Feet sounded on the stair, rapidly descending.
“Whose dream is this?” said a sharp voice. “Ganth, Kindrie, Tori, wake up!”
Kindrie woke with a start. He was sitting in the apartment of the Jaran Matriarch Trishien, who was watching him with concern.
“Lady, how long was I asleep?”
“Only minutes. You dropped off in mid-sentence. Sleep again. Clearly, you are exhausted.”
“No. There’s too much to do.” He started to rise, wavered, and abruptly sat again.
“At least rest a few moments longer. Tell me about your dream.”
“How did you know . . .”
“You cried out.”
Kindrie shivered, remembering, then tried to explain. “It was very peculiar,” he concluded, giving up. “People kept turning into someone else, I among them, and they talked about things that I didn’t understand.” He felt his face heat, which in turn embarrassed him even more. “Some of it was . . . not meant to be seen.”
“It sounds awful,” Trishien agreed, although for a moment at this last bit her eyes flickered with amusement behind the lens sewn into her mask.
She picked up her knitting, a gaudy, amorphous piece full of dropped stitches, and made a tentative stab at it.
“Tsk!” she said in annoyance as her needle missed the loop. She gingerly probed for it again, as if into foreign entrails. “Have you dreamt such things before?”
“More often since I returned to Gothregor, but details change. It’s never quite the same.”
In truth, between exhaustion and all the time spent in other peoples’ soul-images, much had become confused.
“What are we dealing with here?” he had asked the steward Rowan upon his arrival, in response to Trishien’s summons as conveyed by Kirien, who had practically shoved him out Mount Alban’s front door.
Rowan had been sneezing, her eyes and nose red.
“We call it the hay-cough or, if it gets really bad, lung-rot.”
It had started with the midsummer Minor Harvest and the discovery of a weed known as “false timothy” among the hay.
“It looks like true grass,” Rowan had explained, “but it has a hollow stem and a chambered root. The latter collects moisture, and mold grows there. When a reaper cuts the stem, spores puff up into his face. A few days later, he begins to cough and wheeze. As you know—who better?—we Kencyr don’t often get sick. This is usually a minor annoyance that lasts a few days at most. This time, though, more and more of us are falling ill, the young and old especially, who were never in the field with the harvesters to begin with. How did they catch it, too? We don’t know. Then fluid collects in the lungs. The herbalist Kells might help, at least with the fever, but he’s at Tagmeth. There have been several deaths already, with more to come if you can’t stop it.”
Trinity. Could he?
“Matriarch Trishien summoned me, not the Highlord.”
“Blackie is sick too, and not thinking altogether clearly. He would welcome your help, if he had his wits fully about him.”
Kindrie wondered about that. Since his arrival, he had barely seen his cousin at all, much less spoken to him.
“The odd thing,” he said now to Trishien, “is that in each soul-image I enter, something is growing awry. One Kendar sees himself as covered with exploding boils. Another can’t stop spewing gibberish instead of the lyrics to the song that defines her being. A third lives in a narrow room consumed by murals of ever-changing fungus.”
He didn’t add that, whenever he closed his own eyes, he was apt to find himself in a Moon Garden seething with weeds that spat white, stinging froth into his face. If he breathed it, it took root in his lungs, closed his throat, and sprouted out of his mouth. There was nothing for it but to keep pulling the beastly things up by their soggy, stinking roots. In short, sleep had become as exhausting as waking.
He rose again, this time keeping on his feet. So much to do . . .
At the door, however, he turned and blurted out what, even now, bothered him the most:
“Why does Kirien hate me?”
The Matriarch smiled at him. “She doesn’t hate you, child.”
“But she won’t even speak to me!”
“Perhaps you aren’t saying the right things to her.”
Kindrie plucked at his blue robe, bewildered. “I was so happy when she gave me this and—and spoke so kindly to me.”
