The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5 (13 page)

“Yes.” Jevri el’Sol gave no sign of offense. “Only one raised as a seraf in the High Courts. You must have lived on the plains,” he added, “among the free clansmen. The Courts would consider such work as this beneath notice, beneath contempt.”

“You are free of the . . . duties . . . of the High Court.”

“Indeed. And of that contempt.”

“Then why bother at all?”

“I find comfort in it. It gives me something to do with my hands—other than wring them, or fight.” He met Marakas’ gaze, and to Marakas’ surprise, a smile tugged at the corner of lips and eyes; humor. He had not expected to find it, not here.

“We all find comfort in the rituals of our childhood, and food, our manner of taking sustenance, is among the earliest of our learned rituals, our pleasures and our hungers. I do not like to eat as if I were a wild creature, or worse, a boorish cerdan.

“I was raised to serve. It was not clear, not immediately, what form that service would take, and I was watched carefully and tested for many things. I was not a large boy; I did not grow into my size; I was therefore not considered suitable for the kai Lamberto. But I had an eye for arrangement—flowers, food, fabric—that led me, in the end, to the service of the Serra. In the harem, all life starts, all paths begin.

“I watched Fredero as a child. I watch him now. And he does not deny me the simple pleasures of a life lived with order, with decorum, with simplicity. He does, however, deny me the right to impose that life on any of the Radann save himself.” Jevri el’Sol smiled again. “But I am stubborn. I educate those who are able to learn.

“And that, of course, is not what you asked me.”

Marakas was bewildered.

“You wear your heart upon your face,” Jevri said, with mild disapproval. “It is a habit you would do best to lose. Masks are your only freedom, Radann el’Sol; learn to wear them with grace and subtlety. The Lady will offer you what privacy you choose to take; the Lady’s Festival will offer you more. Use these wisely.

“Very well. You have asked what Sol’dan is, and I should not be surprised. You have been with the Radann for a very brief time.”

“I have been with the Radann for the better part of a year. And I have learned how to wield a sword, that is all.”

“Be grateful. When I joined, I was taught how to better wield a broom; the Lord suffers no slaves to serve him, but the cleaning must still be done. I digress.

“A year is a short time, the better part of a year, even shorter. When you have lived this life for a decade, when you have lived it for two, come to me and tell me how long you’ve been at it.”

“You have not been here for nearly that long.”

“I see that Fredero has chosen to trust you. No, I have not. But experience is an able teacher. If it were not, you would sit at some other man’s knees and offer him your questions.

“There are no Tyran among the Radann. No Toran. No cerdan, no serafs. There is the Hand of God, and among the men who comprise that Hand, only one is kai. The four who remain are par. We are men, after all; we have need of our brothers.”

Marakas met the older man’s eyes and held them, thinking them darker than he remembered, and brighter. The Lady was in them; he had learned the signs among his travels in service to the Voyani.

And this man knew, as Marakas did, that kinship counted for nothing among serafs. Not in the Lord’s eyes.

He said, stiffly, a rebuke to the fates that were absent from this conversation, “It is said we are equal in the eyes of God.”

“It is said. But it is not believed, even among the men who serve that Lord. We make our allies, we make our enemies, we fight our battles. We choose—on rare occasions—to trust, to take the risk of trusting. There is no blood to bind us, no blood to tie us or hinder us. We are men.”

“And yet you serve.”

“Yes.” He was silent for a moment. “But it was my choice, if any man can be said to have choice in this life, beneath the gaze of this Lord. All choices of import, in the end, have been out of my hands.

“But perhaps they are of import because of the lack of choice, the struggle; those things that are easily within our grasp are not things we prize.” He shrugged; his shoulders dipped and lifted, as if he were sloughing weight.

“What is a Sol’dan?”

“Sol’dan. It is an honor, but it is not a rank. It is not a title. You cannot claim it as a symbol of power, and if I judge correctly, there is a risk of death or injury if you choose to accept. But it is tangible.”

“Is it service?”

“It is, in a fashion. But it is different. Is ‘brother’ a form of service? No. But to be one brings the responsibilities and duties all families know.

