Jame woke with a start, heart pounding, tangled in sweat soaked bedding. Trinity, when would these nightmares stop? But this one had been different. No hot, close room, no drunken laughter or unholy hunger. They had been chasing . . . someone. Her, she thought. In pain. In despair. How her face had throbbed.
Was that me? Jame wondered, touching her cheek, surprised to find the scar so slight.
In her dream, it had sprawled across half her face, and she had been running very fast on all fours.
There had also been terror.
They would finish what he (who?) had started or, worse, they would give her back to him.
Oh, Kinzi, is this all that honor has come to mean?
And he hunted with them in his gilded armor, as avid for blood as the hounds that bayed on her trail.
"Ho! So ho! Hark, hark, hark!"
There were voices below in the training square, in the predawn glimmer.
Jame scrambled out of her disordered bed and crossed to the inner window, snatching up clothes as she went. The square seethed with subdued, purposeful activity. Horses, dogs, randon and sergeants . . . of course. This morning they would set out to kill the rathorn colt.
Downstairs, she found most of the college's cadets lining the rail, watching and chattering excitedly.
"I reckon they've called up every hound in the college except Gorbel's private pack and Tarn's old Molocar," Dar was saying as Jame slipped between Brier and Vant to a place at the rail.
"Tarn is as mad as fire about that," remarked someone from Vant's ten. "He won't admit that old Torvo isn't up to it. Anyway, the lymers are already out casting for the scent."
"They'll start at the pool," said Quill wisely. "I hear it crashed through the thorns, so there'll be a blood trail, at least at first. Once the direhounds catch sight of it, well, that will be that."
Not far away, the Commandant was checking the tack on his tall, gray stallion Cloud. The horse wore a coat of iron rings interlaced with strips of rhi-sar leather, protecting his chest, sides, and flanks with skirts long enough, hopefully, to foil a rathorn's upward thrust. His rider wore corresponding light armor, designed for the hunt. Man and horse had the same sheen of misted steel, the same chill of purpose.
Two direhounds, impatient for the chase, turned on each other snapping and snarling. They moved almost too fast for the eye to follow, a blur of lean, white bodies, black legs, and square, black heads. Huntsmen grabbed them by their spiked collars and wrenched them apart, but not before one had caught the other's foreleg in its powerful jaws and snapped the bone with an audible crunch. The hunt-master knelt to assess the damage. The hound whined and was licking his face as he slipped a blade between its ribs.
"First blood of the hunt," said Erim uneasily as the randon cradled the dead hound, "and it's ours."
There would be more, thought Jame, eyeing the array of swords, boar-spears, and bows.
"I wish," she said to no one in particular, "that they would just leave him alone."
Vant gave her a sidelong glance. "Now, lady, we can't have a brute like that on the loose, can we? Or were you thinking you'd like to ride him?"
That caused a ripple of laughter; Jame's poor horsemanship was fast becoming the stuff of legend. The horse-master swore that she had found every way to fall off known to man or beast, and then invented a few more.
"Look," said someone.
They all leaned over the rail, craning to the left to watch as Gorbel entered the square. He was dressed in hunting leathers and carried a boar-spear as if he knew how to use it. The hunt-master stroked the hound's head one last time, lowered it to the ground, and rose to meet the Caineron Lordan.
What they said was inaudible to the onlookers, but Gorbel's growing anger spoke for itself. He turned, blustering, to the Commandant.
Sheth shot a sidelong smile at Harn Grip-hard, who stood stone-faced by the rail, watching, clad in his everyday, rumpled clothes. "Since the Highlord's commander does not deign to hunt down and kill the . . . er . . . emblem of his house," the Commandant announced in his clear, light voice to the college at large, "he stays here, in charge during my absence. Ask him."
Even as Gorbel turned, speechless and baffled, Harn was shaking his massive head. No.
Vant laughed as Caineron lordan stalked back to his barracks.
"Better luck next time, Gorbelly!"
"Be quiet," said Brier.
