Something glimmered in the shadow on the opposite bank.
So Kesarh looked up and saw, across the twilight and the low race of folding water, Val Nardia his sister.
The initial shock was nothing, like a blow, no more, for she might be unreal, imagined. But then awareness rushed to fill the void. The crepuscular sheen described her, the river held fragments of her reflection. She existed. The second shock was not sudden, a smooth rapid draining, just such as he had felt when told of her death. It left him hollow, and hollow he moved off the bank into the river.
It seemed she took half a step in retreat as he crossed toward her. But the half step was meaningless. The river was a symbol, crossing it another. She must remain, and remain she did, poised on the low shelf of rock, watching him, until he walked out of the water on to the rock and stood over her less than a foot away, and took her arms in his hands and felt silk and flesh and mortal warmth. Light was sinking through the treetops and the red of her hair, red as that Karmian flower, was the first color to come alive in the world.
“Ulis,” he said.
Hearing him speak her name, Ulis Anet could only stare at him. She seemed paralyzed, or enchanted, and could not even attempt to pull herself from his grasp.
She had lain awake all night, stifled by the tent, too tired to rise, her nerves too quickened to allow sleep. In the hour before dawn something had sent her in flight from the tent and the King’s camp. It was ill-considered, the deed of an adolescent. She had even left the guard, and concluding she sought the King, the guard had not argued. Now, alone and unprotected, she reached the margin of this emblematic river, and from the black wood had come a man clothed in black. That he was one of the Karmian’s officers she decided at once. Her own position was horrible. She meant to withdraw immediately, then she saw, even over the distance and in the dark, his eyes.
That was how he held her, merely by looking at her. His intensity, a compound of exceptional personal force directed solely at her, deprived her of volition. Stupidly she stood and awaited him, until he came out of the water on to the rock and took her by the arms.
The human contact was vital. Appalled at her own willingness, she gave in and let the power that streamed from his overwhelm her. She did not know him, but she had heard yesterday’s descriptions, and suddenly she recognized him as the Karmian King. In that moment he spoke her name.
His voice was a low rough sigh. Dimly and unreasonably she sensed that, while he was a stranger, she was not.
She could say nothing, do nothing.
“You’re not,” he said, “a ghost. So how are you here?”
His voice was level now, but the intensity sheared through it as through the black, devouring eyes.
Not a ghost—am someone dead for him, she thought. Still no words would come. She shook her head, and felt the grasp of his hands tighten on her.
“She’s lying in a mausoleum at Istris,” he said. “You can’t be her.” And, with a peculiar shift to mildness, almost casually: “Who are you, then?”
Her voice came from her, before she realized she could speak.
“You called me by my name.”
“Ulis,” he said.
Begun, the words came flooding, titles, meaning nothing at such an hour: “Ulis Anet Am Xarabiss, daughter of Thann Xa’ath, wife to Raldanash.” Is that, she thought, who I am?
His color had come back. The power persisted, beating on her like a dark sun, but the look which had been almost madness, that had ebbed away.
“One of the Storm Lord’s wives,” he said. He did not relinquish her, not the grip of hands, or eyes.
“But who is it,” she said, “that you believed me to be?”
“Not believed. That you are.”
“No,” she said, and for the first time struggled.
He meditated upon her, hands not slackening, until again she gave in.
“You must have been a child,” he said, “when she died. You’re the age now that she was then, Ulis Anet, wife of Raldanash of Dorthar.”
“Let me go,” she said, “my Lord Kesarh.”
He smiled a little, and his hands were gone. The marrow of her bones seemed to go with them.
It was an effort to turn from him. She constrained herself to do so, and then to move through the trees away from him. She knew herself the focus of his eyes, they mesmerized her, even now she did not see them. At the edge of the open hill she must look over her shoulder.
The sun had risen, he was blacker now than the shadows of the trees. It seemed to her he could have summoned her, drawing her soul toward him by means of some invisible nexus.
Once more she convinced herself to turn away.
The steps she took toward the Storm Lord’s camp were leaden and without strength.
Storms emphasized the journey to Anackyra.
The titbit rendered the Storm Lord in a black tent on the Kumaian hills, was now vehemently debated in the capital. Zakoris-In-Thaddra loomed on one side, Karmiss-In-Lan towered on the other.
Two such blades might close like pincers on the Middle Lands.
A dozen days after Raldanash’s arrival in the city, a convoy of three ships put out on the Inner Sea from Dorthar’s small western port of Thos. Their destination was the Sister Continent, and the bulk of their cargo was news. But it would be an embassy, to and fro, of months. Such ballast was precarious at best.
Storms tore Anackyra’s sky, and her council chambers.
Yannul’s son, standing in the princely apartments of Rarmon, said with desperate quietness, “He means to leave Lan spilled in the dirt under the Karmian’s heel.”
“Raldanash’s enemy is Free Zakoris,” Rarmon said. “Dorthar won’t expend her might against Karmiss. She dare not. Move troops out to Lan and Yl’s navy would come in on Dorthar behind them like high tide.”
“So Lan stays a chattel. You must be proud of your old master, Rem.”
This gauntlet was taken no notice of. “What do you mean to do?” was all Rarmon said.
“Go to Lan, what else? No letters can get through, nor have they. My family is there, and he’s given me little enough here. My father tried to warn me. I should have listened.”
“Would you listen to me?”
“You?” Lur Raldnor looked at him with youth’s blasting disdain. “I don’t know anymore which you run with, sir.”
“None.”
“Kesarh went to your tent with much show.”
“I left him no choice but to make a show of it. Which is how you, and the King, learned of the business.”
“Maybe. You must forgive my bad manners. I’m angry, you see. I do know this. Raldanash can strip me of my name but not my blood. I have his leave. I’m going home.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.” Lur Raldnor took one long breath, and was altered. “I’m sorry,” he said, “You wouldn’t even be in this corner of the earth if we hadn’t argued it.” His eyes were steady and clear. Rarmon sensed an invocation of that night in Zastis on Yannul’s terrace, the fireflies, and some feeling that was gone and would not come back. “Rem,” Lur Raldnor said, and now it was oversight not sarcasm, “you do understand that you put this mile of space between us, and not I? I’ve been listening since Amlan. You had only to call on me. You never have.”
“You never told me what you were offering me. The one thing I’d have taken I don’t think you could give.”
“There were other things. Perhaps you didn’t want those. Just something like sex when you needn’t look at my face or remember I can reason or that I’m alive, as you are. I still recall that time you said it was easier to kill a man than a beast.”