And so randon training began at Tentir.
After the first testing, roughly a thousand cadets were left at the college—still too many, but more were expected to fall prey to the autumn cull. As expected, the Caineron had lost the most candidates in the first few days, but with Lord Caldane's eight established sons adding their numbers of sworn Kendar to his, they were still the largest contingent at the college. Following them in numbers were the Ardeth, the Randir, and the Brandan, all houses with Kendar bound to more than one Highborn. Lord Hollen's little Danior could only muster three ten-commands. The Knorth mustered nine, just shy of a one-hundred command.
For the most part, school days followed the pattern established in the testing. The horn usually sounded at dawn, although sometimes earlier to surprise those who still depended too much on dwar sleep. Following breakfast and assembly, there were four two-hour lessons—half before lunch, half after—then a free period, then supper. Evenings were spent studying, mending gear, or attending to other house business.
Sometimes, after a particularly dismal lesson or because an instructor had had an especially bad day, a ten-command was obliged to repeat a class far into the night.
Often, depending on the season, cadets were called on to perform one of the thousand or so chores that the college needed done to function properly.
Every seventh day they were free to do whatever they pleased.
While each house ate and slept in its own hall, cadets continued to train together, two different ten-commands at a time under whatever randon or sergeant was best suited to teach them. In this way, the college hoped to forge bonds between houses that even their lords could not easily break. Whether this stratagem would work or, indeed, ever had, was a subject of perennial debate in the officers' mess.
To Jame's relief, most of the classes began with reviews of the basics—to correct bad habits, the randon said, and they found much to criticize. However, she had no habits whatsoever in many disciplines and so was glad for the chance to learn whatever she could, as well as to regain the physical edge that a winter in the Women's Halls had badly dulled. It was hard, muscle-aching work, but she enjoyed it.
The situation in the Knorth barracks was less to her taste.
From the start, Vant barely consulted her in the running of her own house. He assumed she knew nothing about such matters, which was true, and proceeded to arrange things to suit himself. For the most part, Jame couldn't fault his competence. For example, it would never have occurred to her to detail cadets to guard the doors to the inner, common corridor when they stood open. Like any other house the Knorth could always gain access to either half of their first story by going up the stairs to the second floor landing (which straddled the corridor) and descending on the other side, but it was considered rude to seal off the barracks during the day and positively hostile to obstruct the corridor itself, as any house could by closing the great gates at either end of their section.
Other house duties included cooking, cleaning, and serving at table, done by rotation. Unlike the Caineron or the Ardeth, the Knorth had no Kendar servants, its lord having none to spare. Whatever needed to be done, the cadets had to do.
And then there was house discipline.
Vant could assign individuals or whole ten-commands such necessary but unpleasant chores as mucking out the Knorth stables, de-worming the hunting pack, and unclogging the kitchen well after a seething of eels set up residence in it.
The boot-polishing incident turned out to be the first of many for Jame's ten. Vant was always finding fault with one or another of them, for example when Erim tripped over his own feet and more or less threw a bowl of soup in Vant's face (Jame wondered about that: Erim might be clumsy, but he had very good aim), or when Niall, Kest's replacement, woke the whole barracks by screaming in his sleep.
Her own ten didn't want Jame involved in the punishments earned by these mishaps.
"Don't you come with us, lady," Rue insisted as the ten-command geared up during what should have been their free time to tackle a trog-infested latrine. "He's got it in for Five, sure, but he's also trying to get at you. He thinks if he makes things nasty enough, you'll give up and leave." She laughed. "Doesn't know you yet, does he?"
He knew her well enough to have put her in a fix, thought Jame glumly, watching her ten go. Whether she went with them or not, should she submit without comment to Vant's unfair punishments and look weak, or complain and look petulant, or pull rank and tell him to lay off them altogether? Being a master ten was awkward to begin with, not (presumably) like being a one-hundred commander with clear-cut lines of authority. If she hadn't come to Tentir as a lordan, Briar would be master now and Vant her second in command. Briar would know how to run the barracks. Jame didn't. If this was another test, to see how each master ten handled his or her house, she was failing miserably.
