WITH THE REST of the crowded Council chamber, Diren turned to stare at Monmart as he stood, outlined by the open doorway, his face flushed, his eyes dark and tense. Chill air from the outer passage threaded through the room.
Tal rapped on the oak table for order. “Take your seats!” The crowd of astonished Kashi, however, surged toward Monmart, buzzing with questions.
Rising, Tal banged his fist on the Council table. A fluted glass jumped and tipped over, spilling water on his notes. He cursed and hastily blotted the sheets against his shirt. “Dammit, take your seats!” The noise faded to a murmur as the onlookers drifted back to the gallery. Then Tal settled into his own throne-like chair. “Now, Monmart, you say Lenhe’ayn has been attacked?”
Monmart met the old Lord’s eyes. “Yes, my Lord. On my way to the courtyard portal, I was contacted by Lady Myriel, who said chierra forces attacked earlier this afternoon, burning the unharvested fields, stealing what stock they could and slaughtering the rest, and—” He spread his hands helplessly, “—murdering her son.”
A hush fell over the crowded room, deeper than the mere absence of words. Diren tapped his fingers against his chin, a study in sober reflection, while he savored their radiated shock, their inability to take it all in; the normally servile chierra had organized themselves to attack a Kashi House and had killed a Kashi heir. Such a thing had not happened within living memory. They found it unthinkable. He might have felt the same, if he hadn’t been there himself.
Tal cleared his throat. “Are the attackers still there?”
Monmart shook his head. “No, my Lord.”
“And what of the chierra servants—did they mutiny and join the attacking force?”
“According to Lady Lenhe,” Monmart answered, “a number of the field hands actually gave their lives fighting for Lenhe’ayn.”
Diren cocked his head. “How is that the Lady contacted you and no one else?” He smiled lazily, watching Haemas Tal’s high-cheekboned face out of the corner of his eye. Her fingers were knotted in her lap, her skin as transparent as fine porcelain. “It had escaped me that the two of you were so—closely associated.”
Monmart’s golden-brown eyes jumped slightly.
He had definitely hit a nerve with that one, Diren told himself.
“We were acquainted, having met some years ago.” Monmart turned away. “And so many people were sequestered here in the Council chamber, which is of course shielded. She is distraught and could locate no one else she knew.”
Diren raised a questioning eyebrow and leaked just the faintest tendril of disbelief through his shields.
“Well, we must investigate at once.” Tal sat back in his seat, then impatiently righted the upset glass. “This is a nasty business, chierra attacking Kashi. We can’t let it go unanswered.”
“Isn’t Lenhe’ayn close to Monmart’ayn?” Diren asked innocently. “Perhaps Master Monmart should assess the damage, then make a report to the Council. I’m sure Lady Lenhe would appreciate his help in this difficult time.” He watched Haemas Tal’s face lose what little color it had.
“Yes, yes.” Tal waved his hand at Monmart, dismissing him like some chierra footman. “That would most likely be best. Go down and render what aid you can. Send for more help, if you find it’s needed, and bring us your report at the earliest possible moment. We must keep the closest of watches on this situation.”
Monmart stood in the doorway like a pillar, his tan face distressed. It was almost too delightful, Diren thought. Here the man was actually losing the High Mastership of Shael’donn and the Tal woman in the same day, and it all fit so beautifully with Diren’s own need to get her alone at some point. When that moment finally came, it would be safer if Monmart was far away in the Lowlands, too distant to be of any help.
“As you wish, my Lords,” Monmart managed finally, then turned on his heel and left the room, taking Haemas Tal’s pale-gold gaze with him.
* * *
The warm, lazy air currents above the edge of the sea cradled Summerstone as she drifted, spread as thinly as an oil sheen on water, soaking up the wan energies of the cold-season sun. Most of her ilseri sisters had migrated into the southern regions, seeking the more concentrated life-giving rays of the sun while the great forest lay shrouded in the shadow of winter. She alone had lingered this far north, savoring the crash of waves on the air-pocked black rocks, the frothy greenness of salt water, and the streamlined jiri that dove into the icy sea to feed, then soared back into the sky to share the clouds with her.
From far away, something teased at her consciousness, a dim sense of fear/anger/warning. Reluctantly she increased her density, gathering herself into solid form.
Come! childish voices called in the most urgent of ilserin modes. Come now! Danger! Sorrow! Danger!
