“Besides,” said Brier, following her own thoughts, “the garrison is edgy enough as it is about their own bonds to your brother.”
“Why should this threaten that?”
Brier considered. “It shouldn’t. But you are a strong counterweight to him. A potential rival.”
“I don’t mean to be.”
“You can’t help it. We all felt it in Kothifir, with the Highlord so far away and you so close. I broke my bond to him. They might too, under stress, unintentionally. Then too, your brother can only bind so many Kendar before he starts to forget their names. There is no place in his household for these fugitives.”
Marc sat by the fireplace, absently prodding the blazing logs. Nights this far north were cold, even in midsummer, especially with a hole in the roof. Jorin stretched out on the hearth on his back, his fore-paws curled up against his snowy chest, his hind in the air. A branch snapped. The ounce jerked, opened his moon-opal eyes, and sniffed. Then he rolled onto his feet and trotted out of the room.
“As Torisen’s lordan,” said Marc, watching him go, “you should be allowed to bind people in your own right. Look at the Caineron. There are so many of them because Caldane has seven established sons, each with his own household within Restormir.”
Jame laughed. “I don’t think he’s yet extended that privilege to Gorbel, who is his heir.”
“Until Caldane changes his mind,” said Brier. “I don’t think Gorbel’s brothers see him as a serious threat.”
“The more fool they. Then too, he isn’t of age yet. Neither am I. Nor is Timmon. I’m not sure that any of us can actually inherit until we turn twenty-seven. Kirien can’t. That’s why her uncle is acting as her regent. It all gets pretty complicated, when you think about it. Someone once told me that the strongest Highborn in a house always, eventually, becomes its lord, and the strongest is the one who can bind the most Kendar.”
“How does that account for Lord Randir? No one seems to be bound to him at all.”
“I did say ‘eventually.’ Kenan couldn’t stand up to the true heir, Randiroc, in a casual encounter. I doubt if he will do better in a serious one.”
“So you could say,” said Marc, reverting to the previous comment, “that the followers make the leader.”
“I suppose you could. But how does that help me with our current guests?”
“It doesn’t,” said Brier. “Ignore them. Sooner or later, they will go away.”
“Go where? Not back to Caldane.”
“Maybe the Danior or the Jaran will take them in, if they can get past Restormir. They aren’t our problem.”
Soon after that, Brier and Marc left. Rue fussed around the room for awhile, setting it straight, but Jame stopped her when she began to remove what was left of the meal.
“That’s right,” said Rue, eyeing her. “Finish it up later. You don’t eat enough, and that’s the truth.”
“Are you calling me skinny?”
“That,” said Rue, “would be a compliment.” And she left.
Jame leaned against the mantelpiece, staring down into the fire. With one thumb hooked in her belt, she ran fingertips over her side. Yes, she could feel the ribs through both shirt and jacket, but still . . .
Famine’s foal, someone had once called her. Oh well.
But those fugitives, not her problem? She wasn’t sure about that. They had risked their lives to get here. One of them had died. She remembered the desperation in that young woman’s eyes. Damn their god anyway for making the Kendar so dependent on the Highborn. Surely that made them every Highborn’s responsibility, whatever Brier said.
The followers make the leader.
Wise Marc.
Still, what could she do without risking her own people?
Jorin slipped back into the room and went to the table, nose raised and wrinkling at the delicious odor of the cooling stew.
“You may as well come in too,” Jame said to the muffled figure hesitating on the threshold.
It advanced, shoving back its hood from a mass of tangled black hair and a smudged face.
“I’m so hungry,” said Lyra Lack-wit.
“Then eat.”
The Caineron girl went quickly to the table, sat, and began to wolf down all that the dinner party had left. Jorin raised a paw to tap her knee imploringly.
“How did you know I was here?” she asked, through a full mouth.
“I saw you on the road this morning. And Jorin has been with you for the past half hour. How did you get from the outer ward into the keep proper?”
“Oh, that was easy. A wagon came out loaded with stuff. When it went back in, I snuck in under it.”
“I see that I will have to speak to my guards. Lyra, why are you here?”
