P. Hodgell - Honor's Paradox

“Where is she now?”

“Aunt Trishien? Back in the Women’s Halls at Gothregor. Torisen has let all the ladies return, to my surprise. They haven’t been exactly tactful in their past dealings with him. I hear that Adiraina even tried to slip him an aphrodisiac.”

“What?”

Kirien laughed at his startled expression. “Oh, not for herself. But I repeat: where did you get this?”

“It was in the bottom of a knapsack that Jame gave me to carry . . . something else.”

Kindrie hadn’t yet mentioned the contract to anyone, fearing the next question: Who was your father? He himself hadn’t gotten used to the idea of Gerridon as his sire—Trinity, who could? He, Jame, and Torisen were all children born of legend and nightmare. What others would say about their lineage hardly bore thinking about.

“I don’t believe my cousin remembered that the cloth was there,” he added. “Where she got it, I don’t know.”

Kirien scrawled Kindrie’s answer, then paused, waiting for a reply. It was several minutes in coming. Then her hand moved again in even, rounded letters.

“ ‘The knot code is a close-kept secret of the Women’s World,’ ” she read. “ ‘We use it to communicate, sisterkin to kin. I wouldn’t betray it, except that the Knorth girl should know what this note says. This appears to be a fragment of a letter from Kinzi Keen-eyed to Adiraina stitched on the night of the Massacre.’ ”

Ashe began, harsh-tongued, to chant:

Kindrie shivered.

The sun had set, leaving the sky on fire—streaks of orange, smoldering red, yellow like a throttled shriek, a silent holocaust on high. Ever since the volcanic eruption the previous year, the evening sky had been ominously spectacular.

Kindrie became aware that Ashe was regarding him closely. The sunset gave the exposed quadrant of the singer’s face almost a rosy glow, but cast into deeper relief the ravages of death. He bit back an instinctive response to use the pyric rune. Where Ashe walked, among the living or among the dead, was her choice. Whether the Jaran were wise to condone it was another matter.

“You saw her . . . didn’t you? Your mother. In the Moon Garden.”

Her harsh, halting voice scraped on his nerves, as did the memory. That thing of woven death banner cords, animated by hunger, swaying toward him—

“. . . come . . . mine . . .”

—mouthing that awful, mindless summons back to the threadbare womb, to fill the aching void within.

Did I create that with my birth? Am I to blame?

So many years wondering what his mother had looked like, at last to see her like that.

“What . . . did you feel?”

Horror, pity, grief. And then the flood had come, washing her poor fragments away.

“Could I have saved her? Was there anything left to save?”

“Very little. Even with a name . . . the neglected soul wears thin. I have seen her pass . . . in the Grayland . . . no more than a flaw on the wind. Let her go.”

Kirien’s hand continued to move as Trishien translated the note for her. “ ‘Can it really be twelve years since Gerraint died? You . . .’ that would be Adiraina . . . ‘have been impatient with me for not having told . . .’ The note is full of holes. This is one of them. And part of it has been ripped off. ‘. . . virtually nothing of what happened in the death banner hall before so much of it burned.’ ”

Kindrie scrambled to catch up. “She’s referring to the night that Gerraint died and Ganth became Highlord?”

“Yes, twelve years before the Massacre, as Kinzi says. We’ve had so many disasters that it does get confusing. Trinity, listen to this:

“ ‘You have laughed at rumors that Greshan was seen walking the halls of Gothregor when he was five days dead.

“ ‘Well, I saw him too. In my precious Moon Garden. With that bitch of Wilden, Rawneth. She led him in by the secret door behind the tapestry and there, under my very window, made love to him.

“ ‘Except it wasn’t Greshan.

“ ‘I knew that the moment I saw him, and I didn’t warn her. Oh, Adiraina . . . I let her damn herself. Then he changed—into whom, I don’t know. I couldn’t see his face, but Rawneth did. She gaped like a trout, then burst out laughing, half in hysteria, half, I swear, in triumph. What face could he have shown her to cause that?’ ”

The three looked at each other.

“Rawneth made love to someone in the Moon Garden who at first appeared to be Greshan,” Kirien repeated.

“But that was the price of Tieri’s contract,” Kindrie blurted out. “That Gerraint should get his precious son back.” Then he felt the blood that had rushed from his face flood back. Oh, his wretched tongue.

“What contract?” asked Kirien. “With whom? For what?”

Her expression softened. She could have demanded the truth from him, that being her Shanir trait, but she took pity. “Never mind. Tell us when you’re ready. The point is, Rawneth’s lover altered his appearance. Only darkling changers do that, as far as I know, unless we include the Whinno-hir, the wolvers, and half a dozen other oddities. But we don’t know whom he changed into. Kinzi says that she didn’t know either, but that Rawneth was at first surprised, then pleased. How very strange.”

Her hand moved again in Trishien’s smooth script.

“Another break. Then, ‘It has been three months since Lord Randir died and four since the Randir Lordan disappeared. My spies tell me that Rawneth contracted the Shadow Guild to assassinate him.’ Another break. ‘Now she insists that Ganth confirm her own son, Kenan, as the new lord of Wilden.

“ ‘And here we come to the heart of the matter.

“ ‘Rawneth went back to Wilden that same night, contracted with a Highborn of her own house, and some nine months later gave birth to Kenan. But who is Kenan’s father—the Randir noble or the thing in the garden? Without knowing, how can I advise Ganth to accept or reject his claim? And so I have summoned Rawneth and her son to Gothregor while you are also here, since your Shanir talent lies in determining bloodlines at a touch. You will tell me, dear heart, and then I will know how to act. I must admit, I do hope our dear Rawneth has mated with a monster.

“ ‘But if so, why did she laugh so triumphantly?

“ ‘How the wind howls! Now something has fallen over below. I hear many feet on the stair. Perhaps it is Ganth, come home at last . . .’ ”

Kirien lowered her pad and picked up the fragile linen square with both hands, delicately, as if it might disintegrate at her touch.

“There this letter ends, I suppose, with the arrival of the shadow assassins and Kinzi’s death. The breaks in the note appear to come where her blood has eaten through the fabric. Look.”

They regarded the discolored cloth, dotted with stitches, fretted with holes, perhaps the last thing that the Knorth Matriarch Kinzi Keen-eyed had ever touched.