In the absolute dark that the Highlord left behind, Jame let out her breath in a long sigh. "Well."
"Do you think so?"
"Not really."
Voice answered voice in the rustling void. Kencyr have good night vision, but not without some light.
"I am no stranger to the dark, you know," said the blind matriarch.
"And I have a very good visual memory."
A feline screech, a muffled curse.
"You were saying, my dear?"
"I was apologizing to Jorin for stepping on his paw. And I apologize to you too, lady, if I was rude. But truly, the secrets of the Women's World aside, couldn't someone have told my brother enough to make him understand? This second loss of Aerulan is driving Brenwyr mad. Sweet Trinity, she's your sisterkin by way of Kinzi and a Shanir maledight. Her curses kill. How long d'you think she can restrain them?"
"Brenwyr is strong. I taught her to be."
That, Jame had to admit, was true. Most maledights died young, either by suicide or at the hands, in self-defense, of their own kin. Brenwyr believed that she had accidentally killed her own mother. Perhaps she had. Only great self-control had allowed her to survive a torturous childhood and adolescence. However, Jame had been drawn into Brenwyr's soul-image where the so-called Iron Matriarch endlessly paced and raged:
"Aerulan, sisterkin, you gave me strength, and love, and then you died. And now must I lose your banner too? He tossed you to me, ancestors damn him, like a bone to a dog! The insult, the shame . . . "
"Oh yes, she is strong," said the matriarch's voice, from a different part of the hall. She was moving about in the freedom of her eternal night, the swish of her gown swallowed by the restless stir of banners in the wind that soughed under the keep's two doors. Before, Jame could have tracked her through Jorin's senses, but the ounce had retreated in a sulk to nurse his sore paw.
Something filmy brushed across her face, making her start.
A light laugh sounded almost in her ear: "Nervous, girl, here before your ancestors in those shameless clothes, with that naked, despoiled face? The last Highborn female—I will not say lady—of a house nearly extinct."
That teasing touch again. Jame snatched, and caught a wisp of cloth. Adiraina's veil. She almost executed a fire-leaping leg sweep in hopes of tripping the woman, but restrained herself: cold stone would not be kind to such old bones. Besides, she felt dizzy and oddly breathless, as if all the room's air was bleeding away even though the draft from under the two doors chilled the clammy sweat breaking out on her face. Dark as it was, images flickered about her as they had when, for a moment, she had thought she glimpsed Greshan on his bier. Two men arguing over a bloated corpse, a woman watching, a third man in the shadows whose face kept twisting, changing . . .
Surely I know that woman, thought Jame. Something about her avid eyes and smile before such a terrible sight . . . Rawneth, young and ravenous with ambition. What had she been doing here, that night?
Then the Randir's gaze had abruptly shifted and caught Jame eye to eye. Her smile had deepened, with a hint of sharp, white teeth.
Scapegrace, spoiled goods. Forget.
She saw me, Jame thought, shaken anew. She was here, both in the past and in the present. She told me to forget her and, until this moment, I had.
Her head swam. What had she been trying to remember?
Adiraina's voice jerked back her attention. "Brenwyr will be stronger still when she finally lets Aerulan go. To remember the dead, to mourn them, yes, but not to embrace them. Let the living go with life."
"You heard that?"
"Yes. No!"
Now Jame's heart was pounding in her throat and she thought she saw stars . . . no, faint constellations of light against the walls across which Adiraina's slim, dark form moved like a cloud rack obscuring the night sky.
"What Gerridon left of your house, Ganth Gray Lord destroyed, and with it the Kencyrath's future as it had been foretold."
Sway, turn, hand arched just so . . . despite her tight underskirt and age, the old Highborn was dancing. Her voice wove as if in a dream through her tiny, flowing steps, through darkness and spectral light.
