- Chapter III

Chapter III

Northward Bound

Summer 15—25

SOME FORTY LEAGUES lay between Gothregor and Tagmeth. A rider using post-horses could have covered that distance in twelve hours. Kendar running would have taken two days. However, Jame hadn’t considered her newly acquired livestock.

“These cows will move about ten miles a day, if you’re lucky, and the oxen less,” Char pointed out with ill-concealed glee. “That is, if the former don’t stampede. Then you either have to round them up or leave them behind. And they will need a midday break to graze.”

Jame considered the herd of tossing black heads and red-rimmed, truculent nostrils that jammed the road at the end of the column. How many were there anyway? Thirty? Forty? They seemed to form one bad-tempered beast with many horns and hooves. Her command had barely left Gothregor before the problem had become obvious, as indeed it should have before they had even set out. All those conferences and consultations, all those hours spent lying awake, trying to think of everything that could go wrong . . .

She had hoped to keep their mission a secret, or at least their destination, so as to reach Tagmeth before potentially hostile keeps along the way learned what was afoot. Small chance of that now.

“Do we go back?” asked Char, lifting his reins as if about to turn.

“No,” said Jame. “Since you know so much about cattle, I put you in charge of them. See that they keep up.”

Char glowered. “I didn’t train at Tentir to become a cowherd.”

“You barely trained at Tentir at all,” Dar pointed out with a grin.

Jame rode back to the head of the column, past so many watchful eyes.

“Already we’re off on the wrong foot,” she muttered to Brier. The keeps lay some twenty-five miles apart. “Send word ahead to Falkirr that we will be there on the sixteenth, to Shadow Rock on the eighteenth, to Tentir on the twentieth, and to Mount Alban on the twenty-second. After that, we’ll hope to sneak past Restormir on the twenty-fourth.”

“D’you think we can?”

Jame shrugged. “We have to try.”

CHAR WAS RIGHT: they only made it half way to Falkirr on that first day, and the cattle barely that. More docile animals would have moved faster, but these were the ill-tempered, barely domesticated kine native to the Riverland, distant cousins to the wild yackcarn of the north. They had been lagging since their midday browse, adopting a mule-like trudge punctuated by random dashes into the bush that lined the road. When Char’s sweating, cursing ten-command drove them into camp after dusk, they charged among the tents, trampling some and overturning cooking pots, before finally being corralled into a sullen mob.

“Really, Char?” said Jame, regarding them.

Char glowered. “Really, Ran.”

“I told you, I’m not . . . oh, forget it. Just keep up.”

She supposed, riding away, that the herd could be left to follow at its own pace, but somehow she didn’t think that it could make it past Wilden alone, much less past Restormir. Did she really need such a fractious charge? Well, yes, for milk as well as for meat if the winter should prove as harsh as she feared it would.

III

THE NEXT EVENING they arrived at Falkirr.

Brant, Lord Brandan, greeted Jame and her officers in his hall. A weathered man in a patched coat, he was used to working shoulder to shoulder with his Kendar in all seasons. Now they were preparing for the mid-summer Minor Harvest to bring in the hay as fodder for the winter to come. Jame supposed that it was too late to plant anything at Tagmeth that could be harvested this year. They would have to carefully ration the grain now bulging the supply wagons.

Brant’s sister Brenwyr swept into the hall as they were sitting down to a plain but hardy dinner.

“So you are striking out on your own,” she said to Jame as she spread her full skirt around the chair that her brother had risen to offer her. Jame noted that the Iron Matriarch’s skirt was divided for riding—no tight under-gown for her, to the other Matriarchs’ distress, although she did wear the traditional mask.

“Yes. It remains to be seen, though, if we can last the winter on our own.”

Brenwyr’s brown eyes snapped at her through her mask’s slits. “I should think you can do anything you set your mind to, child. Is Torisen being unreasonable?”

Jame accepted a bowl of stew in which chunks of vegetables and venison bobbed.

“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully, breaking off a hunk of bread and dipping it in the broth. “I’m only just learning what work is involved. The Kendar will advise me. I hope. How is Aerulan?”

“Besides being dead?” Brenwyr gave a harsh laugh, but her face softened. She ran gloved finger tips down the front of her stiff, rust-brown jacket, flicking open buttons. When she spread the garment to reveal its lining, Jame saw her late cousin’s face smiling at her over the Brendan’s shoulder.

“You reworked her death banner?”

“Only enough to make it fit.”

She gave herself, or rather Aerulan, a brief hug, and shivered. Perhaps her long-dead lover had returned the embrace.

Pages brought in the second course—fish stuffed with almonds and baked in pastry. Jame slipped her half-eaten bowl of stew under the table to an eagerly waiting Jorin.

Aerulan had been slain by Shadow Assassins, her throat slit, her blood soaking the dress she wore, which had subsequently been unraveled and woven into her death banner. No one at the time had realized that the blood had trapped her soul in the weave. Jame wondered if such use as this would eventually rub off the dried flakes, but decided not to mention the possibility to Brenwyr. It was good—and exceedingly rare—to see the Iron Matriarch happy.

