Jame tracked Bear back to his den by his bloody footprints. After the guards had locked him in, the Commandant stood for some time, motionless, brooding outside the door. Then he turned in a swirl of his black coat and left. When all footsteps had faded away, Jame slithered inside through the food-flap.
The apartment was much as she remembered it, dark, hot, and airless, but she had time now to see that otherwise it was fairly comfortable with solid furniture, lively (if hard to make out) tapestries, and toys such as the little wooden warriors strewn enticingly about the floor. The Commandant had done the best he could for his brother. Unfortunately, Bear was in no shape to keep it clean, and any walls will close in when one can't escape them.
The big randon had subsided into his tattered chair before the fireplace and was slowly dismantling the guard mask still entangled in his claws. He must have kept it, Jame thought, to play with like a puzzle, as good a distraction as any for so damaged a brain. He grunted when he saw her but didn't rise. Considering the state of his bare feet, she wasn't surprised. The toenails were much worse than she had realized: several of them curled all the way under until the sharp points pierced the heavily calloused soles of his feet. That he could walk at all, much less fight, amazed her.
To one side was a table with fresh food and drink set out on it. Besides that, she found a small shaft set into the wall that allowed one to haul water up from the springs beneath Old Tentir. This she heated in a basin over the fire and finally got Bear to put his feet in it. The water immediately turned black with dirt. Several basins later, with his toes clean and beginning to wrinkle, she drew out a huge, hairy foot, braced it on her thigh, and began to pry an embedded claw out of the calloused sole. Bear nearly kicked her into the fireplace. It hadn't occurred to her that the big man might be ticklish.
"What I really need," she said to him, picking herself up, "is a nail clipper from the kennel. And maybe a file."
For the moment, however, she must make do with her knife. Finally, she worked out the first claw, rather like digging a nail out of a board, and trimmed off its needle point. Another came out red at the tip, with a sluggish ooze of blood and a faint whiff of corruption. Kendar don't infect easily. Nonetheless, Bear was very lucky not to have suffered worse damage than this. It occurred to her, as she whittled down lethal, overgrown tips, that perhaps this was what Bear had been trying to do when they handed him the White Knife. Life was too strong in him to cut it short, but no one should have to suffer perennially sore feet. Such a simple thing—perhaps too simple for anyone but another Arrin-thari to have noticed.
"There," she said, sitting back on her heels. "The next time, I'll bring the proper tools and do a proper job, on your hands too. These nails are still going to need a lot of filing."
"G-g-g-g-g . . ."
"Good?"
"G-g-g-g-g . . ."
"Girl?"
He leaned forward and patted her clumsily on the head. Unfortunately, the hand he used was still spiky with wire so it took awhile, again, to disentangle her hair without tearing out patches of it.
Maybe I should ask Rue to make me a new cap as well as gloves, Jame thought as she wriggled out into the hallway. Long, lovely locks were all very well, but not if people kept nearly scalping her . . . and be damned if she was going to crop it short, however much Harn grumbled.
Other lessons with Bear followed, none as dramatic as the first but all invaluable.
Harn stayed away, for which Jame was sorry. Although their situations were very different, she wished Harn could see that Bear wasn't a monstrosity so that, by extension, he might feel less like one himself. She certainly felt more at ease at least with that aspect of her Shanir nature than she had since childhood—not that she appreciated being born one of her god's pet monsters. Surely, though, it was better to have such weapons than to face life without them. After all, whatever her heritage, what mattered was what she did with it—or did it? Whenever her thoughts reached that point, she still felt confused. Had she free will in these matters, or did her blood damn her, whatever she did? But to accept the latter was to surrender responsibility for her own fate as Bane had done, and look where that had led him.
At any rate, it was impossible for her to deal with Bear without seeing him as Marc so easily could have been, under similar circumstances.
And Bear had taken that terrible injury fighting a useless battle led by her father. There, if you please, lay the true madness, sprung from her own blood, nurtured in the broken world it had created.
She was sure that exercise helped both Bear's temper and health and would gladly have taken him on midnight rambles or down to one of the hot water pits in the fire timber hall for a proper bath. However, his was a door fitted with a lock that for once she couldn't pick, perhaps because it was Kendar work, and Bear certainly couldn't squeeze through the flap. At least she was able to get his clothes washed and repaired, once she induced him to shed them—an operation that left him huddled naked as far under his cot as he could get, scarlet with embarrassment, probably wishing somewhere in his befuddled brain that this mad Knorth female with her fetish for clean clothes had never come into his life.
Jorin usually stayed in the outer hallway. Occasionally through him, Jame caught the hint of an amused presence outside, but when she flipped up the panel to look, no one was there but the ounce, sometimes batting around an exotic fruit or a new toy soldier for Bear.
The days of high summer passed, divided for Jame between lessons and barracks duty, rathorn colt and Whinno-hir mare, Bear and a changing assortment of gray scarved senior randon, who always seemed to be there, watching, at the worst possible moments.
On the good side, Bel-tairi was healing rapidly.
"Soon she'll be fit to ride," the horse-master said, with a side-long glance at Jame.
However, Jame had no idea if the mare would permit such a liberty. Bel was still bound to her great-grandmother, as far as she could tell, or at least to the blood that bound Kinzi's soul to her death banner. Death was proving to be at least as complicated as life.
The colt continued to run wild. With Bel for company, however, he didn't plague the remount herd so, except for random sightings, only Jame and the horse-master knew that he still haunted the area. Sometimes the master brought out harnesses and lunge lines, but on the rare occasions when the colt allowed them to be strapped on, it was only for the pleasure of tearing them apart. Normal training for him, obviously, was out of the question.
"Never mind," said the master with a sigh, watching the colt prance off flinging aside snapped leather straps and broken rope. "I'll think of something."
