Bound in Blood

VII Rude Walls

Jame had missed lunch, but Rue slipped her a chunk of bread and cheese which she hastily bolted, scattering crumbs, on the way to the afternoon’s first class.

This was one that Jame normally enjoyed. Half Senethar, half Senetha—that is, half fight, half dance—Sene classes were conducted in one of Old Tentir’s large, interior rooms. Candles supplied the only light, that and their reflection glimmering off the odd shards of mirror and beaten metal that lined the walls. Timmon’s ten-command was there before them, complete with its ten-commander; this class the Ardeth Lordan had decided not to miss.

He waited, elegantly poised in a nimbus of light that illuminated his golden locks and finely drawn features. No question about it: Ardeth’s young heir was handsome, verging on gorgeous. In that, Jame felt far outclassed, but she didn’t mind. She had never thought of herself as attractive except, sometimes, for her long, black hair. Others had described her as a “famine’s foal,” and so she still thought of herself, given her tendency to skip meals and her scarred face. Sometimes, though, Timmon made her question that.

He was doing it now.

Under his admiring gaze, she wanted to preen. Her muscles felt loose and limber from their exercise, all stiffness from the punishment run forgotten in the brief respite over the midday. Perfect balance possessed her. She wanted to dance, and quickly had her wish.

The randon whose class this was started to play his wooden flute, the cadets to flow in the kantirs of the Senetha. They were lucky to have such accompaniment. Sometimes classes had to make do with a tone-deaf sargent bellowing old love songs or a cadet enthusiastically banging on dented helmets with a stick. But the rules were the same. When the music stopped, the Senethar began.

Stop it did. Jame spun into position opposite an Ardeth cadet and struck, fire-leaping. He shifted from water-flowing Senetha to Senethar and slipped past her. Another did the same.

The flute began again. Now Timmon faced her. That had been arranged, she thought, and was content that it be so. He moved beautifully, making her feel graceful too. His hands and hers tracing the same patterns, mirroring each other. Physical skills came as easily to him as they had to his father Pereden, whom she had seen her brother fighting in the Heart of the Woods.

“I was with the Southern Host when M’lord Pereden marched it out into the Wastes to meet the advancing Horde,” Brier had said. “Three million of them, some fifty thousand of us. Our center column clashed head on and was ripped apart. The sand drank our blood and the Wasters ate our flesh. I was there when Pereden . . . ” She had paused, hunting for the right word, saying it at last with a curious twist: “fell.”

And again Jame recalled that memory that she had inadvertently shared with her brother—the feeling, the sound of Pereden’s neck snapping under his hands.

If your father knew what you had done . . .

But Lord Ardeth didn’t know. Neither did Pereden’s son, nor Jame.

Never mind.

“Are you tired?” Timmon’s whisper in passing stirred loose strands of hair by her ear. His warm breath made her tingle. “All that unnecessary running around. So undignified.”

Jame almost giggled, remembering Higbert grimly flopping along behind Gorbel. At least he still had had his smelly boots, if precious little else.

The music stopped.

She caught Timmon’s arm and threw him over her hip. Simultaneously, he grabbed her wrist and twisted it as he fell. She somersaulted, landing on her feet and breaking free just as he smoothly rolled upright. They circled, each looking for a new grip in another round of earth-moving. He grabbed her jacket and swept her feet out from under her. Both fell, he on top.

Time stopped. His weight on her, their faces close enough to exchange breath for breath, lip to lip, his moving hands . . .

. . . were not the ones she loved.

The randon with the flute was watching them. He raised his instrument to his lips and a derisive note rang out. Jame broke free.

It had only been a moment, she thought. Perhaps no one else had noticed. Timmon was smirking. She could have hit him. While the music played, however, she must dance.

His hands were as soft and well tended as a cadet’s life permitted, unlike those others with their agile strength and elegant lacework of scars, dear-bought with much pain in distant lands. She had heard the other Ardeth of Timmon’s ten-command grumble about their previous “class” which their leader had shirked, the ongoing repair of Tentir’s outermost wall damaged by the spring’s earthquakes.

“You could have helped,” she muttered as they slipped past each other in water-flowing Senetha. In general, Sene partners changed with each new round, but no one dared to interrupt their commanders’ duet.

