“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?