THE NEXT DAY they crossed the Silver to its western bank and continued north on the New Road.

It was beautiful, early summer weather. Clouds drifted southward overhead against an azure sky. Wind plaited meadow grass. Late spring flowers spangled the slopes that ran down to the river. Deer bounced off the road into trees as the cavalcade came into sight, causing the gazehounds to whine and pull at their leashes, upsetting the lymers who hadn’t yet caught the scent. Glittering jewel-jaws danced over the grass to feast on unseen carrion. Jorin trotted off to investigate, but Jame called him back. No need to borrow trouble. Occasionally she caught a flash of white between trees upslope. By the bond between them, she knew that the rathorn colt Death’s-head was keeping pace with her, and that it irritated him she was going so slowly.

At a break for lunch beside a waterfall, Jame sought out Marc.

“We’ve come at least thirty miles so far,” she said, “with ninety more to go. How are you holding up?”

The big Kendar grinned at her from his seat on a mossy rock. His boots were off, his feet turning wrinkly white in the cold water. He wriggled gnarled toes with evident pleasure. “This is a pleasant summer’s stroll, lass. For a long time I’ve been looking for a chance to stretch my legs.”

Then it was up again and back on the New Road, just as Char’s charges caught up with them again.

THEY NEARED SHADOW ROCK soon after sunset.

First, one saw the lush bottomland meadow, already sunk into shadows, the disputed ownership of which had nearly brought the Danior and the Randir to war with each other two years ago. The Silver still ran in its new bed, putting the land firmly on the Danior side. Good. As one of the smallest houses in the Riverland, one-eighth the size of its rival, the Danior would never have survived a full-out conflict with the Randir. Arguably, only their close connection with the Knorth had kept them intact so far.

Jame’s eyes were drawn across the river, up the slot valley that housed the Randir fortress. Wilden always reminded her of a wedge-shaped jaw full of sharp teeth with streams that trickled down from the lower moat like drool. Tall, bleak buildings clustered in compounds divided by steep, jagged roads, all under the shadow of the Witch’s Tower on the upper terrace. So, too, was the shed-like entrance to the subterranean Priests’ College, although it was not visible from this distance. That made Jame think of Kindrie, who had spent his benighted childhood there.

Benighted, too, seemed to be the entire fortress on this early summer evening. The streets and courtyards were empty. If lights had been kindled within, shutters had also been closed. The only movement was a trickle of smoke or mist emanating from the tower, rising to hang still in the now windless air. The sight made Jame feel tense, breathless. Wilden might have been some great beast frozen in a crouch.

Shadow Rock, on the other hand, bustled happily. Workers were coming in from the fields, hunters from the hills. Bright flags hung motionless from its towers, or perhaps that was laundry. Silver flashed on the wall, followed by the faint, tinny sound of a horn. The visitors had been sighted.

“We heard you were on your way,” said Cousin Holly, Lord Danior, greeting Jame and her officers in his small inner ward. “There isn’t much left by way of wine, but the cider is especially good this year. Come in and partake.”

They drank the welcome cup while Holly’s young son pelted around the hall shrieking “Kitty! Kitty!” and Jorin slunk from one hiding place to another. Jame caught the boy as he hurtled past, pleased to note in doing so that her shoulder now took the strain without complaint.

“Cousin Jame, Cousin Jame!” he shouted in her ear, then wiggled free.

Jorin fled.

Holly had been Torisen’s heir apparent before Jame’s arrival, and his son after him, but he didn’t seem to resent her accession as the Knorth Lordan.

“That would be foolish,” he had once told her. “As if I could impose my will on the entire Kencyrath, or would even want to.”

Dinner was a sparser affair than at Falkirr. By early summer, last year’s harvest had almost run out and this year’s was yet to be gleaned. Still, the hall was bright and cheerful, except that Holly seemed preoccupied.

Jame slept in Shadow Rock’s guest quarters, but uneasily, waking in the dark with a start. Jorin grumbled in protest and snuggled deeper into the blankets against the night’s chill. She lay there waiting for her heart to stop pounding, trying to remember the dream that had so disturbed her. Then she eased out of the bed to more sleepy protests from the ounce, wrapped herself in a cloak, and climbed barefoot to the top of the keep tower.

Someone was there before her. She recognized Holly’s profile as he half-turned at the sound of her approach. They stood side by side in silence at the parapet, looking out across the dark water meadow, the river gleaming swift in its bed, the steep slope beyond, running up to black bulk of Wilden.

As earlier, no lights showed there, nor any sign of life.

“What’s going on?” Jame asked in a hushed voice. The breathless tension had returned, pressing down on her.

Her dream: cold, dark, claustrophobic . . . let me out, let me out, let me out . . .

Let whom out, from where?

She sensed rather than saw Holly’s shrug.

“I don’t know. Things have been strange ever since shortly after the Feast of Fools. As soon as the sun sets, everyone goes into hiding. Maybe Lady Rawneth has been conjuring again.”