Vant turned to her from his haughty height although, indeed, he was slightly shorter than she. "What was that, five?"
Jame spoke without looking at either of them. "She meant, 'Shut up, ten.' It's tacky to gloat."
As Gorbel stalked past the Randir, they called out sympathetically to him. One named Simmel put his arm around the Caineron's shoulders and shook him playfully.
Mmm, thought Jame, remembering her uncle's ill-fated Randir crony, Roane. Whenever there was trouble, there seemed to be a Randir somewhere behind it, pushing.
In the crowd by the rail, she saw a thick coil of gold wrapped around a cadet's neck. The Randir seemed to feel Jame's eyes and glared back, one hand rising to caress the triangular head that rose from her collar to meet it. So. The Shanir had gotten her snake back, apparently uninjured. Good.
Was it really possible for an entire house to go rotten? Some Randir randon seemed all right. Others . . . she remembered the Tempter and the calculating, alien darkness that had seemed for a moment to peer out through her eyes. The Commandant had said that she was back, but Jame hadn't yet encountered her, nor did she wish to.
The Falconer's merlin swooped over the square with a scream, then wheeled toward the upper window of the mews where his master awaited him. Simultaneously came the belling of distant horns.
"They have the scent!" cried several voices. "Hurrah!"
Riders swung into the saddle and took the boar spears handed up to them. Archers strung their bows. Hounds yelped and pressed eagerly against the hall doors, black tails whipping in excitement. The doors opened. They surged through, down Old Tentir's hall, and out into the growing dawn. Swift feet and hooves followed.
Cadets leaned over the rail to watch them go, cheering, but then fell silent as the tumult of the hunt faded into the distance. Gorbel threw down his spear.
After that, it seemed quite prosaic to go in to breakfast with another round of lessons ahead.
However, it turned out to be a day of distractions.
Whatever the class, the cadets' attention kept turning to the hunt. For a long time, snatches of it could be heard in the distance—the bell of hounds, the sound of horns—borne on a shifting wind. The rathorn colt, it seemed, was keeping close to Tentir, playing hide-and-seek with its pursuers. In this, it was no doubt helped not only by the Riverland's odd topography but also by the disruptions caused by the recent weirdingstrom and quakes, which between them had displaced large chunks of the landscape, some as far south as the Cataracts.
Perhaps, some whispered, it could even use the folds of the land as the Merikit did.
Others laughed at this, but uneasily: no one knew for sure how the northern tribesmen could pop up wherever in the Riverland they chose. Some, like Lord Caineron, welcomed the odd native hunter as good sport, to be hunted in turn. Others remembered the fate of Kithorn and kept watch especially against the autumn cattle raids, but it did little good.
We are strangers here, Jame thought, not for the first time, and the land doesn't welcome us.
She and her ten were on their way, finally, to the day's last lesson.
The previous three had been exercises in confusion, with whole files of lancers tripping over each other's weapons, arrows loosed at random (except for Erim's, who couldn't seem to miss if he tried), and an irate strategy instructor dismissing half his class mildly concussed for inattention.
Harn had finally emerged and bellowed that the whole college had better settle down or, by Trinity, he would work off their fidgets with a punishment run the likes of which they had never seen and probably wouldn't survive.
Gorbel, bound for the same lesson as Jame, was still seething: "God's claws, I can track down that brute if anyone can. I'm the best hunter at Restormir except," he added hastily, "for Father."
While his cronies assured him that this was true and Jame's ten bit their tongues under Brier's stony gaze, Jame unhappily considered the rathorn. The Riverland wouldn't be safe for her, or at least as safe as it had ever been, until he was dead, but what a terrible waste!
Here was their classroom, a large chamber on the ground floor of Old Tentir, where they would practice with some of the more obscure weapons in the Kencyrath's armory. Jame stopped short on the threshold, her ten piling up behind her. Hanging on a rack were suits of protective leather armor, face-guards, and beside them, in pairs, heavy gauntlets tipped with steel claws.
