Below Gothregor, the Silver bent to the east before resuming its southward course. Long ago, the low-lying ground within this angle had been cleared and enclosed along the edge by an earthen dike. Every spring part of the snow-swollen river was diverted into the resulting three hundred acre meadow and then drained out its lower end, leaving a new, rich layer of silt through which the early grass soon shot vivid green blades. On the far side, where the land rose to meet the Snowthorn's foothills, long terraces supported bright ribbons of flax, barley, rye, oats, and wheat, all ripening toward the Great Harvest at the end of summer. At midsummer, though, attention fixed on the lower meadow and the haying, which took every hand that the Knorth could muster to bring in the harvest before the weather turned.
First came a line of reapers with a hiss and flash of scythes, the hay falling in swathes at their feet. The next line of workers turned over these sheaves with rakes to loosen them for proper drying. Twenty great wains, drawn by horse or oxen, lumbered behind them between the rows. Onto these the hay was pitched under the expert eye of the load-masters. When a wain was full, it pulled aside to one of the growing stacks. The hayricks themselves were meticulously constructed and, in their way, things of beauty. Each sat on a stone foundation which in turn was covered with a deep layer of green bracken, both to raise the hay off the damp ground and to protect it from rats, who could no more chew through the tough branches than through horse hair. Set on top of that was a wooden structure in the shape of an open-sided pyramid, against which the hay was stacked, again under careful supervision.
All in all, the Lesser Harvest progressed smoothly, well oiled by centuries of practice.
Torisen worked with the reapers, hot, sweaty, and not as smoothly as he would have liked. In past years, he had either been with the Southern Host or saddled with other duties, making this his first season in the field. He knew his Kendar would prefer that he stayed aloof, pretending to oversee—after all, what would their enemies say if they saw the Knorth lord slaving away beside the least of his house? However, Torisen didn't care. At least he had mastered the long-armed scythe well enough not to cut off anyone's foot; and if his row was less orderly than those of more experienced mowers, well, he could learn. After all, there were his hands, both of them, moving at his will. The bandages and splints had come off weeks ago, but his relief remained, as sharp and clear as the moment he had first flexed his mended fingers and known that he wouldn't be a cripple after all.
Besides, it was pleasant to be under orders again, even those of someone as ill-tempered as the harvest-master. The man was behind him now, shouting at a raker in a voice as raspy and irritating as the chaff that worked itself into everything.
"Here now, you cow-handed cadet! Turn those swathes and loosen 'em properly. What, you've never heard of tight-packed hay heating 'til it bursts into flames?"
The cadet Vant stifled a derisive snort. Who are you, it said, to be telling me anything? As a ten-commander, he had already made it clear that he resented playing such a menial role in the harvest, never mind that everyone from senior randon to the highlord himself labored beside him.
"You think that's funny?" The harvest-master must be almost in the cadet's face, up on his toes to bring their eyes level. "Well, I've seen it happen, boy, a whole field of burning ricks, pale tongues of fire in the summer sun, and that winter the cattle lowing with hunger so loud that no one could sleep. So shut up and do your work properly!"
Torisen felt those hard, impatient eyes turn to fix on his back. I dare you, he thought.
"Huh!" said the master, and stomped off to shout at someone else.
Marc and Brier Iron-thorn worked side by side down the line, two tall, strong figures swinging their blades in identical, effortless arcs. The girl's hair glowed sullen red, swaying back and forth as she moved. The man's beard was a thick, white bush with some lingering touches of fox, his head sunburned and peeling under its crown of thinning, reddish hair. Someone was always hiding his hat for a joke; this time he apparently hadn't found it yet. He said something to his companion and she laughed, white teeth ablaze in that dark face which seemed bred into some Southron Kendar. Torisen had never heard Brier Iron-thorn laugh before, or even seen her smile.
He wondered again why Marc—ever so gently, as if not wanting to cause pain—had turned down his offer of a permanent place with the Knorth. Anyone else in the Kendar's position would surely have jumped at the chance. For that matter, any decent lord should have been glad to have him. True, in his mid-nineties he was past his fighting prime, but he had so much else to offer for those who valued kindness and inherent decency, not to mention his growing skill as an artisan. The man was waiting, but for what? In the meantime, ironically, in part because of his refusal to accept Knorth service, his was one of the few names that Torisen was absolutely sure he would never forget.
Not that he had misplaced anyone since the unfortunate Mullen. His people wouldn't let him. In his presence, everyone had pointedly called each other by name until he had demanded that they stop as it gave him a headache. Dammit, didn't they trust him?
Don't answer that.
Kindrie had also declined a place in his service. At the time Torisen had been both surprised and relieved, if puzzled. According to the Matriarchs, an illegitimate Highborn was kin to no one, but that didn't change the fact that Kindrie was the son of Torisen's unfortunate aunt Tieri—a first cousin. And the Shanir was desperate for a home. Why, then, had he turned away at the last minute?
For that matter, Torisen hadn't formally bound his sister Jamethiel. It had never occurred to him to try, nor had she seemed either to expect or want it.
There was another sore spot, dimming his pleasure in the day: Jame's ten-command had come to help with the harvest, but without her. The Min-drear cadet Rue had said that his sister had unfinished business in the hills. What, for Ancestors' sake? Surely she couldn't be mad enough to try to pick up with the Merikit where she had left off at Kithorn on Summer's Eve. He remembered now, uneasily, that she hadn't agreed with him that such a thing was out of the question. Her quiet independence alarmed him, as if she only submitted to authority when she wanted to.