The Witch of Wilden, who had been responsible for the massacre of the Knorth ladies, including Aerulan and the matriarch Kinzi, and who had yet to pay their blood prices.

Someday, thought Jame, making a silent promise to those long-dead kinswomen. Soon.

The trickle of mist that still rose from the tower had gathered into a hazy cloud lit by a gibbous moon. The shape was vaguely disturbing.

“It looks like a face,” said Holly, staring.

So it did, with thinner, darker patches for eyes and a gaping mouth that seemed silently to scream in rage or fear, impossible to tell which. As the cloud rose above the encompassing walls of the valley, a breath of air elongated it. The forehead and eyes sheered off. The mouth stretched and tore. Soon it was gone, but still nothing moved below.

“There was fog the night that Tori stayed here on his way back from Mount Alban,” said Holly. “It flowed down the streets of Wilden and pooled in the valley. Fingers of it reached as far as Shadow Rock. I thought I saw . . . but no: that was only a dream. It’s fading now.”

Like her dream, thought Jame. Never mind. If it was important, she would remember later.

THE NEXT DAY they set off again, and on the second night thereafter arrived at Tentir.

It seemed strange to be back at the randon college, where Jame had spent such an eventful year. On the one hand, she felt as if she could walk back into her quarters in the Knorth barracks, back into her old life, but on the other hand all the cadets were now strangers who looked like children and eyed her askance. The instructors were largely the same, except that Corvine now followed her as a ten-commander rather than acting as a randon sergeant. The commandant this year was the Coman war-leader, who regarded her haughtily as if to say, “If I had been in charge when you were here, you would never have tricked me into letting you graduate.”

That was probably true. She had been remarkably lucky to have had the Caineron Sheth Sharp-tongue as her superior officer, as much as that had at first looked like a disaster.

After a tense dinner, she retired to the guest quarters in Old Tentir rather than to the Knorth compound, although Rue told her that the lordan’s apartment there had been unoccupied since her departure the previous summer.

VII

IN THE MORNING, the one-hundred command again crossed the river, back to its eastern bank and the River Road.

Toward noon, another, faster cavalcade passed them, traveling north on the opposite New Road. By the device on their standard, a golden serpent devouring its young, they were Caineron. By the litter swinging perilously between a team of four high-stepping horses, they were escorting a Highborn lady. Which one became clear when Lyra leaned out between the curtains and waved furiously at them until someone pulled her back inside. Her father Caldane must have summoned her home. Jame wondered why.

So far, Char had managed to keep up with the herd.

“You’re lucky,” he told Jame grudgingly when she sought him out in camp that night. “The cows are antsy, which keeps them moving. A lot of them lost newborn calves to the hailstorm and have since come back into season. When one does that, they all tend to.”

“You really do know a lot about cattle, don’t you?” said Jame, regarding him curiously.

He answered without looking at her. “I should. I grew up with them. If you must know, my father was your father’s head herdsman.” He paused to scrape off a boot on a rock. “When I qualified for Tentir, I swore I would never step in shit again. Huh.”

Jame grinned. “Cow pies and horse apples. Manure happens.”

VIII

AT DUSK on the twenty-second they reached Mount Alban. Lights greeted them, spangling the upper reaches of the Scrollsmen’s College, which was built into a hollowed-out cliff face. The one-hundred command settled in at the cliff’s foot. Jame noted that they avoided the circle of stones that marked the foundations of the old hill fort. That was where Tori had met the Deep Weald wolver known as the Gnasher, Yce’s homicidal sire, and slain him. The Wolver Grimly could have told her what had happened, but he and Yce had both gone south to the Deep Weald to establish Yce as her father’s heir, and Harn remained with the rapidly diminishing Southern Host.

Poor Tori, Jame thought, to be missing his best friends at such a time as this.

As what?

There it was again, that twinge of anxiety.

“Most dreams mean nothing,” said Kindrie, when she told him later, “and most slip away by morning. Still, ‘let me out, let me out’? Are you sure it wasn’t your father speaking?”

Kindrie knew that some fragment of Ganth was trapped in Torisen’s soul-image. When Tori had offered to bind his cousin, the Shanir healer had found himself being offered the bolt to the door that imprisoned that raging madness. Wisely, he had refused to take it.

“I don’t think so,” said Jame.

They had met in Mount Alban’s library, surrounded by niches full of priceless scrolls reaching from floor to ceiling. Night pressed against the windows, held at bay by a chandelier full of guttering candles. Molten wax dripped on Kindrie’s wild mop of white hair. He ignored it. The muted noise of the college rose from below.

“I see you!”

“No, you don’t!”

A rush of ascending footsteps followed, and an elderly man burst into the library—a singer, judging by the intricate gold embroidery on the cuffs and collar of his belted robe.

“Shhh . . .” he said, raising a gnarled finger to his chapped lips, and scrambled for cover behind the room’s largest desk.

A pudgy, panting scrollsman burst into the room on his heels.

“Which way did he go? Which way did he go?”

When neither Jame nor Kindrie answered, the little scrollsman said “Tsk!” in disgust and rushed away, his robe flapping.

