Bound in Blood

IV In the Moon Garden

Jame found Lyra some time later, only because the rain stopped and Lyra started crying, “Here! Here! Here!” like a lost chick.

“Quiet!” said Jame, taking off her sodden coat and wrapping it around the girl’s slight figure to which wet, chill lace now clung like a second skin. Nearby, an unhappy Jorin tried to groom himself dry.

Jame hoped that the rain had washed away her earlier track; however, if Corvine followed any trace of it, she would eventually come upon a clearer trail of trampled grass and muddy footsteps over stone, as Jame had once Lyra’s cries pointed her in the right direction. On the other hand, Lyra had plunged far into the maze of deserted buildings, where courtyards and roofless, crumbling halls were barely distinguishable from each other. When the Riverland had been ceded to the Kencyrath two millennia ago, how like her Knorth ancestors to have claimed the largest fortress even when they barely had the numbers to occupy a tenth of it. She and Lyra stood surrounded by looming walls whose empty windows gave glimpses of the clearing night sky. Soon there would be telltale stars, but at the moment it was hard even to be sure if one faced north or south. Still, few knew this wasteland better than Jame, who had spent the previous winter exploring it to escape the suffocating closeness of the Women’s Halls.

So. Should she hustle the young Caineron and herself back to the safety of more populated regions or go on, trusting that with her knowledge they could dodge any pursuit? Leaving the girl where she stood or sending her back on her own, undoubtedly to get lost again, wasn’t an option.

“Can you keep a secret?”

Behind her wisp of a mask, Lyra blinked. “I think so,” she said, a bit doubtfully.

With that, Jame had to be content. She led the way eastward until the Ghost Walks loomed over them, set in the keep’s northeastern corner. Here hung a tattered tapestry depicting a garden of white flowers in full bloom and behind it, a warped door that screeched on its hinges. Inside was the Moon Garden.

Lyra entered eagerly—Kinzi’s lost paradise had been the stuff of legend within the Women’s World for decades—but stopped just over the threshold, disappointed. “Oh.”

Following on her heels, Jame could see why. In spring and summer, the garden was a riot of white blossomed herbs: tall comfrey, wild heartsease, and silver-leafed yarrow among many others, set in deep, lush grass to the hum of bees. At this time of year, however, all had gone to seed and weed, beaten down by the recent rain. Mist drifted in thickening skeins between the tattered herbs. Clots of it seemed to catch on tall, gaunt shapes dotted about the garden, themselves already bound with white, fibrous shrouds through which frost-curdled leaves poked like withered fingers. Each contorted shape bore a crown of dim, bristling stars.

“They’re only burdocks,” said Jame in answer to Lyra’s fearful clutch on her arm. “Good for arthritis, abscesses, acne, and aphrodisiacs, or so I’m told. At this season, though, they tend to get cranky.”

She spoke absently, her attention elsewhere. A little stream half choked with dead leaves ran across the southern end of the garden, mist rising off it like smoke. On the wall beyond, over yellowing fern fronds, hung the shreds of a banner all but worn away by the rains of many years.

Jame stopped just short of the stream and saluted that ghost of a gentle face. “Hello, Tieri. An Autumn’s Eve’s greetings to you.”

Lyra came up behind her, staring. “That’s Tieri the Tart?”

Jame swung around on her so sharply that the girl flinched back, straight into the embrace of a burdock taller than she was.

“Who calls her that?”

“E-everyone in the Caineron quarters. I think Kallystine started it.”

“Huh. She would.” Jame remembered the taunts of her brother’s former consort in that room glimmering with mirrors and candlelight, when she had first learned of Kindrie’s existence: “Three of you left, my dear, and one a, a thing, that calls into serious question whether you yourself will breed true. I needn’t tell you how damaging even the whisper of this could be to your prospects.”

Dear Kallystine had been referring to Tieri’s bastard, Kindrie. Whispers be damned; her attempted blackmail a failure, the Caineron had probably shouted her juicy bit of gossip from the highest rooftop she could find.

“Forget rumors. This is the truth. To begin with, Tieri was Ganth’s youngest sister.”

Lyra paused in her struggle to fight off the clutching weed. “Your aunt?”

“I suppose.”

Jame hadn’t thought of Tieri that way. How disconcerting that the dead didn’t age.

“Anyway, the night that the shadow assassins came, Aerulan hid her and drew them off, to her own death. Things moved fast then. Ganth ran mad when he saw what he believed to be all of his womenfolk dead and away he marched with the Kencyr Host to collect their blood price in the White Hills.”

“ ‘With the smoke of their pyres rising at his back.’ ” Lyra spoke as one reciting an old, well-known story. “He attacked the wrong enemy, though, didn’t he?”

“Yes. We still don’t know for sure who ordered the Massacre, much less why. Guesses don’t count without proof. Anyway, by the time Tieri crept out of hiding, Ganth was on his way to exile.”

“So she was left behind, alone,” said Lyra, working it out. She was having less luck with the burdock as it clung to her back, busily seeding Jame’s borrowed jacket and working its spiked burrs into Lyra’s hair. She drew up the hood against it. “But why here?”

