Michelle West - The Sun Sword 03 - The Shining Court (58 page)

Margret counted to three. Calmed down.

"Did I mention that I couldn't see? No? I couldn't see. I couldn't speak." She slid on her boots in the darkness. Took a deep breath. "Lady, I'm glad this isn't a story circle."

"Don't be. If it were, you wouldn't be in it for much longer."

"Thanks, Cousin.

"Let me start at the beginning." She closed her eyes. Let the edges of sleep return to her, as if it were a vast ocean and she a child, forbidden the water, playing with toes at that water's edge. "I—I can't see. I am lying someplace dark and warm, but the warmth is unnatural; the cold is waiting. But I'm comfortable with the cold, the same way I'd be comfortable with the idea of hunger just after I'd been very well fed. It's—" she hesitated a moment. "It's night."

"Yes," Yollana said softly. "It's night. During the day you would feel the heat at a distance, not the chill."

Margret nodded slowly. "You've had this dream."

"Yes. But I've never woken from it the way you did. You screamed, Margret."

"Because something was trying to let the cold in," she replied. Her eyes snapped open as she stared at the older woman's face. It was said, among the Voyani, that dreams were significant, and as Margret had been daughter to the Matriarch, she had never had cause to doubt it. She wished she could. "Do all Matriarchs have these dreams?"

"Yes," Yollana replied, "And no. This is your first?"

"No—not the first. I've dreamed of this before, but never so strongly."

"Mother's daughter," Yollana said softly. "We do not speak of the dreams among ourselves. It is enough to know that they speak to us in different ways, but they speak the same language."

The wagon was dark. The night, cold.

"I dream of it," the Havallan Matriarch continued softly, "as being wrapped in a great cocoon, one of my own making. It is the labor, not of years, but of centuries, of millennia, and I am content. I have been born. I am waiting, in the warmth of the darkness, for rebirth."

"And it is
not
the time."

"No, Margret. It is not." The old woman bowed her head.

"
That's
what I screamed."

"Yes."

"In the old tongue." She could feel the words, thick and heavy in her mouth.

"Yes."

"Because something was trying to destroy that cocoon. To force me into the world before my time. To kill me." "Yes."

"What was it? What was I dreaming of, Yollana? "Arkosa."

She started to speak. Stopped. Her face was as pale as the moon, but shadowed in the poor light. At last she said, "Is that what this is about? Is that why my mother—"

In her voice, he heard the sudden strength of certainty. And fear.

"Yes," Yollana replied starkly. Her voice hid much, much more than Margret's. Oddly enough, her face did not.

The younger woman folded at the knees; the thin, flat bed that was, among the Voyani, a luxury caught her weight with a creak.

"Yollana—"

The older woman lifted a hand; the gesture demanded silence. Margret was a young woman, the youngest—for now—of the four Matriarchs. She obeyed.

But only for a moment. Then she began a mad scramble in the darkness, opening the drawers of a large chest that hunkered against the wall, its line softened by night. Cloth went flying like heavy, formless shadow; some of it fell at Kallandras' feet.

Almost absently he bent to retrieve it, but his gaze in the scant light did not leave Margret's face. He was surprised at the very fine feel of silk against his palms; the Voyani did not often acquire such material for personal use.

But she found what she sought; she stilled suddenly, the flight of clothes ended. "Yollana?"

"Turn, Margret."

She did, again as ordered. In her hands she held the round, fat stub of a candle; wax drippings had changed what must have been cylindrical in shape before fire's touch.

The Havallan Matriarch spoke a sharp word, a soft one, a sharp word, a soft one. Then she lifted her hands, cupping weathered palms in a single motion.

Fire came, caught there in the smallest of sparks. She opened her hands and it leaped, as if for safety, to the candle's wick.

"This will protect us a moment or two, but not more."

"And not," the older woman added quietly, "if anyone with true power is intent upon listening. It is not heart's fire."

"No." Margret set the candle down. "Yollana, not long after the Festival of the Sun I met a clanswoman. She spoke to me of my mother's fate."

"That would be the Serra Teresa?"

