Bound in Blood

IX Scrying Glass

Torisen paused to wipe the sweat out of his eyes and to drink another dipper of water. It was unseasonably hot for the thirty-second of Autumn, four days short of the equinox, which meant that it was almost unbearable here in the High Council chamber with both glass furnaces in blazing operation. Yce lay panting by the western wall. Waves of heat distorted the twilight air by the empty eastern window, knocking an unwary bat out of the sky. The sun was almost down. Perhaps spending the day in the glassworks hadn’t been such a good idea after all, except that the alternative had been helping his people harvest the beetlike mangel-wurzel, which they would have hated. Their lord to dirty his hands grubbing about for roots? Unthinkable.

If they only knew how many “unthinkable” things he had done in his life.

Besides, sometimes one got a mandrake instead of a mangel, and that was no fun for anyone within earshot, at least in the Haunted Lands.

Marc emptied a small sack of ingredients into a firepot, considered the color of the adjacent finished bits on the table, and chose a gauntletful of amber cullet veined with silver from the barrels by the northern wall.

“Yellow for sulfur, sulfur from coal,” he remarked. “Not bad for Gothregor.”

He opened the hatch and set the pot over the incandescent fire within to begin its sixteen-hour melt.

“Burr tells me that you’re off for Falkirr tomorrow.”

Torisen cursed under his breath. He had wanted to keep his trip a secret because he didn’t know what its outcome would be. He should have realized, however, that as soon as he ordered travel rations, the word would be out.

“What made you finally decide to take the poor lass home?”

“I don’t know yet where it is—her home, I mean.”

All his instincts still told him that Aerulan belonged below, among her own kin, but Trishien insisted otherwise, and Aerulan herself pleaded with him every time he met her eyes. Now Lord Brandan was at last back in the Riverland with fresh provisions from the south.

“Go,” Trishien told him.

Don’t be a fool, his father breathed in his ear.

What had really changed his mind, however, was a little boy playing by himself with a stick chalked half white. He had been stabbing at himself with it, practicing, he had said, so that when his parents chose the White Knife he could go with them.

“Do you remember the boy’s name?” Marc asked, upon hearing the story.

“Ghill, son of Merry and Cron. And you are Marcarn and I am Torisen Black Lord, sometimes called Blackie. Satisfied?”

“That’s not for me to say, lad, although I’ll admit that I’d rather eat this winter than not.”

They were interrupted by the sudden arrival of a dumpy figure, tumbling down the stair of the northwest tower in a billow of volcanic ash. Yce leaped to her feet; then, seeing who it was, she yipped a welcome.

“What were you doing in my study?” Torisen demanded, helping Mother Ragga up. As usual, she wore a jackdaw assortment of clothes with plenty of wrinkles to hold the bushel or so of ash that dusted her gray from head to toe.

“Came down the chimney, didn’t I? Burny was after me.” She slapped at her clothes with gnarled hands, raising further clouds, then coughed and spat. “At least now I know where the yackcarn herd is. He’s got it bottled up above that filthy volcano of his behind a valley of ash. I was like to smother in the stuff. Thank ye, lad.”

She accepted the scooper of water that Torisen offered and drained it in several loud gulps.

“You have pretty manners, I’ll say that. And the pup likes you.”

“What will the Merikit do if they can’t hunt?” Marc asked.

“Starve, probably. You should be glad of that, given what they did to your family.”

“I wouldn’t wish starvation on anyone. At least my people died quickly, except for poor Willow.”

Torisen listened to them, reflecting that at least Mother Ragga hadn’t come down one of the two eastern chimneys. What her rendered fat would have done to the melting or annealing batches didn’t bear thinking about.

Over the past half-season, he had become more accustomed to her peculiar comings and goings. An infrequent visitor to the Central and Northern Lands before he had become Highlord, he had had no prior acquaintance with her.

Perhaps the scrollsmen and Kendar like Marc knew more about Rathillien’s native powers. On the whole, though, the Kencyrath was remarkably ignorant about the world that it had inhabited for so long. Torisen had to admit that he was, at least. That came, perhaps, from believing that one god—theirs—ruled over all, even as an absentee landlord. Did such faith breed arrogance as well as blindness?

