Chapter Seven

Paragon

The bleeding sun was far away and blinded by drifting clouds, but there was blood enough on the ground.

It was the winter solstice, and the air was so cold it burned to breathe it. The wind flung up gusts of snow like great white waves rolling over the open field of the stadium at the agoge, but it wasn't actually snowing. The snow was so fine and frozen that it whirled and gusted along with a breath of wind, and the wind seemed in variable mood today.

Diana felt much the same.

It was thrilling to see the contests, almost fifty pairs of young Rakkor warriors battling to the death, avatars of the bleeding sun. They wore their finest armor, crested and arrayed with the sigil of the Four-Facing Sun, their winter warrior's leathers banded and striped with gold. The snow on the field was crimson with blood, great slashing sweeps and pools of it like some blotted Ionian calligraphy, but the dead warriors were carried swiftly away by the acolytes as soon as they fell. Some had fallen in the first seconds of the Rite. Others were just beginning to wear down, almost three hours later.

It was the Rite of Kor, and these young warriors were sent to aid the bleeding sun in her battle against the darkness. It was beautiful and terrible, the bright flash of spear and shield and sword, the guttural shouts of triumph. The screams of the wounded and dying, the dark spurt of arterial blood.

There was Marathea, leaning on her spear as she knocked away Apheleon with her shield. Apheleon was taller and had the reach on her, but until now he couldn't seem to close. He would soon. Marathea had taken a deep wound on her right thigh and her leathers were soaked with blood. To Diana the swift-pattering droplets were like sands in Shuriman hourglass, trickling away the last moments of her life.

With two years to go until her own Rite, Diana didn't know most of the young warriors on the field well. She had never trained with them, and knew most of them only as passing faces. But Marathea was another that split her time between the agoge and the Temple, and Diana knew her from many hours of mirror-polishing. Merry and always laughing, Marathea was too good-humored to take part in the little scuffles for power and prestige at the Temple, and was well-liked because of it. She and Diana were not friends, had rarely spoken, but there was no ill-will between them.

Now Diana watched her bleeding the last of her life away with the rest of the Solari in attendance. They sat on the wide and snowy stone benches surrounding the field, rising on tiers to accommodate almost the entire village. There seemed some physical evidence of the Solari claim that they were truly children of the sun, for though they wore furs and cloaks, they were still lightly garbed for the bitter cold. Demacians, Noxians, even the magical folk of Zaun and Shurima, they all froze and failed in the cold, losing fingers and toes to the black rot. Not so the Solari. Not so the Rakkor. Like the little goat-dog poros, they seemed to have some internal furnace that kept them warm and vital. Helion, she thought, picking out his spiky bronze hair a few rows below and to the left. Helion often seemed to radiate his own heat, like the summertime sun.

On the field, Marathea staggered and Apheleon had her, his spear stabbing past her shield and into her belly, punching her off her feet and into the snow. She didn't cry out. Her helmet rolled clear and she clutched the spear in her stomach and pulled it out. She flung it aside, then lay still, and died.

"May the light increase," Father murmured beside her, and Diana bowed her head.

She didn't know any of the remaining duelers, four boys and two girls. Usually a long duel ended badly for the girl; even the hardiest of female warriors didn't have the lung capacity or muscle of a man, and couldn't match their stamina. They were taught to rely on speed, on quick, darting attacks that allowed them to score a hit and then retreat, but there wasn't much room to maneuver with nearly a hundred duelers on the field. A woman who couldn't keep moving usually fared badly.

It was one of the boys who died last, and the girl who killed him sank to her knees, bleeding from a dozen places, pulling off her helmet to show a pale face and hair soaked nearly as dark as the earth under the snow with sweat. She was escorted off the field to be stitched, bandaged, and watered by two acolytes, though she had pride enough to shake them away and walk under her own power, too exhausted for triumph.

The last dead boy was carried away by two other acolytes, loaded carefully onto a red litter with a cloth over his eyes, embroidered with the sigil of the many-rayed sun. Those acolytes and Elders that had family on the field were excused from their duties today, but the rest moved hastily to line up the survivors on one end of the field. On the other end, they hastily carried large bundles of firewood, already bound, blessed, and carefully seasoned against this day.

