Jame woke, still in darkness, to a savage headache. She thought at first, dazed, that she had lost her sight, but then realized that she was only blindfolded. And gagged. And bound hand and foot. This, on the whole, was not good. But where was she, besides on the floor?
Her other senses began, reluctantly, to function.
She could feel the coarse grain of wood under her cheek. It was damp, with a curiously heady tang. Other smells, less appealing, lurked behind it: unwashed flesh, rotting meat, human urine and feces. Unlike the ancient miasma of the lordan's apartment, this reek was fresh, a living stink. She had caught whiffs of it through Jorin's senses when they had been searching Old Tentir for the Knorth guest quarters.
Trinity. Jorin. Where was he? If they had hurt her cat, she would kill them.
Close behind her, something large stirred and groaned. Leather creaked. Something muttered, then began to breathe deeply again, with the hint of a snore.
So.
At a guess, she was in the lair of the mysterious monster who ate little children for lunch and raw joints of meat for dinner.
Also, it drank strong wine. She was lying in a spilt puddle of it. Perhaps its keepers periodically drugged it when they came to clean out its den—and they must, or the stench would be much worse. Her captors had apparently taken advantage of this to dump her here.
"Blood for blood," the Randir had said, but not on her hands.
Perhaps they expected the beast to rip her apart. All the more reason not to be here when it woke up. Besides, if its head hurt half as much as hers did, it would be in a truly foul mood.
Her hands were bound behind her. She curled into a tight ball and began to work them down her back. Cramped muscles threatened to spasm in revolt. Halfway through, she got stuck and lay panting around the gag, trying not to panic.
This was no good. Try again.
Suddenly her hands shot up over her bent knees and hit her in the nose. She fumbled at the blindfold with fingers numb for lack of blood, then at the gag. The former, she saw, was her own token scarf. The latter was Rue's. This had been planned well in advance. The Randir must have been waiting for her to stumble into their hands, and so she had. No one would accuse poor Rue of plotting her death, but the presence of two Knorth scarves would suggest that this was a house matter, best dealt with internally by its lord. Ancestors only knew what Tori would make of such a mess.
By now, her eyes had adjusted to the dim light, most of which came from a fireplace where embers winked and tinkled in the grate. It was very hot. Opposite the hearth was a heavy door, undoubtedly locked, with a narrow, hinged panel at the bottom. There were no windows, thus no way to tell how long she had been unconscious. Damnation. If they made her miss the evening ceremony as they almost had the final test . . . however, that seemed to be the Randir style: traps within traps within traps.
Another deep sigh behind her. Craning painfully to look over her shoulder, she saw a low bed with a large form huddled on it. The breathing had changed. He would wake soon. And her fingers were too numb to untie her ankles, much less her hands.
The rest of the apartment was comfortably furnished, but much disordered. A chair slumped before the fireplace, its arms and back hanging in flayed strips. In the corner, a gutted bookcase spilled its contents onto the carpet. The shredded fragments of books and scrolls littered the floor.
So did little wooden figures, cunningly carved.
A monster that played with toy warriors?
One of them held a little knife as if it were a sword, firelight flickering red on the blade. She wriggled across the floor as quietly as possible, picked it up, and fumbled to lay the edge against the rope securing her legs. She had almost sawed through when the figure on the bed yawned and stretched.
Jame rolled under the bed. Her legs came free as she moved, but she lost the little knife, and her hands were still bound. The leather web of straps above her groaned and sagged. Big, bare feet hit the floor in front of her face. Overgrown toenails extended and flexed, rasping against the wood. Trinity, now what? Could she hide here until someone came to feed the brute?
Now it . . . no, he was pissing in a nearby corner. Jame edged back from the spreading puddle. Did the man have a wine vat for a bladder?
At last, the waterfall ceased.
"Hmmm?" said a deep voice, rusty from lack of use. He was sniffing the air. Surely he couldn't smell her over the room's other assorted stinks.
"Huh!"
The bed upended against the wall with a crash. Jame rolled to her feet and plunged for the panel at the base of the door. It flipped open at her touch, but he caught her by the hair and jerked her back. She kicked at his face. He flicked aside her foot, grabbed her by the shirt, ripping it, and threw her into the wall.
Play dead, she thought, sliding down the wall and lying still. Indeed, she was too shaken to do much else.
Big hands picked her up and dropped her into the chair before the dying fire. The chair sagged, exhaling a sharp breath laced with dead mice. She curled up in its hollow, knees to chin, behind the veil of her long black hair. He bent and sniffed her all over, muttering deep in his throat. Instinctively, she raised her hands to protect her face.
There was a moment's silence.
