To Ride a Rathorn

by P. C. Hodgell

  As Jame fumbled for the answer least likely to get her killed, the Whinno-hir spoke again:

  My lady bade me find you.

  They might have been back at Perimal's Cauldron, but the shock of that first meeting had passed into a dream-like acceptance.

  My lady bids me warn you. Of the Knorth Highborn, only three of you are left.

  Jame blinked. Three? "Lady, who . . .?"

  One is still too wounded to know himself, and the other's mind is poisoned against his own nature. You are the closest of the three to realizing who and what you are, but you also have the darkling glamour bred into your very bones. The haunt singer Ashe has warned my lady, and my lady has warned me.

  "Wait a minute. How does Kinzi know—I mean, about the third? This side of the shadows, except for Tori and me, there's only our cousin Kindrie, and he was born long after the massacre."

  The dead know what concerns the dead. My unfortunate granddaughter Tieri is dead, and so am I. While our blood traps us, we walk the Gray Land together, two of a silent host.

  The Whinno-hir's voice changed. Her fire-cast shadow lengthened and thinned, as if cast by someone else, small and trim.

  Jame gulped. The Gray Land? One by one, all the things she thought she knew about death were proving false, but she must keep to the point. "Lady, Kindrie is a bastard, or doesn't legitimacy count after all?"

  It does. Blood of my blood, some things that matter very much are unfair, but true. It is also true that I told your father to draw strength from his anger, but he did not have the discipline to control what he called up. How could he, while he denied what he was?

  Be strong, Jame had told herself. Be angry.

  "Great-grandmother, I know who I am and what I may become."

  Ah, but what if you are truly alone, with neither That-Which-Creates nor That-Which-Preserves to balance you? Have you the strength, alone, to balance yourself?

  "Huh." The Earth Wife leaned back, her face a pocked moon rising, and the tower groaned as she resumed her slow rocking. "That's the kernel of the nut. Balance. We four have it—most of the time; you three don't. By stone and stock, you don't even seem to know who you are. As I understand it, you people have ruined world after world. Should Rathillien topple as well for your faults?"

  "I think," said Jame carefully, "that without us this world is doomed. Mother Ragga, have you looked into the face of the shadows that loom over you? I have. As everyone keeps reminding me, I was raised among them. If I remembered more of those lost years, perhaps there would be less of me left to recover."

  She paused, surprised by her own words. Of course, her lost childhood still bothered her. (Confess.) What had she done under shadows' eaves and what had been done to her? (You know your faults.) Perhaps, after all, she had deserved the latter, and much more beside.

  Huh. I know who I am, she had just said, and of this much she was sure:

  "Thanks to my Senethari Tirandys . . . and to Bender, his brother . . . my honor has survived."

  "So far," grumbled the Earth Wife.

  "Well, yes, but who can say more than that?"

  Enough. I am sorry, child, but desperate times, desperate measures. Ashe is right: Tentir will test you as it has all Knorth lordan. Succeed or fail. Live or die. Now give back this poor boy's armor until you earn the right to wear it. Besides, he is cold.

  So was Jame, all up her bare back. Half clothed was far worse than stark naked, but must she face the outer darkness in nothing but her skin? What if the blind Arrin-ken was waiting for her? On the other hand, did she really want to back out of the Earth Wife's presence or, worse, turn bare buttocks on her great-grandmother? Oh well.

  At the thought, she felt suddenly lighter, with good reason: the armor was gone, or rather back where it belonged.

  "I cared for the mare," grumbled that huge voice, thunder receding. "I will keep what watch I can over her fosterling until (if ever) you assume your responsibilities. Here."

  Something scratchy dropped around her bare shoulders—a kind of blanket, knit of moss and lichen.

  "Now sleep."

  And, despite herself, she did.

  Chapter XVI: Midsummer's Eve

  Summer 53 - 60

  I

  Jame woke in Tentir's infirmary and, to her great annoyance, was forced to spend another seven days there. She had never been flat on her back for so long before, nor was this usual for the fast-healing Kencyr.

  "You should be glad you aren't dead," said Kindrie, who had been summoned to treat the wounded of the rathorn hunt and had stayed to keep an eye on her. "Soul-walking is dangerous, even when you aren't bled nearly dry."

  Her slashed wrists had all but healed, settling into a random pattern of thin, white lines which, hopefully, would soon also disappear. She had to admit that Tori's scars were much more esthetically pleasing, but then his had been the work of Karnid fanatics, to whom everything formed a pattern.

  More to the point, she was missing vital training. All too soon after midsummer would come the autumn cull both of unworthy cadets and of beasts unlikely to survive the coming winter. For herself, Jame would rather be salted for the larder than sent back to the Women's Halls at Gothregor. The sound of cadets at practice outside in the square made her fidget under the Earth Wife's thick, mossy blanket. So did the blanket itself, which tickled. Besides scratchy lichen, she suspected that it harbored a hidden population of woodlice, if not spiders and centipedes, but so far none had been fool enough to bite her. Then too, the moss was cool and comforting on this hot summer day.

