“Maybe the hill will turn it,” said Prid, beginning to sound nervous.
“You want to bet?” Jame stirred restlessly. It wasn’t in her nature to watch disasters unfold without lending a hand, yet what could she do?
“Damn,” she said, and took off at a run down through the village, calling for the rathorn colt as she went.
He answered her outside the gate, below the hill. Starlight shone on the cold white of his ivory, on his cresting mane and flowing tail. The ride north had been long and he was out of temper, not eager to be ridden again. Twin horns slashed at her, daring her to step into them. He wouldn’t hurt her on purpose, but accidents didn’t count. She lunged, caught the saddle horn, and pulled herself half onto his back. He took off at a gallop with her clinging to his side.
“You damn fool,” she hissed at him as she pulled herself upright. His ears flicked derisively and he bounded over a snowdrift, nearly dislodging her.
By now, the log was halfway down the mountain, a battering ram aimed straight for the front gate, with Merikit chasing it and Chingetai still grimly astride. It dipped and plowed up sheets of snow. As they came alongside, Jame saw that the butt was mounted on a metal skid with an attachment not unlike the prow of a boat but hinged to allow it to swing back and forth. Chingetai hadn’t lost the pilot rope after all, but neither could he lean out far enough to turn the log. That flaw apparently hadn’t occurred to him before.
“Throw it to me!” Jame shouted to him.
He snarled back at her through a mass of flying braids, right side for children sired, left for men killed. She would have to ask what a braided beard meant.
“Everything is under control. Go away!”
The colt would have liked nothing better. Flying snow hit him in the face, and the log yawed ominously. The stumps of lopped off branches glistened with an effusion of resin and perhaps with blood. How many hillmen had it crushed? Death’s-head squealed and bucked in protest. Jame scrambled back from his neck where he had tossed her.
“Throw it, now!”
The Merikit chief darted a chagrined glance at the rapidly approaching village.
“Here, dammit!”
Jame grabbed the rope as it whipped past, wrapped it around the saddle horn, and let Death’s-head plunge away to the left. Hooves skidded and the saddle girth groaned. It was like trying to shift the foundations of the world. The prow creaked over. It was turning, not much but hopefully enough. The hill loomed, then the ruins of the maidens’ lodge yawned before them. Jame cast off the rope. The log shot into the cavity headfirst and rammed into the far wall with an earth-shaking boom. Chingetai flew off and tumbled end over end into the adjacent ruins of the boys’ lodge.
Jame and the colt hurtled past. Now they were sliding on ice. The rathorn sat down, clearing a great swathe of snow with his rump. Jame fell off. Beneath her, something huge moved under the ice, dimly seen as giant scales sliding past. It bumped its frozen roof. Cracks radiated out under Jame’s hands. River Snake or Eaten One? Not waiting to find out, she scrambled to one shore, the colt to the other.
Before her was the log, jutting out of the pit but mostly in it. Again she smelled pitch. A moment later it ignited, wrapping the log in flames. Dazzled by the light, Jame thought she saw a gigantic form loom over it, over her.
“You,” it said, in a voice seared clean of all emotion except recognition.
Then it lowered itself limb by limb into the blazing trench, the Burnt Man reluctantly joining his effigy in the earth
The Burning Ones lined the far side of the pit, baying flame-mouthed after their master.
One stood among them, taller than they, silent. His gaze met Jame’s across the fiery abyss, and he smiled.
Vant.
They never found his body, Jame thought, trying to catch her breath.
He looked as she remembered him, except for the red light reflected in his eyes. Surely, though, he was dead. Well, so were his companions. But a Kencyr in such company? How could that be?
The Burnt Man and the Dark Judge.
The Earth Wife and her unlikely Favorite.
Rathillien and the Kencyrath.
It could happen, as it had before. Bonds were being forged, despite both. But Sweet Trinity . . . !
