Honor's Paradox-ARC (20 page)

“You seem very pleased,” said Jame to the queen, speaking under the noisy chatter. “Has the Burnt Man’s protection as a border guard entirely been withdrawn this past year?”

“Oh, but yes. Not that it isn’t weakened every year between the burning of the effigy and the return of the bones on Summer’s Eve. We risk something, sacrificing one of the Four and then waiting for his resurrection. Hence the importance of this ritual evoking the protection of the Eaten One.”

“I’m still confused,” Jame said. “You need special permission to fish the Silver, but not the Silverhead?”

“The lake falls under the protection of neither the River Snake nor the Eaten One. We take our chances with what swims there.”

“Then, too, one of your stories says that the Maid was eaten by the River Snake, another that she stuck halfway down the gullet of a giant catfish.”

Tungit paused in passing. “Lady, these are men’s mysteries, not to be questioned.”

“Then go away, old man,” said the queen, not unkindly, “lest our foolish talk offend you.”

The shaman shrugged and continued on to his place at table.

“I will be sorry someday to lose that old one. He has as much sense as his creed allows him and, I suspect, somewhat more. Look, Earth Wife’s Favorite.”

She drew a stone figurine out of the pouch that hung at her waist and gave it to Jame. It was roughly diamond-shaped, bulging toward the middle, tapering at the points. It took Jame a moment to make sense of the lines scratched on it. Two sagging breasts, a pendulous belly, no head, hands or feet to speak of . . . all the stress was on fertility, none on personality. “This is the Earth Wife?”

“A crude version of her, very, very old, from far, far away. Here is another.” Cyd dipped her finger into her ale and traced three circles surrounded by a fourth on the tabletop.

Jame stared at it. Although it resembled a crude face, it could be an even cruder, rounded out version of the figurine. “That’s an
imu
!”

“So it is. And both of these images were ancient long before Mother Ragga was even born.”

Other maids, other fates,
thought Jame.

The sense came back to her of layered truths blurring into each other with the ages. Once she had asked the Earth Wife who made up the rules that governed her somewhat erratic nature and she had replied, “Don’t know. They just are.”

If Jame had guessed right, the Four had come into their present forms some three thousand years ago with the arrival of her own people and their temples on Rathillien. But what if the templates that shaped them had already existed, as many as there were cultures to create them? That would explain why their roles were so multiform and often contradictory. No wonder the transformed Four were still trying to sort themselves out.

“Oh!” said Prid at a nearby table. She was staring at something in her hand that she had found in her stew. It was a small fish carved out of rock crystal.

Her friends drew back in a growing circle of silence.

“Oh, granddaughter,” murmured the queen in obvious distress. “Not you.”

The Merikit rose and quietly cleared away the feast. Bowls were emptied on the snow, their contents buried. Fires were doused, tables removed.

“The fish is caught,” ran a murmur through the crowd. “The fish is caught.”

“What’s going on?” Jame demanded, but received no answer.

Prid stood alone, shivering.

Gran Cyd wrapped the girl in her white fur cloak.

“Be brave, child,” she said. “You knew that one of the maidens’ lodge would draw this fate.”

Prid gulped and nodded, but couldn’t stop shaking.

“There was a maid, so beautiful, so proud,” she whispered, and the crowd answered:

“No chief’s son would do for her, oh no.”

To one side, Hatch struggled in the grip of his friends.

Jame opened her mouth to protest, then shut it again. She had seen what harm could come of meddling with Merikit ceremonies, but sweet Trinity . . . !

The river ice ground its crystal teeth. Something huge swam beneath it, much too large for such a shallow depth. River Snake or Eaten One? Prid gingerly stepped out onto the ice over its slushy margin, clutching the cape around her.

Her people took up the chant: “There was a maid, there was a maid . . .”

This was what they had been nerving themselves to face with all of that ale.

Prid slipped, up to her knee in slush. The ice around her was pockmarked and dull, and it crackled alarmingly underfoot.

“Oh,” she quavered. “I’ve fallen into the water.”

With agonizing slowness, she shifted her weight and pulled herself out, dragging her soaked leg as if it had fallen asleep. One could almost hear her teeth rattle together.

