Jame dragged herself free and turned to look. For a moment, her eyes were still dazzled; but then they cleared in time to see a point of radiance as bright as a distant star dwindle and vanish just beyond the cliff edge. The portal that had been Jamethiel Dream-Weaver had collapsed in on itself and closed forever. If the destruction of the body freed the soul, then the Mistress was free at last—if such rules applied beyond the Chain of Creation. Jame found herself praying to the god she despised that they did.
She glanced toward the ground then and saw the changer Tirandys sprawling before her, his fingers dug into the very rock like pale roots. She had crawled out from under his left arm. Torisen still lay under his right. Hastily, she pulled her brother free.
"Are you all right?" she demanded as he sat up, looking distinctly groggy.
"Well . . . enough. Too many things caught up with me at once—including you."
"Sorry. I didn't mean to be quite so dramatic about it. . . . Trinity!"
Tirandys was moving. She had thought he was dead, had hoped it, at least, for his sake, forgetting how hard changers die. He rose on an elbow. His face moved as if secret things crawled at will beneath the skin. Then he made a choking noise and convulsed horribly. They heard bones break. Jame threw off her brother's restraining hand and dropped to her knees at the changer's side. The muscles of his back and shoulders writhed like snakes under her hands.
"Tell me what to do!" she cried in an agony of helplessness.
The seizure subsided, and for a moment he lay still, panting. Then he rolled over. The Ivory Knife was in his hand.
"You've already done it," he said in a hoarse, nearly unrecognizable voice. An expression almost like a smile crossed his tortured face. "We trained you well, Jamie. Some good does endure, it seems."
Then, before the next convulsion could grip him, he turned the Knife's point to his chest and fell forward on it.
He was already dead when Jame turned him over. Even as they watched, his face changed one last time, settling into lines as fine-cut and tranquil as any on a Knorth death banner. Jame closed his silver eyes. Good-bye, Tirandys, Senethari.
Her own eyes were stinging.
"But I never cry," she said almost defiantly to her brother, and then amazed them both by bursting into tears.
Epilogue:
Moon Rise
The Lower Hurdles: 31st of Winter
JAME PACED THE SMALL inner chamber of Torisen's pavilion, which had been set aside for her use. Light was fading beyond the canvas walls. It was late afternoon, almost thirty hours since the events on the escarpment. In all that time, she had hardly seen anyone. When her brother did return to the tent, it was only to collapse in the outer chamber and sleep as long as Burr could keep away the swarms of people who still surrounded him day and night, making requests and requesting orders. Just the same, she wished he would at least look in to say hello. She was beginning to feel more and more like a forgotten piece of luggage.
Jame eyed the canvas wall. It would be the work of seconds to cut her way out with the Ivory Knife, which Torisen had let her keep, apparently not realizing what it was. For that matter, it wouldn't be hard simply to slip past Burr and take a little walk, just to see the sky and feel the breeze. Since Torisen had moved the tent away from the main camp down here to the edge of the Lower Hurdles, perhaps no one would even see her.
She sighed. No, that wouldn't do. Highborn women apparently did not wander around unattended. In fact, there seemed to be a great many things they didn't do. Again, she had a new game to learn, and she already hated the rules. Just the same, she would have to know what they were before she could find a way around them—if such a way existed. If not . . . well, she wouldn't think about that yet. Once they found some "suitable" clothes for her, perhaps she would at least be allowed out of this canvas cell.
In the meantime, at least she had Jorin for company. The ounce was napping on the cot now with his head under the pillow, pretending to be invisible. He had charged into the tent last night and scuttled under the bed, clearly determined not to be hauled away again. Then she had heard Torisen outside, speaking to Marc. It was curious that while the big Kendar had been looking after her, her brother had had charge of Marc's little sister Willow, or rather of her bones. She gathered from what she had heard eavesdropping, that Marc now had a place in Torisen's household whenever he cared to claim it. That was reassuring, as was the note she had found knotted in a scarf around Jorin's neck, written by the Wolver for Marc, who didn't know how. It seemed that her friend had finally landed on his feet. She wondered a bit forlornly if she would ever see him again.
She also wondered about Graykin. Just thinking about him made her uneasy, and yet she found that she no longer distrusted him. Accident or no, he was bound to her, and she believed that he would keep the Book safe for her—if that lay in his power. But Caineron must have realized by now that his bastard son had betrayed him. That put Graykin in great peril, perhaps all the more so because she had entrusted him with such a dangerous secret. In retrospect, she probably shouldn't have; but as with Kin-Slayer, there hadn't seemed to be much choice. The thought of Caineron wresting the Book from Graykin made her shudder, but somehow she didn't think Graykin had yet faced any such crisis. She would have to find some way to help him before he did.
Jorin's head came out from under the pillow, ears pricked. The next moment he had leaped off the cot and dived under it.