He raised his hands. The blunt, charred faces of the Burning Ones rose with the gesture, their cry cut short. All stared at her, crimson-eyed, as if taking note as they had been bidden. Then the fire flared and they were gone. With their lord in the ground, did they now follow a new master?
Voices called to her, making her start, and dark figures rushed out of the night to throw their arms around her. One was Prid, another Gran Cyd, and half a dozen other women besides.
“Well done,” said the queen, helping her to her feet. “We could do without our chief, but not without the father of our unborn children.”
Jame gazed in dismay at the assembled throng, who smiled back at her. Gran Cyd had promised that as the Earth Wife’s supposedly male Favorite, she would be credited with any babies conceived on Winter’s Eve, and here was the proof.
“Oh no,” she said. “Oh, Cyd, not you too.”
CHAPTER III
Pyres and the Pit
Winter 70
I
Jame half woke, tangled in sleeping furs.
Where am I? she thought.
The white-washed wall beside her danced with murals given life by the low fire sulking beneath the great bronze basin while rain tapped on the copper smoke hood above. Rue snored softly in her own mound of blankets by the door. Of course. She was back in her quarters at Tentir, almost too tired from the long ride south from the Merikit village to sleep.
But she had slept, and dreamed of dark things. Fire and ash, furious blue eyes in a charred face, a seared finger encircled by a ring, jutting out of a pile of corpses . . .
Some images she recognized, but to whom had the other ones belonged? Over the past year she had sometimes shared the dreamscape with both Timmon, set on seduction, and her twin brother Torisen, pulled in against his will. Neither showed her anything she wanted to see. To sleep again was to risk falling back into nightmare, but oh, she ached for rest.
A branch snapped and the flames leaped. Her eyelids flickered, then fell again. Through them she still saw fire. . . .
Such pulsing heat, such an incandescent glow! Beads of sweat burst on her brow and trickled down, stinging, into her eyes. It hurt to breathe. Tentir’s fire timbers loomed around her like a forest perpetually eaten by sullen, internal flame.
The vents far above sucked in a breath of hot air: “Aaaah . . .”
Embers glowed, above, below, while black flakes of combustion fluttered against ironwood trunks like infernal butterflies.
At her feet, the floor fell away into a wide-mouthed pit where once a fire timber had stood. “Haahh . . .” breathed the searing air again, and coals glowed in the pit’s deep bed.
“Afraid, little man?”
The creature who spoke looked like Caldane’s son Nusair, but its hair was white under its ruddy fire-tint. It was a Shanir—worse, a darkling changer, once one of the Master’s most loyal servants, now turned against him in a desperate bid for freedom.
“Afraid? Oh you? Moderately.”
That wasn’t her voice, nor her hand creeping to the collar of her dress coat where (since when?) she carried a set of throwing knives.
“Now, what would really frighten you? Shall we find out? Beauty, now!”
Something gray near her foot, something that sank fangs into her leg even as her hand whipped down to bury a blade in its head, and her senses reeled.
But the darkling wyrm is cocooned in a trunk in Greshan’s chambers, she thought, bewildered. It had bitten her brother two years ago when he had visited Tentir on the way south to battle at the Cataracts, and now she was protecting it while it metamorphosed into . . . what?
Then wyrm and changer were gone and again she circled the pit. This time Vant moved opposite he
r, his handsome face underlit by glowing coals, twisted with hate.
“Does honor mean nothing to you?” he snarled at her. “Do the rules? Then again, why should they when the Commandant lets you break them over and over? Quite his little pet, aren’t you? You think you’re so clever that you can get away with anything. Well, not this time.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your scarf. Someone has already scalped you, but here you are, still in play.”
It was the Winter War, and Timmon had seized her scarf before the contest had even begun, officially removing her from competition.
“You think I’m Jame,” said the voice that she now recognized as her brother’s.
Vant spoke to him, not to me. I wasn’t there. Rue told me.
Vant spat on the stones. His saliva skipped among them, sizzling, going, gone. “The spoiled brat. The Highborn little lady. What did your brother think, that Tentir needed a mascot? It was an honest mistake!”
