Honor's Paradox-ARC (11 page)

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.”

V

Later, 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.”

CHAPTER VI
History Lessons

Winter 110

I

Bars of light streamed through cracks in the shed’s walls, piercing the jars shelved from floor to ceiling. The air was thick with motes and the scent of crushed herbs. Half a dozen jars had fallen and smashed on the floor, mixing their contents with shards of glass.

What a mess,
thought Kindrie.

He gingerly stepped through the debris and picked up a fragment of dried root, trying to guess what it was. His job at Mount Alban was to memorize the order of the containers. However, curiosity as a healer had also led him to learn as much as he could about the herbs themselves. Grayish brown and wrinkled outside, inside white and spongy . . . but it was the fragrance that gave him his clue: angelica.

And this straight, dark brown root with its bitter smell—black snake root, surely.

Alfalfa, feverfew, ginger . . .

There was a pattern, of course: all were good for rheumatism.

He collected every bit he could find, carefully picking out the glass, wincing as splinters pricked his fingers, and laid them out on the table. Now the jars. Some large pieces fit together easily but others had been reduced to a powder that had joined the dancing dust motes. It was impossible to do a complete job, however long he took, and the day was already waning toward dusk.

There. Five partial jars held together by his will, filled with as much of their contents as had survived. Now to return them to their rightful places on the shelves.

Oh, bother. None of the containers were labeled and all had moved to fill any gap. Push some aside here, more there . . .

“Well?” said a sharp voice. “Are you done yet?”

His hand jerked. The shelves trembled, ripe for another disaster, and grew transparent. Kindrie hastily slotted the last jar into place. As he withdrew from the soul-image, its real life counterpart took shape around him, complete with his elderly patient glowering at him across the table. He released Index’s claw of a hand.

“How do you feel?”

The old scrollsman flexed arthritic fingers.

“Better,” he said, almost with reluctance. “Not perfect, mind you, but better.”

“I’m glad.” Kindrie rolled his shoulders to release the tension in them and ruefully regarded his own stinging fingertips. Metaphoric splinters were worse that real ones; the nerves remembered them far longer. “It’s hard to replace what the years have taken away.”

“No cure for old age, eh? There should be. And for death.”

Kindrie sighed. If he had completed his training as a healer at the Priests’ College, would he be better now or warped beyond redemption? Had it been selfish of him to flee? No. Lady Rawneth would have destroyed him even if her hieratic minions hadn’t.

Index rose and started to putter around his shed, gathering the ingredients for alfalfa tea.

“Not perfect,” he repeated over his shoulder, “but fair is fair. The scrollsman with the information that you want, Moyden by name, has gone on an ambassadorial mission to the Poison Courts. We may never see him again.”

“Oh.”

“However, I know something about the history of the Southern Wastes. Before we arrived on Rathillien, the natives say that in their place was a huge inland sea surrounded by rich civilizations. Then the climate changed from temperate to a desert, don’t ask me why or how. They say that even the stars shifted in the sky. Anyway, the sea was cut off from its freshwater sources, turned to salt, and dried up. The cities that clustered around it disappeared into the sand and their people fled. Only their outposts remained—Kothifir, Hurlen, and Urakarn, for example. All of this was some three thousand years ago, during the Fifth Age. By most accounts, Rathillien has had seven.”

Kindrie blinked, trying to comprehend the scope of such vast changes, so baldly presented. If Index had been a singer, and more poetic, he would have suspected that the old man was taking advantage of the Lawful Lie.

“I think,” he said, “that I should talk to Moyden when . . .”

“If.”

“If he returns.”

“You do that. Tell him that you bartered with me and that I will repay him.” Index poured boiling water over his herbs and cradled the cup in gnarled fingers. “Ah,” he said, inhaling the fragrance. “Soul-images are all very well, but give me a fistful of dried leaves every time. You’re doing this for that gray sneak, aren’t you? Take my advice, boy: make sure that he pays you.”

Kindrie stood up and executed a courteous if awkward bow. “All information, ultimately, is for my cousin. I don’t barter with her.”

“Ah.” Index impatiently waved him away. “Beware that one: honorable as she seems, she has the darkling glamour.”

As Kindrie climbed the shed’s stair and crossed Mount Alban’s cavernous entry hall, he dismissed Index’s warning and savored that word: cousin. Bastards had no kin. He was not a bastard. He had a family, small though it was, and moreover not one cousin but two. The thought warmed him as much as his blue woolen robe, a gift from Kirien and finer than he had ever owned before. Kin, and friends.

Here was the central wooden stair rising in its square well up though the layers of the Scrollsmen’s College. Within the cliff face itself was a maze of apartments honeycombing the rock. Bits of conversation reached him as he climbed, scrollsmen and singers at their eternal bickering:

“Facts are for small minds. You couldn’t find yours with both hands and a torch.”

“How could I search with both hands and still hold a . . . wait a minute.”

“Who borrowed my concordance to the law scrolls?”

“I needed to look up a word that rhymes with ‘splendiferous.’ Why?”

“Has anyone seen my experiment?”

“D’you mean the purple thing with black spots? It went that way.”

