But even Highlord Gerraint understood that a wounded Whinno-hir couldn’t be allowed to run, weeping blood for all to see. Others might not understand Greshan’s boyish glee, might see something dark and twisted in torturing such an innocent creature for so poor a reason. So he had called on his commandants—the entire Randon High Council—to finish what his son had begun. Let their hands also be red. Let them share the guilt so that none, ever again, would speak of it, or so Sheth had said.
Horses in the square. The hunt had returned. Looking out a window, he saw not the Whinno-hir’s body but the lordan’s slung across his horse’s back, fair hair hanging in a swath over his face. Hallick dismounted with difficulty, almost falling. His hunting leathers were bloodstained. He cradled his strong left hand, while blood seeped through the field dressing. They would take him to the infirmary.
The boy ran there. At the door, he met Sheth.
“Don’t go in,” said his friend. “Harn, please don’t.”
But his father had heard his voice and was calling for him.
Hallick sat on a chair, blood running down his fingers to drip on the pile of loosened dressing.
“He got in a lucky blow, son. Now I haven’t the strength to finish the work. You must help me.” He offered the boy a white-hilted knife. “Terrible things will follow this day’s work, but at least the honor of Tentir will have been saved.”
“I don’t understand.”
I’m too stupid, he thought. Sheth would understand. He did. That’s why he didn’t want me to enter.
“They will say it was a hunting accident, those who don’t know. But it was a judgment. No Knorth Lordan passes through our hands without being judged whether he be worthy to lead our people. Greshan didn’t believe it when I told him. He laughed. Who, after all, was fit to judge him, the Highlord’s heir? We are. Only we. And we did.
“Now help me, boy. Take the knife, draw it just so across my wrist. Cut deep. Deeper. Good. Now sit with me one last time and wait. It’s all right.”
All right, all wrong . . .
So the boy waited, hearing only blood dripping on the floor and his father’s increasingly shallow breath. Then it faltered and stopped.
All gone.
He never saw the shadowy figure by the door holding something dark to her nose, weeping silently.
Jame watched from the doorway, unaware that she was crying. Black forget-me-not made her head spin. One minute she saw a boy and his dead father, the next Harn kneeling in ungainly tears before an empty chair.
She was vaguely aware of a tall, thin boy standing beside her, also silently watching. In the sharp lines of his face, she recognized a young Sheth.
Harn blundered between them. Sheth, grown ghostlike, followed him. Jame followed them both. As she entered the square, she took a deep breath of the caked flower. The practice area was full of fighters, as if every house had suddenly rushed out to do battle. They were phantoms to her and she a ghost to them, dimly aware of each other through the haze of ancient tragedy.
Where was Harn going?
Of course, to her uncle’s quarters.
Greshan’s apartment was still in disarray, but this time it was the lived-in mess of a young man who didn’t value his possessions when they weren’t currently adorning him. He himself lay on the bed under a canopy of silk, his bloody gilt leathers staining the disordered satin spread. The Lordan’s Coat covered his face, its empty arms thrown wide as if futilely trying to embrace him.
The boy/man Harn stood in the doorway, breathing hard. He stiffened at the sound of weak, muffled laughter. The coat stirred; no, that which it covered had moved. A hand crawled up and dragged the coat off the “corpse’s” face. Here, though, was no dead meat but a living if desperately wounded man. Greshan laughed again, and caught his breath in a gasp.
“Oh, your father struck a shrewd blow,” he panted. “I would have been cleaved in two . . . if this blessed coat under my leathers hadn’t slowed the strike. What . . . did you think that I was dead? Just . . . resting. Planning. Little man, you’ve been kneeling in blood. Don’t tell me . . . that fool your father has taken the so-called honorable way out of his treachery. And well he should . . . to have raised his hand against his master’s son. All for nothing, too, you see . . . because here I still am.”
The boy made a deep, retching sound, at which the other laughed harder, half choking. Harn stumbled to the bedside, seized the coat, and thrust it into Greshan’s face. The black rage of a berserker flare was on him, perhaps for the first time. Greshan beat against the boy’s congested face. Unnoticed, young Sheth stepped forward and pinned the lordan’s thrashing legs. Greshan’s face pressed into the embroidered contours of the coat, choking on it in his death throes. The peacock blue lining was halfway down his throat. His teeth gnashed at it. As he weakened, his blood seeped through at the indenture that was his gaping mouth. Then, finally, he lay still.
Guilt in a small room. Bloody hands.
So this was how Harn and Sheth had unintentionally secured Ganth the Highlord’s chair, by killing his older brother.
The forget-me-not was wearing off. Jame saw Harn bending over a much smaller body than Greshan’s, although his full weight still bore down on it. He was smothering Graykin.
Avenger in the wall . . .
“Harn, don’t!”
She tried to pull him off.
The Commandant thrust her aside and caught his colleague in a choke hold. It must have been like trying to throttle a bull. Sheth adjusted his grip and wrestled Harn off his prey. The two lurched back, one clinging to the other.
Likewise, the coat fought Jame as she struggled to tear it free. There might have been a back under its silken threads, a body pressed down face to face with the Southron. She unsheathed her claws and ripped. The sensation was of tearing flesh off bones and it came, wetly. Graykin lay beneath, as skeletal as a corpse months dead, and he didn’t breath.
Jame breathed for him. Beneath her mouth, his changed into a dog’s muzzle.
She jerked back. There they lay on the Master’s cold hearth, she in her ivory armor, he in his scruffy fur. Once she had thought that this hall was her soulscape and here she had lain in wretched oblivion while this poor creature guarded her sleep. Self-knowledge had freed her, but not entirely, not while part of her soul, freely given, remained chained here.
Get away, she thought in near panic. Run before he wakes and begins to whine again. Do you want him always clinging like a sick child, always holding you back?
But it wouldn’t do. Giving him a job while his soul remained trapped here was like patting him on the head and saying, Go away and play. Just leave me alone.
No. She had to free him, but how? Break the braided chain that wound like a noose around his neck. It was woven of her own shining black hair. Break a strand and it bled. Must she rip out her only vanity? So be it. She slashed and tore, finally loosening the knot with her nails.
Now breathe into his slake mouth, once, twice, until his rank breath answered hers.
Follow me. Follow. Away from this cursed place.
And they ran, he panting on her heels, still a mongrel cur, away from the hearth, out of the hall, across the blighted hills, toward a fresh wind blowing.
He blinked up at her, and smiled crookedly. “Lady.”
Free he might be, but his will held the bond between them. Damn.
The Commandant knelt beside Harn with a hand on the bigger man’s slumped, shaking shoulders. Sheth looked more disheveled than Jame had ever seen him, his dark hair in his eyes, one of which was turning purple, his white scarf of office twisted askew around his neck.