A New Snippet
I meant to post this before but kept forgetting. Here are the first two sections of Chapter I. The working title for this novel has changed to Come to Judgment
Chapter I: The White Hills
Winter 36 - 45
I
“… and then,” said the new queen of High Bashti, pacing back and forth in the winter garden of her family palace atop Mount Tigganis, “the merchants come to me complaining that they have nothing to sell or to buy, that their own children are going hungry. Is it their fault that no one will bring food into the city for fear that the mob will seize it? I suppose not. The city guard, the army, and my own Knorth troops all are assigned to protect shipments. What more can I do?”
Instead of black for her dead father, Lord Prestige, Pensa now wore white in honor of her coming marriage. The tilt of her heavy brows over fine eyes, however, still looked miserable, nor did white become her stocky figure.
“Dark, squat, ugly,” Prince Jurik had called her when he had broken off their first engagement.
At the time she had been a besotted child and he a thwarted would-be adult. Then Jurik had laughed and driven her out of his quarters, her carefully stitched bridal clothing torn to tatters by his jeering hangers-on. Since, she had become her father’s advisor, then his heir, then Bashti’s queen. Jurik, still, was counted as a child.
As she sat on the edge of a dry fountain muffled against winter, listening, Jame hardly knew what to say. Half Kendar that he was, actually Harn Grip-hard’s son, Jurik had been and remained a cruel, stupid lout.
As for the late King Mordaunt, what a fool to cut the public dole and to raise taxes simultaneously. His subsequent conflicts with both the High Council of patricians and the citizens of High Bashti proved that. However, he had been desperate at the time to finish the temple that he thought would make him a living god. All of the other gods of High Bashti were dead, deified by the faith of their worshippers. The deceased but not departed included their king, the late General Suwaeton. Terrified of him, his grandson had contracted the Shadow Guild to poison him, but his followers had remained true. Now his imperishable corpse lay in Mordaunt’s unfinished temple since his own had been burned down during the recent riots.
As bad as the latter had been, Suwaeton was now more popular, powerful, and present than ever before.
On the other hand, while the Deathless and their pale prophet had promised Mordaunt immortality, no one, then or now, willingly worshipped him. He had intended to displace the entire Pantheon in order to reign over both the living and the dead. Instead, his legacy already stank as no doubt did his charred remains in the family mausoleum, if anyone cared to check.
“Have you talked recently to the General?” Jame asked Pensa.
“Oh, I pray to him constantly, and sometimes he answers through Trepsis.”
That was the old actor who performed as Suwaeton in the late general’s beloved god farces, sometimes to the point of manifesting him.
“How is Trepsis?” Jame asked Pensa.
“His hands are still scorched from channeling the General’s lightning to strike down Mordaunt. Now they are festering. He may lose them. When Suwaeton possesses him, however, he is whole.”
The queen turned, distracted, away from a painful topic. Gods sometimes demanded sacrifices, even from their most loyal supplicants. That was hard to face.
“Have I thanked you,” she now said, veering off on a tangent, “for giving me the Shadow Guild’s contract with Mordaunt to kill my father?”
“Yes. Repeatedly.”
Jame supposed that was why Pensa had settled on her as a confidant – that and being, as Torisen’s lordan, her own people’s concept of a royal female, even though as lordan she had male status. It was a jolt (and further rejection of Mordaunt) for High Bashti to be ruled now by a queen rather than by a king, and of a different patrician house at that.
As for the Guild contract, it had seemed only right at the time to give it to the then Lady Tigganis as proof that the Guild was behind Prestige’s death. They both had a grievance there, Pensa for her father, Jame for the slaughter thirty years ago of her kins-women, which had become known as the Knorth Massacre.
“How is your father?” she now asked Pensa.
The girl wrung her stubby hands and continued to pace between rows of dormant flowers, some of whose deadheads projected dejectedly out of the mulch.
“By day, he wanders his old apartment here; by night, the streets of High Bashti, hunting for the Guild members who killed him. True, the General has declared him a saint and his body does not corrupt, but sometimes … sometimes it is hard not to see him as a monster. He was poisoned by the Guild and then his body was torn apart by it. I sewed him back together again, with a curse in every stitch at those who had mutilated him. What can he be now but a desecration? But my house worships and sustains him with its faith, more, even, than they support me. Meanwhile, I … I begin to doubt.”
