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Chapter VII
Night at Falkirr

The Riverland: Summer 110−111

I

Summer was almost over. The Riverland’s Minor Harvest had come and gone, and with it the Knorth cadets from Tentir who had helped to bring in the hay. It had been a good crop, all the more so because no one had come down with the dreaded hay cough.

Then the rains had stopped.

Torisen Blacklord stood on the cracked clay of the water meadow amid rows of stunted oat, rye, and wheat. Morosely, he scuffed up dust with the heel of his boot. The upcoming Major Harvest at summer’s end looked all but doomed even if now, at last, it should rain.

At this season, as usual, last year’s provisions were running low. Bread was down to dense, dark loaves made of buckwheat. The cows, usually bred in the fall, had run dry. So had the last wheels of cheese before they cracked from dehydration. Last year’s field vegetables, down to wizened relics, were only good after long soaking, the same for such left-over pulses as beans and peas. The garrison was growing heartily sick of soup. How many cows, pigs, and sheep must be slaughtered in the fall, for meat and to preserve the fodder? Some even spoke of the horses.

On the other hand, there were still some ripening vegetables in the inner ward’s garden, painfully watered by hand, also bushels of fruit. Apples in particular had been plentiful to feed man, beast, and the busy cider press.

“Two more weeks for the first batch to ferment,” said the harvest-master at Torisen’s elbow, as if reading his mind. Then again, he might have been considering the jug hanging at his waist, which he had just emptied.

“Well, that’s something.”

“And those mysterious supplies keep coming from your sister’s keep, in season and out. I know, I know: we aren’t supposed to talk about that. Rush might have told us more, if only to boast, but he’s gone.”

“Where?”

“No one is quite sure. He took a post horse. I hear that he turned right on the River Road at the Silver and rode north. There isn’t enough from Tagmeth, anyway, to see us through the winter. When can we expect shipments from Bashti?”

“Soon, I hope.”

“Huh.”

All of the contracts had specified that the first delivery be made by Autumn’s Day. Wagons full of provisions from the other Central Lands had already begun to pass Gothregor on the way to the northern keeps. Presumably others had stopped in the south.

Autumn’s Eve was near.

Torisen didn’t feel that he could complain until that was past, in the meantime hoping for the best. Was his instinct that Mordaunt meant to shirk his duty as paymaster true? Torisen had thought himself worldly-wise after dealing with Kothifir as the Host’s commander, but had he really been? It came hard to think of anyone foreswearing his word. After all, besides the question of honor, what lasting good would it do Mordaunt? What other factors might be involved, and did the king even think along such lines? Torisen was experienced enough to recognize a congenital manipulator. The main thing was that pertinent shipments should arrive before winter closed the Riverland’s roads.

Time enough, he thought, but with a twinge of unease.

Was Harn keeping all of this in mind? Torisen had received a post letter from Jame announcing her arrival in High Bashti, but about Harn she had only written that he continued to be preoccupied. Also, the Bashtiri garrison hadn’t yet been paid. That was to have been according to the half season, with the first payment due on the arrival of the troops, back-dated to midsummer in consideration of the time spent getting there. It wasn’t like Harn to let such a thing slip. What sort of trouble was he in?

What, for that matter, about Jame? Knowing his sister’s knack for mischief, by now there had to be something.

“Ask questions,” she had said.

Trudging back to the keep through dry grass singing with crickets, he considered this. More and more, he found himself restless, his own attention divided. Was this what it meant, to become That-Which-Creates? If so, it made him profoundly uncomfortable. Since when, though, had his comfort been important? He was responsible for his people, for the entire Kencyrath. Now it required something of him, but what?

When he started to open the door to his drum tower study, Burr’s voice spoke within:

“Careful.”

Books slid out, like a paper tongue extending to envelope him. The room beyond was awash with them, and with scrolls piled on every flat surface. Stiff, dry, and musty, their odor likewise rolled out. Burr stood up to his shins in chaos, glowering.

“More arrived today,” he said. “You can’t read all of these.” Himself a traditional Kendar, he couldn’t read at all, but it seemed to be primarily the disorder that offended him.

