“Does that include the bridges?”
“No, Lady. The bridges are within Damar.”
“And this road?”
“It leads to the East. The only way to reach the West is through the forest, or across the river itself, within Damar.”
“There’s a bridge in the forest?”
His smile was cold. Far too cold.
“There is a passage,” he said quietly. “I would advise against it, were you any other mortal.”
“What the Hells does that mean?”
“It means,” he replied, drawing his sword from the air in front of his slender breast, “that you should not dismount until we are clear of the trees.”
“And Kallandras?”
“Kallandras, as you call him, has walked a darker road than this in his time, if I am not mistaken.”
She didn’t like the way he said the bard’s name. It was almost possessive.
Seven paths. “The forest—that’s not a path?”
He laughed. The sound was beautiful. Funny, that beauty had come to be synonymous with things that were distant and cold. “It is not one of the seven,” he replied. “I ask again, Lady, that you choose a mortal road.”
“Seven paths,” she said, lost in the number, the two words. “No”
“No?”
“They’re guarded. There are at least seven of the kin on the edge of town.” She said the words as if she were groping her way toward truth. She was. “They’re probably there to make sure that no one else escapes.”
He nodded. “We can—”
“Yes. We can. But not without announcing our presence.”
“It is not our way to skulk.”
“It is our way to skulk,” she snapped back. “Are there so many of the kin?”
“They are many, in the Hells.”
“Here, damnit. Here. Are there so many that they can just be sent out in numbers to capture one lousy village?”
“That is the first intelligent question you’ve asked this eve.”
“Thank you, Avandar.”
Kallandras raised his head; until he did, she had not noticed that he had bowed it. “No,” he said. “I think that this village is of import.”
“Or something in it?”
“Or something within the Torrean.”
She was silent as she absorbed the words. “They can’t . . . know . . . that we’re here.”
“Not us, no.”
“Then what?”
“It is said—in the South—that the Sun Sword was crafted to be demon-bane.”
“You think they—”
He shrugged. “Understand, ATerafin, that although they were rare, the immortal races were not without their seers.”
“But—”
“I have had some experience,” he said, and the complete neutrality of his tone was chilling.
“Lord Celleriant?”
The Arianni lord was gazing at Kallandras. After a moment, he bowed; his hair draped across his left shoulder. Across his right, he now carried a Northern bow. “I will lead,” he said gravely.
She nodded. But she looked to Avandar.
He said nothing. His eyes still glittered with golden fire. A little, she thought, like the sun—the afterimage of the flames was burned into her vision for minutes, obscuring all else.
“Well, Adelos?” Alessandro kai di’Clemente said, when the strangers had disappeared into the forest’s depths.
“Tor’agar,” Ser Adelos said, inclining his head. He could not bow without dismounting.
“Reymos?”
“Tor’agar.”
“Come. Your silence is unpleasant. We are not among outsiders now. Tell me.”
The two men shared an uneasy glance. Alessandro waited for Reymos to speak. He assumed it would be Reymos, for Adelos often left the difficult words to the more quiet Toran.
Reymos ran a hand through his beard and cleared his throat. “I trust them.”
“Good. Adelos?”
“I concur.”
“But?”
“The man—the seraf—that serves the Northern woman.”
“Yes?”
He shook his head. “I would not anger him. Not if you offered me the whole of the Terrean as reward.”
Alessandro nodded again. “Come. We have two hours to travel before we arrive in Damar, and Ser Amando is not known for his patience.”
Adelos spit to one side.
The Tor’agar smiled bitterly, but said nothing; although his Toran were, measure for measure, men of the Court, they had not been born to the Court, and some of the habits of old returned to them in times of duress. Fear, they had mastered. Distaste. Exhaustion. But anger?
Perhaps, in the end, he was his father’s son. The time spent in Manelo, the time spent in the Lambertan stronghold, had given him the appearance, the carriage, of high nobility. Certainly his title and his birth spoke of both. But he found no disdain for the men upon whom his life depended.
“Adelos, tell Carvan that he is to keep all but a handful of his men sequestered in the Eastern half of Damar. Have fifty men prepare to secure the bridges when we arrive.”
Adelos nodded.
But Alessandro noticed that the Captain of his Toran had let one hand drop to the sash at his waist; it hovered, in darkness, around the slender curve of silver horn.
In the night, the woods seemed dark and devoid of life. Although no snow was upon the undergrowth, no ice upon the branches, Jewel felt Winter in the air; she shivered upon the back of the Winter King.
Lord Celleriant knew no such cold. Although he stopped frequently as he traversed the thick of trees grown tall and majestic in the fringes of the forest, he did not notice the weight of their impenetrable shadows; he was at home in this place. Still, he did not lead them into the forest’s heart; where he strayed, he kept the flats and the plains of Mancorvo to one side or the other, as if they were anchor.
She could not have done as much; the trees seemed to absorb the whole of her attention, and any glimpse she had of the cleared lands began to seem strange, drab, almost repulsive. She could not have walked in safety here.