Jame wondered if that would undo Pensa’s work of paternal preservation. So too also might Prestige’s hunt for his killers, if he caught them and had his revenge.
The General had asked her to report to him by way of prayer – an odd thing to ask of a Kencyr monotheist. Maybe, though, she should at least consult with him. More and more, what happened to the souls of the dead on Rathillien was becoming an issue.
Still thinking about the Shadow Guild, Pensa laughed with an over-wrought note of triumph. “You struck a shrewd blow there, by burning down their archives. They will never again be able to blackmail people who have previously contracted with them.”
It hadn’t been her directly, Jame thought. Rather, the fire had spread from a candle tipped over when Guild members had swarmed to attack their own grand master. She had come out of that inferno with three of their contracts, all but one since used judicially. In the case of the other two, for once she wasn’t sorry that destruction tended to follow wherever she went. As for the remaining one, well, that might prove the most explosive of all once she rejoined her own people.
At that moment, Prince Jurik stormed into the courtyard, and Pensa turned to face her intended. He had put aside most of his gaudy attire as leader of the king’s brigands but still gilded his eyelids and wore his golden circlet, truculently pulled down to hide a receding hair-line. At thirty, not yet recognized as an adult by either his putative or his real father, he was already going bald.
“What d’you mean by telling your chamberlain that I can’t precede you at our wedding?” he demanded.
“You aren’t king,” she told him. Her voice was steady, but she shook slightly. Standing up to her betrothed was proving harder than she had anticipated.
“I am … I was crown prince of Bashti.”
“You are still the son of Queen Vestula and the cousin of Hathir’s King Harward. Soon you will become my consort.”
As pleased as Jurik had been to find that his father wasn’t pinch-purse Mordaunt but war-legend Harn Grip-hard, he hadn’t taken well to the news that he was illegitimate. There had gone his hope of being crowned king, unless he could somehow finagle that title through his marriage to Pensa. That was why he had reluctantly accepted her proposal. In the meantime, he pushed and pushed. Now, he did so again.
“When are you going to declare me the commander of the city guard?”
“Perhaps never. That depends on the City Council.”
Jurik sneered. “You are queen, are you not? Your word should be enough.”
“I govern by consent. My will is that of the people. They do not favor you.”
His face twisted in a scowl. “They would if you showed them where your true affection lies.”
Pensa sighed. “You will be prince-consort. Be content with that.”
Push, push, and yet again push.
“If you deny me the way to earn money, at least grant me a suitable income. Weddings are expensive.”
“Your mother already gives you a generous allowance. Ask her.”
Jame had risen, half expecting the berserker equivalent of a temper tantrum. He had inherited that trait and his burly build from his true father, Harn. Jurik had killed before this in blind rage after being crossed. She stood between him and his queen. He snarled in her face. Having failed to match her before, however, he thought better of this, turned, and stomped off, kicking flower mounds apart as he went. Deadheads flew, disintegrating into clouds of shriveled seeds.
So, Ancestors willing, might his own seed desiccate and die.
“You still want to marry that immature bully?” she asked Pensa.
The queen shrugged, helpless. “He was my first love.”
“He needn’t be your last, the alliance with Hathir be damned. He abused you then. He’s trying to do it again now.”
Jame eventually got away. She was tired of Pensa leaning on her, also unsure what she could do except listen and sympathize. On that count, nothing she said mattered anyway; Pensa would follow her heart, to whatever misery lay ahead. Her own work here, Jame thought, was done. To stay was to risk causing fresh disasters.
Indeed, she had been eager to leave for the past dozen days, ever since her return on the 24th of Winter from Karkinaroth when she had realized that Torisen hadn’t yet written to her. Never a good correspondent, he tended to fall silent when something dire happened.
The very night she had decided to go home, she had been touched by the nightmare of a hot, stinking room, with something horrible astir in its shadows. She and her brother sometimes shared dreams, a side-effect of being twins despite the difference in their ages. This, she felt, was one of them. What did it mean, though, except that Tori was in trouble again?