Torisen stepped in cautiously, groping for the floor.

“Sorry. I got carried away.”

His servant snorted.

The Highlord slung his coat over the stack on his chair, which consequently took on the appearance of a headless, hunched figure with flaccid arms. That was much how he currently felt.

“The scrollsmen claim that they have the answer to everything, if one only asks the right question.”

“Let them sort out tomorrow’s dinner, then,” said Burr.

“We aren’t that desperate yet. Questions, though—those are hard.”

He waded gingerly to the window, perched on the ledge, and bent to pick up a book. Its pages were vellum, crisply inscribed with elegant text. Tiny, vivid figures danced up the margins. Here a hunter scrambled after a hare that jeered back at him over its shoulder; there stood a cook white up to the elbows with flour in the midst energetically of making a pie. They seemed almost to move. He blinked, then closed the book carefully.

“I’m a fool,” he said. “These are treasures, not to be scattered underfoot. I thought, though, that the more I had, the more I would know. Well, I do know more—about hares, about pies—but it’s the wrong knowledge.”

Burr grunted. “This I can tell you: more books won’t help.”

Torisen wished that Harn were there. Admittedly, as a boy he had listened more to the big randon than talked, but he had learned much.

Then he had become Highlord and, to his regret, his relationship with all Kendar had changed.

Then the Riverland had become a closed book to him during the year during which he had been so deathly ill.

His sense was that each house, likewise, had shut up within itself to face a changing world. Divided . . . weakened?

To whom would he talk now, if he could? The Kendar would help him and often did, but they didn’t share the same burdens. Among the Highborn Brant, Lord Brandan, was his closest neighbor, a steady, honorable man with a deep regard for the welfare of those dependent upon him. From the beginning, he had been a Knorth ally. He was also old enough to be Torisen’s father.

That gave Torisen pause. Would consulting him now be like seeking a father’s approval? The thought made him cringe. Both Ganth and Adric had called him “son,” but they had tried mostly to use him. He would have turned to neither of them now. Brant was unrelated and was therefore (Ancestors, please) different.

Absentmindedly, he reopened the book, on the same page that he had closed it. The hare had scampered off. The pie had been baked and eaten, its cook grinning widely, replete. Torisen returned the volume to the floor, which rustled to receive it.

“Pack up,” he said to Burr, rising, his mind already on new details. “We’re going to pay Falkirr a visit.”

Burr looked dubious. “That last trip to Omiroth didn’t work out so well.”

“My sister was with us then.”

But Jame had suggested that the Tyr-ridden might manifest themselves across all three faces of their god before the end. Dari slain by Torisen’s own sword, Adric on his pyre . . .

“Oh, cheer up,” he said, bracing himself.

If I had stopped to think too much,” his sister had said, with that rueful, lop-sided smile of hers, “might I have done nothing at all, for good or ill?”

There was an urgency in her that pushed him, as it always had. Did he resent it? Yes. But that didn’t mean that she was wrong.

Across the room, on the chair, his empty coat shivered as if with anticipation, but could not raise its arms.

“Brant is my oldest friend, now that Adric is dead,” he said to Burr. “What could go wrong?”

II

By early afternoon they were on the road with a small, armed escort, the latter at Burr’s insistence. Torisen wondered what he feared, then dismissed the thought. Surely things hadn’t become as dire as that, on the common road. He hadn’t wanted to stand on any ceremony whatsoever, even declining to send a messenger ahead to warn Lord Brandan of his approach. He wasn’t nervous, he told himself. There was simply no need to put undue stress on this visit. In the meantime, it was pleasant to escape Gothregor’s gray walls for a while. Here the swaying gait of the horses was soothing, the air crisp, and the hillsides painted all the shades of impending fall.

That reminded him: it was only days until Autumn’s Eve when he was honor bound to recite all the names of the death banners in the old keep’s lowermost hall. The family dead must be remembered or they would crumble, not that some already weren’t as tapestries decayed and the dried blood that held soul to weave flaked away. He hadn’t been aware of the latter connection until Jame had learned of it and given many banners to the torch to free the souls trapped within them. The ones that remained, presumably, wanted to stay, or at least he hoped so. To them, at least, he owed a duty.

