Bound in Blood

VIII Glass of a Different Color

The door to the hall was propped open with an old, double-headed battle axe, the foremost blade of which, still deadly keen, cleaved the wind with a whine as it rushed past into agitated darkness.

Both glass furnaces must be drawing hard, Torisen thought as he paused on the threshold, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Yce brushed past him, a greasy length of rabbit gut clenched in her jaws, and bounded up the northwest spiral stair. Beyond the wash of afternoon light that spilled across the stone floor, death banners were fretted against the walls. Among them stood figures, motionless except for their ruffled clothing, their eyes turned askance to watch him. One looked unnervingly like his sister, but with a most unJamelike expression in her eyes:

Aerulan’s lips moved, unheard but clear in their plea: Oh please, send me home . . .

“This is your home, cousin,” he told her crossly, “and mine too, ancestors help me.”

Another blink of his eyes, and she was only woven cloth again, stained with ancient blood.

Was it better to see those spectral figures or not? Either way, they—and she—were still there, still waiting. He should be used to that by now.

So, are you at last willing to accept my devil’s bargain? purred his father’s voice behind the bolted door in his soul-image. You can free yourself at least of one ghost and be well paid for it.

To that taunt at least he was accustomed, as to the muted sting of a whip on flesh almost too numb to feel the blow.

“I’m tired, Father,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes. “Leave me alone or, better yet, tell me how to get rid of you altogether.”

I am part of your weave, boy, my death crossing your life. To destroy me, you would have to tear yourself apart, but you haven’t the guts for that, have you? Not like your sister . . .

He had been wrong: that stung.

“Oh, shut up!”

A burst of harsh laughter, fading, gone, along with the sound of a door handle furiously rattled.

How strong was he, Torisen wondered. How capable? Ironic, that so far he had been more of a success as Highlord than as Lord Knorth.

He had ridden by the ruined fields on the way out to the hunt early that morning, seeing nothing but pale mud and weeds. They had been lucky to get the haying done, if barely in time. Wheat, oats, rye, flax, all were gone, down to the seeds of future harvests, if any. Some root vegetables, berries, salted fish, hazelnuts, milk, cheese, and flesh from whatever livestock the garrison had managed to get under cover before the lethal ashfall . . . All well and good, as far as it went, but that wasn’t far enough.

“Should I send everyone to Kothifir?” he asked Mullen’s banner. “There’s always food with the Southern Host. But my Kendar are terrified that I will forget their names as I did yours. Most, like you, would rather die and you, of course, I can never forget again.”

He couldn’t accompany them south this time either, not with the other lords wintering in the Riverland. Someone would be bound to make a grab for Gothregor. As much as he disliked the place, it was the Highlord’s seat and the emblem of his power. To lose it might well finish him.

So, not such a success as Highlord either, eh? Where are your allies? Are you prepared to crawl back to Ardeth?

“Be damned if I will,” he said out loud, “or sell my cousin, or take another unfit consort, or marry off my sister. So where does that leave me?”

In a cold hall, with starving followers. Ah, taste it—the bitter dregs of power. How often it was on my tongue during the long years of my exile, and yet the cup never ran dry.

Wearily, hunting leathers a-creak, Torisen followed Yce up the stair.

The second floor of the old keep greeted him with a wave of heat. As windowless as the first, once a hall of judgment, it was now lit by red-rimmed doors set in the northeast and southeast corner turrets behind which fires roared continually to heat the furnaces above. Mounds of coal shouldered out of the darkness. Long ago, the Knorth had discovered a rich bituminous vein in the mountains above Gothregor, enough to warm many a frozen night. The garrison was already busy stocking up for the winter, and some coal from every load found its way here. Tori hadn’t thought to order it, but Marc’s many friends saw that it happened, just as they took turns in their rare off-duty hours to stoke the fires. The whole project had become a community affair, but with only one increasingly knowledgeable (by dint of trial and sometimes disastrous error) glass-master.

Torisen climbed up to the High Council chamber and checked, startled, on the topmost step.

