“Did . . . er . . . things ever get really bad of a winter at Kithorn?”
“Once, when I was a boy.”
Marc carefully poured the pot’s contents onto the flat blade of a long-handled clay paddle, one of several retrieved from the ancient glassworks in Gothregor’s abandoned halls along with the pots. The molten glass flowed like thick, incandescent honey, only covering two palms’ width. Strands of beard that had escaped the Kendar’s hood crinkled and burned with an acrid stench.
“The first melt can take up to sixteen hours,” he said, opening a slot in the second, southeastern furnace and sliding the paddle blade into it. “Fascinating stuff, glass. Did you know it’s basically just sand, lime, and ash, plus some coloring agent? Using cullet—the broken glass of the old window, that is—helps it melt at a lower temperature, although these turrets make natural chimneys and that coal burns something fierce. Huh. I’ll be needing to stoke this one soon, then let it cool to anneal the sheet.”
His smoked-glass eyes, when he turned, held the image of swirling, molten fire, but his voice flattened with sere reminiscence.
“That winter, now. It was hard. The harvest had been poor that year and the winter snows came early. When our supplies ran out, around Mid-Winter’s Day, we ate everything: bark, leather, frostbitten ears and toes. All the animals went, of course, except for the wise cats, who hid. The dogs licked our hands before we cut their throats.”
“And the horses?”
If he could have seen the Kendar’s expression, it would probably have been reproachful.
“We drew the line there in honor of our Whinno-hir except for those that dropped dead by themselves, which was most of them. They’ve no hair in their nostrils, y’know, to filter the cold air, and we had limited space in the keep. Lung infections took those that didn’t die first of hunger.”
“Why didn’t you ask one of the major houses for help?”
Shutting the slot, Marc opened another one below it and drew out a second pallet whose contents had flattened somewhat and spread into an irregular shape. This he slid onto a slab of stone used as a mazer and ironed it flatter still with a heavy metal rod, working quickly before it could cool.
“By the time we knew we needed aid,” he said over his shoulder, “it was too late. Besides, we were a cadet branch of the Caineron, the last to survive the Fall. Caldane’s father would have loved to snap us up, but we fancied our freedom, the same as the Min-drear do from the Knorth.
“Anyway, one bright, bitter day my little sister Willow was so hungry—how do you explain to a child that crying doesn’t help?—that I went out, cleared the snow off a patch in the spinney where I knew the loam was deep, set a fire, and thawed a patch of ground. It froze again almost as fast as I could hack it up, but I found enough roots, frozen worms, and hibernating bugs to make a thin gruel, which the poor thing promptly threw up. When I’d finally gotten her to bed—our parents were both dead by then, y’see—and came back to deal with the mess, someone had already licked the floor clean.
“Quick, now: where d’you think this piece fits?”
The small sheet was still strangely shaped, and strangely colored now that it had begun to cool, with veins of shimmering red that ran through dull green into dusky purple.
Torisen rose to look more closely. “I don’t remember anything like that in the old window.”
“Iron and nickel, I’d say,” said Marc, thinking out loud. “They create that verdigris color sometimes, like the undersides of clouds before a bad storm. The red comes from gold, believe it or not. At a guess, these are streams washing gold dust down to the Silver. It’s a bit of the Riverland, anyway.”
He picked it up with his gauntleted hands, supporting its still malleable shape, and transferred it to the table. Other bits of finished glass dotted the tabletop, roughly where Torisen thought the Riverland should be.
“Move that sack, lad.”
Marc indicated which one with a jerk of his chin, and Torisen snatched it up. The Kendar placed his fragment next to first one, then another of similar hue. As he fiddled with them, Torisen opened the sack and stirred its contents with a long finger. Ground, greenish quartz, bits of rough, dark stone with flecks of iron in it, limestone, a grain of gold, a tiny fern frond that crumbled to ash at his touch . . .
“What’s this?”
“The raw stuff of glass. There’s not enough cullet to recast the whole window. Luckily, a wise-woman has been dropping off these samples as she gathers them. They stretch the supply of cullet further than you would think.”
“She’s not a Kencyr, then?”
“No. I first met her in Peshtar on the western flanks of the Ebonbane. You just missed her. I expect she’s gone with her knitting to listen in on the Matriarchs’ Council as Cattila’s Ear.”
“She reports to the Caineron?” Torisen didn’t like the sound of that at all. “And the Matriarchs let her?”
“As I understand it, only to the Caineron Matriarch, who’s too old to travel and has no very high opinion of her great-grandson Caldane. Don’t fret yourself, lad; it’s an old arrangement and no harm has come of it yet that I know of.”
Still, an outsider . . .
He would have to ask the Jaran Matriarch Trishien about that. Besides, it would be an excuse to visit her, as well as to inquire about other things.
“Anyway, very particular, she is, where her bits and pieces go on the map, with some peculiar results. Look.”
He had fitted the new piece into one already cast. Not only did their edges match perfectly, without any prior shaping, but they had flowed into each other, fusing into one.
Torisen swore softly. “I may not know much about making glass, but that strikes me as distinctly odd.”
“Oh aye, it’s that all right. As I recall, the old window was fitted together with lead strips, like most others in Tai-tastigon.”
“That was where you learned how to do this?”
“Not ‘learned,’ exactly. A guild-master told me more than he probably should have, but he owed me a rather large favor.”
“And that was where you met Jame?”
The words were out before he could stop them.
“Aye.”
The Kendar waited for him to ask more, but he couldn’t. Somehow, somewhere, his twin sister had lost ten years since their father had driven her out of the Haunted Lands keep. Had it been in Tai-tastigon? He remembered his brief time in that god-infested city as a kind of waking nightmare to be escaped as quickly as possible. What had Jame done there? Where had she been before that?
If you knew, jeered his father’s voice, you could never bear to look at her again, much less touch her. Shanir, god-spawn, unclean, unclean . . . and yet you still love her, you weak, stupid boy.
“Shut up!”
Marc was staring at him. “My lord? Lad?”
Torisen rubbed his eyes. “I didn’t mean you, and don’t mind me. I’m being weak, stupid . . . ”
“That you are not. Listen. Hard times make hard, strong men, and women too. That winter, just before Spring’s Eve, it finally came down to a lottery among the garrison. The old lord insisted on putting in his family’s markers as well, but of course we let those slip through.”
Torisen felt his own empty stomach turn. “Who . . . er . . . won?”
“My mother’s sister’s daughter. She took it as a high honor, but you can imagine how the rest of us felt. Nonetheless, we did what we had to do, and included our last portion of dog—the old lord’s favorite courser, Flash; well I remember him—so that later we could all hope that that was what we had eaten. Three weeks later, the cold broke. Most of us wouldn’t have lived to see it without her sacrifice.”
He took the sack from Torisen’s hand and mixed it in the recently emptied firepot with ground cullet from the green and purple barrels. This process must go on steadily day and night, Torisen realized. The resulting pieces were so small, the whole map so large. Regardless, this Kendar would see it through to the end. His strength was humbling. No wonder Jame thought so highly of him, and that Torisen resented Marc’s alliance to his sister rather than to himself. Would his great-granddaughter Brier go the same way, and how many more?