Now Torisen put down his spoon, the porridge half eaten and, in any event, untasted. “We have to assume that it’s the Gnasher.”
“Ancestors know,” said the hunt master, resting his elbows earnestly on the table, “we’ve tried to pursue it as a mere wolf. The traps we’ve set, the woods we’ve baited . . . but it’s too clever to fall for such tricks.” A howl from Yce made him start and look over his shoulder.
“Perhaps we haven’t offered him the right bait,” said Grimly.
“Don’t even think it,” Torisen said.
“Well, she can’t stay mewed up here for the rest of her life.”
That much was true, thought Torisen, making their current hunt all the more essential. Why, though, did he feel that they were going about it all wrong—or was that just his general uncertainty this morning? He had apparently already failed one Kendar. What if he failed Yce as well? Then too, Storm had an abscess in his hoof so Torisen would be riding his secondary mount, a gray gelding named Rain. Everything seemed subtly out of kilter.
The faint sound of a horn blowing reached them.
“At last!” said the hunt master, springing to his feet.
They clattered down the spiral stair, out into the inner ward where grooms held their horses. Torisen swung up onto Rain, who danced nervously sideways under him. He set his spur to the gray’s right flank to correct him and the horse lashed out at the mount behind him. Torisen had forgotten that instinctive response to a sore rib. Oh, for Storm, who had the sense not to make such a fuss. Some twenty Kencyr were riding to the hunt, not counting the dog handlers already in the field, on the scent. The horn sounded again, to the north. Direhounds were loosed, then the massive Molocar. Grimly stayed by Torisen’s side although he had dropped to all fours and ran on shaggy paws. The whole party swept out the gate, down the steep incline, and through the apple orchard. Ahead loomed the forest.
It was a bright, late winter day with snow still lying in the shadows and along branches in ridges from a brief flurry the previous night. Melting, it dripped from tightly rolled buds in diamond drops as the riders plunged underneath. Torisen pulled back on Rain to keep from crowding the hunt master. The direhounds coursed ahead of him, black tails whipping, on the track of the lymers.
The whole party plunged among the trees. Few paths ran here. Close as it was to the fortress, this area was tricky. Here Ganth’s hunt had gone astray, losing him and his followers, the night that the shadow assassins had come for the Knorth ladies. Some said that he had heard their screams but couldn’t find his way back to them until too late.
The horses no longer ran together but swerved back and forth between thickets, stands of trees, and the occasional boulder rolled down from the heights, following the cry of the hounds. Torisen lost sight of Grimly when they split to pass on either side of a small grove. He could hear the others but caught only flickers of movement between the bare branches. There went the hunt master’s russet jacket. Rain gathered himself and jumped a fallen tree, landing with a surprised snort in a tangle of brush. By the time he had fought free, the flash of red was gone although hunters’ cries still filtered back through the trees. They seemed to be moving away.
Torisen slowed Rain to a trot.
Except for the distant hunt, now no more than a rumor, the wood was silent. No bird song, no wind, only the crunch of snow underfoot. The trees thinned and the land dipped toward a shallow stream running between ice-fretted banks. Flakes drifted down from the cloudless sky. It was as if he had ridden into a pocket of winter.
The low-slung sun dazzled and confused him. Had he somehow gotten turned around, heading south rather than north? The land here was fully capable of playing such a trick.
Rain hesitated on the bank, ears flicking nervously back and forth. He snorted plumes of steam and tried to back up. Torisen patted him on the neck.
“Now what, you? Go on.”
Gingerly, the horse crab-stepped down into the hock-deep water, onto slick stones, then stopped again, trembling.
The opposite bank seemed to erupt.
Rain tried to spin away, but slipped. As he floundered, something huge, white, and shaggy rose over the bank’s crest. A claw raked across the gray’s neck, followed by a crimson spray on the snow. Rain squealed and fell. It all happened too quickly for thought. Torisen found himself in the creek bed, water rushing over his face, his left leg pinned by the horse’s weight against the rocky bottom. The shock of the fall and of the cold made him gasp, then choke on icy water. He struggled up on an elbow. Rain’s thick blood swirled past him, borne on the current. Although a chunk of his neck had been ripped away, the horse still struggled to rise, in the process grinding Torisen’s leg against the stones. He tried to drag himself free, and almost fainted from the pain. As he lay back in the stream, panting, something came between him and the sun.
