Honor's Paradox-ARC (12 page)

Kindrie scrambled to catch up. “She’s referring to the night that Gerraint died and Ganth became Highlord?”

“Yes, twelve years before the Massacre, as Kinzi says. We’ve had so many disasters that it does get confusing. Trinity, listen to this:

“ ‘You have laughed at rumors that Greshan was seen walking the halls of Gothregor when he was five days dead.

“ ‘Well, I saw him too. In my precious Moon Garden. With that bitch of Wilden, Rawneth. She led him in by the secret door behind the tapestry and there, under my very window, made love to him.

“ ‘Except it wasn’t Greshan.

“ ‘I knew that the moment I saw him, and I didn’t warn her. Oh, Adiraina . . . I let her damn herself. Then he changed—into whom, I don’t know. I couldn’t see his face, but Rawneth did. She gaped like a trout, then burst out laughing, half in hysteria, half, I swear, in triumph. What face could he have shown her to cause that?’ ”

The three looked at each other.

“Rawneth made love to someone in the Moon Garden who at first appeared to be Greshan,” Kirien repeated.

“But that was the price of Tieri’s contract,” Kindrie blurted out. “That Gerraint should get his precious son back.” Then he felt the blood that had rushed from his face flood back. Oh, his wretched tongue.

“What contract?” asked Kirien. “With whom? For what?”

Her expression softened. She could have demanded the truth from him, that being her Shanir trait, but she took pity. “Never mind. Tell us when you’re ready. The point is, Rawneth’s lover altered his appearance. Only darkling changers do that, as far as I know, unless we include the Whinno-hir, the wolvers, and half a dozen other oddities. But we don’t know whom he changed into. Kinzi says that she didn’t know either, but that Rawneth was at first surprised, then pleased. How very strange.”

Her hand moved again in Trishien’s smooth script.

“Another break. Then, ‘It has been three months since Lord Randir died and four since the Randir Lordan disappeared. My spies tell me that Rawneth contracted the Shadow Guild to assassinate him.’ Another break. ‘Now she insists that Ganth confirm her own son, Kenan, as the new lord of Wilden.

“ ‘And here we come to the heart of the matter.

“ ‘Rawneth went back to Wilden that same night, contracted with a Highborn of her own house, and some nine months later gave birth to Kenan. But who is Kenan’s father—the Randir noble or the thing in the garden? Without knowing, how can I advise Ganth to accept or reject his claim? And so I have summoned Rawneth and her son to Gothregor while you are also here, since your Shanir talent lies in determining bloodlines at a touch. You will tell me, dear heart, and then I will know how to act. I must admit, I do hope our dear Rawneth has mated with a monster.

“ ‘But if so, why did she laugh so triumphantly?

“ ‘How the wind howls! Now something has fallen over below. I hear many feet on the stair. Perhaps it is Ganth, come home at last . . .’ ”

Kirien lowered her pad and picked up the fragile linen square with both hands, delicately, as if it might disintegrate at her touch.

“There this letter ends, I suppose, with the arrival of the shadow assassins and Kinzi’s death. The breaks in the note appear to come where her blood has eaten through the fabric. Look.”

They regarded the discolored cloth, dotted with stitches, fretted with holes, perhaps the last thing that the Knorth Matriarch Kinzi Keen-eyed had ever touched.

“Well.” Kirien looked up. “Do you make of that what I do? Adiraina was going to establish Kenan’s bloodlines, but before she could, the Knorth women were slaughtered. Ganth returned to find them all dead—except for Tieri, who was still in hiding—and stormed off after the wrong enemy. Adiraina never received this letter. The question of Kenan’s parentage, therefore, has never been established except that, if Kinzi is right, his father was some kind of a changer. And we are left to imply . . . what?”

“That Lady Rawneth sent the assassins . . . to forestall her son’s testing.”

Kindrie was appalled. “For that, she would kill all the Knorth ladies?”

“There was bad blood . . . between Kinzi and Rawneth . . . long before the Massacre.”

“That,” said Kirien, ever the scrollswoman, “is one interpretation of the evidence before us. There may be others. Certainly, this raises questions, but it doesn’t establish the whole truth. Kindrie, will you tell your cousins? They need to know this, for what it’s worth.”

