Honor's Paradox

I Songs in the Night

“Gerridon Highlord, Master of Knorth, a proud man was he. The Three People held he in his hand—Arrin-ken, Highborn, and Kendar—by right of birth and might.”

The Tentir cadets listened intently as the haunt singer Ashe limped back and forth before the great hall’s fireplace. Flames outlined her black-robed form. A hood overshadowed her face, but they caught glimpses of its haggard lines as she turned. She chanted hoarsely rather than sang and accompanied herself with a small lyre on which she struck chords apparently at random.

The song itself was as old as the Fall, three thousand years ago. Some believed every word of it. Others thought that the Singers’ cherished prerogative of the Lawful Lie had played a role in its composition or at least in its transformation over the millennia. So much had been lost in the flight to this world, Rathillien, that much of the past has become garbled. So, at least, many claimed, the Caineron loudest of all.

“Wealth and power had he, and knowledge deeper than the Sea of Stars.”

This too was old news: so had their lords. The self-styled Highborn had ruled over the lowly Kendar almost without restraint since the withdrawal of the catlike Arrin-ken who had served as their judges and mediators. Some lords were good, others . . . demanding. “The gentle brush of our lord’s whim,” as another old song put it; “The crack of his displeasure.”

“But he feared death.”

Eyes jerked up at a discordant note and a sudden squawk from Higbert. The tip of Ashe’s little finger had broken off as she struck her lyre and had flipped into the Caineron’s mug of cider. He threw both vessel and contents aside, perhaps by accident into the lap of Gorbel, his lord’s heir. Gorbel retrieved the partial digit and returned it to the singer without comment.

“My thanks, Lordan,” said Ashe, pocketing it. “I will sew it back on later.”

The cadets watched this transfer intently, reminded, as if any need be, that the haunt singer was herself neither alive nor quite dead.

As would-be randon, death was to become a way of life for them, both their own and that of anyone under their command. Would they be strong enough to make such mortal decisions? An honorable death bought freedom—from their lords’ dominion, from their hated Three-Faced God who had set them such an impossible task as to stop the Shadows’ spread down the Chain of Creation. Singer Ashe must be very strong not to have chosen the oblivion that she had earned from her wounds taken even before the battle at the Cataracts. As for the Master, the mere fear of death was no excuse for anything.

Ashe cleared her throat, spat out a loose tooth, and continued.

“ ‘Dread lord,’ he said to the Shadow that Crawls, even to Perimal Darkling, ancient of enemies, ‘my god regards me not. If I serve thee, whilst thou preserve me, even to the end of time?’ Night bowed over him. Words they spoke.”

At the far end of the hall, the outer door ground open a crack. Through it squeezed an ice-crusted figure accompanied by whips of freezing snow and blades of wind. The cadets huddled closer together. Some glared. Others looked wide-eyed with surprise. Who traveled so late at night, in such weather?

Rue of the Knorth jumped up and went quickly to help the new arrival shed her outer garments. The hood slid back from black hair intricately braided and from silver-gray eyes set in a thin face pinched with the cold. Beneath the coat, the newcomer wore a cadet’s jacket, fur-lined boots, and heavy mittens. These last she stripped off to reveal black gloves.

“Lady, what are you doing here?” Rue demanded over her armload of winter gear. “You should still be snug with your lord brother at Gothregor.”

The other laughed wryly. “Tori and I are seldom ‘snug.’ Anyway, you know that I have to ride north tomorrow to be with the Merikit on the solstice.”

Rue made an unhappy sound. None of her people welcomed their lady’s bond with the wild hill folk nor understood it. Wasn’t it enough that the Highlord’s sister was a cadet here at the college where no Highborn girl had ever been before? Why did she have to complicate matters with heathen connections?

She patted Rue on the shoulder. “Never mind. I’m here now and so, I see, is most of the student body. Didn’t anyone go home during the break after the Winter War?”

“A few. The weather kept most of us here. Ashe was benighted on her way south to Falkirr and the Commandant asked her to sing for us. But come to the fire, lady. God’s claws, you’re all but fringed in icicles.”

Across the room, the Ardeth Lordan Timmon smiled at her and Gorbel grunted something that might have been a welcome.

“Then went my lord Gerridon to his sister and consort, the priestess Jamethiel Dream-weaver, and said, ‘Dance out the souls of the faithful that darkness may enter in.’ And she danced.”

“Greetings, my lady.” Ashe broke off to incline her head to the young woman known as Jameth, who bowed in return and settled down among her ten-command.

Pretty Mint hurried to bring her a mug of warm cider which she cupped in chilled, gloved hands. Dar said something that made Quill laugh and the new cadet, Damson, glower. Erim, Killy, and Niall bobbed their heads. Leaning against the wall, wooden faced Brier Iron-thorn gave her a brief nod.