She hesitated, her face turned up to the sun’s orange disk. Ilserin were silly and prone to panic. This was probably nothing important, but she would check on the excitable young males, then spend a few days soothing their fears, perhaps teach them a new game. Soon they would be scrambling through the trees again and leaping like jiri into the wild river below the falls, dreaming of their own days to come when they would ride the sky at her side.
* * *
Fastening her barret-down cloak at her neck, Haemas hurried up the narrow stone steps leading to Tal’ayn’s courtyard. It had been a disastrous meeting and the sooner she quit Tal’ayn, the better for everyone. She still found it difficult to be so close to her father’s long-smoldering anger, and harder yet to visit the scene of so many painful memories.
Although twelve years had passed since her cousin Jarid’s death, his ghost seemed to linger here, permeating the ancient gray stone, haunting every niche and corner, whispering that he would never leave this House for which he’d fought so savagely, that he would never forgive Haemas for winning.
She hurried to the upper door and burst outside into the frigid, snow-edged air. A short queue waited at the Tal’ayn portal up ahead as the visiting Kashi returned, mostly in ones and twos, to their own estates and lives. Joining the line, she heard the door squeak open again behind her.
“Lady Haemas!” Diren Chee’s golden-haired head appeared beside her. “I would like a word with you.”
She didn’t turn. “I’m sorry, Lord Chee. I have pressing duties back at the House of Moons.”
“Please.”
She felt the heat of his presence next to her, bright as an over-stoked fire. A man of average height with lean, sharply chiseled features, he had come into his inheritance after the disastrous Temporal Conclave where so many had died. He had always been courteous to her, which was more than she could say for the rest of the Council. And yet, behind his bland expression and tight shields, there was something dark and unsettling. His eyes were hungry, almost feral, and his ever-present polite smile made her uneasy.
His voice followed her across the snow-dusted cobbles as she advanced with the line. “You could help the Council pinpoint those responsible for this chierra attack.”
She halted in midstep in spite of herself and turned. He wore his golden hair long and undisciplined, and his dark-flecked eyes hinted at things best not mentioned in the daylight. She shivered. Was he broadcasting at her? Strengthening her shields, she swallowed hard and looked away. “How could I possibly help?”
He reached her side again, his expression strangely hungry. “By using what the Old People taught you to travel between times.”
She paled. She had been forced to go over this subject again and again with her father and various other Lords. They would never really understand what the ilseri, the natives of this world, had taught her all those years ago. In fact, most of them did not even want to understand, persisting in the mistaken belief that the temporal pathways could be put to some sort of purpose, like a hammer or an awl or any other tool—but the truth was that they could not.
“You could go back and see who attacked.” Chee’s angular face smiled blandly at her, but she noticed how his eyes, gone as reflective as two pools of melted gold, showed no emotion at all.
“It’s not that simple.” Her heart thumped inside her chest. Not now, she told herself. She couldn’t handle this on top of everything else.
“Couldn’t you go back?” he insisted.
“If I could find it.” She saw the glittering blue temporal pathways again in her mind, the bewildering array of Whens to which one could travel if one had sufficient Talent and training—and if one were female. “The timelines exist in infinite number, but most of them are Otherwhens as far as we are concerned. The ilseri can tell the difference between Otherwhen and Truewhen, but I have always found it difficult.”
“Fascinating.” He moved forward beside her, his steps measured and thoughtful. “I would like to learn more.”
She caught her breath; there was a strangeness about him that set her teeth on edge, and nasty rumors circulated about the House of Chee, talk of instability, madness—and murder. Coals smoldered behind this man’s eyes whenever he looked at her. “Some other time, perhaps, Lord Chee.”
“Yes.” He smiled again without warmth. “Perhaps later would be better.”
Three people ahead of her, a middle-aged man escorted his wife onto a covered platform inset above and below and at the four midpoints with pale-blue ilsera crystals. A second later, they disappeared as he mentally wrenched the energies to transport them home. Then a tall, elegant woman stepped into place—one of the Sennays, if Haemas wasn’t mistaken, and a distant cousin of hers.
A young woman in front of Haemas, gowned in Rald crimson, stepped into the portal, holding a little girl dressed in lacy blue by the hand. How strange to take a child to a Council meeting, Haemas thought. Her father had never taken her anywhere, not even to a Council meeting, even though they were always held here at Tal’ayn. She had rarely left the grounds until the day she fled down into the Lowlands—when Jarid had convinced her that she’d killed her father.
