"Tori, listen: There have been schemes within schemes, enemies behind enemies, treachery, murder, bloody betrayal. What happened to our house was no accident. I'm sure of that, although I don't yet understand it all. But what started then isn't over yet, however strange its course has been. Some of the answers lie at Tentir."
She gave him a quick, almost feral smile, all white teeth and a flash of inhuman, silver eyes.
"Trust me in this at least: I'm good at hunting down hidden enemies."
He believed her, and it frightened him.
She had turned back to contemplate the Earth Wife's swaying feet. "Y'know, I think that bump did more to shift things than all my prodding has. Chumley, again."
Obligingly, the massive horse shifted back and forth where he stood, with each forward surge reaching farther for fresh tufts of grass. Thud, thud, thud went the souls of the swollen feet against the rafter, to accompanying yelps from below.
"Oh, stop complaining, you big baby. You did ask me to hurry up. This is my revenge," she murmured aside to Torisen, "for a good many frights and indignities. No doubt she'll get her own back later, by the bucket full, and I'll be lucky to survive it."
The prospect, however, didn't seem to alarm her. What kind of a life had she lead, to take such things so casually?
Don't ask.
Instead, he regarded her intently, seeking reassurance. They were, after all, twins. How different could they be?
Both had always been slight and fine-boned, even for Highborn, but quick and agile. If he was stronger, she made up for it by constantly surprising him. She did so now, stepping up onto the chair's back and balancing there as it teetered, apparently for a closer look at the thumping progress. She moved like a dancer or a fighter, with easy balance and a chilling disregard for personal safety. Like her, he took far too many unnecessary risks, or so Harn kept telling him.
Torisen also didn't think much about his own appearance. If his servant Burr caught him at a weak moment, he might consent to wear the Highlord's finery, but otherwise why bother? Plain, simple, and black suited him best. Maybe that was why in part he hadn't thought to supply his sister with garments befitting her rank. For that matter, she hadn't asked for them. She didn't seem to care much about what she wore either, given some of the clothes he had seen her in—that outlandish dress at the Cataracts, for example, formerly the property of an overweight Hurlen street-walker. Given a preference, though, she also seemed to favor plain and black, like that oddly cut jacket slung aside on the floor.
Was she handsome?
People kept telling him that they both had the classic Knorth features. For that matter, several times she had been mistaken for him on the battlefield—something which he found profoundly disturbing.
Was she beautiful?
Not by the standards of Kallystine's voluptuous charms that had drawn him despite his better judgment. His former consort had been adept at intoxicating the senses, but with an after-taste that had made him both loathe and mistrust his own passion. One of the Highborn subsequently thrown at him, a ridiculously young Ardeth girl, had seen enough to suggest that Kallystine had used potions to entrap him.
Women.
He would trust his life and honor to most Kendar, but too few Highborn. Kirien and the Matriarch Trishien, maybe, but Jame?
Did he trust his own sister?
No! said the voice in the back of his mind. Never!
Yet he felt drawn to that lithe body with its clean, spare lines and to that wry smile as to a cool breath in an overheated room. If Kallystine had been poison, perhaps here was the antidote.
Then, for the first time, he realized that Jame wasn't wearing gloves. Even with their nails sheathed, those long, slim fingers made him shiver, threat and promise in one touch.
Her face also looked oddly bare, and not for the lack of a mask.
"What happened to your eyebrows?"
She touched her forehead, annoyed. "I got too close to a fire. So did you, apparently. Your jacket may be soaked, but it's also scorched and still smoldering."
Torisen shrugged it off and dropped it on a pile of snow-footed ferrets, who woke briefly to quarrel among themselves before settling back to sleep under the reeking cloth.
Now that he looked, he saw that her clothes were also charred in patches and hanging in long strips, as if fiery claws had tried but failed to catch her. The heavy fall of her long black hair covered her better than the tattered remains of her shirt, although both slid away from delicate curves as she moved. Had the Burning Ones been after her too? If so, why? She had her own secrets, he reminded himself, years' worth of them between the time when their father had driven her out and when he had taken her back in.
As he studied her, so she did him.
"There were strands of white in your hair the last time I saw you," she said. "Now they're gone. So are your scars."
Torisen stared at his unmarked hands. He had grown so used to the phantom pain of the Karnids' red-hot gloves that only now, when it was gone, did he miss it.
"For the first time since we were children," she said slowly, giving voice to his sudden dread, "I think that we're the same age."
They regarded each other, she (infuriatingly) amused, he on the verge of panic.
"For how long?"
"Probably only while we're in the Earth Wife's lodge. Mother Ragga, is this your idea of a joke?"
Between grunts as her horny soles hit the rafter, something like a stifled chuckle emerged from the inverted skirt. ". . . seemed only fair. Taking advantage . . ."
