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Chapter XIV
Into the Den of Monsters

Wilden and Restormir: Autumn 35—39

I

Torisen heard the horn at the northern gate signal a visitor to Gothregor—a friend, by its lilt.

Good. He would welcome something to lift his spirits.

He was in his tower study, reading the same report from Harn over and over, getting nothing new out of it. The old problem remained. Mordaunt hadn’t yet sent supplies or any explanation as to why not. Torisen’s sense was that the Bashtiri king had his own problems and would deal with those of the Kencyrath last, when he finally out-ran his credit there. It was up to Torisen when to say that enough was enough, if it wasn’t already too late.

Jame would be in Wealdhold by now, in the midst of Duke Pugnanos’s farcical games, fighting Mordaunt’s battles. Torisen didn’t trust the duke any more than he did the king, but his sister was clever and unpredictable. Those were two of her greatest strengths, on which he would bet against any number of dim-witted Central Land nobles.

He also wondered about Kindrie. Fifteen days ago he had first realized that his cousin had dropped off the stained-glass map, or perhaps he, Torisen, simply didn’t know how to read it correctly. The latter could still be true. But he worried. Several days later he had finally sent a message by post to Mount Alban, where he believed Kindrie to be. That was a good hundred miles farther north, but with relays of horses the riders were fast. The missive would have reached his cousin by now. How soon might he receive a reply?

Burr knocked on the door.

“The Jaran lordan,” he said, and made way for Kirien.

Torisen rose, startled. Kirien was a very self-possessed young woman. Given that, he was stuck by her haggard aspect.

“Lady.” He offered her a chair, but she didn’t take it. Instead, she placed a message pouch on his desk.

“You sent this to Kindrie,” she said. “He isn’t at the college and hasn’t been since mid-summer. All of this time, I thought that he was here.”

It took some effort to get the story out of her as she paced back and forth, arms wrapped tightly around her chest. Always androgynous, now she was gaunt. Three steps one way, three steps the other, over and over.

She and Kindrie had quarreled. He had left. She knew that he had taken a post horse, but the station attendant had been distracted and couldn’t tell her in which direction he had gone, north or south on the River Road. She had assumed that he was bound for Gothregor.

“I waited to hear from him. And waited. And waited. It became a matter of pride, who would apologize first. Oh, I was a fool.”

“You were hurt,” said Torisen. His relationship with Kallystine had taught him that love could be cruel. Kirien and Kindrie had seemed to have so much more than that. He believed that they still did.

“On the way here, I asked at the east bank keeps if they had seen him. Falkirr hadn’t. Wilden just sneered, but then they would out of habit.”

“And the west bank New Road?”

“I was in a hurry. I didn’t cross the Silver.”

Torisen considered this. “There are bridges, of course, if not always reliable. If he had come by the River Road, bound here, I would expect him to have changed mounts at least at the Falkirr station. What reason would he have to go farther south, to Omiroth or Kestrie? No. That leaves Wilden to the east, Shadow Rock, Tentir, and Restormir to the west. To the north, maybe Tagmeth too, although my sister would have left for the Central Lands by mid-summer.”

He didn’t add that Kindrie, never a good rider, might have fallen off somewhere in between and broken his neck.

He also didn’t point out that Kirien’s enquiries might well have alerted everyone in the Riverland that Kindrie was more important than the harmless bastard that he appeared to be. She was upset enough as it was.

“I think,” he said, “that we need to make a search up one side of the Silver and down the other, starting with Wilden.”

She looked at him with a sort of wonder. “You would do this?”

That was too much.

“God’s claws! You may love him, but he’s also my cousin. Doesn’t that count for something?”

II

They rode for Wilden the next day, a journey of some fifty miles with a change of mounts at Falkirr. Burr, again, insisted on the armed escort of a ten-command, and grumbled that it was still too small.

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” said Lord Brandan, meeting Torisen at the Falkirr station, “but be careful. The Randir are on guard. So is the entire Riverland. These are too few retainers to guarantee your safety.”

“I should bring an army? Surely it hasn’t yet come to war between houses.”

“Not quite. My sense is that things won’t boil over before the winter High Council meeting, unless something dire happens first. Or maybe not until next spring. Either way, I don’t trust Rawneth or Caldane.”

