CHAPTER XV
Wilden
Spring 481
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!”
A Coman, Kindrie thought, about six years old. From the traces of brown dye in his hair, he had been hidden away at home until his Shanir nature had betrayed itself.
“Mommy’s boy, mommy’s boy!” the others chanted at him. Most, like Kindrie, had been delivered to the college as babies. It had been mother and father to them, a lean breast and a hard hand.
The newcomer buried his face in his arms and burst out sobbing.
“Up, you motley rats, up!” cried the stewards, passing among them, thwacking with rods. “To class with you all!”
Kindrie touched the boy’s shoulder in passing and found himself for an instant in the other’s soul-image: a small, bright chamber with childish drawings on the wall and a woman’s voice speaking in the next room.
“Mother!”
The boy leaped up, but his face crumpled when he saw the dank stone that surrounded him. Throwing off Kindrie’s hand, he blundered after the others.
Had it been kind to remind him? Kindrie wondered, following. Already shadows were gathering in that childhood nursery and the beloved voice was fading. It took the strength of innocence to cling to such an image, and there was little of that in this dark place. Was he himself still innocent? In an odd way, yes. Under the circumstances of his childhood, he had never really grown up. Here and now, that was the only strength that he had.
He filed into his first class, where those of pronounced Shanir power met in a claustrophobic room lit only by garish lichen murals of unpleasant designs.
“Who is our lord?” demanded their instructor, a minor priest disparagingly behind his back called a priestling.
“No one!” chorused back the assembled acolytes from the circle that they made around him.
“Who is our patron?”
“Lady Rawneth.”
“Whom do we serve?”
“The high priests.”
“Who is our family?”
“Each other.”
“On whom do we spit?”
“On our cruel god”—each except Kindrie turned to mime spitting over his shoulder—“who has forsaken us.”
The catechism over, the instructor turned to his class. “Remind me. What can each of you do?”
“I can make dogs howl, master.”
“I can start fires with a touch,” said a boy with a hideously scarred face.
“I can shake the earth,” said another who himself couldn’t stop trembling.
“I can madden birds.”
“I can make snakes dance.”
“I can carve stone images that move—all right,” the acolyte added, to the jeers of the others, “very slowly.”
“And you?” the instructor said to Kindrie.
“I heal.”
“No. You can manipulate soul-images and walk the soulscape, as our Lady Rawneth does. Are you greater or lesser than she?”
“That isn’t for me to say.”
“Then I will. You are lesser because you can only heal, not destroy or create. Now, show us your power. Hinde, stand forth.”
The twitching cadet nervously crossed the circle to face the Knorth.
“Well? Touch him.”
Reluctantly, Kindrie did.
In his soulscape and in the room itself, not the acolyte but his entire surroundings began to quake, to the startled protests of the other students. Dust rattled down from the ceiling. Stones groaned. Standing still in the midst of growing chaos, Kindrie focused. In his soul-image, someone huge was shaking the boy, now a mere infant.
“Oh, you little Shanir bastard . . .”
Kindrie gripped those enormous, tormenting hands.
“You’re killing him,” he said. “One more seizure and he will die. You are nothing but a memory, to torment him so. Go away.”
Then they were back in the classroom, the boy quiet and bewildered in his grasp, the stones settling around them. Angry shouts came from neighboring rooms.
“What did you do?” demanded the instructor.
“I sent away a baleful influence.”
“You destroyed it!”
“No. Only he can do that. See. It has him in its grip again.”
The boy broke Kindrie’s hold and backed off, shaking, sneering. His thoughts echoed in the Knorth’s mind:
“I deserve it, I deserve it, I deserve it . . .”
“Try me,” said the fire-boy, suddenly before him, gripping Kindrie’s sleeves.
Kindrie felt heat. The dank wool smoked and stank. His hands in turn gripped the other’s wrists. He was falling toward fire. No. The one falling was a child on a hearth, ignored by his parents as they argued about his fate. That had been decided long ago but still he fell, only to be thrust away by Kindrie’s will.
The acolyte looked at his hands, aghast. His ruined face crumpled on the side not fixed with scar tissue. “I can’t,” he said, almost in tears. “What have you done to me, you bastard?”
Nothing that would last, thought Kindrie sadly as the other, blundering, withdrew. Not without his consent. That was one of the bitter lessons he had learned over the past three weeks: those here below in the Priests’ College had been made to embrace their wretchedness. Earth shaker and fire-touch both might have turned their talents to more constructive ends, but not under the college’s direction.
For the rest of the lesson, the instructor ignored him while the burnt boy wept scalding tears and the trembling boy complacently jittered in place, occasionally gulping back foam.
The next class was wind-blowing Senetha as practiced for the Great Dance. Ah, the freedom to move, almost to fly, but here one also felt a touch of the power that the dance was meant to channel. It streamed in at the top of the college from the Kencyrath’s wide-flung temples and spiraled down through it, bound for the catch pool below, the cloaca of divinity. From whence did it come? Different currents had different scents—the musk of Tai-tastigon, the jungle sweat of Tai-than, the spice of Kothifir, the dust and ashes of Karkinaroth—and there were other flavors there too, including one very strong like simmering brimstone. Kindrie was gingerly trying to backtrack this last when the class ended.
Next(without any intervening lunch) was elementary runes, taught by a former randon whose eyes kept straying to Kindrie.
“Not like that. Here. Look.” He bent over Kindrie’s wax tablet and drew on it. Kindrie noticed that the back of the priest’s neck was scarred, but not heavily enough to disguise the swooping lines of the rathorn sigil. On Kindrie’s pad he had written, “Wake up! She has her nails in you.”
She . . . who?
The cords, climbing higher and higher, obscenely burrowing in and out of flesh . . .
For a moment he knew what was happening to him, and then it was gone. The priest had scraped clean the slate.
Last came potions and powders.
“Today we will compound a dust to stop an enemy’s breath,” announced the instructor, “something so simple that even our esteemed Knorth Bastard should be able to master it.”
The other students tittered and shot him sidelong glances, but Kindrie had his doubts. Nothing that he tried in this class ever came out as planned, perhaps because most of it was meant to harm.
Throttle-weed, ash-berry, powdered bilge-beetle . . .
The instructor was right: what could be simpler—assuming that he really did want someone to choke.
The priestling gingerly sniffed at Kindrie’s concoction, the antidote clutched ready in one fist. His breath caught and his eyes bulged.
Trinity, thought Kindrie, dismayed, did I really do it right?
Then the man drew a whooping gasp and began convulsively to sneeze. His explosive breath scattered the powder throughout the room. Some bent double helplessly as if about to blow their brains out. Others keeled over chairs and table, sending their own ingredients flying to add to the confusion. Kindrie stood back in alarm, holding his breath.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to face a senior priest holding a cloth to his face. “Of course, it would be you,” he said in a tone of muffled exasperation. “Come along. Someone wants to see you.”
Kindrie went with him, but not before surreptitiously sweeping what little was left of his experiment into a pocket.
His guide led him up the spiral ramp to the foot of a stair, then up into the stone building, hardly more than a shed, that masked the college’s entrance. Outside was Wilden’s high, windy terrace looking down over the fortress’ many barred family compounds full of steep, narrow buildings like so many pinched, inward-turning faces. The shadow of the Witch’s Tower fell across the flagstones, turning puddles to ice where it touched.
Kindrie hesitated on the tower’s threshold, loath to enter, and looked out over the clean world denied to him. Beyond the sweep of buildings, down on the river flats, he saw a large tent flying a black flag with white tracery on it, too distant to make out.
“Who is that?” he asked his escort.
The priest laughed. “The Highlord, come to settle our little border dispute, or so he thinks.”
Torisen, so close . . .
Clean air seemed to blow through him for the first time in weeks, but the priest’s hand closed on his arm as he took an involuntary step toward the terrace’s edge.
“Do you think that we don’t know?” the man breathed in his ear. “You could call him ‘cousin,’ but wait: bastards have no kin, do they, even so high-blooded a one as you. Aren’t you glad that we took you in? This way.”
He pushed Kindrie into the Witch’s Tower.
“Now climb.”
The shadows struck him cold as he mounted the twisting stair and his breath smoked. Kindrie remembered the first time, as a child, that he had come this way, not knowing what awaited him.
“Let me see you, infant.” Oh, that chill, caressing voice. “Come close. Closer. Close enough. They say that no one can do you lasting harm. How . . . intriguing. Shall we see?”
Another more recent memory: “What a pretty chart. Here are all the Highlord’s dependents lined up so neatly. Does he really need such an aid to memory? Dear me. The written word is so easily destroyed, though, isn’t it?”
And she had thrust the scroll into the fire.
Witch. Bitch.
At least he still had the rough notes in his room at Mount Alban.
Rawneth lived in the upper stories of the tower, but the doors to the lower of these were closed. Only the way to the top level stood open. Kindrie paused at the head of the stair. Open windows all around let in the wind to swirl sheer curtains of dusky purple and deep blue, spangled with stars like the night sky but turned by the afternoon sun into glowing twilight. Through shifting veils he saw movement, heard muffled voices. The Lady had company in her tower.
“My dear,” she was saying, “now is not the right time. I told you so two nights ago. If you succeed today, might not we be blamed too?”
“Nonsense,” said a familiar, confident voice. “I’m too clever for that. Look.”
A dark figure loomed behind the drapes and swept them aside. Sudden sunlight momentarily blinded Kindrie, but he heard the smile in the other’s voice:
“I even have the perfect witness.”
Kindrie caught his breath as his sight returned, haloed around the edges. That curly brown hair, that smooth, young face so full of seeming innocence . . .
Rawneth’s guest was Holly, Lord Hollens of Danior.
IIIt was the second, long, restless day for Torisen, spent waiting for the scrollsman expert to arrive who hopefully could settle this land squabble without a pitched battle. Holly’s people prowled on one side of the contested ground. On the other, the envoy Wither had pitched a pavilion and could be seen in it placidly reading as he waited. His lack of guards was almost an insult. Holly himself, having heard that Randir were already on his side of the river, poaching, had ridden off to hunt them. Torisen wasn’t sorry to see him go. Lord Danior made a very unquiet companion when frustrated.
The sun beat down, unusually hot for the time of year. Gnats rose in swirling clouds from the marshy land. They didn’t bother Torisen—stinging insects never did—but he could hear his guards slapping at themselves and swearing. Either he had brought too many of them or too few—not enough to protect him in case of an assault, too many to make this seem like a casual affair. He had let the Randir maneuver him into placing his prestige behind the dispute. If he couldn’t protect Holly’s interests, his allies would look at him askance. If he did so by breaking law or custom, however, friends and foes alike would have good cause to question his judgment.
Across the plain, Wither looked up from his book and gravely saluted him. Torisen gave him a nod and debated retiring into his own tent for a nap, but that was something he seldom did, as everyone well knew.
He didn’t even have Grimly to bicker with. That morning, there had been a slight tremor and he had sent the wolver to scout the lands north of the keeps with strict instructions to stay in human form so as to give the Randir bowmen no excuse to shoot at him.
Midafternoon brought a warning cry from his guards.
Torisen emerged from his tent to see Adric, Lord Ardeth, splashing toward him over the marshy ground on an exhausted gray mare.
“Really, Adric!” Torisen touched the Whinno-hir’s shoulder, stained nearly black with sweat. “Someone, rub her down and find some firm ground to walk her on until she’s cool. And now, my lord . . .”
He led Adric into the tent and induced him to sit. When he offered the old man wine, Adric took it but absentmindedly, without tasting it. He continued to fidget through the ceremony of welcome, and Torisen’s heart sank.
“Now,” he said finally, “what brings you from Omiroth to randon college to my humble tent in such a lather?”
Adric put down his cup and leaned forward. “I would have been here earlier, but someone slipped nightshade into my evening tipple and I overslept. I’ve talked to my grandson Timmon. He tells me that you gave him Pereden’s ring. Where did you get it?”
Torisen sipped his own wine, mentally bracing himself. He had known ever since he gave the ring and finger to Timmon that this moment was coming.
“My lords, I hope I don’t interrupt.”
A wizened Jaran scrollsman stood at the tent flap, nearsightedly peering inside. “I was at the High Keep examining some rare manuscripts when your summons reached me. Then I had to consult Mount Alban’s library and certain of my colleagues. Sorry if I’m late. Wine? I wouldn’t say no. A hot day, is it not?”
Burr entered and served him while Torisen scrambled to make sense of his sudden appearance. Of course. This was the expert for whom they had all been waiting. As if in confirmation, Wither appeared at the flap.
Adric plucked at Torisen’s sleeve. “About the ring . . .”
“I hope,” the Randir was saying courteously to the scrollsman, “that you come bearing the solution to our little dilemma.”
“It isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems. Some of the older scrolls refer not to the riverbed but to the River Snake’s back, which is said to run all the way from the Silver Steps to the mouth of the river bordering on Nekrien.”
Wither waved this away. “Mere primitive superstitions. What do the charters between Bashti and Hathir say?”
Grimly entered. “Tori, you should see the shape of the land to the north. Oh, and here’s Holly.”
The young Danior lord paused on the threshold of the already crowded tent, his face in shadow. In his coat of blue velvet laced with silver, he was surprisingly well dressed for someone who had spent the day tracking poachers. Apparently he had caught one, for he led a brown-robed figure by a tether around his neck. Torisen met a pair of anxious, pale blue eyes over a white gag.
“Kindrie?”
Holly twitched the lead, making his prisoner stumble forward. “It’s just a runaway acolyte from the Priests’ College. I was about to send him back.”
“That, be damned. He’s my cousin!”
“He’s a bastard, kin to no one.”
Torisen flicked a throwing knife out of his collar, spun Kindrie around, and cut the rope that bound his wrists. The Shanir scrabbled free of the gag.
“Tori,” he croaked, “I saw Lord Danior with Rawneth!”
As Torisen turned, incredulous, toward Holly, he saw the knife in the other’s hand. It darted toward him. His lighter knife turned the other’s blade, but only so far before snapping. As he twisted aside, he heard cloth rip and felt a line of fire across his ribs. Burr swore and lunged to the rescue, only to crash into Wither. Holly yelped. Grimly had bitten him on the leg. He slashed at the wolver, clipping off the tip of one furry ear, then stumbled as Yce barged between his legs. Torisen grabbed his knife hand at the wrist, bent it, and sent him crashing into the table. Wine flew in a crimson arc across Ardeth’s face.
“Oh, I say,” protested the scrollsman, snatching up his own cup.
In the moment that Holly was down, Kindrie threw the remains of experimental powder in his face. His features convulsed.
“Ah-choo!”
Dust flew everywhere, wrecking havoc. Bodies lurched about in paroxysms of sneezing, falling over furniture and each other. The canvas walls bulged and jittered as if the tent were also suffering a fit. Guards outside cried out in alarm. Those who reached the door first, however, also doubled over, coughing and half-blinded with tears.
Inside, only Torisen and Kindrie had had the wits to hold their breaths.
The figure that Torisen pinned writhed under his hands, distorting fantastically. It gasped, sneezed again, and seemed nearly to blow off its own face. An elbow weirdly bent caught Torisen in the chin, knocking him back. Before he could recover, his opponent had lurched out of the tent through the incapacitated guards with the two wolvers in close pursuit.
Torisen also started after him, but stopped when Kindrie fell to his knees, choking.
“. . . cords . . .” wheezed the Shanir, clutching at his throat. “In my . . . soul-image.”
Torisen only saw the rope tether still around Kindrie’s neck, but it had tightened and was digging into the healer’s flesh. When he worked his fingers under it, he found himself grappling with an entire network of tough threads that bound the Shanir from head to foot. A woven mockery of a head like an inflated sack rose behind Kindrie and hissed at Torisen. Then Kindrie found a loose thread and jerked at it. The cords unraveled with a sigh, leaving Torisen with the original rope in his hands. He dropped it as if it were a dead snake.
“Are you all right?”
Kindrie nodded weakly, still clutching his bruised throat.
“I-I didn’t know . . . I didn’t realize . . . all this time, sh-she had me . . .”
Before Torisen could ask what he meant, Holly burst back into the tent with a wolver gripping either arm of his leather hunting jacket.
“What in Perimal’s name . . .” he began, then took in the chaos only beginning to sort itself out inside the tent as various shaken Highborn extricated themselves from the furniture and each other.
Rowan pushed past him and moved quickly to her lord’s side.
“Blackie, you’re bleeding.”
“I know.”
Burr opened Torisen’s coat and shirt to examine the slash across his ribs.
“As usual, m’lord, you’re luckier than you should be,” he said, and handed Torisen a table linen to hold against the seeping wound.
Holly lifted the arm to which Yce was attached and regarded her dangling from it, growling around her mouthful of leather.
“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”
“Release him, Yce, Grimly. D’you think it likely that my own cousin would try to skewer me, much less that he could change from a dress coat to hunting clothes in seconds?”
Grimly rose, assuming a less hairy, somewhat chagrined aspect. “We did lose sight of him in the confusion,” he admitted, “and neither of us could track worth scat with a snout full of that wretched powder. So when we saw M’lord Holly here coming up the plank walk, bold as you please, we just grabbed him.”
“Oh, that’s as clear as mud soup,” said Holly. “I take it that you thought I was an assassin. I also take it by the carving on your precious hide that there was a would-be assassin who looked like me. So, who and how?”
“I think I can explain,” said Kindrie hoarsely, still sitting hunched on the floor, his face as white as his hair.
Torisen gave him a hard look. “One thing among many that I don’t understand,” he said, abruptly changing the topic, “is why you’re here at all.”
“He . . . the other one . . . brought me as a witness to Lord Danior’s presumed perfidy. Beyond that, I’ve been a prisoner in the Priests’ College these past twenty-six days.”
“Did you know about this?” Torisen demanded of the Randir envoy.
Wither shrugged. “I may have heard some rumor, but really, the priests go their own way under my lady’s protection. Besides, the man is a bastard.”
“If anyone says that one more time, I shall wax violent and ruin more perfectly good napkins.”
“Is there anyone here,” asked the scrollsman piteously, “who wants to hear the results of my research?”
“I do at least,” said Wither, with a courteous inclination of his head.
“Well, all complications aside, it comes down to this: the river establishes the boundary between keeps.”
“Thank you.”
Torisen sighed. “That’s it, then. I’m sorry, Holly.”
The earth trembled again, shaking them where they stood, making the planks chatter like teeth under them.
“That was a strong one,” Holly remarked.
The wolver had darted out the door. Now he returned. “Tori, everyone, come look!”
Torisen, on his way out, hesitated at the abstracted, pained look on Kindrie’s face.
“I said the next seizure would kill him,” whispered the healer. “These are that wretched boy’s death throes.”
Outside, a cloud of dust rose over the shoulder of the northern bluff. The far side seemed to have suffered a considerable landslide, and the eastern end had crumbled altogether. Water and debris boiled through the new cut as the Silver raced to regain its old bed, slicing off a chunk of former Randir land for good measure. They watched as the river, fanged with debris and gilded with the sunset, surged around them. Then Torisen turned to Wither.
“Well,” he said, “that’s it.”
Wither made a face. “As you say. This time. Fare you well, my lord.”
On his departure, Adric emerged from the shadows where he had retreated to avoid being trampled in the uproar and to mop off his wine-soaked clothes. “About Pereden’s ring . . .” he said.
Holly shot Torisen a look, then drew himself up with a gulp. “I gave it to the Highlord,” he said. “It was on the finger of a corpse being burned on the common pyre at the Cataracts along with the renegade changers.”
Adric breathed a sigh of relief. “My boy, why didn’t you say so in the first place? Obviously it was worn by the changer who impersonated my dear son. Tori, you should have given it directly to me.”
Torisen meekly agreed.
“If you will come with me, m’lord,” said Holly, scrambling to recover himself, “I would be honored to host you for the night. Tori?”
“I’ll join you later.
Left alone with Kindrie, Torisen searched for and found a bottle with enough wine left in it for two small cups. His side wrenched at him as he bent to pick it up and the stain on the linen grew.
Kindrie moved as if to help him, but Torisen waved him off.
“It’s only a cut. Let’s not push our luck. The question remains: what in Perimal’s name just happened?”
IIIKindrie drew a deep breath. He was still shaken by how deeply Rawneth had tricked him into despair. She had almost stolen everything that he valued most: friends, family, self-respect . . . all the things that the Priests’ College also sought to destroy.
She could have broken me, he thought. She almost did. But not quite.
He accepted the cup of wine, waited until his hands stopped shaking, and then drank from it. Warmth spread outward from his empty stomach. Breakfast had been a long time ago.
“To begin with,” he said, “you were attacked by a changer.”
Torisen snorted. “That much I guessed. I have come up against such creatures before, you know.”
“Yes, of course. I should have started further back. My lord . . . m-my cousin, our great-grandmother Kinzi stitched a letter on the night that she died. A copy came into the hands of the Jaran Matriarch and she translated it for us.”
“Who, pray tell, is ‘us’?”
Kindrie heard the warning in his voice like steel half unsheathed. Who knew what, and why hadn’t he been told?
“Kirien, Ashe, I, and . . . and your sister’s sneak Graykin. I told Jame myself what we had learned and was going to tell you when I got to Gothregor. As you see, I never made it.”
“Then tell me now.”
Kindrie gulped, tried to organize his thoughts, and began again, adding as many details as he knew. When he was done, he anxiously regarded the Highlord who sat before him frowning.
“Let’s see if I understand this correctly,” said Torisen. “Kinzi writes, no, stitches a letter to her lover Adiraina but is interrupted by Bashtiri shadow assassins. Both the letter and the contract proving your legitimacy are sewn onto the back of Tieri’s death banner.”
He shot Kindrie an unreadable look. “Congratulations, by the way, on not being a bastard and welcome to our small but interestingly inbred family.”
“Thank you. I think.”
“Condolences on your paternity, though.”
“To continue, the banner disintegrates, dropping its secret into Jame’s hands. She turns both the fragmentary letter and the contract over to you, and you seek a translation of the former from Lady Trishien. She reports as follows: Kinzi saw Rawneth and Greshan together in the Moon Garden several days after the latter’s death. They made love, in the midst of which Greshan’s face changed, presumably into Gerridon’s. Jame now reveals that last Autumn’s Eve she had a series of visions of that night in which she recognized Rawneth’s ‘servant’ as the infamous and apparently immortal changer Keral. She assumes, therefore, that Keral was Rawneth’s lover and the father of Kenan. When Kinzi summoned Randir mother and son to Gothregor for Adiraina to test the bloodlines of the latter, Rawneth forestalled her by taking out a contract with the shadow assassins on all the Knorth women. Hence the Massacre. But it doesn’t end there. To bring us up to date, I have just been attacked in the vicinity of Wilden by a changer. According to the above reasoning, Lord Randir has changer blood. Therefore, I have been attacked by Lord Randir, who has since run away.”
Kindrie sagged in his chair, feeling the emptiness of defeat.
This time when he had first come into Torisen’s presence, he had felt a subtle change in the other’s attitude toward him—not quite acceptance, but something close, and he had wondered: could the Highlord really be changing his attitude toward the Shanir? To know for sure, he would have to touch Torisen’s soul-image, but he had specifically been warned not to do that. Perhaps that harsh voice behind the locked door only waited like a snake in a hole for the provocation to strike. He thought, now, that he heard it stir.
“You don’t believe me,” he said numbly.
“On the contrary,” said Torisen, dropping his sarcastic tone, “I do. But will anyone else?”
“Your sister does. So do Kirien, Ashe, and Trishien.”
“Three at least of whom are sensible women. However, I have to deal with the High Council, and that will require solid proof.”
“Jame said the same thing.”
“Four sensible women, then. The attack on me is nothing. A farce, as it turned out, thanks to whatever it was that you blew into that changer’s face. The slaughter of the Knorth women, though . . .”
Torisen ran a hand through his hair, ruffling white streaks in the black. “We seem to have fallen into an old song:
‘Formidable foes (female or male)Bought the Bashtiri, blades for hire,To kill the Knorth. Unanswered questionsHaunt the wide halls of the High Lord’s home:Who kens old quarrels that cost us Kinzi?Who now will whisper a name to the wind?’“Do we really now have the answers to those questions and, more dangerous still, a name? If so, what do we do with them? What happened here today is confusing at best. Someone who appeared to be Holly tried to stick a knife in me. No one but you and I saw his contortions after you spread that powder. It’s a long reach from there back to the slaughter of the Knorth ladies. Even with proof, we’re talking about one of the most powerful houses in the Kencyrath, an ally of the Caineron. To challenge it could lead to civil war.”
“So all of those blood prices will go unpaid?”
“I didn’t say that. My instinct is that today’s assassination attempt and the previous one were clumsy crimes of opportunity, instigated by Kenan, with Rawneth no more prepared to follow them up than I am to pursue her. The time isn’t ripe.”
“And when it is?”
“Oh, then we’ll see.” Torisen’s expression made Kindrie shiver. “Sooner or later, there will be a reckoning.”