He had been wrong: that stung.
“Oh, shut up!”
A burst of harsh laughter, fading, gone, along with the sound of a door handle furiously rattled.
How strong was he, Torisen wondered. How capable? Ironic, that so far he had been more of a success as Highlord than as Lord Knorth.
He had ridden by the ruined fields on the way out to the hunt early that morning, seeing nothing but pale mud and weeds. They had been lucky to get the haying done, if barely in time. Wheat, oats, rye, flax, all were gone, down to the seeds of future harvests, if any. Some root vegetables, berries, salted fish, hazelnuts, milk, cheese, and flesh from whatever livestock the garrison had managed to get under cover before the lethal ashfall . . . All well and good, as far as it went, but that wasn’t far enough.
“Should I send everyone to Kothifir?” he asked Mullen’s banner. “There’s always food with the Southern Host. But my Kendar are terrified that I will forget their names as I did yours. Most, like you, would rather die and you, of course, I can never forget again.”
He couldn’t accompany them south this time either, not with the other lords wintering in the Riverland. Someone would be bound to make a grab for Gothregor. As much as he disliked the place, it was the Highlord’s seat and the emblem of his power. To lose it might well finish him.
So, not such a success as Highlord either, eh? Where are your allies? Are you prepared to crawl back to Ardeth?
“Be damned if I will,” he said out loud, “or sell my cousin, or take another unfit consort, or marry off my sister. So where does that leave me?”
In a cold hall, with starving followers. Ah, taste it—the bitter dregs of power. How often it was on my tongue during the long years of my exile, and yet the cup never ran dry.
Wearily, hunting leathers a-creak, Torisen followed Yce up the stair.
The second floor of the old keep greeted him with a wave of heat. As windowless as the first, once a hall of judgment, it was now lit by red-rimmed doors set in the northeast and southeast corner turrets behind which fires roared continually to heat the furnaces above. Mounds of coal shouldered out of the darkness. Long ago, the Knorth had discovered a rich bituminous vein in the mountains above Gothregor, enough to warm many a frozen night. The garrison was already busy stocking up for the winter, and some coal from every load found its way here. Tori hadn’t thought to order it, but Marc’s many friends saw that it happened, just as they took turns in their rare off-duty hours to stoke the fires. The whole project had become a community affair, but with only one increasingly knowledgeable (by dint of trial and sometimes disastrous error) glass-master.
Torisen climbed up to the High Council chamber and checked, startled, on the topmost step.
At the far end of the room under the vaulted expanse that had been the great, stained glass map of Rathillien, Yce appeared to be locked in combat with a monster. At any rate, her crouching adversary was huge, clad in a patchwork of old rhi-sar armor and animal skins, with round, glowing eyes and paws for hands. The wolver pup lunged back and forth, snarling, before it. They were playing tug-o’-war with her length of cleaned guts. The strange figure let go of his end and rose, pulling off first protective gauntlets and then a leather hood with smoked glass inserts for eyes. Beneath, sweat plastered thinning, reddish hair to Marc’s skull and made a bedraggled rat of the big Kendar’s beard. Before he had come up with this gear, he had managed to singe off his eyebrows, giving him a look of perpetual surprise. The fringe of his beard was also heat-crinkled as was the hair around his parched lips.
“Did the hunt go well, my lord?”
Tori wanted to snap at him, I’m not your lord. You chose not to accept my service.
Nonetheless, here Marc was, trying to repair the damage Jame had done all those months ago. Tori had his doubts that the Kendar would succeed, but something had to be done about that gaping hole before the other lords could set foot again in this chamber and snicker at it.
“No,” he said instead, shrugging off his heavy jacket, slinging it over the back of the Highlord’s displaced chair, and dropping into the seat. This room was nearly as hot as the one below, despite a cool breeze blowing in one broken window and out another. He was indeed very tired.
“Ummm . . . ” said Marc unhappily
Torisen hastily removed his booted feet from the table before they could smudge the map chalked on its surface or disturb the little leather pouches strewn about it.
At the far end of the table was a saddlebag, whose contents he knew only too well, having carried them from Kithorn all the way to the Cataracts. At the moment they lay in shadow, the declining sun not yet having sunk below the upper arch of the western window. Nonetheless, he sketched them a brief salute.
“It was the worst hunt yet,” he said, slumping back in the chair. “Just a few harts and hinds and, as you see”—with a jerk of his head to Yce, gnawing her prize in a corner—“the odd hare. Thanks to these damned folds in the land, we only seem to catch the very stupid or the very confused. At that, we’re lucky not to get lost ourselves.”
Marc offered him a dipper of water, then drank deep himself and absentmindedly emptied what was left over his head.
“You did notice, I take it, that yon pup has blood on her fur.”
“Yes, but it isn’t hers. She fought the direhounds for her treat, and won.”
Marc chuckled. “That sounds uncommonly like our lass. Have you had any word of her of late? I take it, at least, that the college is still standing.”
“If it weren’t, presumably someone would have told me.”
Torisen stirred uneasily. He didn’t like spies, and asking Harn Grip-hard to keep an eye on his sister felt too much like employing one. Just the same . . .
“All I’ve heard from Harn is ‘The weather is fine. Wish you were here.’ ”
“If Ran Harn wants you at Tentir, perhaps you should go.”
Harn couldn’t have meant that literally . . . could he? Maybe he had. The Knorth war-leader and sometime commandant of Tentir wasn’t inclined to be flippant. Moreover, something clearly had been bothering him to near distraction ever since Autumn’s Eve.
Observing that an hourglass on the window sill had run its course, Marc turned it over.
“Never mind,” he said, donning his gauntlets and hood. “Our lass can usually take care of herself, though she takes some getting used to.” He chuckled. “I wonder how my great-granddaughter Brier is doing. She’s a bit stiff in her ways—no surprise, given her history—but no doubt they’ll be good for each other.”
“Wait a minute. Brier Iron-thorn is your kin?”
“Not exactly, since we only trace bloodlines on the mother’s side. Still, right glad I was when you took her into your service at the Cataracts. She’ll do both of you proud.”
Marc opened the hatch on the northeast furnace to a rage of heat and light, reached in with tongs, and removed one of several clay firepots.
“Odd, though, about the hunt, I mean. By now the fall migrations should have begun. When the urge to go south hits, you’d think some beasties had lost their minds. Yackcarn, now, their migration from farther north is more like a month-long stampede. Only the females go. The males stay up above the snow line yearlong. You hear them bellowing in the spring mating session, but I don’t think anyone has ever seen one. The Merikit depend on the fall run of their female folk to survive the winter.”
Torisen pulled off a boot and shook a pebble out of it. The “pebble,” a baby trock, rolled into a corner and settled there, staring back at him with tiny, bright, unblinking eyes. Somehow, scavengers always survived. Ruefully, he studied the hole that the creature had gnawed in his sock. More work for Burr, unless he found time to darn it himself first. Luckily, the creature hadn’t yet started on his foot itself.