Honor's Paradox-ARC (4 page)

Voices called to her, making her start, and dark figures rushed out of the night to throw their arms around her. One was Prid, another Gran Cyd, and half a dozen other women besides.

“Well done,” said the queen, helping her to her feet. “We could do without our chief, but not without the father of our unborn children.”

Jame gazed in dismay at the assembled throng, who smiled back at her. Gran Cyd had promised that as the Earth Wife’s supposedly male Favorite, she would be credited with any babies conceived on Winter’s Eve, and here was the proof.

“Oh no,” she said. “Oh, Cyd, not you too.”

CHAPTER III
Pyres and the Pit

Winter 70

I

Jame half woke, tangled in sleeping furs.

Where am I?
she thought.

The white-washed wall beside her danced with murals given life by the low fire sulking beneath the great bronze basin while rain tapped on the copper smoke hood above. Rue snored softly in her own mound of blankets by the door. Of course. She was back in her quarters at Tentir, almost too tired from the long ride south from the Merikit village to sleep.

But she had slept, and dreamed of dark things. Fire and ash, furious blue eyes in a charred face, a seared finger encircled by a ring, jutting out of a pile of corpses . . .

Some images she recognized, but to whom had the other ones belonged? Over the past year she had sometimes shared the dreamscape with both Timmon, set on seduction, and her twin brother Torisen, pulled in against his will. Neither showed her anything she wanted to see. To sleep again was to risk falling back into nightmare, but oh, she ached for rest.

A branch snapped and the flames leaped. Her eyelids flickered, then fell again. Through them she still saw fire. . . .

Such pulsing heat, such an incandescent glow! Beads of sweat burst on her brow and trickled down, stinging, into her eyes. It hurt to breathe. Tentir’s fire timbers loomed around her like a forest perpetually eaten by sullen, internal flame.

The vents far above sucked in a breath of hot air: “Aaaah . . .”

Embers glowed, above, below, while black flakes of combustion fluttered against ironwood trunks like infernal butterflies.

At her feet, the floor fell away into a wide-mouthed pit where once a fire timber had stood. “Haahh . . .” breathed the searing air again, and coals glowed in the pit’s deep bed.

“Afraid, little man?”

The creature who spoke looked like Caldane’s son Nusair, but its hair was white under its ruddy fire-tint. It was a Shanir—worse, a darkling changer, once one of the Master’s most loyal servants, now turned against him in a desperate bid for freedom.

“Afraid? Oh you? Moderately.”

That wasn’t her voice, nor her hand creeping to the collar of her dress coat where (since when?) she carried a set of throwing knives.

“Now, what would really frighten you? Shall we find out? Beauty, now!”

Something gray near her foot, something that sank fangs into her leg even as her hand whipped down to bury a blade in its head, and her senses reeled.

But the darkling wyrm is cocooned in a trunk in Greshan’s chambers,
she thought, bewildered. It had bitten her brother two years ago when he had visited Tentir on the way south to battle at the Cataracts, and now she was protecting it while it metamorphosed into . . . what?

Then wyrm and changer were gone and again she circled the pit. This time Vant moved opposite her, his handsome face underlit by glowing coals, twisted with hate.

“Does honor mean nothing to you?” he snarled at her. “Do the rules? Then again, why should they when the Commandant lets you break them over and over? Quite his little pet, aren’t you? You think you’re so clever that you can get away with anything. Well, not this time.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your scarf. Someone has already scalped you, but here you are, still in play.”

It was the Winter War, and Timmon had seized her scarf before the contest had even begun, officially removing her from competition.

“You think I’m Jame,” said the voice that she now recognized as her brother’s.

Vant spoke to him, not to me. I wasn’t there. Rue told me.

Vant spat on the stones. His saliva skipped among them, sizzling, going, gone. “The spoiled brat. The Highborn little lady. What did your brother think, that Tentir needed a mascot? It was an honest mistake!”

“What was?” asked both siblings in one voice, and that his.

“How could anyone seriously believe that hillmen were attacking on Tentir’s doorstep? What logic was there in that? What sense is there in anything that you do or that happens around you?”

“You didn’t send help. You laughed. A cadet died.”