At the far end of the room under the vaulted expanse that had been the great, stained glass map of Rathillien, Yce appeared to be locked in combat with a monster. At any rate, her crouching adversary was huge, clad in a patchwork of old rhi-sar armor and animal skins, with round, glowing eyes and paws for hands. The wolver pup lunged back and forth, snarling, before it. They were playing tug-o’-war with her length of cleaned guts. The strange figure let go of his end and rose, pulling off first protective gauntlets and then a leather hood with smoked glass inserts for eyes. Beneath, sweat plastered thinning, reddish hair to Marc’s skull and made a bedraggled rat of the big Kendar’s beard. Before he had come up with this gear, he had managed to singe off his eyebrows, giving him a look of perpetual surprise. The fringe of his beard was also heat-crinkled as was the hair around his parched lips.

“Did the hunt go well, my lord?”

Tori wanted to snap at him, I’m not your lord. You chose not to accept my service.

Nonetheless, here Marc was, trying to repair the damage Jame had done all those months ago. Tori had his doubts that the Kendar would succeed, but something had to be done about that gaping hole before the other lords could set foot again in this chamber and snicker at it.

“No,” he said instead, shrugging off his heavy jacket, slinging it over the back of the Highlord’s displaced chair, and dropping into the seat. This room was nearly as hot as the one below, despite a cool breeze blowing in one broken window and out another. He was indeed very tired.

“Ummm . . . ” said Marc unhappily

Torisen hastily removed his booted feet from the table before they could smudge the map chalked on its surface or disturb the little leather pouches strewn about it.

At the far end of the table was a saddlebag, whose contents he knew only too well, having carried them from Kithorn all the way to the Cataracts. At the moment they lay in shadow, the declining sun not yet having sunk below the upper arch of the western window. Nonetheless, he sketched them a brief salute.

“It was the worst hunt yet,” he said, slumping back in the chair. “Just a few harts and hinds and, as you see”—with a jerk of his head to Yce, gnawing her prize in a corner—“the odd hare. Thanks to these damned folds in the land, we only seem to catch the very stupid or the very confused. At that, we’re lucky not to get lost ourselves.”

Marc offered him a dipper of water, then drank deep himself and absentmindedly emptied what was left over his head.

“You did notice, I take it, that yon pup has blood on her fur.”

“Yes, but it isn’t hers. She fought the direhounds for her treat, and won.”

Marc chuckled. “That sounds uncommonly like our lass. Have you had any word of her of late? I take it, at least, that the college is still standing.”

“If it weren’t, presumably someone would have told me.”

Torisen stirred uneasily. He didn’t like spies, and asking Harn Grip-hard to keep an eye on his sister felt too much like employing one. Just the same . . .

“All I’ve heard from Harn is ‘The weather is fine. Wish you were here.’ ”

“If Ran Harn wants you at Tentir, perhaps you should go.”

Harn couldn’t have meant that literally . . . could he? Maybe he had. The Knorth war-leader and sometime commandant of Tentir wasn’t inclined to be flippant. Moreover, something clearly had been bothering him to near distraction ever since Autumn’s Eve.

Observing that an hourglass on the window sill had run its course, Marc turned it over.

“Never mind,” he said, donning his gauntlets and hood. “Our lass can usually take care of herself, though she takes some getting used to.” He chuckled. “I wonder how my great-granddaughter Brier is doing. She’s a bit stiff in her ways—no surprise, given her history—but no doubt they’ll be good for each other.”

“Wait a minute. Brier Iron-thorn is your kin?”

“Not exactly, since we only trace bloodlines on the mother’s side. Still, right glad I was when you took her into your service at the Cataracts. She’ll do both of you proud.”

Marc opened the hatch on the northeast furnace to a rage of heat and light, reached in with tongs, and removed one of several clay firepots.

“Odd, though, about the hunt, I mean. By now the fall migrations should have begun. When the urge to go south hits, you’d think some beasties had lost their minds. Yackcarn, now, their migration from farther north is more like a month-long stampede. Only the females go. The males stay up above the snow line yearlong. You hear them bellowing in the spring mating session, but I don’t think anyone has ever seen one. The Merikit depend on the fall run of their female folk to survive the winter.”

Torisen pulled off a boot and shook a pebble out of it. The “pebble,” a baby trock, rolled into a corner and settled there, staring back at him with tiny, bright, unblinking eyes. Somehow, scavengers always survived. Ruefully, he studied the hole that the creature had gnawed in his sock. More work for Burr, unless he found time to darn it himself first. Luckily, the creature hadn’t yet started on his foot itself.