"That would be," Margret said, her expression wry, "the Serra Teresa. But while we spoke, another came to interrupt us. He was—he was
far
too handsome. I never trust that in a man."

"I never knew you
noticed
it in a man," Elena muttered. Margret did not choose to hear her. Or perhaps she couldn't; Kallandras' hearing was second to none.

"He said, 'We have the keys to Arkosa, and we are willing to grant them to its rightful owners.' "

"You did not believe him."

"How could I? You
know
the fate of the Cities." Her voice was stark, stripped of almost everything that made her voice her own. Kallandras turned in the darkness. Elena's profile had suddenly become as stiff, as cold, as the daggers she still carried. Elena, the heir to Arkosa now that Margret was Matriarch, and without daughter. "But she told me. I should have known."

"She?"

"The blue-robed witch."

"Ah. What truth did she offer?"

"She told me that the Lord of Night… was here." Margret lifted a hand; encompassed the outer world with a sweeping, a shaking, gesture. "Who else?" she asked, almost whispering. "Who else has the keys?"

"Margret, carefully."

"No. I would see Arkosa destroyed before I would let Him open the door." She turned to face them, her face orange in the candlelight; orange and black but somehow as bright as new silver in sunlight. Faces lit from within, Kallandras thought, were filled with light, and beautiful for it; the light cut. "I didn't know it. I didn't know it until tonight."

Yollana was silent for a time. They might have been kin, these two, the older woman and the younger. Between them, the candle suddenly sputtered. A reminder.

"That," the Havallan Matriarch said, breaking the silence that bound them, "is the choice of the Matriarch; you've made it, without vows, without oaths, without bearing witness to the ancient truths. Arkosan blood is strong in you. Aie, Margret, what you've said. What you've dreamed." She lifted a hand to her forehead. Kallandras had known her long enough to know it was not a coincidence that she covered her eyes. "We cannot afford to wait for the heart to find us; we must find it, and quickly."

"Easier said than done. If it were that easy—"

"It
is
that easy, compared with what you will face. I don't know why our ancient enemies chose Arkosa. I don't even know, for fact, that it is the only family chosen. But I
know
that it will be tried first. And if it fails, we fail."

"No."

"Yes, Margret. You will have to trust an older and wiser voice in this. And if you will not trust my voice, trust this: I am the strongest of the seers the Havalla line has had since Michaela the Blind. I
know
it to be true. We are coming, now, to our final test. Fail, and the
Voyanne
means—and meant—
nothing
."

"And if we pass?"

The old woman did not reply.

"Yollana, Matriarch, if you have seen—"

"Matriarch," Kallandras said, lifting a hand and turning his head slightly to the side.

"What?" Her impatience was almost lovely; it brought an odd fire to her eyes, a vibrancy to her voice, that the high clansmen never showed.

"I believe you have visitors."

"Do I want them?"

"I don't believe," he replied, "that you have much choice." Then the door burst open and a large, bearish man with a burning torch filled its small frame.

The fear left Margret's face as the light from the torch graced it. Her shoulders became a stiff line, her lips an even stiffer one. She paused only to snuff the stout candle that stood on the flat, narrow table.

"Stavos," she said.

"Matriarch."

"He did it." Flat, flat voice. The fear was gone; the uncertainty, the dread. Replacing every hint of emotion in her voice: anger. And the pain that caused it.

The old man bowed his head until it was almost level with the impressive line of his shoulders. After a moment it became clear that that gesture was to be his answer.

"Where is he?"

"We have him."

"Here?"

"Outside the wagon."

"Take me to him."

The old man lifted his head just enough to nod. He turned and walked into the night; she followed, covering the distance between his back and the crowded wagon in two lean strides. She stopped just long enough to say a single word.

"Elena."

Her cousin sheathed the daggers in her hands—but they were there now in the fire of her eyes. She became the Matriarch's shadow as they left the wagon together.

Yollana watched her go. "I pity her," she said to the Northern bard. "For this night's work."

"For a dream, Yollana? You have had darker."

