With the medallion came the rest of the Widan. There were, in total, five, but only two wore the proud Sword, edge glittering with rubies arranged as if in fall. He met their eyes, but he could not hold them; they skittered away from his face as if in shame. Or fear.

And what, he thought, engendered fear in Widan?

The other three.

Ser Alessandro drew his sword. By his side, standing with the grace of purpose that now eluded the Manelan Toran, were the two men he trusted with not only his life, but his death. It would not be the first time; it would not, even if they had victory here, be the last. He had never placed faith in soldiers who had not taken to the field.

The medallion lay before him.

"What oath, cousin, would you swear?" he asked softly.

"That if you offer your allegiance to the Tyr'agar, your men will be spared, your lands will be yours to govern, your people and their supplies will be bartered for instead of taken."

"And can you offer this?"

He said nothing. Instead, Ser Amando kai di'Manelo unsheathed his blade. He lifted it, its crescent flashing orange in the night light, the artificially contained fire.

It fell in a single stroke.

And it missed.

The Manelan Toran drew a single shared breath, ragged around the edges. The silence stretched out in a circle as men turned inward to stare at what they could not clearly see.

Ser Amando grimaced. When he lifted his sword again, the blade shook.

The shouts of Clemente cerdan mingled now with screams: Alessandro knew death when he heard it.

Still, he waited, watching the man he would never again claim as kin.

The blade fell, and this time, shaking, it made its mark. The mark was not clean; the wooden circle clung to the blade's edge as he attempted to raise it.

Toran interceded; their hands touched the medallion that was meant to be cut by blade alone. They pulled it free; set it upon the stone pedestal that was meant to contain the oath wood.

Ser Alessandro kai di'Clemente raised his sword.

He drew breath; his gaze slanted toward the West, and the North, toward the forests that had bounded his clan's lands for centuries. Out of that forest had come the people who might one day be legend; out of that forest, the first hope and the first fear.

But he had met them, these visiting strangers; he had taken their measure.

Against what now stood at his back-river water, raised as wall-their fleeting promise withered like false spring.

"I have hated the kai el'Sol in my time," he said quietly. "For the death of my cousin. For the loss of his life." Truth. To be used now, like any other weapon.

He met Ser Amando's eyes; was surprised at how they flickered.

But I better understand him, cousin. I better understand what I refused to understand that day, that year, the years that followed.

He lifted his sword. Met the eyes of the Tor'agnate without flinching or wavering.

His blade fell. Splinters of wood flew across the dais.

A sign.

Not even the Toran moved. Alessandro's sword rested a hair's breadth above the grinding surface of stone.

The Widan who was not Widan spoke.

"Another medallion, Tor'agnate?"

But Ser Amando stared at the wreckage and understood. His eyes narrowed. "Kill him," he said softly.

His last words. A fitting epitaph for a man who would serve the Lord of Night.

Alessandro struck as the swords of Manelan Toran crested scabbards, filling the silence left in the wake of shattered wood with the song of steel. Amando began to bring his sword to bear, but the movement was slowed; clumsy.

The Lord's men could not afford hesitation.

And Alessandro kai di'Clemente was the Lord's man. The Lord of Day. His sword's edge bit metal and flesh, seeking the short length of exposed neck. Finding it.

Adelos and Reymos were a step behind him; they were three, and they fought without expectation of mercy. Not for death had he come, but he accepted it: it was the sword's only law.

They did not discuss tactics. They did not discuss strategy.

As they approached the river, the master bard of Senniel College and the lord of the Court of the Green Deepings spoke with the nuance of motion and gesture. They did not pause; they did not spare more than a glance at the wall of water that waited them, cleaving the town in two.

Celleriant moved toward the water, tensing for a leap. The breeze began to gather beneath the strands of his hair, pulling at his tunic.

Kallandras caught his shoulder, and Celleriant's legs lengthened, losing tension and the strength of motion's beginning; a brow rose in question, wind dying as water began to rumble in response.

Brother, the bard said softly, a change of plans.

"The mortals oft had a saying about battle plans and the length of their survival."

The bard smiled. Lifting a hand, he pointed into the thicket of men that surrounded the dais and the Tors.

And the drums.

But death has many guises.

And into the Widan, it came, fair-haired and white, swift as wind, unlooked for.

The two who wore the Sword jumped back, unarmed, their hands raised in the complicated weave of dancing fingers and harsh words. They peeled away from the three who stood, beardless and tall, the robes of men of knowledge a poor fit for the length of their bodies, the growing width of their shoulders.

The Manelan cerdan gave way before the two Widan who had chosen flight, absorbing them whole into their ranks; they drew swords, but they did not know which way to turn: toward the man who had killed the Lord to whom they owed their allegiance, or toward their backs, where swords now spoke with voices that could not be denied.

The Clemente Toran were already at work; if they were few, they took advantage of chaos and uncertainty. It was the very essence of battle.

Ser Alessandro, given the vantage of height, drew his bloodied sword from his dying kin. He did not clean the blade; did not sheathe it; instead he took a moment to clearly see what the cerdan could not: Two men.

Ah, Lady, two Northern men.

One bore blue sword, blue shield; he walked-or so it seemed-in the air above the shoulders of the armed Manelan guards. Where his blade fell, it fell in silence, and when sword was raised to parry, metal shattered.

