Honor's Paradox

XVIII Summer’s Eve

Once again, as at the winter solstice, Jame regarded Kithorn’s inner courtyard through its outer gates. This time, not snow but wild flowers blew between the flagstones, and she was mounted on Bel-tairi, having left Death’s-head at the college in reserve against future need.

Otherwise, the inner square was again full of bustle and gaudy figures: the Earth Wife flouncing about with her bright, full skirts; the Falling Man rustling with black feathers; and the Eaten One squatting under his catfish cape, glowering out through gaping piscine jaws. Only the Burnt Man was absent, although the bonefire heaped in his northern corner dwarfed the Earth Wife’s miniature clay lodge, the Eaten One’s basin, and the Falling Man’s wicker cage. Other Merikit scurried around them purifying the square and setting up torches.

It was also much like the previous Summer’s Eve when she had been tricked by Hatch into fighting to become the Earth Wife’s Favorite. There was the serpentine molding around the well mouth that led straight down the River Snake’s throat; there, the indentation where the Snake had claimed the previous Favorite, except for his sheared-off feet. The whole, now as then, was lit by a blazing sunset that tinged all beneath with crimson shadows.

The shaman wearing the Earth Wife’s skirts saw Jame and trotted out to greet her. Under a straw wig and rouged cheeks, she recognized Tungit’s wizened features.

“It’s about time,” he said, making a grab for Bel’s bridle as if to prevent her from escaping, but the Whinno-hir shied away from him. “Did you bring it?”

Jame handed him the knobby, blackened knuckle.

Tungit sighed with relief. “The last Burnt Man’s bone. It was only a guess that it had come to you, though the Earth Wife did say that she had done something to bring you running.” He called over a boy and gave it to him. “Quick, put this in the bonfire set beside the hanging man.”

“Where is Chingetai?” Jame asked as the boy ran off.

“Placing the other two hundred and five gathered bones to change the bonfires into bonefires.”

“What, all in one night?”

“Set the fires beforehand, didn’t he? A week’s work he made of it, all the time avoiding Noyat scouts. Well, tonight he has to run the whole circuit again, putting a bone in each fireplace, still dodging the Noyat. They’ll be out in force tonight, thick as jewel-jaws on a fresh kill.”

Jame remembered that once the fires were primed, each with its own cinder bone, Chingetai would play the Burnt Man and ignite them all simultaneously by jumping over the first—presumably hidden in that mound of kindling in the square’s northern corner. Still, that was a lot to do in one night. She said as much again to Tungit, hoping for more information.

“Ah.” He shoved back the straw wig and wiped a sweaty, wrinkled forehead with the back of his hand. “Take your questions to Gran Cyd’s lodge. Maybe she has time to explain.”

Jame rode on, thinking that this time both the village and Kithorn’s square seemed to have their roles in tonight’s ritual. Perhaps it had been the same last Summer’s Eve, but if so she had never heard of it. Generally speaking, Kithorn was men’s business and the village, women’s.

Here was the Merikit homestead on its palisaded hill under a smoldering sky. The gates opened before her and closed behind, manned by girls from the maidens’ lodge.

“Ride on, Favorite, ride on!” they called. “Gran expects you.”

The wooden walk echoed hollowly under Bel’s hooves. Lodge-wyves popped out of their sunken houses amid billows of savory smoke to wave as she rode by. If all went well tonight, the village would feast. If not, they might find themselves fighting for their lives.

The courtyard outside Gran Cyd’s lodge was crowded with armed men and women who cleared a path for Jame. Anku calling out a greeting, echoed by her war maids. Dismounting, Jame descended into the lodge. A fire burned on a raised hearth at its northern end, illuminating bright tapestries and a wealth of rich furs melting into the shadows. Otherwise, the lodge seemed to be empty. Muffled voices came from behind a hanging in back of the Cyd’s gilded judgment chair. Behind the tapestry was another short flight of stairs. Again Jame descended and ducked under a low lintel deeply carved with imus into the loamy shadows of the Earth Wife’s lodge.

“About time,” said Mother Ragga, sitting back on her haunches in a flounce of skirts. An irregular ring of small stones surrounded her in the middle of her lodge’s dirt floor. Outside it stood Gran Cyd in a green gown shot with gold thread, her dark red hair spilling over white shoulders. The gentle swell of her belly made her more statuesque than usual, her presence enhanced by imminent motherhood.