“I suppose Adiraina was trying to protect her. She was the last pure-blooded lady of her house, as far as anyone knew, and the assassins might have come back.”

“Like they did for you. Oh, I wish I could have been here that night!”

“I don’t,” said Jame grimly, remembering the creeping shadows, the confusion of a garrison trying to fight unseen death, her own blood on the floor. All it had lacked by way of horror was a foolish young Caineron plunging around trying to be helpful.

“But why is her banner here, not with the others in the hall?”

“You said it yourself. The Matriarchs’ Council considers her disgraced. She had a child in this garden, and died here giving birth to it. No one knows who the father was.”

“Oh,” said Lyra, pausing in her struggles, taking this in with widening eyes. Perhaps no one had explained to her what a “tart” was. A year ago, she had scarcely seemed to know where babies came from. “Oh! Without a contract? But that would make her child ill . . . ill . . . ”

She stumbled over the word as if over an obscenity.

“Illegitimate. That’s why he’s called the Knorth Bastard, and why the Women’s World threw him out. I suppose the Priests’ College at Wilden was better than drowning, but not by much. Still, I claim Kindrie Soul-walker as my cousin and you, lady,” she added, turning to the sad, threadbare face against the wall, “also as a member of my house.”

Something snapped. The banner sagged, and fell.

It seemed to Jame that Tieri was plummeting toward her, outstretched arms trailing linen warp threads flecked with what scant weft remained of her rain-cleansed death clothes and of her weatherworn soul. A moment later, she had engulfed Jame in a desperate, clammy embrace, which almost knocked her over. Jame grappled blindly with moldy cloth and thread, unsure if she was trying to support them or to throw them off. The sodden mass was surprisingly heavy, and it stank. Meanwhile, over and over a thin voice keened in her ear:

. . . I only did what I was told. I only did what I was told . . .

The weight settled on her shoulders in an unwanted, twitching mantle.

Now she could see again, a confused vision of the Moon Garden overlaid with that of Gothregor’s death banner hall. What in the latter had been a single stone shattered by fire was now a gaping hole through which the wind poured as if into a gigantic mouth, its rocky teeth fringed with ancient, tattered banners.

That inner void drew Jame forward, one jerky step into the margin of the stream despite a frantic whisper in her ear:

. . . no, no, no . . .

At first, it was like looking into deep, black water, a darkness thick enough to move with its own slow respiration. Then she began to make out a floor, dark marble shot with glowing veins of green that seemed, faintly, to pulse. It stretched far, far back to a wall of still, white faces, thousands upon thousands of them, a mighty host of the dead, watching.

Three death banner halls, if one counted Tieri’s place of exile, one overlapping another. Correspondences. Connections. Portals.

The wind faltered, then turned, sluggishly, to breathe in her face: Haaahhh . . .

It stank of old, old death, of ancient despair, and of things more recent, more intimate.

Do you remember me, child of darkness? asked that reek. On your skin, in your hair, oh, my taste in your mouth like that of a lover, tongue to tongue?

After her father had driven her out from the Haunted Lands keep as a child, had she really grown up in this hideous place? Memories of that time rose sluggishly, half-glimpsed and grotesque, like the winter’s bloated dead after a false spring thaw. She might owe her sanity to such forgetfulness, but also much confusion: for years, she had thought that the Master’s Hall was her soul-image, her place in it there, on the cold hearth, warmed only by the flayed pelts of Arrin-ken with their charred eye sockets and still-twitching claws.

“You made me think I was a monster, didn’t you?” she demanded of it, drawn forward another step, her own nails biting into her clenched palms while water seeped into her boots. Funereal threads twitched in dread across her shoulders, trying to hold her back, ignored. “Unfallen, yes, but what did that count against the taint of my very blood? No choice. No hope. Well, I’m free now and awake, growing armor to match my claws, and I will fight you.”

Aaaahhh . . . a slow, deep inhalation, as of a sleeping monster. And out . . . Haaahahaha . . . as if its secret dreams of her childhood amused it.

Jame shivered.

Under the eyes of the dead, two figures revolved around each other, the one in black only visible when it eclipsed the one clad in white.

Whip-thin fingers plucked at her sleeve, wound desperately about her neck.

. . . I only did . . . you must not do . . .

But Jame no longer listened.

She felt herself yearn toward the white dancer with an ache she scarcely recognized, and without thinking took another step into the water, almost to its far margin. Part of her noted that the stream ran faster and was rising, probably fed by rain from the mountains above at last reaching the valley floor. Then too, the garden had nearly disappeared behind her, giving way to Gothregor’s death banner hall, but she didn’t care. It had been so long ago, since childhood, really, despite rare glimpses over the years. Now, of course, the Dream-weaver was gone forever. Did it really matter that she had perished at the Escarpment’s edge in part to save the children whom she no longer dared to touch? A fine gesture, yes, perhaps even noble, but set against so many years of absence—how could one grieve for the loss of a love that one had barely known?

