HM02 House of Moons (17 page)

Kisa blinked at him, her golden eyes standing out huge in her tear- and dirt-stained face, then finally took his hand.

* * *

The silsha pressed against Haemas’s legs, comfortingly warm, as she strode across the snow-covered grounds toward Shael’donn. Its company was one of the few things holding her together while she tried to make sense of these bewildering changes.

At the front entrance, the great door swung inward before she could touch the handle. The gap-toothed boy on door-duty gaped and she caught the backwash of his half-shielded shock. She glanced at the black silsha looming at her heels. “For Light’s sake, he won’t hurt you.”

The boy’s cheeks reddened. “It’s not the beast, Lady, not really. Lord High Master Senn said—everyone said—that you must be—” he probed her face with worried eyes, “—dead.”

The wind gusted, rattling the rafters and driving its chill deep into her bones. She shivered, then silently pushed past him into the warm hall and stamped the snow off her boots. The boy backed into the doorjamb as the silsha slid in behind her, sinuous as a fish. He watched it helplessly, then threw his shoulder against the massive door to shut it against the blustering wind. “Please wait here until one of the Masters can see you.”

Haemas wearily pushed her hood back from her hair. “That’s not necessary. I can find my way.”

“No, Lady!” The boy swallowed hard. “I’m sorry, but Master Senn
said
we were not to let any more womenfolk in without an escort, especially—” He broke off in embarrassment.

Haemas recalled the calculating look in Riklin Senn’s eyes that day at the Council of Twelve when she had spoken out for Kevisson’s claim on the High Mastership. “He said
I
wasn’t to come in, is that it?”

The boy nodded tightly.

She took a deep breath. “Never mind—I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Jallan Falt, Lady.”

“Yes, Jallan.” She gazed over his bright-gilt head and down the hallway. The green carpet was the same, and the dark paneling, lustrous from generations of small, trailing hands, but the familiar feel to this beloved place had fled. She might as well have been in a vastly altered Otherwhen, where fate had taken a different turn at some crucial branching and nothing was the same. She sighed. “Can you at least tell me if Master Monmart is back from Lenhe’ayn yet?”

The boy glanced up at her, his eyes wide. “No, they brought the healer back yesterday afternoon, but they said Master Monmart refused to come.”

For a second, she glimpsed a pale, barely breathing face in his mind. Stricken with dread, she gripped his shoulder and made him meet her eyes. “What healer?”

“Healer Saxbury, Lady.” He bit his lip. “They say she won’t live. She helped my mum through her last birthing, too. Mum said no one else could have done what she did. It’s not fair.”

“Nothing’s fair about life, Jallan,” a deep voice said.

Haemas glanced up from the boy’s freckled face into the heavyset countenance of Riklin Senn. Withdrawing her hand, she straightened and stared back with all the directness of Dervlin Tal’s daughter. “Master Senn.”

“
Lord High
Master Senn, actually, but then ...” His narrowed eyes examined her as if she were a mare up for sale. “You’ve been—away, haven’t you?”

She wondered suddenly if Senn had known anything of Diren Chee’s plans. After all, Chee had supported this oaf’s claim before the Council for no reason she had been able to understand. “Jallan tells me that Enissa has been hurt. Where has she been taken?”

“A bad business, that.” Senn shook his massive head. “I can’t imagine what got into Monmart, although I suppose in the end breeding will tell.”

Haemas glanced at Jallan’s pale face, unwilling to believe what Senn was implying. The Kevisson she knew would never have hurt anyone, much less Enissa. Jallan flushed and looked away.

“Why don’t you come into my office, Lady Haemas?” With surprising smoothness for a man so large, Senn started to interpose his body between her and the boy, then drew back as the silsha bared its ivory fangs and snarled. “If you’ll put the beast outside, I’ll fill you in on the sad events of the last few days.”

But at the word “office,” Haemas had flashed back to the last time she had been in that room, hardly a month ago, when she and Ellirt had sat together discussing the curriculum for the House of Moons, a fire blazing comfortably in his fireplace, the leather chairs settled in the exact same spot as the first time she had ever come into his room, his sightless eyes, as always, fixed unerringly on her face ...

