Jame woke with a start, dew beading her eyelashes. She had taken to sleeping directly under the hole in the as yet unmended roof, to Jorin's dismay, but in the past few days it had made her feel less like a prisoner. During the night it had rained, hard, driving her back to shelter. As soon as the storm had passed, however, she had returned to watch the hazy stars emerge one by one.
Although she thought that she had dreamed again, after that, she remembered little except a voice calling:
. . . come, come, come . . .
Perhaps that was what had woken her.
She rose, taking care not to disturb the ounce, and looked out. The heavy cloud cover of the past few days had condensed into slow rivers of fog rolling silently down the mountain slopes to the river. Above, a crisp night sky sparkled with stars, the sliver of a waxing moon having long since set. It was either very late or very early, and deathly still.
In a corner, Graykin stirred, grumbled, and went back to sleep. He had told her the previous night of the conversation that he had overheard in the officers' mess. That had given her several things to think about.
. . . come, come . . .
This would be the third day of the hunt, and the seventh in the college's weekly rotation, meaning no classes. One might even sleep in and skip breakfast. If she could slip out unseen, no one would know she was gone until evening.
. . . come . . .
She dressed quietly, choosing her black, knife-fighter's d'hen over a cadet's jacket. It felt good to have the Talisman's old tools back in hand for a night's prowl, if through a different maze than that of Tai-tastigon. Solitary by nature, how she missed the freedom to come and go as she chose. As she extracted grapnel segments from the d'hen's full sleeve and snapped them together, she wondered if she would ever become accustomed to acting with or through others. A long talk with the earnest Brandan master ten had given her a list of her responsibilities as head of her own barracks, which she had memorized and then passed on to Vant, to his ill-disguised disgust. Well, if she had to lump it, so could he.
Attach the line, anchor the hook, and swing out into the night. Hopefully, the Kendar with their dislike of heights would never think of such an escape route. On the ground, she freed the grapnel with a flick of her wrist and caught it as it fell.
The fading summons drew her northward across the foggy training fields, over the bridge under which the mud battle had been fought, to the outer wall. Despite ongoing repairs, parts of it were still down, tumbled by the quake, and the whole length unguarded. Of all the Riverland keeps, ironically, Tentir possessed the fewest fortifications. When Jame had asked Vant about this, he had snorted:
"The other houses defend themselves mostly against each other. Who would attack a school where all young randon train?"
The Merikit, Jame had said. The Seven Kings. The Shadow Guild. A rising of rhi-sar. Caldane, Lord Caineron, on a bad day.
Vant had only laughed, as if humoring a moron.
Beyond the wall was the orchard that each year supplied the college with its apple cider. The boughs were heavy with fruit ripening toward the autumn harvest, the ground beneath fragrant with windfalls that squelched and slipped underfoot. Beyond again were sloping pastures dappled with sleeping cows and sheep and other indistinct shapes that could have been anything. Although the eastern sky now showed the black silhouette of peaks, it was still very dark here in the valley below, and rather foggy.
Jame tripped over a stump hidden in deep grass, then over another. A hare, breaking cover almost under her feet, made her heart leap. Ahead loomed the forest, in this light a solid black mass poised like an avalanche to topple over the land stolen from it. Under its eaves, seedlings had already begun to reclaim what was theirs.
Jame stopped just short of those reaching shadows. For the first time, she wondered what she was doing here.
Two by two, in perfect silence, points of light sprang up in the trees, some low, some high, more and more and more.
The forest is watching me, she thought, and fished the imu medallion out of her pocket.
"I have the Earth Wife's favor," she said, holding it up, wondering even as she spoke if that was still true in all senses of the word.
She had promised to carry the little, clay face with its big ears into places where Mother Ragga otherwise was deaf, but she hadn't done anything yet about the duties foisted on her by the Merikit chief Chingetai. Damn the man anyway for making her his heir and, by implication, male, just to get out of a tight spot.
Still, wasn't that exactly what Tori had done too, following the Merikit's lead and Kirien's advice?
So here she stood at the boundary between two worlds, assigned much the same role in each, in danger of failing in both.
The forest's eyes blinked. Then out of its shadows burst a flight of luminous moths. They swirled around Jame with the flash and flutter of a thousand wings, dusting her with their glow. One landed on her wrist and flexed pale gray-green wings overlaid with a tracery of silver. Its furry antennae twiddled furiously.
