Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 01]

by Glenraven (v1. 5) (html)

  Sophie remembered how Jay had left Bill with sole ownership of the house they'd bought together, not even taking a cash settlement on it, though she'd paid in half the money. And how she had walked away from her second marriage with less than she'd taken from the first. "I hope you'll be more sensible this time, Jay. You've lost a fortune giving them everything."

  "About $300,000 total. Getting out would have been cheap at twice the price." Jayjay smiled off at nothing, her eyes still staring straight ahead. "I kept my computer, I kept my writing and my contracts, and I kept my sanity, though sometimes I thought I was going to lose that for sure. What else did I need?"

  Sophie imagined leaving behind everything she had. The idea choked her. "But you are going to try for an equitable settlement with Steven, aren't you? You two have that big house and everything—"

  "I figure I'm going to give him the keys and walk. Just like I did before."

  "You'll be starting over again, Jay. You're thirty-five years old, and you'll have to reestablish your credit and maybe live in an apartment again and…Jesus…live on beans and macaroni."

  Jay laughed. "It won't be that bad. At least I've learned to cook."

  "You'd be better off if you learned to think."

  "Just because you don't like the decisions I make doesn't mean I don't know how to think, Soph."

  Sophie didn't know what to say to that. Jay did what she wanted; she always had. And she didn't want to hear about her stupid decisions either. Sophie figured the reason she'd never heard about Bill Pfiester's drugging or Stacey Tremont's battering was because Jayjay didn't want to admit she'd made a mistake.

  Unlike everyone else in the world, Jayjay didn't make mistakes. She made decisions, and her decisions had complicated consequences. Sophie could hear the words running through her head in Jayjay's know-it-all voice. "Complicated Consequences"—words Owl would use to lecture Pooh.

  Sophie felt like a Winnie-the-Pooh right then; told to mind her own business because she wasn't bright enough to offer useful advice. Head stuffed full of fluff, that's me.

  I would have told you if Mitch had been a shit, she thought. She glared over at Jay, feeling sulky and left out. I would have asked for your advice, because that's what best friends are for.

  But she'd been distant. Since Karen's death, she hadn't wanted to talk with Jay, because she figured Jay wouldn't understand the pain she felt. She hadn't wanted to associate much with the people who'd known her in better times.

  And in fact, she hadn't managed to tell Jay about everything that was happening in her life.

  She clucked her tongue and shifted her weight; her horses picked up her cues and trotted ahead of Jayjay. And Jayjay, being her usual obstinate self, refused, to catch up.

  Sophie watched the road and thought. She hadn't told Jay everything. She hadn't mentioned Lorin. It wasn't the same, of course. Sophie didn't really have anything to tell—yet. She might never. Nothing had happened. It might, but it hadn't so far.

  You wake up one morning and look in the mirror and a stranger looks back. And no matter what you think you know about yourself, you find out in that moment that you're wrong. You are capable of inconceivable things.

  I am capable of inconceivable things.

  Fifteen

  Aidris Akalan paid mocking tribute to the memory of her family and to her role as Watchmistress of Glenraven; she held court, as the Watchmistresses and Watchmasters had done since the beginning of the reign of the Kin. She sat in her simple chair on her low dais, acting the part of the woman who cared for the future of her people, acting as if she were one of them. As her parents had, as her brothers had. She amused herself with her role, welcomed in the petitioners with a steady smile, and watched how they blanched when they saw her as young and strong as she had ever been.

  She knew, deep down, that was why they still came; not for any hope of justice at her hands, for at every turn she had crushed that hope. No. They hoped to see some sign of wear in her face, some weathering of her skin, some weakening of her bones that would tell them that some day death would touch her, too, and they would at last be free. None of them hoped for this miracle in their own lifetimes, she suspected. Not anymore. But some of them who had grown old under her rule—whose parents told stories of their parents who had spoken of her with bitterness—some of those hoped and prayed for a sign that their children's children would be born into a world that didn't contain her.

  Aidris held court because she liked to grind their hope to powder the way a miller ground wheat to flour. Slowly and steadily, she crushed them beneath the stone of her will, missing not a grain, not an individual. Now, though some hoped that she would die, and she imagined that all wished her ill, they were broken. They would not rise against her even if someone strong and charismatic and determined tried to lead them. They knew they could never hope to win, and now they would not even try.

