Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (22 page)

"You—you have this?"

"I? No. Not that mark." He glanced down to the flow of stone over his forearms. "And the mark that I was given before I was given the responsibility of this domain is, I fear, long since made inaccessible."

"But you've seen this mark before."

"Oh, yes," he said, and there was suddenly something in his voice, like a second presence; something that struck her as lightning struck the storm-heavy sky: there, blinding, gone in an instant.

She didn't ask him. She reached up for the sleeve of her dress— her ridiculous, much despised dress—and yanked it firmly down over the offending arm, the offending sigil.

But perhaps the discussion had gone far enough.

Or perhaps it had not gone as far as he desired.

He said, "I have seen it once before, on the arm of the Warlord's wife."

It should have been easy to talk to him.

Or rather, it should have been easy to turn on her heel and walk down the great hall, each step alleviating some of her anger. She started, but the voice of a man trapped in stone—
of it
now, in this hidden place—stopped her.

As did the weight of his hand on her shoulder.

She wondered how little effort it would take for him to crush that shoulder—not a pleasant thought.

But he offered her words instead of violence. "Jewel ATerafin." The whole tone of his voice, the demeanor of his carriage, had changed subtly—if stone could be subtle.

She turned; he lifted his fingers, breaking all physical contact. "What?"

"I do not… understand… your reaction. It is clear you are angry."

"That would be an understatement, but, yes, I'm angry."

"Why?"

"He is
not
my master, for one. He has
no right
to turn you into stone and keep you locked up on a pedestal until he decides you should be serving someone, for two—I'll have him serve me
himself
first. And three? We've got a very important mission and stopping off in this… in this whatever it is…" She felt as if she had been absorbing the silence of the rest of the hall, as if she could no longer speak in the face of it.

"Do not," he said, "risk yourself for the sake of your pity. I am not worth it, and it is I who will suffer for it should you choose to speak."

Luckily, silence, no matter how heavy, never lasted in the face of her curiosity. She tried not to remember curiosity's natural reward in her grandmother's stories. "And he could do something worse than he's already done?"

"I have seen far, far worse," was his soft reply.

She didn't ask.
Change the subject, Jewel
. "Where
are
we?"

"You are in
Evereve
, his home."

"Yes, well. What I meant was where is
Evereve
?"

"None of us are completely certain."

"None of
us
?"

"Yes."

"Forgive me, Aristos, but I must leave. I'll return."

"Jewel," he said, his voice the low rumble of distant, moving stone, "if you are not careful, you will return in a fashion you will not like."

It took her a moment to realize what he was saying.

"I'll worry about me, all right? You take care of yourself."

She found Avandar almost as soon as the great hall released her. And it was a release; until the moment she stepped from beneath its vaulted ceilings, its magelights, its statues—which had started, in her mind, as an homage to life and had ended as worse than mockery—she had not realized how much like a prison it had felt.

She might have taken a moment to appreciate freedom; to be glad of the fact that her feet were not attached to a pedestal, her life not burdened by that involuntary service. But she saw him instead, and the sense of exultation vanished.

In its place something uncomplicated enough—but barely—to be called anger.

He stood, vivid in blue and gold, the crown a mark across his brow, one that caught light and returned it. At his back, the mercifully less golden, gently curving wall that marked the boundary of the room she had entered. To either side, doors that led into a distance that hinted at visual splendor by casting it into half shadow.

She raised her arm as if it were a weapon. The sleeve—jeweled edges torn now—fell to her elbow and rested there like a gaudy flag.

Between them, the mark in red and gold and silver.

"You'd better have an explanation for this," she said, her voice so quiet any of her den would have ducked for cover. "And you'd better get it
off
."

He was not, had never been, part of her den; she now understood why in a way that she'd never put into words. He
wasn't
a servant. He didn't need her, not the way a servant needed a master. And more, buried beneath the half lifetime they'd spent together, the most important of the little truths: She didn't trust him.

She was certain, now, the mark twining like a serpent on the pale inside of her arm, she never would.

The rest of her den weren't servants, not like the dozens of men and women who swept and cleaned and stabled and cooked for the great House Terafin. But they served her. The understanding itself was as much a surprise as the mark.

It wasn't that they did what she said—they did, if you didn't count Carver's incessant need to sleep with anything that moved and spoke half-intelligibly—it was that they did so because they understood what the stakes were, and why the choices were made.

They stood at her back or at her side, depending on what she needed. They let her take care of the big things, and they filled in the cracks between one crisis and the next, waiting with the patience of—well, maybe that was stretching it. But they were patient.

