Kushiel's Scion - Jacqueline Carey [218]
I'd only ever seen her twice. The first time, I had been a child. I had believed what Brother Selbert had told me, and I had loved her.
The second time… the second time, I had been a child in years only. That was after Daršanga, when Phèdre had taken me to see her. There had been tears in her eyes, then. My mother's eyes, deep and blue as twilight. Do you even know what you look like? Erytheia had asked me. I did. It was why I wasn't overly fond of mirrors.
Melisande.
"That's true." Vernus frowned. "There was some plot within Terre d'Ange itself, wasn't there? It all took place before I was born. I never quite understood what happened or why."
Eamonn glanced at me and cleared his throat. "Perhaps we might speak of something else," he said. "It may have happened before we were born, but three of us at this table are children of that war, and it is a painful subject."
"I respect the lady's sorrow." Akil inclined his head toward Brigitta. "But why should it be a painful subject for you, Dalriadan? Or him?" He pointed at me. "You won."
"Have you ever been in battle?" Eamonn asked. "Any of you?"
Lucius and Vernus shook their heads, and Brigitta, reluctantly. I said nothing. Eamonn knew well enough what I'd witnessed, though I wasn't sure if the massacre at Daršanga could properly be called a battle.
"I stood three sword-challenges to earn the right to come to Tiberium." Akil pushed up his sleeve to reveal the pale welt of a scar on the brown skin of his forearm. He flashed a rare grin. "My father will have my head when he learns I've been studying with mad Master Piero instead of learning to be a Caerdicci diplomat."
"Single challenges?" Eamonn asked. Akil nodded. "It's not the same." He poured wine all around, refilling our cups. "When I was sixteen, there was quarrel between a Dalriadan clan-lord and a clan-lord of the Tarbh Cr€ in the north." He shrugged. "A land dispute, but there is bad blood there, old blood. The Cruarch offered to send his army and mediate, but my mother refused. It is important for the Dalriada to maintain our independence. So we went to war."
I sat quietly while he told the story, having heard it before. Eamonn had killed two men and come through the battle unscathed, but he had watched comrades die, hard and ugly.
"There's glory in it," he acknowledged. "Dagda Mor! It's why I like to fight. When the battle-frenzy fills you, you feel like a god, I think." He paused, remembering. "But then you hear a friend's voice begging you to help, and you see your friend's guts falling out of a hole in his belly, and you can't stop to help, because someone is trying to kill you, so you have to keep going. You tread upon a corpse and realize it's a man who taught you how to hunt when you were ten years old. You see the woman who just got married run through by a spear, falling over her husband's body." The others were hushed, listening. Eamonn shook his head. "And when it's over," he said simply, "they're still dead. Victory doesn't matter to the dead, nor to the living who mourn them."
No one said anything.
"So!" Eamonn took a deep breath. "That is why war is a hurtful subject, even for the victors. And that is why I am here, trying to become wise."
Lucius raised his cup. "Hear, hear."
On the following day, word was released that the University was opening its doors, and Lucius went to see if Master Piero was in attendance. He wasn't, but there was a note pinned to the door of his study, bidding his students to meet him at the butchers' market early in the morning. Lucius passed the word to the rest of us, and I made arrangements with Anna to visit Gilot later in the day.
It was a strange choice of meeting places, and I daresay all of us wondered at it. The butchers' market was not an array of shops like those in the fora, where Tiberian housewives bought their goods, but a vast open-air market, adjacent to the slaughterhouses, where the country herders and farmsteaders brought their livestock for sale. It