VII
Brenwyr's words carried, as such curses do, until they reached the one for whom they were intended. Four flights up, a sigh answered them:
" 'Roofless and rootless'? The same to you, Brandan. 'Cursed be.'"
The door leading from the tower out onto the platform of the catwalk had been left open. Now it swung back. No one had stopped to think that a flat door is not going to lie absolutely flush with a curved wall. The jagged hole in the council chamber roof gaped beneath. Jame had heard every word spoken there. In fact, she had felt inclined to tumble down on the captains' heads, if they didn't shut up soon and go away. Oh God, was this faintness only shock, or had Kallystine doctored her blade?
They had gone, cursing her.
She stumbled back into her brother's study and collapsed into his chair. Senethar techniques had stopped the bleeding. Similar measures to control pain hadn't yet been necessary, but soon would be as the numbness wore off. Her front teeth felt loose from half-swallowing a master rune and her throat raw. As for her cheek, the pulse there was already beginning to throb. She touched it gingerly. No doubt about it: M'lady Kallystine had done her a serious mischief. Sweet Trinity, talk about losing face . . . .
But she needn't. The Randir captain had spoken of someone who might set all right. A healer from Wilden. A priest.
There was the rub.
No Kencyr liked or trusted his own priests, anymore than he did the god whom they served. Both were ignored as much as possible by the rest of the Kencyrath, except when a house wanted to get rid of a Shanir boy. The unforeseen result was that the Priests' College had accumulated most of the curative Shanir, who tended to mature too late for their families to realize what they were throwing away. Lords sometimes bargained to get their healers back, but they never really regained control of them. Being a novice changed a boy. Being a priest warped him utterly.
So, at least, Jame believed, judging by Ishtier.
Moreover, the very thought of deep healing made her skin crawl. Buried deep in every individual's mind was a soul-image—a metaphor for his or her essence in which illness and injury were also reflected. Repairing the image healed the body. A Shanir healer entered the collective soul-scape to do this, in perhaps the most intimate experience known to the Kencyrath.
Be damned if she was going to let anyone that close to her now, Jame thought, even if it meant wearing a mask the rest of her life. It wasn't as if her face had ever amounted to much, anyway.
Here, her thoughts began to blur, perhaps influenced by the healing techniques which normally ended in dwar sleep, perhaps by whatever-it-was which Kallystine might have put on her razor's edge. She slept fitfully for a time, in and out of dreams. A terror of helplessness kept her from the deeper reaches of dwar, which would have speeded the healing process but which also would have set the scar. Awake or dreaming, she stared up at the warped, bronze mirror over the mantle, in which her ghostlike image sat in her brother's chair.
More shadowy still was the reflection of the two figures who stood behind her, backs turned, on a balcony over a moonlit waste. From a great distance, she seemed to hear their voices.
". . . my boy, it's almost dawn," one was saying. "Don't you mean to sleep at all?"
"I will," replied her brother, dogged, "when the chair behind me is empty."
Dammit, he was blaming her again. Somehow, everything out of his control must be her fault, as their father Ganth Gray Lord had taught him.
. . . Ganth's hoarse, mad voice dripping poison in her brother's ear: "You were all right until she came back, your darkling half . . . ."
"Father, no!" she protested thickly, rousing. "You drove me out, into shadows. It isn't fair to blame me. It . . . ."
". . . 's no good whining," someone else seemed to answer her.
Jame cringed back again in the chair. That voice, with its pretended sophistication, its underlying power and cruelty, which she had last heard as a prisoner in his tent at the Cataracts . . . Caldane, Lord Caineron. The reflected scene behind her had darkened into a different prison, where torch light glowered on dank stone walls.
Sounds answered Caldane: the rustle of befouled straw, harsh breathing, mumbled words.
"Done enough to you already? Oh no. You betrayed me, Gricki. No one does that, least of all my own misbegotten bastard. I'll find a use for you yet—in a few days, when I've thought of something . . . special."