"Have you a message for me?" Jame asked it, only half in jest.
If so, there was no time for it. The next moment the moths spiraled up into the sky as rushing bodies parted the thick grass. Jame found herself surrounded by a milling pack of hounds. They were muzzled lymers, she saw, scent trackers with fringed dewlaps and busy, intrusive noses.
One gave a muffled yelp and their black ranks parted to let through the direhounds. Jame stood very still among the glimmer of white backs. Teeth and eyes gleamed up at her. While not up to a Molocar's weight or strength, these hounds were killers. She had seen them practice on the weaker of their own kind: their mothers first taught them to eat meat by ripping apart the runt of each litter and feeding the bloody scraps to its stronger siblings.
Then horsemen rode among the roiling pack, whipping them off. But there were too few of them to be the college hunt—a bare dozen or less.
Someone laughed. "I don't believe it. First that Danior brat slinks out of Tentir with his mangy mutt and now here's the Knorth freak. Ho, my lord! Shall we loose the dogs again and see how fast a Knorth can run?"
Jame recognized the voice: it was one of Gorbel's Highborn cronies. The Caineron Lordan himself rode apart, leaning down from the saddle to let the lymers sniff a white cloth with dark stains—at a guess, rathorn blood wiped from thorns. The dogs milled excitedly around him, although some shrank away, whimpering. A Kendar cadet lashed them back into line. Then they were off, black on black under the trees, casting back and forth for the scent.
"My lord!" called the Highborn again.
Gorbel straightened. "What?" he said, preoccupied, intent on the dogs.
One gave a muffled yip and plunged into the forest, the rest a black tide flowing on his heels.
Gorbel shouted: "Ha!" and spurred after them.
Direhounds and horsemen followed. Jame dodged among them, sure they meant to ride her down. Instead, someone grabbed her by the collar and jerked her up across a horse's withers. A saddle horn punched her in the stomach with every stride. Branches whipped her buttocks and tore at her streaming hair. She started to slip. The horse shied violently as her nails bit into it and the rider cursed.
Trinity, anything to stop this nightmare ride.
Occasionally, prayers are answered.
Something hard clipped Jame on the back of the head and she tumbled into merciful darkness.
Someone was groaning.
Jame swallowed, dry-mouthed, and the sound stopped.
Incautiously, she opened her eyes and winced as sunlight stabbed into them. Time had passed. The day must be well advanced. Before her lay a dappled glen carpeted with ferns, lined with slender, gleaming birch trees. She frowned, trying to remember something, anything. Shouts, dogs yelping, pain.
That last was still with her. Her head throbbed with each heartbeat and her shoulders ached. She tried to straighten to ease the strain and discovered that her hands were bound tightly behind her, around a tree trunk.
Footsteps.
Someone sank onto his heels before her, bringing their eyes level.
"So. Awake at last."
She fumbled for a name to fit that narrow face with its mocking eyes. Simmel. A Randir.
"Where . . ."
"North of Tentir, lost in the folds of the hills. More than that, I can't tell you. The cursed land keeps shifting. Worse, that damn colt has crisscrossed it so often over the last few days that the lymers have run off in all directions and all but three of the Caineron after them." He laughed. "That house. So easily led."
"You mean . . . misled."
"That too. M'lord Gorbel insists, however, that we are on the true scent. Why? Because that Danior brat and his mangy mutt are still ahead of us. But it really isn't necessary to track the rathorn any farther." He brushed loose hair back from her face and let it slide through his fingers. "You see, now we have something he wants. You."
Jame tried to answer, but the words stuck in her dry throat.
"You'd like some water, I suppose," said the Randir, making no effort to get her any.
Behind her back, she extended her claws. Her hands were so numb that she didn't know if she was breaking the rope that bound them, strand by strand, or merely shredding her own wrists. She hawked and spat froth, wishing a moment later that she hadn't turned her head to do so. The Randir's hand had dropped to finger her d'hen.
"What a strange jacket," he murmured, spreading it open at the throat, regarding with detached interest the slight swell of breasts beneath her white shirt, the quick, secret pulse.
When he raised his eyes, his pupils had expanded until only a rim of white remained. From the abyss within, whatever lived in the Randir Tempter's eyes regarded Jame with amused, indolent contempt.
"So here you are, the last of Kinzi's female bloodline, the last Knorth lady."
