Riversend: An Amberlight Novel. Sylvia Kelso

a battle fanfare, her stare said: And it is the Mother’s will I have two husbands, and I flaunt them here before you. Because the one beyond doubt bears Her blessing. And the other, as manifestly, is not cursed.

      I swear, only Tellurith could pull a double victory from a losing fight. When Darthis took her cohorts off, they still looked as if they had been hit over their collective heads. But gods defend me: some of the looks I got across those shoulders said more than, Foreigner. God-touched. Freak.

      Some were reverent.

      * * *

      CHAPTER III

      Settling. Week 8.

      Tellurith’s Diary

      Shameful to squander such a leverage so easily, but with an epidemic in the offing, what could I do? Had Darthis guessed at that . . . And it was thrifty, at least, to bring off my two men under the one shield. I only hope that Darthis, when she recovers, will not devise some hill-felling counter-stroke.

      Because we cannot truly alienate her. When our daughters are grown, when, I dream, we no longer marry House fashion, so far more men will be needed—when, in any case, the blood wants widening—then Iskarda must provide their mates.

      * * *

      Meanwhile we have an epidemic, if not strangle-cough; some sort of mountain fever, Caitha says, which brings us outsiders down in sneezing, aching heaps. The medicine store is stripped; they are down to boiled willow-tea for the joints and hellien-leaf steam for the chest. The children are the worst. Yet every woman who takes to her bed is another empty worker’s place, another house delayed. And we are nearer winter by another day.

      Which has thrown most of the nursing onto the men, so I would hardly have seen my husbands this last half-moon, even had I not been ears under in housing plans.

      The houses have been the most long-drawn change of all. Women from Downhill, women from Uphill, shattered clan affiliations to somehow merge, old-style Iskardan houses to adapt. And men to fit as well. “Not a tower, no,” said Ahio, rubbing her ruin of an ear; memento from the shaper’s shop. “But Mother, how’s a woman to bed her husband when he’s running all over the house? What if he’s married out of the house? Give ’em a place of their own and let us go to them.”

      So the new houses are usually cluster-shape: suites of rooms for work, for men, women, children, sub-sets of clan or kin, about a central kitchen-hall, store-rooms outermost, to chill perishables. Stone outer walls, mostly: with arrow-slit windows, and the sort of vantage point where you can use a light gun, as well as a bow.

      This house, though, is Iskardan built. Meant for a single two or three generation family, and hence segregated except for the kitchen. Which is useless to me, who needs a workplace and meeting-room, and cannot make it among the looms.

      Nor, when the time came, would my household disperse. So Charras, who has become our architect, has designed outliers and wings, and what looks alarmingly like a perimeter wall, with storehouses and a couple of byres inside. And now it will be a household, if not a House. My troublecrew and their kin in the uphill wing, and Iatha’s folk across the hall, Shia and Hanni’s suites where the old weaving-room was; my own work-room next the kitchen, for warmth, and the old dining chamber for a council place. My—our—sleeping quarters, just behind that, will be the only thing unchanged; since, as Charras said, “I’d uproot the hill before I tried to shift that bed of yours.”

      This afternoon has shifted almost everything else.

      * * *

      Charras haled me from pay tallies at Zariah’s house, amid a roomful of hacking, coughing toddlers and filthy, harried men. They had half the house gutted, on a dour, overcast autumn day; no light weather, up here in Iskarda. We had just settled an underground store-room entrance, for after all, the cave is there, and were on to heating pipes when Verrith came striding through the stone-dust, calling, “Ruand! There’s a new one in!”

      The Korite youngsters’ influx has masked a steady dribble of other strangers; fugitives, afterthoughts, slipping away from our old world. The River, Amberlight. And of course their news must be sifted, though their expectation, if not need to see Telluir’s Head in person was growing near ritual. I opened my mouth to say, Iatha can handle this. Verrith said, too blank-faced, “Desis said, Get you.”

      I shut my mouth and moved.

      Desis had taken the incomer to Quetho’s house, the only place out of quarantine. She was hunched over the makeshift hearth, a fiery silhouette; elbows, Crafter’s plait, Dhasdein soldier’s cloak. Then she rose and turned and time ran widdershins.

      “You,” I said, like the veriest numbskull. “You’re dead.”

      “Ruand.” Not a House or Craft greeting; a Navy salute. Everything else, the sharp nose, the tawny eyes, the crinkled Amberlight hair, a perfect duplicate. Except the face, drawn with exhaustion; sharpening, as I looked, with something else.

      “That was my sister, Ruand.”

      “But—!”

      “My mother went with Wasp. Yes.”

      I opened my eyes in time to see her within a hairsbreadth of breaking Navy stance and springing to hold me up. “Ah, Ruand . . .”

      I had grieved, of course I grieved, as we all had for Wasp, most gallant of Navy craft, lost in the last battle against the massed galleys of Dhasdein. And the family with her, mother, sisters, all the precious command chain; except the youngest daughter, who had potential to be a cutter, who had come into the House the season before.

      Who died in my arms, during the city’s fall.

      “But how did you—”

      She had been wounded all but mortally in the ship’s loss. Dragged ashore by Dhasdein marines among their own casualties, still lying, when the city fell, in a hospital tent. Struggling back to convalescence in a world from which her world had gone.

      “They want to keep the Houses up; Terraqa and Jerrish. But without the pearl-rock . . .”

      The curl of her nostrils said the rest. Would she putter about a wharf or vie for copper fiels in a rowing boat amid the ragged longshoremen of a city that no longer tithed, and graced, and centered the River’s world?

      And she had another, closer reason for coming after us.

      They had been a well-to-do Telluir clan, already with their own modest men’s tower just down the hill. As a cutter, her sister might have been their foothold inside the House itself. Mother knows, they paid a bankruptcy price for Khira to marry there. To share marriage-ties with the very Head.

      In the long run, it was probably all that saved Sarth from the cataclysm of divorce.

      My household had gathered already: Iatha to deputize, Hanni with the slate for notes; Zuri, more granite-like than usual. Of course, they knew. When does a House-head expect privacy?

      I said, “Your father’s here.”

      “M-my—”

      This one had known too. Yet for all she had gone through, a Navy officer, she stuttered on the word.

      “You needn’t see him yet. I thought you might like to know he was safe.” How scurrilously easy it is, in possession, to be generous. “Sit down, first, and get warm. And give me the Riverword, while they make you something to eat.”

      I could feel Charras’ scowl on my back. Neglect the house for a Head to play secretary? Zuri’s too: Usurp troublecrew’s place? But the incomer, Navy by skill and blood, turned to business with relief.

      Damas and Eutharie, the chief surviving House-heads, were bent on preserving the forms without the substance of Amberlight, from tithes on the Kora grain to rebuilt towers. There was no real resistance. The sack had decimated River Quarter; the Downhill clan folk who chose to stay had fallen in, willy-nilly. It was, and again the faint curl of the lip spoke her opinion, their only choice.

      However paltry,