CHAPTER V
The High Council
Winter 90–100I
Now came the harshest days of winter.
Everyone huddled close to the fires at night under mounds of fur, and still an exposed finger or nose might turn ominously white by morning. Bare bodies threw on clothes in a hopping frenzy. Sheets of ice sealed wash basins. Food arrived at the breakfast table already cold. After the morning rally in the square, cadets hustled back indoors to make their way to classes by the interior hallway. Lessons proceeded as normally as possible if rather fast to generate heat for chilled limbs. Weapons, strategy, history, the Senethar, the dread (and freezing) writing class . . .
Nonetheless, everyone worked hard, all too aware that with spring would come the final tests that would determine not only if they passed Tentir but where their posting would be the coming year.
“Oh, let it be the Southern Wastes!” groaned many a miserable cadet. “No more winter, ever!”
At first, horses plunged about outside in drifts up to their shaggy bellies, muzzles clumped with ice, while cadets floundered out to them dragging sleds full of hay and ice-mantled water.
Soon, however, they had to be moved inside. The subterranean stable filled to overflowing; the extras were quartered in the great hall under the banners of the major houses. The air thickened with their steaming breath and droppings while the horse-master moved among them checking for strangles or any other deadly, communicable complaint. In passing, he patted the dappled flank of the Whinno-hir Bel-tairi and wondered how her companion was doing out in the snow. The last time he had seen Death’s-head, the rathorn had grown a pelt as shaggy as a wolf’s, but still, all that cold, cold ivory . . . !
Jame missed working with the colt and felt his aching cold through the bond between them enough to deepen her own shudders.
However, she was also glad not to go outside Tentir more than necessary.
For one thing, she had proved to be more susceptible to frostbite than most Kendar, not surprisingly given her slighter build. Bits of her froze almost casually, over and over, and each time had to be reawakened to throbbing life.
For another thing, she didn’t want to encounter the Dark Judge, if he really was haunting the college’s environs. The colt’s senses gave fleeting suggestions of this, but in general, rathorn and giant cat kept their distance from each other. Some nights Jame thought she heard that terrible voice pleated with the wind, wailing wordlessly. Such hunger, such desolation! Was he only lashing out in his eternal pain, or did he think that judging her would make him whole again? Certainly, he longed to pass judgment on such a nemesis as she had proven to be, however innocent. What really drove him mad, however, was that he couldn’t strike at the root of evil itself, Gerridon. In an agony of self-revelation, the great cat had told her that no Arrin-ken could enter the halls of the Master’s monstrous house swallowed by Perimal Darkling until the coming of the Tyr-ridan.
Another memory, another voice, this one harsh and halting: Ashe had said that, according to legend, only a Kencyr could kill one of the Three. Jame feared that she was becoming the incarnation of That-Which-Destroys, the Third Face of God. It would be ironic if the Judge were to blast his last chance at revenge by destroying her, and it would indeed be the last: once there had been many potential Knorth nemeses—now there was only her.
But time passed and the howling on the heights abated, if it had ever been there at all. Jame began to doubt what she had seen and heard, both with the Dark Judge and with Vant among the Burning Ones. How likely was the latter, after all? A trick of the firelight, a shard of free-floating guilt.
As for the blind Arrin-ken, let him mind his own business. Be damned if she was going to run scared of a phantom bully, however bloodthirsty.
Meanwhile, she continued to work with Bear, after badgering the Commandant into letting her into the randon’s cell to deal with his overgrown toenails and claws. She found that since she had last seen him, he had virtually destroyed his lodgings. Had he finally grown aware of how squalid they were, or simply succumbed to an extreme case of cabin fever? She thought that she saw improvement in him now if only in that he no longer tried to kill her during lessons and began to teach again. Once in a while, he actually spoke a word or two. Was it only wishful thinking, or had the scar on his forehead lengthened as his cleft skull finally began to close? Still, how could he really improve while tightly mewed in and isolated as he was most of the time?
Timmon continued to court her, if a bit absent-mindedly. Now that his instructors were holding him to schedule, he had less time and energy for amorous pursuits. As the easiest course, he had again taken Narsa into his bed. Jame worried about that. Surely the Kendar knew that he was only using her, but he had woven his charms so well that she probably didn’t care. Whenever Jame saw her she looked happy, though with a certain uneasy, feverish gleam in her eyes.
