Honor's Paradox-ARC (9 page)

But time passed and the howling on the heights abated, if it had ever been there at all. Jame began to doubt what she had seen and heard, both with the Dark Judge and with Vant among the Burning Ones. How likely was the latter, after all? A trick of the firelight, a shard of free-floating guilt.

As for the blind Arrin-ken, let him mind his own business. Be damned if she was going to run scared of a phantom bully, however bloodthirsty.

Meanwhile, she continued to work with Bear, after badgering the Commandant into letting her into the randon’s cell to deal with his overgrown toenails and claws. She found that since she had last seen him, he had virtually destroyed his lodgings. Had he finally grown aware of how squalid they were, or simply succumbed to an extreme case of cabin fever? She thought that she saw improvement in him now if only in that he no longer tried to kill her during lessons and began to teach again. Once in a while, he actually spoke a word or two. Was it only wishful thinking, or had the scar on his forehead lengthened as his cleft skull finally began to close? Still, how could he really improve while tightly mewed in and isolated as he was most of the time?

Timmon continued to court her, if a bit absent-mindedly. Now that his instructors were holding him to schedule, he had less time and energy for amorous pursuits. As the easiest course, he had again taken Narsa into his bed. Jame worried about that. Surely the Kendar knew that he was only using her, but he had woven his charms so well that she probably didn’t care. Whenever Jame saw her she looked happy, though with a certain uneasy, feverish gleam in her eyes.

Gorbel grumbled through his days, making up for his clumsiness with dogged determination, often with the pook Twizzle in the corner regarding him button-eyed and panting, occasionally shifting within his skin the better to deal with one arcane itch or another.

Fash watched everyone with his wide, white smile and his cold eyes.

At last came a day when the wind changed from the north to the south. Although snow still lay thick on the ground, something hinted at stealthy growth in the dark and at awakenings. Water dripped. Snow slid from boughs in miniature avalanches, echoed by massive ones from the heights. Cadets shoved back their hoods, sniffed, and grinned at each other. They had to endure one last blizzard, but after that the sun shone bright and the snow began to creep back into the shadows. A bird sang tentatively, then another.

Soon it would be time for the High Council meeting.

II

Torisen slid into the dress coat that Burr held for him and ran his scarred hands down its sleek panels. His Kendar servant had talked him into ordering new clothes from Kothifir for himself as well as for his garrison—the former a luxury about which he still felt uneasy. Black satin, richly embroidered with silver thread by his own people . . . they wanted to show him off. A pity that he didn’t fill such extravagance better.

“I can still count your ribs,” muttered Burr, mirroring his thoughts.

“So? No one else can, under all of this finery. Come summer, shall I try to pork up like Lord Caineron?”

“Huh.”

Torisen’s hand slid over his pocket and the slight bulge there. Pereden’s ring and finger. How meaningless everything seemed compared to those, the dull sparks that might overthrow his entire world. If he gave them to Adric, how was he going to explain where they had come from and why they were here? He couldn’t lie without the death of honor, without which there was nothing.

If he hid them, though, Adric’s search would tear the Riverland apart.

Burn them? His study fire wasn’t hot enough, but Marc’s would be. He should have thought of that before. However, what would
that
do to Adric?

Damn Holly anyway—a good idea at the wrong time.
What if his cousin were to confess what he knew? That, after all, wasn’t much. He shouldn’t have recognized Peri in the first place. Much less did he know how Adric’s heir had come to be on the common pyre. Would Adric recognize his innocence, though? A blood feud between the Ardeth and the Danior would destroy the latter and only benefit the Randir, who would love to take over tiny Shadow Rock so temptingly placed just across the river from them.

But Torisen couldn’t permit that either . . . could he?

Wouldn’t that be better than admitting his role in that wretched boy’s death? Because that would lead to total civil war, the probable extinction of his own house, and quite possibly the end of the Kencyrath as he knew it.

One tried and tried to do the right thing.

Damn you, Pereden. I will not let you destroy everything that I’ve worked so hard to build. I will not.

