Honor's Paradox-ARC (19 page)

He had grunted. “My father is fussed. By his reckoning, you should long since had been sent packing from Tentir. What he means to do about it, though, I have no idea.”

Neither did Jame, but supposed that she would find out.

As she and the rathorn traveled north and rose with the land, winter reasserted itself. Snow lingered under trees and blew down from the heights in sparkling veils, momentarily obscuring the landscape. Few birds sang and no trees drifted. When they came within sight of it, the Silver was a gray and white sheet of frozen water. Still, they set a good pace, arriving at Kithorn in the early afternoon.

This time, the keep courtyard was packed with Merikit, with more spilling out the gatehouse doors. Voices and laughter rose from within.

Curious but seeing no way to force an entrance, Jame circled the wall. Bright faces turned to look down at her from on top of it.

“Here, Earth Wife’s Favorite! Up here!”

Jame stood in the saddle and worked her claws into the crumbling stonework. Death’s-head promptly walked out from under her. She scrambled up to join the children.

“You’re just in time,” whispered Prid. “The Maid is about to reject her suitors.”

Below, only the sacred square around the covered well remained relatively clear. Within its precincts a fantastic figure clad in the relics of a white court gown strutted and preened before the audience as if before a wall of mirrors.

“There was a maid, oh so beautiful, so proud,” murmured Jame, remembering her previous venture into the Merikits’ sacred space.

Swish, swish went the embroidered hem. Where had they gotten that dress?

Then Jame remembered: this had been Marc’s home keep before the Merikit had slaughtered everyone in it. Someone must have pilfered this finery before the flames had claimed it. She reminded herself that the massacre had been over eighty years ago, the result of a misunderstanding, not malice, and that Marc had long since claimed the blood price for it. Still, she wondered what Highborn lady had last worn that tattered garment and what she would think to see it now.

Not, of course, that it currently clothed a female. Only shamans could mum before their gods. This one was masked to conceal the wizened features of Index’s old friend, Tungit.

Other shamans decked out in decrepit finery of the same era approached the Maid and were dismissed by her with haughty gestures and personal insults that made the audience roar with laughter.

“No chief’s son would do for her, oh no. Why this particular mummery, Prid?”

“The equinox is the Eaten One’s festival. We need her permission to fish the Silver and she needs us to break open the ice. Listen!”

“I would rather be a war maid and track the wild game,” declaimed the shaman, to a muted cheer from Prid. On her other side her cousin Hatch glanced at her wistfully.

The Maid’s mother sidled up to reproach her. “Take a mate and become a proper wyf,” she squeaked in a high voice. “I have a fine lodge. To whom should I leave it if not to you?”

“What want I with hearth or housebond? What is a lodge but an earthbound trap?”

The audience shuffled their feet. Some began to stomp until all had picked up the beat.

“Oh no!” cried the mother, wringing her hands. “The earth is shaking! The River Snake must be hungry. Who will save us?”

The Maid swayed her hips seductively, to more laughter from the crowd. “No need for a hero. I will deal with him, for who can resist my charms?”

As the mother withdrew, the Maid began to pantomime gingerly walking on ice. Flagstones shifted under her feet, limned by bright lines of sacred space. “Ooh! This is harder than I thought.”

Into the square crept a shaman wearing the catfish-skin cape.

“Look behind you!” cried the children on the wall.

“Did I hear little birds twittering? Wakie, wakie, snakie, snakie!” She slipped. “Oops. I’ve fallen into the water. Oh no!”

The fish-man slithered over her.

“Munch, munch, munch.”

“And he ate her all-l-l up!” came the triumphant chorus of the onlookers.

Then they all turned and began to stream out of the courtyard, leaving the square empty.

“Come on,” said Prid. “Let’s hurry back for the feast.”

Jame went with her. She had no doubt that she had just witnessed one version of that unfortunate maiden’s transformation from mortal into the immortal if eternally compromised Eaten One. At the same time, it had seemed to be ringed with other stories, other maids and other fates—something tragic, profound, and complex reduced to a farce. Pride falls, but what of bravery and rebellion against a fate not of one’s choosing, brought to such an end? Did the audience laugh so as not to cry?