Gorbel grumbled through his days, making up for his clumsiness with dogged determination, often with the pook Twizzle in the corner regarding him button-eyed and panting, occasionally shifting within his skin the better to deal with one arcane itch or another.
Fash watched everyone with his wide, white smile and his cold eyes.
At last came a day when the wind changed from the north to the south. Although snow still lay thick on the ground, something hinted at stealthy growth in the dark and at awakenings. Water dripped. Snow slid from boughs in miniature avalanches, echoed by massive ones from the heights. Cadets shoved back their hoods, sniffed, and grinned at each other. They had to endure one last blizzard, but after that the sun shone bright and the snow began to creep back into the shadows. A bird sang tentatively, then another.
Soon it would be time for the High Council meeting.
IITorisen slid into the dress coat that Burr held for him and ran his scarred hands down its sleek panels. His Kendar servant had talked him into ordering new clothes from Kothifir for himself as well as for his garrison—the former a luxury about which he still felt uneasy. Black satin, richly embroidered with silver thread by his own people . . . they wanted to show him off. A pity that he didn’t fill such extravagance better.
“I can still count your ribs,” muttered Burr, mirroring his thoughts.
“So? No one else can, under all of this finery. Come summer, shall I try to pork up like Lord Caineron?”
“Huh.”
Torisen’s hand slid over his pocket and the slight bulge there. Pereden’s ring and finger. How meaningless everything seemed compared to those, the dull sparks that might overthrow his entire world. If he gave them to Adric, how was he going to explain where they had come from and why they were here? He couldn’t lie without the death of honor, without which there was nothing.
If he hid them, though, Adric’s search would tear the Riverland apart.
Burn them? His study fire wasn’t hot enough, but Marc’s would be. He should have thought of that before. However, what would that do to Adric?
Damn Holly anyway—a good idea at the wrong time. What if his cousin were to confess what he knew? That, after all, wasn’t much. He shouldn’t have recognized Peri in the first place. Much less did he know how Adric’s heir had come to be on the common pyre. Would Adric recognize his innocence, though? A blood feud between the Ardeth and the Danior would destroy the latter and only benefit the Randir, who would love to take over tiny Shadow Rock so temptingly placed just across the river from them.
But Torisen couldn’t permit that either . . . could he?
Wouldn’t that be better than admitting his role in that wretched boy’s death? Because that would lead to total civil war, the probable extinction of his own house, and quite possibly the end of the Kencyrath as he knew it.
One tried and tried to do the right thing.
Damn you, Pereden. I will not let you destroy everything that I’ve worked so hard to build. I will not.
Burr produced an iron box and opened it. They both regarded the Kenthiar, that mysterious, narrow, silver collar set with a gem of shifting hue. Only the true Highlord could wear it; anyone else hazarded his neck, not to mention his head. Torisen picked it up, gingerly, wary of its inner surfaces. Was he still fit to be the leader of his people? Had he ever been? Well, the accursed thing had accepted him before. He put it around his neck and snapped shut the hinges. Both he and Burr let out their breaths, which neither had realized he was holding.
Voices drifted up the stairs from the Council Chamber below. The lords were beginning to gather.
“Now,” he said to Burr, “we go down.”
A cloth had been spread over the ebony table to protect the glass beneath and both furnace doors were shut, leaving the chamber pleasantly warm on this cool, late winter day. Only one lord had arrived so far with his retinue in attendance. He turned. It was Adric, his skin darkened by the Southern Wastes in sharp contrast to his white hair and blue eyes.
“Ganth!” he exclaimed.
A chill went down Torisen’s spine. So too the old Jaran lord, Jedrak, had greeted him out of the depths of his sudden senility before the Host had marched out for the Cataracts. He finished his own descent to the floor and crossed it to his old mentor. As he did so, a middle-aged man bent to whisper in Lord Ardeth’s ear.
Adric drew back, waving a thin, fastidious hand. “Dari, please. Your breath would stun a horse.”
So this was Adric’s grandson and would-be lordan regent. He might have been handsome if not for his prissy expression, half disapproval, half an effort to move his lips as little as possible when he spoke. His teeth, briefly glimpsed, ranged from newborn white nubs to rotting black stumps, the rest a gray all the more distressing set against red, swollen gums. Trinity, what could cause a man’s own body to turn against him so painfully? The healer’s use of soul-images suggested that the body reflected the spirit. Was Dari really so ambitious that he would even devour himself? So far in his grandfather’s absence, however, he had run his house well. Prune-faced or not, he was a competent man.