Burr produced an iron box and opened it. They both regarded the Kenthiar, that mysterious, narrow, silver collar set with a gem of shifting hue. Only the true Highlord could wear it; anyone else hazarded his neck, not to mention his head. Torisen picked it up, gingerly, wary of its inner surfaces. Was he still fit to be the leader of his people? Had he ever been? Well, the accursed thing had accepted him before. He put it around his neck and snapped shut the hinges. Both he and Burr let out their breaths, which neither had realized he was holding.

Voices drifted up the stairs from the Council Chamber below. The lords were beginning to gather.

“Now,” he said to Burr, “we go down.”

A cloth had been spread over the ebony table to protect the glass beneath and both furnace doors were shut, leaving the chamber pleasantly warm on this cool, late winter day. Only one lord had arrived so far with his retinue in attendance. He turned. It was Adric, his skin darkened by the Southern Wastes in sharp contrast to his white hair and blue eyes.

“Ganth!” he exclaimed.

A chill went down Torisen’s spine. So too the old Jaran lord, Jedrak, had greeted him out of the depths of his sudden senility before the Host had marched out for the Cataracts. He finished his own descent to the floor and crossed it to his old mentor. As he did so, a middle-aged man bent to whisper in Lord Ardeth’s ear.

Adric drew back, waving a thin, fastidious hand. “Dari, please. Your breath would stun a horse.”

So this was Adric’s grandson and would-be lordan regent. He might have been handsome if not for his prissy expression, half disapproval, half an effort to move his lips as little as possible when he spoke. His teeth, briefly glimpsed, ranged from newborn white nubs to rotting black stumps, the rest a gray all the more distressing set against red, swollen gums. Trinity, what could cause a man’s own body to turn against him so painfully? The healer’s use of soul-images suggested that the body reflected the spirit. Was Dari really so ambitious that he would even devour himself? So far in his grandfather’s absence, however, he had run his house well. Prune-faced or not, he was a competent man.

“Not Ganth. Torisen.”

He took the old man’s hand and kissed it. “How are you, Adric?”

The blue eyes blinked, then refocused. “Torisen. Of course. I am well, but will be so much better when I find Pereden. You aren’t a father. You don’t know what it’s like, to lose a son.”

Torisen almost asked, “To lose in what sense?”

How d’you think my father will react when he hears what I’ve done, and why?
Pereden’s voice jeered in his memory.

A little boy lost, long before Adric had realized that he was gone, now to be found again in what sense?

Torisen sat down beside the Ardeth lord, all too aware of the lump in his pocket.

“It won’t be long now, though. I haven’t felt so close to him since the Cataracts.”

“Really, Grandfather, I keep telling you that Pereden is dead.”

The old fire snapped into the Highborn’s eyes. “Of course he is. D’you take me for a senile fool?”

His followers shifted uneasily. Torisen noted that some stood behind Dari, but more behind the old lord.

A scrap of sound near the stairwell, and there was Timmon, looking profoundly uneasy.

“Pardon, my lords, but I thought I heard someone call me,” he said.

Adric saw him, and his face lit up. “Pereden, there you are at last!”

The cadet blanched and his gaze darted among the other Ardeth, looking for help. No one but Dari would meet his eyes, and that with a glower. To be fair, he did strongly resemble his father, from his golden hair to the trim fit of his garnet and red dress coat.

Peri should have attended Tentir,
Torisen thought. In Timmon he saw a much less insouciant, feckless boy than he had first met when delivering Jame to the randon college the previous summer. Had Jame also changed as much?

Timmon gulped. “Here I am, my lord,” he said.

III

The lordans and their attendants had gathered in Gothregor’s outer ward, awaiting their lords’ summons. The keep towered over them, but they stayed in the warm sunlight, avoiding its cold shadow. Some talked warily. Others stood haughtily aloof. All wore dazzling dress coats in shades from claret wine to cloud-flecked blue, from autumn gold to spring green freckled with flowers.

As Jame and Brier entered the ward, Rue made an unhappy sound behind them when she saw the others’ brave display. Clearly, she thought that her own lordan could have outshone them all with the Lordan’s Coat, but Jame had burned that haunted garment, relic of her detested uncle Greshan, earlier that winter—a necessary deed considering that his soul had been trapped in it, ready to possess whoever wore it. Nothing else in Greshan’s adopted wardrobe matched its splendor, nor had there been a chance yet to spend any of Jame’s new allowance on suitable finery. Jame had said that she didn’t care as long as her cadet jacket was clean and not too obviously patched. Now, however, she felt plain and out of place, a crow among peacocks.