And she remembered Prid quoting from this mummery at the winter solstice. No wonder Gran Cyd had warned her not to, given the Maid’s fate.

They came to the rebuilt boys’ and girls’ lodges reserved for those like Prid too old to stay at home but too young to know which way to turn their lives.

“I’ve moved into the men’s lodge,” Hatch told her. “It’s on the west side of the village next to the war maids’.”

“Now that you’ve come of age, what will you do?”

He gave her a crooked smile. “The same thing I’ve always done: wait for Prid.”

Overall, thought Jame, he was lucky to live in a society that gave him the freedom to fit in where he wished, or to decline until he was ready. The men’s and women’s lodges seemed to be halfway options. Jame glanced at the tawny-haired girl skipping beside her and wondered if she would outgrow her desire to run wild with the war maids. It seemed to Jame that one had to pick one’s discipline eventually or risk never growing up at all.

On the other hand, who was she to condemn the warrior life?

Here was the village on its palisaded hill, and inside the orderly mounds that marked each individual subterranean lodge. Ma, Da, and their twin girls greeted Jame from their threshold. Among the Merikit even two women could have such a family since the mother decided who had fathered her children. Other lodge-wyves waved. Most took it as a great joke that Jame was the Earth Wife’s Favorite and Chingetai’s heir, therefore officially male.

Gran Cyd waited outside her lodge, resplendent in crimson and gold with a rich fur cape draped over her bare shoulders. Her dark red hair, elaborately braided, shone against the white fur. She had the glow of a woman with child, but as yet showed little other sign of her pregnancy for which (to her embarrassment) Jame had been credited, along with that of half a dozen more among the lodge-wyves.

“Come,” she greeted Jame. “We must make haste to the feasting ground by the Silver Steps.”

Jame was somewhat chagrined. Sitting on the wall had chilled her and she had been looking forward to the warmth of the underground communal hall. The queen saw her shiver.

“Wait.” Gran Cyd descended into her lodge, and returned with a black fur cloak almost as sumptuous as her own. “A present,” she said, slinging it over Jame’s shoulders despite her protests.

“What are the Silver Steps?” Jame asked as they departed the village, followed by a crowd mostly comprised of women and children.

“You will see.”

They walked about a mile upstream over a path beaten through the snow by the men going before them. Here the Silver’s ice showed deep fractures and dislodged chunks ground against each other as the current rushed under them.

By now it was midafternoon with the sun beginning its tumble down the sky toward the western mountain peaks. Jame regarded the lengthening shadows with unease. She hadn’t been this far north since the winter solstice, much less with night coming on.

“What do the Burning Ones do while their master sleeps in the earth?” she asked Gran Cyd.

The queen raised an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”

“I saw them at the solstice, with someone whom I didn’t expect to see. A Kendar named Vant.”

“So.” She walked on for several strides, thinking. “Perhaps that explains it. Normally, from solstice to Summer’s Eve the Burnt Man’s hounds sleep. This winter, though, we had a kin-slayer in the men’s lodge, one brother killing another. It sometimes happens, when the weather is bad and no one can go out. The walls close in. Tempers grow short. Nonetheless, we drove out the slayer, thinking that he would perish of the cold; instead, the Burning Ones came, led by one who did not burn except for his eyes. Perhaps that was your Kendar.”

“Perhaps,” said Jame, chilled. It still seemed strange that Vant should hunt with the Burnt Man’s pack, but there was a rage in him that apparently had survived his death by fire. And he was Greshan’s grandson, tenacious of life.

“I will have justice, or I will have revenge.”

Against whom? Torisen? Damson? Herself?

“If so,” said Gran Cyd, following her own thoughts, “he does his followers no good. They should have slept the cold time away, keeping their fires banked. What came for our slayer could barely shamble through the snow. If he had not fed them, I doubt that they would have survived winter.”

That sounded like Vant, who had never learned that to lead is also to serve.

Moreover, it explained why he hadn’t brought the Burning Ones south to hunt his true prey: they had been too weak.

Were they still? Should she fear them as she did that other seeker-out of guilt, the Dark Judge?

But the sun still shone and, really, what did she have to feel guilty about?

Don’t answer that.

