Chapter X
Among the Ladies
Gothregor: Autumn 20
Crickets sang in the dry grass and jumped before Torisen’s boots. The major grain harvest was over. Ploughing had begun for the winter crops, not that seed preserved from the recent harvest looked very good. Still, the husbandry-men would try. In the meanwhile, thrashing had begun.
Torisen walked up the broad outer steps, through the shadow of the massive main gate flanked by drum towers, into Gothregor’s sunlit inner ward, turned into a sprawling vegetable garden.
This latter at least flourished, thanks to laborious watering by hand during the drought from the keep’s deep wells. Tomatoes and green beans were already being picked, cauliflower, broccoli, and peppers likewise. Most of the root vegetables—beets, carrots, potatoes, parsnips, and onions—were still in the ground and would remain so until the first light frost. Then most would go into the root cellars, if they weren’t pickled or dried like the fruit already there. Turnips had been harvested and reseeded for an early winter crop. Meanwhile, the garrison enjoyed a second summer’s table stocked with any damaged produce that couldn’t survive storage.
Would there be enough left to last the winter, though? Torisen hoped so, but doubted it.
No supplies had yet arrived from High Bashti, nor any word from King Mordaunt.
Torisen had hesitated to comment on this state of affairs before Autumn’s Eve. He hated to write letters anyway, even to his sister. Now he must. To Mordaunt. To Harn. Jame had informed him by post rider of the chaos on Autumn’s Eve and Day. Mordaunt appeared to have problems of his own. She had also mentioned the upcoming games between the Knorth and the Brandan in the Transweald and the stakes involved there. Torisen could threaten to withdraw his troops if they weren’t paid. That would get Harn out of whatever fix the Commandant had foreseen and would also give Mordaunt a well-deserved black eye. If the king forfeited the contest, though, would that give Pugnanos permission to invade the Weald? Grimly, Yce, and the other wolvers came to mind, as formidable as they were. Certainly, it would cut off Gothregor’s chance of supplies.
“Mordaunt and I seem to have each other by the throat,” he muttered.
A flash of yellow among the tomatoes caught his eye. At the nub where ripe fruit had been picked, new flowers bloomed. That was odd, so late in the season. So was the size of many tomatoes still growing on the vine, and a rich crop of greenlings close behind them. He had heard rumors of such things—feathery carrot tops six feet tall, hinting at massive taproots below; ponderous, dappled melons; a cucumber as long as a man’s arm and twice as thick. . . .
For the first time, Torisen wondered if his own creative powers had finally begun to play a constructive role, assuming nothing untoward lurked within these glossy skins. Jame had told him about her misadventure with raising bread in Tai-tastigon, laughing at it but also grimacing, as well she might. The Tyr-ridan’s gifts often came with a twist, as he had already learned for himself, such as thistles erupting from a privy. As for the garden, there were rumors that some over-ripe vegetables had become carnivorous and gone rogue. No one walked there at night if they could help it.
The horn at the north gate sounded. Someone of note was entering—a friend, by the lilting note. Torisen followed the northern walk between beet leaves, green veined with ruby red, to see who it was.
A horse guard rode into the upper end of the ward, escorting a masked lady on a gray palfrey. By her erect carriage, Torisen recognized her as Dianthe, the Danior Matriarch, thus his distant cousin. Other members of the Women’s World had begun to drift back over the past few weeks, as if draw from their homes to this communal hearth. Maybe the randon felt similarly about Tagmeth, or priests about their dank college at Wilden, each a little world of its own within the greater whole. Karidia and Yolindra, matriarchs of the Coman and the Edirr, were also here, plaguing him whenever they could catch him about their houses’ quarrels, of which he had become increasingly tired. Adiraina of the Ardeth had also arrived, although Torisen hadn’t yet sought her out. What she had to say to him in the wake of Adric’s death he didn’t want to hear. She, likewise, hadn’t acknowledged him.
To his regret, Trishien hadn’t yet returned. He missed her advice.
In general, he didn’t know how the Women’s World now regarded him after their previous unceremonious exodus. The game, he felt, had changed, but exactly how?
He reached the visitors in time to offer his hand to Dianthe as she slid down from her mount. Given her traditional tight underskirt, she perforce rode side-saddle.
“My lady, welcome back.”
“My lord cousin,” she said, holding his hand, then self-consciously releasing it.
