VI
The moment the candles blew out, Jame whisked herself through a window into the night, as handily as anyone could whose legs were practically bound together by a tight under-skirt. Jorin scrambled after her. They paused outside, listening to the commotion behind them.
"Now, that's a very excitable lady," said Jame to the ounce, "and not a very bright one. She thinks that you're a civet. Perfumes. Huh."
The screams resolved themselves into words. "You'll pay for this!" Kallystine was shrieking. "I'll see that you pay, you stinking Knorth!"
"Trinity," said Jame, as glass shattered in the room which she had just left, and again and again. "All her mirrors? Why? Let's just keep out of her way for awhile, eh, kitten?"
They went like shadows through the interconnected courtyards which separated the main hall blocks, a dark, gliding figure and a Royal Gold ounce cub silver-gilt with traces of its winter coat. Over black mountains to the west, the sky had shaded to a deep indigo spangled with stars. The wind whooped around them, swirling Jame's skirt until she was obliged to hold it down with both hands. It was turning into a boisterous night, full of vast uproar. As a rule, the Tishooo only visited the Riverland when the priests weren't paying adequate attention to the weather. Its name in Nekrien meant "The Old Man"—an odd title given its prankish nature. When it wasn't chasing its own tail or snatching up loose slates or plunging down chimneys, it was said to carry off unwanted babies and to turn shadows inside out.
Here was the Forecourt and across it, the old Knorth keep. Actually, the keep's lowest level long preceded the Kencyrath's tenure in this valley, or even that of the Hathiri. The ruins of ancient Merikit hill forts lined the Silver, many of them, as here, worked into the foundations of later buildings.
Inside, all was pitch black, heavy with the smell of cold stone and old cloth. Jame closed the door, groped for a box of candles on a shelf and lit one—cautiously, as she'd had chancy luck with fire ever since using its master rune the previous autumn accidentally setting fire to a blizzard. The flickering light revealed a large, low-beamed hall. Faces started out of the shadows against the walls, stirring restlessly in the wind that soughed under the door—death banners, row after row of them, woven of threads from the clothes in which each had died. These were her ancestors, such as had escaped the Fall into this new world, such as hadn't suffered exile with Ganth. All had the distinctive Knorth features—silver-gray eyes under arched brows; high, sharp cheekbones; obstinate chins—to which were often added the hard lines of arrogance and cruelty, it being the privilege of the Kendar weavers to portray the dead as they saw fit, yes, even to that wild, sidelong stare or those fingertips gnawed to white bone.
Who were all these people, anyway? Jame knew some names from old songs but not to which banners they belonged. Her people, lost in time, receding. When their names, at last, were forgotten by all, would their faces crumble away as already the oldest here had done?
. . . past familial glories, a dying house . . . .
But some were more recently dead than others. On the far west wall, flanking the door to the inner ward, hung the banners of those slain that terrible night in the Ghost Walks. Above a strong-jawed, older woman who might be Kinzi was the tapestry which Jame had come to see, the only one there close to her own age. She raised her candle in salute.
"Hello, Aerulan."
On first seeing that bright face with its whimsical smile, no one thought, "This is a death banner," but rather "This is someone I would like to meet." It came as a shock a moment later to realize what that thin red line across Aerulan's neck represented. She was so plainly someone meant to love and be loved, not to bleed to death with a slit throat in the arms of the girl who would later become the Brandan Matriarch. Now it seemed that she had died leading the assassins away from where the child Tieri had lain hidden. That should have made her even more real to Jame. It didn't. Oh, this was hopeless, trying all winter to reach across a gap years deep, full of pyrrhic ash. The burnt dead were dead, and that was that.
She was about to turn away, sighing, when something about the banner caught her attention. As a rule, one only noticed Aerulan's face. Now, however, something about the dead girl's clothes, the cut of her tight-laced bodice . . . . Jame felt a jolt of recognition. It wasn't, of course, the same dress which she now wore—Aerulan's russet gown had been teased apart thread by bloodstained thread to make the weft of this tapestry—but the style was as distinctive as its owner's teasing smile:
Do you know me yet?
Jame's sudden grin mirrored that on the face above her, more closely than she knew. "Walking all winter in your shoes, standing here now in your damned swaddling shift, I'd better, hadn't I? Well met at last, cousin."
The door to the Forecourt opened. A blast of wind extinguished Jame's candle.
"I tell you, I saw a light under the sill," said a dark figure in the doorway, to someone behind her. "Where d'you say that box of candles was?"
