The night wind keened down stairwells, tasting of rain, and the tapestries that rustled against the cold, stone walls of the old keep's lower hall exhaled their stale breath in fitful, answering puffs. Woven faces shifted uneasily in the flickering torchlight, a thin lip twisting here, a brow furrowing there. Eyes, so many watchful eyes, most the silver-gray of their house. Even if the subject of the banner had had the ill fortune to die wearing the wrong shade, Kendar artisans had somehow blended strands to achieve it. Their work, as usual, was unnervingly effective. From the rags of the dead, teased apart thread by thread, they had created an illusion of life that whispered back and forth, each to each:
. . . he can . . . he can't . . . he can . . . he can't . . .
Torisen Black Lord paced under the disapproving gaze of his ancestors, scanning their ranks with something like despair. Except for his haggard expression, the fine bones of his face matched the best of those that glared back at him. Moreover, he had donned his least shabby dress coat to honor this occasion and moved within it like a cat within its skin, unconsciously lithe. If it was a bit loose at the waist, well, it had been a hard summer, and only his servant Burr saw him naked to remark on the growing shadows between his ribs.
Winter is coming, he thought, with an involuntary shiver, and the Greater Harvest has failed. How will I feed my people?
But these too were of his house. Never mind that all had died long before he had been born and might almost be said to have lived in a different world, before the long years of chaos following Ganth Gray Lord's fall. Twice since he had become Highlord of the Kencyrath and, incidentally, Lord Knorth, Torisen had recited their names on Autumn's Eve to keep their memory alive within their house. True, he had had help from senior Kendar like Harn Grip-hard, contemporaries of his father, Ganth, and from his former mentor, Adric, Lord Ardeth. Even so, there had been gaps, fading features to whom no one alive could put a name and others blurred beyond recognition. Weeping stone and silent centuries had not been kind to warp and weft, especially when they were no longer bound to a name.
Then too, Harn had told him what little he knew about the disastrous fire here, the night that Torisen's grandfather Gerraint Highlord had died, with its oddly selective destruction of banners.
And the previous spring his sister Jame had somehow blown out the great, stained-glass map in the Council Chamber two stories above, causing most of what banners were left to be sucked up into the night.
What he faced now were the survivors of those two catastrophes. Otherwise they would have felted the walls a foot or more thick, the oldest moldering together all the way back to the Kencyrath's arrival on Rathillien some three millennia ago.
Still, how many there were: faces without names, names without faces.
Traditional Kencyr believed in well-trained memories rather than in the written word; hence, to Torisen's knowledge, there was no other record of his house unless fragments of it found their way into story and song.
The Master of Knorth
Highlord of the Kencyrath
A proud man was he
Power he had and knowledge
Deeper than the Sea of Stars
But he feared death . . .
No one, ever, would forget Gerridon and his sister-consort Jamethiel Dream-weaver or the deal that he had wrought with Perimal Darkling to gain his precious if sere immortality. Strange to think that, if the songs were true, he still lurked on the other side of the Barrier, on the last of a hundred fallen worlds, in his monstrous house, chewing the bitter, deathless rind of his life, waiting . . . for what? No one knew. Maybe for the coming of the Tyr-ridan, those three Kencyr who were each to embody one of their god's faces: creation, preservation, and destruction. Few, however, still had hope of that manifestation, especially with the Highlord's house nearly extinct. No, their god had forsaken them almost at the moment of drawing the Three People together and giving them their hopeless task of fighting the Shadows.
"We are on our own here," Torisen said to the watching faces. Odd, how some also seemed to listen and respond with subtle, rueful shifts of expression as light from the torch that he carried touched their faces. Kendar work was indeed marvelous, or lack of sleep was at last catching up with him. "It's been so long since the Shadows last menaced us, and without that threat to unite us we are floundering, falling apart."
He felt as if he was, at least.
Some said that the honor of his house had fallen with Gerridon, leaving those who fled across the Barrier to this new world without true authority. Yet the Knorth had continued to rule, until Ganth Gray Lord had run mad after the massacre of his family's womenfolk, created even more slaughter in the White Hills trying to avenge them, at last casting down his title and going into exile in the Haunted Lands.
There his twin children had been born.
There he had cast out his daughter Jame when she had proved to be Shanir, one of the Old Blood, whom he loathed above all things.