"Lady, may I enter?" It was Burr, in the no man's land of the middle chamber.
"Are you sure you want to risk it? Ah, never mind. Come in."
He entered, his arms full of something pink and frothy. Jame eyed it with misgiving.
"What in Perimal's name is that?"
"A dress, lady, from Hurlen. It was the only decent one we could find for tonight's feast."
"Feast? What feast?"
"To honor the dead, lady. The entire High Council sups here this evening. They also want to meet you."
"Trinity. I think I preferred being a piece of lost luggage."
"My lady?"
"Never mind. Let's see that thing." She took the dress from him and held it up. "Names of God. Did you say 'decent'?"
Burr stared at it. His expression didn't change, but color crept into his face until, to Jame's amusement, he was blushing violently.
* * *
DUSK.
Torisen collapsed wearily into a camp chair before his tent and stretched out his legs. All the bodies had finally been gathered from the meadows, the wounded tended to, and the slain given to the pyre. That last had taken most of today. He could still see the glow out on the escarpment against the darkening sky. Tomorrow all the lords would start rebuilding their forces by taking yondri into their regular service, but that was a rite for the morning. Tonight still belonged to the dead, whose memories they would soon be honoring.
Burr emerged from the tent and offered him a cup. He took it, sipped, and made a face. Another damned posset. Oh well. If he objected, Burr was apt to say something scathing about his general decrepitude or, worse, about the barely closed cuts on his hands. He hadn't explained those yet to anyone and didn't intend to if he could help it.
Their sting reminded him of another pyre, down by the river, away from the others. Even if Jame hadn't insisted, he probably would have arranged full rites for the false prince. Odd that after their brief conversation down there in the lower meadow among the wounded, he couldn't quite think of the changer now as the enemy he undoubtedly had been. At any rate, he hadn't been prepared to leave any Kencyr to the outraged Karkinorans. It hadn't pleased them to learn that an impostor had led them into battle; and Harn hadn't sweetened their tempers any by pointing out that between Odalian and a darkling changer, they had gotten by far the better war-leader. But then they had already been upset by news from Karkinaroth of the palace's collapse. Torisen suspected that Jame had come down the Tardy from that city. He shifted uneasily in his chair, wondering if she could have had anything
to do with the palace's destruction. But no. Surely not even Jame could have that cataclysmic an effect—or could she?
She has power of her own, boy. Why do you think I named her Jamethiel?
He flinched away from the memory of his father's voice and remembered instead, despite himself, the strange events on the escarpment. All that light and wind and noise. He hadn't understood any of it then and wasn't sure that he wanted to now. It was confusing enough to have his twin sister back, not as the child he remembered, not even as the woman he had tried to imagine, but as this half-grown girl with a tentative smile and a darkness lurking in the shadow of her silver-gray eyes that frightened him more than he cared to admit.
Face it, boy, he thought glumly. If she was strange before, when Father drove her out, she's ten times stranger now . . . and this time she's your responsibility.
He supposed that in a way that culpability extended to the damage the wind from the escarpment had done to the camp. Trinity, what a mess that had been. Panicking horses all over the meadows, supplies scattered, tents blown down right and left, all but Caineron's which, for some reason, had already been half collapsed . . .
Come to think of it, Caineron himself hadn't been seen since. When Torisen had invited all the High Council to dinner tonight, Caineron had sent back word that he was indisposed.
"Not quite feeling in touch with things yet," his randon commander Sheth Sharp-Tongue had added with a sardonic smile.
Torisen didn't quite know what to make of that, and he wasn't about to ask for fear Jame would turn out to be at the bottom of that mystery too, as camp rumor already hinted.
He looked out over the middle and lower fields, darkening now. Fireflies danced over them and glowing mist nestled softly in their hollows. After the wind had knocked over his tent, he had moved it down here away from the rest of the camp to the Lower Hurdles . . .
"Putting me in quarantine?" Jame had asked. . . . because it was so peaceful. Now below the tent Kendar were setting up chairs and a table borrowed from Hurlen. The fine silver and crystal had all been lent by Ardeth, as had been the cook. The odor of rich meat and spices wafted over the meadow. It was fitting that they gather to celebrate their victory, or at least their survival. The entire Host would be pausing to catch its breath tonight, to share the joy of still being alive and to remember the dead. Torisen wished he could spend the evening with his randon. If the Council didn't sit too late over its wine, he would slip upfield to Harn's tent to talk again with Commanders Elon and Lorey of the Southern Host, just to convince himself that they and their troops were really here.
