II
Adiraina, the Ardeth Matriarch, sat by a window in an upper chamber of her family's compound, stitching a letter to a five times great granddaughter—one of a growing number. They did tend to accumulate, she reflected wryly, when one was over a hundred and twenty years old.
So did memories.
The spring breeze off the Snowthorns bought back an evening a lifetime ago, the child that she had been leaning on this windowsill, looking eastward over the jagged rooftops of the Women's Halls to the lights that sparkled in the Knorth family quarters, hoping for a glimpse of her new sister-friend.
Oh, Kinzi . . . .
How short that springtime together had been and how long the years apart afterward as each had served her lord wherever he sent her, in whatever distant house or bed. Highborn men laughed at the token cloths which their women seemed eternally to exchange. Adiraina touched the worn shawl draped across her shoulders. It had arrived on Spring's Eve almost a century ago, after a winter's enforced silence: Kinzi's vow gift, the stitched record of her winter days. Adiraina's fingertips remembered every detail, however many knots unraveled with age.
But at last the long separation had been over when they both returned to these halls, each now the matriarch of her own house.
Memories: another evening long after the first, standing by this window, the day's work done. Family business kept Kinzi to her quarters, but if Ganth returned soon from his hunt perhaps she could slip out.
Like children again, Adiraina had been thinking, stealing sweet moments. What a good life we've had . . . .
She tried to fix on that moment, the last of happiness, but memory swept her inexorably on: Cries in the darkness, and then screams as Bashtiri shadow assassins slashed their way through the unprotected tower. The blaze of Kinzi's helpless rage like a fireball in her lover's mind, suddenly extinguished. Dead, dead, Aerulan, Telarien, Kinzi—all the Knorth women but one, and that a child who must be kept hidden the rest of her unhappy life . . . .
It would be dark there now, in those apartments built for the Highlord's family in Gothregor's massive outer wall—dark and cold and silent. The Ghost Walks, people called them, and kept their distance. At least she was spared that dismal sight: the eyes on her gray, velvet half-mask were mere embroideries in silver thread. She had been blind since adolescence.
A pity, Adiraina thought, that she couldn't also claim to be deaf.
Behind her the Danior and Coman Matriarchs, Dianthe and Karidia, were arguing again; or rather, as usual, the latter was trying to pick a fight. As always, Karidia was advancing the interests of the Caineron, on the theory that since Caldane was the most powerful Highborn in the Kencyrath, he should be given more power still with first claim on the newly discovered Knorth, Jameth. "Dear Catti" would insist, if only she were here.
Adiraina smiled. "Dear Catti" was Cattila, the Caineron Matriarch and Caldane's great-grandmother, who had once called him the stupidest thing on two legs in the Riverland.
"Speaking of dear Caldane," she said, "has anyone heard exactly what has ailed him this past winter? 'Not quite feeling in touch with things' is not, I'm sure you'll agree, a particularly enlightening diagnosis."
She sensed rather than saw them all glance at Cattila's Ear, who sat in the shadows knitting their conversation into a scarf which she would subsequently dispatch to her mistress. Being an Ear, she of course said nothing.
"At least Lord Caineron sleeps at night," snapped Karidia. "That's more than can always be said of our fine, young Highlord or, recently, of his sister. Anyway," she continued, perhaps still thinking of lost sleep, "there's already an alliance between the Houses of Knorth and Caineron in that Torisen has taken one of Caldane's daughters as a limited term consort."
"Yes, dear," said Yolindra, the Edirr Matriarch, from a cushioned seat by the western window where, like a cat, she took her ease in the day's last warmth. "But I wouldn't count on that if I were you. When the Highlord stopped here last fall on his way to the Cataracts, he didn't so much as send her word, much less visit her. And he's had no trouble staying away all this past winter. It sounds to me as if he's begun to slip through darling Kallystine's grip."
"Nonsense!" snapped Karidia.
"About time, I'd say," Dianthe said briskly. "I've always had the highest regard for that young man's survival instinct."
With that, she swept off to take a turn around the room, with Karidia trotting to keep up, still arguing as fiercely as increasing shortness of breath allowed.
Dear Karidia, thought Adiraina. She did have such an unfortunate tendency to yap.
