“Deliberately, no, but in this case it’s inevitable. Wait here.”
She entered the barracks and shortly returned with a thin, pale boy. So this was the cadet who had strewn Index’s messages over her sleeping body. Jame remembered seeing him at Senetha practice. She had wondered at the time why he was here and not at Mount Alban as some scrollsman’s apprentice, but it seemed that he wanted to be a randon.
“Can you help me?” she asked.
The cadet pulled a rolled, blank parchment out of one sleeve and a steel-tipped quill out of the other. Jame noted that his right hand was bound in linen. He loosened the bandage and pocketed it. His palm was scored with seeping cuts.
“What do you want to ask?” he said, bracing the parchment on the rail and digging the quill into his raw flesh.
You can only hurt.
Jame gulped. If this weren’t so important . . .
“To Kirien: please pass this message along to Trishien and ask her to tell my brother. Adric knows about the ring. He is coming to ask you where you got it.”
The cadet wrote her message in sputtering block letters on the parchment, returning several times to dip the quill into his own welling blood.
Then they waited.
“She may not be in her study,” said Jame.
“It shouldn’t matter. The itch to write will take her.”
His hand jerked into spiky script. “M’lady Kirien acknowledges the message, but reports that the Highlord had gone to Wilden to settle a border dispute. She also asks when Kindrie means to return to Mount Alban.”
Jame felt a chill. “He isn’t there now?”
The cadet’s scrip rounded as Trishien joined the conversation: “ ‘He isn’t at Gothregor either.’ ”
“Trinity,” breathed Jame. “Not here, nor at Mount Alban, nor at Gothregor.”
She remembered saying good-bye to her cousin and his discontented expression. He hadn’t been pleased not to take his pretty chart directly to Torisen on her mere say-so. After she had left, could he possibly have turned south rather than north on the New Road? If so, where had he been the past twenty-odd days? On the road, he should have been safe, but there were always wild animals and, these days, roving Noyat hillmen. Besides, Wilden lay between Tentir and Gothregor.
Oh lord, what if he had fallen into Randir hands?
XV
Wilden
In the cool of early morning, Kindrie walked in the Moon Garden of his soul-image. Regardless of their season, herbs bloomed all around him: comfrey and yarrow, anemone and colt’s-tail, masterwort and hoarhound, all white but all ragged and dispirited as if after a long drought. The stream at the garden’s southern end ran low with brackish water. Kindrie cupped some in his hands, his fingers scraping the woven bed. It was as if a death banner underlay the whole garden, undercutting life.
No.
This was still his sanctuary and he would tend it. Most of the water spilled before he could carry it to a drooping patch of white heartsease. He shook his long, pale fingers above the blooms and they momentarily revived.
Drops of water, drops of hope.
As he turned away, the flowers withered again and petals fell.
Across the stream, a thing of tangled cords fumbled at the wall. Here in the soulscape, the flood had failed to wash away Tieri’s remains completely. Those that remained had woven themselves into a flaccid travesty that moped about the garden idly tearing flowers apart. Mostly, however, they either followed him or clung to the wall from which her banner had hung, beyond which Perimal Darkling had once gaped.
“Mother, no.” Kindrie tried to draw her away.
Sodden loops of cord fell over his hands, clammy to the touch.
My son, come to me, come . . .
If he pulled on them, she would unravel. He let go.
Kindrie suspected that she—no, it—was animated by Rawneth. From the first, he had felt her fumbling about his soul, seeking some chink by which to enter. Once the Witch of Wilden and her pet priest Ishtier had shut him out of his soul-image altogether. He shuddered, remembering that terrible time when he could heal no one, not even himself. Ah, the bitter taste of mortality! Moreover, he had been denied his only source of comfort and peace, without which life was a cold, ragged thing and he little better. What his cousin Jame must have thought of him then. No wonder she had treated him with so little respect, for surely he had deserved none.
He was stronger now, he told himself, able to walk his soul even as he regarded the blight on it that days in Randir captivity had brought. He could even unravel the sorry threads of this mock mother, but then he would be truly alone. Let her be.
A cord fumbled around his ankle.
My son . . .
Not strong. Weak, when even such a cold, slimy touch brought comfort. More cords twined up his body.
My son, lean on me. Who else have you?
He remembered riding down the New Road in the dark, nearing Shadow Rock, so glad to see its lights over the shoulder of a hill. Cousin Holly had emerged from the evening mist to meet him. How his heart had leaped, and then fallen at the other’s cold smile.
“Come to me, have you? Fool. Bastards have no family.”
And he had delivered Kindrie to the Randir patrol that followed him.
Something was wrong there. What? Oh, he was stupid, unable to think straight. Had this memory come to him once or over and over, night after night? How often had he felt this clammy touch, dreamed this dark dream.
Lord Danior be damned. Surely Jame, Tori, Kirien or even Ashe would come to look for him.
Fool. Bastards have no friends.
A lifetime of experience told him that. He had been an idiot to believe otherwise.
The cords climbed higher, threading in and out of his skin. Soon they would reach his throat.
Something stuck his shoulder, and the garden blurred.
“Up, you slugabeds, or break your teeth on the charred scrapings of the pot!”
Kindrie groaned and opened his eyes. He lay on a narrow, lumpy cot in the subterranean Priests’ College at Wilden. Before him on the luminous moss that covered the wall were twenty-five thin scratches. He added a twenty-sixth. It seemed to him that he had been a prisoner much longer than that, since childhood even, friends and family only a desperate dream.
Beyond detaining him, however, the Randir seemed to have no other immediate use for him than to throw him back into the routine of the Priests’ College. He had been theirs once; now he was again. Of course, if they had known that he was a purebred, legitimate Knorth, he would have had value as a pawn or a hostage. As it was, he accepted their seeming indifference gladly. Far better that than M’lady Rawneth’s special attention.
He drew his hairy brown robe over thin shoulders. There had been muscle there once—well, a little. Here, however, there was no exercise but the Great Dance and no sustaining food except for that allotted to the high priests, and he was only an acolyte.
Outside his door, he joined the brown-and-gray-clad mob as it shuffled down the spiral corridor past dormitories and classrooms. The subterranean college was built in a spindle shape, narrow at the top and bottom, wide in the middle. Above, the novices and acolytes lived in squalor; below, in unguessed at luxury, the priests, minor and high. In between was the communal dining hall.
Other acolytes shoved and pinched him.
“Thinks he’s too good for us.” “Yah, runagate!” “Are you happy to be home?”
Breakfast was thin gruel, watery milk, and stale bread already spotted with blue mold. All around him, pinched faces bent to their meal, many under the ragged mops of white hair that betrayed those of the despised Old Blood.
One novice, younger and plumper than the others, pushed back his bowl.
“This is awful,” he whined. “I want my mother!”