Seeker's Mask, page 3
The Coman Matriarch flushed. "H-how dare you think of a purebred Knorth in those terms! You stick to corrupting your own women, you . . . you scrolls-worm! And as for your precious Kirien . . . ."
"Karidia!"
The collective voice and will of the other matriarchs brought her to a dead halt, a bit dazed, as if she had run full-tilt into a wall.
"Remember where and what you are," said Adiraina sternly. "Behave."
"None of us have been quite normal, I think, since that girl arrived," remarked Dianthe. "Haven't you noticed? She makes people forget themselves. I wish, though, that the sewing teacher hadn't slapped her. Have we really made the Highlord's sister so vulnerable?"
Karidia snorted, rallying. "Before you start thinking of that girl as helpless, you'd better look at this."
She held out the sampler which she had appropriated from her young kinswoman. They all regarded it at first with bewilderment, then with growing apprehension as Adiraina took it, spread it out on her lap, and examined the slashes by touch. Each of her fingers fitted into one.
"Oh dear," she said. "Oh dear."
III
Jame's first thought, as she pitched forward down the spiral stair, was an echo of the instructress's: "Oh no. Not again."
Then she gave a shout to warn anyone who might be on the steps below her, curled up, and rolled. The trick was to keep all extremities tucked well in and let the heavy velvet of her gown act as padding as she caromed down the stair's stony throat. It worked, as it had all too often over that long winter, until her hem caught on a broken tread. Suddenly checked, she crashed down full length at the foot of the steps and lay there for a moment, thoroughly shaken. Then, in a language which, hopefully, no one else at Gothregor understood, she began to swear.
"What was that?" voices exclaimed above. "Lady Jameth, are you all right?"
They were probably wondering if she had finally managed to break her neck. Here came one of them now, hopping down the steps to find out.
Jame struggled to rise, in furious contention with the tight under and voluminous overskirt. Dammit, she was not going to be found tied up in knots, like some poorly wrapped package. Her foot tangled in the damaged hem, ripping it more, as she floundered upright.
The lady on the stair bent to peer around its newel. No broken body huddled on the floor below. She descended to the arcade which extended around the Forecourt, under the classrooms. No one there either. Crossing the gallery, she examined the sweep of the court. Nothing.
"Vanished again," she called to her friends above.
When she had hopped laboriously back up the stairs, Jame emerged from a niche under them, shaking dust from her skirts. The sound of renewed lessons rolled down to her, the sewing teacher's voice shrilling above the others in praise of obedience, self-restraint, endurance, and silence, as if by sheer volume she could obliterate the past few minutes. Jame wondered what precious, petty secret she had stumbled across this time, to have made that little idiot panic so badly. Well, not an idiot, exactly—only willfully ignorant, like so many others in these halls.
Come to that, her own response hadn't been particularly brilliant.
She regarded her black gloved hands with disgust. The nails looked almost demure in repose beneath their ripped out fingertips—a secret of her own which she bitterly regretted having at last betrayed. The first time those retractile ivory claws had made their appearance, in her seventh year, they had gotten her thrown out of her Haunted Lands home. A fine joke it would be if the same thing happened here, and perhaps no more than she deserved.
In the meantime, though, what next? Back to her room in the Caineron compound to repair her damaged clothes? Although no needlewoman, she usually wasn't as inept as she had been in the sewing class. Indeed, certain individuals in the past had found her very nimble fingered, although not at skills which the ladies here would appreciate. She wouldn't have made such a mess this afternoon if she hadn't been worried about Jorin.
The Royal Gold ounce cub had been taken away from her on her arrival at Gothregor, after Kallystine had made a fuss. Jame had missed him terribly, especially on cold nights when she was used to having him crawl into bed with her, a warm, purring lump who usually by morning had appropriated both blankets and pillow. Even so, they hadn't been entirely separated. Blind from birth, Jorin used Jame's eyes to see; likewise, she was slowly learning how to share his other four senses. As a result, when he went for his daily run in the outer ward she, in a way, accompanied him. He should be out enjoying himself now. Perhaps the link between them was simply weak today, but what if the ounce was ill or hurt? She had been trying to contact him when she had inadvertently sewn her fingers together.
Worry again directed her: Jame found herself turning left onto the northern leg of the gallery, toward the inner ward and the subterranean stables where Jorin had spent the winter.
This section of the arcade and the apartments opening off of it belonged to the Brandan. A randon cadet and her captain stood by the main entrance, both wearing the dress grays and scarlet shoulder embroidery of their house. Although each compound was considered sovereign territory with its own small garrison, bemused guards had allowed Jame to explore all of them but one. She slowed, remembering her rebuff on the Randir threshold by its smiling, cold-eyed captain, whose name she had never been able to learn.
The Brandan captain looked up. Close-cut sandy hair, one brow broken by an old scar, flattened nose . . . a stranger.
Ah. This must be the Brandan's day to rotate the guard, new cadets coming down with their officer from the randon college at Tentir, the old either returning there or going on to the Southern Host. Would these two let her pass? The cadet looked uncertain, but the captain crossed low-held wrists in the salute of Kendar to Highborn, curiosity in her good-natured, bright blue eyes.