Torisen gave a tight smile. “Then I will walk wary.”

They arrived at Wilden in the late afternoon, without sending ahead any warning. Torisen wanted to take Rawneth unawares. Apparently, he did.

The horns signaled his arrival with a questioning note. He was almost surprised when the main gate opened for his company. They rode up the steep, jagged road, hearing the roar of the river that cascaded down around either side of the keep into its lower moat. Some Randir came out to watch them pass, but most stayed behind the closed doors of their individual compounds.

Wilden had spent a terrible year during which the spirit of its mistress had been trapped in Torisen’s soul-image while, physically, she had wandered from one door after another on Wilden’s streets, knocking for release. Where she went, her minions had followed, killing anyone weak enough to open their door to her. That had all been Rawneth’s doing, not Torisen’s. She was, after all, not only the witch of this keep but, as the saying went, the bitch. Did her ambition and malice surpass her power? In that case, they had.

Meanwhile, shut out of the healing power of his own soul-image, afflicted by lung-rot, Torisen had nearly died.

Still, he hadn’t previously considered the price that Wilden had paid. He only knew that a number of its people had been either executed or exiled to Tagmeth where Jame had given them shelter. What the survivors thought was anyone’s guess.

The road ended in a high terrace, its flagstones slick with spray from the cataract that plunged down beyond the fortress’s back wall. Earth and air shook with the continual roar. The Witch’s Tower rose black against the falling sheet of white water.

The ten-command stayed outside with the horses, not without some muttering from Burr.

Rawneth lived in the upper stories of the tower, but as they entered the lower hall she descended the spiral stair, the black train of her white gown trailing behind her. Its sleeves were also black and the mask through which her eyes glittered. She was, in fact, marked like an elegant direhound, down to the white teeth revealed by her smile. Had they previously been filed to sharp points? Otherwise, Torisen had seen her dressed much the same way before.

“Highlord. Lady Kirien. Welcome to Wilden. To what do I owe this honor?”

Torisen decided to be direct.

“Matriarch, I am in search of Kindrie Soul-walker. Has he passed this way?”

“So.” She paused on the stair and tweaked her train so that it curled around her feet. One almost expected it to twitch like a tail. “You have misplaced him yet again. I was informed, lordan, that you also inquired after him yesterday. Your interest I understand, although I deplore your taste. But you, Highlord, why such continued concern for a mere bastard?”

She hadn’t yet guessed Kindrie’s legitimacy, Torisen realized, and was relieved. Perhaps things weren’t as bad as he had feared and Lady Rawneth, for all her cunning, was not so smart.

“If you find him,” she said with a thin, twisted smile, “you had better leave him to me. I know how to best make use of his kind.”

“Oh, really?” said Kirien.

Torisen instinctively drew back from her. Jame had told him that the Jaran lordan had the power to compel the truth when provoked, whatever the consequences, inconvenience, or out-right danger. What had Kirien said at Kithorn, as reported by Jame?

That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.

“And what kind is he?” she now asked.

“I would like to know too,” said a voice at the open door. A figure stood there against the sunset, casting a shadow before it across the hall. It advanced, turning into a large, young man with white-tufted hair, wearing a belted jacket and big boots that tracked wet footprints into the hall.

Rawneth stomped on her train, which flinched. “Titmouse, go away.”

Torisen regarded the newcomer with interest. “My sister met you in Tai-tastigon, did she not? She said she liked you. What are you doing here?”

“I was recalled to the Priests’ College to report after the chaos in the Eastern Lands this past summer. I liked her too.”

Jame had also said that she had told this priest more than she probably should have about herself, Torisen, and Kindrie. He, too, could draw forth the truth although not ruthlessly compel it. If so, he apparently hadn’t shared it with Rawneth. Torisen smiled at him.

“To repeat, lady,” said Titmouse, “what kind of man is Kindrie Soul-walker?”

She looked flustered. “Hardly a man at all. Shanir. Illegitimate. A tool to be used by anyone with the wits to do so. What good are the weak except to serve the strong? The Priests’ College too. What fools! They could have bowed to Gerridon as hierophant god. Ishtier would have done so had he lived, but do they? Soon, though, soon!”