The hourglass on the sill ran out. Marc turned it, then donned his gauntlets to draw out the newly annealed glass. It had cooled almost past the point of working, but by dint of strenuously rolling it between hot iron and stone like a recalcitrant pie crust, the big Kendar managed to flatten it some more.

“Here, now.” The Earth Wife’s voice was sharp. “What have you done to that glass, and where did you get the materials?”

They regarded it as it cooled, an irregular shape perhaps a palm across, turquoise shot with wandering veins of pale green. At its heart was a splotch of red glass that glowed softly and shaded into luminous purple. Marc positioned it on the tabletop’s chalked map.

“That’s Tentir!”

“I know,” he said. “I asked Ran Harn to send me some of its underlying substance: ground agate, chalk, and the ash of burnt cloud-of-thorn. I think he also got traces of copper and silver. Then I added a nugget of red glass from that batch that you accidentally bled into, lad. Remember? When you nicked your finger on a bit of sharp cullet?”

“I told you to wait!” Mother Ragga ruffled like an upset partridge. “I’ve got a line on a bit of quartz that would have served much better than this!”

“Yes, but ‘served’ whom? When I first met you, Mother, you had a remarkable lodge in Peshtar, with a dirt map on the floor that allowed you to listen to anything going on in that part of Rathillien. That set me to wondering. Could it be that you hope this map will be its visual equivalent?”

“And why not?” She tried to meet the big Kendar eye to eye by bouncing on her toes, emitting puffs of ash. “It’s my world, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but it’s the Highlord’s map.”

The wolver, thinking it was a game, bounced with her, shoulder high. Marc caught the pup at the height of her bound and tossed her higher still, to an excited yelp that was almost a squeal.

“Maybe I should toss her around too,” said Torisen. It was a sore point with him, and a puzzle, that she rarely let him touch her, yet she dogged his heels day and night. “Am I to understand that you want to turn this whole thing into a giant scrying glass, that you intend to spy on us?”

“Not on you in particular. It’s a big world. I can’t be everywhere at once.”

Marc put down the pup. “Yes, but as I understand it, you can’t see, hear, or go inside any Kencyr keep without an invitation. Matriarch Cattila has let you into Restormir, and indirectly into Gothregor as her accredited Ear.”

“So you’re also spying on me?” Torisen spoke mildly, but couldn’t quite keep the chill out of his voice. The very thought felt like a violation.

“I’m looking at you. Is that spying?”

“To my face, no. Behind my back . . . ”

Marc hastily intervened. “The poor man has a right to some privacy, Mother—more, I suspect, than his own people allow him. Let be. At least I’m guessing that you can’t look in on his sister with his blood seal on the college. If so, we can secure all the Kencyr keeps the same way. As for the rest of Rathillien, as you say, it’s your world more than ours.”

The Earth Wife puffed out her cheeks with indignation looking (if she had known it) like an elderly, female version of Gorbel. “All of your precious keeps sit on ground similar to surrounding areas, don’t they? I have access to those.”

“Similar, yes, but not exactly the same. Mother, I say again, let be. We needn’t fight, and I do need the materials you’ve been good enough to provide.” This last, in a sidelong plea to Torisen, who looked ready to pitch the Earth Wife out on her ear, preferably through the empty window frame.

With an effort, Torisen regained most of the control that he had momentarily lost.

“Indeed, lady, we value your help and friendship, not that I exactly understand who or what you are. If Marc speaks for you, I accept his word that you mean no harm or disrespect.”

Her small, black eyes glittered up at him and her mouth spread in a gaping, toothless grin more disconcerting than her previous ire. “Oh, I respect you, boy, if only because you’ve survived that sister of yours for so long. Whether the rest of us will is still in question. As for harm, we’ll see, won’t we?”

Again, Marc felt it time to interpose. “Er . . . Mother Ragga, I’ve just noticed: neither the old map nor the new include the Western Lands. I’ve heard tell that there used to be Kencyr border keeps there, garrisoned by minor families, but it’s been generations since we heard from them. You do know what’s out there, don’t you?”

“Of course I know, or would if I bothered to look. The Central Lands are my home. Enough goes on there, not to mention here in the north, to keep me busy.”

Torisen had been tracing the chalked western line of the map, from the Snowthorns down the spine of another range to the Southern Wastes.

“What about Urakarn?” he asked abruptly.