As he spoke, his voice shifted timber to a drowsy half-purr that made Jame's skin crawl.
"And what do you think your great-grandmother, dear Kinzi, would make of you? Why, you're no lady at all, just a scrawny, mask-less hoyden playing soldier. Scarred, too. Damaged goods." His fingertips brushed her cheek, with a touch more of long, sharp nails than of his own short cut ones. He made a slight moue of disappointment. "I thought Kallystine had cut deeper, but never mind; even now she is paying for that mistake, and for many others."
"Who are you?"
"Even now you don't know. But then my name is legion, as are my forms and the eyes through which I see. Do you recognize these?"
He opened his jacket at the throat. Around his neck was a string of human teeth, the incisors chipped to sharp points. "The roots never stop bleeding," he said, more in his own voice than before, and bared his own sharpened teeth in a feral grin. "Ah, my family have been good servants to my lady, and my mother was one of the best. After you were done with her, my lady returned these to me, lest I forget. I will never forget, and neither should you."
Then Jame remembered, with a shiver. Rawneth had used the soul of one of her randon captains, a former instructor at Tentir and guard at Gothregor, a woman whose name Jame had never been able to learn, to create a demon to hunt Kindrie. There under the shadow of the Witch's tower at Wilden, Bane had literally ripped open its seams with the Ivory Knife and the demon essence had spilled out onto the pavement as a sort of black sludge with a set of teeth—these teeth—afloat in it before they too sank.
So that had been Simmel's mother and the Tempter's "cousin," caught in a situation not unlike Bane's own after the priest Ishtier had used his soul to create the Lower Town Monster—except that the Knife had presumably destroyed the randon's soul, but not necessarily her body. With Bane, the reverse might be true. Or not. Jame's head hurt enough as it was without trying to untangle such a riddle.
The Randir put a finger to his lips. "Shhhh. You mustn't frighten her away."
"Who?" Jame demanded, thoroughly confused as his voice changed again.
"Why, Kinzi's pretty little Whinno-hir, although not so pretty now. I thought she was dead. No matter. Today we finish what my sweet Greshan began."
A Caineron Highborn appeared behind him. "What, trifling with our bait? No fair, Simmel. We've earned that dubious pleasure, not you."
The Randir flinched. His face, sallow before, went white with shock as his pupils suddenly contracted back to normal. He lurched to his feet and stumbled behind a bush, where they could hear him violently retching.
"Odd people, the Randir," commented the Highborn.
Jame recognized him from her first class with the Caineron, the one who had wanted to play games. Now he watched her with bright-eyed intensity, and licked his lips.
"No," said Gorbel, behind him.
"But, my lord, think how proud your father will be of you! Besides, afterward who could tell?"
"I said, no." As the other withdrew, grumbling, Gorbel knelt and raised a leather water-bag to her lips.
Jame drank, feeling as if she could drain a lake.
"Enough," he said, and withdrew the bag.
"Why?"
"Once you helped the Ardeth Timmon save me from water," he said gruffly. "Now I save you with it. We're even."
That wasn't what she had meant. The Caineron was right: after what she had done to him and to his pet advisor, Caldane would love anyone who brought her to grief; and even as his current lordan, Gorbel's position in that snake-pit of a house was none too secure.
A shiver passed through the forest. Leaves rustled, trunks groaned, stirred by no breath of wind. Jame stiffened and tried to draw up her cramped legs.
"I think," she said, as casually as possible, "that I may be sitting on a snake."
"More likely a root. The rain last night loosened the soil. Arboreal drift, you know. Some trees prefer to spend the summer up-slope where it's cooler. Also, that damn willow is stirring things up."
"It's here?"
"Close enough, and on the move, dragging a chunk of mountain after it."
He had risen and spoke in a preoccupied voice, listening. The woods quivered again.
"Take cover. As for you," he looked down at Jame, expressionless, "wait."
Left alone, unable to do otherwise, she waited.
Something was coming, something that glimmered between the white birch. The forest seemed to shift around it. Late spring flowers bloomed in the shadow of new leaves, stirred by a fresher breath than that of near midsummer. The Whinno-hir seemed to drift into the clearing like smoke, like mist. There at its edge she paused, shy as a doe with one delicate hoof poised in mid-air. Her coat was the color of fresh cream, her mane, tail, and stockings white, as were the dapples on her back and flanks. Large, dark eyes darted here and there, warily. Ears flicked. Then she snorted, tossed her head, and stomped.
