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IV

Morning light spilled obliquely into the library, spreading like a cloth of beaten gold across the table. Rending it in two, however, was a shadow. The haunt singer Ashe sat with her back to the windows, a lump of obdurate darkness defying day.

"We need," she said in her hoarse, halting voice, "to make . . . some decisions."

Seated at the table's end, Kirien recorded the statement on her tablet, then added under it something in a rounded script not her own. "Aunt Trishien agrees," she said, reading the note, then looking up. "Myself, I don't entirely understand."

"Neither do I," snapped the Brandan Matriarch, glowering across the table at Ashe.

Brenwyr's sight had at last returned, although the bright light made her squint behind her mask. She kept her hand on a rolled tapestry which lay across the chair to her right, her fingers moving constantly against its nap with subtle changes of pressure.

"Jameth must go back to the Women's Halls to continue her training," she said impatiently. "No other course is open to a Highborn."

Kirien smiled. "No?"

"What a Jaran does concerns only the Jaran. This is a Knorth."

"Ah, but the Knorth aren't quite like any other house either, are they? Torisen certainly isn't much like any other lord."

"Thank . . . the Kendar for that."

"That's right," said Kirien thoughtfully. "He's served with randon all his life, many of them women like his steward Rowan or you, Ashe, before you took the singer's robe. More of his senior officers are female than in any other house. I wonder. Do you suppose that's why he didn't foam at the mouth when the Jaran proposed me as Lordan?"

Brenwyr made an impatient noise. "The other houses will never agree, once they realize that you are a woman. God's claws, to have kept it secret this long . . . !"

"No secret," said Kirien lightly, but with a slight hardening of her fine eyes. "Are we to blame that the lords can't see beyond their own misconceptions? Anyway, their agreement doesn't matter, as long as we have the Highlord's consent."

"Do you suppose that he'll give it now, with his sister to dispose of? If he empowers you, think of the precedent."

Kirien looked startled, then respectful. "You do have a brain, matriarch, don't you?"

Ashe made the rasping noise which for her was a chuckle. ". . . manners, child, manners . . . ."

The rasp became a deep, barking cough. One livid hand reached up, removed a tooth that had been jarred loose, and put it in a pocket.

"However," she continued, more seriously, "Torisen loathes . . . the Shanir."

Kirien frowned. "Who's Shanir? His sister? How do you know that?"

"The haunt that savaged her . . . she ripped off its face . . . with claws."

"Ancestors preserve us. Those gloves."

"And that sampler," added Brenwyr grimly. Adiraina had told her about the sewing teacher's slashed cloth, back in those dark, silent days at Gothregor when her only contact with the world had been the old woman's touch. "The Knorth is also a true berserker."

"And she carries . . . the Ivory Knife."

Brenwyr stared. "There really is such a thing? I thought it was only a Lawful Lie—no offense, singer."

"None taken. But much . . . thought to be myth . . . may come true . . . in the latter days, including Nemesis . . . That-Which-Destroys . . . the Third Face of God."

"The Tyr-ridan? After so long, to come in our lifetime . . . . And you think that this girl . . . . No. It can't be. Where are the other two, then? Answer me that!"

"Not yet matured," Kirien suggested. "Oh, perhaps come of age in the normal way, but unaware of what they are, much less ready to accept it. Nemesis would come first, in any event. Perimal Darkling has to be defeated before anything else can happen."

Her hand changed script. "Aunt Trishien says, 'Remember, the whole purpose of the Kencyrath may be to produce the Tyr-ridan and then not destroy them before they apotheosize. If so, everything else is incidental.' "

"Everything?" The Brandan Matriarch rose and began to pace. "All our long history, our trials and disasters, to no other end but that?"

"No one ever said . . . our god . . . was fair."

"I still don't understand," said Kirien. "Even granted that it's true (and it does have that horrible ring, doesn't it?), what do the four of us have to decide?"

"There have been . . . false nemeses . . . before."

Brenwyr stopped short, staring. "What?"