Still, Jame heard herself whisper, “Mother.”

Other shapes moved between the stream and the broken wall. Ghosts, or something more? A young man with pale blood streaming down a stricken face huddled at the wall’s foot. He looked up, at something behind her.

“F-father?”

That voice she knew, although she had never before heard it stutter.

“Greshan is my son,” came the harsh, panting reply. “I have no other.”

Jame tried to turn to see who spoke, but couldn’t against the terrified clutch of Tieri’s threads. Was that Gerraint? She had never met her grandfather. On the whole, she didn’t think she would have liked him, or vice versa.

“I have come this far, broken oaths and betrayed my house—all for its own sake, I swear! Do you swear your lord can do this thing?”

“Gerridon is your lord too, old man, whatever the Arrin-ken say. Ask, and see.”

That voice . . . ah, she wasn’t likely to forget it any time soon. The wonder was that she hadn’t recognized Rawneth’s strange servant earlier; but why in Perimal’s name had the Randir brought a darkling changer with her to Gothregor, much less the Master’s favorite pet, Keral . . . and where was Rawneth now, or rather then, in the scene playing out around her?

I’ve missed something important, she thought. Something that happened between the point where Rawneth locked eyes with me in the death banner hall and now, but what? She told me to forget that she was there, and for a while I did. What else have I forgotten?

Gerraint lurched past her to face that breach into eternal night.

“Master, Master!” he cried. “Will you grant me my heart’s desire? Will you restore my son to me?”

The void breathed in . . . and out, in . . . and out. Then it spoke, in the distorted rumble of a voice in an empty room, buried fathoms deep.

A phantom gasp from Tieri, and cords tightening in panic around Jame’s throat.

The dark figure had come almost to the threshold. He was cowled and muffled, but somehow gave the impression of a leanness bordering on famine. Him too she knew, and felt her claws unsheathe: Gerridon, the Master of Knorth, who had betrayed all for this meager, immortal life. So many death banners, rank on rank . . . he had devoured the souls of all his followers, one by one, to come to this. His hall, Perimal Darkling itself, surrounded him like the belly of a beast that has swallowed everything, even itself, and still hungers for more.

Oblivious, Ganth stared past him at the Dream-weaver like a man who has seen his fate, not caring that it is also his doom.

Jamethiel danced on, a slim, graceful figure with flowing black hair, untouched by shadow or age. Drawn to that luminous, sensual innocence, wraiths danced with her, tattered souls shivering in the threads of their death banners, torn loose from Gothregor’s keep and swept into this haunt of darkness. One by one, they surrendered to her kiss, and what remained tumbled in unstrung coils to the cold, dark floor.

“That is your price?” Gerraint sounded incredulous, answering a voice that had spoken only to him. “A contract for a pure-bred Knorth lady? But, Master, you already have a consort.”

He and Ganth both looked at the pale shimmer where Jamethiel danced, the opaque air a halo around her. She bent to gather up the tangled threads of the dead.

The darkness rumbled.

“Oh,” said Gerraint, blankly. “You want a child, a . . . daughter? But why?”

The cowled head turned as the Dream-weaver drifted toward him. Absently, smiling, she kissed him, and the ghost of souls glimmered from her lips to his within the hood’s shadow. He reached out as if to return her caress, but stopped himself. Her hair slid through his fingers like black silken water as she turned and drifted away. His hand clenched and fell.

“Such power comes at a cost,” said the changer, still out of sight behind Jame, cloaked in the mist. “She is already dangerous to touch. Soon it will be worse.”

“I d-don’t believe you.”

“Of course you don’t.”

Gerraint was frowning. “We are so few, and fewer still of our women are free to make new contracts.” He crossed his arms, hugging himself. “However, there is my daughter Tieri . . . ”

“Who is only a year old!” Ganth burst out.

Tieri’s grip on Jame’s throat tightened.

No, no, no . . .

Jame felt the ivory of her nails spread up her hands to become articulated gloves, then higher to form the armor of her soul-image. This child’s fate would have been her own, if Tirandys hadn’t taught her how to fight back. Besides, she was beginning to feel half-choked.

“Tieri, please . . . ”

The shadows spoke again.

“Her age doesn’t matter,” translated the changer. “Only her bloodlines. There are rooms in the Master’s House where time barely crawls. He will retreat into one of them and await his . . . pleasure. As for the Mistress, she will do his bidding, as she does now.”

Dancing, singing to herself, the Dream-weaver wove linen threads from the death banners into a new fabric picked out with flecks of ancient blood. The flecks were words; the whole, a document that she presented to her lord.

Ganth floundered to his feet, but Gerraint had already reached into the shadows to seal it with his emerald ring and the rathorn crest.

Noooooo . . . ! wailed Tieri, tightening her grip, making Jame gasp. . . . no no no no . . .

“How cold!” the Highlord murmured, withdrawing his hand. “My fingers are numb.”

They were worse than that. Blanched skin split open across his knuckles and the meager flesh beneath drew back on tendon and bone. Then the bones themselves began to crumble. Ganth caught the signet ring as it fell and threw an arm around his father to steady him.

