Fionavar 1 (42 page)

"Truly?" Diarmuid asked a second time.

"All I have to do is raise my arm," Aileron said. "And I will if I must. Believe it."

Diarmuid shook his head slowly back and forth; he sighed heavily. Then:

"Coll," he said, and pitched it to carry.

"My lord Prince." The big man's voice boomed instantly from overhead. From the musicians'

gallery.

Diarmuid lifted his head, his expression tranquil, almost indifferent. "Report."

"He did do it, my lord." Coil's voice was thick with anger. He moved forward to the railing.

"He really did. There were seven men up here. Say the word and I will slay him now."

Diarmuid smiled. "That," he said, "is reassuring." Then he turned back to Aileron .and his eyes were no longer so aloof. The older brother had changed, too; he seemed to have uncoiled himself into readiness. And he broke the silence.

"I sent six," Aileron said. "Who is the seventh?"

They were all scrambling to grasp the import of this when the seventh leaped from the gallery overhead.

It was a long jump, but the dark figure was lithe and, landing, rolled instantly and was up. Five feet from Diarmuid with a dagger back to throw.

Only Aileron moved in time. With the unleashed reflexes of a pure fighter, he grabbed for the first thing that came to hand. As the assassin's dagger went back, Aileron flung the heavy object hard across the space between. It hit the intruder square in the back; the flung blade was sent awry, just awry. Enough so as not to pierce the heart it was intended for.

Diarmuid had not even moved. He stood, swaying a little, with a peculiar half-smile on his face and a jeweled dagger deep in his left shoulder. He had time, Kim saw, to murmur something very low, indistinguishable, as if to himself, before all the swords were out and the assassin was ringed by steel. Ceredur of North Keep drew back his blade to kill.

"Hold swords!" Diarmuid ordered sharply. "Hold!" Ceredur slowly lowered his weapon. The only sound in the whole great room was made by the object Aileron had flung, rolling in diminishing circles on the mosaic-inlaid floor.

It happened to be the Oak Crown of Brennin.

Diarmuid, with a frightening glint of hilarity in his face, bent to pick it up. He bore it, his footsteps echoing, to the long table in the center of the room. Setting it down, he unstoppered a decanter, using one hand only. They all watched as he poured himself a drink, quite deliberately.

Then he carried his glass slowly back towards them all.

"It is my pleasure," said Diarmuid dan Ailell, Prince of Brennin, "to propose a toast." The wide mouth smiled. There was blood dripping from his arm. "Will you all drink with me," he said, raising high the glass, "to the Dark Rose of Cathal?"

And walking forward, he lifted his other arm, with obvious pain, and removed the cap and pins she wore, so that Sharra's dark hair tumbled free.

Having Devorsh killed had been a mistake, for two reasons. First, it gave her father far too much leverage in his campaign to foist one of the lords on her. The lordlings. Leverage he had already begun to use.

Secondly, he was the wrong man.

By the time Rangat sent up its fiery hand-visible even in Cathal, though the Mountain itself was not-her own explosion of rage had metamorphosed into something else. Something quite as
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deadly, or even more so, since it was sheathed within exquisitely simulated repentance.

She had agreed that she would walk the next morning with Evien of Lagos in the gardens, and then receive two other men in the afternoon; she had been agreeing to everything.

But when the red moon rose that night, she bound up her hair, knowing her father very, very well, and in the strangely hued darkness and the haste of departure, she joined the embassy to Paras

Derval.

It was easy. Too easy, a part of her thought as they rode to Cynan; discipline was shockingly lax among the troops of the Garden Country. Still, it served her purpose now, as had the Mountain and the moon.

For whatever the larger cataclysms might mean, whatever chaos lay before them all, Sharra had her own matter to deal with first, and the falcon is a hunting bird.

At Cynan there was pandemonium. When they finally tracked down the harbor-master, he flashed a code of lights across the delta to Seresh and was quickly answered. He took them across himself, horses and all, on a wide river barge. From the familiarity of the greetings exchanged on the other side of Saeren, it was clear that rumors of quite improper intercourse between the river fortresses were true. It was increasingly evident how certain letters had gotten into Cathal.