There in his growing madness he would eventually have killed his son if Torisen hadn't gained the garrison's approval to flee. But did that truly supersede the authority of one's lord and father?
If Gerridon had polluted Knorth honor, and Ganth had nearly destroyed what was left of his house, how could his son inherit anything?
You can't, jeered his father's hoarse, all too familiar voice behind the locked door in the Haunted Lands' keep where Torisen had grown up, which was still his soul-image. As Highlord you swore to protect the people of this house, alive or dead, and you can't even remember their names.
Torisen ran a distraught, scarred hand through black hair prematurely touched with white. Things had been so much easier when he had commanded the Southern Host, responsible only for the bodies and not the souls of those put in his charge. A year ago, Autumn's Eve had only been a chore. He had meant his presence here tonight, unassisted, to reassure his people. Why, why, why couldn't he remember any names now, or rather only one?
Mullen's honest Kendar face regarded him anxiously from among the ranks of the haughty, Highborn dead. He had been one of Those Who Returned, Knorth Kendar who would have followed their lord into exile but had been driven back by Ganth in the high passes of the Ebonbane. In despair some had chosen the White Knife. Others like Mullen had become yondri-gon, wretched hangers-on in other houses, until the unexpected, well-nigh miraculous return of their lord's son. Torisen had reclaimed and bound as many of them as he could—perhaps too many to hold them all. Mullen had earned his place in this hall by practically flaying himself alive on the cold stone floor, all so that his lord would never forget his name again.
"So much blood," Torisen murmured, remembering. A lake of it, an ocean, warm at its heart, congealing at the edges: Mullen had been all day at his grisly task and he, Torisen, had sensed none of that slow agony until the end. The flagstones were scrubbed clean now, but Mullen's blood must have seeped down through the cracks to the keep's very foundation.
The entire Kencyrath feeds on Kendar blood, thought Torisen, not for the first time. We so-called Highborn live on it. Was that, too, our god's will? If so, what kind of monster do we serve; and in that service, what kind of monsters have we become? Small wonder that this world hates us, as we so often do ourselves.
No names of the living had slipped out of Torisen's memory since Mullen, but by their anxious faces he knew that they feared it was only a matter of time. Was he truly losing his grip—on the living as well as on the dead?
"What songs do you think they will sing of me?" he asked the wolver pup Yce crouched just inside the door, regarding him with her cold, blue eyes.
"Torisen Black Lord
A fool was he
Knowledge he had
Enough to fill a thimble
And he feared . . . "
Yce had begun to growl softly, stopping him. She didn't like the death banner hall, perhaps because it reeked of old blood and ancient despair.
"You didn't have to follow me in here, you know," he told her.
But she followed him everywhere, usually just out of reach, a small white shadow on huge paws that promised unnerving size as she grew. And, like all her kind, she would soon be capable of assuming an at-least-half human form. Why a feral orphan of the Deep Weald should have attached herself to him, Torisen couldn't guess, unless she sensed that he was an outsider here too, like her.
. . . he can't . . . he can . . . he can't . . .
Trinity, what a nightmare, as bad as the ones he had once stayed awake days, even weeks, to avoid. Somehow, he had recently lost the dubious comfort of knowing when such a dream was coming. Certainly, nothing had warned him nine days ago of what sleep that night would bring.
Wrong. His sister Jame had told him. In the Earth Wife's lodge. While outside dueling wind and volcanic ash had flayed the harvest fields:
"Something terrible happened to our father when he was a cadet at Tentir, at the hands of his brother Greshan. In sleep, in dreams, something keeps shoving me into our uncle's foul skin and you into our father's. To show us. To make us see."
Well, he hadn't wanted to see then, or to remember now, but splinters of memory stuck in his mind like broken glass:
The lordan's quarters at Tentir. Greshan in his gorgeous, filthy coat, lolling drunk on the hearth, greedily watching. Hands gripping his arms and the cold kiss of steel as the knife cut away his clothes. A silken voice murmuring in one ear, a mumble in the other, obscene point and counterpoint:
"Little boys should do as they are told . . . "
"You're weak, and y'know it . . . "
"Your people trust you and you fail them. How many more will slip through your fingers?"
The voices had spoken both to the boy that his father had been and to him as he was now, but somehow lacking, somehow maimed.