“Not Ganth. Torisen.”
He took the old man’s hand and kissed it. “How are you, Adric?”
The blue eyes blinked, then refocused. “Torisen. Of course. I am well, but will be so much better when I find Pereden. You aren’t a father. You don’t know what it’s like, to lose a son.”
Torisen almost asked, “To lose in what sense?”
How d’you think my father will react when he hears what I’ve done, and why? Pereden’s voice jeered in his memory.
A little boy lost, long before Adric had realized that he was gone, now to be found again in what sense?
Torisen sat down beside the Ardeth lord, all too aware of the lump in his pocket.
“It won’t be long now, though. I haven’t felt so close to him since the Cataracts.”
“Really, Grandfather, I keep telling you that Pereden is dead.”
The old fire snapped into the Highborn’s eyes. “Of course he is. D’you take me for a senile fool?”
His followers shifted uneasily. Torisen noted that some stood behind Dari, but more behind the old lord.
A scrap of sound near the stairwell, and there was Timmon, looking profoundly uneasy.
“Pardon, my lords, but I thought I heard someone call me,” he said.
Adric saw him, and his face lit up. “Pereden, there you are at last!”
The cadet blanched and his gaze darted among the other Ardeth, looking for help. No one but Dari would meet his eyes, and that with a glower. To be fair, he did strongly resemble his father, from his golden hair to the trim fit of his garnet and red dress coat.
Peri should have attended Tentir, Torisen thought. In Timmon he saw a much less insouciant, feckless boy than he had first met when delivering Jame to the randon college the previous summer. Had Jame also changed as much?
Timmon gulped. “Here I am, my lord,” he said.
IIIThe lordans and their attendants had gathered in Gothregor’s outer ward, awaiting their lords’ summons. The keep towered over them, but they stayed in the warm sunlight, avoiding its cold shadow. Some talked warily. Others stood haughtily aloof. All wore dazzling dress coats in shades from claret wine to cloud-flecked blue, from autumn gold to spring green freckled with flowers.
As Jame and Brier entered the ward, Rue made an unhappy sound behind them when she saw the others’ brave display. Clearly, she thought that her own lordan could have outshone them all with the Lordan’s Coat, but Jame had burned that haunted garment, relic of her detested uncle Greshan, earlier that winter—a necessary deed considering that his soul had been trapped in it, ready to possess whoever wore it. Nothing else in Greshan’s adopted wardrobe matched its splendor, nor had there been a chance yet to spend any of Jame’s new allowance on suitable finery. Jame had said that she didn’t care as long as her cadet jacket was clean and not too obviously patched. Now, however, she felt plain and out of place, a crow among peacocks.
Speaking of peacocks, there was Gorbel in a bright blue coat trimmed with lumps of coral and silver filigree, flanked by his five-commander Obidin and Fash.
“I had to bring him,” he had told Jame earlier, speaking of the latter. “Father ordered it.”
Jame wondered, not for the first time, what Lord Caineron was planning. He had made it clear that he wasn’t happy with Gorbel’s progress in discrediting her—enough to replace him? Now would be a suitably dramatic time.
To one side, two identical boys dressed in sunlit wheat gold were teasing a sullen third in storm gray flecked with opal lightning.
“The Edirr and Coman Lordans,” Rue whispered in Jame’s ear. Although a border brat, the cadet liked to show off her secondhand knowledge of Riverland politics, which might or might not be accurate.
“Do the Edirr always do everything in twos?” asked Jame, thinking of the Lords Essien and Essiar who shared power in their house.
“More often than not. The Edirr produce so many twins that it saves trouble.”
A little boy, perhaps four years old, pelted shrieking between them, pursued by a harried Kendar.
“Danior’s son and heir,” said Rue wisely.
Meanwhile Jame had spotted a familiar face across the ward and went to greet Kirien. White-haired Kindrie was with her.
“I came to see the show,” he told his cousin, smiling.
Jame thought that she had never seen him look better, a long way from the tattered scarecrow he had been when they had first met. Perhaps Kirien was to thank for that. The Jaran Lordan smiled, as tranquil and handsome as ever. She too wore a dress coat, dove-gray with silver trim. With her dark, cropped hair and slender build, it wasn’t at all obvious that she was female, not that she dressed so as to disguise the fact; these were simply a more elegant version of her working clothes as a scrollswoman of Mount Alban, who hadn’t been overly pleased to be chosen lordan by the rest of her house. Few of the lords had guessed her sex. What they would say when they found out didn’t bear thinking about.
