“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.
V
Fractures
Jame woke with a start, disoriented, dream bemused. Where was she? What had woken her?
Overhead, the sky hinted at another coming dawn although stars still glittered defiantly until her breath dimmed them. Trinity, but it was cold. She reclaimed her half of the blanket with a jerk—not for the first time that night—and snuggled against the warm body behind her, trying to ignore the shift and dig of pebbles on the stony ground.
Oh, yes; she lay among the boulders above Tentir and this was, presumably, the third of Autumn.
The first had been spent at Gothregor.
Names with faces, faces without names . . . so many of them, crowding forward, clamoring.
“Remember me!”
“Remember me!”
“Remember us all!”
Who was this man with arms outstretched, the skin hanging off them in bloody strips? Who was this boy clutching his torn neck with both hands, only able to mouth his plea, and he not even a Knorth? A beautiful girl and a tiny, neat, old lady, each with a red line across her throat:
We too are of your house. Child of darkness, have you also forgotten us? How long must our blood price go unpaid?
No. Those were only fragments of her dreams this past night. She knew very well who the flayed man was and the two Highborn women. As for the boy . . . it came after a moment’s hard concentration. Quirl. Corvine’s son.
Still, all those other faces and names only comprised the Knorth garrison at Gothregor and the dead within its hall. Many more of her house soldiered with the Southern Host or were scattered across Rathillien on detached duty. The randon college below held over a hundred by itself, counting cadets, officers, and sargents.
And Torisen had to remember them all.
“Being Lord Knorth is no easy job, lass, especially now, much less being Highlord of the Kencyrath.” So Marc had reminded her, his deep voice rumbling hollowly up the turret stair where he was laying bricks.
All right, she had thought, scowling mulishly at the larger pieces of broken glass laid out on the Council table over a chalked sketch of the huge stained glass map that she had accidentally shattered the previous spring. Cullet barrels along the wall held smaller fragments of stained glass, sorted in a rainbow of color, waiting to be melted and recast.
Likewise, the Knorth was still a scattered, shattered house and Torisen was stretching himself to the breaking point, perhaps beyond, trying to pull it back together.
Just the same . . .
She hadn’t seen her brother all that long day. Wherever she went, he was somewhere else.
Tori, dammit, do you remember me, or do I have to break something else, something bigger, to get your attention?
“He really is doing his best, you know,” Marc had said, as if reading her thoughts and, truly, no one in the Kencyrath knew her mind better.
Jame remembered her reluctant grin. “I’d take that more seriously if I weren’t talking to your backside. What in Perimal’s name are you doing?”
“Eh? Oh.” He had descended the tight, spiral steps to the northeast turret, still backwards, and ducked his balding head under the low mantel to emerge. Most doorways must seem low to the Kendar, who at ninety, in late middle age, still stood a good seven feet tall.
“If I’m to rebuild this window, I’ve got to have a furnace, probably at least two.”
“And you know this because . . . ?”
Since the Merikit had destroyed his home keep, Kithorn, Marc had been a reluctant warrior, first of the Caineron, then of East Kenshold. Never mind that he had only wanted to create things; as a yondri-gon, a threshold dweller in other houses with few rights, no one with his size and strength was used for anything except warfare.
“I wouldn’t say I know, exactly. You probably don’t remember this—it was a minor affair and you were busy resurrecting that funny, green frog god—but as a city guard in Tai-tastigon I helped to prevent a guild war between two glassworks by proving that a third hot-shop was responsible for the leak of guild secrets.”