“Of course not,” said Trishien gently. “They simply care about you. As do I. Come. Sit.”
She dusted off the window ledge and perched on it. After a moment’s hesitation, he joined her.
“Now tell me: Have you been eating properly?”
He was surprised into a laugh. “Yes, Mother, when I remember. It was a busy autumn, you know. Once Brant sent the seeds, we had to plant the rye and winter wheat, not to mention hunts every other day now that the yackcarn are running at last.”
“That much I know. And sleeping enough? There, I fancy not.”
He made an exasperated noise, rose, and began to pace, obviously at war with his fatigue, fading in and out of it. “I try. It’s not like the old days when I refused to. But I have such terrible dreams.”
“Tell me.”
At first, she thought that he would refuse, that she had gone too far. Everyone knew about the terror of nightmares that had haunted him for years and driven him to the edge of sanity.
“It’s so stupid,” he now said, angry at himself and at his weakness. “And it’s always the same: I’m in bed, on the edge of sleep, when she comes in.”
“Who?”
“My sister. Jame. Who else? She undresses by the fire. Trinity, but she’s beautiful. When she’s naked, though, I see that her body is covered with red lines almost like writing, but they’re blood, not paint. Then, just as calmly, she starts to peel off her skin in long strips and to hang them from the bed frame. I can’t move. When she’s completely naked, down to red veins, blue arteries and long, white muscles, she parts the red ribbons of her own skin and climbs into bed with me.”
Realizing that her mouth was open, Trishien shut it.
“I . . . see. I think. All else aside, you were there the night that your sister threatened to flay that cadet alive, weren’t you?”
“Trinity, you should have seen her, playing cat to that boy’s terrified mouse. She was drawing bloody lines on him with her cursed nails, and he couldn’t move. I couldn’t move either, except to turn away. Father was right: I am weak, and she is a monster.”
“But she didn’t flay that boy, you know.” Her voice sharpened at his stunned expression. “Highlord, haven’t you been reading your correspondences from Tentir?”
“God’s claws, I was there! I saw! Why should I want to read some damn account of it?”
“Clearly, you didn’t see. Do you mean to say that you’ve left official reports unread because of a mere dream?”
At another time, her reverence for the written word might have amused him. Now he could only gape at her.
“Sweet Trinity, do you want to think badly of your sister? If she were a monster, how much easier things would be; but she isn’t, and they aren’t. Instead, you are two complicated people bound by blood and love. Trying to hide from that fact in ignorance doesn’t become you, and it’s dangerous. I watched your father turn the world black and white when truth lies in the gray. It helped to destroy him. Now you are the leader of your people. You can’t afford to sit in the corner like a little boy with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears. Do you even know what that wretched cadet did?”
He didn’t. She told him. He was appalled.
“And Sheth let him stay at Tentir?”
“Yes, although broken in rank—a worse punishment, they thought, than simply kicking him out.”
“I suppose Kirien told you all of this.” It came out half a sneer. The morning sun hadn’t cleared the roofline yet, so half the room lay in shadow, and there he had chosen to pace. On the threshold, the wolver pup stirred uneasily.
“She told me some. The rest, I thought, was common knowledge. And yes, Kirien has friends at the college who report things to her. Do you call that spying, or just good intelligence?”
He made a face. “Better, at any rate, than mine. I see your point. You know, though, how I feel about the Shanir. I’d just come from Falkirr where Brenwyr cursed me and the clothes I stood in.”
“Oh no!”
“It didn’t seem to take, except insofar as it shredded my underwear. No one told me that she’d also cursed my sister.”
“ ‘Roofless and rootless, blood and bone, cursed be and cast out.’ ” Trishien shivered. “A terrible malediction, but it seems to have had as little effect on her as on you.”
“There are worse: ‘Damn you, boy, for deserting me. Faithless, honorless . . . I curse you and cast you out. Blood and bone, you are no child of mine.’ ”
His voice had roughened. Trishien felt a shiver run up her spine. Carefully, she removed the lenses from her mask. That which lay near blurred, but the distance sharpened. Again, that hovering shadow paced with the Highlord, spoke through his lips. Oh, how she had hoped that it was only a trick of the light, and yet to talk to him again after all these years . . .
“Ganth,” she said gently. “Why are you so unhappy? Kindrie spoke the pyric rune that should have freed you. Why are you still here?”
He looked at her out of the shadows, out of the past, the only man she had ever loved, and his face was sick with cruel self-loathing.
“Shall I tell you what I told my son, Trish, there in that cold keep where he hides his pitiful, little soul, where I too am trapped? Do you remember my dear brother Greshan, that filthy Shanir? Just a drop of blood on his knife’s tip, not strong enough to bind for more than an hour or two, just long enough to make the game interesting.
“ ‘Dear little Gangrene,’ he called me, a worthless, sniveling liar whom no one would believe—and no one did.
“ ‘Now open wide,’ he would say, ‘or I’ll break your teeth—again—with the blade. There. Now, come to me.’
“I was a child, Trish, blood-bound and violated. Do you wonder that I could never entirely throw him off? That I should come to hate all Shanir? Oh, I was glad when he died, but it changed nothing. Nothing. And that’s what I became.”
Trishien’s hands covered her mouth. “Oh, my dear,” she said through trembling fingers. “You should have told me. I would have believed you. Oh, how could your father have been so blind? But Greshan was his darling. I always knew that. I just didn’t think . . . ”
Her fingertips turned cold against her lips. “Ganth. You didn’t want your son to leave you, to go against your will. Don’t tell me that you . . . you . . . ”
“What, Trish, what?”
He came out of the shadows in a rush, that well-remembered face overlaying one much younger, and tripped over the wolver pup. The shadow rose off Torisen’s prostrate form and fled, pursued by Yce. They seemed to be running over hills of dead grass under a leaden moon toward the ruined shell of a keep. The shadow slipped in through the door with white teeth snapping at its heels. Then Yce came trotting back.
“Lady?” A doorway into light had opened, spilling morning into the room.
Torisen sat up, shaking his head, dazed. “Must have stumbled. Beg pardon.” The captain of Trishien’s guard helped him to his feet. “What were we talking about?”
“I was about to say that I should be leaving.” She took his hand and kissed it. Only the filigree of scars seemed to generate any warmth. “Eat and rest, my lord. Nothing that you have done should visit you in nightmares . . . unless you continue to ignore your correspondences.”
With that she swept out of the room, striding fast in her swirling, divided skirt, not looking back.
Torisen stood, bemused. His mind felt as empty as the room, like a stage after all the actors have left, but he had no memory of the play after he had told Trishien of Brenwyr’s curse. As much as he liked the Jaran Matriarch, odd things seemed to happen to him when he was around her. But he would miss her too. Spring and her return seemed far away, beyond drifts of snow and curtains of sleet.