As it happened, that afternoon she couldn't have gone with them anyway. At breakfast, a sergeant had arrived and called out a dozen names including Jame's with orders to report to various randon after classes. A bit nonplused (after all what had she ever had to do with birds?), Jame went off in search of the Falconer.
The mews occupied a long second story room in Old Tentir, overlooking the inner square. Half the windows were screened with oiled cloth to keep out drafts. Rank after rank of goshawks, peregrines, gyrfalcons and eagle owls rustled on their perches in the subdued light, the bells tied to their legs ringing softly. Their hooded heads jerking toward the door as Jame paused on the threshold, waiting for her eyes to adjust.
"Well, come in, come in!" a shrill voice called from the other end of the room. "D'you think we have all day?"
The far window was uncurtained. A misshapen figure stood black against it in a shaft of light smoky with dust. This half of the room seemed as messy as the other half was obsessively neat. As Jame made her way forward, stumbling over debris and colliding with work tables, she saw that a dozen cadets from various houses had arrived before her and were perched precariously on stools around the cold fireplace, watching her progress. She found an empty stool off to one side. It rocked under her on uneven, rickety legs.
The Falconer had spoken to her as sharply as to any tardy cadet. He must not know who she was. Good.
"Right," he said as she gingerly settled. "We were discussing how bonds form between Kencyr and animal."
Jame felt her tension ease. She had worried how Tentir would regard someone so clearly aligned with the Third Face of God, That-Which-Destroys, especially given the chaos her house had already caused along those lines. However, of all her Shanir traits, this surely was the one least apt to get her into trouble.
Seen momentarily in profile, the Falconer's hooked nose looked like a beak, and there was something strange about his eyes. His apparent hunchback consisted of a small, alert merlin and the padded shoulder that served as its perch. As the bird's head jerked to and fro, so did its master's.
"A select few," he was saying, "have always had this ability. Perhaps we all did, in the beginning, but lost it with the thinning of the Old Blood. You, sirrah!"
A Danior cadet straightened abruptly on his stool, nearly falling off of it.
"How did you and that beast come to be bound?"
Squinting against the light, Jame saw that the great, sprawling mass at the cadet's feet was alive. It raised a massive head, yawned with cavernous, nearly toothless jaws, and went back to sleep.
"W-we were born on the same day," the boy stammered, "and b-both our mothers died. The old lord valued his Molocar as much as his Kendar. Torvo and I were suckled by the same wet nurse."
That meant the hound was fifteen or sixteen years old, a great age for his breed. He began to snore in great, gusty sighs, with an unnerving catch between breaths.
"We've been together forever," said the boy, bending to stroke the gray muzzle.
"Well, now," said the Falconer, not unkindly. "You have the talent. There will be others."
"It won't be the same!"
"No. Alas, that we should out-live so many of those whom we love."
He ruffled the breast feathers of his pretty little merlin. The bird raised its tail and squirted a white stream of excrement out the window. Someone below cursed.
"And you, boy?"
The cadet addressed didn't answer, didn't seem to have heard. His dreamy face was turned toward the window, eyes unfocussed. The Falconer stalked over and slapped him. He came back to life slowly, like a sleeper waking, and sat there stupidly rubbing his cheek.
"Cast your mind after your companion, yes, but, never, ever, lose yourself! All of you, take note: some of us never come back.
"And you, girl?"
The Randir cadet whom he had addressed scowled sullenly at the floor. Like many of her house with some Highborn blood, she had thin, sharp features and hooded eyes. "I don't know what you mean, ran. I don't even know why I'm here wasting my time . . . and yours."
"The answer is up your sleeve." He whistled, a sweet, wavering sound that made the hound twitch in his sleep. "Ah. Here it comes."