“Did . . . er . . . things ever get really bad of a winter at Kithorn?”

“Once, when I was a boy.”

Marc carefully poured the pot’s contents onto the flat blade of a long-handled clay paddle, one of several retrieved from the ancient glassworks in Gothregor’s abandoned halls along with the pots. The molten glass flowed like thick, incandescent honey, only covering two palms’ width. Strands of beard that had escaped the Kendar’s hood crinkled and burned with an acrid stench.

“The first melt can take up to sixteen hours,” he said, opening a slot in the second, southeastern furnace and sliding the paddle blade into it. “Fascinating stuff, glass. Did you know it’s basically just sand, lime, and ash, plus some coloring agent? Using cullet—the broken glass of the old window, that is—helps it melt at a lower temperature, although these turrets make natural chimneys and that coal burns something fierce. Huh. I’ll be needing to stoke this one soon, then let it cool to anneal the sheet.”

His smoked-glass eyes, when he turned, held the image of swirling, molten fire, but his voice flattened with sere reminiscence.

“That winter, now. It was hard. The harvest had been poor that year and the winter snows came early. When our supplies ran out, around Mid-Winter’s Day, we ate everything: bark, leather, frostbitten ears and toes. All the animals went, of course, except for the wise cats, who hid. The dogs licked our hands before we cut their throats.”

“And the horses?”

If he could have seen the Kendar’s expression, it would probably have been reproachful.

“We drew the line there in honor of our Whinno-hir except for those that dropped dead by themselves, which was most of them. They’ve no hair in their nostrils, y’know, to filter the cold air, and we had limited space in the keep. Lung infections took those that didn’t die first of hunger.”

“Why didn’t you ask one of the major houses for help?”

Shutting the slot, Marc opened another one below it and drew out a second pallet whose contents had flattened somewhat and spread into an irregular shape. This he slid onto a slab of stone used as a mazer and ironed it flatter still with a heavy metal rod, working quickly before it could cool.

“By the time we knew we needed aid,” he said over his shoulder, “it was too late. Besides, we were a cadet branch of the Caineron, the last to survive the Fall. Caldane’s father would have loved to snap us up, but we fancied our freedom, the same as the Min-drear do from the Knorth.

“Anyway, one bright, bitter day my little sister Willow was so hungry—how do you explain to a child that crying doesn’t help?—that I went out, cleared the snow off a patch in the spinney where I knew the loam was deep, set a fire, and thawed a patch of ground. It froze again almost as fast as I could hack it up, but I found enough roots, frozen worms, and hibernating bugs to make a thin gruel, which the poor thing promptly threw up. When I’d finally gotten her to bed—our parents were both dead by then, y’see—and came back to deal with the mess, someone had already licked the floor clean.

“Quick, now: where d’you think this piece fits?”

The small sheet was still strangely shaped, and strangely colored now that it had begun to cool, with veins of shimmering red that ran through dull green into dusky purple.

Torisen rose to look more closely. “I don’t remember anything like that in the old window.”

“Iron and nickel, I’d say,” said Marc, thinking out loud. “They create that verdigris color sometimes, like the undersides of clouds before a bad storm. The red comes from gold, believe it or not. At a guess, these are streams washing gold dust down to the Silver. It’s a bit of the Riverland, anyway.”

He picked it up with his gauntleted hands, supporting its still malleable shape, and transferred it to the table. Other bits of finished glass dotted the tabletop, roughly where Torisen thought the Riverland should be.

“Move that sack, lad.”

Marc indicated which one with a jerk of his chin, and Torisen snatched it up. The Kendar placed his fragment next to first one, then another of similar hue. As he fiddled with them, Torisen opened the sack and stirred its contents with a long finger. Ground, greenish quartz, bits of rough, dark stone with flecks of iron in it, limestone, a grain of gold, a tiny fern frond that crumbled to ash at his touch . . .

“What’s this?”

“The raw stuff of glass. There’s not enough cullet to recast the whole window. Luckily, a wise-woman has been dropping off these samples as she gathers them. They stretch the supply of cullet further than you would think.”

