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 Chapter II 

Days of Summer

The Riverland: Summer 5−63

I

Summer 5

Four days after the muster, the Highlord of the Kencyrath walked at dusk in Gothregor’s apple orchard. White blossoms tinged with pink cascaded around him, clinging to his shoulders, carpeting the ground at his feet. Through the mass of fallen petals gnarled tree roots surfaced here and there like the backs of so many subterranean serpents. His boots stirred subtle hints of decay from last year’s windfalls. From overhead, however, fragrance drifted down and bees hummed, heavy with pollen. Hopefully, come winter, there would be a good supply of hard cider. Other crops were usually less bountiful.

At least, thought Torisen gloomily, as long as the cider lasts, we can always get drunk.

With longing, he considered Tagmeth’s gates and what might pass through them. It would be such an elegant solution to so many of his problems, but Jame was right: first the land must be cultivated beyond her keep’s narrow needs.

Blossoms swirled. Through them came his sister, darkness emerging from the glimmer of twilight. Why had they both chosen to favor black clothing? At least it suited Jame. True, she was too thin, but she carried herself with such supple grace that one hardly noticed. His servant Burr, ever tactful, claimed that it made him look gaunt and gloomy. Blacklord, indeed, and “Blackie” to his friends.

“Hello,” said Jame. “Are you pleased to have Gothregor back to yourself?”

If only that were true.

The last randon had departed the previous day to consult with their lords about the lost safeguards and the new contracts which they expected to arrive momentarily. Indeed, that very afternoon the Kings’ representative had appeared at Gothregor. His visit seemed timed to take advantage of the confusion sown by Tiggeri’s announcement, and his choice of the Highlord’s keep first deliberate. If Torisen signed, after all, the other lords would have little course but to follow his example. So far, Torisen had put off seeing him, wanting one last chance to think through possible alternatives. Soon, however, he must make up his mind.

“About the gates,” he said, to forestall the evil hour. “I’ve talked to my husbandry-men.”

“Discreetly, I hope.”

“Of course. It wouldn’t do to raise false hopes.”

“And Restormir is Tagmeth’s nearest neighbor. Can you imagine how Caldane would react if he were to hear of such a temptation? Luckily, Tiggeri didn’t notice anything the last time he came to call. I don’t want the Caineron descending on us again.”

“Of course not,” said Torisen with a shudder. Given the chance, Caldane would happily rape his way across all Rathillien if he believed that it was to his benefit. “In terms of preparation, it helps that you’ve already been getting reports from Farmer Fen. His opinion, you tell me, is that it will take at least a year to put the land you’ve already discovered into heart. My Kendar agree. I propose an initial force of one hundred with tools, livestock, and provisions. The man to lead it, I think, is a Kendar named Rush. At least I hear good things about his determination. In the meantime, the Riverland will just have to survive. Do you still plan to leave tomorrow?”

“Yes. I need to get back to Tagmeth, especially if you’re about to send us reinforcements. Also, Trishien has requested our escort back to Valantir.”

That surprised and dismayed him. Just to have the Jaran Matriarch at Gothregor had been reassuring as she was the only senior lady to whom he felt he could turn for advice.

“I understand that the Jedrak has recalled her for consultations,” said Jame, looking at him warily, askance. “You hadn’t heard?”

“No.”

And he should have.

Trishien was his guest, after all, and he her host as he was to the entire Women’s World—not that many Highborn ladies chose to remember that. Most of them considered part of Gothregor to be their exclusive property, as often as the Jaran Matriarch corrected them.

Moreover, this sudden news reminded him of a conversation several days ago in his study when Jame had chided him for not keeping better track of current events.

“Haven’t you forgiven Burr yet for spying on you for Adric?” she had asked.

Burr had been working in the room at the time, pretending not to listen. After all, Torisen told himself, he could hardly order his servant to be deaf.

“Of course I have,” he had said. “You know that, Burr, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Burr had replied, with a blank face.

“Then it’s Lord Ardeth whom you continue to blame,” Jame had said, and he had known that she was right.

He now turned toward her, glowering. “I still decline to use spies. What, should I employ someone like your precious Graykin?”

She grimaced. “Gray can be a pain, but he learns things. You could too, if you just asked questions. For instance, did you know that quite a few ladies are leaving? They say that they don’t feel safe here anymore.”

That came as a second jolt. All winter Torisen had had the sense of things slipping away, but then he had been deathly ill with lung-rot and had expected to die. Now, cured, was it any better?

“How is Rue?” he asked abruptly.

Jame blinked at the change of topic.

“The same,” she said, “as the last time you asked. I didn’t hurt her, Ancestors be praised. Death take me, darkness break me, if I ever do. She, Brier, and Marc could be the Kendar rolled up as one. How does Rue feel? I’m not sure.”

Did Torisen believe her? His father no longer muttered behind the door in his soul-image—that door, in fact, now stood unnervingly open—but it was hard to dismiss a lifetime of instilled prejudice. Was it part of her Shanir nature to prey on others, as she had half suggested? Could she even help it? Yes, he loved her, but the fact remained: she was dangerous.

“Nonetheless,” he said, more harshly than he had intended, “I don’t want you to bind anyone else.”

“So you said before.”

He began to pace, impatient with himself as much as with her. Why did their conversations always turn so prickly?

“Has it ever occurred to you,” he said over his shoulder, “that the whole idea of binding is just . . . wrong? Since I drove our father out of my soul-image, I have more scope there, but I don’t want to use it to bind more Kendar. I just don’t.”

She had bridled at his tone. Now she looked thoughtful. “How long have you felt this way?”

“Oh, for quite a while, I suppose, but I didn’t question it. That was just the way things were. Now you say that I may be turning into That-Which-Creates. I don’t feel especially creative, except for random outbreaks of mold or thistles, but I am . . . dissatisfied. So much is wrong in the Kencyrath. So much needs to change.”

“Now you sound like me. I think, though, that it’s easier to break than to make.”

Someone was approaching. Bright patches of color showed through the blossoms, jarring flashes of crimson and orange. A hand batted away falling petals and bumbling bees. The face that emerged was dark and vaguely familiar.

“Ah, there you are, Highlord,” said the agent of the Seven Kings with a bland smile. What was his name? Oh, yes: Malapirt. “Your servants really should have told you that I had arrived.”

“They did.”

“So blunt. One might almost say, so rude, but we of the south are an understanding people. I have brought the new contracts for you to sign.”

Torisen ignored the scroll presented to him.

“Your presence puzzles me,” he said. “Traditionally, the Knorth serve at High Bashti’s court. Prince Uthecon of Karkinor is your master, is he not?”

“Yes.” Malapirt waved more bees away from his face, which they seemed to find attractive. Close up, it was apparent that he wore a rather strong floral perfume. “This year, though, once we discovered your little . . . er . . . game, their highnesses convened to write a new joint contract. I am the common emissary of Bashti, Hathor, and all the countries which they have become, including Karkinor.”

“I recognize you now,” said Jame, who had been staring at him. “You were here last Summer’s Eve, come to collect Lyra Lack-wit.”

He gave a start, pretending to notice her for the first time. “Ah, lady, pardon me. I did not recognize you with your clothes on.”

Jame blinked, then smiled.

Dangerous, Torisen thought again.

“I’m usually wearing something,” she said pleasantly, “if only sleeping ribbons. As I recall, you tried to kidnap me.”

He bowed. “Oh, lady, I would not aspire so high. You were merely where we expected to find the princess. She will soon reach my prince through other means.”

Jame looked momentarily taken aback. “I didn’t know that. So her father has agreed to a new contract after all.”

“She was, let us say, a cardinal clause of our general agreement. If you should wish to follow her example, something might be arranged. My prince has a nephew. Rumors that he is imbecilic and diseased are, no doubt, greatly exaggerated.”

He slapped at more bees. They were beginning to swarm.

“Respectfully, I decline that honor. Please remind your prince: Lyra’s father may have signed her away yet again, but she still has powerful friends. We will be watching.”

He bowed yet again. “I have no doubt. My lord, the contract?”

Torisen had accepted and unrolled it, reading as the other two talked. “In the morning,” he said, letting it curl up on itself. “I want to go over this more closely.”

“As you wish. Remember, though: the longer you delay, day by day, the less it is worth.”

“Huh,” said Jame, watching him go, trailing bees, stumbling over roots. “The last time, you shouldn’t have ordered him out of the Riverland by sunset. Fifty miles in a day. He isn’t likely to forget that anytime soon.”

“Let him remember. In the meanwhile, I have until tomorrow to see if there’s anything in this precious contract of his that will help us.”

“You saw something?”

“A glimpse. Maybe a glimpse.”

II

Summer 10

Quarrels at Mount Alban had festered ever since the Jaran randon had brought back the dire news about the contracts days before. Voices hissed from landing to landing up and down the wooden stair well that climbed the college’s spine within the cliff face. Inkwells were thrown, quills hurled like darts, and books flew. Doors slammed against the assault, then were thrown open again to emit further heated rejoinders:

“You scrollsmen think you’re so smart,” someone jeered down the stairs. “You should have listened to us singers!”

