Bound in Blood

XIII A Day in the Life

It took the college days to settle down, during which the sargents worked the cadets too hard to brood over what had happened on the equinox. Jame also thought about it as little as possible. On the ninth night afterward, however, dreams came to her.

She was walking the Gray Land. The sere grass whined underfoot, bending and tossing in pewter waves on hills that rolled forever on and on beneath a sickly waning moon. Ash was on the wind, on her lips, in her throat, and her clothes turned gray with it.

Shadows drifted past as if cloud-cast, but there were no clouds nor any stars, and the moon that should have been waxing here was always dying, yet never quite dead.

. . . never, forever, never, forever, the wind keened.

Now, faintly, she could see the wandering dead who cast the shadows. Some were mere flaws in the air, barely disturbing the grass on which they trod, turning ghostly countenances up to a pallid lunar rind as eaten away as they themselves were. Jame recognized faces from her own death banner hall, but none answered when she breathed their names, not even Tieri trailing the cords of her fast-fading mortality.

Others moved with more purpose, Kinzi and Aerulan among them, drifting against the wind—southward, she thought, but in such a place how was one to know?

A figure more solid than the others stood with its back to her on the crest of a hill. She touched its shoulder. It turned to reveal the ghastly face of the haunt singer Ashe, who should have been dead and probably was, but who still walked among the living.

“Do haunts dream?” Jame asked her.

“Child . . . what is the dream . . . life or death? I merely stand . . . and watch them pass . . . some drawn one way, some another. Saddest are those . . . who only drift in gray dreams . . . from which they can not wake.”

“And these, all of them, are the unburnt dead?”

“Aye. Bound in blood . . . free neither to come nor to go. Is life . . . all that different?”

“But where is this place, Ashe? I thought I knew the soul and dreamscapes. This is neither.”

“You know fragments . . . of both. This place . . . you know even better. Look.” She turned back the way she had been facing.

Following her dull gaze, Jame saw the round battlements of the keep in which she had been born. She was in the Haunted Lands.

A figure lurched past below in a gaudy coat, although the sick light caught only the flash of silver thread and of gold.

Jame ran down the hill toward it, conscience-stricken, stumbling as the grass clutched at her feet. “Graykin! Are you dead and I never knew?”

The face that turned toward her would have been handsome, but death had coarsened and bloated it. It grinned, and maggots wriggled between its teeth.

Trinity. Greshan.

“Save ’em if you can, liddle girl. Meanwhile, ’m hungry. I feed.”

Jame woke with a gasp.

Some dreams are prophetic. Others mean nothing. How can one tell which is which? Oh, but Graykin lost and the taste of bitter ash on her lips . . .

Rue was adding wood to the fire under the copper basin. Even when Jame didn’t bathe (as she did more and more often as she discovered the pleasures of it after an exhausting day), several buckets of water were added to preserve the copper and to add humidity to air already arid with the approach of winter.

“First snowfall,” said Rue cheerfully, tossing on another log. “Not that it will stick long this early in the season. Here, lady. This came for you from your brother by post rider last night.

Jame accepted the leather sack and nearly dropped it in surprise at its weight. Opening it, she was even more bewildered.

“Look,” she said to Rue, and poured the contents out onto her blanket.

They both stared at the heap of gleaming gold and silver coins.

“This is an arax from Kothifir,” said Rue reverently, picking up one of the former. “See? There’s King Krothen’s fat face, splayed from rim to rim to discourage clipping. It’s death to disfigure the king’s image. Here’s an ollin from Karkinaroth, and a copper bool from Hurlen, and this”—gingerly fingering a bit of silver the size of a thumbnail—“is a fungit from the Central Lands. Be careful handling these: sometimes the Poison Courts mint them with curses. We Kencyr don’t have any coinage of our own, of course, unless you count turnips.”

“And the blood of our fighters; and the wisdom of our scrollsmen; and the songs of our singers.”

“Oh. Those.”