The Green Deepings were his home, the Winter King offered, in silence. Warmth nestled in the words. And in some fashion, this forest remembers them. He need know no fear here.
No fear that is not for you, Lady.
Don’t call me that, she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.
Celleriant raised a hand. The Winter King came to a stop. Jewel noticed that the stag’s hooves were placed, with care, upon the ground; that although he moved quickly, he moved with a precision that spoke of dance. Dangerous dance.
She heard voices in the fringes of this forest.
Whispers, things that carried words just beyond the edge of her hearing.
Do not listen, the Winter King said sharply.
I’m not an idiot, she said, as sharply, although her hands gripped his fur. And anyway, I can’t hear a damn word they’re saying.
No; that wasn’t true. She could hear a voice. One voice, resolving itself now into something that tugged at memory.
The darkest of memories. Her rage.
She couldn’t help herself; she turned back.
Saw the dark trunks of trees, like an iron wall, extending into the distance for as far as the eye could see. Which was, all things considered, far indeed.
Jewel, the Winter King said quietly.
Carmenta.
She heard the Winter King’s voice. Was grateful, for the first time, for the way she heard it. Because sound was lost to the snarling, agonized accusation in a voice she hadn’t heard for half a lifetime: Carmenta’s voice. Carmenta, whose gang had once controlled the streets of the twenty-sixth holding.
You killed me, he said. She searched the darkness for him; the darkness was—for the moment—merciful.
“Yes,” she said out loud, her voice much thinner than she’d’ve liked. “I did.”
The voice was silent a moment. She had no
illusions; it would start up again, and soon.
Jewel ATerafin, Jewel Markess, Jay.
Three women, one woman. She had never lifted dagger in anger, although she’d certainly lifted hand—or pot, or whatever else happened to be in easy range. She had never played the games that the House Council immersed themselves in. Prided herself on that, but in silence, especially when Avandar was around.
But she had, just once, killed. She had given a demon the location of Carmenta’s den. And she had known, when the words left her lips, what that would mean.
No, she had known before they left. She had taken their lives in payment for Lander’s. Her den-kin. Carmenta’s gang had chased him into the labyrinth that lay beneath the sprawl of the hundred holdings in Averalaan. The maze had swallowed him whole, and she knew now that the death he suffered had been slow and terrible. They had never found his body.
“Yes,” she said again, but quietly. “I killed you.”
There was no triumph in the words.
She felt the Winter King beneath her stiff legs; he had stilled.
Not in self-defense.
No, she told him flatly. Revenge.
Ah. He was surprised. She took no pleasure from it. It had been many, many years since she had taken pleasure from the death.
But not none. Not none. She closed her eyes; the voice grew sharper.
I didn’t kill your den-kin, it said. And it spoke inside her, the words contained, as the Winter King’s words were, but made of ice.
She could have argued. Even wanted to. When she had been sixteen, she would have. And what would she have said? Yes. Yes, you did. You killed him. You forced him into the maze. You sent him straight to the kin.
It was true.
You wouldn’t shed any tears if you’d killed me, you bastard.
That was true, too.
But sometime between the then of lean streets, terrible cold, and fear of starvation, and now—even the ridiculous now of being seated upon the back of a creature that hadn’t even been one of her childhood stories—she had lost the ability to make that argument stick.
Because it made her Carmenta.
It was the only thing that she had ever done that made of her life something akin to his.
“Yes,” she said again, into the dark that was suddenly too familiar. “I killed you.”
He came out of the shadows then, her acknowledgment giving him form and shape. His face—aiee, what was left of his face—was twisted and broken.
Rage she could have accepted; it would have given her something to fight against. But all she saw was his fear and his torment. She had killed him. She had brought him to this.
“They killed us all,” he said, the words coming from broken lips. “Do you know how?”
“No.”
But it was a lie. She did know. She had, through the auspices of House Terafin, requested the reports of the magisterial guards. She had read them, their cold, precise language understating the horror of those deaths. Two bodies were beyond identification. None of the bodies were in one piece.
“We never hurt you,” he said.
“You did,” she snapped back. But it was hard. Her memories of Carmenta had been of a large, brutish giant with an ugly face, an ugly laugh, the scars of old fights adorning his jaw.
This—this Carmenta—was a child. Not a small child, never that, but a boy.
Jewel. The Winter King’s voice was deep and deceptively gentle.
What?
Do not do this.
Can you see him?
No.
Can you see anything?
The Winter King was silent. She thought he would remain silent. Didn’t want him to.
And he heard that desire. I was the mount of the Winter Queen, he said softly. And I have seen much, much worse in the Deepings. But I am some part of them now. They do not speak to me with human voices.
She turned then, stiffly, and looked ahead. Celleriant’s hair was like a sheen of winter snow. By his side, Kallandras of Senniel College walked. His steps were light, quick, elegant; his legs did not shake and his feet did not hesitate.
“Kallandras,” she whispered.