  She smiled.

  One young, strong, idealistic, charismatic Kin plotted treason. He hoped to stir the broken hearts of her people against her. He wanted to bring her down.

  Matthiall. Matthiall of the single name, of the single desire. Matthiall, whose face she saw in her dreams.

  She wasn't going to break him, though. She intended instead to let him break himself against the apathy and despair of his fellows. It would take as long as it took. When his eyes opened and he saw, as she did, that sheep existed only to be slaughtered, his idealism would die. Then she would claim him as her consort. Her mate and lover. He would never be her equal, but he would come to worship her for her power, her beauty, her wisdom.

  He was only the second man she'd found herself wanting in the last thousand years. The first she had kept for half a century, until he tried to hire someone to assassinate her. Then she murdered him as they mated, and took great pleasure from both acts.

  Some fool stood before her, rambling on about predators in the forest beyond his hovel, complaining about how they stole his food and his flock, and asking her to do something about them. After all, he kept mentioning, by the Watch accords, he had the right to ask. She let his voice roll past her without touching her, letting herself think about Matthiall instead. When the stupid bastard finished complaining, she would do what she always did. She would promise him relief, and then she would do nothing. He would receive no help, he would struggle against the forces that opposed him, and he would sink deeper into apathy. Meanwhile, she pretended to listen.

  "A moment of your time, Watchmistress."

  The voice buzzed in her ear, sharp and urgent, cutting through the ramblings of the farmer. "Hold, please," she told the man, and turned to face the badger-faced little monster who served her. Amused, she said, "Hultif, can't you see I'm busy?" When one of her servants interrupted her during court, she always pretended that she cared about the supplicant and his problem. Her servants knew better, of course.

  Hultif played the game with her as she had taught him. "Yes, Watchmistress. I know how important this is to you…but this is a matter of dire need." The usual words. The usual words, but this time they stirred something in her gut. Hultif's black bead eyes gleamed uncharacteristically bright, and the line of black fur along his neck bristled erect. In him she saw fear or excitement, and definitely uncertainty.

  For no reason, she felt uneasy. Damn. The phlegmatic Hultif had never shown excitement since the day she'd lifted him from the arms of his dead mother, when he'd been a child. Something had to be very wrong.

  She turned and signaled to her corpsmen, who announced that court was closed for the day. The people still waiting turned and shuffled away, sighing, muttering, heads hanging. They expected no better. Not one voiced an audible complaint.

  Pity. Had there been any complainers, she would have singled them out to be killed on their trips home.

  When the room cleared, she turned to Hultif again. "What?"

  "I can't tell you here. I have to show you."

  She nodded. A few of the services Hultif performed for he
r were things no one else could know about. If she considered her power as a chain, then her need for Hultif and his special talents was one of the few weak links in it.

  She followed him out of the Hearing Chamber, through the halls and down into the cellars of his workroom.

  He liked clutter and darkness, the scents of mold and mildew and rotting leaves. These were all traits of his race, of which he was the last surviving member. She had made sure of that. He liked dirt walls and worms and other burrowing slimy things, and in his home, which he had dug for himself at the back of one of the wine cellars, he had a maze that gave him everything he liked.

  He led her in—he'd made his front room taller for her convenience—and bade her be seated in the high, straight-backed chair he kept there for her. He lit a small lamp for her, another concession he made for her comfort.

  Without preamble, he said, "The omens are bad, Mother." She'd taught him to call her Mother when they were alone. She had no offspring and never would; she had no intention of giving birth to her own replacements. One of them might turn out to be as clever and ambitious as she was. She wouldn't want that. When she considered how she had come to raise Hultif, and when she thought of what he would call her if he knew the truth, his unquestioning devotion to her well-being delighted her.

  She nodded and waited.

  Hultif stood watching her for a long, silent moment, head cocked to one side, ears flicking forward and back, forward and back. His wet black nose twitched and the squared nostrils flared rapidly. He tried hard to give the appearance of calm and control, but now that she had him alone, his agitation was clearer to her than before. Finally he sighed and lumbered over to the shelf where he kept his instruments. He brought back a bowl full of amber, acrid-smelling liquid, which he set on the table, being careful not to spill the contents. She waited. He could have had everything waiting for her when she arrived, but something in his nature preferred the heightened drama of making her wait while he demonstrated his magical skill.

