P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

“D’you think your sister would be so spiritless if she ruled here? Already the Kendar Marcarn prefers her to you. Soon others will also.”

“Marc said she couldn’t hold the Kencyrath together, that her way led elsewhere.”

“Yes, it does. To destruction.”

The Matriarch rose, trembling. She fumbled the lenses out of her mask as if to clean them and dropped one, barely hearing it shatter on the floor. Long sight, shadow sight. Someone paced at the Highlord’s shoulder, leaning to whisper in his ear. She knew that sharp profile, those haunted eyes that used rage to mask their vulnerability.

“What a joke it would be, if you should prove to be Shanir too, just like your sister. God-spawn, unclean, unclean . . . ”

“Ganth!” She hardly recognized her own voice, half-strangled as it was. “Do you want to prove yourself no better than your brother Greshan? Leave that boy alone!”

He was stalking toward her, the younger face eclipsed by the older. “Ah, Trish. Mind your own business, or shall I curse you as I did both of my faithless children? How would you like never to open a book again for fear of what you might find? Bookworm, filthy Shanir . . . ”

The second lens slipped out of her fingers and crunched under her foot as she retreated. The mask itself might have fallen, so naked did her face feel.

“Ganth, please . . . ”

A storm of yelping broke out on the roof.

Torisen drew up in dismay, looking confused. “What was I saying? What was I about to do?” The shadow had fallen from his face and with it any resemblance to his father, although he was close enough to her now for his features to blur. Was that the unknown mother that she saw in his fine bones, in those quick, changing eyes and mobile mouth, now twisted in dismay?

“Yip, yip, yip, aroooo . . . !”

“Yce,” said Torisen. “I thought I left her safely sound asleep beside the glass furnace. She must have somehow tracked me across the rooftops. Matriarch, your pardon. I’d better leave as I came. She’s going to bring the entire Women’s World down on me.”

Indeed, they heard voices approaching in the hall outside, Karidia’s shrill notes predominant.

“I swear, that woman has set spies on me. Highlord, wait.” Trishien scrambled for her wits, cursing the blurred vision that also seemed to have unfocused her thoughts. “You should know. This day the Matriarchs’ Council has decided to leave Gothregor for the winter. Everyone will go, to be schooled at their home keeps until such time as the Council deems your house safe again.”

“Oh.” He paused, one leg flung over the window sill, considering this. “I really must be in bad shape, mustn’t I?” He sounded almost regretful. It was one thing, after all, to dodge hunting parties, another to be deemed unworthy of the chase.

At that moment, a small white shape hurtled down from the roof, crashed into him, and knocked both off the ledge. Trishien heard a mighty scramble and a ripping of vines. By the time she reached the window, Torisen had gained the ground by dint of tearing the other half of the ivy loose. Wolver pup and Highlord emerged, liberally festooned, from the leafy ruins.

Seized by a sudden dread, Trishien leaned out the window. The last thing any of them needed, worse even than keeping Aerulan’s banner, was for Torisen to face the maledight Brenwyr alone.

“If you do take your cousin north, wait for Lord Brandan to return from Kothifir. Promise me!”

He sketched her a brief, relieved salute and fled with the pup at his heels.

Karidia was pounding on the door.

“I know you have a man in there, you cross-eyed hypocrite, maybe two of them! What is this, an orgy? Open up and be honest for once!”

Trishien groped her way to the door and opened it. “That was no man,” she told the irate Coman Matriarch on her threshold, peering down into the other’s suffused face as it bobbed about, trying to see past her. “It was the Highlord.”

“Oh, him.”

With a snort, Karidia turned on her heel and left.

Torisen paused to wipe the sweat out of his eyes and to drink another dipper of water. It was unseasonably hot for the thirty-second of Autumn, four days short of the equinox, which meant that it was almost unbearable here in the High Council chamber with both glass furnaces in blazing operation. Yce lay panting by the western wall. Waves of heat distorted the twilight air by the empty eastern window, knocking an unwary bat out of the sky. The sun was almost down. Perhaps spending the day in the glassworks hadn’t been such a good idea after all, except that the alternative had been helping his people harvest the beetlike mangel-wurzel, which they would have hated. Their lord to dirty his hands grubbing about for roots? Unthinkable.

If they only knew how many “unthinkable” things he had done in his life.

Besides, sometimes one got a mandrake instead of a mangel, and that was no fun for anyone within earshot, at least in the Haunted Lands.

Marc emptied a small sack of ingredients into a firepot, considered the color of the adjacent finished bits on the table, and chose a gauntletful of amber cullet veined with silver from the barrels by the northern wall.

“Yellow for sulfur, sulfur from coal,” he remarked. “Not bad for Gothregor.”

He opened the hatch and set the pot over the incandescent fire within to begin its sixteen-hour melt.

“Burr tells me that you’re off for Falkirr tomorrow.”

Torisen cursed under his breath. He had wanted to keep his trip a secret because he didn’t know what its outcome would be. He should have realized, however, that as soon as he ordered travel rations, the word would be out.

“What made you finally decide to take the poor lass home?”

“I don’t know yet where it is—her home, I mean.”

All his instincts still told him that Aerulan belonged below, among her own kin, but Trishien insisted otherwise, and Aerulan herself pleaded with him every time he met her eyes. Now Lord Brandan was at last back in the Riverland with fresh provisions from the south.

“Go,” Trishien told him.

Don’t be a fool , his father breathed in his ear.

What had really changed his mind, however, was a little boy playing by himself with a stick chalked half white. He had been stabbing at himself with it, practicing, he had said, so that when his parents chose the White Knife he could go with them.

“Do you remember the boy’s name?” Marc asked, upon hearing the story.

“Ghill, son of Merry and Cron. And you are Marcarn and I am Torisen Black Lord, sometimes called Blackie. Satisfied?”

“That’s not for me to say, lad, although I’ll admit that I’d rather eat this winter than not.”

They were interrupted by the sudden arrival of a dumpy figure, tumbling down the stair of the northwest tower in a billow of volcanic ash. Yce leaped to her feet; then, seeing who it was, she yipped a welcome.

“What were you doing in my study?” Torisen demanded, helping Mother Ragga up. As usual, she wore a jackdaw assortment of clothes with plenty of wrinkles to hold the bushel or so of ash that dusted her gray from head to toe.

“Came down the chimney, didn’t I? Burny was after me.” She slapped at her clothes with gnarled hands, raising further clouds, then coughed and spat. “At least now I know where the yackcarn herd is. He’s got it bottled up above that filthy volcano of his behind a valley of ash. I was like to smother in the stuff. Thank ye, lad.”

She accepted the scooper of water that Torisen offered and drained it in several loud gulps.