They were hers.

Teller. He'd known. What it would cost. What she was leaving them to. He had never once questioned her. He had never once confronted her about the choices she'd made. The accusation,
you're leaving us
could sting and cut and bite because it was true—but only Jewel herself had ever made it, and only at night when sleep refused to alleviate her guilt and anxiety.

Ellerson had been like them. They'd all known it, pretty much the minute he'd corrected their poor manners and forced them to take a bath before they gathered round the dining table. There was a safety about him that in simpler times meant he was trustworthy.

In complex times? Trustworthy as well.

Morretz was.

Avandar was
not
.

As if he could hear her thoughts—and perhaps he could; it had always been rumored that some mages had that capability, although the Magisterium itself had dryly and precisely denied the accusation time and again—he spoke.

She didn't understand the language, and she recognized at least five, spoke two fluently.

She waited.

He spoke again, and again the language made no sense; it was an ugly complex of snarls and clicks. But she was certain it con-tained meaning. He lifted a hand. Pointed; she saw a light take the outline of his finger as if he were oil and it, fire.

Unfortunately, he was pointing at her.

She
knew
he wouldn't harm her. If it weren't for that instinct, the one that overrode every lesson and every experience that together comprised the wisdom she'd managed to attain, she would have leaped to the side to escape what left his hand: fire. Light.

Instead, she waited as it touched her skin. Was surprised at how warm it was, how mild and pervasive its heat.

"Jewel," he said.

She wore no crown. If it hadn't meant parading around the halls almost entirely naked, she wouldn't have worn the dress either. But the halls were cool, and the shifts and undercoat meant to be hidden between skin and jewel-stubbled silk were not proof against the temperature. She almost always chose practicality over pride.

"You didn't have any problem saying that before."

"Before?"

"When I—when I woke up. In my—in your—in that room."

"Ah. No."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "Does it matter? I have no problem now."

"If that was a spell you just cast, and I was the recipient, then
yes
, it does matter."

He turned away from her by the simple expedient of shifting his gaze. "This is my home," he told her softly, his words strangely slow. "But it was built by many hands, and some of them belonged to very talented men whom I found intriguing, and whom you, I fear, would find mad. They created works I had barely dreamed of, and even the dreams were the type that linger in shadow at the first edge of morning." His gaze rose as he spoke, eyes tracking the vault of the ceiling. "I gave them freer rein than I had realized. I set few conditions on their work.

"But understand," he said softly, "that I desired privacy above all else; a place hidden from all of the visions that even the gods possessed. To enter is… never easy. I find these visits disorienting, but I generally recover."

"Oh, good. I suppose that's more than you could say about Aristos."

He hadn't been smiling, and given the sudden narrowing of his eyes, there wasn't a chance in the hells he'd start now. "Do not meddle in what does not concern you."

"You sent him to
me
."

"I? Alas, I—previous commandments ruled his presence in your chamber. My apologies for the discomfort he may have caused."

"Discomfort?"

"Jewel."

"No, don't take that tone with me—what do you mean
discomfort
? As far as I can tell, he's a
living man
and someone's done something—
you've
done something—to turn him into a convenient block of stone!"

He did smile then. It wasn't pretty.

What he spoke next was not Weston; was so far from being Weston she didn't recognize it immediately as the language he had first spoken when she slid out of the great hall and into his vision. "It was not for my convenience that I so chose," he said, and the language
hurt
. But she understood it.

She stepped back. She knew it was the wrong thing to do, but there was suddenly something about him that spoke of death. Hers. Everyone's. She stopped before she could take the next step, and took a deep breath instead.

"It was," he said softly, "for the convenience of my faithless, cunning wife. A reminder." He turned. Turned back. "If you follow the gold-encased lights, you will find dinner served."

"I won't—"

"I suggest you eat. You will find that you are much closer to starvation than your body thinks you are." He left her standing there, clenching her fists, surrounded by tapestries in an anteroom that obviously led to the lord of the manor.

Later she would look at them; she promised herself that. She would look at them, try to glean some hint of the future from the obvious past the tapestries were made to commemorate.

7th of Scaral, 427 AA 

Tor Leonne, Annagar

"There's trouble," Benito said, nodding casually toward the gently sloping streets that led up to one of about six merchant compounds.

"What trouble?" Kallandras replied, moving heavily in the heat of the afternoon sun. Feeling the extra "weight" that he had adopted, like so much personality, as he made his way home at Benito's side. He waited; Benito, as usual, was expansive. The loud, half-friendly chatter of the merchant demanded no response. Better, it allowed for none.