Back | Next
Contents

Chapter XVI
Karkinaroth

High Bashti and Karkinaroth:

Autumn 58−Winter 12

I

Soon after this came another round of games about which Jame had entirely forgotten. Before the Kencyrath had arrived in High Bashti, King Mordaunt had negotiated with Prince Uthecon for a match between Bashti’s Knorth and Karkinor’s Caineron. It was meant to be a friendly contest. The prince, elderly, ailing, didn’t believe in violence, and his only territorial aims centered on the gold-rich Forks. Those, however, were against the Midlands and their Randir troops, where conflict had come to a stalemate due in part to bribes from the Forkites and to Riverland politics. Most of the prince’s Caineron troops had been stationed near the northern borders since the previous summer while the Commandant tried to untangle matters.

High Bashti, of course, was also disturbed and getting worse every day. Jame didn’t want to leave it in such a state, but she felt that she must.

“I promised Timmon that I would check on Lyra,” she explained to Harn. “Already, I’ve put that off much too long.”

“Karkinor doesn’t ask for the rathorn,” said Harn, absentmindedly. He was pacing the front line of Kendar practicing the kantirs of fire-leaping Senethar in the campus training field. Exercises such as this had been going on since the Transweald expedition in preparation for the next set.

“Ha!” cried a score of throats as a bristling hedge of fists punched the air.

“However,” said Harn, countering the nearest strike, turning to pace back, “the prince has asked for you.”

“Oh” Jame said, blankly. She had met young Prince Odalian, the previous ruler of Karkinor and briefly Lyra’s consort, but never his uncle and successor, Uthecon. Why would he ask for her now? “Then I suppose I really should go. Not with Jurik, though.”

Harn gave a harsh laugh. “His performance in the Transweald did not endear him to the king, or to his mother, or to me. It would be hard to do worse. Also, most of his comrades have left him. I understand that he beat one of them to death and left the body beside the road.”

“Cervil,” said Jame, sickened. She hadn’t liked the simpering Bashtiri, but she also hadn’t heard this final detail of his fate.

“That was the name. The last I heard, Jurik was in nominal command of the king’s ruffians, bedizened up to the eyebrows.”

How did Harn feel about that? Perhaps, at last, he was getting annoyed enough to shake off his officious, ineffectual offspring. It might help that the Kendar were matrilineal. Mothers had primary responsibility for their children, not fathers. Queen Vestula already had much to answer for.

Still, Jame worried about Harn.

“Who leads the expedition this time?” she asked.

Harn caught a flying foot, twisted it, and sent a randon sprawling. Three in the second line, entangled, also fell.

“Watch your balance,” he growled. “I lead.”

“Pardon, Commander, but you surprise me. Before, Mordaunt wanted you here, to protect him. Now he’s in more danger even than before.”

“Karkinor is a sideshow for Mordaunt and he doesn’t like you for some reason. Or, for that matter, me. He would rather have both of us in Karkinor than here. The queen has been taunting him with tales, some of which he no doubt believes, some of which, regrettably, are true. After all the man can’t seem to sire legitimate heirs, yet he must have one. Jurik came from somewhere. Also, Jurik blames me for his disastrous mission to Transweald.”

“But you weren’t even there!”

Harn snorted. “Oh, but my troops were, and they, you understand, represent my will. Jurik claims that they never gave him a chance. They hung back, were surly, and defied his orders. That last applies especially to you. Eventually you left him alone, paralyzed by your witch Damson, on the road, in the rain, while you went on to lead the company to Wealdhold without him.”

Had they really not talked about this before? Yes. Jame hadn’t wanted to bring up the embarrassing details, and Harn hadn’t asked her.

“Well, that last at least is partially true,” she said. “It was raining. He wouldn’t move. We were running out of time.”

“I understand that. Others have reported to me even if you didn’t. And you humiliated him in combat with that rathorn of yours.”

“Only with his help.”

“Huh. His stories of the wolver hunt, the Burnt Man, and the rout in the Weald are harder to believe.”

“Agreed. What do we Kencyr know of such things? But the Burnt Man let us go and the Deep Weald wolvers escorted us out of the wilderness. Beyond that, what can I say? Jurik panicked.”

“And in his mad scramble to escape he left troops behind.”

“That too.”

Harn sighed, his broad shoulders slumping. “If only he could be truthful about something. But note: he hates you.”

“I gathered that. What can I do about it, though?”

“Stay out of his way.”

“So, we are sent traipsing off to Karkinaroth.”

“Yes. But a word of caution. We haven’t fought the Caineron since the White Hills, unless you count Tiggeri’s attack on Tagmeth.”

