To Ride a Rathorn

by P. C. Hodgell

  All in all, the Lesser Harvest progressed smoothly, well oiled by centuries of practice.

  Torisen worked with the reapers, hot, sweaty, and not as smoothly as he would have liked. In past years, he had either been with the Southern Host or saddled with other duties, making this his first season in the field. He knew his Kendar would prefer that he stayed aloof, pretending to oversee—after all, what would their enemies say if they saw the Knorth lord slaving away beside the least of his house? However, Torisen didn't care. At least he had mastered the long-armed scythe well enough not to cut off anyone's foot; and if his row was less orderly than those of more experienced mowers, well, he could learn. After all, there were his hands, both of them, moving at his will. The bandages and splints had come off weeks ago, but his relief remained, as sharp and clear as the moment he had first flexed his mended fingers and known that he wouldn't be a cripple after all.

  Besides, it was pleasant to be under orders again, even those of someone as ill-tempered as the harvest-master. The man was behind him now, shouting at a raker in a voice as raspy and irritating as the chaff that worked itself into everything.

  "Here now, you cow-handed cadet! Turn those swathes and loosen 'em properly. What, you've never heard of tight-packed hay heating 'til it bursts into flames?"

  The cadet Vant stifled a derisive snort. Who are you, it said, to be telling me anything? As a ten-commander, he had already made it clear that he resented playing such a menial role in the harvest, never mind that everyone from senior randon to the highlord himself labored beside him.

  "You think that's funny?" The harvest-master must be almost in the cadet's face, up on his toes to bring their eyes level. "Well, I've seen it happen, boy, a whole field of burning ricks, pale tongues of fire in the summer sun, and that winter the cattle lowing with hunger so loud that no one could sleep. So shut up and do your work properly!"

  Torisen felt those hard, impatient eyes turn to fix on his back. I dare you, he thought.

  "Huh!" said the master, and stomped off to shout at someone else.

  Marc and Brier Iron-thorn worked side by side down the line, two tall, strong figures swinging their blades in identical, effortless arcs. The girl's hair glowed sullen red, swaying back and forth as she moved. The man's beard was a thick, white bush with some lingering touches of fox, his head sunburned and peeling under its crown of thinning, reddish hair. Someone was always hiding his hat for a joke; this time he apparently hadn't found it yet. He said something to his companion and she laughed, white teeth ablaze in that dark face which seemed bred into some Southron Kendar. Torisen had never heard Brier Iron-thorn laugh before, or even seen her smile.

  He wondered again why Marc—ever so gently, as if not wanting to cause pain—had turned down his offer of a permanent place with the Knorth. Anyone else in the Kendar's position would surely have jumped at the chance. For that matter, any decent lord should have been glad to have him. True, in his mid-nineties he was past his fighting prime, but he had so much else to offer for those who valued kindness and inherent decency, not to mention his growing skill as an artisan. The man was waiting, but for what? In the meantime, ironically, in part because of his refusal to accept Knorth service, his was one of the few names that Torisen was absolutely sure he would never forget.

  Not that he had misplaced anyone since the unfortunate Mullen. His people wouldn't let him. In his presence, everyone had pointedly called each other by name until he had demanded that they stop as it gave him a headache. Dammit, didn't they trust him?

  Don't answer that.

  Kindrie had also declined a place in his service. At the time Torisen had been both surprised and relieved, if puzzled. According to the Matriarchs, an illegitimate Highborn was kin to no one, but that didn't change the fact that Kindrie was the son of Torisen's unfortunate aunt Tieri—a first cousin. And the Shanir was desperate for a home. Why, then, had he turned away at the last minute?

  For that matter, Torisen hadn't formally bound his sister Jamethiel. It had never occurred to him to try, nor had she seemed either to expect or want it.

