Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows Page 18

  "Might I suggest that it would be more constructive if you asked for help from someone who was actually present? Absentee leaders, like gods, rarely offer advice of use."

  No, Finch thought, as she lifted her head. You're wrong. The movement was slow, not because her head was particularly heavy, but because she recognized that voice; had thought she would never hear it again, and had—just as Jay had done, although Jay would've killed anyone who said it—missed it. A lot. And she didn't want to break the spell of familiarity by seeing who had actually spoken.

  But whoever it was, he was in her kitchen—in Jay's kitchen—and he wasn't allowed in without permission. She took a deep breath, snapped to attention.

  And met the eyes of Ellerson, the domicis.

  She had never been a particularly quiet person; that was Teller's job. But she knew when to keep her mouth shut until the words had settled into something intelligible.

  "Ellerson?"

  He raised a brow, his features as stiff and formal as a perfect suit. "Indeed," he said. His hair was grayer; the lines of his face deeper. But his posture was so perfect she felt like a dull slouch, and she found herself lifting her shoulders into what she hoped was a better line.

  "Sometimes the gods do listen."

  His smile was shallow, but it was there. "You had best hope that that is not the case; the gods are known to exact a steep price for their intervention, and it is my intent to teach you how to avoid the inevitable results of such poor negotiations."

  "Good." She lifted her hands and found that they were, sadly, still shaking. Clutching the invitation in them, she said, "Start with this, okay?"

  He stepped to the desk, bowed slightly, and then took what she offered.

  "You—why are you—did you talk to Morretz? Did he tell you what—"

  "I did, indeed, speak with Morretz."

  "What did he say? Did he tell you—"

  "He is not your domicis. He is not my servant. Guild law, however, requires that he speak on your behalf should you choose, for some reason, to appoint an agent rather than venturing into the guild itself. He let me know how things have changed in the last sixteen years. And yes, Finch," he added, in a voice that was at once gentle and formal, "I know full well who Elonne ATerafin is.

  "You will forgive me," he said at last, "if I choose to see this as an opportunity?"

  "Only if you're going instead of me."

  The smile deepened and then vanished.

  "No. It would be unspeakably rude to send me in your place, an insult. There may be a time in the future in which you wish to offer such an insult—but when doing so, you must offer that insult deliberately, you must offer an insult you can survive, and you must make certain that it is the vanguard of a larger political action."

  Just that. As if he had never been gone.

  And as if he had never been gone, his expression wrinkled into lines of distaste—ones which he reserved for the privacy of quarters, and never offered in public. She remembered that clearly. "Your clothing," he said at last. "I hope that Avandar sees that Jewel does not attire herself in such a… fashion."

  She stood, carefully pushing the chair away from the kitchen table. She wanted to hug this man, but she knew she couldn't. Instead, she rushed past him, containing the urge; she burst out into the hall, the kitchen doors swinging wildly, the names of her den-mates passing from her lips in an increasingly loud demand for attention.

  Behind the wildly swinging doors, Ellerson of the domicis looked down at the uncreased invitation in his hand, his expression unreadable.

  Then he looked up at the sound of the names: Teller, Jester, Carver, Angel, Arann.

  He stood alone, in the kitchen, before a table that was both familiar and foreign, while the slanted light of the afternoon grazed his legs.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  22nd of Scaral 427 AA

  House Kalakar grounds

  Colors were a funny thing.

  The analytical part of Duarte's mind, the part that had misled him in his youth into believing that the magi were his calling, looked at the unit he had built out of men and women considered gallows fodder. They had seen the slaughter of two thirds of their number without tears, although the wounds they had taken there had never healed.

  That was what this new war had been about for the older Ospreys. Time had not gentled them. It had, at most, rounded the edges of corners, as if they were blocks of new-cut stone, stained with salt and the ill use of weather. Not a single one of them, with the exception of Sanderton, had a family they cared to name; they had given their lives to the Ospreys. The Ospreys defined them. And The Kalakar, curse her, curse her, curse her, knew. But in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, she had chosen to absent herself from address, an absentee patrician. Duarte had never considered her a coward.

  He was not entirely certain that her decision had been an act of cowardice now; she understood her soldiers—even the ones under Duarte. Even the Ospreys.

  "You have been offered the choice of remaining with the House Guard. Each and every one of you has distinguished yourself with honorable service; the House acknowledges this. No, The Kalakar acknowledges this."

  "By retiring our colors?" Fiara shouted, her voice stained with a rage that he was certain also stained her cheeks. Hard to tell; the sky itself was pink and deepening into the purple that would become blue-black; his favorite color. He had chosen the early evening as the time to give the address; the bars and taverns would be open, and the window between knowledge and action for his Ospreys—or whatever it was they would become—as small as possible. He could not therefore see her face clearly without the aid of magical enhancement to his vision.

  Ah, and perhaps he had chosen the early evening as the appropriate time for reasons of his own.

  "We are a third of our former number," he said, angry at anyone who made this job more difficult than it already was, no matter—no matter—how justified their own anger. "We are, and have been since the war, below the minimum number necessary to maintain a unit within the House Guard."