The Randir's jacket bulged and rippled as if with new, strangely placed muscles. Something golden flowed out of her sleeve onto her lap. There it collected itself in thick, molten coils and raised a triangular head with glittering orange eyes. At its soft hiss, the others drew back and the merlin bated, screaming.
"It's a gilded swamp adder!" someone exclaimed.
Jame liked snakes, and this one fascinated her, being at once so beautiful and so grotesque. She leaned forward for a better look.
"Is it blood-bound to you?" she asked, genuinely curious.
Randir and serpent both hissed. The wicked little head wove back and forth, black tongue flickering.
Jame withdrew hastily.
"You Randir have odd tastes," the Falconer said dryly.
"It was a gift from my mistress."
"Dear Lady Rawneth. That explains everything. And you, girl? Where's that ounce of yours?"
He did know who she was. "Back in the Knorth quarters, ran."
"Sure of that, are you, or only guessing?"
Jame reached out to Jorin's senses. As a rule, he used hers much more easily than she did his.
"Well?" the Falconer demanded. "What d'you see?"
"Nothing, ran."
Or rather, only memory: she was on a ropewalk between Tai-tastigon's inner and outer walls. Below her, a man carried a wriggling sack. He threw it into the water.
. . . close, wet, and all those other weighted, pathetic sacks bobbing lifeless in the current . . .
She gulped, swallowing the sense of something so precious, so nearly lost forever.
"He's a Royal Gold," she heard herself say. "Extremely valuable, if sound, but Jorin has been blind since birth. His breeder ordered him to be destroyed. He was drowning when we bonded and I rescued him. Now I am his eyes and, sometimes, he is my nose."
"Ah," said the Falconer. "A spontaneous bond, and not one by blood. Interesting. Those in distress must be particularly vulnerable to you. Be careful whom you touch, and when."
Too late for Graykin, thought Jame, not that he seemed to mind except when she failed to live up to his grand expectations.
"And you, boy?"
He spoke to the shadows behind Jame. She had been aware for some time of the buzz of flies but had assumed that they were attracted to some bit of food left out too long in the general mess. Now, turning, she saw a Coman cadet hunched in the corner, surrounded by a blur of wings.
"It isn't always flies, ran," he said, with a lop-sided smile. "Sometimes it's wasps or moths or jewel-jaws. They don't bother me—much—because they never land, but they don't tell me anything either."
Jame reflected that insects seldom bothered her either, which was fortunate. The last thing she needed was a swarm of blood-bound mosquitoes.
"Hmm," said the Falconer, tapping his yellow teeth with a dirty fingernail. "You should talk to Randiroc, the next time he swings by. Then again, he doesn't talk much to anyone."
The name stirred Jame's memory. She sat up straight. "The missing Randir Heir?"
A stool crashed over. The Randir cadet had sprung to her feet. "There is no 'missing heir,' only a hunted renegade and traitor to his house!"
Jame recoiled, not so much at the finger thrust almost in her face as at the sinuous, golden form gliding down the other's arm toward her. Her stool broke. She turned a backward fall into a roll, fetching up on her feet in the corner with the Coman cadet. For a moment, she was surrounded by a sizzle of tiny wings.
Then the swarm launched itself at the Randir.
The latter backed away, flailing, tripped over the supine hound, and crashed into the Falconer.
Snake and merlin went up, the former inadvertently flung into the air, the latter launching itself after it. The bird caught the serpent behind its wicked little head and shot out the window clutching it.
Half the hooded hawks screamed and leaped to follow, but their jesses stopped them short in mid-air, leaving them to swing upside down from their perches, wings bating and beaks angrily panting.
The Randir lurched to her feet and fled the mews, pursued by a furious cloud of flies.
"Well!" said the Falconer as some cadets hauled him to his feet while the others rushed to help the frantic birds before they injured themselves. "At least we've discovered one thing your talent is good for, boy. Myself, I wouldn't care to be your enemy."