Jame hoped so. She had an odd feeling that they would never be complete without each other, but how was she to ride such a creature when she still could barely stay on the quietest lesson horse? Forget the bridle bit. As with the Whinno-hir, she sensed that the colt would never submit to one. A halter, maybe, for appearance's sake. At the very least, though, she was going to need a tightly girthed saddle and stirrups.
Still, he was young, and so was she. There was time.
More worrying were reports that hill tribes had begun to raid farther south, and more aggressively. A Caineron flock had been slaughtered in the high fields, the carcasses left to rot, and the Kendar herders flayed alive. Worse, not only were their skins taken but their raw flesh was smeared with sheep fat so that, when found, they were still alive, in agony, begging for the White Knife. Perhaps one shouldn't wonder at such barbarity, given Caldane's practices, but it still didn't sound right to Jame. From what little she knew of the Merikit, they weren't given to wasteful, wanton cruelty. Nonetheless, Caldane now regularly hunted them, pushing farther and farther into northern lands once closed to him, thwarted only by the mysterious folds in the land from striking at the heart of Merikit territory.
She could only guess what the scrollsman Index felt after his years of study and friendship with the Merikit. He had given up demanding that she take him with her up into the hills, which was ominous in itself. She hoped he wasn't going to do something stupid, while simultaneously feeling guilty that she hadn't come up with a plan of her own. She was, after all, still the Earth Wife's Favorite and, technically, Chingetai's heir.
And the Burnt Man's son, she reminded herself.
Trinity knew, she had no desire to face that nightmare again, Burnt Man and Dark Judge combined, ready to pass judgment on such an errant darkling as herself. To them, she must represent the worst of both worlds, much as they did to her.
Then there was Torisen. She heard nothing more about her brother's problem in remembering the names of those Kendar bound to him. Sometimes, though, she felt a shiver ripple through the fabric of her house and for days after that, everyone would call each other by name in her presence. She wasn't sure what good it would do, but she began to learn every Knorth name she could, alive or dead, until her head hurt.
One night late in the barracks dining room, Jame dawdled over a cup of cider, listening to Vant set the next day's duty roster with the other ten-commanders of their house. As this was one of his chores, she didn't have to be there, but it amused her how his eyes kept sliding toward her and how at such times he lost focus on the matter at hand.
Just then, a sort of muffled rumpus broke out overhead, punctuated by Graykin's sharp voice raised in protest.
Jame rose. "Carry on," she said to the ten-commanders. "The roster sounds fine, Vant, except that you have cadet Cherry cooking dinner and cleaning the latrine simultaneously. What goes in does come out, but usually not that fast, unless Cherry is a much worse cook than I realized."
With that, she went quickly up the stair with Jorin on her heels. The second story dorm was quiet. Above, however, feet tramped back and forth between the front common room and the lordan's quarters to the back.
From the landing, Jame saw that the latter's anteroom door stood wide open, as did that of the larger, inner chamber. Flames leaped in the over-sized fireplace. She fell back a step before the heat, feeling for a moment as if she had suddenly walked into her as yet unresolved, recurrent nightmare. The floor was even strewn with clothes.
Inside, Rue was directing the dismantlement of the northern wall of chests, while Graykin stood before the southern ramparts as if ready to defend them with his life.
"What's going on?" Jame asked the assembly at large.
Rue set a pugnacious jaw.
"Well, lady, you keep coming back clad in naught but rags, if that. It isn't proper."
What she meant was Consider our pride, if not your own, and Jame knew it. Clothes weren't that important to her, but the other houses were beginning to laugh at the increasingly shabby Knorth lordan.
She glanced at her servant, who glared back at her defiantly.
"There's plenty dumped out on the floor already," he said. "Tell them to leave this side alone."
Besides his normal, dusty gear, he wore an elegant if filthy scarf woven of silvery silk, embroidered along the borders in peacock blue with animals engaged in enthusiastic if highly improbable frolics. No doubt he had pilfered it from one of the chests. Well, she had told him to take whatever he wanted. She also suspected that he had wormed through the southern barrier to set up his new lodgings in the deserted rooms beyond. It was easy to forget that the lordan's suite extended in both directions down the length of the western wall.
"Leave the south side of the room intact for the time being," she told Rue. "Trinity knows, there's enough here already for me to wear a different set of clothes every day for a year."
Rue wrinkled her pug nose at the armful she had scooped up. "But not all of it is salvageable." She tossed the lot into the flames, which snatched it and roared up the chimney. "Ugh, that stink!"
Jame regarded the room's north wall. "Let's have it all down," she said abruptly. "I want to see what's behind it."
Cadets stared at her for a moment, then Rue gave a whoop of delight and practically threw herself at the barrier. Jame backed out of the way as the others leaped to help. It hadn't occurred to her that they had been itching to reclaim the lost rooms—more like to exorcise them. It had to happen sooner or later.
But am I ready? she asked herself, and didn't know the answer.
Not all the chests contained clothes. Some held ornate weapons more for show than use, pretty baubles, broken musical instruments, scrolls with many interesting illustrations along the lines of the scarf, and enough ointments, unguents, and cosmetics to have kept the courtesans of Tai-tastigon in business for a year.
There were also cracked kegs leaking a gooey, amber substance and crates of corked bottles of every size, shape, and color.
Beyond that was a door.
When Rue stepped forward to open it, however, Jame stopped her.
"After all," she said, bracing herself, "he was my uncle."
It was unlocked, but its rusty hinges ground like iron teeth and all was dark within. Dar ran to fetch lights. As she waited, Jame tested the stale air both with her own senses and with Jorin's. Here and now, though, the attic smelled worse than the darkness before her. When Rue handed her a lit candle, she entered cautiously, to find dust, small empty rooms, smaller windows in the outer wall, and at the end of the hall, a kitchen. These were the servants' quarters.
Looking back down the long, dusty hall, she saw Graykin still in the central room, glowering back at her, guarding the unseen master chambers behind him that he had claimed as his own.