Speaking of peacocks, there was Gorbel in a bright blue coat trimmed with lumps of coral and silver filigree, flanked by his five-commander Obidin and Fash.

“I had to bring him,” he had told Jame earlier, speaking of the latter. “Father ordered it.”

Jame wondered, not for the first time, what Lord Caineron was planning. He had made it clear that he wasn’t happy with Gorbel’s progress in discrediting her—enough to replace him? Now would be a suitably dramatic time.

To one side, two identical boys dressed in sunlit wheat gold were teasing a sullen third in storm gray flecked with opal lightning.

“The Edirr and Coman Lordans,” Rue whispered in Jame’s ear. Although a border brat, the cadet liked to show off her secondhand knowledge of Riverland politics, which might or might not be accurate.

“Do the Edirr always do everything in twos?” asked Jame, thinking of the Lords Essien and Essiar who shared power in their house.

“More often than not. The Edirr produce so many twins that it saves trouble.”

A little boy, perhaps four years old, pelted shrieking between them, pursued by a harried Kendar.

“Danior’s son and heir,” said Rue wisely.

Meanwhile Jame had spotted a familiar face across the ward and went to greet Kirien. White-haired Kindrie was with her.

“I came to see the show,” he told his cousin, smiling.

Jame thought that she had never seen him look better, a long way from the tattered scarecrow he had been when they had first met. Perhaps Kirien was to thank for that. The Jaran Lordan smiled, as tranquil and handsome as ever. She too wore a dress coat, dove-gray with silver trim. With her dark, cropped hair and slender build, it wasn’t at all obvious that she was female, not that she dressed so as to disguise the fact; these were simply a more elegant version of her working clothes as a scrollswoman of Mount Alban, who hadn’t been overly pleased to be chosen lordan by the rest of her house. Few of the lords had guessed her sex. What they would say when they found out didn’t bear thinking about.

“You’ve sent us an avid scholar,” she said.

“Who?”

“Your servant Graykin. He’s been reading everything he can find and questioning every scrollsman or singer he can catch about the history of the Southern Wastes.”

Jame was taken aback. After the trauma inflicted on him by Greshan’s coat, she had only hoped to keep Gray busy until the weather made travel to Kothifir safe, always assuming that she graduated to follow him.

“How is he getting them to cooperate?” she asked, remembering that most scrollsmen operated on a barter system when it came to sharing information.

“I’ve been able to help a bit there,” said Kindrie. “Y’see, Index has been plagued with joint pains recently, beyond the help of his herb shed to cure.”

Index, who had gotten his nickname because he knew where every arcane scrap of information was stored, be it in scroll, scholar, or singer. Index, whose knowledge had allowed him to amass a fabulous store of barter points.

“So you’ve been trading him points for your help as a healer. I appreciate that.”

Kindrie’s ears turned faintly pink. “Consider it recompense for helping me to escape from the Priests’ College.”

Jame felt like blushing herself when she remembered how harshly she had treated him on the journey to Restormir to rescue Gray, all because she hadn’t been able to stomach his hieratic background, never mind that it had been involuntary. That prejudice at least seemed to have faded, at least where Kindrie was concerned. Would that Tori could say as much about his feelings toward the Shanir.

Timmon emerged from the keep, looking shaken.

“This is awful,” he said to Jame, hardly seeming to care who else heard. “Grandfather is convinced that I’m Pereden. Dari keeps trying to tell him differently, and he keeps insisting that ‘blood and bone, a father knows.’ You should have seen Dari glare. He spat a rotten tooth at me.”

Fash had drifted within earshot. “Gone soft, has he? Poor old man. Now everyone will feel free to take advantage of him.”

Timmon bridled. “If you mean me . . .”

“Fash,” said Gorbel. “Shut up.”

Holly’s small son rushed past again, this time in pursuit of Gorbel’s pook, shrieking, “Doggie!”

“Here now, stop that,” snapped the Caineron Lordan, and hurried off to his pet’s rescue.

Fash and Obidin stayed.