Trishien put aside her tangled work, not without relief. “No, I don’t suppose you have encountered much kindness in your life. Disowned by the Knorth as a baby, raised by the priests at Wilden in that foul subterranean school of theirs, tortured by Rawneth in her vile experiments, beaten by Caldane, used by Ardeth, rejected by your cousins, at least at first . . .”
“Torisen still doesn’t like me.”
“He fears what you are, the more so because he is beginning to see something similar in himself. And just now this illness preoccupies him. But regarding my great-niece, for whom I have high regard, is it like her to be so fickle?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Then consider: perhaps she likes you very much, and all you have offered her in return is bashful friendship.”
Kindrie gaped at her. “You mean . . . you mean . . . but that’s impossible. Who could possibly love me?”
“Until you can answer that for yourself, expect to be miserable.”
II
KINDRIE STUMBLED OUT of the Women’s Halls and stopped on the edge of Gothregor’s inner ward. The descending sun seemed to wobble in the sky, spitting fire into his dazed eyes.
Lady Trishien must have it wrong, he thought.
Like Kirien, however, she was no fool.
If there was such a one in this business, could it be he himself?
Yes. No. Yes.
Think about it later.
The inner ward spread out before him with its rows of bright green newly sprouted garden vegetables, the first crop having been pounded flat by the summer’s eve hailstorm. Would these plants ripen in time to see the garrison through the next winter? Kindrie had heard that Gothregor might again have trouble feeding itself. The loss of the hay harvest was especially worrisome. While the false timothy had by no means outnumbered the true, the moisture it had contributed to the hay-ricks had caused many of them spontaneously to combust and others to rot. The other houses had little to spare. Thanks to Aerulan’s dowry, Torisen should have been able to buy what he needed from the Central Lands, but word had it that the Seven Kings had raised the price to ruinous heights, hoping to force the Riverland lords into open contracts for Kencyr to fight in their spring campaigns. Truly, thought Kindrie, his cousin had much to worry him.
Shouts drew his attention, and the sound of many hasty feet. Both were converging on the bakehouse, which abutted the kitchens and the garrison’s mess-hall. Kindrie found himself walking in that direction across the top of the ward, then trotting under the old keep, then running westward along the southern wall.
Ahead, he saw an anxious crowd milling outside the bakery. Something pallid, bloated, and quivering bulged out of its windows. Bubbles swelled and burst on its surface like gaseous pimples:
. . . glub, glub . . . urp.
“You don’t understand,” someone was saying as he approached. “Bake-master Nutley is still in there!”
This close, Kindrie couldn’t see over the onlookers’ heads. “What’s happening?” he asked a Kendar on the edge of the crowd.
“A batch of sourdough has gone rogue. Stand back.”
Other Kendar ran up brandishing clubs and bare fists.
“Beat it down! Beat it down!” cried voices closer to the action.
The dough collapsed grudgingly with many a yeasty belch, back into the bakery. Kendar emerged amid a babble of voices carrying a limp body.
“He was crushed against the wall.” “He isn’t breathing.” “Did someone say that the healer is here?” “Yes, yes!”
The crowd parted. Kindrie looked do
wn at the burly baker, with his blue-tinged face, whom they had laid at his feet.
All of those eyes, watching him anxiously . . .
Kindrie pushed them out of his mind, knelt beside the man, and opened his shirt to touch his bare, hairy chest. Sometimes he simply fell into a patient’s soul-image. On other occasions, it took him what seemed like forever to gain access, and even then some images were hard to recognize, being so personal to each individual. Here, at first he felt nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing.
I’m too late, he thought. He’s dead.
Then a whisper reached him, rising as if out of a darkening void:
“. . . I need . . . I need . . .”
Oh God, need what?
Then he understood: I knead.
Kindrie drove the heels of his palms into the man’s chest. Never having made bread, he wasn’t sure if he was doing this correctly. As he understood it, though, one pressed down with all of one’s weight, folded the flattened dough, and pressed again to work out the air bubbles. Here, thick bands of muscle resisted him. His arms began to ache. Sweat dripped into his eyes. He seemed to be kneading the thick mat of hair inward while the skin turned smooth, white, and glistening.