  "It would help if you ate something." Rue presented her latest offering. "Look, here's a nice bowl of gruel."

  "Yum, yum," muttered Graykin from the far corner where he was pretending to be invisible.

  "I wish," said Jame, exasperated, "that all of you would stop treating me like a moron."

  "Then stop acting like one." Kindrie took the bowl and offered her a spoonful.

  The Scrollsmen's College must agree with him, Jame thought, unconsciously drawing back from the dripping, gray gunk.

  (Toad eggs, dog vomit . . .)

  When she had first met her cousin that spring, he had seemed to have all the backbone of an angle-worm and a beaten air that had made her long to hit him. Of course, at the time, he had just escaped from what must have been a nightmare winter in the Priests' College at Wilden, in Lady Rawneth's shadow and under her thumb.

  "You won't regain your strength if you don't eat," he said patiently.

  "I'm not hungry."

  (Maggot larvae, cow drool. . .)

  Food had seldom been more than a necessary evil in her life, given her early acquaintance with the shrieking carrots and oozing onions of the Haunted Lands. Now the very thought of it nauseated her. Marc might have coaxed her into eating. However, after assuring himself that she was out of danger, or at least as much so as she ever was, he had gone back to tend an unpredictable glass furnace at Gothregor.

  "If it decides to blow up," he had said, not too comfortingly, "I should be there."

  Harn Grip-hard had gone with him, to prepare for the Minor Harvest. Tomorrow, Midsummer's Day, all cadets would go home to help with the haying.

  Kindrie put down the bowl. "Very well. You can serve a rathorn rabbit, but you can't make him eat it. Before I forget, my lady Kirien sends her congratulations."

  "For what?"

  "Not being dead yet, I suppose. Also, Index says he's going up into the hills with you for the summer solstice."

  "Damn that man. How often do I have to tell him that I'm not going at all?"

  "Every day from now until then, I suppose. The solstice comes, what, six days after our Midsummer? You'd think our ancestors would have paid more attention to Rathillien's calendar, but we always have tried to impose our own systems on any threshold world where we happen to land. Anyway, you can hardly blame Index. Herbs are only his practical job. The Merikit were his field of study before your friend Marc wiped out a score of them, avenging Kitho
rn."

  "For what it's worth, that winter killed Marc's taste for bloodshed for the rest of his life, which for a professional warrior is awkward."

  "It also closed the hills to all Kencyr except, apparently, you."

  "That wasn't my idea."

  "No. A lot of things aren't, but they still happen."

  "Oh, bugger this." Jame threw off the Earth Wife's gift, tripped over Jorin, and fell flat on her face. Rue returned her to bed while Graykin modestly averted his eyes.

  "What is this thing?" asked the cadet, regarding the fibrous mat suspiciously.

  "A reminder." Not that she was likely to forget, Index notwithstanding. What would the Merikit do on the solstice without the legitimate Favorite? Oh well. That was their problem.

  "Even if you wanted to go up into the hills," said Kindrie, "I doubt if you would have the strength, especially if you carry on like this."

  Jame growled at him, echoed by Jorin under the bed, nursing the paw on which she had trodden.

  "You're enjoying this, aren't you?"

  The ghost of a smile flickered across his thin face. "A bit," he admitted.

  "Huh." She glowered at him for a moment. "Rue, Graykin, I want to talk to my cousin alone."

  Rue sketched a salute and turned to leave. Graykin tried to sidle into the shadows behind the open door, but the cadet fished him out and pushed him before her, protesting, into the hall. The door closed behind them. Kindrie sat down on the opposite cot, looking nervous.

  "Have you been mucking around with my soul-image again?" Jame asked him bluntly.

  That, after all, was how a healer worked. Each person, consciously or not, visualized his or her soul in a particular way. The Knorth favored architectural models. A healer might spend what felt like a year inside an injured person's soulscape, rebuilding a fallen wall, and emerge an hour later to find his patient's broken ribs well on the mend. What repairs she might need now, Jame couldn't imagine.

  But Kindrie was shaking his head, the window behind him making a halo of his white hair.

  "No. The last time, remember, you threw me out so hard that I cracked my skull on an inconveniently placed anvil. This time, all you needed was a solid stint of dwar sleep. That, and food. Still, battered, half-drowned, and nearly exsanguinated—a busy day, even for you. But why did you ask about your soul-image?"

  "I'm not sure." She frowned, trying to recapture impressions that had hardly registered at the time. "Something about it this time was . . . different. First, I was on the edge of Tori's soulscape—no, I didn't meddle with it, although I did shout a bit. Then there was the Master's House, but I was outside of it. In fact, it came after me. What in Perimal's name was that all about?"

  "I'd forgotten," said Kindrie slowly. "We haven't had a chance to talk since Summer's Eve when I tried to heal your face."