He was welcome to them.
Jame sighed for the lost, airy freedom of her attic.
"If those rooms were cleaned up," she said as they left the dreary wing, "I suppose I could live there. It will certainly be warmer than the attic, come winter. Rue, ask Ran Harn if we can knock out some walls to make larger spaces, and maybe enlarge some windows. Cold be damned. I hate feeling shut in."
Rue agreed with such enthusiasm that Jame realized her odd choice of living quarters had been as much a source of embarrassment to her house as her sparse wardrobe. Speaking of which . . .
"As a council member, Ran Harn needs a proper scarf. Graykin, give me that, please. Consider it rent," she added as he hesitated to surrender his prize. "Rue, wash it and do something about that border. We can't have the Knorth war leader sporting hounds in heat, or hopping hares, or whatever these beasties are supposed to be."
In the common room across the landing, cadets both female and male were busily sorting, cutting, and sewing. Dusk had fallen. Candles cast pools of light through which needle and knife flashed like silvery fish. The cadets might be serving their own pride as much as her need, but the cheerful babble of their voices and the sacrifice of their scant free time touched Jame.
"Use most of this to make new clothes for the cadets," she told Rue. "Truly, I only need a serviceable wardrobe, not an enormous or fancy one, and some of us are even shabbier than I am. Remember, we're a poor house. I'll wear whatever you can salvage for me—within reason—but not that damned jacket."
The Lordan's Coat sprawled on a chair in the corner, as if sent there in punishment like a naughty child. Even untenanted, it had an air of indolent, stupid malice to it as faint but persistent as its reek, and just as personal.
Rue made a face. "Beautiful needlework it may be, but a foul thing nonetheless. You wouldn't think that one man could leave such a taint."
"Master Gerridon did," said Jame grimly, not adding that he, too, had been her uncle.
The smell reminded her that she had only reclaimed a few, dusty rooms. Greshan's personal quarters and the nightmare he had left behind had not yet been exorcized. In that, the coat seemed to mock her, the past overshadowing the present and threatening the future. For that matter, if she failed the autumn cull, all here would sink back into obscurity; and she knew, perhaps better than anyone, what malignant strength that darkness held.
Given that, it was a comfort to pass through the candle-glow of the common room, greeting those cadets whom she knew by name, learning the names of others. As master ten of the entire barracks she should have done this long ago, except for distractions and a lingering fear that many (like Vant) wished that she would just go away. Their cheerful welcome on this particular evening warmed her. Had she really, somehow, come to be accepted?
But at the door, watching, stood Briar Iron-thorn, as wooden faced as ever, judgment reserved.
No, thought Jame sadly, slipping past the big Southron and down the stair with Jorin on her heels. She wasn't home yet.
The remains of an incredible sunset hung over the black bulk of the western mountains, smears and whorls of red, orange, and yellow, lurid and smoldering, as if the entire sky were a great fire dying down to ash. Such spectacles had become common since the eruption, and the light on cloudy days was often an odd, murky yellow tinged with olive green shadows. The wind picked up. Dust rattled in the practice square and the tin roof of the surrounding arcade flexed with a hollow boom like imitation thunder. Warm light spilled from barracks' doors and windows. Supper over, cadets and randon alike were settling down to their favorite evening pursuits before bed.
Jame walked south, then east around the square, bound for Old Tentir—not the most direct route, but she preferred to stay clear of the Caineron and Randir quarters when by herself. After all, why ask for trouble?
She wondered, looking across at them: where did one draw the line between house and college loyalties? Just before their oath-taking, the Commandant had said, "While you attend this college, it is your home and all within it are your family, wherever you were born, whomever you call 'enemy' outside these walls. Here we are all blood-kin."
So far, it hadn't quite worked out that way . . . or had it? There were rivalries between barracks, of course, that turned many lessons into fierce competitions; but that was nothing, and good in its way. Here, everyone competed all the time, enthusiastically.
However, you didn't tie blood-kin to a tree as bait for a rathorn, or try to feed them to a poor, mad monster in his lair, or drop poisonous snakes on them as they slept.
As for the first, though, Gorbel probably hadn't meant to harm her, intending to get the rathorn before it got her.
The Randir had indeed tossed her into Bear's den, but that was before she had formally become a cadet.
True, she still had no idea who had introduced her to Addy the gilded swamp adder so informally.
Then there was the Randir Tempter . . . but presumably, whether the Witch watched through the randon's eyes or not, she was only doing her job. She and the Commandant both tested weaknesses and exposed flaws—valuable work, as far as that went. Jame had certainly learned more about self-control here in a half a season than in years outside the college walls.
Yes, but if so why had no one tested Greshan . . . unless that role had fallen to the unfortunate Roane? Was Roane the Randir also a tempter? If so, how far had he intended to go before he passed judgment on the Knorth lordan? Too far, it seemed, as Roane had ended up dead, warping her father's life forever in the process. How far were the current tempter and commandant prepared to go?
Could one be at Tentir, but not of it?
Clearly, her uncle Greshan hadn't belonged here, only attending because that was what the Knorth lordan was supposed to do. From what she had heard, he had made no attempt to fulfill a cadet's duties. Did Gorbel belong? Did Timmon? Did she? The Commandant had said that the college had its own rules, its own justice, and that by the end she would know for sure whether or not she had succeeded. Getting out alive would be a good start. Ah, but winning one's randon collar would be even better.
Jorin's ears flicked as something stirred on the other side of the square. The lower story of the Randir barracks was dark, the main door almost invisible in the arcade's shadow, but figures were slipping out of it and moving quickly, silently, toward Old Tentir. Some seemed to be carrying bows.
What in Perimal's name . . .?