An arax escaped and went rolling off across the floor, to Jorin’s delight. Jame flinched but didn’t look up as the ounce bounced headfirst off the copper basin. Rue scrambled to save the gold from the fire, then shied it into a corner for the cat gleefully to chase.

A note had tumbled out with the glittering cascade.

“It seems that I’ve been granted a quarterly allowance,” said Jame, reading it. “Oh, good! Tori has returned Aerulan to Brenwyr. This seems to be in earnest of my share of the booty. What a way to put it, and what a stiff, little message. He still seems to be angry with me.”

“Well, he did hear you threaten to flay Vant alive. I saw him at the edge of the crowd. Then he turned around and left, just as the Commandant stepped forward.”

“So you and the walls told me. Of all times for him to have paid a visit!”

“And of all times to send you money, when the Southron peddlers are long gone. We won’t have much use for this short of spring.”

“I just hope he kept enough of it for himself. Trinity, Rue, look at it! I’ve never had this much wealth in my hands in my life.”

Well, maybe, as an apprentice thief in Tai-tastigon, but then anything she stole had belonged to her master Penari and besides, she had always gone for the most challenging thefts rather than the most lucrative. Now, however, was not the time to enlighten Rue about such details of her former life.

The five-minute horn sounded, indicating the imminent arrival of breakfast.

Jame scooped up the coins and poured them back in their sack.

“Put this somewhere. No, don’t bother about Jorin’s. Someone should get some fun out of it.”

Five minutes later, Jame took her place at the head of her table. Knowing that she was on her way, the cadets had remained standing until her arrival. All sat at a barked order from Brier while those assigned to serve ran in with bowls of porridge, baskets of bread, and pitchers of milk.

Jorin had brought down his new toy and batted it around the floor under tables and chairs, to universal amazement. More than one cadet stopped the spinning coin with a foot and picked it up to examine it before sending it, ringing, back into play, pursued by a wildly excited ounce.

Jame buttered a slab of fresh bread—part of the bounty now flowing from Falkirr to Gothregor and Tentir. No one had known what to make of it when it had started to arrive several days ago but now, of course, she could easily guess. Good for Tori.

As she chewed, she surveyed the room. Everyone looked happy, with a few exceptions. The most notable of these was Vant. The remains of his ten-command had been dissolved and its members scattered among the other short tens. Her own table had gained a quiet, thick-set Kendar named Damson to fill Anise’s empty chair. One couldn’t tell yet if the girl resented this change or was naturally shy among comparative strangers. At least no one was teasing her about being overweight, as had been the case when she had served in her previous command.

Vant was also silent, for more understandable reasons. In effect, thrown back into the cull pool, he had emerged without rank at the bottom of another’s table—enough to make anyone unhappy, whether he deserved it or not.

Jame remembered Greshan’s fine coat that she had ripped off his back. Sober, he probably never would have donned it. After all, he claimed to hate the Highborn, but part of him still plainly craved recognition of his own portion of Highborn blood. She supposed it was natural to despise what one was denied, and yet still to crave it.

The other cadets left him alone, in part because of his black expression, in part because everyone blamed him for a fellow cadet’s death. He had really picked the wrong night to overindulge in applejack, much less to keep company with Fash and Higbert. To Jame’s mind, the latter two were probably as much to blame for what had happened as Vant’s own pig-headedness. She had no doubt whatsoever that they had goaded him on. It seemed unlikely that he would thank her for her part in his demotion. She wondered if he realized how close he had come to being expelled altogether.

Arguably, he might now hate Brier even more than he did her: the Southron had been made a provisional Ten and given his old job of running the Knorth barracks, although she continued also to serve under Jame as her Five. No one else could have made such a situation work, Jame thought, glancing at Brier’s strong profile. Even cadets who had originally mistrusted her for her Southron blood and turn-collar status now took their daily assignments from her cheerfully, as a matter of course. They had both come a long way since their early days at the college.

But her gaze drifted back to proud, brooding Vant, and she wondered if she had done him a favor after all.