“Believe me, I haven’t forgotten it.”

“Still, he wasn’t acting then on his father’s orders. That was personal.”

Tiggeri had thought that Jame was sheltering his sister Must and their child Benj, born of rape, but Must was dead by then in childbirth and her infant son had been taken for safety behind one of Tagmeth’s gates. He was still there. Tiggeri had missed that. He had not, however, forgiven Jame for interfering.

“Surely Tiggeri isn’t at Karkinaroth.”

“I didn’t say that he was. The thing is, what stories has he told his father? Then too, Caldane has gotten more and more unstable, and it affects his Kendar. I don’t know what we will find in Karkinor.”

With that she had to be content.

II

The games, or whatever Prince Uthecon had in mind, were scheduled to start on the 12th of Winter. In some ways, they were like those at Transweald, most notably in that no program had yet been announced. Therefore, the Knorth had no idea what skills they were supposed to display or what trials they must undertake. Harn thought that the prince had made the initial arrangements, and then had become too ill to be more specific. Subsequent correspondence had been vague and signed by Uthecon’s chamberlain, Malapirt, a name Jame remembered from Gothregor without fondness.

On the other hand, this was a much smaller expedition consisting of twenty contestants with twenty assistants and a much smaller baggage train. There would also be no hangers-on. The Transweald expedition had scared all such off, not that they would have been welcome in any case. Instead, all the participants were Knorth randon or sargents, whose backs stiffened whenever Harn Grip-hard passed. This was to be the military excursion that it should be, not the pleasure party to Transweald that Jurik had planned.

What else? thought Jame as she arranged her own affairs and worried about them.

The Danior, for one, had been recalled from Nether Bashti to serve in the army at the capital. Mordaunt apparently trusted them, and some Knorth. Mint and Dar, at least, were still employed as royal guards.

Who, however, trusted the king? The Council was still enraged by his increased call for taxes, even though he claimed that they were for the greater glory of the city.

Pensa challenged that, and the Council supported her. At last she had found her voice, and her audience. So far, however, she hadn’t mentioned the contract for her father’s murder. Jame supposed that she was biding her time. It added a note of uncertainty to Jame’s own plans but, on the whole, she was glad that she had passed on the parchment. What happened next was up to Pensa.

III

The expedition left two days later on the 60th, the last day of Autumn, to no cheers or bands playing umph-pah-pah but with a purposeful stride. The roads were good, the weather better, enough for them to make at least forty miles a day down Thyme Street to the River Road. That was perhaps three hundred miles—seven or eight days.

Some thirty miles down the Silver, Karkinor had recently rebuilt a bridge across the river that allowed travelers to take a shortcut across the toe of Karkinor to the capital of Karkinaroth. They came to this on the 9th.

Harn crossed first, to demonstrate that it was safe. No bridge across the Silver was completely trustworthy thanks to the frequent writhing of the River Snake. Jame followed as the second in command.

She had asked about that.

“You have at least three dozen randon senior to me. What will they think?”

“That you’re the Knorth lordan,” he had said, “arguably the highest ranking Knorth with the Southern Host. Also, that you saved the Transweald expedition from disaster. Maybe they could have done as well, but they weren’t there, and it was a tricky situation.”

So Jame rode second. Was it only her imagination that the stones beneath her horse’s feet quivered under the pressure of the rushing water? Currents sucked and swirled at the piers below. The horse stepped warily.

Bloop, said a minor maelstrom, with a flash of silver scales, and the span above it shivered.

On the eleventh day of their journey, they crossed a more secure bridge over the River Tardy with Karkinaroth looming ahead of them.

Jame had last seen it in ruins, crouching down within itself as the Kencyr temple inside had collapsed. Lower and lower it had gone, drawing in on itself. The rumble had gone on and on, in the air, in the ground, in one’s bones, until at last it had died out of each in turn.

Silence.

Then below in the city, shouting had begun, and the howl of dogs.

That was then. This was now.

Prince Uthecon had rebuilt, nearly as grand as before. Walls, towers, turrets, banners . . . what lacked but the patina of age and, perhaps, of substance? To Jame, the whole structure felt misty, ephemeral. She wondered if she should enter it at all given that compromised architecture tended to collapse when she was around, but here she was, with no place else to go, following Harn.

They rode into the palace’s main courtyard, where baggage was reclaimed and the horses were led off by liveried grooms to the stables. A flight of steps led up to the gilded front door. On the threshold above stood Malapirt, clothed in a robe of orange and puce swirls that stood out vividly against the palace’s pale pink walls. So did his white teeth against a face nearly as dark as Brier’s. Around his neck, in further contrast, he wore the ornate golden chain of a chamberlain.

