Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King (13 page)

He didn't make it easy, though, the bastard. He grabbed both her hands by the wrists and pulled her suddenly close, yanking her hard enough that she lost the flat of her feet, and the protection of the wall at her back.

If he tries to kiss me
, she thought, although her breathing quickened,
I'm going to bite his tongue so badly even Alowan won't be able to save it
. "Rymark, treating me like you treat the household servants is not likely to endear you to me." Icy, keep it icy.

He only laughed. "The girl who says no to the end. In the North, my dear, they would respect this provincialism. You are not in the North now. Do you think, when the Terafin dies, that you will have no need of support? Or would you see Haerrad raise his little army and slaughter half the House to bring it to heel?"

"Not even Haerrad would be that stupid."

"You don't speak with conviction. Jewel."

No, because she didn't have it. Haerrad, gods curse him to the Hells with no further lifetimes of atonement, was, she suspected, much like the ancestral ATerafin it was forbidden to name in his open desire for power and his ruthlessness in his quest to obtain it. That The Terafin had not chosen to have him killed was something that she did not—not quite—understand, legality aside. Instead, to neutralize him, she'd made him part of the Council, and answerable to it. "What do you want?"

"You know it, little seer. I want your support in the Council. When the discussion of the heir is raised—and it will be, for The Terafin believes it is time—I want your vote of confidence. Or I want you to abstain from a vote at all." His grip on her wrists tightened as he smiled again. "But perhaps I am not only interested in the business of politics: there are many more things in this life."

He bent, again, and she'd had enough. Brought her knee up, suddenly, and found that it was hampered by folds of a too heavy cloak. He laughed, caught the back of her head in one hand, twisting his fingers into her hair. "Lady," he said, his lips a hair's breadth from her own.

And then he cried out in pain: his hands were scoured by a brilliant, brief light, a light that burned blue and then orange before his grip was broken. He turned at once, all pretext of charm— and it seemed to Jewel that there was little enough of it—gone. "You!"

Jewel made haste to stumble around him out of the alcove that had proved such a poor choice of hiding place. She had to scrape skin against stone to do it, but she didn't wait for Rymark to move; he wasn't likely to just to be convenient. She won free quickly, as if the opportunity was going to be a very, very short one.

And there, arms hanging deceptively free at his sides, was the man she least wanted to see: Avandar. It couldn't have been anyone else, of course. It had to be him. He did her the grace of not speaking his mind, although she could see it in the momentary narrowing of his eyes; he never criticized her in any company save that of her den, where he, like only one other outsider in the last fifteen years, had made a half-place for himself by his dogged persistence.

And the last man, Ellerson, she often wondered about; the hurt of losing him had dimmed with time. Dimmed the same way the loss of her father had, even though her father had not chosen his death the way Ellerson had chosen his departure.

"Avandar," Rymark said coldly. "This does not concern you."

Avandar was a domicis. It was not his right to reply. But he folded his arms and said softly, "It seems you are not only im-perceptive but graceless. I am not a man with your reputation for prowling—"

"Avandar, you had a choice." It was as close as Rymark ever came to open anger. "You made it. You
serve
, and you serve her. If she does not cry for help, do not seek to interfere in what you do not understand."

Morretz, The Terafin's domicis, would have been deaf to Rymark ATerafin; in fact, he usually was, which Jewel found quietly amusing and Rymark found irritating.

Avandar showed her again—as he usually did—why he was not Morretz. "The function of a domicis is not mere service, ATerafin—and I rather thought you knew that when you applied for the services of one."

Jewel was shocked.
Oh, gods
, she thought,
he's done it now
.

Rymark paled and then purpled. "That is strictly under the confidence of the guild order," he said, and Jewel thought a whole lake would freeze at the chill in his voice if one were available. "And you,
domicis
, have broken that confidence by your words tonight. I will speak with the guild," he added.

Avandar now offered a stony silence in return for the truth that Rymark had spoken; he managed to maintain that silence until Rymark turned on his heel and strode out of sight.