Jame caught a trace of what she had scented: the infinitely personal reek that clung to the Heir's Coat. But she had long since laid that aside.
The hills fold space. Sometimes perhaps they also fold time. This wasn't the ragged creature that Jame had seen before, but what she had been. For a moment, it was forty-three years ago, and Greshan lurked behind her in ambush.
"Lady!" Her voice came out as hollow as an echo in an empty room, straining to cross decades. "It's a trap. Run!"
Twangggg . . .
The note of the bow seemed by itself to flick a crimson line across that cream colored shoulder, so fast did the arrow fly.
The Whinno-hir screamed, wheeled, and fled.
Simmel leaped from the bushes to follow, already fitting another arrow to his bow, but Gorbel caught him by the jacket and swung him around, hard.
"Never." Slap. "Hurt." Slap. "A Whinno-hir." Slap.
He let go and the Randir fell.
"I challenge you for this, lordling," he snarled through blood spilling from a split lip.
"Do. Then you can explain to the Commandant why. Oh, Perimal."
Half a dozen direhounds erupted from the undergrowth. They might not be scent trackers, but bloodshed almost under their noses whipped them to frenzy. Most charged after the wounded Whinno-hir. One made for the Randir. Gorbel caught the hound on his dagger as it leaped and flung it aside.
"Damn waste of a good dog. Horses!" he roared, turning. "After them, you fools, before they catch her!"
The three Caineron plunged away, two of them riding high in their stirrups, whooping, the third grim-faced with spurs clapped to his mount's sides.
Simmel lurched to his feet and smeared blood across his white face with a shaking hand. His trembling fingers caught the necklace of teeth and broke it. He looked beyond sick, like an apple half-devoured from within by worms. His skin grew taut over bone and his eyes sank.
"My lady honored me," he said, in a drying thread of a voice. "Then she left me. She left, with her will unfulfilled."
He was Randir. His lady was Rawneth, the Witch of Wilden. Of course. That was who had spoken to her through him.
"Your mistress has hag-ridden you," Jame said, to distract him, to gain time as she strained against her bonds. "I've seen this before, with a . . . a creature named Bane. Where is your shadow, Randir? What's happened to your soul?"
His lips peeled back, teeth already falling from oozing gums, and went for Jame in a shamble. At last she wrenched her hands free. One came up with a rock in it. She smashed him on the side of the head and his skull crumpled like paper, empty. He fell, and in falling crumbled to dust and to a rain of bloody teeth within his cadet's uniform.
Jame scrabbled off the remains of rope, noting that her claws had indeed picked apart one length, but they had also badly lacerated the opposite wrists. Her own blood, still flowing freely, had loosened the knots.
A moment to tear strips of cloth from her shirt, another to bind up the bleeding wounds, and she was off, stumbling after the hunt. No tracker, she quickly went astray in the restless landscape. Somewhere hounds were baying and men shouting but, it seemed, in different directions. Perhaps Gorbel, that mighty hunter, had also gotten lost.
The ground rippled with roots to trip her. Aspens quivered, reaching for the cool heights. Valley oaks dug in their gnarled toes. A grove of sumac scattered wildly in all directions. The whole Riverland felt unstable, shifting—from the crack on her head or blood loss or arboreal drift, Jame couldn't tell. Dense undergrowth, swaying trees, a sky rapidly clouding over—which way was north, which south? Lost. And under it all was the nightmare sense of needing to get somewhere, fearing that it was already too late.
Shouts, crashes, a high, terrified whinny.
Jame floundered through bushes and stopped, staring. She had caught up with the wrong hunt. Again.
The Whinno-hir Bel-tairi plunged against the ropes that held her, jerking her captors back and forth. She was small and delicately made, but terror gave her strength. A violent lunge yanked a Kendar off his feet. She stood poised to trample him, but restrained herself, snorting, and he scrambled out of her way.
"Hold her, damn you!"
The man who spoke bent over a fire, stirring it with a metal rod. There was something of Torisen in his features, something of Ganth in his voice, but both on the turn. Though still young and handsome, he looked like a man with a secret taste for spoiled meat, his own flesh just beginning to ripen on the bone.
Jame stood rooted, staring at him. This, without doubt, was her long-dead uncle Greshan.