“Agree to stand as his Sol’dan, and you agree to serve as only Tyran serve their Tyrs; you agree to defend his cause as if he were your brother. He has chosen challenge beneath the open sky; you must accept that, and abide by the rules of the governance of men. But should the man so challenged seek to gain by treachery what he cannot gain by the grace of the Lord, you are given leave to intervene.”

“That is . . . that is all?”

Jevri el’Sol stopped speaking. His hands fell into his lap as he straightened his shoulders. “Yes,” he said quietly. “But you are young, Radann. If you can ask that, you are young.”

CHAPTER FOUR

27th of Misteral, 427 AA

Sea of Sorrows

A
T THE height of day, Marakas par el’Sol once again built his shelter. He laid
Verragar
by his side and removed the mask that protected his face from the winds that swept out of the desert, carrying with it sand, heat, the story of a thousand deaths. The desert was fierce this day.

An omen.

He could see where horses had passed before him; their tracks were not shadowed by the heavy ridges of wheels in the dry ground. Alesso di’Marente’s men, and in number. He wondered when they had passed; how long it would be before they passed this way again. The patrol was overlarge to be perfunctory, and that was disquieting; of all places that one watched for danger, the Sea was not one.

Or perhaps it was not a danger that armies could be threatened by, had they the sense to remain beyond its grasp. Marakas had taken precautions when traversing the shores of the Sea of Sorrows, but they had been perfunctory; had there been battle, or death, within miles, he would have known it by the movement of carrion birds. The sky was bereft of their shadows. Even they chose to shelter when the sun was high.

And the sun was at its height, its glory a radiant death that disturbed the air, distorted the vision, transformed what was left of unwary sight. The Lord’s dominion was undisputed; if men served him, they served with the full knowledge of his ascendance.

Men did not make oaths of note to women; the oaths that were offered women were private. No wooden medallions bore the marks of raised and lowered sword; no blood was shed. Even in marriage, the oaths a
man
made were made to his wife’s fathers and brothers.

So Marakas had been brought to the desert by an oath that he had not made.

Evallen of Arkosa had died a terrible death, and the wind’s voice was her voice; he could not escape it. For he alone had known her as the Matriarch of her kin, the mother of her people, and it grieved him to deprive a whole people of the woman whose guidance was crucial at a time of such darkness.

Thus, the power of the Matriarch.

Thus, the power of Fredero kai el’Sol.

Marakas was not a young man. He had not been young when the Radann had accepted his service. But he had been a different man. The winds had etched lines in his face, and in the fires of his enemy, he had been reborn, come new into the world with a sword, hairless as an infant.

He had seen only one enemy. It was a blessing unlooked for, to possess such perfect clarity of vision; to be free of the conflicts and the conscience of any imperative other than that war.

But the weeks had curbed and clouded that vision; as each day passed, he felt the weight of humanity, with its incumbent frailty, return. He accepted it.

With it came memory.

The kai di’Manelo and his men met Fredero kai el’Sol at the heart of the village. The villagers had been instructed to bear witness, and the command of such men as these could never safely be ignored, but although they were present, they were ill at ease. Words had been offered, between one kai and another; words had been sent on the back of the swiftest horse present.

But those words would not reach their destination before judgment was made.

Darran di’Sambali and his wife, now adorned with a veil that hid her face from the open view of sun and man, were pushed forward by the oldest of the women present; they stood beneath a hastily constructed canopy. Marakas desired nothing more than to object; from prior experience, he knew that Darran should be resting as far away from the man who had healed him as it was possible to be.

But the kai el’Sol had spoken.

Jevri attended them, boy and girl; Jevri made clear—to the wife, not the husband—that the boy’s welfare and sanity depended upon her ability to keep him still. Jevri was wise, and although Marakas had acknowledged that fact from the first day they had met, he found it a surprise and a blessing to be so often reacquainted with the knowledge.

As for himself, he was given leave to draw his sword.