  There was another sore spot, dimming his pleasure in the day: Jame's ten-command had come to help with the harvest, but without her. The Min-drear cadet Rue had said that his sister had unfinished business in the hills. What, for Ancestors' sake? Surely she couldn't be mad enough to try to pick up with the Merikit where she had left off at Kithorn on Summer's Eve. He remembered now, uneasily, that she hadn't agreed with him that such a thing was out of the question. Her quiet independence alarmed him, as if she only submitted to authority when she wanted to.

  Am I losing control? he wondered, not for the first time. Of my sister, of my people, of myself? Was I wrong to assume my father's title with his curse hanging over me? Can the disowned inherit power any more than the illegitimate?

  But he had seen how close the Kencyrath was to falling apart. As he had sensed Ganth's death, so had others, if less clearly. Some Highborn, soon, would have claimed the Highlord's seat. Caineron, probably. Or Ardeth. Or Randir. Then there would have been civil war and slaughter enough to make the White Hills pale by comparison. Those seeds of destruction were also part of his father's legacy.

  No matter what I do, Torisen thought, swinging his scythe with untoward force, making the Kendar next to him hastily step aside, I stand in his shadow.

  "Rest!" bellowed the harvest-master.

  Reapers grounded their tools and reached for the water bottles hanging from their belts. Some sat down, drew out cheese and onion wrapped in black bread, and began to munch on it. A ripple of talk and laughter passed down the line, some of it directed at the workers behind them whose failure to keep up had caused this welcome halt. As it was, they had almost reached the bottom of the meadow. Tubs of oil and sand were brought forward along with the hones to whet the blades for the final assault.

  Harn trudged up, an eight-foot pitchfork cocked like an ungainly spear over his shoulder.

  "Hot work," he said, offering Torisen a swig from his bottle, which turned out to contain hard cider. He squinted up at the hazy sky and at the sun, which was ringed by a halo. "Odd light, odd weather. D'you suppose it's going to storm?"

  Rain was coming, thought Torisen. He could feel it in his new-knit bones. And something else, somehow connected to his delinquent sister . . . but to think that was ridiculous. All natural disasters weren't Jame's fault—maybe just the unnatural ones.

  There had been several jolts around dawn, enough to crumble some already damaged walls and to stir fears of another earthquake like the one that spring, whose marks could still be seen up and down the Riverland. Torisen looked northward. Early that morning, from window of his turret quarters, he had seen a plume of smoke on the horizon. Now clouds were coming—strange, lobed ones white against a darkening sky. The air stirred, laced with a hint of . . . what? Rotten eggs? Birds flew overhead, all going south.

  Someone shouted a warning as a herd of deer bounded across the field between and sometimes over harvesters, who threw themselves flat to avoid the flying hooves. At a stag's heels, snapping, ran a white streak. The wolver pup Yce had grown over the summer, although not as much as a wolf cub would have, and she chased anything that fled her. Deer, cows, sheep, people . . .

  "Just wait until she gets big enough to make her first kill," Harn said grimly, watching. "One taste of fresh blood, and there'll be no stopping her."

  Yce gave up pursuit and loped back to Torisen, as usual stopping just out of reach.

  "What am I going to do with you?" he asked her, "and what in Perimal's name do you want of me?"

  No answer but that unnerving, ice-blue stare.

  More than ever, she reminded him of his sister. Both seemed to be challenging him in ways he couldn't understand, or perhaps didn't want to.

  Again came that sick sense of lost control, like tumbling down an abyss by stages with no bottom in sight.

  . . . Daddy's boy, run, hide . . .

  Words spoken in deli
rium. Ridiculous that they should have struck so deep, that they continued to hurt. She hadn't known what she was saying, of course.

  He still didn't know how his sister had come to be injured. Apparently no one did, although Torisen sensed that the Caineron Gorbel knew more than he would admit. Something odd was going on between the two lordans, if by "odd" one meant anything besides the inevitable house rivalries, which in the past had bordered on the lethal. And then there was the Ardeth Timmon as well. Pereden's son. Adric's favorite. What had he to do with Jame, and why did both of them keep edging into his most intimate dreams?