"We floundered, lost, abandoned. You have no idea what a nightmare that was. Honor . . . who could define it anymore? The strong learned to prey upon the weak, house on house, Highborn on Kendar, male on female. Everything was falling apart, yet not quite. Ganth still lived, though in exile, and then his son, hidden by my Lord Ardeth among the Southern Host. Their mere existence sustained us, or so I believe. Then, finally, Torisen stepped forward to claim his inheritance and we awoke. Our god had abandoned us, but one of his chosen had returned. A new beginning, we thought, a new direction.
"Then you appeared, out of nowhere, out of nothing. We tried to make you one of us. The Women's World bears the scars of that encounter, even as you do. And now, what?"
"Lady . . . please . . . "
"Shhhh."
The sound slithered around Jame's throat and began to tighten. She fell to her knees. One part of her mind noted, This is a wind-blowing technique. I didn't know that the Senetha could be used this way.
Another part thought, If that witch comes near me again, I'm going to break both of her legs.
And a third, barely an incredulous whisper: . . . she's killing me . . .
"I could not see how you looked at one another when you first met tonight," that smooth, soft voice continued, "but I could hear. You cut, so as not to kiss."
Something dripped onto the floor between Jame's hands, spattering them. Her nose had started to bleed.
"If you were twins, according to the custom of your house you would already be consorts and perhaps between you have bred a third of your pure blood. Then, finally, the Tyr-ridan might have come to complete our fate. And you are twins, are you not, despite the difference in your ages. I sensed it when I touched your blood. You are also a nemesis but not the Nemesis, for there is no third to balance you."
As Jame's blood sank into a crack between the flagstones, lines of pale light spread outward from it, limning the stones' edges. She knelt on the edge of the pool formed when Mullen had shed his life's blood.
"I think, if you were to become your brother's mate, you would destroy him. I think you may anyway. Then will come chaos, far, far worse than anything that has ever happened before, worse even than the Fall, and everything will fall apart. Before that, better that you should die . . . "
Her voice faltered.
Looking up, Jame saw Mullen, or rather a woven patchwork of light seemingly without a head, for in death his face had been unmarked. His burly arms circled something slim and dark, without touching it. The Ardeth Matriarch stood absolutely still by the eastern wall, within that phantom, restraining embrace.
"What is it?" she asked, barely above a whisper. "Who is it?"
"The guardian of the hall, newly appointed." Trinity, was that croak her voice? "Hello, Mullen."
Jorin crept to her side, chirping anxiously. She fended him away from her spilt blood with an elbow, then rose unsteadily, wiping her nose on her sleeve. She could see them all now, those who had died in a welter of their own gore, standing around the edge of the room; or rather she could see the dim light emanating from those spots on their death banners where the blood still clung. They were all watching her.
"Adiraina and I were sisterkin." Kinzi's voice was a thin, red thread, weaving through Jame's mind. "Forgive and let go."
"Huh," said Jame, but she nodded to the Kendar and he stepped back.
The Ardeth Matriarch wrapped thin arms around herself as if to contain her shivering. "What is happening? I don't understand."
"Lady, you said that Brenwyr should give up Aerulan's banner, just walk away. Well, she can't. Death isn't that simple."
A harsh laugh answered her, a crack to the heart's core. "Child, what do you know of grief or of death?"
"Less and less, the more I learn, or so it seems. Lady, have you ever touched a death banner?"
"Once. My mother's. What I saw then . . . it blinded me. I never saw anything again, except what the blood of the living shows me. Old blood, cold blood, dead blood . . . abomination. Ancestors be praised that the pyre sets free all souls."
"Does it? Lady, think. We burn flesh and bone, but what about blood? Many of these banners are saturated in it. Mullen's. Kinzi's. Aerulan's . . . "
"What are you suggesting?"
" 'The dead know what concerns the dead.' Kinzi told me that when we met in the soulscape's Moon Garden. 'My unfortunate granddaughter Tieri is dead, and so am I. While our blood traps us, we walk the Gray Land together, two of a silent host.' Lady, what else could she mean? And what is the Gray Land?"
"Nothing. Nowhere. Do you claim, now, to be a soul-walker, or do dreams stalk you as they do your brother? Mad, the both of you. The dead are at peace. Tell me no more!"