"Having been on your travels," he said to the Whinno-hir in a conversational tone, "you may not know this, but your mistress Kinzi, my dear grandmother, has seen fit to stand between me and my chosen consort. She has even talked Father into sending my brother to seek the contract that should be mine. Dear little Gangoid. Sweet little Gangrene. As if he were man enough for Rawneth, or for anything else. I will have her, you know. I always get what I want. But your lady must be taught not to meddle, and you will bear that message to her."
He drew out the iron, which by now was glowing red hot, and spat on it. Fixed to its end were the three curved lines of the rathorn sigil, incandescent with heat.
With an effort, the mare controlled herself, although her wide, dark eyes still rolled white. The men gasped and fell back a step. Their ropes now hung loosely around a slender woman with long, white hair and a triangular face.
Please, she said. Please.
"Well, well, well." Greshan thrust the iron back into the heart of the fire and rose. "I've heard that your kind can shape-change, but never believed it. Now, is this form true, or an illusion? Shall we find out?"
He sauntered around her, stepping over the slackened ropes. "You aren't bad looking . . . for an animal. I've had worse. Perhaps we can handle this another way, if you please me."
As he came up behind her, his hand dropped to loosen his belt. In a flash, she was again equine, lashing out with small, sharp hooves. He fell over backwards with a yelp and scuttled away. Once clear, he rose, his face going from white to blotchy red with anger.
"You mangy, flea-bitten nag, look what you did!"
She might have cracked open his skull. Instead, she had ripped his coat and knocked him into a mud puddle.
He grabbed the hot iron and stalked toward her.
"Bring her down!"
Ropes tightened around her legs. She crashed over on her side.
"You. Hold her head."
A wooden-faced Kendar forced it to the ground and knelt on her neck, one hand brutally twisted in her mane. Greshan stepped forward and thrust the glowing iron into the Whinno-hir's face.
Her scream and the stench of burning hair shocked Jame from her trance. She sprang at Greshan, the rathorn battle-shriek tearing from her throat and her claws out. He saw her. His eyes widened and his jaw dropped. So did the brand. But at the end of her lunge, he wasn't there. Face down in deep mould, she heard the fading echoes of shouts as the mare freed herself and then the receding beat of hooves. She was alone, the glen undisturbed by fire or struggle.
Did I dream it? She wondered, but then she felt a hard shape under her hand, under the loom of decades and drew it out. It was a rusted metal rod, its end bent into the sigil of a Knorth branding iron.
You can visit the past, Tirandys had once told her, speaking of the Master's House, but you can't change it.
"Damn, damn, damn!" said Jame.
However, this terrible story wasn't over yet.
Today, we finish what my sweet Greshan began.
The hounds were still on the trail of their prey and she was still lost. Jame pulled herself together and rose.
Water flows downhill. Find water.
Some time later, how long she hardly knew, Jame found herself stumbling up a slope. Something beyond the ridge above her was moving, something big.
Overhead, golden leaves undulated against a leaden sky. Supple withies swayed back until the trunk invisible beneath them groaned, then surged forward with a great swooshhhh.
From the crest, she looked down on the errant golden willow. It had just passed by, a shimmering hillock of narrow leaves on long, wand-like stems, fighting its way up the bed of a mountain stream. Beneath, its roots writhed in a serpentine node, cracking out like whips to anchor and pull, digging into the stream bed to push. Its trunk swayed back, then surged forward. As it did so, the chain fettering it rose dripping from the stream and the huge boulder to which it was attached ground forward another inch. Back and forth, back and forth.
This was the tree that, not so long ago, had carried Jame and her cousin Kindrie across the Silver, away from the Randir's ravening pack, not that it had probably been aware of them clinging like a pair of aphids to its boughs. Now here it was, all but trapped, wood for the axe.
A moment's dizziness, and suddenly she was slithering down the steep slope, into the stream. Half obstructed as it was below by the boulder, it had risen far above its natural bed. Moreover, the willow's roots had churned it to the consistence of thick oatmeal lumpy with stones and apparently bottomless.
Flailing about, she managed to grab the overhanging branch of a tree that had survived the willow's passing. Whether she clawed her way out or the tree pulled her up, Jame had no idea. As she lay panting on the bank among its hunched roots (why did she have the impression that they had pulled themselves out of the willow's way?), a hoarse, hollow voice spoke above her, sounding not altogether pleased:
"You again, girl. I might have known."