“She’s not a Kencyr, then?”

“No. I first met her in Peshtar on the western flanks of the Ebonbane. You just missed her. I expect she’s gone with her knitting to listen in on the Matriarchs’ Council as Cattila’s Ear.”

“She reports to the Caineron?” Torisen didn’t like the sound of that at all. “And the Matriarchs let her?”

“As I understand it, only to the Caineron Matriarch, who’s too old to travel and has no very high opinion of her great-grandson Caldane. Don’t fret yourself, lad; it’s an old arrangement and no harm has come of it yet that I know of.”

Still, an outsider . . .

He would have to ask the Jaran Matriarch Trishien about that. Besides, it would be an excuse to visit her, as well as to inquire about other things.

“Anyway, very particular, she is, where her bits and pieces go on the map, with some peculiar results. Look.”

He had fitted the new piece into one already cast. Not only did their edges match perfectly, without any prior shaping, but they had flowed into each other, fusing into one.

Torisen swore softly. “I may not know much about making glass, but that strikes me as distinctly odd.”

“Oh aye, it’s that all right. As I recall, the old window was fitted together with lead strips, like most others in Tai-tastigon.”

“That was where you learned how to do this?”

“Not ‘learned,’ exactly. A guild-master told me more than he probably should have, but he owed me a rather large favor.”

“And that was where you met Jame?”

The words were out before he could stop them.

“Aye.”

The Kendar waited for him to ask more, but he couldn’t. Somehow, somewhere, his twin sister had lost ten years since their father had driven her out of the Haunted Lands keep. Had it been in Tai-tastigon? He remembered his brief time in that god-infested city as a kind of waking nightmare to be escaped as quickly as possible. What had Jame done there? Where had she been before that?

If you knew, jeered his father’s voice, you could never bear to look at her again, much less touch her. Shanir, god-spawn, unclean, unclean . . . and yet you still love her, you weak, stupid boy.

“Shut up!”

Marc was staring at him. “My lord? Lad?”

Torisen rubbed his eyes. “I didn’t mean you, and don’t mind me. I’m being weak, stupid . . . ”

“That you are not. Listen. Hard times make hard, strong men, and women too. That winter, just before Spring’s Eve, it finally came down to a lottery among the garrison. The old lord insisted on putting in his family’s markers as well, but of course we let those slip through.”

Torisen felt his own empty stomach turn. “Who . . . er . . . won?”

“My mother’s sister’s daughter. She took it as a high honor, but you can imagine how the rest of us felt. Nonetheless, we did what we had to do, and included our last portion of dog—the old lord’s favorite courser, Flash; well I remember him—so that later we could all hope that that was what we had eaten. Three weeks later, the cold broke. Most of us wouldn’t have lived to see it without her sacrifice.”

He took the sack from Torisen’s hand and mixed it in the recently emptied firepot with ground cullet from the green and purple barrels. This process must go on steadily day and night, Torisen realized. The resulting pieces were so small, the whole map so large. Regardless, this Kendar would see it through to the end. His strength was humbling. No wonder Jame thought so highly of him, and that Torisen resented Marc’s alliance to his sister rather than to himself. Would his great-granddaughter Brier go the same way, and how many more?

You will lose them, one by one. How can you compete with such unnatural, darkling glamour?

Marc transferred the pot to the main furnace, the last vessel in a long line.

“An hour, more or less, until the next melt is ready,” he said, closing the hatch, once again shedding his hood and wiping the sweat from his flushed face.

“What happened next?” Torisen heard himself ask.

The big Kendar sighed, with a smile that twisted oddly awry.

“Then at last came spring, and summer, and the richest harvest any of us had ever seen. Trinity, I thought I would burst with feasting after so long a-fast; but the other boys made a joke of it, what with me already being so much bigger than any of them, so I took my bow and went off to be alone a bit.

“While I was gone, the Merikit came and slaughtered everyone. I understand why now. Then . . . only the wolves and ravens feasted, except on those that I managed to save for the pyre. If I had been stronger, maybe I would have stayed, but then who would have claimed their blood price? Strength is a strange thing, at least as strange as honor. Your sister, now. She is strong, no denying it; but she couldn’t hold together the Kencyrath as you have. Her way leads apart, where few if any may follow. So my instinct tells me, and I say this as one who loves her dearly, for her sense of honor, for her determination to do the right thing at whatever cost to others or to herself. I ask you to trust me in this.”