Am I losing control? he wondered, not for the first time. Of my sister, of my people, of myself? Was I wrong to assume my father's title with his curse hanging over me? Can the disowned inherit power any more than the illegitimate?
But he had seen how close the Kencyrath was to falling apart. As he had sensed Ganth's death, so had others, if less clearly. Some Highborn, soon, would have claimed the Highlord's seat. Caineron, probably. Or Ardeth. Or Randir. Then there would have been civil war and slaughter enough to make the White Hills pale by comparison. Those seeds of destruction were also part of his father's legacy.
No matter what I do, Torisen thought, swinging his scythe with untoward force, making the Kendar next to him hastily step aside, I stand in his shadow.
"Rest!" bellowed the harvest-master.
Reapers grounded their tools and reached for the water bottles hanging from their belts. Some sat down, drew out cheese and onion wrapped in black bread, and began to munch on it. A ripple of talk and laughter passed down the line, some of it directed at the workers behind them whose failure to keep up had caused this welcome halt. As it was, they had almost reached the bottom of the meadow. Tubs of oil and sand were brought forward along with the hones to whet the blades for the final assault.
Harn trudged up, an eight-foot pitchfork cocked like an ungainly spear over his shoulder.
"Hot work," he said, offering Torisen a swig from his bottle, which turned out to contain hard cider. He squinted up at the hazy sky and at the sun, which was ringed by a halo. "Odd light, odd weather. D'you suppose it's going to storm?"
Rain was coming, thought Torisen. He could feel it in his new-knit bones. And something else, somehow connected to his delinquent sister . . . but to think that was ridiculous. All natural disasters weren't Jame's fault—maybe just the unnatural ones.
There had been several jolts around dawn, enough to crumble some already damaged walls and to stir fears of another earthquake like the one that spring, whose marks could still be seen up and down the Riverland. Torisen looked northward. Early that morning, from window of his turret quarters, he had seen a plume of smoke on the horizon. Now clouds were coming—strange, lobed ones white against a darkening sky. The air stirred, laced with a hint of . . . what? Rotten eggs? Birds flew overhead, all going south.
Someone shouted a warning as a herd of deer bounded across the field between and sometimes over harvesters, who threw themselves flat to avoid the flying hooves. At a stag's heels, snapping, ran a white streak. The wolver pup Yce had grown over the summer, although not as much as a wolf cub would have, and she chased anything that fled her. Deer, cows, sheep, people . . .
"Just wait until she gets big enough to make her first kill," Harn said grimly, watching. "One taste of fresh blood, and there'll be no stopping her."
Yce gave up pursuit and loped back to Torisen, as usual stopping just out of reach.
"What am I going to do with you?" he asked her, "and what in Perimal's name do you want of me?"
No answer but that unnerving, ice-blue stare.
More than ever, she reminded him of his sister. Both seemed to be challenging him in ways he couldn't understand, or perhaps didn't want to.
Again came that sick sense of lost control, like tumbling down an abyss by stages with no bottom in sight.
. . . Daddy's boy, run, hide . . .
Words spoken in delirium. Ridiculous that they should have struck so deep, that they continued to hurt. She hadn't known what she was saying, of course.
He still didn't know how his sister had come to be injured. Apparently no one did, although Torisen sensed that the Caineron Gorbel knew more than he would admit. Something odd was going on between the two lordans, if by "odd" one meant anything besides the inevitable house rivalries, which in the past had bordered on the lethal. And then there was the Ardeth Timmon as well. Pereden's son. Adric's favorite. What had he to do with Jame, and why did both of them keep edging into his most intimate dreams?
G'ah, think of something else. But he couldn't.
After half a lifetime his twin sister had returned, but she kept slipping away again into one outlandish situation after another. She was younger than he now, but sometimes she seemed older, with eyes that hinted at experiences beyond his comprehension and at a certain rising irritation: You might at least try to understand.
On top of all that, she was now a cadet at Tentir, where he had longed with all his heart to go.
She is gaining strength, boy, murmured the voice in his head, behind the locked door. Even your war-leader Harn speaks well of her. The randon like a fighter, and she is becoming one of them. What if, eventually, they prefer her to you?
Madness. Don't listen.
Besides, not everyone at Tentir wanted her there. The cadet Vant, although an ass in other respects, had said as much. To many, she was a freak, her mere presence at the college an insult to all randon past and present. Vant had also hinted that no one expected her actually to stay the course. M'lord shouldn't worry. His people at Tentir knew his mind.
Ha, thought Torisen. He wished that he knew it himself.
Harn nudged him. "Company."
Two riders were coming down the New Road, one a randon guard, the other . . . damn. A lady. Torisen mopped his sweaty face, silently cursing.
He had thought that, here in the middle of a hay field, he would be safe from the Matriarchs. As Rowan had predicted, their schemes had grown subtler since the farce of the first few days, but they were far from giving up. Over the past few weeks he had been presented with everything from an unhappy bald girl, her head newly shaven (someone must have noticed his strong reaction to long, black hair, but taken it the wrong way), to the wide-eyed seven-year-old who had first asked him to marry her outside Adiraina's quarters.
Occasionally, on the sly, he visited the Jaran Matriarch Trishien to reassure himself that all Highborn women weren't mad; and if she should have news of Jame by way of Kirien, all the better, although he took care never to ask directly.