Jame shrank backward in the rustling darkness, silently cursing. Betrayed by fire again. They would hear her if she opened the door to the inner ward, assuming it wasn't locked. She edged northward along the wall to the spiral stair in the corner, hitched up her skirts, and scrambled upward with Jorin bounding on ahead. Candle light danced over the steps at her heels. On the second floor landing, she paused to listen and learn that the people below were indeed Caineron guards, seeking the Knorth runaway.
They were climbing the stair.
Quick, quick—up to the lofty third-story chamber where the High Council met in the jeweled light of stained glass windows, up again into the northwest tower which Jame had never visited before, it having been so hideously cold here in winter. At the top of the stairs was an unlocked door. She slipped inside and closed it softly behind her. Her ear against its inner panels, she heard heavy feet mount the steps. The door started to open.
"Wait!" a guard called from the council chamber below. "That's Gothregor up there. Leave it be, for honor's sake, and help me search down here."
The door closed. Feet descended.
"Whew," Jame said, very softly, to Jorin. Then she turned.
The room was almost as dark as the hall below, except for what light seeped around its shutters as the wind rattled them impatiently. Jame groped over to the western window. When she unlatched it, the shutters flew open in her face and the Tishooo rushed in, exulting: So there you are!
Seventy feet below lay the grassy expanse of the inner ward, surrounded by the fortress's massive outer wall. Lights shone in the mural rooms opposite where her brother's Kendar were making themselves snug against the night. From this height, she could see over the battlements to the pale glimmer of Chantrie's ruins on the river's far bank. Jame wished that she had known about this vantage point when Lord Caineron had passed. As it was, she had spent the day keeping well out of sight, trusting Caldane no more than the Knorth garrison had. After all, the lord of Restormir had strong reasons, personal as well as dynastic, for wanting to get his hands on her again.
Thinking about Caineron reminded her of Graykin, his bastard son and erstwhile spy. At the Cataracts, though, she had accidentally bound Gray—something which only established Highborn males were supposed to do. There would be serious trouble if word got out about that, but nothing compared to the furor if anyone learned that she had also entrusted this Southron half-breed with the Book Bound in Pale Leather.
The Book, the Ivory Knife, and the Serpent-skin Cloak—those three object of great if ambiguous power kept by the Master in Perimal Darkling after the Fall. No one knew what roles they might play in the final conflict, only that each was necessary. Now at last two of them had come to Rathillien. The Knife lay hidden in Jame's room here at Gothregor, sullenly eating a hole in her mattress with its malign presence. As for the pale Book with its collection of master runes, what a poor guardian she had proved of that. In Tai-tastigon, both the Sirdan Theocandi and the priest Ishtier had coveted the deadly tome and been destroyed by their brief possession of it. At the Cataracts, with Caldane on her heels, she'd had to entrust it to Graykin.
No word had come of it or him since.
In her experience, that damned Book could usually look after itself, using whomever it pleased to do whatever it wanted.
As for Graykin, though, sooner or later Caineron would realize that his son had changed sides. Perhaps he had already. Perhaps that was why Jame had felt so uneasy these last three days since Caldane's passing and why now, when thinking about Gray, she found herself leaning out the window to look northward, toward the Caineron stronghold, Restormir. Her bond with the Southron was only of the mind, not the blood, but still it twitched at her attention like a string tied to a broken tooth.
What was she doing at Gothregor anyway? Playing dolly dress-up, demonstrating incompetence at things she had no wish to learn, wasting time when she had urgent business elsewhere . . . . Damn Graykin anyway, and damn her too. Trapped behind a seeker's mask, searching for a name that would let her survive among her own people, how could she even defend herself, much less someone dependent on her?
Jame shivered. So this was what helplessness felt like: a cold draft up the spine, a premonition: Find a way to fight back, soon, or be destroyed. Something is coming.
"What?" she asked the breathing night.
No answer . . . no defense?
Other ladies would look for that from their kinsmen and guards. She was cut off from her brother's Kendar and her family was dead except for Tori—accidentally wasn't it?
Could she really have other surviving kin within the degree of blood—a first cousin, in fact accidentally a bastard?
Illegitimacy shouldn't exist among the Highborn, whose ladies usually controlled conception at will and grimly honored the terms of any contract to which their lord bound them. She remembered Lyra, Caineron's young daughter, contracted to Prince Odalian of Karkinor and longing for the child she would never dare have without her father's consent. To misbreed as Tieri had was black disgrace, dishonoring both mother and child. Now Kallystine claimed that it also called into doubt the constancy of all Tieri's female blood-kin.