“That nasty place? Why should anyone want anything to do with it?”

“I don’t know. It still gives me nightmares. But if my sister graduates from Tentir, she’s likely to be assigned to the Southern Host at Kothifir.”

“So? That’s hundreds of miles from the Black Keep.”

“Put Jame within a hundred leagues of such a mystery and she’s bound to seek it out.”

“I hope not,” said Marc, not sounding at all sure. “If we go by likes and dislikes, though, there are going to be lots of blind spots on the map. Oh, I can make do with normal glass. I’ll have to, to fill the frame. Still, one way or another, this isn’t going to look anything like the original or, to the casual eye, like a map at all.”

Torisen suddenly laughed. “It will give the High Council one more reason to question my sanity, or at least my taste in cartography.”

With that, the Earth Wife departed, still grumbling. Marc watched her go, then turned to the Highlord.

“Have you any experience scrying, lad?”

“None whatsoever, nor do I want to try.”

The very thought roused his long-held dislike of any information covertly obtained by a betrayal of trust. Doubtless he was being overly squeamish, just because Adric had spied on him through Burr from the time he entered the Ardeth lord’s service until Burr had left it.

Still, he found himself staring at the patch of red that represented the heart of Tentir and continued to do so, seeing nothing, until night turned it black.

Early the next morning, Torisen joined his servant Burr in the subterranean stable with Aerulan’s banner, rolled up and sheathed, slung across his back and the wolver pup Yce on his heels. He looked haggard.

“I didn’t sleep well,” he said in answer to the Kendar’s questioning look. “Too many strange dreams.”

Burr accepted this warily, no doubt remembering how often in the past his lord hadn’t slept at all for days on end to avoid certain dreams. They always caught up with him in the end, though. It was something new that he spoke of them at all, even without details.

Torisen’s black war-horse Storm was already saddled and a sturdy bay for his servant. Rowan and others had begged to go with him, but he had turned them down. Given his will, he would have ridden out completely alone and unnoticed, not watched by so many covert, anxious eyes. He felt the weight of his people’s concern, and it irked him, as well as he understood it. The only thing worse than having their lord forget their names was to lose him altogether. For once, though, he was going to be selfish and suit himself.

As the day brightened and began to warm, they rode down the east bank Old Road, infrequently passing other travelers. In particular, Brandan’s supply wagons were on the move, following their lord home to Falkirr. Guards rode with them and saluted Torisen, looking startled, as he passed. They would have a long day of it, whereas a post rider with remounts could have made the same distance in two hours. At a modest pace, Torisen expected to spend the better part of the day on the road, and looked forward to it, if not necessarily to arriving at the end. The creak of tack and Storm’s easy movement soothed him. Moreover, he had had precious little time to enjoy the autumn’s blaze of color, even when riding to the hunt.

His shadow kept pace with him on the ground. Glancing at it, he was startled to see that two rode the war-horse, the second a slim figure behind him on the saddle. Ah well. It wasn’t the first time he had ridden with the dead. Aerulan’s banner lay in a band of warmth across his back as might her arm. He could almost feel her eager breath in his ear. She at least had no hesitation about this mission.

His thoughts drifted back to the previous night’s dreams. Some of them were familiar. The Haunted Lands keep:

He had been playing hide—and-seek with his sister and found her in their parents’ bedchamber. Mother had been long gone by then and their father half-mad with seeking her, yet Torisen had seen her, dancing in the mirror, and would have gone to her through the silvered glass if Jame hadn’t stopped him.

He had turned on her. “Don’t you understand? If Mother comes back, Father will leave us alone. If she doesn’t, sooner or later he’s going to kill us!”

“ ‘Destruction begins with love’?”

“Yes! Now let me go!”

But she hadn’t. They had fought and she had tipped him onto the bed, which had collapsed under him, stunning him with its falling footboard. By the time he recovered, she was gone, driven out by their father.

The Cataracts, with the changer Tirandys writhing on the ground and a girl bending over him in tears:

“Who in Perimal’s name are . . . oh no. Don’t tell me.”

“I’m afraid so. Hello, brother.”

Kithorn in ruins:

“Your friend Marc warned me that I would probably find the Riverland reduced to rubble and you in the midst of it, looking apologetic.”

