Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  These thoughts drew a flush back to her cheeks and made her breath come faster. He watched her bosom rising and falling and placed this vision of her in the shared space of their minds, that she might see and understand how her need drove his; that she might know the depth of his regard, that while he claimed her body for his own, he would cherish her love more.

  Alyneri sat for a moment with her lips parted, seeing the vision of herself framed in his eyes. Then she reached for him, even as he reached for her.

  Thought became fluid as their hands found one another. Somehow they found their feet. His fingers deftly unworked the hooks of her gown, hers the buttons of his coat. He broke their kiss to pull his shirt over his head but let it fall slowly as he gazed upon her delicate shift—hardly more than a slip of sheer silk edged in lace, yet it cupped her breasts and slid languidly across her hips, sketching shadows beneath her navel.

  Trell withdrew the pins from her hair and arranged the heavy locks as they fell until they teased long at her waist. He walked a circle then, admiring her with a subtle half-smile while she stood confidently beneath his inspection. Then he came up behind her and drew her close to feel him rise against her.

  “Are you…” she whispered breathlessly, leaning back against him, “do you…”

  But he knew she didn’t know how to ask him what he truly desired, or if he thought she could fulfill it.

  Trell pressed a kiss to her neck. “Everything that’s happened to me, Alyneri—all I’ve endured….I would do it all again to have this night with you.”

  She knew he meant it. He made sure that was clear in his thoughts.

  “Trell…”

  He claimed her neck and then her mouth, and soon after, the rest of her, and as daybreak claimed the world and he took her yet again, Trell reaffirmed for himself that every word he’d said was true.

  Eight

  “The truest power there is in this universe is understanding. It is the greatest force for change.”

  –Björn van Gelderan, Fifth Vestal of Alorin

  All the next day, Tanis walked the lonesome Hallovian moors, keeping company with the gorse and the wind and his own troubled thoughts. He tried to push images of the Healers he’d seen Pelas torturing from his mind—tried not to imagine his mother in the same situation, or recall too clearly the images he’d caught from Pelas’s thoughts—but the constant wind blew ill envisionings into his head.

  He was reeling, both from the turbulence that came with the knowledge of what Pelas had done, and from sensitivity to Pelas’s acute torment on the other end of their binding. Several times that day Pelas had contacted him, mind to mind, to convey again his sorrow at having harmed Tanis by harming Isabel. He’d begged Tanis to let him explain better of his acts. But Tanis didn’t think he could handle knowing more details.

  He felt Pelas’s dismay as if it were his own. He perceived the man’s deep contrition. He didn’t even really blame him, for he understood how Pelas had suffered beneath Darshan’s compulsion—and he knew from his own experience that a Malorin’athgul’s compulsion was impossible to deny.

  But could he forgive him?

  How could he forgive him?

  After thinking himself in circles for the better part of the day, Tanis finally determined that he needed more information before he could reach any conclusion about what to do, or even decide how he really felt about what Pelas had done. Yet the very idea of listening while Pelas told him more details filled him with dread. He saw then only one path.

  Sunset was painting the clouds in shades of violet-rose when Tanis finally found his way back to the cliffs. Sitting down near the crumbling edge, he hugged his knees, gazed out at the dark line where sea met sky, and tried to regain some sense of equilibrium.

  Finally, still not ready to face more truth but too emotionally exhausted to endure the indecision any longer, Tanis closed his eyes and cast his thoughts along a different binding…an older bond. His mind seemed to travel so far…reaching out across an immense distance, but then…

  Tanis, love of my heart.

  Mother—

  Abruptly his thoughts just started pouring out—a turmoil of confusion, horror, disbelief, even a desperate desire to reject the truth, all of it in a flood of wordless emotion.

  He felt her startled silence. Then an ethereal sigh, redolent of regret. I see he told you.