Someone descended the stair behind her, clad in a pale robe with a waxen smiling face barely glimpsed in the shadow of his hood. She leaned back into him as if for strength. His arms went around her. The hem of her dress writhed. He murmured in her ear.

“And who is this?” asked Kirien.

Rawneth flinched, more at the power behind this question than at the question itself, and bit her lip, which bled. “I mustn’t say, but I . . . I must. The father of my dear son. The rightful Highlord of the Kencyrath. Not you, Knorth upstart! Yours was always a cadet branch, illegitimate, Shanir. Don’t think we won’t overcome you yet.”

“I think you think you will,” Torisen said, with a bow, although he was still sorting out what she had just said, finding it a nonsense. “Kirien, she didn’t directly answer me. Ask her again: does she know where Kindrie is?”

He could feel the Jaran lordan focus her will as if it were a lance couched for battle. The short hair on his arms prickled and rose. Not for anything, at that moment, would he have touched her.

“Matriarch. If you know where Kindrie Soul-walker is, tell me.”

Rawneth swayed and would have fallen without the support of her companion. “I . . . I think he is at Restormir. At least Lord Caineron boasted to me of having captured a fine healer, and the description fitted. When I asked that he gift me with this prize, for friendship’s sake, he laughed. ‘Lady, you had your chance,’ he said. ‘Now it is my turn to use him as I see fit.’ That was last summer.”

“Oh,” said Kirien faintly, sagging. Torisen caught her. “My poor love. All of this time!”

A door to the lower halls had stood ajar. Now it burst open and Kallystine rushed through it, wearing a loose linen gown that molded unflatteringly against the swollen curves of her body.

“I thought I heard your voice!” she cried to Torisen, shoving Kirien out of the way, almost off her feet, and flinging herself into his arms. “Listen! I want to go home. Tell her that you will take me!”

He held her back, skeptical and at the same time stirred. She made a lush armful. He remembered their nights together when she had been his consort, the hunger she had roused but never could quite slake. Now her breath behind the shroud-like mask stank. He could feel her body move, not in response to his own but to internal pressures. It was like holding a bag full of snakes. He thrust her away. That she was pregnant was evident, but not the site of the baby. Its bulge shifted even as he watched from her abdomen to her chest where it formed a third palpitating breast.

And what was the sound he heard—the ghost of a tiny, mischievous giggle?

“I want to go home!” Kallystine cried again to the figure on the stairs.

Rawneth gathered herself and smiled down at her, or rather again showed her teeth. “You are my son’s consort. Your baby must be born here.”

“This is too soon! Let me go home first. If that Shanir freak is there, I want to consult him. Please!”

“Kenan was born prematurely. So was the Kendar Shade, for that matter, but we won’t speak of her. Your babe, however, is of the direct line to Gerridon. You stay here.”

Kallystine stomped her foot, turned, and fled.

Torisen took Kirien’s arm to steady her. “We should go too. Matriarch, by your leave.”

The pale figure on the stair whispered urgently in Rawneth’s ear. She brushed him off and held her head as if it hurt her.

“What, keep the Highlord here? And the lordan? No, no. Send them away, send them all away. Now.”

And so they went.

III

You need to think about this,” said Holly when he heard the whole story.

With night coming on, they had taken shelter at the Danior keep, Shadow Rock, across the Silver from Wilden.

“You can’t just march in on the Caineron the way you did on the Randir.”

“Why not?” demanded Kirien. Her need to act was palpable after waiting so long for news, but was it practical? Moreover, she was still pale and shaken. Compelling the Witch of Wilden had exhausted her more than Torisen had realized it would.

“You think Caldane will take us hostage?” he asked.

“Lady Rawneth almost did,” muttered Burr, refilling his cup. “You could disappear the same way your cousin did.”

“Kindrie isn’t Highlord. No one expected him to have powerful friends.”

Holly sipped his cider, considering his words. “Tonight, just how powerful do you feel?”