“Er . . . sorry.”

Old dreams, all of them. But then had come a new, baffling set of images:

Four hands weaving a golden, living form with the orange glint of an adder’s eye.

A cadet prancing, flailing at his back: “ . . . get it off, get it off, GET IT OFF!”

A foot obscenely wrapped in writhing, fibrous growth.

A card, on which was written, “Do you want the world to end?”

A hand drawing patterns in blood on a supine female body . . .

He knew that lithe form. That cloud of black hair. His sister’s face. Her hand reached out to him and his to her through a curtain of red ribbons. But was that his hand? Where were the scars? A flash of steel and spurting blood . . . ah!

That had woken him with a start, in a cold sweat, his sister’s voice purring after him down the fading corridors of sleep:

“You have woken destruction. Now come to meet it. First, my uncle’s coat. Now my uncle’s shirt. And now, I think, your skin.”

He had not slept again that night.

They stopped around noon to share bread, cheese, and apples, washed down with a stream’s cold, clear water while Yce happily cracked open the meaty bone that Torisen had brought along for her and rasped out the marrow.

As the afternoon advanced, it occurred to Torisen that he should give Brandan some belated warning that he was coming. At the next posting station, he gave an attendant a note to carry ahead of them, then followed sedately in the other’s dust. Nearing Falkirr, he noted with envy the gleaned harvest fields, orchards, and water meadows. By some trick of the wind, little or no ash had fallen here and they were still passing wagons full of such provisions as the Riverland could not provide. Falkirr would have a snug winter.

The Brandan fortress was built much like Gothregor, but smaller and much better populated. While Torisen had to let nearly two-thirds of his keep stand empty, in ruins, Falkirr bustled with a garrison four times larger than his own. Brandan was both a good and powerful lord. If he bolstered his numbers with yondri-gon, threshold dwellers, they served with a sure sense that eventually he would find a permanent place for them, even if it meant eventually rebuilding the ruined keep across the Silver. Would that Caineron could say the same. Torisen himself took on no yondri despite Ardeth’s advice, being unsure when (if ever) he could give them full Knorth rights.

While Burr tended to their horses, the Highlord was shown to a small reception room in the central keep, opening off a pocket courtyard complete with fountain and boisterously bathing birds, which immediately drew the wolver pup’s attention. The room itself was comfortably if sparsely furnished, as if as an afterthought. Given his choice of wine or cider, he chose the latter, to the evident approval of the one-armed Kendar who served him.

“M’lord isn’t much for hard drink,” the grizzled Kendar confided in a raspy voice, “but he does keep a small cellar for them as can’t seem to live without it. Funny, though, how they never ask for seconds.”

He departed, and could be heard in the hallway berating someone for meeting the Highlord in all his dirt.

My dirt? Torisen wondered, casting an anxious eye over his dusty riding leathers.

However, the man who entered brought his own in the form of muddy boots and earth-stained knees, although he had thrown on an old court coat in honor of the occasion.

Torisen rose to greet him. “Brant, Lord Brandan, honor be to your halls.”

“And to yours, Torisen, Lord Knorth, also my Highlord. Sorry for the muck. Geof swears by the arm he lost thirty-some years ago that it’s going to rain, if not today then tomorrow or the next day, and here we are with a field of potatoes still to harvest.”

No need to ask what battle had cost the Kendar his limb: thirty-four years ago had been the White Hills and the beginning of Ganth’s exile. Brant had served as a randon cadet beside his father, returning to Tentir afterward to complete his training. He was now in hale middle age, but his weathered face looked older than his years, an impression aided by fair hair bleached nearly white by the sun.

His gaze fell on the rolled-up banner. “I see that you’ve brought Aerulan.”

“Yes. I still offer her to you free and clear. It’s taken me longer than it should to understand that she belongs here, not in that cold hall at Gothregor.”

Brant sipped his cider, then spoke carefully. “Your generosity does us honor, Highlord, as I’ve said before. I have no wish, however, to take advantage of it.”

“Nor I of yours.”

“Are we still at an impasse, then? If so, why bring her here now?”

Torisen took a deep breath. “For myself, I would rather starve than profit by my father’s greed, but I have to think of my people. Without help, we won’t survive the winter.”