The singer emerged from cover and slunk after him, pausing to give Jame and Kindrie a mischievous, gap-toothed grin.

Jame remembered climbing the twisting ironwood stair that led through the college’s irregular levels. Scrollsmen had been tiptoeing across landings, peering into rooms and around corners. In their wake, there had been a scurry of singers seeking new hiding places.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

The answer came from the doorway as the Jaran Lordan Kirien entered the library.

“The singers have hidden various scrolls throughout the college,” she said. “If a scrollsman catches a singer, he or she has to tell them where a specific manuscript is. It’s their somewhat harebrained response to Caldane trying to destroy certain valuable scrolls this past spring. Index is beside himself.”

So the old scrollsman would be, thought Jame; his reputation was based on his knowledge of where every scrap of parchment was.

Candlelight caught the delicate bones of Kirien’s face as she emerged from the shadows, her profile as fine as any engraved on an antique coin. Although both a Highborn lady and a scrollswoman, she wore neither dress nor mask nor robe, but rather pants and a plain, belted jacket of good material. At first glance, one might have taken her for a handsome boy. She ignored Kindrie despite his involuntary step toward her.

“We heard that you were coming,” she said to Jame, echoing Holly.

“The entire Riverland seems to know,” said Jame ruefully.

“Of course. Whatever you and your brother do is of interest to the rest of us.”

She still hadn’t even glanced at Kindrie, who subsided, looking perplexed and unhappy.

“I suppose Matriarch Trishien has kept you up to date.”

Kirien touched a pocket distorted by the slate on which she and her great-aunt communicated by far-writing.

“Aunt Trishien is worried,” she said. “The Highlord’s behavior lately has been . . . mystifying. My impression is that he is trying to act properly, but under great stress and no, I haven’t any idea what is wrong.”

A scrawny old man bustled into the library and thrust a rolled parchment into Kirien’s hands.

“Hello, Index,” said Jame.

The ancient scrollsman glared at her.

“Here again, are you?” he spat. “So, what falls apart or down this time, eh? Or maybe a nice fire . . . no.” His gaze wandered up the shelves of frighteningly flammable parchment. “Don’t you dare.”

Not waiting for an answer, he scurried out again.

Kirien returned the parchment to its niche.

“No,” she said to the singer who arrived on Index’s heels. “This was fairly returned and so is out of the game. Really,” she added to Jame as the singer departed, disappointed, “it’s like dealing with a houseful of children. Still, I will miss them when I become Lady Jedrak.”

“Wasn’t that the name of the former lord, your great-great-grandfather?”

“So we have called every leader of our house since the Fall, as a sort of joke. It’s High Kens for ‘servant,’ or, more loosely, ‘one who has no time to read.’ I suppose that we’ve always tried to distance ourselves from the burden of leadership. ‘The Jedrak,’ we say, sometimes. My great-uncle can’t wait to become simple Kedan again.”

“Will you have to leave Mount Alban?”

“Not altogether. After all, Valantir is just across the river. But the head of a house has other responsibilities than scholarship, which is why no one else wants the job.”

Jame thought ruefully about her own duties as the Knorth Lordan, which in the past she had barely met.

Perhaps thinking along similar lines, Kindrie twisted a handful of his blue robe nervously. “I should have gone with Cousin Torisen back to Gothregor,” he said. “I’ve stayed here too long.”

Kirien regarded him for the first time, with exasperation. “D’you really think you can help him? Aunt Trishien had the right of it: First, he has to help himself.”

“Nonetheless . . .”

“Then go! What good d’you think you’re doing here?”

With that, she turned and stormed out.

Kindrie looked helplessly at Jame.

Jame shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”

FOR ONCE, Jame didn’t partake of a keep’s hospitality, despite invitations both from the Director of Mount Alban and from Jedrak, Lord of Valantir until Kirien came of age.

Instead, she ate with her one-hundred command and then, after dinner, walked into the ring of ancient hill fort stones. It was eerily quiet there, muffling the sounds of the nearby camp. A mist had risen from the river, but it didn’t intrude within the circle. Rather, set aglow by the light of campfires, it traced the outside of the old keep as it had once been, walls, windows, doors, as if looking at the inside of an invisible mould. All had fallen long before the Kencyrath had arrived on this world, giving way to the border forts of Hathir which had cannibalized the older ruins.

Then Hathir and its rival west bank empire, Bashti, had ceded the Riverland to the Kencyrath.

Movement caught Jame’s eye, a bright something scurrying along the floor of the phantom, glowing hall where it met the wall. Long tail, quivering whiskers, big ears—a mouse, or rather the ghost of one. It sat up and seemed to peer at her. Dead these four thousand years. Perhaps to it she was the specter of a future which neither it nor its many times great-grandchildren would live to see.

Turning up her collar against the night chill, Jame stepped out between the standing stones. No light shone behind her as the ruins sank back into shadow, leaving only the smudged fires of the camp ahead. Something tapped her upturned face and trickled down her cheeks like tears. It had begun to rain.