No one had mentioned this last, personal application to Jame before or, she suspected, to Torisen. Either the lords didn't care, or knowledge of Tieri's disgrace was very restricted, perhaps to the matriarchs. Odd. Odder still that they would tell Kallystine, whom no one trusted. Perhaps they hadn't, directly. Everyone knew that when the council had met today, Cattila's Ear had listened in. Jame knew through Jorin's senses that there had been three people in Kallystine's room when they had left it: M'lady herself, her maid, and a stranger with an almost familiar, earthy smell, like the inside of a potting shed. Perhaps that had been the mysterious Ear, who some claimed was not even a Kencyr, admitted only at Cattila's insistence. Whatever she was, though, perhaps she had been carrying tales.
One way or another, a great secret had fallen into enemy hands.
How damaging was it, though, really? Brought up by Kendar, Jame didn't share M'lady's revulsion at illegitimacy. If Tieri's misfortune got her off the breeding books, she didn't care if people expected her to litter kittens. Unfortunately, as long as the issue was legitimate, most lords probably wouldn't care.
Regarding the Highlord, though, when—if—Tori found out about the Knorth Bastard, how would he react? Kendar had raised him too. He was still said to feel more at home among the randon at Kothifir than here in his father's stronghold. Strange to think of the Highlord of the Kencyrath as an outsider. In some ways, she and he were still much alike. Old songs claimed that living or dead, twins occupied corners in each other's soul. Jame could almost believe that, asleep if not awake: all winter she'd had the recurrent dream of seeking her brother up and down Rathillien, as once she had sought him through the bleak rooms of the Haunted Lands keep. On Spring Eve, she had even dreamt that she had tracked him down at last, only to have her dream twist into the nightmares that had haunted her sleep ever since.
Jame hugged herself, shivering. Think of something else.
She turned away from the window to survey the room. Starlight revealed it to be circular, containing two chairs, a worktable, and a fireplace down whose throat the wind whistled off-key. On the mantle was a branched candlestick with wax guttered to the sockets. Behind that stood a pitted, bronze mirror, placed to throw back candlelight and, incidentally, a distorted image of the room. In it, she seemed to be wearing a black coat much like Tori's and almost his thin, handsome face, but so haggard . . . .
. . . looking like the unburnt dead . . . .
The faint, uncanny echo of her thoughts made her start; however, she was still alone in this cold, tower room.
Rumor said that Tori sometimes stayed awake for weeks on end. Well, if he was losing sleep because of her, it served him right. He should never have stranded her here. She stuck out her tongue at the reflection.
The surrounding walls were lined with shelves full of parchment scrolls. A second door opened off the south wall. Outside was a narrow platform and a catwalk swaying through dizzy space to the southwest tower of the keep which housed sleeping quarters. Now, where had she learned that? Then Jame remembered, and knew why the guard had called these upper reaches "Gothregor": It was customary to identify a lord, his possessions, and his chambers by the name of his fortress.
This was Tori's study.
The ladies of the halls speculated endlessly over the Highlord's refusal to reoccupy the Ghost Walks. Most saw it as a slap at M'lady Kallystine's ambitions, or an evasion of her company. However, faced with this austere bivouac at the very top of her brother's ancestral keep, Jame wondered if in truth he loathed everything that had been his father's. What had his life with Ganth Gray Lord been like after her expulsion and before his own departure, under mysterious circumstances, at the age of fifteen? Twin or not, Tori was no longer the child she remembered. Nameless boy under Lord Ardeth's protection, young commander of the Southern Host, Highlord of the Kencyrath, he had lived a lifetime since their childhood together, and a life uncommonly private for someone born to power. Look at this chamber. There was hardly room here for his servant Burr, much less for the retinue which his position would seem to demand. Knorth poverty only explained part of it. The Caineron guards had been right to respect such determined privacy. So should she.
But at the door she heard M'lady's guards still below.
Damn. She would have to wait them out. The thought of inactivity, however brief, reminded her that, like her brother, she hadn't slept in several nights. His chair, set before the cold fireplace, looked dangerously comfortable. She sat down on the floor, her back to a bookcase. Jorin flopped across her knees.
I need a bigger lap or a smaller cat, she thought, bemused, and, despite herself, fell asleep.