“You woke Granduncle up with your stampede. The next thing I knew, he was in my quarters brandishing a whip, saying that he meant to know where I had gotten Father’s ring or he would have the hide off of Drie. A few lashes and, well, I couldn’t stop myself. I wrestled the whip away from him and broke it. He was to deal with me, dammit, not with my half-brother. While we were shouting at each other, Drie slipped away. As soon as he noticed, Granduncle went after him. I couldn’t stop them, so I went after them.”
Stopping first to collect her, Jame noted; but still he had prevented Aden from beating Drie.
They fought their way through lashing cloud-of-thorn bushes toward the swimming hole.
Lightning outlined two figures on Breakneck Rock. One gripped the other by the collar and carried something silvery. By the afterimage, Jame recognized the latter as a fish spear.
“Pereden, Distan, welcome. Have you come to see Tentir purified?”
Rain plastered his white hair over his face, over the eye sealed with wax that still continued to twitch under its lid. That side of his face had gone slack and the corner of his mouth drooped.
“I suppose that we will lose your valuable company tomorrow,” he said. “Meanwhile, keep my quarters since you have claimed them. Damned half-breed. When they rise that high in the service, there’s no putting them in their place. Why can’t anyone realize that I’ve been doing my best to save Tentir?”
“What is he talking about?” Timmon asked Jame, raising his voice over the thrashing wind and rain.
Jame shook her head, although she had a suspicion. Ancestors please that she was right.
The swollen, surging Burley had risen halfway up the face of Breakneck Rock. Behind Aden, unseen by him, a broad, leathery back surfaced in the river. Lightning glimmered off its wet skin. Then it submerged again.
Timmon clutched Jame. “It’s huge! How can something so big be in our swimming hole?”
Jame remembered the chasm beyond the underwater ledge that gave the rock its name, from which huge eyes had once watched her. She also remembered the shallow Silver Steps and what had lurked there.
The wind changed direction, blowing from the west down the gullet of the canyon that fed into the hole. Stinging rain whipped sideways. With it came an approaching roar more felt than heard. It must be raining even more heavily in the mountains than here.
Drie leaned eagerly toward the rock’s edge against the short leash of the Highborn’s arm.
“Get back!” Jame called to him, Timmon’s voice joining her own: “Ran, let him go!”
Aden made a face at them like a dolorous clown. “Could it be that you don’t understand either? No, no. Peri, remember the first time we caught this freak at his piscine perversions? He wouldn’t cry when we beat him, because he was with that damn carp. What right had the bastard to defy us or to try to escape? What right have such creatures even to exist? You never should have sired one, Peri. Distan, you laughed too. So many abominations at Tentir: Shanir, half-breeds, even the Highlord’s unnatural sister, ancestors preserve us. Well, I can free the college of one freak at least.”
He shook Drie. “Call it, boy, call your filthy familiar.”
As if in response, a vast head reared up and slammed down thunderously on the rock. Its eyes were the size of ships’ wheels; its bristling whiskers, spars. The cavernous oval of its mouth gaped. Something like a pallid tongue flopped out to scrabble with overgrown nails on stone. The Eaten One existed only from the thighs up, the rest stuck down the catfish’s gigantic maw. Her skin glimmered pale green; her hair draped like seaweed on a low-tide shore. But the face that she turned upward was of transcendental beauty, even with its lambent eyes and needle teeth bared in a smile.
Drie broke loose and threw his arms around her as hers closed around him.
“GLUP,” went the catfish, and swallowed them both.
Aden belatedly raised his spear to thrust it into one of the creature’s eyes, but it slid back into the water, out of reach. Water slopped over the cliff top.
The wind was roaring now, and a wall of debris like jagged jaws swept toward them down the Burley. Hands jerked Jame and Timmon back from behind. A tangle of branches, tree trunks, and boulders flayed the rock face, taking Aden with it. Then a wall of water hit stone in an explosion of spray. The flash flood swept on carrying all before it. Aden could be seen for a moment on the crest of the tide before it lifted him over the lip of Perimal’s Cauldron and bore him down.
“I was wrong,” said the Commandant. “We have seen the last of M’lord Aden before morning.”
Jame turned and threw her arms around him. “Ran, you’re back!”
“Er . . . yes,” he said, disengaging from her hug. “It would seem that I was missed. Poor Aden. He was beginning to be a problem, as I discovered tonight when I returned not only to find him trying to run my duty officer to death but also settled in my quarters. I fear, though, that you have also lost a friend and you, Lordan, a half-brother.”
“Lost perhaps,” said Jame, looking down river thoughtfully, “but I imagine Drie is finally where he always wanted to be, and the Eaten One has the Favorite of her choice. Look. It’s stopped raining.”
XIII
Secrets
The great rain had stopped but a gray sky still pressed down heavily over the Riverland. Low, hurrying clouds shrouded the mountaintops, occasionally spitting on the sodden earth beneath as if as an afterthought.
“Remember,” each drop seemed to say. “What I did before, I can do again.”
Torisen stood in the midst of his ruined crops, surveying the damage. While Gothregor itself stood on a high bluff and so had escaped the waters, the fields downstream around the curve of the Silver had been ravaged. The dikes of the water meadow where the hay grew were gone. The grain terraces above existed only in strips, broken by the smear of landslides. The winter wheat and rye had been stripped to the stalk and then beaten into the ground. Spring seed, so recently planted with such hopes, had washed away. Due to the late, cold spring, barley and flax hadn’t yet been sown, but couldn’t now be until the terraces were repaired.
“So in time we’ll have barley bread, beer, and enough rope to hang ourselves with,” said Torisen sourly.
His steward Rowan shot him a sideways look. Her face, as usual, was expressionless, frozen in place by the scars across her forehead spelling out the name of the Karnid god. “We can still turn the inner ward into a vegetable garden, once the livestock return to the fields.”
Torisen laughed despite himself. “I can just imagine Caldane when he hears that I’m growing cabbages on my doorstep.”
“Very nourishing, cabbages. Also carrots, onions, parsnips, and beets.”
“So we can eventually make vegetable soup. What about the next hay crop?”
“The roots are still there, under all of that mud and silt. They should recover. Anyway, now you have the funds to buy new seeds.”
“Hmmm,” said Torisen, unhappily.
He turned to squish back to their horses and Yce, all waiting for them on higher ground. Rowan limped after him. Both Kencyr wore thigh high boots and were glad of them as the clinging mud oozed halfway up to their knees.
Squelch, plop, squelch, plop . . .
True, he did have Aerulan’s dowry, as much as he hated drawing on that (in his opinion) tainted source. His father Ganth had demanded an obscene amount for the girl’s contract in perpetuity and Lord Brandan had insisted on paying it for her death banner. Torisen had wanted simply to give it to him. To profit from old pain felt wrong. However, both the Jaran Matriarch Trishien and Jame had told him that to refuse the price was to do even more harm, not that he quite saw why.
It also confused him somewhat that Aerulan had turned out to be the beloved not of Brant but of his maledight sister Brenwyr, she who had cursed Torisen’s underwear into ribbons and suffered the backlash in her own shredded garments. There was obviously much about the Women’s World that he still didn’t understand, nor was he likely to unless he worked up the nerve to ask his sister about her winter within its halls.