“You must visit Chee’ayn,” Chee said pleasantly over her shoulder. “We have the only surviving stand of pine there, right at the edge of a cliff. Chee’ayn is the one place in the Highlands where the soil is just right. When the wind blows from the north, you can smell the needles all the way up to the main house.”
Haemas stepped onto the platform as soon as the woman and child disappeared, hastily throwing her mind open to the vibrations of the psi-active crystals. North ... south, she recited in her mind, feeling each crystal warm in turn, east ... west ... above ... below! She altered the vibrations to match the portal at Shael’donn. The world twisted into a chill grayness, then resolved itself into the familiar snow-covered grounds shared by the paired schools.
* * *
Kevisson stepped out of the Lenhe’ayn portal into the warmer air of the Lowlands. Smoke from the smoldering fields curled up into the clear green sky and the acrid smell of burned grain filled his lungs. After stripping off his black leather gloves, he thrust them into his belt while he surveyed the havoc wrought: the sturdy, well-kept outbuildings burned to ashes, the famous black Lenhe horses and other stock lying torn and bloodied in the dead grass, the golden fields of ripe zeli-grain now a charred ruin. An iciness ran through him; he had never known the outlying chierra people to be violent, and like all Lowlands-bred Kashi he had dealt with them his whole life.
Closing his eyes, he cast about with his mind for some hint of the surviving Lenhes, the Kashi family that held this land. Letting his awareness drift, he passed the unhearing minds of the estate’s sorrowing chierra servants, brushed against the bewildered, untrained minds of several Kashi children in the main house, then came across a tendril of broadcast pain and grief. Tracing it, he identified Myriel, the old Lord’s grown daughter, in a large vaulted room somewhere nearby.
He followed her thoughts, passing several dark-haired, olive-complected chierra workers as they struggled to drag the mutilated stock to an enormous bonfire burning in one of the blackened fields. They met him with wary, strained expressions, but he stared each one down as he walked by, forcing their dark-brown eyes to lower and acknowledge him a Kashi Lord.
He didn’t enjoy that, but it had been impressed upon him at an early age what his hair and eyes of golden brown meant in a society in which the lightness of a man’s coloring was taken as the measure of his worth and strength. Golden eyes and hair were the genetic tag that indicated the presence of inherited mindtalents, and their absence indicated that an infant was only chierra, both head-blind and head-deaf, forever excluded from Kashi circles. Shael’donn had been the one place where none of that mattered, but Shael’donn was changing.
Stopping at a low building, he pushed open an ornately carved door and realized he had found the Lenhe family chapel. The stuffy air was thick with incense and oversweet with mounds of fall flowers. Myriel Lenhe stood at the far end, framed in a bright shaft of sunlight slanting down from a high window, her ash-gold head bent, gazing down at the still face of her murdered son—the child she had once asked of him many years ago and which, for his own reasons, he had refused to give.
“I told him to stay inside with me and the girls.” Her voice had tiny cracks in it, like a crystal already shattered by the hammer and about to fall apart. “I told him to let the field hands handle the bandits when they attacked, but he just laughed and said, ‘They’re only chierra, Mother,’ as if I didn’t understand that he was a man and could do a man’s work.”
She stretched out trembling fingers toward the cold, alabaster-pale hand under its gossamer covering of fine Merir silk. The fluted pots of chispa-fire placed around the walls flickered as her unshielded sorrow surged through the room. “He would have been the most talented Lord in our family for generations!”
Kevisson glanced back at the additional bodies laid out on rough wooden biers at the other end of the chapel, undoubtedly all dark-haired, five-fingered chierra workers who had fallen defending the Lenhe estate beside this child.
Myriel walked slowly along the bier, studying the golden-haired boy laid out in his blue-and-gold ceremonial best. “I saw their leader, you know, when he struck Lat down.” She looked at Kevisson for the first time, her reddened eyes overlarge in her drawn white face. “There was something wrong with his eyes.” Her hand trembled as she straightened the silken veil draped over the body. “They were the wrong color. I actually tried to kill him myself, but my mind couldn’t get a grasp on him. It was like ...” She shook her head as tears welled again and trickled down her cheeks. “I can’t really explain. It was like ... he was Talented.”
The wrong color ... Kevisson’s mouth compressed. He had once known a Lowlander with blue eyes, an oddity among a race of brown-eyed people, a freeborn chierra who had lived in the middle of the Great Forest in a nest of bandits. And that Lowlander had been protected by the ilseri. Had he been the one who attacked here today?