. . . cursed be and cast out, blood and bone, you are no son of mine . . .
Then had come his sister's voice, in a purr husky with the Old Blood that ran strong in her veins, sending a chill down his spine: "You will not hurt my brother."
He had barely slept since.
A faint sound made Torisen turn sharply, his free hand leaping up to touch the hilts of the throwing knives concealed in the stiff collar of his dress coat. Finally, he had had time to have new ones forged after wyrm's venom had eaten away the old the previous winter.
"Who's there?"
A trim, gray-clad figure detached itself from the shadows. For a moment, Torisen thought that one of the dead had lost patience and was coming for him; but this specter had no face. Then he saw that it was merely veiled, and under that masked.
"Your pardon, Highlord." The voice was low and soothing, as one might speak to a startled child. "I came to honor an old . . . friend, and lost track of the time."
He knew her now, with her tight-laced, dove-gray gown and eyeless mask, for she had been blind since adolescence, and he saluted her warily. Adiraina, the Ardeth Matriarch, glided forward. As with all proper Highborn ladies, she wore a full outer skirt over a tight undergarment which restricted her steps to a flowing mince. Highborn often lived a century and a half unless violence cut short their lives. Toward the end, many plunged into senility. At one hundred and twenty-odd years, however, Adiraina remained as sharp and full of schemes to advance her house as ever.
As she passed them, some woven faces stood out more clearly than others and seemed to watch her pass: a tiny, white-haired woman with keen, worried eyes; Mullen again; then a girl disturbingly like his sister Jame but with softer features and a thin red line across her throat to indicate where Bashtiri shadow assassins had cut it.
"However . . . " Adiraina paused, the image of demure, elderly innocence. "It did occur to me that, in the absence of my kinsman Ardeth, you might welcome a little . . . er . . . company tonight."
Torisen felt the wolver pup brush again his leg and reached down without looking to restrain her. By reflex she snapped at his hand, but her teeth only brushed his skin. Jame had told her never to bite either one of them, and in that if in nothing else the pup obeyed. Still, she continued to vibrate with menace in his grip as she leaned toward the Ardeth. Her instincts, at least, were good. Damnation. Why hadn't he thought to set a guard at the door?
"Matriarch, the last time you tried to 'help' me, you slipped an aphrodisiac into my wine. The results, I suspect, were not exactly what you had in mind."
Not unless she had expected half the Women's Halls to throw themselves at him or he, on escaping, to be vilely sick behind a bush. Even now, he couldn't enter the Forecourt without Highborn girls crowding the classroom windows above to moon over him. In that context, Caineron's young daughter Lyra Lack-wit was a welcome diversion as she waved furiously and shouted guileless greetings, until one teacher or another dragged her back out of sight. There, too, his sister Jame had certainly left her mark. The Women's Halls were not likely any time soon to forget her forced sojourn with them the previous winter.
Adiraina had the grace to look abashed, as much as one could tell behind the double cover of mask and veil. Then she brushed aside the incident of the drugged wine with an elegant wave of one small hand.
"As I explained at the time, I hoped to clarify your mind. You have been somewhat . . . er . . . distracted since the return of your sister. Such a surprise, of course, to us all, when we thought the Knorth ladies dead."
And a cause for ruthless competition, Torisen thought sourly. One more pure-blooded Highborn in the Knorth stable, which now consisted of two. It was a pity that one couldn't count the Knorth Bastard, Kindrie, Shanir that he was. So, for that matter, was Jame, but that mattered far less than the healer's illegitimacy. Trust his former consort Kallystine to have made that public knowledge. Many of the matriarchs were hot for any match that would give their houses a legitimate half-Knorth heir to the Highlord's seat on his death. He almost regretted putting his sister temporarily out of their reach by making her his heir and sending her to the randon college at Tentir for military training. Anyone who dared to slip her a love potion was apt to get his face ripped off.
Ah, Jame. At least I've placed you beyond harm. Tentir protects its own. I hope. It should at least keep ravening suitors from your door.
