Clearly, then, they did not understand what they faced.
The stag lifted antlered head, casting a shadow in the moonlight that was too long, and too strange, to suit his form.
The moonlight, he said, hearing what she did not say, is the Lady’s. This is my form, he added, but it is not my truth.
Are you fearless?
I would be.
If?
If not for your command, Lady.
Obviously not the one in which I told you to call me something else.
He snorted. Ariel sat on his back, her hands bunched around folds of his thick fur. She looked at Jewel, and only at Jewel; the stag remained standing in such a way that the child could clearly see her.
The child, he said quietly, is mortal.
So is Kallandras.
He speaks with power’s voice; the child does not speak. She is not even graced with a hint of gift.
No?
You know this.
And she did. She had not known it until this moment.
Then why?
I do not know. But she is under no spell; the only protection offered her here is offered willingly, by you.
Jewel nodded.
In another time I would ask you why.
I know. And in another place I would hate you for asking. We are what we are. She needs me.
Only because you need to be needed.
You sound like Avandar.
He laughed. His eyes, round and luminous, opened fully upon her. Do you disdain him so much because he does not need you?
Pardon?
An idle question Lady. It passes time.
I don’t . . . disdain him.
No?
The first of the kin crested the distant horizon. In the chill of night, the wavering lines of heat were distant memory; everything was clear for miles.
Jewel glanced at the child; the child met her gaze, steady and silent.
“Ariel.”
She nodded.
“You’ve seen these before.”
She nodded again.
“He will not let you fall, no matter what happens. If you lose sight of me, he will protect you, and when it is safe, he will bring you back.”
She nodded again, her silence unnerving.
“Lady?” Celleriant’s voice, clear as bard’s song, cold as night.
“Lord Celleriant?”
“Will you allow us the privilege?”
As if it were a game.
She nodded before she thought to ask who “us” referred to.
Had her answer as Kallandras of Senniel College joined him in the moonlight, his weapons gleaming with a strange light that she knew was not dependent on the height of moon, the lack of cloud.
Another creature joined the first, and another; Jewel counted five in all. They were of a height and not even the night sky could grant them the illusion of mortality. They were as large as the stag, and they moved with a deadly, supple grace that belied, in every possible way, their size, the awkward build of their fore and hind legs. Sand seemed to shroud their feet in a cloud that was always a few yards behind them.
They moved.
The Serra Diora and the Radann par el’Sol came to stand at her side.
“Where are the others?”
“Coming,” Yollana said brusquely.
Stavos joined them; Serra Teresa, lending weight and strength to the older woman, joined them as well.
The Radann par el’Sol drew his sword and Jewel flinched; it burned the vision with its pale, blue fire.
Across the plain, the demons saw its light; they stopped a moment, then rose on two legs. Their song was a cry of recognition.
“Serra,” the Radann said coldly.
But the Serra Diora did not cower. Instead, to Jewel’s surprise, she smiled. “I believe,” she said softly, “that you move too slowly.”
He raised a brow. Turned his back upon her and gazed out at the two who now stood ten yards ahead.
“I ask, as a favor, that you put up your sword,” she continued, her voice as demure and soft as a Serra of her rank’s could be—and as steely, as cool, beneath that facade.
“There is a danger here,” he said softly.
“The danger that is perceived is the danger that we might face—we, the Matriarch, the Northerner, and her ward.” Silent as shadow, Ramdan stood behind her, his hands by his sides, sleep and weariness shorn from his face by the demands of his duties: her presence. “It is for us that concern was shown.
“Watch,” she said, speaking not as Serra, but as a denizen of the Lady’s Night.
“But—”
“Watch and listen. The wind is speaking.”
He raised a brow. Frowned. “Do you trust the voice of the wind, Serra?”
“The wind,” she said serenely, “has only one voice, this eve.”
Lord Celleriant drew his sword. Summoned his shield.
He gazed at Kallandras, and at the weapons he held. “You have courage,” he said softly. “In the heat of our last battle, I did not notice what you wielded.”
“They are mine.”
“For the moment.” His gaze was a mixture of appraisal and approval. But it held more than that; his eyes were alight with an excitement that he seldom showed. “I will take the leader,” he said, “if that is agreeable.”
Kallandras smiled. “Among my brethren,” he replied softly, “the honor of the kill was merely the honor of being summoned to serve. I fear I will be an unsatisfactory competitor if you hope to count kills.”
Celleriant laughed, and his voice was a cascade of music, a wild echo of the song that Kallandras had heard for the whole of his adult life. “You are so very different,” he said at last.
Kallandras smiled as well, the expression graceful and easy. “I am. I am no longer a youth. I fear I am not your match in speed.”
“Haste makes a poor warrior.”
“Indeed.” He leaped, then, his legs straight, toes pointed groundward. The light of the ring upon his hand flared white in the darkness, captured essence of starlight, cold and perfect. He did not touch the ground again.
But he heard his companion’s delighted laugh as the wind swept him across the stretch of their chosen battlefield toward their chosen foes. Here, at this moment, there were only three things that mattered: a brother, life, and death.