“Welcome to Karkinaroth!” he said to Harn, spreading his wide-sleeved arms in greeting. “His Highness, Prince Uthecon, regrets that his health does not permit him to express his salutations in person.”

“And Lyra?” asked Jame, stepping forward.

Malapirt’s mouth twitched, as if jerked up at one corner. “Ah, lady. How pleasant to see you again, and once again fully clothed. What delight is denied me. The princess attends His Highness, as any good consort should. I doubt if she has either the time or the inclination for idle chatter.”

“For that matter,” said Harn, bulking large at the foot of the stair, “where is the Commandant?”

“You refer, I assume, to your esteemed colleague, Sheth Sharp-tongue. He has spent most of the summer and fall at the Forks, tending to the prince’s business. We expected him back for your arrival, but some matter has called him to the northern border of Karkinor. Our business here will commence when he returns. In the meantime, you are our honored guests.”

They followed him into the cavernous entry hall and were directed from there up a sweeping flight of stairs to their second-story quarters. Jame noted that the plaster walls were cracked here and there, with dust dribbling down onto the steps.

“I don’t like this,” she said to Harn under her breath as they went. “Too many people are missing, and I don’t trust our dear chamberlain.”

“Huh. Eyes wary, ears open.”

Most of the company was assigned to a spacious dormitory, reached after many curving corridors farther back in the structure. Harn had a suite next door which he was to share with his servant Secur. Jame and Rue were lodged in the room opposite.

By now, it was late afternoon with a formal dinner soon to come. Before that, however, there was time for a hasty bath in a more luxurious tub than Jame had seen in years, fitted with lion’s feet which she half expected to walk off with her.

When she emerged, Rue ruthlessly toweled her down despite her protests, then shoved her into a chair and attacked her wet, black mane of hair. After hard travel, the Merikit braids for which she had become famous were frayed. It took both Rue’s horse-comb and Jame’s claws to disentangle them, then their combined efforts to braid them up again slick and intricate enough for company—not that anyone here was likely to know that the twenty braids on one side represented men she had been credited by the Merikit with having killed and seven on the other with daughters that she had presumably sired. Merikit society was complicated.

After that, Rue presented Jame with clean under clothes, then shrugged her into her court coat, a rich patchwork of heirloom fabrics donated and stitched together by her fellow cadets, a treasured possession.

There was a full-length mirror in the room. They both looked at her reflection.

“You clean up good,” said Rue gruffly, and slapped her on the back.

The dinner warning sounded below in the banqueting hall with horns and a commanding rattle of drums.

The Knorth descended. All, including Harn, at most other times slovenly, looked their best. He, Jame, Malapirt, and various minor Karkinoran nobles sat at the high table. Down the right side of the hall were the Caineron participants; down the left side, the Knorth. This, Jame thought, did not bode well. Her people and the Brandan at Wealdhold had mixed. They had understood that they were all Kencyr in league, if need be, against their Central Lands paymasters. These Caineron seemed to have their own scheme. They hunched over their food and traded whispers. Laughter rippled from one end of the table to the other and many sly glances were cast across the hall. They reminded Jame of nasty little boys plotting mayhem.

Sheth’s second in command, Marham, was there. Jame hadn’t met him before, but he had a good reputation among the randon, as befit anyone in Sheth’s favor. However, his gloating expression made her skin crawl. With Sheth absent, he had been let off the leash, and something within him obviously relished it.

The food was sumptuous, if overly rich, and the wine free-flowing. Harn partook sparingly. His troops, observing him, followed suit. Jame herself had only been drunk twice in her life and had no urge to repeat the experience, especially in such company. The Caineron drank, and giggled, and snorted.

The Knorth, eventually, went up to bed.

“That was uncomfortable,” said Jame to Rue.

Out in the hall, Harn started shouting for his servant Secur, who had disappeared.

Jame was about to shed the court coat when someone scratched on the door. Before she could answer, it burst open and Lyra Lack-wit rushed in in a swirl of crimson skirts and a tight, pearl-strewn waist-coat.

“Oh!” she cried, throwing herself into Jame’s arms. “They said that you had come but didn’t want to see me! I couldn’t believe that!”

“Of course not,” Jame said, returning the girl’s embrace.

Lyra burst into tears. “It’s been awful! Not the prince. He’s ever so kind. But all of his relatives! They swarm and swarm and swarm like so many flies, waiting for him to die, and then they’ll eat me up too! I don’t want anything to do with any of them. I want to go home!”

Home was likely to be worse than she remembered, thought Jame, given Caldane’s decline, but still . . .