“B-bastard!” he said to the changer. “You knew this would happen.”

“No. How the shadows enter each man’s soul is his own affair.”

“Nonetheless, I will k-kill you someday, darkling.”

“Perhaps, unless I k-kill you first. Farewell, Ganth Grayling.”

Gerraint fell to his knees. His right sleeve and the whole right side of his coat hung limp, empty. Half of his face withered on the bone. “So cold,” he moaned, collapsed, and was gone. So was Ganth, taking the shades of Gothregor’s death banner hall with him.

Jame staggered, clawing at her throat as Tieri’s fingers tightened around it in panic.

. . . I honored my contract! I’m a good girl! It wasn’t my fault, not my fault, my fault . . .

Extended nails hooked on the cords and tore them loose. Jame fought free of the clinging death threads and kicked them away from her, onto the far side of the stream where already herbs blackened and rotted on the dark marble floor as their virtue bled into the green, glowing cracks. Something had come away in her grip: a packet of waterproofed silk that must have been sewn to the banner’s reverse side. Clutching it, she threw herself backward into the garden and sprawled there on a carpet of dwarf gentian and white hellebore. On the opposite bank, under shadows’ eaves, the threads of Tieri’s death banner continued feebly to twitch.

It wasn’t her, Jame thought, panting, fighting sick horror. Not really. Not anymore.

That voice in her mind—after her years of solitary exile, Tieri must have been older than Jame when she died, although still a young woman. Yet that voice, whining, begging, impervious to reason . . . so a very young child might speak, or an old, old woman. The blood thins. The soul fades. The mind goes. All that had made Tieri herself was gone.

And yet her fibrous remains still quivered.

So did others, behind her. The Dream-weaver had not used all the death banner threads whose souls she had reaped. What remained stirred restlessly on the green-veined floor, perhaps trying to regain the shapes that they had held for so long, so far more resembling a knot of blind, white, whip-thin worms. Here also was no true life, no soul; but then within Perimal Darkling, life and death, animate and inanimate, obscenely intertwined.

Jame scrabbled to her feet, the packet still in her arms. Looking down at the flowers that she had crushed in her fall, she realized that this wasn’t the real Moon Garden anymore, ravaged by a late summer storm, but part of the Kencyr soulscape. Jame cursed herself. She should have known as soon as her own soul-image had clad her in ivory and she had felt that draft up her bare backside, young rathorns only having armor on the front. And there was Perimal Darkling across the rising stream, poised to vomit its poison into the Kencyrath at its most vulnerable level.

However, nothing seemed to be happening except for the slow, forward seethe of death banner cords as they groped toward the world that they had known. Some wove momentarily into the blind likeness of a face turned toward the garden’s warmth or into a reaching hand, braided fingers already unraveling for they were too old, too fragmentary, to hold any true shape long.

Meanwhile, the Master and the Dream-weaver were nowhere in sight. A vast hollowness had replaced them, the sort that made one want to shout if only to break the tension. The thought, however, of all those echoing, empty rooms strung out down the Chain of Creation dried the throat.

It occurred to Jame that Gerridon was no more prepared for this sudden, accidental opportunity than she was. Given time, he could marshal his forces. Given time, she might be prepared to meet them. But here and now, while a nemesis, she was not yet the Nemesis—and not at all eager to fight a major battle buck-naked.

Still, by now the garden wall had faded away entirely and only the stream held back the creeping advance of the marble floor. Gerridon might call himself the Master, but when he betrayed his people to the shadows he opened the doors of his worlds-spanning House to a power far greater than his own. The ultimate price of his immortality was that he should become the Voice of Perimal Darkling, the One to answer the Three who (just as reluctantly) were to speak for their own trice damned Three-Faced God—that is, if the Four who personified Rathillien didn’t mess things up first. While the Dream-weaver could reap souls for him, Gerridon had been safe; but now she was gone and proving precious hard to replace.

So. He might not be ready for a final encounter, but his master Perimal Darkling had already sensed this breach into another world and was flowing toward it like dark water down the Chain of Creation, at first only in a trickle, but soon in a torrent with the weight of a hundred drowned worlds behind it.

Jame slipped the packet inside her armor for later examination and retreated, in search of Lyra and Jorin. Half-stifled cries led her to a large clump of burdocks man-high, which surely hadn’t been there before. In the soulscape, the plants had regained their large, lower leaves but kept their bristling autumn crowns. Ivory armor helped Jame push her way through, but did nothing to protect her bare backside as the plants closed in behind her. In their midst, she found a mound which with difficultly she recognized as her forage jacket, completely sealed in prickles. Lyra must have hunched down within the coat’s protective folds, tucked its hem under her, then wrapped her arms around her knees and pinned them to her chest. Yes. The jacket began to seethe as its prisoner heard Jame approaching. Then it tipped over.

“Help!”

“I’m not sure how.”