He glanced at the saddlebag resting on the far end of the table. The sun had sunk below the stone tracery. Shortly, it would slip behind the mountains, but at the moment it cast an elongated child’s shadow toward them, its head cocked as though listening.

“I have you to thank, lad, for rescuing my sister Willow, or her bones at least.”

Torisen remembered finding them in Kithorn’s stillroom where the child had run to hide on the night of the Massacre and subsequently starved to death, surrounded by the preserves of a plentiful harvest.

“When will you give her to the pyre?”

“Not yet. I will know the time.”

“I wish I had your certainty, about so many things.”

“Ah, you may yet, lad. Have the courage to wait.”

The sun had set behind the western Snowthorns, ushering in the long twilight of autumn. Trishien, Matriarch of the Jaran, sat at her table by one window of an arcade writing to her grandniece Kirien.

“ . . . and so, my dear,” ran her swooping, rounded letters, “you will see me sooner than either of us expected. I have seldom attended a Council so brief or, all things considered, so civil. Even Karidia only yapped once or twice. But then, of course, we have been discussing the matter informally for weeks.”

She dipped her quill in ink. Immediately it darted from pot to paper and began to inscribe Kirien’s spiky script under her own.

“Has anyone told the Highlord yet?”

“No . . . ”

She paused, listening to a shuffle on the flat roof overhead. Some leaves drifted past the window. The ivy outside jerked and the birds that nested in it fled, protesting shrilly. The next moment, the vines above gave way with a sharp, ripping sound and swung into the room, bearing a black-clad figure tangled up in them. It rolled upright, then tripped over the tough tendrils wrapped around its legs and pitched face first onto the floor at her feet.

Bemused, she stared down at black hair shot with premature white and festooned with ivy leaves. A face turned upward to her, foreshortened, its lower half twisted in a wry smile.

“Your pardon, Matriarch,” said Torisen Black Lord. “I would have used the door, but I didn’t want the entire Women’s World bursting in on my heels.”

“What, and abandon such a dignified method of entrance? Next time, though, for the birds’ sake, bring a rope.”

He laughed and set about freeing himself.

“What is it?” wrote Kirien.

“The Highlord has come to call.”

“Will you tell him?”

“Yes.” Trishien hesitated. “Is he very like his sister?”

She regretted never having seen Jameth’s face unmasked. The Highborn habit of always wearing veils was a nuisance, especially for her in hot weather when the magnifying lenses slotted into her own mask invariably steamed up.

“Very like, except older,” said the spiky script jerking from her quill.

Ancestors, Kirien’s penmanship! And she gripped the quill so tightly that even a short message left Trishien’s finger’s painfully cramped.

“I can see why Adiraina mistook them for twins.”

Trishien made no response to this. She had never known the Ardeth Matriarch to be wrong in such matters.

“So, to what do I owe the honor of your presence in my chamber?” she asked the Highlord.

Torisen asked about Cattila’s Ear. Was it wise to have someone not of the Kencyrath privy to one of its most secret councils?

Trishien waved this away. “I have known Mother Ragga all my life. She frequently drops in at the Scrollsmen’s College.”

He looked startled. “Mother Ragga? The Earth Wife?”

“Yes. Have you met her?”

Torisen ran a distraught hand through his hair, dislodging a shower of twigs, the fragments of birds’ nests, and one protesting fledging. “I thought it was a dream,” he said. “What else could it have been? I stumbled into her lodge in the middle of the harvest field, when the winds were tearing it apart. She was strung up by her heels from a rafter and Jame was using a plow horse to thump the soles of her feet against it. She said something about all the melted fat having run into the Earth Wife’s legs, that she was trying to jar it back into place. I thought I was going mad.”

“Anyone would have,” said Trishien soothingly, and yet she wondered. A dream? A blow to the head? Insanity? With the Knorth, one never knew.

But the Earth Wife was strange. How could she be the same old woman now that she had been when Trishien was a child, and what about those crispy slugs she used to give the Jaran youngsters as treats? At the time, Trishien had assumed that Mother Ragga made them, like candy or fried shortbread. Now she wasn’t so sure.