Not there. Her fingers clenched. Anywhere but there. After meeting Ellirt’s counterpart in the Otherwhen, her old friend felt both closer and more lost to her than ever. Resting her hand on the silsha’s head, she ignored the arm Senn held out to her. “Just tell me where Enissa is.”

“You can’t see her now.” Senn edged closer, his eyes resting uneasily on the silsha. “Lising and Nevarr are attending her.”

“She’s
here
?”

Jallan nodded soberly. “South Wing, Lady,” he said before Senn could silence him with a scowl.

South Wing. The Healer’s Wing, where Enissa had once trained under the disapproving eyes of the other healers, honing her natural talents, while Haemas planned for the House of Moons. Dimly she was aware that Senn was still talking to her, but she brushed past his velvet-clad chest and took the stairs two at a time, opening her shields enough to listen for Enissa’s mind, trusting the shadowfoot at her heels to prevent any interference.

All around her, she felt the school stirring, boys stumbling sleepily down the halls toward steaming bowls of zeli porridge in the dining hall, Masters emerging from their chambers in North Wing, students on cooking duty grumbling—everything as it ought to be, except that everyone she cared for most was dead or in grave danger or missing.

The halls had never seemed so endless when she’d lived and studied here. She stopped and tried to remember which healers were attending Enissa—Lising and ... Nevarr? Closing her eyes, she reached for Havil Nevarr’s mental pattern, never having known Lising well enough to recognize him that way.

She caught a glimmer of the healer, one floor up and half a wing away. Catching her intentions, the silsha bounded up the narrow stairs before her, growling deep in its throat. She followed it, then hurried down the long hall until she reached Nevarr’s location.

After wrenching the door open, she saw the two healers standing over the bedside, gazing down at a still form buried in thick quilts. Nevarr’s sandy head turned to look at her in dismay. “Lady Haemas! But—”

Bidding the shadowfoot stay in the hall, Haemas slipped between the two men to Enissa’s side. Touching her friend’s cheek, she was shocked to find her skin so cold. “What—happened?”

“Mindburn.” Lising’s voice was short. “One of the worst cases I’ve ever seen.”

And Lising had been at Senn’ayn with her on that terrible day twelve years ago, Haemas thought numbly, attending the survivors of the Temporal Conclave where so many had died. Laying her hand on Enissa’s chilled forehead, she closed her eyes, reaching deep into the still mind for some indication that her friend might know her.
Enissa?
she said softly, then louder.
Enissa?

Nevarr took her arm. “She can’t hear you, Lady Haemas. I’m afraid it’s just a matter of time now.”

“No!” Wrenching away from him, she gazed down at Enissa’s still white face, her eyes hot and tearless. “How—” She stopped, forcing herself to control her voice. “How did this happen?”

“We’re not sure.” Lising’s gaze was bleak. “She and Monmart returned to Lenhe’ayn, supposedly to find some evidence that would clear him of Myriel Lenhe’s death. The next day, Leric Rald called up here for help, and we brought her back like this.” He folded his arms.

“Myriel Lenhe’s death?” she echoed numbly.

Nevarr crossed to a porcelain basin on the nightstand and poured out a measure of water. “She died the night that Monmart went down to Lenhe’ayn. And when an inquiry was conducted into her death, Monmart attacked Riklin Senn in front of everyone—tried to choke the life out of him and might have succeeded, too, if they’d been alone.”

Haemas’s throat felt dry and achingly tight. “He couldn’t have done that.”

“Only two days ago, I saw him attack Senn with my own eyes.” Nevarr soaped his hands, rinsed, then reached for a towel. “He was completely out of control.”

She clenched her hands by her sides to keep them from shaking. One thing at a time, she told herself. First take care of Enissa—then she could find out what had happened to Kevisson. “All right, what can we do for her?”