Keeping to the shadows herself, Jame entered the great hall by its southern-most door. On the other side was the ramp leading down to the stables. That was where they were going. She had been bound there herself, to ask the horse-master some minor question about Bel. If those were bows, who or what were the Randir hunting with such stealth in such an unlikely place at this time of night? Should she tell someone or find out first, if she could, what was going on? The latter appealed more. She crossed the hall and descended, moving briskly and openly, as if nothing were wrong.
Most of the subterranean stable was dark, its inmates fed and settled for the night. Here and there for light, candles floated in pans of water, open flame being a serious danger when surrounded by so much dry wood and hay. As she passed, Jame glimpsed pale, hooded faces drawing back into the dark and heard the restless movements of horses. Jorin growled, until a soft word from her quieted him. But he had caught a familiar scent, and they followed it, down again into the fire-timber hall, where giant upright trunks of iron-wood smoldered in their pits, fifty feet from brick floor to ceiling. Here among other facilities was the farrier's forge, glowing red.
A gray mare stood patiently in cross-ties, waiting to be fitted with new shoes. The horse-master himself manned bellows, tongs, and hammer, his bald head shining with sweat that ran freely down his face, unimpeded by his flattened nose. When he saw Jame, his eyebrows rose but he continued as if a visit by the Knorth Lordan at such an hour was nothing unusual.
"What a beautiful animal," said Jame, running a hand down the mare's neck.
Encircling it was a thin leather band. All traces of paint had been washed away, but between the band and those mild, leaf-green eyes, the creature was unmistakable. Jame was greatly relieved that Mer-kanti had outrun the volcano; she had been worried about him. But what was either he or his mare doing here?
"Her name is Mirah." He lifted a fore-hoof to check it against the shoe. Jame bent as if to examine his work. "Her master is in danger," he breathed, lips barely moving. "The bastards have set an ambush. You've got to warn him."
"Where is he?"
"Probably in Ran Harn's apartment."
Jame straightened with a casual "Good night, then," hoping that her sudden departure would take the lurkers off guard. She hadn't spotted any in the fire timber hall, but three surrounded her at the top of the ramp, bows drawn.
"Now what?" she asked them.
Coming up behind, farrier's hammer in hand, the horse-master dropped one with an arm-shattering blow. An arrow flew wild, and in the stable's darkness a horse screamed. Confused, the second archer wavered between two targets, and Jame took him down with a fire-leaping kick. Turning, she found that the third had melted back into the shadows.
"Run," said the horse-master.
Jame did, with Jorin bounding ahead. From behind came the master's defiant war-cry, a hawk's jeering shriek, cut short. She hadn't known that he was Edirr.
The stable was awake now, nervous horses bugling, hooves ringing on wood, great flanks crashing into slat walls and boards cracking. Dark figures flitted through the chaos, on the hunt. The hunted fled, dodging down aisles, around corners, through stalls, under hooves. The ramp up to the great hall would surely be guarded.
Jorin's nose twitched at a sharp, well-remembered smell. Bales of hay hid the back wall, but behind them was the hole that the wyrm had eaten through solid stone that first night at Tentir, which now seemed so long ago. Jame scrambled through it and up the steep, slippery stairs on all fours, toward a faint line of light. Yes, here was the secret door, still ajar, and beyond it the charred ruins of the Knorth guest quarters. The weakened floor groaned under her feet and clouds of stale dust made Jorin sneeze.
Had anyone heard? Were they being followed?
Out into the hall. Now, which way?
The maze of Old Tentir had proved harder to master even than the labyrinth that was Tai-tastigon. Someone either expert at misdirection or mentally unhinged had designed it so that one never quite knew where one was, at least within the public halls. Jame guessed that east lay to the left and set off in that direction, only to find herself in a room with many doors, one of which opened on a blank wall, another on a sheer drop, and a third on a flight of stairs going up. She climbed. At the top, fading light met her through the arched windows of the eastern third story. Down the corridor to the left was the base of Harn's tower.
At the foot of the tight, spiral stair, the ounce paused and Jame with him, panting, catching through his senses the smell of fresh blood. She sprinted up the steps two at a time, only to trip over Jorin at the top and fall flat on her face at Harn's feet.
"Well," he said, looking down at her. "Look what the cat dragged in."
By dusk, the small room was pleasant and homey. Its windows stood open to the north and south so that the evening breeze blew in one and out the other. A fire played in the grate, its light dancing on the two large chairs drawn up on either side of it. A platter on the table held the remains of . . . what? In shape it looked vaguely like a roast bustard, but it was covered with brown and white fluttering wings. These suddenly took flight, circled the room, and settled upon the occupant of the chair turned toward the stair-head. Those who landed on his face, hair, and hands turned white, the others a mossy green veined with gold to match his hunting leathers. Mer-kanti smiled at Jame through the restless mask of their wings.
"Soft," he said, greeting her in his rusty voice.
Jame rose, thoroughly rattled. "I thought jewel-jaws were blue," she said, no doubt sounding as stupid as she felt.
"The common ones are." Harn poured a glass of wine and handed it to her. "Drink this. It's said to be good for out-of-breath idiots. These 'jaws could be blue too, if they wanted, but they're a species called crown jewels that can match almost any background. They still do like blood, though."
Mer-kanti put a hand over his goblet to ward off questing feelers. The glass's content, a dark, opaque red, clearly wasn't wine. Jame noted that Harn wore a bandage around his wrist.
"When we were both cadets here," Harn said, "he could still eat raw meat. Now only blood and milk will stay down. Honey too, but it hurts his teeth. Mine too, for that matter. Still, this"—he nodded at his wrist—"at least makes a difference from horse blood."
Jame remembered the band and plug on Mirah's neck, the permanently open wound. The thought made her a little queasy, but it didn't seem to bother the mare.
"And the . . . er . . . crown jewel-jaws?"
"He migrates south with 'em. The Riverland is no place for man or insect, come winter."
"Harn, you're forgetting your manners," said the Commandant from the other chair, whose back was turned to Jame. "I believe these two know each other, but not formally."