“You can’t go,” she was saying patiently to Prid, as if she had said it too often already. “This is work for your elders.”

The girl shook her tawny mane in frustration. “I’m old enough to be a war maid. Almost. Besides, Hatch is out with the men hunting the wood. Please, Gran!”

“Your cousin is older than you, however closely the two of you have been raised. Stand back, my love.”

Then they saw Jame. Prid rushed to her across the stone circle, drawing a growl of warning from the Earth Wife.

“My granddam won’t let me stand by my sisters. Will you?”

How like a child she was, refused by her mother, turning to her father. Jame touched the girl’s bare shoulder. It felt surprisingly thin and her face, upturned, was full of something close to desperation. Something had changed since the spring equinox, but what?

“It isn’t for me to say whether you go or stay,” she said gently. “Prid, what’s the matter?”

But the girl turned away, biting her lip, without answering. Meeting Jame’s eyes, Cyd make a slight, helpless gesture.

The ground shivered. Glowing cracks opened in the floor, spelling out the Four’s sigils. The square was probably similarly marked by now. Heat warped the air over each fissure. Jame slipped off the scythe-arms sheathed across her back, then her jacket, taking care where she dropped them.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

The Earth Wife indicated the circle with a sweep of her plump, grubby hand. “These stones come from each of the preset bonfires. When one flips over—see, like that one!—we know that Chingetai has placed a cinder bone there and turned over the stone’s mate in the firebed. Thus we track his progress.”

Jame observed that the Merikit chief had already completed a third of his circuit, fast work indeed.

“How far out are the fires placed?”

“About three miles, centered on the village. A closer circle would have been more secure, but our noble leader must needs use the folds in the land to grab all he can.”

“As when he tried to seize the entire Riverland.”

The Earth Wife snorted. “That would never have worked, not with the fires in a line like that. He got carried away by more than the weirdingstrom. As it is, this”—here she indicated the map—“may work, unless he gets caught. The set fires are hard to find, just a few dry twigs and a pinch of kindling. Unless the Noyat actually see him place one, they aren’t likely to stumble across it. And the Merikit are doing their best to harry them through the woods.” She shook her starling’s nest of a head, dislodging twigs and a confused caterpillar. “Still, they’re spread pretty damn thin.”

Another stone, the next in the progression, stirred, then tipped over.

“So the danger,” said Jame, working it out, “isn’t so much with the sites ahead as with the primed sites behind: the Noyat only have to snatch the bone out of one of them and run off with it.”

Much the way she had done, she reflected, before the previous Summer’s Eve, without being aware of the consequences.

“Snatch it and keep it,” Mother Ragga agreed. “If a stone turns out of sequence, chances are that the Noyat have disturbed the site. Then we send Merikit to check. Hence that mob at the door.”

It still sounded chancy to Jame. “Why aren’t they all out guarding the set bonefires?”

“Think. How better to say, ‘Here it is’? Besides, we haven’t enough warriors to guard each and every site properly.”

“Why aren’t the Noyat busy with their own bonefires?”

Ragga glowered at her. “Ask a lot of questions, don’t you, missy? I’ve noticed that before. It’s very annoying. In answer, the Noyat don’t set ’em. Put their trust in the Shadows, haven’t they? We Four are nothing to them unless the Burnt Man catches one of ’em over a border that he’s sealed. Even then, he doesn’t catch ’em all.”

Jame considered the Earth Wife’s stricture on her curiosity and dismissed it: how else was she to learn?

“You know, I’ve never really understood what it means to close the hills. I thought it just meant that you didn’t welcome intruders, and that the watch-weirdlings warned you if anyone crossed into Merikit territory with iron. To come without, presumably, would mean to come in peace, as my brother did last winter. But what if the Noyat were to arrive with bows and flint-tipped arrows?”

The Earth Wife gave a snort of laughter that made the rocks shiver. “So they did last Winter’s Eve. This entire past year, thanks to you and Chingetai, they could have marched across with an entire smithy strapped to their backs. When the hills are properly sealed, though, the folds in the land confuse intruders. They may cross into Merikit land, but their chances of finding its heart, the village, are slight. Meanwhile, we can hunt ’em down at our pleasure.”