He was not mortal; did not look mortal; his hair was a thing of wind, a cloud and a storm. No man could fight thus enc.u.mbered. No man.

By his side, hair drawn back, was the Northern bard. In his hands he carried the weapons of the Dark Lady; they moved as if they were an extension of his body. Alessandro was frozen for a moment in recognition. The Dark Lady. Kovaschaii. He had never found a circ.u.mstance so dire that he had been willing to call upon the brotherhood; did not, in truth, know how to begin.

Bard, he thought. Northern bard. The words made no sense; they were foreign words, Northern words, nonsensical syllables.

And this bard offered no song; his lips were set in a slender line, and his expression was so still it seemed a mask had been set about his face-a mask of flesh, pale and reposed.

Two men. Against such two, the cerdan of Manelo retreated, shouting orders, raising a cry kin to the cries across the shattered bridge.

The bard brought his weapons down, seeking neither flesh nor armor.

In the night, the stretched skins of the drums that had beat greeting and warning screamed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

HAD Kallandras been another man, had he in truth been born to the North and the halls of Senniel, or had he been entirely Southern, had he been raised in the domis of his father's clan, the screams would have stilled all movement, all breath.

Although both of these men were some part of the man he had become, he had given his youth to death, and the pa.s.sage of years, the songs of the bardic masters, had not deprived those lessons of strength: he leaped clear of the drums. But the gift of the magi, the weapons he bore, gained a sudden weight, drawn to the sounds of pain and death. They struggled against his tightening grip.

They were not his only weapons; had they been, he would have fallen; they rose too slowly to parry; the skins of the drums had closed around their edges, and whether it was the blades that clung or the instruments, the result was the same.

He struck out with his foot; caught an arm wielding blade just above the bend of elbow. A new cry joined the fading screams of drum, but it was brief.

He leaped up, into air, and his blades at last came free, but they were heavy in his hands, and their shape seemed to shift and change as he moved. He vaulted, shifting his weight to land, tensing his knees to leap again before his body acknowledged the full weight of gravity. Around these movements, steel, the dance of the blade, the promise of death.

The drums were beyond repair.

The makers of those instruments, however, came quick to the fray.

They shunted aside the unwieldy robes of the Widan; they dispensed with the pretense of diminished height. They were three, and they drew swords with the same perfect grace that Celleriant had: red fire to blue.

The Manelan Toran raised cry; their swords lost unison, and for a moment, purpose. Those that crowded the Widan at the dais' edge paid for their duty with their lives; the red swords took them all.

They should have had quick deaths.

Kallandras did not pause to bear witness; he had seen death before, and he understood what he did not see. Instead, he took care not to join them.

But he was grateful for these kinlords and their red, red blades; his own sprang free of their unnatural weight as if called to battle. In the darkness, he could see the faintest trace of light across their edge-and it, too, was red.

Not even in the desert had the blades come to life.

They roared, or seemed to roar, as he raised them; they parried the sweeping arc of two swords. The third did not fall.

Instead, the water did.

From the back of the Winter King, she saw the river.

"Avandar!"

He acknowledged her without a word or a backward glance, for he saw what she saw; the river water gathered, losing the shape and form of wall. It rose, in coiling arms, limbs clear and undulating in the moonlight. Too many.

Too late. She could not tell who spoke.

"Too late? Why?" Her knees bit into the flanks of the King. But he would not go forward.

The water is a difficult element, the King said. The most difficult to contain.

"I thought the earth-"

Earth is the most difficult to call, the most difficult to wield; it sheds its form slowly. No one in need of haste will depend on it. Air and Fire come quickly, he added, but they are almost formless; Water is heavy, and if it can be held to form, the destruction it brings is vast. Be grateful that we are by a river and not an ocean; be grateful that the river is long and thin.

Grat.i.tude was beyond her. Fear was not.

The watery limbs became tentacles.

"I don't understand!"

Did you not hear it, Jewel? The drums that were used in invocation were . . . wounded. The power that they exerted over the water's form was greatly weakened, but it was not broken; what they summoned remains. You see the water now as the water itself desires to be seen.

"Kallandras," Avandar said quietly, "Or Celleriant. They must have chosen to break the hold the Kialli have over the river. They failed," he added, as if he spoke of the downturn in market prices. "One, at least one, of the Kialli must have been an adept. If he does not release the water, it will not subside-but he has imperfect control."

She could see, for the moonlight was merciless, the sudden fall of liquid; could hear the crash of sundered timber in its wake. Water rose again, thin and graceful; in its center, she saw the flailing limbs of an armored man and cried out.

He is your enemy, the Winter King said coldly. He is not of Clemente.

She didn't tell him that she didn't care; he knew it, and it angered him.

Instead, Jewel caught tines. Pressed her thumbs into the sharpest of their points. Blood ran down her palms.

Go, she said.

There was no pretense of request. The Winter King leaped forward.

Kallandras was aware of the water.

It had a voice, and although he had never heard its waking strength, he had weathered storms in the lee of the seawall beyond which Senniel rose like a maker-made cliff. He had watched boats in harbor tossed against the rocks and the timber docks; had seen sails ripped from their moorings go to their resting place in the crook of waves made wild by storm.

Such storms had almost prepared him for this one.