There had been rumblings of thunder in the north as they rode to Cynan, but as they came ashore in

Seresh in the dark hours before dawn, all was still and the red moon hung low over the sea, sailing in and out of scudding clouds. All about her flowed the apprehensive murmurings of war, mingled with a desperate relief among the men of Brennin at the rain that was softly falling.

There had been a drought, she gathered.

Shalhassan's emissaries accepted, with some relief, an invitation from the garrison commander at Seresh to stay for what remained of the night. The Duke, they learned, was in Paras Derval already, and something else they learned: Ailell was dead. This morning. Word had come at sundown.

There would be a funeral and then a coronation on the morrow.

Who? Why, Prince Diarmuid, of course. The heir, you know. A little wild, the commander conceded, but a gallant Prince. There were none in Cathal to match him, he'd wager. Only a daughter for Shalhassan. What a shame, that.

She slipped from the party as it rode towards Seresh castle and, circling the town to the northeast, set out alone on the road to Paras Derval.

She reached it late in the morning. It was easy there, too, amid the hysteria of an interrupted, overcrowded festival, a dead King, and the terror of Rakoth unchained. She should, a part of her mind said, be feeling that terror, too, for as Shalhassan's heir she had an idea of what was to come, and she had seen her father's face as he looked upon the shattered ward-stone.

Shalhassan's frightened face, which never, ever showed his thought. Oh, there was terror enough to be found, but not yet.

She was on a hunt.

The doors of the palace were wide open. The funeral had so many people coming and going back and forth that Sharra was able to slip inside without trouble. She thought, briefly, of going to the tombs, but there would be too many people there, too great a press.

Fighting the first numbings of fatigue, she forced herself to clarity. They were having a coronation after the burial. They would have to; in time of war there was no space to linger.

Where? Even in

Cathal the Great Hall of Tomaz Lal was a byword. It would have to be there.

She had spent all her life in palaces. No other assassin could have navigated with such instinctive
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ease the maze of corridors and stairwells. Indeed, it was the very certainty of her bearing that precluded any challenge.

All so very easy. She found the musicians' gallery, and it was even unlocked. She could have picked the lock in any case; her brother had taught her how, years and years ago. Entering, she sat down in a dark corner and composed herself to wait. From the high shadows she could see servants below making ready glasses and decanters, trays of food, deep chairs for nobility.

It was a fine hall, she conceded, and the windows were indeed something rare and special. Larai Rigal was better, though. Nothing matched the gardens she knew so well.

The gardens she might never see again. For the first time, now that she was, unbelievably, here, and had only to wait, a tendril of fear snaked insidiously through her mind. She banished it.

Leaning forward, she gauged the leap. It was long, longer than from high branches of familiar trees, but it could be done. It would be done. And he would see her face before he died, and die knowing. Else there was no point.

A noise startled her. Pressing quickly back into her corner, she caught her breath as six archers slipped through the unlocked door and ranged themselves along the gallery. It was wide and deep;

she was not seen, though one of them was very close to her. In silence she crouched in the corner, and so learned, from their low talk, that there was more than a simple coronation to take place that day, and that there were others in that hall with designs on the life she had claimed as her own.

She had a moment to think on the nature of this returned Prince, Aileron, who could send men hither with orders to kill his only brother on command. Briefly she remembered Marlen, her own brother, whom she had loved and who was dead. Only briefly, though, because such thoughts were too soft for what she had still to do, despite this new difficulty. It had been easy to this point, she had no right to have expected no hindrance at all.

In the next moments, though, difficulty became something more, for ten men burst through the two doors of the high gallery; in pairs they came, with knives and swords drawn, and in cold, efficient silence they disarmed the archers and found her.

She had the presence of mind to keep her head down as they threw her together with the six archers. The gallery had been designed to be shadowed and torch-lit, with only the flames visible from below, so that music emanating therefrom would seem disembodied, born of fire. It was this that saved her from being exposed in the moments before the nobles of Brennin began to file in over the mosaic-inlaid floor below them.

