Out in the hall, Jame leaned against the door, shaking.
You just gave it to her, she thought, appalled. And she was about to test its point. Some guardian you are. Throw the damn thing into the weirding; sink it in an ocean, if you can find one . . . .
Yes, and into whose hands would it fall then, for there would be someone else. It was an object of power, like the Book Bound in Pale Leather. It would go where it wished, although it took a millennium to arrive.
That last thought made Jame almost dizzy. Her life was tangled up in so many things the scope of which boggled the imagination. Usually, she tried to ignore them. Hard enough, living a day at a time. Eventually, though, she would have to come to grips with them all, or there would be real trouble.
But oh lord—nemesis, fratricide . . . and Tyr-ridan?
"Are you all right?"
The voice made Jame start. Before her stood a randon whose concerned, pleasantly ugly features gave her a second shock greater than the first.
"Captain!" she gasped, and hastily slipped the knife out of sight in its boot sheath.
The Brandan captain frowned, then also looked amazed as she recognized this masked, boy-clad figure. "Lady? What are you doing here?"
"I might ask the same of you. Shouldn't you be on duty in the Women's Halls at Gothregor?"
"Should, yes, but when my lady Brenwyr needs must leave for Falkirr, blind as she still is, with weirding coming on, how could I or her guard let her go alone?"
Brenwyr. She must be the "lady of stature" whose arrival had caught the Director so much on the hop. Ask for a matriarch to question and one appears . . . except that Jame didn't want so much as to see this particular Highborn, much less demand answers of her. Still . . . .
"Did you say 'blind'?"
"Aye. It was that shout of yours that did it, lady, if you'll recall. It shocked her deaf too, but that passed off more quickly. Not that I blame you for popping off with such a noise. That was a shocking thing which M'lady Kallystine did to you."
She was regarding Jame, trying to assess the remaining damage, but the mask thwarted her. Ironic, thought Jame, that if she had been bare faced the Kendar would have been too embarrassed to look at all. As it was, the Highborn turned away first.
"I should pay my respects to the Matriarch, I suppose."
"That's as you decide, lady, of course, but she's none too pleased with you."
"That I can believe," said Jame ruefully.
After all, the last words the Matriarch had addressed to her had been a curse. Memory set it rankling again:
Roofless and rootless, blood and bone, cursed be and cast out.
It had never been entirely out of her mind, she realized, like a burr that sticks and frets. Somehow, being under a Kencyr roof again made the irritation worse. In Brenwyr, had she really run afoul of a Shanir maledight? There were old songs about such people. They usually died young, though, killed by their families in self-defense, if they didn't wish themselves dead first. The cursing talent sounded akin to the God-voice, but with only That-Which-Destroys speaking—a frightening thought. Still, it didn't seem likely that Brenwyr could be one since it would take phenomenal self-control to hide such a thing and so-called Iron Matriarch didn't seem very controlled at all, at least around Jame.
"Nonetheless," she said, thinking out-loud, "I hurt her. That requires an apology, even if she bashes me over the head half way through it."
"That isn't very good sense," said the captain, "but it is good manners and good will. I'll stand by to see fair play. This way, lady."
Brenwyr had been allotted quarters on the third floor down, against the southern wall. As the captain and Jame approached, they found the escort—a cadet ten-command, late of the Gothregor guard—gathered out in the hall, speaking together in low, worried voices. Jame recognized one of them as the cadet who had failed to stop her escape with Jorin from the Brandan compound . . . could it only be six days ago?
"She's in a queer mood," the ten-commander reported. "Still of a stew to be on her way. When I told her that the weirding had closed in, she made a strange sound, like choking, and ordered us all out."
"She was too on edge to stay at Gothregor either," mused the captain. "A strong-willed lady, that. When her sight returns, as the Ardeth Matriarch assures me it soon should, she's apt to bolt, mist or no, unless we look sharp. Lady?"
Jame closed her mouth with a snap. What had she said when the Iron Matriarch had cursed her? The same to you, Brandan—and now Brenwyr was also too restless to stay under a Kencyr roof? Sweet Trinity.
"I'd still like to see her, captain." Now, more than ever.
"All right, lady. On your head be it."
She knocked. There was no answer, but they could hear footsteps inside, pacing back and forth, back and forth. Jame pushed open the door.
The large room beyond was a study, full of work tables and scroll shelves. Arched windows lined the far wall, the Director's stair spidering past outside against the growing light of day. Brenwyr's dark form stalked past it, up the room and down, up and down. Her boots intermittently rang against the oak floor and thudded as dust swirled up around the hem of her divided skirt. Her grim, blind way led through mounds of crumbling furniture, as if she had cleared a path for herself by cursing anything that got in her way.
Jame cleared her throat. "Matriarch?" Crack, crack, thud went the boots without pause. "Lady?" Thud, thud, crack . . . . "Brenwyr?"
The Highborn stopped short, not turning. "Aerulan?" she whispered.
"No, lady," said Jame, taken aback. "It's only me."
"You." The tone was almost a curse in itself. "The Knorth mountebank."
"Careful," said the randon softly, to either or both of them.
Whatever clever questions Jame had planned to ask went straight out of her head. "I-I came to apologize," she stammered.
"What good is that?" said the other harshly. "It won't bring her back."
"W-who? Aerulan? B-but Matriarch, she's dead . . . ."