She felt his hot breath snuffling on her wrists, and then his teeth bit down on the cords that bound them.
Jame opened her eyes.
He was kneeling before her, turning her freed hands over in his own. He had claws as big as a cave bear's, three inches long at least and too large to retract. Her own ivory nails, unsheathed, were delicate in contrast. She could make out little of his face in shadow, behind its wild mask of beard. He snuffled at her fingertips, then folded them in on themselves so that the nails were hidden and cupped within his own huge claws as if in a cage of polished bone. His touch was surprisingly gentle, almost protective.
"D-d-d-d . . ."
"Don't? Don't what?"
"T-t-t-t . . ."
"Tell? Don't tell?"
The door burst open. In a blaze of torchlight, Jame saw the man's face, the savage cleft in his skull into which his wild graying hair tumbled. Something long ago had cleaved him half way down to the eyebrows. No one should survive such a blow, but this man had. He sprang back as a swung torch roared past his face, over Jame's head. His beard sparked as if infested with fireflies. The room stank of burnt hair. As he backed away, beating at his face, a big hand reached over the chair's back, grabbed Jame by the arm, and jerked her up. The room seemed to be full of giants, although there were only two of them. The one with the torch propelled her out the door into the hall and slammed the door after them. Something very big hit it on the other side. The wood shook, but held.
Harn Grip-hard backed away. The torch, unnoticed, still flared in his hand. He was shaking, his broad face white beneath its perennial stubble. From inside the locked room came strange sounds. The captive was crying. Harn dropped the torch and blundered away. Jame picked it up before it could start a fire, noting that it was wet with blood where Harn had gripped it. With a last glance at the door, she followed him.
Someone rounded a corner, fast, and almost knocked her off her feet.
"Where have you been?" demanded Graykin fiercely, grabbing her by the shoulders. She noted that he was liberally festooned with cobwebs. He also looked angry enough to kill her, presumably for still being alive. "Everyone is looking for you!"
"Tell you later. Damn. Where did he go?"
They tracked Harn by the blood drops on the floor, Graykin hissing questions to which Jame had no answers. She was touched that her peculiar servant really had been worried about her, although he hid it well behind an affronted air: How dare she upset him like that? She had no idea at first where they were, the inner halls of Old Tentir being dark enough even by day to require candles.
"What time is it?" she asked Graykin abruptly.
"Late afternoon."
"Good. What day?"
He stared at her, then looked quickly away. She became aware that her shirt was hanging in tatters over bare skin.
"The same," he said, not very clearly, but she understood.
"Very good."
Here at last was a hall slotted on one side with narrow windows. They had emerged at the northeastern corner of the third floor, near a door that opened to one of Tentir's four watchtowers. Jame recalled hearing that during his stint as commandant Harn had made his quarters in this out-of-the-place. She set the torch in a wall sconce.
"I need clothes," she told Graykin. "Go back to the barracks and tell Rue. She'll find me something. Bring it here."
When he had gone, radiating irritation that his mistress needed help from anyone but him, Jame climbed into a rush of sweet air.
On the first of two levels, windows opened to the north and south onto the sweep of the Riverland. Below, the Silver threaded through gathering shadows under as yet sun-crowned heights. It took Jame a moment, blinking against the light, to make out two large chairs drawn up before a cold fireplace. Someone slumped in the one with its back to her.
"You stink," growled the unseen occupant, "like a tavern latrine. Bathe. There." A large hand waved toward the northern window, under which Jame now saw a large tub of rapidly cooling water, undoubtedly brought here for the randon's solitary ablutions. She hesitated only briefly, then stripped off what was left of her now decidedly rank clothing.
He threw her a sharp look, as if still not entirely convinced that she wasn't Blackie in disguise.
More like black and blue, she thought wryly, but bruises only hurt for a while, turned interesting colors, and then went away. She was used to them.
"How did you know where I was, ran?" she asked, gratefully sinking into the tub. Harn would have overlapped it on all sides, but it fit her slender limbs nicely.
He grunted. "I heard a rumor that you'd had the good sense to leave Tentir. I should have known better. Anyway, I went to check."
On the way, he had encountered the Randir Tempter helping a colleague back to their quarters.
"Proper shredded, his legs were. I knew your cat's work when I saw it."
Harn had found the ounce racing about the Knorth barracks, bouncing off walls, scratching anyone who tried to stop him. Vant was shouting that the cat had gone mad and calling for archers. When no one moved (except to get out of Jorin's way), he had grabbed a bow but then inexplicably tripped, nearly impaling himself on the arrow. By then, Captain Hawthorn had arrived, looking for Jame. She and Brier had thrown a blanket over the ounce as he hurtled past and bundled him off, all teeth and claws, to a vacant room. There they had left him, from the sound of it, careening off the walls, floor, and ceiling.
