Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (24 page)

He almost stepped aside. Here, in the Tor Leonne, there was no crime in such a decision. In the lands to the far North, the laws of the Empire and his own position there—master bard, unofficial servant to the Kings and the Queens of the land—would have forced his hand. But here power ruled, and the women, these two Voyani women, now held its balance on the edge of their short, curved swords. It was not Kallandras' duty to intervene should he choose to turn a blind eye.

We are all changed by the facades we have chosen.

Hearing them, the lone Tyrian cerdan looked up. His eyes widened; his sword, slack by his side, came up at once. He found his feet, and he moved—but he did not move away from them; rather he moved to stand before the bodies of his fallen comrades. They were alive, then.

The red-haired woman reached him first; she swung easily, swung low, feinting. He was off-balance; a man who, in Kallandras' opinion, had never been properly trained to fight the fight he was handed; he was cerdan of the city, and the high clans, and the high clans did not fight women. Her second swing drove him back a step; her third swing did not. Behind him, unconscious, his men hovered, and if they were intemperate, if they interrupted him, if they did not—quite—follow the orders that he had set them, they were his men. That much was obvious from his actions alone.

Loyalty. Ah.

Over time, loyalty had become a trait that Kallandras could not quite ignore. This was not his fight, but he had already intervened, albeit for his own purposes.

He stepped into the roadway now, his hands empty.

"Elena," he said.

She heard him; she stepped back a moment, sword still at play. Her companion chose to join her, changing the odds. Two to one.

The man looked toward Kallandras as well, his sword, as theirs, unbloodied.

"Elena, this man, his life is not worth your anger. You have won the victory you desire. The children are safe; you will be expected to join them."

Her eyes were brown-green, flashing with sunlight, anger, the last vestiges of fear as she faced him, her gaze flickering between him and the cerdan who stood so close to death. The sun was high, harsh; it cast her shadow down in a squat mockery of natural grace.

"Who are you to tell me what to do?"

"I? I am a friend," Kallandras replied, "and I have walked the
Voyanne
in my own way these many years. Slaughter him, and what will you achieve? His concern was for his fallen—as yours would be. Look at him."

"And if I want his death?" she replied, her knuckles ivory beneath the sun's bronze, her cheeks flushed.

Beside her, the other Voyani woman waited.

"If you want it, Elena of Arkosa, you will have it. But in the end, if the Dominion is to stand against the Lord of Night, the Tyrians and the Voyani who are, at heart, loyal or honorable men will be needed." He shrugged. "The three who lie felled are not dead. There are other ways."

"And you, so-called friend of the Voyani, what will you do if I choose to take his life? We are owed a life, at least that!"

"Make your decision," he replied, folding his arms almost casually beneath the fullness of the sun. "And I, too, will make mine. We live by our judgments, Elena, and we live, at times, to regret them."

The sword shook. Oh, the sword shook.

Had this… man… been Annagarian, had he been clan, she would have ignored him; he carried no sword. But his hair was golden, and his eyes were pale, and his skin was like nothing she had seen in her life. Tall, too slender to be a warrior, he seemed a thing of night at the height of day. A whisper of conscience, a messenger of the Lady.

Night pooled in her heart.

She met the eyes of the cerdan. "You were hunting our children," she said softly, her voice as sharp as her sword.

"We were hunting only the women," he replied.

"You take our children as serafs where you can find them."

"You take
our
children as serafs where you can find them."

Stung, she started to reply; her sword shifted.

"Truth," the stranger said to them both. "But this battle is over. You have defended your children, and you," he said, turning slightly so that he might fully face the cerdan, "have defended your men. The Lord has judged you. It is not the province of a warrior to seek the helpless to prove his strength against."

He bridled like a high-spirited horse.

But his sword came down.

"Elena," the soft-spoken stranger said quietly.

She did not sheathe her sword. Did not take her eyes off the clansmen, and that was wise. The clans were steeped in treachery and deceit from birth.

"Elena?" Ilia's voice.

She badly wanted Ilia's advice; the women often turned to each other for consensus. But not here, not now; such indecision was just another weakness she couldn't afford.
Aiee, Margret
—
how have you lived like this for all of your life
? It was possibly the first time she hadn't envied her cousin her position as heir to the Matriarch.

"Leave him," she said curtly. Her face hardened. "And you?" she said to the stranger.

"I will follow, with your permission; without it, I will return to my work."

She snorted; tossed her hair back because she'd forgotten it was pulled so tightly off her face. "I'd give Voyani song to know just what that work is."

His smile was light, mysterious, dark. "I'd listen," he said softly.

She turned, and then she heard it: the shout.

"OVER THERE!"

