Coward, said his father’s voice behind the locked door in his soul. Then again, what do you need with such trivial knowledge?
He wanted to snap back, Trying to have it both ways, Father? but keeping still worked better with that hectoring, inner voice.
His people must come before his pride. That was his responsibility, his dearest honor. He had already used the dowry to buy this year’s seeds, the previous harvest having been destroyed by the hail and ash engendered by last year’s volcanic eruption farther north. He would draw on Aerulan’s bounty again if he must.
And go on bended knee to ask your sister what she knows about the Women’s World?
That too, if necessary. Odd, how the once unthinkable slowly became possible—almost. Nothing dramatic had happened; he had only had some time blessedly free from nightmares to think. Now his innate good sense warned him that there was much he needed to know about Jame’s mysterious past before that ignorance harmed them both.
Responsibility. How many forms it took.
That morning the Kendar Cron had come to see him.
“Lord, you know that this past winter my young son Ghill died.”
Torisen remembered it—how could he not? The boy had tried to ride one of the new-dropped calves brought in to shelter from the storms and an unlucky fall had broken his neck. Worse, the accident hadn’t killed him outright. When the parents had seen that he was paralyzed, they had requested the White Knife. Torisen had never before brought death to one so young or so brave.
Cron had held himself very straight, but his eyes had shone with anxiety. “I and my mate would like to have another child. Not that anything can replace what we’ve lost, but the room is so quiet without him.”
To sanction the birth of an infant was to guarantee it a place in one’s house. Sweet Trinity, one more name to remember . . .
True, he hadn’t forgotten any since the death of Mullen, but still it was as if he gave a piece of his soul to each Kencyr whom he bound, and there was only so much of him to give.
Then there had been that petition from the Randir Corvine, who turned out to be a former Knorth Oath-breaker. He hadn’t known that there were Knorth in Wilden. A worrying thought, that, but also an intriguing one. What an opportunity to learn about the Randir from the inside. He didn’t blame any Knorth who had had the good sense not to follow his father into exile. Still, it bothered him that their need had driven them to such a haven. There was also the remote possibility that to invite any of them back might be to welcome a Randir spy into his house. After all, some might see Ganth’s madness as a betrayal, as Torisen did himself.
So, two claimants, one position. To which did he owe allegiance, the past or the future?
Rowan gave a stifled exclamation. Torisen turned to find her sunk thigh-deep and floundering.
“Don’t come near, my lord,” she said hastily as he moved to assist her. “Perimal be damned . . . I’ve blundered into a shwupp pit.”
“A what?”
“That’s right,” she said, as much to herself as to him. “You usually aren’t here in the spring, nor has it ever been this wet before. Fetch me a pole and I’ll be fine. Oops.”
With that she sank again, up to her waist. The mud made obscene sucking noises, like a tongue exploring a rotten tooth. She lay back on the quavering bog to spread her weight and tried to wriggle free her legs.
That might work with sinksand. Torisen wasn’t so sure about the present case. Expressionless she might be, but Rowan was taking her current predicament a bit too calmly.
“You might go for help,” she suggested.
“And leave you here in your mud bath?”
He circled her, stepping carefully. The mud around the Kendar, agitated by her efforts to escape, was clearly more liquid than the surrounding earth. By now, water must be pouring into her boots. How deep was this pit anyway?
“I think you just want to get rid of me,” he said.
“Should you stay to laugh? Bad enough what they will say in the barracks tonight. Of all the stupid accidents . . .”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
He risked a step forward, bent, and gripped her under the arms. It quickly became clear, however, that to pull her clear through sheer strength was out of the question; while the earth retained its grip, he was more likely to dislocate both of his arms if not to rip her in two. Still, if he could stop her sinking any further until her natural buoyancy came to her rescue . . .
“What, for example, is a shwupp?”
Bloop.
Bubbles rose in a series of small, wet explosions, approaching.
“My lord. Blackie. Just go.”
Bloop, bloop. Here came more trails, from every direction.
Yce splashed toward them. Lighter than they, on huge paws, she ran as if through melting snow although spattered brown to the eyebrows. Then she paused, ears pricked, head cocked.
Bloop, bloop, bloop . . .
At the end of a trail of bubbles, she pounced and dug furiously. A slick head, eyeless and seemingly all teeth, burst out of the ground. Webbed claws churned the mud. It screamed as the pup’s jaws closed on its neck. Then she was on to another trail and another, but there were too many of them, all converging on the hidden pit.
Rowan’s legs came free, her boots shredded. The watery pit seethed with muddy bodies like some obscene eel stew. Tori dragged her clear and helped her up.
“Yce, come!”
The two Kencyr staggered back to their horses with the wolver pup mounting a furious rear-guard defense. Torisen gave Rowan a leg up into her saddle and swung into his own. Yce grinned up at him, white teeth, lolling red tongue, and blue eyes in a mask of mud.
“Good girl.”
It was late afternoon before they regained the fortress. Torisen paused within the guardhouse, regarding the penned-up livestock that had well nigh destroyed the inner sward. After the ravages of cows, goats, sheep, and pigs, one might as well plow up what was left for Rowan’s vegetable garden. Ancestors knew, it was already well manured.
Around the ward were his garrison’s domestic offices and lodgings; across it, the old keep; beyond that, the Women’s Halls, and then an acre of desolation—all within the walls of the greater fortress. If only his soul-image were as large as Gothregor with its thousands of empty rooms, he need deny no one shelter there. The thought struck him that, thanks to the locked door in his soul, he only had access to about a third of it.
What, truly, was behind that door?
His last conversation with Trishien nagged at him. Something had happened, something he hadn’t been able to remember at the time but which kept coming back as if slowly rising out of the well of sleep.
“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 . . .”
That had been his father talking about his foul uncle Greshan, talking through him. Greshan had temporarily blood-bound Ganth—how many times, and what obscene game had he played with him?
There had been more, too.
He remembered Trishien standing with her hands pressed to her lips, speaking not to him but to his father: “Ganth. You didn’t want your son to leave you, to go against your will. Don’t tell me that you . . . you . . .”
Torisen shivered. Enough for now. To ashes with the dead and with the past.
He turned to Rowan. “Find Cron, if you please. Tell him that he has my blessing.”