Diana had been given another duty.

She understood that it was to signal the approval of the Temple, and it was a great honor; it was likely that Skala Ligeia had engineered it somehow. For all that Skalos Joras had said she was forgiven, she had been in disgrace since her whipping, and it was natural, inevitable, that it would be so. But two months had come and gone, and they had examined her only a day ago, to see that she was progressing under Domitian's demanding tutelage.

They had not found her wanting.

So today, at one of the highest and holiest rites of the Solari, she was the psalta.

Dressed in white and silver, she looked paler than ever among all the ruddy Solari. Her cloak was of winter fox fur, her boots laced in white thongs over her winter leathers. Her hair was braided with silver ribbons and hung nearly to her waist, thick and gleaming silver-blonde. She stood on her bench beside Father, a tall girl and still coltish with it, and her voice when she sang was as high and clear and sweet as anyone could have asked.

Ask not the sun why she fades

Why the light to dark gives way

Ask not why life to death must yield

As sunset comes, as twilight fades.

Her voice rose like bells, soft and mournful, swelling to roll and fill the whole of the stadium. It was a song of grief, grief for the loss of the sun over the long winter, grief for the young Rakkor whose blood dyed the snow red. She was the voice of the Solari during the time when their dead sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, were laid out and the firewood was piled high by the acolytes. Her song was the anguish of their broken hearts.

How bright he was, our Rakkor son

What strength she had, our warrior maid

They are gone like wind upon the grass

Their battle done, their banners laid.

It rolled up in the white exhalation of her breath, as if the song itself were made solid by the cold and cast into the teeth of the bitter wind. Diana thought of Marathea, and her throat tightened. In the back of her mind it wasn't Marathea's cold face, white and stilled forever as she lay dead; it was Lelia, Kallista, Partha, Borean, and all the others she knew. And oh, what if it were Helion? What if it were him, dead on the field? Yet all around her, the Rakkor faces as far as she could see were iron. They would grieve in their hearts, they would grieve in the darkness, but only the psalta Diana could grieve for them under the open sky.

They are vassals ever faithful,

Summoned to her call

Sped westward to the bleeding sun

With spear and shield, her wall.

Now the Elders and the acolytes were carrying the dead to the firewood, the bodies wrapped in white cloths. It took three, sometimes even four men, to carry them; the dead would be burned with their armor and weapons, so they could go instantly to battle. And maybe it made it easier to see all those dead, laid side by side, brothers and sisters in death as they were in life. They did not die alone. And those left behind did not grieve alone.

We will not fear the shadowed dark

We are not wayward souls to roam

For they went ahead with courageous hearts

And by their hands, they bring us home.

How could you fear death, Father had asked her, if you knew your brothers and sisters awaited you? She knew she was thinking of his own brothers and sisters, men and women he hadn't seen in more than fifty years, but still he had trained with them, bled with them. Did they live still? If they did, they would be old and scarred, like the tough old roots of great trees.

There were mosaics in the Temple that showed the spirits of the young dead of the Rite of Kor glowing from the heart of the sun, their faces outlined in fire, their arms outstretched, beckoning the adult Rakkor left on earth to join them. The Rite of Kor sent the sun the warriors she needed to fight back the dark, but it also strengthened the hearts of the Rakkor left behind, Father explained; a Rakkor warrior never feared death. And now, thought Diana, Marathea would be there. For a long moment, she looked at the wide and bloody stretch of the field. It was as much to allow herself time to recover as to let the acolytes lay the last body on the pyre. There was no delay, from death to burning. It would be cruel, the Elders said; cruel to women like Kallista's mother, the ferocious Elder Jocaste.

Kallista's older sister had fallen today, and while Elder Jocaste's face was iron, it was old iron, gray and brittle.

The torches were touched to the wood of the pyre and Diana lifted her voice one last time. All of them sang with her, filling the bowl of the stadium with sound that rose up and rolled and swelled to the sky as the white cloth began to catch, and the first of the dead began to burn.

