As the afternoon advanced, it occurred to Torisen that he should give Brandan some belated warning that he was coming. At the next posting station, he gave an attendant a note to carry ahead of them, then followed sedately in the other’s dust. Nearing Falkirr, he noted with envy the gleaned harvest fields, orchards, and water meadows. By some trick of the wind, little or no ash had fallen here and they were still passing wagons full of such provisions as the Riverland could not provide. Falkirr would have a snug winter.
The Brandan fortress was built much like Gothregor, but smaller and much better populated. While Torisen had to let nearly two-thirds of his keep stand empty, in ruins, Falkirr bustled with a garrison four times larger than his own. Brandan was both a good and powerful lord. If he bolstered his numbers with yondri-gon, threshold dwellers, they served with a sure sense that eventually he would find a permanent place for them, even if it meant eventually rebuilding the ruined keep across the Silver. Would that Caineron could say the same. Torisen himself took on no yondri despite Ardeth’s advice, being unsure when (if ever) he could give them full Knorth rights.
While Burr tended to their horses, the Highlord was shown to a small reception room in the central keep, opening off a pocket courtyard complete with fountain and boisterously bathing birds, which immediately drew the wolver pup’s attention. The room itself was comfortably if sparsely furnished, as if as an afterthought. Given his choice of wine or cider, he chose the latter, to the evident approval of the one-armed Kendar who served him.
“M’lord isn’t much for hard drink,” the grizzled Kendar confided in a raspy voice, “but he does keep a small cellar for them as can’t seem to live without it. Funny, though, how they never ask for seconds.”
He departed, and could be heard in the hallway berating someone for meeting the Highlord in all his dirt.
My dirt? Torisen wondered, casting an anxious eye over his dusty riding leathers.
However, the man who entered brought his own in the form of muddy boots and earth-stained knees, although he had thrown on an old court coat in honor of the occasion.
Torisen rose to greet him. “Brant, Lord Brandan, honor be to your halls.”
“And to yours, Torisen, Lord Knorth, also my Highlord. Sorry for the muck. Geof swears by the arm he lost thirty-some years ago that it’s going to rain, if not today then tomorrow or the next day, and here we are with a field of potatoes still to harvest.”
No need to ask what battle had cost the Kendar his limb: thirty-four years ago had been the White Hills and the beginning of Ganth’s exile. Brant had served as a randon cadet beside his father, returning to Tentir afterward to complete his training. He was now in hale middle age, but his weathered face looked older than his years, an impression aided by fair hair bleached nearly white by the sun.
His gaze fell on the rolled-up banner. “I see that you’ve brought Aerulan.”
“Yes. I still offer her to you free and clear. It’s taken me longer than it should to understand that she belongs here, not in that cold hall at Gothregor.”
Brant sipped his cider, then spoke carefully. “Your generosity does us honor, Highlord, as I’ve said before. I have no wish, however, to take advantage of it.”
“Nor I of yours.”
“Are we still at an impasse, then? If so, why bring her here now?”
Torisen took a deep breath. “For myself, I would rather starve than profit by my father’s greed, but I have to think of my people. Without help, we won’t survive the winter.”
“Good lad. I told Brenwyr that you were too responsible to let false pride harm your house. Wait here while I fetch my bursar.” Brandan clapped him on the shoulder and hurried out, shouting for the keeper of his accounts.
Left alone, Torisen let out his breath in a long sigh. “I was a fool, wasn’t I?” he asked Aerulan. “I should have brought you here long ago.”
Since it seemed discourteous to talk to her back, he unrolled the banner and looked for a place to put it. Not on one of the chairs: it would either have to slouch or to hang with its head tipped backwards over the neck rest at a distressing angle. Ah. Here was a bench. He laid her out on it.
No sooner had he done so than the Brandan Matriarch Brenwyr swept into the room.
“Geof said . . . oh.” Behind her mask, her eyes flashed to Aerulan and softened. “Oh, my dear heart.”
Then she saw Torisen and turned such a fierce if half-veiled countenance upon him that he retreated a step. “Have you come to throw her in my teeth again, my lord, stripped of her dues and honors? How can you shame her so? Is this your revenge because I cursed your sister?”
“You did? When? Why? How?”
“ ‘Roofless and rootless, blood and bone, cursed be and cast out.’ ”
She spat the words at him. Under them, he seemed to hear an echo of his father’s dying malediction: “Cursed be and cast out. Blood and bone, you are no son of mine.”
“I didn’t know,” he stammered, profoundly shaken. “No one told me.”
For a moment, he wondered if that was why Jame couldn’t settle down like a normal Highborn female, but no; cursed or not, she had never been normal.
Brant’s sister also appeared to be on the strange side, dangerously so. He tried to explain. However, her fury drove him back into a corner while she rampaged about the room, cursing every piece of furniture that got in her way, leaving ruin in her wake. He had heard her called a maledight, but had never guessed the extent of her Shanir power. It was terrifying.
“And you!” She turned on him, divided riding skirt flaring purple and scarlet below a flame-colored bodice. “Who are you to be arbiter of her fate? I have been closer to her than you ever will, alive or dead. What is love to you but possession? Somehow, her soul is bound to this tapestry, and that you never shall possess.”
“Lady, I swear . . . ”
“Swear not, where you have no right. Break not, where you have no just cause. Let go, for honor’s sake, and recognize that we women are also honor bound.”
“I have never denied that.” Trinity, it was like trying to stand in the teeth of a tempest. In this mood, Brandan’s sister seemed more like an elemental force than a woman.
. . . Shanir, Old Blood, unclean, unclean . . .
“I came to do my cousin what honor I can.”
“Liar!” The word struck him like a blow. Yce, in the doorway, crouched, growling. “Curse you and the clothes you stand in!”
Brushing past the pup, Brant grabbed his sister from behind and held her fast like a struggling, spitting cat.
“Curse you too, brother. Of all men to be so blind!”
Brandan flinched. The lines in his face seemed to deepen, but he rolled with her fury.
“Bren, love, he’s come to accept Aerulan’s price.”
“He . . . what?” Relief and horror warred in her face. “Oh, what have I done?”
“Met your match, I think.”
Torisen felt a loosening under his leathers. Shredded fragments of his shirt and underwear drifted out of his sleeves and gathered softly inside where pants met riding boot.
All of Brenwyr’s clothes, on the other hand, were rotting off her back. Flame-colored strips fluttered down, purple split along fold lines. As her mask disintegrated, she seized Aerulan and rushed off with her face buried in the banner, half-naked, trailing a conflagration of tattered ribbons.
Brandan turned to his guest. “Some people are immune, more or less, to her curses. I, for one. You, apparently, for another, if not your clothes. Generally, she tries to deflect her anger onto inanimate objects, which is rather hard on the furniture. Still, I do apologize.”
“So do I.” Torisen closed his coat with trembling fingers. As much as the Shanir unnerved him in general, it was rare to experience a direct attack, especially one so furious. “I never realized that Aerulan was for your sister, not for you.”