Jame was a little disappointed at this. She had hoped that no one could enter Merikit territory at all and so by extension penetrate through it into the Riverland. Still, she could see how a proper sealing decreased the odds of the latter.

“Look!” said Gran Cyd, pointing. A stone, flipped over once, had turned again, then another and another.

Mother Ragga swore. “They’ve found three bonefires. Prid . . .”

But the girl was already on her way up the stairs.

Gran Cyd watched her go, and sighed. “Things have not been easy for my grandchild since the spring equinox, when she failed as the Ice Maid.”

“That was hardly her fault.”

“Perhaps not. To my mind, she did all that was asked of her, but the refusal of the Eaten One to accept her has raised questions, not least about her chastity. Why was she found unworthy? The other girls made her so miserable that she left their lodge—which was flooding at the time anyway—and the war maids are of two minds whether to accept her into theirs. Ever. Only Hatch and Anku have been unfailingly kind.”

Jame had wondered how the thwarted rite might affect her young friend. The war maids might take what lovers they pleased but apparently not so their younger sisters, if that was the problem. It would do no good to protest that the Eaten One had preferred a different Favorite, and that a Kencyr; the Merikit would still ask, “Why?” And they, like the Riverland, had suffered the consequences.

“Where has she been living?”

“With me. My daughter left her a lodge of her own, but she would be alone there and very unhappy. I don’t believe that she has been back to it since her mother died in childbirth.”

A moment later Prid returned with two Merikit men and Anku.

“Here, here, and here.” With a stubby finger, the Earth Wife indicated sites on the map. “Go.”

They left quickly. Prid looked after Anku longingly.

“Gran . . .”

“No.”

Meanwhile, Chingetai was halfway through his circuit, presumably unaware of the disturbance behind him.

“My housebond is clever at woodcraft,” said Gran Cyd, hugging herself. Jame had never before seen her show uncertainty, and found it alarming now. “Dressed in nothing but his tattoos and Burnt Man’s ash, he should be hard to catch.”

“Yet they must have at least seen him,” said the Earth Wife. “That’s three parties gone on the hunt, all of our reserve.”

They waited anxiously. The fissures on the floor widened and the air above them danced with heat. Runners returned to announce that they had retrieved two of the missing three bones.

“Actually,” one man admitted, “the Burning Ones got to them first. We only had to sort out the right bones.”

“Where’s Prid?” Jame asked suddenly.

As one, they realized that they hadn’t seen the girl since her great-aunt’s party had set out.

“Damnation,” said Jame, grabbing her jacket and weapons.

“Be careful!” the queen called after her.

She slung on clothes and arms as she rushed up the two short flights of stairs and out into the deepening night. The space before the lodge was empty except for the very young and the very old.

“Prid?” she asked them.

“Gone with the war maids,” came the answer, as if she had needed to hear it.

A child, perhaps four years old, held Bel with the mare’s patient consent. Jame seized the reins and mounted.

“Run,” she told the Whinno-hir, and turned her toward the outer gate. The girls there barely opened it in time to prevent horse and rider from piling into it nose first.

Outside, Bel stumbled on the steep descent, then gathered herself and leaped forward. They had only to follow the Silver, as Jame had done at the spring equinox. The Silver Steps were about a mile from the village. She hoped to catch up with Prid, but doubted that she would given the other’s head start. By now it was full dark, the red faded in livid gashes from the sky, the way lit by intermittent shafts of moonlight piercing a patchwork of clouds.

Bel emerged at the meadow where on the equinox the Merikit had feasted in honor of the Eaten One. Ahead, a circle of figures at the foot of the falls played a slight form back and forth between them to bursts of stiffled laughter. Cloth ripped. White skin shone.

Bel shied at a body half hidden in the deep grass. For a moment, Jame looked down into the still face of the war maid Anku, an arrow through her throat. Other bodies dimpled the meadow. They must have walked into an ambush.

By now the intruders had seen her and their circle split open. Some drew bows but their leader stopped them. Even from here, Jame could see the scar-twisted lip of the Noyat chief Nidling who had led the horse raid against Tentir and killed her cadet Anise. He held Prid with an arm twisted up behind her back, then thrust her contemptuously away to fall in a small heap at his feet.