“Two-thirds of the People fell that night, Highborn and Kendar. ‘Rise up, Highlord of the Kencyrath,’ said the Arrin-ken to Glendar. ‘Your brother has forfeited all. Flee, man, flee, and we will follow.’ And so he fled, Cloak, Knife and Book abandoning, into the new world. Barriers he raised, and his people consecrated them. ‘A watch we will keep,’ they said, ‘and our honor someday avenge. Alas for the greed of a man and the deceit of a woman, that we should come to this!’ ”

The last words fell like the blow of an axe on dead flesh, not quite sundering it from the living present.

The cadets clapped, as if to draw some warmth back into their hands. As old as the song was, it still struck cold. Moreover, there sat Glendar’s heir, the Knorth Lordan, last (save her brother) of that ancient, fabulously pure bloodline. It was enough to give pause even to those who believed in the Lawful Lie.

“The Master I understand—somewhat,” Rue said, “but nothing else in the old songs explains the Dream-weaver. How could she do something so wicked?”

Jameth moved as if to comment, but bit back whatever she had been about to say.

“You just heard the story,” said Killy. “She followed her lord’s command.”

“And so became entangled in Honor’s Paradox,” added Quill, so named because his parents had wanted him to become a scrollsman. “Where does one’s honor lie, in following orders or in oneself?”

No one answered, although many stirred uneasily. Honor might have held the Kencyrath together since its creation, but in these latter days it had become a complicated thing as some lords pushed hard to bend it to their own use.

“Sing something funny!” called a voice from the safety of the crowd.

Straight-faced, the singer responded:

This drew genuine cheers which the singer acknowledged, but then she struck a chord and continued with barely a pause.

The hall quieted. If the Master had been the first to fall, this was the prologue to the second cataclysm, triggered by the massacre of the Knorth ladies by Bashtiri shadow assassins. No one knew who had sent them, but they had surely come and slain all but the child Tieri whom Aerulan had hidden. Ganth’s misplaced revenge had led to his exile and, seemingly, to the end of the Knorth highlords. However, first Torisen and then his sister Jameth had appeared to reestablish the line. As the song ended, some cadets glanced uncertainly at the latter. Her father might well have been Ganth, but no one could name her mother, nor had she been willing to do so. The lords made more of that than the Kendar did. The latter, more practical, dealt with what they found, and the Highlord’s sister had so far proven to be a formidable if unnervingly unpredictable young woman.

Ashe sang again, this time about the second, more recent battle in those infamous hills, some thirty years after Ganth’s fall:

The ballad continued, shading into “The Cataracts,” both told from the viewpoint of the dead and the dying. In the first battle, Ashe had been savaged by a haunt and had let the wound go untreated. During the second, she had fought at Harn Grip-hard’s back although she had been three days dead at the time.

The Knorth cadet Niall began to shiver. He had slipped away from Gothregor and had seen that latter dread battlefield when the Kencyr Host had clashed with the Waster Horde, led by darkling changers in rebellion against the Master himself. Some nights, he still woke screaming.

Ashe changed the theme once again:

The cadets’ eyes darted from Timmon to Gorbel to Jameth—Ardeth, Caineron, and Knorth. To have even one lord’s heir at the college was unusual; three, unheard of, much more so in that one of them was the Highlord’s newfound sister.

Ashe finished and turned to Jameth. “Lordan, will you add a coda to my song?”

Jameth hesitated, looking blank. Clearly, nothing came to mind. Then, as if despite herself, she began softly to sing:

The last note faded into plaintive silence. Some cadets clapped but hesitantly, as if not quite sure what to do with their hands.

“Well,” said the Commandant, detaching himself from the opposite wall, sardonic hawk face and white scarf of office moving into the firelight. “I think that’s enough for one night. To bed, children, and pleasant dreams to you all.”

Some time later, Jame paced her quarters. Rue had stoked the fire under the bronze basin until the apartment was warm enough for shirt-sleeves and light danced on the brightly muraled walls. These chambers had belonged to her uncle Greshan’s servants, and a darker, more dismal suite of rooms would have been hard to imagine. Truly, her cadets had worked hard to make them appealing to their eccentric mistress, although she still missed the airy freedom of the attic above.

Why, oh why had she sung them the Whinno-hir Bel-tairi’s sad little song? Now she couldn’t get it out of her mind:

Her bones ached and her head still buzzed with the day-long winter silence through which she had ridden. Even traveling by the folds in the land, Tentir was a long way from Gothregor, and nightfall a long time since morning. Before dawn she must journey on if she hoped to make the northern hills in time. What she needed was a few hours of dwar sleep, but not yet.

She thought about Ashe’s songs, which amounted to what most Kencyr knew about their history. How strange to hear her ancestors’ deeds described and to know that she lay in their direct line of descent. Not so long ago, she hadn’t even known that she was Highborn, much less the Highlord’s sister. After all, who would guess such a thing when he, her twin, was a good ten years older than she thanks to her time in Perimal Darkling?

That, Ancestors be praised, was something about which her fellow cadets knew nothing, much less that the Master himself was her uncle and the Dream-weaver her mother. Whatever the songs said, Gerridon had gotten some good out of his dire bargain in the form of prolonged life, at the cost of his followers’ souls reaped for him by his sister-consort. What he hadn’t gotten was her, Jame, whom he had bred to replace the faltering Dream-weaver. Thus, in the end, he might yet lose all.

