Chapter I 
Chapter I
Gothregor
Spring 50—Spring 60
I
JAME PAUSED IN THE DOORWAY of her brother’s tower study, blinking into the gloom. The room seemed empty, yet it breathed fitfully as the wind ebbed and flowed through it. In the open western window, up the chimney, through the doorway to the spiral stair in which she stood, out again, ahhhh . . .
Papers rustled on the desk. Embers flared on the hearth, the last of a fire set on this chill evening in late spring.
Perhaps I won’t have to face him just yet, she thought. Oh, first, for food, sleep, time . . .
“Tori?”
“Here.”
His voice came from the shadows near the window, where he stood so still that her eyes had slipped over him. Back turned, hands clasped behind him, he was staring down into the inner ward, as perhaps he had been ever since she and her tired, hungry ten-command had ridden into Gothregor at dusk. Below, Brier Iron-thorn would be dismantling their little caravan, the cadets sent to dinner, their meager baggage to their new quarters, their mounts to the subterranean stable. The wind gusted again, bringing a grumble of thunder.
“So you’ve come at last,” he said.
“As you see.”
Or would, she thought, if you turned around.
But he didn’t.
“I won’t ask if you had a pleasant journey. How is your shoulder?”
Jame flexed it and winced. The broken collarbone would have healed by now if not for the past thirty-odd days in the saddle, despite Bel-tairi’s gentle gait. As for riding the rathorn colt Death’s-head, forget it.
“Never had a broken bone before, have you?” Harn Grip-hard had said. “Everything will seem worse than it is until you get used to it.”
Get used to it? Did one ever?
“We made the best time we could,” she said, trying not to sound defensive. “There were delays in Kothifir. Then it’s a long way north to the Riverland.”
“So I remember, having ridden it many times.”
Was he reminding her that, despite the fact that they were twins, he was at least ten years her senior? They had been allies as children, but that was long ago, before their father had ripped them apart. Now he was Lord Knorth and Highlord of the Kencyrath while she was only a second year randon cadet. Despite all that she had accomplished, the gap between them kept widening.
“I thought we had agreed,” she said, then bit her lip, vexed. She hadn’t meant to lash out so soon, if at all; sometimes, though, he made her so very angry, and she had waited a long time to tell him so.
Torisen’s shoulders twitched. “Agreed,” he said. “On what?”
“That I was to qualify as a randon officer, if I could, with your approval and support. But I have a year of training yet to go—if the Randon Council doesn’t kick me out, and they may. Your summons has cost me my last season at Kothifir.”
“From what Harn Grip-hard tells me, you caused quite enough trouble there with the time that you had.”
Jame choked back a retort. Dammit, that wasn’t fair. She hadn’t triggered the failure of the Kencyr temple, or the civic disorder that had followed, or the descent of the Karnid horde upon Kothifir. Things simply happened whenever she was around. Should she tell him that she was potentially one of the three Tyr-ridan expected for millennia by their people? Worse, she was a latent nemesis linked to That-Which-Destroys, the third face of their despised god. Even without trying, how could she help but cause trouble?
. . . some things need to be broken . . .
That was hard to explain, however, when standing up to one’s knees in the rubble that had been someone else’s life.
And Tori hadn’t helped matters by summoning her back to Gothregor prematurely.
Renewed unease and anger pricked her. Perhaps he meant to sabotage her chances with the randon, she thought, not for the first time. If they finally accepted her, he would no longer be able to strip her of the rank that she had fought so hard to achieve—not, at least, without insulting the Kencyr warrior class who, so far, supported him and whom he held in high regard. Without that status, though, what prevented him from dumping her back into the Women’s World where Highborn girls were nothing but chattel to be contracted out for the greatest political gain?
Maybe, however, the Matriarchs could stop Torisen from foisting her on them again. No doubt they remembered all too well the miserable winter that Jame had spent in their halls when she had first rejoined the Kencyrath. A certain young sewing instructress was still prone to hysterics whenever her name was mentioned, or so Jame had heard.
