Another part thought, If that witch comes near me again, I’m going to break both of her legs.
And a third, barely an incredulous whisper: . . . she’s killing me . . .
“I could not see how you looked at one another when you first met tonight,” that smooth, soft voice continued, “but I could hear. You cut, so as not to kiss.”
Something dripped onto the floor between Jame’s hands, spattering them. Her nose had started to bleed.
“If you were twins, according to the custom of your house you would already be consorts and perhaps between you have bred a third of your pure blood. Then, finally, the Tyr-ridan might have come to complete our fate. And you are twins, are you not, despite the difference in your ages. I sensed it when I touched your blood. You are also a nemesis but not the Nemesis, for there is no third to balance you.”
As Jame’s blood sank into a crack between the flagstones, lines of pale light spread outward from it, limning the stones’ edges. She knelt on the edge of the pool formed when Mullen had shed his life’s blood.
“I think, if you were to become your brother’s mate, you would destroy him. I think you may anyway. Then will come chaos, far, far worse than anything that has ever happened before, worse even than the Fall, and everything will fall apart. Before that, better that you should die . . . ”
Her voice faltered.
Looking up, Jame saw Mullen, or rather a woven patchwork of light seemingly without a head, for in death his face had been unmarked. His burly arms circled something slim and dark, without touching it. The Ardeth Matriarch stood absolutely still by the eastern wall, within that phantom, restraining embrace.
“What is it?” she asked, barely above a whisper. “Who is it?”
“The guardian of the hall, newly appointed.” Trinity, was that croak her voice? “Hello, Mullen.”
Jorin crept to her side, chirping anxiously. She fended him away from her spilt blood with an elbow, then rose unsteadily, wiping her nose on her sleeve. She could see them all now, those who had died in a welter of their own gore, standing around the edge of the room; or rather she could see the dim light emanating from those spots on their death banners where the blood still clung. They were all watching her.
“Adiraina and I were sisterkin.” Kinzi’s voice was a thin, red thread, weaving through Jame’s mind. “Forgive and let go.”
“Huh,” said Jame, but she nodded to the Kendar and he stepped back.
The Ardeth Matriarch wrapped thin arms around herself as if to contain her shivering. “What is happening? I don’t understand.”
“Lady, you said that Brenwyr should give up Aerulan’s banner, just walk away. Well, she can’t. Death isn’t that simple.”
A harsh laugh answered her, a crack to the heart’s core. “Child, what do you know of grief or of death?”
“Less and less, the more I learn, or so it seems. Lady, have you ever touched a death banner?”
“Once. My mother’s. What I saw then . . . it blinded me. I never saw anything again, except what the blood of the living shows me. Old blood, cold blood, dead blood . . . abomination. Ancestors be praised that the pyre sets free all souls.”
“Does it? Lady, think. We burn flesh and bone, but what about blood? Many of these banners are saturated in it. Mullen’s. Kinzi’s. Aerulan’s . . . ”
“What are you suggesting?”
“ ‘The dead know what concerns the dead.’ Kinzi told me that when we met in the soulscape’s Moon Garden. ‘My unfortunate granddaughter Tieri is dead, and so am I. While our blood traps us, we walk the Gray Land together, two of a silent host.’ Lady, what else could she mean? And what is the Gray Land?”
“Nothing. Nowhere. Do you claim, now, to be a soul-walker, or do dreams stalk you as they do your brother? Mad, the both of you. The dead are at peace. Tell me no more!”
Jame sighed. She was tired of people who didn’t ask questions and wouldn’t listen to answers. God’s claws, she was simply tired. “As you wish, lady.”
By the firefly light of that host of trapped souls, she made her way to the eastern door, opened it and stepped through with Jorin on her heels. Her last glimpse of the interior showed Adiraina standing rigidly still, hands over her ears, surrounded by the dead.
Outside in the Forecourt of the Women’s World, Jame leaned against the closed door of the death banner hall, loosening the collar of her shirt as she waited for her pulse to calm. The last night of summer was warmer than the hall’s interior, if more boisterous and fitfully spitting rain. Her clothes already felt drenched with clammy sweat and the wind swirled her loosened hair up into her face where strains of it stuck and clung.
Had Adiraina really meant to kill her?
Torisen had warned them not to start a new blood feud by slaughtering each other, but he hadn’t seriously thought that they would. Surely Adiraina wouldn’t have been so foolish . . . or so desperate? Jame kept forgetting how involved others were in her relationship to the Highlord, and how important various aspects of it were to the Kencyrath as a whole. Trinity, as if it wasn’t hard enough to sort things out just between the two of them.
And what to do about all of those other souls caught like flies in the ancient, tattered web of their mortality? Get someone to utter the pyric rune and spark another indiscriminate holocaust? That, surely, must have been what happened when Greshan’s corpse burned, along with all the other bloodstained banners in the hall at the time. Not everyone would want to go up in flames, though, and risk being forgotten. Certainly not poor Mullen.
Take the rest down to the river and beat them on rocks until they were washed clean and stopped whimpering?
She would have to ask Great-grandmother Kinzi about it, but not tonight, and with no guarantee of getting a helpful answer. The haunt singer Ashe had once told her that the dead knew what concerned the dead. Jame’s sense, though, was that what concerned the dead didn’t necessarily extend to the living whom they had left behind. Moreover, without a strong incentive and a stronger will, she suspected that all souls eventually faded away, like sinking deeper and deeper into the dementia that seized so many Highborn in extreme old age. A living death or death in life . . . ugh. No wonder most preferred the clean, quick oblivion of the pyre, so much so that some went to it still alive, when they felt their minds failing.
Just the same, something had happened in that hall, the night of Greshan’s unceremonious pyre. Why had Gerraint been ripping banners off the eastern wall? What had been that gaping, breathing darkness behind them where there should only have been ancient stone or, at worst, innocent earth?
But she knew, from experience she would rather not possess. Gerraint had allowed Perimal Darkling to breach that chamber, ancestors only knew why. Rathillien was thin, there by the eastern wall, like parts of the palace at Karkinaroth, like the White Hills, with the Shadows pressing hard against a barrier weakened by her own people’s refusal to believe that it still existed, and by the apparent reluctance of the Four who embodied Rathillien to take the Shadows seriously.
At the fringes of this world, in the Haunted Lands and the Southern Wastes, such a threat was understandable, but here, in her family’s most sacred space?
Sweet Trinity, what had happened to bring that about . . . and why was she sure that that bastard Greshan was somehow at the root of it?
It was Greshan’s quarters at Tentir all over again, a room full of bad memories trying to reveal themselves to her in nightmare visions. The last time she had had to drug herself with that vile green liquor, otherwise good for etching stone, to get at the truth. This time, perhaps it would be easier, but not by much. Why couldn’t someone from the past simply write her a letter?