In the process of brushing him off, Jame saw his eyes clearly for the first time, or rather didn't: the sockets were sunken and the lids were sealed shut over them with tiny, neat stitches.
He groped for a chair and sat down. "Well, well, well. That's quite enough excitement for today. Come back next week and we will continue."
It had been a short session.
When Jame emerged from Old Tentir, a Jaran and an Edirr ten-command were still practicing swordplay on horseback in the training square. Timmon leaned on the rail before his compound, watching as if the display were being staged purely for his amusement.
He greeted Jame with a smile and a jerk of his chin toward second story window of the mews.
"Did you have fun up there? First a hawk with a snake in its beak and then a Randir with a ball of flies for a head. She half-drowned herself in the water trough getting rid of them."
"I think," said Jame ruefully, "that I've made another enemy. Why aren't you in class?"
"Oh, I didn't feel like hammering nails."
From behind them within the Ardeth quarters came the ruckus of reconstruction, where Timmon's ten-command (minus Timmon) was apparently being kept busy.
"I wish they'd finish," he said. "We haven't had a hot meal since you dropped the dining room into the kitchen."
"Sorry about that, but it wasn't entirely my fault. I mean, buildings don't necessarily fall down or burn up whenever I walk into them."
"Only on special occasions, I suppose. Speaking of which, have you ordered that gaping hole in your barracks' roof to be repaired yet?"
Jame grimaced. There it was again: the question of command, when she didn't even like telling Rue to clean her boots. Of course, Rue did it anyway, with the air of helping the helpless.
"I like to sleep under the open sky."
Timmon shot her a grin. "I was teasing. As the senior Knorth randon, Harn Grip-hard should tend to any structural repairs, now that he's decided to stay on for the term as an instructor."
"Is Harn also the Knorth one-hundred commander?" she asked hopefully.
"No, silly. In the barracks you are, in all but name, as I am in mine—although," he added with a note of complacence, "the Ardeth have twice as many cadets as you do. No, Harn Grip-hard will only intervene there if you make a real mess of things."
So it was a test of sorts. Damn, blast, and hell.
"Seriously, Timmon, how do you handle being a master ten?"
"Oh, I leave it all to my second ten-commander, of course. So does Gorbel, from what I hear. Why should we lordan be bothered with such mundane trifles?"
"Because we're training to become randon officers and the heads of our respective houses?"
Timmon laughed. "D'you really think the three of us will ever assume lordship? Gorbel is only at Tentir because you are. Why you're here, ancestors only know. I came because I enjoy sports and, frankly, to please my mother, who has ambitions for me. I may have older half-brothers, you see, but my parents were half-siblings, which counts for a lot in our house." He grinned. "Are you shocked? In the Knorth, don't twins often mate?"
"Not since Gerridon and Jamethiel Dream-weaver."
And if the High Council knew that Tori and I are twins, she thought uneasily, what then? Would they throw us together or make sure that we never met again? Between them, the Master and the Dream-weaver bred the Fall. Between us, what might Tori and I produce?
"Don't you have any ambitions of your own?" she asked Timmon.
"To enjoy myself, mainly. I wouldn't mind commanding the Southern Host as my father did, provided my staff did all the work. He was a great man, my father. But lordship sounds too much like hard work. Let cousin Dari have it if he wants it. Grandfather will probably live forever anyway, so why fret."
Before them, two horses collided and their riders tumbled, laughing, onto the ground. Jame flinched, then wondered why. The fall was nothing, given their training. What was it about horses in general that set her teeth on edge? Granted, her encounter last fall with the rathorn mare and her death's-head colt hadn't helped, but this—call it what it was: fear—predated that. Forgotten events still lurked like assassins in the shadowy pockets of her childhood. The ghost of one now rose—something about a dark gray stallion stained black with sweat and flecked with white foam. . . .
She remembered. It had been her father's warhorse Iron-jaw, the one that had turned into a haunt. The changer Keral had threatened to feed her to it.
