Honor's Paradox-ARC (28 page)

And she had thrust the scroll into the fire.

Witch. Bitch.

At least he still had the rough notes in his room at Mount Alban.

Rawneth lived in the upper stories of the tower, but the doors to the lower of these were closed. Only the way to the top level stood open. Kindrie paused at the head of the stair. Open windows all around let in the wind to swirl sheer curtains of dusky purple and deep blue, spangled with stars like the night sky but turned by the afternoon sun into glowing twilight. Through shifting veils he saw movement, heard muffled voices. The Lady had company in her tower.

“My dear,” she was saying, “now is not the right time. I told you so two nights ago. If you succeed today, might not we be blamed too?”

“Nonsense,” said a familiar, confident voice. “I’m too clever for that. Look.”

A dark figure loomed behind the drapes and swept them aside. Sudden sunlight momentarily blinded Kindrie, but he heard the smile in the other’s voice:

“I even have the perfect witness.”

Kindrie caught his breath as his sight returned, haloed around the edges. That curly brown hair, that smooth, young face so full of seeming innocence . . .

Rawneth’s guest was Holly, Lord Hollens of Danior.

II

It was the second, long, restless day for Torisen, spent waiting for the scrollsman expert to arrive who hopefully could settle this land squabble without a pitched battle. Holly’s people prowled on one side of the contested ground. On the other, the envoy Wither had pitched a pavilion and could be seen in it placidly reading as he waited. His lack of guards was almost an insult. Holly himself, having heard that Randir were already on his side of the river, poaching, had ridden off to hunt them. Torisen wasn’t sorry to see him go. Lord Danior made a very unquiet companion when frustrated.

The sun beat down, unusually hot for the time of year. Gnats rose in swirling clouds from the marshy land. They didn’t bother Torisen—stinging insects never did—but he could hear his guards slapping at themselves and swearing. Either he had brought too many of them or too few—not enough to protect him in case of an assault, too many to make this seem like a casual affair. He had let the Randir maneuver him into placing his prestige behind the dispute. If he couldn’t protect Holly’s interests, his allies would look at him askance. If he did so by breaking law or custom, however, friends and foes alike would have good cause to question his judgment.

Across the plain, Wither looked up from his book and gravely saluted him. Torisen gave him a nod and debated retiring into his own tent for a nap, but that was something he seldom did, as everyone well knew.

He didn’t even have Grimly to bicker with. That morning, there had been a slight tremor and he had sent the wolver to scout the lands north of the keeps with strict instructions to stay in human form so as to give the Randir bowmen no excuse to shoot at him.

Midafternoon brought a warning cry from his guards.

Torisen emerged from his tent to see Adric, Lord Ardeth, splashing toward him over the marshy ground on an exhausted gray mare.

“Really, Adric!” Torisen touched the Whinno-hir’s shoulder, stained nearly black with sweat. “Someone, rub her down and find some firm ground to walk her on until she’s cool. And now, my lord . . .”

He led Adric into the tent and induced him to sit. When he offered the old man wine, Adric took it but absentmindedly, without tasting it. He continued to fidget through the ceremony of welcome, and Torisen’s heart sank.

“Now,” he said finally, “what brings you from Omiroth to randon college to my humble tent in such a lather?”

Adric put down his cup and leaned forward. “I would have been here earlier, but someone slipped nightshade into my evening tipple and I overslept. I’ve talked to my grandson Timmon. He tells me that you gave him Pereden’s ring. Where did you get it?”

Torisen sipped his own wine, mentally bracing himself. He had known ever since he gave the ring and finger to Timmon that this moment was coming.

“My lords, I hope I don’t interrupt.”

A wizened Jaran scrollsman stood at the tent flap, nearsightedly peering inside. “I was at the High Keep examining some rare manuscripts when your summons reached me. Then I had to consult Mount Alban’s library and certain of my colleagues. Sorry if I’m late. Wine? I wouldn’t say no. A hot day, is it not?”

Burr entered and served him while Torisen scrambled to make sense of his sudden appearance. Of course. This was the expert for whom they had all been waiting. As if in confirmation, Wither appeared at the flap.

Adric plucked at Torisen’s sleeve. “About the ring . . .”