THE NEXT DAY an overcast sky drizzled and drifting clouds cut off the upper slopes of the surrounding Snowthorns while the Silver smoked in its bed.

The one-hundred command plodded on. To the Kendar this was a minor inconvenience, given the well-made River Road on which they trod, but the horses, dogs, and cattle walked with heads listlessly bowed. If they could have grumbled out loud, they would have.

The day after was worse.

A damp mist settled in the valley, as dense, almost, as wet white feathers. Soon one could see no more than a dozen feet in any direction, and the column closed ranks to keep in touch with each other.

Toward late afternoon on the twenty-fourth of Summer, they paused just short of Restormir on the opposite bank. There was no question about seeking hospitality in the Caineron fortress. Once enclosed by it, Jame doubted she would ever willingly be released, such was Lord Caldane’s hatred of her. She smiled, remembering their first clash at the Cataracts. He had thought she was a typical Highborn girl, another Lyra Lack-wit. She had slipped him a potion found in the Builders’ city in the Anarchies. It had given him the hiccups, and with each “hic” he had risen farther into the sky. Kendar were often afflicted with height-sickness. So too was Lord Caineron. The sight of her ever since had threatened to launch him again.

“Go ahead,” she told a scout. “Tell me what you see.”

The rider was soon back, emerging suddenly out of the fog.

“There’s what might be a Caineron one-thousand command blocking the road,” she reported. “I eased through the edge of their ranks, but the bulk of us won’t get past them without a fight.”

Jame glanced back at what she could see of her one hundred. Fighting was not an option, even if they weren’t so heavily outnumbered, not without risking an internecine war.

“Stay here,” she told Brier, and rode forward.

The mist hovered around her, muffling the sound of Bel’s hooves, making it seem as if they were moved in place. Then the hoofbeats doubled. Jame first saw four white socks approaching, then the bulk of a stocky chestnut gelding. Gorbel sat on it like a sack of potatoes. They drew up head to tail.

“Don’t tell me,” said Jame. “You heard that I was coming. I didn’t know you were back in the Riverland.”

Gorbel harrumphed. With his bulging brow, small eyes, and long, down-turned slash of a mouth, he looked more than ever like a dyspeptic bullfrog.

“My father doesn’t know what to do with me,” he said. “He only made me his lordan and sent me to Tentir because you were there and I was the only son of the right age. We Caineron weren’t to be left behind, oh no.”

“Well, you showed him, didn’t you?”

Gorbel gave a sound that was half croak, half mirthless chuckle. “Too right I proved myself, at least to the Randon. Now Father can’t demote me without insulting them. Sounds rather like your own situation, doesn’t it?”

It did.

“So,” said Jame. “Here we are. Now what?”

“Father claims Tagmeth. His great-granduncle did a lot to restore it, oh, a hundred years ago or so, before my grandfather started gathering all Caineron back into Restormir. No more cadet branches striking off by themselves. Kithorn was the last, and look what happened to it. I won’t say the recall was a good idea. We’re wickedly crowded. But that’s what he did and my father holds by it.”

“Tagmeth isn’t on your side of the Silver,” Jame pointed out. “For that matter, neither are you.”

“Strictly speaking, the old keep is on an island in the middle of the river. And we Caineron go where we please, here about. D’you want to make something of that?”

Any other Caineron would have been belligerent; Gorbel simply wanted to know her intentions. They had had a strange relationship ever since their days at Tentir, with grudging mutual respect but also the awareness that any change of politics could turn them into mortal enemies.

Jame considered her situation, wishing she had asked more questions at Mount Alban. Surely some scholar there would know the rules governing such matters, as there had been during the dispute between Wilden and Shadow Rock.

“I suppose it depends on who holds Tagmeth,” she said.

Gorbel gave a volcanic sneeze that made his horse jump.

“Damp,” he said morosely, wiping his nose on his sleeve, leaving a slimy smear. “And cold. Kothifir suited me better.”

“I never liked the heat. Besides, I’m dressed for this climate.”

Gorbel was not. His ornate court coat, crimson stitched with swirls of gold, might have served in the over-heated banquet hall which he had just departed, judging from the fresh stains down the front.

“Sorry to tear you away from dinner,” Jame said.

“More like from a twenty-course breakfast that never ends. Most days are like that at Restormir, what with all of my brothers crowding in to vie for notice, huh, even that fool Tiggeri who thinks he’s so funny. They all believe that my days as lordan are numbered. Everything is a dead bore, and there sits Father in the midst of it, goading everyone on, as sleek and fat as King Krothen.”

Jame thought of that incredibly obese monarch, and wondered if his svelte alter-ego Kroaky had also begun to swell now that, presumably, he could no longer play the scamp in low dives. “Truly?”

“Well, not quite. He can still stand up, with help. Anyway, regarding possession of Tagmeth, Father has sent a one-hundred command north to occupy it. They left this afternoon, when we heard of your approach. You’ll never catch up with them, though, given that cow-tail you’re dragging behind you.”

So he had also sent out scouts.

There being nothing more to say, Jame gave him a rueful salute, turned, and rode back to her own command, all the time thinking hard, making up her mind.