  "She never let us recruit!"

  "Fiara—"

  Rescue came from an unlooked for place.

  "You know why she's doing this." Alexis stood forward, on the raised platform that had been erected in a hurry in the Osprey's training ground.

  Duarte would have preferred a medium in which he could control the passage of sound; he expected that things would be said about The Kalakar in this meeting that would not bear repeating. But the trees, tall and tended, lent the soldiery a sweep of shadow; the grass or what remained of it after the singeing of fire and magery that had always been a part of their exercises, gave them a battlefield on which to stand. As Ospreys, one last time.

  Silence.

  "You know," Alexis said, her voice knife sharp, "you don't have any choice. She gave us our colors and our unit because we'd won the war for them, and they could keep their hands spit and polish and shiny while we bled and we died. They paid us what we were due.

  "But that was during peacetime. This is war. We're soldiers. That's what we're paid for. You've been given your orders. Quit whining."

  "We're Ospreys, damn you!" Fiara countered. Fiara, stupid, fierce, beautiful in defiance in a way that she otherwise never was.

  Yes, the trees shadowed them, but there was no shelter there; Duarte had provided that for as long as he could, and now the scales were off their eyes. This was the reality they had always known: the swift boot. The kick in the teeth.

  The flag was flying. Black bird of prey against a background of House colors mercifully muted by the fall of dusk. They were right: the Osprey was what had always counted.

  Soon, Duarte thought, the music would start. Cook would play. There would be no singing, but the notes, dirgelike, would be song enough by which to lay colors to rest. He was surprised at how much pain the reality could cause; he had thought—more fool he—that he had made his peace with it in The Kalakar's quarters, when she had given
him her oblique orders, made her oblique offer.

  "You're all AKalakar," Alexis continued, doing for him what he had become accustomed to in war: fulfilling the role of adjutant; speaking when he could not, for a moment, speak, and the words needed saying.

  He would pay for it; that was the nature of her gifts. She would turn on him later, tongue sharp as her steel, eyes flashing with contempt and anger and the pain that she held back in order to soothe theirs. All of it had to go somewhere; he knew who the target would be. But here, now, he would marvel at the gift for what it was.

  "AKalakar. She didn't take that from you, and she could have. She would have no choice if she could hear half of what you're saying now. Less. She knows what we did for her. You think you're dirt? There are people out there now who are less," her hands swung, now wildly, but precisely, to the gates at her back. "We all know 'em. People who would have sold us into slavery to get what we earned. The Kalakar's name behind us."

  "Well, what if we don't give a shit about the name?"

  "Then you're as much a fool as everyone always said you were!"

  Saying what he could not say because he was their captain, and she was… family.

  Kiriel turned quietly to Auralis. She touched him, gently, on the arm between elbow and shoulder. It was a signal of sorts. Jewel called it shorthand because she knew how to write. She said it was like the signals that had been used by the den—ones that Kiriel had learned in days, and would never forget.

  Kiriel had learned how to read; Isladar had pressed that upon her as if it were a weapon. But her writing had never become the equal of her reading, and both lagged behind the skill that had defined her early years: the sword. So she understood the concept of shorthand poorly. Not as poorly as she understood the concept of friendship; it was like ally, except there was trust beneath it, and trust…

  But she was capable of learning this, this language that wasn't language. She touched his arm.

  He failed to notice.

  She wasn't sure what this meant, and after a moment, Fiara's angry voice the only sound worthy of note, she touched him again. Spoke his name, like an enchantment, to call him back from the place he had gone to.

  He looked down at her. "What?"

  "I don't understand."

  "What don't you understand?"

  "They are… retiring… the colors?"

  He didn't answer.

  Hard to know whether to speak or to leave things be; she spoke after a moment, the desire to understand greater than the desire to be… politic.

  Politic was a word Duarte had taught her.

  She'd learned it because he was lord here; she could not understand how it was that so many of the Ospreys failed to do the same.

  "How will you ever be powerful if you can't learn from those who have power?"

  "If someone big attacks me with a sword right now, what happens to them?"

  Kiriel shrugged. She had learned, with time, that Auralis' pointless questions served their purpose and had learned not to interrupt him. It was a lesson she had never been required to learn with Alexis. She had never interrupted the woman who claimed Duarte. If she thought about it for a moment, she realized that she'd never interrupted Fiara; on the rare occasion that Mirialyn ACormaris had had cause to address them, she had likewise known that it would be unwise to break the flow of her words.

  She regularly interrupted the men and wondered if this was significant.

  "They die."

  "So?" She had also learned that arguing the validity of the finer points of his torturously slow explanations—for instance pointing out that his outcome did not take into account the relative power of said attacker—only served to lengthen the time until her enlightenment, such as it was, and besides, older instincts prevailed. One did not question another's claim to competence unless one was willing to prove how little it was worth. And she was strangely unwilling to kill this man.

  "Kiriel?"

  "Yes?"

  "Did you even hear what I said?"

  "No."

  "I said yes. They're retiring the colors."

  She frowned. "What does this mean?"