A faint aroma made her stomach growl. Her brother’s dinner, untouched, sat on the table in a nest of papers—cold roast chicken, bread, and cheese. Although it was hard to tell with his back turned, she thought that he looked thinner than when she had last seen him, almost a year ago, and he had always been slender. They shared that trait; people always underestimated them because of it. But this time, perhaps, it was something else.
When Torisen’s steward Rowan had delivered his order that Jame attend him immediately upon her arrival, the scar-faced randon had added in a low voice, “Blackie hasn’t been quite himself since the end of winter. Walk wary.”
At winter’s end, Tori would have learned about Brier.
Dark shapes flitted past outside the window as sparrows came home to roost in the vines that climbed the tower. A breeze rustled ivy leaves. On the table, the haphazard pile of correspondence stirred. Jame noted that on many of the scrolls, the wax seal was intact. She wondered if their cousin, Kindrie Soul-walker, was still acting as her brother’s scribe. They had decided not to make it common knowledge that the white-haired Shanir was in truth a pure-blooded, legitimate Knorth, one of only three survivors of that ancient house from which the Highlord had always come. People might get ideas.
If Torisen had pushed Kindrie away again, though . . .
Their father, Ganth, had taught him to fear those of the Old Blood. Like Kindrie. Like Jame herself. She knew that, in some moods, she was indeed to be feared, but surely her twin brother with his bound household was Shanir himself. How could he not see that? She had walked in his dreams and in his soulscape, had felt the tension between harsh childhood lessons and adult responsibilities. He was a good man at heart, she told herself, doing his best to manage the flawed society which the Kencyrath had become. He needed her to sweep away the dead wood of the past and Kindrie to preserve that which was still worthwhile, but how could he while the ghost of their father whispered poison through the door in his soul-image which she herself had locked?
A drop of blood trembled on a knife’s tip, falling into a cup of wine:
Here, son. Drink to my health.
Had Ganth tried to blood-bind the young Tori as their foul uncle Greshan had his younger brother Ganth? Did that explain the festering paternal splinter in Tori’s soul? If so, how did one root out such a thing?
Ah, ha, ha, ha . . .
“You spoke?” said Jame sharply.
“I said, ‘Don’t touch those.’”
Without thinking, she had reached out to steady the shifting mound of papers. She drew back her hand.
“You claim that we had an agreement,” he said, his back still turned, his voice roughening as if it caught in his throat. “If so, it was based on the assumption that you could be trusted. Father said you would steal my people, and he was right. Whom else have you suborned besides the Southron Iron-thorn?”
“If you think that anyone could corrupt Brier,” she said, trying to keep her voice light, “you don’t know her very well.”
“I have known her since she was a child.”
And so, of course, he had. Brier was the daughter of Rose Iron-thorn, who had died helping Torisen escape from the dungeons of Urakarn when he had been little more than a boy. He must be remembering that too: His hands had tightened behind his back. A flare of firelight caught their lacework of white scars drawn taut over fine bones.
Jame remembered Brier drunk and raging in the Kothifir barracks, trying to drown the memory of the muffled snap of a baby’s neck. Its mother had flung it out the window of a burning tower. Brier had caught it. It had looked merely asleep in her arms, rosy with the heat, its tiny hands just beginning to relax, but it had been dead.
“She said to hold its head just so . . .”
The Highlord is kind, but do I deserve kindness? Do I trust it? Rather give me strength, even if it is cruel.
“She was in despair,” Jame said to her brother’s back. “She needed support. You were too far away to give it.”
And too weak, she nearly added, but was that true? As much as they might fight about other things, she and Torisen shared a deep respect for the Kendar and a reluctance to take advantage of them . . . or was that merely a failure of leadership, as the former Caineron Brier seemed to think?
“I need you,” Jame had said to her, oh, in so many ways.
That night, Brier’s bond to the Highlord had broken and a new one to his sister had formed.
But am I strong enough to do her justice, Jame wondered now. If it comes to that, am I sufficiently cruel?