These squabbles would be amusing, if the stakes weren't so high. Ever since the Three-Faced God had created the Kencyrath over thirty millennia ago, its highlord had been Knorth. Everyone had thought that Torisen was the last of his lineage, had almost been glad of it, after the grief which his father Ganth Gray Lord had caused; but suddenly this girl, his sister, had appeared out of nowhere. It seemed inevitable that either her son or his would be the next highlord, the first in history with the blood of another house also in his veins. So far, Torisen had proven the impeccable instincts with which Dianthe credited him by refusing to give anyone a legitimate Knorth heir. It was unlikely, though, that the lords would permit him to be so evasive with his sister. If ambitious Lord Caineron did secure the girl's first contract with the option for a child, young Torisen Black Lord was not apt to get much older. That he would be better off dead than his sister would be alive under Caineron's roof, Adiraina knew perfectly well, but she gave it little consideration: in the Women's World, after all, one obeyed and endured.
Karidia trotted by, still trying to keep up with the much taller Danior Matriarch. "It isn't as if the girl is such a prize in herself," she was panting. "I mean so ignorant so clumsy . . . ."
This last made the Jaran Matriarch Trishien look up from her reading. Sunlight caught the lenses worked into her mask, fiery eyes in a cool face. "I'd like to see you fall downstairs even once without breaking your neck, much less make a habit of it."
"So she has . . . a brilliant future . . . as a tumbler," snapped Karidia, coming to a breathless stop before Adiraina. "Is it really possible . . . that this girl . . . is a pure-blooded Knorth? I mean, all the Knorth ladies died here over thirty years ago . . . except for the child Tieri . . . and we all know what became of her."
Adiraina's hand closed convulsively on the letter which she had been stitching. "It wasn't Tieri's fault that her lord brother went directly from the White Hills into exile, without her. Aerulan had saved her from the assassins by hiding her in the empty halls. I tried to do the same when I concealed her in the Ghost Walks for twelve long years and told no one, not even this council, not until she died in the moon garden, bearing an illegitimate child to an unknown father, to her utter disgrace. She was sister-kin to me, the daughter of Telarien, the granddaughter of my dear, dead Kinzi. But here it ends. We will not speak of her or her bastard again."
There was a moment's embarrassed silence, even the truculent Karidia looking abashed. By the opposite window, Cattila's Ear had dropped a stitch. Adiraina released her cloth letter and removed the needle from her thumb.
"As for this girl's mother," she said, with an abrupt return to her usual calm manner, "all I know is that she was pure Knorth and a potent Shanir, as members of that house so often were. Remember, my own gift is to sense bloodlines by touch—back a hundred generations, if necessary."
"So you keep reminding us," Karidia grumbled. "Worth your eyes, was it? All right, all right: we don't know if developing the blood-sight caused your blindness: they just happened at the same time. A fat lot of good either does us now, anyway. Without the mother's name, we wouldn't know how to bring the daughter into sister-kinship even if we wanted to. And the darkling taint? You're sure that's in this uncouth brat too?"
"Regrettably, yes."
"So, we have here a purebred Shanir Knorth who probably knows who her mother was, but won't tell us. She also refuses to say where she's been for the past nineteen-odd years. Given the taint, it could have been in Perimal Darkling itself. And you once even said that she and the Highlord could be twins except, of course, that he's at least ten years older than she is. I ask you! What are we supposed to do with a mystery like that?"
"We crack it," said the Ardeth Matriarch tartly, "or we crack her. What else do you think we've been trying to do, this past winter? We have to know what we're dealing with."
"Make her drop the mask?" said Yolindra. "How indelicate!"
"Yes," said Trishien dryly, "especially since we forced her to wear it in the first place."
"I see now why you turned her over to Kallystine," said Dianthe, as she swept past yet again. "If you want to learn the worst about anyone, dear Kally will bring it out."
"I resent that!" yelped Karidia, and took off in pursuit.
Yolindra's chime of laughter broke as the sound of hoofbeats below made her glance down into the Forecourt. "Brenwyr," she said.
The others glanced at each other, momentarily united by the unease which the Iron Matriarch seemed to create these days.
"And she's wearing that horrid skirt again."
Trishien grinned. "Jealous, Yo? But I forgot: unlike some of us, you enjoy being hobbled. Never mind. I'm sure she'll change before coming up here rather than offend you or scare the children. At least, she's insisted that our young Knorth be properly clothed, which is just as well considering that her brother didn't make any provisions for her at all."
"Only you would call those old rags proper clothing," the Edirr Matriarch retorted with a sniff. "Still, I suppose they are better than that awful pink dress she arrived in."
Dianthe had come to stand beside Adiraina, scarcely breathing hard at all despite her brisk walk. Ah, to be ninety again, thought the blind matriarch. She felt her friend's hand on her shoulder. The fingers spoke to her with quick, deft changes of pressure.