Timmon was looking at her sideways.
"I have to ask: why are you at Tentir? What do you want?"
"A place to belong, I suppose. You wouldn't understand. Half of the time, I don't either."
"What a strange way to live. Don't you miss the Women's Halls?"
"No!"
He laughed. "I've heard something about your adventures there. No doubt they don't miss you either. My mother says Highborn girls often go through a hoyden stage. Obviously, you reached it later than most. You ran wild too long, she says, like a filly that's never been broken to ride. Someday, though, you'll settle down and realize what you really want."
"And what, pray, is that?"
"Why, what any woman wants: a good man, of course, or maybe several of them, preferably one at a time."
Jame grinned, showing the half-filled gap in her front teeth. Brier had been right both about the timing of re-growth and about the teething itch. "Like you? Like your grandfather, who worships tradition? Like Caineron, whose only god is power? Like Tori, who can't face who or what he is? The best man I know is a seven foot tall, ninety-five year old Kendar named Marcarn whom, ancestors know, I miss with all my heart."
"You," said Timmon, "are adorable. And more than a bit peculiar. I'd like to see you properly dressed or, better yet, undressed. We could have pleasant times together, you and I."
He wound a loose strand of her hair around his finger, using the excuse to trace the curve of her neck. Jame shivered and drew away.
"You'd only be disappointed," she said over her shoulder, turning to leave. "I've often been mistaken for a boy."
His voice, gay with laughter, followed her: "Now, where's the fun in that?"
The days passed, edging toward midsummer. Up and down the Riverland, the bad-tempered black cattle had been driven up into the mountain pastures to graze and the long horned sheep with them, shorn of their thick fleece. Flax was sown, cherries and strawberries picked. The apple crop was thinned to make the remaining fruit grow larger and swine feasted on the discards under drooping boughs. Grass grew thick toward hay-time, called the Minor Harvest, while oats, rye, and wheat ripened in the riverside flood-plains and water meadows for the Major Harvest at summer's end.
So far, so good, reported the Kendar harvest-master. Despite the previous year's neglect, when the Kencyr Host had marched south to fight the Horde rather than stay home to mind the fields, the Riverland might yet squeak through the next winter without famine.
Meanwhile, last year's stores were beginning to run out. Oatmeal, moldy cheese, and black bread hard enough to drive nails were supplemented by whatever forest, field, or sky could provide by way of fruit or game. Hart season would begin soon. Streams were eagerly fished or set with traps. The Silver itself, however, was left alone: anything hooked there was likely to snap the line or pull the fisherman in, never to be seen again. Anyway, as Rue said, why risk offending the River Snake? Vant might laugh at that, but he didn't meddle with the Silver either.
The weirdingstrom had swept other, stranger game into the valley, both from the north and the south: black swans and fierce little hawks with pearly feathers shading to pale blue; dire elk whose eight foot antler-spans kept tangling in the undergrowth; lumpy desert creatures that caught cold in the crisp, mountain air and rent the night with their hacking coughs; flying frogs and things like black, leather kites that killed by wrapping themselves around the heads of their prey.
And there was something else.
One morning Jame and her ten went with the bow-legged horse-master to bring in fresh mounts from the upper field where the Knorth horses pastured.
It proved a frustrating task. The herd was on edge, easily spooked but unwilling to stray far from the paddock's lower fence.
"There's a predator somewhere about," said the master, peering up the slope from under his shaggy eye-brows and moping his bald, perspiring head. He sniffed as if for a scent, but it would be a wonder, thought Jame, if he could smell anything, given that at some point long ago his nose had been smashed almost flat to his face.
At its top was a jumble of enormous boulders, many newly tumbled down from the mountains above.
Jame glimpsed a flicker of white among them and immediately thought of the phantom Whinno-hir Bel-tairi. As she shifted for a better look, however, the horses suddenly surged around her, all wild eyes and great, swinging flanks.