She felt like being cruel to her brother, to break through his shell of denial. If she was potentially Destruction and Kindrie was becoming Preservation, then Tori must be Creation. Without all three of them aware of and accepting their roles, however, the Tyr-ridan would fail and with it the Kencyrath’s god-given mandate to defeat Perimal Darkling—a battle so old that many Kencyr seemed to have forgotten all about it. She could shatter Tori with truths he couldn’t bear to face. Perhaps she should. Or was that just the destroyer in her speaking?
The wind came again, alternately bearing the tang of snow high on the surrounding mountain peaks and a promise of rain much needed since the failure of the southern wind earlier that season to bring moisture. The pile of scrolls shifted again. Some rattled to the floor and rolled in among the glowing embers. Parchment scorched, then burst into flames.
Torisen glanced over his shoulder at the flash of light, his eyes a clouded silver gleam in his shadowed face.
“I didn’t touch them,” said Jame.
“You didn’t have to. Filthy Shanir . . .”
“What?”
But he had turned back to the window. The wind built, lifting the wings of his hair, weaving black and silver threads, and careened around the room as if trapped there. Thunder rolled closer. Rain spattered the window ledge. More scrolls tumbled into the fire, and smoldering logs near the back burst into flames. By their uncertain light, Jame thought she saw movement on the plate bearing Torisen’s dinner—mold crawling over the bread, maggots over the cheese and meat.
Am I doing that?
It was suddenly much colder, making her exhaled breath smoke. The rain turned to sleet, then hail that drove into the room and bounced off the floor, while overhead, the slate roof rattled. It must be pelting Torisen in the face, but he didn’t turn away from it. Jame thought she heard him mutter something, but his words were lost in the general uproar. She crossed the room to stand beside him.
The hail was now whipping sideways, all but obscuring the view. A rush of sparrows outside the window made Jame flinch back. They were fleeing the shelter of the vines in a shrieking mob, to be snatched up by the wind and carried away. She leaned out and looked down, shielding her eyes with a hand. At first, she thought that wind and hail were thrashing the ivy; then she saw that it was crawling slowly up the wall. Rootlets groped for cracks and dug into them. Ice sliced through puffs of mortar dust as the mass of greenery dragged itself up inch by inch.
“Destruction begins with love,” Torisen said through stiff lips, in a harsh voice not his own. “The power that seduces, that betrays. . . They are creatures of the shadows, poisoning men’s dreams, sucking out their souls . . . Cursèd be the lot of them . . .”
“Who, Tori?”
“Shanir. Women. You.”
And he looked up at her through Ganth’s sullen, raging eyes.
For a moment, Jame was rendered speechless. Then, without thinking, she slapped him as hard as she could.
He jerked back and blinked. His rigid expression seemed to melt with the rain that ran down his hollow cheeks and streamed off his beard.
“Jame? When did you get here? What was I saying?”
Scrabbling vines reached the window ledge and hesitated, tendrils waving uncertainly. Beneath them, loosened stones ground together like teeth, spitting out mortar dust, and the tower shivered.
“Stop it,” said Torisen to Jame. “Get out. Now.”
She opened her mouth to protest, then closed it, gulped, and fled.
II
THE STORM PASSED THAT NIGHT, leaving havoc in its wake.
Until then, it had been a mild spring and the crops were well advanced despite the lack of rain. Tomatoes, peas, and strawberries were now smashed down in their furrows, along with all new grain less than four inches high with undeveloped roots.
Animals, too, had suffered. Horses and cattle in the fields had stampeded in panic. Lambs, foals, and calves that hadn’t been brought into shelter had been trampled or pummeled with hail the size of a child’s clenched fist. One clutch of chicks was found pounded into the mud, rendered virtually boneless but still feebly cheeping.
Jame and her ten-command helped wherever they could—in the water meadow, until someone unlatched the flood gate and the inrushing Silver nearly carried them away; in the subterranean stable, until the horses spooked and, led by Torisen’s black stallion Storm, battered down the partition walls; around the old keep, until a workman replacing mortar above nearly dropped a loosened stone on Jame’s head. No one seemed to be deliberately trying to hurt her, but things kept happening. Finally, on the tenth day after their arrival, Rowan sent them to the relative safety of the apple orchard north of Gothregor, to save as much of it as they could.
