The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5 (64 page)

The third time, she failed in the duty that she had silently undertaken; the old woman’s knees buckled quickly and suddenly, rounding toward the earth beyond the rise of knotted, ancient tree roots that time had exposed to air.

“Teresa,” the Matriarch said, “leave me.”

It was not a request. And the Serra Teresa was not Havallan, not a daughter who might be forgiven the crime of disobedience by the expedience of her necessity to the bloodline.

But she did not choose to hear the older Woman’s words. Instead, she shifted her arms—they ached now, with damp, with morning—around the old woman’s waist, feeling the line of tobacco satchel, of hidden pack, of dagger hilt.

“Na’tere,” the Matriarch said.

Her voice was devoid of querulous anger, of annoyance, of rage. It was devoid of almost all emotion; Yollana had closed the window that lay between them as firmly as she could.

Of all things that had happened this eve, this single act was the most disquieting.

“I have seen you through the Sea of Sorrows,” the Serra of clan Marano said, bending to the older woman’s ear. “I have stayed by your side while the Serpent of the ancient storm rode the winds above us; while the earth broke and bent beneath our feet. Will you send me away now?”

“Yes.”

“Ah. Forgive me, Matriarch. I understand the cost associated with deliberate disobedience; I understand it better than you understand it yourself, for I have lived at its whim all my life. When I chose to travel with you, when I chose to step—for as long as our roads conjoin—upon the
Voyanne
, I made my vows.”

“To whom?”

“Does it matter? If I say ‘To the Lady’ you will chide me; you will tell me that this is not the Lady’s time. And you know that I make no vow to the Lord.”

“You know me too well,” the old woman replied, but again her voice was smooth as stone wall; no cracks or fissures there, nothing to read.

A reminder, if it were needed, that Serra Teresa di’Marano relied upon what lay in the voice; that it had become a part of every conversation she had ever overheard or participated in. She felt the absence of Yollana in Yollana’s words; she was alone with her own.

“I know you well enough,” the Serra said quietly. “You fear to meet something on this road.”

“I do not fear it,” the old woman replied, snapping, coloring her words with annoyance. “I accept it as inevitable. I will meet what I meet, and if I am strong enough—” and she gazed at her broken legs, legs that could not support the whole of her weight without the humiliation of dependence, “—we will win through.”

“And if you are not strong enough?”

Silence.

“Yollana, are we lost to this path if you cannot face what is here?”

“It is my . . . hope . . . that you will make your escape,” the old woman replied, and the walls cracked suddenly as her eyes turned up, toward the Serra’s face, “while they are otherwise occupied.”

“Then you know me less well than I know you,” the Serra said.

“You have your duty.”

“I have done with duty. No, that is not true. I
have
my duty, and it is here, by the side of the Matriarch of Havalla.”

“And your niece?”

“I have given her everything that I am capable of giving; she stands in the lee of Kallandras of Senniel College, a man who speaks with the very voice of the wind.”

“He had best not speak with that voice here.”

“If it is necessary,” Teresa replied, “he will speak with all the voices he possesses.”

“And?”

“And then we will see death, and know it.”

Yollana shuddered. “I see death,” she said, and her hand reached out, caught Teresa’s, clamped tight. The gesture was involuntary, and Teresa did not deign to notice it, although she saw her fingers whiten at the strength of Yollana’s grip.

“I tried,” the old woman said weakly. “Bear witness, Na’tere, and remember: I tried.”

“I understand. I hold you responsible in no wise for my action, for my decision.” She bent, braced herself, and drew Yollana to her feet. And then, softly, she added, “That is not true. I hold you in esteem, and myself in your debt, for the road you offered me was the only road for which I am now fit, and you offered it without judgment or fear.”

“Na’tere.”

“Yollana?”

“Sing,” the old woman said quietly. “Sing a song that is meant to soothe, to speak to, the loss of men.”

She had no samisen, no Northern harp, no lute; she might find one at a word to Ramdan, a word to Na’dio, but in taking it, she would have to give over the burden that she bore.

She closed her eyes. The burden was, in some fashion, an instrument. “Yes, Yollana,” she said quietly. And she lifted her face in the gray light, and she opened her dry lips, and she wrapped her words in their most naked form of expression: song.

They heard it.

Jewel ATerafin, the child in her arms, the stag upon whom she sat in relative safety; Avandar Gallais, in the shadows cast by old trees, older memories; Kallandras of Senniel College and the brother he had chosen in the fight of flight and blade; Stavos, Ramdan, the Radann Marakas par el’Sol, and the woman they chose to guard, hovering like common cerdan.

They lifted their heads in unison; her voice commanded the attention; drew it, coaxing and cajoling in turn.

The Serra Teresa di’Marano had been called upon to sing of loss, and she understood loss in some measure; she had forsaken her home, her family, the only life for which she was suited. The decades of perfect courtly grace honed the words she chose, coloring them, lending them a depth, a gravity, a majesty, that a child’s voice could never contain.

They bowed head, these witnesses, and some felt tears sting their eyes and blur vision in the dusk of this new, this unknown world.

They were not the only listeners; not the only ones who were drawn to the song that she offered. They were, however, the only ones for whom trees, plants, the twisting roots of undergrowth, were an obstacle.

The dead came.

Teresa saw them first.

Had she been younger, had she been a different woman, she would have fallen silent, the strength of voice faltering in the wake of fear. She had seen death before; no one who made home of the High Courts could avoid it, no matter how careful their fathers or brothers chose to be. But that death was different: a thing of blood and flesh; a cessation of motion, something that could be touched, ascertained, made distant.