"Avandar," she said, the concern in her words genuine.

"It is not—quite—a disruption of guild confidence," he said, his lips nearly white. "Rymark's original application came through Terafin, and as it happens, those documents are accessible to us if they still exist. I will argue that the breach and the knowledge occurred at
this
end."

"But I've never—"

"You will." He shrugged.

She thought about it for a minute. Thought hard. "I think I can find them. Gabriel's got to have them filed neatly somewhere. An application of that nature is recorded; refusal would be recorded as well, for future reference in dealings with the guild.

"Of course there's a very small chance that Gabriel didn't keep track of the application. Remember, Rymark's his blood son."

"And that," Avandar said quietly, "is an insult to both the right-kin, Gabriel, and all those who have become, through dint of effort, ATerafin."

It stung when he was right, and he was right more often than she cared to admit. Of course, given his disposition and his unbearable arrogance, once was more than she cared to admit, so she supposed it wasn't that hard. He'd not yet faulted her for her appearance, and she didn't want to deal with yet another criticism, so she said, hoping to distract him, "How in the Hells did you know that he'd made that application? He doesn't have a domicis."

"Now
that
would be breaking guild confidence."

"How convenient. I suppose this means you're not going to tell me."

"You suppose correctly."

"It was
you
, wasn't it? You were offered his service."

Avandar said, voice low with warning, "Jewel."

She could not imagine how two men—Morretz, who served The Terafin, and Avandar, who served her—could be so different. He was dark and mercurial in temperament; Morretz was patience and stability defined. She knew by Avandar's tone that she was right, and that he would not elucidate further. Ever. Fifteen years had taught her when to fight and when to give up. She gave up. "Were you following me?"

"Yes."

"Well. I guess this time it wasn't such a bad idea."

"How graceful of you to acknowledge it."

Her cheeks reddened. Jewel hated when they did that.

"You go to the shrine." It wasn't a question.

She nodded, self-conscious.

"I will escort you as far as the path will allow." His offer was grudging; he loathed the exclusion. But The Terafin and the ATerafin who sought the shrine sought it in isolation.

If the offer was grudging, the acceptance was not less so. Jewel turned and began to walk, her cheeks burning with the embarrassment of the required rescue, her anger directed at Rymark for proving to her, yet again, how necessary Avandar had become to her life in Terafin.

He had not always been so.

Vision.

Torchlight in the darkness. Blue, blue night, scattered across with stars twisting the raiment of moonlight into light, the haze of the heavens. Against that backdrop, leaves and fronds, black— the silhouettes of the puppet theater in the Southern holdings, moving at the hand of the wind, whispering their muted night whisper.

Sight.

Terafin burning. Sands where the gates might be, shadows lapping at the grasses and the flat stones that lead to the shrines. She walked in their center, taking careful steps. Afraid to look left, to look right; afraid that her talent would take her eyes again, show her things she did not wish to see.

Gods, but the visions hadn't invaded her dreams this strongly since—

Since the last time they'd been searching for the Shining City. Unbidden, the ghostly vision of a young woman with dark hair and darker eyes smiled at her from across the way—but the smile was dangerous, half-threatening. Duster. Death.

She had walked this path so many times she could follow it without looking, but she looked anyway, for comfort's sake. There, the Mother's shrine, a flat-roofed presence, surrounded artfully by flowers and plants whose colors could be seen in the torchlight of the rings on each of the four pillars. She bowed at the sight of its murky marble, but did not stop to make an offering; she might have once, but this was not a matter for the Mother.

Nor was it a matter for Reymaris, and that grieved her, because Jewel Markess—the girl she had been before Terafin had both saved and swallowed her life—had believed in that justice, without reservation; the reservations were ones she had learned as ATerafin, and having once learned them, she discovered them to be like spiderwebs, and she the fly; she could not turn back.

Still, she held what she could of her old beliefs. Bowed a moment at the plaque that graced his presence on the grounds of Terafin, wondering how angered he might be at the end of the succession. Wondering if, indeed, there would be a succession war.