They had come in early that afternoon, nearly two-thirds of the Southern Host, exhausted and filthy after their desert campaign, but alive. It turned out that only Pereden's center column had been virtually annihilated. The message found at Wyrden had come from Larch, its randon commander, who had had no way of knowing that when Pereden's ill-judged assault had failed and he had been captured, the right and left flanks of the Southern Host had fallen back, each unaware of the other's survival. They had continued to harry the Wastelanders all the way to the Cataracts and probably were the reason the Riverland Host had reached the battlefield first. So Pereden had a fair chance of going down in history as a hero after all. Ardeth must be very pleased. Torisen wondered, though, what kind of a song Ashe would make out of the whole affair, given her new perspective.
A faint light grew over the east bank bluff. The horn of the new moon edged up over the trees, the merest curve of ivory tipped with pale rose. Torisen watched it rise.
"I thought I would never see that again," said Jame behind him.
"Nor I."
Her thoughts so closely matched his own that it took him a moment to realize that she was actually there. He turned. Finding Jame anything like proper clothes had been quite a problem in a camp with only one other Highborn lady who also, apparently, had arrived without luggage. She looked, he thought, like a child who had made a not very successful raid on her mother's wardrobe. She glowered at him from behind a makeshift mask.
"Go ahead. Laugh. I'd like to see how you would look in some three-hundred-pound courtesan's best street dress."
He stared at her. "How in Perimal's name do you know that?"
"Simple. This wretched thing is big enough for three of me."
"No, no . . . the rest of it."
"Oh. Well, best, because it's perfectly clean; courtesan, because it had slits. Fore and aft. Poor Burr nearly had pups when I pointed them out to him. They're sewed shut now. Wouldn't it be better, though, if I just wore my old clothes? After all, plenty of people have already seen me in them."
"Believe me, the High Council will find even a streetwalker's gown less offensive than a knife-fighter's d'hen—although I sincerely hope they have no more idea of whose dress that was than I did."
Jame sighed. "All right, Tori. I know I haven't had your experience with the world, but then," she added, with a flash of pure mischief, "you haven't had mine, either."
"Oh, for God's sake . . . !"
"Sorry. But what will you tell them about me?"
"Just what you've told me. Nothing. Let them speculate."
"Oh, I expect they'll do that, all right," she said dryly. "But Tori, do I really have to meet the High Council tonight? Isn't it a bit unusual to show off any Highborn woman in public?"
"It is, very. But you're a new player entering an extremely complex game of bloodlines and power. Our house has led the Kencyrath since the beginning, by our god's decree. The other Highborn thought they only had me left to deal with, but suddenly here you are, a new Knorth, a new possibility—or threat. After all the rumors that have been floating around camp, the High Council needs to see you, to be reassured that you're only a pawn after all."
"And am I?"
"Yes," he said, looking away, willing it to be true. "What else?"
"I see," she said in an expressionless voice, after a pause. "Well, then, I suppose you'd better take this."
She tugged at a ring. He had noticed its gold band before, but not the stone, which had been turned inward and wrapped with a scrap of cloth to keep it in place. The cloth fluttered down. The stone caught a flash of firelight and blazed back green as a cat's eye.
"Father's ring." Torisen rose quickly. The emblems of my power in her hands, boy. "Give me that," he said sharply. "You should never have put it on."
"I didn't exactly do it to amuse myself," she said, nettled. "And I would have returned it before now if I'd had a chance. Here."
She held it out to him. He reached for it, then paused involuntarily. She must have realized what made him hesitate for she raised her other hand and flexed the claws. "Some things don't change, do they?" she said with a bitter smile. "Yes, Tori, I'm still a Shanir."
Torisen took the ring and put it on. He probably had her to thank for the return of Kin-Slayer too, he realized; but the words of gratitude stuck in his throat. He remembered Kindrie. There was another debt to a Shanir that he hadn't been able to make himself pay—yet.
"Perhaps I haven't changed all that much either," he said slowly, "but I am trying." He looked up sharply. "What did you say?"
"I?" Her eyes widened, startled . . . guilty? "Nothing."
He knew that was true, but the ghost of a whisper still echoed in his mind: "You had better try, blood-binder." He shook his head as if to clear it. After the past two days, it wasn't surprising that he had begun to hear voices, even if they didn't make any sense.
Jame had picked up his posset, sipped it, and made a face. "You actually like this stuff?"
"No, not at all."
"Nor I. It tastes as if something was sick in it. So now what?"
"Most of us will start back for the Riverland tomorrow. Only token garrisons at Kestrie and Kraggen keeps hold it now. Some will stay here until the wounded can travel. Ardeth will probably insist on going to the Southern Wastes to look for his son's bones." Torisen suddenly felt rather ill. "I suppose I'll have to go with hi
m."
"No. I meant what will happen to me . . . to us?"
He looked at her, then away. "I don't know." Your Shanir twin, boy, your darker half, Returned to destroy you . . .
No. Those too were his father's words. But she was dangerous. He would have to control her, find some way to bind her energy and power . . . or was that Ganth talking again?
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