“Wait. I’ll ask.”
She did, and read the answer in Kirien’s spiky script. “This is odd. She seems to have fought with that handsome Ardeth Lordan Timmon and taken up with the Caineron Gorbel. What a strange pairing. But then I remember Gorbel as a child with his solemn ways and scrunched-up little face. He was only a baby when his father beat his mother to death. We knew about it in the Women’s World. I doubt, though, if anyone ever told him.”
While she read him the rest of Kirien’s report, adding to it details she had previously learned, the Highlord restlessly paced the far end of the room. The light was beginning to fail and no candles were yet lit. Trishien was by nature farsighted, a disadvantage to a scholar which her lenses corrected. With them in place, it seemed to her that Torisen moved in a nimbus of shadow that followed and swung with him as he turned. Once or twice he laughed, but mostly he maintained a grim silence. Trishien wondered why. Jameth’s misadventures were, as usual, inexplicable and alarming, but she always survived them, even if those who set them in motion sometimes didn’t. On the whole, given everything against her, she was doing very well at Tentir.
“Don’t you want her to succeed?” she asked abruptly.
“It . . . would cause difficulties.”
“More so than her failure?”
He didn’t answer. Trishien sighed and put down her quill in mid-question from Kirien.
“My lord,” she said, flexing her cramped, ink-stained fingers, “when we were both young, I was fond of your father and he of me. Under other circumstances, you might have been our son.”
She paused, remembering that no one knew who the Highlord’s mother actually was or anything about her except that, according to Adiraina, she was a pure-blooded Knorth Highborn, which was strange enough given the Massacre.
“What happened?” Torisen asked out of the settling dusk.
Trishien shrugged, feeling the pinch of old pain, dismissing it. “Your grandfather considered me to be of unsound breeding stock.”
“So he settled on Rawneth instead.”
“Yes, ironically, since she wanted Greshan, the Knorth Lordan. They would have suited each other, I think, but what a lethal pairing. Everything changed, though, the night that Gerraint died, when both he and his heir Greshan burned on that hasty pyre along with so many banners of your house. ‘I’ve seen her, Trish,’ Ganth told me later, ‘the woman without whom I can’t live.’ Whom he meant, though, I can’t tell, since none but Rawneth was there, and he always said that she scared him half to death. For his sake, I will give you what aid I can. How can I act, though, in the dark?”
She waited. When he didn’t respond, she turned reluctantly to the next item on the agenda.
“I understand that your sister has urged you to give Aerulan’s banner to the Brandan and to accept the price placed on it by your father. I urge you to do so too. You don’t know the grief that your reluctance is causing.”
“How can I profit from such greed? I told Brandan: he can have the banner with my blessing.”
“Trust me, that won’t work. Consider your responsibility to your people. You don’t know how brutal a northern winter can be.”
He gave a sharp laugh. “Marc was just telling how, once, his home keep was reduced to cannibalism.”
“I remember that bitter season. We all went hungry before the end. He probably didn’t tell you, though, how the Caineron tried to starve them out by blocking the aid that we attempted to send. Falkirr and Omiroth are your nearest neighbors. Can you afford to enter this of all winters at odds with both of them?”
He resumed his pacing. “No. Yes. Maybe.”
“As decisive as ever, boy. P’ah, I said you were weak, as so you prove yourself to be yet again.”
Trishien had started at the harsh change in Torisen’s voice. It didn’t sound like him at all and yet . . . and yet . . . it was familiar.
“D’you think your sister would be so spiritless if she ruled here? Already the Kendar Marcarn prefers her to you. Soon others will also.”
“Marc said she couldn’t hold the Kencyrath together, that her way led elsewhere.”
“Yes, it does. To destruction.”
The Matriarch rose, trembling. She fumbled the lenses out of her mask as if to clean them and dropped one, barely hearing it shatter on the floor. Long sight, shadow sight. Someone paced at the Highlord’s shoulder, leaning to whisper in his ear. She knew that sharp profile, those haunted eyes that used rage to mask their vulnerability.
“What a joke it would be, if you should prove to be Shanir too, just like your sister. God-spawn, unclean, unclean . . . ”
“Ganth!” She hardly recognized her own voice, half-strangled as it was. “Do you want to prove yourself no better than your brother Greshan? Leave that boy alone!”
He was stalking toward her, the younger face eclipsed by the older. “Ah, Trish. Mind your own business, or shall I curse you as I did both of my faithless children? How would you like never to open a book again for fear of what you might find? Bookworm, filthy Shanir . . . ”
The second lens slipped out of her fingers and crunched under her foot as she retreated. The mask itself might have fallen, so naked did her face feel.
“Ganth, please . . . ”
A storm of yelping broke out on the roof.
Torisen drew up in dismay, looking confused. “What was I saying? What was I about to do?” The shadow had fallen from his face and with it any resemblance to his father, although he was close enough to her now for his features to blur. Was that the unknown mother that she saw in his fine bones, in those quick, changing eyes and mobile mouth, now twisted in dismay?
“Yip, yip, yip, aroooo . . . !”
“Yce,” said Torisen. “I thought I left her safely sound asleep beside the glass furnace. She must have somehow tracked me across the rooftops. Matriarch, your pardon. I’d better leave as I came. She’s going to bring the entire Women’s World down on me.”
Indeed, they heard voices approaching in the hall outside, Karidia’s shrill notes predominant.
“I swear, that woman has set spies on me. Highlord, wait.” Trishien scrambled for her wits, cursing the blurred vision that also seemed to have unfocused her thoughts. “You should know. This day the Matriarchs’ Council has decided to leave Gothregor for the winter. Everyone will go, to be schooled at their home keeps until such time as the Council deems your house safe again.”
“Oh.” He paused, one leg flung over the window sill, considering this. “I really must be in bad shape, mustn’t I?” He sounded almost regretful. It was one thing, after all, to dodge hunting parties, another to be deemed unworthy of the chase.
At that moment, a small white shape hurtled down from the roof, crashed into him, and knocked both off the ledge. Trishien heard a mighty scramble and a ripping of vines. By the time she reached the window, Torisen had gained the ground by dint of tearing the other half of the ivy loose. Wolver pup and Highlord emerged, liberally festooned, from the leafy ruins.
Seized by a sudden dread, Trishien leaned out the window. The last thing any of them needed, worse even than keeping Aerulan’s banner, was for Torisen to face the maledight Brenwyr alone.
“If you do take your cousin north, wait for Lord Brandan to return from Kothifir. Promise me!”
He sketched her a brief, relieved salute and fled with the pup at his heels.
Karidia was pounding on the door.
“I know you have a man in there, you cross-eyed hypocrite, maybe two of them! What is this, an orgy? Open up and be honest for once!”
Trishien groped her way to the door and opened it. “That was no man,” she told the irate Coman Matriarch on her threshold, peering down into the other’s suffused face as it bobbed about, trying to see past her. “It was the Highlord.”