Harn had put together bloody legs, an hysterical cat, and a lost Knorth. Then he had gone off to storm the Randir quarters.
Here, he fell silent.
Jame ducked to rinse soap out of her hair, then rose and slid, dripping, into the enveloping folds of Harn's gray dress coat. She picked up a shirt to dry her hair, hoping belatedly that Harn hadn't meant to wear it that night, curled into the chair opposite him, and waited.
The burly randon slumped in the over-sized chair, staring blankly at the previous winter's ashes, his arms limp on the chair's rests. The knuckles of his left hand were broken and crusted with drying blood. Finally he spoke in a low, hoarse voice, as if to himself.
"So I go to the Randir. They know I'm coming, plain enough, because the door is shut. I knock. Inside, I think I hear someone snicker. Then they begin to chant, oh, so softly, 'Beast, beast, beast,' and I knock louder, to drown them out."
As he spoke, he began unconsciously to beat the wooden arm of his chair with his clenched fist, harder and harder, reopening the cuts on his battered knuckles.
Jame slipped out of her chair, knelt beside him, and wrapped her own hands around his fist as it descended. She wondered, biting her lip, if she was about to add broken bones to the day's other mementos. Harn didn't seem to notice her grip, but his blows faltered and stopped. His fingers unclenched and his big hand, relaxing, hung over the chair's arm. Blood dripped from it onto the floor. Jame cleaned the cuts with the shirt, still damp from her hair.
"I think I must have beaten down the door," he said slowly, "because the next thing I know I'm inside, surrounded by a ring of spears. No one was laughing then.
"They say, 'Leave, or we'll kill you.'
"I say, 'Bring me your bitch temptress or you'll have to.'
"So finally she comes, and I ask her where the Highlord's sister is. She says . . . she says, 'Look in your future lodgings.' And smiles."
Jame considered this as she ripped strips of cloth to bandage his wounds. That done, she wadded up the torn, bloody shirt and threw it into the back of the cold grate. Then she resumed her seat across from him. Sunk deep in his chair, Harn reminded her of a large, wild animal flinching away from the light, drawing back into self-imposed, self-destructive isolation.
"Become the beast that you know you are . . ."
"The man in the locked room is definitely Shanir," she said, "but I don't think he's a berserker. That needn't happen to you. Who is he, ran? What happened to him?" A sudden thought struck her. "Don't tell me I've stumbled across the long-lost Randir Heir!"
"I won't because you haven't," snapped Harn, rousing. "Besides, Randiroc isn't lost. He just doesn't want to be found. Neither would you if the Witch of Wilden and Shadow Guide assassins were after you."
In fact they were, but she wasn't hiding. Yes, and look how that had worked out so far.
Harn raised a hand to rub his eyes and frowned at the bandages, clearly surprised to find them there. "We call him Bear," he said.
" 'We'?"
"Every commandant knows about him and attends to his needs. Since we command Tentir by rotation, that means all the senior randon, not to mention the sergeants and servants. He was one of us. The best. Until the White Hills when a war axe did . . . that."
Thirty-four years ago, thought Jame, just after the slaughter of the Knorth women when her father's misguided revenge against the Seven Kings of the Central Lands had led to such carnage and to his own exile. So much pain led back to that time, to those events.
"It must have been an awful wound," she said, involuntarily imagining it red and raw, white shards of skull and gray, spattered brain. "Why wasn't he offered the White Knife?"
"His lord lay dead on the field and his heirs were already squabbling over the spoils. No one had time for the dying."
Jame remembered Tori the previous autumn, wandering alone through the bloody shambles at the Cataracts, drawn by his Shanir power (if only he realized it) to those bound to him who lay mortally wounded, bringing them honorable release with a white-hilted suicide knife. A true lord cared for his own—in life, in death.
"There was so much loss, and confusion, and pain." Harn leaned forward, elbows on knees, big hands tightly clasped, fresh injuries forgotten for old. He spoke to the ashes as if to those distant dead, as if still trying to understand. "I was there. I saw it all, until the Highlord's madness took me, and then—ancestors only know what I did, and to whom. We fought our own kind, you know, Kencyr against Kencyr, the Host against our own kindred hired out as mercenaries to the Seven Kings. It was . . . terrible."
"And Bear?"