"Don't crowd the mares!" the horse-master was shouting. "They'll kick you if you get between them!"
Jame ducked under a gelding's belly and jumped for the fence. What she hit, though, was the gate, which swung open, taking her with it. It stopped with a jar that sent her tumbling over its top rail, down between the gate and the fence. The herd plunged through the opening and thundered off down the slope, pursued by sweating, shouting cadets. Brier gave Jame an unfathomable look and then, more sedately, followed them as the whole mob, equine and Kencyr, made for the underground stables at a dead run.
"Perhaps in future, lady," said the master in his nasal voice, eyeing her askance, "you should leave horse-wrangling to others."
Jame glanced again at the upper slope. Nothing white showed now, but it had been there, and it hadn't been a Whinno-hir.
A lunch of bread, hard cheese, and milk followed, with much subdued laughter and glances at the top table. By then, everyone had heard about the stampede through the great hall and the chaos it had caused below.
Afterward, Jame and her ten tried to stay awake during an interminable lecture on strategy, delivered by a randon so battered that he appeared to have made every mistake against which he was now warning them. When he got excited, he pounded the desk with a wooden fist or sometimes detached and threw it at a dozing cadet.
Their next class was held in the great hall of Old Tentir. They entered to find Senethar practice mats spread out on the flagstones and half a ten-command lounging on them. Jame slowed, recognizing Gorbel's heavy-lidded face, so like his father Caldane's that it set her teeth on edge. His four Highborn toadies eyed her askance as she approached and snickered among themselves. Behind them stood five young Caineron Kendar, their personal servants and cadets in their own right, watching Brier Iron-thorn with hard, set faces older than their years.
Gorbel rose casually to acknowledge the arrival of their instructor, a small, red-faced Coman sergeant. His friends followed suit, waiting just long enough to make clear their opinion of a teacher so far beneath them in social rank and blood.
The lesson began with a demonstration of a simple water-flowing throw. One pulled an opponent off balance, pivoted back to belly, and threw him over one's hip. It didn't call for great strength, only good balance and proper leverage. As for falling, the mats were an unexpected luxury.
"Form a circle!" ordered the sergeant and they did, one house taking the inner ring, the other the outer, face to face. "Salute and begin."
Jame's first opponent was a grinning Caineron Highborn who used the excuse to let his hands wander.
"I know a better game than this," he breathed in her ear.
"Perhaps, but can you play it without balls?"
She reached behind her, low, and squeezed. He gasped. As his grip involuntarily loosened, she threw him, hard.
The sergeant frowned, knowing that something had happened but not what. He clapped. "Change!"
The pace quickened. Throw, fall, change; throw, fall, change, over and over. The cadets grimly settled down to the rhythmic thud of bodies hitting the mats. It seemed to go on forever, until breath burned in the lungs and sweat stung the eyes. Thirty minutes, sixty . . . sweet Trinity, did he mean to keep them at it the full two hours? However, if someone fell off onto the stone floor, he or she was permitted to quit. Jame saw first one, then another and another of Gorbel's cronies roll free and settle back to watch the fun. She was tempted to join them. This was the most sustained practice yet, worse than when she had tested in the Senethar because this time there were no rest breaks, or rather only one.
As he fell, a cadet grabbed both her cap and a handful of the hair coiled beneath.
The sergeant glared as she interrupted the lesson's flow to disengage the other's grip. "You should cut that short, lady. Anyone who can grab it in a fight is going to have you at a disadvantage."
Grinning, the cadet tugged. Hard. Jame bent his wrist until he yelped with pain and let go. Then she twisted the black skein of hair back on top of her head and defiantly tugged the cap down over it. Other randon including Harn had said the same thing, admittedly with reason, but be damned if she was going to lose the only attractive feature she had left.
The lesson continued.
Throw, fall, change . . . and here was Gorbel.