He smiled at her. He and the Danior, in general, dealt well with each other.
“To what do we owe the honor of your return?”
“I heard that my dear Adiraina was in residence, and so I see that she is. Here she comes now.”
The Ardeth Matriarch had appeared in the gateway that led beside the old keep back into those halls claimed by the Highborn ladies as the Women’s World. Clad in a pearl-gray gown with a full, rippling skirt and a tight under-shift that reduced her steps to a mincing glide, she was as neat and trim as Torisen remembered although, it seemed, smaller. He was reminded, with a pang, that she was nearly as old as her kinsman Adric had been. If that needle-sharp mind also ended in dementia, what a tragedy.
She and Dianthe clasped hands. Their finger-tips moved delicately against each other’s wrists—another more intimate form of communication, perhaps? He understood that they had been friends for a long time.
Over-burdened, Dianthe burst out in speech: “And when Rawneth said that, of course, I had to leave. My dear, what advice can you give me?”
The horse guards were listening, although they turned their eyes away.
Torisen stepped in.
“Perhaps you will both join me for refreshments in the Council Chamber,” he said to them. “My own quarters, alas, are too small to host such distinguished visitors. Nutley has baked strawberry tarts this morning, that crop being ripe. They should just be out of the oven.”
Adiraina bridled. Her eyes, embroidered in silk and jewels on her blind mask, seemed to flash.
“We would be honored,” said Dianthe quickly, to douse that flame. Of course. She was bone-kin, of a house that had always supported the Knorth. She couldn’t be pleased that it was currently at odds with the Ardeth.
He bowed to them, crossed the death banner hall, and ran up the northwest spiral stairs, first to Marc’s studio with its piles of raw materials awaiting his return, then up to the Council Chamber with its soaring stained-glass windows. Three sides, north, west, and south, were graced with the crests of the nine houses. The east displayed Marc’s incomplete map of Rathillien, the original having been shattered by Jame the night that the Shadow Guide had come to kill her.
Burr met him at the foot of the tower stair leading to his study.
“Tell Nutley to bring up tarts and tea,” he told his servant. “Quick. Use the southwest stair or you’ll run into our guests.”
Burr gave him a blank look, then hustled away.
When he turned to face the room, memory presented it to him askew, as fever had left it to him. At the last Council meeting, the chairs around the ebony table had been thrust back by the lords who had sat at them when he had challenged Caldane. Glasses had shattered spontaneously. Wine had spilled. Caldane had wanted the biggest houses to have the most power, his own first among them. Torisen had charged Caldane’s son Tiggeri with attacking Tagmeth, which he had. Hiccoughs had sent a startled Caldane floating out the window. Then Torisen had started to cough up blood from lung-rot and Brant had hustled the others out of the room. It had been, at the least, an eventful meeting.
Torisen remembered the ebon surface of the table tacky with drying wine and gore, strewn with shattered glass, and the chairs scattered. He had almost died.
Since then someone, probably Burr, had cleaned up. The table top was not only clean but dusted, the chairs in place.
Except for one.
This latter faced the map window, its back to the room. When Torisen approached to straighten it, however, he found that it was occupied.
“Oh,” he said, falling back a step. “I didn’t know that you were here.”
“Ha,” grumbled a fusty, subterranean voice from the depths of the chair. “About to have a party, are you? D’you mean to throw me out?”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
“Smart boy.”
Breathless voices sounded in the northwestern stair well. It occurred to Torisen as he returned to the table that he had just asked two elderly women in tight under-skirts to climb two flights of stone steps. How were they managing? By raising their hems? By hopping? Dianthe, at least, was helping her old friend, as became obvious as they emerged into the chamber. Adiraina was breathing hard. Her mouth, ajar, downturned, looked grim.
“Ah,” said Dianthe, glancing around, panting. “This room always takes my breath away. What a pity that the east window was shattered.”
“You don’t approve of the repairs so far, lady?”
“They are . . . baffling.”
In a way, Torisen agreed. The original glass had depicted Rathillien in recognizable shapes and colors, if not always in its proper proportions. Marc was rebuilding it with materials taken from each geological area where he could obtain them. Different minerals gave the glass different colors: carbon and sulfur for amber, cobalt for deep blue, gold and copper for red, cranberry, and pink, iron oxide for red-brown, and so on. A scrollsman intimate with the geology of this world could have read them at a glance. Anyone else would have seen an abstract sprawl of colors, mingled in streaks at the rivers. Still, what an intriguing experiment.