“Well, well, well.” His voice carried clearly across the meadow. “Have you come to play, little girl?”

Jame swung down from Bel. As she walked toward him, she tugged free the scythe-arms at her back and slid her hands into their leather grips. Black rage built in her, giving a tiger’s lope to her stride. Here was her prey, too long denied, here her claws, two and three feet long respectively with deadly spurs behind. Cool night breathed in her face, spiked with the sharp scent of blood. Lithe and loose-limbed, she moved into her element.

The Noyat were spreading out, moving to encircle her with drawn knives. Good. She wanted them within reach. A flicker behind her. She spun and parried a thrust. Her blade slithered up her attacker’s arm, splitting cloth and skin. A backhanded slash opened a second mouth below his chin and he fell away in a spray of blood, suddenly speechless. Two came at her from either side. She slid out from between them with a wind-blowing move. As they crashed together, she swept in low, hamstringing them both.

The others were drawing back. Whatever they had expected, it wasn’t this cold, silent savagery.

“Well?” demanded their leader. “Get her!”

She had reached Prid and stood over her.

“All right, child?”

“Y-yes . . .”

Two more took their chances and fell, gutted, to her spurs. That still left seven including Nidling. Jame smiled at them. “Next?”

Six turned and fled. Dark figures tracked them through the grass, leaving smoldering trails as the Burning Ones took up their master’s hunt.

Jame faced the chief, still smiling. “Alone at last,” she said, hearing the purr roughening her voice, relishing it. This, after all, was what she had been born for. Damson had been right to say, “Why do I have this ability, if not to use it?”

He had a short sword, perhaps stolen in some southern raid, but he handled it clumsily, gripping the hilt with both hands. Jame might have sympathized; however, she was having too much fun. Thrust and parry, slash and retreat, steel rang. Oh, how she loved her twin blades. One needn’t even get one’s hands dirty.

She was backing the Noyat up toward the Silver. Behind him, water cascaded over the stepped falls, fretted now with the tumbling dark whips of blackheads. The borders were down, the infestation spreading. She slashed at his chest, opening his felt coat. Tucked into his belt, a black stick protruded like a rib sprung free. Jame snatched it.

“Prid, quick.”

The girl seized the cinder bone and scrambled up the path beside the Steps. At their top, on the edge of the dark lake, she thrust her prize into a tangle of branches. Barely had she fallen back when the bonefire ignited. Above it, for a instant, in midleap, Chingetai appeared, his braids wildly swinging, his face screwed up in determination. Then he was gone. Behind him, the fire continued to flare. Out of it, limb by limb, rose the Burnt Man. His skin crackled with fiery fissures. His charred eyepits scanned the meadow.

“YOU.”

Jame fought to stand still, repelled as she was by his hot, stinking breath. Prid shrank back against her as her own anger sputtered and died. Such rage hardly seemed a match for the figure now drawing itself up out of the flames. Obviously, he remembered her role in the holocaust of the winter solstice.

Then his head turned, creaking, toward the Noyat who was backing away with open mouth and goggling eyes. The northern tribe didn’t believe in the Four. Had their chief thought that such a creature was a tale fit only to scare children?

“Ha-ROOM,” said the Burnt Man, spraying him with flaming cinders. Some nestled in the folds of his clothing and began to smoke against his bare skin.

He didn’t know where to turn. The Merikit land had closed, leaving him adrift and tottering on the riverbank. Behind him, the water seethed obscenely with blackheads. His foot slipped, and he fell in. Serpentine forms swarmed over him, nuzzling, biting, burrowing. His clothes shredded under the assault. Round holes appeared in his pale skin and leaked red around the thrashing black bodies as they bore into him.

Prid gagged. Jame held her, the girl’s face against her shoulder, but she herself watched steadily as the blackheads claimed Anise’s blood-price.

The roiling water surged backward up the falls. A great, gray, bewhiskered head had surfaced at their foot.

“BLOOP,” said the monster catfish.

In its gaping, oval mouth behind the serrated teeth lay two figures, blissfully entwined, paying no attention to anything but each other.

“Drie!” Jame called. “Drive them back!”