The baker’s mouth opened.
“Ahhh . . .!” the crowd breathed with him.
Kindrie sat back on his heels, panting. The baker gasped again and opened his eyes. They were a startling periwinkle blue but, at first, clouded with confusion. Then they cleared.
“The second rise . . .” he croaked.
Most of those who heard him looked confused, but the bakery assistants exchanged horrified glances, turned as one, and plunged back inside. Chunks of hacked-up dough flew out the windows, already expanding again in midair as the yeast worked furiously within them.
Under cover of the ensuing uproar, Kindrie rose and tottered away unnoticed. There had been quite enough excitement for him already, thank you very much.
He had been bound for the garrison barracks that occupied the western wall of Gothregor. Once there, he climbed to the third floor where rooms were set aside for established duos, or trios, or (for the recklessly adventuresome) quartets. The Kendar Merry met him at the door. Looking past her, Kindrie saw that her child’s cradle was empty. His heart caught in his throat.
“Oh, no,” she said, seeing his expression. “The Highlord has only taken him up to the roof for some fresh air.”
“Is he any better?”
Merry wrung her hands, saw what she was doing, and clasped them tightly behind her back.
“He coughed all night, just when we thought he was so much improved. It seems to go like that: good as gold one day with hardly a sniffle, sickening the next. If it should reach his lungs . . . Cron is beside himself, so soon after losing Ghill.”
Ghill had been their first son, a sturdy, reckless boy who had tried to ride a new-born calf and been thrown, breaking his neck. That hadn’t killed him, however. When his parents had seen that he was paralyzed, they had asked Torisen to give him an honorable death with the white knife. Kindrie could barely imagine how his cousin had felt about that. Later, he had given the couple permission to have this second child, Bo. Trishien thought that Torisen had come to see this small family as the symbol of his Kendars’ well-being in general and of his success (or failure) as their lord. Only when the infant Bo had sickened with hay-cough and Trishien had seen the effect this had had on the Highlord had she sent for Kindrie.
“He’s been so good with Bobo,” Merry was saying, “stopping in to see how he is almost every day, sick as he has been himself. Go up and keep him company, lord, please do. Maybe . . . maybe you can tell him something cheerful.”
Kindrie climbed to the roof, prey to dire forebodings. While he had seen his cousin (at a distance) since his arrival at Gothregor, he hadn’t spoken to him. It occurred to him that Jame had said much the same about her time here, before she had set out for Tagmeth. True, Torisen had had problems accepting both of his Shanir blood-kin, but he had seemed to be getting over that. What had happened since the Feast of Fools to set him so far back?
The roof was some fifty feet wide, covering the inner and outer walls as well as the barracks crammed between them. Crenellated battlements lined both sides. Down the middle ran a raised herbal knot garden, now mostly taken over by plots of vegetables about as advanced as those in the ward below.
All of this Kindrie saw under a shielding hand as he blinked the setting sun out of his eyes. The alternating tooth and gum of merlon and embrasure stood out black against the glare, with a patch of darkness between them backlit by flames. Torisen. Kindrie approached, cautiously.
“My lord.”
“So you call me. Not cousin, as you might.”
“I would, if I thought you would welcome such an address.”
“Oh, so formal.”
An ashen face haloed in black regarded him dully with tarnished silver gray eyes. Kindrie thought he had never seen Torisen look so haggard, or his hair so threaded with white. It was hard to remember that he was still a young man, not much older than Kindrie himself.
“What’s wrong?” he blurted out.
“This child is dying.”
Black-clad arms half-opened to reveal a small, still form—only asleep, Kindrie hoped. He wanted to snatch that morsel of life away from such encroaching shadows, but held himself still waiting, breathless, for the child to breathe. When he did, he began to cough, a wet, tearing sound. If fluid was gathering in his lungs . . . but what could Kindrie do? Children so young didn’t yet have stable soul-images.