Nutley arrived with a tray of tea and tarts. Out of respect, he had pulled up his bodice, but his generous bosom still threatened to spill out of it. Dianthe glanced at him, then hastily away. Torisen signaled his appreciation and the bake-master gratefully withdrew.
The Danior and the Ardeth had clearly been talking, both below and, intermittently, on the stair.
“Well,” demanded the former again, “what do you advise?”
Adiraina sipped tea, thin fingers cradling the warm cup, her nose over the fragrant steam. The leaves came from the south, a rare delicacy this far north. Torisen knew of the matriarch’s taste for the beverage and hoped that she appreciated his courtesy in offering it out of his small store.
“You say that Rawneth has come to you,” she replied to Dianthe. “She brought her daughter-in-law Kallystine with her, who does not seem best pleased with her pregnancy. How could she? Thanks to her father Caldane, that was not a courtship but a rape, with an uncertain issue. And Rawneth said . . . what?”
Dianthe curled a lip. “It wasn’t so much what she said as how she said it. She looks forward to the High Council meeting on the 100th of Winter. There the Highlord—you my dear,” with a glance toward Torisen, “will be called on to uphold his role as our leader against more powerful lords such as Caldane, my brother, and your grandson, Timmon. Can tradition stand against such pressure? She hinted that we Danior must follow her lead or fall under her heel.”
“She, and not her son Lord Randir?”
Dianthe snorted. “He may think so. We both know, however, who rules Wilden—or do we? M’lady Rawneth has a new councilor upon whom she dotes. I have glimpsed him standing on the walls of Wilden, gazing across the valley at us. He casts a pallid light.”
“What more?”
Dianthe slapped her hand against the table top, nearly overturning her cup. “Oh, the impudence! Rawneth proposed all of this, but still she smiled and smiled, oh so condescendingly. We aren’t worth her time, you see. The Danior are too small. We will go the way of all weaklings, deservedly so.”
“You are one of the founding houses. Never so.”
They seemed to have forgotten Torisen. Perhaps, he thought, having proven himself bashful as breeding stock, in future all Highborn ladies would treat him as a servant or as a pet.
Dianthe sighed. “That explains my presence, at least. Why are you here, Adiraina?”
The Ardeth Matriarch sipped her tea as if to collect herself. “My story is similar to yours. Lady Distan drove me out. Her attitude is like Rawneth’s, with whom she corresponds, and she seeks to bend the new lord, her son, to her will.”
“How strong is Timmon?”
“I would have said not very. He was spoiled by his mother as a child, taught to think that everything he desired was by right his. Granted, the Randon college seems to have changed him. So has Jameth. I cannot like that girl—so difficult, so disruptive—but she may be the first female who ever told him ‘no’ and meant it. What’s more, she challenged him. Now there’s a core of iron, if I am any judge, and a moral code to stub the toe of any brat. Still, how long can he stand up to his mother? The habit of obedience, of self-indulgence, is strong. She is confident of her success, enough to tell me that I should tend to my knitting and leave affairs of state to her.”
Dianthe laughed. “As if you could ever knit.”
“Well, so I could, when I was a girl, before I went blind. Then it became too frustrating. I miss the calm it used to bring me.”
“But you still knot stitch, given your letters to me.”
“Yes. That I can do by touch.”
Torisen considered the High Council meeting on the coming 100th of Winter. The Caineron and the Randir would stand together. That was twenty thousand or more, if one went by the number of bound Kencyr. He, on the other hand, could count on the Knorth, Danior, Jaran, and Brandon. Fifteen thousand. Who knew where the Edirr and Coman would fall? Of the major houses, that left the Ardeth at nearly ten thousand as the linchpin in any vote, if he should be driven to such an extreme.
But must he be? The millennia long history of the Kencyrath stood on his side. Before Caldane and Rawneth, no one would have questioned it.
Am I so weak? he asked himself.
Yes, came the first answer, by your own failings.
It wasn’t just that he had been ill for a year with lung-rot, although that hadn’t helped. For longer than that, he hadn’t faced himself in regard to the Shanir. His father. His sister. His cousin. Himself.