“I’m afraid there’s nothing that can be done.” Lising’s weary eyes met hers. “I only wish there were, but the damage is too great. All we can do is make her comfortable.”

She glanced in shock from Lising’s stony face to Nevarr’s. “You can’t just give up.”

“We can’t do anything else, unless ...” Lising scowled and turned away.

“Unless what!” she demanded.

“Unless you know some trick of healing that we don’t.”

Nevarr threw the towel down in disgust.

Some trick ... Haemas turned back to Enissa and fumbled for the limp, cold hand under the layered covers. The latteh could heal, but it was lost in the nexus with Axia.

“How long?” she heard her voice ask calmly from far away. “How long does she have?”

“A day, perhaps two.”

Gently she replaced Enissa’s hand beneath the quilts. “Look after her,” she said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Lady Haemas, don’t be foolish!” Nevarr called after her as she ran out the door. “There’s nothing anyone can do!”

But there might be, she thought, if only doing it didn’t make her as unscrupulous as Diren Chee.

KISA DISLIKED THE
vast, drafty kitchen full of unswept crumbs and dust mites that would have sent her chierra nurse, Dorria, into an angry cleaning frenzy. She craned her neck, taking in the grimy windows, the crooked cabinet doors—many hanging from a single rusty hinge—and the feeling of abandonment that hung over the entire house. She swung her feet back and forth above the worn stone, studying this stranger clad in black who was her father. “When can we fetch Adrina?”

“Who?” He looked up from the meager breakfast of cold roast savok and coarse brown bread. His hollow-cheeked face made his fierce golden eyes stand out. His hair was as bright gold as the new coin her mother had given her when last they had gone to a fair, much brighter than her mother’s or grandfather’s.

“My sister, Adrina.” Kisa poked the meat with a finger. It was nasty stringy stuff, she decided, and pushed her chipped plate away.

“Not now.” Her father chewed, his expression distant. “I have too much to do.” He speared another bite of roast.

Kisa picked up the chunk of hard bread and turned it over in her fingers. “Where’s the butter and jam?”

He glanced at her, his gold eyebrows knotting together over the sharp nose. His eyes glittered like an iced-over field after a winter storm. “There isn’t any.”

At home, she’d always had steaming porridge for breakfast, topped with yellow pats of butter made fresh from milk that came from one of the finest herds of Old dairy cattle to be found anywhere in the Lowlands, her grandfather had always said. And there had been tall mugfuls of chilled milk and all the honey and yellow callyt jam she wanted. Her chin trembled as she remembered the sweetness of callyt on her tongue and her mother’s ready smile across the bountiful breakfast table. “I want to go home.”

His eyes drilled her. “Stop that sniveling and eat.”

Laying her hands in her lap, she pressed her lips together. She would not cry! she told herself severely. For years she had longed for a father, and now she had one—so what if he was not as she had expected? Mother had always insisted nothing in life was ever perfect. Why, hadn’t Mother wanted sons who could inherit Lenhe’ayn, when she’d borne Kisa and Adrina? If Kisa had been a boy, surely her father would have been proud of her and would have come for her long ago, instead of waiting until now.

Suddenly she felt his mind hammering at her, pushing at her shields, insisting. Shocked, she watched her hand reach for the stale bread without her willing it. She broke away from him and stared back with frightened eyes. Mother had never used her Talent to force her or her sister and brother to do anything. It was wrong! Mother had always insisted upon that. The three of them were never to do that to anyone, not even the chierra servants, with whom it would have been ever so easy.

“Eat your breakfast or I’ll make you.” His voice was threaded with quiet menace.

Her heart racing, Kisa picked up the bread and managed a cold, tasteless nibble. In her short life, she had sometimes been lonely or sad, but she suddenly realized that she had seldom been truly frightened—until now.

* * *

Haemas crunched through the ankle-deep crust of snow. The silsha prowled at her heels, and she was comforted by its daunting presence. Three of the forest predators resided with her up here in the Highlands, but this particular silsha was the one that the ilseri had sent to her so long ago in the Great Forest, and the bond between them was especially strong. It was twelve years older now, a length of time that would have aged a horse or a dog, yet it was as lithe and vigorous as the first time she’d seen it.