Lyra snuffled into a lacy handkerchief, then stuffed it, sodden, into her sleeve. “Oh. I was sent with a message,” she said, like a child faithfully remembering a duty. “His Highness, Prince Uthecon, would be pleased to grant you an audience. Now.”

“He would? I mean, of course, if you will show me the way.”

The way led up more flights of stairs, back into the palace’s main tower. Up and up and up. Jame told herself that it was only imagination that made the spire seem to sway, although more plaster dust dribbled on the floor. Who had overseen the rebuilding of this structure anyway—Uthecon or Malapirt?

Here was a spacious tower room rimmed with windows. A cool breeze blew sheer curtains in and out, in and out.

Furious play on the floor froze at their entrance. Six pairs of blue eyes stared at them. Tails twitched and rose.

“Oh,” said Jame, going down on her knees. “Ounce cubs!”

A litter of them tumbled into her arms, sniffing, nuzzling, waving their paws in the air. They might be nine or ten weeks old. Their mother, a royal gold, approached with more deliberation, inspected Jame’s coat, which probably smelled of Jorin, and retreated with tacit approval.

Lyra scooped up a cub. “This is Smokie, a silver smoke ounce. The prince says he will give her to me when she’s old enough, any day now.”

The cub was white, dappled and pointed with blue-gray fur—paws, mask, and tail. Her eyes were wide and luminously blue. She licked Jame’s nose.

“Oh,” said Jame again, cuddling her. “What a sweetheart.”

“The prince raises them,” said Lyra proudly. “He loves them. They love him.”

The chamber, however, was strewn with moldy food, urine-soaked bedding, and feces. Whoever cared for the prince cared less for his pets, or perhaps in equal measure. Lyra led Jame to a canopied bed. Gauzy hangings flexed in the air, but could not contain the stench within. Prince Uthecon lay on silken sheets in his own filth. His eyes were filmy and anxious, his breath labored. One side of his face drooped and drooled. He seemed, however, to smile at Jame, and mumbled something that she didn’t understand.

“He says that he is pleased to meet you,” said Lyra.

“You can understand him?”

“Oh, yes. No one else can, though. Some of them used to come to me to translate, but they didn’t listen. I’ve told him, oh, so much about you.”

He mumbled again, and fumbled at Jame’s hand.

“He says that he sent for you, hoping that you will protect me,” Lyra reported.

“I will,” said Jame.

IV

By now, the eleventh shortening day of winter was drawing to a close. Shadows stretched over the city, reaching eastward away from the setting sun. The city hummed, consumed with its own affairs, while palace towers jutted up into the fading light.

Jame followed the way down to the second floor. Her instinct for mazes, she noted, was still strong, once she had seen the way.

Harn came grumbling to the door when she knocked.

“Have you found him yet?” he demanded, by which she knew that Secur was still missing.

“No, Commander, but there is this.”

She told him what she had found in the high tower.

“Huh,” he said. “Come with me.”

The dormitory was full of Kendar preparing for bed.

“Volunteers!” Harn barked.

All rose. This was Harn Grip-hard. One didn’t ask questions.

Jame led them up to the chamber where the wind blew in one window and out the other to a billowing of curtains. Here she introduced the commander to the prince, who greeted his visitor with a tremulous, broken smile.

Harn surveyed the filthy room. “Right,” he said to his troops. “Clean up this mess.”

They attacked the piles of waste and shoveled them out the windows. Lyra shoved the ounce cubs out of the way despite their mother, who hissed and jumped up onto the prince’s bed. She meant to protect him. Her cubs scrambled up after her except for Smokie whom Lyra grabbed and held despite her protests.

Harn picked up Uthecon, an armful of bones, while the Kendar chased off the ounce family and stripped the bed. Soiled sheets fluttered down into an interior courtyard far below. Somewhere, someone had found fresh linens. These were spread, the prince reinstalled. He patted Harn’s arm and mouthed his thanks.

“This is horrible,” Jame said as they descended. “What can we do about it?”

He grunted. “Only what we can. D’you think we can save the world?”

Jame sighed. “I rather hoped so, but then who am I to talk?”

V

In the morning, another two Knorth were missing. It seemed that they had gotten up separately in the night to relieve themselves, and had not come back.

“Could they have gotten lost?” wondered Rue.

“The garderobe is just down the hall,” Jame said. “No. Something else is going on.”

This was to have been the first day of the games. Instead, the Caineron didn’t even appear for breakfast. Neither did any Karkinoran nobles or the servants. The palace seemed to be deserted.

Lyra showed up at this point to announce that she too was hungry. Moreover, no one had fed the prince or the ounces.

“Right,” said Harn. “First, we find the kitchen. Then we continue to search for our people.”

Lyra brightened. “Oh, I can lead you to the cook rooms!”

Jame assumed that she often raided them. The girl she remembered would do that, as during the rescue of Graykin when she and Lyra had unexpectedly come face to face in Restormir’s pantry thanks to a run-away chicken.

“Do you know the palace well?” she asked.

Lyra beamed. “Yes, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring it. That was what I thought you would do. Besides, I was bored.”

Here, as she said, were the kitchens on the ground floor, a complex of pantries for fresh food, storage for nonperishables, roasting rooms, stew pots, bakeries, and butteries. All had been abandoned, it seemed, in haste. Chopped vegetables wilted on the block. Roasts were scorched on one side, raw on the other. Bread crusts blackened in the oven. Soup boiled over.

A meal was scrounged from this chaos and as much as was salvageable was set aside for later in the day. Lyra scraped up porridge for the prince and minced meat for the cubs. A Kendar took these from her and went up into the tower to feed the inmates, also to deal with any residual or resultant mess. No one questioned that the Kencyr had become responsible for the prince, at least as long as they were there.

The palace was complicated, if crumbling. More plaster rattled down. Walls groaned and cracked. It made Jame cringe every time this happened, remembering that previous cataclysmic collapse. Was it her imagination or did Prince Uthecon’s labored breath now drive the curtains in and out, in and out?

Lyra stayed below to help the Knorth with their search for their comrades.

“I get the feeling,” said Jame to Harn, “that the games have already begun, but no one has told us the rules.”

The day progressed. Two more Knorth disappeared. By now, most were going about in five-squad units. Some reported glimpses of flitting, outlandish figures, others of a solitary form in white, wax-face.

What, thought Jame, are the Deathless involved now too? How and why?

And who, more worrying, were the other figures?

She went with Lyra and Rue to explore the most obscure hiding spaces within the deep palace, of which there were many. The structure seemed to be full of dead ends, of doors opening on blank walls or onto empty shafts. Windows, likewise, sometimes led outside, but just as often their stained-glass panes faced internal corridors lit with branches of candles where these hadn’t burned down to the sockets. The palace had been confusing before. It was worse now.

Low whistles sounded around them as they moved, now before, now behind. Who was signaling? Figures flitted by corners. Then they unexpectedly came face to face with one. It was presumably a Kendar, but with white streaks painted on its face and black kohl around its eyes and mouth. It—he?—rushed them. Jame slipped aside and tripped him. Rue dropped on his back and wrestled his arms behind him to be bound by his own belt. They turned him over.

“Don’t cut me!” he cried, cringing. “Don’t cut me!”

“Why would we?” Jame asked, puzzled.

They did gag him, however, and left him where he lay, threshing and trying to whistle around the gag.

“We need to get back to our own people,” said Rue.

Jame agreed.

At a wrong turn, though, they found themselves in an upper chamber below the prince’s suite. It seemed to be designed for intimate dinners, but food lay rotting on the tables, infested with maggots, and flies buzzed over it. Also, there were desiccated bodies sprawled over the plates or tumbled into the floor. Judging by their rich robes, they were nobles, and some wore chains of office similar to Malapirt’s. Could this be the rest of the prince’s household? If so, who had killed them? When? Why?

“This is a charnel-house,” said Jame, stepping back as if from an abomination, which it was.

Otherwise, they found desolation: stale rooms long untended, dust-balls in the halls, cobwebs draping corners.

“How long d’you think it’s been like this?” asked Rue.

“Since last summer, when the prince fell ill,” said Lyra. “At least, that’s when I first noticed it. Chamberlain Malapirt took charge of more and more, and consulted the prince less and less. People disappeared.” She shivered. “Now I’ve seen where some of them went.”

“In short,” said Jame, “it was a palace coup with murderous intent. Poor Uthecon. He had no way to fight back.”

Another turn placed them in a hall which once might have held the royal guard. Tables and benches were pushed back against the walls between meals, the floor cleared for pallets that had never been laid out. Their feet echoed hollowly under a high ceiling. Other feet echoed too. Figures flowed through the door and moved along the walls, spreading out to surround them.

“Eek!” said Lyra.

“Run,” Jame told her, and she did.

The intruders parted to let her pass. By that, Jame knew who they were, if there had been any question before: Caineron would not attack their lord’s daughter.

“Get help!” Rue shouted after her.

There were perhaps twenty of them with painted faces and knives. They circled the two Knorth, chuckling.

“Here, chickee, chickee, chickee . . .”