Brenwyr took a fierce stride toward her and fetched up hard against a work table. Jame found that, without thinking, she had backed into the randon. Behind them, Jorin was digging frantically at the door. The matriarch leaned over the table, fighting to control herself, red sparking in her blind, blood-shot eyes. A choked sound came out of her throat through bared teeth, curses half-swallowed.
"Dead . . . ." she repeated thickly, and gave a terrible laugh that was half sob. "Don't you think I know that? Get out, Knorth. Now. Before I hurt you." Her fist crashed down on the table. "Rot you!" she cried at it, with all her thwarted grief and rage.
The table sagged. Dry rot dust rattled down from it as its legs started to crumble.
Jame heard the door open behind her and Jorin scramble out. The next moment she was through it herself, shoved so hard by the randon that she bounced off the corridor's far wall. The captain shut the study door behind them. Her short, sandy hair was bristling, like Jorin's tail. They heard a curiously soft, slithering, rotten sound inside as the table collapsed.
That could have been me, Jame thought.
The cadets were staring at them. They had probably never seen a Kendar manhandle a lady before.
"Stay out of there," the captain told them. "If she calls, I'll go in, but no one else. Understand?"
When she turned, Jame saw worry and more than a touch of fear in her blue eyes. She hadn't known what her matriarch was. She still wasn't sure. A maledight with berserker tendencies, so high in the power of her house . . . . The suspicion alone was the stuff of nightmares.
"She did stop with the table," said Jame.
"Next time, she probably won't. You'd better leave, lady. Now."
There was no answer to that but to sketch a salute and go, so Jame did, wondering.
Was she to blame for Brenwyr's state? It was hard to see how, considering that Aerulan had been dead nearly twice as long as Jame had been alive. She felt as if she had wandered into an old song of passion and loss, but one as yet without an ending. It was that which might yet drive Brenwyr mad. If it did, she could do hideous damage, and stopping her could be just as costly. But that really wasn't Jame's business . . . was it? Anyway, how could one destructive Shanir help another? Being so ignorant made her feel stupid and weak. Worst thought of all, was she fated to end like Brenwyr, a curse to everyone she loved? Tori thought so already.
". . . a mistake, too dangerous to live . . . ."
Eh, enough of that. Since she had made such a mess of apologizing for something that wasn't her fault, she should find Brier Iron-thorn and try again for something that was.
Only then did she realize that Jorin was gone. Lady Brenwyr, it seemed, had been one too many for him. His disappearance didn't worry Jame too much, though: blind as he was, the ounce could usually find his way in any area which he had previously seen through her eyes. She would look for him as she did for Brier.
The morning passed, however, with no sign of either. Noon came and went.
Mount Alban's upper keep floated on over a weirding sea as its inmates set to their experiments, trying to direct their wandering home in one direction or another. As usual, the singers and scrollsmen competed. The former stationed themselves along the western edge of the observation deck and in unison chanted any song they could think of that referred to the Western Sea. (A fine thing, thought Jame, if Mount Alban should land in the middle of it.) Below, the latter engaged in more individual efforts, aiming for landfalls as diverse as Kothifir and the Isles of the Dead, using methods which ranged from solemn appeals to the masonry to one ancient scholar playing hopscotch in a corner.
Jame fell in with Index as the old man bustled about the upper keep and what remained of the lower, dispensing information and counting up his barter-profits with a miser's glee. Sometime, though, he faltered. A doggerel couplet would start him off again if he could remember it or if Jame could supply it from those she had over-heard in the herb shed. Index apparently used the wall of herb jars as a mnemonic device, with nonsense verse as its key, a clever solution for an old man with a failing memory and no trust in the written word—except that he had begun to forget the key. Jame remembered it for him when she could, and kept her own barter score for later use.
While she saved her questions with Index, however, she asked them whenever she ran into one of the Knorth cadets. Considerably junior to the Brandan honor guard, they had been scattered throughout the keep, told to make themselves useful or at least to keep out from under foot. None of them had seen Brier in hours, and all found excuses not to talk about her.
"Vant's orders," said Rue, glowering. "We're in trouble enough as it is, he says."
"What trouble?" Jame demanded.
Rue fidgeted with the sack of chicken feathers which she was carrying in aid, ancestors only knew, of what arcane experiment. As much as she disliked him, Vant was Five, with an authority over her more immediate than that of her lord's runagate sister. Suddenly she stiffened, listening.
"Did someone say, 'Land ho'?"
"Don't change the topic . . . ." said Jame, exasperated, then broke off as the cry came again. "Not 'Land ho.' 'Sand ho.' "
Rue dropped her sack and sprinted for the nearest stairs leading upward, hard on Jame's heels.
Hot, crimson light flooded down to meet them. Up on the observation deck, figures lined the western rail, black against the glare, singers and scrollsmen both. Beyond them, a setting sun hung low and swollen in the sky. Jame looked sideways down the line of scholars, blinking away black after-images from sun-shocked eyes. Not far away stood Brier Iron-thorn, red hair sullenly ablaze. As usual, her dark face revealed nothing, but the tense lines of her body suggested someone leaning hard against a short leash. Jame looked west again, following the Kendar's stare. A vast plain stretched out before them, seemingly endless, so absolutely flat as to look unreal. A hot breath of wind blew in her face. With it came a distant, empty keening and the dry incense of desert places.
"All right," said someone, breaking the awed silence. "What clown aimed for the Southern Wastes?"