“I am grateful for that, at least, Methi.”
“Do you want for anything?”
“To speak with Kta,” he said, “that most of all.”
“That,” she said, “will not be permitted.”
19
Keys rattled. Kurt stirred out of the torpor of long waiting. Suddenly he realized it was not breakfast. Too many people were in the halclass="underline" he heard their moving, the insertion of the key. Another of the moods of Ylith-methi, he reckoned.
Or it was an execution detail, and he was about to learn what had become of Kta.
Lhe led them, Lhe with fatigue-marks under his eyes and his normally impeccable hair disarranged. A tai,a short sword, was through his belt.
“Wait down the hall,” he said to the others.
They did not want to go. He repeated the order, this time with wildness in his voice, and they almost fled his presence.
No!Kurt started to protest, rising off his cot, but they were gone. Lhe closed the door and stood with his hand clenched on the hilt of the tai.
“I am t’Nethim,” said Lhe. “My father’s business is with Vel t’Elas. Mine is with you. Mim t’Nethim was my cousin.”
Kurt recovered his dignity and bowed slightly, ignoring the threat of the fury that trembled in Lhe’s nostrils. After such a point, there was little else to do. “I honored her,” he said, “very much.”
“No,” said Lhe. “That you did not.”
“Please. Say the rites for her.”
“We have said rites, with many prayers for the welfare of her soul. Because of Mim t’Nethim we have spoken well of Elas to our Guardians for the first time in centuries: even in ignorance, they sheltered her. But other things we will not forgive. There is no peace between the Guardians of Nethim and you, human. They do not accept this disgrace.”
“Mim thought them in harmony with her choice,” said Kurt. “There was peace in Mim. She loved Nethim and she loved Elas.”
It did not greatly please Lhe, but it affected him greatly. His lips became a hard line. His brows came as near to meeting as a nemet’s might.
“She was consenting?” he asked. “Elas did not command this of her, giving her to you?”
“At first they opposed it, but I asked Mim’s consent before I asked Elas. I wished her happy, t’Nethim. If you are not offended to hear it,—I loved her.”
A vein beat ceaselessly at Lhe’s temple. He was silent a moment, as if gathering the self-control to speak. “We are offended. But it is clear she trusted you, since she gave you her true name in the house of her enemies. She trusted you more than Elas.”
“No. She knew I would keep that to myself; but it was not fear of Elas. She honored Elas too much to burden their honor with knowing the name of her house.”
“I thank you, that you confessed her true name to the Methi so we could comfort her soul. It is a great deal,” he added coldly, “that we thanka human.”
“I know it is,” said Kurt, and bowed, courtesy second nature by now. He lifted his eyes cautiously to Lhe’s face; there was no yielding there.
Scurrying footsteps approached the door. With a timid knock, a lesser guardsman cracked the door and awkwardly bowed his apology. “Sir. Sir. The Methi is waiting for this human. Please, sir, she has sent t’Iren to ask about the delay.”
“Out,” Lhe snapped. The head vanished out of the doorway. Lhe stood for a moment, fingers white on the hilt of the tai.Then he gestured abruptly to the door. “Human. You are not mine to deal with. Out.”
The summons this time was to the fortress rhmei,into a gathering of the lords of Indresul, shadowy figures in the firelit hall of state. Ylith waited beside the hearthfire itself, wearing again the wide-winged crown, a slender form of color and light in the dim hall, her gown the color of flame and the light glancing from the metal around her face.
Kurt went down to his knees and on his face without being forced, despite that a guard held him there with the butt of a spear in his back.
“Let him sit,” said Ylith. “He may look at me.”
Kurt sat back on his heels, amid a great murmuring of the Indras lords, and he realized to his hurt that they murmured against that permission. He was not fit to meet their Methi as even a humble chanmight, making a quick and dignified obeisance and rising. He laced his hands in his lap, proper for a man who had been given no courtesy of welcome, and kept his head bowed despite the permission. He did not want to stir their anger. There was nowhere to begin with them, to whom he was an animal; there was no protest and no action that would make any difference to them.
“T’Morgan,” Ylith insisted softly.
He would not, even for her. She let him alone after that, and quietly asked someone to fetch Kta.
It did not take long. Kta came of his own volition, as far as the place where Kurt knelt, and there he too went to his knees and bowed his head, but he did not make the full prostration and no one insisted on it. He was at least without the humiliation of the iron band that Kurt still wore on his ankle.
If they were to die, Kurt thought wildly, irrationally, he would ask them to remove it. He did not know why it mattered, but it did: it offended his pride more than the other indignities, to have something locked on his person against which he had no power. He loathed it.
“T’Elas,” said the Methi, “you have had a full day to reconsider your decision.”
“Great Methi,” said Kta in a voice faint but steady, “I have given you the only answer I will ever give.”
“For love of Nephane?”
“Yes.”
“And for love of the one who destroyed your hearth?”
“No. But for Nephane.”
“Kta t’Elas,” said the Methi, “I have spoken at length with Vel t’Elas. They would take you to the hearth of your Ancestors, and I would permit that, if you would remember that you are Indras.”
He hesitated long over that. Kurt felt the anxiety in him; but he would not offend Kta’s dignity by turning to urge him one way or the other.
“I belong to Nephane,” said Kta.
“Will you then refuse me, will you directly refuse me,t’Elas, knowing the meaning of that refusal?”
“Methi,” pleaded Kta, “let me be, let me alone in peace. Do not make me answer you.”
“Then you were brought up in reverence of Indras law and the Ind.”
“Yes, Methi.”
“And you admit that I have the authority to require your obedience? That I can curse you from hearth and from city, from all holy rites, even that of burial? That I have the power to consign your undying soul to perdition to all eternity?”
“Yes,” said Kta, and his voice was no more than a whisper in that deathly silence.
“Then, t’Elas,—I am sending you and the human t’Morgan to the priests. Consider, consider well the answers you will give them.”
The temple lay across a wide courtyard, still within the walls of the Indume, a cube of white marble, vast beyond all expectation. The very base of its door was as high as the shoulder of a man, and within the triangular rhmeiof the temple blazed the phusmehaof the greatest of all shrines, the hearthfire of all mankind.
Kta stopped at the threshold of the inner shrine, that awful golden light bathing his sweating face and reflecting in his eyes. He had an expression of terror on his face such as Kurt had never seen in him. He faltered and would not go on, and the guards took him by the arms and led him forward into the shrine, where the roar of the fire drowned the sound of their steps.
Kurt started to follow him, in haste. A spearshaft slammed across his belly, doubling him over with a cry of pain, swallowed in the noise.
When he straightened in the hands of the guards, barred from that holy place, he saw Kta at the side of the hearthfire fall to his face on the stone floor. The guards with him bowed and touched hands to lips in reverence, bowed again and withdrew as white-robed priests entered the hall from beyond the fire.