“Good lad. I told Brenwyr that you were too responsible to let false pride harm your house. Wait here while I fetch my bursar.” Brandan clapped him on the shoulder and hurried out, shouting for the keeper of his accounts.

Left alone, Torisen let out his breath in a long sigh. “I was a fool, wasn’t I?” he asked Aerulan. “I should have brought you here long ago.”

Since it seemed discourteous to talk to her back, he unrolled the banner and looked for a place to put it. Not on one of the chairs: it would either have to slouch or to hang with its head tipped backwards over the neck rest at a distressing angle. Ah. Here was a bench. He laid her out on it.

No sooner had he done so than the Brandan Matriarch Brenwyr swept into the room.

“Geof said . . . oh.” Behind her mask, her eyes flashed to Aerulan and softened. “Oh, my dear heart.”

Then she saw Torisen and turned such a fierce if half-veiled countenance upon him that he retreated a step. “Have you come to throw her in my teeth again, my lord, stripped of her dues and honors? How can you shame her so? Is this your revenge because I cursed your sister?”

“You did? When? Why? How?”

“ ‘Roofless and rootless, blood and bone, cursed be and cast out.’ ”

She spat the words at him. Under them, he seemed to hear an echo of his father’s dying malediction: “Cursed be and cast out. Blood and bone, you are no son of mine.”

“I didn’t know,” he stammered, profoundly shaken. “No one told me.”

For a moment, he wondered if that was why Jame couldn’t settle down like a normal Highborn female, but no; cursed or not, she had never been normal.

Brant’s sister also appeared to be on the strange side, dangerously so. He tried to explain. However, her fury drove him back into a corner while she rampaged about the room, cursing every piece of furniture that got in her way, leaving ruin in her wake. He had heard her called a maledight, but had never guessed the extent of her Shanir power. It was terrifying.

“And you!” She turned on him, divided riding skirt flaring purple and scarlet below a flame-colored bodice. “Who are you to be arbiter of her fate? I have been closer to her than you ever will, alive or dead. What is love to you but possession? Somehow, her soul is bound to this tapestry, and that you never shall possess.”

“Lady, I swear . . . ”

“Swear not, where you have no right. Break not, where you have no just cause. Let go, for honor’s sake, and recognize that we women are also honor bound.”

“I have never denied that.” Trinity, it was like trying to stand in the teeth of a tempest. In this mood, Brandan’s sister seemed more like an elemental force than a woman.

. . . Shanir, Old Blood, unclean, unclean . . .

“I came to do my cousin what honor I can.”

“Liar!” The word struck him like a blow. Yce, in the doorway, crouched, growling. “Curse you and the clothes you stand in!”

Brushing past the pup, Brant grabbed his sister from behind and held her fast like a struggling, spitting cat.

“Curse you too, brother. Of all men to be so blind!”

Brandan flinched. The lines in his face seemed to deepen, but he rolled with her fury.

“Bren, love, he’s come to accept Aerulan’s price.”

“He . . . what?” Relief and horror warred in her face. “Oh, what have I done?”

“Met your match, I think.”

Torisen felt a loosening under his leathers. Shredded fragments of his shirt and underwear drifted out of his sleeves and gathered softly inside where pants met riding boot.

All of Brenwyr’s clothes, on the other hand, were rotting off her back. Flame-colored strips fluttered down, purple split along fold lines. As her mask disintegrated, she seized Aerulan and rushed off with her face buried in the banner, half-naked, trailing a conflagration of tattered ribbons.

Brandan turned to his guest. “Some people are immune, more or less, to her curses. I, for one. You, apparently, for another, if not your clothes. Generally, she tries to deflect her anger onto inanimate objects, which is rather hard on the furniture. Still, I do apologize.”

“So do I.” Torisen closed his coat with trembling fingers. As much as the Shanir unnerved him in general, it was rare to experience a direct attack, especially one so furious. “I never realized that Aerulan was for your sister, not for you.”

“Ah, well. I was fond of the girl too, but she was Brenwyr’s whole life. So little else has made her happy. I do whatever I can for her, within reason and beyond. Consequently, I am no less grateful to you, Highlord, for bringing Aerulan back than if she were my own heart’s love. Now let me find you an intact undershirt and so to dinner. We can discuss details afterward, when my sister has had a chance to collect herself.”