Oh sun, bring the end

Let this darkness never come again.

On the way home from the Rite, Diana asked again.

"When is my tutor coming, Father?"

And he said the same thing he had said for the last two months.

"Soon."

It made her angry, but anger served no purpose; Father merely stared at her until she was ready to calm down and discuss whatever it was rationally. She pulled her furs tighter around her shoulders.

"Because my Rite is two years away now," she said doggedly. "I'm already two months behind everyone else. I don't want to…"

And then she trailed off when she realized what she was about to say. She didn't want to go into the sun, and preserve the life of this world? She didn't want to go with her brothers and sisters to this last and greatest battle?

"You will not," Father said, watching the evolutions of her face carefully. Before him she felt transparent as glass. And that assurance—and the uncertainty of what Father thought about what she was thinking—was all she would have. In as much as she was instructed to tell him every part of what she was thinking, Diana thought, aggrieved, why did Father never have to tell her?

In the courtyard she practiced again with glaive and spear, sword and shield, shadow fencing. In the bitter cold of the morning before sunrise she left her warm bed, donned her armor, and ran the paths that strung along the outer cliffs, mile upon mile while the cold froze her face and her breath puffed white. Father interspersed her lessons with exercise, giving her an hour here, two hours there, filling her daylight hours with work and instruction, taxing her mind and body. He had a boy from the lower village come to do her marketing so she wouldn't be bothered leaving the Temple Heights.

Diana wouldn't have minded being bothered. She would have leaped at the chance to get out of the house. The days wore away and winter passed, and still she learned and trained, making her round from home to cliffs to Temple and back again.

Maybe because Father couldn't go anywhere except the Temple and home, he forgot that she could. Or maybe it was part of her punishment. She did feel often that she was being punished in some obscure way; she felt that there was something in Father always held back, listening to everything she said and judging her. Sometimes it was physically uncomfortable to sit in his room and attempt to explain her logic, because Father seemed to think so much more than he said aloud. It was less like an argument than a…a…confession.

It had taken many days to grope for that word in her thoughts, and much of her wanted to shy away from it, but it was true. Until Skalos Abeon, Diana had trusted her teachers and Elders implicitly, but now she turned the mistrust she had learned from that man onto even her father. It would have helped had he spoken, explained himself, but there was a wall between them that had been there since the whipping. The scratching of his quill as she spoke in their lessons had taken on a sinister aspect, and she often wanted to snatch the parchment away and read what he had written. Somehow, she didn't know quite why, she suspected even her beloved father of deceiving her.

The agony of that thought added strength to her arm and she slit open the practice dummy from navel to throat. Sand spilled onto the floor of the courtyard and she stepped back, panting for breath. She would sweep away the mess at the end of her practice, but for now she switched back to her spear, tossing her sword onto the nearby bench. She wanted to practice with her glaive, but she knew she couldn't favor that weapon; the spear, then the sword, were the preferred weapons with the Rakkor, especially since it was hard to use a glaive with a shield. It was a heavy weapon, heavier in the blade, heavier in the shaft, best used with a two-handed grip. In battle they might use a glaive against heavy cavalry, but until then, it was spear and shield, with swords for mop-up and close quarters.

She worked herself hard, sweating in the cold air, the multiple light layers of her training garb wicking the moisture away and keeping her warm. The Rakkor wore training leathers when the weather was cold, leather leggings and tunic fitted tightly to the skin and lined with cotton or linen. She would wear through many pairs and outgrow the rest over the years until she settled into her adult height and weight. For women, it was around age twenty, and then she would go to the leatherworker for a final measurement to commission real warrior's leathers, reinforced with metal wire and plate, to be worn under her armor when it was too cold to go in her tunic and sandals alone.