Another note was delivered, this one from the horse-master. It might almost have been in code—as an old-school randon, the master generally mistrusting the written word—but from the rathorn sigil Jame deduced that he wanted to see her up among the boulders above Tentir when classes ended.

The horn sounded assembly. As they all scrambled out into the square, a passing cadet slipped the errant arax into her hand. They left blind Jorin still hunting for it, ears pricked for its ring-bring-bring along the wooden floorboards.

The first class that day was under the Brandan instructor, practicing again with the scythe-arms. Their opponents were a ten-command from tiny Danior. As play advanced, it became clear that most of the Knorth far outranked their distant cousins.

“Whoa, stop!” cried Jame’s adversary, laughing, as she drove him into a corner with her flashing blades. “I thought you didn’t like swords.”

“I don’t. This is something different.”

She looked down at the gleaming steel with their leather-sheathed edges and flexed her claws within their grips. Accepting the claws and accepting these blades amounted to much the same thing. Oh, how she wished that Bear were here to witness how much his lessons had benefited her.

The instructor called time and they disarmed.

Jame had noticed that Damson had fared poorly throughout the lesson. Now the cadet leaned against a wall gasping, her black hair a stringy fringe over her eyes and ears, her heavy shoulders slumping.

“There’s a trick to it, you know,” Jame said to her. “You have to imagine that your fingers extend as much as a foot beyond your hands, and be careful where your spurs go. You have to think both before you and behind. Listen: Brier is giving lessons on the side in this, and you’re welcome to join in.”

Damson probably knew as much; it wasn’t a secret. However, Vant had expressed such distain for anything of Southron origin that his command had never taken part.

Jame didn’t tell her that Brier was also finally tutoring her in Kothifir street-fighting, something that Tentir with its reverence for tradition had never sanctioned. To her mind, though, what worked, worked. She had lost a tooth finding that out.

The morning’s second session wasn’t a class but rather one of a dozen household chores needed to keep the barracks functioning smoothly.

After a quick trip back to their quarters to collect the weekly laundry sacks and their own last set of clean clothes, they returned to Old Tentir and descended into the fire timber hall beneath the subterranean stables.

Tentir had fifteen upright, ironwood trunks. Seven were prime, towering fifty feet from the brick-laid floor to the ironwood ceiling, casting a dusky orange light from the fires burning deep within the fissures of their bark and radiating waves of heat that made the air quiver. Six were too green to kindle properly and would be for years to come. The last two and oldest dated back to the founding of the keep when it still belonged to that giant of the Central Lands, the kingdom of Bashti. These were now reduced to glowing embers within their deep fire pits.

One of these pits was lined with stones beneath which the coals still glowed, fitfully seen through boiling water left from the last laundry detail. Soap bubbles rose and burst, reflecting the fires above and below. A bucket brigade formed from the corner well to top off the pit and to cool the water somewhat. Into it were dumped more soap and the contents of the bags.

Jame went to check that their spare clothes were safely stowed from the coming deluge. When she returned, her ten were teasing Damson. It seemed that during his tour of duty Vant had never once assigned his own ten-command this particular detail.

“We always throw in the dirtiest first,” Dar was saying. “Come on, Damson. You’ll love it.”

Before Jame could stop them, they pitched the cadet into the cauldron, fully clothed.

Oh, for pity’s sake, she thought, stripped off her clothes, and dived in.

The water was hot enough, almost, to make her gasp. It would become hotter still as the submerged, inextinguishable embers worked on it. Damson was tangled in a welter of wet laundry, thrashing wildly. She caught Jame a blow on the jaw that would have been serious above water, without someone’s trouser legs wrapped around the cadet’s arms. Somehow, she got Damson up to the edge of the pit where the latter clung, gasping. Above and behind her, air and water filled with diving, whooping cadets, naked except for their black, token scarves.

“This is how we do the wash,” she assured Damson. “In summer, it may be too hot for comfort, but with autumn here . . . what’s wrong?”

“I—I can’t swim.”

“Oh. Well, neither can Brier.”

She indicated her five-commander who, although naked, was standing on the edge of the pit, narrowly observing the cavorting cadets in case one of them came to grief among the clinging swirl of clothes.

“The last time I tried to drown her, she sank to the bottom and then walked ashore. Isn’t that right, Five?”

As she spoke, Jame remembered the circumstances: Caldane’s barge teetering on top of a waterfall, she in the bow, Brier in the prow. Both had ordered the other out of the boat to safety, but in her desperation she had used master words on the Southron to overwhelm her will: COME HERE.

No Kencyr should be spoken to so ruthlessly, even though she had been trying to save the Southron’s life. Did Brier forgive her for acting no better than her former Caineron master?

Brier gave her a brief, unreadable look.

“That’s correct, Ten.”

Jame let out her breath in a long sigh. She was forgiven for that, at least, if just barely. “Hang on to the side and kick,” she told Damson.

Damson hooked her arms over the edge, sneezing as soap bubbles went up her nose. “All right, Lordan.”

With that, Jame joined the other gamboling cadets among roiling shirts, trousers, and underwear. Shouts and whoops sounded all around her.

“It’s too farking hot! My skin is boiling off!”

“Then get out of the pot, softy.”

“Ouch! Watch out for the stones.”

“Ten, Mint keeps dunking me.”

“Then dunk her back.”

One by one as they grew overheated, cadets left the water and helped to fish out the now clean clothes. From here, first they would be rinsed (as would the soapy cadets) and then they would be hung on lines high over the other fire pit to dry. The last Knorth detail of the day would retrieve and sort them. So went one more day in the Knorth barracks.

Meanwhile, with everyone out and nicely crinkly, they changed into their last dry set of clothes and returned to the barracks just in time for lunch.

The first afternoon class was also held in Old Tentir in an exterior, third-story room with a view over the inner square. Jame recognized it as the site of Corrudin’s ill-fated lesson in refusing improper Highborn orders.

“I wonder if they’re still at it,” Quill had said. “Kibben standing on his head in one corner and M’lord Corrudin backed into another, afraid to move.”

Jame wondered how Kibbet felt about his brother’s fate. After all, he was now one of Gorbel’s ten-command, and it was Gorbel who, at his granduncle’s bidding, had given Kibben that foolish, fateful order.

Waiting for them, however, were not Caineron cadets but Randir, with one extra member.

“Shade.”

Jame put her hand on the Randir’s shoulder, and snatched it away again. Muscle and bone had moved under her touch where they should not have.

It’s only Addy, she told herself, embarrassed by her reaction; but when Shade turned, the gilded swamp adder was looped full length around her neck. Over her gleaming coils, Shade’s face looked even more tightly drawn than before, as if she had pulled her hair back so fiercely that the corners of her eyes and part of her skull had followed.

“What’s wrong?” Jame asked on impulse, but the Randir only turned away, Addy hissing a warning over her shoulder. At least the snake’s eyes were their usual fierce orange, not black, and no alien intelligence sneered out of them

When Jame saw who was leading the class, she got a second shock. It was the Randir sargent Corvine, back from her stint of guard duty at Gothregor. She was staring at Jame with her heavy jaw set, but turned away as soon as their eyes met and clapped to gather the other cadets’ attention.

“Right, my lords and ladies. Today you practice your water-flowing kantirs. Remember them, do you? Good. Take your places.”

The cadets spread out evenly and assumed the first position of the First Kantir, Water-Stirs—the-Body.

The movements of this set are done slowly, at a steady pace. The essence of water lifts the body and carries it along. Currents shift it this way and that, with flowing hands and bending knees. Arms wave in an eddy, twining and untwining. To the observer, the body is borne like a dead thing on the breast of the flood, but the ease is deceptive. All depends on balance and the summoning of one’s inner strength to match that of external forces.

It probably helped that not an hour before Jame had been rollicking in hot water. Her braid was still wet and tended to crack like a whip when she moved too quickly, but this kantir was too languid for that. When it ended, she let out a long sigh, as if all this time she had been holding her breath, and shook out her limbs. Throughout, she had been vaguely aware of Corvine walking up and down the lines, correcting a cadet here, a cadet there, with a tap of her baton. However, she had never come near Jame.

“Right,” said Corvine. “The Second Kantir: Body-Stirs—the-Water . . . ”

This set of motions proceeds at a varied pace. The stance is deeper, the moves characterized by twists and turns. One swims, now through tranquil water, now through turbulent. Power coils within, wound by each gyration. Twenty-one feet hit the floor together as all are drawn to the bottom of the whirlpool and stomp to break free. Twenty-one bodies arch toward the surface, hands knifing upward. Ah, to float for a moment, then to dive. Bend around rocks. Chase bubbles. Race fish. A roar grows that is both water and the blood in one’s veins. Shoot out of the mist of the waterfall, and fall, and fall. Keep control. This is like flying, but one way only, down and down. Water leaps up. Body cleaves it. Nineteen feet hit the floor as one. Nineteen bodies arc up to the sun.

Jame straightened, breathing deeply. The pounding in her ears, of water, or her blood, subsided. Damson and a Randir cadet had lost their balance and fallen to the floor under Corvine’s scornful gaze. The Randir contorted and flopped about gasping until a sharp rap of the baton brought him to his senses.

“Turned fish, did you? Now remember how to breathe and tell me where you failed.”

The cadet sat up, gulping air and shaking.

“I-it was during salmon-leaps-downstream, Sar. I forgot myself. Ouch!”

Corvine had rapped him again. “That’s so you’ll remember. We leave ourselves at our peril. With that in mind, the Third Kantir: Body-Becomes-Water.”

Most lessons didn’t go this far. To become water and yet remain oneself was very tricky. It also involved movements more fluid and extreme than many cadets could manage. Jame herself had never successfully finished the set. She wondered why Corvine was pushing them so hard, but was game to try.

Again, listen for the tide in the blood, but this time it runs deeper and stronger. This is not stream but ocean, vast enough to lose oneself forever and to drown. Great billows of the deep, stitched with silver fish. The shadows of predators, the feel of their skin brushing past. Drawn by the moon, push back. Lifted by the sun, rise. Water is strong and supple. Ocean is immense—don’t let it swallow you! Somewhere in it is a vast maelstrom, the size of a kingdom, there, to the north. Water roars into the gaping maw of the chaos serpent of the deeps beneath. Flow. Flee. Now the shore calls. One is back in the moon tide, rising, falling, surging forward. Ah, the sound of the breakers, the curling waves. Keep balance, keep balance . . .

Jame felt her back creak as it arched backward. Surely it would snap. Then the surf took her and she was tumbling helplessly over and over, to wash up at last on the classroom floor.

Damn, she thought, wincing as strained muscles twinged. I didn’t make it.

Nor had all but one of the class. Several cadets lay twitching, salt water dribbling from their mouths. Others sat up dazed, rubbing sore joints. All who could stared at the last cadet standing, or rather floating with black hair spread out in a cloud.

Shade bent impossibly, not front to back but back to front, her spine curling over on itself in a serpentine arch. Hands came down but slid above the floor rather than on it. They spread in a swimmer’s stroke. Her back uncurled, feet coming over her head. She slid along the floor on her stomach, at last coming to rest, at peace. The kantir was over.

No one clapped. All stared. Someone muttered, “Freak.”

Shade came to herself and met their eyes. Her own, still slit and taut despite her loosened hair, narrowed further. Without a word, she gathered up her snake and left the room.

The class scattered soon afterward, still muttering.

“You pushed her to see what she could do,” Jame said to Corvine. “Why?”

“Better to know.”

“To know what? Addy could have told you that she’s a Shanir. So am I, as you well know.”

“This is . . . different. I don’t understand it, and what I don’t understand worries me.”

“Do you doubt her honor?”

“No.” Small eyes bore into Jame’s over the set trap of a mouth. “I care,” said this remarkable woman. “About her. About you. We destroy too much that is irreplaceable as it is.”

“That doesn’t sound like a Randir.”

“I wasn’t always. Someone else will tell you if I don’t. I’m an Oath-breaker.”

It took Jame a moment to remember what that was.

“You were a Knorth?”

“Long ago, before the White Hills. I broke faith because of my unborn child. I didn’t follow my lord into exile. The Randir took me in, as they did many others of my kind. But it was all for naught: the babe was stillborn.”

“I’m sorry. D’you think I blame you? The Haunted Lands were no place for a child. Tori and I were nursed by a Kendar whose infant couldn’t survive those harsh, unnatural hills.”

“Who?”

“Winter.”

“Ah. My cousin. I always wondered. Did she teach you the Senethar as well?”

Jame laughed. “She refused. I was a lady, y’see, although I had no idea at the time what that was besides a dirty word. She taught my brother and I learned by attacking him.”

Her mouth quirked, not quite into a smile. “You would.”

As she turned to go, Jame called after her. “Do you remember?”

The Kendar rolled up a sleeve. On her forearm, carved deep and scarred over, was a name: Quirl.

“The flesh remembers.”

Then she was gone.

Jame arrived, late, for her last lesson of the day: strategy. This class was taught by an irascible, grizzled veteran in the habit of throwing his wooden hand at any inattentive student, thus earning him the distinction of being the only lecturer at the college not only capable of putting his audience to sleep but of rendering it unconscious. Today, however, was reserved for Gen and everyone was already enthusiastically engaged at their boards. Her opponent waited, his own side of the game set up and no doubt well memorized.

Timmon grinned at her. “Hello, stranger.”

True, thought Jame, sliding into the chair opposite him; they had hardly met since her return from Gothregor. She had missed the Ardeth’s easy manner and even his flirtations, before they had turned serious.

“Are you all right?” she asked him, reminded only as she spoke that she had inquired much the same of Shade barely two hours ago.

His smile twisted wryly. “You know how it is when something gets under your skin, an itch that you can’t scratch . . . ”

She cut him off. “Please. Let’s not go there. I think better of you than that. Damn. I’m no good at this.”

“What, at telling me you just want to be friends?”

“What’s wrong with that? I’m sorry about your itch, but I’m not obligated to scratch it. Friendship wouldn’t demand it.”

“So, on your terms or on none?”

“Pretty much. Timmon, grow up. You can’t have everything you want, at whatever cost to others. And don’t tell me that your father would have taken it as his due. I’m afraid that he would.”

Their whispered conversation was interrupted by a wooden missile flying between them and stunning Drie at the next table.

“Are you two going to play or not?” demanded the randon instructor, retrieving his hand. “Sorry about that,” he added to the dazed cadet, whose game pieces along with his opponent’s were now scattered all over the floor.

So they began.

Timmon had chosen white; perforce, she chose black. The Gen pieces were smooth, flat, river stones about two fingers’ width across, and one thick. On their bottoms were indicated their rank or status: one commandant, three ten-commanders, three five-commanders, and twenty-four cadets—in essence, three ten-commands and a master-ten. Added to these were four hunters, four hazards, and one flag. The goal of Gen was either to capture this last or to end play with a higher count of survivors than one’s adversary. Strategy and tactics were called for, but also memory: once the pebbles were in place, the player had to remember what each one of them represented, as well as what one deduced about the opposing pebbles by their movement and effect.

Timmon advanced a pebble from the front rank. Was it a mere cadet or an officer? Both moved only one square at a time, vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. It could even be a hunter, whose movements in a straight line were unlimited.

Jame moved a ten-commander.

Soon the board was busy with sliding pebbles and the players intent on their game.

Timmon attacked one of Jame’s pieces by moving into its square. “Two,” he said, indicating one of his cadets.

“Five.” A five-commander. “Five takes two.”

She removed his pebble from the board, first checking to make sure that they had both remembered correctly. If either had been wrong, their piece would have automatically been forfeit.

“They say that this is good training for the Winter War,” remarked Timmon, shifting another piece. “Two again.”

“Ten. Ten takes two. What Winter War?”

His eyes flickered up to hers, for a moment lit by unholy glee. He loved to catch her out on Tentir lore.

“You mean you haven’t heard . . . you don’t know . . . ?”

“Five.”

“Thirty. Thirty takes five.”

So that was where his commandant was, well to the back. It was worth a five-commander to learn that. Had he placed his major player next to the stationary flag? She would have to watch what pieces didn’t move and hope that they weren’t decoy hazards.

“As to the Winter War, no and no. So tell.”

Timmon practically wriggled with delight. He could be cute when he wasn’t trying.

“Every Mid-Winter’s Day, the whole college stages a campaign, to test our skills, to ward off cabin fever, to give us points toward our eventual placement as second-year cadets. Usually there are two teams. This year there will be three comprised of three houses each. That’s nine flags, rated according to each house’s importance. You have to protect your own three and try to get the other six. Failing that, you do as much damage to your opponents as possible.”

“Damage as in actually hurting them?” She slid one of her pebbles halfway across the board. “Hunter.”

“Hazard.”

He drew out his deck of hazard cards, each lovingly illustrated, and offered them to her. She drew a card.

“Rathorn.”

“How appropriate. Whatever happened to that rogue rathorn Gorbel stormed off to hunt?”

He meant Death’s-head. “The last Gorbel saw of him, he was being washed away by a flash flood.”

With her clinging to his back, she didn’t add. That had been the first time she had “ridden the rathorn,” not that she really counted it a success except in that she had prevented the wretched beast from drowning himself.

“So, is your hunter going to conjure up a flood?”

“That would have too widespread an effect on other players. Besides, the referee would consider it impossible.” She meant he of the wooden hand, whom no one wanted commandeering their game, however wild it got outside his classroom. “Let’s say she climbs a tree.”

“Fair enough. That keeps both stones stationary until either she comes down or the rathorn wanders off—at my pleasure, of course.”

“Of course. It’s your hazard, but watch your own pieces if you set it loose.”

He snorted. As if I need to be told. In the meantime, she had effectively lost the use of one hunter. Odd that such important pieces only ranked one point each.

“Damage.” He reverted to her previous question. “That depends. Usually it’s enough to incapacitate an enemy by seizing his or her token scarf. Lethal weapons are forbidden, which probably includes your claws, my lady, but things can still get rough. That’s why certain randon wander around masked, therefore technically invisible, to see that we don’t all slaughter each other. But it is a time traditionally to settle grudges, so walk wary. Ten.”

“Hazard.”

“Good-bye, ten.” He slid a piece several squares into the vacated place. “Hunter.”

“Same hazard.” She drew out her own deck of cards, reluctantly, since they were little more than words scrawled on slips of paper. A game such as this of Long Gen took up to two hours, time she seldom had to spare. In Short Gen, to attack any hazard piece was instant death.

Timmon drew a slip. “Avenger in the wall,” he read. “What in Perimal’s name does that mean?”

Jame had no idea. She hadn’t written that particular card. Shuffling through her deck, she found several more additions: “Guilt in a small room.”

“Bloody hands.” And a small, almost furtive scrawl: “ . . . help me . . . ”

Puzzled and disturbed, she laid the cards aside for future study and offered the deck again to Timmon. He drew another slip.

“Well mouth with teeth. That’s almost as bad. ‘Well’ as in ‘healthy’?”

“No. As in you drop a bucket into it.” She had been thinking of hazards she had faced herself, including the River Snake’s maw under the well at Kithorn. “Think of it as a pitfall that’s very hard to climb out of.”

“All right. My player—a two, by the way—disappears to the realms of mystery, otherwise known as your lap.”

“Funny. Wait a minute. You said there will be three teams. Who leads them?”

This time his smile glinted with something almost like malice. “Didn’t I say? Why, we three lordan, of course: you, me, and Gorbel.”

The game ended badly for Jame, who couldn’t quite keep her mind on it. Neither flag was captured, but she had spent so many senior pieces defending it that she lost due to pure attrition. Timmon, on the other hand, had played mostly with his cadets until he spotted a target worthy of attack. That was something worth remembering.

But a board game was one thing. How in Perimal’s name was she supposed to command three houses in a potentially dangerous campaign?

It had taken her all summer and most of the fall to become an effective master-ten to her own barracks and even so, she still had doubts about her ability. Tentir was supposed to be teaching her how to lead. For Trinity’s sake, she was not just a randon cadet but her brother’s lordan. Jame sighed. On the whole, she still felt more like a hunter than a commandant.

Supper came earlier as the days shortened, but she still had at least an hour to answer the horse-master’s enigmatic summons. Consequently, her way led her out the north gate and up among the boulders above Tentir.

She could hear the colt snorting before she saw him. Rounding a screen of bushes, she found the rathorn backed in between two tall rocks angled so that he couldn’t back out. Bel-tairi blocked the exit. Whenever he tried to duck past her, she stepped in his way. Given that he towered over her by at least three hands, he could easily have run her down; but, predatory fiend that he was, not even this indignity could induce him to hurt her.

The same couldn’t be said for the horse-master, who sat against one of the boulders nursing a flat, bloody nose.

“Oh, you missed a lovely time,” he said, getting painfully to his feet. It seemed that his ribs had also suffered. “Getting him in there was only half the fun.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

He hawked and spat blood. “You say he isn’t trying to kill you anymore nor even deliberately to throw you, but that you just can’t stay on him long bareback. Small wonder. Few could. So I’ve rigged something that may help.”

Peering around Bel’s dappled flanks, past the rathorn’s shoulders, she saw a girth around his barrel. Dangling from it were a pair of stirrups.

“Mind you, he rattled me around like bones in a box, but I reckon I got it cinched tight at last. Well? Climb a rock and drop down on him. Time to put this rig to the test.”

Jame almost said no. The rathorn pawed, glaring red-eyed at her, and her knees went weak. But there was the horse-master who had literally shed blood to bring this about. Moreover, she had never yet disobeyed him, however many times it had led to near disaster.

Gritting her teeth, she scrambled up the boulder, slid back, and tried again. One step at a time. Now she was above the rathorn who glared up at her over his shoulder.

Don’t you dare.

Ivory horns clashed against stone. Sparks flew.

The girth looked pathetically thin and fragile. At its top, between his withers, was a loop of rope presumably to hang on to.

Not giving herself time to think, she slid down onto the colt’s back and gripped the loop. He lunged from side to side, threatening to smash her legs against the rocks as he undoubtedly had the horse-master’s nose and ribs. She kept her feet up, not even trying for the stirrups.

“Here we go!” said the horse-master, and Bel jumped out of the way.

The colt lunged out, bucking. She had only guessed that he didn’t want to kill her, based on the fact that he hadn’t yet done so. Without the loop, she would have been pitched over his head within moments. He reared and bounded forward on his hind legs, then launched into a gallop. There was no guiding him. They might have rampaged straight through Tentir, but luckily he kept above it, passing the paddocks—to the terror of their inmates—and so on northward over the wall, through the orchard, and into the wood beyond.

Finally Jame got her feet into the stirrups. Ah, that was better. In fact, it was like flying. She stood up in the irons and gave a whoop of glee that turned into a half-shriek as the colt bolted, throwing her backward but not off. One iron flew free.

I’m going to fall . . . no, I damn well am not.

The stirrup cracked her on the ankle, then her groping foot found it and thrust home.

They were galloping now through the forest. Again, more cautiously, she rose in the stirrups and rode above the rathorn’s back, balancing, swaying as he threaded between the trees, through dying day and coming night. The wind tore at her hair as she shook it free. Her hands left the rope and gripped the colt’s silken mane. In her mind, she felt his shifts in balance a moment before he acted on them and adjusted accordingly. On they raced and on, into the twilight wood, chasing shadows cast by the new-risen moon.