Read Michelle West - The Sun Sword 02 - The Uncrowned King for Free Online Page A

mistakes."
    Aidan was quiet for a long time. At last he said, "So can your friends, though."
    The old man's arms tightened a moment; Aidan should have worried about being tossed off the horse. But he didn't. "You are young," the old man said at length. "You don't yet realize that in truth, we have no friends. There is the will of the Lord. The will of powerful men."
    "There has to be more than that," Aidan said.
    "Does there?"
    "Yeah. Why else would you come to the Challenge?"
    "What makes you think that I do not travel at the will of other, more powerful men?" Bitter, bitter words.
    "Because," Aidan said, "you're the master."
    Silence, punctuated by the clipped weight of shod hooves on exposed stone. "You are very observant, boy. If you stay where you are in the life that you have, it will be a crime in the Lord's eyes."
    "The Lord doesn't rule these lands."
    "No, perhaps he does not."
    "Can I ask a question?"
    "You have asked more questions in this last hour than anyone of my acquaintance has dared to ask in the last ten years," he replied.
    Aidan took that as a yes. "Why do you serve the Lord? You don't even sound like you like him."
    "You do not particularly care for
Kalliaris
, but if I had to guess, I would say that you pray to her far more often than you pray to any of your other gods."
    Aidan shrugged. "She is what she is. But I like the Mother, and the Kings' fathers."
    "They are none of them powerful enough to stand alone," the old man replied, with the faintest hint of scorn.
    "Maybe they don't feel they have to. They don't have a lot to prove."
    Dry chuckle. "Your point, Aidan. Perhaps if I lived in the North, I would believe as you believe, worship as you worship. But the Lord
is
the Dominion, and he shapes us all. I do not follow him any more than you follow
Kalliaris
. He
is
. I am. But before the winds take me, I will stand up to his heat; I will stand. And if he destroys the things I value, I will have vengeance.
    "Because creatures of power only understand power; everything else is in a tone too delicate, a nuance to subtle, to catch their attention, to force their acknowledgment."
    "Nobody lives alone," Aidan said. "My—my mother used to say that."
    "She was a woman of the North."
    "She was smart."
    "Wise, I think, would be the better word. What else did your mother say?"
    "All the old stuff. Stand up for what you believe in. Do the right thing, even when it's easier to do the wrong one. Give when you can. Take only what you need." He shrugged, uncomfortably close to himself, to the fact that he was slipping away from his mother's words because he couldn't figure out how to live with his father. She'd've hated that. "Stuff like that. Girl stuff."
    The old man said, softly, "Once, there was a woman in my life who said very much what your mother said. I, too, thought her very foolish. Very, very foolish."
    And Aidan, who found his eyes stinging a moment as memory blending into the present became sharp and twisted, understood that this man had lost someone, and that he, too, would take no comfort at all in the telling of it.
    One hundred men.
    One hundred men would be chosen out of this gathered, hopeful crowd. Aidan was not very good with numbers, but he was certain that the long, thick line of waiting men, on this first day of the trials, far outnumbered that. Some, he knew, would be turned away immediately; they were perhaps a year or two older than he was, and worse, looked it. The Challenge had rules just like the army's; you had to be Old Enough. Aidan wasn't that mythical age. He wondered if he would ever reach it.
    "What do you see?" the old man asked.
    "That we're not the only people here on horseback."
    "That is unusual. It is seldom that we see Northern riders, and for the Northerners, the horses are large and fine. Who are they?" There was an awkward pause before the old man said, "Forgive me, boy. You know so much of the Challenge's history and ritual that I had almost forgotten that some of these