"Huh. Lady Jameth, Lordan of the Knorth, meet Lord Randiroc, Lordan of the Randir—yes, yes, Wilden's so-called missing heir, although not as lost as some would like."
Jame felt as if someone had jabbed her in the ribs. "Mer-kanti—that is, Lord Randiroc, they've set an ambush for you in the stable. A trap. I think Mirah is the bait."
The Randir rose so quickly that he left a shell of himself in glimmering wings.
"Surely they wouldn't hurt her," said Harn, distressed, "and who d'you mean by 'they' anyhow?"
"They hurt the horse-master," said Jame grimly. "I heard him cry out. And 'they' came from the Randir barracks, or at least seemed to."
Harn caught the Randir's arm as the latter started for the door. "Wait a minute. No need to charge in by the front door. We can slip down the private stair in the Knorth guest quarters."
"That's how I came up," said Jame. "They'll be watching it."
"Well, there are other hidden ways. Your gray sneak isn't the only one who knows Tentir's secret passages."
"As many at least as you can fit through, and there are fewer of those each year."
The Commandant's words were light but not his expression. He rose, seeming to fill the small room with his dark presence. "We are not 'sneaking' anywhere. This is Tentir, and they mean to pollute its honor by spilling innocent blood."
"These are also probably cadets, however misguided. Let me at least sound the alarm. That may bring them to their senses."
Jame had never heard Harn use that tone before, much less beg for anything.
"You always were too soft on others, and too hard on yourself," said the Commandant in a quiet voice that yet rasped like drawn steel. "We may live in a world of shifting values, but some lines cannot be crossed." When Harn still blocked his way, he put him gently aside. "My old friend, you should understand. Tonight, I am Tentir."
Some slight noise below caught Jame's attention. She ran down the stairs and at their foot collided with someone. They fought briefly, soundlessly, until Jame drove her opponent back against the wall hard enough to knock the wind out of her. It was the Randir cadet Shade.
The Commandant and Harn descended the stairs, the latter still arguing, the former as still as death. Jame pushed her adversary back into the shadows and held her there, a hand over her mouth, as they passed.
Trinity, she thought. Don't bite me. Please.
Then came the Randir Lordan, in a mantle of fluttering jewel-jaws. He paused and looked at them. A surprisingly sweet smile crossed his pale face.
"Nightshade, my cousin," he said.
Jame dropped her hand. Shade looked stunned.
"Randiroc," she said, hoarsely. "My lord."
The two cadets stumbled after the randon, Jame supporting the Randir. "Cousin" could mean almost any relation within the bonds of blood-kinship. "My lord" was less ambiguous, especially the way that Shade had said it. She had probably never met this man before, her natural lord, whom she had been taught from childhood to hate.
The Commandant meant to approach the stables without stealth, by public ways. Jame knew another, faster route, and hustled Shade along it. As they went, both felt the Commandant's silent call go out to all the college's Shanir. No wonder he was taking his time, allowing them to respond. Whatever happened, there would be witnesses.
Below in the hay-sweet darkness, she depended on Jorin's nose and ears to slip past the hidden assassins, whoever they were. Would the Randir really be this blatant, here of all places? Despite all that she had seen, like Harn she didn't want to believe it. Tentir should mean so much more than that.
They hid behind one of the massive pillars that surrounded the underground arena. The stable had quieted somewhat, although hooves still shifted uneasily on straw. Mirah stood alone in the center of the torch-lit space, head drooping, hip-shot. She might have been asleep on her feet, shoeing done, awaiting her master's return.
However, the leather band around her neck hung low, unbuckled. In its place was something thicker, something golden, something that bent sinuously to lap at the thin stream of blood that trickled down the mare's neck.
Shade's breath caught. "That's Addy," she said. "I left her in the barracks. I never thought . . ."
Jame grabbed her arm. "Wait. Has she bitten Mirah?"
"No, or the mare would be dead. Addy likes warm blood. When she only nips her prey, her saliva paralyzes it. She can live off a stunned rat for days before she eats it, but she will strike if alarmed."
She started forward again, and again Jame held her back.
"If either one flinches, both, eventually, will die. D'you think they will spare a horse-slayer? But I know both of them. Who else at Tentir can say the same? Let me try."
The Randir shivered under her hands, wide eyes on the golden band. Unconsciously, the tip of her tongue slid over teeth which, for the first time, Jame realized, were not filed.
"Go then," she said hoarsely. "Now."
Jame had also heard feet on the ramp, Harn's voice still raised in protest. From farther away, through Jorin's senses, came puzzled calls and questions as the Shanir responded to the Commandant's summons. She stepped out into the open and walked toward the mare. The faint groan of drawn bows almost made her stop. How many? Twenty, at least. She might not be their target of choice, but she was there, in the way, and if these were indeed Randir, they bore her no love.
Glancing behind her, she saw Shade on her knees, arms clasped tight around Jorin to restrain him. Knorth and Randir they might be, but here at least they understood each other perfectly.
"Hush," she said softly to Mirah, running a hand down the mare's sleek back. "Are you half-asleep, dreaming? Dream on, a moment longer."
The adder had raised her head and flicked a black, forked tongue, tasting the air.
"Yes, you too know my scent. Your lady awaits. Be still while I return you to her."
She slid her hand under the serpent's head and lifted her away from the trickle of blood. The adder loosed her grip on the mare's neck and curled her thick body trustingly around Jame's arm.
"There. Good girl."
The Commandant stood at the arena's side, watching. He waited until Jame had retreated—not too fast, not too slow—then strolled forward with Harn and Randiroc on his heels. The former stumped, scowling, daring anything to happen. The latter moved with his usual seemingly weightless stride. When he stopped beside the mare, apparitions of him drifted on in the uncertain light, defined by a flutter of wings. He slid the leather band into place and fastened it. The dribble of blood stopped. Mirah leaned against him with a sigh and closed her green eyes.
