Tears pricked her eyes. Ah, no, Senethari, dear teacher, I don’t want to remember.
But she did.
Tirandys had damned himself at the Fall for love of Jamethiel Dream-weaver, becoming a shape-shifting changer in Gerridon’s service. Under shadow’s eaves he had taught the Dream-weaver’s daughter, Jame, the Senethar and the meaning of honor by his own bitter example. At the Cataracts, on his master’s orders, he had tried to blood-bind Torisen, not realizing that Tori himself was a blood-binder, far stronger than he. The resulting convulsions had nearly torn him apart before the Ivory Knife had brought him final peace.
“What is love, Jamie? What is honor?”
“Child, what do you know of grief or of death?”
Of grief, much. As for the rest, well, she was learning. Oh, but it was hard.
Forepaws on the marble rim, Jorin stretched down his long, graceful neck to lap water. A fish rose to the motion, thinking that someone had come to feed it. Instead, the rough tongue scooped it up and the cat sprang back in surprise, dropping it on the grass. Then he nosed out the frantic quicksilver wriggle from among the blades, gulped it down, and began eagerly to angle for another with quick, random dabs of a paw and much joyous splashing.
Her bond to him was of a different sort, formed spontaneously when his breeder had tried to drown him as a kitten. Royal gold ounces were valuable, but not blind ones. About a dozen other Shanir at the randon college possessed this particular gift and were bound to a variety of creatures ranging from a hawk to a gilded swamp adder to assorted insects.
Jame smiled, remembering Gari and his temporary infestation of termites, exiled to sleep in the training square because wooden floors kept disintegrating under him.
Her amusement faded as she thought of her half-breed servant Graykin. That had been another spontaneous bond, of mind rather than of blood, created out of his desperate desire to belong and her need, at that moment, for his assistance. Desire had outlived need, or so it seemed, but the bond still held, awake and asleep. How often she had dreamed of the Southron’s soul-image where a chained mongrel guarded an empty hearth—empty because his mistress had escaped and failed to take him with her.
She would have to decide, when she got back to Tentir, what to do about him.
All in all, how many kinds of binding there were, as if their detested three-faced god had tried to lash them all together in as many ways as possible before he (or she, or it) had deserted them for realms unknown. That applied most strongly to the Kendar, like poor Mullen, who felt incomplete when not bound to one lord or another. As a rule, Highborn didn’t bind other Highborn; the link of kinship was usually considered enough. If a lord was mistrustful or sadistic enough, though . . . there were some terrible, ancient stories of madness among the Highborn consummated in blood. What Greshan had done to his brother, however temporary, was a pale shadow of such abominations.
Then there were the deeper connections, which she was only beginning to understand.
Shadows, names, and souls were definitely linked.
Dreams could be prophetic or utterly trivial, individual or shared. As a child, she had lived in her brother’s dreamscape as easily as he had in hers, the one melting into the other. Some of that was coming back, to Torisen’s horror and her amusement, when they didn’t make her tingle with half-aroused annoyance.
More important, dreams gave access to the collective soulscape. Everyone had a soul-image, whether they knew it or not, and at some point all such images merged, first within a house, then within the Kencyrath as a whole. There, one touched as deep as it was possible to go short of penetrating the god-head itself. A lord bound his followers on this level; a healer worked here to cure body and mind; a nemesis—ah, what mischief one could inflict with access and sufficient ill will.
Jame wondered if she should tell anyone that Rawneth had somehow invaded Brenwyr’s soul-image and had been taunting the Iron Matriarch half to madness—that is, until she, Jame, had ripped the Witch out.
She extended her ivory claws, each like a honed crescent of the moon, and flexed them thoughtfully. Click, click, click. So many years hating and hiding them, only to find them a valued asset at Tentir. The Kendar were practical that way, unlike most Highborn who saw the shame of Gerridon’s fall in every Shanir child born among their ranks. The irony of that was that they had destroyed or discarded many potential Tyr-ridan over the past three thousand years and so effectively had thwarted their own destiny.
Brenwyr the Maledight was undoubtedly a nemesis, but one (so far) constrained by love and honor.
What, if anything, restrained the Witch of Wilden? Neither time nor space, apparently, and her presence in Brenwyr’s soul-image suggested some truly appalling possibilities.
Jame’s awareness of the Randir Matriarch had sharpened over the past year, even over the past few days since she had seen Rawneth in the eyes of her puppet, the possessed, dying Tempter. It was a good thing, although mortifying, that Rawneth considered Jame no more than a mouse under her paw, a plaything rather than a threat. No question about it: The Witch was much more experienced than Jame. She certainly got around a damn sight too much in the soulscape for Jame’s comfort.
And what in Perimal’s name had she done to those poor Randir cadets?
Again Jame saw the leaping flames of the pyre, the silent watchers, and Lord Kenan’s features twisting, twisting, into the face of the servant who had stood a-smirk behind Rawneth on the night that Greshan burned.
Surely I know that man . . .
She jerked awake, on the verge of revelation and of tumbling into the fountain.
It had been much too long a day.
Jorin ambled around the rim to join her.
“Am I forgiven?” she asked him as he butted her with his nut-hard head.
So many bonds, she thought, rubbing cheeks with the ounce. So many ways to misuse them.
Yes, she was also a nemesis. It was her nature to sense the weak places in the fabric of her people, rotted with ambition or treachery. Every instinct told her to reach in with her claws and rip out the foulness, just as she had Rawneth from Brenwyr’s soul and the Randir Tempter from Tentir’s shadows. She could do that, but could she contain the damage that she caused?
Tai-tastigon in flames, Karkinaroth crumbling, “The Riverland reduced to rubble and you in the midst of it, looking apologetic . . . ”
Adiraina was right to fear her.
Still, some things did need to be broken.
I’ll just have to be more careful, she thought.
Jorin’s ears pricked. He jumped down and trotted toward the bushes hard against the Caineron compound just as a figure clad in billowing white burst out through them.
“Surprise . . . umph!”
“Yow!”
Lyra Lack-wit sprawled at Jame’s feet, having tripped over Jorin and, again, trodden on his toes.
“Between us,” said Jame, “we’ll cripple that cat yet.”
She helped the young Caineron to rise as Lyra floundered in a welter of lace that revealed as much as it concealed, secured by a haphazard web of ribbons. That and a sketchy mask made up the night attire of a young lady belonging to a very rich house with not very good taste.
“I hate these clothes,” Lyra said, wrestling with wayward cords as if with a knot of silken serpents. “They keep trying to strangle me. What do you wear to bed?”
“Nothing. Lyra, why are you plunging around in the shrubbery, much less this late at night?”
“That’s my room up there.” The girl gestured vaguely toward the looming bulk of the Caineron quarters. As with most Caineron structures, given a family tendency to height-sickness, there were few windows, but one halfway up sported the defiant stub of a balcony. “I saw you below and came down to say hello. Hello!”