It was a good question. Kirien had wanted to ride on to Tentir, although the sun had already set. They would have arrived in the dark, very late. Torisen’s instinct, though, had been as soon as possible to let someone not of his party know what had happened and where he was bound next. The lesson of Kindrie’s fate had not been lost on him. But what good, really, would that do? Who would come to their rescue if they needed it and even then, what next? Lord Brandan has spoken of some dire event igniting the Riverland. That could be it. Caldane would be a fool to take such a risk, but he was also stupid and unstable.

Still wondering, Torisen rode north the next day on the west bank New Road. Some seventy miles lay between him and Restormir, also the randon college at Tentir, also the Jaran keep Valantir opposite Mount Alban.

Kirien wanted to travel fast and kept edging ahead. Wanting to think, Torisen held back.

If Rawneth considered Caldane a friend, she might already have sent him warning by post rider of Torisen’s approach. In that case, he couldn’t count on surprise again and speed presumably wasn’t an issue. A slower advance might help, if it gave Caldane time to second guess himself or, perhaps, even to come to reason.

In the afternoon they realized that they were being followed. Kallystine galloped up on their heels, riding a lathered horse.

“I said I was going with you,” she panted through her mask. Sweat molded it to the ruined contours of her face. In and out it went around her mouth and protruding bones, in and out.

Torisen caught her bridle to stop her. The horse staggered and nearly fell. “Is this wise? You might miscarry.”

“If I do, so much the better. If Kindrie is at Restormir, he will help me. He must!”

Kirien had reined back to ride beside them. “What, to miscarry?”

“Yes! This thing within me is an abomination, not a child.”

“I don’t think you understand the role of a healer.”

“You do know,” said Torisen, “that if—no, when—Rawneth hears of this, she is going to be furious with both of us.”

“What do I care? I’m tired, though. When can we stop?”

“D’you want the Randir to catch up with us?”

“No! Ride on.”

Tentir was several miles ahead of them. They reached it in the late afternoon.

“You do realize, don’t you,” said Burr to Torisen, “that we’re still being followed.”

“Yes. I know. One rider keeping his or her distance.”

The Coman randon currently in command of the college was not pleased to see them.

“You should have given me advance warning,” he said. “Your guest quarters haven’t been prepared, nor has anything special for dinner.”

“We will take whatever you can offer,” said Torisen, dismounting in the hall of Old Tentir, surrounded by the fusty banners of the nine houses, each thick with the stitches of its pledged cadets.

“I need a bed,” Kallystine declared, accepting Burr’s hand down from her horse, landing with an ungainly stagger. The fetus jolted downward into her upper thigh where it wriggled under the fabric of her gown. “Bring me a bowl of warm gruel. Now. Good night.”

Torisen spread his hands in apology. “What can I say? She’s pregnant.”

“Humph,” said the Coman commandant, and turned away.

Dinner was plain, but acceptable. They ate in the map room of New Tentir, surrounded by the intricate battle plans of a hundred conflicts on Rathillien alone, overlooking the training yard around which the cadet barracks clustered.

The commandant was short with his guests. Finally, his indignation burst out.

“How can we at Tentir expect to inculcate discipline in these cadets when you Highborn persist in fighting?”

Torisen set down his wine glass. “I wasn’t aware that I was setting a bad example,” he said mildly. “How so?”

“You and Lord Caineron and Lady Rawneth and . . . and all the rest. Can’t you feel it? The Riverland is like jagged glass, catching at every snag. Never mind our divine mandate or whatever it is. Ancestors help me, how am I supposed to know anymore? How are any of us supposed to live here, now, with honor?”

Torisen considered this. “Yes, these are difficult times. Much is coming to a head. You will have to ask yourself, in what do you believe? If honor, what does that mean? Where do you choose to fight? If necessary, where do you choose to die? The days of easy answers are over. As you say, this is here. At long last, after three millennia, this is now.”

Voices rose in the training yard. The cadets had come out of their barracks in the twilight and were singing to the map room’s balcony. Torisen went out to listen. The tune was old, fitted to new words:


“You lead us, lord.

If not in you, whom should we trust?

Show us the way. We will follow.

Your sister too, one of us.

Honor her name.

Honor your own.”


“And that,” said the commandant sourly, “is your answer. Ancestors preserve you both.”

