“Here!”
Ranger Quill tossed her the ball, which nearly knocked her out of the saddle. Trinity, but the thing was heavy. What did they stuff it with anyway? Bel wheeled and sprinted toward the opposite goal, but regulars intercepted and shoved her nearly into the crowd of onlookers. Faces flashed past, split open with shouts. Bel shied, uneasy at so many people on her blind side. Jame tried to pass the ball to ranger Erim, but it was caught by a Caineron skirmisher. The regulars formed a flying wedge around him. They swept aside Killy and plunged across the cadets’ goal to a roar from the crowd.
Both sides huddled to plan their next assault.
“I’m no good at this,” Jame said. “I only weaken the team.”
“Too late to replace you,” said Brier, speaking with the ruthless preoccupation of the team’s captain. A welt ran down her face where Amberley had struck it and one eye was turning black. “Stay on the edge of the action. The rest of you, pass to her only if no one else is in the clear.”
Chagrined, Jame retreated to her post as a ranger.
Again the horses clashed, but this time Niall and Mint were brought down. Amberley wasn’t the only one carrying a crook-whip. One of the horses scrambled to its feet or rather to three of them as the fourth dangled useless with a shattered canon bone.
Too rough, Jame thought. Too rough. What do they want—blood?
Damson rode up next to her. “Ten, they aren’t playing fair. What should I do?”
“The judge determines fairness.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s Caineron.”
The field seemed to shift before Jame’s eyes, not cadet against regular but Knorth against Caineron, with her five-commander caught in the middle.
“Watch out for Brier,” she told Damson.
The ball dropped back into play and the horses charged it. Damson rode to Brier’s right, gashing her mount’s sides to keep up. Crook-whips flailed and Brier’s horse screamed, floundering. Then confusion seized the combatants as they found themselves inexplicably beating each other. Brier’s chestnut recovered and surged out of the confining circle.
The ball, meanwhile, had fallen into cadet hands. Jame paced Quill as he charged down the field toward the Caineron goal. Bel startled the goalkeeper by streaking under his nose, and Quill broke through to score.
One to one.
“So far, so good,” panted Dar as they huddled again, “except that Niall is out with a downed horse. We have time for one more win before our set is over.”
Or for one more loss, thought Jame.
Brier’s chestnut was bleeding at the shoulders and flanks from whip blows, likewise his rider across the brow where bright blood matted her dark red hair and dripped in her eyes.
“I’ll take the ball this time,” she said, impatiently wiping her face. “Cover me.”
Jame withdrew, apprehensive, to her ranger’s position.
The horses rushed together a third time. Brier swooped down from the saddle to snatch the ball out from under Amberley’s nose. The Caineron wheeled in pursuit. She surged up on Brier’s left side and bent low to swing a borrowed crook. It caught the chestnut’s hock. The horse stumbled and fell. Brier rolled clear clutching the ball. She threw it to Damson, who swept past toward the goal. Instead of following, Amberley rounded on Brier as she rose, intent, it seemed, on riding her down. Brier dodged and back the Caineron came, whipping her horse’s flank.
Jame cut between them.
“Up!” she cried, and Brier, grabbing her hand, swung onto Bel’s back. The Whinno-hir staggered under their joint weight, but gamely swerved toward the boundary. People scrambled out of the way as she plowed into them. Amberley reined in just short of the crowd and spun back toward the action, but too late: shielded by cadet rangers, Damson had dodged past the goalkeeper and carried the ball between the posts for the winning score.
The judge threw down his baton. “Game!”
Jame extricated Bel from the onlookers and Brier slid to the ground.
“That wasn’t necessary,” she said.
“Maybe not, but it made me feel better.”
CHAPTER XIII
Dreams and Nightmares
Autumn 50–Winter 14
I
WITH THE END of the autumn harvest, preparations for winter began in the Riverland. Barley was threshed, chimneys cleaned, meat smoked and salted. All of the outer ward garden at Gothregor had been gleaned except for the mangel-wurzel destined for fodder or, if necessary, for soup; but it needn’t come to the latter. For the first time, Torisen could buy what he lacked, with enough left over for the odd luxury. However, as with many a man suddenly come into wealth, he hesitated to spend any more than was absolutely required. Aerulan’s dowry arrived in regular installments, most of which went into an iron box shoved into a corner.