Jame could barely hold herself still. “What if she makes it safely to the other side?”

“Then the Eaten One has rejected her and we have lost her blessing.”

The vast shape beneath the dark ice bumped against it and white cracks spread. Chunks lurked free. Prid staggered on among them.

A warning shout turned everyone’s attention upstream. Chingetai’s friend had staggered over to the open water at the Steps’ foot and was vomiting into it. His lips peeled back, splitting to the hinges of his jaws, then to his ears, and still the black, writhing forms spewed out of his mouth into the river.

“Blackheads!” someone cried.

There was a rush to pull him away, but already he seemed to have disgorged half of his own weight and still the seething tide continued. By the time Chingetai reached him, he had sunk to his knees. His flesh melted away and he collapsed, nothing but loose bones in a sack of skin.

Dark, serpentine forms darted under the ice, converging on the river leviathan. It smashed up through the ice, broad, bewhiskered mouth agape, blackheads attached like streamers along its gray sides, and crashed down again. The entire ice floe was breaking up.

Prid tottered, shrieked, and fell in.

Hatch gave a shout of horror.

Jame swore and darted forward.

Gran Cyd clutched at her but only caught the black cape.

Jame’s dash faltered as she felt the ice shift under her. It was unevenly pocked with rot where the rushing current had eaten it away underneath, and now the cracks were spreading. How did one tell good ice from bad? She had meant to dive in after Prid, but every nerve told her to stand very, very still.

Then the block on which she balanced began to tip. Down it she slid, into the frigid water, and the ice closed over her.

Jame’s first thought was
I’ve gone deaf
. After the confusion above, the silence below clamped down on her like jaws. No, that was the water flooding into her clothes. Numb and heavy, she sank. The light above receded. Where was Prid? Where was the bottom? Shallow as the river must be here, she seemed to be descending into an abyss. In its depths in a great roiling, the Eaten One struggled against its attackers. One by one, they detached, uncoiled, and disintegrated like ribbons of shadow.

Something white caught the corner of Jame’s eye. It was Prid’s fur cloak, still wrapped around her, now saturated and dragging her down. Jame grabbed at its hem. Her fingers were so numb that she couldn’t tell if she had caught it until it unfurled, spilling Prid out of it. Quick, let go of the fur and grab the girl. Prid’s eyes were wide open and alive with terror.

We should both be unconscious, even dead,
thought Jame.

Instead, they had apparently fallen into sacred space, where gods and monsters contend. It was even possible, with caution, to breathe, although the frigid water nearly stopped the heart.

The leviathan of a catfish rose to meet them, bristling mouth agape wide enough to swallow ships whole. In its maw like a pearl, a beautiful, pouting, pale green face turned upward toward them. The Eaten One spoke in a burst of rapidly expanding bubbles, silent until they enveloped the two swimmers and bore them rapidly toward the surface: MINE. SHE. IS. NOT.

The erupting bubbles shouldered aside the ice. Cold air hit bare skin like fire. Ah, such pain! Prid fainted. Jame clung to her with one arm and clawed at the ice with the other. They had fetched up near the shore, but considerably downstream, borne by its rapid current. Someone was shouting. Hatch. Hands gripped their sodden clothes and dragged them out. How could the cold burn so? Jame curled up on the bank, shaking, vomiting water and fish stew.

Gran Cyd stood over her.

“Oh, child,” she said. “What have you done?”

CHAPTER XI
Rain

Spring 37–43

I

It was snowing when Jame left the Merikit village the next morning. Snow turned to sleet on the ride south, and sleet to chill rain. By the time she reached Tentir late that night, she was soaked and shivering.

Rue ordered Greshan’s huge, obscenely ornate bath filled for her. Jame lay in it slowly thawing out, listening to rain ping against the bronze hood and flinching as icy drops found their way down the smoke hole to tap on her bare shoulders.

The next morning rain still fell as cadets gathered in the muddy square for assembly. Most lessons were held inside, but that provided only partial relief. While not the winter chill, this was perhaps more piercing. No place in the college seemed warm more than a dozen paces from the nearest fire.

Jame’s second class took place in the Map Room with the Coman master-ten Clary. It was the first time they had met since he had hit her with a rock during the egging exercise. She came up behind him as he bent over a scroll.