IV

When they set out the next day, perhaps half the cadets followed them, several hundred in all. The Knorth were there, also the Jaran with their lordan ahead of them. The Brandan and the Danior followed. There were even a few Ardeth, remembering Timmon and, surprisingly, some Caineron, in honor of Sheth Sharp-tongue and Gorbel.

“I don’t like this,” Torisen said to Kirien, looking back at the train behind them. “We’re going to Restormir. That’s dangerous.”

“On the other hand,” said Kirien, “they are witnesses. And their houses will rise up if they are hurt.”

“Still, I should shelter behind children?”

She gave him a level look. “We’re talking about Caldane here. What realities does he recognize?”

That, thought Torisen, was a good question.

It was another slow ride, thanks to Kallystine’s continued complaints. Torisen almost wished that the Randir would catch up with them. Maybe Rawneth, disgusted with her daughter-in-law, hadn’t bothered to ask where she was, or no one had dared to tell her.

Next came Valantir, connected to Mount Alban across the river by a much-travelled bridge in a continual state of repair. The Jaran welcomed Kirien with great relief—it seemed that she hadn’t told them where she was going or why. The Riverland, thought Torisen, seemed currently full of bolting Highborn. He welcomed the Jedrak’s hospitality, though, for both his small party and the considerably larger one following in his wake.

“But we must come too,” said Lord Jaran when he heard their story. “Kindrie was our guest. Caldane is our neighbor. Kirien is our lordan. And she looks exhausted. Should we let her venture into that ogre’s den alone?”

“Hardly that,” murmured Torisen. “I didn’t ask for an army, but I seem to be acquiring one.”

“Well, then, welcome us too. And the singers. And the scrollsmen. How can I tell any of them to hold back?”

It was therefore a considerable force that descended on a surprised Restormir the next day.

V

Torisen knew that he was being watched ever since warning horns had sounded the minute the vanguard of his party topped the ridge overlooking the fortress. The size of the latter always amazed him. Caldane had some twelve thousand adherents either bound directly to him or to his seven established sons, each of whom had a compound of his own clustered to the south of his father’s original holding. Over all rose the mound on top of which stood the family’s tower keep.

The horns kept blowing, sounding ever shriller, as Torisen descended the rise and the number of his followers became evident. Armed riders galloped out of the easternmost compound, enough of them to have surrounded the smaller company that they apparently had expected. Instead, they lined the road on either side and saluted their Highlord as he passed.

The gate stood open, the tail-end of the New Road running through it. Caineron stopped what they were doing to stare at the visitors as they passed. No one cheered. From ahead came the hollow sound of rushing water—a tributary of the Silver tumbling down to join it between close-set walls, under a bridge. On the other side of the bridge was Caldane’s much larger compound, and on its western end, across yet another bridge, the tower mound.

Torisen dismounted at the foot of the mound on its river-girt island. Tack clinked and groaned behind him as his attendants also swung down. He didn’t look back to see how many of them followed him up the steep stair to the tower on the hill—probably as many as would fit. He felt Kirien close beside him, however, and was again uneasily aware of how much the encounter with Rawneth had cost her.

Kallystine rushed past up the stairs and disappeared within. A thin, dark randon followed her, perhaps the second rider who had pursued them from Wilden. When they entered the tower, though, they saw no sign of either.

Inside, one could look up the shaft to the apartments of the so-called Crown, Caldane’s home, and to the opening into the garden above that where the Matriarch Cattila had once held court. Here on the ground level was a courtyard paved with white marble. At its center was a rimmed well extending down into the dungeons. Surrounding this were tall glass doors that opened into reception halls. In the halls were a host of large, gilded statues striking heroic poses, each with Caldane’s smug face but not with his corpulent body.

“Welcome to Restormir,” said Tiggeri, stepping forward. His smile, as usual, was wide and full of white teeth, but his eyes were wary. “To what do we owe such a number of uninvited visitors?”

“Rawneth of Wilden informs us that my cousin Kindrie Soul-walker is your . . . er . . . guest,” said Torisen. “We have come to escort him home.”

Tiggeri’s smile twitched at one corner. “Now why would the dear lady suggest any such thing? We never told her that.”

Kirien stepped forward. She trembled slightly, like a bow-string just beyond strength’s pull. “Nonetheless, she told us that he was here.”

“Why should he be?”

