Amberlight by Sylvia Kelso

Author:Sylvia Kelso
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, romance, war, adventure, magic
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2017-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

PART II

SUNLIGHT

. . . the hidden paths that run

East of the Moon, West of the Sun.

~ J.R.R. Tolkien, adapted

CHAPTER VI

High noon on Amberlight, glaring, quivering unhindered from the zenith of a leached turquoise sky. Color, coolness, shadows erased. Head foolhardily bare, Tellurith squints out from her balustrade into the mid-summer day.

Windmills swing fitfully in oven-hot westerly breaths. Vertical leaves tremble in the valley beneath, changing the familiar vistas of tower and garden, whose colors pale and deliquesce in the glare. The streets are deserted, heat-haze and sun-stare, all Amberlight panting under the weight of noon.

And beyond the mirror-glitter that loops the city’s perimeter runs another loop. Braided with overlaps and entrances, beaded with standards and sentries’ heads, stapled with palisade stakes, its bare-trampled dykes and massive interleaving earth-banks dirt-brown as the huge scrapes whence they have been torn. Hauled up on a multitude of carts and wheelbarrows and forced-laborers’ baskets, tamped and stamped into this new perimeter loop. This noose. Which cuts off the emerald rice-plots, the golden wheat-harvest, the silver-beige of hayed-off grazing land that recedes into the Kora’s blurry summer heat.

Amberlight is under siege.

* * * *

I’m sorry. A.

Sorry for what? she wonders, as she has wondered endlessly. For running away? With no slip-ups this time, out the main doors on a word to the watch-crew, commandeering a vehicle to the waterfront, a dinghy to reach the Kora, a horse from the first inn. And then? Upstream, downstream, to whichever intriguer’s nest he has flown so unerringly, none of their intelligencers knows.

For her hurt? For the sheer physical pain of losing him, lover and protector-killer, for two months the closest human presence in her life? Shield and sweetness lost, sharing and loving lost, smashed along with her pride, her self-respect.

Her trust.

For the repercussions? For the uproar and recrimination and bitter, bitter in-House, “I told you so’s.” Iatha’s rage and outrage, Shia’s disbelief. Zuri’s humiliation. Did he feel, she wonders, for her and her troublecrews? Who no less, if not so deeply as their House-head, have trusted and been betrayed.

Or was it for the external outrage, yet more acrimonious, Telluir House left to face a Thirteen whose wrath can barely be contained? Censure and revocation of contracts, insult and abuse; and worst of all, from Maeran’s rapier stabs downward, the knowledge that there is no counter. That they are right. That whatever calamity Telluir House has brought on Amberlight is their fault. Her fault.

Or the wider political results? Demands from Verrain. An ul­timatum from Cataract. Increasingly undiplomatic correspon­dence, which within a month issues in an outright threat of war.

Since Telluir House resolutely continues to trumpet the assassination attempt, and enough of the Thirteen have been frightened, bullied or badgered into backing her to hang a deciding vote. No decision being made, the statuette is withheld. If Vannish was behind that blow-dart, Tellurith reflects, they must have long rued the failure of their bluff.

As she and all Amberlight look to rue the recoil. Since Dinda has not been content with threats.

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