"I was not!" Torisen burst out, and then, to his horror, found himself blushing as he hadn't since his youth. Trinity, was he about to be thrown back to those long-gone, miserable days? On the whole he would rather drop dead, here and now, than live through them again. Maybe Jame would too.
Had he taken unfair advantage of the years he had gained on her? After all, they were twins and always would been, however strangely their lives had diverged. He wasn't even sure which one of them had been born first. But that didn't matter. As the male, he would always come first and she be his inferior—but that wasn't how it felt. Did he need to be older, to feel that he had control over her, and why was that so important anyway?
Because destruction begins with love, and you love her.
"No," he said out loud. When in doubt, attack. "Lyra tells me that you ordered her father to step off a balcony two hundred feet up, and he did."
"You disapprove?"
"No. I mean, yes! Who are you to order the lord of any house to do something like that, and what did you do to Caldane at the Cataracts anyway?"
"Finally, you ask! He held me prisoner in his tent, and I had to escape to bring you Father's ring and sword. I slipped him a powder I had picked up on my travels, not knowing that it would do to him, at that point not really caring." She suddenly grinned. "If you ever want to get an . . . er . . . rise out of m'lord Caldane, just startle him into an attack of the hiccups."
"Harn said something about Caineron's advisor, Corrudin." He didn't want to know, but could no more prevent himself from asking than he had from fretting endlessly about his bandaged hand. "What did you do to him?"
"That filthy man." Her abrupt, deep anger made the room's temperature drop. Rumbling, sleepy complaints rose from all sides. "He tried to make me order Brier Iron-thorn to lick the mud off my boots. I told him to back off and he did, right out a third story window. I wish he had broken his neck."
" 'This is what I am,' " Torisen quoted, teeth chattering, breath hanging on the air. " 'Remember that.' "
"Yes. Sorry. Corrudin and I both abused our power, which probably makes me no better than he is, at least in Brier's eyes. I do care what she thinks, you know, and Marc too. If they disapprove, then I've still gotten it wrong somehow. It's so hard to find a balance. Sweet Trinity, haven't you ever made someone do something he or she didn't want to?"
"Not like that!"
Even as he spoke, however, he rememb
ered forcing the Ardeth Matriarch Adiraina to tell him what had happened to his sister in the Women's Halls that winter. Afterward, Grimly had called it "a good trick," and he had nearly snapped the Wolver's head off for suggesting that he had done anything unusual. It wasn't the same, though. It couldn't be. He certainly didn't feel that power in himself now. On the other hand, this young body didn't know that the man who had sired it was dead. In this strange house, in this displaced moment, that authority hadn't yet passed to him.
Then again, perhaps it never had, and never would.
"Damn you, boy, for deserting me. Faithless, honorless . . . I curse you and cast you out. Blood and bone, you are no son of mine . . ."
Words spoken in searing bitterness by a dying man. By his father. How could any curse be more terrible?
To his horror, he felt himself growing younger, smaller, while the edges of the Earth Wife's lodge dimmed around him into the dusty corners of the Haunted Lands keep where he had grown up, which he never seemed able entirely to escape.
"Tori, stop it!"
She had jumped down from the chair and crossed the room to seize him. As her nails bit into his shoulders, the keep faded.
Something crunched, and the wolver pup backed off, shaking her head. Seeing him apparently under attack, she had bitten his sister's leg, or tried to. Something white and hard showed through Jame's torn pants at shin level.
"Oh no, child," she said to Yce. "You don't want to taste my blood, or my brother's either." And Torisen knew, somehow, that the pup would never try to again.
"What's happening to you?" he demanded. While he could clearly see the fine lines of her face, simultaneously it wore a sketchy half-mask of ivory, more like a rudimentary helm than any frivolous product of the Women's World. Then the ivory faded as had the shadows of the keep, although he sensed that neither had gone far.
"This lodge exists in Rathillien's sacred space. From there, it seems to be a short step to the Kencyr soulscape. I don't entirely understand that. It may be as the Earth Wife wills, or as our needs demand. My soul-image is changing. They can, you know. You should try it. Get away from that foul keep, from that voice of madness, before it's too late!"
" 'Daddy's boy. Run. Hide.' "
"Er . . . sorry. I didn't mean it quite like that, and I don't think I told you to hide. Oh, Perimal. You can't leave, can you? Not while that door stays locked with half of what you are on the other side."
This time he grabbed her, hard. "What are you talking about? Filthy Shanir, what have you done to me?"
She didn't flinch, but her gaze was stricken. "Now you sound like Father. I've gotten it wrong again, haven't I? Kindrie told me as much. But I was only trying to help, to buy you some time. You weren't ready then to open that door. Are you now?"
Involuntarily, he glanced over his shoulder at what was somehow the door both to the Earth Wife's lodge and to the ramparts of the Haunted Lands' keep.