The trees had been in bloom when the storm struck and had suffered as much from the sharp, accompanying frost as from the wind and pelting hail. Some were completely blighted, with leaves and blossoms turning black. Many had broken limbs. Others lay on their sides, gnarled roots clutching at the sky. All needed either pruning or removal.
“Heads up!”
A branch crashed down through brittle leaves, almost hitting Damson. The stocky cadet glowered up at Dar, who yelped and lost his grip on a high limb.
“Damson . . .” said Jame, in a warning tone.
The Shanir cadet made a face and turned away. Jame already knew that Damson could cause considerable damage by tweaking others’ minds, especially their sense of balance. Worse, she seemed to enjoy doing so and had, as far as Jame could determine, no conscience whatsoever except where her command-mates were concerned. Instead of now hanging upside down by his knees like some improbable fruit, Dar could have fallen like a stone on his head.
Rue prodded the branch with a toe. “Look. The wood is rotten and . . . ugh.” She drew back as black beetles swarmed out of it. The bark collapsed with a papery rustle on its hollow core.
Jame remembered Tori’s dinner teeming with mold and maggots. Perhaps the firelight had fooled her eyes, but reports had been coming in for days about disease and insects covering damaged crops.
“Trinity,” Rowan had muttered when Jame had told her, in part, what had happened in the tower that first night. “That’s worse than I’ve seen. I only meant to warn you that Blackie has been unusually short-tempered and preoccupied of late. You had better stay out of his way until he sorts himself out. Trust me: he always does.”
This had struck Jame as very good advice. She had since seen her brother at a distance, but in general the latter days of spring had passed without the twins crossing paths even though they dwelt, more or less, under the same roof.
In the meantime, Jame thought a good deal about what had happened in the tower, without understanding it at all. She might be a potential nemesis, and she had been very angry that night, but she was usually aware when destruction flared in her. There was a cold, ruthless joy to it, a surrender to forces that seemed beyond her control. At such a moment, one could do anything, no matter how terrible, before conscience pulled one back. If nothing else, her retractile claws emerged. In that context, slapping Tori hardly seemed to count.
How, though, could he be responsible? He had manifested some Shanir traits in the past, true, whether he admitted them or not, but how could That-Which-Creates cause such destruction?
Jame shivered. The closer the three surviving Knorth came to fulfilling their destiny—if they ever did—the more terrifying the prospect became. Would she, Tori, and Kindrie still be themselves, or only puppets of their hated god, possessed by his power? Honor guided them now. Would it protect them then?
“So, how do you reckon the ratings will go?” asked Killy as he tossed an armload of shattered branches into a waiting wagon.
The horse in the shafts shifted from one shot hip to the other, sighed, and went back to sleep. In the wagon bed, the hunting ounce Jorin protested at being woken from his nap. The other cadets groaned.
Of course, they were deeply concerned about how they ranked after their year in Kothifir and how that would effect their third and final year of training. However, they had already picked this topic to pieces and most felt that it was bad luck to bring it up again so close to learning their fates—tomorrow, in fact, on Summer’s Day. Killy could be maladroit at times, though. Now he was so again.
“If we pass,” he said, cheerfully plowing on, “we’ll all become ten-commanders, in charge of regular Kendar or of other cadets. Just think of that!”
“Or five-commanders,” said Quill, “which, either way, is barely a step up from where we are now. You mark my words: everything we’ve done to mess up over the past two years will come back to haunt us. You shouldn’t have put a spear through that instructor’s leg at Tentir, Killy.”
“Ah, who’s going to remember that?”
“The instructor, I should think.”
“Anyway,” said stolid Erim, “the Randon Council will decide according to what skills they think we still need to prove. What good does it do to second-guess them?”
Nonetheless, they were off again despite themselves, wondering out loud where they would be bound on the morrow.