The giant mouth closed, fringed with shredded blackheads, and the fish surged forward. Blackheads fled it, squirming up the Steps, taking with them the tattered remains of the Noyat. To the last, until they dumped him over the upper lip of the falls into the seething lake, his eyes were fixed in horror on Jame.

The Eaten One sank in a swirl of clear water.

“Hoom-ha,” said the Burnt Man, folding himself into the dying fire, and squatting there with his knees jutting high over his charred lump of a head.

Looking past Jame, Prid gave a little shriek.

Jame turned, and there was Vant, smiling down at her. His clothes fluttered in blackened scraps. The skin on his face seemed to come and go, charring in patches, eaten down to the bone in others, re-forming over all in an ever-changing map of devastation.

“What are you doing here?” Jame asked him, resisting the urge to back away.

His smile widened. Incandescence rimmed the edges of his teeth from the banked fire deep in his throat. She had forgotten that he was so tall and broad.

“You asked me that before, in the lilac grove.” He driveled fire and impatiently wiped his mouth as if plagued with spittle. “Where else should I be, when we have unfinished business?”

“I mean, why here, with the Burning Ones?”

“Ah. In the pit at Tentir where you left me, I sensed that there were others like myself, so I went to them and they accepted me as their leader.”

He seemed pleased with himself. Finally, someone had recognized his qualities.

Jame became aware of the Noyat plunging about the meadow, unable to tell from moment to moment in which direction they went as the closing of the hills played havoc with them. On their trails crept the Burning Ones, leaving behind smoldering tracks. Some hillmen doubled back and were caught. Their screams and the sizzle of their flesh rose above thrashing screens of grass. Others would probably escape, for their hunters crawled painfully on the stubs of limbs attached to wasted torsos. Gran Cyd had said that they needed the winter to sleep, but Vant hadn’t allowed that. Driven by his own need, he still hadn’t learned that to lead was also to be responsible for one’s followers as well as for their actions. Honor’s Paradox, it seemed, had many facets, all of them sharp-edged.

Jame was also very aware—more so, apparently, than her former five-commander—of the Burnt Man crouching on the ridge above them. Vant had arrived at the solstice just as the master of fire had laid himself in the earth for the winter. A vacuum had formed and Vant had stepped into it. He no more believed in the Four than had Nidling of the Noyat, nor did he see what lurked over him with head cocked as if puzzling over this miniature usurper.

Clutching Jame’s shoulder, Prid whispered in her ear.

“What does the little savage say?” Vant asked.

“That you’re dead.”

He laughed, which set him to a harsh, raking cough. “Now, is that likely? I walk, I talk, I think.”

“So do some haunts. Look at your hands.”

As with his face, flesh came and went there over a lattice of white bones. He regarded the phenomena, and dismissed it.

“True, I was badly burned after you threw me into the fire.”

“Vant, I wasn’t there.”

His face contorted. Skin ripped and sloughed off over taut muscles. “It was your fault. Deny that if you dare.”

“I do.”

As she spoke, Jame realized that she truly didn’t feel guilt anymore, that she never should have in the first place. What had happened to Vant wasn’t fair, but it also wasn’t her fault.

He jerked back with a hiss like raw meat on a hot grill. “You will admit it. Someone is to blame. If not you, then who? I will have justice, or I will have vengeance.”

The night growled back at him. “All things end, light, hope, and life. Come to judgment. Come!”

Something huge prowled the meadow’s edge, a great darkness shot with fiery fissures that opened and closed as it moved. The earth trembled under its paws and the bones of fallen Noyat crunched.

Jame freed herself from Prid’s clutch.

“Stay here,” she told the girl, and moved to face the blind Arrin-ken. Who better to support her cause, but sweet Trinity, how dangerous even to ask.

“Lord, a judgment!” Vant cried behind her.

She and the Dark Judge circled each other. He moved out into the moonlight, seemingly as vast as the mountain range that he claimed as his domain. Heat rolled off his body. Loose strands of her hair rose, crinkled, and stank in the draft.

“Ah,” he muttered and cleared his throat like boulders grinding together. “I would gladly judge you, little nemesis, as I have so many others of your kind. What are you to us but grief and disappointment?”