These dead, Yollana’s dead, were hampered by no such forms. They were pale as morning mist, solid as vision; fear gave them their only solidity.

In her arms, Yollana of the Havallan Voyani stirred; in her arms, the old woman froze. The hand that Teresa held, the hand that held her, was tight now, so rigid it seemed that life had deserted it between the start—and the end—of the song.

But the song did not end.

Three ghosts. Three quiet ghosts, moved toward it.

A young man, one barely past childhood. A man in his prime. An old man, not yet bent by years, his face pale with beard’s ghost. But all of their eyes were black and hollow, and their skin was the color of light on water, although no light pierced the trees.

They came, moving in time to the rhythm of her song, and she knew that she could not let that song falter. Not yet.

The man who wore the mockery of the prime of life raised an arm. Flesh hung from it loosely, as if it were poorly donned cloth. But it was not flesh that concerned her; his finger was part fist and part finger; he pointed at the heart of the Havallan Matriarch, and when he opened his mouth, he introduced the first discordant note into the Serra’s perfect song.

She groped for harmony. Groped, phrasing the notes and the scales, as she tried to match, to gentle, his wordless keening.

He drew blade, and the blade was dark as his eyes. From it, dripping groundward, black blood. This, she thought, was memory; the memory of the dead. She knew how he had died.

He approached. Her song slowed him; she could see that he stepped in time with the notes that she sang. Seeing this, she modulated them, slowed her words, the power that they contained.

If he did not deign to notice her in any other way, he slowed.

The old man joined him, eyes as dark, hands darker. He, too, carried a dagger, night’s dagger. It was not, she thought, the Lady’s work.

Last came the boy. He was of an age with Adam, the Arkosan Matriarch’s brother, but there was none of his inherent sweetness in this ghostly face; there was something akin to malice, something akin to rage, and the youngest face wore it most openly of the three.

Yollana
, Teresa thought, very much afraid.
What did you do here
?

She did not ask. Could not afford to; the break in the words would give them room and time to maneuver. No knowledge of the dead was necessary; she knew what that would mean. Could see it clearly in eyes that were no longer—if they had ever been—mortal.

The Serra Diora di’Marano lifted her head. As she did, her shoulders dropped; her posture became the posture of the wife of Tyrs. She did not rise, for she had not taken shelter upon the ground, fearing the earth here, fearing the tangle of roots, the touch of these trees.

But she was not unarmed: She, too sang.

Who better than she to sing a song of loss?

Since her sojourn, her brief peace, in the towers of Arkosa, the dead had slept more quietly; her memories had stilled and gentled. She heard, in Margret’s voice, the voice of the most beloved of her wives, and she was almost content. She had discovered, in the Sea of Sorrows, that the dead were not dead; that the wind did not contain them; that there existed, beyond the moment of a terrible, painful end, the possibility of another life.

That had brought her peace, in the only measure that she had known since the night of the slaughter.

Hard, to set that peace aside.

But she heard Ona Teresa’s song, and she understood that the moment for peace had passed. She reached for memory, and memory came.

She sang of her own failure. She sang of her own betrayal. She sang of the terrible, terrible cost to her loved and her dead, and in that song, she made her first plea for their forgiveness since she had trod the desert sands at the side of the Matriarch.

They did not hear her, of course; they had never heard her.

But there were creatures upon the road who were more—or less—fortunate.

The Radann par el’Sol was speaking. She lifted a hand, an imperious hand, stemming the tide of his scant words. Although she knew grace—how could she not, who was the Flower of the Dominion—she knew also that it cost, would cost, time. And time was the thing she did not have.

They did not have.

She began to walk. At her back, to one side, followed Ramdan; beside her, shoulder to shoulder, although his were broader and higher, the Radann par el’Sol. Stavos, blade drawn, walked before them, silent; he offered no interruption to the song she now sang.

They wound their way toward Serra Teresa.

Toward the dead.

Last, Kallandras of Senniel College lifted his head; pale curls, edges darkened by the dyes he had used to better disguise himself among the clans, shook a moment as he tested the wind.

Lord Celleriant, blade drawn, stood at his side. “Be wary,” he said softly. “I have drawn blade, but it is not, I fear, a weapon against what we face here.”

“What do we face?”

“Memory,” the Arianni lord said quietly. “Mortal memory.”

“If I recall my history correctly, mortal memory is a poor container for events; it lacks the steel of the Arianni, the fire of the
Kialli
.”

“One day, I will ask you where you learned that history,” Celleriant said quietly. “And as payment against that day, I will offer you my own experience. You are right: my memory is sharper and cleaner than yours—than any of yours—and it is far, far longer. But the passions of the Arianni, the passions of those who were once
Allasiani
, run to few things, and they are living passions. Few events in our lives have the significance of a simple birth or a simple death in yours; we are not moved by the mundane.”

“This is hardly mundane.”

“No? Three men died here, and those deaths define the path upon which we now stand.”

“Memory of death—”

“Not their memory,” Celleriant said softly, “but hers.” He lifted his head. “The Cities of Man,” he said quietly, “contained such ghosts as these. They were a punishment, and a monument, to the power of those to whom they had lost. In the cities of this diminished world, you build gargoyles and winged creatures, you decorate your buildings with the silence of stone.

“Such art, such work, was considered lesser by the Tors of the ancient Cities. What they built, what they contained, was meant to invoke no sense of grandeur; it was meant to invoke fear. It offered warning. And it offered death to the unwary, the unpowerful.”

Kallandras nodded quietly. “I will sing,” he said quietly.

Celleriant nodded, understanding the truth that had not yet been spoken: song was their best weapon.