Torisen noticed the two handwritings on the Matriarch’s sheet and flinched.

“Have you ever stopped to think,” she asked tartly, “that the ability to bind Kendar might also be a Shanir trait?”

“How can it? The Kencyrath abominates those of the Old Blood. No offense meant.”

“None, or not much, taken.”

“But that would mean that all the lords . . . ”

His voice faded. He still looked aghast, but also thoughtful as if gazing through glass of a different color at something whose obscenity both horrified and fascinated him. “It might explain a lot; still . . . no. Matriarch, what disgusts you the most?”

“Bookworms,” she said promptly. “Once I opened a book and a mass of them tumbled out into my lap, all white and writhing.” Her stomach lurched at the memory, and at the thought of the Earth Wife’s crispy creeper “treats.” It was after the bookworm incident, she now realized, that she had stopped begging for the latter.

“Well then, think of them roiling in your guts and eating out your brain. That’s how it feels when I think of myself as a Shanir.”

Trishien gulped, glad for once of the mask that shielded her expression, thinking that she had just lost her taste for dinner. “Point taken.”

The Highlord had obviously been nerving himself for something. Now he asked, with feigned nonchalance, “Speaking of the Shanir, have you . . . er . . . heard anything about my sister’s progress at Tentir?”

“Wait. I’ll ask.”

She did, and read the answer in Kirien’s spiky script. “This is odd. She seems to have fought with that handsome Ardeth Lordan Timmon and taken up with the Caineron Gorbel. What a strange pairing. But then I remember Gorbel as a child with his solemn ways and scrunched-up little face. He was only a baby when his father beat his mother to death. We knew about it in the Women’s World. I doubt, though, if anyone ever told him.”

While she read him the rest of Kirien’s report, adding to it details she had previously learned, the Highlord restlessly paced the far end of the room. The light was beginning to fail and no candles were yet lit. Trishien was by nature farsighted, a disadvantage to a scholar which her lenses corrected. With them in place, it seemed to her that Torisen moved in a nimbus of shadow that followed and swung with him as he turned. Once or twice he laughed, but mostly he maintained a grim silence. Trishien wondered why. Jameth’s misadventures were, as usual, inexplicable and alarming, but she always survived them, even if those who set them in motion sometimes didn’t. On the whole, given everything against her, she was doing very well at Tentir.

“Don’t you want her to succeed?” she asked abruptly.

“It . . . would cause difficulties.”

“More so than her failure?”

He didn’t answer. Trishien sighed and put down her quill in mid-question from Kirien.

“My lord,” she said, flexing her cramped, ink-stained fingers, “when we were both young, I was fond of your father and he of me. Under other circumstances, you might have been our son.”

She paused, remembering that no one knew who the Highlord’s mother actually was or anything about her except that, according to Adiraina, she was a pure-blooded Knorth Highborn, which was strange enough given the Massacre.

“What happened?” Torisen asked out of the settling dusk.

Trishien shrugged, feeling the pinch of old pain, dismissing it. “Your grandfather considered me to be of unsound breeding stock.”

“So he settled on Rawneth instead.”

“Yes, ironically, since she wanted Greshan, the Knorth Lordan. They would have suited each other, I think, but what a lethal pairing. Everything changed, though, the night that Gerraint died, when both he and his heir Greshan burned on that hasty pyre along with so many banners of your house. ‘I’ve seen her, Trish,’ Ganth told me later, ‘the woman without whom I can’t live.’ Whom he meant, though, I can’t tell, since none but Rawneth was there, and he always said that she scared him half to death. For his sake, I will give you what aid I can. How can I act, though, in the dark?”

She waited. When he didn’t respond, she turned reluctantly to the next item on the agenda.

“I understand that your sister has urged you to give Aerulan’s banner to the Brandan and to accept the price placed on it by your father. I urge you to do so too. You don’t know the grief that your reluctance is causing.”

“How can I profit from such greed? I told Brandan: he can have the banner with my blessing.”

“Trust me, that won’t work. Consider your responsibility to your people. You don’t know how brutal a northern winter can be.”