“You really could afford to buy more clothes,” Kindrie said, eyeing his lord’s meager winter wardrobe. “Most of these coats have darns on top of darns.”
“And all the warmer they are for it.” Which was true: Kendar work tended to be eerily efficient. “Besides,” he added, “Burr enjoys a bit of needlework on a cold winter’s night.”
Burr made a face, but didn’t contradict.
The two cousins were getting along reasonably well, if with some wariness on both sides.
Walking on eggshells, Torisen thought, not that he really doubted Kindrie’s competence or loyalty, nor had he for some time. Rather, he was afraid of waking the wrathful voice of his father deep in his soul-image and the spates of irrationality to which it gave rise. It occurred to him from time to time that he really had to get Ganth out of there, but how? Kindrie was a soul-walker. Perhaps he would know. However, Torisen hesitated to put it to the test, and felt all the more weakened by that hesitation.
Luckily, Riverland politics were currently quiet, although rumors came from Restormir that Lord Caineron still fretted over the loss of the golden willow long after any sensible man would have let it go. Certainly, his ire over the singers’ Lawful Lies had been inflamed. Word came from Mount Alban that he was withdrawing his scrollsmen one by one and questioning them—about what, exactly, they refused to say, but they didn’t look happy.
Meanwhile, Torisen continued to dream, sometimes in a confused fashion about Jame, but more often about his own past with the Southern Host. He caught fitful glimpses of his sister’s journey into the Wastes, though—snatchers groping out of the sand, a rhi-sar charge, a long ride out into the waters of a vanished sea, and then a wailing, desolate cry:
“Langadine has fallen!”
“My sons,” someone was weeping. “Oh, my children!”
Jame stood on the deck of a ship, looking back into nightmare, her face implacable. The slaughter of an innocent population—“Do we also worship a monster?”
“There,” she said, pointing, and the wind did her bidding. A sea of corpses rose up to storm a black tower and everything fell.
I am falling too, Torisen thought. Away from my sister and the present, into the past . . .
Harn looked up from a note on thick cream paper which he had just received.
“King Kruin wants to see you,” he said.
The boy Tori was startled. “How is he even aware that I exist?”
“Ancestors know. You keep quiet enough, all things considered. D’you suppose it has something to do with your new friend?”
Of course Harn had discovered Kroaky’s presence in Tori’s quarters, given that the latter were only feet from his office and that the Kothifiran prince insisted on roaming about after dark. He was a restless houseguest, and a voracious one. Tori had never seen anyone eat so much while remaining so thin.
After Torisen’s hazing in the Caineron barracks, Harn Grip-hard looked at him as if vaguely puzzled. If Tori caught his eye at such a moment, the big Kendar cleared his throat and became even gruffer; however, he also had stopped insulting his self-appointed clerk.
Tori would have liked to think that it
was because he had refused to complain about his ill-treatment at Genjar’s hands. However, he wondered if Harn, a former Knorth, was beginning to sense his bloodlines as Rowan apparently had.
If so, that made life easier, but also more dangerous and problematic.
While no one had dared to claim the Highlord’s seat—much less that potentially lethal collar, the Kenthiar—since Ganth’s exile, the Caineron, for one, would never permit the son of their former master to live if they could help it. Look how they had dealt with a senior randon like Harn, only a threshold dweller after all these years. Blood wasn’t enough to protect Ganth’s son. He also needed respect and power. The thought made Tori grimace. How was he to gain either, situated as he was? Nothing would be handed to him as it had been to his ancestors, never mind that they went back to the creation of the Kencyrath. Whatever he gained would be on his own.