The steel in Torisen’s voice pierced her. Beneath it she felt his barely suppressed rage that one of the precious young Kendar entrusted to him had been lost. The other lords mistook his mild ways for weakness, but for thirty millennia his ancestors had been Highlord of the Kencyrath, just as he was now, and their power ran in his veins. As such, he was responsible for the well-being of all his people, in life, in death.

Anise with a Noyat arrow jutting out of her stomach, so scared, then so cold. And I nearly flayed you alive for it, Vant, Ancestors forgive me. Now here you are, with fire at your feet.

“I was master-ten of my barracks. I still should be.” Before his lord, the cadet’s outrage thinned to a self-justifying whine. “Am I to pay for one misjudgment forever?”

“That depends on you.” Trinity, but Tori sounded cold, no less than an Arrin-ken passing judgment. Despite the heat, the words half froze on his lips, issuing forth in a plume of frost. “In Sheth’s place, I would have thrown you out of Tentir altogether.”

“You misbegotten bitch!”

Suddenly Vant was upon him, grappling, trying to throw him onto the coals. They wrestled back and forth on the pit’s rim. Then Vant lurched free, shaking his head. He looked startled and dazed, as if dealt an unexpected blow.

“You . . .” His eyes wildly searched the shadows. “Don’t!”

And he reeled again, over the edge, onto the coals, rolling to his feet. For the first time he clearly saw and recognized his adversary as the Highlord.

“Oh.”

“Now that that’s settled, get out of that damn firebox.” In life, in death . . .

Do it, you fool!
Jame thought behind the mask of her brother’s face.
Don’t haggle!

But even now Vant didn’t believe that such a terrible thing could happen to him.

“Not until you make me master-ten of my barracks again and withdraw that bitch sister of yours. You must see that her presence here isn’t right!”

Get out, get out, get out . . .

“I suppose you know that your boots are smoking. I can’t be blackmailed, Vant. It would be a betrayal of my position.”

The cadet beat at his smoldering clothes with a kind of exasperated irritation.

“You’re Highlord, dammit!” The furnace breath of the pit made him increasingly hoarse as his throat closed. “You can do . . . what you please!”

“Not so,” came the pitiless answer. “To lead is also to serve . . . something that you never seem to have grasped. What you ask would be a betrayal of responsibility. Come out, Vant. Now.”

Fire flared under Vant’s hands.

“I don’t believe this. I don’t accept it. It isn’t fair!”

“Is the truth? Come out. Here, take my hand.”

The flames rose, licking from pants to jacket, with a sudden rush to the hair. At last Vant believed the unthinkable.

“I
will
. . . have justice,” he panted as the smoke gnawed at his throat, “or I will . . . have revenge.”

Torisen/I/we reach for him, but Brier stops us.

“He would have pulled you in, lord.”

Tori didn’t deserve that. Did I? Did Vant?

Pyre succeeded pyre, as if all the flames in the world roiled through her dreams:

At the Haunted Lands keep, where her father Ganth presumably had burned.

But I wasn’t there either. Kindrie told me.

In Wilden’s forecourt.

Ah, Rawneth. How much will your people endure when you put their children to the torch?

At the Cataracts.

Oh, Tirandys, Senethari, I will never forget.

At the Cataracts again.

This was confusing. Who had told her about the common pyre and why did she remember it now? A ring, a blackened finger, broken off, pocketed.

I took both from my father to give to my brother, but who else would do such a thing, and why?

She couldn’t see the faces of the living or of the dead. What she did see, abruptly, was a fair-haired young man with a swollen nose.

“I think you’ve broken it,” he said in a nasal, petulant whine.

He looked like Timmon. His eyes were Timmon’s, wide with surprise to hear his father’s voice issuing from his lips. Once again the Ardeth Lordan had invaded her dreams, damn him.

“Why did you do it, Pereden?”

That was her brother again, speaking to Timmon’s father. They were in the Highlord’s tent at the Cataracts. Torisen sounded exhausted, as well he might be, having fought and won such a battle. Worse, he had just come from culling the bloody field where he had granted so many of the fatally wounded the White Knife. The least they had deserved was an honorable death at the hands of their lord. In death as in life, they were his responsibility, at whatever cost to him. Yes, he was exhausted, but there was hurt in his voice too, and a desperate need to understand.

“Why, Peri?”