Jevri’s expression, when the metal cleared the scabbard, was as dire a criticism as the finely-mannered servitor was capable of offering. “If it were not for the gravity of the situation, Radann, I would insist that you use mine. But it must be your sword.”

Marakas nodded, shamed for the first time by the quality of the blade itself. “Will it be enough?”

“It is not by the blade that you will be judged. It is by your actions. And you will weather that judgment. You have chosen.”

“I . . . do not know, Jevri. I know only that I—that I wish to see Fredero kai el’Sol’s vision of justice.”

“It is not as witness that you stand,” Jevri replied quietly. “That robe . . . that crest . . . did you embroider it yourself?”

Marakas’ frown was a quick thing, there and gone like the flash of light in summer storm. “I was not taught the arts of embroidery,” he replied stiffly.

“No,” the old man answered, “of course not. Forgive me; it is not a skill taught to free men.” The frown deepened as he added, “As the evidence shows. Go now; he is waiting.”

As if, Marakas thought, he never doubted what my decision would be.

He turned again to Jevri. “He understands my gift,” he said softly. “Does he seek to use it?”

“What man would not seek to use the shield that is offered him? He is no fool; of course he seeks to use it. But think on this while you stand beneath the open sky: He takes little that is offered, for he understands the burden of debt. If he receives a service from you, he must be prepared to offer in return a service of no lesser merit.”

“He is kai el’Sol. I am merely Radann.”

“For now, Marakas. For now.”

“I have no ambition.”

“You have,” the old man said, “but it is not an ambition that lesser men would understand. He is waiting.”

Marakas swallowed. Nodded, and bowed gravely. The sword was heavier in his hands than he had thought possible; if he were called upon to wield the blade this day, if lives depended on it, they would be lost.

But he set his lips, straightened his shoulders, lifted his chin, and strode forward.

Fredero acknowledged his presence—his decision—with the simplest of nods. “Kai di’Manelo.” He bowed.

The kai di’Manelo returned that bow, gracefully, fluidly. They were, Marakas realized, of a kind; men raised to the privilege and grace of the High Court; men to whom hunger was no enemy, to whom drought was a stranger. At their word, a village such as this could be consumed in flame, destroyed by sword.

They exchanged no pleasantries. They bowed again, and when they rose, their blades readied, they seemed kin, to Marakas’ eye. He could not imagine that such a combat could end in anything but the mildest of injury. He could not imagine that the so-called crime this lordling had committed could in truth be considered a crime; after all, who was the injured man? Who had heard of the clan Sambali? Who cared for the fate of a beautiful peasant, a girl one step from seraf, if women were ever truly born free?

He cared.

He had cared when Amelia lived, for she had been like this girl. He had cared fiercely, with a panicked, quickening pride, when his son had been pulled from her arms and given over to his, and had let his displeasure in this change of arrangements be known.

But he had learned that the Lord did not care, and he had never forgotten the brutality of that lesson.

And so he watched, almost numb, as if the events unfolding were a courtly dance, a simple maneuver, a political exercise.

And when the young kai di’Manelo paid for his excesses with his life—at the single, quick stroke of the kai el’Sol’s blade, he felt—surely he felt—what every villager present must have felt: shock. Fear. A terrible certainty that someone would pay for that death.

But beneath that, for he was aware that much of that emotion, much of that certainty, was Darran di’Sambali’s, he felt something within him break.

The kai el’Sol wiped his blade, sheathed his sword, and turned to the slack-jawed men who had not had time to ready their weapons. “I will wait,” he said evenly, “upon the Tor’agnate. We will raise tents in the South field—with the permission of the clan Sambali—and when he arrives, please offer him our apologies for the humility of our lodgings—but send him to us.”

A man’s son is his son.

Marakas, his own lost as a child just able to walk, had barely begun to understand what motivated men to allow sons whose criminality was certain to live; he did not, however, expect that the Tor’agnate would accept this turn of events with grace.

And why should he? This village was his, and within his territories, and had the girl not been married, his kai might have lifted her from servitude in the fields beneath the damaging gaze of the Lord, the withering voice of the wind, and placed her within the confines of his harem, as concubine.