"No!" Jame cried again, struggling against the grip of nightmare to rise and turn. "Caldane, don't you dare . . . ."
But the effort made her wits whirl. She thought, dazed, that she must have fallen, but didn't remember hitting the ground. Her angle of vision was . . . odd. Askew. Instead of Restormir's dungeon, she glimpsed Gothregor across the Silver, shadowy ruins, and the blond boy-assassin, looking terrified. Then, very, very close, a pair of yellow eyes glittered down at her, with no face behind them. Not just mere clothes, but mere tattooing—the mark of a guild master. Invisible lips drew back from rotten teeth.
"You were sent to find a pale book," tongue and ulcerated throat said harshly from midair. "Instead, you bring me this strange knife." Trinity. She must be seeing him through the eyes of the Maiden, the third face carved on the pommel of the Ivory Knife. "You were sent to kill a girl. Instead, you tell me that all your brothers are dead. That is . . . unsatisfactory. Oh, I'm so glad that you agree, boy, because this isn't over yet . . . ."
No, not yet. Not alive, not dead either. Just lost, bewildered, and very, very frightened.
Brothers, where are you? Where am I? What happened to us? There was a great wind, full of wings, and in its midst the Old Man snatched us up. Flying, flying, falling . . . ah! Dead branches against the moon, catching us, but we can not catch them. Where are my hands?
On an ironwood floor, beside an ebony table, growing cold, growing stiff . . . .
No. Here. Not dead . . . but not alive either.
The other is here too, snagged out of the air by the tree's bleached fingers, a darkness that flows down the white wood, stronger than we are, older and more cruel, a shadow with hungry, silver eyes. Run, hide!
. . . but we are growing cold and stiff.
"You can't run from me forever," it whispers, smiling. "Blood binds."
Jame sprang to her feet. For a moment, the suddenness of her rise struck her blind. Dreams, she thought, breathing hard, forcing herself to stand still. Nothing but damned dreams . . . .
"No," said Torisen's half-choked voice. "I refuse to dream this!"
Her eyes cleared. She was staring directly into the bronze mirror and a warped version of her own face seemed to stare back at her in horror. It had the same Knorth features, at least, even the blood across one high cheekbone. But it wasn't her.
"Tori?" she whispered. "Tori, wait!"
A hasty step forward had turned into a lunge as her legs failed her, and his image had recoiled. She clung to the mantle for support, her breath clouding the cold bronze.
"Dammit, where are you? Come to me, brother. Come!"
The metal cleared. Reflected in it, behind her, she saw the tower room and Torisen's chair, over which her shadow lay. No. Something sat there, spun of nightmares, silver-eyed. It rose, smiling. The wrong brother had answered, her darkling shadow-bane . . . .
Run. Hide.
Images blurred into a nightmare of flight. Underfoot, stairs, ironwood floors, grass, flagstones, get away get away get away . . . .
A stab of pain brought Jame up short. She blinked and found herself, breathless, in the ruins of her tiny room in the Caineron quarter. She sat abruptly on the bed and was enveloped in down from the slashed mattress.
Sweet Trinity, was this another dream? Not with feathers in it, she thought, sneezing. Nothing so innocent. As for the rest . . . .
. . . Torisen and Ardeth on the balcony; Caineron and Graykin; the Ivory Knife in a guild master's invisible hand; the souls of the boy-assassins hunted by Bane; Blood binds . . . .
All phantasms of a possibly drugged mind? Perhaps. Earlier, she had refused to believe that she might far-see anything—what did she want with another Shanir curse?—but these images rang all too true, all but the last. Bane was not her shadow. Darkling she might be, but unfallen, her soul and honor still her own.
Besides, the bastard was up a tree somewhere, breakfasting on nasty little boys. What would their souls taste like—sticky fingers and snot?
But then, if not Bane, what had her brother seen, to react with such horror? The room's broken mirror told her, over and over in a dozen shattered planes. Oh God.