“Tentir for Dar and me as third-year mentors, we hope,” said Mint.
The others hooted. During the ride north, she and Dar had at first tried to conceal that they had become lovers, then responded to teasing by flaunting it. The Randon college frowned on such attachments, although they were far from uncommon there.
“Special duty for me,” said Quill. “I’d like to accompany a diplomatic mission to the Central Lands now that the Seven Kings are riling up against each other again.”
“Back to Kothifir,” said Erim, “on Harn Grip-hard’s staff.”
When pressed, quiet Niall spoke wistfully about a ranger assignment. Given his experiences in the slaughter at the Cataracts, no one wondered that he would yearn for the quiet of the wilderness.
Rue had already made it clear that she intended to continue as Jame’s servant, no matter what anybody said.
Damson remained silent, although Jame felt the dart of her small eyes. Well aware of her oddity, this disconcerting cadet had announced that she would henceforth look to her Highborn ten-commander as a model—a prospect that filled Jame with profound misgivings.
No one asked the Southron Brier Iron-thorn. She, like Rue, would presumably go wherever Jame did, whatever she felt about it.
Jame hoped that her ten wouldn’t suffer for her faults. After all, they had proved themselves over and over in one unlikely situation after another, ending with the defeat of the Karnid horde before Kothifir that had resulted in her own broken collarbone.
She herself had hardly been idle, but not in ways that might count among the randon, assuming they ever learned of them. Harn Grip-hard had his suspicions. So did Sheth Sharp-tongue. Still, they were only two members of the Randon Council, made up as it was of one war-leader from each of the nine major houses.
Jame wondered if Tori already knew what the Council had decided. Surely so, since the randon would have consulted with him as they did with all lords, each of whom had his own special needs for this new crop of cadets. Her brother must already be thinking about possibilities. She hated being at his mercy, especially when their father might at any moment glare at her out of his eyes.
Oh, Tori, what has happened to you, and what does it mean for all of us?
Dar had righted himself on a tree limb. “You should see this, Ten,” he called down to her.
Jame considered the apple tree’s trunk. Boughs flung wide their arms from it, offering a ready ladder—that is, assuming more of it wasn’t afflicted with rot. Her shoulder twinged.
“Here.”
Brier stepped between her and the tree, offering cupped hands. For a moment, Jame looked into the Southron’s eyes, as green and unreadable as malachite. Even bound as they were, would they ever understand each other?
She put her foot into the offered stirrup of laced fingers without giving herself time to think and was flung upward. Leaves and twigs whipped her in the face. A flailing hand struck a major limb and clung by its claw-tips. Then her feet found purchase. Dar reached down and pulled her up to his perch.
“Look,” he said.
Blinking away black spots—crumbled leaves, surely—Jame stared out over the orchard. From ground level, the damage had seemed random. From here, it appeared that the wind and hail had raked through the trees like fingers, leaving parallel tracks of destruction. Those trees on the southwestern edge were blighted and broken. Others leaned together behind them in rows as if seeking shelter, no doubt aided by a vernal touch of arboreal drift. Those that had fallen must have leaned too far. Jame’s eyes followed the sweep of destruction, which curled around the foot of Gothregor. She couldn’t see over the fortress’s high walls, but memory showed her the bands of hail that had fallen across the inner ward, melting in the next day’s morning sun. No doubt about it: the Highlord’s tower had been the epicenter of the storm.
Movement caught her eye down on the River Road—a troop of travelers approaching the Knorth fortress from the north. From their bright clothes, she judged that they weren’t Kencyr.
“Those must be the emissaries from Karkinaroth,” said Dar. “I hear that they passed through here around the Feast of Fools, headed for Restormir.”
“Why?”
“Folk say that their new prince wants a contract with a Caineron Highborn.”
Jame snorted, then reconsidered.