Jame sighed. She was tired of people who didn't ask questions and wouldn't listen to answers. God's claws, she was simply tired. "As you wish, lady."
By the firefly light of that host of trapped souls, she made her way to the eastern door, opened it and stepped through with Jorin on her heels. Her last glimpse of the interior showed Adiraina standing rigidly still, hands over her ears, surrounded by the dead.
Outside in the Forecourt of the Women's World, Jame leaned against the closed door of the death banner hall, loosening the collar of her shirt as she waited for her pulse to calm. The last night of summer was warmer than the hall's interior, if more boisterous and fitfully spitting rain. Her clothes already felt drenched with clammy sweat and the wind swirled her loosened hair up into her face where strains of it stuck and clung.
Had Adiraina really meant to kill her?
Torisen had warned them not to start a new blood feud by slaughtering each other, but he hadn't seriously thought that they would. Surely Adiraina wouldn't have been so foolish . . . or so desperate? Jame kept forgetting how involved others were in her relationship to the Highlord, and how important various aspects of it were to the Kencyrath as a whole. Trinity, as if it wasn't hard enough to sort things out just between the two of them.
And what to do about all of those other souls caught like flies in the ancient, tattered web of their mortality? Get someone to utter the pyric rune and spark another indiscriminate holocaust? That, surely, must have been what happened when Greshan's corpse burned, along with all the other blood-stained banners in the hall at the time. Not everyone would want to go up in flames, though, and risk being forgotten. Certainly not poor Mullen.
Take the rest down to the river and beat them on rocks until they were washed clean and stopped whimpering?
She would have to ask Great-grandmother Kinzi about it, but not tonight, and with no guarantee of getting a helpful answer. The haunt singer Ashe had once told her that the dead knew what concerned the dead. Jame's sense, though, was that what concerned the dead didn't necessarily extend to the living whom they had left behind. Moreover, without a strong incentive and a stronger will, she suspected that all souls eventually faded away, like sinking deeper and deeper into the dementia that seized so many Highborn in extreme old age. A living death or death in life . . . ugh. No wonder most preferred the clean, quick oblivion of the pyre, so much so that some went to it still alive, when they felt their minds failing.
Just the same, something had happened in that hall, the night of Greshan's unceremonious pyre. Why had Gerraint been ripping banners off the eastern wall? What had been that gaping, breathing darkness behind them where there should only have been ancient stone or, at worst, innocent earth?
But she knew, from experience she would rather not possess. Gerraint had allowed Perimal Darkling to breach that chamber, ancestors only knew why. Rathillien was thin, there by the eastern wall, like parts of the palace at Karkinaroth, like the White Hills, with the Shadows pressing hard against a barrier weakened by her own people's refusal to believe that it still existed, and by the apparent reluctance of the Four who embodied Rathillien to take the Shadows seriously.
At the fringes of this world, in the Haunted Lands and the Southern Wastes, such a threat was understandable, but here, in her family's most sacred space?
Sweet Trinity, what had happened to bring that about . . . and why was she sure that that bastard Greshan was somehow at the root of it?
It was Greshan's quarters at Tentir all over again, a room full of bad memories trying to reveal themselves to her in nightmare visions. The last time she had had to drug herself with that vile green liquor, otherwise good for etching stone, to get at the truth. This time, perhaps it would be easier, but not by much. Why couldn't someone from the past simply write her a letter?
"Dear Jame: Sorry for the inconvenience. This is what really happened . . . "
Her nose was bleeding again. As she snuffled wetly into her sleeve, a dark figure limped quickly across the Forecourt toward her. Rowan, her brother's steward. The Knorth Kendar must have been watching both doors, hoping to catch her on her way out.
Glass crunched under the randon's boot. This must be where the shards of the great, stained glass window had fallen when she had summoned the wind and blown it out. Not that she had had much choice at the time: shadow assassins had been after her and had already half paralyzed her by their touch. The sudden blast had not only sent banners flying from the hall below but had ripped free the assassins' shadow-cast souls, killing them with the shock. They had only been boys, apprentices sent for their first blooding on a mission to close an old contract on the Knorth ladies. They had been told that it would be an easy kill. No one had expected their target to be a Shanir nemesis.