With her spear she practiced the thuella, the tempest, a slashing move performed with her arm straight along the shaft of the spear, an overhand arc that swung upward and slashed down, intended to cleave an enemy from shoulder to hip. She liked the maneuver; it reminded her of Skalos Grakos calling her a whirlwind. Slash and pace, forward, forward, driving back imaginary enemies, and then she spun counterface, her shield smashing one way as her spear stabbed forward, an attack on an enemy approaching from behind.

Her spear smashed into a shield and almost skidded out of her hand, and she staggered back a pace, her shield snapping up automatically.

The monster in front of her was surely more metal than man.

She only had time for one awed impression of height, shoulders as wide as the turrets of Mogron Pass, the high horsetail crest of his helmet dyed crimson, and then his massive shield swung forward like the blunt end of a battering ram and she dodged, lunging for the clear part of the courtyard. His sword swung down behind her and struck sparks off the paving stones.

"Who are you?" she demanded, and swung her shield out to meet him, deflecting. It was like slamming her shield into a rock face. She bounced backward and narrowly managed to keep her feet.

"Your teacher." He advanced on her and his voice, at least, was reassuringly human. "If I choose. I will not teach a coward."

"I am no coward." His sword stabbed out and she dodged again. "I'm not stupid, either."

"Words are wind," he said, and charged her, his armor rattling like the thunder.

She slipped him again, stabbed out with her spear, and she was genuinely trying to kill him; half measures would be useless with this man. For such a big man, he was surprisingly quick. He was wearing full Rakkor armor, breast and back plate, helmet, shin greaves, gauntlets, and he had at least eighteen inches and two hundred pounds on Diana, but he was still swift as a striking snake. It wasn't even a contest. His sword caught her shield and shoved it aside, and he pulled the sharp tip of it an inch from her belly.

"Again," he said, stepping back three paces and tossing his sword aside in favor of a spear. Diana didn't even have time to contemplate where exactly she was going to stab him before he smashed his shield into her and knocked her flat on her back.

She got up, readied her shield, and decided aim for his throat this time.

He knocked her down again. And again. Over the course of the next two hours she was stabbed, slashed, bludgeoned twice with the butt of his spear, and once knocked out cold, but that was her own fault. She'd charged into him while he'd been swinging his shield and the full weight of it had come down on her head with the force of a mountain boulder.

She was dizzy.

There was no part of her that didn't hurt.

There were multiple parts of her that would need stitching.

But she had scored a hit on him.

Across one of his enormous biceps was a gash four inches long, gouged deep into the meat of the muscle. It wasn't enough to cripple him, but he would feel it every time he swung his sword or hefted his spear.

"Enough," he said, stopping her charge one-handed. When he took off his helmet, he was older than she expected; forty at least, though not a whit less powerful for it. His face was broad and tanned and plain, a bit the worse for what looked like many broken noses, and his eyes were a searing Rakkor blue, his hair the red-gold of molten copper.

"You're the tutor my father sent for," she said, more statement than question.

"I am." He looked at her without favor. "You're the moon-addled acolyte of the Temple of the Sun."

She bared her teeth at him. "I am."

"I am charged with keeping you alive," he said. "Your task is to see that you deserve it. That is the bargain between us. Are we agreed?"

"Yes," she said, and gripped his forearm as he extended it to seal the deal. His forearm was the size of a joint of ham.

"Good. I will see your father now." He let her go and picked up his spear and shield, strapping the latter to his enormous back. "There is already a chirurgeon in your room. I told her you would need stitching, after. When she is done you will run again, a full circuit from here to the Spear and back again. Then you may come and see us."

That was nearly ten miles.

"Who are you?" she demanded again, trailing after him into the house. He moved through it as easily as if he lived there, and that more than anything else nettled her.

"I am Karacas," he said, and went into her father's study.

The way Karacas, the Paragon of the Rakkor, had come to be her teacher was this.

Nearly fifty years before, two young Rakkor warriors named Domitian and Erebos decided to climb their own version of the Titan's Spear. Near the village of Leros there was a high promontory they called the Ram's Head for the slight bowing at the crest, like a ram's head between its horns. There was a steep slope on the back of the Ram's Head that was an unpleasant run but not dangerous in the least, but it wasn't for that that the Ram was renowned among the aspiring young heroes of Leros. The eastern face of the Ram's Head was so sharp it looked as if a sword had sheared that side off, and year after year, they challenged one another to climb it.