Jame had seen herdsmen use burrs to secure their clothes against the winter wind, but this was the soulscape, and this particular soul-image obviously considered both of them to be enemy invaders. Lyra was as thoroughly encased as a bug in a cocoon.

Burrs stung Jame’s bare back. When she turned to ward them off, however, there was the pincushion that was Lyra behind her and burdock seeds ready to spit in her eyes.

“Kindrie!” she called, arched backward, one ivory gloved hand on Lyra’s shoulder to steady herself and the other up to protect her face. The whole of her soul-armor resonating with her need. “KINDRIE!”

The garden was, after all, the healer’s personal soul-image, and he could damn well make it behave.

Someone stumbled toward her, cursing. The weeds parted as though their roots waded through the damp soil, and there was her cousin.

“You,” he said. “I might have known.”

Kindrie looked awful. His white hair stood up in sweat-matted shocks and his pale blue eyes were rimmed with red. Like Jame, he apparently slept naked. His thin frame had filled out somewhat since she had last seen him, but under his clutching hand there was a hole in his side, all the more startling in that blood, bone, and flesh seemed to have been scooped out under the pallid skin without breaking it.

“These,” he said, through his teeth, “are the worst cramps I’ve ever had. Back at Mount Alban, I’ve half chewed through a blanket trying to keep quiet. And yes, healers do make the worst patients, thank you very much. Now what in Perimal’s name have you done?” Then he saw the south end of the garden gaping wide open to darkness. “Oh no.”

Naturally, if what a healer did to a soul-image wrought a curative effect on its owner, whatever happened to his own image affected him too, mentally and physically.

“Is that your work?” he demanded.

“No! At least, I don’t think so.”

The truth was that she wasn’t sure. As a nemesis and a darkling, however unfallen, she represented a connection between the Kencyrath and the Shadows wherever she went. People as well as places could be “thin” in that respect, and Kindrie was particularly vulnerable to her touch.

“I may have a hole in my side, but you have one in your head. What?” he added, with a grin that turned into a grimace of pain. “Didn’t you know?”

Jame ran her hand over her skull, and found an unnerving dent in the ivory. As with Kindrie, something beneath had been taken away. Sweet Trinity, when had that happened, and what did it mean?

Memories.

What have I forgotten, and why?

Kindrie stared, then so did Jame. The fumbling node of threads had reached Tieri’s linen remains. Being more numerous and still endowed with a trace of life, they were stronger than their older counterparts. A woman’s figure arose slowly, unsteadily, weaving itself together as it did so. Skirt, bodice, arms like empty sleeves with flaccid, dangling fingers . . . The wobbling column of a neck straightening as more cords climbed to strengthen it. Then the blank face lifted. Through its empty sockets and open mouth, they saw threads weave together the back of its head. Mutely, it raised its arms to Kindrie.

. . . come . . .

Did he know who it was, or rather had been? Kindrie had been born in the Moon Garden, but had he ever visited it since? Jame didn’t know. In her previous glimpses of his soul-image, no banner had hung on that far wall, but a pattern of lichen had suggested the ghost of a face. Even as a newborn, he had remembered enough to adopt the real garden as his soul-image. Did he also remember the embrace of a dying mother?

She wished to embrace him again, to draw him back into the shell of her body with all of the cords that his birth had torn out, nevermore to part.

. . . mine . . .

“Go,” he said to Jame in a half-strangled voice, his eyes locked on that strange figure. It swayed forward a step, into the far margin of the stream. Water swirled and rose about the hem of its skirt, unraveling it. “Now.”

Jame scooped up the prickly, protesting bundle that was Lyra, profoundly glad that at least her arms and chest were protected. As she staggered toward the door, she heard mighty waters coming, and the ground shook. At first she thought that it was that great tide of clotted shadows vomiting out of Perimal Darkling that sometimes haunted her nightmares. Then she recognized its more natural origin. The stream flowed down under Gothregor from the mountains above where it must have rained very heavily indeed. Besides, at least one of Rathillien’s Four had noticed the breached boundary.

“Kindrie, run!”

Too late. As Tieri swayed another step into the stream, the western iron grate by which it entered the garden was wrenched out of the wall by a great gout of water. In the midst of it surged a glistening, translucent form. Although the Eaten One usually manifested itself as a huge catfish, this time it had come in the form of a silvery fish from the courtyard fountain, grown vast as a leviathan. Seeing it through Jame’s eyes, Jorin shrieked and scuttled out the door with all his fur on end and tail a-bristle. She paused on the threshold, staring back. Water and giant fish, nearly indistinguishable from each other, crested over the healer and relics of his mother as they stood facing each other, oblivious. Then something like a great, shimmering tail lashed out sideways, hurtling Jame and Lyra out the door, slamming it after them.

Running water protects boundaries, thought Jame, half dazed, picking herself up. What protects a son from the mindless hunger of a dead mother?

She was stumbling back toward the tapestry-shrouded door when a heavy hand fell on her shoulder and spun her around. Sweet Trinity. Corvine. The Randir sargent lifted her off her feet and slammed her back against the stone wall beside the hidden door.

