Sounds came and went.
Jame was vaguely aware of hounds baying and someone (Gorbel?) shouting to attract the hunt's attention.
Time passed.
A thin, cool hand touched her brow, then held something to her lips, forcing her to drink. "I don't know what's wrong," said a voice which, surely, she should know. "These injuries are bad, but nothing that dwar sleep won't heal . . . if she lets it. This constant agitation is killing her."
You try to calm down, she wanted to say, with a bloody great cat breathing hot ash down your neck!
Yes, there had been a cat. A blind Arrin-ken. Hunting them. Somehow mixed up with the Merikits' Burning Man.
And there had been a Whinno-hir mare—Bel-tairi, the Shame of Tentir, whatever that meant. She had tried to stop their mad flight crying, Kinzi-kin! Nemesis! Do you want to kill him?
Herself, perhaps; the rathorn colt, no.
Then the blind Arrin-ken had erupted from the undergrowth, roaring, and the branches around him burst into flame. The colt jumped out of his skin, literally. One moment he was bucking like a lunatic, as if that could unseat an disembodied rider, the next he and Jame were looking down at his collapsed form. With its fierce animation gone, it had looked almost as pathetic as Jame had under the Arrin-ken's paw. And then the blind brute had come at them again, not to be fooled by mere flesh and blood.
The rathorn bolted.
. . . run, run, run . . .
But where were the mountains, and what were these hills that rose and fell, swooping on wings of withered grass under the leaden eye of the moon? In a hollow, a patch of bloated flowers burst with a carrion stench under the colt's hooves. He slowed, snorting with alarm.
Oh no, thought Jame.
There probably were ways to step straight from the banks of the Silver into the Haunted Lands, several hundred leagues to the east on the other side of the Ebonbane.
With luck, though, this was only a nightmare, or the onset of terminal delirium.
However, given past experience, it was just as likely that she had somehow stumbled into her brother's soulscape. Again.
From the crest of the next rise, they looked down on the desolate ruins of a keep, just as Jame knew they would. Every line of it was familiar to her, from the squat tower to the broken walls, from the dry moat to the cracked, moon-like solar aglow over the lord's hall. She and Tori had grown up here, and here their father had died.
Memories: helping Cook dig poached eyes out of boiled potatoes, carefully, because if they burst they poisoned the food; the randon Tigon so hungry for meat that he cut off and roasted his own toes; Winter refusing to teach her how to fight because she was not a girl but—that awful thing—a lady. Ha. She had pounced her brother after that, hoping to learn something from his reaction. Instead, she had only given him a bloody nose.
"Father says it's dangerous to teach you anything." Tori had said, snuffling into his sleeve. "Will the things you learn always hurt people?"
Jame had considered this, as she did again now, wondering if the answer had changed. "Maybe. As long as I learn, does it matter?"
"It does to me. I'm the one who usually gets hurt. Father says you're dangerous. He says you'll destroy me."
"That's silly. I love you."
"Father says destruction begins with love."
Love had destroyed their father, or rather the loss of it had with the gradual fading of their mother out of their lives and his increasingly desperate search for her.
Another memory, as sharp as a splinter of glass and as hard to forget: That day, she had played hide and seek with her brother ("You be Father, I'll be Mother"). There. Below. In the keep. And ended up dancing to entertain a warty faced death banner in the great hall.
At first, she had hadn't seen Father watching her. Then his husky voice had stopped her in mid-step.
"You've come back to me." He had looked half dazed with a relief so intense that it wiped twenty years off his face. "Oh, I knew you would. I knew. . ." But as he stepped hastily forward and saw her more clearly, the softness had run out of his expression like melting wax. "You."
I don't want to remember this, Jame thought, gripping the colt's tuft of a mane.
Simultaneously, she realized that she was not only in the rathorn's mind but on his back. Also, her hands had gone small and childish, without nails. The colt likewise had dwindled to a frightened foal, with mere bumps between his eyes and on his nose instead of those lethal horns.
Maybe this was a nightmare after all, and she was trapped in it. Perhaps this was a taste of the same terror that sometimes kept her brother awake for days on end rather than risk never being able to wake up again.
But fear only sharpened memory.
There in the hall, Father had stuck her hard across the face and slammed her back against the wall.
"You changeling, you impostor, how dare you be so much like her? How dare you! And yet, and yet, you are . . . so like." His hands rose as if by themselves to cup her bruised face. "So like. . ." he breathed, and kissed her, hard, on the mouth.
"My lord!" Winter stood in the hall doorway.
He had drawn back with a gasp. "No. No! I am not my brother!" And he smashed his fist into the stone wall next to Jame's head, speckling her face with his blood. Then he had raged out, shouting for his horse, hell-bent on storming the Master's House itself to reclaim his lost love.
Winter had knelt beside her. "All right, child?"
Jame remembered nodding, and not being able to stop until the randon touched her shoulder. Then Winter had risen but paused, briefly, looking down at her. "It isn't entirely his fault." she had said, and gone out to ready her lord's gaunt, gray stallion before someone got killed.
