They were circling each other now, with Torisen hastily moving aside.
“I am not bound by your rules, lady. A winter in your ‘care’ earned me only this.” Jame traced the scar on her cheek with a gloved fingertip. “Whatever else I learned, I took by right of discovery. Still . . . ” and here she made an obvious effort to control herself . . . “Tori, you made the Brandan a generous offer, declining payment, especially when our house needs funds so badly to survive the winter. But, believe me, it wasn’t a kindness.”
“The Jaran Matriarch told me as much just after Summer’s Day.” Even to himself, Torisen sounded petulant. Dealing with the Women’s World set his teeth on edge. Always, there was that unnerving sense of important things left unsaid, of being kept in the dark, out of control.
“Trishien is wise as well as learned, which isn’t always the same thing. Did she add that refusing Aerulan’s price demeans her in the eyes of someone—anyone—who loves her? And that is a deadly insult.”
No, the Jaran hadn’t gone that far, but he could almost see it, almost understand. Yet to accept that outrageous fee was to sanction his father’s greed.
“You want nothing from me, boy, do you . . . except my power.”
The nightmares he had shared with his sister, the obscene things that had happened to his father as a child, that had shaped him into what he had become . . .
“Perhaps we can learn to understand, if not to forgive him,” his sister had said. “Either way, we needn’t become either our father or our uncle.”
But he didn’t want to understand, not while there was a locked door in his soul and a mad, muttering voice on the other side.
The stairs behind him led up to the cold comfort of his turret room, as far from the rest of Gothregor as he could get without leaving its walls. He touched his inheritance with mere fingertips, and with loathing; but he had done the best he could for his people this night.
“I’ve heard enough,” he said. “I’m tired. We’ve named everyone either of us can remember and our duty is done. I’m going to bed.”
With that, he turned and climbed, taking the light of his torch with him. The wolver pup Yce sat at the foot of the stair until he was out of sight, then ghosted up the steps after him.
II
A Dance in the Dark
In the absolute dark that the Highlord left behind, Jame let out her breath in a long sigh. “Well.”
“Do you think so?”
“Not really.”
Voice answered voice in the rustling void. Kencyr have good night vision, but not without some light.
“I am no stranger to the dark, you know,” said the blind matriarch.
“And I have a very good visual memory.”
A feline screech, a muffled curse.
“You were saying, my dear?”
“I was apologizing to Jorin for stepping on his paw. And I apologize to you too, lady, if I was rude. But truly, the secrets of the Women’s World aside, couldn’t someone have told my brother enough to make him understand? This second loss of Aerulan is driving Brenwyr mad. Sweet Trinity, she’s your sisterkin by way of Kinzi and a Shanir maledight. Her curses kill. How long d’you think she can restrain them?”
“Brenwyr is strong. I taught her to be.”
That, Jame had to admit, was true. Most maledights died young, either by suicide or at the hands, in self-defense, of their own kin. Brenwyr believed that she had accidentally killed her own mother. Perhaps she had. Only great self-control had allowed her to survive a torturous childhood and adolescence. However, Jame had been drawn into Brenwyr’s soul-image where the so-called Iron Matriarch endlessly paced and raged:
“Aerulan, sisterkin, you gave me strength, and love, and then you died. And now must I lose your banner too? He tossed you to me, ancestors damn him, like a bone to a dog! The insult, the shame . . . ”
“Oh yes, she is strong,” said the matriarch’s voice, from a different part of the hall. She was moving about in the freedom of her eternal night, the swish of her gown swallowed by the restless stir of banners in the wind that soughed under the keep’s two doors. Before, Jame could have tracked her through Jorin’s senses, but the ounce had retreated in a sulk to nurse his sore paw.
Something filmy brushed across her face, making her start.
A light laugh sounded almost in her ear: “Nervous, girl, here before your ancestors in those shameless clothes, with that naked, despoiled face? The last Highborn female—I will not say lady—of a house nearly extinct.”
That teasing touch again. Jame snatched, and caught a wisp of cloth. Adiraina’s veil. She almost executed a fire-leaping leg sweep in hopes of tripping the woman, but restrained herself: cold stone would not be kind to such old bones. Besides, she felt dizzy and oddly breathless, as if all the room’s air was bleeding away even though the draft from under the two doors chilled the clammy sweat breaking out on her face. Dark as it was, images flickered about her as they had when, for a moment, she had thought she glimpsed Greshan on his bier. Two men arguing over a bloated corpse, a woman watching, a third man in the shadows whose face kept twisting, changing . . .
Surely I know that woman, thought Jame. Something about her avid eyes and smile before such a terrible sight . . . Rawneth, young and ravenous with ambition. What had she been doing here, that night?
Then the Randir’s gaze had abruptly shifted and caught Jame eye to eye. Her smile had deepened, with a hint of sharp, white teeth.
Scapegrace, spoiled goods. Forget.
She saw me, Jame thought, shaken anew. She was here, both in the past and in the present. She told me to forget her and, until this moment, I had.
Her head swam. What had she been trying to remember?
Adiraina’s voice jerked back her attention. “Brenwyr will be stronger still when she finally lets Aerulan go. To remember the dead, to mourn them, yes, but not to embrace them. Let the living go with life.”
“You heard that?”
“Yes. No!”
Now Jame’s heart was pounding in her throat and she thought she saw stars . . . no, faint constellations of light against the walls across which Adiraina’s slim, dark form moved like a cloud rack obscuring the night sky.
“What Gerridon left of your house, Ganth Gray Lord destroyed, and with it the Kencyrath’s future as it had been foretold.”
Sway, turn, hand arched just so . . . despite her tight underskirt and age, the old Highborn was dancing. Her voice wove as if in a dream through her tiny, flowing steps, through darkness and spectral light.
“We floundered, lost, abandoned. You have no idea what a nightmare that was. Honor . . . who could define it anymore? The strong learned to prey upon the weak, house on house, Highborn on Kendar, male on female. Everything was falling apart, yet not quite. Ganth still lived, though in exile, and then his son, hidden by my Lord Ardeth among the Southern Host. Their mere existence sustained us, or so I believe. Then, finally, Torisen stepped forward to claim his inheritance and we awoke. Our god had abandoned us, but one of his chosen had returned. A new beginning, we thought, a new direction.
“Then you appeared, out of nowhere, out of nothing. We tried to make you one of us. The Women’s World bears the scars of that encounter, even as you do. And now, what?”
“Lady . . . please . . . ”
“Shhhh.”
The sound slithered around Jame’s throat and began to tighten. She fell to her knees. One part of her mind noted, This is a wind-blowing technique. I didn’t know that the Senetha could be used this way.