“Of course, I’m only rated as a Plus-One, but ...” She crossed her arms, hugging herself fiercely. “I’ve never had any trouble controlling our servants. It should have been enough to kill one of them! They have no shields, and Lat was a Plus-Four, even if he hadn’t been fully trained—that should have been more than enough.” Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “What will I do now? Father has been dead these last three years and my other children are only girls. How long will the Council allow me to hold Lenhe’ayn without a male heir?”
Kevisson took her arm; her clammy skin was as cold as the flagstones beneath their feet. “Why don’t you come back to the house, Myriel? We’ll discuss it.”
“No.” Suddenly she looked at him as if truly seeing him for the first time and twisted out of his grasp. “You’ve come from Shael’donn, haven’t you? To express their sympathies.” The pupils in her eyes were so dilated that he could hardly see the gold of her irises. “Well, there wouldn’t have to be any so-called sympathies if you men had done your job. The Council is supposed to protect us. Those chierra could come back and finish us off any moment! Where are the men to keep it from happening again?”
“Myriel, you know Monmart’ayn has never held a seat on the Council.” He trailed after her as she turned back to the bier. His boots echoed through the emptiness of the large room. “But I’ll go back and speak to them for you.”
“I asked you for help once and you refused.” She gathered a double handful of the tiny white anith flowers strewn around the bier’s edge and pressed them to her face. “I don’t want anything from you now. Go back to Shael’donn and let your beloved books keep you warm at night. I’ll take care of myself, as I’ve always had to.”
“The Council wants me to investiga—”
“I said go!” She whirled on him, the flowers crushed between her fingers and her knuckles white. “I don’t want you here! Go away!” Snowy petals drifted to the floor.
A figure dressed in gray homespun detached itself from the shadows by the wooden biers in the back and hurried toward her. “Begging your pardon, my Lord, but if you could just persuade her Ladyship to rest for a bit.” Brushing past him, the old chierra servant with swollen, wet eyes slipped an arm around the staring woman and drew her gently toward the outside door. “She’s not herself right now.”
Myriel resisted for a moment. then turned to look at the old woman. “Dorria, what will I do?” Her voice was high-pitched and strained.
“You just let old Dorria worry about that, child.” The chierra folded Myriel’s head to her ample bosom and rocked her gently within her arms. “Dorria’s never let you down, has she, all these years?”
Myriel began to cry, her body wracked with great convulsive sobs. The old woman glanced up at him. “If you will just go on back to the main house, your Lordship, they should be setting out supper in a bit. Her Ladyship and I will be along by and by.”
Kevisson turned back to take one last look at the still, colorless face of Myriel’s son, the child who might have been his had he answered her differently all those years ago. Then he walked back to the door and let himself outside into the late afternoon sunlight.
* * *
“I never know where I stand with Kevisson.” Haemas spread her palms against the chill windowpanes in her study as the flock of girl students roughhoused outside in the falling snow. The cold seeped through her hands up into her arms. “Sometimes we’re so close, I feel we’ve a single mind between us, thinking the same thoughts. He’s the other half of me. Then other times I feel as if I were sixteen again and he’s come to drag me by the scruff of my neck back to my father.”
“Well, wanting to help him is one thing.” Enissa looked up from her thick leather-bound book of accounts. “Interfering is something else again.”
The wind gusted, rattling the windowpanes and sending flurries of the dry, dust-like snow flying. Outside, the girls shrieked and ran harder, their young legs pumping, slipping, then getting up to run again. Haemas shivered. Had she ever felt as young as that, played with that kind of reckless abandon? She felt cold just watching them. “But Master Ellirt meant Kevisson to succeed him. It’s not right that Shael’donn goes to someone else, especially to a man like Riklin Senn.” Dropping the heavy velvet drapes, she turned away from the window’s frosted panes. “What would you have done?”
“The same.” Enissa’s grayish-gold eyes crinkled merrily at the corners as she laid aside her pen. “I never could keep my nose where it belonged, but that’s no excuse for you to be as bad.” She pushed her metal spectacles back in place with her middle finger. “You should have more sense.”
Haemas gazed at the older woman affectionately, thinking how difficult, even with Master Ellirt’s help, it would have been to set up the House of Moons without her. She remembered the day a gray-haired stranger had shown up at Shael’donn. Brother Alidale had knocked on her door, then peeked in, his usually sober face amused. “Someone to see you,” he had said, radiating a barely contained mirth through his shields.
A wave of irritation washed through her. “I don’t have time.” She glanced up from the raw crystal she was evaluating for a new portal set for Senn’ayn. “Tell him to come back later.”