As rare as such an occurrence was, it had happened once before, when Caldane had sent his young daughter Lyra Lack-wit south to the ill-fated Prince Odalian. Then, what the Karkinorans had really wanted was a military alliance with the Kencyrath, and they had gotten something of the sort when the Waster Horde had marched on the Cataracts. Never mind that poor Odalian had been replaced with the darkling changer Tirandys, Jame’s former teacher or Senethari, for whom she still mourned.
The visitors disappeared around the foot of the mountain spur upon which Gothregor was built. Horns echoed off the opposite mountain slope, announcing their arrival.
By now it was late afternoon. The sun had set behind the western Snowthorns, and shadows were beginning to pool in the river valley. The cadets threw their last armloads of branches into the wagon, scrambled in after them (again displacing Jorin), and woke the drowsy horse. As soon as the latter realized it was stable-bound, it roused and took them through the northern gate at a bone-jarring trot.
As they passed under the shadow of the gatehouse, a bucket full of hammers fell from above, clipping the horse’s flank and smashing on the pavement at its heels. It bolted through into the wasteland that had been the inner ward’s garden, sending several cadets tumbling off the back of the wagon into the churned-up mud.
“Sorry!” a voice called after them from above.
“This is getting ridiculous,” Rue muttered to Dar as they scrambled to catch up.
The mess hall was already full and boisterous by the time they reached it. Surrounded by towering Kendar, Jame didn’t see that someone was already sitting at their table until she was almost upon him, and then he was hard to miss, being large even for one of his kind. She noted, amused, that the table bobbed slightly as it balanced on his raised knees. Marc had aged some over the past year, his red hair thin and receding at the temples, but he was still hale and fit with the muscles of a warrior turned artisan in his late middle age. How old was he now? In his mid-to-late nineties, probably. Jame dropped a kiss on the top of his balding head and sat down on the bench beside him. Since they had first met in Tai-tastigon nearly four years ago, he had been her dearest companion and the moral compass of her turbulent life, sorely missed during her sojourns at Tentir and Kothifir.
Brier sat down on the big Kendar’s other side with a nod to him, which he returned with a warm smile. Jame felt an unfamiliar twinge of jealousy. Brier might be his great-granddaughter, but that didn’t count for much since they were only related by the paternal line and had barely seen each other since Brier’s childhood.
“How was your day?” Jame asked to regain his attention. “Still shutting down the kilns?”
He popped a chunk of bread dripping with gravy into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “Yes. Mind you, I’m nowhere near done, but I’ve run out of raw materials for the moment.”
On her last night in the Women’s Halls two years ago, pursued by shadow assassins, Jame had accidentally shattered the huge stained-glass map that made up the eastern wall of the High Council Chamber. Ever since, Marc had been trying to repair it, and doing a remarkable job, considering his only knowledge of glassmaking was hearsay gained from the secretive artists of Tai-tastigon. He had discovered that sand, ash, and lime taken from various parts of Rathillien, not to mention traces of such native elements as cobalt, copper, and gold to add color, created glass unique to that area.
Contiguous pieces in turn fused together spontaneously, allowing him to fit them into the upright window frame. The result was spectacular, but it didn’t look at all like a map unless one knew how to read the mineral traces. Bits of it glowed where Torisen had mixed drops of his blood into the molten glass, to what purpose, no one was yet sure. Also, there were holes in it: despite over three thousand years on Rathillien, the Kencyr had not yet explored all parts of their new world.
“That reminds me,” said Jame. “It’s odd that this never occurred to me before, but the original map only showed the Central and Eastern Lands.”
Marc frowned, wiping his beard. “I didn’t think of that either. There’s no room for the Western Lands on the new map either, and that’s not just because I have no raw materials for them. It’s as if they no longer existed.”
Jame shivered. One could go a long while, even a lifetime, without thinking about Rathillien’s endangered status as the threshold world closest to Perimal Darkling, ancient of enemies. The Kencyrath had retreated down the Chain of Creation for some thirty millennia, ever since The Three-Faced God had created it to fight the shadows that crawled. How many worlds they had lost, not even the scrollsmen of Mount Alban knew for sure, nor how close they were to losing this last refuge. Most agreed that Rathillien was round, and that the other side of it had already been swallowed. The Barrier lay within sight of the Haunted Lands keep where Jame and Tori had been born, also just north of the Merikits’ land and south of the Southern Wastes. There were also “thin” spots such as the White Hills where it dwelt just under Rathillien’s surface. How close had it crept to the west? The Tishooo, otherwise known as the Falling Man, one of Rathillien’s four elementals, had gone to see. Jame wondered if he would ever return to tell her.