“So,” said a thick, familiar voice overhead. “We meet again, lordling.”
Torisen held up a hand to shield his eyes. Below the red halo of his fingers, he saw that the Gnasher stood on the bank, his hind legs bent backward at the knees. The rest of his bulk, half lupine, half human, hunched against the sun. He was much bigger than Torisen remembered, and if his soul cast either light or shadow, it was swallowed by that greater glare.
“Where is that little bitch, my darling daughter?”
“Safe from you.”
The Gnasher laughed. Even against the sun, his teeth were very white. “For how long, eh? Who will protect her once you are dead? Might she even try to avenge you? Oh, that would be perfect.”
Squinting, Torisen could now make out the wolver’s stomach and chest. Both were thickly matted with whorls of white fur that suggested the smashed heads of pups, silently howling. Trinity, how many litters of his progeny had he slaughtered?
“Hasn’t there been blood enough?”
The Gnasher’s laughter turned to a snarl. “The young always consume the old—unless the old strike first. Kruin taught me that, even if he didn’t have the guts to succeed himself. How else could I have become the King of the Wood if I hadn’t killed my father? No pup of mine will survive to do the same to me and so I will live forever.”
Icy water found its way through the seams and inserts of Torisen’s leathers. More poured down his collar. His teeth began to rattle together with the cold and shock.
Mortality, immortality . . . which was the trap? The Gnasher, King Kruin, and the Master all had traded the souls of their followers for life and yet more life, but how fulfilling had they found it? Dying was easy, to avoid such entrapment. However, Torisen’s people depended on him. What, here and now, was he willing to risk against imminent death, assuming he had anything left with which to barter?
Not rocks but the wooden door in his soul-image pressed against Torisen’s back. His hand fumbled behind him as if with a will of its own at the bolt that secured the door.
That’s right, boy, came the hoarse, eager whisper from shriveled lips through the keyhole. Let me out. Remember how this cur turned into a shivering pup at the mere sound of my foot upon the stair?
So long ago, in Kothifir, before Ganth was even dead . . .
That last had never struck Torisen before.
Trinity, how long had his father haunted him? How had it started, and what sustained that possession now?
The image formed in Torisen’s mind of a drop of blood trembling on a knife’s tip, falling into a cup of wine:
Here, son. Drink to my health.
Back in the Haunted Lands keep, had his father tried to blood-bind him as Greshan had the young Ganth? Was that why he was haunted by his father now, with that drop of blood still sunk into his soul, poisoning it? But surely only a Shanir could do such a thing.
Words rose in Torisen’s mind, spoken by his father through his mouth to the Jaran Matriarch, forgotten until now: Do you wonder that I could never entirely throw Greshan off? That I should come to hate all Shanir?
Argh. What good did it do to thin
k of such things now?
But some day he would have to open that door. His hand was on the latch. Would it be today?
Remember, son, anger is strength.
The Gnasher stopped pacing. “What are you doing? Stop it!”
The sun had cast Torisen’s shadow behind him. Now he felt the chill of it gathering around him. His voice came out rough-edged, more his father’s than his own.
“Would you cross souls with me, cub-killer? Come closer, if you dare.”
With a snarl, the wolver dropped to all fours and sprang into the stream. Simultaneously, Torisen drove his spur into the right flank of the dying horse. A steel-shod hoof lashed out in a rainbow of spray. The Gnasher yelped and fell with a mighty splash.
“What have you done, wretched boy?” he cried, floundering in the current. “Ah, my leg!”
The hunt sounded in the distance, drawing closer. The Gnasher must have backtracked on his own trail, but now they had turned with it and were catching up.
“Run. Hide, child-slayer. For surely we will meet again.”
