifetime’s worth of guilt and terrified frustration lurking behind her composed mask.

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  She stepped back, gesturing invitation. “Come in.”

  I nodded and slipped through Amien’s binding, closing the door behind me. She stood just a step away, eyes intent, waiting for me to speak; I had no idea where to begin. I should have worked it out before walking in, and already I was growing distracted by all the flavors of need she roused in me, by the sorrow that would drown me the second I stepped back out the door. I willed myself to focus, at least long enough to do a proper job of opening the vein.

  “Letitia, I—” I swallowed. “Mora. The loss you suffered last night was entirely my fault—” Her mask fell away, revealing all the pain beneath. My heart threatened to explode. “—and I need to explain—”

  “No!” she said. “Those knights were my responsibility—I was the one who insisted we must cross—”

  I shook my head. “Annu, thou’rt—” Oh, dear gods. “I’m sorry—” I had meant that as an apology for the error of intimacy, for claiming a relationship we would never have—but then I truly heard the words, and a vein opened; but it was not the right one.

  “Oh, gods,” I croaked, voice gone absolutely to ruin again. “I’m sorry, Letitia, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t even be here, I should have given all of you safe distance at Goibniu, and instead I got everyone—”

  She touched her fingers to my lips, stopping the torrent of words. The tenderness of the gesture tore away the last measure of self-containment left to me: I shut my eyes against the pain trying to force its way up from my throat and turned my face into her palm. A tremor wracked me—and her hand slipped around to the back of my neck, compelled my mouth to meet hers. Amien’s wards buzzed against me; down the hall, his eyes flew open, and he looked straight into the truth of my transgression. I drew back, but Letitia pulled me to her again.

  “No,” I breathed, but raw pain and need exploded through me, and I found myself devouring her, found my hands dragging through the nets of his wards and dispersing them. I gasped in yet more guilt and clasped her so fiercely that I lifted her feet from the floor. My breath came in ragged sobs; a little whimper escaped her throat, and I drew back in fear of whatever injury I’d inadvertently caused. But her desperate eyes met mine in a way that made it clear the injury had happened hours ago; she commandeered my mouth again, and heartbreak and passion tore through me until I fell apart.

  “You must dismiss me,” I croaked, and buried my face in her neck, hiding inside her hair. But already my mouth was on the silk of her neck, and my teeth grazed her skin as if I might open up her veins, too, might drink her life right here.

  “I need you,” she breathed, hand closing around the back of my skull.

  “I’m going to get you killed.” And oh, gods, how I wanted to bite her, to feel her flesh yield and hear her cries of confused pleasure and pain. But I must not mark her. She was not mine.

  “You’re keeping me alive,” she rejoined, with a near-logic I was insufficiently coherent to counter, and began undressing me.

  The faces of our companions swam through my muddled mind; again I saw them spread out into stars. It should have cooled my ardor; my breath sobbed in me again. But I found myself trembling with redoubled need, discovered my fists full of her shirt and the garment flying past her hair without even tangling. And all conscious thought ceased.

  I clasped her fiercely, not caring how I interfered with her efforts with my buttons; I lifted and fell across the bed with her, pulled off her clothes, let her peel me bare. Nothing remained of the world of the living but Letitia, and I wanted only to crawl inside her and find oblivion. There was no elegance between us this time, no gentle melding of minds: only sobbing breath and pounding desire and the unanswerable need to somehow put back the lives I had destroyed. I held off on the release, but just barely; the incompletion of it wrecked me yet again. When it was over I fell back, drew her across me, clasped her as if her slender body might shield me from the horror I carried.

  Gradually we quieted, though the occasional shudder still passed between us, and my heart still felt as if it would burst. I stroked her hair, as much to soothe myself as to comfort her. Outside, the sounds of morning in a city rose around the building; the bells of boats on the river rang against the walls. After some uncounted interval Letitia wrapped a grip of astonishing intensity around me, head still on my chest, and said, “I do not release you, Ellion Tellan. Say what you will. You offered me your service, and I have need—” Her voice dried up.