The cadets didn’t know her in many other ways as well, some for the better, some for the worse.

Oh, they had all heard those doggerel verses that Ashe could have sung but hadn’t—one supposed, through good manners or good taste—about the Knorth Lordan’s career as a randon cadet:

Or

Trinity, but she hated being called “Jameth.” Whatever other secrets she kept, it irked that she couldn’t tell them her true name. After her winter in the Women’s Halls at Gothregor, she had sworn never to wear a mask again. Her old friend the Kendar Marc might well ask, “Is this confusion of names any different?” Wise Marc. How she missed him, but he had his own work repairing the stained glass windows at Gothregor that she had shattered.

Someone knocked softly on the door.

“Come in,” Jame called, wondering if Rue had found another tiresome way to make her comfortable.

Ashe entered, closing the door behind her.

Jame fought an instinctive surge of revulsion. The scar on her arm where a haunt had once savaged her twinged, but at least she had found help soon enough to avoid becoming a haunt herself.

“Singer.” Jame gave a jerky half salute. Before she had retired to Mount Alban, Ashe had been a senior, highly respected randon, and she had saved Harn’s life at the Cataracts. “How may I serve you?”

The haunt singer shuffled forward, leaning on her staff. “With some information . . . if you please, lady.” When not in performance, her voice roughened into a hoarse, halting thing, mere air pushed through dried cords by shriveled lungs. She drew a deep, whistling breath and declaimed:

What I know, lady . . . is that fewer of us walk the Grayland . . . than we did a day ago. I would know . . . why.”

The Gray Lands was the border between life and death where some Kencyr found themselves trapped if their remains were not given to the pyre. To Jame, from her glimpses of it, it looked much like the accursed Haunted Lands surrounding the keep where she and her brother had been born during their father’s bitter exile.

“It came to my attention,” she said carefully, circling the fire to keep it between herself and the haunt, “that those death banners woven from the blood-stained clothes of their subjects had snared their souls in the weave. Not all Knorth wished to remain so trapped. I offered them freedom.”

“Oblivion, you mean . . . with a torch’s flame.”

“They chose to embrace it. I forced no one. By the way, if I might point out, you yourself stand in imminent danger of immolation.”

“Ah.” Ashe looked down at the hem of her robe, which was beginning to smolder where cinders from the fire had fallen on it. She paused to consider, then thumped out the sparks with the iron-shod foot of her staff. “Someday, perhaps . . . but not just yet. Life is still . . . too interesting.”

Jame was suddenly enlightened. “You hope to see it through to the coming of the Tyr-ridan and the Master’s second fall.”

“If fall . . . he does. What singer willingly . . . leaves a song unfinished?”

“And I already know that you think I may become Nemesis, the Third Face of our God.”

Ashe spread her hands. Several fingertips were missing. “Who else . . . is there?”

Indeed, there were only three pure-blooded Knorth left—herself, her brother, and their first cousin Kindrie, who had only recently discovered that he was legitimate. However, each had to recognize and accept his or her role for the Tyr-ridan to be complete. Torisen had no idea that he might become That-Which-Creates. Given how he felt about the Shanir, that was bound to come as a shock. Kindrie guessed that as a healer he was destined to become Argentiel, Preservation, and the thought horrified him. She was closest to fulfilling the position for which thirty millennia of her people’s history had sought to prepare her, but—Ancestors, please!—not just yet.

She looked sharply at the singer. “You’re here to try to talk me into staying away from the hills.”

“Think . . . what you may someday mean to your people. Should you risk yourself . . . for such foolishness?”

“Ashe, last Summer’s Eve you witnessed the Merikits’ rites. You know that they deal with real power, however alien it is to us. And we need this world’s good will in order to live here. I didn’t choose to become the Earth Wife’s Favorite, you know. It was literally thrust upon me. Now every time I miss a ritual, something goes wrong. Besides, didn’t you once say that only a Kencyr can kill a Tyr-ridan?”

“So an old song claims. But at present . . . you are only a nemesis . . . not the definite article.”

“So I should be wrapped in cotton until fate decides? Ashe, I can’t live that way. There’s too much to do.

Ashe sighed. “Can you at least . . . try to use . . . a little common sense?”

Jame smiled, her thin lips tugged further awry by the scar across one cheek bone, a present of the Women’s World. “I can try, but you know me: if I knew what I was doing, I probably wouldn’t be doing it.”

A muffled cry full of terror rose from the barracks below.

Jame cursed. “I knew we were going to give Niall nightmares. I’ve a cadet to comfort, then a few hours of dwar to catch before I leave for Kithorn. Ashe, please go away and do whatever it is you do instead of sleeping.”

She left the apartment as the frightened cry sounded again and other voices rose in drowsy protest.

Ashe grounded her staff and shook her grizzled head. “Some nemesis,” she muttered.