Besides supplying his guest with a new silk shirt and drawers, Brant presented him with a dress coat of blue and silver brocade, quite elegant but so large that Torisen had to roll up the cuffs to avoid dipping them in the soup. Brenwyr didn’t attend the simple but hearty evening meal, eaten in the great hall. The company on the whole seemed very pleased with this unexpected visit from their overlord. At any rate, they represented the largest collection of happy faces he had seen in a very long time. He was glad to observe Burr seated at a lower table, talking and eating with evident relish.

This is how it should be, he thought, slipping a tidbit to Yce under the table, not like the gloomy meals at Gothregor with everyone wondering where the next bean would come from.

Brenwyr joined them after supper in her brother’s quarters, carrying a rolled-up Aerulan as if afraid to put her down. She had donned a rich, brown dress with gold embroidery at the collar and cuffs and carried herself carefully. Berserker flares always gave her a terrible headache, Brant had explained. From her heightened color, however, it didn’t appear that she cared what her head did short of exploding.

Brandan and Torisen had already arranged for winter supplies as well as for rye and wheat seed for the autumn sowing—this, over formal glasses of thin, sour wine that explained why so few guests asked for a second round.

So far, they had taken care of about a third of Aerulan’s price.

“I hardly know what else to ask for,” said Torisen, leaning back in his chair, putting aside his barely tasted parsnip wine. “This means more to me than you can know.”

Brandan regarded him quizzically. “You are an unusual fellow, Highlord. Most people would ask next, ‘Where is the gold?’ ”

Torisen shrugged. “I’ve never had more than enough for the essentials.” Even when he had been commander of the Southern Host, Ardeth had kept him on a short allowance, presumably so that he wouldn’t draw attention to himself with extravagance, an annoying, unnecessary measure. Why dress or eat better than one had to? “To me, sums like this seem unreal. Fabulous.”

“You do know, I suppose, that Caineron and his allies sneer at your poverty.”

“What, because I don’t clutter Gothregor with golden images of myself striking heroic poses?”

“One needn’t go that far. I look at it this way: you are Highlord. We are all your people, and your mode of life reflects on us all. You can’t afford to appear shabby, for the sake of the Kencyrath.”

Torisen made a face. “Sometimes I wish I’d stayed a simple commander.”

“So I had gathered. But it was your duty to step forward and you did. Think of it as a necessary sacrifice.”

“You might also consider settling an allowance on your sister,” said Brenwyr, speaking for the first time. “She shouldn’t have to make do with hand-me-downs from the late lordan.”

“She’s wearing Greshan’s clothes?” The very thought made his skin crawl.

“And before that, Aerulan’s; and before that, some overweight Hurlen streetwalker’s. Besides,” Brant added, “if she graduates Tentir and is stationed with the Southern Host, she will need not only new clothes but arms, armor, and whatever else befits her position as the Knorth Lordan.”

Torisen stirred uneasily. He still wasn’t at all sure he wanted her to go. The empty place on the map that would represent Urakarn continued to haunt him. But he had to agree: Jame needed an allowance to finally get out of second-hand clothes, especially her late uncle’s. The image came back to him from Autumn’s Eve of Greshan neither alive nor dead, swaying, chewing maggots and swallowing them:

“ ‘m hungry. Dear father, feed me . . . ”

“All right,” he said. “An allowance for my sister and enough for me to uphold the office into which I’ve been thrust. Will you hold the rest in trust for me?”

They both glanced nervously at Brenwyr who had retreated to a dark corner of the room.

“We are content,” she said in a husky voice, holding the hand of the smiling girl who sat next to her.

The two travelers left early the next morning. It promised to be another hot day, but clouds building to the north in a gray wall suggested coming changes.

Torisen still felt slightly dazed. Was that all it had taken to save his house? If so, what a fool he had been to make so much of it. Jame would be very pleased to hear his tidings. On impulse, he turned north on the Old Road to tell her in person, meanwhile sending the news south with a post rider to Rowan. Brant had also sent a messenger to divert the last supply wagons to the Knorth keep and was repacking others, to their drivers’ disgust, to follow them. It wouldn’t be luxury, but it would be enough.

With luck, the Gothregor garrison would have calmed down by the time he got home. He didn’t want much made of his sudden return to common sense.