If not his fault, Jame had wondered as a child, then whose?
Now, the half-grown part of her mind caught the glimmer of an answer, and felt an unexpected stab of pity. From the miseries of his own childhood, her father had risen to the pinnacle of power, only to fall with the loss of the one thing he had ever wanted. Love.
And for all his flaws, he was not like his brother, although Greshan had shaped him in ways that she was only beginning to understand.
So, who is the monster in the maze?
The question sprang into her mind as if asked by someone else. She recognized the test it posed, and the importance of the answer. Who was her true enemy?
Trinity. There were too many possibilities. Master Gerridon, the Witch of Wilden, Ishtier, Caldane, Torisen . . .
No, she told herself fiercely. Not him. Never.
Here and now, or rather down there in the keep that had become her brother's soul-image, the enemy was a mad, muttering voice behind a locked door.
"Tori!" she cried. Both she and the foal flinched as her shrill, child's voice cracked the leaden silence. Every nerve in her body cried, Shut up, you fool! Run! Hide! But she tried again, louder. "Daddy's boy! Come out, come out, wherever you are!"
The rathorn shook as the sky rumbled, or perhaps it was the earth. The sour wind shifted, this way and that, and the grass rustled like so many ribbons of dry snake skin.
Someone stood in the keep door, a thin, dark-haired boy her own age, give or take a minute either way. A white wolver pup crouched at his heels, just out of reach. The twins stared at each other. It was then. It was now. All they had had together lay between them, close enough to touch and yet years out of reach. The wind blew hard and the grass cringed, beginning to whine.
"Tori, get out!" she cried down at him, into the teeth of the rising gale, across the abyss of time. Could he hear her at all? "Go somewhere, anywhere, as far from here as you can!"
The wind veered again, now pushing at her back. It brought with it an all too familiar smell of must and dust and ancient sickness. She knew what was there before she turned to face it, but heart and stomach still lurched at the sight.
The Master's House loomed over them. Mist obscured its lower stories but the upper leaned as if poised to topple. Ashes of th
e dead blew in veils off its many roofs and gables, clouding the moon, thickening the air. Darkness stared out of a thousand broken windows and the reek of dull hunger exhaled—HHAAAaaaa . . .—through a hundred gaping doors. From the shadows within came the grinding of stone on stone as at a glacial pace the whole massive pile edged forward, for this was only the blind head of the House. The rest of it stretched back into Perimal Darkling and beyond, from fallen world to world, down the Chain of Creation. All those rooms of darkness drove it forward with a vast, inhuman momentum while its shadow rolled before it over the hills, and the grass wailed under it.
Jame gulped down nausea. If Tori's soul-image was bad, hers was worse. In the House was a hall with a green-shot floor. There, the woven eyes of the dead and the damned stared down from the walls at a sleeper huddled on the cold hearth, on a pile of Arrin-ken pelts.
And when the Master, finally, enters his hall, what then, Dancer's daughter? Will you rise and fight, or open your arms to him as you so nearly did once before? For what else, after all, were you bred?
Ah, but that time had not yet come.
"Hush," Jame breathed to the foal, her hand on his quivering neck. An ear flickered back to listen, then forward again, then back. "Hush. The Master is still in his house, the monster in its maze. In the end, either he will come out to meet us or we will go in after him. There. Aren't you glad now that you tried a taste of my blood?"
Perhaps she had spoken too soon.
A clot of darkness detached itself from the shadow of the House and rushed toward them over the swelling hills, glimpsed and gone and glimpsed again. Part of the rumble separated into pounding hooves.
"Oh no," said Jame.
The Master's gray stallion burst over the next rise and roared down on them. Its gaping jaws spewed foam and its steel-shod hooves threw up divots of turf that turned to dust in midair. The foal shrieked for his mother and bolted.
They dodged away among the rolling hills, the foal running in blind panic, Jame trying to keep him in the hollows, out of sight. This was hide and seek with a vengeance. It was also that buried childhood nightmare only recently unearthed by her abysmal attempts at horsemanship.
If you fail the Master, we'll just have to feed you to Iron-jaw, won't we?
She remembered the gray stallion charging her, ears back and teeth bared, when he had been only a horse and she only a child who had strayed into what might laughingly be called his pasture, given the noisome herbage of the Haunted Lands. Another time, Tori had dared her to ride him and, of course, she had been thrown, hard. There. That was the origin of the sick fear that cuddled her stomach to this day every time she put foot to stirrup and herself at the mercy of such a strong, unpredictable creature. Then her father had ridden the stallion to death and the changer Keral had claimed the haunt that it had become for his master.
The foal skidded around a mound, his hind legs nearly flying out from under him, and they swept down on a lone, white-haired figure on foot.
"Stop, or you'll kill yourselves!" he shouted, then jumped out of the way as they hurtled past.
"If we stop," Jame yelled back over her shoulder, "we'll die!"