Rowan's suggestion floated in the back of his mind. If nothing else, it would be sweet to confound them all by taking his sister as his consort—only for show, of course.
Torisen slipped back on the black jacket that he had discarded in the heat. One should show one's enemies respect, and wear whatever protection was available.
"Hello!"
He straightened, surprised at the hail. Decorum kept most of his would-be consorts silent, except for the seven-year-old whose naive, highly improper stream of questions no one had been able either to stop or to divert.
Then he recognized the newcomer as Lyra, Caineron's young daughter, and relaxed. It was hard to feel threatened by a girl nicknamed "Lack-wit." Besides, at Kithorn she had stopped her sister Kallystine from slapping him with the same razor ring that his former consort had used to slash Jame's face. Even if the girl's interference had been an accident, as she claimed, he owed her for it.
Not waiting for help, Lyra tumbled off her pony in a swirl of flame red velvet and plunged across the rough meadow toward him. Bemused Kendar drew aside to let her pass. From the freedom with which she moved, Torisen guessed that she had left her tight under-skirt back in the Women's Halls. Then she saw Marc and threw herself into his arms with a squeal of delight.
"I saw you in the courtyard, working with all those pretty bits of glass, but they wouldn't let me go out to say hello. Hello!"
Marc laughed, gently returning her enthusiastic hug. The top of her head only came up to the lower edge of his rib cage. "I saw you too, lady, at an upper window waving and, I think, shouting. Then someone pulled you away."
"That was the sewing mistress. It's so funny when she gets hysterical. Just ask, 'Why?' and off she goes. Young ladies aren't supposed to ask questions, you see, which I think is stupid, so I ask them all the time."
"You must be very popular with your teachers," said Torisen, amused. "I didn't realize that you knew Marcarn."
"Oh yes!" She turned to beam at him—quite a pretty girl, actually, from what one could see behind her deceptively demure half-mask; and no fool either, despite her nickname and manner. "Marc rescued us from the palace at Karkinaroth. That was after it caught fire and before it fell down, of course. In between, poor Prince Odalian died." Her pert face dimmed at the memory, a cloud crossing the sun, but immediately brightened again. "Then we three rode a barge down the Tardy to Hurlen, along with that darling ounce Jorin. That was fun. Such exciting things happen when your sister is around!"
"I've noticed," he said, with a smile that was half grimace. "But she's not here now. To what do we owe the honor of your presence, lady? Surely the Matriarchs didn't send you."
"Oh no," she said blithely. "They threw a bucket of water over the sewing mistress, just when she was getting interesting, and sent me to my room to practice knot stitches, but that's so boring! Nearly everything is, in the Women's Halls. I'd ask to go home, but Kallystine would probably kill me. Anyway, I just had to get out of the Halls for a while. I would have come alone, except Marrow here spotted me and besides I needed help with the basket. I thought I'd bring you a picnic lunch. It is almost noon, you know."
Torisen had noticed the wicker hamper that the cadet guard Marrow carried self-consciously slung over her arm. He also noted that harried look on her face of someone rushed into something without time to think it through. No doubt her captain would give her seven kinds of hell over this later.
Lyra spread a white garment over the hummocky stubble—so she hadn't left her under-skirt behind after all—and dumped the contents of the basket onto it.
"There!" she said. "I brought some of everything that I like to eat."
Torisen accepted a purple sugarplum scrolled with cream frosting. Marzipan, chocolate rolled in crumbled walnut, snails encased in ginger shells . . . the Caineron larder was obviously much better stocked with luxuries than the Knorth, and probably with everything else as well.
"So you know our kitten as well as our Marcarn." Harn popped something bright green into his mouth, made a face, and swallowed it whole. "I think that one was still alive."
"Well, you wouldn't want to eat a dead candied cockroach, would you? Oh yes, Jame and I are like sisters. After Hurlen, though, we didn't see each other again until she showed up at Restormir just before the weirdingstrom. You know," she added, turning to Brier. "You were there too."
"I've heard something about that," said Harn. He eyed the rest of Lyra's offerings, but didn't take any. Around them Kendar were settling down to their more mundane repasts, pretending not to listen. "What did happen, cadet?"
The rest of Brier's ten in the second row stared at her with ill-concealed horror. Vant, down the line, went white under his peeling sunburn. The story was by now well known in the barracks at Tentir, with many unintended embellishments gained by repetition. So far, though, no senior randon had gotten around to asking for a formal account of it, probably afraid of what they would hear.
Brier gave her report in a voice so flat that one could have rolled a marble across it. They had encountered the lordan while on patrol. She had stated that her servant Graykin was Lord Caineron's prisoner and that she was honor-bound to rescue him. They had helped her accomplish this.
Everyone waited for the Southron to go on, but she had come to a full stop. Vant sighed with relief.
"Oh, you don't know how to tell a story at all!" said Lyra impatiently. "Listen. Everyone was up in the Crown—that's Restormir's tower—getting beastly drunk and making a row. I was with Gran in her rooftop garden, but she sent me down to fetch some food from the kitchen, and who do you think I ran into there? Jame and a bunch of cadets, chasing a chicken. No, that's not quite right. My uncles and cousins and brothers were chasing it to make soup—Father's drinking had made all our servants sick, you see, so we had to fend for ourselves—and it (the chicken) ran into the pantry where we were hiding. That's when Jame told me why she was there. Gricki—that is, Graykin—used to be my servant at Karkinaroth. He's also my half-brother by some Southron kitchen maid. Anyway, Father was mad at him for changing houses and so he jabbed all these red-hot hooks through his skin."