Jame passed with a nod, feeling suddenly shy. Who was she to receive tribute from a randon officer? Ganth Gray Lord's daughter, yes, but she hadn't known that until a few months ago. The last Knorth lady, clothed in rotting velvet . . . . Behind the mask, what was she becoming? Who had she ever, really, been?
Abruptly, she felt the touch of Jorin's senses. The surface under his paws was hard—stone, not packed earth—and he was running. The air smelled of stone too. At the end of the long gallery, a Kendar maid leaped aside with a shriek, her arm-load of clean linen flying. Through the blizzard of white sheets hurtled a silver-gilt form. Blind Jorin had apparently gotten this far by ricochetting off walls and was headed for another one when Jame saw him. Instantly, he straightened out, came pelting down the hall, and leaped into her arms. Struck in the chest by forty pounds of rapidly moving ounce, Jame went over backward. The Brandan captain loomed above her. Someone was shouting that the cat had attacked her.
"He did not!" she gasped, clutching Jorin.
"I can see that, lady," said the captain, amused, as the ounce hid his sleek head under Jame's arm. "Damned funny behavior for a full-grown hunting ounce, though."
"He is not full-grown . . . well, not quite . . . and he doesn't know he's an ounce. A tabby cat named Boo raised him."
"Ah. Well, that explains everything."
Someone shoved the captain aside. Jame saw riding boots, a brown, divided skirt, a heavy coat with inserts of braided leather, a masked face. Although she had never met this lady before, there was only one person whom she could be: Brenwyr, the Iron Matriarch.
What Brenwyr saw was Jame's torn clothes. Brown eyes widened, then flared red. The impact of her sudden fury seemed to pick Jame up off the floor and nail her against the arcade's inner wall. She slid sideways in a water flowing evasion, snatched up both of her skirts and ran, Jorin pelting after her.
Afterward, she supposed that they must have bolted right through the Caineron compound and into the derelict halls beyond, where the women of numerous minor houses had once lived. What brought her up at last, hard, was a wall which she had apparently also tried to run straight through. At least the collision had been muted by the tapestry. It hung before her now, frayed and faded but still wonderfully wrought: a moon garden full of pale blooms, seen through an open door.
Sanctuary . . . she thought, still half-dazed; then, as Jorin climbed into her arms chirping anxiously, What in Perimal's name happened?
But she already knew. When Ganth had realized with the appearance of her claws that she was Shanir, he had driven her out with just such a blast of mad rage. That time, she hadn't stopped running until she was across the Barrier into Perimal Darkling.
Trinity. That was another secret which she hoped these women never learned. Yet she had sung that song to those children, as if to remind both them and herself that there was more to their world than needlework. To that little sewing teacher, though, it had been only a tale of ancient days. Few knew or guessed that Gerridon, Master of Knorth, had indeed gained a semblance of that immortality for which he had betrayed his people, through the souls which the Dream-Weaver had reaped for him and the slower passage of time in Perimal Darkling. There in his monstrous house he still dwelt, deeper in shadow with each captured soul which he devoured, yet desperate for more as their number dwindled and darkness crept closer to claiming him as its own.
And there Jame had also lived, from the time of her flight from the Haunted Lands keep until two years ago.
That was hard to believe now.
Half her life had passed in those dark halls, yet most of it was a blur, like the fading images of a bad dream. Had she been made to forget, or willed it to protect herself? Sometimes she wondered: Had it even, really, happened?
When she had finally stumbled back to her old home two years ago, she had remembered nothing of the decade since her expulsion. Since then, fragmentary memories had begun to return, like snatches of an old, dark song: practicing the combat kantirs of the Senethar on the green-veined floor of the Master's great hall under the eyes of massed Knorth death banners; learning how to read the master runes in a pale book, in a library whose volumes slithered, whispering, on the shelves; dancing the Great Dance as her namesake had before her under the instruction of golden-eyed shadows; realizing at last with horror that she was being trained to take the Dream-Weaver's place.
Only afterward had she learned that this last was no coincidence.
Gerridon needed someone to reap souls for him, to keep him both immortal and human despite the shadows' hunger. Whatever the Women's World thought, his sister-consort had only been his tool, not understanding the evil which he had asked her to commit until too late. Her fall had not been complete, and in the end she had redeemed herself. Still, she had paid a terrible price. So massive an abuse of power had opened a rift in her nature to the chaos beyond, so that toward the end all souls which she touched were caught in the vortex and sucked down, irretrievably. Before that final stage, however, Gerridon had sent her to the exiled Ganth Gray Lord specifically to breed her own successor. Jame was the child whom he had wanted, or so her Senethari Tirandys had told her. No one had counted on twins. Likewise, Gerridon hadn't expected Tirandys to teach the new Jamethiel honor as well as the Senethar. When the night of her investment came, she had slashed the hand held out to her between the red ribbons of a bridal couch, taken the Book Bound in Pale Leather, and fled back across the barrier into Rathillien.