Around another curve and there he was again, directly in their path with his thin hands up, terrified but determined. "I'm not joking!"
"Neither are we!"
The foal ran into him, stumbled, and fell head over heels. Thrown clear, Jame scrambled to her feet and spat out a mouthful of wriggling grass before it could take root.
The cause of their fall sat holding his head and groaning. Belatedly, Jame recognized her cousin Kindrie Soul-walker. Of course. That was the other voice she had heard in her sleep or delirium or whatever this was, and those were the thin, sensitive hands that had held a cup to her lips. Now he had entered the soulscape as a healer to help her, and been trampled for his pains.
"Sorry," she said to him, then "Run!"
The ground was thrumming like a vast drum. Over the crest came Iron-jaw and hurtled down on them, roaring. Kindrie stared, aghast, then abruptly vanished. The foal shied, squealing, directly into the stallion's path and went down under his hooves. The haunt wheeled and went for him, teeth bared. If he caught the young rathorn, he would shake him to death or snap his neck.
Jame leaped at the haunt's head. She meant to go for his eyes with her claws; however, her fingertips were still without nails. Instead, she found herself clinging to the stallion's neck, his hot breath reeking in her ear. One dead, white eye rolled toward her. He reared and tossed his head, trying to throw her off. If she fell, he would surely kill her.
So, she thought with an odd detachment, do I die a helpless child or, finally, accept what I am and grow up?
Her body seemed to decide for her. Skin split and bloody claws erupted from the tips of her fingers, just as they had when she had turned seven and faced her father over the dying Kendar Winter. She wrapped her legs around the haunt's neck. When he reared again, swinging her upward into his face, she drove her claws into that white marble of an eye. It burst, spraying an arc of black blood that clotted as it hit the air. Up he went and over, crashing down on his back. Jame sprang clear and ran. She heard him thrashing behind her, trying to roll away from such agony.
So some haunts can still feel pain, observed part of her mind. Interesting.
Another part, the one that wanted to live, thought only . . . run run run . . . and so she did, on and on and on, too scared to realize that she ran alone.
Chapter XV: Back to the Soulscape
Summer 53
I
Someone was calling her.
"Jame." And again, "Jame."
She knew that voice, although it seemed a lifetime since she had last heard it.
"Jame. Come on now, lass. Wake up."
Part of her was still running, lost among hills that rolled on forever, but the rest of her would rather die than not answer that call. Her eyes fluttered open. The moon glowed through tall windows, throwing tranquil bars of light on the floor, onto facing rows of cots empty except for the one in which she lay, but not alone. A strong arm held her. She knew that touch, that very smell, clean and honest as the man himself.
"Oh, Marc," she said. "I had such an awful dream."
But then, when she raised her hand to touch him, to be sure he was really there, she saw that her arm was heavily bandaged from wrist to elbow. No, it hadn't all been a dream. The worst part was true.
"Marc, I've done a terrible thing."
"Have you now." His big, rough hand gently stroked her hair. "You'd better tell me about it, then."
For a long while, however, neither of them spoke. They hadn't seen each other in nearly a year, not since the battle at the Cataracts. It seemed more like a lifetime ago, Jame thought, settling against the Kendar's broad chest, feeling him breathe and listening to his heart beat, steady and strong.
She remembered how they had first met. Dashing around a corner in Tai-tastigon with the stolen Peacock Gloves tucked into her wallet and the city guards on her heels, she had run head-on into what she at first had thought was a wall. Then it had put out big hands to catch her on the rebound.
He had walked all the way from East Kenshold—a big Kendar in late middle-age, turned out by the new lord of a minor house for defending the old lord's Whinno-hir mare from being ridden against her will. Before that, he had been a Caineron yondri with the Southern Host; before that, the last survivor of another minor house that had held Kithorn until the Merikit slaughtered everyone except Marc, who had been out hunting at the time and had come home to red ruin. By the time he had reached Tai-tastigon, seventy-odd years later, he had been tired unto death and ready to die, sure that at his age no Kencyr house would ever accept him again.
He had, however, woken in time to save her from a brigands' attack in the alley below—this, by climbing down two stories from the inn's loft "and then, to save time, falling the rest of the way," as he had put it later.
He was the most solidly decent perso
n Jame had ever known, and she trusted his moral sense far more than she did her own.
However, he had assumed that she was Kendar with only enough Highborn blood to account for her various strange attributes. After all, Kencyr ladies were a breed apart, seldom seen outside their own halls and then only heavily masked. That one of them should be the infamous Talisman, apprentice to the greatest thief in Tai-tastigon, had never crossed his mind. At the time, Jame hadn't been sure herself what she was, and certainly hadn't guessed that the Highlord of the Kencyrath was her long-lost twin brother Tori.
Then she had found out, and so had Marc.
Would there ever be that easy friendship and equality between them again? Could there be between a Highborn and a Kendar? They hadn't yet crossed that bridge, yet here he was. Hang on to that.
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