“You’ve sent us an avid scholar,” she said.
“Who?”
“Your servant Graykin. He’s been reading everything he can find and questioning every scrollsman or singer he can catch about the history of the Southern Wastes.”
Jame was taken aback. After the trauma inflicted on him by Greshan’s coat, she had only hoped to keep Gray busy until the weather made travel to Kothifir safe, always assuming that she graduated to follow him.
“How is he getting them to cooperate?” she asked, remembering that most scrollsmen operated on a barter system when it came to sharing information.
“I’ve been able to help a bit there,” said Kindrie. “Y’see, Index has been plagued with joint pains recently, beyond the help of his herb shed to cure.”
Index, who had gotten his nickname because he knew where every arcane scrap of information was stored, be it in scroll, scholar, or singer. Index, whose knowledge had allowed him to amass a fabulous store of barter points.
“So you’ve been trading him points for your help as a healer. I appreciate that.”
Kindrie’s ears turned faintly pink. “Consider it recompense for helping me to escape from the Priests’ College.”
Jame felt like blushing herself when she remembered how harshly she had treated him on the journey to Restormir to rescue Gray, all because she hadn’t been able to stomach his hieratic background, never mind that it had been involuntary. That prejudice at least seemed to have faded, at least where Kindrie was concerned. Would that Tori could say as much about his feelings toward the Shanir.
Timmon emerged from the keep, looking shaken.
“This is awful,” he said to Jame, hardly seeming to care who else heard. “Grandfather is convinced that I’m Pereden. Dari keeps trying to tell him differently, and he keeps insisting that ‘blood and bone, a father knows.’ You should have seen Dari glare. He spat a rotten tooth at me.”
Fash had drifted within earshot. “Gone soft, has he? Poor old man. Now everyone will feel free to take advantage of him.”
Timmon bridled. “If you mean me . . .”
“Fash,” said Gorbel. “Shut up.”
Holly’s small son rushed past again, this time in pursuit of Gorbel’s pook, shrieking, “Doggie!”
“Here now, stop that,” snapped the Caineron Lordan, and hurried off to his pet’s rescue.
Fash and Obidin stayed.
“Oh,” the former said to Timmon with his wide, white grin, “I didn’t mean you, Lordan. Your cousin Dari, now . . .”
Timmon drew himself up, projecting more strength than Jame had yet seen in him.
“That is house business, Caineron. Butt out.”
Fash actually recoiled a step, but no more. His grin, having flickered, came back. “And you, M’lady Kirien. Don’t you think that the High Council deserves the truth?”
Kirien answered, still serene. “D’you think I’ve hidden anything from any of them? They see what they expect to see. Unlike you, I hide little.”
Fash flushed, but his retort stuck in his throat. He knew better than to challenge a Shanir like Kirien whose power lay in being able to compel the truth. What was his game anyway, trying to pick one fight after another with his superiors? Gorbel would have stopped him, but Obidin just stood there, radiating mild interest. She wondered if, like a certain late, unlamented Randir, Fash’s own talent lay in temptation.
Would you tempt the destroyer in me, Caineron?
As if he had heard her thought, he turned his white teeth on her.
“I see that you shun the flatteries of fashion, Lordan. How . . . modest of you. But that’s not quite correct: you may wear your cadet jacket—very dashingly, I might add—but you dress your hair Merikit style. Let’s see: smooth on the right but, oh my, twenty braids on the left, all twisted into one down the back. Have you really killed twenty hillmen?”
The simple answer to that was “no.” Jame had no idea how many Noyat she had personally slain during their raid on the Merikit village, but the Merikit women had credited her with all of their kills as well and Gran Cyd herself had first braided the record of the enemy dead into Jame’s hair, slathered with their blood. Why had she worn it into Gothregor? Perhaps to compensate for her plain coat, or perhaps in defiance because other cadets had started to gossip about her adventures among the so-called savages. Only now did it occur to her that those rumors might have been started by Fash, one of the few at Tentir who would know what those braids signified.
“What happens in the hills is no business of yours,” she told him coldly.