  Tanis was struggling so desperately to find a way to reconcile what Pelas had done with his own sense of rightness. Hearing her admission gave him an overwhelming urge to distance himself from both Pelas and his mother. He didn’t know what he’d do, perhaps just leave—bindings be damned—and flee with Nadia to elsewhere in the realm, just anywhere he wouldn’t have to deal with this.

  Oh, my dearest son, I’m so sorry…

  His mother must’ve sensed the dismay that gripped him, for all at once

  the world around Tanis shifted, altered—

  —He found himself standing on a high balcony overlooking an immense white city. The sight was so startling and at the same time so awe-inspiring that he almost forgot his troubles in lieu of the view. Part of its majesty was how real it seemed. He had to be dreaming, yet his mind felt awake—alert even—perhaps more so than it had just a heartbeat before.

  “Tanis.”

  He started at the sound of her voice—so real, so close, as if truly hearing it with his own ears instead of mind to mind—and turned.

  His mother stood in the portal between two open doors. She wore an aqua robe of heavy silk, and her dark hair hung in an elegant plait across one shoulder. She looked exactly as she had in his lessons. As he met her gaze for the first time since babyhood, he saw his own eyes mirrored in the shape of hers.

  For a heartbeat’s pause, Tanis clung to the railing at his back. Then he launched himself across the space between them and threw his arms around his mother.

  She caught her breath in a joyous inhale. One hand cradled the back of his head while the other clutched him close. “Oh, my son…my dear, dear boy.” She smelled of jasmine and sunlight, just as he remembered.

  Though in truth they remained realms away, his mother felt solid and warm in his arms. And being in her arms…Tanis was smiling so wide his face was starting to ache.

  Isabel pressed a kiss to his cheek and released him from her arms, but only to take him by the shoulders, that she might better look upon his face. “You’ve grown so tall.” Her gaze reflected admiration and a mother’s pride. “So like your father.”

  He met her colorless eyes, feeling a wondrous, welling joy that quite overshadowed all that had been troubling him. Though they’d spoken across their bond, this was their first meeting in the flesh—or as close as they could manage—since he’d left her arms as a toddler. Yet standing there, bathed in the warmth of his mother’s adoration, Tanis felt as though they’d never been a day apart.

  He looked around again. “Where have you brought me?”

  “Dreamscape.” Her eyes strayed out across the city, and a softness came to her expression. “Niyadbakir, T’khendar. My home.” She looked back to him and cupped his cheek tenderly with one hand.

  Then her smile faded, her brow furrowed. “I regret that he had to tell you,” she stroked his cheek with her thumb, “but how could he not? You two are bound; there can be no secrets between you.” Tanis glanced away at this, to which she added, “And you wouldn’t want there to be.”

  “No.” Then he flinched at what it would mean, knowing all that Pelas knew.

  “Oh, Tanis…” She ran her hand lovingly down his arm. “Say what you would to me. I’ll answer what I can.”

  Tanis pressed a palm to one eye. He wanted to know, but he didn’t want to know. He had to know yet couldn’t bear the knowing, and he certainly didn’t want to ask—

  She stroked his arm. “I’m unsure of the source of your turmoil. Is it fear for my welfare, or do you feel betrayed by him? What is it that bothers you most?”

  In their Dreamscape meeting
, she was regarding him steadily, but through their binding, the truthreader in her was permeating his thoughts, seeking the answers to her questions—answers he wasn’t even sure of himself.

  After a moment she caught her breath. “It cannot be…surely you’re not concerned for my dignity?”

  Tanis’s eyes flew to hers. “He cut you! You were bound and—” Tanis pushed both palms to his temples, wishing he could sear the images out of his head.

  His mother stroked his arm again. “I understand why you would have such feelings, and you’re right to feel as you do—of course you would. You’re my son, my champion. But here I now stand, Tanis,” Isabel said gently then. “What harm remains that you need worry for?” When he didn’t answer, she drew in her breath and let it out slowly. “Would you fashion me as his victim? Who is aided by doing so?”

  Tanis dropped his hands and looked at her.