“What was?” asked both siblings in one voice, and that his.
“How could anyone seriously believe that hillmen were attacking on Tentir’s doorstep? What logic was there in that? What sense is there in anything that you do or that happens around you?”
“You didn’t send help. You laughed. A cadet died.”
The steel in Torisen’s voice pierced her. Beneath it she felt his barely suppressed rage that one of the precious young Kendar entrusted to him had been lost. The other lords mistook his mild ways for weakness, but for thirty millennia his ancestors had been Highlord of the Kencyrath, just as he was now, and their power ran in his veins. As such, he was responsible for the well-being of all his people, in life, in death.
Anise with a Noyat arrow jutting out of her stomach, so scared, then so cold. And I nearly flayed you alive for it, Vant, Ancestors forgive me. Now here you are, with fire at your feet.
“I was master-ten of my barracks. I still should be.” Before his lord, the cadet’s outrage thinned to a self-justifying whine. “Am I to pay for one misjudgment forever?”
“That depends on you.” Trinity, but Tori sounded cold, no less than an Arrin-ken passing judgment. Despite the heat, the words half froze on his lips, issuing forth in a plume of frost. “In Sheth’s place, I would have thrown you out of Tentir altogether.”
“You misbegotten bitch!”
Suddenly Vant was upon him, grappling, trying to throw him onto the coals. They wrestled back and forth on the pit’s rim. Then Vant lurched free, shaking his head. He looked startled and dazed, as if dealt an unexpected blow.
“You . . .” His eyes wildly searched the shadows. “Don’t!”
And he reeled again, over the edge, onto the coals, rolling to his feet. For the first time he clearly saw and recognized his adversary as the Highlord.
“Oh.”
“Now that that’s settled, get out of that damn firebox.” In life, in death . . .
Do it, you fool! Jame thought behind the mask of her brother’s face. Don’t haggle!
But even now Vant didn’t believe that such a terrible thing could happen to him.
“Not until you make me master-ten of my barracks again and withdraw that bitch sister of yours. You must see that her presence here isn’t right!”
Get out, get out, get out . . .
“I suppose you know that your boots are smoking. I can’t be blackmailed, Vant. It would be a betrayal of my position.”
The cadet beat at his smoldering clothes with a kind of exasperated irritation.
“You’re Highlord, dammit!” The furnace breath of the pit made him increasingly hoarse as his throat closed. “You can do . . . what you please!”
“Not so,” came the pitiless answer. “To lead is also to serve . . . something that you never seem to have grasped. What you ask would be a betrayal of responsibility. Come out, Vant. Now.”
Fire flared under Vant’s hands.
“I don’t believe this. I don’t accept it. It isn’t fair!”
“Is the truth? Come out. Here, take my hand.”
The flames rose, licking from pants to jacket, with a sudden rush to the hair. At last Vant believed the unthinkable.
“I will . . . have justice,” he panted as the smoke gnawed at his throat, “or I will . . . have revenge.”
Torisen/I/we reach for him, but Brier stops us.
“He would have pulled you in, lord.”
Tori didn’t deserve that. Did I? Did Vant?
Pyre succeeded pyre, as if all the flames in the world roiled through her dreams:
At the Haunted Lands keep, where her father Ganth presumably had burned.
But I wasn’t there either. Kindrie told me.
In Wilden’s forecourt.
Ah, Rawneth. How much will your people endure when you put their children to the torch?
At the Cataracts.
Oh, Tirandys, Senethari, I will never forget.
At the Cataracts again.
This was confusing. Who had told her about the common pyre and why did she remember it now? A ring, a blackened finger, broken off, pocketed.
I took both from my father to give to my brother, but who else would do such a thing, and why?
She couldn’t see the faces of the living or of the dead. What she did see, abruptly, was a fair-haired young man with a swollen nose.
“I think you’ve broken it,” he said in a nasal, petulant whine.