Lyra paused, remembering, suddenly sober. "He screamed," she said. "A lot. No one should have to scream like that.
"Anyway, then Father attached wires and swung him out into the Crown's central shaft. For a while he made him dance like a puppet. Then he got bored and left, thinking that the hooks would eventually tear through Gricki's skin and that he would fall all the way down to the Pit."
"That's a good two hundred feet," one Kendar muttered to another. Both had turned pale at the thought of dangling from such a height. Others also looked sick.
"But he didn't fall," Lyra continued. "We reeled him in . . . well, I helped a bit . . . and unhooked him. By then, though, Father was coming. I ran. Then Father caught you."
She looked up at Brier, a bit uncertainly.
"He said something about binding you by the seed, whatever that means, and ordered you to kneel. It scares when he uses that voice. Somehow, there's no disobeying it. I was back on top in Gran's garden by then, kneeling on the edge, so I couldn't see anything, but I could hear. Jame said, 'BOO!' and Father said, 'HIC!' and the next thing I know, he bobs out over the rail, into the shaft, floating upside down with his pants undone and flapping in his face."
"Sweet Trinity," breathed Harn. "Sheth said something at the Cataracts about Caineron 'not quite feeling in touch with things.' What in Perimal's name did our kitten do to him?"
"I don't know," said Lyra, "but he's terrified of her. Then she said, 'Make sport of decent Kendar, will you? Play God almighty in your high tower, huh? Well, the next time the urge takes you, remember me. And this. And keep looking down.'
"Then he started to scream.
"Brier, you said, 'You don't know what you've done.'
"And she said, 'I seldom do, but I do it anyway. This is what I am, Briar Iron-thorn. Remember that.'
"And neither of us ever will forget, will we? Because she said it in a voice just like Father's."
For a moment, no one spoke.
The wind shifted to and fro between them, swirling eddies of chaff like ghosts trying to rise from the shorn field, then slumping back among the rows. Vanguards of the north wind and of the tardy Tishooo from the south skirmished in the upper air.
Harn shot Torisen a look under his heavy brows. "Remind me later to tell you about something else that's happened. At Tentir. Concerning Caineron's councilor Corrudin."
Torisen didn't want to hear it. He had heard too much already.
Lyra's recitation had left her looking frightened, as if she hadn't realized what she was going to say until she had said it. Now she jumped and squealed as a dead bird plummeted to earth beside her. They were falling all over the field. So was a light fall of what at first appeared to be dirty snow. The clouds were almost upon them, growling with muffled thunder, pulling a shroud over the sun.
Marc tasted a flake that had fallen on his hand and spat it out. "Ash," he said. "I was afraid of this. Some mountain to the north has blown its top."
The harvest-master bustled up, scowling. "That hasn't happened in my lifetime," he said, as if to assert that it wasn't possible now. "Say you're right, though, we're way to the south. How much of the damn stuff could we possibly get?"
"Anywhere from a dusting to several feet." Marc looked apologetic. "Usually Old Man Tishooo blows the worst of it northward over the Barrier, but this time he seems to have been slow off the mark. It may also rain."
The master stared at him, then cast a wild glance at the upper terraces where cat's-paws of wind tossed the ripening grain in its gleaming bands. Golden brown barley bowed to shine silver gold. Wheat bent more stiffly, its beards of grain barely open.
"We might gather some," he muttered. "A few bushels of early wheat, at least, or rye, or oats, just in case . . ."
Torisen glanced at Marc, who shook his head. There wasn't time. "We must save what we can here in the water meadow," he said, "and hope for the best."
The master looked stricken. Just as hay was vital to the beasts' winter survival, so the Greater Harvest at summer's end was to anything on two legs.
Famine didn't scare him, Torisen realized. He was afraid that if supplies ran short, his lord would send most of his people south while he himself stayed to hold the keep with a token garrison. As weak as the Highlord had recently shown himself to be, to leave Gothregor unguarded was to risk having it seized by a stronger house. On the other hand, of those he sent away, how many would he forget? Mullen had flayed himself alive to escape such a fate.
All the weight of his position fell back on his shoulders, no longer to be escaped, harder than ever to bear. They depend on me. I gave them that right when I assumed my father's place.
He touched the Kendar's shoulder.
"It will be all right, Stav." Somehow. "Carry on."
The harvest-master blinked at the sound of his own name, and that sudden flare of panic faded from his eyes. He gave his lord a brusque, awkward nod and turned to the assembled troops. "Forget the last standing grass. Get those hayricks covered. Move!"
As Kendar sprang into action all over the field, Marc picked up a frightened Lyra, set her on her pony's back, and handed the reins to the already mounted cadet guard. "Ride for Gothregor," he said. "Fast. Tell them to bring in the livestock, hood the wells, close all chimney dampers, secure the shutters, and stuff as many cracks as possible with rags. At the very least, this is going to be messy." Lyra yelped as lightning split the sky and her pony shied. "Go. We'll follow as quickly as we can. And don't lock us out!" he bellowed after them.
At the bottom of their loads, all wains carried mats woven of wiry rye stalks. Kendar now hauled these out and started to pitch them over the hayricks. It took four to cover each stack. Frantic hands laced together the edges with wisps of straw and bound them to iron rings set in the stone foundations. Before some mats could be secured, they tore free to flap and flail while swearing Kendar fought to control them.