Not that he had really expected her to make it this far. The randon college was fiercely competitive, and his sister had been tossed in among the best Kencyr of their generation—mostly Kendar but also a few Highborn such as the Caineron Lordan Gorbel and the Ardeth Timmon. Jame, however, was the only Highborn female. He suspected that she knew how to fight but knew little about her other talents, except that, however apologetically, she left a trail of destruction wherever she went. What else besides the Senethar she might have learned in their years apart, he hardly dared to think. Reports of her progress or lack thereof at Tentir had been oddly garbled, as if Harn hadn't quite known what to say. Jame often had that effect on people. First it had seemed sure that she would fail the Autumn cull. However, according to Harn's last message, she had somehow passed after all by "redeeming the Shame of Tentir."
Torisen had no idea what that last meant, but it sounded ominous.
What had his sister been up to, besides turning the college upside down, running afoul of a rogue rathorn, and nearly getting herself killed?
Meanwhile, Adiraina continued to drift around the hall, obliging him to turn with her.
"You know, my dear, your estrangement from my lord Adric is most unfortunate and, if you will forgive me, ill-advised. Without his help, you would never have survived to claim the Highlord's seat. A nameless boy, arriving out of nowhere . . . who else would have believed you and promoted you to command of the Southern Host, much less stood behind you when you came of age? I had some small part in that. It is my gift, you know, to sense bloodlines by touch. And sometimes degrees of kinship."
Trinity, thought Torisen with a sick jolt, remembering. Last spring, he had invaded the Matriarchs' Council to demand what it had done with his sister. Adiraina had had a cloth stained with Jame's blood from her slashed face, and he had left drops of his own blood on the floor from a reopened cut on his hand. On her knees, touching them both, Adiraina had cried, "Twins! You are twins after all!"
No one had brought up that dangerous matter since, the idea being—on the face of it—absurd, and the implications profound.
But Adiraina moved on smoothly, her warning (if such it was) delivered: "We both only want what is best for you and our people as a whole."
She and Adric probably believed that. Moreover, Torisen had sworn never to hurt his former mentor to whom, truly, he owed much. But to allow the Highlord of the Kencyrath to become an Ardeth puppet . . . he had had enough of that and more as commander of the Southern Host.
"Forgive me for mentioning it, but this winter you will need help. Why the storms should have ravaged your fields worse than anyone else's, no one knows, but surely all your crops except the hay are lost, and winter is coming."
For that tone of sweet reason, he could have strangled her. She thought she had him at last, and perhaps she did.
Torisen hardly knew whether to welcome the distraction or to tear his hair out when the door to the Outer Ward began to scrape open, as if pried by gusts of wind and rain. Sodden leaves scuttled across the stone floor. Nearby death banners flapped in protest while the torch in his hand flared wildly. Then through the widening crack slipped a big cat, no, a hunting ounce, anxious to escape the wet. But what followed him?
Torisen had the fleeting impression of a wraithlike figure clothed only in storm-torn rags, white hair and a cloud of steam rising like smoke off an overheated horse. One dark, liquid eye regarded him nervously askance as the creature slipped sideways along the wall. A raised hand covered the other half of that strange, triangular face. Wary ears pricked through its tangled mane.
I'm dreaming, he thought, with a touch of panic.
Too many near sleepless nights must have caught up with him. Again. Certainly, awake he had never seen such a thing, and he wasn't sure that he was seeing it now.
Then his attention snapped back to the door as a third person entered it, clad in a cadet's field jacket with the hood up against the weather. Ah. Of course. He crossed the room in quick strides to grasp the newcomer by the shoulder. The hood fell back and a coil of long, black hair tumbled over his hand. He saw the quick flash of extended ivory claws, instantly sheathed, for he had startled her.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded.
"Hello to you too."
His sister Jame gave him her usual wry smile, tilted further askew by the thin, straight scar that ran around one high cheekbone. His former consort, the Caineron Kallystine, had given her that, while he had kept to the Southern Wastes to avoid them both. It was a year since Jame had returned, but every time he saw her the difference in their ages shocked him. How had his twin come to be a good decade younger than he was? There was still so much he hadn't asked her, afraid of the answers he might get.
"What have you done with your hair?" he blurted out.
Except for the fallen coil, the rest was looped up in an ornate construction secured by . . . what? Something alive, and moving.
"I've been on the road with someone who likes to play with it."
She waved a gloved hand around her head. "Shoo." Multiple feet let loose. Black wings unfolded and took flight as the rest of her hair tumbled down in a tangled ebon sheet to below her waist. "The randon wants me to cut it, but be damned if I will. It's the only good feature I've ever had."