Something was wrong in the Riverland.
She had since been stuck in High Bashti by Pensa, but even more so by the need to ensure supplies for the Riverland’s winter after Mordaunt’s refusal to honor his contractual obligations to his Knorth mercenaries. Pensa had promised that she would settle those debts. First, though, she had to regain control of High Bashti, and talking to Jame had seemed to help her mental state, if not necessarily the physical circumstances.
What now?
II
Still wondering, Jame made her way through the busy streets of the capital as late afternoon fell. High Bashti showed the scars of riot and arson – walls seared, statues toppled, public fountains cracked – but its citizens were a resilient lot, already rebuilding. What bothered them the most, no doubt, on the verge of dinner, was that most food stalls remained closed with nothing to sell – this, in a city where domestic kitchens were rare among the common folk even in more abundant times.
Campus Kencyrath was lucky that it had in residence Lady Anthea, one of the city’s richest women, who had taken an interest not only in the Kencyr garrison but in a resident horde of street urchins and a recent flood of impoverished citizens in flight from civic chaos. Thanks to Anthea, so far none of the campus’s inhabitants had gone hungry.
Here at last was the Campus in its vale between urban hills, a three-story amphitheater with many apartments set in its outer wall and stables beneath them. Here also were Harn Grip-hard’s second-story quarters, next to Lady Anthea’s more luxurious ones.
Harn’s hulk hunched black against the failing light of the inner field. He was seated at his desk, fumbling blunt-fingered through a mountainous pile of messages.
“Everyone writes at once,” he grumbled, hearing Jame’s footstep in the threshold, but not turning to greet her. Not for the first time, she felt as if their lives overlapped. Tori no doubt felt the same. “Where is Secur when I need him?”
In Karkinaroth, Jame thought, remembering Harn’s late servant. Ashes on the wind. Something had gone desperately wrong there too, when Lord Caineron’s corruption of his Kendar had caused them to murder their own kind in a demented version of Tentir’s winter games.
“We won the war!” Sheth’s second-in-command Marham had cried, waving the Caineron banner from which five mops of hair dangled, each still attached to its flayed scalp. “At last, at last!”
Then he had come to his senses and taken the White Knife.
On hearing this, the Commandant had turned and began to pace his room, hands clenched behind him, while Harn and Jame hastily got out of his way.
“All of this time,” he had said over his shoulder, “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 Highborn and his Kendar, between Kencyr and Kencyr.”
That was still true. Lacking their god’s support, honor had become the keystone of the Kencyrath, but Honor’s Paradox remained: did a lord like Caldane keep his hands clean by ordering his people to do his dirty work, and did they likewise escape blame by obeying him? How, then, in either case, did honor survive? Sheth’s bond to his master had been severely strained that night, but it had not broken. What would it take, to do that?
Sorting through the scripts on Harn’s desk, Jame came up with one inscribed by a familiar hand.
“This is from Torisen,” she said.
Harn grunted. “I’ve read that. One of the Lords Edirr – unclear which – has been killed during an idiotic raid on the Coman. The surviving twin won’t acknowledge his death, much less give his body to the pyre. The Riverland Edirr, consequently, have run mad and immolated the Coman ambassador. Blackie has sent your cousin Kindrie Soul-walker to see what he can do as a healer. Since then, however, unrest has spread to the Central Lands.”
He dug out more messages and waved them in her face.
“Here. The Coman in Mirkwood report that the Edirr in Ordor are getting all roiled up due to some ‘pale agent’ – their phrase, not mine: unclear who or what that is. Next, they may swarm across the Silver to attack the Coman, who are moving north to meet them. That would almost be funny, tiny house that the Edirr is, the Coman not much larger, if the threat wasn’t so serious. The Knorth are almost as small, and look what disaster they wrought in the grip of your father’s madness in the White Hills. Now their allies are swarming.”
He pulled out another letter.
“Commandant Sheth says that he’s been ordered by Lord Caldane to take the entire Caineron garrison north from Karkinor to ‘beat back the Edirr menace’ and he is already on the move.”