“Now tell me,” she growled in Jame’s face, thus brought level with her own. “How did my son die and what was his name? Quick. Before I break your misbegotten neck.”

“Just once, I’d like to spend a quiet night at home, wherever that is. Ouch.”

The Kendar had just bounced Jame’s skull off the wall again.

“What did you say?”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to speak out loud. Sar, I have it on good authority that there’s a hole in my head. Please don’t crack it as well.”

Her feet dangled, but Corvine stood too close for an effective kick. Moreover, the Randir was gripping her upper arms, not her shirt, out of which she might have slipped, if the fabric didn’t tear first. The Kendar wasn’t berserk, only so focused on her own inner torment that she didn’t notice Jorin wrapped tooth and nail about her leg. She also seemed unaware of Jame’s hands, which had been trapped between them and which Jame had been edging upward. Now her extended claws rested on either side of the randon’s neck just above the old scar, sharp tips moving with the arterial pulse that throbbed beneath them. One quick thrust and she could finish what some enemy’s blade had nearly accomplished long ago.

However, she hesitated. Somehow, she had the key to this situation, if only she could remember what it was.

Meanwhile, Lyra kicked loose the tucked-in hem of the jacket and started to wriggle out backward. Here burrs were only burrs, after all, not the barbed weapons of the soulscape. Corvine might ignore a furious ounce attached to her leg, but she and Jame both stared down, bemused, at this unlikely sartorial breech birth. By the time Lyra had fought her way free, she was thoroughly flushed, scratched, and disheveled. Also, very little of her nightgown remained intact. She looked up at them, panting, and shoved hair out of her eyes.

“Now . . . can I . . . scream?”

“No,” said Jame and Corvine simultaneously, and the Kendar gave the Highborn another almost absentminded thump against the wall by way of emphasis.

Perhaps that last jolt did it; perhaps it was the sight of a bloody youngster on the ground; but at last Jame remembered.

She had been leaning on the rail of the training square, looking across it up at the peach-colored windows of the Map Room where the Autumn cull would begin as soon as they had cleared up the mess below in the stable in the wake of the failed attempt to assassinate Randiroc. On the other side of the low wall, close enough to touch, the black head of a direhound rose to snarl at her. Before it in moon-cast shadow and a growing pool of blood lay the huddled form of its prey.

The Randir cadet Shade had come up beside her, the gilded swamp adder Addy slung like a thick, undulating chain about her neck.

“Quirl,” she had said, glancing down dispassionately at that pathetic heap. “He always was a fool.”

“You can stop shaking me now,” Jame said to Corvine. “Your son’s name was Quirl. He tried to put an arrow through the Randir Heir and failed. The hunt-master gave a lymer his scent from the fletching and sent a direhound after him. He was dead when I found him. I’m sorry.”

The Kendar’s face seemed to clench in on itself, more like a Molocar’s than ever, and her small eyes lost focus.

“Quirl,” she said to herself. “His name was Quirl.”

She dropped Jame, turned, and limped off, muttering her son’s name over and over. At the corner she paused to glance back over her shoulder. “Thank you, lady.” Then she was gone.

Lyra stared after her. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m beginning to,” said Jame, and wasn’t surprised when both the ounce and the younger Highborn drew back from her. She had rarely felt more angry in her life, short of a full berserker flare. That was what Rawneth had done to the cadets who had failed to kill her son’s rival: she had taken away their names. Without a name, soul and body crumble. No wonder they had been too wasted even to cast proper shadows. Soon, it would be as if they had never been born, except for an aching, nameless void in the lives of those who had loved them.

And the Witch had found some chink in Jame’s soul as well, to make her forget the first cadet to die on that terrible night. Poor, hapless Quirl. That was the hole that Kindrie had sensed in her head.

She thought she heard the echo of Rawneth’s taunting laugh. Will you play another game with me, little hoyden, would-be warrior? Shall we match soul’s strength again?

Jame felt her rage grow, and struggled with it. She wasn’t ready for this. God’s claws, the entire backside of her immature soul-armor was one gaping hole, open to any shrewd blow. Play the game too soon, start the fight unprepared, and lose all.

She had sunken down beside the wall, curled in on herself, fists clenched. Lyra crouched before her, trying to pry her nails out of her palms. “Oh, don’t! You’re hurting yourself.”

Jame freed her hands and tucked them into her armpits. Force down the rage. Force it. Back away.

Ah, good girl, came the fading whisper, rich with amused condescension. I will do with my people as I please, now and forever. Learn that and live . . . for a while.

“Sometimes pain is good,” said Jame, and took a deep, shuddering breath. “Sometimes it helps you to survive.”

She rose stiffly, drew back the tapestry, and shouldered open the door. It wouldn’t have surprised her to find the entire Moon Garden swept away, but it was just as she had first seen it that night, ragged, drear, and overgrown with weeds. There was no sign of Kindrie or Tieri. The southern wall beyond the stream stood intact and blank except for a green glow that edged the stones, already fading.

Farewell, Tieri, wherever death has taken you.