He looked like Timmon. His eyes were Timmon’s, wide with surprise to hear his father’s voice issuing from his lips. Once again the Ardeth Lordan had invaded her dreams, damn him.
“Why did you do it, Pereden?”
That was her brother again, speaking to Timmon’s father. They were in the Highlord’s tent at the Cataracts. Torisen sounded exhausted, as well he might be, having fought and won such a battle. Worse, he had just come from culling the bloody field where he had granted so many of the fatally wounded the White Knife. The least they had deserved was an honorable death at the hands of their lord. In death as in life, they were his responsibility, at whatever cost to him. Yes, he was exhausted, but there was hurt in his voice too, and a desperate need to understand.
“Why, Peri?”
“What else had you left me to do? Damn.” His nose had started to bleed. Torisen gave him a handkerchief. Pereden began to pace, he and a bewildered Timmon both, overlapping, caught in the same dream of a memory that was Torisen’s. “Taking my rightful place as commander of the Southern Host, turning my father against me . . . You lied to him!”
Behind Pereden’s fury, his son’s bafflement and interest grew. Jame knew from a previous dream where this conversation would end, if not what went before. Timmon mustn’t know, even if to stop now was to thwart her own curiosity. Why had Torisen broken not just Pereden’s nose but his neck, then sent his body to burn on the common pyre?
No more of this. No more. Wake up, wake up, wake up—
And she did, to find Rue hovering anxiously over her.
“You were having a nightmare, lady.”
“You’re telling me.”
Jame threw back the furs. Her slim, naked body steamed with sweat while the cold air raised goosebumps down her arms.
“Damn and blast that Timmon,” she said thickly, rubbing her face. “He’s gotten into my dreams again and between us we’ve ensnared Tori. But who else’s dream was I in? That finger, that ring . . . ah, never mind,” she added, seeing Rue’s confused, concerned expression. “Fetch me something to drink, please.”
The Ardeth Lordan was a charmer, a dream-stalker, and a would-be seducer, except every time he tried to entangle her in one of his erotic fantasies, between them they seemed to open the door to her brother’s sleeping mind which, while fascinating, was hardly fair to Tori.
As for that last dream . . .
Timmon had adored his father and still tried to imitate him. Jame suspected that therein lay the source of half the Ardeth Lordan’s personality flaws, not that Timmon saw them as such.
“Damn him,” she muttered again, accepting a cup of cold water from Rue. In so many other ways, he was almost worthwhile.
II
As it happened, their first class was together.
Timmon arrived with his ten-command, looking aggrieved, with dark smudges under his eyes.
“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “I try to arrange some harmless fun on a fur rug in front of a cheerful fireplace, and you drag me from one immolation to another.”
“Good morning to you too. Sorry about that, but I did warn you to keep out of my dreams.”
“If I were Torisen, you wouldn’t fight me so hard,” he muttered. It was a sore point that, despite herself, Jame found her brother more interesting than she did him. “And what about that last bit? My father called your brother a liar!”
“I have no more idea than you do what that was about. Of all people, you should know that dreams don’t always make sense.”
Seeing that he was about to argue, she abruptly changed the topic.
“For that matter, I’ve a bone to pick with you. Why did you tackle me in Greshan’s quarters before the Winter War even started?”
“I didn’t think you’d let me do it afterward.”
“Let you? Huh. And how did Torisen get my scarf back from you?”
At this, Timmon looked distinctly sheepish. “If he hasn’t told you, I’m not going to.”
“Could it be . . . oh no!” She burst out laughing. “You tackled him in the Knorth kitchen thinking he was me. He took the scarf and locked you in!”
With that, Jame stifling mirth and Timmon very red in the face, they reached their destination: a room in Old Tentir with rush mats strewn about the floor. Timmon stopped on the threshold.
“Oh no. Not the Senethar this early in the morning. I’m for my bed again.”
“Not so fast.” The randon instructor entered behind them.
Timmon smiled, all dimples with the trace of a pout. “I didn’t sleep well last night, Ran. Really, I’d rather not.”
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