Vanye reached for the cup, swallowed the last, the wine souring in his mouth. “Father had a fine choice of heirs, did he not? Three would-be murderers.”
“Father was the best of all,” said Erij. “He killed our mother: I am sure of it. He pushed Handrys to his death, favoring you as much as he did once. No wonder he saw ghosts.”
“Then purify this hall of them. Let me ride out of here. Our father was no better to you than he was to me. Let me go from here.”
“You keep asking; I refuse. Why do you not try to escape?”
“I thought that you expected me to keep my given word,” he said. “Besides, I would never reach the ground floor of Ra-morij.”
“You might be sorry later that you missed the chance.”
“You want to frighten me. I know the game, Erij. You were always expert at that. I always believed the things you told me, and I always trusted you more than I did Handrys. I always wanted to think that mere was some sense of honor in you—whatever it was that he was lacking.”
“You hated the both of us.”
“I was sorry about you; I was even sorry about Handrys.”
Erij smiled and rose from the table, walked near the fire, where it was warm. Vanye joined him there. Erij still had his cup in hand, and took his accustomed chair, while Vanye settled on the warm stones. There was silence between them for a long time, almost peace. Two more cups of wine passed from Erij’s cup, and his tanned face grew flushed and his breathing heavy.
“You drink too much,” said Vanye at last. “This evening and last—you drink too much.”
Erij lifted the stump of his arm. ‘This—pains me of cold evenings. For a long time I drank to ease my sleep at night. Probably I shall have to stop it, or come to what Father did. It was the wine that helped ruin him, I well know that. When he drank, which was constantly after Handrys died, he grew unreasonable. When he would get drunk he would go out and sit by his tomb and see ghosts. I should hate to die like that.”
It was the rationality in Erij that made him seem most mad; at times Vanye almost thought him amenable to reason, to forgiveness. A man could not speak so with an enemy. At such times they were more brothers than they had ever been. At such times he almost understood Erij, through the moods and the hates and the lines that began to be graven into his face, making him look several years older than was the truth.
“Your lady,” said Erij then, “has not quitted Morija as you said she would.”
Vayne looked up sharply. “Where is she?”
“You might know,” said Erij, “since I think you know full well what she is about.”
“That is her business.”
“Shall I recall her and ask her or shall I ask you again?”
Vanye stared at him, beginning suddenly to see purpose within the madness, the sickly, fragile humors. He liked it no less. “Her business is with Hjemur, and she is no friend of Thiye. Let that suffice.”
“Truly?”
“It is truth, Erij.”
“All the same,” said Erij, “she has not quitted Morija. And all my promises were conditional on that.”
“So were mine,” said Vanye, “conditional.”
Erij looked down at him. There was no mirth there at all. Of a sudden it was Nhi Rijan in that look, young and hard and full of malice. “You are dismissed.”
“Do nothing against her,” Vanye warned him.
“You are dismissed,” said Erij.
Vanye gathered himself up and took his leave with a scant bow, maintaining the slender thread of courtesy between them. There were the guards outside to take him—there always were: Myya; Erij trusted no Nhi to do this duty, walking him to and from his quarters.
But they had doubled since he had come into the room. There had been two. Now four waited.
Suddenly he tried to retreat back within the room, heard the whisper of steel and saw Erij drawing his longsword from its sheath. In that instant of hesitation they hauled him back and tried to hold him.
He had nothing to lose. He knew it, and flung himself at his brother, intent on cracking his skull at least: there should no Myya whelp lord it in Ra-morij, that benefit for the unfortunate Nhi if nothing else.
But they overhauled him, stumbling over each other and overturning furniture in their haste to seize him; and Erij’s fist, guarded by the pommel, came hard against the side of his head, dropping him to his knees.
He knew these nether portions of the fortress, those carved deep into the hill for the holding of supplies in the event of siege, a veritable warren of tunnels and rooms of dripping ceilings, frozen in winter. It was this which made the whole east wing unsafe, so that no one lived there: collapse had been reckoned imminent as long as anyone could remember, though the tunnels were shored up and the storerooms braced with pillars and some filled with dirt. As children they had been forbidden these places: as children they had used the upper storerooms on the safe west for their amusements in the bitter days of winter and the heat of summer.
And one time after he came to live in Ra-morij, his brothers had dared him to come with them down to the nethermost depths: they had taken a single lamp and ventured into this place of damp and cold and moldering beams and crumbling masonry.
Here they had left him, where his screams could in nowise be heard above.
And it was into this place that the Myya sealed him, without light and without water, with only his thin shirt against the numbing cold. He fought against them, dazed as he yet was, panicked by the fear that they would bind him here as Handrys had: fled their grasp and meant to fight them.
They closed the door on him, plunged him into utter dark; the bolt outside crashed across and eckoed.
He tried his strength against it until he was exhausted, his shoulder bruised and his hands torn. Then he sank down against it, the only sure point in this absolute dark, the only place that was not cold earth and stone. He caught his breath and heard for a time only the slow and distant drip of water.
Then the rats began to stir again, timid at first, stopping when he would make a sound. Gradually they grew bolder. He heard their small feet, both along the walls and overhead, in the maze of unseen beams.
He loathed them, since that nightmare in the basement of Ra-morij; he hated even seeing them in light, despising them there: the very sight of them brought back the memory, reminding him of dark places where they thrived in numbers, a realm within the walls, under foundations, where they were the terror and he small and helpless.
He no longer dared lie there. They generally avoided a man who was awake: he knew this sensibly, in spite of his fear; but he had heard too much of what they might do to a man asleep. He paced to keep himself awake, and once, when he did lie down to rest, and felt something light skitter over his leg, he came up with a shuddering cry that echoed madly through the dark, and gathered himself to his feet.
The sound made a pause in all the scurryings—only a moment. Then they proceeded fearlessly about their business.
Sometime, eventually, he would have to sleep. There had to be a time that he would fall down exhausted. Already his knees were shaking. He paced until he had to take his rest by leaning against the walls, until he had long moments of knowing nothing, and woke again in the midst of a fall to the ground, to scramble up again, dusting his hands and shuddering, holding himself on his shaking legs with difficulty.
Then, at last, came a clatter in the hall, a light under the door, and it opened, blazing torchlight into his face, dark figures of men. He went to them as to dear friends, flung himself into their arms as into a place of refuge.
They brought him back upstairs, back to the fine hall that was Erij’s apartment. It was night outside the window, so that he knew it had been a night and a day since he had slept; and now his knees were shaking and his hands almost incapable of handling the utensils as he seated himself at the accustomed table opposite his brother.
He reached for the wine first, that began to take the chill from his belly, but he could not eat. He picked at a few bites, and ate some of the bread, and a bit of cheese.
The knife clattered from his hand and he had had enough. He shoved his chair back without Erij’s leave, withdrew to the warm hearth and lay down there while Erij finished his dinner. His senses dimmed, exhaustion taking him, and he wakened to Erij’s boot in his ribs, gently applied.
He gathered himself up, willing to stave off a return to that place by conversation, by applying himself most earnestly to Erij’s humors, but the Myya guards were there. They set hands on him to take him back to that place of