Their instructor was a dark Brandan who looked as if he had had entirely too much experience with the wicked blades behind him. Indeed, one puckered eyelid drooped over an empty socket while three seamed scars ran parallel to it slantwise across his face.
"The Arrin-thar," he announced, gesturing to dangling weapons. "You see the intended connection with the lethal claws of the Arrin-ken, also with occasional rare Shanir. Find the pair that suits you best."
Alone among the excited chatter of her classmates, Jame fumbled through the swinging scythes, hoping desperately that none of them would fit.
"Here, lady," said the instructor, and thrust a pair at her. "These were made for a Kendar child—as playthings, no less—but you have hands almost as small." He pulled on his own and flexed their articulated fingers. Clink, clink, clink. "Well, Jameth?"
Jame stood holding the gauntlets in her own gloved hands, feeling numb, then nauseous.
"My name is Jame, ran, not Jameth." She gulped. "And I think that I'm going to be sick."
"Not good enough." He flipped down his face guard. "Defend yourself."
And he sprang at her.
She dropped the gauntlets.
The next moment passed in a blur of action, two figures at the heart of it leaping, striking, withdrawing.
The instructor looked down at his shirt—he hadn't bothered to don body armor against a novice—and watched it fall apart in five long gashes. The hairy chest beneath was similarly slashed, and the cuts just beginning to bleed.
Jame backed into a corner, hands gripped tightly behind her.
". . . sorry, sorry, sorry. . ."
The randon stalked after her, cadets scattering before him.
"Show me."
White faced and miserable, she held out her hands. He stripped off the gloves and examined her fingertips. Then he pressed her palms to make the ivory claws extend.
Gorbel's moon of a face appeared at the randon's elbow, wide eyed and goggling.
"Oh, how splendid!" he breathed, and then, as his friends pushed up behind him. "I mean, how grotesque. Father always said you were a freak."
For this, he got the randon's elbow casually jabbed into his eye and retreated, swearing.
"You'll need special training to use these properly," said the instructor in a matter-of-fact tone, releasing Jame's hands. "Gloves aren't a bad idea, though. Take note, all of you: always keep a weapon in reserve, the more unexpected, the better. D'you have clawed toes as well . . . er . . . Jame? Too bad. They can be useful. Now, on to practice."
The rest of the session passed in a daze for Jame. Wearing armor against the others' inexperience, encumbered by her own, she countered their flailing attacks automatically, initiating none of her own. Nor did it help that the instructor kept watching her, although he said nothing. At last the class was over and the cadets dismissed.
Outside the room, Jame almost ran head first into the Randir Tempter. All the more startling, the woman wore a heavy veil across the lower half of her face. She stepped aside without speaking, but the lines around her dark eyes shifted as if she smiled, unpleasantly: Why should I interfere? You will destroy yourself soon enough.
Jame had meant to slink back to her attic, but word of what had happened preceded her.
Timmon was waiting on the boardwalk. "From all the ruckus," he said, "I thought you must at least have sprouted fur and fangs." When he craned to see her hands, she presented them to him with a defiant glare, nails out. "Now these," he said, examining them, "are quite elegant. Just the same, you'll have to be careful how you use them in bed."
Jame realized that her ten had bunched up behind her, watching and listening, Vant with distaste, Brier without expression, the others obviously fascinated.
"Do you mind?" she snapped at them. As they reluctantly departed, she rounded on the Ardeth. "As for you . . ."
Timmon also retreated, throwing up his hands in mock surrender. "Keep 'em sheathed! I'm off too. And sleep well tonight, Lordan of Ivory," he called after her as she stalked away. "I'll see you in your dreams."
At the door of the Knorth barracks, Jame paused, hearing a babble of voices within: "Did you hear. . ."
"Did you see . . ."
"Oh no."
"Oh yes!"