“I have failed him, them, everyone. Father said that I would. Father said . . .”
“What?”
“‘Cursèd be and cast out. Blood and bone, you are no son of mine.’ By what right, therefore, do I claim the Highlord’s seat? But if I do not, what good am I to my people? Better, perhaps, we both should fall.”
He moved as if to rise, while behind him space gaped. From this height, it was a long way to the foot of the outer wall. Kindrie spoke quickly to snag back his attention.
“You serve your people to the best of your ability. If not you, who?”
“I said that I wouldn’t listen, but a voice whispers, gloating, that the true Highlord has yet to declare himself. I stand in the way. I should not. Is it only my pride that keeps me here? My people have suffered before because of me. Trinity, in the Haunted Lands Kendar ransomed me with their lives and I let them. I let them.”
Kindrie wanted to say that his people today would suffer much more without Torisen, who at least cared about them. He had opened his mouth to speak when the other went into a sudden paroxysm of coughing. He sounded worse than the child had, and he was barking white phlegm directly into the boy’s face.
Several things clicked together simultaneously in Kindrie’s mind. Without thinking, he dashed forward and snatched the infant out of Torisen’s arms.
“Don’t!” he cried. “You’re killing him!”
His sudden rush almost knocked Torisen out of the embrasure, but his hands leaped to catch the surrounding merlons. Before, he had seemed half in a sick daze. Now he was wide awake, and furious.
“What in Perimal’s name d’you think you’re doing?” he demanded.
Kindrie retreated, clutching the now wailing child, horrified at his own audacity and its near fatal consequences.
“I didn’t mean . . .” he gasped. “I wasn’t trying to . . . Tori! You must know me better than that!”
“I know that you almost killed me, and you’re frightening Bo. Give him to me.”
“No.” Kindrie drew back. “You’ve got to promise not to see him again until you’re entirely well yourself.”
“Now see here . . .”
“I’m serious.” And so Kindrie was. Even in his own ears, his voice had changed to a tone that he had never used before. “Swear it.”
“I . . . swear. Now get out. Of my sight. Of my house. We will not speak of this again.”
; Kindrie stumbled down the steps to find Merry and Cron anxiously waiting below, where they had undoubtedly heard the uproar overhead. He dropped the infant into their arms.
“Is he . . . are you . . .”
“Fine, fine.” Kindrie wiped cold sweat from his brow with a shaking hand. Not so fine, really.
Cursèd be and cast out . . .
If he had used a special voice on Torisen, so Tori had on him.
Get out. Of my sight. Of my house.
“I made him promise not to see Bo again while they’re both still sick. Don’t you see? When a person has hay-cough, they can pass it on as if . . . as if they were a stalk of false timothy with mold in their lungs instead of in their roots. When the stalk is cut, when they cough, the spores spread. That’s how people who never attended the harvest can still come down with the disease, and why Tori and Bo keep re-infecting each other. Trust me! I’m a healer!”
Torisen wouldn’t stay on the battlements forever. Kindrie fled to his apartment in the northwest drum tower and began throwing his meager possessions into a saddle bag.
Rowan came to the door.
“It’s already getting dark,” she said. “You can’t leave tonight.”
Kindrie hesitated, a boot in one hand, an inside-out shirt in the other. She would hold him here—by force, if necessary—until dawn, but he couldn’t stay.
“It would be foolish to run off so late,” he said, carefully.
Some tension went out of the steward’s shoulders. “I heard what happened at the bakery.”
“How is the bake-master?”
“Recovering, if somewhat bemused. Everyone thought at first that you had bruised his ribs with all of that pummeling, but the swellings have risen into a pair of quite respectable female breasts. His assistants always did say that he had yeast in his blood. Maybe that’s so. Temporary or permanent, though, it’s too soon to be sure. And no, they don’t go ‘glub, glub, urp’ and collapse when squeezed. I tried.”
The Gates of Tagmeth (Chronicles of the Kencyrath Book 8) Page 15