"His younger brother found him on the third day, under a pile of the slain. Oh, he was strong, was Bear, to have lived that long with blood and brains leaking onto ground already too sodden to drink in any more. At first we thought he was dead and put him on the pyre, but then he moved in the flames and we pulled him out. Better if we had let him burn alive. However, his brother wouldn't let him go. After all, our kind have recovered from worse and so did he—in body, at least. In mind—well, you saw. The new lord of his house didn't want him shambling around his precious keep, so the college took him in. After all, he was . . . is . . . one of us. For awhile, he even taught the Arrin-thar."
"The what?"
"A rare, armed combat discipline, based on clawed gauntlets. Originally, only Shanir like Bear practiced it. You saw his hands."
Jame folded her own into Harn's jacket. She had completely forgotten about them while tending to his injuries. Her gloves were with the rest of her clothes beside the tub.
"There are many Shanir here," the Randir had said.
Highborn Shanir like her cousin Kindrie were often sent off to the Priest's College at Wilden—in a sense, thrown away. It occurred to her now that Tentir would be a logical place for Kendar Shanir to gather.
"Are there other Shanir-based fighting skills, ran?"
"Many, but seldom practiced. Most Highborn don't approve of them."
That made sense. Given the disaster of the Fall and the Shanir role in it, Tori was hardly alone in his hatred of the Old Blood. Most lords didn't even know that they were Shanir. All must be, however, in order to bind Kendar to them. The greater their power, the larger their house, except that some like Caldane added the Kendar bound to their established sons. In the old days, these new lords would have gone off to set up their own minor houses as the Min-drear had, often near the Barrier. Now, however, all nine major houses held their people close, at the most sending them out as mercenaries to support those at home here in the barren Riverland.
"But why is Bear caged, ran? To be forced to live like that, even to spread rumors of a monster to keep cadets away. . . . It's cruel. It's intolerable."
Harn rounded on her, so fiercely that she shrank back into her chair. "Don't you think we know that? He was confined because he mauled a cadet to death. Never mind that the fool had been taunting him all winter, as we found out later."
He paused and gulped. "I . . . ripped the arm off someone once myself. One of Caldane's cousins. In a berserker fit. Because he taunted me. Blackie had moved north to the Highlord's seat by then. With him nearby, I can control myself. Without him. . . . I would have used the White Knife, but Blackie forbade it and sent me instead to Tentir as commandant. That's why I set up quarters here, to protect the rest of the college."
He shook himself. "Anyway, seclusion turned Bear even more savage. Somewhere in that broken head, he knows who he is and what honor is due him. We all know it. But what can we do? He can't be allowed to roam free, to savage the next cadet stupid enough to make fun of him. We gave him a White Knife. He picked his toenails with it. Some would poison his food or rush him with spears like a cornered boar, but God curse anyone who takes the life of such a man without a fair fight."
He beat the chair's arm again in time to his words, making Jame flinch: "We don't know what to do."
Jame had no idea either, but she was going to think about it.
"Tell me why the Randir hate the Knorth."
The question jolted him from his personal nightmare and reminded him to whom he spoke. "That's Tentir business."
"So, presumably, is Bear. That didn't stop the Randir from trying to feed me to him."
He looked hard at her. "You aren't going away, are you? You should. This making you lordan is madness. Blackie won't hold to it. He can't. One way or the other, it will destroy him."
Jame considered this. "It might. I'm not stupid, ran, nor am I some willful, spoiled brat hell-bent on playing soldier. You know that. You've watched me fight. I was blooded long before Brier Iron-thorn made me a present of my own front tooth, or M'lady Kallystine gave me this." She almost touched the scar on her cheek, but remembered in time to keep her hands hidden.
The burly randon regarded her almost with amusement. "How long ago, then, child?"
Jame frowned, thinking. "Honestly, I don't remember. It feels as if I was born blooded, but then so is everyone. The point is, what I don't know, I will learn, whatever it costs. The one thing I can't afford is ignorance. So, tonight I become a cadet. Tell me what I need to survive until then."
He gave an explosive snort of laughter. "I think you'll survive us all. Whether we survive you is another matter. All right. When your father Ganth was a cadet here, he was present at the death of a Randir named Roane—a cousin and favorite of the Witch of Wilden, as it turned out."
Jame remembered the stain on the floor of the Knorth apartment. "Was this in Greshan's quarters?"
"It was." Harn looked at her under craggy, lowered brows. "What have you heard?"
"Nothing." In fact, she was surprised. How did this tie into anything that had happened since?
"Mind you, your father and I were nearly the same age, but I came to Tentir the year after he left, at the same time as Sheth Sharp-tongue. From what I heard, though, Greshan summoned Ganth to his quarters in the middle of the night. Roane was there. He and the lordan had been drinking. Greshan was his father's darling, but . . . well, as a Highlord, he would have been a disaster."