Perhaps her cousin Kindrie now slept in peace at Mount Alban, but she doubted it; nor with his experience was he likely to wake thinking it had all been a bad dream—worse luck for him.

“What’s this?” Lyra was holding the packet that had been sewn to the back of Tieri’s banner. It must have fallen out of Jame’s shirt when Corvine grabbed her.

Jame took it, a quiver of apprehension mingled with exhaustion shaking her hand. This night just kept on getting longer, and more complicated.

Written on the silk, in the faint, shaky letters of the barely literate, was “My ladee’s honnor.” What in Perimal’s name . . . ?

“Who put that there?” demanded Lyra, peering over Jame’s shoulder. “What does it say?”

Like most Kencyr, Kendar and Highborn alike, Lyra didn’t know how to read. Jame suspected, however, that the Women’s World had a stitched language all its own.

“Maybe Tieri didn’t die alone after all,” she said, gingerly turning the packet over in her hands. It stank of mold and mortality.

Remember her as a little girl, virtually walled up alive, she told herself. Forget what you just saw, that thing of mindless horror that she became in death.

“As hidden as she was, it makes sense that she would at least have had a Kendar servant.” Please ancestors, as a companion and confidante, not as a jailor. The days in the abandoned garden and the empty Ghost Walks must have seemed endless. “Maybe one taught the other the rudiments of writing. Anyway, afterward, someone had to weave her banner.”

And in doing so had tried to preserve Tieri’s honor in a sealed pouch masked by the assumed shame of her death.

With Lyra craning to watch, Jame extended a claw and picked out the stitches that secured the envelop. When she eased open the flap, the brittle silk shattered into flakes at the fold. Gingerly she inserted her fingertips and drew out a coarse, folded cloth. It was woven of death banner threads and words were written on it, hard to read by starlight. As the air hit them, they began to crumble off the surface, leaving ghostly stains of script. Jame caught a tiny, falling clot and sniffed it. Ugh.

“Old blood, cold blood, dead blood,” as Adiraina had put it.

No doubt about it: this was the contract that the Dream-weaver had woven, ready for Gerraint’s signet. Yes, there was the rathorn crest, and another beneath it, red wax stamped with the head of a black horse. Gerridon’s mark. Stripped of all soul, thread and blood together were the deadest thing that Jame had ever touched. Abomination indeed, made by innocent hands to damn the innocent, signed by monsters.

Innocence and guilt.

She remembered challenging that blind Arrin-ken, the Dark Judge, at the solstice when he had sought to judge her: “What are you but a stinking shadow to frighten children if you can not strike at evil’s root, there, under shadow’s eaves?”

His answer howled again in her mind, mephitic with frustration and the stench of his ever-burning flesh:

No Arrin-ken may enter Perimal Darkling until the coming of the Tyr-ridan, and that is never, because our god has forsaken us. Once, only once, the Master came within reach here in the Riverland. I felt him cross into this world, into a garden of white flowers, but by the time I arrived he was gone, leaving yet another marred innocent. I would have judged her, punished her, but she had license for what she did. She showed me. The one I should have judged, the one who had doomed her, was then long dead, and he her own father! All things end, light, hope, and life. All come to judgment—except the guilty.

At the time, in the midst of a volcanic eruption, Jame hadn’t had a chance to consider his words. Now she heard again Tieri’s plaintive wail:

. . . I only did what I was told . . .

For a society that claimed to be based on honor, the Kencyrath cast some very dark shadows of its own.

Then another thought struck her.

“Lyra, if a Highborn contracts for a daughter but gets a son instead, never mind that that’s not supposed to happen, is the boy considered a bastard?”

“Of course not. The lady just has to keep trying until she gets it right.”

For Tieri, however, there had been no second chance. At least Kindrie was legitimate, and so was Torisen. Jame had never seen the contract for her own birth, but she knew from Tirandys that no one had expected or wanted twins. She had been as much a shock to Ganth as Tori had been to Gerridon. How ironic that in his desperation to replace the failing Dream-weaver, the Master had contrived to bring about the births of the last three pure-blooded, legitimate Knorth on this side of the Shadows.

But why would Gerraint doom his youngest daughter to such a fate?

“Master, Master! Will you grant me my heart’s desire? Will you restore my son to me?”

Yes, the terms were spelled out in the crumbling lines of the contract, and in a fragment of memory from earlier that endless night, in the death banner hall: a figure clad in gilded leather dragging itself upright against the bier off which it had fallen. It hawked, spat out a mouthful of maggots.

“ ’m hungry,” it muttered, chewing and swallowing. “Dear father, feed me . . . ”

Sweet Trinity. Greshan brought back to life. For how long and to what purpose?

Another snatch of memory: Rawneth, drawing herself up before the gaping darkness which should have been a solid wall but was not.

“Change is coming, and we Kencyr must change or perish. My honor follows my interest. What can this shadow lord do for me?”

“Ask, and see.” Keral again, damn him.