Meanwhile, the Commandant paced slowly around them, his long, black coat swishing with each stride. Again, Jame was reminded of an Arrin-ken, but not of that charred, stalking menace that was the Dark Judge, warped by pain and hate. Here too was judgment incarnate, but cool and precise, wearing the mantle of power as he did his white scarf of office—with negligent grace, but not to be taken lightly.
"So," he said to the shadows. "Here we are. You will perhaps recall that I once spoke to you of the special contract that you enter when you take the cadet's oath. As I said then, whatever your house, whomever your enemies there, within these walls we are all blood-kin."
As he spoke, the Shanir arrived: the Falconer; the horse-master, looking rather dazed, with a lump rising on his bald head; Tarn with his Molocar pup; Gari with a humming halo of bees; Timmon, faintly luminous; Gorbel, his hair in cowlicks, clad in a glorious, untied dressing robe with nothing on underneath—cadets, sergeants, officers.
"We are many," the Randir Tempter had said, "and we are proud."
There, even, was Bear, his claws ragged and bloody with splinters from ripping apart the door of his prison in answer to his brother's call. He joined the others in watchful silence at the foot of the ramp and waited, shifting his great weight from foot to foot. Among them too was the senior Randir officer, a raw-boned, gray-scarved woman named Awl. Sheth acknowledged her with a nod. Other members of the Randon Council stood in the background. As most, like Harn, were pure Kendar, not all could be Shanir; some other instinct or message must have brought them. All nine were present, Jame realized, for the first time all summer. The autumn cull must be near, even tonight, but at the moment that hardly seemed to matter.
"You may also recall," said the Commandant to those other hidden watchers, "that I spoke of honor, and nothing about honor has ever been easy. So, ask yourselves and answer truthfully: here and now, which is more important to you, loyalty to your house or to your oath of fellowship to Tentir? Those who choose their house, come forth."
A blank moment followed. Then a score of Randir cadets stumbled out into the open, bows at the slack. Shade started forward too, but stopped when Jame touched her shoulder and spun around, glaring.
"Think," said Jame.
She didn't know how far the Randir had been in this plot, but she hadn't been carrying a bow.
"Stay. Please."
Shade gave her a brooding look, then a curt, reluctant nod.
Sheth regarded the other cadets, not without compassion. They looked very young and stricken, as if suddenly awakened from a nightmare only to find that it was real. "I release you from the college," he said, "without prejudice. You were tempted and you fell. The politics of your house are . . . complex, if not torturous, but they have no place here. Apply again a year hence, when you have had time to think, if you still wish to become randon."
The senior Randir gave a slight, stiff nod, accepting his judgment. Whether her lord or lady would be as understanding was another matter.
Sheth's hawk eyes swept back to the shadows. "You have also made your choice. Do you hold to it?"
An arrow flashed out of the shadows. Randiroc caught it in mid-flight, snapped it in two, and dropped the pieces. He was, after all, in addition to everything else, a weapons-master.
"I see," said the Commandant.
The rest will slip away, thought Jame. What have we done here but unmask a few weak souls?
But then she felt another presence in the shadows and remembered the oath ceremony in the great hall under the house banners, when she had suddenly known that someone was swearing falsely. Over that lay a second memory, like one stink on top of another, of a much different hall and a far stranger banner, where black stitches crawled like maggots into the semblance of a smile.
My name is legion, as are my forms and the eyes through which I see.
The worm was back in the weave.
Jame found herself walking out into the arena, her Shanir senses questing. Everyone was staring at her, but that didn't matter. She would find the wrong thing and she would break it. Again. And again. And again. Until it stayed broken forever.
This is what I am. This is what I do.
As she drew parallel to the Commandant, another arrow hissed out of the darkness. He thrust her aside, then made a faint sound and rocked back on his heels.
"Now that," he said mildly, "was uncalled for."
The shaft had gone through high on his right shoulder, taking his scarf of office with it. White silk began to turn red.
Jame was vaguely aware of a struggle as many hands gripped Bear to restrain him. She stepped forward on the Commandant's right, and Gorbel on his left. Their voices caught each other's pitch perfectly and launched it with all the strength of their outrage into the shadows:
"COME OUT."
The Randir Tempter stumbled into the open, her bow falling from palsied hands. She clawed away her half-mask. The lower half of her face was a shredded ruin, and she spat red through a full set of sharpened, bleeding teeth. Gorbel fell back, staring. No one else moved.
"Damned Knorth." That voice, however mangled, was not her own, nor was the soul that glared out of her eyes. "Again and again and again, you thwart me, even when such is not your intent. Worthless chit. Damaged goods."
"Not half as damaged as the woman whom you now ride."
The Witch laughed through her servant's mask of pain, a wet, ragged sound. "My people obey me willingly. Child of a fallen house, what do you know of such devotion, such sacrifice, such worship?"
"Only what I have seen of their results. They aren't pretty."
They were circling each other now, so close that Jame could see her own reflection in those wide, black eyes, in pupils with barely a rim. She felt her anger grow, a cold, balanced thing, a weapon poised to strike. Their breath hung between them on the suddenly chill air and the floor under their feet rimed with ice.
"The cadet Simmel gave his life for you, lady, but you left him to die alone."
"Not quite alone. You were there. In fact, I believe that you killed him. Did you enjoy it, Kinzi-kin? Was his death sweet?"
"Dust and bloody teeth scattered in the dirt. I took no pleasure in it, snake-heart, nor in what you are doing to your servant now, enemy of my house that she is."
The Tempter bared her sharp teeth, or perhaps the Witch did, twitching the other's raw sinews like some ghastly puppeteer. "You Knorth, hypocrites from first to last. The Old Blood runs strong in you. You savor it, girl, don't you? Did your father, the night that he slew my dear cousin Roane? Well, did he?"