Jeers followed her from the unseen Caineron as word of her retreat spread. Her own troops heard. Disgruntled grumbling rippled through their ranks as she rejoined them.

She told Brier what she had learned.

“That’s it, then,” said the Southron.

“Not necessarily. We’re going to leave the road and bypass Gorbel on the upper slopes.”

Corvine had ridden up. “Not a good idea,” she said in her hoarse croak of a voice, around long-since axe damaged vocal cords. “You know how tricky the Riverland is away from the keeps. People get lost in the wilderness all the time, if they’re fool enough to go there. Many never find their way out.”

That was true. Any unoccupied part of Rathillien had a tendency to live its own secretive life. Jame wasn’t sure if it actually changed, apart from occasional arboreal drift, or just seemed to. However, only natives such as the Merikit and animals knew how to navigate it. Another example, she thought, of how unwelcome this world had made itself to her kind.

“Agreed,” she told Corvine, “but up-slope there are also folds in the land. Those are our only chance to beat the Caineron to Tagmeth.”

Other ten-commanders had joined them and were listening with profound unease.

“I’ve heard of those folds,” said Jerr, “but I always thought they were myths. I mean, shortcuts though the landscape from one place to another—how likely is that?”

“It’s a matter of correspondences. If one spot resembles another in some way, geological or psychic, they tend to overlap. Likely or not, the folds exist. I’ve used them.”

Yes, mostly with a wise horse like that equine mountain-range Chumley to find the way. But now she had the Whinno-hir Bel-tairi, and the rathorn colt Death’s-head, and no other choice.

The caravan retreated about a mile, far enough, Jame hoped, for Gorbel’s scouts to give up on it, then cut eastward off the River Road. Here there were water meadows swimming in a soup of fog, and finally the stony toes of the Snowthorns, discovered when the lead horses tripped over them.

By now, the sun had set and night was falling. As they climbed out of the fog and drizzle, at first the western sky over the Snowthorns glowed cobalt and then, as color faded, the stars came out. It was the dark of the moon, the heavens a vault spangled with tiny diamonds. Looking up at them, Jame wondered what it would be like if they ever went out. Legend said that when Perimal Darkling swallowed a threshold world like Rathillien, first the moon disappeared and then, one by one as the shadows spread, the stars. How far away were they? What were they? How much, truly, had been lost with each defeat of her people? The very thought made her dizzy.

Then darkness began to spread across the sky, coming from the north.

It was only the wings of high, tattered clouds, Jame told herself, after the first jolt of fear.

However, their shadows cast a black, velvet cloak over the land beneath. Kencyr have good night-vision, but they must have some light. Now hands groped unseen and feet stumbled over invisible obstacles. Brier ordered that the horses be roped together and that the foot troops hang on to the nearest stirrup. To be separated now was to risk being utterly lost. Jame clung to Bel’s mane as the mare’s movement beneath her anchored her to the earth. Somewhere in the void, Jorin wailed. Blind since birth, the ounce used her eyes to see, and found the current situation deeply upsetting.

“Jorin, here.”

A moment later, his weight landed scrabbling on Bel’s rump. She started, nearly throwing both of them, before settling again into her cautious pace.

Weirding mists also came from the north, Jame remembered uneasily, and the south wind, the Tishooo, had been absent all season to sweep them away.

Pale illumination swept down on them—a momentary parting of the clouds. Before, they had looked down on the mist-flooded valley of the Silver. Now they were surrounded by hills and cliffs. A ripple of unease passed down the column. Lost. . .

Not yet, thought Jame. So far, Bel had not hesitated. Moreover, she was leading them through this trackless wilderness by a way that allowed the jouncing supply wagons to follow, if with difficulty.

Darkness silently returned, and went, and came again. The night went on and on, as if it would never end. Already tired from a day on the road, horses and Kendar alike began to stumble over undergrowth until they found themselves among tall trees whose leaf canopy cut off most light to the bare forest floor.

An eternity later, they stopped to water the horses at a rushing mountain stream.

Word came from the back of the column that Char’s ten and the herd had vanished.

“Damn,” said Jame. “Of all times to fall behind . . .”

The night had been eerily still. Now a strange, muffled cry sounded in the distance, like a bass squeal sinking to a series of barking grunts: “Squeeee . . . huh, huh, huh.”

Horses froze, heads up, ears pricked.

Brier wheeled, trying to face the sound, but it might have come from any direction.

“Squeee . . . huh!”

“Have you ever heard anything like that before?” Brier asked Corvine, who had spent more time in the Riverland than she had.

“No.”

“Yes,” said Jame. “Once.”

She had been hunting with the Merikit north of their village.

“You saw the yackcarn stampede,” their leader, Chingetai, had said to her. “By the Four, you and that white brute of yours were in the middle of it. But those were only the cows. Yes, only the females migrate. The bulls stay up in the hills. You can hear them trumpeting in season for the mates who climb to seek them out. Oh, they must be magnificent!”

“You’ve never seen one?”