"I have had darker dreams than even her dream of the desert," the Havallan Matriarch replied, staring at the door that the passage of two women had left ajar, "but there is no dream as harsh as what she faces now."

"And that?"

Yollana turned back to him. "If we do not have family, if we cannot trust family, we are nothing. You cannot understand this."

He smiled. And he smiled without allowing the bitterness that took him by surprise to show.

His face was bloody. Nose bent at an odd angle—and bleeding— left eye beginning to swell in a way that would end with black and purple before it faded. His hair was sticky; she saw that as she approached him. He would have bent his head—he struggled to do so, to avoid her glare—but the man at his back held him up by the hair.

Two men held his arms.

"Matriarch," Stavos said.

She did not listen. Instead, she approached Nicu. Her cousin. Her favorite cousin.

Her hand moved before she could stop it; she struck him hard enough that he would have flown back a full body's length had he not been held by either arm.

"How
dare
you?"

Silence.

No one spoke. No one spoke to stop her, and she knew that no one would. Not even Carmello, Nicu's best friend. But her aunt, Donatella, appeared in night's shadow, carrying a torch she held slightly higher than anyone else's.

Light ran in trails down the older woman's face, flowing from her eyes over the sun-worn lines of her cheeks. She looked ancient, at that moment, and so weathered by wind and sun that she shouldn't have had any water left to cry with. Had she spoken at all, had she given voice to the mute plea her presence made, Margret's anger would have known no bounds; it was sharp with new pain, and new pain was a wild and restless creature.

But she didn't speak. She understood that what Margret did, this night, was not only her right but her duty. A weak Matriarch meant a weak clan.

And Margret now knew that at no time in Voyani history— save at the very foot of the
Voyanne
itself—could a weak Matriarch be less afforded.

"I forbade you the sword, Nicu. I let you keep your own counsel—against my better judgment—about its origin, but I
ordered
you to stay away from it."

He lifted his face, and beneath the damage done to it, she could see the willful, and wild, and the petulantly handsome youth that had urged her on in most of her childhood escapades. She wanted to turn away.

"And you've become so good at following orders, you expect the rest of us to fall in line?" he said under his breath.

This time, Stavos struck him before she could.

It was probably a good thing. Her hands were frozen at her sides. He was right, of course; Margret, Nicu, and Elena had spent a lifetime thinking of ways to thwart her mother and survive. When he lifted his head again—or more accurately, when it was lifted for him—new blood ran down the length of his face. He wore undyed cloth, a shirt his mother had made; its laces, undone, were sticky with blood and made a string painting across the canvas of his clothing.

"None of the games we played caused deaths." She knew better than to speak. She didn't have to justify herself to Nicu; in fact, it was entirely the wrong thing to do. She knew it would be costly. But she had never just walked away from an argument with Nicu before, no matter how stupid. No matter who had started it.

"And mine have? It's just a sword, Cousin."

"You will
be silent
until the Matriarch gives you permission to speak. She is not to be questioned here—
you
are."

Oh, Stavos
, she thought, as she saw the stone that had, just this afternoon, been his warm and expressive face.

"Is it?" She spoke as if Stavos had not, her eyes narrowing. Her arms were across her chest before she realized she'd crossed them. "Where did you get the sword, Nicu?"

He was silent.

"Nicu, you know how this will play out. In the end, if I want the answers, I'll get them. Save me the time."

He said nothing.

"Nicu, am
I
your enemy?"

At that, his eyes met hers; they were dark, and although at least one would be purpled with bruise for weeks by the look of it, they were still his eyes. It cut her.

"Nicu, answer me. Am I your enemy?"

His gaze dropped. But she saw that the question burned him. She wasn't surprised when he answered it.

"No."

"Then why all of this?"

He glanced to either side.

"Nicu, I gave these men direct orders. I gave you the same." She unlocked her folded arms and forced them to her sides, hooking her thumbs into the perfectly tied folds of her sash. Elena's gift. "Tell me. I let it go, tonight. I shouldn't have. I see that now. Tell me about the sword."

"It was—it was a gift."

"From whom?"