Now a third young warrior, Hesperus, and Domitian were like rams themselves, and had been butting heads since Hesperus had tried to forcibly take Domitian's practice shield from him at the agoge when they were both six years old. And though Hesperus was the larger of the two and would be all his life, Domitian was cunning, and generally got the better of their exchanges.

There was one memorable night that he did not.

It was the night after the Rite of Kor, and Domitian and his friend Erebos were deep in their cups at an inn in Leros. It was customary to salute their dead brothers and sisters after the Rite, and Domitian and his friend had decided that one cup for each brother or sister they lost was the only way to honor them properly. They had so honored roughly a dozen of their fallen comrades before Hesperus found them.

The result of the exchange was that Domitian and Erebos found themselves outside marching toward the Ram's Head and sobering up quickly in the cold. It was the night of the solstice, the longest night of the year, and the wind was blasting the mountainside like a forge bellows, throwing up clouds of ice and snow. But Hesperus had goaded them into the challenge, Domitian wouldn't give his rival the satisfaction of backing down, and Erebos wasn't about to let his friend make the icy climb alone. So, stone-cold sober except for a lingering nausea, they began the ascent.

It was the longest climb they had ever made. With only the moon's light to see by, they found their hand and footholds by looking for the shine of ice on the narrow ledges, and then trusted that their hands would melt the ice before they slipped and fell twenty, fifty, a hundred feet. From the base of the cliff to the top of the Ram's Head was nearly three hundred feet; on a clear day, a climber who had the nerves of a Bilgewater pickpocket and the sinews of Avarosan ice-boar might manage it, if the wind didn't rip them bodily off the cliff face.

But after nearly forty minutes in the grim dark, they began to think that it might be possible. Or at least that they were luckier than any young Rakkor could ever dream of being. They would be legends if they pulled it off, they told each other, climbing, endlessly climbing. They would be remembered for a hundred years if they managed to climb the Ram's Head in the dark, in the cold, in this wind, while at least partly drunk.

Of course, that wasn't what happened.

There was no warning; not even time to shout. His toehold was crusted with solid ice and it was impossible to tell where the ice ended and the rock began. And maybe Domitian wasn't as steady as he should have been, or he set his foot wrong. The ice gave way with a sickening lurch and then he was falling, falling in the dark with the wind whistling by his ears and Erebos's trailing shout lost above him.

The pain when he landed was shocking, explosive, all-encompassing. It was the fear of that pain that made him dream of falling, decades after the accident. But he lived to dream those dreams, which was more important in the end.

After Domitian's accident and removal to the Solari Erebos never forgot him, and more than once made a pilgrimage to the Temple of the Sun to visit his friend. Some thirty years before, he made the pilgrimage with his ten year-old son, Karacas, whose name meant "breaker of stones." Even at ten the boy looked more than capable of shattering them with his bare hands.

"And Karacas usually stays with Father when he comes to the Temple," Diana concluded, a story that she had pieced together from a dozen different sources over the past few weeks. Maybe all the long lonely months had been worth it to have Karacas, the Paragon of the Rakkor, to teach her. Helion looked overjoyed; Kallista torn between laughter and annoyance. Lelia, a white patch over her missing eye, was as fixated on Wilhelm as ever, and was dangling a poro snack on a string for him to chase.

They were clustered around the sandstone hearth at the front of the house, where they could be noisy without disturbing Father or Karacas, who, Diana thought privately, was as touchy as an old woman about his naptime. It was pleasantly warm with the fire going, and Father had even let her serve honey-cakes like she was a grown-up lady entertaining for the afternoon, the thick sweet pastry neatly quartered and warming by the hearth. She wasn't sure how she felt about being a grown-up lady, as opposed to a grown-up warrior, but she was entirely sure about how she felt about honey cakes.

"I suppose if you can't train at the agoge, that's some compensation," Kallista said dryly, while Helion laughed and kissed the side of Diana's head with a hearty smack.