“What,” said a voice below, “and have used the Lawful Lie? I can just imagine how that would have worked.”

“You begged us for poetic language!” shrilled another voice.

“Yes, to make the clauses more confusing. D’you think we came to you for sense?”

“Arrgh!”

Slam. Splat. Thud. Creak.

On a landing halfway down a tiny old singer confronted a looming scrollsman and jabbed her forefinger into his stomach.

“It’s a Trinity-be-damned mess, admit it. We have to figure out what to do next. Why can’t you just write in new, even more obscure clauses?”

“Haven’t you been listening, woman? Because the Kings have composed their own contracts, which we haven’t yet seen.”

“All right, all right. The question lingers, though: who betrayed the clauses to M’lord Caldane? I say that it must have been a Caineron, yes, from this very college.”

The scrollsman, a Caineron himself, growled. “Nonsense. It could also have been a judge of that cursed contest.”

“Not necessarily.” The little woman rose on her toes and jabbed higher, eye level for her, breast level for her colleague. “You all talked freely about your precious articles. In fact, you bragged.”

Other voices heckled back and forth, above and below:

“We did not!”

“Yes, you did, you did, you did! That’s how you were able to steal each other’s ideas.”

“It isn’t plagiarism if you improve on it. You singers do it all the time.”

“In that case,” piped the little singer on the landing, “if he learned one clause, he could have guessed the remaining eight, but he still had to learn at least one. Who told him? This argument goes in circles. Don’t you dare try to put this disaster off on us, you . . . you great lummox.”

Someone stepped between them and held them apart, one hand on a chest, the other on a forehead.

“Dunfause,” murmured the stair-well. “Back from Restormir.”

“Behave yourselves,” said the newcomer in a tone of outraged authority. “Is this any way for Mount Alban to behave? How did the Director let things get so out of hand?”

“The scrollsman started it,” muttered someone below.

“No, the singer did,” came a snarl from above.

“Quiet!”

Kindrie leaned over an upper rail, listening. Mostly, he could see the top of heads, the top of doors, but the stair-well echoed. Kirien came up behind him. He knew from the warmth at his back and her sweet breath on his neck.

“Oh,” she said. “Dunfause has returned.”

“You know him?”

“We’ve been friends since I was a child and he a dashing young apprentice. In those days, you may laugh, but I idolized him.”

Dunfause came up the stairs, smiling. He was middle-aged, with the fine-drawn features of a Highborn and an elegant scrollsman’s robe edged with lace to match.

“My dear girl,” he said warmly, taking her hands. “I hoped to find you here but then again, where else would you be?”

She smiled at him. “True, Mount Alban is still more my home than Valantir. There’s some time, yet, before I come of age.”

“Then the Jaran could have no finer lady, if it must have one at all. You know how I feel about that—the waste of an excellent scholar, I mean. Your uncle Kedan will be pleased to give up power and return to his academic role, though.”

His gaze, shifting to Kindrie, hardened. “You. Still here?”

Kindrie bowed. He had only met this man once before and was unsure, then as now, how to take him. “As you see.”

“In my day, bastards knew where to keep themselves.”

“Kindrie is not . . .” began Kirien.

“. . . unaware of such opinions,” Kindrie concluded.

Hide, said long-entrenched instincts of self-preservation. Deny—but wouldn’t that be a lie?

“Just so,” said Dunfause, turning his back on him. “My dear.” This, to Kirien. “Will you join me for dinner?”

Someone nearby, hoarsely, cleared her throat. There stood Singer Ashe, looking as haggard as usual—small wonder given that she was that rare thing, a sentient haunt.

“Lord Jaran summons you . . . to dine,” she said. “The Knorth Lordan and Lady Trishien . . . have arrived.”

“Oh,” said Kirien, pleased. “Jame and my aunt are here? Now we shall have fresh news, I hope. Kindrie, will you sup with us? Dunfause, of course, you too. Supper at the college tonight is likely to devolve into a food fight.”

Ignoring Kindrie, the scrollsman gave her a bow and departed, remarking that he would bathe and change his clothes first.

Kirien turned. “You didn’t have to be so rude to him.”

“I? To him?”

“Many people think that he should have been nominated director of the college instead of Taur.”

“I expect that he thought so too,” said Kindrie, then looked at her. “Why? What have I said now?”

She turned on her heel and walked away.

They had been having these irritable exchanges for some time now. Kindrie didn’t know what they meant except that, perhaps, Kirien was having second thoughts about their relationship. He had never been in love before. Kirien said that neither had she. How were they supposed to know what they were doing?

Kedan, lord of the Jaran, was a fixture only until his grand-niece Kirien came of age. All Lords Jaran were also known as the Jedrak, meaning roughly One Who Has No Time to Read. As Dunfause had said, he was impatient to become simple Kedan again. That night, however, he obviously enjoyed using his temporary rank to entertain his guests at Valantir across the Silver from Mount Alban.

There, Kindrie greeted his cousin Jame with pleasure. What a long time ago, it seemed, since she had scorned him for his priestly training.

“Kindrie,” she now said, smiling at him. Her eyes were silver-gray; his, pale blue. They still differed in that at least. “You look well.”

So did she, in a patchwork court coat made up of rich, heirloom scraps such as Kencyr often carried with them to be used in their eventual death-banners, along with threads from the more mundane clothes in which they died. Her people, he understood, had gifted her with them in this form. How far she, too, had come since their first meeting on the River Road, in flight from a world that had rejected them both.

Kirien wore her usual dove gray coat, and it became her well. She probably would always look like a handsome boy, which endeared her all the more to Kindrie. Dunfause sat by her side, murmuring in the ear that she bent toward him. Was he, Kindrie, about to lose her? Was this wretched feeling jealousy?

“The Kings’ emissary is on my heels,” said Jame to the Jedrak and to Kirien. “I’ve told you that my brother has agreed to his terms.” Here she paused, but bit back what she might have said next. “I stopped at Falkirr and Shadow Rock on the way here—not, you understand, at Wilden.”

“Of course not,” murmured the Jedrak.

Everyone knew that the Knorth and the Randir were at dagger’s point, or should have been. Knowledge that Lady Rawneth had tampered with Torisen’s soul-image was by now wide spread, although he had made no formal complaint. The Kencyrath wondered about that too.

“What of the Brandan and the Danior?” asked Kirien.

“Brant is upset, of course. He values his Kendar, which isn’t always the case.”

They all thought of the Caineron and possibly of the Randir, although no one quite knew how to judge the snake pit that Wilden had become.

“I think Brant will try to bargain,” said Jame, “but I don’t know how well he will succeed. He has his home keep to provide for, of course. The Danior even more so, with less resources. They will be assigned to Nether Bashti, I understand. At least not much happens there.”

“They will be under Bashti’s shadow, though,” said Dunfause, fastidiously stirring his cream of turnip soup, so far not deigning to taste it. “That is to say, they will depend on your troops to the north.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Jame ruefully. “Truth be told, I haven’t gotten it all worked out in my mind yet who goes where or what their relationships will be with each other.”

“Highborn women seldom worry themselves about such matters,” Dunfause said, eyes still on his despised soup.

Trishien, across the table, regarded him thoughtfully.

She takes him for a fool, thought Kindrie, and was obscurely reassured.

“In fact,” said Dunfause to Jame, “has the Highlord consulted you at all?”

“Sometimes he thinks out-loud.”

The Caineron dismissed her, turning to the Jedrak. “What are your plans, my lord?”

The Jedrak leaned forward, earnest. “We hope for a different approach. Everyone knows that the Central Lands are obsessed with history. Some of our scrollsmen are experts on that region and our singers have many songs. We propose that they travel the west and east banks of the Silver with randon escorts, bartering such information.”

Jame considered this. “It’s worth a try. You, at least, have special skills besides fighting.”

The main course arrived, borne by the twin boys Tomtim and Timtom whom Kindrie had helped rescue from the Priests’ College at Wilden, who were now the Jedrak’s pages. Dunfause greeted their burdens—galantine pie and pike pudding stuffed with oatmeal—with evident relief.

“What I don’t understand,” said Lord Jaran, sopping up gravy with spiced toast, “is who betrayed whom first. You say that Caldane was rewarded with concessions. But who told him?”

Dunfause grimaced. “Such an unpleasant topic. Must we?”

“It will keep coming up,” said Kirien. “After all, it’s unpleasant to think of a traitor in our midst.”

“Need it be so?” He looked around the table. “Others are here besides scrollsmen and singers. One sits among us even now.”

It took Kindrie a moment to realize whom he meant. “Me? Why would I do such a thing?”

“Why would anyone?” Dunfause leaned forward.

His eyes, Kindrie thought, had a feverish glint. The healer in him wondered: what is wrong with this man?

“What but someone who doesn’t belong and never will?” Dunfause continued. “What price acceptance then?”

“I-I don’t know what you mean,” Kindrie stammered, although he did. A lie, but surely a minor one. But did that excuse it? For a moment, he thought that they all looked at him askance. He was the outsider. He always had been.

