The guard hailed them as they drew up before the gate with a loud if slurred challenge: “Password!”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“That’ll do.”
The gate creaked open and they rode into the small inner ward. Another guard leaned over the gate’s mechanism, regarding them owlishly, while a third stumbled forward to take their mounts.
“Are you drunk?” Burr demanded of him.
“I am; they are; so are we all. Go claim your portion—hic!—before those rascals drink it all.”
“And have them send out more for us!” his comrades shouted after them.
The scene in the great hall was rowdy, to say the least. Holly, Lord Danior, had apparently decided to celebrate harvest home by sharing all the last season’s remaining hard cider with his entire house and garrison, to the uproarious delight of all. Even his womenfolk were there, flushed behind their modest masks and giggling together. When he saw his guests, he jumped up, spilling a Kendar girl off his lap. One of her booted feet remained above table level, and her hand, waving off his fumbling attempt to help her up.
“Cousin Tori! Welcome, welcome! Wench, bring two more cups.”
The “wench” extricated herself from assorted table legs and rose, grinning, to fetch the required vessels, a-brim with amber liquid.
“I take it you had a good harvest,” said Tori, accepting his and sipping it.
A wide grin split the boy’s sun-freckled face. It was hard sometime to remember that he was actually of age, much less the lord of a house, however small, but still young enough to take great pride in every step that he made on his own. “The best harvest in years. Some fields caught a dusting of ash, but we were able to save the crop, and the soil will be all the richer for it next time around.”
Torisen hadn’t thought about that. Perhaps, long-term, his own smothered fields might likewise benefit. Now that this winter was taken care of, he could look ahead with more optimism than at any time since he had assumed the Highlord’s collar. How heavy the weight had been on him he only now realized as it began to lift. He drank again and began to relax in his chair.
But one thing still had to be said.
“Holly, I haven’t had a chance to explain or to apologize. Until I made my sister my heir, you were. Do you mind much being supplanted?”
The bumbling puppy in Holly faded. “Trinity, no. How long d’you think I would have survived as Highlord? I’m not you, cousin, to spin alliances out of cobwebs. And now you say you’ve roped in the Brandan! Oh, well done! That will be one in Adric’s eye, and in the Caineron’s too.”
That thought had also been giving Torisen pleasure. Perhaps he wasn’t such a failure as Highlord and Lord Knorth after all.
Later that night, with the party below still shaking the floor under their feet, the two kinsmen stood on the battlements, looking across the river at Wilden in its slotted valley. There it rose, tier on tier, from the frothy moat at its foot to the Witch’s Tower at its head, under whose shadow lay the subterranean Priest’s College. What drew the eye most, however, were the pyres like sullen, winking eyes in many private courtyards. It was like watching a slow, smoldering apocalypse. Errant breaths of wind carried its stench and a dusting of ash over Shadow Rock’s walls.
Holly had sobered quickly. “Every night since just before Autumn’s Eve, there have been new fires,” he said, “as if grief and confusion were a plague. I met one of their hunters on this side of the river, where they aren’t supposed to come. He hardly seemed to know where he was or what he was doing. ‘My son,’ he kept saying. Then, ‘What son?’ ”
“How peculiar. Have you any idea what’s going on?”
“It has something to do with the failed assassination attempt on the Randir Heir at Tentir. He brought back some of the cadets’ bodies. I was here that night, and thought that I saw your sister with him.”
“Huh. She would be.”
“The Randir don’t exactly talk to us, but I get the feeling that they’re bewildered and miserable, all the more so because none of them can remember why. Also, Lord Randir seems to be conducting some sort of a purge, or maybe it’s his lady mother, Rawneth.”
Holly leaned on the rampart, his young face unusually bleak. “Not all of them are bad people, you know. They don’t deserve this. To have such power and to misuse it so—I don’t understand.”
In the morning, the thirty-sixth of Autumn, Holly made a point of sending his guests on with a guide who led them by paths above the New Road, out of Wilden’s sight.
“You can thank their distraction that no one saw you on the road yesterday,” he had said as they swung back into the saddle. “Really, cousin, you should be more careful. What would happen to the rest of us if you should disappear between keeps?”
I can’t escape it, Torisen thought wryly as they rode out. Once again, the weight of the Kencyrath settled on his shoulders.
Today the weather was definitely changing, gusting first hot and then cold, while the cloud bank to the north rose like a gray wall, rushing toward them. Forerunners of it scudded across the sun. Under their fleeting shadows, whole fields of tube poppies alternately flamed scarlet and then inverted into their stems, precursor to a winter spent underground. Torisen remembered that it was the equinox. Seasonal changes on Rathillien were often odd, more so than the Kencyrath’s systemic divisions of the year.
With the fall of dusk, it began to rain, then to hail. Yce crouched and leaped into the saddle, her scrabbling claws considerably startling Storm.
“So now you want to cuddle,” Torisen remarked, wrapping her inside his coat, wet fur and all.
Not long afterward, rounding a toe of the Snowthorns, they saw the randon college spread out before them. Something seemed to be going on there. They rode down to it and in by the southern postern. Leaving Burr with the horses, Torisen advanced to the edge of the training square.
Beyond his lord, Burr could see sputtering torches, the rail lined with silent onlookers, and a bedraggled group of cadets standing in the rain around a makeshift stretcher. A cadet no bigger than a Kendar child—surely Torisen’s sister—was speaking to a tall Kendar in a fine coat. He stepped out into the mud, stiffly, as if against his will. She circled him. Her words reached Burr in fragments, broken by the din of hail on the tin roof.
“First, I think, my uncle’s coat.” Her nails darted, and the garment fell away, dismembered. “Now my uncle’s shirt.” It too peeled off in shreds. “And now, I think, your skin.”
The Highlord turned abruptly and returned to Burr, his face pinched and grim. Behind him, unobserved, the Commandant stepped forward to stop the game.
“We’re leaving.”
“What, now, in the rain and the dark?” Burr thought longingly of the Tentir common room, of dry clothes and hot food. The horses stirred, restive, no doubt with thoughts of their own, and Yce whined.
“We’ll shelter in the first post station we reach and start back to Gothregor tomorrow.”
Burr tried again.
“But to come all this way and not even speak to your sister . . . ”
His words died at the sick look in his lord’s eyes. “I don’t want to speak to her. I don’t want to see her. I’ve seen enough.”
So they remounted, turned their reluctant horses, and rode back out into the storm.
X
Noontide Ghosts
Jame woke with a start. Her first conscious sense was one of panic: she was supposed to be somewhere else. For a moment, as if still locked in nightmare, she scrambled to remember. One urgent voice had said, “Come”; another, “Go.” Come to whom? Go where? Oh, yes. To the hills, to act as the Earth Wife’s Favorite for the autumnal equinox.
Her sudden motion caused a swirl of Index’s notes, over the bedding, over her face. She could have sworn that Rue had burned them, but here they all were, cascading onto the floor—in fact, twice as many as there had been before. They had been turning up more and more frequently over the past thirty-odd days. Presumably, some Jaran cadet had Kirien’s Shanir knack for distance-writing, although how such a flurry of notes could have found their way into her private quarters was another mystery.