The grounds between Shael’donn and the House of Moons lay eerily quiet, with the odd hush of a lull between violent storms, and the air was so cold that Haemas felt she could have reached out and snapped a portion of it in two between her hands. Ice glittered on the spiny branches of the surrounding trees and patchy gray clouds scudded overhead. She pulled her cloak closer as she trudged toward the two schools’ shared portal. Questions chased each other round and round through her head like barrets playing in a tree. What were the latteh crystals, really? Were they alive in some way, as she had seemed to sense, or some sort of ilseri artifact? If they were alive, why were they found only in ilseri pools? But perhaps the most sobering thought of all was what Riklin Senn and the other Masters at Shael’donn would be lawfully bound to do if they caught her at Enissa’s bedside with something so blatantly forbidden as a latteh.

She shivered in the icy stillness, her head spinning like a child’s top. Well, before she could do anything else, she had to go to Windsign and Summerstone, the ilseri who had first befriended and taught her all those years ago, and learn what they could tell her on this matter.

Grasping the portal’s outside rail, she stepped onto the staging platform, then watched in surprise as the persistent shadowfoot flowed up the steps. She laid her hand on the black-furred head and stared down into the inscrutable yellow eyes. The silshas, although fond of her, were usually wary of other humans, but this one had followed her in and out of buildings all morning with hardly the flick of an ear. It seemed to radiate an uneasy vigilance. Did it somehow sense that she was in danger?

She slid an arm around the sleek powerful neck, maintaining contact in order to transport it with her. Opening her shields, she aligned her mind with the voice of the crystals, activating them in the pattern learned long ago:
north ... south
—she felt each crystal warm in turn—
east ... west ... above ... below.
At the sequence’s completion, the world around her dissolved and she flashed through the silent gray betweenness, reaching not for the pattern of another portal but the remembered voices of ilsera crystals set into the rim of a certain secluded ilseri pool.

The silsha snarled softly as they emerged in a wintery stillness only slightly less cold than the one they had just left behind in the Highlands. Ice crystals pinged as the trees shifted in the wind. Haemas glimpsed patches of leaden sky overhead, somber and brooding, through the interwoven true-tree branches. When last she had been there, the grove had been alive with blue-leaved branches and rich with the scent of water and warm moist soil. She knelt at the edge of the white walled pool and peered down through the thin rime of ice.

Moonspeaker, why have you come?
The ilseri voice rang with the strength of stone struck by a hammer.

Summerstone?
Haemas turned her head, hoping to see the familiar green-skinned form, although the natives often dissipated their mass too thinly to be visible.

A gust of wind rattled the frozen tree branches.
It has begun again.

What?
Haemas asked, but only the wind moaning through the trees answered. She shivered, feeling suddenly alone in this place as she never had before. The shadowfoot stood motionless on the other side of the half-frozen pool, gazing at her as if, within the space of a single breath, she had become someone else—and unwelcome. Doubt burned in its yellow eyes, along with distrust.
What’s wrong?
she asked Summerstone.
What have I done to displease you?

Your kind, not you.
Another mindvoice, less harsh, more sorrowful.
Still, it will not matter in the end.

It was Windsign. Haemas hesitated, then asked,
Does it have anything to do with the latteh?
She brought forth the image of the irregular dull-green crystal in her mind, remembering the feel of it in her hand.
What do you know about such crystals? Are they really found in your pools?

A vague green haze settled downward through the branches.
What you speak of are not crystals.

Then what are they?
Haemas stepped back as a second greenness formed in the air above the pool.

The future.
The green mist contracted, coalescing into the roughly humanoid shape of an adult female ilseri garbed in flowing white.
We thought your kind had finally forgotten.

The future?
she echoed, realizing what Windsign’s words must mean, and understanding at the same time that if she was right, the ilseri would never allow her to take a latteh back to the Highlands.