“I hope,” the Randir was saying courteously to the scrollsman, “that you come bearing the solution to our little dilemma.”

“It isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems. Some of the older scrolls refer not to the riverbed but to the River Snake’s back, which is said to run all the way from the Silver Steps to the mouth of the river bordering on Nekrien.”

Wither waved this away. “Mere primitive superstitions. What do the charters between Bashti and Hathir say?”

Grimly entered. “Tori, you should see the shape of the land to the north. Oh, and here’s Holly.”

The young Danior lord paused on the threshold of the already crowded tent, his face in shadow. In his coat of blue velvet laced with silver, he was surprisingly well dressed for someone who had spent the day tracking poachers. Apparently he had caught one, for he led a brown-robed figure by a tether around his neck. Torisen met a pair of anxious, pale blue eyes over a white gag.

“Kindrie?”

Holly twitched the lead, making his prisoner stumble forward. “It’s just a runaway acolyte from the Priests’ College. I was about to send him back.”

“That, be damned. He’s my cousin!”

“He’s a bastard, kin to no one.”

Torisen flicked a throwing knife out of his collar, spun Kindrie around, and cut the rope that bound his wrists. The Shanir scrabbled free of the gag.

“Tori,” he croaked, “I saw Lord Danior with Rawneth!”

As Torisen turned, incredulous, toward Holly, he saw the knife in the other’s hand. It darted toward him. His lighter knife turned the other’s blade, but only so far before snapping. As he twisted aside, he heard cloth rip and felt a line of fire across his ribs. Burr swore and lunged to the rescue, only to crash into Wither. Holly yelped. Grimly had bitten him on the leg. He slashed at the wolver, clipping off the tip of one furry ear, then stumbled as Yce barged between his legs. Torisen grabbed his knife hand at the wrist, bent it, and sent him crashing into the table. Wine flew in a crimson arc across Ardeth’s face.

“Oh, I say,” protested the scrollsman, snatching up his own cup.

In the moment that Holly was down, Kindrie threw the remains of experimental powder in his face. His features convulsed.

“Ah-
choo!
”

Dust flew everywhere, wrecking havoc. Bodies lurched about in paroxysms of sneezing, falling over furniture and each other. The canvas walls bulged and jittered as if the tent were also suffering a fit. Guards outside cried out in alarm. Those who reached the door first, however, also doubled over, coughing and half-blinded with tears.

Inside, only Torisen and Kindrie had had the wits to hold their breaths.

The figure that Torisen pinned writhed under his hands, distorting fantastically. It gasped, sneezed again, and seemed nearly to blow off its own face. An elbow weirdly bent caught Torisen in the chin, knocking him back. Before he could recover, his opponent had lurched out of the tent through the incapacitated guards with the two wolvers in close pursuit.

Torisen also started after him, but stopped when Kindrie fell to his knees, choking.

“. . . cords . . .” wheezed the Shanir, clutching at his throat. “In my . . . soul-image.”

Torisen only saw the rope tether still around Kindrie’s neck, but it had tightened and was digging into the healer’s flesh. When he worked his fingers under it, he found himself grappling with an entire network of tough threads that bound the Shanir from head to foot. A woven mockery of a head like an inflated sack rose behind Kindrie and hissed at Torisen. Then Kindrie found a loose thread and jerked at it. The cords unraveled with a sigh, leaving Torisen with the original rope in his hands. He dropped it as if it were a dead snake.

“Are you all right?”

Kindrie nodded weakly, still clutching his bruised throat.

“I-I didn’t know . . . I didn’t realize . . . all this time, sh-she had me . . .”

Before Torisen could ask what he meant, Holly burst back into the tent with a wolver gripping either arm of his leather hunting jacket.

“What in Perimal’s name . . .” he began, then took in the chaos only beginning to sort itself out inside the tent as various shaken Highborn extricated themselves from the furniture and each other.

Rowan pushed past him and moved quickly to her lord’s side.

“Blackie, you’re bleeding.”

“I know.”

Burr opened Torisen’s coat and shirt to examine the slash across his ribs.

“As usual, m’lord, you’re luckier than you should be,” he said, and handed Torisen a table linen to hold against the seeping wound.

Holly lifted the arm to which Yce was attached and regarded her dangling from it, growling around her mouthful of leather.