Satisfaction glinted in his eyes. He knew that he had drawn blood.
“Ah, but then hillmen die so easily,” he said, “like the dumb brutes that they are.”
“That’s all they are to you, isn’t it? Mere animals.”
Kirien touched her arm. “Gently, gently . . .”
The pook dashed past again, followed by Danior’s son shrieking, “Doggie, doggie, doggie!” followed by a panting Gorbel.
“That’s right,” said Fash, answering Jame, flashing an even wider smile at her that was more like the bearing of teeth. “Pilfering vermin, to be exact. A waste of skin.”
Jame remembered the tattooed Merikit hides strewn like rugs about Lord Caineron’s quarters. Fash and his ilk had supplied those. She thought of Prid’s tawny mane or Gran Cyd’s auburn braids spread across the floor under Caldane’s slippered feet. Dark anger stirred in her.
“Half hill and half hall,” mused Fash, eyeing her slyly askance. “How many classes d’you reckon you’ve missed, playing savage in the wilds?”
“Do you think me ill-learned? Yet I am still at the college, after two culls.”
“As am I. The randon, Trinity bless them, who are they to deny a lord’s heir?”
“Now listen here . . .” began Timmon ominously.
“Oh, no one questions you, m’lord.”
“But you imply that they do me.” Jame was too angry now for caution, although part of her mind noted the Caineron’s manipulations and urged her back. But this . . . this beast had put his knife to decent Merikit skin and had lived to laugh about it.
“Challenge me,” she heard herself say, “anytime, anywhere, and we will see.”
Fash bowed himself away. “Oh yes. We undoubtedly will.”
“That,” said Kirien, “was not wise.”
Jame sighed, letting the rage flow out of her taut limbs and her nails resheathe. “No, it wasn’t. But one has to take a stand somewhere.”
IVAt last the summons came and the lordans trooped up to the Council Chamber. There the lords sat around the table in coats of brocade, silk, and embroidery heavy with gold, far more resplendent even than their heirs.
Torisen stood framed by the empty window with his hands clasped behind him, a figure of slim, simple elegance in black and silver.
His beard startled Jame, who hadn’t seen him since the Winter Wars. She wondered if he had grown it to disguise the hollows of his cheeks. Nothing dire that she knew about was going on. The job of Highlord was apparently wearing enough in itself when taken seriously as, of course, Torisen would. She wished that she could make him laugh. Even more, she wished that they could simply meet as the equals that they first had been. After all, they were twins even if Tori was a good ten years older than she.
But she was also a Highborn female, less than any lord, more and yet somehow simultaneously less than just about everyone else. Then too, she was also a randon cadet and her brother’s heir, an anomaly anyway anyone cared to look at it.
She could feel the lords’ eyes seek her out, some disapproving, some speculative. Caldane, Lord Caineron, glowered, but with a hint of eagerness in his stance, like a cat that has spotted its prey. His pudgy, beringed fingers drummed the table, stilled, and drummed again. Only Brandan and Cousin Holly looked at all friendly, the former nodding to her as she entered the room, the latter raising a finger in greeting.
“Before we start the business for which we are gathered,” said the Highlord, “it is customary for us to present our heirs to the full Council and for me to give a token of approval to each. Lord Brandan, I understand that your nephew is absent on official business.”
“Yes.” Torisen’s closest neighbor leaned forward, his face nearly as dark as Adric’s and more seamed, although he was a much younger man. Not for Brant, the well-kept smoothness of the Ardeth lord; summer and winter, he worked beside his Kendar in the fields and in the Southern Wastes. “I left Boden in Kothifir, ready to finalize our troop contracts according to the decisions made here today.”
“Lord Randir . . .”
Kenan, Lord Randir, leaned back nonchalantly in his chair. As usual, his haughty features reminded Jame of something, or someone, but she couldn’t quite pin it down. Could she be thinking of Shade, his only child? “I have decades yet to rule my house. Ask for my choice of lordan fifty years from now.”
“Very well.” Torisen dipped his long, scar-laced fingers into a leather sack, drew out a chunky piece of glass, and glanced at the emblem stamped on it.
“Coman.”
The Coman Lordan came forward, with a slight air of truculence: his house hadn’t yet decided if it supported the Knorth or the Caineron. The Edirr twins came trying to look serious but failing. Danior’s little son made almost everyone smile as he dashed up in his red coat crying, “Cousin Tori! Cousin Tori!” Timmon approached to soft applause from his beaming grandfather and a murderous look from his cousin Dari.