For that matter, did he even want his father’s place, supposing that it was in fact vacant? Perhaps he belonged somewhere else within the Kencyrath, gained on his own merit. If only Adric had allowed him to attend Tentir . . .
Harn folded the summons and handed it to him. “Whatever the reason, you’ll have to go. Now. And walk wary: the Overcliff has been unsettled since the king’s illness.”
Tori paused in his quarters to change into the cleaner of his two jackets. Kroaky lounged discontentedly on Burr’s narrow bed.
“You might find some way or someone to amuse me,” he said, pouting.
“Not today. Your father wants to see me.”
The lanky prince sat up, alarmed. “Will you tell him that I’m here?”
“Of course not, but Commandant Harn knows. I take it that you ran into him on one of your evening strolls.”
“Can he be trusted?”
“To the death, unless someone asks him a direct question.”
Kroaky settled back, marginally reassured. “You Kencyr. Inexplicable.”
Torisen rode the open lift cage up to Kothifir.
The first thing he noticed on arrival was that the swirling cloud cover had dispersed. In its absence, the summer sun beat down mercilessly on the clifftop city, washing out its usually vibrant colors and glazing everything with a layer of dust. It hadn’t rained since spring. The Amar ran shallow and bitter, poisoning its fish and withering crops in the field. A few residents moved languidly from shop to shop, where they found little to buy. Some gathered on street corners listening to men muffled in black robes and cheches—Karnids from Urakarn, Tori thought, preaching their obscure message of doom and rebirth. The Kencyrath had little to do with them. Given their own bitter experience with the Three-Faced God, most Kencyr wondered why anyone would willingly embrace any religion, much less one that made such dire promises.
“This world is but a shadow of the one to come!” cried a speaker as Torisen passed. “You, boy, stay and listen to the holy words of our Prophet!”
Here at last was the Rose Tower and the long climb up its spiral stair under the beating sun. Without the clouds, the sparsely occupied mid-towers showed up as clearly as a ring of blight. Some had broken off and fallen into the streets below. One wondered how the rest could support the gilded upper stories where the guild lords lived, although even these looked brassy and cheap in the sun’s glare.
Some claimed that it was all because the Kencyr temple was currently abandoned by its priests. The guild lords also seemed to have lost their power. Tori himself didn’t see the connection.
What he did see were carrion crows circling overhead. Something about the Rose Tower seemed to attract them.
No one guarded the king’s audience chamber at the top. Tori stopped at the threshold on the edge of the pale green, golden veined chalcedony floor, wondering if he should announce himself. No: the wide, circular room brimmed with noblewomen, all in white-faced makeup as befitted their rank. Most wore rich but somber gowns, although a few flashed almost defiantly with brilliant color. The king himself reclined on a lofty dais wearing black in regal imitation of a Karnid’s robe. He was a big man, famous for his hunting prowess. Now, however, his flesh drooped like soft wax and the color on his haggard face came out of a rouge box.
“You ask me where your fathers, and sons, and husbands are,” he said, then paused to draw in a ragged breath. His eyes glittered with feverish, defiant life in their deep sockets. I will not die, they seemed to say, oh no, not me; but he stank as if already dead in that hot, rose-tinted chamber.
“My kinsmen serve me as my sons already have, all but that runagate coward Krothen whom I will find soon enough. That is all you need to know.”
“My lord brother, I disagree.”
The voice boomed from the front of the crowd, but Tori couldn’t see who spoke. He started to edge toward the right, then froze. Genjar lounged against the wall in a turquoise court coat trimmed with blue pearls and whirls of silver thread, watching the drama play out before him with the thin-lipped smile of a connoisseur in pain. Tori moved left. He and the Caineron would settle their score, but not today and certainly not here. Now he could see the front rank of the ladies and their spokeswoman. No wonder he had overlooked the latter: she was very short and, from the width of her, very pregnant. This must be Princess Amantine, the king’s sister.
“My child needs his father,” she said, glowering.
“This city needs its king. Debate that with the towers themselves.”