War. Although she did not speak the word aloud, it echoed, lingering in air and on the tip of her tongue as if she'd shouted it. Her arms stiffened a moment; she forced them to relax and then remembered that the bundle she was pressing more and more tightly to her chest was a cloak, and proof against this unseasonally cool evening. Hands shaking, she donned it, and then drew it tight, treating it as if it were more blanket than apparel.

To Cormaris' shrine she went; if one followed the path set out by a long-dead architect, there was no choice—it took you to this shrine, this lit and guiding place, and made you stop there, for the path surrounded the shrine in a circular ring.

Cormaris, the god of wisdom, was worshiped, if privately, by more of the older Terafins than she could count, and not all of them the men who made of their lives political tools and weapons. His presence secured more in the way of offerings than the Mother and Reymaris combined, although it was the Mother's name that was most often spoken across the Empire's breadth.

Just' behind the gleam of the eagle swooping there was an offering bowl, hidden by the height of the plaque so as not to be too garish, too obvious—but obvious nonetheless to any who knew to come here. Jewel bowed, and as she shifted into a momentary obeisance, light caught her eyes; the torches were flickering across shining brass. The rod, and the ring, each caught beneath the ea-gle's claws, in bright relief. The ruler and the servant. The ruled and the master.

For most of House Terafin, the path ended here.

But Jewel ATerafin had not come this way to seek the wisdom of Cormaris, blessed though that might be. She took a breath as she rose, expelled it and drew a deeper one, and then brushed her straggling curls out of her eyes.

The path went one shrine farther; there were four shrines in the gardens of Terafin.

It was to the shrine of Terafin, that round-domed, marble structure beneath which lay the altar upon which so many dreams and oaths were offered, that Jewel ATerafin repaired in a darkness that she had not once thought to alleviate by lamplight or torchlight of her own.

She came, bearing the fading reality of a dream that only a seer could know, and climbed the concentric marble circles that made stairs and a plateau upon which the simple, smooth stone of the Terafin altar sat.

There, in the light of lamps that were never allowed to dim completely, she knelt before the stone itself and began to pray. And if she leaned her forehead into the stone itself, more for support and comfort than to offer respect, no one was there who would comment on it.

And yet, someone did. .

"Terafin has no strength to give you. If you have strength, offer it and it will be accepted. But the ways have begun to open; there is nothing to take from the altar once you have placed your life there."

She withdrew at once, as if the cool stone's touch had marked her, burned her. As if she could withdraw what she had, in honesty and truth, offered years ago. Taking a deep breath, she rose, unfolding one knee and then the other, feeling her weight upon both. Standing seemed hard.

"Not so hard as it will, Jewel Markess."

She recognized the voice, and she did not; she kept her back to the light, away from the night and the night's solitary visitor. "It's been a long time since I've been called that."

"Yes."

She heard no sound of motion, nothing at all, but she
knew
that the spirit of Terafin, the spirit of The Founder, had drifted closer and closer to her exposed back. She waited without turning.

"Why are you using that name?"

"Because, Jewel, it
is
who you are. The years have given you wisdom, of a type, but they have not changed your nature. You are ATerafin in times of peace."

She turned then, bleakly, her dark eyes the color of night, but wider. And what she saw stilled her completely. For the last time she had spoken alone with the spirit of the Founder, he had worn the face and flesh of one of the Terafin's Chosen, Torvan ATerafin.

Tonight, he wore the guise of someone so different she drew breath: a woman whose face defined Terafin, hair paled by time's touch, but body still slender. Bent, she thought, and oddly fragile, although not until he came to her thus had she recognized any sign of the weakness of age; The Terafin was the signal example of age's strength.

Almost grim, she smiled. "You realize," she said lightly, "that she'd probably kill you if she saw you."

His smile was not The Terafin's smile, although it was The Terafin's lips that framed it. "There are worse fates. I speak from experience." The smile dimmed. "And, although she will not thank me for it, I will tell you now that not only has she seen me in this guise, but she understands what it presages, for her House, that I appear thus to her. Do you?"