In the light of the wind’s vision, he could see clearly what he faced: five demons. They strode now upon two legs, but their forearms were curved groundward as if by gravity. Closer inspection revealed the reason for that drift: their hands were stubs from which long blades protruded, chittering against each other. Their faces were long, their jaws slender; they smiled with the gleaming, sharp fangs of predators.
He offered them no quarter, no greeting.
Celleriant did. “Turn back,” he said, “and we will forgive you your presumption.”
His voice was low and deep, a sonorous call to battle. He knew, before he spoke, what the answer would be; delighted in it, extending it by the simple grace of conversation.
They roared. There was, in the cadence of their outrage, the trappings of language, but it was a foreign language, a thing unlearned in his years of study in the labyrinth of Melesnea, or the halls of Senniel. Kallandras understood it by the grace of his gift, for he was born to understand.
They were fast.
But he was deliberate; quick enough to slide sideways, to avoid the whistle of hands that bristled with edges and weight. He had taken injuries in his aerial battle with the Serpent of the storm; they hampered him.
But he had learned to fight in almost any condition; he adjusted the rhythm of his movements, minimizing them; he allowed the wind to alleviate the weaknesses injury determined.
When he struck, he struck quickly; blood flowed as an arm fell, severed at the joint.
Jewel watched. “Avandar?”
He nodded, his eyes upon the field and the battle that she had chosen to grant the most reluctant of her fol
lowers.
“There’s another one,” she told him softly.
He raised a brow. “Where?”
“Beyond the swell of the dune. Toward the east.”
“You see him?”
“I see . . . something . . . that extends from the demons.”
“Good. Shall I?”
She hesitated a fraction of a second, and then nodded, watching him.
Jewel.
Seeing in him something out of a dream that she had entered without choice, and had not yet fully wakened from. Do I, she thought, guarding the question from his hearing, fear you because you don’t need anything from me?
No.
So much for privacy.
His smile was dark; she realized as she gazed at the curve of his lips that he was standing just a little too close to her.
You fear what you cannot control. In me. In yourself. I will return. He bowed, the motion as sardonic as the smile.
You fear, he added, as he turned his back upon her and began his trek across sand so cold it might as well have been the ice of the Northern Wastes, what you need.
I don’t need anything.
You need to eat, to sleep, to breathe. You need what mortals need.
She didn’t ask him what he meant. Told herself it was because she didn’t want to distract him from the battle he was about to enter.
Didn’t believe it for a minute.
There was a lyrical grace to the dance of the wind; to the sweep of two blades in the arms of a man trained to music’s subtlety. There was a spare elegance to the economy of his motion, the precision of his chosen strike, his chosen retreat.
There was beauty of a different kind entirely in his companion’s wild charge, the sweep of his blade, the grandeur of his gestures. The length of his pale, pale hair swept out and back like the edges of a finely weighed cloak; no mortal man would have been allowed such a dangerous vanity.
But Lord Celleriant was clearly no mortal, and his beauty did not seem to be tainted by anything as petty as vanity; it was a part of him, a part of what made him compelling.
Audience to this, they watched, they bore witness, and they felt, as they did, the weight of hope as it settled around them, precious burden.
They counted, silent, as the demons fell before wind and blade and wild magic.
The Lady’s Night was a strength, a secret place, a dreamscape unlike any other. They welcomed it, shivering, unable to dispel the cold and unwilling to find the blankets and the robes that might do so; they would miss some step of this dance, some part of the gift of its magic.
It was over so quickly.
Lord Celleriant lifted his blade, twisted it, sheathed it in the air before his heart center. “Brother,” he said softly, extending a hand.
Kallandras reached for it, and the gem about his finger dulled as he let gravity claim him. He smiled. “We are three for two,” he said gravely.
A pale brow rose. The lord of the Green Deepings laughed. “A poor competitor? Your words are too pretty and too serious, bard, when they are not wrapped in song.” He laughed again, releasing the hand he held. “Three indeed, and in your favor. But there will be other battles.”
“Yes,” Kallandras replied gravely. “Other battles, and with a less . . . obliging . . . audience. We will lose lives before we set our swords down.”
The Arianni lord raised a silver brow. “Not each other’s.”
Not each other’s. Kallandras closed his eyes briefly. “No,” he said softly. “But neither of us are Moorelas. There are lives, in this war, that will count for more than either of ours if we are to have victory.
“And we might not know, now or ever, which lives those will be.”
“I had almost forgotten,” Lord Celleriant said, “that you are mortal.”
“I . . . had almost forgotten as well.” He bowed. “But that is the nature of mortality; if we are to fight, to face death, to live, we forget what awaits us at its end.”
Lord Celleriant lifted his eyes; they were burning in the deep of the night sky. But he said nothing; all of his denial was in the ferocity of that simple gaze.
It was too soon; too soon to notice such a fierceness.
And yet.
Kallandras, master bard of Senniel College, born to the South and raised by the brotherhood of the Lady’s darkest visage, turned to face the men and women who had become his responsibility. But it was not to them that he spoke.
“I have seen Viandaran,” he said quietly, speaking in a voice that would not carry, no matter how close his companions were. “More, I have heard his voice.
“Do not wish that upon me, brother.”