Jame gulped, her mouth dry. She had dealt with the Dark Judge before, and barely escaped with her skin. All that had saved her was his obsession with the truth.

“I could be the way to Master Gerridon and to the changer Keral who blinded you.”

“So they might all have claimed.”

“But this time there are three of us, all potential Tyr-ridan. Do you dare take the risk?”

“If you should prove unworthy, if . . .” He raked his face with lethal claws as if to wipe it clean. “Argh, where is the stench of guilt? You should reek of it.”

“Sorry,” said Jame. “Not this time.”

“You!” The great head swung toward Vant. “Judgment you have demanded. Receive it you shall. Who threw you into the fire?”

“She did!”

“Liar.”

Jame backed away as the Blind Judge prowled past her, closer to Vant. Prid gripped her arm. The Burning Ones crept past toward the hunched figure on the ridge.

The Arrin-ken indicated Jame with a sideways sweep of his massive head. “I know this one. If she could take the blame, she would. That has confused me before. Someday I will judge her, but not for this. You, however, tried to pull your lord into the flames with you and now you have lied, yet I smell no sense of guilt on you for that.”

“It was his own fault! A lord shouldn’t humiliate his followers as he did by subjecting me to that . . . that freak, his sister!”

“Look to your own winter’s servants. See how they crawl, mewling, back to their true master, how he gathers them up one by one. Is honor only honor when it serves your purpose?”

Vant sputtered with outrage. “How dare you judge me? I am a lord’s grandson, and I will have revenge.”

He started for Jame.

The Dark Judge reared up behind him, blotting out the stars and, with one mighty blow, batted off his head. It rolled, gibbering, to Jame’s feet. By reflex, she kicked it into the river where the heat within, meeting the ice-melt water, exploded the skull.

“Bloop,” said the lurking catfish, and swallowed it. “Burp.”

Vant’s body remained on hands and knees, swaying.

“Yours,” said the Arrin-ken to the Burnt Man, who nodded and gathered up one more smoldering corpse to run, silent, at his heels.

“And you.”

The blind, blunt face swung toward Jame, who tried not to recoil from its fetid stench.

“Our time will come. And for the cadet Damson perhaps sooner. Be careful how you call me.”

“And you, beware how you answer.” The words came from deep within her Shanir nature, and she shuddered to utter them.

“Huh.” The gust of his breath singed her lashes and made her eyes sting. “You have grown, little nemesis.”

When she blinked away involuntary tears, he, the Burnt Man, and the Burning Ones were gone. A cricket sang tentatively, then another and another while the Silver Steps chuckled beside them.

“Come on,” said Jame to Prid in a shaken voice. “Let’s go home.”

Bel carried them to the Merikit village where Gran Cyd waited to enfold her half-naked granddaughter in rich sable.

Jame rode on to Kithorn. There she found the square containing sacred space nearly filled with blue smoke to the height of the torches. Vast shapes moved within the murk, shifting preposterously: the walls of the Earth Wife’s lodge; the Falling Man perpetually plummeting within his wicker cage; the catfish’s gigantic bewhiskered mouth out of which the Eaten One and Drie smiled at her. Largest of all, however, a bonefire blazed in the square’s northern corner. Smoke billowed from it, filling the square, tinged cobalt by the torches.

Bel whickered and minced uneasily as Jame rode her slowly around the square. Where was everyone? There was the smithy in which she had been held captive the previous Summer’s Eve; there, the steps up to the ruined stub of Kithorn’s tower.

“Hello?” she called, if only to break the silence.

Around the southwest corner of the square, she encountered Hatch, clad in green, fiddling with something behind his back. Jame dismounted, keeping her distance.

“Prid is safe,” she said. “The hills are closed. And this is entirely too much like last Summer’s Eve.”

A torch burst into flames beside her, one of a sequence closing the square. Bel retreated, snorting.

“Chingetai is trying to advance the midsummer rite, isn’t he?” she said to Hatch. “You and I are supposed to fight to become the Earth Wife’s new Favorite, but you don’t want that role and neither do I. Can you slip out of it again?”

He lunged at her, an ivy crown in his hand, and tried to plant it on her head. She blocked him with water-flowing, almost causing him to stumble into the square.