Someone knocked on it.
Without thinking, the twins found themselves in each other's arms. Torisen held his sister tight, his face buried in the glorious richness of her hair as if to hide in it. Her breasts pressed against him in odd, soft contrast to the firm, boyish lines of her body beneath his hands. Gray eyes met gray, mirroring each other. Her lips tasted like wild honey, sweet and bitter at once.
"Stay," she murmured. "I will stay with you."
Thump, thump, thump, fists on the door, feet on the rafters, his heart against his ribs . . .
On the keep stairs, heavy footsteps descended. Two children huddled together in bed, terrified. They had heard him in the room above, smashing Mother's things, raving. "Betrayed, betrayed, whore, slut, love . . . oh, return to me, return!" Now he was coming for them, the last vestige of her that he possessed, the last bit that he could still hurt, and if he found them together . . .
Torisen thrust his sister away in sudden panic. "I can't stay. I won't."
He had to get out. Better anywhere than here.
The door flew open as he threw himself at it and he fell out, face first. The wolver pup landed on his back and bounded off again, driving him yet deeper into the mud.
"Well," said Harn's voice over him, hoarse with exasperation and relief. "There you are at last."
IV
Jame stared at the door. It had swung shut in her face, but not before she had glimpsed the gray, sodden hay field beyond and recognized Gothregor's outline against a leaden northern sky. At least Tori was safely home. Just the same . . .
"Damn, damn, damn," she muttered, touching her lips where his lips had touched them. Her whole body tingled from that unexpected contact, which had been almost as much an assault as a kiss. But if so, who had attacked whom, and why did she long for a rematch?
She turned, and the bat-thing from the south lunged at her, all gaping mouth and teeth, hissing. She punched it in the face. Its nose flattened with a faint crunch of cartilage, and its red eyes crossed.
"Oh, go suck an egg," she told it as it slunk, whimpering, into a corner.
Then she went to let Mother Ragga down before all the fat went to her head.
Chapter XX: The Bear Pit
Summer 68 - 90
I
Everyone agreed afterward that it had been the most eventful Minor Harvest in living memory.
All the northern keeps received at least a dusting of ash and a day of darkness, reeking of sulfur, not unlike the end of the world. Beasts ran mad in the fields, the Silver seethed white with debris, and scrollsmen gleefully collected samples from the ramparts of Mount Alban. Later, one swore that he had recreated a miniature volcano, but as the glass globe containing it immediately exploded, his claim went unrecorded—and no, colleagues said, the chaos to which his room had been reduced proved nothing, unless he wanted to credit the college kitchen with similar feats of spontaneous creation on a daily basis.
Gothregor suffered the worst of ash, wind, and rain, due to the clash of the north wind and the Tishooo directly overhead. Half a dozen hay ricks were torn apart or burnt down, but the rest stood firm under their hoods of woven rye while their stone foundations raised them above the subsequent torrent of ash-laden mud.
The stepped fields above, however, were utterly destroyed, and their precious crops with them.
The only good thing was that a day later the Highlord had suddenly reappeared, face down and dazed but otherwise unhurt, in the middle of the ruined field.
The day after that, his sister the lordan Jameth limped back into Tentir by a side door, apparently hoping that her return would escape immediate notice. It didn't.
Vant stopped short in the doorway of the Knorth barracks, staring at this dirty, singed apparition with its clothes hanging off it in rags and its eyebrows gone.
"Lady, what in Perimal's name happened to you?"
"Don't ask," she snarled, echoed by the ounce at her heels. "Just tell Rue to get me hot water, fresh clothes, and food. Lots of it. I'm starved."
II
The randon college quickly settled back into its routine, with a growing sense of urgency. All too soon would come the autumn cull and the end of many hopes.
Jame in particular had cause to worry. After a slow start, she had lost more training time than any other cadet due to various mishaps, and now she was hindered by severely bruised if not broken ribs. Her ten-command began to look worried and Vant increasingly smug.
It disturbed her to learn, by accident, that the cull would not be like the summer testing, as she had assumed.
She and Timmon were on their way down from sword practice on the second floor of Old Tentir. Jame, as usual, had been disarmed with unnerving speed. This time the blade had spun straight out the window, to be caught below by the Commandant and returned with a polite request that in future the Knorth Lordan was, please, not to substitute disemboweling her instructors for driving them insane.
Huh, thought Jame sourly. Sheth hadn't even had to ask whose escaped weapon it was.
"That's another blac
k stone for you, for sure," said Timmon cheerfully. "Maybe you'll break the college record and get all eleven of them. You know," he added, seeing her puzzled expression. "Black stone, white stone, leave or stay."
"I don't know. What are you talking about?"
"I keep forgetting. You weren't raised in the randon tradition, were you? See, each member of the Randon Council has one black stone and one white. That's . . ."
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