“Word has reached us that Lord Caineron is ill. Where would he look, if not to a powerful healer?”

“He has healers of his own. Do you say that ours are insufficient?”

“If your lord is still sick, yes.”

“But what good would an outsider do?”

Kirien gulped. “Lord Caineron doesn’t know how to deal with any power not absolutely under his control. Even then, whatever he thinks, his control, like his judgment, is limited. How has he used Kindrie Soul-walker?”

Tiggeri grinned, but he had begun to sweat. “I didn’t say that the Shanir was here, did I? Even if he was, he owes my father a debt of loyalty for past favors. Should he not pay them?”

“He served Lord Caineron once, perforce, and in recompense was tortured. Don’t tell me what he does or doesn’t owe this house.”

Torisen stepped up behind her. “We Knorth support this view.”

“And we Jaran.”

“And we Danior.”

“And we Brandan.”

“You also, Ardeth?” sneered Tiggeri. “And you traitorous Caineron? Oh yes, we note your presence here.”

The haunt singer Ashe stepped forth. Torisen hadn’t known that she was there.

“All of us . . . bear witness,” she said in her hoarse, death-halted voice. “Think what our songs . . . what history . . . will say about you, proud Caineron. Gerridon once stood on such a slope. He fell. Listen and learn.”

Tiggeri’s grin widened. From one corner of his mouth hung a thread of drool, slickening his teeth, his chin. “Tell that to my father,” he said, licking it up. “He comes. He comes now.”

VI

Kindrie could hear the murmur below, but didn’t know what it meant. While the shaft of the tower conducted sound, not much had happened there for a long time. This far within stone and mortar, the outer city was mute.

Someone scrabbled at the door. It had no lock. Kallystine burst in and threw herself at him.

“Now, now!” she panted. “You have to help me!”

He held her off while half supporting her. She had never been his favorite Caineron.

“What do you need?” the healer within him asked, cursing itself even as it spoke. Could he deny no one?

“This child . . . no, this abomination. It will destroy me!”

He could tell by the seething of her body that she was going into labor. Too late to stop that, even if he had been willing.

“Kill it, kill it!” she cried and convulsed under his hands.

Someone, suddenly, was beside him—a dark young randon wearing a Randir neck scarf with what appeared to be a glittering band wrapped around it, except that the band breathed.

“Who are you?”

“Shade. This is Addy, a gilded swamp adder to whom I am bound. That ‘abomination’ is Lord Randir’s son, my half-brother. Please, help him.”

This was a lot to absorb all at once. Kindrie had heard that Kenan, Lord Randir, had taken Lord Caineron’s daughter Kallystine as consort for the purpose of siring an heir. He hadn’t expected to be presented with the results.

“Help me loosen her clothes,” he said to Shade. “What do you know about childbirth?”

“The father, Lord Randir, is a changer. He was my father too, by a Kendar. Changer babies tend to be born prematurely, while their bodies are still in flux. I was one such. My mother hid me, or I would have been killed.”

Worse and worse.

Kallystine thrashed. The fetus surged about inside her body, seeking a way out.

“It’s a condition called the wandering womb,” said Kindrie, trying to track its progress while catching Kallystine’s hands as she tore at herself. “It can be deadly to both mother and child.”

Someone else entered the room. “Now what?” said Gorbel over Kindrie’s shoulder, looking down at his convulsed half-sister. “Is she having a fit, or just a temper tantrum?”

Kallystine wrenched a hand free and hit Kindrie in the nose with it, knocking him over backward. She began to scream.

“Hold her down,” he said to Gorbel and Shade, wiping a smear of blood off his face.

Gorbel pinned her flailing arms. Shade steadied her head. Kindrie laid his hands on her heaving body to calm it . . .

. . . and found himself in her soul-image. It resembled a ruined mansion, once luxurious, now fallen into decay and haunted by bad odors. The walls were stained, the floors cracked. Lilies festered in filthy water. Roses dropped bruised petals. No air moved.

But there was sound: small feet pattered from room to room, just out of sight. Someone giggled—a protean innocent, playing hide and seek. But now the walls of flesh were moving, in and out, in and out, pressing ever closer, and the giggle became a frightened cry. Someone, somewhere, was screaming.