This was the first time that the rotation of classes had brought them up against each other. He was younger than she had thought. Breathing hard, hair plastered with sweat to his bulging forehead, the Caineron lordan stared at her.
"You," he said heavily.
"Me," Jame agreed. She expected a sneer, but he looked merely exhausted and dogged. "Ready?"
In answer, he grabbed her jacket and threw her awkwardly. For a moment, she thought his legs were going to buckle under them both. On impulse, when her turn came, she threw him near the edge of the mat. His friends pulled him off, laughing at his half-hearted attempt to resist.
That left only a half dozen cadets in the game, Brier Iron-thorn among them. The Southron flowed through the moves, the only sign of effort a sheen of sweat that made her dark face gleam like polished wood. Her expression was calm and remote, as if her thoughts dwelt on the far side of the moon. It didn't change when one of the Caineron Kendar first threw, then kicked her viciously in the ribs.
Jame had heard that muffled thud before over the course of the practice without realizing what it was. Four times? Five? More? She should have recognized the hatred in the Kendars' eyes for one of their own who had escaped their lord's cruel grip. Their masters snickered. Her own ten stirred and muttered; they had seen what was happening long before she had. So must the instructor, but he had done nothing. Perhaps he felt that a turn-collar deserved no better. Brier picked herself up more slowly than before. That last kick had hurt.
Jame felt rage stir in her. Careful, she thought, as her current partner backed hastily away. Don't over-react. Then, the hell I won't.
She stalked across the mat toward the Kendar, who shrank back and looked quickly away. Here was one who either could not or would not met her eyes. They hadn't been matched before; he had been avoiding her. She clapped, and he jumped like a spooked horse.
He was taller than she was by at least a head. She had to reach up to touch his face and turn it, nails out only enough to prick although they still drew tiny drops of blood.
"Look at me." Her voice roughened with the under-note of a purr. "There. That's better. One should always meet one's enemies face to face, don't you think?"
He was a handsome, almost pretty boy, or would have been without terror distorting his face. A sudden stench announced that he had lost control of his bowels. She tapped him lightly on the cheek and let her hands slide down to grip his sleeves.
"Now, let's play. Throw me, or try."
Stiffly, he assumed the proper stance, took a deep breath, and turned to lift her over his hip. She leaned back and shifted her weight so that his buttocks shot past her. Nervous laughter rippled through the cadets. They had often played this trick on each other, but the Caineron was too rattled to counter it.
"Again."
White face beginning to blotch with red, he tried, and was caught off-balance, bent backward with her knee in the small of his back.
"Again."
This time she moved even as he did, rolling over his arm, landing on her feet in a crouch before him. Her grip shifted to a lock on his wrist. She twisted. He somersaulted over this fulcrum of pain and slammed down on the stone floor.
"There," said Jame, straightening up. "Isn't that better?"
The instructor clapped twice. "That's enough," he said. His voice shook and so did he. "Never, ever humiliate a fellow cadet that way."
"If not respect for one, then why for any?"
He gaped at her, mouth opening and closing. At another time, it would have been funny.
"Let it go," said Brier behind her.
Jame glanced at her. "If you wish. For now."
Dismissed, the rest of the command except Rue scattered to practice on their own until dinner.
Brier gave Jame an unreadable look. "What you did back there during the lesson, lady . . . it didn't help."
With that, she turned and walked away.
Jame stared after her. Dammit, the Southron was right. Terrorizing Kendar only made them more stubborn unless it broke them altogether, and what right had she to do either? Blood right, some would say. She was Highborn, and had just demonstrated everything that she hated about her own kind's casual abuse of power, to someone who had already suffered far too much from it.
"Has she had to put up with much more of this harassment?" Jame asked Rue.
The cadet squirmed. "A lot," she admitted, "usually not so obvious. She says she can deal with it. I wasn't supposed to tell you."
It seemed that either she scared people shitless or they thought she was too weak to protect her own. What a choice. Jame sighed. In every way, the road ahead was longer than she had realized.