"Jewel-jaws?"
He stared as the carrion-eating butterflies settled on a nearby banner, changing color as they did so to match the weave and distort the features that they mimicked.
Jame slipped off her jacket and flapped it at them. "I said, 'Shoo.' D'you want to get left behind?"
Wings rose in a swirling cloud and fluttered reluctantly out the door, leaving the banner pocked with tiny holes where old blood had spotted it.
"They're a species called 'crown jewels,' " she explained, "migrating south with their master who should be well on his way by now; and no, 'jaws not withstanding, he isn't dead. Unlike some of our mutual acquaintances."
Movement caught his eye. The blind ounce Jorin was stalking the wolver pup Yce, or perhaps vice versa, around Adiraina's full skirt and rigid form.
"Harn didn't tell you that I was coming, did he?"
"He did not. Again, why are you here?" A roil of emotions—alarm, fear, hope—surprised him. He had almost decided what to do with his sister if . . . when . . . Tentir cast her out. "Did you fail the cull after all?"
"Oddly enough, no. When I left, at a dead run, mind you, the Randon Council seemed to be having a collective fit. At least Harn was jumping up and down in the Map Room, about to smash through the floor." She laughed. "The Commandant keeps asking me not to drive my instructors mad. So far, I've only done it to one of them, and then helped to kill her. A Randir Tempter." Laughter died and her expression hardened, eyes glinting silver. "She deserved it."
"I don't think I would want you for an enemy," Torisen heard himself say.
"Ah." She raised a hand to touch his cheek, but stopped herself as he flinched away from her fingertips, sheathed as they now were. "That I will never be."
Adiraina's voice broke in on them, sharp with outrage. "Have you dared to bring a horse into this sacred place, tonight of all nights? Don't deny it. I smell its sweat."
"For that matter," said Jame, as the ounce nosed around the Ardeth's skirts, more interested in the wolver pup lurking behind them than in the Highborn herself, "I smell yours. Your pardon, Matriarch. I didn't expect to find you here. They say in the Women's Halls that you never attend your own Spring's Eve memorials at Omiroth, so why ours, tonight?
"Anyway, not a horse. A Whinno-hir."
The pale figure had stopped before a banner, that of the tiny, white-haired woman. It seemed to Torisen that they leaned into each other, embracing, but surely that was a trick of the flickering light. Jame crossed over to them, then hesitated, uncharacteristically deferential. The old woman reached out to draw her in, then placed the other's hands in her own gloved ones.
Let the living go with life.
"You're sure, Matriarch?" Jame's voice trembled slightly. "So far, few things have proved safe in my keeping, let alone something so precious."
"My trust in you, great-granddaughter."
I am dreaming, thought Torisen, and gave his head a thump with the heel of his hand. That, or worse.
Jame wrapped her jacket around those slim, steaming shoulders.
"The horse-master at Tentir would never forgive me if you caught a chill, lady. Nine days on the road," she added aside to her brother, "but the first few between Tentir and Wilden, there were . . . problems. We had to gallop the last bit to make it on time, if barely that. Moreover, Bel is recovering from a bowed tendon. But where are my manners? Torisen Black Lord, may I present Bel-tairi, the White Lady, formerly known as the Shame of Tentir through no fault of her own."
Adiraina stiffened, at which the pup charged the ounce and both streaked up the northeast stairwell in a wild scramble of claws.
"Impossible. Bel-tairi was Kinzi's mount, dead these forty years."
"Not dead. Wounded and hiding in the Earth Wife's lodge. Our uncle Greshan put a branding iron to her face, all to spite Great-grandmother Kinzi. Do you know why, Matriarch?"
The old Highborn bristled. "Who could understand such an atrocity? Dear Kinzi and her grandson Greshan quarreled. Such things happen."
"Huh. Like the massacre of the Knorth ladies." Jame paused, as if listening. "Bel, you had better rejoin our boy. He's getting restless and upset."
" 'Our boy'?" Torisen asked, as Bel-tairi slipped past him out the door, shedding the jacket as she went.
"Someone I hope you will meet. Someday. If we don't kill each other first."
As she scooped up the fallen coat and slipped into it, hoofbeats rang outside, their retreating sound quickly swallowed by the boisterous wind.
"I didn't know that the Whinno-hir were shapeshifters," said Torisen, at a loss for anything else to say.