“Why did you do it?

He flinched, but didn’t turn to meet her eyes.

“Fash said . . .”

“Fash says many things. You shouldn’t listen.”

Clary hunched his shoulders as if against a blow. “I’ve been waiting for you to complain to the Commandant.”

“Have I ever, about anything? It isn’t likely to happen again, is it?”

The back of his neck turned dusky red. “No. It was a shoddy trick. I wish I hadn’t done it.”

“Good.”

She passed on to Brier, who was studying a map of the Southern Wastes.

“Urakarn,” said Brier, pointing to a mark on the western edge of the desert. “Here is the plain before it where my mother and your brother followed Genjar to defeat against the Karnids. Genjar came back. So many others didn’t. They say that the ground there is still white with powdered bones. And this”—she swept her hand eastward—“is the dry salt sea over which they escaped. Is it true that my mother returned under the salt, under the sand, to save you?”

The previous spring, a weirdingstrom had carried the entire Scrollsmen’s College all the way south taking Jame and Brier with it. Jame remembered the terror of sinking, of sand closing over her head, the salt on her lips turning wet, the ancient sea returning.

Then Rose Iron-thorn’s hand had closed over her own and drawn her up to the air, to life.
For your brother’s sake . . .

“I think so.”

Would they soon be revisiting those mysterious regions? Hot, dry, barren . . . Jame glanced out the window at the cold rain still descending in rods. How far away the Wastes seemed. Strange to think that someday, in some foreign desert, she might regret that it wasn’t raining.

The downpour continued the next day, and the next. Nothing dried properly. The Silver rose, beginning to gnaw away its banks. Wells brimmed on the verge of overflowing. If the Eaten One indeed represented water, she was clearly showing her displeasure, but at what?

MINE. SHE. IS. NOT.

“She” undoubtedly referred to Prid, but why had the river goddess rejected her, with what consequences for her, her people, and all other dwellers of the Riverland? The solstice sacrifice usually went without a challenge from what Jame could learn. What happened to the sacrificed Favorite was more obscure.

And still the rain fell.

Oh, Gran Cyd, what
have
we done?

II

Late on the fourth day, the college had visitors.

The ten-commands of Jame and Timmon were on the second-floor balcony of the great hall, putting out pots to catch drips before they could run down the lower walls and soak the house banners which already sagged under the weight of their dank stitches.

“If this keeps up,” said Jame, emptying a sauce pan into a roasting pot, “wouldn’t it be better to roll them up and store them somewhere dry?”

Timmon grunted. “If such a place exists.”

The outer door ground open, swollen wood scraping on flagstones. Riders entered clad in oiled coats on dripping horses. Following them, a rose-colored canopy squeezed through the door. Something pale glimmered under it.

“It can’t be,” said Timmon, staring. “Sweet Trinity, it is. My mother.”

Lady Distan extended her gloved hand to a white-haired randon who helped her to dismount.

“And that’s Ran Aden. What in Perimal’s name are they doing here?”

“You’d better go down to greet them.”

Timmon chewed his lower lip. “Will you come with me?”

“Given how they both feel about me? Just go.”

Reluctantly, Timmon went. His mother offered him her pink-gloved hand to kiss and allowed herself to be escorted out of the hall.

The horses and riders descended into the subterranean stable.

Aden was left surveying the hall. From his expression, nothing he saw pleased him.

A randon of his house, hastily summoned, stepped forward to welcome him. The Highborn looked down his nose at him.

“What, not Sheth Sharp-tongue?”

“The Commandant has been summoned home for an urgent consultation, Ran.”

“Really. How irregular. In his absence, I am the senior officer here. Until Sheth deigns to resume his post, Tentir is under my command. Now, show me to the Commandant’s quarters.”

“Well,” said Brier at Jame’s shoulder as the two randon left.

Jame made a face. “That remains to be seen.”

III

“Can he really take over Tentir, just like that?” asked Dar over dinner. “I’ve never heard of such a thing before.”

Everything on the table was cold, the well having overflowed in the basement and put out the kitchen fire. Trocks and newts had taken refuge on all available tabletops, while salamanders smoldered under the surface, emitting sullen bubbles.