You will lose them, one by one. How can you compete with such unnatural, darkling glamour?
Marc transferred the pot to the main furnace, the last vessel in a long line.
“An hour, more or less, until the next melt is ready,” he said, closing the hatch, once again shedding his hood and wiping the sweat from his flushed face.
“What happened next?” Torisen heard himself ask.
The big Kendar sighed, with a smile that twisted oddly awry.
“Then at last came spring, and summer, and the richest harvest any of us had ever seen. Trinity, I thought I would burst with feasting after so long a-fast; but the other boys made a joke of it, what with me already being so much bigger than any of them, so I took my bow and went off to be alone a bit.
“While I was gone, the Merikit came and slaughtered everyone. I understand why now. Then . . . only the wolves and ravens feasted, except on those that I managed to save for the pyre. If I had been stronger, maybe I would have stayed, but then who would have claimed their blood price? Strength is a strange thing, at least as strange as honor. Your sister, now. She is strong, no denying it; but she couldn’t hold together the Kencyrath as you have. Her way leads apart, where few if any may follow. So my instinct tells me, and I say this as one who loves her dearly, for her sense of honor, for her determination to do the right thing at whatever cost to others or to herself. I ask you to trust me in this.”
He glanced at the saddlebag resting on the far end of the table. The sun had sunk below the stone tracery. Shortly, it would slip behind the mountains, but at the moment it cast an elongated child’s shadow toward them, its head cocked as though listening.
“I have you to thank, lad, for rescuing my sister Willow, or her bones at least.”
Torisen remembered finding them in Kithorn’s stillroom where the child had run to hide on the night of the Massacre and subsequently starved to death, surrounded by the preserves of a plentiful harvest.
“When will you give her to the pyre?”
“Not yet. I will know the time.”
“I wish I had your certainty, about so many things.”
“Ah, you may yet, lad. Have the courage to wait.”
The sun had set behind the western Snowthorns, ushering in the long twilight of autumn. Trishien, Matriarch of the Jaran, sat at her table by one window of an arcade writing to her grandniece Kirien.
“ . . . and so, my dear,” ran her swooping, rounded letters, “you will see me sooner than either of us expected. I have seldom attended a Council so brief or, all things considered, so civil. Even Karidia only yapped once or twice. But then, of course, we have been discussing the matter informally for weeks.”
She dipped her quill in ink. Immediately it darted from pot to paper and began to inscribe Kirien’s spiky script under her own.
“Has anyone told the Highlord yet?”
“No . . . ”
She paused, listening to a shuffle on the flat roof overhead. Some leaves drifted past the window. The ivy outside jerked and the birds that nested in it fled, protesting shrilly. The next moment, the vines above gave way with a sharp, ripping sound and swung into the room, bearing a black-clad figure tangled up in them. It rolled upright, then tripped over the tough tendrils wrapped around its legs and pitched face first onto the floor at her feet.
Bemused, she stared down at black hair shot with premature white and festooned with ivy leaves. A face turned upward to her, foreshortened, its lower half twisted in a wry smile.
“Your pardon, Matriarch,” said Torisen Black Lord. “I would have used the door, but I didn’t want the entire Women’s World bursting in on my heels.”
“What, and abandon such a dignified method of entrance? Next time, though, for the birds’ sake, bring a rope.”
He laughed and set about freeing himself.
“What is it?” wrote Kirien.
“The Highlord has come to call.”
“Will you tell him?”
“Yes.” Trishien hesitated. “Is he very like his sister?”
She regretted never having seen Jameth’s face unmasked. The Highborn habit of always wearing veils was a nuisance, especially for her in hot weather when the magnifying lenses slotted into her own mask invariably steamed up.
“Very like, except older,” said the spiky script jerking from her quill.
Ancestors, Kirien’s penmanship! And she gripped the quill so tightly that even a short message left Trishien’s finger’s painfully cramped.
“I can see why Adiraina mistook them for twins.”
Trishien made no response to this. She had never known the Ardeth Matriarch to be wrong in such matters.
“So, to what do I owe the honor of your presence in my chamber?” she asked the Highlord.
Torisen asked about Cattila’s Ear. Was it wise to have someone not of the Kencyrath privy to one of its most secret councils?
Trishien waved this away. “I have known Mother Ragga all my life. She frequently drops in at the Scrollsmen’s College.”
He looked startled. “Mother Ragga? The Earth Wife?”
“Yes. Have you met her?”
Torisen ran a distraught hand through his hair, dislodging a shower of twigs, the fragments of birds’ nests, and one protesting fledging. “I thought it was a dream,” he said. “What else could it have been? I stumbled into her lodge in the middle of the harvest field, when the winds were tearing it apart. She was strung up by her heels from a rafter and Jame was using a plow horse to thump the soles of her feet against it. She said something about all the melted fat having run into the Earth Wife’s legs, that she was trying to jar it back into place. I thought I was going mad.”
“Anyone would have,” said Trishien soothingly, and yet she wondered. A dream? A blow to the head? Insanity? With the Knorth, one never knew.
But the Earth Wife was strange. How could she be the same old woman now that she had been when Trishien was a child, and what about those crispy slugs she used to give the Jaran youngsters as treats? At the time, Trishien had assumed that Mother Ragga made them, like candy or fried shortbread. Now she wasn’t so sure.
Torisen noticed the two handwritings on the Matriarch’s sheet and flinched.
“Have you ever stopped to think,” she asked tartly, “that the ability to bind Kendar might also be a Shanir trait?”
“How can it? The Kencyrath abominates those of the Old Blood. No offense meant.”
“None, or not much, taken.”
“But that would mean that all the lords . . . ”
His voice faded. He still looked aghast, but also thoughtful as if gazing through glass of a different color at something whose obscenity both horrified and fascinated him. “It might explain a lot; still . . . no. Matriarch, what disgusts you the most?”
“Bookworms,” she said promptly. “Once I opened a book and a mass of them tumbled out into my lap, all white and writhing.” Her stomach lurched at the memory, and at the thought of the Earth Wife’s crispy creeper “treats.” It was after the bookworm incident, she now realized, that she had stopped begging for the latter.
“Well then, think of them roiling in your guts and eating out your brain. That’s how it feels when I think of myself as a Shanir.”
Trishien gulped, glad for once of the mask that shielded her expression, thinking that she had just lost her taste for dinner. “Point taken.”
The Highlord had obviously been nerving himself for something. Now he asked, with feigned nonchalance, “Speaking of the Shanir, have you . . . er . . . heard anything about my sister’s progress at Tentir?”