"It's a theory, anyway," said Kirien, now watching the haunt singer, suddenly wary. "Especially destructive Shanir have turned up before—spontaneous binders, soul-reapers, maledights—and some of them have done great harm, perhaps because no equally potent creative or curative Shanir were on hand to counter-balance them. I think that either Jamethiel Dream-Weaver or Gerridon was a nemesis, or maybe both. The latter's obsession with immortality—that is, with preservation—certainly suggests a personal imbalance. Incidentally, he also seems to have been unable to sire children, perhaps even impotent. Some historians argue that if his people had realized what he was and had dealt with him accordingly, the Fall never would have occurred."

Without thinking, Brenwyr had picked up the tapestry and was now cradling it in her arms. "Do you mean that false nemeses should be killed? If they mature before their curative and creative counterparts, though, how can you tell false from true?"

"A good question," said Kirien, still watching Ashe. "Perhaps our ordeal has gone on so long because we keep destroying the true as well as the false, assuming that there's been more than one potential Nemesis in our long history. Even if the Knorth is the one and only, though, she can only be a nemesis until the other two appear and so, by definition, out of balance. Like Gerridon, she may also try to balance herself with acts of preservation or creation, although I would be wary of the results. What exactly are you suggesting, Ashe?"

Again, the singer's answer was indirect. "According to legend . . . the true Nemesis can only be killed . . . by another Kencyr. Most dangerous of all . . . to him or her . . . are the other two potential Tyr-ridan. Other tests . . . may exist as well. I propose . . . to apply them."

"And if the Knorth proves false?" Brenwyr demanded.

Ashe didn't answer.

"Ancestors preserve us," said Kirien. "Why us? Why now?"

Her hand gave a jerk and wrote. " 'Because when Mount Alban returns home, the matter will be out of women's hands,' " she read. " 'Because men can't be trusted to make this decision.' "

Ashe nodded. "The Kendar would say . . . it was none of their business."

"And the Highborn would answer as you did earlier, matriarch. If the Knorth is Nemesis, she's the arch-iconoclast. The lords will try to destroy her out of sheer self-defense. By God, 'Some things need to be broken' in the Kencyrath all right, with a vengeance; but can't we at least trust Torisen?"

"No," wrote her hand.

Kirien frowned at its sudden vehemence, waiting for an explanation. Instead, after a long pause, she got a sort of doodle, made by someone with her attention elsewhere. Two words followed, immediately scratched out. Then came an emphatic command: "Stay out of his/her/their way," and the curt symbol that signals a message's end.

"Well!" said Kirien, letting the pen drop. "What was all that about?"

"Whatever, we appear . . . to be . . . on our own."

The haunt singer sounded almost pleased, Kirien thought. "Hmmm. With decisions to make, you say. I suspect, though, that you arrived at yours long ago. You mean to test the Knorth, don't you, and you don't expect her to pass. Why?"

Ashe hesitated. "That one . . . was bred to walk . . . in shadows," she said at last, in a low voice. "She has . . . the darkling glamor."

Brenwyr snorted. "Coming from you, haunt . . . ."

Ashe pushed back her hood. Snatches of yellowed hair went with it, still attached to bits of dried scalp. Sunlight, which threw her face into shadow, shone off patches of naked skull.

"Yes. Coming from me. Who . . . would know better?"

The matriarch turned sharply away, clutching the rolled tapestry as if to protect it. "Abomination!" she said thickly, and stalked out of the room.

Ashe resumed her hood.

"She will still make her own decision about the Knorth," remarked Kirien. "You can't shock her out of that, or me either."

"Do you decide . . . against me?"

Again, Kirien felt the pressure of darkness. Her childhood had ended when she had realized that such evil could befall such a person as her old friend. She didn't like to think about the shadows that would eventually, inevitably consume Ashe. Only remarkable strength—physical, mental, and moral—had kept so much of the singer intact this long. Kirien refused to believe that integrity had yet been compromised.

"Not against," she said slowly. "Test her, if you must. For my part, I'd rather deal with facts than theory. She's Shanir, you say. All right: I accept that. The rest is conjecture. Even for a Shanir Knorth, though, there must be other options than the matriarchs' hen coop. My decision is to research possibilities. Whatever Aunt Trishien says, surely Torisen won't object to a reasonable alternative."

But as she rose, her mind already on who owed her what in barter, her gaze fell uneasily on the tablet and on those two now obliterated words which the Jaran Matriarch must never have intended to write:

". . . Kin-Slayer unsheathed . . . ."

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Framed