They passed several waterfalls, then a series of them rising in tiers to the lip of an escarpment overhung with ice. In the field below the men had set up trestle tables and were cooking in huge cauldrons suspended over pale, bright flames.

“Here are the Steps,” said Gran Cyd. “Climb them and behold a wonder.”

Jame found a twisting trail beside the river and scrambled up it, clinging to bare shrubs. At the top, she looked out over an ice-locked lake winding back between steep, dark mountains into premature dusk. Wintry sunlight gleamed blue off the nearer shore, deepening to cobalt under the streamers of snow that drifted over it. Sparkles here and there reflected back from ice rills as if the night sky had fallen into the ocean.

“Is this the headwater of the Silver?” Jame asked as she regained the queen’s side.

“Yes. It stretches through a chain of lakes farther north, to the foot of a glacier, in the shadow of a greater darkness.”

That sounded uncomfortably like the Barrier with Perimal Darkling on the other side. One tended to forget that it was there, just out of sight.

“That, they say, is where the blackheads breed. We have yet to see one. The northern tribes speak of a lampreylike fish native to those benighted waters that lays its eggs in other fish and seeks to migrate with them even as the eggs hatch within and devour their host. If they should ever find their way into the Silver . . .”

Chingetai laughed behind them, making Jame start. “A tale to frighten children. They even claim that the larvae can reanimate the dead. I ask you!”

Cyd turned to face him, hands on her hips. “You are a great hunter and raider, housebond, doubtless, but no fisherman upon the ice. The depths beneath terrify you.”

The chief swelled in outrage. He really was a big man, thought Jame, looking up at him, seeing mostly chest and the underside of a jutting, bearded chin. Still, he wasn’t quite up to Marc’s stature, in any sense of that word.

“Nothing scares me!” he declared. “When my sick friend craved fresh salmon, did I not go out onto the ice and catch him one? He was so overjoyed that he devoured it raw and so regained his strength.”

“Not noticeably,” said the queen wryly.

She indicated a haggard man hovering near the cooking pots as if led there by his nose. His eyes were glassy and while otherwise thin, his belly swelled like that of a pregnant woman. The cooks shied away from him.

Chingetai harrumphed and stalked away.

“Fresh salmon, at this time of the year. I would think that he caught one of the mothers of the school who return more than once to spawn, except that this one was male. With eggs. Nonetheless,” Gran Cyd lowered her voice and leaned to confide in Jame, “it
was
an act of courage for him to go out onto the ice. He fears deep water in all its forms and has ever since his sister was chosen when they were both children.”

“Chosen for what?”

“Ah.” The queen turned away from her. “Here is my sister Anku, leader of the war maids.”

Anku might have been the queen’s age or slightly older; with her weathered face and trim, hard body, it was difficult to tell. She smiled at Jame. “I hear that you have cast your glamour over my grandniece Prid. She talks of no one else.”

“I don’t deserve that.”

“Ah, but who among the Kencyr is closer to being a war maid than you, and such a one as to have fought the River Snake and won! Prid envies what she sees as our free life.”

“It’s hardly that,” said Jame, thinking of the trials of Tentir.

“So you and I know full well. But Prid remembers her mother, who died in child-bed. For her, the village lodges stink of duty and death. A pity for that nice boy Hatch, now that she is almost of an age to make her choice.”

The crowd stirred. “Here comes the feast!” exclaimed many voices.

The men served them steaming bowls of fish stew—perch, pike, walleye, and blue gimp—all the fruits of winter fishing boiled up with the season’s last root vegetables, washed down with tankards of strong ale. Noisy, almost hectic merriment spread. Unlike the previous time when Jame had feasted with them, rather than simply enjoying themselves, the Merikit seemed to be trying to get drunk as fast as possible.

One of the men tending the fire suddenly knelt, drew out a long, charred stick with a knob at each end, and brandished it on high with a shout of triumph. The Merikit cheered.

“A Burnt Man’s bone,” said Gran Cyd, pleased. “Probably a femur. They have been showing up in our fireplaces ever since the winter solstice. We have maybe half of them by now, set aside for the Summer’s Eve bonefires.”

At that time, Chingetai would use them to close the Merikits’ borders; but if even one was missing, as had happened last year due to Jame’s unintentional interference, the rite would fail. Such matters in the hills certainly were complicated.