Every man in that gallery, and the one woman, watched, absorbed, as the foreshortened figures moved to the end of the hall where stood a carved wooden throne. It was oak, she knew, and so was the crown resting on the table beside it.

Then he came forward into view from the perimeter of the room and it was clear that he had to die, because she was still, in spite of all, having trouble breathing at the sight of him. The golden hair was bright above the black of his mourning. He wore a red armband; so, she abruptly realized, did the ten men encircling her and the archers. An understanding came then and, though she fought it very hard, a sharp pleasure at his mastery. Oh, it was clear, it was clear he had to die. The broad-shouldered man with the Chancellor's seal about his neck was speaking now. Then he was interrupted once, and, more intensely, a second time. It was hard to hear, but when a dark-bearded man strode to stand in front of the throne she knew it was Aileron, the exile returned. He didn't look like Diarmuid.

"Kevin, by all the gods, I want his blood for this!" the leader of her captors hissed fiercely.

"Easy,"

a fair-haired man replied. "Listen." They all did. Diarmuid, she saw, was no longer pacing; he
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had come to stand, his posture indolent, before his brother.

"The Throne is mine," the dark Prince announced. "I will kill for it or die for it before we leave this hall." Even in the high gallery, the intensity of it reached them. There was a silence.

Raucously broken by Diarmuid's lazy applause. "God," the one called Kevin murmured. I could have told you, she thought, and then checked it brutally.

He was speaking now, something too soft to be caught, which was maddening, but Aileron's reply they all heard, and stiffened: "There are six archers in the musicians' gallery," he said, "who will kill you if I raise my hand."

Time seemed to slow impossibly. It was upon her, she knew. Words were spoken very softly down below, then more words, then: "Coll," Diarmuid said clearly, and the big man moved forward to be seen and speak, and say, as she had known he would: "There were seven men up here." It all seemed to be quite peculiarly slow; she had a great deal of time to think, to know what was about to happen, long, long it seemed, before Aileron said, "I sent six. Who is the seventh?"-and she jumped, catching them utterly by surprise, drawing her dagger even as she fell, so slowly, with so much clarity, to land and roll and rise to face her lover.

She had intended to give him an instant to recognize her; she prayed she had that much time before they killed her.

He didn't need it. His eyes were wide on hers, knowing right away, knowing probably even as she fell, and, oh, curse him forever, quite unafraid. So she threw. She had to throw, before he smiled.

It would have killed him, for she knew how to use a dagger, if something had not struck her from behind as she released.

She staggered, but kept her feet. So did he, her dagger in his left arm to the hilt, just above the red armband. And then, in a longed-for, terrifying access to what lay underneath the command and the glitter, she heard him murmur, so low no one else could possibly hear, "Both of you?"

And in that moment he was undisguised.

Only for the moment, so brief, she almost doubted it had taken place, because immediately he was smiling again, elusive, controlling. With vivid laughter in his eyes, he took the crown his brother

had thrown to save his life, and set it down. Then he poured his wine and came back to salute her extravagantly, and set free her hair so that she was revealed, and though her dagger was in his arm, it seemed that it was he who held her as a small thing in the palm of his hand, and not the other way around at all.

"Both of them!" Coll exclaimed. "They both wanted him dead, and now he has them both. Oh, by the gods, he will do it now!"

"I don't think so," said Kevin soberly. "I don't think he will."

"What?" demanded Coll, taken aback.

"Watch."

"We will treat this lady," Diarmuid was saying, "with all dignity due to her. If I am not mistaken, she comes as the vanguard of an embassy from Shalhassan of Cathal. We are honored that he sends his daughter and heir to consult with us."

It was so smoothly done that he took them all with him for a moment, standing the reality on its head.

"But," spluttered Ceredur, red-faced with indignation, "she tried to kill you!"

"She had cause," Diarmuid replied calmly.

"Will you explain, Prince Diarmuid?" It was Mabon of Rhoden. Speaking with deference, Kevin noted.