“The Coman are loosely allied with the Caineron,” said Jame, reflecting. “As are the Edirr with the Knorth. Who else?”
“The Brandon, Jaran, and Danior are with us. The Randir are with the Caineron. I don’t know about the Ardeth. There, Lord Timmon likes you from your cadet days together, but his mother Distan favors Rawneth as a Highborn lady with power in her house. All of these Central Land mercenaries are on the move, trying to avert disaster. You can see where they will converge.”
Picturing the map of Rathillien, Jame shivered.
She had suddenly remembered the fragment of another dream, this one of white, skull-shaped flowers cupped in the hollow of hills, danced over by pale butterflies, under an ashen sky. If this too came from one of Tori’s visions, was he foreseeing again?
“The White Hills,” she said.
Harn glowered at her. “Yes. The slaughter there thirty years ago after the Knorth Massacre was the downfall of Ganth Graylord and nearly that of the Knorth. It will also be that of his son Torisen if these forces clash.”
Jame considered this. “That could be why Lord Caineron is pushing for a conflict now, to destroy my brother as highlord. I was at the High Council meeting where Caldane first proposed that the larger houses such as his and the Randir should have more power than the smaller ones, such as the Danior, Edirr, Coman, and Knorth – not one house, one vote but according to house size. He didn’t have the influence then to overturn the Kencyrath but he might have if Tori hadn’t startled him into a fit of hiccups, during which he rose off the floor, bumped like a bee in a bottle against a broken window, and then floated out through a hole, screaming.”
“Huh,” said Harn. “I heard about that, but didn’t understand it.”
“Well, several years ago at the Cataracts I tricked him into drinking a potion that I had picked up at the ruined Builders’ city in the Anarchies. I think they used it to bob around the ceiling at parties, having fun. Caldane, of course, is deathly afraid of heights.”
Harn stared at her. “Why is it that whenever something weird happens, you are always behind it?”
Jame’s mouth quirked into a wry grimace. “Sometimes, perhaps, but not ‘always,’ surely.”
“Huh,” he said again, and fished out one last script. “Blackie sent you a message too.”
Jame took it and saw that it consisted of one word scrawled in her brother’s hand: “Come.”.
Chapter I: The White Hills
Winter 36 - 45
I
“… and then,” said the new queen of High Bashti, pacing back and forth in the winter garden of her family palace atop Mount Tigganis, “the merchants come to me complaining that they have nothing to sell or to buy, that their own children are going hungry. Is it their fault that no one will bring food into the city for fear that the mob will seize it? I suppose not. The city guard, the army, and my own Knorth troops all are assigned to protect shipments. What more can I do?”
Instead of black for her dead father, Lord Prestige, Pensa now wore white in honor of her coming marriage. The tilt of her heavy brows over fine eyes, however, still looked miserable, nor did white become her stocky figure.
“Dark, squat, ugly,” Prince Jurik had called her when he had broken off their first engagement.
At the time she had been a besotted child and he a thwarted would-be adult. Then Jurik had laughed and driven her out of his quarters, her carefully stitched bridal clothing torn to tatters by his jeering hangers-on. Since, she had become her father’s advisor, then his heir, then Bashti’s queen. Jurik, still, was counted as a child.
As she sat on the edge of a dry fountain muffled against winter, listening, Jame hardly knew what to say. Half Kendar that he was, actually Harn Grip-hard’s son, Jurik had been and remained a cruel, stupid lout.
As for the late King Mordaunt, what a fool to cut the public dole and to raise taxes simultaneously. His subsequent conflicts with both the High Council of patricians and the citizens of High Bashti proved that. However, he had been desperate at the time to finish the temple that he thought would make him a living god. All of the other gods of High Bashti were dead, deified by the faith of their worshippers. The deceased but not departed included their king, the late General Suwaeton. Terrified of him, his grandson had contracted the Shadow Guild to poison him, but his followers had remained true. Now his imperishable corpse lay in Mordaunt’s unfinished temple since his own had been burned down during the recent riots.
As bad as the latter had been, Suwaeton was now more popular, powerful, and present than ever before.