  He closed his eyes. "To you? Nothing. Nothing."

  "But it does."

  "If it meant anything at all to you, you wouldn't have asked. You wouldn't have needed to."

  "But it does," she said, touching him for emphasis.

  "Kiriel—please. Not now."

  "Why?"

  His expression paused the way it did when he was between anger and vulnerability. She felt it: a sharp, terrible sweetness that passed so quickly she forgot about his pain. No; she forgot that it was his; forgot that it was anything other than a way to satisfy a hunger. The sensation was like pain. The pain was exquisite.

  She cried out when the ring took it away, replacing it with a fire that was far more mundane.

  "Kiriel?"

  She did not look at him; she could not. Not yet, not when he had almost been… Food.

  "You're right," she said, her voice sliding uncomfortably over the syllables as she struggled to master the first, the most important lesson: show no weakness. "It's not important to me."

  He watched her for a moment and the lovely expression that had arrested all thought dissipated.

  It was replaced by an expression that she understood better, one that she could easily associate with this man's face. "Then why did you say it was?"

  "Because," she replied, clutching her hand as he somehow failed to notice the smell of singed flesh, "it's important to you."

  "And that's important? Why?"

  "I… don't know. Maybe because whenever you're angry you fight poorly."

  His expression soured. She was always surprised when she found it could get worse. "I don't fight any worse."

  "You do."

  "I don't."

  "You do. Your swing," she said, pointing to his sheathed sword, "goes wild. You only think of attack; you open up your lower left side; you extend yourself too far. If you paid attention, you'd fight a bit more conservatively, but… you don't pay attention to your own pain."

  "Oh, and you do?" He laughed. "You of all people?" His smile turned, as hers had often done, onto an edge that was thin and dark. It was why she was comfortable with Auralis. With many of the Ospreys. This was what she was used to.

  And used to ignoring, when it suited her.

  "Yes. I do. I don't let it control me. I don't show it. But I feel pain. And I pay attention to what I feel; pain exists for a reason."

  Pain exists for a reason, little Kiriel. Your own pain serves as a warning, and it is a warning that you must not share with others. But heed it. When I cut you, and you bleed, there is a shock that pierces skin… here. Here. The bleeding is not heavy; the wound will not kill. But if I cut you deeply, if you are foolish enough to remain where I might cut you deeply—and you are not—the pain would be exquisite, and the blood would tell the brief story of your life.

  It is interesting in those moments. Some people understand what the end of that story will be; some don't. Some fear that end, even if it is not the story being told by the fall of their blood, the depth of their wound. I have watched humans die countless times, and it is often fascinating; even the

  weakest will surprise you in the fashion with which they choose to acknowledge the truth of their death.

  And the Kialli? She had asked him.

  The Kialli? His stare was cool. You change the subject, little one.

  Do I? Hand on blade, hers; she could remember the feel of the supple leather in the curve of her palm even at the remove of years. There are some things that cannot be taken away, cannot be given away.

  We are not mortal, Kiriel. You are. I speak of the death of mortals.

  But you are not eternal, she had answered. You live, somehow, and you die.

  You are developing a dragon's smile. Be certain, little one, that when you use it, you have the breath behind it to give it strength; it will almost certainly be nece
ssary, for in the Shining Court, where everyone knows of the weakness of your birth, the taint of your mortality, false bravado is certain to attract challengers.

  He had not answered her, not directly. But she had been persistent then, as she was now.

  Do the Kialli feel no pain?

  He had laughed. Lord Isladar. The sound of his laughter, like the edge of his momentary claws or the matte feel of leather against palm, was hers to keep even in his absence.

  All we feel is pain. Why else would we have chosen to be the reavers of the mortal dead?

  And he had ended the lesson.

  But the lesson itself had taken root in the darkness of thought and memory, and like all of his lessons, flowered unexpectedly in difficult places.

  Her eyes were stranger's eyes. He had seen the look before. Not often, and not recently, but a different man could spend the rest of a life trying to forget a glimpse of that expression; could wake up wrapped in the knowledge of it, nightmare's grip so visceral he couldn't hear over heartbeat and labored breath.

  They didn't speak of her past. Here, all pasts were insignificant; it was the present and the future that counted. Ospreys, he thought bitterly. We were Ospreys before we were whatever the past made of us. We could leave it all behind.

  The flag was flying. Or it should have been. But it was a hot, still day, and the colors, just like any common fabric, clung to the pole as if afraid to fall.

  She was right. It was just cloth.

  As long as they paid him, he served under it, but it was all the same to him.

  Something caught his eye. Something hurt his throat. He wondered idly if the summer sickness had managed to find him. But although he was good at lying to himself, Auralis AKalakar was not a miracle worker.

  The bitch was retiring the colors they had laid across every gods-cursed coffin and every gods-cursed Osprey grave in the Southern valleys. Two thirds of their number, butchered, screaming or silent as they took their sweet time getting to Mandaros' Hall. Men who had died at his back, had lived up to the oaths that real battle should have destroyed, taking the swords that were meant for him. She was destroying what they had built without having the courage to face them.