Torisen paused, looking troubled.
“Do you swear to uphold the honor of your house, to put its interests always before your own?”
Timmon blinked. No one else had been asked such a question. He glanced at Adric who was mouthing, “Go on, Pereden!” then back at the Highlord.
“Honor break me, darkness take me, I do.”
“Then I entrust you with this. After all, it’s primarily the business of your house. Do with it as you will.” Instead of a glass token, he reached into a pocket, drew out something wrapped in linen, and handed it to the Ardeth Lordan.
Timmon retreated, looking confused. His bewilderment only grew when he examined the contents of the packet. Jame wanted to see too, but then Torisen called out, “Knorth.”
A restive stir passed among the lords. Caldane gave it voice:
“Do you really mean to uphold this travesty? She may be your sister, but what kind of a fool picks a lady for his lordan?”
“As for her right to wear that coat,” added the Randir, lazily fingering his wine glass, “what lord sends a lady to become a randon cadet?
They’ve planned this, Jame thought as a murmur rose from the table, and most of the Council agree.
“It’s not even as if she can properly defend herself,” Caldane continued, leaning forward like a bulldog on a short leash, lower jaw thrust forward. “Put it to the test if you doubt me.”
Torisen’s troubled gaze sought her out. Can you deal with this challenge? his eyes asked her.
She met his worried look steadily and gave a brief nod. If I can’t, both of us are wasting our time.
“So be it.”
“Will I do as a challenger?” Fash ambled forward. “You did say ‘anytime, anyplace,’ ” he reminded her with an amiable smirk.
So this was why he had taunted her in the outer ward, doubtless with Caldane’s approval. She glanced at Gorbel, who had regained his errant pook and was holding it apparently upside down. If she failed, who would Lord Caineron present as his heir?
“I said it, I meant it,” she said to Fash. “Choose your weapon.”
“Swords, then.”
Oh, schist. Fash knew perfectly well that swordcraft was her weakest discipline. Still, she accepted the blade thrown to her, and found it poorly balanced.
Before she could complain, Fash was on her with a vicious down cut. She blocked it, and felt the weight of the blow up to her shoulder. He slashed; she ducked.
This was hopeless. Attack.
He easily foiled her advance and, with a twist of his wrist, disarmed her.
A sigh arose from the onlookers, half satisfaction, half relief, but it changed to exclamations of protest as Fash lunged for her throat.
She turned her evasion into a backward somersault, kicking him in the face as she went over. He staggered with a bloody nose, cursing. Another backflip put her temporarily out of his reach. There had to be some way to defend herself. Under a nearby bench, neatly stowed, was Marc’s glassmaking gear. She snatched out the leather apron and wrapped it around her left arm, just in time to baffle another thrust. Whatever his original intentions, to pink or merely to humiliate her, that kick to the face had infuriated the man. Now he was out for blood. Well, so was she.
Jame snapped the apron’s braided belt like a whip, slashing his forehead. It wasn’t much of a cut but it bled profusely, hindering his sight. He swung wildly. She evaded with water-flowing, channeling his blow aside. As he staggered, momentarily off balance, she stepped in and slammed the heel of her palm into his nose, this time breaking it with an audible crunch. He couldn’t see, nor could he breathe except through his mouth, and blood was streaming into that fit to choke him. Jame circled warily. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Torisen watching with tightly folded arms, as if restraining himself. Fash swung again, this time clipping her shoulder. Cloth and skin ripped. The cut wasn’t much, but Rue was in for more darning. She glimpsed the straw-headed cadet to one side, fast in Brier’s grip as if struggling to intervene.
Time to end this.
She snaked the belt around Fash’s sword hand and jerked. The blade flew free. Lords ducked. It crashed down on the table and skidded to a stop, its point facing Caldane. The Caineron lord recoiled.
“Hic!”
A look of panic turned his florid face blotchy. He grabbed the arms of his heavy chair and hung on like a drowning man.
“Hic!”
The chair started to rise, with him in it.
“HIC!”
Gorbel dropped the pook and quickly rounded the table to stand behind his father. With his hands on Caldane’s shoulders, he brought his weight to bear and forced him down. Brandan (who didn’t like wine) offered his cup of cider. Gorbel took it and poured it down his father’s throat.