On the other hand, while the Deathless and their pale prophet had promised Mordaunt immortality, no one, then or now, willingly worshipped him. He had intended to displace the entire Pantheon in order to reign over both the living and the dead. Instead, his legacy already stank as no doubt did his charred remains in the family mausoleum, if anyone cared to check.
“Have you talked recently to the General?” Jame asked Pensa.
“Oh, I pray to him constantly, and sometimes he answers through Trepsis.”
That was the old actor who performed as Suwaeton in the late general’s beloved god farces, sometimes to the point of manifesting him.
“How is Trepsis?” Jame asked Pensa.
“His hands are still scorched from channeling the General’s lightning to strike down Mordaunt. Now they are festering. He may lose them. When Suwaeton possesses him, however, he is whole.”
The queen turned, distracted, away from a painful topic. Gods sometimes demanded sacrifices, even from their most loyal supplicants. That was hard to face.
“Have I thanked you,” she now said, veering off on a tangent, “for giving me the Shadow Guild’s contract with Mordaunt to kill my father?”
“Yes. Repeatedly.”
Jame supposed that was why Pensa had settled on her as a confidant – that and being, as Torisen’s lordan, her own people’s concept of a royal female, even though as lordan she had male status. It was a jolt (and further rejection of Mordaunt) for High Bashti to be ruled now by a queen rather than by a king, and of a different patrician house at that.
As for the Guild contract, it had seemed only right at the time to give it to the then Lady Tigganis as proof that the Guild was behind Prestige’s death. They both had a grievance there, Pensa for her father, Jame for the slaughter thirty years ago of her kins-women, which had become known as the Knorth Massacre.
“How is your father?” she now asked Pensa.
The girl wrung her stubby hands and continued to pace between rows of dormant flowers, some of whose deadheads projected dejectedly out of the mulch.
“By day, he wanders his old apartment here; by night, the streets of High Bashti, hunting for the Guild members who killed him. True, the General has declared him a saint and his body does not corrupt, but sometimes … sometimes it is hard not to see him as a monster. He was poisoned by the Guild and then his body was torn apart by it. I sewed him back together again, with a curse in every stitch at those who had mutilated him. What can he be now but a desecration? But my house worships and sustains him with its faith, more, even, than they support me. Meanwhile, I … I begin to doubt.”
Jame wondered if that would undo Pensa’s work of paternal preservation. So too also might Prestige’s hunt for his killers, if he caught them and had his revenge.
The General had asked her to report to him by way of prayer – an odd thing to ask of a Kencyr monotheist. Maybe, though, she should at least consult with him. More and more, what happened to the souls of the dead on Rathillien was becoming an issue.
Still thinking about the Shadow Guild, Pensa laughed with an over-wrought note of triumph. “You struck a shrewd blow there, by burning down their archives. They will never again be able to blackmail people who have previously contracted with them.”
It hadn’t been her directly, Jame thought. Rather, the fire had spread from a candle tipped over when Guild members had swarmed to attack their own grand master. She had come out of that inferno with three of their contracts, all but one since used judicially. In the case of the other two, for once she wasn’t sorry that destruction tended to follow wherever she went. As for the remaining one, well, that might prove the most explosive of all once she rejoined her own people.
At that moment, Prince Jurik stormed into the courtyard, and Pensa turned to face her intended. He had put aside most of his gaudy attire as leader of the king’s brigands but still gilded his eyelids and wore his golden circlet, truculently pulled down to hide a receding hair-line. At thirty, not yet recognized as an adult by either his putative or his real father, he was already going bald.
“What d’you mean by telling your chamberlain that I can’t precede you at our wedding?” he demanded.
“You aren’t king,” she told him. Her voice was steady, but she shook slightly. Standing up to her betrothed was proving harder than she had anticipated.
“I am … I was crown prince of Bashti.”
“You are still the son of Queen Vestula and the cousin of Hathir’s King Harward. Soon you will become my consort.”
As pleased as Jurik had been to find that his father wasn’t pinch-purse Mordaunt but war-legend Harn Grip-hard, he hadn’t taken well to the news that he was illegitimate. There had gone his hope of being crowned king, unless he could somehow finagle that title through his marriage to Pensa. That was why he had reluctantly accepted her proposal. In the meantime, he pushed and pushed. Now, he did so again.