“During my recent absence,” said Dunfause, “you were seen talking to a Caineron agent. What did you talk about, eh?”

“Nothing to do with this.”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

Dunfause had the Shanir trait of command, but Kindrie’s word dropped like a stone into the room, waking them all.

“We do not question honor here,” said Trishien, with a finality that even the Jedrak did not question.

Afterward, Kindrie and Jame walked to the door, following their host and his other guests.

“You know,” said Jame, “I really don’t like that man.”

“Kirien thinks highly of him,” Kindrie said unhappily, watching the two precede him, their heads bent together.

“He certainly seems smitten with her. I gather that they’re old friends, come to the next potential step. Mind you, I’m no expert. Tori and I have problems of our own. It seems to me, though, that Kirien has to decide that she wants, the past or the present, with the future at stake. What can you do about that? How should I know? I have to leave in the morning. If you would like to talk more, though, visit me at Tagmeth.”

III

Summer 24

The twenty-fourth of summer arrived, a fine, hot day now tending toward sunset. Soon would come supper and ease after the day’s work. Before that, Jame and Brier met in the lordan’s quarters to discuss what needed to be done next.

“Are we still expecting Gothregor’s one hundred tomorrow?” asked Brier, deliberately ignoring Rue, who was repairing a smashed shutter.

When Jame had first returned from Tai-tastigon, she had found the rooms torn apart—clothes shredded, furniture torn apart, holes punched in the walls. No one had admitted to the destruction. Her own belief was that Brier herself had done it in a fit of unconscious rage at her disappearance, hag-ridden by a dream-stalking Gerridon who had haunted the keep in Jame’s absence.

Gerridon.

Jame had tried not to think about him since her return, which might yet prove to be a mistake. After all, she had left the Master in his own soul-image, stripped of the larder of souls that fed his life, in dire straits. He would try to do something about that, but what, and when, and where?

Admit it, she thought. You aren’t ready to face him again. Will you ever be?

Shaking off doubts, she turned back to the matter at hand.

“According to the latest messenger,” she said, “they should arrive some time tomorrow or the day after. Our number here is about to double. You’ve warned the kitchen, the barracks, the latrine squad?”

Brier nodded. “All should be ready by then. How soon before they take to the gates?”

“Quickly, I hope. We need to start supplying the Riverland or at least Gothregor as quickly as possible. Anything to break this dependence on the Central Lands.”

“Fen thinks it will take at least a year.”

“Hopefully he’s wrong. It sounds as if you have doubts.”

Her marshal moved restlessly around the room, still avoiding Rue. Could she be jealous, thinking that Jame had indeed bound the former cadet? No, that didn’t make sense: Brier wanted Jame to bind as many Kendar as possible to strengthen Tagmeth. Jame hadn’t yet told anyone about Torisen’s prohibition. That news would be hard to break, especially to Marc who had waited so long for her. To Rue as well.

Brier echoed her with an impatient shake of her head. “Doubts? About the gates? How could I not? We don’t know what lies behind most of them or what it will mean to exploit them fully, much less so rapidly. Don’t tell me that you are certain.”

Jame couldn’t, because she wasn’t, but now she was committed to try.

“What about the rest of our new randon officers?” she asked to change the topic, also because she wanted to know.

Of her original ten-command, so far only Dar and Mint had asked for reassignment to the Central Lands.

“We don’t want to leave for good,” Dar had said, looking embarrassed, “but, well, both of us are getting a bit restless at Tagmeth. We’d like to see more of Rathillien before we settle down.”

If she had offered to bind them, would they have stayed? How many more, eventually, would want to exercise their new rank on a wider stage? Of course, she had given them permission, and now wondered if she would ever see them again.

From outside, muted by the tower’s stone walls, came a horn’s blast.

“Visitors?” said Brier, listening to its wavering note. “From the south. A lot of them. You don’t suppose . . . ”

They descended to the courtyard. Soon afterward into it rode a small Kendar on a dusty horse, at the head of a one-hundred command on foot, looking exhausted.

“Here at last,” said the Kendar—Torisen’s Rush, presumably. He swung down with a grunt on hitting the ground. His legs bowed, then straightened. “When do we eat?”

“We didn’t expect you until tomorrow at the earliest,” said Jame mildly, although her smile was tight.

He grinned. “Best not to keep your lord brother waiting, eh, lady?” His eyes slid past her as if in search of someone more responsible and settled on Brier Iron-thorn. “Marshal, where do we sleep?”

“Rooms will be cleared out to accommodate you,” said Brier in a stony tone.

The command sagged against the walls.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Jame murmured to Brier.

IV

Summer 30

Several days later, Jame went out in search of Death’s-head. The rathorn colt hadn’t been seen since their return to Tagmeth and she was worried, given how hard the ride south had been. Moreover, recently her blood-link with him had been unusually chaotic. She had wondered before how stable he was considering all of the times, accidentally on purpose, he had tried to kill her. What was wrong with him now?

Behind her, likewise, she left a keep in disarray. Rush had dispatched his Kendar to the gates already opened except for the one leading to the oasis, which she had forbidden. Rush had scowled at that.

“My lord said that all doors would be open to me.”

“I doubt if those were his exact words. This is my keep. I determine what happens here.”

“Humph. He is your lord as well as mine. Who are you to deny him?”

“And you, of course, speak for the entire Kencyrath.”

Such sarcasm, she suspected, was lost on this diminutive Kendar. One said that, but actually he was bigger than she was and moreover tended to balance on his toes when they talked, the better to tower over her. On the last of these occasions, Brier had come up and put him in her own intimidating shade. Jame was beginning to hope that Brier meant what she had said at Gothregor about accepting her, Highborn or not. She would trade any amount of aggravation for that.

Now here she was, on the top cliff above the keep, on her stomach, having crawled to this vantage point under tangled boughs. To the north, the Silver roared down the ravine from the escarpment, throwing up a spray that, even at this distance, flecked her face. Below, the river frothed southward. In between was Tagmeth on its tear-drop of an island. Her bond to the rathorn had brought her here. Where was he?

The branches behind her rustled. Something snuffled. Before she could edge away from the drop, her boot was seized and she was jerked backward.

Jame twisted over onto her back and lashed out with her free foot. The first time, it tangled in undergrowth. The second, it made contact, answered by an enraged snort.

One jerk more and she was out in the open, looking up into a pair of furious red eyes. Fangs bared. A white nasal tusk brandished before her face. She kicked again and caught her assailant below the horn, in the nose. Her foot was dropped. Hooves drove down, barely missing her head as she rolled aside. The other reared, black against the sky, and struck again. Jame scrambled back between dancing hooves, noting in passing that this was a mare, but she had already guessed that.

Kindrie’s voice came back to her:

“The Randir were riding thorns—you know, those female offspring of horses and rathorns, yes, just like the ones that the Karnids rode to attack Kothifir. Well, one of them escaped just south of Mount Alban. . . .”

And that, Jame reckoned, was what she faced now.

The thorn wheeled on her haunches and charged back at her. Such speed, so much power on the hoof. Terrifying.

A rushing wall of white cut between them as Death’s-head shouldered the thorn aside. They circled Jame, the mare outermost, the stallion blocking her, snapping at each other, until she subsided with a grumble and a glare. Jame suddenly wondered if she was in foal.

“So now you have a mate,” she said to the rathorn, who snarled at her over his shoulder. “All right. That’s your business.”

After all, she thought as she walked away, deliberately not looking back, he had been lonely for a long time. She should be glad for him. But sweet Trinity . . . !

V

Summer 35

Kindrie hesitated outside the door. Did he really want to do this? No. However, Kirien had asked him to.

“He spends more and more time in his room,” she had said, looking worried. “It’s been nearly a week since he last joined us for a meal. Then, yesterday, he got into a shouting match with a fellow scrollsman. They nearly came to blows.”

Someone spoke within the room, seeming to plead, and a voice answered with a laugh. Kindrie’s skin crawled. Surely, he knew the latter with its smug undertone, its not so subtle reminder of pain and despair, but what was it saying? The door muffled any words.

He can’t be here. He can’t. Run away. Hide.

No. Kindrie was a healer with a duty.

He knocked, too softly at first, then louder, although the noise made him wince.

“Well?” snapped the first voice. “Come in, if you must.”

The apartment was one of Mount Alban’s best, located near its upper observation deck with windows chiseled out of the cliff face’s living rock. Late afternoon light streamed through the latter, the sun having declined to just above the opposite peaks. Dust motes danced in its shafts. These last also illuminated the apartment’s furnishings, which were rich and comfortable but in a state of disarray. Clothes lay strewn on the furniture, dirty dishes on the table. Over all was the faint but unmistakable stink of sickness.

Dunfause sat behind the table, indistinct in the shadow of a window, cut off from the rest of the room by the light lancing through it. He was alone.

“Oh,” he said. “You.”

Kindrie blinked against the glare, collecting himself. “Er . . . Kirien sent me to ask if you are coming down to dinner. Also, if you are all right.”

Fabric rustled as the Caineron huddled deeper into the folds of a heavy robe. “Of course I am. It’s just a chill.”