Rawneth laughed, but behind her mask, black eyes shifted to the beckoning shadows and she bit her lip. She would kill the man who played her for a fool, but if this offer was real . . . She approached the breach, swaying willow-supple. Her voice, mock coy at first, sharpened with an ambition as keen as hunger, as strong as madness:

“Master, Master, will you grant me my heart’s desire? Will you raise the dead to love me? Will you give me an heir to power?”

Then her eyes had snapped back to Jame, from the past to the present, and her face was terrible. “I told you . . . ”

Jame slammed the door on that memory, on Rawneth’s access to her body, mind, and soul—and on any further revelations. The contract fell from her hand as she slumped, shaking, against the wall.

I’m not strong enough. I’m not strong . . .

It took her several moments to recover. When she did, she saw that Lyra had picked up a scrap of fine linen that had fallen out of the document’s folds.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, nothing.”

The Caineron turned aside as if to study it, adopting a casual, provocative air. Jame’s refusal to tell her what the contract said clearly irked her. That was understandable, but how much did Jame dare to share with the daughter of an archenemy? Lyra’s intentions might be good; but as for discretion, her nickname “Lack-wit” was well earned.

Jame pushed herself away from the wall. “Those are knot stitches. I bet you can’t read them.”

“Yes, I can—sort of. Classes in the knot-stitch code are so boring.” She ran her fingertips over the raised dots. “It’s part of a letter from Kinzi to Adiraina. My, that would make it old!”

“By at least thirty-four years, since the Massacre. Careful!”

Lyra was impatiently turning it back and forth, searching for bits that she could translate. Half of it was flecked with rust-brown stains and obviously very fragile.

“I suppose Tieri found it in the Ghost Walks,” she said, and exclaimed with annoyance as her questing fingertip broke through a rotted patch in the weave. Jame flinched. “I wonder if she could read it, or if she just kept it because it belonged to her grandmother.”

“Lyra, please, give it to me.”

“Can you read it? I didn’t think so. Wouldn’t it be amazing if Matriarch Kinzi stitched it on the very night that she died? She says something about Ganth being off on a rathorn hunt, and about seeing Rawneth in the Moon Garden with . . . someone. I can’t quite make out who. Greshan? Kinzi doesn’t seem sure herself. ‘You have laughed at rumors that Greshan was seen walking the halls of Gothregor when he was five days dead. Well, I saw him too.’ No, that can’t be right. Oh, this is odd! ‘I must admit, I do hope our dear Rawneth has’ . . . something . . . ‘with a monster.’ ”

“Lyra, that bit of cloth is a relic of my house.”

She tried to snatch it from the girl’s hands, and it ripped in two. The brown stains were Kinzi’s blood. She spoke urgently through them to Jame, her great-granddaughter: Give this letter to Adiraina.

“Lyra . . . ”

To her horror, the girl crumpled up her half, popped it into her mouth, and swallowed.

“There,” she said, looking both defiant and scared. “I can keep secrets too.”

Then she burst into tears and threw herself into Jame’s arms.

“Oh, what’s the use of an adventure when you won’t share it with me? I was so bored, and lonely, and all these Highborn women only care about such stupid things. They haven’t traveled. They haven’t seen things. Their world is so small. But I’m the one they call an idiot, no good to anybody. I thought you were different. I thought you trusted me!”

Jame held her.

Her first impulse had been to jam her fingers down Lyra’s gullet to make her throw up the precious note. Earlier she had wished that someone would write her a letter explaining the past, and it had nearly happened. However, she hadn’t trusted herself not to slash the girl’s throat from the inside out—accidentally, of course.

Besides, perhaps Kinzi’s long-lost missive would only have provided further complications and confusion, assuming anyone could still read it.

She also remembered her own miserable winter in the Women’s Halls. In the end, the arrival of the shadow assassins had come almost as a relief. Better any death than one by boredom.

Then too, the almost naked body clinging to her, hiccupping wetly in her ear, was no longer that of a child but of an adolescent on the cusp of womanhood . . . and the Women’s World was teaching her nothing that she needed to know.

“Hush,” she said, patting the girl’s back. “They’re the idiots, not you. I’m not always that smart myself.”

Lyra burped and drew back. “I feel sick. I want to go home.”

“You’d be sicker if you had swallowed the half with Kinzi’s blood on it.”

With a sigh, Jame carefully folded her half and slipped it into a pocket. At some point, she would have to find someone she could trust to make what they could of it. Adiraina? That was Kinzi’s wish, and the letter was addressed to the Ardeth Matriarch, but be damned if Jame would give it to her after what had happened earlier in the death banner hall. Perhaps the Jaran Matriarch Trishien. As it was, she had had quite enough of the past for one evening, not that it really was evening anymore. The sky had turned a pale opalescent. Somewhere beyond the Snowthorns, beyond the Ebonbane, beyond the curved horizon of the Eastern Sea, the sun was rising on Autumn’s Day.

“Come on,” she said to Lyra. “Your teeth are starting to rattle with the cold, I’m late for an appointment in the garrison’s common room, and there are probably search parties looking for both of us.”

There were.