  Terrible relief washed through me; I hated myself for giving in. “At least let me take you to Aballo.”

  She raised her head, cast me a quizzical look. “How am I to capture the Shadow of the Sun from there?”

  “Seems to me you should be less concerned about his weapon than your own,” I said. There was no point, less than no point, in sending her against Nechton; if she would recover her family’s honor, addressing the issue of the broken Spear would accomplish much more.

  But Letitia’s mouth twisted; she glanced at the talisman trailing across my chest and sighed. And rolled away to lie on her stomach.

  “Of course you’d know,” she said, eyes on something miles away and a bitter edge to her voice. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

  “What do you mean?” I said carefully, bewildered.

  “Well, I’m supposed to store—the Light energy, the power of the Holy Mora, in there—right? But I can’t.”

  Now I understood: she thought I’d meant Amien’s talisman. I frowned without planning it: watching Letitia’s despairing face, thinking about the energy that raced through me when I held the diamond in my mouth at the shrine in Presatyn. I hadn’t been seeking power, only trying to render a moment of intensity into something more playful; it had charged me without my even being aware of the possibility.

  “But you are,” I said.

  She turned her head to look at me, sudden hope fading into fear of hoping at all. “What?”

  “You are charging it.” The talisman lay on the blanket, in the shadow Letitia cast; the chain traced a sinuous path around her neck. I picked up the diamond, held it between fingertips and thumb, let it roll across my palm. It sparkled as if lit from within, just a little brighter than the light in the room could explain; the memory of the gentle power it carried flashed through me, rendering the world mere shadows across my mind. I glanced at her again. “Oh, yes. You are.”

  Tremulous hope turned her wide-eyed.

  “I’m not sure how,” I said. “But the energy’s getting in.” The precision of the diamond’s facets, the grace of its form, even the sweet manner of its mounting made my eyes want to trace its line again and again. Its energy was an invitation written on my palm.

  “Maybe you’re making this harder than it really is.” I met her eyes. “That’s a common novice mistake.”

  She stared at me, lips pa
rted; her regard shifted. Now it held that same smolder with which she’d addressed me while suggesting I work with Esus’s Power last night. I saw, finally: it ran both ways, this strange perilous current between us. Her awareness of my power and that closed-off part of my life lit her with a desire almost as complicated as what she incited in me.

  It was the last thing I would have expected: what sane woman would find any appeal in a wizard too disgraced to practice? The taint of potential evil should disqualify me in the eyes of anyone who knew even part of the truth. A dangerous tingle spread through me; but answering her look would mean things I was too muddled with lack of sleep to work out. I dragged my focus back to the matter of the talisman.

  I put on a reassuring smile. “Maybe you just need to relax and trust yourself.”

  The smolder still lay in her eyes, intensifying; my heart quickened, beyond my control. A hint of a smile graced her lips; her gaze turned inward, in a manner I’d seen times beyond counting at Aballo. But after a moment she sagged again.

  “Maybe I’m not the one who’s… charging… it at all. Maybe it’s all leftovers or something. I just can’t see how.”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t feel like leftovers. It’s hot. Look, I never even touched it with my mind; all I did was put it in my mouth and—bam!”

  “Bam,” she repeated.

  “The power was there. It lit me up.”

  This time the smile that came over me was genuine, but she just gazed solemnly at me. And I saw: she’d been chewing her own liver over this. She was so knotted up she’d never relax enough to be effective.

  I saw what was necessary. For any other wizard it would have been simple: he would have taught her the process of charging, by demonstration and practice. But I could not draw the power necessary for that lesson; I sensed without asking that she would never admit her difficulty to Amien and allow him to help. It had somehow fallen into the category of things that would bring disgrace: things she would sooner die than confess.