"If you got lost in Shurima you'd come back with the lost treasure of Bel'zhun," He said gleefully. "Can we see him? I want to ask about the siege of the Hoplodome."

"His duel with Kirith the Technomancer, the Darkhallow champion," Kallista added, beginning to smile at the idea. "There has to be more to that story."

"The march to Kumungu," Lelia said, her eye flicking hopefully to Diana. Lelia had always loved stories about faraway lands and exotic creatures. And if Wilhelm was a representative sample, the feeling was mutual; the poro devoured the dangling snack in a single bite and then bounded into Lelia's lap to lick her face.

Diana had been about to demur on the grounds that Karacas would pound her flat for asking, but she could deny Lelia nothing.

"I'll see," she said instead.

"They say he's the best spearman in a hundred years, you have to show me what he teaches you," Kallista said. "Or see if I can come and train with you? Just once?"

Though she had only known Karacas for a few weeks, Diana could already picture her teacher's reaction to that suggestion. His expressionless face somehow managed to convey a wide range of emotions, all the way from irritation to annoyance to exasperation. The idea of training all the yapping wolf cubs of the Solari, as he would say, might just move him from exasperation to apoplexy.

"Maybe if I tell him I need to spar against people closer to my size sometimes," she said aloud, winding the argument through her mind.

"You do," Kallista agreed immediately. "Is he as tall as they say? Karacas?"

"He has to duck to get in the house and Father had to have a special cot made for him so his feet won't dangle off the end."

All of them looked suitably impressed.

"Then you definitely need some shorter to spar against sometimes," Kallista said, nodding her head as if there were nothing else for it; it was as inescapable as sunset. "Training to fight against someone like Karacas is completely different than fighting someone…"

"Your size?" Lelia asked slyly, her dimple flickering in her left cheek.

"Or some middling height between you and Karacas," Helion said, puffing out his chest. "It's like Skalos Grakos says, we have to train for all possibilities."

It was a good argument. They put their heads together to refine it further and time flew by, the first hours Diana had spent with her friends in nearly a month. Her father never let her forget that she was a danger to them as much as herself; even when he didn't say it, she could see it in his eyes every time she asked to see them again.

She hadn't told Lelia and Kallista why she was so confined yet, but she did wonder sometimes if they guessed it. Helion wouldn't have told them; he had urged Diana to do so too many times to take the task on himself, and for all his gregarious nature, he knew well enough how to keep his mouth shut when he had to. But something in Kallista's manner had given her away, a new hesitance when she spoke as if she were weighing the words first for any accidental references to Diana's misfortune. She might have figured it out herself, but Diana was almost sure her mother, the formidable Elder Jocaste, had told her.

Lelia, Diana thought, had put the pieces together on her own, and was just waiting for Diana to bring it up herself.

Well, it wouldn't be today.

"If your father wanted you to train with the agoge, he wouldn't have invited me," another voice said, interrupting their planning. Kallista actually gasped aloud and all four of them turned to goggle at Karacas, who was in full, impressive armor with his helmet tucked under one beefy arm.

"Oh," Diana said, after a painful silence. "Skalos, this is…"

"I heard." He turned a gimlet eye on the other three wolf cubs, who had the grace to look at their hands, their feet, and the floor. "They have business elsewhere, I hope. You were to meet me fifteen minutes ago. In the grove. In your armor."

"We'll go," Helion said, low, giving Diana a quick kiss and scooping up Wilhelm to give the poro's head a rub goodbye. Karacas was already stalking away around the side of the house, but his voice rose up behind, clear and unmistakable.

"Tell the tall girl to come back in two week's time," he called. "You need someone else to spar against, or so I've heard."

Helion looked thunderstruck. Lelia clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter.

Kallista, who had inherited every measure of her mother's dignity, actually bounced in her seat.

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Author's Note: It being Christmas, I make no promises for a speedy next chapter, but don't worry, it'll get here. Thanks again for your reviews and messages, I really appreciate every one of them.