"Worse than Ganth Gray Lord?"
She heard the bitterness in her voice. After all, they were discussing the man who had led his people to disaster in the White Hills and later had driven his only daughter out into the Haunted Lands to seek whatever protection she could find, even in Perimal Darkling, even in the Master's House itself.
But Harn was shaking his massive head. "It isn't that simple. Nothing ever is that really matters. Parents, children, family . . . and we're talking about a boy here, younger than you are now. I meet Ganth Grayling once at Gothregor, before his brief career at Tentir. His lord father Gerraint treated him like shit. Called him a liar in front of us all, although we never knew why, while that damned Greshan stood by smirking. Ganth slunk off like a whipped puppy."
Jame stared. To her, Ganth Graylord had always been a monster. She could barely conceive of him as a helpless boy younger than herself, despised by his own father.
"What happened in the lordan's quarters?"
"No one knows exactly. When the randon broke in, Roane was dead, Greshan was fouling himself in a corner, and Roane's servant was floundering around on fire. Also, for some reason, Ganth was stark naked."
Jame caught her breath, remembering her foul dream, that first night at Tentir, when the Knorth lordan had suggested calling "Dear little Gangrene" up to his apartment for some "midnight games" to impress his Randir friend. Only she had been the lordan, inside Greshan's dirty coat, inside his stinking skin. The thought made her want to crawl back into the bath and shrub herself raw to remove even the memory of that tainted touch.
"Anyway," Harn was saying, "Ganth put on some clothes and walked out of Tentir without a word to anyone. That was the end of him as a randon. A year later, Gerraint and Greshan were both dead, and Ganth was Highlord."
"Trinity. Does Tori know all this?"
"Not about Roane. That secret belongs to Tentir and Blackie doesn't. Ardeth did him no service in forbidding him to train here."
"But the randon respect him, and he loves them. He said once that the Southern Host was his true family."
"Yes. In a sense we raised him and he's done us proud. We haven't had such a decent, competent Highlord in a long time—not that those are necessarily the qualities that we need just now. These are perilous times. To survive, should we side with the just or with the powerful? Well, I made my choice when I put my hands between his in this very room and swore to follow him to the death. It's life that scares me. We totter on a knife's edge. In these treacherous times, where does honor lie?"
Jame listened, a chill running up her spine. She had thought it was only her own weakness that made her doubt, but here was one of the foremost randon of his age asking the same questions.
"You've sworn loyalty to Torisen Black Lord. Don't you trust him to recognize honor when he sees it?"
"Yes. But he still isn't one of us."
Poor Tori, Jame thought.
It had occurred to her before that her brother must feel nearly as rootless here in the Riverland as she did, neither of them having grown up in the heart of the Kencyrath. Still, she had envied him his link with the randon of the Southern Host. Now it seemed that that might not be as strong as she had supposed, lacking the Tentir bond, and here he was giving her this precious chance which he himself had been denied . . . if she lived to take advantage of it.
"Are the Randir going to keep attacking me?"
"They mean all Knorth ill. Never forget that." He scratched his stubbly chin thoughtfully, with an audible rasp. "A strange house, the Randir. Secrets within secrets. Of course, it doesn't help that the Witch has chased out their natural lord and set her son in his place, which is enough in itself to set up some fierce cross-currents."
"How did that happen, anyway?"
"I dunno for sure. The old Randir lord died, and Rawneth put a contract with the Shadow Assassins on his heir, Randiroc. Your father Ganth was to have sorted out that mess, but then came the massacre of the Knorth ladies and the White Hills. With no highlord in power to stop her, Rawneth did as she pleased."
Another piece of the puzzle, thought Jame, if only I knew where to place it.
"A strange house it was then," Harn was saying, "and stranger still it's become. Some Randir never use their true name unless among themselves. Some don't seem to have names at all outside their own house."
"Like the Randir Tempter?"
"That one." He growled, almost like Bear. If he had had claws, he would have flexed them. "Aye."
"In the hall, during the rope test, she said that I had hurt her cousin. I don't know whom she meant."
"Huh. Roane, perhaps, if she was speaking to you as a Knorth. On the other hand, the Randir tend to call all their blood-kin 'cousin.' " He shook himself. "At any rate, those here won't have so free a hand once you're an acknowledged cadet. Randon discipline tries to transcend house politics, not that it isn't getting harder and harder with lords like Caldane stirring the pot. You watch out for that Gorbel too, girl."
"That's another thing, ran. Why Gorbel? He isn't one of Caldane's established sons, is he?"