Jame looked up.
The tree's trunk was a knobby, thick affair, easily twice as wide around as her arms could have reached. Shaggy bark clung to its bulges like an ill-fitting dress. Some eight feet up was a broad burl that suggested a contorted face, with a large hole where a major branch had long since broken off. The whole looked not unlike a natural imu.
"Earth Wife? Mother Ragga?"
"G'ah," said the voice, as if clearing its throat, and the hole spat out a shower of leave mold mixed with old bird bones, twigs, and one very angry squirrel. "Step-mother to you, if that. Get off my feet. Your blood is poison."
Jame let her head droop. The rag around her wrist was dripping red. ". . . could have told you that," she muttered, trying to tighten it with teeth and her free hand. ". . .'s hardly a secret anymore."
"Get up," said the hollow voice as the squirrel furiously scolded them both from a nearby branch. "G'aaah up! They have her."
Then Jame heard the Whinno-hir's despairing cry. Over it soared the rathorn's scream, mingling with the mad howl of the direhounds.
Jame clawed her way to her feet, bark shredding under her nails. The sounds were surprisingly close. Trinity, had they all been running in circles? She fought her way down stream through brambles, past the boulder, up the far slope. The ridge above was crowned with throttle-berries and under them ran the narrow paths of wild things. Clothed this time, but otherwise as wet and slippery with mud as she had been at the falls, Jame slithered between the roots until she could see into the hollow beyond.
On the far side, the Whinno-hir huddled, a pale blur, against the trunk of a giant fir. Bare, lower branches thrust out around her like so many brittle arms seeking to protect a ghost.
The rathorn colt also stood between her and the hounds. Three lay dead and mangled at his feet. A fourth dragged itself in circles, snapping furiously at its own useless hindquarters. The last two, one on each side, darted back and forth, trying to draw their quarry off balance.
The colt reared up, presenting his horned mask, greaves, and ivory sheathed belly. Head on, only his hind legs were vulnerable. Hackles rattled and rose, lifting the lower half of his mane, a spiky wave down his spine, and his tail. As the hounds lunged, he pivoted on his hocks and struck at them, fangs snapping, with the whip-crack speed of a snake. One came too close, and was impaled on the twin horns. As the colt flung him off, his mate lunged for the rathorn's throat, broke his teeth on the ivory armor, and went down with a shriek under sharp hooves.
The hound with the broken back had stopped circling. It snarled as the rathorn loomed over it. The hooves drove down again in a precise blow to the skull that shattered it.
Sudden silence.
There in the midst of carnage stood the rathorn like some fabulous cross between a dragon and a warhorse, all white except for his own blood and that of the hounds. The latter ran down the curved horns into grooves in the ivory mask, between the glittering red eyes, down to the mouth where it was caught by the flick of a pink tongue between white fangs.
Then he gave himself a very equine shake that set his mane flying and uttered a loud snort of satisfaction.
Jame could feel his eyes fix on her. He snorted again: "Huuh!"
She crawled out from under the bushes and stood, swaying slightly. "All right. You can see me and I can see you. What next?"
Below, undergrowth crackled and parted for Gorbel, closely followed by his two men. He gave a grunt of satisfaction, not unlike the rathorn's, and swung down from his mount, a wickedly sharp boar spear in hand. His companions kept to their saddles, but with difficulty: all three horses had caught the rathorn's disturbing scent. The colt lowered his bloody horns at them and snarled. They backed, wild-eyed, barely under control.
The Caineron took up a stance, perhaps by accident, between Jame and the ivory-clad beast. One of his own hounds lay disemboweled at his feet. Jame didn't like the odds for either man or beast. She slid down through the bracken to his Gorbel's side and touched his sleeve. "Please. Don't."
He shot her a look askance, taking in her filthy condition. "Been playing in the mud again, have you? Father would love to see you now."
"Well, I've seen him turning handle over spout in mid-air, filling his pants. Who d'you think is ahead so far?"
The sound he made might almost have been a laugh.
Then both horns and spear swung around to cover the opposite side of the hollow. Someone or thing was approaching. A snuffle, a sneeze, and the Molocar Torvo shambled panting into the clearing, followed by his master Tarn.
Both were utterly disheveled and matted with burrs. One of the Caineron snickered. Gorbel looked exasperated. When Tarn saw the rathorn, however, his face lit up with delight.
