Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows (62 page)

I know
. He stepped toward her.
I never grow cold. I was… changed… for the Winter, and it is the Winter I serve. Sit with me, and you will feel the cold only when you desire it
.

Thank you
, she told him, but she was silent, waiting.

Waiting, face upturned.

Because there were some things you didn't watch from a position of comfort.

The lights that took the sky scattered the simpler light shed by stars; it was grand and glorious, a thing of sweeping breadth, of scintillating color. There, green, an emerald the mines could never contain or never release; beyond it, an opalescent white and black; there the pale gold of dream's fire.

But she was aware that no matter how beautiful these fires, no matter how compelling, how breathtaking, no matter how significant—and they were significant, and she
knew
, the instant she saw them, what they signified—they were cold as ice, or colder; they were above life and the painful loyalties that life, in and of itself, commanded.

Lord Ishavriel saw the same lights, although their truth was no revelation; it was vaguely comforting.

He had been forced to retreat well beyond the limits of the tiny Voyani encampment in the late afternoon when he had sensed the presence of binding magic. At the time, the retreat had been an act of caution, no more; he was now grateful for the warning of the earlier spell, although he was frustrated in all attempts to pinpoint its source.

But the warding done in the afternoon was not a spell that could be cast without power or blood. He could taste the miasma of the combination in the air as it lingered. The wind mocked him.

There
was
no power within these pathetic mortals; he would have bet much on it. It wounded his pride to be proved wrong, although he had not, in the end, advanced his belief in a way that could be used against him.

The boy he had been toying, with was nowhere to be found, and this, too, was annoying; the Voyani were clearly about to embark upon their voyage into the desert, and he required time to reaffirm the undercurrent of his influence. He had assumed, when the Voyani took their hasty leave of the Tor Leonne, that the trek into the vast deserts would begin immediately—and judging by the reaction of the Voyani themselves, this was not without cause. But he had been forced to linger, like any pathetic creature, in the fringes of the scrub, waiting, biding his time.

The problem with mortality, with the dealings of the merely mortal, was always time. Time became an issue. And those whose province was—no matter how distasteful—the mortal realm, were likewise trapped. Ishavriel, whose sense of awareness was in every way superior to those he now watched, was aware of its passage in excruciating detail; the lengthening of shadows cast by ugly, minimal plants, the slow movement of sun—and moon—across the barren sky, the aging of plants, the death of small insects, the movement of water beneath the plain.

But those were preferable to this: the cleansing fires.

The Lord
, he thought, for the first time in centuries,
was wise. These creatures are not entirely denuded; they have some spark that might, in the end, be a threat
.

That spark was above them all.

He thought the lights would dim and fade quickly. But they remained, raiment to night sky and pale, prickly stars, until he understood that his task was not so easy as he had first assumed. He felt not anger but a strange elation.

For it had been millennia since he had seen a fire dance of this length, this brilliance, this duration.

Indeed, the Lord was wise
, he thought, as he summoned the winds and ordered them, in as much as they could be ordered, to carry him away from the interference of the Voyani magicks.
For the desert itself was not the only guardian he set against the coming of his ancient enemies
.

There was a risk. The old powers slumbered uneasily, their dreams and nightmares the totality of their world, and one who would waken the sleeper—if he could—had to be strong indeed to withstand the force of that awakening.

Lord Ishavriel was
Kialli;
he was drawn to wild power because in its raw form, it had a beauty that the precise order of the gods and their creations could never contain.

Lord Telakar was also
Kialli
. But when the lights reigned in the skies, he watched, forgetting all other duties, all other obligations. While the shadows swallowed Isladar's rival, the light swallowed his servant; they were bound by the magic they had witnessed, in ways that defined them.

Telakar could
feel
the power. If he reached out with the merest tendril of his own, he knew he would have to fight it, or be consumed—and he was not completely certain that he would win such a battle.

It had been years since he had felt such uncertainty. Years, and the decision that defined his existence lay between that time and this.

The world unfolding before him was not the world he had been summoned to; not the world he had returned to serve. He watched it, fascinated, entranced.

The desert had been such a bitter blow. He had traversed it, edge to edge, searching; denying by action the despair, the bitterness, of loss. But his search availed nothing; the sand left no markers by which to find even the grave of the strangest beauty that had come, not from the wilderness, not from the gods, not from the Firstborn—but from the most fragile of their thinking creations.

They are lost
, he was told.

And he had come to believe it, in so short a time— because if they were not lost, these scions of inexplicable power, they would surely rule.

He repented of his lack of faith now. But with joy, with an exultant glory that in the end made a gleeful, a youthful, mockery of repentance. It was here. He felt it: the power of the Cities of Man.

It did not occur to him, until after the lights had at last bled from the sky, to wonder if Lord Isladar already knew what he had discovered this night.

In the darkness that followed the lights, two women sat alone. Two men stood waiting in the cold beyond the periphery of their vision; beyond their awareness. They waited, these two; they had become good at waiting, although for different reasons. The women were not interrupted for a long time, perhaps for the better, perhaps not; privacy and isolation are two sides of the same coin.

Serra Diora di'Marano saw, in the lights, not the glow of foreign magery, not the rim of the Sea of Sorrows, but the end, in truth, of the Festival of the Moon. And not the Festival that had passed in the Tor Leonne scant days ago, but a Festival that she had visited, time and again, in the halls of memory.

She felt, in the ice of a desert wind blowing across the lifeless sands, the warmth of her father's arms, the feel of his shoulders beneath her thighs when she, four years old and far too small, had been borne aloft that she might be those few precious feet closer to heaven.

There was no heaven in the South, but in the North, the heavens were promised to those who had led a life she could not conceive of, did not understand—but desired, as only the naive could desire a thing.