How had he gotten through that task last year with his mind addled by illness? Harn, Burr, and Rowan must have helped. Again, he was reminded of that lost year. While Jame had been proving herself at Tentir, he feared that he had lost ground in the Riverland as a whole.

The sun had set beyond the western Snowthorns by the time they reached Falkirr. Brant’s steward said that his lord was still in the fields but would be summoned at once. Then he showed Torisen into a reception room and left him there with a bottle of wine. Torisen wondered if his stiff manner indicated disapproval. Perhaps it hadn’t been such a good idea after all to arrive unannounced.

He had poured himself a glass of wine and was sipping it by the window when the Brandan Matriarch Brenwyr burst into the room. At the sight of him, she stopped so suddenly that her heavy skirts rushed past her, then rustled back into place. She was wearing the divided riding skirt that so offended her fellow matriarchs, also boots, also a boxy, shabby jacket, also the customary mask of a Highborn lady. Her eyes glared through the latter, brown tinged with red. With an effort, Torisen refrained from falling back a step, which would have tumbled him over the low window sill into the garden beyond.

“My lady,” he said, bowing.

Now he remembered at least one reason why a visit to Falkirr could be dangerous. Brenwyr was a Shanir maledight, whose curses could kill. She had cursed his sister.

“‘Rootless and roofless,’” Jame had said, with a shaky laugh. “‘Curséd be and cast out.’ That hasn’t happened yet, thanks to Tagmeth, but who knows?”

Dying, his father Ganth had said much the same thing to him: “Curséd be and cast out. Blood and bone, you are no son of mine.” But he had called him son again, before the end, when he had begged to be set free from the sterile wasteland of Torisen’s soul-image where his own self-hate had trapped him.

“So,” said Brenwyr now. She tried to speak calmly, but sounded half strangled. “You have come at last.”

“Er . . . ”

“Did my brother summon you? He worries about me, you know. He should not. While I have her, I am safe.” Her thin lips jerked up at the corners. “Wine?”

“Of course.” He poured her a glass which she took, but made no move to drink.

She paced before him, skirts swishing, wine sloshing over her gloved hand. “Imagine! He even keeps servants out of my rooms and does their tasks himself, as if I would harm them, as if I would not notice. You know what they call me.”

“The Iron Matriarch, lady, for your self-control.”

“Also, the Maledight. I killed my own mother. Did they tell you that? She railed at me because I chose to wear boys’ clothing and she took them away. I cursed her. She tangled in their threads, storming down the stair, and broke her neck. ‘Breathe!’ I told her, but she could not. Ah! Cross me and I will curse you too.” She clutched the bulky coat tight to her spare form. “Aerulan is mine, I say, and always will be!”

Brant entered abruptly and pulled up sharp. He wore a tunic dusty from the fields. His face was as brown as a Southron’s from the sun, creased before its time with care.

“Sister, you should rest.”

“But Aerulan . . .”

“Let her rest with you.”

Brenwyr smiled at him and went out, hunched, hugging herself.

Lord Brandan poured himself a cup of wine and gulped it down.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that I was coming,” said Torisen.

“It doesn’t signify, although I might have kept her out of your way.”

“About Aerulan . . .”

“She thinks that you mean to reclaim her, never mind the dowry that we continue to pay for her perpetual contract.”

It was indeed a prodigious sum which might, with caution, sustain Gothregor over at least the fall, if Jame didn’t draw too heavily on her portion of it.

“I appreciate that.”

Brant gave him a crooked smile. “I would guess that you do. King Mordaunt is slow in his payments, is he not?”

“You expected this?”

“Not so, exactly, but Mordaunt has always been peculiar and parsimonious. I should have warned you.”

He well might have, thought Torisen. Then again, that was the sort of information he should have learned on his own.

Ask questions.

“In what way is he peculiar?”