  She arched an inquiring brow. “Pelas is not helped, for he becomes the tormentor. I am not helped—indeed, I’m made helpless by the description. Who gains from your pity? Your own sense of dignity, perhaps?”

  He frowned at this.

  She gave him a telling look, if still a gentle one. “A wielder acts from a place of causation—always, in every sense, with every step along the path. I don’t see myself as a victim of Pelas’s acts, Tanis; I beg you, don’t do it in my stead.”

  “But…” Tanis exhaled a forceful breath. Pelas had harmed her. Surely there should be consequences.

  Yet even in having the thought, Tanis realized that Pelas had been enduring consequences throughout—he’d been made to do things he hated and regretted, yet without any ability to withhold himself. He’d even taken steps to sequester himself on a remote Hallovian shore, rather than bring more harm he felt incapable of preventing. For centuries, he’d conceived of himself as a monster. The personal cost had been high.

  Isabel took up his hand again, and with a look of invitation, drew him towards the railing. “This game is bigger than you or me, Tanis, bigger than any of our personal desires. Bigger even than our personal concepts of justice. The game isn’t fair in many regards. It is not kind to individuals, and it’s certainly not kind to love.”

  She stopped at the railing and laid her hands on the marble balustrade. His mother radiated calm—no matter the emotions she might’ve been personally experiencing in that moment, and Tanis suspected they were powerful and intense—outwardly she projected only a sense of serenity.

  Isabel glanced to him, and her expression resolved into a tragic sort of smile. “Your uncle has lived three hundred years without the woman he loves. I have done the same; your father has died three times for this game and now lives anew, but as yet without the full knowledge he’ll need to survive it.”

  She didn’t tell him what name and face his father wore now, and he didn’t ask. It was not the time to go hunting down that path.

  Isabel sighed and shook her head. “I would’ve kept you free of the game if I could have.”

  Tanis thought of that sense of duty that had initially bound him to Pelas, and the newer feeling that pushed or pulled against him when he seemed to set his will in the wrong direction. “Somehow…” he lifted his eyes to meet her gaze, “I think I’ve always been bound to the game.”

  His mother exhaled a slow breath by way of agreement. “Our paths are entwined, yours and mine, even as mine and your father’s are, and mine and your uncle’s within the fabric of the tapestry.”

  She looked back out across the sparkling city, and a faint furrow came to her brow. “I couldn’t have freed Pelas from Darshan’s compulsion if you hadn’t begun the process of freeing his mind, Tanis. Pelas would not now be pledged to a path except for what we together have done. And we have all three of us made sacrifices to gain the place we stand now.”

  She turned him a look of deep concern, yet her eyes were luminous with adoration. She lifted a hand and stroked his cheek. “I think that when it comes to Pelas, you are the last person who needs an explanation of why those sacrifices were worthwhile.”

  Tanis dropped his gaze, for of course, this was true.

  “And he loves you.” She placed her hand on his arm and squeezed it gently. “When we two were together in Darshan’s tower, all was darkness in Pelas’s world except the memories he kept of you. Seeing the likeness of you in the shape of my eyes was the thing that allowed him to overcome the melancholia that had claimed him and ultimately to overcome Darshan’s compulsion.”

  Tanis looked desperately to her. “But he harmed you—”

  “Tanis, that was my path.” She took him by both arms and made him face her. “I chose to walk it, even as you must choose to walk yours.”

  When Tanis still stared at her with the faint shadow of horror behind his eyes, his mother exhaled a measured breath and loosened the sash at her waist. She slipped one shoulder free of her robe and revealed the pattern etched there. The scar lines were thin, barely more raised than a tattoo, but the way the silver lines glowed…they might’ve been traced in mercury.

  “Do you see, Tanis love?” She searched his gaze with a deep meaning in the conflict marring her brow. “There is a truth here that must be acknowledged.”

  Tanis swallowed and shifted his eyes back to hers, but he quickly looked away again, for the truth she was sharing with him across the binding made him feel wobbly inside. He couldn’t grasp all that she was showing him—pieces of past visions, future possibilities still gauzy and insubstantial—so he let her visions seek their own place in his thoughts until such time as the light of understanding might illuminate them.

