P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

“What’s this?”

“The raw stuff of glass. There’s not enough cullet to recast the whole window. Luckily, a wise-woman has been dropping off these samples as she gathers them. They stretch the supply of cullet further than you would think.”

“She’s not a Kencyr, then?”

“No. I first met her in Peshtar on the western flanks of the Ebonbane. You just missed her. I expect she’s gone with her knitting to listen in on the Matriarchs’ Council as Cattila’s Ear.”

“She reports to the Caineron?” Torisen didn’t like the sound of that at all. “And the Matriarchs let her?”

“As I understand it, only to the Caineron Matriarch, who’s too old to travel and has no very high opinion of her great-grandson Caldane. Don’t fret yourself, lad; it’s an old arrangement and no harm has come of it yet that I know of.”

Still, an outsider . . .

He would have to ask the Jaran Matriarch Trishien about that. Besides, it would be an excuse to visit her, as well as to inquire about other things.

“Anyway, very particular, she is, where her bits and pieces go on the map, with some peculiar results. Look.”

He had fitted the new piece into one already cast. Not only did their edges match perfectly, without any prior shaping, but they had flowed into each other, fusing into one.

Torisen swore softly. “I may not know much about making glass, but that strikes me as distinctly odd.”

“Oh aye, it’s that all right. As I recall, the old window was fitted together with lead strips, like most others in Tai-tastigon.”

“That was where you learned how to do this?”

“Not ‘learned,’ exactly. A guild-master told me more than he probably should have, but he owed me a rather large favor.”

“And that was where you met Jame?”

The words were out before he could stop them.

“Aye.”

The Kendar waited for him to ask more, but he couldn’t. Somehow, somewhere, his twin sister had lost ten years since their father had driven her out of the Haunted Lands keep. Had it been in Tai-tastigon? He remembered his brief time in that god-infested city as a kind of waking nightmare to be escaped as quickly as possible. What had Jame done there? Where had she been before that?

If you knew , jeered his father’s voice, you could never bear to look at her again, much less touch her. Shanir, god-spawn, unclean, unclean . . . and yet you still love her, you weak, stupid boy.

“Shut up!”

Marc was staring at him. “My lord? Lad?”

Torisen rubbed his eyes. “I didn’t mean you, and don’t mind me. I’m being weak, stupid . . . ”

“That you are not. Listen. Hard times make hard, strong men, and women too. That winter, just before Spring’s Eve, it finally came down to a lottery among the garrison. The old lord insisted on putting in his family’s markers as well, but of course we let those slip through.”

Torisen felt his own empty stomach turn. “Who . . . er . . . won?”

“My mother’s sister’s daughter. She took it as a high honor, but you can imagine how the rest of us felt. Nonetheless, we did what we had to do, and included our last portion of dog—the old lord’s favorite courser, Flash; well I remember him—so that later we could all hope that that was what we had eaten. Three weeks later, the cold broke. Most of us wouldn’t have lived to see it without her sacrifice.”

He took the sack from Torisen’s hand and mixed it in the recently emptied firepot with ground cullet from the green and purple barrels. This process must go on steadily day and night, Torisen realized. The resulting pieces were so small, the whole map so large. Regardless, this Kendar would see it through to the end. His strength was humbling. No wonder Jame thought so highly of him, and that Torisen resented Marc’s alliance to his sister rather than to himself. Would his great-granddaughter Brier go the same way, and how many more?

You will lose them, one by one. How can you compete with such unnatural, darkling glamour?

Marc transferred the pot to the main furnace, the last vessel in a long line.

“An hour, more or less, until the next melt is ready,” he said, closing the hatch, once again shedding his hood and wiping the sweat from his flushed face.

“What happened next?” Torisen heard himself ask.

The big Kendar sighed, with a smile that twisted oddly awry.

“Then at last came spring, and summer, and the richest harvest any of us had ever seen. Trinity, I thought I would burst with feasting after so long a-fast; but the other boys made a joke of it, what with me already being so much bigger than any of them, so I took my bow and went off to be alone a bit.

“While I was gone, the Merikit came and slaughtered everyone. I understand why now. Then . . . only the wolves and ravens feasted, except on those that I managed to save for the pyre. If I had been stronger, maybe I would have stayed, but then who would have claimed their blood price? Strength is a strange thing, at least as strange as honor. Your sister, now. She is strong, no denying it; but she couldn’t hold together the Kencyrath as you have. Her way leads apart, where few if any may follow. So my instinct tells me, and I say this as one who loves her dearly, for her sense of honor, for her determination to do the right thing at whatever cost to others or to herself. I ask you to trust me in this.”

He glanced at the saddlebag resting on the far end of the table. The sun had sunk below the stone tracery. Shortly, it would slip behind the mountains, but at the moment it cast an elongated child’s shadow toward them, its head cocked as though listening.

“I have you to thank, lad, for rescuing my sister Willow, or her bones at least.”

Torisen remembered finding them in Kithorn’s stillroom where the child had run to hide on the night of the Massacre and subsequently starved to death, surrounded by the preserves of a plentiful harvest.

“When will you give her to the pyre?”

“Not yet. I will know the time.”

“I wish I had your certainty, about so many things.”

“Ah, you may yet, lad. Have the courage to wait.”

The sun had set behind the western Snowthorns, ushering in the long twilight of autumn. Trishien, Matriarch of the Jaran, sat at her table by one window of an arcade writing to her grandniece Kirien.

“ . . . and so, my dear,” ran her swooping, rounded letters, “you will see me sooner than either of us expected. I have seldom attended a Council so brief or, all things considered, so civil. Even Karidia only yapped once or twice. But then, of course, we have been discussing the matter informally for weeks.”

She dipped her quill in ink. Immediately it darted from pot to paper and began to inscribe Kirien’s spiky script under her own.

“Has anyone told the Highlord yet?”

“No . . . ”

She paused, listening to a shuffle on the flat roof overhead. Some leaves drifted past the window. The ivy outside jerked and the birds that nested in it fled, protesting shrilly. The next moment, the vines above gave way with a sharp, ripping sound and swung into the room, bearing a black-clad figure tangled up in them. It rolled upright, then tripped over the tough tendrils wrapped around its legs and pitched face first onto the floor at her feet.

Bemused, she stared down at black hair shot with premature white and festooned with ivy leaves. A face turned upward to her, foreshortened, its lower half twisted in a wry smile.

“Your pardon, Matriarch,” said Torisen Black Lord. “I would have used the door, but I didn’t want the entire Women’s World bursting in on my heels.”

“What, and abandon such a dignified method of entrance? Next time, though, for the birds’ sake, bring a rope.”