“When are you going to declare me the commander of the city guard?”
“Perhaps never. That depends on the City Council.”
Jurik sneered. “You are queen, are you not? Your word should be enough.”
“I govern by consent. My will is that of the people. They do not favor you.”
His face twisted in a scowl. “They would if you showed them where your true affection lies.”
Pensa sighed. “You will be prince-consort. Be content with that.”
Push, push, and yet again push.
“If you deny me the way to earn money, at least grant me a suitable income. Weddings are expensive.”
“Your mother already gives you a generous allowance. Ask her.”
Jame had risen, half expecting the berserker equivalent of a temper tantrum. He had inherited that trait and his burly build from his true father, Harn. Jurik had killed before this in blind rage after being crossed. She stood between him and his queen. He snarled in her face. Having failed to match her before, however, he thought better of this, turned, and stomped off, kicking flower mounds apart as he went. Deadheads flew, disintegrating into clouds of shriveled seeds.
So, Ancestors willing, might his own seed desiccate and die.
“You still want to marry that immature bully?” she asked Pensa.
The queen shrugged, helpless. “He was my first love.”
“He needn’t be your last, the alliance with Hathir be damned. He abused you then. He’s trying to do it again now.”
Jame eventually got away. She was tired of Pensa leaning on her, also unsure what she could do except listen and sympathize. On that count, nothing she said mattered anyway; Pensa would follow her heart, to whatever misery lay ahead. Her own work here, Jame thought, was done. To stay was to risk causing fresh disasters.
Indeed, she had been eager to leave for the past dozen days, ever since her return on the 24th of Winter from Karkinaroth when she had realized that Torisen hadn’t yet written to her. Never a good correspondent, he tended to fall silent when something dire happened.
The very night she had decided to go home, she had been touched by the nightmare of a hot, stinking room, with something horrible astir in its shadows. She and her brother sometimes shared dreams, a side-effect of being twins despite the difference in their ages. This, she felt, was one of them. What did it mean, though, except that Tori was in trouble again?
Something was wrong in the Riverland.
She had since been stuck in High Bashti by Pensa, but even more so by the need to ensure supplies for the Riverland’s winter after Mordaunt’s refusal to honor his contractual obligations to his Knorth mercenaries. Pensa had promised that she would settle those debts. First, though, she had to regain control of High Bashti, and talking to Jame had seemed to help her mental state, if not necessarily the physical circumstances.
What now?
II
Still wondering, Jame made her way through the busy streets of the capital as late afternoon fell. High Bashti showed the scars of riot and arson – walls seared, statues toppled, public fountains cracked – but its citizens were a resilient lot, already rebuilding. What bothered them the most, no doubt, on the verge of dinner, was that most food stalls remained closed with nothing to sell – this, in a city where domestic kitchens were rare among the common folk even in more abundant times.
Campus Kencyrath was lucky that it had in residence Lady Anthea, one of the city’s richest women, who had taken an interest not only in the Kencyr garrison but in a resident horde of street urchins and a recent flood of impoverished citizens in flight from civic chaos. Thanks to Anthea, so far none of the campus’s inhabitants had gone hungry.
Here at last was the Campus in its vale between urban hills, a three-story amphitheater with many apartments set in its outer wall and stables beneath them. Here also were Harn Grip-hard’s second-story quarters, next to Lady Anthea’s more luxurious ones.
Harn’s hulk hunched black against the failing light of the inner field. He was seated at his desk, fumbling blunt-fingered through a mountainous pile of messages.
“Everyone writes at once,” he grumbled, hearing Jame’s footstep in the threshold, but not turning to greet her. Not for the first time, she felt as if their lives overlapped. Tori no doubt felt the same. “Where is Secur when I need him?”
In Karkinaroth, Jame thought, remembering Harn’s late servant. Ashes on the wind. Something had gone desperately wrong there too, when Lord Caineron’s corruption of his Kendar had caused them to murder their own kind in a demented version of Tentir’s winter games.
“We won the war!” Sheth’s second-in-command Marham had cried, waving the Caineron banner from which five mops of hair dangled, each still attached to its flayed scalp. “At last, at last!”