Kindrie didn’t point out that such things were rare for a Kencyr. “I am a healer, you know,” he said. “Would you like me to examine your soul-image?”

“No! But I thank you.” Dunfause was trying to be gracious. It came hard. “Can’t a man indulge in a little privacy? Life at Mount Alban can be so . . . contentious.”

“You at least have found it so.”

“Some people are fools. All of this talk about those wretched clauses . . .  The harm is done. Can’t they let it go?”

Hard, thought Kindrie, when so many lives among the Host remain in danger. Nothing dire had happened yet, though, as far as he knew. Ancestors, please, let that state continue.

“I’m sorry that you find it distressing,” he said.

“I? What about you? Still won’t tell me what Lord Caldane’s agent said to you, eh?”

“That was personal. Besides, his agent came while you were still at Restormir. He didn’t tell you either, did he?”

“When m’lord speaks, it is for the good of his house. You served him once. You owe him now.”

Sweat beaded Dunfause’s face. Perhaps he spoke for himself too.

How well Kindrie remembered his own temporary, ill-fated connection with the Caineron. He had been fleeing the Priests’ College at Wilden. Any rescue from that hell-hole had looked good at the time. Then he had met Torisen and had realized where his true loyalty lay, even before he had recognized the blood tie between them. He and Caldane had not parted on the best of terms, given that m’lord had nearly flayed him alive.

“I follow my honor,” he now said.

Dunfause sneered. “You are a bastard. You have no honor. What lies did you tell Kirien to seduce her, eh?”

Kindrie bit his tongue. What lies had led to the quarrel between them? Rather, what truths? Kirien urged him to declare his legitimacy, to support his lord cousin and Jame. Why couldn’t he?

The sun set. Shadows crawled up the walls, chasing the dying brilliance. In gathering darkness, Dunfause began to cough.

“Oh, go away,” he said, weakly flapping a hand. His voice broke. “You sicken me.”

VI

Summer 35

“The Edirr are still bedeviling the Coman, either by cattle raids or by hunting on their land.”

Steward Rowan shifted scrolls away from the visitor’s chair in Torisen’s study, but otherwise seemed hesitant to sit down. How often, after all, did her lord ask her for Riverland gossip?

“Boys’ pranks, I would say,” she added, trying to be judicious, “but that doesn’t explain it: the Lords Edirr are both grown men, if young.”

Torisen listened. Jame had said that he should ask questions, but it still came hard. This felt damnably like prying—behind the lords’ backs, too.

Then: Don’t be childish, he told himself.

In his father’s day, the Coman would long since have brought a formal complaint. They might even have done so to Torisen himself before his illness. Instead, the Coman were trying in their ham-handed way to cope on their own, which only made the Edirr laugh harder. How many more houses now made do without his judgment as Highlord? For that matter, how well had he judged before with so little information?

A night breeze blew through the open window, cool after the day’s heat. The summer was passing quickly. There was enough at Gothregor, Ancestors knew, to keep him busy—the keep to run, the crops to cultivate, news from the south to sift . . . but he wouldn’t think of that last just yet.

Rowan caught another scroll as it rolled off the chair. Rush, his chief agricultural agent at Tagmeth, had been sending him a steady stream of notes, all complaints. The lands beyond the gates were too diverse, or had been neglected too long, or the seasons there were wrong, either to plant or to harvest. Under this ran a current of insinuation: the lordan didn’t know what she was doing, no, nor did her precious Farmer Fen. The latter criticized. The former interfered. Why had m’lord sent him, Rush, if not to take charge? Jame’s letters listed problems and minor triumphs but said nothing about Rush, which in itself was telling. Well, let her cope with him. It was her keep.

“What about the Ardeth?” he asked, reaching for a boot.

Rowan looked almost embarrassed. Who, after all, was she to bring him such tales? Was he being fair, he wondered, even to ask her?

“We only get rumors from Omiroth. Lord Adric is sound some days, rotten with age on others. Dari rules in his stead, at odds with Lady Distan—Timmon’s mother, you know. My impression is that she is much more ambitious than her son.”

“The Brandan?”

“Still a strong ally. The word is, though, that Brant is worried about his sister.”

That sounded serious. Brenwyr was a maledight, a Shanir whose curses could kill. They might call her the Iron Matriarch for her self-control, but Torisen had always found her terrifying.

“The Randir?”

Rowan shook her head. “I thought we would hear more, what with the Heir back in the Riverland, but they keep things as tight there as Lady Rawneth’s smile. M’lady may have a new councilor. At least, there are reports of someone whispering in her ear, a pale presence that wasn’t there before. And there are also strange rumors about Lady Kallystine’s pregnancy. Apparently the baby is moving around inside her body at will.” The steward’s expression didn’t change, nailed in place as it was with scars, but her face flushed. “Sorry, Blackie.”

“Why? Because she was my consort once? That’s long over.”

Was it? There were still occasional dreams, and there had been no one since.

Rowan collected herself. “My sense? Wilden is on the edge of explosion. Lord Danior can’t be happy having it as his neighbor.”

“Poor Holly,” said Torisen absently. He tended to forget how vulnerable his cousin was, just across the river from Wilden. For tiny Shadow Rock to have survived so long, the Randir must assume that the Highlord would stand behind it. What could he do, though, if they attacked Holly? There were certain points at which he felt his weakness with special keenness. This was one of them.

Rowan fidgeted with another scroll, this one from Harn in Bashti, newly arrived there with the Knorth troops. Nothing terrible had happened yet, as far as Torisen could tell. Harn seemed obsessed, though, with local politics, and he was oddly scatter-brained. If—when—trouble came, would he be able to handle it?

“The Jaran have their own interests,” Rowan continued. Now that she had adjusted to his curiosity, she seemed determined to satisfy it. “They may be the only house that’s managed to alter that damn contract, although their arrangement may yet come back to bite them. The Caineron seem happy too, in a strange way. Lord Caldane laughs a lot, I hear, but there’s been a rash of suicides at Restormir.”

All in all, it was more information than Torisen had expected from what he judged to be idle chatter, but it still raised more questions than it answered. Where had he been while all of this was happening? Dying, he had thought. No more.

“Look,” said Rowan. “Blackie. Do you really want to try this?”

She meant his experiment that night. Some of the cattle had come down with blisters in their mouths and on their feet—a murrain, his herdsmen called it. This had happened before and wasn’t always fatal, but no one seemed to know what to do about it except to keep the afflicted cows apart.

On a side table was a somewhat more orderly stack of scrolls and books which he had borrowed from Mount Alban. It was not enough to ask questions, he had learned. One had to know what questions to ask. His correspondence with the college had been erratic at best. They kept demanding what he wanted to learn. How was he supposed to know, though, until he stumbled across an answer?

One of the books that had come his way detailed native remedies for bovine diseases, noted by the recording scrollsman as “a compendium of superstitions, some oddly effective.”

Torisen grudgingly accepted that some of Gothregor’s recent woes had to do with his perverse experiences as That-Which-Creates. Mold. Fungus. Weeds. Disease. If the cause lay in him, though, might not also the cure?

“Ask questions,” Jame had said.

“Ask the right questions,” he now would have answered her.

“The Merikit swear by this,” he said, taking the scroll from his steward. “Can it hurt to try?”

Rowan looked dubious.

So too did the other Kendar as he descended Gothregor’s steps to the strip of land on the valley’s floor that edged the Silver. The crescent moon had set, leaving a star-spangled sky. Midsummer it might almost be, but a breeze blew off the heights of the Snowthorns and breath clouded the air, both of the herders and of the restless herd. It looked as if all the latter had been brought, a sea of eyes and tossing horns over dark shoulders. Those afflicted, at least, came first.

Close to the Silver and again closer to the keep, two fires sparked to life. Kendar had been quickening them since sun-down, twirling spindles into the notches of fireboards. Needfire, it was called, and sometimes force-fire. By rights, all hearths above should have been quenched, but Torisen hadn’t gone quite to that extreme. As it was, by now the herdsmen’s hands must be blistered, if not themselves smoking.

Torisen felt momentary guilt. I asked them to do this, out of faith in me. Well, if it worked . . . 

Flames started, fed with tinder, then with kindling, then with sticks. Bovine eyes gleamed uneasily in the flickering light and horns tossed. Brush was added. Smoke began to rise, full of darting embers. The herdsmen urged their reluctant changes forward. The idea was to drive them between the fires, through the cleansing heat. It seemed an odd idea, but perhaps no stranger than that spores could rise from the roots of plants to infect Kencyr lungs. What if the cows, likewise, were surrounded by tiny agents that passed disease from the sick of the herd to the well? Fire was said to purify. Let it do so now.

The breeze had died. Smoke billowed up into the chill air, merging between the fires, shouldering its way into starlight. It started out white. Then a shadow seemed to gather within it.

“What’s that stench?” asked Rowan, standing beside Torisen, sniffing. “Has someone fallen into the fire?”

The darkness moved, defined by rolling clouds, by dancing sparks. Here might have been a broad back straightening; there, arms laced with veins of fire. It seemed to bend over those gathered at its feet. Deep sockets peered down. The ghost of a hand reached out.