The wolver’s bulk heaved out of the water as direhounds ran at him, red-mouthed and baying. He batted the leader out of midair as it sprang and ripped the head off its mate. Then he was running on two forelegs and one hind as the pack streamed after him in full cry, followed by the booming Molocar.
Torisen eased himself back into the water, panting. In his soul-image, he gingerly released the bolt, amazed that he had brought himself to touch it at all, worried that in doing so he had somehow compromised himself.
Still, he thought, Not today, Father.
Here came Grimly, the wolver, exclaiming with distress, and Rowan, and Burr. Many hands lifted Rain’s dead weight off his leg and drew him onto the bank. The air felt as cold as the water, and the sun had slid behind a cloud.
II
“NOT BROKEN. Just badly sprained and bruised.”
So the herbalist Kells had said once they had cut the wet leathers away from Torisen’s throbbing leg. Already the flesh was turning a mottled black and purple and the swollen knee barely bent.
Kells glanced at white-haired Kindrie who stood to one side, hands clenched behind him against his instinctive urge as a healer to help. Torisen glared at him.
Don’t you dare.
Now he was back in the study of his tower apartment, having rejected all offers of help and stubbornly limped up four flights of stairs. Yce, released from the southwest bedchamber, sulked by the cold fireplace.
“We haven’t heard the last of this,” remarked Rowan, glancing at the wolver pup. “Her sire has escaped into the wilds.”
“With a broken hind leg,” muttered Burr, as if to himself, as he moved about the room straightening things that were already in their place. “With luck, unable to hunt, he’ll starve to death.”
“Anyway,” said Rowan, “he’s shown himself to be formidable but not invincible. Why didn’t he attack while you were pinned under Rain?”
“Maybe he wanted to gloat,” said Kindrie.
No, thought Torisen, he was wary of my soul-image. Ganth still scares him.
It had clearly shaken both Burr and Rowan to so nearly have lost their lord. After all, where would they be without him? The Knorth would collapse (it was foolish to think that his sister and cousin could hold it together), and the other houses would pick its bones. Thus would end the Kencyrath’s divine mission, unwelcome as it had always been. In life, in death, he was responsible. As usual, the thought flicked Torisen like a fly on flayed skin. Dammit, why did everything always depend on him?
Because you are Highlord, said the voice, a snide echo in his mind. You accepted that responsibility when you assumed that lethal collar, the Kenthiar, and it accepted you.
“Burr, stop fidgeting. Leave me alone, all of you.”
It was unlike Torisen to be short-tempered. Surely, however, he had cause enough today. The hunt had been a failure and here he was back again, mere hours later, half crippled and no closer to discovering which Kendar he had failed.
Kindrie stood in the doorway, looking poised for flight but stubborn too. “I meant to give this to you earlier, Highlord. It may help.”
He held out a scroll.
Torisen unrolled it, and saw to his amazement that it listed all of the Knorth Kendar, with lines indicating the various paternal and maternal lineages.
“The first draft was illuminated,” said Kindrie wistfully, “but Lady Rawneth burned it. It’s taken a while to reconstruct the chart from my notes.”
Traditionally, the Kencyr favored memory above writing for most things unconnected with the law. It had never occurred to Torisen that he might fall back on such an aid. Part of him wanted to snap, “D’you think I need this?” Another part grudgingly admitted that he did.
“Thank you,” he said, his eyes already sweeping up and down the columns for the name that he had forgotten.
Kindrie hadn’t moved. He gulped. “Er, Highlord. Has it ever occurred to you that any act of binding, blood or otherwise, might spring from a Shanir nature?”
Torisen’s expression drove him back a step like a physical blow.
“Get out.”
Kindrie scrambled down the steps. Below, he could be heard nervously conferring with Burr and Rowan.
Alone again, Torisen leaned back in his chair, shaken by his own heartbeat. He could accept that blood-binding was a Shanir skill. Ruthless as it was, hardly anyone used it anymore . . .
Except your uncle Greshan and perhaps your father.
. . . but as for the mental bond, all lords employed that. What else, after all, held the Kencyrath together? Were they all Shanir without knowing it? Torisen wished he could talk to his mentor, Lord Ardeth, but Adric was unstable these days, sometimes coherent, sometimes trapped in the dementia of extreme old age. He might say anything.