“There are stories. Ever since he was a boy, people say that he has been obsessed with death and immortality. Then too, he grew up in the shadow of his grandfather, General Suwaeton, whom he feared and hated. Mordaunt didn’t much like his father, either, for not standing up to the old man. Suwaeton died, and was popular enough to be deified—as king of their gods, no less. Not so his son, who died soon after. That left Mordaunt as mortal king. The timing of both deaths was thought to be suspicious.”

“And this, somehow, leads to Mordaunt not paying his bills?”

“Presumably he has other expenses that he considers more pressing. Myself, I don’t understand Bashtiri politics, much less their religion.”

They ate later, figs stuffed with cinnamon eggs, a beef roast garnished with leeks, a damson tart. None of these were soup, Torisen was glad to note. Brenwyr dined in her own apartment, also to his relief.

Brant poured more wine.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” he said. “Has Lord Caineron sent you any messengers?”

“Not one.”

“He has to me, repeatedly. Once, even, he sent his uncle and chief advisor, Lord Corrudin, who wanted to know where I stood on the issue that larger Kencyr houses should have more power than smaller ones.”

The Brandan was the fourth largest house, the Knorth seventh or eighth, depending on who counted. Torisen had thought that matter settled. Apparently not.

“How is Lord Corrudin?”

“He still prefers enclosed spaces as I found, after meeting him in the reception room where I met you. Did your sister really . . . ”

“Yes. He gave her an obscene order regarding a Kendar. She told him to back off and he did, out a second story window.”

Lord Brandan smiled. “He’s still doing it, if on the ground floor this time. That didn’t help his dignity, or his nephew’s case. I wonder, though . . .”

“What?”

Brant fiddled with the tart. “Does it really work, that smaller houses should rule larger ones? In the beginning, the Knorth was the most powerful. Did that determine its rank? A Highlord was chosen from among its ranks, in any event, and so served for millennia. Then came Master Gerridon’s Fall, then Ganth Graylord’s retreat after the White Hills. Whom were we supposed to follow after that?”

“You chose Ganth’s son.”

“Yes, I did.”

Torisen regarded his cup. He was used to cider. This potent vintage threatened to go to his head.

“If the biggest house was to rule,” he said, listening to his words, glad to hear that they didn’t slur, “that means the Caineron. Would you prefer Caldane as Highlord to me?”

Brant made a face. “That’s the sticking point, isn’t it? No. For one thing, you are by far the better man. How not? The Kendar and the randon raised you, wherever you came from before that.”

He paused, regarding his guest over the lip of his cup, one eyebrow raised. Torisen didn’t reply. His sister might have secrets, but so did he.

“For another,” Brant continued, “our god chose the Knorth to lead us. I’m traditional that way, whatever I think of our subsequent fate. The Arrin-ken might depose you, but not that clown Caldane. There’s something wrong with that man, and it’s getting worse. I won’t soon forget the trick he played with the hidden clauses in the contracts or the way he reneged on his word to the Transweald and the Midlands. He smiles and smiles, but what he says doesn’t always make sense. His latest message hinted that he believes you to have failed and that ‘the divine mandate,’ as he calls it, has passed to him. How could it be otherwise? He trusts I have the wisdom to see that, for the sake of my house.”

“Threats?”

“Veiled, but there. Behind him in order of size stand the Ardeth. What do you think of their new boy lord?”

Torisen shrugged. “I hardly know. My sister trained with Timmon at Tentir. She had mixed feelings, the last time we spoke. He’s spoiled and raised to be trivial, but there’s something there. Jame considers him potentially worth saving, in her words, if he ever manages to escape his mother.”

“Then there are the Randir, and another mother. Distan is silly, Ancestors know, but Rawneth is poisonous and powerful. I also fear that she pulls Caldane’s strings.”

“How?”

“By flattery. By hinting that she knows deep secrets. This is the Witch of Wilden, after all, who has ambitions of her own. Now they say that she also has a new councilor who whispers to her that one need never die. Deathless. I know that because my sister has received honeyed letters from her, referring to Aerulan.”

“You permit that?”

Brant gave him a level look. “Brenwyr is her own mistress. Yes, I protect her when I can, but I also respect her. You, I think, have not always done the same with Jameth.”