Jame stared at her. "You don't know what really happened, do you? Your lover Greshan wouldn't tell you, for all your wiles, and that still galls you, after all these years."
"Just as it does you, dear child." She raised a hand as if to caress Jame's hair, but Jame slid away from it. "Something changed your father. Several things. And this was one of the first. His blood is yours, and your brother's as well. Is his final madness also your joint inheritance? How much easier it is to hate than to understand, but can either of you truly know yourself until you understand him? Little girl, dare you try?"
The Witch knew something about the haunted room, about the lordan's coat, about nightmares faced or fled. Such things weren't spoken of outside the Knorth barracks, but they were hardly secrets either.
Her black eyes turned to sweep contemptuously over the silent, watching randon.
"And you, Tentir, such noble talk of honor when my darling Greshan's blood is still wet upon your hands. What are decades to such guilt as that? Be assured: he will yet have his revenge, and soon."
She swung back to smile almost playfully at Jame. "But first, dear child, I think I will finish Kallystine's work and rip off your face."
Her hands curled into claws and her ruined mouth gaped, wide, then wider, all sharp teeth bared to bite, to tear.
"Steady," murmured someone. It sounded like the Commandant, but his voice was strangely blurred, as if with the hum of wings. "Wait, wait . . ."
Jame smiled into that terrible face, without humor, without mercy.
"I told you once, as the Randir Tempter, never to touch me again and now, in her form, you can't. But I can touch you."
She extended a claw and drew it delicately in a swooping curve down the woman's face from the forehead, across the bridge of the nose, down to circle that ghastly mouth. Her finger tip left a thin, red line.
"There. The first stroke of the rathorn brand. Of course, when your dear Greshan did this to the Whinno-hir Bel-tairi, he used searing iron. What is it about innocence that drives you to destroy it?"
She traced a second red curve from one nostril up around a sharp cheekbone. "The lesser horn. Slayer of innocents, you ordered the assassination of all my female blood-kin, didn't you? Why? What did you and Kinzi quarrel about that it should lead to such slaughter?
"The line of the greater horn, you know," she added, conversationally, "will cut across your eye, as it did across Bel's."
Then Jame hear it under the other's voice, the deep temptation that had been there all along:
Give up. Give in. Become the monster that you know you are.
The Randir began to laugh, half-choking on the ruins of her tongue. "Oh, child of darkness. Tempt me to speak, would you? But I am older than you, and stronger. How you betray yourself! Tricked. Trapped. Here, before all those whose opinions you value most. Cut deeper, then, and prove me right."
Silver eyes reflected back from the gloating, obsidian stare. Behind them both, the angry, frustrated thrum of wings swelled.
Jame's smile grew. "So be it."
She cupped the woman's face in her hands, claws extending, and kissed her on the lips. "Tempter, victim of a greater temptation, randon, sister, farewell. I'm sorry." Then she drove her thumbs into the other's mouth, back to the hinges, forcing her jaws open.
"Gari, now!"
The bee swarm roared over Jame's shoulders, around her head, and down the Randir's throat. Eyes widened in shock as they began to sting and to die, inside her, yet more came, and more. They crawled down Jame's arms in a furry, furious pelt, down her hands, down into that seething mouth. The Randir began to gag and thrash, but she couldn't touch the one who held her. When she fell, Jame went down with her, straddling her body as it bucked and convulsed under her.
"This is your servant!" she shouted into those bulging eyes, at the alien presence within. "Keep faith with her and stay to honor her death!" But the black pupils were already contracting as the Witch fled.
Jame let go and sat back heavily on the floor.
"Damn you," she muttered, close to tears. "Witch, bitch, worm, damn you to the Gray Lands and there let the dead have their way with you forever."
She had no wish to witness those final, terrible death throes, but it seemed as if someone should. At last the body lay still, except where dying bees crawled beneath its clothes, their entrails torn out with their stingers. Then came a bright flutter of carrion jewel-jaws that settled, eagerly, on whatever exposed flesh they could find.
Timmon leaned against a pillar, throwing up his dinner.
"I just told them to go," Gari was saying, again and again. "I didn't tell them to do that. I didn't . . . I didn't . . ."
Sheth put his uninjured arm around the boy, and the cadet clung to him, sobbing. "Of course you didn't," the Commandant said gently.
"Huh." Gorbel nudged the body with his foot, only just not kicking it in case some of the bees were still alive and armed. "You do come up with interesting ways to kill people, Knorth."
"Oh, shut up," said Jame.
She considered vomiting too, but decided it wouldn't make her feel any better. Nothing she could think of would. But here was Jorin, anxiously nuzzling her ear, trying to crawl into her lap where he hadn't fit since he was a kitten. She held him, surprised to find that she was both chilled and shivering.
The Commandant stood over her. "All right, child?"
She gave a laugh that was half a sob. "You keep asking me that, ran."
"With you, the question continually arises."
"Er . . . you do know that you still have an arrow stuck through your shoulder, don't you?"
"I had noticed," he said dryly.
Harn snapped off the head and pulled out the shaft, which had punched Sheth's silk scarf of office through the wound from entry to exit. "No splinters there," he said. "Finally, the damned thing has served a purpose."
Jame climbed to her feet, trying to pull herself together. She thought distractedly that she must give Harn the silver silk scarf as soon as possible, cavorting beasties be damned. It seemed a lifetime since she had first seen it wrapped around Graykin's dirty neck.
"I'm curious," said the Commandant to her. "What did the Tempter mean about you killing Simmel? That young man's fate has always puzzled me. All we ever found were his clothes and a pile of teeth."
"Well, ran, I did hit him in the head with a rock, but that's not why he crumbled to dust."
"I see. Or rather, I don't. Perhaps, at some future date, you will enlighten me."