The sun was so damned hot and bright she could hope, for just a minute, that she was befuddled enough to mistake the voice. Teeth that she thought couldn't be clamped any tighter almost drove themselves through the opposite jaw as she gripped her sword and turned.

Beyond her, beyond the sole standing cerdan and the three men over whom he kept watch, she saw something that made her jaw slacken.

A man red with blood, slick with it, face and hands and chest splattered with things that were far too solid. Behind him, behind him others, five, six, seven—all cut and bleeding in the same way. Her face paled.

And the stranger said quietly—so quietly that for the first time she wondered how it was his voice actually carried—"It is not his blood."

Nicu of the Arkosa Voyani came down the street at a wild run, bucking like a mad stallion, his sword the only thing about him more obviously bloody than he.

"We've come to rescue you, Elena!" he shouted. "Stand aside!" His sword came up in a terrible arc.

"Nicu, no!" she cried back, lifting both empty hand and sword hand in denial. For it seemed to her, suddenly, that a cloud had caught the sun, banishing its harsh glare; seemed to her that she could see—just for a second—clearly. And she knew, she knew that what he was about to do was not only wrong, but dangerous. To him. To them all.

"NICU, NO!"

He stopped in the street; the men at his heels ran into him. Were it not for the fact they were sticky with blood—and their blood at least had been shed in the shedding of their enemy's blood—it would have seemed a comic thing, an act to make small children laugh. They were gleeful in the manner that small children sometimes are, and such a glee, in such guise, was hideous and wrong.

But it was fact; the bard did not argue with fact.

Nor did he argue with what he heard at the heart of Elena of Arkosa's voice. He knew who she was, of course, although the knowledge was recent. He knew what her position in the line Arkosa must be. And he knew that the Arkosans, the Havallans, the Lyserrans, and the Corronans all boasted their share of the seer's taint.

He carried no sword; it was true.

But he carried his weapons.

Left hand, then right, he touched their hilts, waiting.

The man called Nicu frowned.

"By what right do you tell me to stop? These men are hunting my kin during the Lady's Festival. They hunt my women, my children."

"
Your
women?
Your
children?" Her sword was a flash, much like her eyes. She was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

And she was correcting him again, in front of the men he had led to
victory
through the streets of the Tor Leonne. The anger warred with desire, but it was not such an even battle as all that; with Elena, desire was a part of his growing anger.

"I am the leader of the protectors; I was appointed by the Matriarch. The decision is
mine
, Elena!"

He heard the decision in Nicu's raw voice. Heard more, besides. But he was not ready to be the Wind's Voice; not yet. He made a noisy display of pulling his weapons out of their hidden sheaths. There were two. Glinting in the sunlight, they caught all eyes, even Nicu's. Even Elena's.

In the North, they were considered extremely unusual weapons. Very, very few were trained in their use. They had, of course, short blades, and the Northerners preferred the straight reach of the long double edge. But it was not the blades that made them unique. It was the guard; for each side of the guard came up almost two thirds of the length of the blade itself, and each tip was pointed. Honed.

In the North, brows would have been raised. And magisterial guards called, in loud and echoing voices, as they were often called when weapons were drawn.

In the South, brows were raised, but voices stilled.

These weapons were the Lady's weapons. The weapons of her dark face.

If he could have ordered the cerdan to flee, he would have, but he knew that the man would run no more than half the length of road before the duty to his companions drew him, shuddering, back.

"This fight," he said, his voice as reasonable, as soft as it had been when it reached Elena through her anger, "is unnecessary. It is not an act of the Lord—your numbers are too great to make it anything but a slaughter—and it is not an act of the Lady's, who seeks no open battle."

"These men," Nicu said, his voice shaking with anger and righteousness, "will serve the Lord of
Night
! Who are you to tell us how to—"

"Mete out death in the Lady's service?"

The silence was the silence of the sun's height. Kallandras stepped forward, moving silently, slowly, a single man in the sun. He was slender, not overly tall; were it not for the weapons he carried, his demeanor would have robbed him of all threat.

But threat or no, his intent was fulfilled; he came to stand between Nicu of the Arkosans and the lone Tyrian cerdan. Thinking it strange, after all these years, to interfere in such a basic way. To save the children had been easy; to save the women, simple. But to save the man was fraught with difficulty. Kallandras was of the brotherhood of the Lady, and there were no shadows here.

"Nicu," Elena said, her voice softening. "Please. They will send others—"

"Not a single one of
these
," Nicu said, pitching his words so they traveled beyond the stranger who stood in his way, "has been capable of stopping
us
. Not today!"

Elena's voice was not a voice which took to softness well. "And because of your slaughter, they've started to hunt
us
in earnest. Because you have tried to play Tyrian games, they enmesh us in Tyrian tactics!"