Well, he hadn’t wanted to see then, or to remember now, but splinters of memory stuck in his mind like broken glass:
The lordan’s quarters at Tentir. Greshan in his gorgeous, filthy coat, lolling drunk on the hearth, greedily watching. Hands gripping his arms and the cold kiss of steel as the knife cut away his clothes. A silken voice murmuring in one ear, a mumble in the other, obscene point and counterpoint:
“Little boys should do as they are told . . . ”
“You’re weak, and y’know it . . . ”
“Your people trust you and you fail them. How many more will slip through your fingers?”
The voices had spoken both to the boy that his father had been and to him as he was now, but somehow lacking, somehow maimed.
. . . cursed be and cast out, blood and bone, you are no son of mine . . .
Then had come his sister’s voice, in a purr husky with the Old Blood that ran strong in her veins, sending a chill down his spine: “You will not hurt my brother.”
He had barely slept since.
A faint sound made Torisen turn sharply, his free hand leaping up to touch the hilts of the throwing knives concealed in the stiff collar of his dress coat. Finally, he had had time to have new ones forged after wyrm’s venom had eaten away the old the previous winter.
“Who’s there?”
A trim, gray-clad figure detached itself from the shadows. For a moment, Torisen thought that one of the dead had lost patience and was coming for him; but this specter had no face. Then he saw that it was merely veiled, and under that masked.
“Your pardon, Highlord.” The voice was low and soothing, as one might speak to a startled child. “I came to honor an old . . . friend, and lost track of the time.”
He knew her now, with her tight-laced, dove-gray gown and eyeless mask, for she had been blind since adolescence, and he saluted her warily. Adiraina, the Ardeth Matriarch, glided forward. As with all proper Highborn ladies, she wore a full outer skirt over a tight undergarment which restricted her steps to a flowing mince. Highborn often lived a century and a half unless violence cut short their lives. Toward the end, many plunged into senility. At one hundred and twenty-odd years, however, Adiraina remained as sharp and full of schemes to advance her house as ever.
As she passed them, some woven faces stood out more clearly than others and seemed to watch her pass: a tiny, white-haired woman with keen, worried eyes; Mullen again; then a girl disturbingly like his sister Jame but with softer features and a thin red line across her throat to indicate where Bashtiri shadow assassins had cut it.
“However . . . ” Adiraina paused, the image of demure, elderly innocence. “It did occur to me that, in the absence of my kinsman Ardeth, you might welcome a little . . . er . . . company tonight.”
Torisen felt the wolver pup brush again his leg and reached down without looking to restrain her. By reflex she snapped at his hand, but her teeth only brushed his skin. Jame had told her never to bite either one of them, and in that if in nothing else the pup obeyed. Still, she continued to vibrate with menace in his grip as she leaned toward the Ardeth. Her instincts, at least, were good. Damnation. Why hadn’t he thought to set a guard at the door?
“Matriarch, the last time you tried to ‘help’ me, you slipped an aphrodisiac into my wine. The results, I suspect, were not exactly what you had in mind.”
Not unless she had expected half the Women’s Halls to throw themselves at him or he, on escaping, to be vilely sick behind a bush. Even now, he couldn’t enter the Forecourt without Highborn girls crowding the classroom windows above to moon over him. In that context, Caineron’s young daughter Lyra Lack-wit was a welcome diversion as she waved furiously and shouted guileless greetings, until one teacher or another dragged her back out of sight. There, too, his sister Jame had certainly left her mark. The Women’s Halls were not likely any time soon to forget her forced sojourn with them the previous winter.
Adiraina had the grace to look abashed, as much as one could tell behind the double cover of mask and veil. Then she brushed aside the incident of the drugged wine with an elegant wave of one small hand.
“As I explained at the time, I hoped to clarify your mind. You have been somewhat . . . er . . . distracted since the return of your sister. Such a surprise, of course, to us all, when we thought the Knorth ladies dead.”
And a cause for ruthless competition, Torisen thought sourly. One more pure-blooded Highborn in the Knorth stable, which now consisted of two. It was a pity that one couldn’t count the Knorth Bastard, Kindrie, Shanir that he was. So, for that matter, was Jame, but that mattered far less than the healer’s illegitimacy. Trust his former consort Kallystine to have made that public knowledge. Many of the matriarchs were hot for any match that would give their houses a legitimate half-Knorth heir to the Highlord’s seat on his death. He almost regretted putting his sister temporarily out of their reach by making her his heir and sending her to the randon college at Tentir for military training. Anyone who dared to slip her a love potion was apt to get his face ripped off.
Ah, Jame. At least I’ve placed you beyond harm. Tentir protects its own. I hope. It should at least keep ravening suitors from your door.
Not that he had really expected her to make it this far. The randon college was fiercely competitive, and his sister had been tossed in among the best Kencyr of their generation—mostly Kendar but also a few Highborn such as the Caineron Lordan Gorbel and the Ardeth Timmon. Jame, however, was the only Highborn female. He suspected that she knew how to fight but knew little about her other talents, except that, however apologetically, she left a trail of destruction wherever she went. What else besides the Senethar she might have learned in their years apart, he hardly dared to think. Reports of her progress or lack thereof at Tentir had been oddly garbled, as if Harn hadn’t quite known what to say. Jame often had that effect on people. First it had seemed sure that she would fail the Autumn cull. However, according to Harn’s last message, she had somehow passed after all by “redeeming the Shame of Tentir.”
Torisen had no idea what that last meant, but it sounded ominous.
What had his sister been up to, besides turning the college upside down, running afoul of a rogue rathorn, and nearly getting herself killed?
Meanwhile, Adiraina continued to drift around the hall, obliging him to turn with her.
“You know, my dear, your estrangement from my lord Adric is most unfortunate and, if you will forgive me, ill-advised. Without his help, you would never have survived to claim the Highlord’s seat. A nameless boy, arriving out of nowhere . . . who else would have believed you and promoted you to command of the Southern Host, much less stood behind you when you came of age? I had some small part in that. It is my gift, you know, to sense bloodlines by touch. And sometimes degrees of kinship.”
Trinity, thought Torisen with a sick jolt, remembering. Last spring, he had invaded the Matriarchs’ Council to demand what it had done with his sister. Adiraina had had a cloth stained with Jame’s blood from her slashed face, and he had left drops of his own blood on the floor from a reopened cut on his hand. On her knees, touching them both, Adiraina had cried, “Twins! You are twins after all!”
No one had brought up that dangerous matter since, the idea being—on the face of it—absurd, and the implications profound.
But Adiraina moved on smoothly, her warning (if such it was) delivered: “We both only want what is best for you and our people as a whole.”