No matter that she was only a few years older than those unfortunate apprentice assassins. In experience, she felt ancient.
Darinby was right, she thought, rubbing her eyes, remembering a friend from what seemed like a different life. To some, I am a baited trap.
"Lordan, are you injured?"
At the randon college, Jame was only a first-year cadet and Rowan an officer, but here she was also the Highlord's heir. She waved off the Kendar and pinched the bridge of her nose to stop the flow. " 'm fine, but keep back: 'm a blood-binder."
Rowan stopped short. Her scarred face never registered emotion, but every line of her lean form turned wary. "Do they know that at Tentir?"
"Since the first week, when Brier Iron-thorn knocked out one of my front teeth." She released her nose and sniffed cautiously. So far, so good. "Luckily, no one touched the blood, and the tooth grew back."
"Then if you could spare a few minutes, Lordan, please accompany me to the common room. The garrison would like to meet you."
What Rowan meant was that the other Knorth Kendar wanted to be sure that she knew all of their names. Kept sequestered in the Women's World during her winter here, she hadn't had the chance to meet many of her brother's people. Now, however, she was his declared heir, and that changed everything.
Jame sighed. She had the highly trained memory of most Kencyr, but it already felt stuffed full and groaning at the seams. Still, maybe Marc would be there. How good it would be to see the big Kendar again and to talk over with him his plans to rebuild the keep's stained glass windows. Never mind that he had never tackled such a project before; all his long life as a reluctant warrior, he had only wanted to create. It was kind of Tori to let him try, especially after Marc had refused to accept a formal place in the Highlord's establishment.
Waiting for you, lass . . .
As if her brother were ever likely to let her set up an establishment of her own, much less formally bind Kendar to her service. She knew only too well how much he feared the strength of her Shanir blood. Although they were twins, it wasn't even clear which of them had been born first, not that that mattered in a society that saw its Highborn females primarily as breeding stock.
Inside the hall at her back, all was quiet. It would be just her luck if Adiraina had dropped dead of a heart attack. On the other hand, if the matriarch started screaming, presumably Torisen would feel obliged to do something about it.
"All right," she said to Rowan as she caught her wind-tossed hair, half of it still tangled in fancy braids, and twisted it into a knot. After all, there must be no more forgotten names, like poor Mullen's. "I have something to do first, though. I'll meet you and the garrison within the hour—sooner, if I can. Gari should already be there and, I hope, made welcome."
"Lordan . . . " The steward's voice held all the perturbation that the damaged muscles of her face could not show. "You took your time on the road. Word arrived days ago of events at Tentir on the night of the cull when the stones were cast." She glanced toward the halls of the Randir Women's World where, even at this hour, some windows showed lights and moving silhouettes. "They've clenched in on themselves like a fist over there, especially the Kendar guards, just waiting for someone to hit."
Jame tightened the knot with a jerk. "If they've heard, then they know that their Shanir Tempter earned her death, grisly as it was. She didn't just try to assassinate a fellow randon within the college's very walls; she suborned cadets to help her. All paid for it."
And she told Rowan about the grim harvest that they had delivered to the pyre at Wilden.
"We heard something about that," said Rowan, who had been listening in bleak silence. The dead cadets might belong to another house and one reckoned an enemy by the Knorth, but the loss of any young Kendar was a grief to all. "The Danior of Shadow Rock kept watch on Wilden from across the river that night, although they aren't sure what they saw."
Jame paused, remembering. "Something remarkable," she said, and told the rest of her story.
"Strange indeed," said Rowan, after a perplexed pause. "What do you make of it?"
"Not much, except that the Witch did something so terrible to those cadets that her own people nearly rebelled. That house is more flawed than I realized. You might tell my brother," she added, hearing the bitterness in her voice, hating it, "if you can get him to listen."
With that, she scooped up Jorin to spare his paws from random splinters in the grass and slipped away into the midnight halls of the Women's World.