“Yes, of course,” said Kindrie. The blunder over the contract still rattled him, but even more so this sudden window into events that had shaped his life even before his birth. He thought of his mother, only a child, finding herself in a house of death and then being left behind to become a virtual prisoner, alone, in the Ghost Walks. It wasn’t only his birth that had left her an empty shell.

Kirien rose and slipped her notepad into a pocket. The cloth letter she returned to Kindrie. “I have some research to do.” She kissed the healer lightly on the lips. “Don’t fret.” And she left.

“She is fond of you,” said Ashe. “Don’t hurt her.”

Kindrie fumbled with the alien idea that he could hurt anyone, much less the young woman whom he had come to think of as his patron, and his friend.

“You could hurt . . . you know. Badly.” The haunt singer regarded him steadily from the shadows of her hood. More than ever, he felt the unnatural cold radiating off of her and ached to cure it with fire. “You have access to the soulscape . . . on our most vulnerable level. It is in your mind even now . . . to burn me where I stand.”

“I wouldn’t. Not without cause.”

“It isn’t enough . . . that I am dead? And if I told you . . . that I have guessed your secret? Tieri had a contract. That could only have been . . . for you . . . therefore you are legitimate. As for your father . . . the dead whisper each to each. Tieri spoke . . . to your great-grandmother Kinzi and to Aerulan . . . before her banner wore to rags with decades of exposure . . . and neglect. I could name the man . . . who sired you.”

“Don’t!”

“Would you stop me? You can . . . with one searing word.”

Kindrie struggled with the thought. Until recently, he had been as alone in his way as his mother had been in hers. What would Kirien think if she knew that his father was the greatest archtraitor in the history of the Kencyrath? He could hardly blame her if she threw him out. But to hurt instead of to heal . . .

Yet he had spoken the pyric rune before the Haunted Lands keep to prevent the dead from rising. One of them, he gathered, had been his uncle Ganth himself, not that that had apparently stopped the Gray Lord from haunting his son.

There is a locked door in Torisen’s soul, and behind that, a mad, muttering voice.

But those darklings had risen consumed with mindless hunger, not as Ashe had done, her intellect still held intact by her will alone, suspended between life and death.

“You’re testing me.”

“So I am. You are . . . potentially one of the Tyr-ridan. Are you worthy . . . that we should rest one third of our hopes . . . on you?”

“Trinity knows, I don’t feel it, but then the idea is new to me. And it may not come to pass. Are you testing Jame and Torisen as well?”

“Jame, yes . . .”

Despite himself, Kindrie was impressed; he would never have had the nerve.

“. . . until Tentir took over that duty. The Highlord tests himself . . . so far with limited success . . . but at least he recognizes the need.”

Somewhere nearby, someone stifled a sneeze. Ashe stepped into the shadows and out again hauling Graykin by the scuff of his neck, over his furious protests.

“So . . . the gray sneak.”

The Southron bared his teeth at them both and jerked his robe out of the singer’s grasp. “My lady’s sneak, if you please.”

“And what will you tell her . . . this time?”

“Everything, or at least as much as I could hear, which wasn’t much. She doesn’t need either one of you. She has me.”

“She also needs whatever I can discover for her,” said Kindrie mildly.

“Not if I find it out first.”

“You were listening outside the herb shed.”

“Of course I was, not that Index made much sense. Seas turning from fresh to salt to sand—bah.”

“Listen . . . little rat. Your mistress does need to know . . . but the whole truth, not just such crumbs . . . as you manage to gather.”

Graykin drew himself up. “Then tell me, if it’s so important. I’m likely to see her before you do.”

“Ashe?” Kindrie looked at the singer for guidance.

Thinking, Ashe chewed her lip. Part of it ripped off and was absently spat over the wall. “No,” she said at last. “This is a story . . . for the three of you. You . . . will see your cousin soon enough. And you, little man . . . consider the danger of passing along incomplete information.”

“Graykin.” Kindrie touched his shoulder, and looked into the raging eyes of the scruffy cur that was the Southron’s soul-image. For a moment, he thought that the beast would lunge for his throat. However, he also recognized the dazed emptiness behind that fury. “You must leave some things to others. Jame has taken you into her service, but the harder you clutch at her, the more she will push you away.”

The shoulder under his hand stiffened, then slumped. “Yes. All right. I know that she never wanted to bind me in the first place. It just happened.”

With that, he turned and shuffled off.