No one had yet served the cadets their dinner.
“D’you suppose they’ve forgotten us again?” Quill asked, craning to look around.
It had happened at almost every meal. The odd thing was that the neglect didn’t seem to be deliberate. People simply forgot that they were there.
Under the table, Jorin impatiently butted her knee with his nut-hard head. He was hungry too.
Belatedly, a cook rushed out of the kitchen carrying a streaming cauldron of soup, its bottom still ruddy from the fire. Clutching its handles through his bunched-up apron, he dodged around the diners, trying not to splash anyone. As he neared Jame’s table, however, he tripped. His grip on the pot held, but its contents went flying. Marc knocked her backward off the bench, out of the way. Soup flew over her head in a scalding brown sheet that seemed to boil in midair. It hit the back and exposed neck of a Knorth Kendar seated at the next table, who jumped up with a startled yelp of pain. The cook dropped the kettle and bustled over to administer to his enraged victim. The pot, meanwhile, rolled under another bench and over assorted feet. As chaos spread, Jame regained her seat.
“Has this sort of thing happened often, since you returned?” Marc asked.
“Huh. More so than it should.”
The big man regarded the remains of his meal, then pushed them aside.
“Kendar are often vulnerable to their lords’ health and moods,” he said. “It comes with the bond between them.”
“I know that.”
Hadn’t she seen Lord Caineron inflict his vicious hangover on his helpless bondsmen at Restormir? Worse, wasn’t her father Ganth said to have imposed his madness on his followers in the White Hills when he had sought to avenge the slaughter of the Knorth ladies on the Seven Kings, never mind that they were the wrong target?
The very thought made her feel sick. The so-called Highborn shouldn’t have such power over the perforce servile Kendar. Damn their god anyway, for having made the Kencyrath so.
Some things need to be broken.
“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be,” Kirien had said, never mind that it had been in the grip of what amounted to an academic berserker fit.
But what was the truth?
If the link between the Three People suddenly disappeared, what would become of them? The catlike Arrin-ken would probably go their own way, as they had for the past two millennia. The competent Kendar could no doubt manage by themselves. Only the proud Highborn would be left helpless. Fair enough. However, if the Kencyrath did break, who would be left to oppose Perimal Darkling? She thought again of shadows hungry for life crawling out of the Master’s House, out of the Haunted Lands, out of the Southern Wastes, and she shivered.
The mess-hall fracas had grown around them, spilling from table to table. Some Kendar leaped up with curses, upsetting benches, as their neighbors barged into them. Others shouted for order, and raised fists to enforce it. When someone bumped into him, Killy half rose, but Brier’s hand on his shoulder pressed him back down. The ten-command sat wide-eyed in the midst of chaos, once again forgotten.
All in all, it was one of the strangest fights that Jame had ever seen.
Kendar sometimes reflected their lords’ moods.
Tori was doing his best to ignore her, but behind that Jame sensed that he was angry, confused and, yes, perhaps even frightened, Ancestors only knew why. He didn’t want to hurt her. Neither did his people. However, accidents kept happening. Of course, except for Brier, her ten-command were also bound to the Highlord, but they knew her better than they did him, and as twins she and Tori had much in common. So far she seemed to be providing them with an adequate substitute.
“We should leave,” Jame said to Brier, under the uproar, both of them ducking a flung bowl. “Without us here, they may calm down.”
She had been resting her forearms on the tabletop, sleeves rolled up to her elbows after the day’s heat. When she rose, she saw that the wood which she had touched was bumpy with knotted whorls as surely it hadn’t been before. What, now she was giving the very furniture hives? Time to go, indeed.