Jame drew a deep breath, extended her claws, and screamed. As the rathorn battle cry deepened to a roar, both she and Rue sprang forward, taking their enemies by surprise. Some Caineron tripped over each other, trying to get out of the way. Others, however, closed in. Jame slashed at them, ripping cloth, ripping skin, and slid past them with wind-blowing when they slashed back.

At first she sensed Rue at her back, but then they were separated. Twenty against two were not good odds to begin with. This was worse.

Someone kicked her from behind and she crashed to her knees. Hands seized her hands, nails still out, and stretched them out to either side. She couldn’t get free. She couldn’t get up. Fingers twined in her braids and jerked her head back by their roots. Straining to turn, out of the corner of an eye she saw the flash of a knife.

“Don’t cut me!” the Caineron had cried. “Don’t cut me!”

A figure in a pale robe entered the room and approached her, its waxen mask fixed in a smile. A voice spoke softly through its motionless lips.

“Now you will see,” it said, “what it means to defy your superiors.”

At that point, Harn Grip-hard arrived with a bellow, twelve Knorth behind him. They were outnumbered, but they swept the hall clear of Caineron within seconds.

Harn picked Jame up off the floor and shook her.

“What are you playing at?” he roared in her face. “You little fool, why d’you always go off on your own like this?”

Jame realized that she had scared him half witless and now he was on the edge of a berserker flare. Still, she could only take so much of being man-handled in a day, much less within fifteen minutes. Her own temper flared. She rotated her hands in his grip and put the tips of her unsheathed claws against his inner wrists, over the throbbing pulse.

“Put. Me. Down.”

Lyra burst in at the door. “I found them!” she cried. “They’re dead. All of them. And . . . and . . . ”

But here she fell prey to strong hysterics and made no more sense.

Harn and Jame looked at each other. He still held her suspended in mid-air and she still had her claws poised over his veins. She withdrew them. He put her down. They both turned toward Lyra who had collapsed, wailing, into Rue’s arms.

“Show us,” said Jame.

Still babbling with shock, Lyra led them to a closet. Five bodies were stuffed into it in a tangle of limbs, with room for more on top. Harn’s servant Secur was at the bottom of the heap, identifiable by his wooden foot sticking out. All had had their throats cut. Even more shocking, when they were pulled out and sorted, was that each had been scalped.

“‘Don’t cut me,’” Jame said. “Was this what the Caineron meant? Oh. I’ve just realized what game we’re playing. It comes early, but this is Tentir’s Winter War.”

Harn was sitting on the floor with Secur’s head in his lap. He kept gesturing as if to stroke the old man’s gray locks, but they were gone, leaving red ruin. A massive rage built in his eyes. Jame knelt before him and put her hands on his shoulders.

Ancestors, please, let me deal with this, she thought, even as she felt the berserker surge within him.

He lay his servant down and rose, Jame rising with him, to her feet. The other Kendar drew back.

“I will kill whoever did this,” he said thickly. “I will kill . . . ”

His hands rose as if to rend. So he might have looked just before he tore apart the Kencyr who had dared to taunt him, so many years ago. The room seemed to distort. Berserkers were the Kendar equivalent of the Highborn Shanir, which also had its problems with rage. Both could warp the world. Now everyone else had backed up to the walls, leaving Harn at the center of an apocalypse about to explode. Jame threw her arms around him.

Hold on, hold on . . .

“Think,” she said to him, trying to reach his rational mind. “Think. What is the goal of the Winter War?”

He blinked down at her, his mind finally, reluctantly, engaging.

“To capture the opponent’s flag.”

“But what else counts in the final tally? Seizing the scarves of the enemy. It’s called ‘scalping.’ It takes cadets out of play unless someone restores their scarves to them.”

Harn still looked dangerous. “Are you saying that the Caineron are claiming literal scalps?”

“Wait a minute,” said Rue. “Lady, in the war your scarf was worth as much as our house banner. We don’t have a flag here, but we have your braids, and your scalp.”

“Which they nearly got,” Jame said grimly.

A Knorth Kendar skidded into the hallway leading to the closet and stopped short, aghast at what he saw.

“Commander,” he gasped, wrenching himself back to his message. “The Commandant has just ridden into the courtyard. He brings company.”

VI

They arrived in the entry hall just as Sheth Sharp-tongue entered it. In recognition of the warmer clime, the Commandant wore a coat of black silk, elegantly figured, flowing. He smiled at the welcomers, with only a twitch of the lip at the absence of Malapirt or the prince. With him, several paces back, came a young man with golden hair and a rich if dusty coat.

“Timmon!” cried Lyra, and rushed to embrace him.

“Here now,” he said, enfolding her, “has it been so bad?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!”

His eyes found Jame. “I entrusted her to you.”

“You shuffled her off on me. I’m glad to see you, though, as she apparently is too. What happened?”

He smiled crookedly. “I slipped my mother’s minders and came south. The Ardeth randon let me through Hathir. The Randir in Midlands caught up with me at the border to Karkinor. I think my mother sent a rider to the Randir there. She still has some influence with Lady Rawneth, or perhaps vice versa. They would have packed me back home, but then the Commandant arrived and ordered them off.”

“One should not,” said the Commandant mildly, “treat a randon officer so dismissively. Not even a mother.”

“So here I am,” concluded Timmon with an engaging smile.

He still trusted his charm to win him all contests, Jame thought. Would that ever change?

Harn had advanced into to hall carrying Secur’s body. The party bearing the other four mutilated corpses followed him. Sheth saw him, saw them, and frowned.

“Old friend. What has happened?”

“You tell me. Your people did this.”

The Commandant touched Secur’s face with his white fingertips, closing the man’s dull, staring eyes.

“Not with my will,” he said.

“But under your watch.” No longer with rage but with sorrow, Harn spoke almost in tears. “How could you let this happen?”

“All summer, all autumn, I was at the border. Orders came from Restormir to obey the prince; orders came from the prince’s chamberlain to stay where I was. But I feared . . . I feared . . . then, when Lord Ardeth fell into my hands . . . ”

“Who?” blurted Timmon. “Oh, I thought you meant my grandfather Adric.”

Lyra thumped him in the chest with her small fist. “Timmy. Grow up.”

“ . . . I used that as an excuse to return to Karkinaroth, to find this.”

Painted Caineron poured out of the palace.

“Commandant!” cried Marham. “We won the war! At last, at last!”

Following him came the Caineron banner, a golden serpent on a field of crimson, devouring its young. The flag was trimmed with five mops of hair.

“Why is your face painted?” asked Sheth.

Bewildered, his second-in-command smeared a hand across his brow and stared at the resultant black and white streaks.

“I don’t know. He told me, ‘Honor my name,’ but what does that mean? ‘Obey me,’ he said. ‘Do this. Do that.’ Heh, heh, heh.”

His blurred face contorted into a sly grin. “Can do anything I want, can’t I? Who’s to tell me otherwise? You, you Shanir half-breed? Oh, the great commandant this, the great commandant that. I have more grandeur in my little finger than you do in your whole, long, lanky body. Who obeys whom, heh?”

Jame felt the hair prickle on her scalp. Sheth was talking to his lord Caldane through his unfortunate subordinate. Marham’s grin widened, bearing white teeth. The corners of his mouth cracked and bled.

“You will do as I say, yes, even you. Everyone will. It is inevitable. Obey now.”

Sheth swayed. For a moment, he covered his face with both hands. Then he let them fall, drew a deep breath, and straightened. The entire hall seemed to breathe with relief.

“These bodies, these scalps, will be given to the pyre at dusk,” Sheth said. “Commander Harn, do you agree?”

Harn nodded with a grunt.

“Marham . . . ”

But the Kendar had turned away. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he babbled, and bolted back into the palace.

VII

Harn asked Jame into his quarters, although he didn’t seem to know what to say to her when she got there. It was something to do with the pyres. She listened, and tried to make sense.

A rap on the door announced Sheth Sharp-tongue. He nodded to Jame and turned to Harn.

“So,” he said. “You feared that you would rule in favor of Jurik in the Transweald games.”

“I didn’t say so,” Harn protested, turning away, gruff. “I only said that he should be given a fair chance.”

“How fair could that be, given his training?”

“I trained him as best I could, but he grew up in High Bashti, in the king’s court. Its morals are his. I didn’t even know that he existed until I returned to the court thirty years later.”

They spoke as if Jame wasn’t there, but both had acknowledged her presence and neither had told her to leave. She sat on Harn’s bed, cross-legged, elbows on knees, fists under her chin, listening. It felt to her as if she had been called upon to bear witness. A randon, a Highborn, a potential Tyr-ridden—how much did they understand? Enough that she was here.

“Queen Vestula claims you as his sire.”

Harn turned, a baited bear. “I don’t deny that.”

“She also claims that you raped her.”

Harn beat his fists together. “I don’t deny that either, but I don’t remember any of it.”

“So, you don’t know. She has had other lovers, and has pulled other such tricks before, but without issue. Ah, I thought that would surprise you. Her position depends on having provided Mordaunt with an heir whom he can at least pretend is legitimate.”

Harn glared at him. “Jurik is my son,” he said. “I know it. But I don’t have to be proud of him or responsible for him. I see that now.”