Harn gave a snort of laughter. "I'd like to see any of that lot try to fit in here. I hear Grondin is so fat that he has to be moved around his own house in a wheel-barrow, and the rest are too old. I don't know this Gorbel, but he's probably the son closest to cadet quality that Caldane could dig up and, for his pains, he gets the title 'lordan' slapped on him, not that he's apt to keep it long. He's only here because you are, as long and probably no longer. I'm not saying the boy is smart enough to cause true mischief, but he's bound to try."
"I'll be careful, ran. At least it's only for a year."
He snorted again. "One year? Try three, if you do well, and not all will be spent here under the protection of the college. You really don't know what you're getting into, do you?"
"Er . . . apparently not. I seldom do. And Tori didn't have time to explain much. What happens after Tentir?"
"That will depend on your final ranking, assuming you survive the autumn and spring culls. Some people have to repeat Tentir as novice cadets. That's what you'll become tonight. You get two tries. Do better, and they send you out into the field—to the Southern Host at Kothifir if you're lucky, or as an honor guard attached to the Women's Halls at Gothregor. Some third year master cadets come back here to teach and to learn advanced techniques. Some finish up with their house's randon, wherever their lord sends them. One way or another, all have to prove themselves to the Randon Council. In the end, maybe one in ten win their collars."
They hadn't noticed as they spoke that the room was falling into shadow. Then from somewhere far below came the peremptory note of a horn.
Harn sprang up, aghast as a tardy schoolboy. "It's beginning, and I'm not even dressed!"
He was, in fact, a good deal more dressed than Jame. She stripped off his coat, threw it at him in passing as if at a distraught bull, and bolted down the stairs in a glimmer of white limbs and black, whipping hair with what was left of her own clothing bundled in her arms. Around the first turn, she ran full tilt into Graykin. They tumbled down the rest of the way together. At the bottom, Jame contrived to land on top.
"I'm dead," Graykin moaned.
"No." She rolled off of him onto her feet and began rapidly sorting through her salvaged clothes, discarding most of them. "With luck, I only broke your back. You deserve it. Spy on anyone else, Gray, but not on me."
" 's not fair. You never tell me anything. Look," he said, doing anything but, struggling to sit up. "They've already started. It's too late. Give up this madness, take up your proper rank, and for God's sake put on some clothes!"
"I'm trying," said Jame, hopping on one foot to pull on a boot. "Highborn I may be, worse luck. However, I am not"—hop—"nor will I ever be"—hop—"a lady. Damn. The wrong foot, or the wrong boot. But I swear, on my honor, I'll be initiated tonight as a cadet if I have to do it wearing nothing but gloves and a surly expression."
Rue appeared, panting, with an armload of clothes. "Why'd you try to lose me?" she demanded of Gray. "Here. Hurry." She thrust the still damp but blessedly clean garments into Jame's arms. The shirt, jacket, and pants—Greshan's, no doubt—were still much too big, but at least the cuffs had been basted up. Reminded, Jame fished in the pocket of her discarded coat, drew out the two scarves, and tossed one to Rue.
Rue caught and stared at the sodden black cloth with its finely worked rathorn crest. "Where d'you find it?"
"Stuffed half way down my throat." Jame knotted her own scarf haphazardly around her neck. "I'll explain later. Damn. Where's my cap?"
Above, they could hear Harn apparently tearing apart his quarters. An anguished cry rolled down the stair: "Where's my damned shirt?"
Rue tugged urgently at Jame's sleeve. "God's claws, he's coming. Run!"
Too late. They shrank back as the burly randon blundered past, trying to pull himself together.
Jame started in pursuit, but Rue stopped her.
"He'll be going to join the officers by the front door. We need to come in with our house by the back." She looked about frantically. "Trinity, don't let us get lost now!"
Jame advanced on her servant. "Graykin . . . ."
"Oh, all right."
With an ill grace, he led them through a maze of halls to an obscure, narrow stair that plunged straight down to the first floor, emerging in the short, blind corridor between Old Tentir and the Randir barracks. Smart and stiff with a sense of occasion, answering the imperious summons of drum and horn, cadets passed the corridor's open end on the boardwalk, wheeled right, then left into the great hall, stepping proudly into their future.
"Coman," Rue breathed with relief. "Next Caineron, Jaran, and then Knorth. The other houses will be entering by the south door. We're in time."
Jame waited, fiddling discontentedly with her loose, wet hair as it tumbled well below her waist like a rain of black, blue-shot silk. It was her only vanity, but she usually kept it up out of the way, under a cap. Wearing it down now made her feel disheveled and vulnerable.