“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?”

“Release him, Yce, Grimly. D’you think it likely that my own cousin would try to skewer me, much less that he could change from a dress coat to hunting clothes in seconds?”

Grimly rose, assuming a less hairy, somewhat chagrined aspect. “We did lose sight of him in the confusion,” he admitted, “and neither of us could track worth scat with a snout full of that wretched powder. So when we saw M’lord Holly here coming up the plank walk, bold as you please, we just grabbed him.”

“Oh, that’s as clear as mud soup,” said Holly. “I take it that you thought I was an assassin. I also take it by the carving on your precious hide that there
was
a would-be assassin who looked like me. So, who and how?”

“I think I can explain,” said Kindrie hoarsely, still sitting hunched on the floor, his face as white as his hair.

Torisen gave him a hard look. “One thing among many that I don’t understand,” he said, abruptly changing the topic, “is why you’re here at all.”

“He . . . the other one . . . brought me as a witness to Lord Danior’s presumed perfidy. Beyond that, I’ve been a prisoner in the Priests’ College these past twenty-six days.”

“Did you know about this?” Torisen demanded of the Randir envoy.

Wither shrugged. “I may have heard some rumor, but really, the priests go their own way under my lady’s protection. Besides, the man is a bastard.”

“If anyone says that one more time, I shall wax violent and ruin more perfectly good napkins.”

“Is there anyone here,” asked the scrollsman piteously, “who wants to hear the results of my research?”

“I do at least,” said Wither, with a courteous inclination of his head.

“Well, all complications aside, it comes down to this: the river establishes the boundary between keeps.”

“Thank you.”

Torisen sighed. “That’s it, then. I’m sorry, Holly.”

The earth trembled again, shaking them where they stood, making the planks chatter like teeth under them.

“That was a strong one,” Holly remarked.

The wolver had darted out the door. Now he returned. “Tori, everyone, come look!”

Torisen, on his way out, hesitated at the abstracted, pained look on Kindrie’s face.

“I said the next seizure would kill him,” whispered the healer. “These are that wretched boy’s death throes.”

Outside, a cloud of dust rose over the shoulder of the northern bluff. The far side seemed to have suffered a considerable landslide, and the eastern end had crumbled altogether. Water and debris boiled through the new cut as the Silver raced to regain its old bed, slicing off a chunk of former Randir land for good measure. They watched as the river, fanged with debris and gilded with the sunset, surged around them. Then Torisen turned to Wither.

“Well,” he said, “that’s it.”

Wither made a face. “As you say. This time. Fare you well, my lord.”

On his departure, Adric emerged from the shadows where he had retreated to avoid being trampled in the uproar and to mop off his wine-soaked clothes. “About Pereden’s ring . . .” he said.

Holly shot Torisen a look, then drew himself up with a gulp. “I gave it to the Highlord,” he said. “It was on the finger of a corpse being burned on the common pyre at the Cataracts along with the renegade changers.”

Adric breathed a sigh of relief. “My boy, why didn’t you say so in the first place? Obviously it was worn by the changer who impersonated my dear son. Tori, you should have given it directly to me.”

Torisen meekly agreed.

“If you will come with me, m’lord,” said Holly, scrambling to recover himself, “I would be honored to host you for the night. Tori?”

“I’ll join you later.

Left alone with Kindrie, Torisen searched for and found a bottle with enough wine left in it for two small cups. His side wrenched at him as he bent to pick it up and the stain on the linen grew.

Kindrie moved as if to help him, but Torisen waved him off.

“It’s only a cut. Let’s not push our luck. The question remains: what in Perimal’s name just happened?”

III

Kindrie drew a deep breath. He was still shaken by how deeply Rawneth had tricked him into despair. She had almost stolen everything that he valued most: friends, family, self-respect . . . all the things that the Priests’ College also sought to destroy.

She could have broken me,
he thought.
She almost did. But not quite.

He accepted the cup of wine, waited until his hands stopped shaking, and then drank from it. Warmth spread outward from his empty stomach. Breakfast had been a long time ago.

“To begin with,” he said, “you were attacked by a changer.”

Torisen snorted. “That much I guessed. I have come up against such creatures before, you know.”