Our children.
Summerstone’s body solidified and her bottomless black eyes stared at Haemas.
What you think of as latteh crystals are First Ones, the beginning form of our kind, and now two have been stolen from their birthing pool. If they are not returned, they will die.

* * *

The clouds had thickened, further obscuring the sun. Kevisson stared hopelessly at the closely set trees that surrounded him on all sides; each one looked identical to the next. Scratched and aching, light-headed from lack of sleep and hunger, he could not delude himself any longer. He had no idea which direction he was traveling.

He pushed his way through another thicket, and without warning the forest grew abruptly colder. The bark snapped and popped. His breath froze in his lungs and his heart lurched sluggishly. He doubled over, teeth chattering, a vague impression skirting the edges of his mind that something was approaching. “Who’s there?” he called through clenched teeth. “What do you want?”

A vast, chill presence settled over him, threading through brain and blood and bone, leaving him huddled in a knot on the forest floor with his shivering muscles locked, so numb that he could not feel any part of his body. The cold presence wanted, no,
demanded
something, perhaps some
one
, but he could not make out what. Blackness ate at his vision; he watched as the ice crystals in his breath plumed out white before him, slow, then more slowly, finally ceasing altogether.

As abruptly as it had come, the coldness withdrew. Kevisson’s diaphragm convulsed and he drew in lungfuls of icy air. His fingers began to tingle painfully, followed by his face and toes. He forced himself to pile a handful of twigs and run through the ritual to start a fire. A tiny spark flared, fierce and golden. He bent to blow on it, then fed it with dry leaves and larger twigs until it was burning strongly. He drew in the welcome scent of wood smoke and held his palms out to the blessed heat, feeling as if now he might survive.

Danger, male-brother! Run!
Suddenly the branches around him were alive with agile green bodies that swirled down and scattered his fire.

Where in the name of Darkness had they come from? Kevisson could have sworn he had left them behind hours ago. “Go away!” He struggled to regain his feet, but an army of green arms wrestled him face first to the frozen ground.

We cannot play this game anymore.
Four-fingered hands gently plucked dead leaves out of his hair.
The Oldest says you must go back to the river.

They hauled Kevisson to his feet and he tried to push them away. “I have to go home. Can you understand that? This isn’t a goddamned game!”

A wave of sorrow from the alien minds washed unexpectedly over him, deep as the grief he’d felt standing before his father’s funeral pyre. Startled, he stared into the shiny black eyes of the single ilserin that imprisoned him in its arms.

You must give them back, male-brother.
Absently the native patted his cheek with limber, too-long fingers.
The mothers are angry, and even the Oldests know what you have done.

Kevisson concentrated, struggling to shield the aching sorrow out of his mind, but as before, his defenses seemed worthless with these creatures. Their projected sadness overwhelmed him, tearing at him until he would have thrown himself off a cliff to end it if they had permitted it.

The ilserin pulled him back toward the fierce green river with its immense, thundering falls. Dizzy with cold and hunger and sorrow, he let them take him, not even watching where his feet fell.

* * *

Haemas huddled against the leeward side of a giant sturdy tree, avoiding the worst of the stinging sleet that came in spurts with the north wind. The grove was empty now. Windsign and Summerstone had withdrawn, and even the faithful shadowfoot had stalked off into the brush. She scuffed her heel in a drift of dead leaves, thinking that she should probably return to Shael’donn to sit with Enissa. If she could not help her friend, at least she should not leave her to die alone.

The pattern begins now again and will continue until broken by one side or the other.
The mindvoice startled her; it was huge and unfamiliar, laced with an icy, dark rage that she had not even known an ilseri was capable of feeling.

What pattern?
She craned her head, looking for a hint of movement among the stiff, gray-barked branches.

They have called me because alone of all the ilserlara, the Last Ones, I remember.

A feeling of immensity crept over Haemas, as if she had walked under the boughs of an incredibly ancient tree or beneath the sheer face of an overhanging cliff.
Who are you?

Frostvine, last of the hunted ones.