“Sweet Trinity,” said Torisen, staring up. “It’s the Burnt Man.”

Rowan pushed him out of the way, then staggered as her jacket burst into flames across the back. Torisen wrestled it off of her, scorching his fingers in the process. Others rushed up to beat it out along with a dozen other small conflagrations caused in the dry grass by falling sparks.

The herd surged back and forth, likewise stung but held in check. Then something dark rushed through its midst, nipping at flanks, yelping. The cows stampeded. Some charged straight through the smoke. Others, shouldered sideways, blundered into the two needfires and scattered them. All stormed on, bellowing, pursued by their tenders.

The shadowy image overhead wavered. As the breeze returned and the smoke dispersed, it disappeared except for a lingering charnel reek.

A gray wolf trotted out of the shadows, rising onto his hind-legs as he came, his fur subsiding into that appropriate for a very hairy young man.

“Just what did you think you were doing?” he demanded of Torisen, when his mouth was the right shape to form words.

“Not what I expected, apparently. Hello, Grimly. What are you doing here?”

“Starving,” snapped the wolver. “First, food. Then answers.”

They retreated to the keep’s mess-hall where Torisen scrounged for left-overs from dinner for his friend. Bread, cheese rinds, stew. . . . Grimly tucked in voraciously, with a tendency to slobber the latter’s gravy.

“I’ve been on the road for nearly two weeks,” he said, after licking the bowl clean and then his chops with a red, alarmingly long tongue, “mostly hunting small prey as I went. One gets tired of raw rabbit, though. And are my paws sore? Woof!”

They had last met over a year ago at Mount Alban, when Torisen had fought and killed the wolver king known as the Gnasher. The Gnasher’s daughter, Yce, had been there too, and when it was over she had left to claim her father’s place in the Weald. Grimly had gone with her—as an escort, he had said, and then had laughed.

“As if she needs one!”

Yce was young but fierce, like most deep Weald wolvers. To call them feral was to slander true wolves. Their kin in the Grimly Holt were gentle by comparison, most of them dedicated poets much given to the cadences of howled song. Torisen had wondered how his old friend would fare among his savage cousins.

“Have you been in the Deep Weald all this time?” he now asked.

Grimly grinned, then shuddered. “Most of it,” he said. “I watched Yce fight her way to power, and I do mean fight, tooth and nail, against both males and females. Real wolves would have had the sense to roll over and give in. These had to be killed, maimed, or driven out. She bears scars now, our lady. She still speaks of you often.”

Torisen had thought about her too. Yce had come to him as an outcast pup in flight from a father who devoured all of his potential heirs. But she had grown. He remembered her arms around him at the scrollsmen’s college, her rough tongue as it had licked his cheek.

“I will miss you,” she had breathed in his ear.

“And I, you.”

So he had, if with a certain relief that she was gone.

He now regarded Grimly askance. “What aren’t you saying?”

The wolver ducked his head, looking away under shaggy brows. “She came into power. She came into heat. We of the Holt practice courtship. Many of our best songs are about it. We also can control our mating cycles. Being around my cousins, though, and especially around her . . .  She was overwhelming. It was madness. I think, now, for the first time, that I understand how you felt about Kallystine.”

Torisen rose. “Kallystine was poison,” he said over his shoulder. “She made me crave her against all reason. She used her aunt Rawneth’s witchcraft to manipulate my senses. With her, love was a ravenous thing.”

Grimly cringed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

Torisen stopped himself, conscience struck. “I’m sorry too. We Kencyr have some odd practices, I think. You were saying?”

“Only that, from then on, I had to fight to keep her. Against every male in her pack. I have my scars too, now. Even so, I only survived by engaging them in songs and riddles and jokes. They are our kinsmen, after all; we have some things in common. But it got to be too much. How often can you make a bully laugh and not feel like a fool or a coward yourself? I went back to the Holt. Even there, though, what could I say about such things? My own kind are too superior to understand. I wish I still was. So I came here.”

Torisen gave him a crooked smile. “And glad I am to see you, however rough your welcome.”

“About that. To repeat, what did you think you were doing just now?”

Torisen explained. Grimly groaned.

“You can’t just conjure up other people’s gods!” he exclaimed.

“Is that what that was?”

“Well, not exactly. The Deep Weald wolvers claim that he is their progenitor. A confusing story, that. They say that he was originally a Bashtiri prince who killed his father and then fled to the Weald—a template, as it were, for the Weald’s subsequent patterns of parricide and infanticide, Yce and the Gnasher in a nutshell. His brothers tracked him down there and burned him alive. The heart of the Weald is a blackened ruin to this day. Of course, this was after he mated with a she-wolf to sire the first of my kind. We of the Holt have some good songs about that. I hope to learn more of them.”

“So you do believe in the Burnt Man.”

“I saw him. So did you and not, I think, for the first time.”

“Seeing is believing?”

“On some level. As to what we saw, ah, that’s a different matter.”

“Jame said something similar about the gods of Tai-tastigon. Your world has given us monotheists much to think about.”

Grimly grinned. “Still, you Kennies have a hair-raising disregard for local powers.”

“Sorry about that. Here. Have some more stew. And stay as long as you like. I, too, could use someone to listen.”

VII

Summer 40

Marc hesitated in the doorway under whose lintel he had ducked so that his bald pate entered first. “You sent for me, lass?” he asked, looking up at her from under tangled brows.

Jame rose from her desk and the letter she had been scrawling to her brother. Torisen, as usual, was proving an unsatisfactory correspondent, although he had informed her that Grimly had come to visit and moreover had passed on an interesting story about the Burnt Man being the progenitor of the wolvers. Also, the needfires apparently had worked: the sick cows were on the mend.

Rather than talk about himself, her brother tended to relay stories about other people or things—he, who couldn’t stand to rely on spies.

What to make of the latter report about the Burnt Man she still wasn’t sure.

Good, she had thought about the former. Despite his friendship with the Kendar, Tori needed a companion.

Just the same, he might at least answer her own missives in more detail.

She would rather prod him once again, though, than go through with the conversation that lay ahead.

“Come in,” she told her old friend. “Rue has brought us some of the last wine.”

“Well, now.” Marc sank into a mended chair, which creaked alarmingly as it took his weight. He was in his nineties now, on the edge of old age. His own legs must ache from stumping around the keep all day, helping to make everything work. This was his home. He cherished it perhaps even more than she did. “You know that cider is good enough for me, lass. What’s the occasion?”

Jame hedged. “How are Torisen’s people settling in?”

“Well enough,” he said, accepting a cup, regarding it dubiously, much as he did her. “Most of them are encamped beyond the gates. Sometimes they come back to report. Sometimes Master Rush goes out to them.”

Rush had taken the first floor of the tower as his headquarters after Graykin had moved out, in part driven away by Rush.

“He has no respect for my profession,” Graykin had complained. “Neither has his lord, he says.”

“Tori’s opinions are his own. It occurs to me, though, that, thanks to them, we are largely blind in the Central Lands. If I send you there, can you remedy that?”

Graykin had drawn himself up, the hem of his shabby court coat lifting away from scrawny ankles. He had taken to stitching extensions onto it as each robe in turn wore out. While these were all gaudy, Jame had realized, they weren’t of very good quality. Annoying as her servant could be, he deserved better.

“I have my allowance from Aerulan’s dowry,” she had said, “and, so far, not much else to spend it on. I can send you to Bashti.”

She had read the conflict in his face. He wanted so desperately to belong to the Kencyrath, but Tagmeth was too primitive to suit his pretensions. Then there was Rush, sneering.

So he had gone.

Jame wondered now if he could really help, cut off from all of his accustomed sources. Well, he was a spy. That was his choice, and his chosen job.

“Most of the newcomers seem like decent folk,” said Marc, taking a cautious sip. How long since he had last tasted wine? The gates could provide many things but, so far, not that. “Farmer Fen says so too, when Master Rush lets him speak at all. Lass, what’s wrong?”

“Oh, Marc. I nearly bound Rue on the way to Gothregor and . . . and then almost fed on her soul. Now Tori says that I can’t be trusted to bind any more Kendar.”

He sighed. “I thought something was up. You didn’t hurt her, did you?”

“No!”

“I didn’t think so. We always knew that you were dangerous, but also compassionate. Both seem to be your nature. Don’t fuss.”

“If I could have bound anyone . . .”

“It would have been me. I know that and appreciate it. But, lass, can we really be closer than we already are?”

He put down his cup, barely tasted, and opened his arms. She walked into them. Oh, the thump of his strong heart, the honest smell of his sweat. This was the father she wanted. Ganth had been a pale ghost by comparison.

“Commandant,” a guard’s voice called from below. “Master Rush is here. He wants to talk to you.”

“‘Commandant’?” Marc raised an eyebrow.

Jame laughed, a bit unsteadily. “It’s the first time I’ve been called that. Will Sheth Sharp-tongue be annoyed with me?”

“He will always be the Commandant to those who know him. Otherwise, it’s primarily a title of respect rather than of appointment. He should be pleased that you’ve earned it.”