Kindrie jerked back his hands.

Kallystine was gasping behind her wet mask. Afraid that she would suffocate, he removed it. Her face was the facade of the ruined house, fallen in around its bony structure yet still desperately alive behind those bulging eyes.

She seemed to be strangling. Her neck swelled.

Sweet Trinity. The baby was coming up her throat.

She choked and gagged. Her jaw gaped wide, wider, until with a crack it unhinged.

“Push, push,” he begged her even as she tried desperately to swallow.

The baby shot forth, to be caught by Shade. Kindrie glimpsed its big head and tiny, thrashing limbs before the Randir bore it off to his bed where she snatched up a blanket to dry and swaddle it.

Not “it.” Him. She had said that this was her brother, and Lord Kenan’s heir. What, then, about Randiroc?

Shade brought the baby to his mother, who threw up her hands in horror against him. She couldn’t speak with her damaged jaw, but her rejection was explicit.

“What now?” Kindrie asked.

“I take him to Randiroc,” said Shade. “If half of what I guess is true, it’s time he concerned himself with the Randir succession.” She chucked the hidden baby under the chin and smiled fondly down at him. Tiny fingers curled around her hand. “Until Randiroc decides or he takes a final form, I will call him Jelly.”

“Well,” said Gorbel, wiping his hands. “That was disgusting. I came up to tell you that the Highlord is in the lower reception hall, asking for you. You should go down to meet him. Now, will someone please call my sister’s ladies to attend to her before this gets even more messy?”

VII

In the hall iron squealed and wood groaned. Caldane, Lord Caineron, emerged from the shadows in an over-sized throne mounted on high, tottering wheels, pushed by his first and sixth sons, Grondin and Higron. Both labored and wheezed. They were middle-aged and grossly fat, but nothing compared to their father, who overflowed the slats on which he sat. His swollen, bandaged foot and leg thrust out before him like an obscene proclamation. His weight bowed both wood and iron.

“Heh, heh, heh,” he rasped. “The little so-called Highlord has come to call. To what do I owe this honor?”

Torisen stood forth, slim and needle fine. As usual, in accordance with his nickname, he wore black, which accented the white streaks in his hair. These, only recently, he had come to recognize as Shanir traits. His power might have haloed him, if not for the restraint under which he kept it.

“Everyone keeps asking me that,” he said, with a pleasant smile, a rebuff in itself to Caldane’s glower. “I am concerned about my cousin. He is here, is he not?”

“I didn’t say so,” Tiggeri murmured aside to his sire. “Why should he be?”

“Because you plainly need a healer,” said Torisen. “How long has your leg been so swollen?”

Caldane smirked. “The more of me, the better. The less of you, better still. Less, and less, and less.”

“But you still require a healer.”

Caldane pouted. “I need no one. I never have. I never will.”

“Then I have no hesitation about reclaiming Kindrie Soul-walker. Clearly, he is wasted here.”

Kindrie came into the hall, followed by Shade carrying a bundle.

Caldane pummeled the arms of his chair with pudgy fists. “Everyone betrays me!” he whined. “It isn’t fair!”

Kirien walked into Kindrie’s arms.

“You’re late,” he said, smiling down at her.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I think,” said Torisen, “that we should be going.”

Caldane scowled. “Not without my permission. I think, Highlord, that you shouldn’t leave at all. Why prolong the inevitable? You and your pitiful little house are doomed. You were always a cadet branch of the Knorth. The Arrin-ken should never have turned their backs on Gerridon. Huh. Cats.”

Kindrie gulped as Caldane’s renewed will beat against him, febrile, rancid. It seemed about to push everything else out, leaving room only for a vast, infantile me, me, me.

The crowd of witnesses swayed, baby Jelly screamed, and even Torisen fell back a step.

Don’t flinch! Kindrie silently begged his cousin. If you can’t stand up to this man, how can we?

But the power to resist lay in everyone here, yes, even in him.

Preserve these people, he thought, embracing Kirien. Preserve your love and yourself, at long last.

He put Kirien aside and stepped up to Caldane, who regarded him with dull, malicious eyes.

“M’lord, would you be healed? Take my hand.”