He turned. His eyes were wide, unblinking in the mask of his face. “ATerafin?”
She wanted to ask him. If he could see anything. Hear anything. But what could he hear? What did a master bard know of death?
Unbidden, another memory returned. Henden.
The song of the bards of Senniel College.
What had Kallandras of Senniel offered to the dying? What had he offered to the victims whose tortured cries were slowly destroying the morale and the spirit of Averalaan?
Death.
Simple. Merciful. Quick. But death, nonetheless.
Had she forgotten that? How?
Yet he did not seem tormented. He did not seem to be caught in conversation, to be speaking to ghosts. No; maybe they were hers. Maybe that was how the forest spoke to her.
The Winter King said nothing.
“It’s . . . nothing,” she said lamely. But before her attention left him, she saw that Lord Celleriant had reached out to catch the bard by the arm; that a slender, perfect hand, a long arm, had wrapped itself around the bard’s shoulders.
The boy had come to her side, and although his feet left no mark upon the ground, neither did hers; he kept pace with the stag. He spoke.
She wanted to lift her hands to her ears; to stop the words from reaching them. Wanted to cry out or snarl in fury because fury was easier than anything else.
But she didn’t.
“Yes,” she heard herself saying. “Yes. Tell me how you died.”
Hating him. Hating him, but not as much as she hated herself. This had been her only act of willful murder. This was the death that she could have prevented by the simple expediency of silence. But she had been so angry that she had wanted the justice of his death. An eye for an eye. Lander had been worth a hundred Carmentas, and she had never been able to face the fact that she could not protect her own. Not then.
Not now.
A hundred things came between her and this ghost.
I only did it once.
We were already at war.
I thought it was necessary. I thought we would be going back. I was protecting my own.
I’m not as bad as Haerrad—
Or less. She understood the danger here.
Yes, she said flatly. I killed you. I enjoyed it, for a while.
She curled up on the back of the Winter King, the night so cold she might as well have been in the desert.
The ghost stopped speaking. And smiled.
She wondered if the others might come back to haunt her; none did. No Duster. No Lefty, no Fisher, no Lander. Just Carmenta.
She swallowed, and said out loud, “It’s part of what I am. But I swear that it’s not all that I am. And it will never be all that I am. If you came to remind me,” she added softly, staring at the mutilated, oddly peaceful face, “I’ve been reminded. If you came to torment me, you can stand in line.”
“Lady.” Celleriant’s voice, clear as a bell.
She looked across a slender clearing and met the startling clarity of eyes that the darkness should have concealed. He bowed.
“You are . . . more, indeed, than you seem.”
“And less,” she said sadly.
She wondered what Haerrad would see, if he walked these roads.
And wondering, turned.
Avandar.
She forgot to breathe then.
Avandar Gallais stood at the very edge of her vision. He looked up, as Celleriant had done, but the fire in his eyes was guttered.
“Viandaran has walked roads darker than this,” Celleriant said quietly. But he, too, turned.
“Avandar?”
Silence.
What’s wrong with him?
The Winter King didn’t answer.
What’s wrong?
The absence of his voice was frightening.
/> “Is every single road going to be like this one?” she snarled, to no one in particular. She wrapped her hands around folds of warm fur and then tensed; her legs tightened and she braced herself for a fall.
The ground beneath her feet was harder than it looked from a distance.
The shadow of the Winter King’s great tines fell like a net at her feet; he had turned; she could feel his gaze upon her back. She expected him to try to stop her. Expected some warning, some grave discussion of the danger she faced just standing on the ground.
Nothing.
Squaring her shoulders, she began to walk toward Avandar Gallais. The distance was not great, but she was aware of it because in times of danger, he never stood more than ten feet from her back.
Fair enough; the danger wasn’t hers.
He can’t die, she thought, knowing that what she was doing was absurd. He can’t be killed.
True. All true.
There were other truths, glimpsed in dream and vision, that she didn’t want to approach. But they led to the one question that occupied her as she walked.
What could make a man want to die so badly he was willing to destroy an entire city on the off chance he’d be killed?
Ask him. The ground beneath her feet was uneven; the night was unkind. She stumbled twice, but righted herself before her hands hit the ground.
“ATerafin,” Avandar said. “Go back.”
She nodded politely; it was a habit she had struggled to form over the last few years, and although it was best suited to the Terafin Council Hall, she wasn’t above using it here.
The Winter King still said nothing, and she took that as a good sign. Or as a sign, at any rate.
She walked until she stood two feet away from Avandar, and then she stopped.
His face was about as warm as steel. Luckily, she was used to that. “Avandar,” she said quietly. “Come on.” She held out a hand, palm up.
He stared at it.
Okay; he wasn’t going to make this easy. He almost never made anything easy, though, so it didn’t come as much of a surprise. She reached out and caught his hand—
And cried out, falling back as fire lanced up her arm, consuming the length of her sleeve. Shock held her still for a moment; it was followed by anger.
The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5 Page 61