“You don’t understand,” he panted, collecting himself. “Who will protect Prid now?”

She feinted again, then caught him in an earth-moving maneuver that sent him sprawling. “Protect her from what?”

“She failed as the Ice Maid of the Merikit. You ruined her reputation. You owe her recognition. I could give that to her as her housebond, but I can’t if I become the new Favorite.”

So, although valued for their sexual potency, Favorites weren’t allowed to take life-mates during their tenure. Somehow, no one had thought to tell her that.

“Would she accept you?”

“What choice does she have? The maidens have cast her out. The war maids have refused her admittance. She can’t hide in her granddam’s lodge forever.”

Damnation. Had she saved Prid only to make her an outcast? Should everyone have to fight as hard as she herself had for a role in her own society? But wait. What place? Wasn’t she about to fail Tentir?

Hatch had escaped his fate once by clapping the ivy crown on her head and once by throwing himself at his opponent’s feet, just before the latter had been crushed by a lava bomb hurtled by the Burnt Man from an erupting volcano. Hatch couldn’t count on such a coincidence to save him again. He probably would have thrown the fight before now if he hadn’t felt compelled to explain.

“Listen,” she said, maneuvering to keep out of his reach. “Whatever happens next at Tentir, I have to give up the Favorite’s role. Events in the hills can’t depend on me anymore. D’you really want the Burnt Man breathing down your neck?”

“Just take the crown,” he urged, lunging at her again.

“Dammit,” said Jame, and flung herself under it at his feet.

Chingetai, on the steps of Kithorn’s stair, burst into applause.

Hatch threw the crown on the ground beside Jame and stomped on it. “She cheated!”

“Boy, you have no right to complain.”

Chingetai descended and thrust over a torch, which hit the next in line and the next. Smoke billowed out of the collapsing square, causing eyes to water and lungs to seize up. Briefly, one glimpsed the expanse of sacred space within, figured with the burning sigils of the Four like so many incandescent, heat-warped crevasses. Then all blurred. Out of the haze shuffled the Earth Wife.

Shamans passed behind her, dragging a goat. At the well’s lip, they hoisted it up and over. The animal’s terrified bleat echoed up the shaft all the way down. Then, briefly, the earth quivered. No need this time for any other scapegoat to feed the Snake.

“Dear son,” Ragga said, grabbing Hatch by the arm. He tried to wrench free, but could as easily have shifted Rathillien on its axis. “I present you to your father.”

This was called “fooling death.” The Burnt Man was supposed to accept his mate’s new lover and favorite as his son, which didn’t say much about his powers of perception.

“My son,” he echoed in an earth-shaking rumble. Both he and a looming black figure shot with red stood there, overlapping.

Their heads turned toward Jame. “My fool.”

“All right,” she said, coughing. “You needn’t rub it in.

Chingetai shook himself, shedding a black cloud of ash.

“Ah, what was I saying? My grandson-in-law.”

Jame felt her mouth drop open. “What?”

“Now that your duty to the Earth Wife has ended, it’s time that you settled down, and I have just the right lodge-wyf for you.”

The Earth Wife seized Jame and hustled her through the dispersing haze with Chingetai on their heels. On the other side, they found themselves in the village before the communal underground hall. Chingetai seized an astonished Prid and thrust her forward.

“Granddaughter, behold your new housebond!”

A great shout welcomed their appearence within the lodge. Row upon descending concentric row of faces turned up toward them, mead cups raised. All were women. At the door men fought, not very hard, to rescue the groom, but were driven back with showers of food on which to make their dinner. Jame and Prid were seated side by side, half stunned by the noise, with no idea what to say to each other.

“Bitter honey and sweet!” cried the women, raising their mugs. “Roast rabbit for a fruitful union!”

“No need to worry about that.” One of the women carrying Jame’s putative children stood up, sporting her round belly, followed by the rest. All looked well pleased with themselves as the hall rang with shouts of approval.

One hand on her own stomach, Gran Cyd saluted Jame. “To the Favorite’s success!”

“What?” asked Prid, seeing Jame’s expression.

“I’m not ready to be a father.”

Cyd gestured for her to rise and, when she did, rapped her smartly with a stick once on each shoulder, then sharply on the head.

“Ouch,” said Jame, as the crowd roared congratulations. “What was that for?”