Torisen shifted uneasily in his chair. “True. She is . . . so much younger than I am and, I thought, so different. I didn’t trust her at first.” No, nor any Shanir. That was their father’s work. “She still scares me. But I made her my heir, and sent her to Tentir, and to Tagmeth, and, now, to the Central Lands as my emissary, with my mandate. Yes, I respect her that much. All the time, though, I have never known what she will do next.”

They talked more, into the night, then parted. Torisen was shown to a guest apartment where Burr waited by candlelight to relieve him of his court coat and boots. Wine and fatigue made his head spin. So did the realization that the Riverland had indeed been talking, but not to him. It had been good, however, to discuss matters with someone so much older and, presumably, wiser than himself, although in many ways Brant’s life seemed simple compared to his own.

Shanir, whispered the memory of his father in his mind. See what you get for embracing the Old Blood.

“What choice did I have? She is my sister.”

You are yourself.

“And your son. You were a Shanir blood-binder too, and tried to bind me.”

Ah, ha-ha-ha. How do you know that it didn’t work?

Torisen sat bolt upright in bed. “It didn’t,” he muttered to himself, dashing sweat from his brow. “I know that it didn’t.”

Burr snored on a pallet at his feet.

The fire had burned low on the hearth, leaving the chill of stone walls like those of a cave despite the late summer heat outside.

Someone had cried out, a familiar voice in distress, but whose? Let the Brandan deal with it? This, after all, was their house. However, such inarticulate pain required an immediate response. Somebody needed something of him. Rising, he went out into the hall.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

Silence answered, then a sound like a distant hoarse sob. The voice spoke again, angry now, still indistinct but in a tone that pricked his nerves with warning. He turned left, toward it, into a portion of Falkirr unfamiliar to him.

Graded candles lit the walls at intervals, burning down the hours of the night. Doors, closed. Then one that stood partly open.

Click, click, click went heels inside, pacing.

Torisen entered warily. Within was a spacious room. It would have been luxurious, but most of its furniture had collapsed into piles of rubble on the floor. Brenwyr trod between them, hunched over, clutching herself or rather the frayed ruins of her coat.

“You took her from me,” she railed. That was the angry voice he had heard, half choked with grief. “You slit her throat. I cursed you. ‘Shadow, by a shadow be exposed.’ And so it was. Then that little Knorth bitch summoned the dark Kencyr and he opened up the seams of your being, cut by cut, until your guts spilled out on the floor. Was that enough? No. Someone paid the price for her death, and Kinzi’s, and all of the rest. The Knorth Massacre, they call it. But I only care about her. Oh, Aerulan!”

Torisen understood some of this, but not all. By flickers he saw someone pressed against Brenwyr’s back, arms around her waist. No, not arms: rather, tattered cords like the warp threads of a death banner.

“Where is her blood price?” Brenwyr cried, beating her breast. Flakes of dried blood rattled down on the floor. Fragile weft strands of fabric disintegrated. The warp threads tried to restrain her, but could not.

Brenwyr stumbled blindly against one of the remaining tables.

“Rot you!” she cried.

The table groaned and slumped. Its top cracked. Its legs crumbled into dust, dumping it onto the floor.

“Don’t!” Torisen protested, stepping forward.

He was pushed out of the way by Lord Brandan, who threw his arms around his sister and hugged her, to a further cascade of flakes.

“Don’t you see?” said Torisen. “The tighter you cling, the more the tapestry disintegrates. Can life embrace death? This is the destruction that you both fear.”

Brenwyr glared at him. “Damn you . . . ” she began, but her brother clamped a hand over her mouth. She fought him. Blood trickled down from between his fingers. In her savage grief, she had bitten either them, her own lips, or both.

“Get out,” Brant said to Torisen over Brenwyr’s shoulder. He might have spoken in anger or impotent despair. “Just go.”

Torisen backed out, then returned to his room.

“Wake up,” he said to Burr, shaking him. “We’re leaving.”

Burr blinked at him. “What, in the middle of the night?”

“Yes. Now. I think that I was just almost cursed by a maledight.”


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