"Let me," said Graykin with irritation, beginning to comb out its heavy fall with nimble fingers. Then he twisted it up into a knot and secured it with thin-bladed knife, almost a spike, produced from somewhere on his person. "Honestly, don't you know any feminine arts?"
"Caineron . . . Jaran. . . ." Rue was counting down. "Here we come."
Vant appeared, almost strutting, at the head of the Knorth cadets. He started violently as Jame slid in before him, followed by Rue. His ten wavered and fell back as Brier lead her grinning squad to the fore. If there had been room or time, there might have been a serious scuffle, but they were almost to the door and the drumbeat called them insistently on.
Inside, the massed torchlight was almost blinding. Jame stopped dead on the threshold, sure for a moment that the hall was on fire, nearly tripping up all those behind her. She had to advance before her eyes had adjusted and blundered into the rear rank of the Jaran, who fended her off with a ripple of nervous laughter. Here at last was her place, before the blazing western fireplace and under the rathorn banner, parallel to Timmon on her right and the Jaran master-ten on her left, with her house drawn up behind her. The drums in the upper gallery ended with a thunderous flourish and fell silent.
In their wake, one heard only the crackle of fire, the slough of wind through upper windows, and the breathing of nine hundred-odd younglings.
Opposite, by the front door, stood the senior randon in a dark mass. Firelight glinted off their silver collars and caught the weathered, sometimes scar-broken lines of their faces. A few were clearly Highborn, smaller and finer boned than the Kendar, but claiming no precedence over them. Here as at Mount Alban, the Scrollsmen's College, ability outranked both blood and gender: at least a third of the senior randon were women, more than Jame had yet seen at Tentir. None of the latter, however, were Highborn.
Am I the first, ever, to come here? she wondered, and was suddenly, profoundly, grateful that she hadn't appeared in her uncle's stinking rags.
The Commandant stepped forward, his mix of blood clearer than ever in the keen lines of his face and in his tall, rangy form. He paced down the hall, his boots clicking on the flagstones in a measured tread. Around the high neck of his austere dress coat he wore a silver collar hung thick with plaques that chimed softly as he moved. So many battles. So much honor.
"Four long days ago," he said, "I welcomed you to Tentir as candidates. Now I do so again as novice cadets. Tonight you join our ranks and receive your scarves in token of the randon collars that you may someday earn. You have passed a time of testing, the first of many. Each day from now on will bring new challenges to surmount or to fail. A year hence, only the best of you will remain."
He regarded the cadets as he passed, as if already further thinning their ranks. It was hard not to cower under that ruthless, winnowing glance.
"As you progress, consider well your goals. This is no easy path to glory. It never has been. We buy our honor with blood, and scars, and pain."
Their eyes were drawn, with his, to the upper walls where the collars of the dead hung, glimmering down on this new, raw muster of children, many of whom had never seen death, much less the horrors of battle.
"Within our ranks, all of us have lost friends, family, beloved. Some we knowingly sent to their deaths and they willingly went, because it was necessary. We remember them always and honor their names. Death can be easier to bear than life. Oh, but it is sometimes hard. Very hard. Expect no soft choices here."
Gorbel yawned. Perhaps it was only nerves on his part, but it made Jame's jaw ache to imitate him. Ancestors, please, not now! she thought wildly as the Commandant stopped equidistant from the three Highborn cadets. He seemed now to speak directly to them.
"We randon think of ourselves as a breed apart, an amalgam of all that is best in the Kencyrath. Our ranks transcend politics, or should. Yes, we are loyal to our houses. Fiercely so. But also to each other. Note this and note it well: 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. House and college, cadet and randon, Highborn and Kendar. Honor holds us in balance, but what is honor? Consider that too, as you progress, and remember that you are bound by whatever words you swear in this sacred hall, before your banners and under the insignia of our dead so, on peril of your souls, swear honestly or not at all." He turned, his coat swinging wide. "Officers, administer the oath."
Nine senior randon stepped forth, one from each house, and advanced on their respective body of cadets.
Harn Grip-hard stumped down the hall to the Knorth. He looked as if he had thrown on his dress clothes in the dark and not adjusted them since, which was probably true. The undershirt was the same that he had worn before, liberally spattered with grease. However, the honors suspended clanking from his massive collar out-numbered even the Commandant's. He stopped in front of Jame.
"Last chance to save yourself, girl."
"Now, ran, when have the Knorth ever showed that much sense?"
He gave a grunt of laughter. "Not in my lifetime, nor my father's before me. Give me your scarf."