"Neither did I, at first. They don't do it often. It does make one wonder, though, about Lord Ardeth's long relationship with Brithany, Bel's sister."
Adiraina took a hasty stride forward, brought up short by her tight underskirt. "Wretched girl, you dare?"
"I dare many things, lady," said Jame in a level tone. "As well you know. Sometimes right, other times wrong. But I'm good, eventually, at finding out the truth."
"Yes, by breaking things."
"If necessary."
The Ardeth drew herself up. "You are a disgrace to your race and sex."
Torisen stepped between them. "Stop it. This is a night to honor the dead, not to create more by starting new blood feuds."
The Ardeth laughed. "Yes, honor them. If you can remember their names."
Jame had been scanning the attentive ranks. "I can tell you one problem right now: these banners have been rearranged."
Both twins turned to give the blind matriarch a hard look. She couldn't have done it herself, Torisen thought, but she might easily have had help. Another piece of Ardeth trickery, more subtle than drugged wine, but then that had been a hasty improvisation, taking advantage of his unexpected return to Gothregor. He was growing very tired indeed of the Women's World infesting his halls.
"I know some of the names," said Jame, her attention returning to the banners. "The Knorth Kendar at Tentir have been teaching me. That's why Harn sent me, I think." She stopped before Mullen's banner. "But who is this?"
Torisen told her.
"He came to me in a dream," she said, distressed, "and asked me to remember him. But I couldn't. We had never met." She touched the banner gingerly. "These woven strips of leather . . . is this his actual skin, tanned?"
Torisen had never asked or noticed, which shook him. "The Kendar took his body. They have their own customs."
She moved on to the white-haired woman. "And this of course is our great-grandmother Kinzi Keen-eyed, the last Knorth Matriarch, your . . . special friend, Ardeth. These . . . I'm not sure. Our grandfather Gerraint Highlord and his consort Telarien?"
"Token banners," said Adiraina, behind them. "Telarien's was consumed in the fire here, the night that Gerraint died and his son Ganth became Highlord, to the eventual grief of us all. The same flames consumed both Gerraint's and Greshan's bodies, the latter none too soon: he had been five days dead at the time."
For a moment, Torisen almost thought he saw them: his father facing his grandfather over a bloated corpse clad in gilded leather, lying on a pall-draped catafalque. Lips moved. They were arguing. Behind them, avidly listening, stood a slim, veiled lady in black with stars spangling her skirt and behind her, a man dressed as a servant but with a most peculiar expression.
In a blink, they were gone.
Jame's breath caught. Had she also seen that brief, strange apparition? She turned away, looking puzzled, and started again.
"Now what?" he demanded irritably.
"Nothing. I thought I saw banners falling, there, along the eastern wall. No, being ripped down, and behind them . . . what?"
Torisen stared at the wall in question. By tradition, the oldest banners hung there, dating back to the Fall, but again fire and rot had destroyed many while someone more recently had scrambled the rest. Several hung crookedly. One slipped sideways even as he watched and slumped to the floor.
The sight shook him, more than he would have believed possible. Worse was the sudden exposure of the keep's wall beyond. Greshan's pyre had seared it and laced some of the ancient stones with cracks. One had actually exploded as the air pockets in it expanded. The very foundation of his house undermined, breached . . .
"I told you," whispered his father's voice from the depths of his soul, "as my father told me: a dying, failed house we have been, ever since Gerridon betrayed us to the Shadows."
Torisen stared at the ragged hole where the stone had been, which the banner had masked. Over ages, either the hall had sunk or the ground had risen, probably both, to conceal this damage from the outside. A cold wind breathed out of the dark gap as if out of a toothless mouth . . . Hhhaaaa . . . stinking of earth, and death, and hunger. If he stared long enough, what would he see?
"Nothing," said Torisen harshly. "Nonsense." And he went to rehang the fallen tapestry. It was ancient, the survivor of fire and neglect, but only through the tightness of its weave. Its own weight ripped it apart as he lifted it up.
"Try this." Jame had come up behind him, gingerly holding the tanned hide of Mullen's banner at arms' length. "It may be the newest one here, but I think it's also the strongest."
When he raised it to the hook, it neatly filled the gap left by the other's fall, like closing a door against the dark. As he lowered his hands, they brushed against Mullen's woven ones; he could almost feel the latter move, warm and reassuring, under his touch.