And—as a second thought—his ideas were different now too. He hadn’t talked to anyone but Jame about his reluctance to bind more Kendar. How would that work out, most of all with the Kendar themselves? Creation worked in him like a seething stew, still too hot to taste. To feed or to burn?
“Someone told me once,” Jame had said, “that a potential Tyr-ridan will be potent across all three aspects of our god until each of us settles into our own.”
If so, he could still wrack ruin. Was this what it felt like, to be his sister?
Adiraina put down her cup—the tart she had never touched—and rose. “What good does it do to talk? The power is out of our hands.”
Torisen roused himself. “What would Adric say?”
She glowered at him with stitched, unblinking eyes. “How should we know? Your patron, your oldest friend, is dead. He should not be, if only you had had the sense to keep him calm.”
She turned, outer skirt swirling, and glided out of the room. Dianthe cast Torisen a worried look and followed.
“Well,” said the rough voice in the chair. “What d’you make of that?”
“Nothing that pleases me.”
He poured a new cup of tea, took a strawberry tart, and presented them to the Earth Wife.
“Thank ye,” she said, gulping down the former, taking a prodigious bite of the latter. “I thought you would never ask.”
She herself looked rather like a slumped dumpling, seated in the regal chair with her knobby feet dangling. Her clothes, as usual, seemed to be slapped on in layers pasted together with mud and bird droppings. Pastry flakes spilled out of the toothless corners of her mouth.
“Don’t like you very much, do they?”
“Dianthe does, well enough. I don’t know about Adiraina, and she’s the one who counts. Perhaps she’s right that I should have prevented Adric’s heart attack by keeping him quiet.”
“Could you have?”
Torisen sighed. “Probably not. Jame called that situation a festering sore, all the worse because Dari only did what he thought was right and Adric wasn’t fit to listen to reason.”
“Heh. What else did your sister say?”
“That it wasn’t my fault.”
“She has some sense, that girl, although a lot else that makes me very uneasy.”
Torisen smiled. “You too?”
“She plays with my world—not maliciously, true, but with a power that we Four do not understand nor, I think, does she. You too, Highlord. Do you know what you are doing?”
“I’m trying to learn. Give me time.”
“How much do we have of that?”
“Little, according to my sister. Things are coming to a head, and she seems to be the forefront of that.”
Ragga gave him a shrewd look. “D’you resent her?”
Torisen considered. “A bit. I am, after all, the Highlord. While she was gone, doing what I still hardly know, I held the Kencyrath together, or thought I did. Recent events make me wonder.”
The Earth Wife snorted. “Honest, at least.”
They regarded the map. Torisen reflected that the Earth Wife had once coveted it as a scrying glass, to complement the earth map to which she had listened. How much of that had gone into Marc’s store of materials, waiting below to be worked into the map above?
“D’you think he will ever finish it?” asked Mother Ragga.
Contingent glass had melted together in places where region met region. The wonder was that they had joined in upright panes. Beyond that was leading, then patches temporarily filled with cullet from the original smashed window and from common glass tinted green with iron. Rathillien was speckled with such neutral areas, especially in the Riverland, which had always defied cartographers. Most of the keeps were recognizable but not all, if they hadn’t supplied materials. Wilden, for example. And Restormir.
“See that glowing fleck of red?” said the Earth Wife.
Torisen peered. “It seems to be around where I would place Gothregor. By accident, I nicked my hand and let a drop of blood fall there, into the melt. Do you suppose . . . ”
“That it represents where you are? Could be. Look, here’s another fleck in the Central Lands, even brighter than yours. Your sister, maybe. After all, she’s also of your blood.”
They scanned the map, looking for more, seeing none.
“It could only be the two of us,” Torisen agreed, but he thought, Shouldn’t there be three?
As quiet as Kindrie was, Torisen and Jame had agreed that he would be safest at Mount Alban in the care of the Jaran lordan and of the randon scrollsmen who, though retired, were fiercely protective of any within their walls. No one else besides Kirien knew that their cousin was legitimate, much less Gerridon’s son, and therefore a candidate for the Tyr-ridan. All others scorned him as a bastard and considered him worthless beyond his skills as a healer. It had been best, they had thought, to keep him out of sight, his identity secret, until he stepped into his role. After all, neither one of them was ready either. It would be dangerous to call attention to Kindrie prematurely.
As to the blood flecks, Marc’s abstract map was hard to read and incomplete. That was all.