  “He didn’t know, you know.” His mother ducked her head to capture his attention and pulled her robe back up over her shoulder. “When Pelas was drawing his patterns in my flesh, he didn’t know I was your mother.”

  Tanis’s eyes flew back to hers.

  She acknowledged the question in his gaze. “Yes, I could’ve told him. He would’ve stopped at once if I had. He would probably have freed me immediately and bound himself before harming me again. But then where would we be?” She searched his eyes with her own. “Tanis…I knew my path was leading me to Pelas, and I knew that I would somehow be given the opportunity to bind him to our game, but I didn’t know the circumstances under which that chance would appear…only that it would require sacrificing something very important to me.”

  She took his hand in hers and ran her thumb across his knuckles. “Along my path, I made choices. Some of those choices were…” she frowned slightly, seemed to search for the right word, “unusual. When I saw that those choices had led me to the circumstances under which Pelas and I met…I’ll admit I was concerned. But I trusted that I would somehow find my way through. I believed I could still bring about the effect I intended to achieve—application of the First Law—even though I didn’t see how I could possibly help him at first.”

  Isabel released his hand and turned and laid both of hers on the railing. She gazed out over the vast, glowing city. “If I had made my personal safety more important than my path…if I’d told Pelas who I was to make him stop hurting me, where would we be now?”

  Tanis lifted a tormented gaze to her.

  “I was not a victim in my interaction with Pelas, my son. If anything, I manipulated him to the best of my skill. I made no move to stray from the path until I saw that my postulated outcome would be achieved. It is the First Law, and an unbreakable one.”

  Tanis exhaled a slow breath and nodded once. “Yes, mother.” This was a lesson he would never forget.

  Looking him over then, she exhaled a sigh and drew him into her arms again. Holding him close, she murmured at his ear, “Whatever Pelas has done to violate the Balance, whatever forces he’s set in motion against himself as a result, we need not be the agents of its retribution.”

  Tanis heard much more in this statement than he understood, similar to the way the zanthyr spoke in dualities, conveying multiple layers of meaning. He hugged his mother closer and reste
d his chin on her shoulder. “I understand.”

  “To love and forgive despite anything that is done to us is the truest expression of greatness, my dearest son. It is your choice now how to treat Pelas, your choice what you will feel towards him…but I would like to see this greatness in you.” She blessed him with a smile then, and a caress of her fingers along his cheek—

  —And he was back on the cliff, hugging his knees and staring out across a mercuric sea while the moon rose slowly in the east.

  Feeling somewhat relieved if not exactly resolved, Tanis made his way back to the manor. While he dressed for dinner, he considered everything his mother had told him.

  The feeling of her presence remained heady in his mind. He wondered if she’d stayed with him somehow, for he felt an almost gentle prodding away from thoughts of Pelas to ruminate instead on the other truths, ones she’d hinted at as much as ones she’d given him bluntly.

  ‘…your father has died three times for this game…’

  Three times? Tanis exhaled a slow breath while donning a clean tunic. No wonder the zanthyr had said his father wasn’t as he remembered him.

  The lad had long suspected that Arion had died, though the zanthyr had never said so exactly, but something in Phaedor’s gaze when he’d spoken of Arion, some shadowed duality in his words…Tanis had known.

  During his first exchange with his mother across their binding, Isabel had intimated that Tanis and his father would know each other again one day. Tanis was eagerly anticipating that reunion.

  Through reading his father’s journals, Tanis had grown to admire him immensely. Indeed, Arion’s philosophies had shaped the way Tanis worked the lifeforce. Yet even more valuable than any one technique was learning how Arion thought. Tanis found himself easily following the same logical paths his father had walked down, finding connections between ideas and action in a way he wasn’t sure he could have explained to anyone, yet which Arion had been able to do with alacrity. Arion hadn’t just been strong in his talent, he’d been brilliant in its execution.