The winds were picking up, and they came from both directions. The Tishooo and the northern wind clashed overhead, warm and cold, clear and ash-laden, roiling together, with sudden cracks of blue sky between them and sharper cracks of lightning. Wrestling funnels dipped and swayed above the field, lashing it with their tails. Chaff flew. Horses screamed. Then the stack which Torisen was trying to cover exploded in his face.
Nearby, a Kendar cried out as the wind drove sharp straws like needles into her eyes.
Torisen found himself flat on his back, staring up at an ascending maelstrom of hay. It seemed to take shape as it rose, assuming the nebulous form of something huge with wings that spanned the entire valley. There might or might not have been the figure riding it, an old man whose beard streamed behind him. Against him came the clouds of ash, and they too had gained both form and voice.
"Wha, wha, wha?" howled the roiling, black figures of the Burning Ones. "Tha!"
They dived at Torisen.
My father's curse, he thought, watching them come. My own weakness. I deserve this.
The wolver pup Yce was suddenly crouching over him with her over-sized paws heavy on his chest and her white teeth bared at the falling sky. The thing of hay and wind swooped, every straw pricked to the attack, but what good is chaff against fire? Torisen threw his arms around the pup and rolled to protect her as flaming debris rained down on them. He found himself holding a small body shaken by its own pounding heart. Small hands, short fingered, long nailed, clutched his shirt. A child looked up at him with terrified blue eyes set in a mask of creamy fur, then buried her face against his chest. He tightened his grip.
Me, you can have; her, never.
The field burned around them, but the flames cast curiously little light. Falling ash had clamped a tight, black bowl over the earth. In the outer darkness, things fought with muffled bellows of thunder, but not even the lightning stroke of their blows penetrated the gloom. Then the sky split open and the deluge descended like a cataract.
The fires hissed out.
The world filled with noise and hard driven water.
Torisen stumbled to his feet, still clutching the child who was also a wolf, and nearly fell again. Mixed ash and mud slithered under foot, in a blinding rain. It had also turned surprisingly cold. Would the other ricks stand, or had they already lost the Lesser Harvest? Where was everyone? Please Trinity someone had pulled the injured Kendar to safety and tended her wounds. It was a terrible thing to be maimed. Kindrie could help her, but he wasn't here. Because of Torisen. Because of something the healer had seen or felt in that moment when their hands had touched, his cringing at the mere thought of accepting a Shanir, the other's thin and cool and suddenly withdrawn.
"My lord, I can't do it."
Why? What corruption in him could repel one already tainted by the Old Blood? What, but a father's curse?
I am doomed and damned, he thought. That too perhaps I deserve, but not my people as well!
A vertical crack of light opened in the chaos and widened slightly. As it did so, faint horizontal lines joined it above and below. Trinity. It was a door, in the middle of a field. As he stood gaping at it, a familiar voice spoke from inside:
"Well? Don't you know enough to come in out of the rain?"
Torisen decided that he was dreaming, or had finally gone barking mad. Either seemed more likely that that the destroyed haystack had been build around such a large, stone hut, or rather a full-sized lodge. Down several steps was an earthen floor covered with lumpy forms. Opposite, a small fire smoked and flared on a sunken hearth, its light picking out low rafters from which hung an odd assortment of shapes. Most appeared to be drowsy bats and foxkin but one, larger, rustled leathery wings and glared sleepily at him with obsidian eyes set in a wizened, almost human face.
"Watch out for that one," said Jame behind him, closing the door. "It blew north with the weirdingstrom, and I don't think it's had a decent meal since."
As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Torisen saw that the room was full of sleeping creatures. Hawks and sparrows, side by side, perched one-legged on the mantle, chair backs, and the enormous antlers of a snoring moose. Badgers and otters rolled up together for warmth under a table. That huge mound by the door was a cave bear, covered by a living coat of ermine which rose and fell with his stentorian breathing. As for the cauldron of water beside him, surreptitiously seething . . .
Stiff whiskers broke the surface, then a wide, gaping mouth and a pair of round, knowing eyes.
"Bloop," said the catfish solemnly, and sank back out of sight.
"What is all this?" Torisen asked, more convinced than ever that he had fallen into some insane dream.
"They're refugees, of course."
Jame picked her way across the room to a chair next to the fire.
"Not everyone could get to shelter when the ash-flow came . . ."
She removed a hedgehog from the seat and settling it in a basket of knit-work on the floor.
"Quip!" said the knitting in drowsy protest.
". . . but a lot did. It must have been a madhouse in here before Mother Ragga told them all to shut up and go to sleep."
She stepped up onto the chair, balancing carefully on its arms as it creaked under her, and began to do something to the upper end of an unusually large bundle suspended from the rafters.
The wolver pup wriggled out of Torisen's arms and bounded toward the hearth, where a cat rose, hissing, to meet him. It was a surprisingly big cat, Torisen noted, as its arched back rose higher and higher. Flames surrounded it in a nimbus of red-gold, bristling fur and its eyes reflected only fire.
"You'd better call off your friend," said Jame. "Jorin is in no mood for games, and I haven't the time. Who is she, anyway?"
"Yce, an orphan from the Deep Weald, or so Grimly tells me."
"Ice?"