It seemed to her, on descending, that her guard had spoken in counterpoint to her guest. Rush waited below, looking impatient. He had clearly come from the field, with dust on his riding leathers and horse sweat staining his knees.

“About those hills,” he said pugnaciously, as if blaming her for them.

Jame thought first of the Haunted Lands, but that gate had been sealed ever since it had unleashed a horde of haunts on Tagmeth the previous year. She had come back to the keep one day not long ago to find Rush poised to break it open.

“You really don’t want to go there,” she said.

“What? This is where you deflected me.”

Oh. He meant the next gate to the east, unopened until now, which she had offered him as a sop.

“What about it?”

“It would do for pasturage, but we already have the savannah. Now there are interlopers. Riders, watching us from hilltops. Savages, judging by their leather and furs. Then yesterday one showed up all decked out in gold and silver plaques. Fair dazzling, he was, by all accounts. I reckon this land is rich in more than grass.”

Each gate tended to face in the direction of its destination. She should have considered that before.

“I think,” said Jame, “that you may have come out in Skyrr, north of Tai-tastigon. That certainly sounds like Skyrr armor. They are nomadic herds-people, but their wealth lies in metal and minerals.”

Rush grinned. “I was right, then. Think of it! With resources like that, we can buy anything we want from the Central Lands, things that the gates can’t provide, without bartering our blood. Our lord will be rich! And here I was beginning to think that this keep was a waste of time.”

Jame had come downstairs absentmindedly carrying her cup. He seized it and drank. Wine splashed, unheeded, on his chest.

“Listen,” she said, trying to recapture his attention. “We can’t just seize their property. You call them ‘interlopers.’ Rather, we trespass on their land. Oh, Tori warned me about this possibility and I shrugged him off because it hadn’t happened yet. Now, apparently, it has.”

Rush stared at her. “What are you saying? We should just walk away? We are better warriors than that. Send enough troops and we can fight off any barbarian who dares to challenge us.”

“Arribek sen Tenzi, the Archiem of Skyrr, is a friend, and a very impressive man.”

“Impressed you, at least, did he? But then I hear tell that you’ve spent most of your life away from the Kencyrath. Gone native yourself, some say, north of Kithorn. I wouldn’t know about that. Consider this, though: as we speak, our Kendar are at the mercy of the Seven Kings, Trinity damn them, and all may yet end in a second White Hills massacre. That would break our lord, your brother.”

“I hear you,” said Jame grimly. “I ask you, though: is survival everything? Would you choose it, without honor?”

“What does that have to do with this? These are savages, not our own people.”

“There speaks the likes of Lord Caineron. I think, Rush, that you are in the wrong house.”

He went beet-red. While he sputtered, Jame took back her cup, which now was empty.

“Enough,” she said, putting it aside. “Withdraw our Kendar from that gate and never go there again. Be still. Do it.”

And she walked away.

VIII

Summer 56

As Torisen approached the bake-house, voices sounded within it. One belonged to Grimly, the other to bake-master Nutley.

“How do you keep your balance?” the former was asking.

“Much the same way I always have,” replied the latter cheerfully. “It still comes a surprise sometimes, though, to glimpse them out of the corner of my eye. ‘What are those?’ I ask myself, then remember and smile.”

“Truly, you never regret them?”

Nutley laughed. “Why should I? They are a new experience. Besides, my lady Rowan likes them.”

Torisen looked in at the door. “Grimly, don’t tease. Nutley, good morning.”

The baker straightened from the kneading board and brushed a lock of raven hair out of his eyes with the back of a floury fist. His beard was neatly braided. His bosom had all but burst its bodice with his recent exertions. His proud breasts, also flour-speckled, resembled the two newly risen lumps of dough on the table before him. Well they might, thought Torisen, given that Kindrie had kneaded them out of Nutley’s chest in an effort to save his life after he had been attacked by a batch of sour dough gone rogue.

“Good morning to you too, my lord,” he said, grinning. “I have a batch of those sticky buns you like due out of the oven momentarily.”

“I thought that I smelled something good. Your stores are holding up?”

At this time of year, between harvests, that was always a question.

“The winter wheat crop was adequate. Meanwhile, the cooks are devoutly grateful for these mysterious supplies that your lady sister sends us, although they say that more would be better.”

“We’re working on that.”

Munching fresh, hot buns, Torisen and Grimly left the fortress and walked down its steep steps toward the valley floor. The sun shone bright in a midsummer sky, catching glints off the swift-flowing Silver. Butterflies danced over the flanking fields.

“Having breasts really doesn’t bother him,” said Grimly, still amazed.

“Why should it? The Kendar are very adaptable. Male Kendar have even been known to breast-feed babies in times of need, not that they can bear them. As far as I know.”

What would he say if Rowan asked him for permission to have a child, if only to please her mate? That acceptance would be a promise that he would take the infant into his house, just when he had decided that binding Kendar was wrong. Rowan and Nutley were both bound to him, and seemed pleased to be so. Everyone had always thought that that was just the way things were. And now? Eh. A problem for another day.

“I mean,” said Grimly, still fretting, “what does it signify to him to be a man?”

“What does it to you?”

Grimly squirmed. “I’m confused. And, anyway, I’m also a wolf, most of the time. I would have said that we wolvers of the Holt didn’t put as much stock in such things as those of the Deep Weald, but that was before I lived among them. They have a prime male and female, but their leader can be either. That’s Yce. I don’t think, though, that she really recognizes me as her peer or a proper mate. That would be you, Tori, but I was as close to you as she was going to get. Then. Let’s hope she never chooses to fight Jame for your affection.”

“That,” said Torisen, “is quite enough. Grimly, behave.”

The wolver giggled. “I’m trying to. Just tell me how.”

Here was the field which the Burnt Man had visited. Beyond was the bridge over the Silver, which had to be rebuilt nearly every year due to the gnawing of the River Snake. Beyond lay the hayfield, set in the lower meadow.

Soon the Knorth cadets would return from Tentir to help with the Minor Harvest. Torisen had already sent out gleaners to cull the hay of false timothy. No one else, he was determined, would suffer from either hay-cough or lung-rot as he had. This time, despite their protests, the reapers were supposed to wear masks to protect them from the spores that the false timothy stems ejected from their chambered roots when severed. No one, so far, had gotten sick. That at least had been one good guess.

Now he saw these select gleaners at work, under direction of the bad-tempered harvest-master who had already shouted himself hoarse at them. He wasn’t wearing a mask.

“Why not?” Torisen asked him.

“Huh. Are we to believe in tiny demons who try to drown us from the lungs out? Highlord, give us credit for more sense than that.”

“Nonetheless, you heard my orders. Follow them.”

The man snorted, but then his eyes fell before Torisen’s steady gaze and he backed off, muttering, fumbling for the cloth that hung from a string around his neck.

Near the edge of the field, the Kendar Merry watched her child Bo while her mate Cron labored amid the crops. Bo crowed when he saw Torisen and toddled eagerly toward him.

“He’s missed you, lord,” said Merry, smiling.

Torisen hadn’t seen the little family much of late. He still felt guilty for almost killing Bo by coughing lung-rot spores in his face, thereby giving him a near fatal case of hay-cough. If Kindrie hadn’t seen it happen, though, he might never have guessed how the disease was spreading, Kencyr as a rule not being prone to infection. Torisen was relieved to see that the child was now wearing a scrap of cloth as a mask, but worried to find him so close to the original source of contamination.

“Let me walk with him for a while,” he said to Merry, picking up the toddler.

Merry agreed. “I’ll be glad to join Cron in the field,” she said, “for what’s left of the morning.”

With Bo in his arms, Torisen departed, Grimly at his side. Ahead, stretched across the rising ground, lay bright, terraced ribbons of flax, barley, oats, and wheat, all ripening toward the Great Harvest at summer’s end. Workers’ paths led upward, cutting across the furrows to the wooded toes of the Snowthorns.

As he climbed, Torisen kept glancing back down the valley and the River Road.

“It’s been a while since the last message from Harn,” he said when Grimly noticed his abstraction. “He didn’t seem very happy then.”

The wolver grinned. “I pity anyone who causes that man trouble.”

“He has his weaknesses too, you know. You’ve never seen him in the grip of a berserker fit. If there’s one thing he fears, it’s losing control.”

And, thought Torisen, that was what he had sensed behind Harn’s last few scribbled scrolls—an incipient panic. What could have upset him so much? For years he had been the Knorth war-leader and, during that time, also the commandant of Tentir, neither easy jobs. He was, as Grimly said, a formidable man. With potentially fatal weaknesses.

“Around you, though,” said Grimly, “he seems to be all right.”

“That might be because of the bond between us. On the other hand, Jame’s presence also seems to steady him. I don’t entirely understand that.”

Grimly looked at him sideways. “About messages, nothing new from your old mentor?”

“These days, Adric doesn’t send messages. The last was from his steward and grandson, Dari. I told you about that. Adric seems to be getting more erratic, which isn’t surprising. Highborn tend to go suddenly soft in old age. Dari wants to be recognized officially as lordan regent to House Ardeth.”