Sudden silence fell as she stepped over the threshold. Nearly everyone was there, back from the last lesson, and all had turned to stare at her. Instinctively, she thrust her hands behind her back. Her movement broke the spell. At least half the room rushed at her, shouting questions:
"Oh, lady, can we see? Rue says they're five inches long" ("I did not!" Rue protested from the back of crowd) "and as sharp as knives!"
"Did you really make cat's meat of the instructor?"
"We knew you were a true Knorth!"
"Oh please, lady, show us!"
And, hesitantly, Jame did, flexing her long, black gloved fingers, the ivory nails, honed to lethal points, sliding out of their sheathes.
"Oooh!"
"So that's why the king post in the attic is all scratched up!" Rue exclaimed, suddenly enlightened.
Jame bolted up the stairs.
In her own quarters above, she leaned out the hole in the roof to gulp down cool mountain air, to wonder if, after all, she was going to be sick.
But here came Jorin, trotting across the floor, greeting her as if she had been gone a year. She sank down against the wall, gathered up as much of the ounce as would fit into her lap, and pressed her face into his rich fur. His purr shook them both, or perhaps not his purr alone.
"Shanir, god-spawn, unclean, unclean!"
Words shouted at a frightened child with bloody fingertips and nails. No: claws. Hide them. Chop them off. But too late: Father had seen. So much hate, such loathing for who and what she was.
Worse, Tori felt the same way, on a gut level perhaps inaccessible to reason. Father had trained him well, even as he had rebelled against that legacy of hate.
She, too, had rebelled, over and over again . . . but she had never quite lost the sense that it was all her fault. The claws. The rejection. Everything. That lesson, too, had sunk in deeper than reason.
Now Kendar who previously couldn't look her in the face had been avid to see what she had kept hidden in shame all her life. True, some had expressed horror. But not all. Not even most.
She remembered Marc's easy acceptance of her . . . deformity. Perhaps he was more typical of the Kendar attitude than she had thought. "We are many," the Randir Tempter had said, speaking of the Kendar Shanir, "and we are proud."
Jorin stretched backward over her arm, bracing himself with a paw against her cheek. She took it, feeling the warm, thick pad, the hidden menace. Press here, and out they came, hooked and sharp. Jorin took back his paw and began to groom it, pausing to crunch on the tip of a nail.
The most natural thing in the world.
No. It wasn't the same . . . or was it?
She cupped his sleek, golden head with her ivory nails. He leaned back into them. There. Scratch there.
All her life, she had mistrusted her own judgment, depending instead on that of Kendar like Marc, like these cadets, like Brier.
But her brother's feelings still mattered. Dreadfully.
And there was far more to her Shanir nature than ten embellished fingers. As yet, Tentir had no exact knowledge what it had on its hands.
Below, the dinner horn sounded.
Had so much time passed? Apparently. Her stomach rebelled at the thought of food, but she couldn't hide here forever. Jame pushed Jorin off her lap and soberly went down to a meal for which she had no appetite.
I must be dreaming, thought Jame.
She had expected to fall asleep with difficulty that night—after all, one's life didn't turn upside down every day—but now she barely remembered falling into bed.
Not this bed, though. The attic offered nothing so soft nor such silken sheets, deliciously cool on bare, bruised skin. Eyes still closed, she stretched luxuriously, like a cat, and found that her hands were bound above her head.
. . . be careful how you use those claws in bed . . .
Her eyes snapped open. Surely, this was a dream. Curtains of red ribbons surrounded her, rippling, whispering together. More ribbons bound her wrists, but loosely as if to say, Relax. Blame us if you must, but enjoy what you can't prevent. Truly, is it so bad to be a woman?
There was a flaw in that logic—probably several—but Jame found it hard to think clearly over the seductive suspiration of silk on silk. Anyway, did it matter what happened in a dream? And this felt so very, very good . . .
The ribbons parted. Timmon stood over her, naked and smiling. "I promised you some fun," he said.
Abruptly his expression changed. "Oh, no. Not again."
He seemed to go flat, and then his image separated into long strips . . . no, into more ribbons, fluttering in futile protest.