  G'ah, think of something else. But he couldn't.

  After half a lifetime his twin sister had returned, but she kept slipping away again into one outlandish situation after another. She was younger than he now, but sometimes she seemed older, with eyes that hinted at experiences beyond his comprehension and at a certain rising irritation: You might at least try to understand.

  On top of all that, she was now a cadet at Tentir, where he had longed with all his heart to go.

  She is gaining strength, boy, murmured the voice in his head, behind the locked door. Even your war-leader Harn speaks well of her. The randon like a fighter, and she is becoming one of them. What if, eventually, they prefer her to you?

  Madness. Don't listen.

  Besides, not everyone at Tentir wanted her there. The cadet Vant, although an ass in other respects, had said as much. To many, she was a freak, her mere presence at the college an insult to all randon past and present. Vant had also hinted that no one expected her actually to stay the course. M'lord shouldn't worry. His people at Tentir knew his mind.

  Ha, thought Torisen. He wished that he knew it himself.

  Harn nudged him. "Company."

  Two riders were coming down the New Road, one a randon guard, the other . . . damn. A lady. Torisen mopped his sweaty face, silently cursing.

  He had thought that, here in the middle of a hay field, he would be safe from the Matriarchs. As Rowan had predicted, their schemes had grown subtler since the farce of the first few days, but they were far from giving up. Over the past few weeks he had been presented with everything from an unhappy bald girl, her head newly shaven (someone must have noticed his strong reaction to long, black hair, but taken it the wrong way), to the wide-eyed seven-year-old who had first asked him to marry her outside Adiraina's quarters.

  Occasionally, on the sly, he visited the Jaran Matriarch Trishien to reassure himself that all Highborn women weren't mad; and if she should have news of Jame by way of Kirien, all the better, although he took care never to ask directly.

  Rowan's suggestion floated in the back of his mind. If nothing else, it would be sweet to confound them all by taking his sister as his consort—only for show, of course.

  Torisen slipped back on the black jacket that he had discarded in the heat. One should show one's enemies respect, and wear whatever protection was available.

  "Hello!"

  He straightened, surprised at the hail. Decorum kept most of his would-be consorts silent, except for the seven-year-old whose naive, highly improper stream of questions no one had been able either to stop or to divert.

  Then he recognized the newcomer as Lyra, Caineron's young daughter, and relaxed. It was hard to feel threatened by a girl nicknamed "Lack-wit." Besides, at Kithorn she had stopped her sister Kallystine from slapping him with the same razor ring that his former consort had used to slash Jame's face. Even if the girl's interference had been an accident, as she claimed, he owed her for it.

  Not waiting for help, Lyra tumbled off her pony in a swirl of flame red velvet and plunged across the rough meadow toward him. Bemused Kendar drew aside to let her pass. From the freedom with which she moved, Torisen guessed that she had left her tight under-skirt back in the Women's Halls. Then she saw Marc and threw herself into his arms with a squeal of delight.

  "I saw you in the courtyard, working with all those pretty bits of glass, but they wouldn't let me go out to say hello. Hello!"

  Marc laughed, gently returning her enthusiastic hug. The top of her head only came up to the lower edge of his rib cage. "I saw you too, lady, at an upper window waving and, I think, shouting. Then someone pulled you away."

  "That was the sewing mistress. It's so funny when she gets hysterical. Just ask, 'Why?' and off she goes. Young ladies aren't supposed to ask questions, you see, which I think is stupid, so I ask them all the time."

  "You must be very popular with your teachers," said Torisen, amused. "I didn't realize that you knew Marcarn."

  "Oh yes!" She turned to beam at him—quite a pretty girl, actually, from what one could see behind her deceptively demure half-mask; and no fool either, despite her nickname and manner. "Marc rescued us from the palace at Karkinaroth. That was after it caught fire and before it fell down, of course. In between, poor Prince Odalian died." Her pert face dimmed at the memory, a cloud crossing the sun, but immediately brightened again. "Then we three rode a barge down the Tardy to Hurlen, along with that darling ounce Jorin. That was fun. Such exciting things happen when your sister is around!"