Caldane’s swollen fingers crawled down the arm of his chair, dragging his hand behind them like the obese body of some wounded spider. Then he lunged to grab the healer’s slender wrist.

Kindrie gasped with pain . . .

. . . and fell into Caldane’s soul-image.

A golden statue bent over him, smirking. Its grip, oh so tight, made the bones in his arm grate together. More golden figures shuffled in to surround him, all muttering:

Give, give, give, or I will take.

In all the days that he had been a prisoner here, had Kindrie ever touched Caldane even with his fingertips? No. This soul-image terrified him, such of it as he had glimpsed in the dreamscape. So cold, so gross, so overwhelming. If he opened himself to it, might it not consume him utterly? But he must try something.

He dropped his free hand to fumble at the bandages around the other’s foot. They were tight, so tight, but here was the end tag of one. He loosened it.

Ah!

Skeins of stiff, gilded wrapping fell. The flesh beneath was red and swollen. Then it cracked open. Yellow fluid seeped out to congeal on the floor in a stinking puddle studded with crystalline acid. The leg above began to drain, then the body.

“No!” cried Caldane, clutching at himself as if to hold on. “Not my divine mass!”

His skin collapsed around him into a tent of crumpled, jaundiced folds. At its heart was a scrawny boy, over whom loomed the golden giant that it had lately been.

“Father!” the child Caldane cried up at it. “Can I help it that I am so small? I eat as much as I can, every day, every meal, more and more and more! Please, don’t laugh at me!”

As his grip loosened on Kindrie, Kirien drew the healer back, panting, into the reception hall. His wrist felt fractured and blood squelched in his boot, but an internal glimpse of white flowers told him that his soul-image remained intact. That was a relief.

He hadn’t known what to expect when he had interacted with Caldane, only that he must try. This revelation of the Caineron’s secret weakness came as a surprise.

Caldane huddled back in his chair, staring blindly, mumbling, “Don’t laugh, don’t laugh. . . . ”

Kindrie gulped. It went against his nature to hurt anyone, but surely it was time to speak the truth.

“Caldane, that tub of lard, but inside a puny man was he.”

Catching his tone, Ashe stepped forward to take up the parody of Jamethiel’s lament: “The Three People he feign would lead . . . drunk with swollen pride.”

“Wealth and power had he,” said the sonorous voice of Director Taur behind her, “but with less sense than in a thimble full of sand. More than death, he feared ridicule. ‘Everyone laughs at me,’ he said to the darkness that crawled within him. ‘How can I make them stop?’”

Lord Caineron cringed back into his tottering chair, whose front wheels lifted off the floor. His sons leaned forward to prop it up.

“Stop,” Caldane cried. “Unfair, unfair! I am greater than that. See? I move. I swell. I conquer.”

As he spoke, the gilded images in the hall seemed to turn, creaking, toward his tormentors. Seams split. Molten metal leaked out like sweat. Torisen’s supporters fell back another step.

“You are hollow,” cried a shrill voice from the back, among the Caineron cadets, “and full of crap! You are a liar! Everyone knows it!”

“False, false, false!”

His accuser, a boy, fell in strong convulsions. He twisted and bent over backward until, with a muffled crunch, his spine snapped. His friends bent over him as his breath faltered and failed. Then they rose, growling.

“We are witnesses,” they said, and many of the other houses echoed them. “Keep faith with honor or fall. So say we all.”

“You threaten me? Me?” Caldane laughed, still shaken but wiping the slabber from his lips and trying to rally. “Know your master, brats, and you too, so-called Highlord.”

“You,” said Ashe, “are mad. Do not seek to hinder our departure . . . or our scorn will never end.”

She laughed, a harsh bark of a sound. Others did too, until the hall filled with derisive mirth.

Caldane’s mouth flopped open and shut, open and shut. He looked as if he had been slapped in the face with a rotten fish.

The Knorth and their allies withdrew.

“You spoke up to him,” said Kirien to Kindrie in wonder.

“Yes. Finally.”

“Now,” said Torisen as they left Restormir through the ranks of baffled troops who seemed to mirror their lord’s confusion, “where do you want to go?”

Kindrie looked at Kirien and smiled. “Home,” he said. “Back to Mount Alban.”

And so it was done.


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Framed