“. . . hic . . .”
The chair settled.
Meanwhile Fash angrily tried to wipe the blood off his face, although both forehead and nose continued to bleed. Jame stood ready with her leather shield and the belt, which she continued to twitch experimentally, trying to master its ungainly length and balance.
“Yield?”
He sputtered, fighting to regain control of himself.
“An . . . interesting demonstration, to make use of whatever crude means one finds at hand. And we all thought that your fighting style was so pure.”
“Never assume. What works, works.”
Torisen unfolded his arms and took a deep breath.
“I believe that my lordan has proved her point. Now, if we may proceed . . .”
Jame put aside Marc’s apron and belt. The cut on her shoulder stung. Would these petty tests never end? Then again, she thought, glancing at Gorbel, not so petty after all, for either of them. As for Fash, an old friend had said it long ago: To such a man, she would always be a lure and a trap, because he would never take her seriously.
But her brother was holding out the emblem of his acceptance. She stepped forward to receive it.
“Doggie!”
The pook hurtled between them, pursued by a miniature whirlwind in red. The latter knocked the glass token out of Torisen’s hand and Jame, recoiling, stepped on it. Crunch. Both regarded the shattered remains.
“Can we share anything without breaking it?” murmured Torisen. Then he sighed. “So be it.” Reaching into a pocket he drew out a small, feline carving, and gave it to Jame.
She stared at it. “Oh. I’d forgotten all about this.”
“I didn’t.”
Jame retreated with her prize, bemused.
Torisen dipped into the sack and drew out the next-to-last piece of glass.
“Caineron.”
Caldane still clutched the arms of his chair but had stopped hiccupping. He glared at the gory, snuffling spectacle that was Fash, then turned to Gorbel. “Well, go on. It seems, after all, that you’re the best of a poor lot.”
Gorbel approached the Highlord and stolidly received his token.
“Jaran.”
Kirien had been standing thoughtfully to one side. Now she shrugged as if making up her mind, slipped off her gray coat, and approached Torisen in a discreet but still revealing white shirt.
Exclamations of surprise and horror rose from some (but not all) of the lords. “It can’t be.” “It is!” “Another damned female!”
“So what if it is?” Kedan, acting lord of the Jaran, waved off the outraged faces turned toward him. “Jedrak made his choice and the rest of his house supports it. If the Highlord does too, what right do any of you have to protest against it?”
Torisen handed Kirien the token. “You picked a fine time to unveil,” he said, under cover of a growing storm of outrage.
“Unnatural, perverse . . .” “. . . bad enough that the Knorth have run mad, but the Jaran . . . !” “. . . rathorns and Whinno-hir, living together . . .”
Kirien smiled. “They had to find out sooner or later, for those who hadn’t already guessed. Not that it was ever meant to be a secret. ‘Observe, describe, learn,’ we Jaran say. As it is, your sister diverts attention from me as I do from her. Let them fight us both, or neither.”
Torisen considered this.
“I expect, when I have time to think, that I’ll be grateful.”
VLater, Jame showed the statuette to Timmon and Gorbel. “We fought over it as children until it broke. I kept the hind leg . . .”
Until the changer Keral had taken it from her and dropped it into the fire over her furious protests.
“No mementos for you, brat. This is your home now.”
“. . . until I lost it. What did you get, Timmon?”
The Ardeth opened the linen packet and showed them.
Gorbel peered at the contents. “A fire-cured finger and a cracked ring? I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I except—I think—this is my father’s ring.”
“And his finger? If so, how did the Highlord get it?”
“I don’t know. I can’t guess. He said that it was my house’s business. ‘Do with it what you will.’ ”
Jame wasn’t sure that her brother had done a wise thing. She remembered her dream of Tori breaking Pereden’s neck and of the pyre at the Cataracts from which someone had taken what were surely these relics. Since Adric believed that he had found his living son in Timmon, he would presumably no longer continue his bone hunt and would hopefully resume control of his house. She heard again the Ardeth lord’s clear voice rising above the uproar over Kirien’s “unmasking”: “Be that as it may, we still have business to discuss.”
In everything not touching on Pereden, he seemed to be all right, although no doubt Dari would continue to press for his replacement. But if Adric or Timmon were ever to learn the truth . . .
“Huh,” said Gorbel. “You two have all the luck. All I got was this dumb chunk of glass.”