  She was patient. She had all the time in the world.

  Next he brought out a round, wood-backed, black glass mirror. What he was doing was quite different from his usual procedure, which involved tracking the movements of worms or snails or ugly, thick-carapaced bugs through sand and reading the future in their tracks. She found that method amusing; she suspected him of eating his oracles when he was finished with them.

  But this was different. She'd never seen the black mirror before, and though she couldn't define why, she didn't like it.

  He settled the mirror onto the liquid. It didn't break the surface, but it did deform it, so that she could see the bulge of the amber meniscus rising around the mirror's rim. The smell of the liquid changed when the mirror touched it. For a moment it was sickeningly sweet, and then the stink of dead meat overlaid that sweetness. She did not let herself gag, but the smell became so thick she almost couldn't bear to breathe. Hultif seemed unbothered.

  Her eyes and nose and mouth began to itch. She felt as if insects were landing on her face. She bore that, too. Hultif's magic no doubt had something to do with the itching, as it did with the hideous stink that he pretended not to notice and she refused to acknowledge.

  He waited a moment, watching her. Curious. Expectant. He wanted a reaction to what had happened. She knew it. He evidently didn't see what he hoped to see in her eyes, though, because he sighed again and said, "Look into the glass and tell me what you see. Perhaps for you the omens will be better than they were when I read them for you."

  She looked into the glass. She saw a dim reflection of her face. She frowned, and the lovely face frowned back at her. She smiled in spite of herself, and her reflection returned her smile. She looked up. Disappointed, she said, "I see nothing but myself."

  "Really?" He seemed to brighten, as if this was unexpectedly good news. "How do you look?"

  "I'm looking at my own reflection," she snapped, but as the words left her mouth, she wished she could take them back. Her reflection changed. The face in the mirror became still, where hers still moved. She tried to get it to reflect her smile, but the mouth went slack. The eyes ceased blinking. Then the face—my face, she thought—began to swell. Flies crawled in the eyes and nostrils and into the open mouth. Her mouth. Her eyes and nose. The flies laid their eggs and left, and after a short while maggots appeared, eating through her swelling, discolored flesh.

  She looked away, sick, and found herself staring into the bright, eager eyes of Hultif, who asked, "What did you see? What did you see?"

  "Only my own face," she told him. She stood, feeling weak and frightened and irrationally angry, as if he had created the omens he'd placed in front of her, when instead he had merely shown her what his own searching had revealed.

  He smiled, sighed with obvious relief, and lifted the mirror out of its liquid bed. "Wonderful. I'd foreseen disaster, Mother. Disaster for you. I'm relieved that you did not see the same thing."

  So he had not taken joy in the news he brought her. She'd thought from his odd demeanor that he might have. She decided to tell him the details of her vision, to find out how he reacted to that. "I saw my own face, but I was dead," she admitted.

  He frowned at her words, and exhaled sharply. He looked away. "So. Not my imagination, then. Danger is coming. I saw two tall and shining heroes riding through the forest, armed with tremendous weapons and followed by all Glenraven's rabble. I saw battles and blood raining from the heavens. I saw darkness and plagues."

  "Interesting," she said. "An indication, perhaps, that those who plot against me are not as ineffectual as they seem." She watched him, coldly curious. "What do we do to avert this fate?"

  He sucked the whiskers on the right side of his face into his mouth and chewed on them. The long, hard digging claws of his right hand rested on the table, clicking nervously. He stared down at his bare, clawed feet, shaking his head. "Avert. Avert. That is the question; can we avert it? I will do what I can to find the danger, Mother. What I can. What happens then…who can tell?"

  "It would be wise of you," she said softly, "to be prompt in finding your answer. Your value to me lies in your effectiveness. My…son."

  Sixteen

  Jayjay kept waiting for some sign of bandits or murderers among the increasing flow of peasants that joined her and Sophie on the road to Zearn. To her amazement, though, the trip took place without incident. She and Sophie drew a few looks and some carefully hushed whispers, but people didn't stare. The Glenraven costumes had been a good idea, she decided. No matter what his game had been, Lestovru had done the two of them a service with those costumes.