  Jame touched her scarred cheek. "And I never got a chance to thank you for your work on this. I know, I know: you could have done more if I hadn't thrown you out. That wasn't deliberate. Sorry about the anvil."

  She still had to fight her revulsion at his priestling background. What the Shanir were to her brother, priests were to her, with better reason. Still, she kept reminding herself, Kindrie hadn't chosen to grow up at Wilden in the Priest's College. Born after the Knorth had nearly been wiped out by Shadow Assassins, Shanir, and (worse) illegitimate, he had been dropped into the priests' laps, so to speak, as an alternative to drowning him like an unwanted pup.

  She wondered what those who had thrown him away so casually would think if they could see him now. Besides having become a powerful healer, he was beginning to show the fine-drawn Knorth features that one could trace on death banners back to the Fall. There was much of his mother Tieri's gentle melancholy in his eyes, but also much of his great-grandmother Kinzi's deceptive strength in the elegant bones of his face and hands. In fact, physically, he was starting to look like a cross between Tori and herself, except for the white hair and pale blue eyes. Were they a legacy from his unknown father? Who in Perimal's name could that have been, anyway?

  Of the Knorth Highborn, only three of you are left.

  And those three were the Kencyrath's last chance to produce the long-awaited Tyr-ridan, through whom their god was supposed to manifest himself and do battle with that ancient enemy, Perimal Darkling.

  One is still too wounded to know himself, and the other's mind is poisoned against his own nature.

  If she was becoming That-Which-Destroys, Tori presumably was destined to become That-Which-Creates, if he could overcome the poison instilled by his father, if he ever got the chance to make something new out of their increasingly compromised society.

  As a potential third, That-Which-Preserves, who else was there and who better than the healer Kindrie, wounded by his past but slowly recovering from it?

  Except that he was a bastard, and blood still mattered.

  "About your soul-image," he was saying, "I know you believe that it's the Master's Hall. I thought so at first too. When I went into the soulscape to work on your injury, all of the hall's death banners had been slashed across the face, like you, then stitched up again with coarse thread to form raised welts. I wasted a lot of time unpicking stitches before I realized that they were only a diversion."

  "I'm confused. Aren't disfigured faces what you would expect to find?"

  "Yes, but there were too many of them, and they were laughing at me. Then I saw something white on the hearth. It was you, the real you, asleep, wearing partial rathorn armor, with a bleeding crack across the cheek. That's what I was trying to close when you woke up and threw me out."

  "Oh."

  Jame considered this, rather blankly. Perhaps she had worn the ivory armor in the soulscape before borrowing it this last time, as it were, off the colt's back. On that level, just as different versions of the Moon Garden might shelter more than one soul, so armor might shield whoever needed it, and she already had close links both personal and familial with those horned beasts of madness.

  "I think," said Kindrie, "that it means you've begun to protect yourself against your past, like growing a callus, only in you it takes the form of an outbreak of ivory. Sleep could be another defense, if a passive one. There, they couldn't get at you. But now you're awake and out. Of the hall. Of the Master's House."

  Jame snorted. "Into the Haunted Lands. Back among the dead. Not quite like my brother, though."

  "No. For some reason he's still confined to that awful keep where you both grew up. You, though, seem to be free in the soulscape, though travel there is perilous and I'll thank you to remember that it just nearly killed you."

  "At least Tori has the keep, and you have the Moon Garden. Will I ever have a true home or must I always wander, armored and perhaps armed, but roofless and rootless?"

  The question burst from her with a force that surprised them both.

  "That's what you really want? A home?"

  "More than anything." Until she said it, she didn't realize how painfully true it was. What had her life been so far but a desperate search for a place where she belonged? Brenwyr hadn't needed to curse her, although it probably hadn't helped; she was the eternal outsider, the arch-iconoclast. Given her nature, what else could she be?

  "I'm sorry," said Kindrie, seeing that she was upset. "Still, soul-images do change as we grow. You're only—what, nineteen years old? Twenty? More?"

  There was no answer to this: thanks to the slower, erratic passage of time in Perimal Darkling, Jame didn't know. She felt ancient.

  "I should tell you," said the Shanir, this time not meeting her eyes. "In the soulscape, your servant Graykin was guarding you in the shape of a half-starved mongrel dog, chained to the hearth. He's intensely jealous of anyone who gets close to you. That's his soul-image, and it's a pretty miserable one. It's not my business, but you should consider more carefully how you treat him."

  Jame brushed this aside. Graykin was the least of her worries.

  "Has Tori accepted you as a
Knorth?" she asked abruptly.

  "No." Again Kindrie looked away, biting his lip. "He tried, but . . . do you know how psychic bonding works? Most of the lords don't really understand, but when they bind a follower they give that person a small piece of their soul image, or maybe they give him or her a niche in their own soulscape, or maybe both. It's hard to explain, but there's definitely an element of give, whereas with blood binding it's all take, like . . . like . . ."

  "Rape versus love?" Jame suggested, deliberately probing her own sense of guilt over the colt.