“But Adric favors his other grandson, Timmon.”

Torisen grimaced. “Half of the time, he thinks that Timmon is his son Pereden.”

He had fretted that the other houses were not bringing him their problems for judgment. Then this had happened, a situation in which he had no desire to meddle. Unlike Jame with Marc Long-shanks, he had had two failed fathers, Ganth and Adric. Ganth had warped his life for years, only to disappear, as it were, in a puff of miserable smoke. Alas, that his feelings toward Lord Ardeth were still so mixed.

“And then,” he said, “I’ve also heard from Timmon’s mother, the Lady Distan, pleading her son’s case, with some justice.”

“A mess,” said Grimly solemnly, not understanding. His father had died while he was still a pup. What memories he had were good.

They were in the shade of trees by now, winding around brush and the occasional ravine. Sound still rose from behind them in the field, but it was more and more muffled, even the irate shouts of the harvest-master.

“Goo!” said Bo, waving small fists. One hit Torisen in the nose. The other dislodged the child’s mask. Torisen removed it—they were far enough from the field by now—and shoved it into a pocket. Grimly walked more and more slowly, his ears pricked through the unruly thatch of his hair.

“Listen,” he said softly. “Do you hear that? Do you smell it? Stay back.”

With that, he dropped to the ground in his complete furs and charged through the undergrowth. On the far side, someone grunted in surprise, then gave a wordless shout.

Torisen followed as quickly as he could, hindered by Bo.

Beyond was a clearing. In it, Grimly circled a big man nearly as hairy as he was himself. The stranger held an axe in one hand, a piece of kindling in the other. He shifted them as if unsure which to use, if either.

“Grimly, stop!”

The wolver lunged. Blocked by the kindling, he locked his jaws around it and tried to wrest it free, ignoring the axe with which the other could easily have split his skull.

Bo bounced in Torisen’s arms, gurgling.

The big man raised the stick with Grimly still clinging to it.

“Huh,” he said, looking at Torisen.

Torisen put down Bo, stepped forward, and tapped the wolver on the shoulder as he swung in midair.

“Grimly, let go. This is Bear.”

The wolver’s eyes swiveled toward him. He let go, thumped to the ground, and backed off, rising to his hind legs as he went, retracting his claws and some of his hair. “He’s who?”

“One of my sister’s randon Senethari.”

“Oh,” said Grimly. “What is he doing here?”

“At a guess, chopping wood.”

Torisen looked around. Across the clearing a door gaped open, and out of it rolled a fog of cold air. The door seemed to stand by itself among the trees. A shift of position, however, revealed a low wall framing it, sunk into the earth, decorated by a band of emu faces.

“And that,” he said, “appears to be the Earth Wife’s lodge.”

“What, here?”

“She and her lodge can be anywhere. The last time I visited, both were in the middle of a volcanic eruption. Today, the interior appears to be someplace cold, hence that firewood.”

He turned. Bear sat on his haunches before Bo, playing a clapping game. His hair still tumbled into the crevasse in his skull, but not quite as deeply as it had before. He chuckled. Jame would be pleased to know that he was happy.

A horn sounded in the distance. Torisen listened.

“That signifies a post rider,” he said. “I said that one was due.”

When he looked again, Bear was gone. So was the wall. And the door.

IX

Summer 60

On Midsummer’s Day, Jame visited the Caineron and the Randir yondri in the oasis. She had been there before, on a similar errand.

“We understand,” said nurse Girt, cradling Benj, who for once was peacefully asleep. Perhaps the Builder Chirp had recently been there; no one else seemed able to pacify the infant. “Our lady Mustard wanted your house to accept us. She had no greater ambition for herself. But now we have her child. He will be our new lord.”

Jame bit her tongue. Benj might be Tiggeri’s son and Caldane’s grandson, but Must had been half Kendar. There had never been a lord who was not pure Highborn, nor an unsanctioned cadet house. She knew what Caldane would say. What about Torisen, though? Even if he wanted to, had he the authority to make such a drastic change in the code that had ruled the Kencyrath for millennia?

The Randir yondri spoke through their youngest member—why, Jame wasn’t quite sure, unless it was because he seemed the least afraid of her. The others, after all, had had a lifetime of their Lady Rawneth, who was enough to scare anyone.

“We have decided to wait for Lord Randiroc,” the boy now told her, with an air of consequence. “After all, he is the true Randir heir.”

So he was, if he survived Rawneth and her precious son Kenan. That was another affair where Torisen might eventually have a voice, if he could muster the influence. More and more, she didn’t envy his fate.

On the way out of the oasis, she stopped by the Builders’ low-slung lodge. No one appeared to be there, but then they never did. When she turned, however, a small, gray-robed figure sat on the shore before the lake, his back to her. She approached and settled down on her heels behind him. They watched the sunset. Flickering patterns of red light played across the water. Date palms rustled. Birds called. It was all very peaceful.

“This is a nice place,” said Jame.

“It is home,” said Chirpentundrum. “Now.”

“The special bread is still delivered every other day? And you still eat it?”

“Of course. How else can I share my dear wife’s memories one last time?”

“Oh. I didn’t realize that was what you were doing.”

“You give the ashes of your dead to the wind. We consume them, a bit at a time, baked in bread. Which way is better?”

“I suppose that depends on what you want. We think of it as freeing them. You think of it as communion. Some memories of the dead I would not want to share.”

The sun set behind the western bluffs. Shadows crept over the lake, over the garden. Bats flitted from grove to grove. An olive tree rustled.

“We are being watched,” said Chirp.

Jame stifled the urge to turn.

“Does this happen often?”

“Only recently. It is, I believe, just one person. He has never offered us harm.”

“Bad enough,” said Jame, “that he knows anything about you at all.”

Who could it be, she wondered as she left the oasis. The slyness of it worried her more than anything else, although mere curiosity might make any observer shy, not to mention the Builders’ unique appearance.

Back at Tagmeth, an unusual number of workers from the gates milled about the courtyard carrying tools as if not sure what to do with them. The garrison cut through their ranks with amused jibes (“Looking for trouble?” “What, there’s not enough work for you afield?”), bound for the mess-hall and the evening meal.

That reminded Jame: she had missed lunch yet again. For that matter, she couldn’t remember breakfast either. Rue always chided her for such lapses. Now, however, she was hungry. As she approached the mess-hall, Rue emerged from it carrying a tray loaded with food. She passed Jame without seeing her and entered the tower. Jame followed. Rush awaited his dinner, as usual, in his quarters.

“Go away,” he told Rue.

Rue, turning, met Jame in the doorway but stifled her surprise at a gesture from her lady.

Rush took a handful of dates from his pocket and garnished his plate with them. He looked pleased with himself. Jame stepped forward and picked one up. He started as her hand passed under his nose.

“Good,” she said, eating it, “but then everything in the oasis is. I told you not to go there.”

He tried to collect himself. “Is that what you call it? An apt name.”

“Given that is what it is.”

She saw that she made him nervous, and was glad. He rose, the better to loom over her. She smiled up at him, although anger stirred under her bland expression.

“Now see here,” he said, attempting to bluster. “Matters have become unacceptable. You thwart me at every turn. I can’t do the work to which I was assigned, and it’s important, whatever you think.”

“So?”

“Some time ago, I sent a message to the Highlord, explaining all of this. Either he was to give me a free hand or I would leave.”

“And?”

He thrust out his chest, a glint of uneasy triumph in his small eyes. “He has not replied. I take it, therefore, that he agrees with my position.”

“Which is?” It was hard to keep her voice from sinking to a purr. Oh, how she wanted to lapse into a berserker flare. Insufferable man.

“We will send a force from Tagmeth’s garrison into this land that you call Skyrr to seize whatever riches we find there. I doubt if your precious Archiem will give us much trouble. Now that I have seen it, we will also secure this oasis of yours. It was a mistake not to tell your brother about it, by the way.”

“What makes you think that I didn’t?”

“Well, of course he would have set our people to work there rather than leave it to such worthless folk as the yondri and those strange little people.”

“And what future role do you see for me in these plans?”

He relaxed somewhat. “Someone has to manage this keep. Your second-in-command, Brier Iron-thorn, would be the most competent person for that job. You can go back to your brother’s house where you belong. It will be more comfortable there, after all.”

Her smile sharpened at the corners. “Oh, so generous of you to express concern for my comfort. I choose, however, to stay. It is you who will leave.”

He laughed. “By now, my people will have seized control of the courtyard. Shall we see with whom they side?”

“Yes. Let’s.”

In the doorway, she paused. “By the way, have you been in the habit of sending my brother complaints?”

“Reports, rather, as is my duty.”

“I think, in that case, that you haven’t heard from him because he has stopped reading them. You can ask him when you see him.”

With that she left the tower, leaving him with his mouth open.

Many of his people indeed milled about the courtyard, looking as puzzled as they had before, watched curiously by the garrison.

“Master Rush is leaving,” Jame told them. “Your new commander is Farmer Fen, pending my brother’s approval. In the meantime, please join us for dinner.”