The girl held out a chunk of beef. The ounce balanced on his hind legs and delicately took it from her fingertips.
“Well,” she said at last, not looking at Jame, “after all that excitement at Gothregor, the Matriarchs sent me home, and I was glad to go. We passed you on the road. Did you see me wave? Back at Restormir, Father put me up on top of the Crown to look after Great-gran.”
“How is Cattila?”
Lyra’s expressive face drooped. “She says, as long as someone has to keep an eye on Father, she isn’t going anywhere, but I don’t think it works like that . . . does it?”
Jame remembered the Caineron Matriarch with her toothless grin and her face like an apple dumpling gone bad. Those tiny, wicked eyes, that iron will . . .
“Who knows,” she said. “Maybe with her it does. Why did you leave her?”
“Oh, it was too awful! Father has made a contract for me with Dari of Omiroth.”
Timmon’s cousin and rival, who was pressuring Tori to make him Ardeth lordan regent over his failing father Adric. He with the terrible breath, who was allergic to his own teeth. He whom no woman contradicted twice.
If Caldane was offering him his daughter, he must intend to support Dari’s claim.
“So you ran away,” she said. A terrible thought struck her. “Lyra, don’t tell me: you promised those yondri that, if they brought you here, I would give them a place.”
“Oh no! Of course not!”
But she still wouldn’t meet Jame’s eyes.
“What, then?”
“I . . . I may have told them that . . . that you would be grateful . . . oh, Jame!”
She sprang up, ignoring Jorin’s squall as she stepped on his foot, and threw herself into Jame’s arms.
“Where else could I go? Who else could protect me? Oh, don’t throw me out! I’m sorry if I’m being a nuisance. I’m sorry . . .”
And, with a hiccup, she began to cry.
Jame held her, considering. This was worse than when Lyra had thrown herself on Knorth mercy at Gothregor. Caldane would be furious enough when he found out to rip Tagmeth apart stone by stone, and her allies were too far away to help. If he found out. Fash hadn’t known whom he was chasing or surely he would have said something. No men were allowed on top of Restormir’s Crown where Cattila held court. Quite possibly Lord Caineron didn’t know yet that his daughter was missing, and then would he guess where she had gone?
Then again, if Kallystine had undertaken Cattila’s duties, would she be aware that her half-sister had fled? Maybe not if Cattila didn’t tell her, and somehow Jame didn’t think the Caineron Matriarch would even obliquely help her despised great grandson.
“All right,” she said to the sobbing girl, whose tears were beginning to soak through her shirt. “We’ll think of something.”
III
THEREAFTER, the summer turned hot. Occasional thunderstorms rumbled down the valley, rendering the stones of the New and River Roads slick, and washing the cliffs above until they gleamed. Flies gathered in the sloping pasture where the cattle grazed among a sprinkling of flowers. The meadow at the lower end of the island turned a lush green. Work continued on the keep, whose walls and roofs were now mostly repaired. But was it enough? Not un
less the garrison could also provide for the coming winter. Jame woke each morning with a panicky sense of precious hours slipping away.
The sun beat down as she made her way north toward the bridge that spanned the river.
“Wait for me! Wait for me!”
Jame sighed as Lyra skipped up to her, swishing a patchwork skirt. The girl had arrived in clothes stained and tattered from her flight from Restormir with the yondri. No one at Tagmeth had had anything to offer in her favorite color, flame red, so she had settled, pouting, for a shirt and a pair of dark britches whose seams had been ripped open and re-sewn to fit her slender figure—more or less.
“These are hot!” she complained, fanning her open collar against fair, flushed skin. “Let’s take a picnic lunch and go wading.”
“The Silver is too dangerous.”
“Oh, but there’s that darling pond down-stream. You know, the one that gathers among the rocks before it spills into the river. You promised!”
“I said, if there was time. There isn’t. Not today.”
“Then when?”
Jame sighed. Lyra was proving a tiresome houseguest, always demanding to be entertained. If no one paid attention to her, she whined, as if to be left on her own was a sign that no one wanted her. Jame supposed that she understood. The girl was still terrified of being sent back to Restormir, and apparently unaware that this was no way to endear herself to her new hosts.