And that, thought Jame, was as fair a judgement as he was likely to make. The mission on which Torisen had sent her was complete. Now one only need deal with the aftershocks.

A rumble came from the core of the palace and plaster dust rattled down from a cracked ceiling. As the disturbance subsided, someone knocked on the door. The Commandant answered it. One of his Kendar murmured a message to him. When he had gently closed the door and turned, his expression was unreadable.

“The pyre is ready,” he told them, and began slowly to pace.

Harn got out of his way. Jame watched. The Commandant kept his emotions close, behind a sardonic mask, but they were there, and they stirred the room like the passing of some great, dire cat.

“One more will join it,” he said over his shoulder. “Marham has taken the white knife. Others had to be talked out of it. To most, the events of the past few days are a nightmare from which they are just awakening. Marham was a good man, until m’lord Caldane fouled his soul.”

He laughed, a terrible sound. “All of this time, we have worried about the lost clause that would protect us against our paymasters here in the Central Lands, but we were looking in the wrong direction. The contracts that really matter are between a lord and his people, between Kencyr and Kencyr. Is that not so, lady?”

They both looked at Jame.

“Yes,” she said, and felt her answer resonate in the very fabric of a tortured Kencyrath. Would Tori agree? She thought so.

Some things need to be broken.

What was that but another way to say that change must come?

The mass pyre was laid in the palace courtyard. Much of it came from shattered furniture doused in oil. Five Knorth bodies and one Caineron were placed on or under combustible layers, and more oil was poured on top. The sun set behind the western mountains. Shadows climbed the palace’s central tower. The curtains there must be going in and out, in and out, Jame thought as she watched the Commandant insert a burning brand into the wooden pile. Flames kindled and licked up its sides, over kindling, over bodies. Firelight flared up the palace’s pink facade.

A rumble came from within. The tower swayed. It was crumbling, falling. Wood and stone and shoddy plaster—all collapsed inward with the sullen internal ruction of a flawed architectural body giving way to gravity.

Dust belched out the front door.

Lyra emerged from it, clutching Smokie. The royal gold queen followed her, carrying her smallest cub by the scruff of its neck. The rest of her family tumbled after her.

“Oh!” Lyra cried, falling into Jame’s arms, pinning a protesting ounce cub between them. “My poor prince is dead! He died on clean linen, though, smiling, so that’s something, isn’t it?”

“I would like to think so,” said Jame, watching the spires fall.

A crowd of nobles and commoners pressed against the outer gate. Now it gave way and they spilled into the courtyard, ignoring the Kencyr and the flaring pyre.

“Prince Uthecon is dead!” they cried. “Long live the new prince!”

But who was he?

Claimants rallied their supporters, there, on the threshold of desolation. Some apparently were related to the lost, poisoned councilors. It had taken them all of this time to work up concern? Kencyr held them back, or in their enthusiasm they would have fallen into the pyrrhic flames. Some surged forward as if to seize Lyra as their prize, but Caineron troops held them off while Timmon retrieved her from Jame’s arms and held her tight.

“These people are animals,” said Harn, swatting one of the most persistent.

“They have a reputation for sophistication,” said Jame. “Ah, ambition.”

Another figure descended the stair, feet crunching on debris. It wore a pale robe and the waxen mask of the Deathless.

“Ah, people, dear people,” said Malapirt, taking off the latter and smiling at the faces turned upward toward him. “Have I not served you well? Who else should you choose to lead you forward after this tragic occurrence?”

A growl answered him. The crowd bore him backward into the entry hall, into the palace’s ongoing collapse, and left him there.

“Well,” said Harn. “Maybe they aren’t so bad after all.”

VIII

It remained to decide what to do about Lyra.

“I would take her back to Omiroth,” said Timmon uncomfortably, “but I don’t think my mother would welcome her. Most likely, she would contrive to send her to Restormir, or to Wilden.”

“And you, as Lord Ardeth, couldn’t say ‘no’?” Jame asked.

Timmon squirmed. “She’s very persistent, my mother. Not smart, you understand, but stubborn.”

“I should think,” Jame said, “that she would welcome a Caineron as your consort.”

“But, you see, according to her standards Lyra is used goods. Never mind that no man has touched her. She’s been the consort of two Karkinoran princes, both now dead. I don’t know what Mother wants for me, but it isn’t that.”

Jame threw up her hands. “Timmon, you have to sort this out for yourself. My advice? Send Lyra to the Women’s World at Gothregor. The Matriarchs will have conniptions, but Tori won’t force her to do anything she doesn’t want. And let her take the ounces with her.”


Back | Next
Framed