“To seal the contract and to remind you that your new wyf is allowed to beat you only three times, with no larger a stick than this. If she does more than that, or if you complain to me more than thrice, the marriage is void.”

Jame caught Prid’s glance. They both looked hastily away, blushing. Jame drank deep, for something to do. She had once sworn never again to get drunk, but surely this was an exception. Her head began to swim.

At last the feast came to an end and they were led, with much discordant song and shouted advice, to the mouth of a lodge, down which they were thrust. Jame lost her footing on the stair and sprawled, cursing, at its foot. Finally, the racket above withdrew.

Jame looked about her, her ears still ringing. A fire had been set on the raised hearth and candles surrounded the better furnished of the two sleeping ledges. Otherwise, the lodge appeared to be long deserted, with dust thick around its edges and the musty smell of old tapestries. At the far end of the chamber hulked the spidery ruins of a large loom.

“Your mother’s?” she asked Prid.

“Yes.” The girl was shivering despite the warmth, thin arms wrapped around her. “I used to sit under it and watch the shuttle fly back and forth. My mother was the best weaver in the village. Gran’s walls are hung with her work. I haven’t been here since she died. It smells like, it smells . . .”

Her teeth chattered together.

“That was a long time ago,” said Jame, shaking her head to clear it. “I smell only history.”

Prid, roused, glared at her. “You don’t understand. That was where she lay. Alive. Dead. There was so much blood. I touched my baby brother’s fingers. So perfect. So still.”

“Clean deaths, then. Natural. My mother . . .”

“Yes?”

“She imploded, rather than touch me. I think she meant it for the best.”

“Oh.”

Jame gave her a wolf’s feral grin, all teeth. “You see, there are worse things, and more outlandish. Beware, if you take me as a model.”

Prid gulped. “I wanted to be a war maid like great-aunt Anku, but her way has also led to death.”

“In the end, all things do. Better to ask how to live. What will you do now, Prid?”

The girl gave a shaky laugh. “Keep lodge for you, apparently, and weave, if I can remember how, and try to be happy.”

“I’m not going to be here often. You could divorce me. Here’s a log, if you’d like to beat me over the head. I promise to complain loud and long.”

Prid shook her tawny mane. “I have no place else to go, except back to Gran Cyd, and I’m too old now for that. Married to you, I at least have the status of a lodge-wyf. Oh, but to live here alone . . . !”

Clinkers rattled down the smoke hole, followed by Hatch, who narrowly missed landing in the fire.

“You could have used the door,” said Jame.

The next moment he had barreled into her. She fell backward between the hearth and the bed, barely able in that confined space to raise her arms against his flailing fists. One caught her agonizingly in the eye. She countered with an elbow to his mouth that split his lip. Prid was shouting at them. Jame got a foot into Hatch’s groin and hoisted him sideways. He rolled into the fireplace on his back amid a fountain of sparks, some of which settled in his clothes and began to smolder there. Oblivious, he scrambled free and threw himself at her again. Candles flew.

Prid dumped a bucket of water over them both.

They separated, panting, to opposite sides of the lodge.

“What in Perimal’s name . . .” gasped Jame.

“You monster!” he spat at her.

“Both of you, shut up!”

They looked at Prid in surprise. She let the bucket fall and burst into tears.

“All right,” said Jame, dropping onto the opposite ledge. Hatch hadn’t put out her eye, she decided, fingering it gingerly, but given how her head throbbed it was hard to tell. “I assume there’s some reason why you just tried to kill me.”

Hatch had gathered Prid in his arms and glared at Jame over the girl’s bent head.

“Earth Wife’s Favorite, father of Gran’s unborn child, I don’t care what sort of a freak you are. You shan’t have her!”

“You,” said Jame profoundly, “are confused—not that it isn’t a confusing situation. Housebond I may be, but I’m not about to do anything to Prid that she doesn’t want . . . or maybe that she does. G’ah, I hate being drunk!”

He glared at her. “Well then, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t bloody know.” She tried to rise and fell back with a reeling head. “Tonight, or rather tomorrow, I have to ride back to Tentir. In the meantime, the two of you figure it out.”

With that, she rolled herself up in the musty blanket and fell asleep.