They crossed the bridge. Lyra lingered, leaning on the rail to drink in the cool mist that breathed down the gorge. Jame would have done the same if she had been alone, but now she went on, back into the heat of the valley.
From the tower keep, she had seen a stocky figure trudging up the New Road and had been too impatient to wait for his arrival. Now he approached, a middle-aged Kendar built like the stump of some mighty tree, short of leg and barrel-chested.
“I don’t understand it,” said Fen, taking off his wide-brimmed straw hat and wiping his forehead with a sleeve. The upper quarter of his face was pale, the rest the permanent leathery brown of a farmer. That, indeed, was the role that Torisen had sent him to fulfill in the new keep, to his growing frustration.
“I’ve been up and down the Silver for some ten miles each way, and there are precious few arable fields. Everything is thin soil over rocks, barely fit to graze.”
“What about that?” Jame asked, glancing across at the island with its green lower margin.
“That’s another strange thing. The soil there is about a foot deep, but it must have been carted in. Where did it come from? We could turn out the horses and plant it, I suppose, but it isn’t very big. You need one or two fertile acres to support each individual for a year. True as my hat, I don’t see how Tagmeth has ever been able to sustain itself.”
“I know how they did it,” said a husky voice behind Jame.
She turned to find the yondri who had first spoken to her. The young woman looked ready to bolt, but febrile determination anchored her.
Fen snorted. He obviously had no more use for the runagate Caineron than the rest of the Knorth Kendar did, nor for Lyra. Bored with eavesdropping, the Highborn girl had begun to gather pebbles by the roadside.
“One moment,” Jame said to the yondri, and turned to finish her conversation with Fen. When he had trudged away, grumbling, she turned back.
“Must,” said the yondri, with a gulp.
“Must what?”
“That’s my name. Must. Short for Mustard.”
“I see. Well . . . er . . . Must, what have you to say?”
“What I said. I know.”
Jame sighed. This was getting nowhere. “Explain.”
“My grandfather was one of the Caineron who helped to restore this keep back a hundred years or so ago. He told me the secret.”
“Which is?”
Must gulped again. Jame could almost see her digging in her toes.
“First, you have to promise.”
“Promise what?”
“To take us in.”
Jame took a deep breath, controlling herself. “This really won’t do,” she said. “You can’t blackmail me. What kind of an arrangement would that be?”
“D’you think I care?”
“Obviously not, but I do. Go back to Lord Caldane.”
She had turned away when Must’s voice, half-choking, stopped her.
“All right. All right. It was a bluff anyway. Grandfather and the rest survived on supplies sent from Restormir.”
Lyra laughed, and threw a stone. It hit one of the grazing cows, whose head jerked up with a snort. Small, bloodshot eyes glared downhill at the group on the road. More heads raised. Sunlight gleamed on an array of menacing horns.
Jame gripped both women by their shoulders and turned them around. “Walk,” she said through her teeth. “Don’t run.”
They regained the bridge after what felt like an eternity.
“Whoop!” said Lyra, with a breathless giggle.
“Listen to me, both of you,” Jame said to them. “Leave. Me. Alone.”
And she stalked off.
IV
JAME DIDN’T SEE LYRA or Must again for the rest of the morning. At first this pleased her, but then she began to wonder where they were. Must, she learned, had gone off with the rest of the Caineron yondri to gather firewood in the west bank forest. No one had given them this chore. They had apparently taken it on in an attempt to make themselves useful.
“Or, more like, to ingratiate themselves,” said the Kendar who told Jame, with a snort.
Not until almost noon did she have news of Lyra.
Apprentices scurried about the keep’s kitchen, preparing the midday meal. Off to one side, Marc was learning how to prepare lamprey soup.
“Now, I’ve taught you how to dress this slippery fellow,” the little master cook was saying, obviously pleased to have no less a person than the keep’s steward leaning attentively over him. “Repeat.”
“First, you bleed it through the mouth and cut out its tongue,” said Marc, with the air of someone counting steps on his fingers. “That last is to stop it from screaming. Save the blood, for it is the fat. Then scald it as you would an eel.”