Someone tapped Torisen on the shoulder. Suppressing a start, he turned to see the shadow of a black-gloved hand withdrawing, gesturing him to follow. The marble walls of the chamber were carved as thin as rose petals and separated so that one could slip out between them. Tori did so, onto an outer walkway that circled the tower. It had no rail. Birds swooped dizzyingly through the void beyond.
“Come here, boy.”
He followed the voice.
“Stop.”
The other stood just beyond the curve of the thin wall, his distorted shadow falling through it.
“I was summoned by the king,” said Tori, keeping his voice down, unsure if he was defending his presence in the royal hall or protesting his absence from it.
“Summoned at my request. So. You are Ganth Grayling’s son.”
Tori felt the flesh jump on his bones, but he held himself still. Then he remembered to breathe.
The other laughed, his voice a soft rumble. “I didn’t mean to alarm you, only it surprised me to learn that you were here. Did your father really let you leave that pest hole in the Haunted Lands, or did you run away?”
“Who are you?” Tori demanded, taking a step forward.
A raised hand stopped him, as if he had run into a wall. “Why, child, who should I be but your true lord and master?”
That made no sense. Ganth was Highlord if he still lived, and Tori felt instinctively that he did, never mind that he had thrown away his power as petulantly as a child might a broken toy. Highlord or not, though, what right did such a man have to claim anyone’s loyalty? His own Kendar had united to free his son from his unworthy tyranny.
Choose your own lord, said the mocking rumble under the stranger’s voice. Have you not earned the right, boy? Did your father keep faith with you, with anyone? Honor is a failed concept. Only strength matters. Choose me.
Tori shook his head to clear it.
“What have you done to King Kruin?” he demanded.
The other sighed. “Nothing. He is not a young man, and has lived a profligate life. Nonetheless, he wants to live forever. I suggested that he might, if he made a few sacrifices. Look below.”
Tori had been avoiding that, not because he was afraid of heights (although the Rose Tower was very high), but because the carrion birds squabbling below unnerved him. Now he looked. A ring of iron thorns circled the edifice. Many of them were tipped with round shapes from which loose hair blew in the wind.
“A lord’s followers serve their master, in life, in death, don’t you agree, little lordling? A variant on that ancient belief has worked for me—
so far. But the Gnasher is no Dream-weaver. She reaped; he rends. The latter may not succeed for our dear Kruin.”
“Death and rebirth,” said Tori. Much that the other said confused him, but one thing was suddenly clear. “You are the Karnids’ Prophet.”
“Oh, he died millennia ago. The Karnids say that I am he, returned. It amuses me to play that role.” The other’s purr sank into a half-snarl. “Anyway, why should I submit to death at all? Let other fools die for me, as they were born to do.”
Raised voices sounded within the chamber.
“You would not dare,” Princess Amantine said, and this time her tone shook with more than anger.
“Would I not?” Kruin was panting now. He sounded ghastly. “If your child is a son . . . what are heirs for . . . if not to prolong . . . the life of their king? If I must take him as he is . . . I shall. So the Karnid Prophet has taught me. Now, come here.”
Someone screamed.
Tori slipped back into the chamber to witness panicked ladies surge for the door. Caught up in the rush, Genjar stumbled and disappeared beneath billowing black skirts. Meanwhile, the cause of it all, Kruin, had risen and was lurching toward his sister, a hunting knife in his hand.
“I will gut you where you stand . . . you fat, little pig,” he wheezed. “Give me your unborn child!”
Without thinking, Tori stepped between them. Kruin loomed over him, the king’s stinking breath in his face. He tried to brush the Kencyr aside, but Tori caught him in a wristlock that brought him crashing to his knees. The knife skittered away across the chalcedony floor. Kruin tried to rise, but his legs folded under him. A look of astonishment crossed his wasted face.
“Why, I’m dying. But I can’t be. You promised!”
His eyes rolled toward the stranger who stood by the dais, half in shadows. He wore a Karnid’s black robe and cheche, the tail end of the latter wrapped around his face. A veil beneath concealed all but the silver-gray glint of his eyes.
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