Alidale’s golden eyes danced merrily. “But it isn’t a ‘he.’”
“Tell her to go away, then.” Haemas adjusted the lathe and picked up the blue crystal again. “This set has been promised in a ten-day. I’m busy.”
“Not too busy for me, I trust,” said a calm, low-pitched voice from the doorway.
Haemas looked up into the plump, lined face of an older woman. “I’m afraid today is a bad time, Lady ...?”
“Saxbury.” The round-faced woman walked into the small workroom, then dumped a large leather pouch on the floor at Haemas’s feet. “But I don’t intend to be Lady Saxbury anymore. I don’t like her.”
Alidale’s mouth twitched. Haemas could see that in another second, he would be laughing in the poor woman’s face. “Thank you, Brother Alidale,” she said crisply. “I can handle this from here.”
“As you wish.” Alidale’s cheeks bulged with the effort of remaining silent as he backed out the door, then closed it behind him.
“Please.” Haemas rose from her seat and pulled out another one beside her work table. “Sit down.”
The woman sat, folding her hands on the table and studying Haemas closely with shrewd golden eyes. She was dressed in a richly cut dark-green velvet skirt and jacket that smelled, strangely enough, of furniture polish and paint. Her mouth twisted as she glanced down and brushed at a spot of white paint on her sleeve. “Drat,” she muttered. “That’s what comes of always having to show servants how it’s done.”
“Now,” Haemas said as she reseated herself, “how may I help you?”
“For a start, you can call me Enissa.” The gray-haired woman nodded. “I’ve come to work in your House of Moons.”
“I will be looking for staff once the house is finished next summer.” Haemas turned the blue crystal over in her fingers, searching for flaws. “But I don’t have a place for you until then.”
“Oh, I’ll just stay with you.” Enissa gazed around the simple room and its overflowing bookshelves with satisfaction. “I wanted to study here when I was growing up, but, of course, Shael’donn never allowed females—until you came along.” She leaned over the table and stared into Haemas’s eyes. “I can’t imagine how you persuaded them to train you. I’m a natural healer, myself, although no one would ever teach me.”
Haemas was dumbfounded. “A healer?”
The woman reached out and pressed Haemas’s right hand between her two small palms. A sense of warmth and wellbeing enveloped Haemas, as if sunlight were playing over her face. A faint taste of cinnamon hung in the back of her throat, and she felt a subtle, relaxing energy quite unlike anything she’d ever known.
Enissa’s eyes drifted shut. “Don’t get much rest, do you?” she murmured. The warmth crept up Haemas’s arm, threading through her brain in slow, lazy swirls. “They keep you far too busy, and you’re always afraid to say no, afraid they’ll say you can’t keep up, that you’re not good enough.” She squeezed Haemas’s hand, then released it and sat back in her chair. “Being in charge will mean recognizing your own limitations as well as everyone else’s. You need to remember that.”
“I—” Haemas flexed her still-tingling fingers.
“Yes, yes, I know.” The older woman’s no-nonsense mouth frowned. “There’s no such beast as a female healer, is there? At least, that’s what they’d like us to think. Well, I won’t put up with it anymore, not when there’s finally somewhere else to go—and something that needs doing. I don’t want to be a lady of a great House anymore. My children are all grown; the last of them just married a few days ago. My husband has been dead now eight years, and only the Light above knows how glad my son will be to have his wife, a proper Rald granddaughter, no less, as Lady of Sithnal’ayn instead of me. Sometimes I have to wonder at Rhydal, my departed husband. Whatever possessed him to take me, a mere Revann Saxbury with almost no dowry, to wife?”
Unable to think of a reply, Haemas stared at the older woman’s unconcerned face.
“Oh, you won’t get rid of me,” Enissa said. “I’m here to stay.”
And a good thing, too, Haemas thought now, or no telling where she and the House of Moons would be. She turned away from the window and the shrieking students, rubbing her chilled palms against her tunic. “So you think I should apologize.”
Enissa winked. “Or, at the very least, lie. He’s not likely to forgive you otherwise.”
Haemas massaged her temples with her forefingers. She was an abominable liar, and besides, she wasn’t a child anymore. Now that she was grown, the fact that Kevisson was ten years older than herself no longer mattered, and she ached for him to take her seriously. She had as much right to her opinion as he had to his. She wasn’t going to give in this time.
She picked up her schedule book. “Well, I’ll talk to him when he comes back from Lenhe’ayn. I’ll make him understand.”