Through them stumbled someone else. A spare body wired with muscle and laced with scars, black hair shot with white, silver-gray eyes . . .
Brother and sister stared at each other. "Oh no!" they said simultaneously, and Jame woke with a start in her attic loft on rough blankets, alone.
What a strange dream, she thought as her pounding heart slowed. Even for me. Especially for me. Oh well.
She curled up again in her scratchy nest, but this time sleep eluded her for a long, long time.
Dawn came at last, but no word from the hunt. The distant sounds had faded under a leaden, over-cast sky. Not even the keen eyes of the Falconer's merlin, circling above, could pierce the clouds that mantled the lower slopes of the Snowthorns.
After assembly, Gorbel again demanded that he be allowed to lead out his private pack of hounds, and again he was denied. Simmel led him off, whispering in his ear with a twisted smile that the Caineron did not see.
The Danior Tarn also begged for permission to join the hunt with his Molocar Torvo and also was denied, but more gently. The old hound gave a cavernous, nearly toothless yawn and fell asleep at his master's feet.
When Jame's ten set out to do their stint in rebuilding the quake-broken outer walls, she was told to stay behind. It occurred to her, watching them go, that she hadn't been outside Tentir since the rathorn attack at the river, that the class schedule had deliberately been changed to keep her in. The college was a large place. Nonetheless, she suddenly felt cramped and restless.
Having nothing else to do, she took Jorin and went in search of Harn Grip-hard.
On the way, she ran into Timmon, arm in arm with a Kendar girl of his house.
"Have any good dreams last night?" asked Timmon. "Because I didn't. At first. Then I remembered Narsa here, and the rest of the evening was quite jolly."
He toyed with a lock of the girl's dark hair as he spoke, glancing sidelong at Jame. It occurred to her that he was trying to make her jealous.
"Play your games, then," she said, lightly. "I wish you joy of him, cadet."
Timmon blinked at her and the girl glared, clutching his arm even more tightly.
Jame went her way, annoyed to find that she was vaguely, fleetingly jealous. But, after all, he hadn't been all that impressive naked, even in a dream.
. . . anyway, not compared to that other lean, neatly muscled body tempered by hardship and battle, those beautiful hands that wore their scars like elegant lace-work gloves, those silver-shadowed eyes . . .
Stop it, Jame told herself crossly. Things are complicated enough already.
At length she found Harn in the subterranean stable.
A commotion drew her to the southernmost row of stalls, hard against Old Tentir's foundation. Over shouts of warning rose the eerie shriek of a terrified horse, followed by a series of crashes. Edging closer, Jame saw a large, piebald horse in its stall, on its back, with all four hooves in the air. She burst out laughing. Harn turned around and boxed her on the ear, hard.
"It isn't funny," he said.
The blow sent her reeling. Rage surged over shock and she came back at him, claws out; but his expression, impatient and preoccupied, stopped her like a dash of ice water in the face:
Not now.
The horse began to thrash again. A flying hoof smashed through wood, caught, was wrenched free. The animal kept rolling back against the wall and pausing to pant, its pale belly heaving. Then it lashed out again.
The bow-legged horse-master jerked a cadet out of the way. "D'you want your face flattened like mine, youngling? You and you. Pin him down."
A sergeant and a third year cadet threw themselves on the horse's head and neck.
"Steady, steady. . ."
The master shook out a coil of rope and expertly snaked it around the far hind leg near the hock. "Now, let go!"
They sprang back.
The master pulled, aided a moment later by Harn, and the horse crashed over in a cloud of dust. It rested for moment, looking dazed, then lurched to its feet. Harn grunted approval when he saw that it was uninjured and turned to walk away. Jame followed him, rubbing her ear.
"Listen," he said, rounding on her. "When a horse gets cast in a stall like that, it can't get up by itself. It will struggle until it dies."
"Ran, I'm sorry I laughed. It wasn't funny at all. And yes, I did nearly flare at you."
"Huh." He gave her a brooding look. "But you didn't."