Arianni lords did not spit.
Therefore, Lord Celleriant was still. Ferocity fell into lines of genuine anger. “Do not lie to me.”
Kallandras was rarely surprised; he was surprised now. “Lie?”
The Arianni lord who had ridden, mounted, in the Winter Host reached out gently with his left hand, and brushed the strands of Kallandras’ hair aside, revealing the lobe of his ear. Although it could not be seen by mortal eyes, Kallandras knew what Celleriant saw: the Lady’s mark. The mark of the Kovaschaii.
“The brotherhood has served the Lady for as long as I have served mine. Do not think I am ignorant of what that mark means,” the lord of the Green Deepings said coldly.
“It means—”
“To you, Kallatin, forsworn. Do not tell me not to wish Viandaran’s life upon you; I know what waits you.”
Kallandras bowed his head, and his shoulders, the perfect line of his graceful posture, slumped. And straightened. “It is many years away,” he said at last. “And although this will surprise you, those years do not feel as short to those of us who are confined by them as it must to those who live above them and beyond their grasp.
“Many things can happen in that short span.”
Lord Celleriant said nothing.
When they returned, Stavos and Ramdan were already taking the tents down.
Kallandras turned to Jewel and raised a pale brow.
“Avandar,” she said curtly.
“What of him?”
“He . . . arrived too late. Whoever held the leash of the demons you killed fled.”
He listened a moment to the wind, but the wind was silent. Then he nodded and set to work on his own tent.
In the heart of the desert, beneath the surface of the cold earth, he listened, bore witness, waited.
He heard the claws of the kin scar the surface above as they passed over his chosen resting place; heard the words they spoke to their lord before they joined battle.
He heard the words the kinlord chose to speak after they had traveled beyond his hearing. A moment drifted past; in earth time, it was over so quickly it was almost impossible to absorb the whole of what had occurred.
But if earth had not been his strength, it had not been among his weaknesses; of the Kialli, he had been one of the few who had invoked its power with ease. It raged against his touch here, in the heart of lands that had once known the breadth and depth of life seen nowhere but in the Green Deepings; it had raged against him in the bitter stretch of the Northern Wastes.
But he had called it nonetheless, choosing his time and his place to reacquaint himself with its confines, its crushing presence, its slow, slow life. Wild earth. Not ally, now, but not—never quite—slave.
Take the water, snare the fire, demand the movement of air. But the earth? It could be done. Ishavriel had done it, time and again, expending a vast outlay of power in order to exert, to prove, his mastery. That was the way of the Hells.
But the way of the Kialli, the way of the chosen servants of Allasakar, before the Sundering, had been different, and it was that path that Lord Isladar had sought. Earth. It would never love him. Perhaps once, and in the bitter darkness beneath its surface, that once gave him pause for regret, for a pain akin to loss.
But if it did not love him, it knew his voice. Taint, it whispered, in its ru
mble, its treacherous crush of stone and dirt, of root, of ancient waterways.
Yes, he replied calmly. It is a taint I bear, and no cleansing will expunge it. I am sorry. I have paid.
The earth’s anger was slight, this eve.
He paid it its due.
Spoke to it of old glory; of the trees that had once reached the heavens, of the flowers that had nestled in the still, hidden ponds, of whole lives lived in the plants whose roots depended upon the soil for nourishment.
Not for Isladar the anger of rejection, the satisfaction of that momentary pain; his was the long path, the patient path. He had, over the course of decades, forced the earth to remember his voice.
His voice.
It knew him, and it chose, for now, to tolerate his presence. And so he watched, and waited, and learned.
The demons were dead. The kinlord had returned to the Northern Wastes. He would make his report to Etridian, and he would wait instruction—or punishment for his failure—at that lord’s whim.
No one would return to the Shining City to make such a report to the Lord Isladar. Anduvin’s sword had weakened him. Kiriel’s blood had weakened him. He had been unable to completely obscure the marks under which he now labored.
And sensing his weakness, the Lord’s Fist had chosen to remove him. It caused no resentment, no anger, and no surprise; he had lived by the side of the Lord of the Hells for long enough. He knew the laws of the Hells, and he—as they—abided by them: Power ruled.
But he smiled as he thought it.
The vision of the Lord’s Fist was so remarkably narrow; the definition of power so completely predictable. Had it not been for the child, there would have been no risk at all.
But the child had been present, in the Tower that had become a symbol of all things despised and hated. He should have left her. She had no power, no gift, no role to play; victim to Anya a’Cooper’s insanity, she was an afterthought, kin to grass crushed by the hooves of cavalry.
He should have let her die there.
Instead, he had come South, and in the South he would reside until he had seen the outcome of the battle for the Dominion.
Ariel. It was not the name she had been born to; she had been unwilling to part with that, and he had chosen to gift her with another. She was like, and unlike, Kiriel. She was devoid of the strength that came naturally to Kiriel; could not withstand cold, would be scorched to death by fire. She had no easy joy, no bright curiosity, no heated, bitter fury; she had no cruelty. She was almost a flicker of life, robed in form—but behind her fear, she waited. If he was patient, she would shed it; he had been certain of that.
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