"See?" he demanded of them all. "See? I don't know what trail you lot followed to get here, but we came by the true one, every step of the way." He dropped to his knees and threw his arms the enormous, shaggy hound. "Good boy, Torvie, good boy!"
Torvo licked his master's face and slowly collapsed in the boy's embrace.
Tarn shook him. "Torvie, you idiot, this is no time for a nap. There's the rathorn. There! We still have to take it." The hound breathed in long, rasping sighs, with a rattle at the end of each, his half open eye-lids fluttered. "Torvie!"
Everyone was watching now, transfixed.
"Torvie, wake up! You're not going to die. No, no . . ."
The rathorn colt began to quiver. His hackles had fallen and he seemed somehow smaller than he had been, more vulnerable. His own grief had scabbed over, Jame realized, but never healed, like an abscess on the soul. What he saw now was not a boy and a dying hound but himself in the last moments of his dam's life, frantic that she not leave him, knowing that she must, but not yet, please, not yet.
The hound's breath rattled and stopped.
For a moment, no one breathed.
Then the rathorn screamed.
His grief and despair blasted the clearing, withering every leaf, killing every blade of grass. Jame fell to her knees, hands over her ears, but the sound was in her heart, in her soul, ripping open old scars.
She was with her first teacher and nurse, Winter, as Kin-Slayer in her father's hands sheared the Kendar woman nearly in two.
She was on the edge of the Escarpment, watching her mother plummet into the abyss.
She was crouching beside the body of the man who had taught her honor and given her love under the eaves of darkness.
Good-bye, Tirandys, Senethari. Good-bye.
A hand on her shoulder . . . Torisen? No. Gorbel.
"B-but I never cry," she told him, feeling tears track down her muddy face.
"Neither do I," he said, and perfunctorily wiped a streaming nose on his sleeve.
Somewhere beyond her own grief, she had glimpsed a fat man beating a woman over and over, despite her screams, until she lay still on the floor in a pool of blood that inched toward a child's bed.
Tarn bent over Torvo, sobbing. "It's my fault! It's all my fault!"
Otherwise, the clearing was empty.
Jame glanced toward where the Caineron had been.
"They ran away," said Gorbel flatly. "I might have too, if I'd been on horseback."
"The rathorn?"
Then they heard him shriek, not far away. He sounded terrified. Gorbel grabbed his spear and plunged off in the direction of the sound, with Jame hard on his heels.
They came to the churning stream, the boulder, and the willow. The latter two had progressed perhaps a foot since Jame had last seen it, but where was the rathorn?
The willow swung back and surged ahead, its leaves flowing molten gold. The chain rose dripping, and there was the colt, brought up with it. In his headlong flight, he had plunged into the quagmire and somehow gotten his lesser horn wedged into a link of the chain.
"Oh, shit," said Jame.
The colt snorted out mud, wheezed, and began feebly to struggle. The willow swung back and the chain sank again, dragging him down with it.
"Damn," said Gorbel. "There goes my trophy."
"Quit on me now and I'll hand you something you'll be even sorrier to lose. Come on."
Seen close up, the boulder really did look like a dislodged chunk of mountain. A very big chunk. With muddy water boiling around it. Jame took a running jump and for a moment hung from its slick rock-face by her nails. The roar of the water echoed in her head. Then she forced the world back into focus and clawed her way up. Luckily, the boulder was full of cracks and niches. When she reached the top, she looked back down to see Gorbel trying to follow her, still stubbornly clutching his boar spear. She grabbed its shaft below the head and braced herself. He climbed up hand over hand and collapsed gasping beside her.
"This . . . is . . . insane."
"But interesting. Look."
The willow was shedding wands. As they floated down, they grew thread-like roots and clustered around the rock's base, busily prying into its fractures. The cap of each rootlet excreted an acid that allowed both the saplings and their parent tree to anchor themselves with startling speed, years of erosion accomplished in minutes. Still, that might not be fast enough.
"Can you use that pig-sticker to pry this open?" she asked, shouting to make herself heard.
He examined the link that hooked the chain's ends together. "I might. Why?"
"Just do it, once I reach the colt."
He caught her arm. "Again, why?"
"Because I killed his dam."
Rathorn ivory is the second hardest substance on Rathillien, and it never stops growing. If they live long enough—and some scrollsmen argue that, like the Whinno-hir, they are potentially immortal—their armor eventually encases them in a living tomb.