Adric wouldn’t be pleased when he heard. On the other hand, Torisen didn’t think that Brandan would hold it over his head the way the Ardeth, that arch-manipulator, would have.

Before they left Falkirr, he had had Burr gather materials for the map. Not that he meant to scry on the Brandan himself, assuming he could learn how to: now more than ever, that would feel too much like spying on a friend. However, if his blood could preserve the Brandans’ privacy from Mother Ragga, he felt it his duty to do them that service.

Still, was it really dishonest to want to know how his friends fared and if they were in trouble?

Enemies, now, that was a different matter.

Was Jame one also?

His strange dreams had irritated his itch to know how she was doing—or was that what she was doing?

Your Shanir twin, boy, breathed his father’s voice in the back of his mind. Your darker half. How can you trust her? Destruction begins with love, and you love her, don’t you, you poor, weak fool.

No matter.

She was sure to get into trouble, wherever she was. This was Jame, after all. Whose coat, shirt, and skin had she been about to remove, in the past, present, or future? The memory of Brenwyr’s curse made his skin crawl. Shanir, unclean, unclean . . . If all lords should turn out to be of the Old Blood, that would explain much; but it would also mean that he—no! Unthinkable.

So ran his scattered thoughts, chasing each other’s tails until he was tired of them.

Toward noon, they crossed the Silver to the New Road to be on the same side as Shadow Rock where he proposed to spend the night. A flight of golden leaves fluttered overhead, bound from a northern host tree to one in the south. Extra bark hung like oversized, fibrous coats on some trees, waiting for cold weather to pull them close. Leaping squirrels caused Storm to snort and Yce to give furious chase until Torisen called her back.

The New Road here was still quake-wracked and broken. Shadow Rock, the Danior keep, was one of the smallest in the Riverland, set opposite one of the mightiest, the Randir Wilden. Little Danior hadn’t a garrison large enough for extensive civil engineering. They had, however, fertile fields and orchards, newly gleaned. Nearing the keep under the shadow of its perilous hanging rock, it became obvious that the house was celebrating the harvest.

The guard hailed them as they drew up before the gate with a loud if slurred challenge: “Password!”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“That’ll do.”

The gate creaked open and they rode into the small inner ward. Another guard leaned over the gate’s mechanism, regarding them owlishly, while a third stumbled forward to take their mounts.

“Are you drunk?” Burr demanded of him.

“I am; they are; so are we all. Go claim your portion—hic!—before those rascals drink it all.”

“And have them send out more for us!” his comrades shouted after them.

The scene in the great hall was rowdy, to say the least. Holly, Lord Danior, had apparently decided to celebrate harvest home by sharing all the last season’s remaining hard cider with his entire house and garrison, to the uproarious delight of all. Even his womenfolk were there, flushed behind their modest masks and giggling together. When he saw his guests, he jumped up, spilling a Kendar girl off his lap. One of her booted feet remained above table level, and her hand, waving off his fumbling attempt to help her up.

“Cousin Tori! Welcome, welcome! Wench, bring two more cups.”

The “wench” extricated herself from assorted table legs and rose, grinning, to fetch the required vessels, a-brim with amber liquid.

“I take it you had a good harvest,” said Tori, accepting his and sipping it.

A wide grin split the boy’s sun-freckled face. It was hard sometime to remember that he was actually of age, much less the lord of a house, however small, but still young enough to take great pride in every step that he made on his own. “The best harvest in years. Some fields caught a dusting of ash, but we were able to save the crop, and the soil will be all the richer for it next time around.”

Torisen hadn’t thought about that. Perhaps, long-term, his own smothered fields might likewise benefit. Now that this winter was taken care of, he could look ahead with more optimism than at any time since he had assumed the Highlord’s collar. How heavy the weight had been on him he only now realized as it began to lift. He drank again and began to relax in his chair.

But one thing still had to be said.

“Holly, I haven’t had a chance to explain or to apologize. Until I made my sister my heir, you were. Do you mind much being supplanted?”

The bumbling puppy in Holly faded. “Trinity, no. How long d’you think I would have survived as Highlord? I’m not you, cousin, to spin alliances out of cobwebs. And now you say you’ve roped in the Brandan! Oh, well done! That will be one in Adric’s eye, and in the Caineron’s too.”