"Close enough. It's a wolver term for a frozen crust over deep snow. The name seemed appropriate."
Pup and ounce met on the hearth. After a moment's hostile posing for honor's sake, they settled down side by side, not touching and studiously ignoring each other, to watch the fire.
"This is a very strange place," said Torisen, wiping rain out of his eyes the better to see it. "Where are we?"
"Inside the Earth Wife's lodge, which in turn could be anywhere. It moves around a lot. I found it in a meadow near Kithorn, just before a volcano caught up with me. Now I'm guessing we're closer to Gothregor, or were when you came through the door. But I'm forgetting my manners. Mother Ragga, this is my brother Torisen, Highlord of the Kencyrath. Tori, this is Mother Ragga, also known as the Earth Wife."
The lower edge of the bundle stirred. Knobby hands lifted what turned out to be the hem of an inverted outer skirt and a florid, upside-down face peered out, like a pudding hanging in a sack.
"Highlord, eh? About time we met. Welcome to my house, if not necessarily to my world."
The features started to rotate sickeningly, as if for a better look, but Jame gave her a warning slap.
"Stop that. D'you want to get stuck with your head on the wrong way?"
Torisen saw that the upper end of the bundle was a much patched underskirt held up, as was the whole body, by a rope around the ankles. Above that, close to the supporting beam, were a pair of enormously swollen feet. Jame resumed squeezing the sausage-like toes as if trying to milk an upside-down cow.
"That tickles!" protested Mother Ragga.
"I told you, this isn't my sort of job."
"What," asked Torisen, bemused, "hanging old women up by their heels?"
"That either. But Kindrie is the healer, not me—not that he could probably do any better. Y'see, the volcano melted all the fat in her body and it settled to what was then the lowest point. I'm trying to work it back into place before it cools and hardens where it is. This was her idea, by the way, and it seems to be working, if slowly."
The bundle twitched irritably. "Well, hurry up! I'm getting dizzy." Then she yelped as she was suddenly jerked up, her feet jamming hard against the underside of the rafter. Dislodged dust drifted down.
"Chumley!" Jame called into the darkness at the end of the room. "Stand still, you great lummox!"
Torisen traced the taut line of rope over the beam and down into the gloom. Beyond the mounds of sleeping animals, he could just make out an enormous pair of hindquarters with a flaxen tail swishing complacently between them. The rope appeared to be secured to the beast's other end.
"There's horse in the corner," he said. "Also, I think, a meadow."
He could see now that the room had no far wall. Where it should have been, there was a sea of grass lit only by the dance of fireflies and a few reluctant stars low on the horizon. Night, and no mountains. They were no longer in the Riverland, or at least that side of the lodge wasn't. Unconcerned, the big horse continued to graze.
"This is madness," he said.
"Oh, for Ancestors' sake." Jame stopped squeezing the Earth Wife's toes and began vigorously to knead her calves through the patched underskirt, ignoring muffled squawks of pain and a certain amount of thrashing below. "You must have seen as many strange things as I have—well, almost as many. Neither of us has lead an exactly normal life. Things happen to us. Powers seek us out. You know that, although you seem Perimal-bent on denying it. How can either of us be sure what's sane and what isn't?"
Torisen started to protest then stopped, considering his words. "We are a house noted for our madness, or so everyone says. Are they wrong? What about our father?"
His sister paused, frowning. "There's more to his story than we were ever told—if not enough to forgive him, perhaps enough to understand and take warning. Tori, since Summer Eve, have you had any strange dreams?"
He stiffened, remembering a flurry of them, some of which he had no intention of repeating to his sister. "All dreams are strange. What about it?"
She also looked acutely ill at ease, but determined. "I had one that first night at Tentir and another, later. Do you remember dreaming that you were a cadet at the college, and being summoned up to the lordan's quarters late one night?"
He did. Twice. Trinity, that second time . . .
"Do you remember who you were, and who waited for you on the hearth, wearing a particular coat?"
His mouth felt dry. "It was beautiful, all the colors of creation, but the man wearing it . . ."
". . . was Greshan, our uncle. A monster. It was also me, somewhere inside him, only able to watch through his foul eyes. And you were there too, inside a young Ganth, our father."
He remembered, as hard as he had tried to forget. "So? It was only a dream." After all, he had been cured, mysteriously, miraculously, of those nightmares that had driven him to the edge of madness—or had he only be relieved of the foresight that had led him to try so hard to fight them off?
She sighed. "Perhaps they are only nightmares, frightening but harmless. I hope you're right. If not, though, I have to warn you: there will be at least one more, maybe several, in that room, before that hearth, and the last will be worse than all the others rolled up together. Something terrible happened to our father there. No one alive today knows what it was, but something at Tentir seems to be trying to show me, to show us.
"Tori, listen: There have been schemes within schemes, enemies behind enemies, treachery, murder, bloody betrayal. What happened to our house was no accident. I'm sure of that, although I don't yet understand it all. But what started then isn't over yet, however strange its course has been. Some of the answers lie at Tentir."
She gave him a quick, almost feral smile, all white teeth and a flash of inhuman, silver eyes.
"Trust me in this at least: I'm good at hunting down hidden enemies."
He believed her, and it frightened him.
She had turned back to contemplate the Earth Wife's swaying feet. "Y'know, I think that bump did more to shift things than all my prodding has. Chumley, again."