*Seriously, what does the Highlord think of his sister in Kallystine's tender care? It can't be what he intended when he sent her here.*
Adiraina put her thin hand over Dianthe's. *It wasn't. He thought his steward Rowan would take charge of her.*
*A Highborn girl alone in a Kendar garrison? Ridiculous!*
*So I said, and snatched her out of the steward's hands. Rowan must have told him that, but she doesn't know about dear Kallystine, anymore than he seems to have known that he should provide his sister with suitable clothes, quarters, and guards. So we have her quite to ourselves.*
"Hmmmm." Dianthe's fingers drummed briefly. *At least until the Highlord comes home. 'Point of law,' as Trishien would say: custom may put her in our hands, but she's still Knorth. Be careful, old friend. About those clothes, though. Why did Brenwyr insist that she wear them? You do realize whose they were, don't you?*
Adiraina sighed. *Yes, I do. Having a Knorth in the halls again seems to have . . . set all the old ghosts walking, as it were. For me, Kinzi Kin-singer; for Brenwyr, in a more literal sense, young Aerulan.*
*But this girl is so very different,* Dianthe's fingers protested. *She's Knorth too, of course, and young, but so gawky, so maladroit . . . .*
*You've forgotten what young Knorth are like.*
Dianthe considered this rather blankly. "You're right," she said. "It's been so long." *If this girl follows the way of her house, she'll grow to be a beauty.* The fingers paused a moment. *I wonder if Kallystine realizes that . . . .* "What is it?"
Adiraina had suddenly stiffened. "Someone in the Halls has just experienced a berserker episode."
"I warned you!" Karidia burst out. "This comes of using Shanir powers and breeding for them. Oh yes, Ardeth, you and Kinzi did, admit it or not. Manipulating bloodlines, creating monsters . . . . And now that precious Iron Matriarch of yours has blown up in someone's face!"
"It wasn't Brenwyr," said Adiraina, shaken. "I don't know who it was."
The matriarchs looked at each other. Berserker Highborn were Shanir with a strong affinity to the Third Face of God, That-Which-Destroys. Adolescent girls sometimes passed through a mock-berserker phase, but the genuine thing was not taken lightly by anyone remotely interested in a quiet life.
"Well, someone's got to find out," said Karidia, and went.
The others were still discussing possibilities when she returned, hauling with her the young sewing teacher.
"It was that wretched Knorth," she announced, almost with satisfaction. "Tell them, girl."
The instructress told her story, stammering to find herself with such an august audience.
"I never said a-anything about using knot stitches as a code!" she wailed, clutching her shredded sampler. "That's a third circle secret. She shouldn't have known about it herself, much less mentioned it in front of the children. And she sang them Jamethiel's lament, a-all about obedience and Honor's Paradox . . . ."
"The trouble with that young lady," remarked Trishien after the instructress had burst into tears and been dismissed, "is that she isn't used to people who can think."
"Of course not!" snapped Karidia. "At that age, it's indecent! Honor's Paradox, indeed. As if anyone in that classroom was ready to learn about that, or perhaps ever will be. And the knot stitch code. That wretched girl has nosed out another of our mysteries, without being sworn to keep quiet about it."
"You can't have it both ways," said Trishien reasonably. "We haven't trusted her with the secrets of the Women's World, so she learns what she can and owes nothing to us. Excuse me." Her hand had written something in a spiky script. She read the short message and signed an acknowledgment in her own rounded letters. "A weather note from Kirien: Mount Alban reports increased weirding. The College thinks a storm is on the way. What a pity," she added, musing, "that this Jameth was born a Knorth. The Jaran would know what to do with a mind like that."
The Coman Matriarch flushed. "H-how dare you think of a purebred Knorth in those terms! You stick to corrupting your own women, you . . . you scrolls-worm! And as for your precious Kirien . . . ."
"Karidia!"
The collective voice and will of the other matriarchs brought her to a dead halt, a bit dazed, as if she had run full-tilt into a wall.
"Remember where and what you are," said Adiraina sternly. "Behave."
"None of us have been quite normal, I think, since that girl arrived," remarked Dianthe. "Haven't you noticed? She makes people forget themselves. I wish, though, that the sewing teacher hadn't slapped her. Have we really made the Highlord's sister so vulnerable?"
Karidia snorted, rallying. "Before you start thinking of that girl as helpless, you'd better look at this."
She held out the sampler which she had appropriated from her young kinswoman. They all regarded it at first with bewilderment, then with growing apprehension as Adiraina took it, spread it out on her lap, and examined the slashes by touch. Each of her fingers fitted into one.
"Oh dear," she said. "Oh dear."