The servants’ quarters retained two small rooms at the far end and a now-spotless scullery, but the rest had been opened up between rows of support columns. The floor was scrubbed down to its honey grain and strewn with meadow flowers, across which lay glowing bars of late afternoon light. Faint sketches on freshly whitewashed walls hinted at murals to come. Best of all, sections of the western wall had been knocked out to form windows overlooking the boulders and the lower reaches of the Snowthorns with the peaks looming high above, black against a golden sunset. Cool air with a tang of snow blew in.
A flash of white below, either Bel or the rathorn colt. She would have to warn the horse-master that if either equine ventured beyond the lowest tumble of boulders, they would be visible from this new vantage point. With Bel, it hardly mattered, but she wanted to keep the colt secret as long as possible to forestall more hunting parties.
“We can shutter the windows when winter comes,” said Rue, still anxiously watching Jame’s face, misunderstanding her sudden frown. “Or screen them with oiled linen. And look: won’t this be fine on a Mid-Winter’s Night?”
Near the end of the long room, they had set a huge, curiously shaped copper basin on an ironwood platform to be used as a free-standing fire pit. The ceiling overhead had been cut open to form a smoke hole. At that end of the attic, Jame remembered, roof and floor nearly meet. She tapped the basin, which rang sweetly. Around its lip ran a frieze of naked boys, some wrestling, others otherwise employed.
“Let me guess. My uncle’s bathtub?”
Rue blushed and Mint giggled.
“Something like that,” said the latter. “M’lord Greshan enjoyed playing ‘little fishies’ with the scullery lads, or so I’ve heard. It was crated up in the outer room. If we put the fire underneath instead of inside, it can be your bath now.”
“I’ll consider it,” Jame said gravely.
A disturbance at the door, and Brier pushed her way through the ten-command with the pack swinging in her hand. Jame took it with a sigh of relief. She was entirely too good at misplacing valuable objects. This one would have to be securely stowed somewhere until she had a chance to give it to her cousin Kindrie, whose property it really was.
Graykin would kill for such proof of legitimacy. If Vant’s situation was complicated, Gray’s was worse, with Lord Caineron for a father and some Karkinaroth scullery maid for a mother.
Someone gasped.
Jame turned, and the flesh leaped on her bones.
Down the clean-swept, colonnaded room, across the dim entry hall, the door to Greshan’s apartment had silently opened. A figure stood on the threshold, backlit, oddly dwarfish. Emerald and amethyst swirled over one shoulder, vermillion and orange like a garish splash of blood over the other. Then the watcher stepped back and the door closed, slowly, furtively.
So Mint and Rue were right: her half-breed servant still occupied Greshan’s private quarters and wore her uncle’s clothes. No doubt that had been the lavishly embroidered Lordan’s Coat, tailored for broader shoulders than the Southron’s, mocking his pretensions even as he reveled in its rich, occasionally sordid history.
At first he had reported to her regularly. It was weeks, though, since she had last seen him, although sometimes she heard him whisper mockingly to her from the secret passage behind one wall or another, as she just had when Timmon kicked her in the head. No doubt he fed himself by raiding the college kitchens and occupied the long, empty days by spying on the college’s inhabitants, as he just had been on her.
That’s more than I promised him when I accepted his service, she thought defensively.
Yes, but it was still less than he deserved for his suffering on her behalf at his father Caldane’s hands.
. . . that dream again: the half-starved cur on the empty hearth . . .
Really, though, the little man was so irritating with his needy, never-ending quest for self-respect, all tied to her own uncertain status, that she sometimes feared she would kill him out of sheer frustration.
A shuffle of feet and a cough caused her to turn. No one met her gaze. Graykin hardly existed for the other Knorth, she realized, except for Brier who stared at the closed door with hard, green eyes; what could the bastard son of her former lord be to her but an enemy? What shamed the others was that they had been afraid to enter Greshan’s quarters themselves to reclaim them for their current lordan. Greshan’s specter haunted more than poor Harn. Tentir’s rough walls might keep many dangers out, but they still held their secrets within and with them a wrongness, a sickness, that threatened to rot the college’s very bones.
Jame shook herself. Enough futile banging of heads against walls for one day.
“Everybody out,” she said, slinging the pack in a corner and unfastening her jacket. “It may be early for you, but I need some dwar sleep and mean to get it if it kills me.”
They filed out except for an unusually quiet Rue who stayed in her self-appointed role as body servant, gathering Jame’s clothes as she stripped them off. She was naked before she saw the white note on the pillow.
“Remember the equinox,” it read, and this time it was signed: “Index.” Probably some Jaran cadet had slipped in to leave it, as they had the first note in the dining hall.
The old scrollsman meant another Merikit ritual in which Jame was presumably supposed to take part as the Earth Wife’s Favorite, but about which she knew nothing. Moreover, it was half a season away.
“Bugger that,” Jame muttered and cast herself down on an almost too soft pallet in the corner, only to swear and shift off the thorns of a well-meant but inconveniently placed rose.
Silence fell except for the muted voice of the college settling for the night. Outside, the long twilight dwindled. The last sound Jame heard before sleep took her was Rue locking the door.
VIII
Glass of a Different Color
The door to the hall was propped open with an old, double-headed battle axe, the foremost blade of which, still deadly keen, cleaved the wind with a whine as it rushed past into agitated darkness.
Both glass furnaces must be drawing hard, Torisen thought as he paused on the threshold, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Yce brushed past him, a greasy length of rabbit gut clenched in her jaws, and bounded up the northwest spiral stair. Beyond the wash of afternoon light that spilled across the stone floor, death banners were fretted against the walls. Among them stood figures, motionless except for their ruffled clothing, their eyes turned askance to watch him. One looked unnervingly like his sister, but with a most unJamelike expression in her eyes:
Aerulan’s lips moved, unheard but clear in their plea: Oh please, send me home . . .
“This is your home, cousin,” he told her crossly, “and mine too, ancestors help me.”
Another blink of his eyes, and she was only woven cloth again, stained with ancient blood.
Was it better to see those spectral figures or not? Either way, they—and she—were still there, still waiting. He should be used to that by now.
So, are you at last willing to accept my devil’s bargain? purred his father’s voice behind the bolted door in his soul-image. You can free yourself at least of one ghost and be well paid for it.
To that taunt at least he was accustomed, as to the muted sting of a whip on flesh almost too numb to feel the blow.
“I’m tired, Father,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes. “Leave me alone or, better yet, tell me how to get rid of you altogether.”
I am part of your weave, boy, my death crossing your life. To destroy me, you would have to tear yourself apart, but you haven’t the guts for that, have you? Not like your sister . . .