"Ran," she said as he turned again to leave, "tell me about the White Lady."
He swung back, so suddenly that she shrank from him. "Why?"
"Because I've seen her, first outside my quarters, calling to me, and then beside Perimal's Cauldron."
To her surprise, behind its garnish of grizzled stubble his broad face paled. "I said your being here was madness, and now this."
"Now what, ran?" she asked, bewildered by his agitation. Did he mean to hit her again, burst into tears, or faint? "Has it something to do with her being called 'The Shame of Tentir,' and why that, anyway?"
He loomed over her like a cliff face, as if poised to crush her questions with his sheer bulk, and perhaps her as well.
"Just leave!" he roared down at her, causing heads to turn across the stable and Jorin to bolt. "D'you hear me? Get out!"
She stared after him as he stumped off.
The horse-master came trotting up to see what all the shouting was about. "Now, now, remember what the Commandant said about not driving your instructors mad, lady," he said, adding, "not that it looks like with Harn Grip-hard you'd have far to go. What in Trinity's name d'you say to him?"
"Just that I'd seen the White Lady. Was that so awful?"
The master's shaggy eyebrows rose, as if attempting to scale the mottled heights of his bald head. "Well, it's a surprise, given that the poor thing's been dead these forty years. And no, I'll not tell you how or why if the senior randon of your own house won't. I've heard tell, though, that if a Knorth sees her, it means they're going to die."
"Oh," said Jame, digesting this. "Ran, did Harn just expel me from Tentir?"
"No, no." He clapped her bracingly on the shoulder as he might have to reassure an nervous filly. "You've still got a mort of tests to fail and horses to fall off. All things in good time."
The hunt returned at dusk the next day in shocking disarray.
Everyone in it was muddy and bruised, with ripped clothes and shattered weapons. The dogs limped, heads down, and most of the horses had gone lame. The Commandant led his own mount with a sergeant swaying on its back, his head wrapped in bloody rags. Other injured randon entered supported by friends or on makeshift litters.
"Trinity," said Harn, staring, as were most of the cadets who had gathered as the morning before at the practice ground rail, this time in stunned silence. "That damned colt did all of this?"
"Hardly any of it," answered Sheth, helping down the sergeant. Members of the man's house rushed to help him. "I've sent for a healer," the Commandant told them. "There are some broken limbs. Otherwise, this is the worst of it.
"No, not the rathorn," he repeated to Harn, preoccupied, as he turned to help the other wounded. "We ran into a tree, or rather a tree ran over us."
The rest of the story had to wait until dinner in the officers' mess. Nearly everyone attended, bandages, splints, and all. A healer, borrowed from the Scrollsmen's College at Mount Alban, was with the injured sergeant. Otherwise, even the Commandant was present for once, although this was a mixed blessing: no one dared to speak of the hunt before he did and there he sat, calmly sipping the wine that he had ordered served instead of the customary cider, clad in a coat of rich, purple velvet with trimmed with royal blue. Unlike most of his fellow huntsmen, he had found time to bathe.
Harn too drank, more deeply than usual. He had been rattled by Jameth's sighting of the White Lady and, no doubt, had made a fool of himself, luckily during the Commandant's absence. Since then, he had had time to think. Whatever his feelings about Bel-tairi and the terrible events following her death, or disappearance, or whatever-it-had-been, he felt now that he had underestimated the Knorth Lordan. It was hard not to see her as a frighteningly vulnerable version of her brother or as a fragile child when compared to her fellow Kendar cadets, but Bran's news heartened him.
On the other hand, as usual, he found Sheth's reticence maddening. At last he slammed down his glass, ignoring it when it shattered. His neighbors flinched at the flying shards.
"Well?" he growled. "D'you mean to sit there all night smirking like a cat in cream? What happened, man?"
Sheth picked a splinter of glass out of his venison stew and laid it beside his plate. "Patience never was one of your virtues, was it, Ran Harn? All right."