“What else had you left me to do? Damn.” His nose had started to bleed. Torisen gave him a handkerchief. Pereden began to pace, he and a bewildered Timmon both, overlapping, caught in the same dream of a memory that was Torisen’s. “Taking my rightful place as commander of the Southern Host, turning my father against me . . . You lied to him!”

Behind Pereden’s fury, his son’s bafflement and interest grew. Jame knew from a previous dream where this conversation would end, if not what went before. Timmon mustn’t know, even if to stop now was to thwart her own curiosity. Why had Torisen broken not just Pereden’s nose but his neck, then sent his body to burn on the common pyre?

No more of this. No more. Wake up, wake up, wake up—

And she did, to find Rue hovering anxiously over her.

“You were having a nightmare, lady.”

“You’re telling me.”

Jame threw back the furs. Her slim, naked body steamed with sweat while the cold air raised goosebumps down her arms.

“Damn and blast that Timmon,” she said thickly, rubbing her face. “He’s gotten into my dreams again and between us we’ve ensnared Tori. But who else’s dream was I in? That finger, that ring . . . ah, never mind,” she added, seeing Rue’s confused, concerned expression. “Fetch me something to drink, please.”

The Ardeth Lordan was a charmer, a dream-stalker, and a would-be seducer, except every time he tried to entangle her in one of his erotic fantasies, between them they seemed to open the door to her brother’s sleeping mind which, while fascinating, was hardly fair to Tori.

As for that last dream . . .

Timmon had adored his father and still tried to imitate him. Jame suspected that therein lay the source of half the Ardeth Lordan’s personality flaws, not that Timmon saw them as such.

“Damn him,” she muttered again, accepting a cup of cold water from Rue. In so many other ways, he was almost worthwhile.

II

As it happened, their first class was together.

Timmon arrived with his ten-command, looking aggrieved, with dark smudges under his eyes.

“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “I try to arrange some harmless fun on a fur rug in front of a cheerful fireplace, and you drag me from one immolation to another.”

“Good morning to you too. Sorry about that, but I did warn you to keep out of my dreams.”

“If I were Torisen, you wouldn’t fight me so hard,” he muttered. It was a sore point that, despite herself, Jame found her brother more interesting than she did him. “And what about that last bit? My father called your brother a liar!”

“I have no more idea than you do what that was about. Of all people, you should know that dreams don’t always make sense.”

Seeing that he was about to argue, she abruptly changed the topic.

“For that matter, I’ve a bone to pick with you. Why did you tackle me in Greshan’s quarters before the Winter War even started?”

“I didn’t think you’d let me do it afterward.”

“Let you? Huh. And how did Torisen get my scarf back from you?”

At this, Timmon looked distinctly sheepish. “If he hasn’t told you, I’m not going to.”

“Could it be . . . oh no!” She burst out laughing. “You tackled him in the Knorth kitchen thinking he was me. He took the scarf and locked you in!”

With that, Jame stifling mirth and Timmon very red in the face, they reached their destination: a room in Old Tentir with rush mats strewn about the floor. Timmon stopped on the threshold.

“Oh no. Not the Senethar this early in the morning. I’m for my bed again.”

“Not so fast.” The randon instructor entered behind them.

Timmon smiled, all dimples with the trace of a pout. “I didn’t sleep well last night, Ran. Really, I’d rather not.”

The randon, an Ardeth, smiled back with more teeth than humor. “Like it or not, young Lordan, you’ll learn your lesson. Everyone, coats off and take your places for the fire-leaping kantirs.”

“Losing your charm, Timmon?” Jame asked.

“I don’t understand. Usually the only one who denies me is you. What’s gotten into the randon of my house lately?”

Still grumbling, he and Jame dutifully squared up as their ten-commands followed suit. Fire-leaping Senethar consisted of a series of kicks and blows. Its kantirs could be practiced alone but when in class two opponents mirrored each other, starting slow, getting faster, not seeking to connect. Jame’s fist brushed past Timmon’s ear, and his past hers. Simultaneous kicks pivoted them away from each other, then back. So far, properly speaking, they were engaged in the Senetha, the Senethar’s dance form. The pace quickened. Each focused on a point just short of the other. Timmon’s booted foot stopped close enough for her to smell its fine leather and to see, cross-eyed, the dirt engrained in its sole. Hers brushed the tip of his nose.