Thus, she had come again to the Haunted Lands keep, stripped of her memory, searching for the twin brother who had stood by while their father had driven her out but whom she still loved, almost as the other half of her soul. But everyone there was dead, slain by the Master in his search for her—everyone except Tori.
Her efforts to find him had taken the next two years, including a sojourn as an apprentice thief in the wonderful, god-ridden city of Tai-tastigon.
Now here she was at last, in their ancestral home, with a twin brother who turned out to be not only Highlord but (thanks to the slower passage of time in the Master's house) a decade her senior. Or rather, here she was without him. Judging from his continued absence, he wished that she had stayed lost. So did Jame, in a way, but she was Kencyr. She belonged with her people. It had crossed her mind not half an hour before that she might be on the verge of a second expulsion. If she was driven out again, this time from the heart of the Kencyrath, where was there left to go?
The image rose in her memory of a snowfield high in the Ebonbane, splitting open, thundering down into the maw of the chasm hidden beneath.
Why had she suddenly remembered that?
Ah. Over the tapestry was a wooden frieze depicting big cats at play—Arrin-ken, actually, third of the three people that made up the Kencyrath, once its judges. On the night of the Fall, many of them had been blinded with burning coals and then slain in the Master's hall, where their flayed skins still lay as trophies on his cold hearth. The rest had fled to Rathillien. A thousand years ago, though, they had withdrawn into the wilds. The carver, therefore, had never seen one. Jame had. In the Ebonbane, on the chasm's edge, Immalai the Silent had laid bare all the shadows which years in the Master's House had bred in her:
Child, you have perverted the Great Dance as your namesake did before you. You have also usurped a priest's authority and misused a master rune. We conclude that you are indeed a darkling, in training if not in blood, reckless to the point of madness . . . .
Under his silent voice in her mind had spoken all the Arrin-ken in their distant retreats, a woven chorus of power, judging her.
But in the end she had passed judgment on herself. She had indeed done all those things and perhaps more besides, which she had now forgotten. She could have blamed the darkness bred into her or the training forced on her, neither her fault. She could even have blamed her Shanir blood, which had made the rest possible. Instead, she had chosen to take responsibility for her own actions, to jump into the abyss and die, if that was required.
It wasn't. Immalai had overridden the others, suspending judgment.
An unfallen darkling; innocent, but not ignorant . . . .
It was something, Jame supposed, to embody a paradox which could make even an Arrin-ken pause. Despite all the dark things she had been taught, despite some of the truly stupid things she had done, she hadn't yet fallen from honor. So, be damned if she was going to let anyone drive her over the edge of anything, if she wasn't prepared to go.
Nor was she ready to surrender Jorin. Jame looked back the way she had come, out of doors hanging askew down a long corridor half-sunk into dusty twilight. The guards might try to follow her. She didn't think much of their chances, though, in this wilderness of empty halls which, thanks to a winter of ceaseless exploration, she probably knew better than any of them did. No, no one would take Jorin away from her tonight, unless she tripped over a search party. Best, though, to keep moving.
She pushed aside the tapestry. Behind it was a door, and through that, under the grim shadow of the Ghost Walks, the moon garden itself.
Tall, windowless walls surrounded it. Pale comfrey sheltered against its northern end, three feet high with drooping, bell-shaped flowers on racemes as curved as a scorpion's tail. Then there were yarrow with their lacy, silver-gray foliage, white self-heal, wild heart's-ease already hanging their heads against the coming night, and a dozen other flowering herbs, all pure white. A small brook cut across the southern end of the garden, emerging from a tunnel under the outer wall and plunging under ground near the inner to join the fortress's subterranean water system. Beyond it, against the south wall, the delicate fiddlehead scrolls of young ferns arched up through the last, sheltered crust of snow. All the white flowers glowed slightly in the dusk (except the yarrow, still in tight bud), and white moths danced over them, wings luminous with pollen.
Jorin plunged into the deep grass with an excited bleat.
Jame followed more slowly. She was tempted to spend the night as she sometimes had in the past, escaping Kallystine, but didn't want to bring her bad dreams here. The garden had a dreaming quality of its own, haunted not so much by a ghost as by the half-forgotten memory of one. Against the south wall hung a tattered death banner. A gentle, barely discernible face gazed out of it, the texture of the wall behind showing through its weather-worn threads. It was a Knorth face, Jame thought, but she didn't know whose, much less why it had been exiled here while the rest of the family banners hung in state in the old keep. No, she would leave the garden and its lady in peace tonight. Bending, she picked a spray of white primrose. A light shake caused its buds to spring open and the pollen within to luminesce. Surrounded by a nimbus of eager moths and followed by a reluctant ounce, she entered the Ghost Walks.
Once the Knorth had occupied these mural apartments from the northern gate to the eastern, but they had been a dwindling house long before the massacre. On that spring night, the northeast drum tower had been large enough to house them all. A door in the herb garden's corner opened immediately into the kitchen. The family's guard had occupied the ground level, where they had slept through the slaughter taking place over their heads—inexplicably, some had thought afterward, but Jame suspected the expert use of poppy dust.