  Zearn rose up in front of them, a white-stone-walled city with a cleared swath of closely cut grass all around the outside. The guards could see anything larger than a mouse approaching over that, she realized, and looked up at the battlements to find cold, appraising faces staring back at her. At her. Not merely at the mob of people in general, but at her and Soph in particular.

  So maybe the costumes weren't foolproof.

  A man in a gorgeous red and gold and blue uniform stepped out from the guard tower as the two of them rode up. He watched them but made no move to stop them. Jay nodded at him, and he bowed slightly to her, his eyes still narrowed and his entire air one of speculation. They rode past him, with Jay constantly expecting to hear his voice calling them back. But he didn't, and she decided that perhaps his reaction hadn't been important.

  Inside Zearn, Jay found herself thrown into an astonishing tableau from the past, and surrounded by all the scents and sights and sounds of a prosperous and bustling medieval town.

  Tall barracks leaned out over both sides of the narrow, twisting cobblestone street, and soldiers in the same gold and black and blue uniforms lounged in the doorways and leaned on narrow, stone-balustraded balconies overhead, calling to young women passing below and shouting to each other, their voices quick and hard and full of amusement, their words unintelligible.

  They left the barracks behi
nd and now passed little storefronts; signs carved in the shapes of the things found within hung over the street. The town had no walkways; riders and pedestrian traffic shared the same thoroughfare. Zearn was pretty and quaint, but the smell wasn't. It indicated sanitation held at a medieval level. Down alleys that pierced the otherwise unbroken wall of buildings, Jay spotted rats crawling through the darkness.

  She'd considered the tiny, poverty-stricken village of Inzo an anomaly; she'd imagined that it was an odd relic in a world that would otherwise fit western conceptions of hygiene and civilization. But the smell of this city, highly recommended by the guidebook as a location of special interest, struck what was perhaps a racial memory in a primitive part of her brain. Glenraven ceased to seem to her like a Disney World model of a medieval city; the scent of raw sewage and smoky wood cooking fires and animal dung snapped her fully into a world where night began at sunset, where food spoiled unless it had been smoked or dried or salt-cured or kept in a springhouse, where children died because they'd never had inoculations for measles and mumps and diphtheria. She glanced at the faces in the streets around her. Some of them, both men and women, bore the deep disfigurations of pox scars. Probably smallpox. She shivered and stroked her sleeve over her right deltoid, feeling for her smallpox vaccine scar. Thank God for the sixties, when they still immunized for that. She realized this place was truly a holdover from ancient Europe, pinned in its primitive time like a formaldehyded butterfly to a board.

  They came out of the close press of buildings at last, into a huge open square. In it, an open-air market fair was in full swing. Jayjay reined in and gaped at the madhouse that churned in front of her, and, as people noticed her interest, around her. A flock of fat, dark brown ducks charged quacking under her horse's hooves, and an instant later a black-and-white streak of collie came tearing out of an alley barking after them. Neither Jay's nor Sophie's horse startled, though Jayjay jumped. Women and men shouted at her and at each other, waved brightly colored swatches of cloth and handfuls of vegetables in her face, and pointed at their chickens and piglets and breads while no doubt lauding the quality of their wares. A couple of buskers—a flautist and a drummer—and a thin, pale-haired dancer plied their trades on the corner directly across from the near edge of the market square. Solemn-faced little girls dressed in hand-embroidered smocks carried baskets of eggs on their heads, while their mothers, with babies on hips and hiding behind their long, full skirts, carried larger baskets full of fruit, bread, beans and grains. Boys and young men herded long-horned goats and long-legged sheep or carried packs or huge sheaves of rushes. Old men and old women dickered at their stalls in the marketplace or watched the goings-on from narrow plank benches lined along the city walls. One man blew glass into utilitarian shapes—pitchers and glasses and plates—dipping and spinning his long metal rod while women waited, calling out their orders. His assistant, a boy of about six or seven, stacked the cooled wares and counted out money. Tinkers hammered, leather workers cut and tailors sewed.