“No one has.” Chingetai had puffed out his tattooed chest with pride. “Such is the mystery and grandeur of the male.”

At the time, Jame had reflected wryly that, despite his title and pride, the Merikit chieftain was actually subordinate to Gran Cyd whose housebond he was, as long as she should care to keep him.

Could a yackcarn bull actually be stalking Char’s herd, so far south of his usual territory and so far below the snowline? True, what a lure an entire herd of cows in season would be, even if they weren’t yackcarn, but still . . .

She remembered the stampede thundering down on her as she wrapped her legs around Death-head’s barrel and Prid clung to her waist from behind the saddle. The rathorn reared, but still his head only came to the shoulders of the oncoming behemoths. Four-foot horn spans, ropes of lather swinging from mouths agape, small mad eyes all but buried in bulging, warty foreheads, the stench of them, rolling on before . . .

Jame dismounted.

“What are you doing?” Brier asked sharply.

“I have to find Char.”

“No,” said Corvine. “You led us here. Into the wilderness. Into the folds of the land. You can’t abandon us.”

Jame hesitated. She read the same judgment in Brier’s hard, malachite eyes. She was their commander. Her place was here, with the nine-tenths of her force whom she had brought into such danger.

Delegate, the randon would say . . . but to whom?

Corvine had caught Bel by the bridle, but the Whinno-hir shook free and drifted away. On the edge of visibility, she paused, no longer an equine but a woman with white, flowing hair that masked the half of her face seared by Greshan’s fiery brand. Jame had never been quite sure if she actually shape-changed or only seemed to.

“Follow her,” she told Brier and Corvine.

They looked, and their expressions changed.

The Whinno-hir’s disfigurement and presumed death had haunted Tentir for decades. It was a terrible thing to defile one of her kind, an innocent, who had been with the Kencyrath almost since the beginning, never mind that she had also been bound to Kinzi, the last Knorth Matriarch, whom the Shadow Assassins had subsequently slain. Her presence reminded them all of the depths of their past, which many now did their best to forget.

See, she might have said. We are more than the present moment, our duties beyond mortal reckoning.

“All right,” said Brier in a choked voice. “Go.”

Jame cut away from the column, moving perpendicular to it. She didn’t want to see those incredulous eyes following her apparent desertion.

Dark fell again. The sounds of the column faded as if they too had been muffled by the night. Nearer, hooves crunched on the previous year’s dead leaves. Even though Jame was prepared, she jumped when Death’s-head snorted down the back of her neck.

“Don’t do that!” she exclaimed, spinning around to face him.

His ivory mask hung in the gloom like the visage of a demon, greater horn curving back from his forehead, the shorter nasal tusk all but pricking her under the chin. She might have impaled herself on it. Blood-bound to her as he was, he couldn’t deliberately harm her, but he never tired of offering her chances to hurt herself.

The rathorn had stopped next to a big rock. Jame used it as a mounting block to swing onto him, bareback. She hoped that he, like Bel, like Chumley, would know how to navigate the folds of the land, especially since he was a true native of Rathillien.

“Squeee . . . huh.”

Whatever it was, they were close to it, and to the voices of Char’s ten-command calling out to one another among the trees.

Death’s-head nearly ran into a cow. The beast brandished her horns at them and shied away, back into the night. All around them cattle were lowing. They sounded urgent. Cloud shadows chased each other over the ground, alternating dense midnight with patches of faint starlight. What Jame saw then, she saw only briefly, but the image lingered:

A cow on her knees, rump in the air. Something clung to her haunches, moving. A warty, furrowed brow; horns, one snapped off short; wrinkled skin with gray tufts of bristles, crisscrossed by scars; a short tail sticking straight up and quivering like a pennant . . .

“. . . huh, huh, huh . . .”

“What in Perimal’s name . . .?”

Char had come up behind Jame, with someone behind him. Who . . . oh, Killy, Char’s five-commander, once a member of her own ten. Odd, how he always seemed to slip everyone’s mind. Together, they stared at the spectacle before them.

The cow gave a startled snort and lurched to her feet, the other still clinging to her from behind. Her rear legs folded and she sat down.

“Huh!”

Stumpy limbs shot straight out and small, piggy eyes bulged. A knobby member that would have done justice to a stallion emerged with a plop and jutted skyward.

Then darkness fell again. In it, the cow lumbered off while another of her sisters lowed plaintively nearby for attention. When star-light returned, the clearing was empty.

Killy had turned away. Even in the gloom, one could tell that his face was suffused with embarrassment. Char made an impatient sound. Jame leaned over Death’s-head’s neck, helpless with laughter.

“I shouldn’t, I know,” she gasped, “but oh, it was so funny!”

Char glared at her as if she had affronted his dignity. Again. “All right. I know what happened—more or less—but what was that thing?”

“Something never before seen: a yackcarn bull.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone knows that they must be huge.”

“‘Such is the mystery and grandeur of the male.’”

“Stop laughing, damn you!”

“All right.” She straightened, wiped her eyes, and stifled a hiccup. “Mind you, I had no idea that one of them might mate with a domestic cow—to the extent that this lot are domesticated. This fellow looked pretty old and scruffy, though. Maybe he’s been driven out of the hills.”