That thought had also been giving Torisen pleasure. Perhaps he wasn’t such a failure as Highlord and Lord Knorth after all.

Later that night, with the party below still shaking the floor under their feet, the two kinsmen stood on the battlements, looking across the river at Wilden in its slotted valley. There it rose, tier on tier, from the frothy moat at its foot to the Witch’s Tower at its head, under whose shadow lay the subterranean Priest’s College. What drew the eye most, however, were the pyres like sullen, winking eyes in many private courtyards. It was like watching a slow, smoldering apocalypse. Errant breaths of wind carried its stench and a dusting of ash over Shadow Rock’s walls.

Holly had sobered quickly. “Every night since just before Autumn’s Eve, there have been new fires,” he said, “as if grief and confusion were a plague. I met one of their hunters on this side of the river, where they aren’t supposed to come. He hardly seemed to know where he was or what he was doing. ‘My son,’ he kept saying. Then, ‘What son?’ ”

“How peculiar. Have you any idea what’s going on?”

“It has something to do with the failed assassination attempt on the Randir Heir at Tentir. He brought back some of the cadets’ bodies. I was here that night, and thought that I saw your sister with him.”

“Huh. She would be.”

“The Randir don’t exactly talk to us, but I get the feeling that they’re bewildered and miserable, all the more so because none of them can remember why. Also, Lord Randir seems to be conducting some sort of a purge, or maybe it’s his lady mother, Rawneth.”

Holly leaned on the rampart, his young face unusually bleak. “Not all of them are bad people, you know. They don’t deserve this. To have such power and to misuse it so—I don’t understand.”

In the morning, the thirty-sixth of Autumn, Holly made a point of sending his guests on with a guide who led them by paths above the New Road, out of Wilden’s sight.

“You can thank their distraction that no one saw you on the road yesterday,” he had said as they swung back into the saddle. “Really, cousin, you should be more careful. What would happen to the rest of us if you should disappear between keeps?”

I can’t escape it, Torisen thought wryly as they rode out. Once again, the weight of the Kencyrath settled on his shoulders.

Today the weather was definitely changing, gusting first hot and then cold, while the cloud bank to the north rose like a gray wall, rushing toward them. Forerunners of it scudded across the sun. Under their fleeting shadows, whole fields of tube poppies alternately flamed scarlet and then inverted into their stems, precursor to a winter spent underground. Torisen remembered that it was the equinox. Seasonal changes on Rathillien were often odd, more so than the Kencyrath’s systemic divisions of the year.

With the fall of dusk, it began to rain, then to hail. Yce crouched and leaped into the saddle, her scrabbling claws considerably startling Storm.

“So now you want to cuddle,” Torisen remarked, wrapping her inside his coat, wet fur and all.

Not long afterward, rounding a toe of the Snowthorns, they saw the randon college spread out before them. Something seemed to be going on there. They rode down to it and in by the southern postern. Leaving Burr with the horses, Torisen advanced to the edge of the training square.

Beyond his lord, Burr could see sputtering torches, the rail lined with silent onlookers, and a bedraggled group of cadets standing in the rain around a makeshift stretcher. A cadet no bigger than a Kendar child—surely Torisen’s sister—was speaking to a tall Kendar in a fine coat. He stepped out into the mud, stiffly, as if against his will. She circled him. Her words reached Burr in fragments, broken by the din of hail on the tin roof.

“First, I think, my uncle’s coat.” Her nails darted, and the garment fell away, dismembered. “Now my uncle’s shirt.” It too peeled off in shreds. “And now, I think, your skin.”

The Highlord turned abruptly and returned to Burr, his face pinched and grim. Behind him, unobserved, the Commandant stepped forward to stop the game.

“We’re leaving.”

“What, now, in the rain and the dark?” Burr thought longingly of the Tentir common room, of dry clothes and hot food. The horses stirred, restive, no doubt with thoughts of their own, and Yce whined.

“We’ll shelter in the first post station we reach and start back to Gothregor tomorrow.”

Burr tried again.

“But to come all this way and not even speak to your sister . . . ”

His words died at the sick look in his lord’s eyes. “I don’t want to speak to her. I don’t want to see her. I’ve seen enough.”

So they remounted, turned their reluctant horses, and rode back out into the storm.