Straight-faced, the singer responded:
This drew genuine cheers which the singer acknowledged, but then she struck a chord and continued with barely a pause.
The hall quieted. If the Master had been the first to fall, this was the prologue to the second cataclysm, triggered by the massacre of the Knorth ladies by Bashtiri shadow assassins. No one knew who had sent them, but they had surely come and slain all but the child Tieri whom Aerulan had hidden. Ganth’s misplaced revenge had led to his exile and, seemingly, to the end of the Knorth highlords. However, first Torisen and then his sister Jameth had appeared to reestablish the line. As the song ended, some cadets glanced uncertainly at the latter. Her father might well have been Ganth, but no one could name her mother, nor had she been willing to do so. The lords made more of that than the Kendar did. The latter, more practical, dealt with what they found, and the Highlord’s sister had so far proven to be a formidable if unnervingly unpredictable young woman.
Ashe sang again, this time about the second, more recent battle in those infamous hills, some thirty years after Ganth’s falclass="underline"
The ballad continued, shading into “The Cataracts,” both told from the viewpoint of the dead and the dying. In the first battle, Ashe had been savaged by a haunt and had let the wound go untreated. During the second, she had fought at Harn Grip-hard’s back although she had been three days dead at the time.
The Knorth cadet Niall began to shiver. He had slipped away from Gothregor and had seen that latter dread battlefield when the Kencyr Host had clashed with the Waster Horde, led by darkling changers in rebellion against the Master himself. Some nights, he still woke screaming.
Ashe changed the theme once again:
The cadets’ eyes darted from Timmon to Gorbel to Jameth—Ardeth, Caineron, and Knorth. To have even one lord’s heir at the college was unusual; three, unheard of, much more so in that one of them was the Highlord’s newfound sister.
Ashe finished and turned to Jameth. “Lordan, will you add a coda to my song?”
Jameth hesitated, looking blank. Clearly, nothing came to mind. Then, as if despite herself, she began softly to sing:
The last note faded into plaintive silence. Some cadets clapped but hesitantly, as if not quite sure what to do with their hands.
“Well,” said the Commandant, detaching himself from the opposite wall, sardonic hawk face and white scarf of office moving into the firelight. “I think that’s enough for one night. To bed, children, and pleasant dreams to you all.”
Some time later, Jame paced her quarters. Rue had stoked the fire under the bronze basin until the apartment was warm enough for shirt-sleeves and light danced on the brightly muraled walls. These chambers had belonged to her uncle Greshan’s servants, and a darker, more dismal suite of rooms would have been hard to imagine. Truly, her cadets had worked hard to make them appealing to their eccentric mistress, although she still missed the airy freedom of the attic above.
Why, oh why had she sung them the Whinno-hir Bel-tairi’s sad little song? Now she couldn’t get it out of her mind:
Her bones ached and her head still buzzed with the day-long winter silence through which she had ridden. Even traveling by the folds in the land, Tentir was a long way from Gothregor, and nightfall a long time since morning. Before dawn she must journey on if she hoped to make the northern hills in time. What she needed was a few hours of dwar sleep, but not yet.
She thought about Ashe’s songs, which amounted to what most Kencyr knew about their history. How strange to hear her ancestors’ deeds described and to know that she lay in their direct line of descent. Not so long ago, she hadn’t even known that she was Highborn, much less the Highlord’s sister. After all, who would guess such a thing when he, her twin, was a good ten years older than she thanks to her time in Perimal Darkling?
That, Ancestors be praised, was something about which her fellow cadets knew nothing, much less that the Master himself was her uncle and the Dream-weaver her mother. Whatever the songs said, Gerridon had gotten some good out of his dire bargain in the form of prolonged life, at the cost of his followers’ souls reaped for him by his sister-consort. What he hadn’t gotten was her, Jame, whom he had bred to replace the faltering Dream-weaver. Thus, in the end, he might yet lose all.
The cadets didn’t know her in many other ways as well, some for the better, some for the worse.
Oh, they had all heard those doggerel verses that Ashe could have sung but hadn’t—one supposed, through good manners or good taste—about the Knorth Lordan’s career as a randon cadet:
Or
Trinity, but she hated being called “Jameth.” Whatever other secrets she kept, it irked that she couldn’t tell them her true name. After her winter in the Women’s Halls at Gothregor, she had sworn never to wear a mask again. Her old friend the Kendar Marc might well ask, “Is this confusion of names any different?” Wise Marc. How she missed him, but he had his own work repairing the stained glass windows at Gothregor that she had shattered.
Someone knocked softly on the door.
“Come in,” Jame called, wondering if Rue had found another tiresome way to make her comfortable.
Ashe entered, closing the door behind her.
Jame fought an instinctive surge of revulsion. The scar on her arm where a haunt had once savaged her twinged, but at least she had found help soon enough to avoid becoming a haunt herself.
“Singer.” Jame gave a jerky half salute. Before she had retired to Mount Alban, Ashe had been a senior, highly respected randon, and she had saved Harn’s life at the Cataracts. “How may I serve you?”
The haunt singer shuffled forward, leaning on her staff. “With some information . . . if you please, lady.” When not in performance, her voice roughened into a hoarse, halting thing, mere air pushed through dried cords by shriveled lungs. She drew a deep, whistling breath and declaimed: