Bound in Blood

XII Fire and Ice

BOOM!

Everyone in the lodge jumped, and Gorbel fell over again.

BOOM!

“It sounds as if he’s knocking on the door with a battering ram,” said Jame, and stooped to pick up a frightened Jorin before he could wreak painful havoc by climbing her leg. At forty pounds, the ounce made a considerable armful. “How can he do that without shattering his hands? God’s claws, I could see the naked bones.”

The Earth Wife had retreated to the chair by the hearth and settled herself in it, one hulking shadow among many. Her own guardians had come forward but checked at a wave of her hand. So many eyes, some near the ground, others higher than seemed possible under that low roof. “That will come later, when the Burnt Man has ridden him to pieces.”

“I’ve seen that happen before,” said Jame, thinking of the unfortunate Simmel, whose rider had been a mere if very nasty mortal. “Can’t the process be stopped?”

“Would you if you could, considering the state that boy is in already?”

Tap, tap, tap . . .

“Mother, Mother, please let me in. Listen: I can talk again!”

“Sod off!” Gorbel shouted from the floor.

Boom!

“You should return to the college,” the Earth Wife said, “before he breaks down my door. But you, girl, promise me first that you’ll return on Winter’s Day.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Gorbel sputtered. “This is no place for any sane person, not that you exactly are, Knorth.”

“Thank you.”

He climbed to his feet or rather to one foot, the other clearly being too sore to bear his weight. “I’m getting really tired of falling over,” he said, precariously balancing. “Crazy promises aside, how are we supposed to leave? The disappearing wall isn’t there, or rather it is—oh, you know what I mean—and a human torch is knocking at the door.”

“Wait.”

Boom. The sound seemed farther away . . . boom . . . and farther yet. At last it faded to a mere vibration, then was gone.

“Right. Out you go. He will follow you as long as the boy’s body holds its form, but not into Tentir. Probably. So run.”

The door creaked open. Beyond lay not the Merikit square but a twilight wood, with a glimpse of Old Tentir’s towers over the trees. They found themselves standing on grass, beside a featureless bank. Gorbel wobbled and clutched at Jame to steady himself. She in turn dropped an indignant cat to take his weight.

“We’ve got to find you a crutch.”

“And a basin of hot water.”

“Wimp.”

“You try walking on a foot punched full of holes.”

“Gimp. Listen.”

A shiver passed through the forest, rattling leaves, causing many of them to fall. The wind gusted hot, then cold again, uncertain, frightened. They had outpaced the rain, as they had the Burnt Man, but both followed fast on their heels.

Now Jame felt something else, ahead of them. It was the rathorn colt, and he was upset, almost frantic. What could drive him to such distraction? Only a threat to the Whinno-hir Bel-tairi. She remembered her sense earlier that day—Trinity, how long ago that seemed!—of strangers in the wood, and the unrest among the herd which Bel had been trying to calm. Even at this distance, she could hear them crying, and then the rathorn’s scream.

“Someone is after the horses,” she said, letting go of Gorbel, who promptly fell over yet again and sat swearing on the grass. She searched for and found a fallen branch sturdy enough to support him.

“Take this. Get help.”

“Who?”

“Find the Commandant or Harn if you can. If not, go to Vant. I need every Knorth he can muster.”

“You,” he said, “are out of your mind. Either that, or you want all the credit for thwarting a raid, as if one were likely this far south.”

“Go!”

“All right, all right.” He limped away, cursing at every step.

Jame ran slantwise toward the paddocks, through the orchard, over the broken wall, across the training field. The wind whipped grass around her legs and blew cold down her back. Behind, trees began to swoop and toss, sending cascades of leaves after her. With the coming storm, the odds were that no one in the college would hear what was going on outside.

Thunder grumbled. Lightning flared, stroke and delayed crack as the first chill drops of rain fell. Jorin, running at her side, made an unhappy sound.

The gelding herd was galloping from fence to fence, out of control, careening. Perhaps a dozen were down. Leaving an anxious Jorin behind, Jame slipped between the fence bars, waited her chance, and ran to one of the fallen. It looked huge on the ground, with sweat darkening its shoulders. When she touched it, it squealed and tried to lurch to its feet, but couldn’t. Jame had leaped back, heart pounding. Horses were so big and powerful, so unpredictable . . . then she could see that the gelding’s hind hocks had been hamstrung. Who would do such a cruel thing, and why?

The next paddock contained the mares. They surged against the northern end of their enclosure, agitated but somewhat in check if only because they were so close-packed. The wooden fence groaned under the press of their bodies.

Jame slipped into the aisle between the fields and skirted the mares’ paddock along its western side. As soon as she was clear of the packed herd, she saw a pale mound on the ground. Oh no. Not Bel-tairi. The Whinno-hir raised her head and whickered at the mares, calming them somewhat. Then she was forced back down. Someone in black knelt on her neck and held bright steel to her throat. Other dark-clad figures formed a line holding back the mares, preparing to drive them out.

But they—whoever they were—had run into a hitch.

Jame was so intent on Bel that for a moment she didn’t realize that the rathorn was also there. He stood at the southern end of the field like some fabulous statue, ivory-sheathed head held high with its scythe horns, white back and flanks almost luminous in the deepening gloom. From crest to tail, his hackles were up. He too was surrounded, with ropes radiating out from around his neck like spokes. He raised one hoof and brought it down—crack!—to another whiplash of lightning. The man bending over the Whinno-hir pressed his knife to her neck, and the rathorn again froze.

Jame could feel his rage, impatience, and fear. He had been waiting for her to come, and now she was here.

Do something!

The words might as well have been shouted.

Those not holding a rope were fitting arrows to their bows. The rathorn’s armor protected most of his vital organs, barring a lucky shaft to the eye, but he was about to become a very unhappy pincushion. If they did succeed in killing him, they would probably drag his carcass away for the wealth of ivory on it, but not if she could help it.

Jame’s own fury at Bel’s plight half choked her. The last time the Whinno-hir had been trapped like this, Greshan, Jame’s own dear uncle, had pressed a branding iron to her face, half blinding and maiming her. Not again. Never again. Jame drew her knife, slipped into the field, and ran at a crouch toward Bel’s captor. The man heard her coming at the last minute.

A Merikit? she thought as she glimpsed his startled, heavily tattooed face. How could that be? Not only were Chingetai and his people tied up with their ruined rites, but this didn’t seem like them at all. Theft, maybe; not mutilation. But it made no difference. The stranger held a knife at Bel’s throat. Her own blade slid past his and across his neck, stilling any outcry in a great gout of blood.

His mates hadn’t noticed his silent fall.

Hastily checking Bel, Jame saw with relief that she was only bound, not cut, and freed her.

“Stay down a moment,” she whispered, and took off at a run toward the rathorn.

He saw her coming, reared, and screamed. In that sound, and the smell rolling off of him, was sheer terror for all who heard except Jame, who was protected by the bond between them. Bel leaped to her feet and shrilled at the mares. The herd surged backward, crashed through the fence, and fled. Most of their would-be captors ran after them, while a few turned back to help their mates. There must be a good twenty of them still in the paddock.

Jame swung up onto the rathorn’s back without giving herself a chance to think. His hackles made for an uncomfortable seat, but she clung with her knees and one hand twisted in the feathery tips of his mane. The other wielding the knife slashed at those ropes that still held him captive. Some of the raiders had dropped their weapons and fled, but others hung on grimly or drew their bows. Arrows hissed past or rebounded from the rathorn’s ivory armor. One creased Jame’s leg, drawing a line of pain, and the rathorn screamed again. His rage licked like fire at the edges of Jame’s already frayed self-control.

As for controlling him, huh. She simply hung on. While she had, briefly, ridden the colt before, he had mainly focused on trying to dislodge her without seeming to. It had been a game for him, a way to get back at her for accidentally blood-binding him. This was different. She felt linked to his movements, sensing them a moment before he made them and shifting her balance accordingly. The night reeled about her, terrifying, exhilarating.

Horns, hooves, and teeth—Trinity, what a nightmare. The rathorn jerked a raider to him, speared him under the ribs with his nasal tusk, and threw him, shrieking, at his companions. Another crumpled under the scimitar blow of his major horn. A third died screaming under his hooves. A fourth’s head he caught in his jaws and lifted the man off the ground to shake him until Jame heard the dull crunch of his neck breaking. The next moment, his body tumbled free.

Sweet Trinity, Jame thought, sickened. He’s bitten that man’s head off.

But this last almost proved the rathorn’s downfall. He retreated, madly shaking his skull mask, then reared and went over backward.

Jame was thrown clear. For a moment she lay half-dazed with the impact, then scrambled up. The colt was still on his back, legs thrashing in a vain attempt to hook a dew-claw in his mouth. He was also choking. The head must be wedged in his jaws, Jame thought, probably snagged through the eye sockets on his fangs. Oh, ugh.

On her knees, she captured his skull mask and stilled him with a fierce thought. His breath certainly was hissing around something. To her relief, she saw not mangled flesh and gristle stuck in that gaping maw but the remains of a leather helmet. True, though, it had caught on his teeth and was halfway to strangling him. She freed it with her claws. As he surged to his feet, Jame rose astride him, but nearly fell off when he paused to give himself a vigorous shake.

“We have got to do some serious training,” she told him. “Be damned if I’m going to pick your teeth again.”

Chill rain spat in her face, as cold as the day had been hot. Storm clouds boiled down the river valley from the north, laced with lightning bolts flung back and forth on high. Flashes of sudden, brutal light showed the mares circling in time to their own thunder on the training field, Bel palely glimmering among them. A group of the raiders were trying to herd them toward the forest. Closer at hand, their fellows had stopped to form a rear guard. One man seemed to be rallying them. A lightning flash limned his face and the scar twisting his upper lip. Then the dark rushed in again, concealing all.

Jame felt the rathorn gather himself and so wasn’t left sitting in midair when he hurtled onto the field. Great muscles flexed between her knees, gather and release, gather and release, and his breath roared. The ground rushed past. She tried to remember if there were any sudden dips or rises or rocks on which the colt might trip—the thought of being flung like a shot from a sling didn’t appeal to her—but he seemed to know where to put his hooves; and, after all, there were four of them, the better to maintain balance.

Just then he stumbled, nearly pitching her over his head. One of the raiders had gotten in his way. Flashing hooves tangled in something soft that screamed, then they were past, still charging toward the endangered mares. Some had been separated from the herd and were being driven through the gate into the orchard. Bel was with them.

Here was the outer wall. The colt didn’t bother with the gate. Jame nearly broke her nose against his neck as he leaped, then almost pitched forward over his shoulder as he landed. Trinity, she needed practice at this even more that he did. In no way yet were they a team.

They wove through the orchard, Jame lying flat to his neck to avoid being swept off by a low branch. Windfalls swished and slipped underfoot.

Beyond lay a pasture, then the forest, now throwing up its boughs while autumn leaves fled before the storm’s approach. Steadier than the lightning flashes was a trail of fire snaking from the north southward. It could have been caused by a lightning strike, but Jame doubted it. Here came the last person on Rathillien whom she cared to meet, and they were racing straight toward him.

Bel burst out of the trees, the stolen mares wild-eyed on her heels. They swerved, squealing, at the sight of the rathorn, but he ignored them, turning sharply to run beside his foster-dam. Jame thought she heard shouts ahead in the pasture, and screams behind in the forest. Which call to answer first, hill or hall? Hall, dammit, and they mustn’t see the rathorn. She slipped off the galloping colt’s back, and fell flat on her face. This time, it did indeed feel as if she had broken her nose, but nothing worse.

As Whinno-hir and rathorn sheered off at a tangent, she ran toward the sound of battle.

A large figure rose up before her and struck, so swift a fire-leaping kick that Jame felt it breeze past her chin as she sprang back out of range.

“Brier, it’s me!”

“What’s going on, lady?” demanded Brier Iron-thorn, looming over her. “That Caineron”—Gorbel, no doubt—“told us precious little except that you needed us. Who are we fighting?”

“I suspect not whom we’re supposed to think. How goes it?”

Brier made a gesture of disgust. Lightning revealed her short dark-red hair plastered to her skull and water dripping off her chin. “It’s a right mess. We were under fire before we knew they were there. Two of us got hit.”

“Who?”

“Anise and Erim. Anise looks bad.”

Another figure charged them, giving a rathorn battle cry cut off as Brier swept his feet out from under him. Dar rose, spitting grass and dirt.

“You could just say, ‘friend,’ ” he protested.

“You didn’t exactly give us a chance.”

“Where are they?” barked Brier. “Report!”

“No point in shouting at me, Five. They seem to have shot their bolt, or rather their arrows, and melted away. I doubt if we’ve caught one of them. There were just too few of us.”

“I ordered Vant to send everyone he could.”

The cadet didn’t meet her eyes. He himself seemed close to tears. “Vant said it was all in your imagination. And he laughed, Ten. He laughed!”

Jame felt the stirring of cold rage, but she mustn’t give in to it. Not yet. There remained the hills.

“See to our wounded,” she told Brier. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Ignoring the big Kendar’s attempt to stop her, she turned and sped into the forest, toward where she had heard the screams. Fire winked between the trees and spat as the rain came down more fiercely. Not far in, she came on a scorched circle. Within it lay bodies blackened and contracted with heat so that they seemed to shriek silently at the pouring sky. So much, at least, for the would-be mare thieves.

Amidst them, one moved. Blind and deaf, it crept forward, shedding charred bits of itself as it came. The terrible head turned from side to side. The mouth, driveling flames, opened.

“M-m-mother?”

“Here.” Jame opened her arms to him, and he fell apart in her embrace.

“Are you happy?” she demanded of the drenched landscape. “Burnt Man, this was your son, more than I will ever be. Earth Wife, he called to you, not me. Eaten One, blessing on you for ending his agony. Falling Man, hear my call and scatter his ashes!”

But the boisterous north wind still blew, flinging all that remained of the Merikit boy into her face, then sweeping him on southward with the storm farther and farther from home. Fires hissed out under a veil of rain. Charred figures crumbled into the tossing grass.

Jorin emerged from the darkness, chirping anxiously. She held him as he nuzzled her face, grateful for the instinct that kept the ounce out from underfoot when he could only get hurt.

“You have more sense than I do,” she told him.

His soft fur comforted her, wet as it was. How long ago today had begun, how much had happened. She wanted a moment’s peace to gather herself, to put it all together before it overwhelmed her, to breathe in the warm, wild scent of Jorin’s fur.

So many had been hurt, one way or another: Narsa, Timmon, Bear, the Commandant, Graykin, the hamstrung geldings, Bel, and now two of her own ten-command—how badly, she couldn’t yet bear to think. What kind of a god did they serve who could allow such wanton misery? Where were those three faces turned, if not toward the people they had bound together and set on this painful course? The compromised god-voice aside, the only evidence of the Three-Faced God’s existence on Rathillien lay in his temples, mindlessly generating power, managed (or mismanaged) by Kencyr priests whom no one trusted.

On the other hand, there were the Four, whom she suspected had come into being with the activation of the Kencyr temples some three thousand years ago. Nonetheless, they seemed to be Rathillien incarnate.

. . . two of their Merikit servants senselessly slain; an unknown number of hill-raiders; Sonny Boy, whose death she could still taste on her lips, feel in the charred grit between her teeth . . .

Did one expect the elements to be kind, or cruel, or simply indifferent? When called upon, did they hear? Earth Wife, Falling Man, Eaten One, Burnt Man—they had all been mortal once, subject to love and hate, capricious as any human. So they still seemed to be. The Earth Wife was the most approachable of them, yet even she would apparently do nothing to prevent the Merikit from starving that winter, though she knew where the problem lay.

And what about her, Jame?

“As we are, so you may become,” the Earth Wife had once said, a mortal transformed—in Jame’s case into the third face of her detested god, That-Which-Destroys.

So, where did responsibility lie?

Much of today wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been involved, both with the hills and the hall, with Rathillien and Kencyrath. Was that what she was, a bridge between the two? How could that be the role of destruction, unless to bring ruin on both? Was everything, somehow, her fault?

Then came the crowning irony: nowhere in today’s chaos could she see the hand of that ultimate evil, Perimal Darkling or its servant Gerridon. Maybe the shadows weren’t necessary. Kencyr and hillman alike seemed to be doing just fine on their own when it came to messing things up.

Jame realized that she was shivering violently. Icy rain had soaked her coat and was running into her eyes. Moreover, she was curled protectively around an increasingly restive ounce.

A voice called her name, or rather her titles: “Ten! Lordan! Where are you?”

She wasn’t ready, but it was time to answer, and to face the day’s hardest test.

Erim met her in the field between the forest and the orchard.

“I’m all right, Ten,” he said in answer to her anxious question. He held up a torn sleeve with the glimmer of a white bandage beneath. “It barely grazed me. But Anise . . . ”

Rather than hear, not wanting to, she led the way back through the orchard to the gate. There two figures emerged from the downpour: Mint and Dar, lowering elk-horn bows rendered almost useless by the rain.

“Don’t you go running off like that, Ten,” Mint said, a note of pleading in her voice. “How are we supposed to protect you?”

Jame was both touched that they cared and surprised that they still thought she needed protection. Here in this chaos of wind and weather, with unseen enemies perhaps still lurking around them, it was the cadets who seemed painfully young and vulnerable.

They led the way across the training field, almost more through water than air, both now laced with stinging shards of hail. Underfoot, the grass was slippery with runoff and mud. Here was a huddled group comprised of several cadets holding up their jackets to provide what shelter they could to the trio on the ground.

Anise lay on her back, coat and shirt cut away, an arrow jutting from her abdomen. Brier and Niall leaned over her. While all the cadets knew something about battlefield first aid, only these two had actually practiced it.

“Of course we’re not going to pull it out,” Brier was saying sharply to one of the onlookers. “Remember your training. And you, Anise, keep your hand away from that shaft.”

Jame ducked under the makeshift shelter. Anise was awake, panting, terrified. She reached out and grabbed Jame’s hand. Her exposed stomach swelled as if with some obscene pregnancy.

“She’s bleeding into the belly,” said Brier. “Damn.”

Anise spasmed and vomited a great gout of blood, mostly onto Jame.

“ ’ware horses,” someone said sharply.

One felt the vibration of their hooves through the ground rather than saw their approach. Suddenly the ten-command was surrounded.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said someone. “Our little lordan wasn’t jumping at shadows after all.”

“Shut up, Higbert.”

It was Gorbel. He leaned down from his horse, peering. “Nasty. It was those blasted Merikit, I suppose. Where are they now?”

“Gone.”

Gorbel grunted. “Hunt them, Obi. Bring one of them to me alive if you can, I don’t care in what shape.”

“And the rest?”

“This time take whatever trophies you want.”

Fash whooped. The ten-command’s horses disappeared into the storm as suddenly as they had emerged from it, despite Jame’s cry of protest.

“The herd is still running free,” she told Gorbel. “Fash had better not bag himself a mare. If he touches Bel, I’ll kill him. Anyway, it may not be Chingetai’s people at all.”

“Who else? I should have kept one back, though, to take your cadet to the college.” With his bare, swollen foot hanging beside the stirrup, he himself didn’t offer to dismount.

Brier stood up. “No need, Lordan.” It said something about the stress she felt that she addressed him at all. Usually Brier didn’t talk to her former comrades nor they to her. “We can carry her. Lady, we’ve got to get her some place warm, out of this filthy field.”

While the cadets built an improvised litter out of jackets and bow shaves, Jame continued to crouch by Anise, holding her hand, an unhappy ounce huddled at her side. Somehow, the fact that this was her least favorite among her ten-command made it worse. Poor, sharp-tongued, jealous Anise. Why had she been so unhappy? Now Jame might never know. She reminded herself, however, that the cadet might still survive. Kencyr blood clotted quickly, which was one of the reasons why they were so hard to kill. It was impossible in that downpour, however, to see if the wound still bled or if Anise was slipping into shock. That obscene, jutting arrow . . . ! No wonder someone had suggested removing it, even though it could do more damage coming out than going in.

The litter was only long enough to support Anise from head to buttocks, so Brier placed the cadet’s feet on her shoulders before she stood, bow tips in her hands. Rue took Anise’s head. The way back to Tentir seemed to take forever, slogging through the mud under an increasingly vicious hail of ice. Everyone was soaked and thoroughly chilled by the time they glimpsed the college’s lights.

They entered by the northern postern along the side of the Randir barracks. If the field’s mud had been bad, the grassless training square’s was worse. Hail thundered on the tin roof of the arcade while squares of warm light fell on its boardfloor. With some distant part of her mind, Jame noted that it was still early evening, barely past supper. Simultaneously, she felt Anise’s grip on her hand slacken.

“Put her down.”

“Here, in the mud?”

“She won’t mind.”

They lowered Anise on her bed of jackets, through which the mud immediately soaked. Her eyes were half-open, fixed on nothing. The arrow that had quivered with every agonized breath was still.

The door to the Knorth barracks opened, spilling golden light into the square.

“Well, well, well.” Vant stood on the threshold, wearing a fine jacket that had once belonged to Greshan. Jame remembered Rue passing it over as too large to cut down for her use. Greshan had been a big man. So was Vant. From the slight slur in his voice, he had also been indulging in the last of the previous season’s applejack.

Other faces appeared behind him, some likewise flushed. None could see Anise, whose body was screened from them by the sodden ten-command in the square. More barrack doors opened. More curious faces appeared at windows.

“Have you had a pleasant day, lady, chasing phantoms? I said no Merikit would dare raid here.” He spoke with lazy, drunken contempt, as if here was the proof of all he had ever said about the flighty, unfit lordan with whom Torisen had inexplicably chosen to saddle him.

Brier stepped aside to let him see Anise’s body.

His jaw dropped. Those behind him exclaimed in dismay and started forward, only to stop at Jame’s voice.

“You shouldn’t have laughed. Come down, Vant. Come down and see. Is this a laughing matter?”

“I . . . I didn’t think . . . you didn’t say . . . ”

“I say this now: come down, and bring with you whatever weapon you choose. No blood price can be demanded here at the college, certainly not within the same house, but I challenge you, Vant, for failure to obey orders, resulting in a cadet’s death.”

“What, here and now?” Rue asked Brier in a shocked undertone.

“Yes. While the slain is still warm. Let justice be done in her presence,” Brier answered.

“Oh yes.” Jame smiled, without mirth. Her silvery eyes never left Vant’s nor seemed even to blink. She could feel the power of a berserker flare growing in her, and this time welcomed it. “What good it will do her where she walks now, I don’t know, but by all means let us have justice. Come down, big man. Come down and fight.”

Vant stepped into the square, into the hail, stumbling a little, drawn by her voice but still not taking the challenge seriously.

“Your weapon, lady?”

“These.” Her claws unsheathed. The gloves, all but ruined, hung in tatters from her scythe-curved fingers. “You have woken destruction. Now come to meet it.”

The rail was lined with onlookers, including Timmon and several randon officers. No one said a word.

As she circled him, Vant laughed, a foolish, disbelieving sound. The ground was turning icy. He slipped, trying to follow her, but she moved without hesitation, sure-footed, bringing her own cold with her.

“First, I think, my uncle’s coat.”

With a flick of a claw, a sleeve flared open.

“Hey!” He frowned, both uncertain and indignant, at the damage. “Who’s going to repair that?”

“No one.”

Flick. The other sleeve. Flick, flick, flick. The back and front. Its shreds now hung on him as her tattered gloves did on her. He shrugged off the ruins and exclaimed angrily as icy rain plastered linen to his chest. Doubtless he had never had such fine clothes before, stained as they were with another’s sweat, nor had he ever dared to wear them in her presence.

“Stop it, lady! This is ridiculous.”

“Shhh . . . ” She touched a finger to her lips, then laid it on his, light as a phantom kiss. “Now my uncle’s shirt. Stand very still.”

She was gliding around him now, half dancing, humming to herself, and her eyes shone silver. Long fingers wove through the air, through cloth. Vant’s shirt fluttered down in ribbons. True to Bear’s training, however, not a fleck of blood marked them.

“And now, I think, your skin.”

The cadet had lost much of his summer bronze and his flesh rippled with shivers, but his torso was still finely muscled. Jame traced its lines with a fingertip, leaving the faintest of red lines, immediately washed away.

“I had a friend once who used to play this game, oh, with younger, smaller boys than you, but he would cut deeper, tease up an edge, and then rip. Now, how would that feel, I wonder. Worse than an arrow in the guts? Shall we find out?”

Rue gave a stifled cry and hid her face in Brier’s coat. Brier herself watched, stone-faced, as did the onlookers by the rail. There, only Timmon turned abruptly away, breathing hard.

As she reached out again, however, suddenly the Commandant was between her and her prey. He snapped his fingers in Jame’s face. She recoiled, her eyes wide with shock and the sudden return of sanity. Black pupils swallowed the silver irises, shading them back to rain-clouded gray.

She stepped back, nearly as shaken as Vant. Her people made way for her. On the threshold of the Knorth barracks, she looked back once over her shoulder and spoke:

“He shouldn’t have laughed.”

Then she fled up the stairs to her quarters.

No lights were lit in the rooms that had once housed Greshan’s servants, nor were any fires set. Hail rattled on the rooftop hood over the cold fire pit, a few ice balls finding their way below to careen about the copper bath-basin. Jame sank down on her pallet bed and drew a blanket up over her shoulders. Jorin crawled under it. Too tired to undress, propped up by the ounce warm against her back, she rested her head on her arms, her arms crossed on her raised knees. There must be a hundred things she should be doing, but her mind echoed hollowly in her skull, as bereft of answers as of questions.

“So you’ve done it again,” whispered the walls. “Who trusted in you this time and paid the price?”

“One. Two. Too many.”

“Did you see your brother there, on the edge of the crowd? He saw. He left.”

“He was? He did? How odd. Oh, what will he have thought?”

“The worst, undoubtedly. You are his lordan, and he doesn’t trust you. Others do, and you betray them. Child of darkness, Perimal’s spawn, how could it be otherwise? Woe to them who put their faith in you, as I know only too well.”

Presently, footsteps and lowered voices sounded in the empty rooms. Someone built a fire; she could feel its warmth on her arms and the crown of her bowed head. Water splashed into Greshan’s huge tub. He must be going to play “little fishie,” she thought vaguely, and wondered if she should leave, but was too tired to rise.

Chairs scraped up, one on either side, and someone sat down with a grunt.

Commandant Sheth Sharp-tongue and Harn Grip-hard had been talking quietly for some time before she half-roused to their words.

“Trinity, what a mess,” Harn was saying, his voice rough with disgust. “Too bad Gorbel didn’t find one of us first.”

“I gather that he was and presumably still is in considerable pain. His foot, you know. He heard that ass Vant braying with his drinking partners, who just happened to be Gorbel’s own Higbert and Fash, and went to him first.”

“How could Vant ignore a direct order like that?”

“It wasn’t direct. It was conveyed through someone perceived as an enemy of his house.”

“Don’t tell me he called Gorbel a liar!”

“He wasn’t that drunk, only enough to discount the message. You know how he feels about your lordan.”

“I don’t like him either,” Jame muttered into the crook of her arm. “He looms.”

“Huh. With us again, eh?”

“Are you injured, child?”

Jame thought the Commandant was referring to the arrow crease on her thigh, which kept breaking open. “It’s only a scratch. Oh. You mean Anise’s blood. Was my brother just here?”

Harn sounded startled. “Blackie? I didn’t see him.”

“I did,” said the Commandant. “Doubtless we will learn in due course why he came and why he left. In the meantime, what do you suggest we do about Vant?”

Jame made an effort to concentrate, failed, and sneezed. The Commandant of Tentir couldn’t just have asked her opinion on such a matter, not after what she had done. She mumbled something.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The horse-master. Has he been told about the injured geldings?”

“He has. They are being . . . er . . . attended to.”

Which meant he was finishing what the hillmen had started. Poor man. Poor beasts. “Did he find a raider with his throat cut?”

“Is there a reason why he should?”

“I cut it,” she said, not very clearly. “He was holding a knife to Bel’s throat. It looked as if his face was covered with Merikit tattoos, but it could have been paint. If so, the rain might have washed it away.”

“No bodies were found. They must have taken their dead with them.”

“Damn. Then we don’t know if they were Merikit or not. But I don’t believe they were.”

“Why not, pray tell?”

“All tied up with their precious rites, aren’t they? I should know. I was there.”

And she told them, with many pauses to collect her scattered thoughts, how she had spent her free day. The whole account sounded utterly insane. A long silence followed it.

The Commandant sighed and rubbed his eyes. “You Knorth,” he said. “Never a dull moment. Do you mean to return to the hills?”

“I think I have to, Ran.”

Harn started up, the chair protesting under his abrupt shift of weight. “Be damned to that.”

“No. Honor and obligation must extend beyond our own people or they are nothing. You know that, Harn. Go she must, but not tonight nor yet tomorrow. So. We don’t know who the raiders were but, thanks to Anise and the mutilated horses, not to mention the mares’ paddock awash in blood, we know that they existed. On top of that, Gorbel claims that someone tried to shoot him while they were winnowing the field. An arrow did notch his ear.”

“Damnation. This, after that scythe-arm thrust in class. Coincidence?”

“I mistrust them. Still, who would want the Caineron lordan dead?”

Harn snorted. “Anyone who knows his father? Still, Vant should have raised his house or at least have sent for me. As it was, Brier Iron-thorn overheard and went to the rescue while Gorbel brought out his own ten to see the fun.”

“Fun!” That almost roused Jame. Anise with the arrow quivering in her flesh, horses screaming, Bel down with a knife at her throat . . . “Fun,” she repeated, bitterly.

Hands teased the blanket from her grasp. Rue eased her out of her clammy, blood-sodden clothes and urged her to rise.

“The water is hot enough, Ten. Trinity, your skin is like ice!”

Jame caught the glare that her servant shot at the two seated randon and almost laughed; neither a little bare skin nor a lot of it was likely to bother either one of them, any more than it did her. She climbed into the basin and sank down into its blessed warmth. Ahhh . . .

They were talking again, over her head, out of sight over the copper rim.

“If you expel him,” Harn was saying, “he’ll probably choose the White Knife. He should anyway. His disgrace could hardly have been more public.”

“As opposed to faith broken in secret?” The words seemed to breathe out of nowhere.

Harn started up. “What do you mean?”

“I didn’t speak. Have the walls been talking to you too?”

“Blood will have blood, they say. Greshan has been seen walking.”

A soft laugh came from the nearest wall.

“And talking,” Harn added.

Jame dragged herself reluctantly out of pleasant stupor. “That’s just Graykin playing dress-up, and sneaking around by the secret passageways . . . I think.”

Her voice echoed hollowly: think, think, think . . . What had that hated voice said out of her servant’s mouth?

“What is the betrayal of a brother compared to that of your precious Highlord? What did you think his son would give you for what you and Harn did?”

“We did nothing for him.”

“Only secured him the Highlord’s chair. Is that ‘nothing’?”

It still made no sense to Jame, but clearly it did to the Commandant. “You said I wasn’t to stop his prowling,” she reminded Sheth.

“You did?” Harn’s voice was sharp with suspicion.

“The less attention paid, the better. Leave the dead to the dead.”

Now the Knorth sounded shaken. “If you know about that, you know it was for the best, whatever the reason, whatever the result.”

“Hush,” said the Caineron, with surprising gentleness. “I know.”

“Well, I don’t.”

Jame fumbled to rise. The water was only about a foot deep and the basin’s bottom heavily embossed with the images of improbable sea creatures. Above that, however, the copper walls rose like a sleek, slippery wall. With an effort, she hoisted herself enough to peer over the rim.

There sat the Commandant as elegant and cool as ever, his long legs stretched out before him, crossed at the ankles. Harn, on the other hand, was sweating.

“What broken faith?” she demanded. “What secret? And what does any of that have to do with Vant?”

“You keep us to our purpose admirably. What about Vant?”

“He may be an arrogant ass—”

“And he looms. Yes, we know.”

“But he doesn’t deserve to die. Anise might have been killed whatever he did. Mostly, he isn’t a fool. He’s just in a muddle about having some Highborn blood, hating the way he got it, and feeling that it should guarantee him more respect.”

Harn grunted. “Sounds like a fool to me.”

“Then I prance in, a Highborn female, and all the rules that seem to bend around me turn against him. He doesn’t see the logic or justice in that.”

“A masterly description. Your point?”

“My brother needs all the good randon he can get, and Vant still has the makings of one. Just the same I won’t have him running the Knorth barracks anymore. Brier should be master-ten. Not Vant. Not me.”

“Are you giving up?”

“Aren’t you expelling me?”

“Because of what you did in the square? Oh, I don’t think so. It was . . . an arresting dance. Very powerful, on the edge of something very dark, and all in the midst of a controlled berserker flare. I doubt if any but a few realized what they were witnessing.”

“I’m not sure I did,” grumbled Harn. “First a three-millennia-old fighting style and now this. Is that the way we all once danced the Senetha?”

“I doubt that such skill was common even in those fabled days. Strange times, old friend, when ancient legends walk amongst us.”

Jame let herself slide back into the cooling water. “I’m not a legend,” she muttered. “I’m a monster.”

“One doesn’t necessarily preclude the other. We have known true monsters, Harn and I, and so, I suspect, have you. They never stop. You did.”

True, Bear hadn’t stopped when he dismembered that wretched cadet. Neither had Harn when in a berserker rage he had torn an arm off another Caineron.

“So I’m an inconsistent monster.”

“There are worse things.” He rose, followed by Harn. “Finish your bath and rest. We will decide what to do about Vant, keeping your opinions in mind. Good night.”

With that, they left.

Jame tried to raise herself and slipped back. All her bruises were stiffening. She never wanted to move again, but the water was growing cold.

“Hello?” . . . ello, ello, ello . . .

Rue must have left to give them some privacy. Well, then, she must simply wait, and try not to drown in the meantime. After such a day, what an anticlimax that would be.

Jame wedged her elbows between an overendowed squid and a leering whale, sank farther down, and fell asleep.