  "I've noticed," he said, with a smile that was half grimace. "But she's not here now. To what do we owe the honor of your presence, lady? Surely the Matriarchs didn't send you."

  "Oh no," she said blithely. "They threw a bucket of water over the sewing mistress, just when she was getting interesting, and sent me to my room to practice knot stitches, but that's so boring! Nearly everything is, in the Women's Halls. I'd ask to go home, but Kallystine would probably kill me. Anyway, I just had to get out of the Halls for a while. I would have come alone, except Marrow here spotted me and besides I needed help with the basket. I thought I'd bring you a picnic lunch. It is almost noon, you know."

  Torisen had noticed the wicker hamper that the cadet guard Marrow carried self-consciously slung over her arm. He also noted that harried look on her face of someone rushed into something without time to think it through. No doubt her captain would give her seven kinds of hell over this later.

  Lyra spread a white garment over the hummocky stubble—so she hadn't left her under-skirt behind after all—and dumped the contents of the basket onto it.

  "There!" she said. "I brought some of everything that I like to eat."

  Torisen accepted a purple sugarplum scrolled with cream frosting. Marzipan, chocolate rolled in crumbled walnut, snails encased in ginger shells . . . the Caineron larder was obviously much better stocked with luxuries than the Knorth, and probably with everything else as well.

  "So you know our kitten as well as our Marcarn." Harn popped something bright green into his mouth, made a face, and swallowed it whole. "I think that one was still alive."

  "Well, you wouldn't want to eat a dead candied cockroach, would you? Oh yes, Jame and I are like sisters. After Hurlen, though, we didn't see each other again until she showed up at Restormir just before the weirdingstrom. You know," she added, turning to Brier. "You were there too."

  "I've heard something about that," said Harn. He eyed the rest of Lyra's offerings, but didn't take any. Around them Kendar were settling down to their more mundane repasts, pretending not to listen. "What did happen, cadet?"

  The rest of Brier's ten in the second row stared at her with ill-concealed horror. Vant, down the line, went white under his peeling sunburn. The story was by now well known in the barracks at Tentir, with many unintended embellishments gained by repetition. So far, though, no senior randon had gotten around to asking for a formal account of it, probably afraid of what they would hear.

  Brier gave her report in a voice so flat that one could have rolled a marble across it. They had encountered the lordan while on patrol. She had stated that her servant Graykin was Lord Caineron's prisoner and that she was honor-bound to rescue him. They had helped her accomplish this.

  Everyone waited for the Southron to go on, but she had come to a full stop. Vant sighed with relief.

  "Oh, you don't know how to tell a sto
ry at all!" said Lyra impatiently. "Listen. Everyone was up in the Crown—that's Restormir's tower—getting beastly drunk and making a row. I was with Gran in her rooftop garden, but she sent me down to fetch some food from the kitchen, and who do you think I ran into there? Jame and a bunch of cadets, chasing a chicken. No, that's not quite right. My uncles and cousins and brothers were chasing it to make soup—Father's drinking had made all our servants sick, you see, so we had to fend for ourselves—and it (the chicken) ran into the pantry where we were hiding. That's when Jame told me why she was there. Gricki—that is, Graykin—used to be my servant at Karkinaroth. He's also my half-brother by some Southron kitchen maid. Anyway, Father was mad at him for changing houses and so he jabbed all these red-hot hooks through his skin."

  Lyra paused, remembering, suddenly sober. "He screamed," she said. "A lot. No one should have to scream like that.

  "Anyway, then Father attached wires and swung him out into the Crown's central shaft. For a while he made him dance like a puppet. Then he got bored and left, thinking that the hooks would eventually tear through Gricki's skin and that he would fall all the way down to the Pit."