Then he had come to his senses and taken the White Knife.
On hearing this, the Commandant had turned and began to pace his room, hands clenched behind him, while Harn and Jame hastily got out of his way.
“All of this time,” he had said over his shoulder, “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 Highborn and his Kendar, between Kencyr and Kencyr.”
That was still true. Lacking their god’s support, honor had become the keystone of the Kencyrath, but Honor’s Paradox remained: did a lord like Caldane keep his hands clean by ordering his people to do his dirty work, and did they likewise escape blame by obeying him? How, then, in either case, did honor survive? Sheth’s bond to his master had been severely strained that night, but it had not broken. What would it take, to do that?
Sorting through the scripts on Harn’s desk, Jame came up with one inscribed by a familiar hand.
“This is from Torisen,” she said.
Harn grunted. “I’ve read that. One of the Lords Edirr – unclear which – has been killed during an idiotic raid on the Coman. The surviving twin won’t acknowledge his death, much less give his body to the pyre. The Riverland Edirr, consequently, have run mad and immolated the Coman ambassador. Blackie has sent your cousin Kindrie Soul-walker to see what he can do as a healer. Since then, however, unrest has spread to the Central Lands.”
He dug out more messages and waved them in her face.
“Here. The Coman in Mirkwood report that the Edirr in Ordor are getting all roiled up due to some ‘pale agent’ – their phrase, not mine: unclear who or what that is. Next, they may swarm across the Silver to attack the Coman, who are moving north to meet them. That would almost be funny, tiny house that the Edirr is, the Coman not much larger, if the threat wasn’t so serious. The Knorth are almost as small, and look what disaster they wrought in the grip of your father’s madness in the White Hills. Now their allies are swarming.”
He pulled out another letter.
“Commandant Sheth says that he’s been ordered by Lord Caldane to take the entire Caineron garrison north from Karkinor to ‘beat back the Edirr menace’ and he is already on the move.”
“The Coman are loosely allied with the Caineron,” said Jame, reflecting. “As are the Edirr with the Knorth. Who else?”
“The Brandon, Jaran, and Danior are with us. The Randir are with the Caineron. I don’t know about the Ardeth. There, Lord Timmon likes you from your cadet days together, but his mother Distan favors Rawneth as a Highborn lady with power in her house. All of these Central Land mercenaries are on the move, trying to avert disaster. You can see where they will converge.”
Picturing the map of Rathillien, Jame shivered.
She had suddenly remembered the fragment of another dream, this one of white, skull-shaped flowers cupped in the hollow of hills, danced over by pale butterflies, under an ashen sky. If this too came from one of Tori’s visions, was he foreseeing again?
“The White Hills,” she said.
Harn glowered at her. “Yes. The slaughter there thirty years ago after the Knorth Massacre was the downfall of Ganth Graylord and nearly that of the Knorth. It will also be that of his son Torisen if these forces clash.”
Jame considered this. “That could be why Lord Caineron is pushing for a conflict now, to destroy my brother as highlord. I was at the High Council meeting where Caldane first proposed that the larger houses such as his and the Randir should have more power than the smaller ones, such as the Danior, Edirr, Coman, and Knorth – not one house, one vote but according to house size. He didn’t have the influence then to overturn the Kencyrath but he might have if Tori hadn’t startled him into a fit of hiccups, during which he rose off the floor, bumped like a bee in a bottle against a broken window, and then floated out through a hole, screaming.”
“Huh,” said Harn. “I heard about that, but didn’t understand it.”
“Well, several years ago at the Cataracts I tricked him into drinking a potion that I had picked up at the ruined Builders’ city in the Anarchies. I think they used it to bob around the ceiling at parties, having fun. Caldane, of course, is deathly afraid of heights.”
Harn stared at her. “Why is it that whenever something weird happens, you are always behind it?”
Jame’s mouth quirked into a wry grimace. “Sometimes, perhaps, but not ‘always,’ surely.”
“Huh,” he said again, and fished out one last script. “Blackie sent you a message too.”
Jame took it and saw that it consisted of one word scrawled in her brother’s hand: “Come.”.