The voices faded behind him as he reached the three levels on top of the cliff, devoted to public spaces and the Director’s quarters. Over these was the observation deck. The level rays of the setting sun met Kindrie as he emerged from the stairwell and half blinded him. Two figures stood silhouetted against the glare.

“Kindrie,” said one warmly, in Kirien’s voice.

“My lady.”

She laughed. “Such formality.”

The other figure by contrast radiated the cold of the unburnt dead. Kindrie braced himself.

“Singer Ashe,” he said, with an awkward bob of the head.

“I was about to send for you,” said the Jaran Lordan. “I have news.”

She indicated a seat on the ledge between herself and Ashe. Kindrie self-consciously perched on her far side, putting her between himself and the haunt singer. Beyond Kirien’s clean-cut profile, a wry smile quirked Ashe’s thin lips away from yellow teeth within the shadow of her hood.

Kirien held up a fragile piece of linen dotted with knot stitches. “Getting this translated—and you were right: the stitches do constitute a code—has proved surprisingly hard. We have several former Jaran ladies turned scrollswomen at Mount Alban, but none wanted to violate an apparent secret of the Women’s World. Finally I sent a transcript to my great-great-aunt Trishien.”

“The Jaran Matriarch.”

“Yes. She wasn’t eager to translate it either, until she read it for herself. She asks where you got it.”

Kirien’s writing pad was out, her hand moving across it in her spiky script as she recorded their conversation for the matriarch’s benefit. Kindrie imagined Trishien’s own ink-stained fingers jerking across a page as she received Kirien’s message.

“Where is she now?”

“Aunt Trishien? Back in the Women’s Halls at Gothregor. Torisen has let all the ladies return, to my surprise. They haven’t been exactly tactful in their past dealings with him. I hear that Adiraina even tried to slip him an aphrodisiac.”

“What?”

Kirien laughed at his startled expression. “Oh, not for herself. But I repeat: where did you get this?”

“It was in the bottom of a knapsack that Jame gave me to carry . . . something else.”

Kindrie hadn’t yet mentioned the contract to anyone, fearing the next question: Who was your father? He himself hadn’t gotten used to the idea of Gerridon as his sire—Trinity, who could? He, Jame, and Torisen were all children born of legend and nightmare. What others would say about their lineage hardly bore thinking about.

“I don’t believe my cousin remembered that the cloth was there,” he added. “Where she got it, I don’t know.”

Kirien scrawled Kindrie’s answer, then paused, waiting for a reply. It was several minutes in coming. Then her hand moved again in even, rounded letters.

“ ‘The knot code is a close-kept secret of the Women’s World,’ ” she read. “ ‘We use it to communicate, sisterkin to kin. I wouldn’t betray it, except that the Knorth girl should know what this note says. This appears to be a fragment of a letter from Kinzi Keen-eyed to Adiraina stitched on the night of the Massacre.’ ”

Ashe began, harsh-tongued, to chant:

“Down in a dark hall desperate footsteps

Seek out the safety of shadows and silence.

Beautiful Aerulan, Brenwyr’s beloved

Clutches a child’s hand, white-cheeked with fear.

Above, at the doorway already cold

Kinzi lies killed among cascades of crimson.

Sweet pale blooms promise protection

Concealment and comfort for cold Tieri.

A woven hanging hides her behind it,

Moon-garden entrance guarded by grace.

Aerulan invites assassins to her arms:

Her death distracts them from Tieri’s trail.

Cut down like corn the women of Knorth.

Ashes blew black from blazing pyres.

Knorth’s men, maddened made for the hills

Drinking full deep of destruction’s draught.

Under her home’s halls Tieri lay hidden

Last Knorth woman left all alone.”

Kindrie shivered.

The sun had set, leaving the sky on fire—streaks of orange, smoldering red, yellow like a throttled shriek, a silent holocaust on high. Ever since the volcanic eruption the previous year, the evening sky had been ominously spectacular.

Kindrie became aware that Ashe was regarding him closely. The sunset gave the exposed quadrant of the singer’s face almost a rosy glow, but cast into deeper relief the ravages of death. He bit back an instinctive response to use the pyric rune. Where Ashe walked, among the living or among the dead, was her choice. Whether the Jaran were wise to condone it was another matter.

“You saw her . . . didn’t you? Your mother. In the Moon Garden.”

Her harsh, halting voice scraped on his nerves, as did the memory. That thing of woven death banner cords, animated by hunger, swaying toward him—

“. . . come . . . mine . . .”

—mouthing that awful, mindless summons back to the threadbare womb, to fill the aching void within.

Did I create that with my birth? Am I to blame?

So many years wondering what his mother had looked like, at last to see her like that.

“What . . . did you feel?”

Horror, pity, grief. And then the flood had come, washing her poor fragments away.

“Could I have saved her? Was there anything left to save?”

“Very little. Even with a name . . . the neglected soul wears thin. I have seen her pass . . . in the Grayland . . . no more than a flaw on the wind. Let her go.”

Kirien’s hand continued to move as Trishien translated the note for her. “ ‘Can it really be twelve years since Gerraint died? You . . .’ that would be Adiraina . . . ‘have been impatient with me for not having told . . .’ The note is full of holes. This is one of them. And part of it has been ripped off. ‘. . . virtually nothing of what happened in the death banner hall before so much of it burned.’ ”