Ashe regarded Kindrie with death-glazed eyes in which something yet glimmered. “I see . . . that you can convince . . . without hurting. Such is not . . . my talent.”

The healer sighed. “I saw myself in his eyes. We Knorth seem to be lonely perforce, with no home but each other. Have you finished testing me?”

“For the moment.”

“Good,” said Kindrie, and left.

CHAPTER VII
The Day of Misrule

Between Winter 120 and Spring 1

I

Jame woke to a familiar sense of heaviness on her chest. The blanket there stirred with more than her own breath. Lifting up a corner of it, she found herself nose to nose with a triangular head and a flickering, black, forked tongue. Golden coils shifted sleepily between her bare breasts. At least the swamp adder’s eyes were their normal fiery orange; when they turned black, Jame suspected that the Witch of Wilden was peering through them.

“Rue,” she called, keeping her voice calm and low. “Is this a practical joke?”

Her towheaded servant came to an abrupt, wary stop in the doorway.

“It’s no joke of mine, lady. Hadn’t you, er, better get rid of it?”

“Not until I find out why Addy is here.”

Either Timmon’s jealous Narsa was getting repetitious, or Shade was in trouble.

She slid her hands under the serpent’s coils, feeling muscles ripple beneath the warm, gilded skin, and shifted Addy to the bed beside her.

“No one should come after you here.” Rue sounded indignant. “In your own quarters, you’re out of the game.”

Last night had been Spring’s Eve. Tomorrow was Spring’s Day. Between them lay a span of time unmarked on any calendar, separating the old year from the new. In Tai-tastigon, it was called the Feast of Fools, when the gods were mocked to their servants’ content. Here at the randon college, authority suffered a similar fate. Possibly similar upsets occurred all over Rathillien.

“You are going to stay here, aren’t you?” Rue demanded. “If not, I have to call up your ten-command to act as your bodyguard so that no one scalps you.”

Jame smiled. Mindful of her lordan’s dignity which Rue associated with her own, the cadet didn’t want her pulled into any foolery. From what she had heard about Tentir’s Day of Misrule, Jame didn’t especially want to participate either. She had intended to wait until Rue left and then slip out the window to spend the day training with Death’s-head. Now she had to find Shade. Damnation.

“I imagine that the Commandant is going to keep to his quarters.”

“Certainly. Why would anyone want to play silly tricks on him, or he to spoil anyone’s fun? Mind you, it did happen once, with Ardeth’s war-leader Aden.”

Jame remembered the haughty Highborn from his visit earlier that spring and from the last cull when he had served on the Randon Council. Nothing, not even redeeming the Shame of Tentir, made a Highborn girl worthy in his eyes to be a randon cadet. “What happened?”

“He was commandant here then and not at all popular. Didn’t think that the randon were strict enough, that they coddled us all rotten, that nothing was as good as in his day. That sort of nonsense. Well, the cadets rounded up a troop of captured sargents to serenade him and when he stuck his nose out to complain about the noise, somebody grabbed his scarf. They made him serve everyone at the day’s end feast out of his own hoard of delicacies. It got messy, a proper food fight as I hear tell. He’s never forgiven the college.”

Good enough reason, Jame thought, for the less popular officers to make themselves scarce. She had heard that others, better natured, often participated, assuming that roving bands of cadets caught them and managed to nab their scarves, thus ensuring their obedience. Sargents and master-tens would also be fair game for anyone below those ranks.

A light knock on the door heralded Brier’s arrival with a sheaf of papers. Jame tossed the blanket over Addy and rose to dress.

“The duty roster for next week,” said her acting master-ten when she was admitted, and handed it over.

Jame scanned it, noting dozens of spelling errors but not commenting on them. “This looks good.”

The big Southron relaxed marginally.

“So what are your plans for the day, Brier?”

“I’ve more paperwork to do. Let the children play.”

“Hey!” Rue protested. “I’m no child.”

“Close enough.” Jame could see that her servant was fretting to get away. “What mischief are you up to, Rue?”

The towhead grinned. “We’ve set a guard on the strategy instructor’s quarters—you know, the one who always throws his wooden hand at us to keep our attention. If he comes out, let’s see how he likes being on the receiving end.”

“Don’t hurt him,” said Jame sharply.

“Of course not. That wouldn’t be playing the game right. What we’ve gathered to throw is a lot softer than his hand but less sweet smelling.”