The mare had been staggering under its weight, breathing in hissing gasps through bared fangs because the nasal pits of her mask had grown shut, as had one eye hole. He had walked beside her, crying, now a yearling foal, now a slender, white-haired boy with red, red eyes: No, you're not going to die! No, no . . .
"You bagged a rathorn?" Gorbel's goggle eyes were suddenly those of a child, wide with wonder. "How?" he demanded eagerly. "With what weapon?"
"There isn't time. . ."
"Tell me, and I'll help."
"With a knife."
If you kill me, my child will kill you.
"Through the eye."
Kill me.
"At extremely close quarters."
The chain was rising again, and the rathorn with it. Gorbel still held Jame's arm, for a moment supporting her as she sagged. He peered at her face, white under its muddy mask, but if the cloth around her wrist was more red than brown, he didn't notice.
"Are you all right?"
I'm bleeding to death, Jame thought with odd detachment. Well, either I have enough blood left in me to do this or I don't.
"Besides," she said out loud, "I owe the tree too."
He was surprised into letting her go, and she stepped out onto the taut chain. The colt's weakening struggles barely caused a tremor, but at least he was still alive. The links were slick and knobby underfoot (who brings a chain on a hunt? They must have sent to Restormir or Wilden for it), but it was at least as thick as the rope that had stretched across the Great Hall.
When she reached the colt, she slid into the roiling water, onto his back. His red eyes snapped open and he began feebly to thrash, but already they were sinking again. Jame took a deep breath. Opaque water, almost liquid mud, closed over her head. Eyes squeezed shut, she slid her hands up the rathorn's neck and down his mask to the trapped horn. There. She began to work the link back and forth, inch by inch, up the length of ivory. The air in her lungs was turning to fire when the slack went out of the chain and they rose again.
Above water, she clung gasping to the colt's neck. He hung limp. She drove her nails into his crest.
"Wake up, dammit! You can't kill me if you die first!"
Gorbel wondered if the Knorth madness was indeed contagious and if so, whether he had caught it.
After all, here he was on top of a bloody big rock (don't think how far off the ground you are; don't think), trying to break a Trinity-be-damned chain with an ancestors-cursed boar spear, while trying to fend off a swarm of willow saplings. The boulder's face seethed with them as if with so many leafy snakes (ugh), all industriously rooting themselves in stone. Debris rattled down on all sides, along with occasional larger chunks.
Father had told him clearly enough what to do with the Knorth bitch: humiliate her; make her suffer; show the entire Kencyrath how insane both she and her brother were for thinking that a Highborn girl could ever become a randon.
But it wasn't so easy. She kept throwing him off-guard.
This . . . this was insane.
She had killed a rathorn mare. There, he envied her. She felt she owed a debt to the rathorn's foal. All right. He could see that, vaguely. But to a tree?
Madness.
And what about that sudden flash of . . . memory? . . . back in the clearing when the rathorn had let off that god-awful cry? Father beating Mother, smashing her skull, spattering blood and brains . . . no. His mother had died when he was still only a squalling brat. He didn't remember her at all, and he cried for no one. But his nose did run. It was running now.
Sudden pain lanced through his foot. A sapling had crawled onto it unnoticed and had sunken its roots through the boot into flesh. He yanked out the leafy wand as if it were a weed, but only the top part came. His foot continued to throb as if splinters had been driven deeply into it.
The willow swayed back and forward again with a rush. The chain around the boulder tightened. Its length rose, bringing with it a muddy mass that resolved itself into two figures, one clinging to the other. The rathorn hung by his horn like a slaughtered hog on a hook. Then he snorted mud out of his nostrils and again began struggling weakly to free himself. He had guts, that one. So (face it) did the Knorth.
But Trinity, what a way to ride a rathorn!
Stone shifted under foot. Gorbel wobbled, terror clutching his heart. One side of the rock sheared away, trailing saplings, and hit the water with a great, drenching splash. The rest of the boulder was breaking apart, the chain paying out link by link, faster and faster, as the willow pulled and its anchor gave way.
Jump. Jump!
Gorbel did, and nearly fainted on impact from the stabbing pain in his foot. He limped to high ground and clung to a tree, watching, as the boulder disintegrated. Set loose, the dammed stream crested in a muddy flash flood. Two figures tumbled with it, around a curve in the river bed, out of sight.