He folded his hands and spoke as if to them, a thin smile wryly twisting his saturnine face. "As you may have guessed, we saw precious little of the rathorn. His trail kept ending up in a hopeless muddle, crossed, re-crossed, and crossed yet again. Clearly, he was playing with us and no doubt enjoying himself enormously. Then too, we kept stumbling on stray patches of weirding and the occasional case of arboreal drift."
Someone laughed, like Harn a bit drunk. "S'true. I got caught in a creeping grove of sumac and was nearly carried off, Trinity knows where."
"You were lucky," said another morosely, his hands such a welter of bandages that he could only glare at his untouched meal. "The cloud-of-thorns were on the move too. So were the wild roses. And the raspberry canes."
"Ah, the thorns of life," murmured Sheth. "So sweet. So sharp. Things didn't get really . . . er . . . interesting, though, until last night. We were bedding down when we first heard it. From the approaching lash of branches, I thought we were in for a storm, but there was no wind. Then it burst into our camp. I think," he added judiciously, "that we were simply in its way."
"In whose way?" demanded Harn, just short of an explosion.
"Why, didn't I say? It was a golden willow. Rampant."
"God's claws, Commandant! Don't y'know how to tell a story?" The bandaged randon leaned forward, elbows planted firmly in his dinner.
"Listen. First, as Sheth Sharp-tongue says, we hear this mighty thrashing in the forest. Myself, I wondered if the Dark Judge and judgment itself were about to fall on us. Then the earth begins to writhe. Roots are surging out of it and rocks are sinking in. See, the ground has turned as soft as quicksand and I'm fighting in its grip, all tangled up in runners like so many ropes of steel. Then comes the tree.
"God's truth, we all thought we were dead. Some were sinking, others picked up and flung aside. It had no more regard for us than . . . than for so much straw flung in its way. Less, if possible. Myself, I don't believe that the Riverland is alive and conscious, much less that it doesn't like us crawling over its wrinkled hide like . . . like . . ."
"Fleas?" suggested an Edirr, helpfully. "Lice? Wood ticks?"
"Argh. Brute nature. Brute Rathillien. That's all it is. Like a hundred other worlds before it."
"Ah, but we don't know about them, do we?" said the Commandant gently. "Only that none of them have put us to the test the way this world has."
"It needs to know its master," a Caineron muttered into his glass. "That's all."
"And if it refuses?" asked a Randir, with a sidelong smile at the others of her house.
"Then, I say, break it all to bits."
"Leaving us to stand on what?" Harn snorted. "This is ridiculous. Look at you, bandaged up to the eyebrows. Who broke whom? You Caineron and you Randir, who cut down all the trees around Wilden to stop them from drifting away. What has that gotten you? Mud-slides in season and a rain of frogs out of it. Is all the Chain of Creation to be bent to your will?"
"Yes!" shouted the Caineron, and banged their glasses on the table, more shattering in the process.
"If this keeps up," murmured one senior randon to another, "we'll have to start drinking from tin cups, or from cupped hands."
"So we are to rule the whole of creation," said Sheth, with a wry smile, regarding their battered ranks. "Never mind the Master or Perimal Darkling or a trail of lost, fallen worlds. Never mind betrayal, heartbreak, and thirty millennia of failure. And for whom, after all, do we accomplish this great feat—our hated god, our . . . er . . . beloved lords, ourselves?"
He had spoken this last softly so that most of his fellow Caineron hadn't heard. But Harn did.
"Which do you serve, randon?"
"Ah, my dear brother-in-arms. Grant me the space to decide."
Harn looked hard at him. "Choice, yes, so that it be done with honor."
The other inclined his head, acknowledging ruefully the Kencyrath's fundamental dilemma.
"I dunno about Rathillien," said one of the hunters with satisfaction, "but we spent all day chasing down and settling for that damn tree. It's chained to a boulder now, waiting for the axe. Prime bows, its wood will make, among other things."
"It's a prize all right," another agreed, "for whichever house reaches it first."