She could say goodbye a hundred times. She regretted none of them. But in the lights, in the deceptions and the honesties that came with night, she remembered only who she had been.

She knew—who better?—that all safety, even her own, even then, was illusory. That the world of a child was simply the world seen through the narrowest of slits, the vantage chosen so that the blood that flowed, flowed above or beneath their field of vision. She knew that the protection promised made of promises both a mockery and a fervent prayer.

She knew. She could hear the sound of her son's death; a simple sound. No screaming, no struggle.

The lights across the sky, the gift of the mages to the festival witnessed by a four-year-old girl, the life her father had chosen afterward, the death he had given… they came, and they went, and in the darkness, the Serra Diora di'Marano placed her hands in her lap, and bowed her perfect head, and not even the ice she felt as she breathed could force her to break that perfect posture.

She was alone.

She was waiting.

She knew how to wait. She had been raised to wait upon the whim of others forever. Here, at desert's edge, she found herself.

Margret of Arkosa was alone.

The warmth of the song of Arkosa had deserted her. She had held onto it for as long as she could—and then, when she understood what the silence entailed, held it longer, held it by the edge of a throat that was raw with the effort of making sound, rough with the demands of breath, of breathing in the desert night.

She had passed beyond thought; beyond intent. The night was not the Lady's; it was simply darkness, the vast emptiness that existed when she closed her eyes and faced the responsibility of Arkosa… alone. Natural, then, to want to fill it. Natural, to grab at anything that passed between one's fingers, to pull it in, to swallow it.

But in the end, she could hold onto
nothing
.

Evallen had taught her that.

The song failed her.

Bereft of Arkosa, but not the responsibility of it, she sat, alone, her knees beneath her chin, her arms wrapped around her shins, her body shuddering with a terrible exhaustion. She was dimly aware that someone was waiting, but she did not want to call him.

She could not afford to ask for help.

Because she knew who he was, and she knew that the darkness that waited was something she would die before she asked him to face.

But Adam came to her anyway.

She sat shivering with cold and shuddering with the fear of failure, with the absolute certainty that her mother, with these words, was gone from the .wagon that had been their truest home—home, that forbidden, laughable word,
how could she desire it
?—and he drew from hands that were now too numb to hold them, the wide brush and the slender brush that were used in the painting of the Matriarch's wagon. She murmured something, but he didn't choose to hear it, and although she should have smacked him, she was tired enough that she let
him
take the brushes that should have gone to Elena to clean and store away.

In truth, she wasn't certain where Elena was. She was dimly aware—if she concentrated—that Elena had backed away from the wagons to let her work in peace; that Nicu had trailed after her cousin like clingy shadow. She would have to talk to him about that, but he had been so helpful in the afternoon, they had worked so well together, that she could almost forget anything bad had happened between them.

And she wanted to let go of that past completely.

Which left her with Adam.

He brought her a blanket and a hat, and then when she sat in the darkness staring at them numbly, he brought her a soft, soft cloth and in silence, he wiped her cheeks. It was a good idea. The night air was cold. The ghost of her breath hung in clouds before her face, and between those clouds, Adam's hands were callused but gentle in a way that almost defined strength.

She lifted a hand, caught his, although her grip was no stronger than a baby's. She had often taken comfort from his youth, from the fact that he was so unlike the other Voyani men; the wild, earnest son of Evallen of Arkosa. She did not wish to lose that.

But he said nothing. Instead, he turned away from where she sat, in self-imposed exile, and handed her a deep bowl. Food. It was warm, but it would cool quickly.

Scent rose in stillness; cinnamon, nutmeg, milk, and the wild oats that the Voyani prized so highly as a sign of the Lady's favor. She held it between her hands, breathing deeply, and thinking of the desert nights during which she had held such a bowl at her mother's side. The daughter of the Matriarch. The daughter.

She did not want to be fed. She did not want to be fed by her baby brother. She did not want to be outside, alone, at wagon's side, waiting for the gray between night and day during which she would finally begin this first terrible voyage.

But she could not speak to deny any of these fates. When she groped for words, she would find them, but she would find the wrong ones, and they would say nothing of what she meant. That was the Arkosan way.

"Where's—where's 'Lena?" Her hands were stiff; her fingers sore; the space between the blades of her shoulders uncomfortably rigid.

He shrugged. After a moment, he spoke. "With Nicu, I think."

She nodded. "It's cold."

He looked right at her. "Yes. It's cold."

"Did you eat?"

He nodded. "You eat."

Silence. She groped for words, struggled with a spoon instead. Eating was surprisingly difficult, given how hungry she was.

Adam stood, aware of the awkwardness of the words she offered—and the words she withheld.

/
am just like my mother
, she thought bitterly. All the things withheld. All the pain given expression only by anger. But Adam was impervious to things withheld; he suspected no cruelty, no emotional manipulation; he accepted things as they were, now, and did not look often to the past or the future. And he was happy.

Why have I never been able to be you? You never cared what Momma thought, and she thought of nothing but you; I always cared, and she gave me a stranger with the Heart of Arkosa.

Matriarch's daughter
, she heard the ghost of her mother say.

A Matriarch's daughter shouldn't be so needy. Adam only has to be strong enough to bear the burden of you— and you won't be much of a burden. You have to be strong enough to bear the burden of the others.

Why? Why can't they bear their own burdens?

Her cheek remembered her mother's angry reply.

Adam waited, quietly, looking at symbols that were black in the darkness, but still discernible. He lifted a hand. His fingers hovered above painted wood, but they offered no indignity to her crude symbols; he knew that the price for touching them was high.

"You can't stay here," she told him, the spoon now ice between her lips. "It's my vigil. It's my watch. You have to join the others."