They looked at her doubtfully, then turned to file into the mess-hall. Jame hoped, watching them go, that Cook Rackny could scrape up the extra food on such short notice.

Rush stood behind her, aghast.

“You will want to pack,” she told him kindly, “and, no doubt, to finish you own supper. Then go.”

He turned, speechless, and reentered the tower.

Brier came up, slapping dust off her clothes. It would seem that she had ridden in from the fields in haste. Jame realized that Rue had slipped out earlier, no doubt to send a message.

“We wondered how long it would take you to drive him out,” said Brier.

“And I did it without losing my temper.”

The big Kendar regarded her, expressionless. “Congratulations.”

Jame shivered despite herself. She felt from the pressure in her chest as if she had just swallowed something enormous. It was a step toward self-control, however, and away from her hated god.

“Just the same,” she said, gulping down bile, “the experience leaves a bad taste. What I am. What I could become. How easy it would be just to give in. It’s nearly the summer solstice. I think I’ll spend it in the hills with the Merikit. They have a way of clearing the mind.”

X

Summer 63

When Kindrie entered the library, Kirien was studying a scroll, or trying to. Her gaze lifted, blank at first, then focusing on him as he stood tentatively in the doorway. Their daytime encounters of late had all had this disconnected air, as if each was locked into his or her own thoughts which they dared not share. At night they met, starved for each other but wordless, in the dark. Kindrie missed their talks; however, he dreaded this one.

“You sent for me?” he said.

“Yes. It’s about Dunfause.”

“Again?”

Her voice sharpened. “Do you resent that?”

“I . . . may.”

“You’re jealous.”

“I suppose I am. Is that foolish of me?”

“Yes. Very. We have been friends for a long time, he and I. I worry about him. He’s not getting any better, you know. When he leaves his room these days, people hear him talking to himself—arguing, some say. Cursing. Sometimes pleading. He mentions you often, going back to this encounter that he says you had with Caldane’s agent, hinting at all sorts of vile things. Sometimes . . . he sounds half deranged.”

Kindrie heard the shudder in her voice. After the loss of honor, what most Highborn feared most was madness, knowing that it would come for many of them if they lived long enough.

“Dunfause isn’t that old,” he protested, longing to take her in his arms, to reassure her.

Even if he were, he wanted to say, we are still young.

She paused, looking at him. “Kindrie. Love. These horrid accusations . . .  Won’t you defend yourself? Please. Tell me the truth.”

He wanted to, but he was afraid. That, he told himself, was stupid; the agent had only made an unwelcome, no, a preposterous proposal. The mere thought of it, however, froze his tongue. Kirien read the fear in his eyes, and in exasperation let the scroll roll up in her hands. It was old. Its edge crumbled.

“Now look what you’ve made me do. Oh Kindrie, I didn’t mean that. At least tell Dunfause, tell the world, that you are legitimate.”

“I . . . can’t. Not yet. You don’t understand.”

“True. I don’t. Explain it to me.”

He began to pace back and forth before her desk, hating himself, almost hating her for making him face this. “You don’t know what it feels like to be weak, to be at everyone’s mercy. My first memories are of the Priests’ College at Wilden. I told you what Lady Rawneth did to me there, once she realized that I could heal myself of virtually any injury. I was her living doll, her pet, sometimes pampered, sometimes tortured, always used. The priests took their lead from her. They would have destroyed my mind, if not my body, if I hadn’t taken refuge in my soul-image.”

“Which was based on the Moon Garden at Gothregor, where you were born. Yes, you told me that too.”

Was that sympathy in her voice? He hoped so, yet blamed himself for so desperately wanting it.

“Don’t you see? I had to hide in order to survive. I’ve done that all of my life. Some might say that I’m doing it here, now. You and the Jaran protect me. When have I ever stood up for myself?”

“You stepped forward to save Torisen at Kithorn when you first met him, and several times since. You have shown courage. I saw it for myself when you brought those Shanir boys, Timtom and Tomtim, here to sanctuary, although Rawneth’s people were close behind you.”

Kindrie almost laughed. “The twins defended themselves quite handily on their own, by giving their pursuers explosive diarrhea. Then Ashe arrived with reinforcements from Mount Alban. I was called on to do very little.”

“You don’t give yourself enough credit. You never have. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

She knew him too well, or not well enough.

“You are a strong person,” he said. “So are my cousins. I am not. Don’t I deserve some credit, though, for having survived? Do I have to change myself to be worthy of you?”

She sighed. “The question begs the answer. No. You need to be worthy of yourself. You say you may be becoming That-Which-Preserves. Destruction and Creation are active forces, yes, but must preservation always be passive? How can it, if it is to survive?”

Someone knocked on the door and opened it in haste, without waiting for an answer. The sparrow-like singer peered in. “Lady—oh, and lord—come quick! Scrollsman Dunfause has tried to take the White Knife!”

“Tried?” said Kindrie, aghast.

“And failed. He can’t seem to die.”

Kirien had turned pale. “There must be some mistake. Kindrie, help him!”

“If I can,” said Kindrie, but his mouth had gone dry.

They found an anxious knot of scholars and singers outside Dunfause’s apartment. Inside was Director Taur, bent over a huddled figure in a chair, holding shut his slit wrists with big, blunt hands. The room stank with the hot copper tang of blood.

Kindrie hesitated on the threshold. “What if this is what he truly wants?”

Kirien shoved him inside. “Why would he? You are a healer. Heal!”

Kindrie reluctantly took the blind Director’s place. He felt the older scrollsman’s life flutter against his palms. The wrists, wet with blood, slid under his fingertips.

His craft lay in reaching his patient’s soul-image. Sometimes it was easy, but this was hard. Dunfause hid beneath layers of memories, in each of which Kirien played a part. Here she was a wide-eyed child listening to his stories. He had found her amusing then. She had grown into a handsome girl with a tentative smile and an eager mind that challenged his own, then into a young woman, sharper still, ever more beautiful.

“Oh, Dunfause, tell me more.”

When had he lost her? Her image receded into maturity. He aged.

“My dear old friend . . . ”

Not old. Never that.

Kindrie moved through layers of time, now going back. A room took shape around him, sparse, elegant. Tables held a scholar’s tools—quills, shining ink, translucent scrolls. Light poured in through many windows. The furniture glowed. It was the soul-image of a fastidious man, justly proud of his accomplishments. In pride of place, casting radiance where otherwise shadows would have fallen, was the central statue of a young girl, frozen in innocence. Kirien again. How she smiled at her hands, across which balanced a blank roll of parchment. Who would write on it?

But the room quivered around the edges. A sound struck up a muted vibration there, changing from gibberish into the wheedling voice that Kindrie had only half heard before.

Dunfause, my faithful servant. Tell me.

“You . . . you gave me strong wine to drink. My head spins. To tell you, yes, but I am also a senior member of the college. I owe it, I owe . . .”

Nothing compared to what you owe to me, to your house. Besides, they have betrayed your trust. You should have been the next director, not that blind cretin Taur. Your rank, your Highborn blood, my favor . . .  Come. Think better of yourself, as I do. Tell me.

The edges of the room darkened. Someone stood in the shadows behind the kneeling scholar with a smug smile, sure of righteous triumph. Cracks skittered across the pristine walls, across the polished floor.

My honor is yours, and yours is mine. I am your lord. What are you without me? Nothing. Only I matter. Trust me.

The cracks spread. Through them seeped sluggish darkness and the stink of blood. The tide lapped about the child’s statue.

You think that she is so innocent, so pure. Even now, another courts her, has won her. Should he become my new favorite and not you? Listen, then, and obey. Tell me.

The scrollsman bent over wrists across which slits had opened.

“I will tell, I will tell . . . ”

And he did.

Ah, breathed the shadows. You were right to do so. This foolish clause in our contract, that was supposed to protect our troops, the other eight that you have guessed, what leverage this will give us with the Seven Kings! Our house will be greater than ever. I will be greater.

His presence withdrew, turning away, leaving Dunfause crouched over his bleeding wrists. The room around him had dimmed to dirty clothes, dirty dishes, dirty furniture.

“Oh, sweet Trinity,” he moaned, “I can’t have said that. It can’t be my fault. Kindrie . . . somehow, he is to blame for everything. I will say that, over and over, until everyone believes it. Until Kirien believes it. Until I do.”

He had been holding the veins in his wrists shut. Now he let them go. His life sank into squalor.

“Oh, why can’t I die?”

Kindrie released him and stepped back. The last throb of blood ebbed, then stopped. At the door, Kirien cried out, hands over her face.

“I didn’t tell you,” he said, turning to her in supplication. “I will now. Caldane’s agent—he brought a message from his lord. Lord Caineron is in poor health. He wants me to become his personal healer. At Restormir.”

She stared at him, as if not quite taking in his words.

“What? Oh, go away. Just go away.” Then she fled.

Others spoke to him, among them the Director and Ashe. He didn’t listen. Once Torisen had driven him out and he had gone. Now he felt that it had happened again. What was there here for him except Kirien? What was there anywhere?

“Visit me at Tagmeth,” his cousin had said.

Very well. He would.

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