Another flare of pain. Sensation was returning in ragged waves, in between which she hastily applied the appropriate technique. Ironic, that she had learned it here at Gothregor. Because of childbirth, the Women's World knew more ways to control pain than even her Senethari, Tirandys, had been able to teach her.
Then she looked again, and saw by her reflection to her surprise that she was wearing travel clothes—black boots and pants, black knife-fighter's d'hen jacket with its tight right sleeve and full, reinforced left—with no memory of having put them on.
Roofless and rootless . . . .
So, she hadn't come back here to hide. Well, they would have found her eventually anyway, wherever in Gothregor she had gone to earth. Then there would have been a forced healing as subtle as a rape and a lunatic's confinement, with Kallystine gloating through the keyhole. And all that time, Graykin would have been in Caldane's hands where service to her had landed him, because she did believe that part of her dreams, if nothing else.
So she was running: North, to Caldane's Restormir, to the rescue, if she could manage it . . . with a face that could start a war?
Blood and bone . . . .
At least, Tori would never believe what he had far-seen in his mirror. She wondered bitterly if he would even remember it, having seen him wipe far more important things completely out of his mind when they touched on the Shanir.
As for the rest of the Kencyrath, if it disliked unmasked females so much, it need never look on her face again. In her hand was a strip of clean linen, ripped from the hem of a spare underskirt. She wrapped it around her head, over the bridge of her nose and across both cheekbones, binding up the injury. A half mask covered the whole neatly—not that it made her a proper lady, she thought, scowling at her visored image in the broken glass, any more than skirts had made her Aerulan. Damn all mirrors, anyway. No more trying to see herself as others wished her to be, no more useless reflections.
She left the room without a backward glance.
The compound seemed abandoned, except around Kallystine's quarters. At a guess, the Caineron guard had searched their own territory while she had slept in Tori's chair and were now out combing the rest of Gothregor for her. The other compounds proved to be locked tight and fully garrisoned. Jame therefore had no trouble raiding the communal kitchen for provisions or making her way westward through the empty corridors north of the Brandan.
From the top of the wall that separated the Women's World from the inner ward, she saw her brother's scar-faced steward Rowan arguing with the hall guards at the gate, demanding information and entry, getting neither, while the fortress's regular garrison gathered behind her.
No one noticed the slight, dark-clad figure who slipped down off the wall into the shadows on their left and then walked around behind them toward the subterranean stable. The thieves of Tai-tastigon could have taught the Shadow Guild something about passing unseen through a crowd. That the Knorth Kendar failed to notice the same figure a few minutes later, going in the opposite direction with an ounce trotting beside it, reflected more poorly on their powers of observation, but it was a very confusing night.
The post-rider, dispatched in haste for the Priests' College, nearly trampled someone under the North Gate. Swearing, she wrenched her horse to one side and thundered past.
Fifty miles to Wilden. Four hours riding flat out with a remount at Falkirr, Jame thought, watching the messenger plunge down through the steep middle ward and across the broad outer. The healer priest could return just as quickly, if he hurried. She and Jorin were getting out none too soon. They followed the rider down through the wards to the curtain wall and the northern barbican, passing out under the latter unchallenged into the apple orchard beyond.
Overhead, the gibbous moon shone bright at zenith while the stars sank into the deep blue of a predawn sky. The air was giddy with apple blossoms. Looking up through their white glimmer at Gothregor's looming darkness, Jame experienced a moment of bleak clarity.
What she did next, she had to do, for honor's sake as much as for her servant's life; but it would end her chance of acceptance by the Kencyrath in any role which it had been prepared to offer her. So this was the end of the long, bleak winter, turned into empty spring. Driven from the heart, where was there left to go?
Cursed be and cast . . . .
Stop it, stop it. Brenwyr's curse buzzed in her mind like bees in the night's carcass. What would Marc say, if only he were here to ask?
Perhaps, again, "Stop hiding. Follow honor and forget the rest."
Wise, wise Marc.
Dawn birds were chirping sleepily as they left the orchard, bound northward for Restormir, forty leagues away.