“Yes! And here it is.”
The cook thrust a long-handled fork into a seething pot and drew out a dark, lank form, not unlike a boiled snake.
“Oh, what a beauty!” he exclaimed, turning it so that it flopped this way and that, its tongue-bereft circular mouth grimacing with rings of bared teeth. “Caught it myself, I did. I’ve never seen its like.”
Probably he hadn’t, thought Jame. Such fish weren’t known in Kothifir, from which, judging from his walnut tan, the cook had recently come.
“Then thread it crosswise on a very thin spit in one or two loops, like this, and roast it. Meanwhile, what spices do you prepare?”
“Ginger, cassia, cloves, nutmeg, grains of paradise . . . what’s that, by the way?”
“Never mind. We don’t have any. If we had some parsley, we could turn the broth bright green, but it’s supposed to be thick and black. ‘Mud,’ we call it.”
Jame regarded the sinuous loop crackling in the flames and seeming, stealthily, to writhe.
“That’s not a lamprey,” she said. “It’s a blackhead.”
The little cook blinked at her. “A what?”
“They come from the lake that’s the source of the Silver, under the shadow of Perimal Darkling. When they bite their prey, they lay eggs in its flesh. These hatch and compel their host to migrate downstream, even while they devour its flesh from the inside out. Finally it explodes, releasing them to a new stretch of the river. I’ve seen them infest a man who ate an infected host. It wasn’t pretty.”
As the cook stared at her, aghast, Marc reached over his shoulder and slid the creature off the spit, into the devouring flames.
“There, there,” he said, patting the little man kindly on the back. “Why don’t you teach me how to make a nice parsnip pottage instead?”
The cook tottered off.
“I suppose nobody told him that one doesn’t fish in the Silver,” Marc said, turning to Jame. “For that matter, this is the first I’ve heard of blackheads myself.”
“I thought they’d been stopped at the Steps, but it seems that they weren’t.”
She remembered Chingetai’s friend vomiting a tide of black, writhing forms into the river as his flesh melted away and he shrank to nothing but bones in a loose sack of skin. The parasites had next attached themselves to the Eaten One, one of Rathillien’s elemental Four, but then had melted into ribbons of shadow. This world apparently had ways of protecting itself, if not completely. She wondered whether the Merikit might be having similar problems upstream.
“You think they come from Perimal Darkling?” Marc asked.
“You can see the Barrier from the top of the steps, across the lake, and sometimes up to the threshold of the Master’s House.”
Marc ran a calloused hand through his thinning hair. “I keep forgetting that the shadows are so close.”
“I’ve felt them looming over me all of my life,” said Jame wryly, “when I wasn’t actually under them.”
She gulped as the truth suddenly swelled up inside her. Her past held so many secrets. No wonder the Kendar didn’t trust her. Who could she tell, though, if not this, her oldest friend?
“In fact,” she heard herself say, “did I ever tell you that I grew up in Perimal Darkling, in the Master’s House?”
He regarded her steadily, and her heart caught in her throat.
“No, you didn’t,” he said at last, “but I sometimes wondered. Never mind. You’re here now.”
He patted her on the shoulder, then turned to manage the kitchen until its master chef stopped shaking.
Jame leaned against the mantelpiece, waiting for her breath to slow.
There, she thought. That wasn’t so bad, was it?
Yes, dammit, it was, like ripping open an old sore.
To follow that simile, though, the wound that was her childhood had never properly healed, and wouldn’t as long as she could remember so little of it.
Another thought struck her. If she was here, now, so was Marc. When he had talked about her supposed right to bind Kendar, had he meant himself? She knew that Torisen had offered him a place in his service at Gothregor, but he had refused it. He was waiting, he had said. Of course. For her. Anyone else in his position might have been jealous of Brier, but not Marc, and neither of them knew about Graykin. How had she come to place them both before her old friend, who deserved a place so much more than either? Chance. Need. Somehow, she would bring Marc into the fold too where, in her heart, he had been all along.
The Gates of Tagmeth (Chronicles of the Kencyrath Book 8) Page 9