Obligingly, the massive horse shifted back and forth where he stood, with each forward surge reaching farther for fresh tufts of grass. Thud, thud, thud went the souls of the swollen feet against the rafter, to accompanying yelps from below.
"Oh, stop complaining, you big baby. You did ask me to hurry up. This is my revenge," she murmured aside to Torisen, "for a good many frights and indignities. No doubt she'll get her own back later, by the bucket full, and I'll be lucky to survive it."
The prospect, however, didn't seem to alarm her. What kind of a life had she lead, to take such things so casually?
Don't ask.
Instead, he regarded her intently, seeking reassurance. They were, after all, twins. How different could they be?
Both had always been slight and fine-boned, even for Highborn, but quick and agile. If he was stronger, she made up for it by constantly surprising him. She did so now, stepping up onto the chair's back and balancing there as it teetered, apparently for a closer look at the thumping progress. She moved like a dancer or a fighter, with easy balance and a chilling disregard for personal safety. Like her, he took far too many unnecessary risks, or so Harn kept telling him.
Torisen also didn't think much about his own appearance. If his servant Burr caught him at a weak moment, he might consent to wear the Highlord's finery, but otherwise why bother? Plain, simple, and black suited him best. Maybe that was why in part he hadn't thought to supply his sister with garments befitting her rank. For that matter, she hadn't asked for them. She didn't seem to care much about what she wore either, given some of the clothes he had seen her in—that outlandish dress at the Cataracts, for example, formerly the property of an overweight Hurlen street-walker. Given a preference, though, she also seemed to favor plain and black, like that oddly cut jacket slung aside on the floor.
Was she handsome?
People kept telling him that they both had the classic Knorth features. For that matter, several times she had been mistaken for him on the battlefield—something which he found profoundly disturbing.
Was she beautiful?
Not by the standards of Kallystine's voluptuous charms that had drawn him despite his better judgment. His former consort had been adept at intoxicating the senses, but with an after-taste that had made him both loathe and mistrust his own passion. One of the Highborn subsequently thrown at him, a ridiculously young Ardeth girl, had seen enough to suggest that Kallystine had used potions to entrap him.
Women.
He would trust his life and honor to most Kendar, but too few Highborn. Kirien and the Matriarch Trishien, maybe, but Jame?
Did he trust his own sister?
No! said the voice in the back of his mind. Never!
Yet he felt drawn to that lithe body with its clean, spare lines and to that wry smile as to a cool breath in an overheated room. If Kallystine had been poison, perhaps here was the antidote.
Then, for the first time, he realized that Jame wasn't wearing gloves. Even with their nails sheathed, those long, slim fingers made him shiver, threat and promise in one touch.
Her face also looked oddly bare, and not for the lack of a mask.
"What happened to your eyebrows?"
She touched her forehead, annoyed. "I got too close to a fire. So did you, apparently. Your jacket may be soaked, but it's also scorched and still smoldering."
Torisen shrugged it off and dropped it on a pile of snow-footed ferrets, who woke briefly to quarrel among themselves before settling back to sleep under the reeking cloth.
Now that he looked, he saw that her clothes were also charred in patches and hanging in long strips, as if fiery claws had tried but failed to catch her. The heavy fall of her long black hair covered her better than the tattered remains of her shirt, although both slid away from delicate curves as she moved. Had the Burning Ones been after her too? If so, why? She had her own secrets, he reminded himself, years' worth of them between the time when their father had driven her out and when he had taken her back in.
As he studied her, so she did him.
"There were strands of white in your hair the last time I saw you," she said. "Now they're gone. So are your scars."
Torisen stared at his unmarked hands. He had grown so used to the phantom pain of the Karnids' red-hot gloves that only now, when it was gone, did he miss it.
"For the first time since we were children," she said slowly, giving voice to his sudden dread, "I think that we're the same age."
They regarded each other, she (infuriatingly) amused, he on the verge of panic.
"For how long?"
"Probably only while we're in the Earth Wife's lodge. Mother Ragga, is this your idea of a joke?"
Between grunts as her horny soles hit the rafter, something like a stifled chuckle emerged from the inverted skirt. ". . . seemed only fair. Taking advantage . . ."
"I was not!" Torisen burst out, and then, to his horror, found himself blushing as he hadn't since his youth. Trinity, was he about to be thrown back to those long-gone, miserable days? On the whole he would rather drop dead, here and now, than live through them again. Maybe Jame would too.
Had he taken unfair advantage of the years he had gained on her? After all, they were twins and always would been, however strangely their lives had diverged. He wasn't even sure which one of them had been born first. But that didn't matter. As the male, he would always come first and she be his inferior—but that wasn't how it felt. Did he need to be older, to feel that he had control over her, and why was that so important anyway?
Because destruction begins with love, and you love her.
"No," he said out loud. When in doubt, attack. "Lyra tells me that you ordered her father to step off a balcony two hundred feet up, and he did."
"You disapprove?"
"No. I mean, yes! Who are you to order the lord of any house to do something like that, and what did you do to Caldane at the Cataracts anyway?"
"Finally, you ask! He held me prisoner in his tent, and I had to escape to bring you Father's ring and sword. I slipped him a powder I had picked up on my travels, not knowing that it would do to him, at that point not really caring." She suddenly grinned. "If you ever want to get an . . . er . . . rise out of m'lord Caldane, just startle him into an attack of the hiccups."
"Harn said something about Caineron's advisor, Corrudin." He didn't want to know, but could no more prevent himself from asking than he had from fretting endlessly about his bandaged hand. "What did you do to him?"