By now, the others who had lain in ambush had slipped away. Making no fuss about it, the hunt-master gave a lymer the scent from the feathers of the arrow that Randiroc had snapped in two. When the tracker had found the scent and sped up the ramp in pursuit, he loosed a direhound after it.
"This has not been one of Tentir's better days," remarked the Commandant. "It might, however, have been worse."
He turned aside to speak with the Randir Lordan. Mirah had sunk to the ground asleep, legs folded neatly under her, head cradled in her master's arms. Clearly, she would not be fit to travel at least until morning.
Harn stared down at the Randir's body. "Trinity, girl, Blackie would never . . ."
"No, ran, I don't suppose he would; but I am not my brother."
The big Kendar regarded her soberly for a moment, chewing on the inside of his cheek. "It will be Autumn's Eve in ten days," he said. "Blackie hasn't asked for you, but tomorrow you should leave for Gothregor to stand by him on the night. I think he's going to need you."
His eyes were still on her, hesitant but heavy with judgment.
"Tonight we cast the stones for the autumn cull. I'm sorry, but I don't think you will be coming back."
Jame left the stable, feeling numb.
The college was still in the process of rousing; the departure of its Shanir, without a general alarm, had been too sudden to create more than an initial stir, but now word was filtering back to the barracks that something startling if not terrible had happened. Lights flared in rooms among groggy sleepers. Those who hadn't yet gone to bed stood in their barracks doorways, bootless, calling questions to which there were few if any answers. Jame slipped by them as if invisible.
Outside her own barracks, she stopped to lean on the rail. Across the practice square, on the second floor of Old Tentir, candle light glowed through the peach-colored screens of the Map Room and spilled out onto the Commandant's balcony. There, tonight, the casting of the stones, the autumn cull, would take place, but probably not for awhile yet: the Commandant would need to have his shoulder properly patched up, and then there was that mess below to sort out. She wondered what they would do with the Tempter's body. On her way out, she had heard Sheth say something about putting it outside the walls, to be claimed by whomever cared to take the trouble. If not, he had said, let Randiroc's jewel-jaws have it.
Was that fair? Was it right? She didn't know.
Almost at her feet, on the other side of the low wall and in its moon-cast shadow, the direhound raised its black head and snarled up at her over its prey. Front paws on the rail, Jorin growled back. The white lymer crouched to one side, its tracking done, patiently waiting for its reward of fresh entrails.
"I know the hunt-master doesn't starve you," she told them both. "Return to him." The hound bared bloody fangs and crouched to spring. "Go."
As one, they flattened and went, slinking.
Huddled as the body was, she could only guess that the Randir cadet was male. Given the great pool of blood in which he lay, he was most certainly dead. So. Those were the fingers that had smoothed the arrow's feathers, set its notch to the string, and loosed it at a man whom this cadet had been told was a mortal enemy of his house.
"I'm afraid," she said to him, "that you've been both gulled and culled. Perhaps I have been and will be too, soon."
Maybe Harn was right. Maybe she didn't belong at Tentir and should be cast out. On the simple level of skill, except in a few areas she still trailed far behind the rest of her class. There was still a huge gap between their experience and hers. And she was dangerous—but would she be any less so elsewhere? Sending her back to Gothregor for anything longer than a visit was chancy, to say the least. What did one do with a nemesis, anyway, between catastrophes?
"I have got to learn how to knit," Jame muttered to herself. "What's the worst I can do with a ball of yarn and a pair of needles? No, don't answer that."
"I've been looking for you," said a grim voice, and there was Shade, with Addy draped around her neck like a thick, golden collar. She glanced over the railing. "Quirl. He always was a fool. Then again, I wasn't so bloody smart this evening either. Why did you do it?"
"Do what, or rather, which? It's been a busy night."
The other snorted. "You might well say so. I mean, why did you stop me? I could be packing now too, or more likely looking for a White Knife. My lady grand-dam does not like failure."
Jame had forgotten that Shade was Rawneth's half-Kendar grand-daughter and that Lord Kenan was her father, not that either seemed to count for much among the Randir.
"Would you have done it? Shot a fellow randon from ambush in the heart of Tentir?"
Shade scowled. "I don't know what I was going to do. Listening to the Tempter, it sounded right: kill the enemy of our house; accomplish what even the dread Shadow Assassins have failed to do, these forty years past; protect our blood. Then I followed you, and spoke to him, and suddenly nothing was simple anymore." She shook her head. "It was always so clear before. Us against you. That's the way I was raised. No questions. No hesitation. Tentir is changing that, and so are you. I don't like it. It makes my head hurt." She shot Jame a look askance. "I was there, you know, in the stable. That devil hound went for me first because I was closest, but he veered off."
"Why not? You hands were clean."
"Is that why you stopped me from stepping forward?"
"I suppose. Also, I like your snake." Jame looked up at the Map Room where shadows were beginning to move against the peach-colored screens. "Tonight, for me too, there were moments of such blinding clarity, when I knew exactly what I had to do and how to do it."
She rubbed her mouth, as if to wipe away the cold touch of the Tempter's lips: Victim of a greater temptation, randon, sister, farewell. Somehow, she had known that the swarm was coming, and why, and how to open the way for it. No doubt. No hesitation. No question, even now. Only guilt.
Jame sighed. "Now so much is murky again. Right and wrong, good and evil, honor and loyalty . . . "
"You sound more familiar with confusion than with certainty. I don't envy you." Shade nodded toward the body almost at their feet. "That's certain, at least."
"Death? I'm beginning to think that it's the most complicated thing of all, next to honor."
She straightened and stretched, feeling the strain of the day in all the muscles down her back, hearing her spine creak.
"The cull is about to begin, the stones to be cast. I wish you luck, Randir. For my part, this is probably my last night at the college, and I have one last thing to do while I still have the chance."
The other looked at her suspiciously. "What?"
Jame had started to turn toward the barracks door but hesitated, looking back. A wry smile twisted her face. "Why, sleep, of course. And dream."