“Damn him, too. We’ve got to collect the herd and catch up with the rest of the column.”

No argument there.

The rest of the night was spent routing cows out of the undergrowth where they had settled to sleep. At least, their need remedied, they were easier than before to handle. Jorin proved unexpectedly adept at herding them, probably because he saw it as a wonderful game, and they were too sluggish to gore him. Death’s-head rousted the more stubborn with his horns and scent, both capable of causing panic. The clouds had blown southward, leaving a sable sky sparkling with points of light. Toward dawn, the sky began to glow over the peaks of the eastern Snowthorns, then dazzling light tipped the western range.

From somewhere ahead came the sound of rushing water. Death’s-head slashed through undergrowth and stopped on top of a cliff that overlooked the Silver. To the north, the river tumbled down a series of falls in the raucous throat of a gorge. The River Road continued, carved out of its eastern bank, joined by the New Road at the foot of the cataracts over the back of a bridge.

Below was an island in the middle of the river, roughly shaped like a teardrop. Its high, broad prow breasted the swift current, and crowning the rocks were the ruins of a shell fortress. Its trapezoidal tower keep faced the waterfall. Most of its roofs were gone, exposing a honeycomb of intramural rooms circling a center court. However, it was in better shape than Jame had expected, thanks, no doubt, to the efforts of Gorbel’s great-granduncle.

“Tagmeth,” she breathed.

An unexpected chill ran down her spine. All of her life, she had been looking for a place to call home. Was this it?

Char pushed through the bushes on foot.

“You’re blocking the way,” he said, then saw where they were.

Below the castle was a walled outer ward set with a double gate; below that, a lush meadow tapering to the island’s nether point. Some horses grazed there while others, including Bel, warily regarded the Kendar who blocked the island’s only bridge, which spanned the Silver to the River Road. Jame saw Brier’s dark-red helm of hair and Corvine’s cropped gray. She couldn’t see whom they faced.

Char stretched out on the cliff top and peered down.

“A flag,” he said. “Gold on crimson. So, the Caineron have arrived.”

“Can you hear that they are saying?”

“No.”

His hand dislodged a rock as he shifted his weight. A shout of protest came from below.

In the meadow, Bel looked up and gave a silvery cry of welcome.

The rathorn snorted in answer and pawed at the rim. More stones fell. Before Jame could stop him, he reared, screamed, and came down again, hard, driving his fore-hoofs into the loosened soil. Char scrambled back as the cliff top gave way. Death’s-head also tried to retreat, but then he was sliding down on his hocks and rump in an avalanche of debris with Jame clinging to his neck. Caineron troops scattered below. Rathorn and rider thumped down on the River Road in a cloud of dirt. Death’s-head shook himself vigorously. Jame fell off.

“Well,” she said, climbing unsteadily to her feet and slapping dust off her clothes with shaking hands. “Here I am.”

Everyone was staring at her.

“So we see,” remarked the Caineron commander dryly.

A tall, elegant man riding a tall, gray stallion that Jame had once . . . er . . . borrowed to race across the bloody tatters of a battlefield . . . From above Cloud’s pricked ears, the dark, sardonic face of Sheth Sharp-tongue gazed down at her.

“Commandant,” she said, drawing herself up with a jerk into a salute.

“Not at present. My Coman counterpart currently has charge of Tentir, as I believe you discovered on your way north.”

This was of course, true. However, Jame could scarcely say in front of such an audience that in her opinion Sheth Sharp-tongue and Harn Grip-hard were the only commandants of either the randon college or the Southern Host who mattered.

“How can I help you, Ran?” she asked instead.

“I was just about to request that your people turn this keep over to us. As you no doubt know, the Caineron claimed it many years ago and spent considerable effort restoring it.”

“Then they abandoned it. I’m sorry, Ran, but the Knorth hold Tagmeth now.”

Movement caught the corner of her eye. With exquisite timing, someone had raised the rathorn banner over the tower keep. Sheth Sharp-tongue regarded it with the flicker of a smile.

“Indeed,” he said. “Well, we hardly came equipped for a siege and we certainly have lost the element of surprise.”

He reined, about to go.

“Lord Caineron won’t be pleased,” said Jame with concern. The commandant was already in trouble for letting her graduate Tentir and for releasing his brother Bear into the wilds.

Sheth glanced back and smiled again, crookedly this time. “Let me worry about that, child. Fair warning, though: m’lord won’t give up Tagmeth easily.”

As the Caineron column reversed and retreated, Brier joined Jame on the River Road.

“A mess,” she said, regarding the tumbled debris of the landslide. “As usual.”

Death’s-head bared his fangs at her and hissed through them. Jame swatted him on the nose, bruising her hand in the process.

“Still,” said Brier, “it could have been worse. What d’you suppose Lord Caineron will try next?”

Jame sighed. “I have no idea. We need to set up sentries as soon as possible, though. Now, how are we going to get the herd down off that cliff?”

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Framed