"That filthy man." Her abrupt, deep anger made the room's temperature drop. Rumbling, sleepy complaints rose from all sides. "He tried to make me order Brier Iron-thorn to lick the mud off my boots. I told him to back off and he did, right out a third story window. I wish he had broken his neck."
" 'This is what I am,' " Torisen quoted, teeth chattering, breath hanging on the air. " 'Remember that.' "
"Yes. Sorry. Corrudin and I both abused our power, which probably makes me no better than he is, at least in Brier's eyes. I do care what she thinks, you know, and Marc too. If they disapprove, then I've still gotten it wrong somehow. It's so hard to find a balance. Sweet Trinity, haven't you ever made someone do something he or she didn't want to?"
"Not like that!"
Even as he spoke, however, he remembered forcing the Ardeth Matriarch Adiraina to tell him what had happened to his sister in the Women's Halls that winter. Afterward, Grimly had called it "a good trick," and he had nearly snapped the Wolver's head off for suggesting that he had done anything unusual. It wasn't the same, though. It couldn't be. He certainly didn't feel that power in himself now. On the other hand, this young body didn't know that the man who had sired it was dead. In this strange house, in this displaced moment, that authority hadn't yet passed to him.
Then again, perhaps it never had, and never would.
"Damn you, boy, for deserting me. Faithless, honorless . . . I curse you and cast you out. Blood and bone, you are no son of mine . . ."
Words spoken in searing bitterness by a dying man. By his father. How could any curse be more terrible?
To his horror, he felt himself growing younger, smaller, while the edges of the Earth Wife's lodge dimmed around him into the dusty corners of the Haunted Lands keep where he had grown up, which he never seemed able entirely to escape.
"Tori, stop it!"
She had jumped down from the chair and crossed the room to seize him. As her nails bit into his shoulders, the keep faded.
Something crunched, and the wolver pup backed off, shaking her head. Seeing him apparently under attack, she had bitten his sister's leg, or tried to. Something white and hard showed through Jame's torn pants at shin level.
"Oh no, child," she said to Yce. "You don't want to taste my blood, or my brother's either." And Torisen knew, somehow, that the pup would never try to again.
"What's happening to you?" he demanded. While he could clearly see the fine lines of her face, simultaneously it wore a sketchy half-mask of ivory, more like a rudimentary helm than any frivolous product of the Women's World. Then the ivory faded as had the shadows of the keep, although he sensed that neither had gone far.
"This lodge exists in Rathillien's sacred space. From there, it seems to be a short step to the Kencyr soulscape. I don't entirely understand that. It may be as the Earth Wife wills, or as our needs demand. My soul-image is changing. They can, you know. You should try it. Get away from that foul keep, from that voice of madness, before it's too late!"
" 'Daddy's boy. Run. Hide.' "
"Er . . . sorry. I didn't mean it quite like that, and I don't think I told you to hide. Oh, Perimal. You can't leave, can you? Not while that door stays locked with half of what you are on the other side."
This time he grabbed her, hard. "What are you talking about? Filthy Shanir, what have you done to me?"
She didn't flinch, but her gaze was stricken. "Now you sound like Father. I've gotten it wrong again, haven't I? Kindrie told me as much. But I was only trying to help, to buy you some time. You weren't ready then to open that door. Are you now?"
Involuntarily, he glanced over his shoulder at what was somehow the door both to the Earth Wife's lodge and to the ramparts of the Haunted Lands' keep.
Someone knocked on it.
Without thinking, the twins found themselves in each other's arms. Torisen held his sister tight, his face buried in the glorious richness of her hair as if to hide in it. Her breasts pressed against him in odd, soft contrast to the firm, boyish lines of her body beneath his hands. Gray eyes met gray, mirroring each other. Her lips tasted like wild honey, sweet and bitter at once.
"Stay," she murmured. "I will stay with you."
Thump, thump, thump, fists on the door, feet on the rafters, his heart against his ribs . . .
On the keep stairs, heavy footsteps descended. Two children huddled together in bed, terrified. They had heard him in the room above, smashing Mother's things, raving. "Betrayed, betrayed, whore, slut, love . . . oh, return to me, return!" Now he was coming for them, the last vestige of her that he possessed, the last bit that he could still hurt, and if he found them together . . .
Torisen thrust his sister away in sudden panic. "I can't stay. I won't."
He had to get out. Better anywhere than here.
The door flew open as he threw himself at it and he fell out, face first. The wolver pup landed on his back and bounded off again, driving him yet deeper into the mud.
"Well," said Harn's voice over him, hoarse with exasperation and relief. "There you are at last."
Jame stared at the door. It had swung shut in her face, but not before she had glimpsed the gray, sodden hay field beyond and recognized Gothregor's outline against a leaden northern sky. At least Tori was safely home. Just the same . . .
"Damn, damn, damn," she muttered, touching her lips where his lips had touched them. Her whole body tingled from that unexpected contact, which had been almost as much an assault as a kiss. But if so, who had attacked whom, and why did she long for a rematch?
She turned, and the bat-thing from the south lunged at her, all gaping mouth and teeth, hissing. She punched it in the face. Its nose flattened with a faint crunch of cartilage, and its red eyes crossed.
"Oh, go suck an egg," she told it as it slunk, whimpering, into a corner.
Then she went to let Mother Ragga down before all the fat went to her head.