She loosened the clumsy knot and handed it to him. He regarded her attempt at needlework with raised brows. "Perhaps better here than in the Women's Halls after all. Now for it. Do you swear to obey the rules of Tentir? To guard its honor as closely as you do your own? To go out and come in, to live or to die, as you are bid? To protect its secrets now and forever, from all and sundry, whatever should befall?"
As he spoke, she heard the murmur of oaths and answers, weaving the fabric of Tentir around her, each house fitting into the pattern, somber Brandan and bright Edirr, subtle Ardeth and gaudy Caineron, rough-spun Kendar and silken Highborn, the oaths like sinews binding all together.
Now I join this pattern, she thought, this tapestry eternally renewed. Finally, the thread of my life will be racked into place, crossing the lives of others and crossed. Finally, I will belong.
But then she hesitated, frowning. There was a flaw somewhere in that texture of oaths given and received. A snag. Someone was swearing falsely. How could they at such a time when it weakened the whole fabric, or was that the point? This was as bad, as treacherous, as the notched rope, waiting for the first strain to fail. She began seriously to hunt for the fatal flaw, fingering through the different textures with all her Shanir wits. If she could find the source, she knew instinctively that she could destroy it.
But what if doing so rips an even larger gap?
She became aware of Harn waiting for her response. Perhaps he thought she was losing her nerve. Behind her, the Knorth cadets stirred restively, waiting to take their oaths with hers. Everyone else had finished.
Jame took a deep breath and swore the strongest oath she could:
"Honor break me, darkness take me, now and forever, so I swear."
The first part she spoke alone into a startled silence. Then came a ragged echo, not just from behind her but also from all down the hall on both sides, and every massive banner shuddered where it hung:
"So I swear" . . . "So I swear" . . . "So I swear. . . ."
Jame knew she had struck hard at someone, but whom?
Gorbel stared at her with his mouth agape, no yawn this time. Then he laughed unsteadily and said something that made his cronies snicker.
At the far end of the hall, there was a sudden stir of consternation among the Randir.
"Indeed," said Sheth softly, looking at her. "So swear we all."
Harn blinked. "That," he said, "should do nicely."
As he tied her scarf back on, correctly this time, she took the opportunity to twitch his coat closed over a particularly large grease stain. At least the bandages still wrapped around his knuckles were clean.
"Salute!" came a collective roar from the sergeants.
As one, except for Jame, the cadets wheeled to face their house banners.
Now what? she thought, belatedly turning, and then flinched as the Randir war cry ripped through the hall, discordant and shaken; but perhaps that was how it was supposed to sound.
The deep, sure note of the Brandan answered it from across the hall. Then the Coman, small and shrill, like their house; the Edirr, in a falcon's jeering shriek; the Danior's gleeful howl; the Jaran, a shouted phrase in High Kens: "The shadows are burning!"; the Ardeth, not loud, but with a swelling under-surge of Shanir power.
And now for us, thought Jame.
She took a deep breath, down to the pit of her soul, and let loose with the rathorn war cry.
It began as a scream, high and wild. She could hear each cadet's voice in it, tuning to her own, ripping the air. Rathorns were called "beasts of madness" for their effect on their prey. Their cry was an assault in itself, an incitement to panic. Then it sank to a bone-shaking roar.
Yells of consternation and outrage cut it short as if with a snap of teeth. Jame turned to see that every banner in the hall but her own had fallen, half on top of their assembled companies. Heavy tapestries heaved as indignant cadets fought their way out. Angry randon crowded around the Commandant, brandishing lengths of the banners' cords and crying foul, although clearly they had snapped by themselves, without external tampering.
And all this time that wild cry went on and on, under the floor, under the flagstones. In the subterranean stable, every horse was screaming.
"Truly," said Sheth, regarding Jame over the heads of his furious officers, "we live in interesting times." He clapped his hands. "And now, we feast."
The doors to New Tentir were flung open. Beyond, the training square blazed with light, falling on long tables loaded with food and drink. Roast ox and stag, stuffed stork and crisped carp; mawmenny stew boiled in wine, garnished with almonds; baked pears and apples swimming in caramel sauce. The cadets cheered, as much with relief as joy, and rushed out to drown the taste of fear with ale. Jame and Sheth were left, looking at each other.
"I think," said the Commandant, "that you may have broken the Randir Tempter. At least, they carried her off gagged to stop her raving. A pity, that. I would have liked to hear what she had to say. Nonetheless, if you please, don't make a practice of driving your instructors mad."
"N-no, ran. I'm sorry—I think."
"At the moment, that is all I require of you: think. Now go."
But on the threshold she hesitated, stopped between past and future by the sudden memory of something she had just heard but not immediately recognized. Over the cries of cadets and horses, out in the dark, in the night, a rathorn had answered her.