Am I Shanir?
No, no, no . . .
With an effort, he put the thought out of his mind.
It did, however, suggest something. So far, he had concentrated solely on remembering the names of all the Kendar in his house. What he hadn’t checked was the tie that bound them to him. With that in mind, he started over from the beginning, using Kindrie’s scroll to prompt his memory. Half an hour later, his finger paused on a name that woke no answering spark:
Brier Iron-thorn.
CHAPTER XVIII
“Please”
Winter 100
I
“NOW TRY SITTING,” said Gaudaric. “And remember to breathe.”
Jame gingerly lowered herself onto a wooden chair, misjudged the distance, and dropped the last few inches with a thud. Every joint of the rhi-sar armor creaked in protest.
“Hmm,” said the armorer, regarding her critically, stroking his chin. “Now bend forward. I thought so: the shoulder straps are too tight.”
Byrne detached and lifted each shoulder guard in turn to let the strap beneath out a notch—like adjusting the girth on a horse, thought Jame, grumpily, feeling the front- and backplates of the cuirass shift downward. Unused as she was even to shopping for clothes, the fitting sessions were beginning to try her patience. But the armor did feel better. Now she could reach down to stroke Jorin with a gauntleted hand. The ounce rolled over on his back and stretched, purring. The gloves at least were marvels. The smallest rhi-sar teeth marched down the fully articulated backs, which in turn were sewn to leather gloves with slits in the fingertips to accommodate her extended nails. She hadn’t realized that the armorer had noticed them.
“It will grow more supple the more you wear it,” said Gaudaric. “The trick in making it is to use as little wax and resin as possible to give it its initial shape. Too much and it becomes brittle.”
“I feel like a tortoise,” said Jame in a muffled voice, speaking to her knees. Their leather cops showed the pattern of fine, mottled scales, surprisingly dainty to have come from such a monster.
“You should feel like a dragon,” said Gaudaric. “Stand up. Take a l
ook at yourself.”
Jame rose and stepped in front of the full-length mirror. What she saw reflected there was a fantastical creature sheathed in white leather reinforced by the ivory of tooth and claw. The armor fit together as steel plate would, but it was much lighter. Braided inserts increased its flexibility and vented body heat. Gaudaric had reinforced the helm with a ridged crest and one rhi-sar fang thrusting downward from it as a nasal guard. Two more teeth pointed upward, socketed in the cheek guards. Jame hoped that these last were as unbreakable as Gaudaric believed, given that they presented two very sharp tips just below the slit out of which she peered. Larger teeth encased her torso like an external ribcage, their points tucked under a reinforced breastplate. Smaller ones in addition to claws marched up her arms and down her legs. It wasn’t hard to imagine the white rhi-sar’s mad, blue eyes glaring back at her from within that cage of ivory.
“I see what you mean,” she said.
“Never think that you’re invulnerable, though. A bludgeon swung with sufficient force can break ribs through the leather, and some weapons can pierce or slice through it, especially in a lateral blow falling between the ivory. Remember, the beast had to be skinned in the first place and then I had to cut out the pieces, mostly with persistent sawing. Does it pull anywhere else?”
Jame rolled her shoulders and head, then twisted her body, to the right, to the left. Presumably the leather would also creak less with use.
“Good,” said Gaudaric. “We can still make minor adjustments, but that, I think, completes the final fitting. Now, let’s see you get out of it.”
Jame considered the arming sequence in reverse. First she removed the helmet and gauntlets; then, with Byrne’s help, the shoulder cops with their toothy spikes, the arm harnesses, and the gorget. Next Byrne unstrapped the cuirass and removed both back- and frontplates. Then the thigh protectors with their knee cops were unhooked from the belt and the belt itself was unbuckled, followed by the greaves and articulated shoes. This reduced Jame to the padded underwear of a gambeson. To her amusement, both men tactfully turned their backs as she stripped and then gratefully re-dressed in her own clothing.
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