He gave a sharp laugh. “Marc was just telling how, once, his home keep was reduced to cannibalism.”

“I remember that bitter season. We all went hungry before the end. He probably didn’t tell you, though, how the Caineron tried to starve them out by blocking the aid that we attempted to send. Falkirr and Omiroth are your nearest neighbors. Can you afford to enter this of all winters at odds with both of them?”

He resumed his pacing. “No. Yes. Maybe.”

“As decisive as ever, boy. P’ah, I said you were weak, as so you prove yourself to be yet again.”

Trishien had started at the harsh change in Torisen’s voice. It didn’t sound like him at all and yet . . . and yet . . . it was familiar.

“D’you think your sister would be so spiritless if she ruled here? Already the Kendar Marcarn prefers her to you. Soon others will also.”

“Marc said she couldn’t hold the Kencyrath together, that her way led elsewhere.”

“Yes, it does. To destruction.”

The Matriarch rose, trembling. She fumbled the lenses out of her mask as if to clean them and dropped one, barely hearing it shatter on the floor. Long sight, shadow sight. Someone paced at the Highlord’s shoulder, leaning to whisper in his ear. She knew that sharp profile, those haunted eyes that used rage to mask their vulnerability.

“What a joke it would be, if you should prove to be Shanir too, just like your sister. God-spawn, unclean, unclean . . . ”

“Ganth!” She hardly recognized her own voice, half-strangled as it was. “Do you want to prove yourself no better than your brother Greshan? Leave that boy alone!”

He was stalking toward her, the younger face eclipsed by the older. “Ah, Trish. Mind your own business, or shall I curse you as I did both of my faithless children? How would you like never to open a book again for fear of what you might find? Bookworm, filthy Shanir . . . ”

The second lens slipped out of her fingers and crunched under her foot as she retreated. The mask itself might have fallen, so naked did her face feel.

“Ganth, please . . . ”

A storm of yelping broke out on the roof.

Torisen drew up in dismay, looking confused. “What was I saying? What was I about to do?” The shadow had fallen from his face and with it any resemblance to his father, although he was close enough to her now for his features to blur. Was that the unknown mother that she saw in his fine bones, in those quick, changing eyes and mobile mouth, now twisted in dismay?

“Yip, yip, yip, aroooo . . . !”

“Yce,” said Torisen. “I thought I left her safely sound asleep beside the glass furnace. She must have somehow tracked me across the rooftops. Matriarch, your pardon. I’d better leave as I came. She’s going to bring the entire Women’s World down on me.”

Indeed, they heard voices approaching in the hall outside, Karidia’s shrill notes predominant.

“I swear, that woman has set spies on me. Highlord, wait.” Trishien scrambled for her wits, cursing the blurred vision that also seemed to have unfocused her thoughts. “You should know. This day the Matriarchs’ Council has decided to leave Gothregor for the winter. Everyone will go, to be schooled at their home keeps until such time as the Council deems your house safe again.”

“Oh.” He paused, one leg flung over the window sill, considering this. “I really must be in bad shape, mustn’t I?” He sounded almost regretful. It was one thing, after all, to dodge hunting parties, another to be deemed unworthy of the chase.

At that moment, a small white shape hurtled down from the roof, crashed into him, and knocked both off the ledge. Trishien heard a mighty scramble and a ripping of vines. By the time she reached the window, Torisen had gained the ground by dint of tearing the other half of the ivy loose. Wolver pup and Highlord emerged, liberally festooned, from the leafy ruins.

Seized by a sudden dread, Trishien leaned out the window. The last thing any of them needed, worse even than keeping Aerulan’s banner, was for Torisen to face the maledight Brenwyr alone.

“If you do take your cousin north, wait for Lord Brandan to return from Kothifir. Promise me!”

He sketched her a brief, relieved salute and fled with the pup at his heels.

Karidia was pounding on the door.

“I know you have a man in there, you cross-eyed hypocrite, maybe two of them! What is this, an orgy? Open up and be honest for once!”

Trishien groped her way to the door and opened it. “That was no man,” she told the irate Coman Matriarch on her threshold, peering down into the other’s suffused face as it bobbed about, trying to see past her. “It was the Highlord.”

“Oh, him.”

With a snort, Karidia turned on her heel and left.