“Oh, him.”
With a snort, Karidia turned on her heel and left.
IX
Scrying Glass
Torisen paused to wipe the sweat out of his eyes and to drink another dipper of water. It was unseasonably hot for the thirty-second of Autumn, four days short of the equinox, which meant that it was almost unbearable here in the High Council chamber with both glass furnaces in blazing operation. Yce lay panting by the western wall. Waves of heat distorted the twilight air by the empty eastern window, knocking an unwary bat out of the sky. The sun was almost down. Perhaps spending the day in the glassworks hadn’t been such a good idea after all, except that the alternative had been helping his people harvest the beetlike mangel-wurzel, which they would have hated. Their lord to dirty his hands grubbing about for roots? Unthinkable.
If they only knew how many “unthinkable” things he had done in his life.
Besides, sometimes one got a mandrake instead of a mangel, and that was no fun for anyone within earshot, at least in the Haunted Lands.
Marc emptied a small sack of ingredients into a firepot, considered the color of the adjacent finished bits on the table, and chose a gauntletful of amber cullet veined with silver from the barrels by the northern wall.
“Yellow for sulfur, sulfur from coal,” he remarked. “Not bad for Gothregor.”
He opened the hatch and set the pot over the incandescent fire within to begin its sixteen-hour melt.
“Burr tells me that you’re off for Falkirr tomorrow.”
Torisen cursed under his breath. He had wanted to keep his trip a secret because he didn’t know what its outcome would be. He should have realized, however, that as soon as he ordered travel rations, the word would be out.
“What made you finally decide to take the poor lass home?”
“I don’t know yet where it is—her home, I mean.”
All his instincts still told him that Aerulan belonged below, among her own kin, but Trishien insisted otherwise, and Aerulan herself pleaded with him every time he met her eyes. Now Lord Brandan was at last back in the Riverland with fresh provisions from the south.
“Go,” Trishien told him.
Don’t be a fool, his father breathed in his ear.
What had really changed his mind, however, was a little boy playing by himself with a stick chalked half white. He had been stabbing at himself with it, practicing, he had said, so that when his parents chose the White Knife he could go with them.
“Do you remember the boy’s name?” Marc asked, upon hearing the story.
“Ghill, son of Merry and Cron. And you are Marcarn and I am Torisen Black Lord, sometimes called Blackie. Satisfied?”
“That’s not for me to say, lad, although I’ll admit that I’d rather eat this winter than not.”
They were interrupted by the sudden arrival of a dumpy figure, tumbling down the stair of the northwest tower in a billow of volcanic ash. Yce leaped to her feet; then, seeing who it was, she yipped a welcome.
“What were you doing in my study?” Torisen demanded, helping Mother Ragga up. As usual, she wore a jackdaw assortment of clothes with plenty of wrinkles to hold the bushel or so of ash that dusted her gray from head to toe.
“Came down the chimney, didn’t I? Burny was after me.” She slapped at her clothes with gnarled hands, raising further clouds, then coughed and spat. “At least now I know where the yackcarn herd is. He’s got it bottled up above that filthy volcano of his behind a valley of ash. I was like to smother in the stuff. Thank ye, lad.”
She accepted the scooper of water that Torisen offered and drained it in several loud gulps.
“You have pretty manners, I’ll say that. And the pup likes you.”
“What will the Merikit do if they can’t hunt?” Marc asked.
“Starve, probably. You should be glad of that, given what they did to your family.”
“I wouldn’t wish starvation on anyone. At least my people died quickly, except for poor Willow.”
Torisen listened to them, reflecting that at least Mother Ragga hadn’t come down one of the two eastern chimneys. What her rendered fat would have done to the melting or annealing batches didn’t bear thinking about.
Over the past half-season, he had become more accustomed to her peculiar comings and goings. An infrequent visitor to the Central and Northern Lands before he had become Highlord, he had had no prior acquaintance with her.
Perhaps the scrollsmen and Kendar like Marc knew more about Rathillien’s native powers. On the whole, though, the Kencyrath was remarkably ignorant about the world that it had inhabited for so long. Torisen had to admit that he was, at least. That came, perhaps, from believing that one god—theirs—ruled over all, even as an absentee landlord. Did such faith breed arrogance as well as blindness?
The hourglass on the sill ran out. Marc turned it, then donned his gauntlets to draw out the newly annealed glass. It had cooled almost past the point of working, but by dint of strenuously rolling it between hot iron and stone like a recalcitrant pie crust, the big Kendar managed to flatten it some more.
“Here, now.” The Earth Wife’s voice was sharp. “What have you done to that glass, and where did you get the materials?”
They regarded it as it cooled, an irregular shape perhaps a palm across, turquoise shot with wandering veins of pale green. At its heart was a splotch of red glass that glowed softly and shaded into luminous purple. Marc positioned it on the tabletop’s chalked map.
“That’s Tentir!”
“I know,” he said. “I asked Ran Harn to send me some of its underlying substance: ground agate, chalk, and the ash of burnt cloud-of-thorn. I think he also got traces of copper and silver. Then I added a nugget of red glass from that batch that you accidentally bled into, lad. Remember? When you nicked your finger on a bit of sharp cullet?”
“I told you to wait!” Mother Ragga ruffled like an upset partridge. “I’ve got a line on a bit of quartz that would have served much better than this!”
“Yes, but ‘served’ whom? When I first met you, Mother, you had a remarkable lodge in Peshtar, with a dirt map on the floor that allowed you to listen to anything going on in that part of Rathillien. That set me to wondering. Could it be that you hope this map will be its visual equivalent?”
“And why not?” She tried to meet the big Kendar eye to eye by bouncing on her toes, emitting puffs of ash. “It’s my world, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but it’s the Highlord’s map.”
The wolver, thinking it was a game, bounced with her, shoulder high. Marc caught the pup at the height of her bound and tossed her higher still, to an excited yelp that was almost a squeal.
“Maybe I should toss her around too,” said Torisen. It was a sore point with him, and a puzzle, that she rarely let him touch her, yet she dogged his heels day and night. “Am I to understand that you want to turn this whole thing into a giant scrying glass, that you intend to spy on us?”
“Not on you in particular. It’s a big world. I can’t be everywhere at once.”
Marc put down the pup. “Yes, but as I understand it, you can’t see, hear, or go inside any Kencyr keep without an invitation. Matriarch Cattila has let you into Restormir, and indirectly into Gothregor as her accredited Ear.”
“So you’re also spying on me?” Torisen spoke mildly, but couldn’t quite keep the chill out of his voice. The very thought felt like a violation.
“I’m looking at you. Is that spying?”
“To my face, no. Behind my back . . . ”
Marc hastily intervened. “The poor man has a right to some privacy, Mother—more, I suspect, than his own people allow him. Let be. At least I’m guessing that you can’t look in on his sister with his blood seal on the college. If so, we can secure all the Kencyr keeps the same way. As for the rest of Rathillien, as you say, it’s your world more than ours.”