This sparked a widespread, increasingly loud argument: to whom did the willow belong? It turned out that the randon of the two nearest major houses—Caineron and Randir—had sent urgent messages to their lords requesting foresters. The Brandan claimed that they had put their mark on it first, the previous fall. Others pointed out, however, that they had subsequently lost it: when the sap began to run that spring, not surprisingly so had the tree, right across the river south of the Danior's Shadow Rock. Other houses, smaller, farther away, or more altruistic, insisted that it belonged to Tentir, hard won with blood, bruises and sundry broken bones.
Before the randon could become too heated, Harn loudly broke in: "We stay-at-homes have some news too. Bran, show'em."
The dark, scarred randon obligingly opened his shirt to reveal five scabbed-over gashes across his hairy torso. Then he explained how he had gotten them.
"So," said someone, after a blank moment. "Our kitten has claws."
"And why," murmured the Commandant, "am I not surprised?"
"We already know that she's a reasonably controlled berserker," Harn growled. "I'll swear to that."
"We won't," snapped a Randir. "When our tempter first chewed through her gag, she induced the Kendar in charge of her to jump down a well. Something at the bottom ate him."
"Trogs, probably," muttered someone. "And poor sanitation. Never trust a rock with teeth, or a midden that burps."
Hawthorn glanced around to make sure that the randon in question was absent. "Yet Lady Rawneth has since sent her pet tempter back to . . . er . . . grace our halls."
Since her return, she had, in fact, kept mostly to the Randir barracks, to no one's disappointment except (perhaps) the Randir.
"Odd," remarked a Danior. "We've been watching the Highlord for any of his father's destructive traits, and here they pop up in his sister. True, it's not as if she could read runes or reap souls. . ."
He paused, perhaps remembering when Knorth and Ardeth had danced and darkness had gaped. But nothing, after all, had come of that.
"Just the same," said another randon, maybe following the other's thought, maybe not, "d'you think Torisen knows?"
"He might," said Bran, securing his shirt. "We all know how the Highlord feels about the Shanir, and his attitude toward our Jameth has been . . . puzzling. Does he want her to succeed at Tentir or not? Does he really mean to keep her as his heir, perhaps to become the first highlady in our history? Does he even know his own mind in the matter?"
"Or perhaps," murmured a Randir, "he's lost said mind altogether. It's been known to happen in his family. Ask the Knorth: how secure do they feel in his power since the battle at the Cataracts, much less since he fled Kothifir for the Riverland as if the Shadows themselves were snapping at his heels?"
Harn started to rise, but Sheth's fingertips on his arm stopped him.
"Time will tell," the Commandant said gently. "Shouting won't."
"No offense, rans," said a Coman, his eyes flickering nervously from face to face, "but the rest aside, we all know there's only one person at Tentir qualified to train a natural Arrin-thari."
He jumped as Harn's fist crashed down on the table.
"No! We agreed that that was far too dangerous. Remember the mauled cadet. And look what he did to your face, Bran."
"Oh, I don't blame him for that. After all, at the time we were forcing him at spear-point into a cage."
"Just the same . . ."
"Enough," said the Commandant quietly, and the room lapsed momentarily into a strange, almost embarrassed silence.
Behind the wall, in the gloom of Old Tentir's secret ways, Graykin listened with interest.
"Speaking of the Highborn," said Hawthorn, "I'd watch out, if I were you, for the Ardeth Timmon."
"Why?" demanded a member of that house.
"Because you also produce strong Shanir, as we know to our grief from Pereden. Because his son may also be a dream-stalker, as well as a charmer. Because he's already snared a Kendar girl with his glamour and bedded her. We all know what damage that can cause, and how many Kendar Pereden ruined."
"Nonetheless, it's a house matter," said the Ardeth flatly. "Don't interfere."
"Still, he's bound to try for the Knorth Lordan."
"I pity him if he does," Harn said with a sudden bark of laughter. "God's teeth and toenails, didn't you hear? Our kitten has claws."