The fact that she was married might have been of note had she been the wife of a man of rank, or a man whose merchant ties gave him the less impeccable credentials of wealth, but Darran was clearly neither; he was one step from seraf.

And for these, the kai di’Manelo had died.

The Radann had lifted the dead man’s body with care, and with much honor; they had lifted his unblooded blade and arranged it studiously beneath the kai’s crossed and bloodied arms, and they had traversed the village and returned with funereal poles across which they might drape white fabric. This would be the last resting place of the kai di’Manelo.

Of the men who had served the kai so poorly, only one had chosen to stand his ground; only one had remained by the side of the fallen. He was a young man, his face slender, his eyes large, dark. When the Radann approached the body, he had drawn sword a moment, but he had not lifted that sword against them.

The kai el’Sol’s expression was as dark as this stranger’s eyes, but older, wiser. He said nothing, but he lingered, waiting for the man to speak.

Nor was his wait in vain.

“Kai el’Sol,” the young man said, surprising Marakas with the depth of his bow.

The kai el’Sol said, simply, “Ser Alessandro.” He turned to Marakas, and added, “Radann Marakas el’Sol, may I present Ser Alessandro par di’Clemente.”

Marakas bowed stiffly. He did not—at that time—recognize the clan. But the fact that Fredero did, and more, recognized the man, said something.

“There will be a price to pay,” Ser Alessandro said, gazing down upon the body of the kai di’Manelo. “For this day’s work, there will be a price.”

“Did you think to tell him that, before he embarked upon it?” Fredero asked.

“Very clever, kai el’Sol. I do not judge. I do not threaten. I merely observe. He was impulsive. He was—as many men are—attracted to beauty. He was powerful, in a fashion, competent with a sword, deadly when it was necessary.” He knelt by the man he spoke so softly of. Very gently, he brushed strands of dark hair from a face that death had made noble. The Radann had chosen to close eyes left wide by the surprise of a death unforeseen at the start of an ordinary, unremarkable day. He did not touch them.

Instead, he reached for the sword held below the awkward repose of crossed arms. The kai el’Sol did not see fit to stop him; Marakas therefore said nothing.

But he was surprised when Ser Alessandro rolled back his sleeve until he had exposed his arm from wrist to elbow. Shocked when the par Clemente laid his arm against the blade’s edge, its outer curve, and, tightening fist, drawing sharp breath, cut himself. The blade was a fine one; sharp and true; the wound itself would only sting after the blood began to flow. Ser Alessandro waited until blood pooled visibly in the runnels along the sword’s edge; it didn’t take long. The cut was deep.

Radann Paolo el’Sol offered him a long, pale cloth. As that cloth passed from sun-darkened hands to pale ones, Paolo also bowed; there was nothing in the gesture that spoke of falsity. Alessandro raised his head, for he still knelt and he had to look up to meet the Radann’s dark eyes. Something passed, wordless, between them before he chose to tend to the wound. He asked for no aid, and Marakas knew that he was warrior born; he would ask for none. Accept none.

Marakas looked to Fredero, but the kai el’Sol was watching the stranger closely, his expression impenetrable. At last, stiffly, he said, “You honor the kai Manelo.”

Ser Alessandro did not reply, although he chose to speak. “If I am not mistaken, kai el’Sol, there is thunder within the cloudless sky.”

Fredero nodded, although Marakas could hear nothing.

“What would you have done, kai el’Sol, if the Tor’agnate had arrived before the Lord’s test?”

“What do you think, Ser Alessandro?”

Alessandro smiled, but it was a thin smile. “I think you are Lambertan, kai el’Sol.”

“So is the Tyr’agnate.”

“Indeed.” He had finished binding the wound tightly, and now drew his sleeve across his arm. He had been careful, his cut had been exact, precise. No blood had fallen from blade to sleeve, and if the bandages had been bound tightly enough, none would be immediately obvious for perhaps an hour.

“They come,” Ser Alessandro said, rising. “And as you seem to persist in valuing those who barely value themselves, I must make haste to greet them outside of the village. I will bring them, kai el’Sol.”