Trust me, my lord.
"That's better," Jame said with a sigh of relief as he stepped back; and so it was, never mind why.
She looked around the hall again, back to business. "I don't recognize Greshan here, in token or otherwise, which isn't surprising given how Ganth Gray Lord felt about him, and why. We haven't been fortunate in our uncles, have we?"
Torisen said nothing to that, not knowing what she meant. Besides, she had moved on to another blurred face with strangely anxious eyes. "Negalent Nerves-on-edge, I think, a second, no, a third cousin twice removed, dead on his wedding night of a nosebleed. How embarrassing."
Threads once sodden with blood seemed to droop in relief.
After that, it became easier to remember names. Other houses no doubt had more elaborate rituals to honor this night—surely Adric did at Omiroth—but here it was only the two of them. Torisen began to relax. How much of his distress had been mere fear of failure? As much as his sister disconcerted him, she had a wry way of taking things in stride that was strangely reassuring.
Paws thundered overhead. Yce bounded down the northwest stair, closely pursued. The wolver pup skittered on dank flagstones and was bowled over by the ounce. When Yce wriggled onto her back, Jorin pinned her and began furiously to groom her creamy chest.
Jame had stopped in front of the death banner of the mild-faced girl who in other ways so closely resembled her.
"What's Aerulan doing here? The Brandan were supposed to hold her in perpetuity."
At her sharp tone, ounce and pup looked up, startled, and Torisen's ease shattered. Only when it was gone did he realize that for the past half hour he had almost been happy.
"Lord Brandan sent her back when I refused to accept the price demanded for her contract," he said, suddenly on the defensive although not quite sure why. "Our father asked too much. Besides, the poor girl has been dead these thirty years and more, ever since the Massacre. If Brant still loves her so much, hasn't he earned the right to keep her banner without further grief?"
"It doesn't work that way."
Adiraina was suddenly between them. "I forbid you to speak," she said to Jame, and even Torisen could feel the power behind her words. She was after all not only the Ardeth Matriarch but the leader of the Matriarchs' Council, and her voice that of the Women's World.
His sister had gone back a step, but now she stood her ground. On the wall, her fire-cast shadow darkened. Yce fought free of Jorin. The fur along both creatures' spines rose and they backed away.
"You and your precious secrets," Jame said softly. "Are they worth your adopted daughter's sanity?"
"I said, be quiet."
They were circling each other now, with Torisen hastily moving aside.
"I am not bound by your rules, lady. A winter in your 'care' earned me only this." Jame traced the scar on her cheek with a gloved fingertip. "Whatever else I learned, I took by right of discovery. Still . . . " and here she made an obvious effort to control herself . . . "Tori, you made the Brandan a generous offer, declining payment, especially when our house needs funds so badly to survive the winter. But, believe me, it wasn't a kindness."
"The Jaran Matriarch told me as much just after Summer's Day." Even to himself, Torisen sounded petulant. Dealing with the Women's World set his teeth on edge. Always, there was that unnerving sense of important things left unsaid, of being kept in the dark, out of control.
"Trishien is wise as well as learned, which isn't always the same thing. Did she add that refusing Aerulan's price demeans her in the eyes of someone—anyone—who loves her? And that is a deadly insult."
No, the Jaran hadn't gone that far, but he could almost see it, almost understand. Yet to accept that outrageous fee was to sanction his father's greed.
"You want nothing from me, boy, do you . . . except my power."
The nightmares he had shared with his sister, the obscene things that had happened to his father as a child, that had shaped him into what he had become . . .
"Perhaps we can learn to understand, if not to forgive him," his sister had said. "Either way, we needn't become either our father or our uncle."
But he didn't want to understand, not while there was a locked door in his soul and a mad, muttering voice on the other side.
The stairs behind him led up to the cold comfort of his turret room, as far from the rest of Gothregor as he could get without leaving its walls. He touched his inheritance with mere fingertips, and with loathing; but he had done the best he could for his people this night.
"I've heard enough," he said. "I'm tired. We've named everyone either of us can remember and our duty is done. I'm going to bed."
With that, he turned and climbed, taking the light of his torch with him. The wolver pup Yce sat at the foot of the stair until he was out of sight, then ghosted up the steps after him.