“With the wall?”

So their thoughts still matched.

“What a waste of time,” he said lightly.

Then again, perhaps not.

“After all, who would be fool enough to attack the randon college?”

Everyone kept saying that. Such arrogance seemed like an open challenge to fate.

“Cattle raids happen every autumn,” said Jame, turning with him, “farther north.”

She moved more quickly to take the lead, the flutist’s notes racing after her. Everyone moved faster. At this pace, soon no one would have breath for anything but the dance.

“We aren’t the only ones . . . in the Riverland . . . facing a hungry winter.”

“And a simple wall . . . will keep them out?”

“If Kendar build it, yes.”

“You see? They don’t need a mere Highborn . . . getting in the way.”

“They need all the hands . . . they can get.”

She was thinking not so much of the Merikit as of the hill tribes farther north, some of whom lived under the shadow of the great Barrier between Rathillien and Perimal Darkling. Chingetai’s failed attempt to claim the entire Riverland had left his own borders unsecured and the northern end of the valley wide open from all directions.

The music stopped.

Timmon struck with fire-leaping. She parried and countered.

“I wasn’t born to pile up stones,” he said, now barely keeping down his voice. “You weren’t to run with the common herd. Let Gorbel trot around and around like the donkey that he is. He’s a joke. You must know that.”

“He’s prepared to suffer for what he wants. So am I. Are you?”

Instinct made them leap apart as Dar staggered between them, bounced off the wall, and launched himself back at his Ardeth opponent.

“The walls are taking a beating today,” remarked Jame.

She slid past Timmon, her water-flowing defense to his fire-leaping offense. He followed, still trying to land a blow, she continuing to slip away. His face flushed, but not with exertion.

“Think how much I can offer you.” The words rushed out of him, low and urgent. “A position. Power. Think how little you will have when the Highlord calls you to heel. He can do anything he likes. Any bed he chooses, he can toss you into, including his own. To whom will you spread your legs, lady? Whom will you call ‘master’?”

Jame slapped him.

For a moment they stood frozen, staring at each other. Everyone else had stopped as if caught up in the shock of that moment.

Yes, thought Jame sadly, the delicate courtship was over.

He launched himself at her again, driving her diagonally across the room in a frenzy of kicks and blows.

Cadets scrambled out of their way. Highborn fighting in earnest was a serious matter, even if one of them only baited and dodged. Color flared on Timmon’s cheeks, leaving the rest of his face white and taut. Jame knew she should engage, if only to give the Ardeth an outlet, but she was too angry.

“I haven’t been giving myself enough credit,” he said, with a feint at her face, followed by a punch that connected, hard, with the ribs just below her left breast. She reeled away. He followed. “I should be more like my father, who took what he wanted and deserved it. For that matter, why should you act so high and mighty? We’re both lordan, but my grandfather is far more likely to support me than your brother is you. Everyone knows Torisen is only waiting for you to fail.”

True, but beside the point.

“We’re here, now, trying to accomplish something. What’s more important than that?”

For a moment, Timmon struggled with himself. “Sometimes,” he said, in a half-strangled voice, “I’d like to wring your silly little neck.”

Jame raised an eyebrow. “I’ll put you down on my list after . . . um, Higbert.”

“You actually like Gorbel, don’t you? Is that why you slipped into his quarters at lunchtime, to hold his hand?”

Reflected in the fragmentary mirrors, Jame saw the randon raise his flute but hesitate, either to draw breath or perhaps to listen. Timmon’s voice, gone suddenly shrill, had cut through half the classroom.

She also paused, turned from Timmon, anticipating the first note. They both needed the dance to regain their tempers. Still, she couldn’t resist a final shot.

“I think,” she said lightly, as the music began, “that you’re jealous of Gorbel.”

The back of her head seemed to explode. The wall, then the floor leaped up at her. People were shouting, the randon loudest of all: “Damn you, I was playing!”

“Sorry.” That mutter was Timmon, farther away, withdrawing. “Sorry, sorry, sorry . . . ”

Someone behind the wall chuckled. Graykin. Watching her again through some chink or spy-hole.

“Oh, be quiet,” she told him.

Fingers probed her skull, making her wince and the light flicker.

“I’m all right,” she protested, and pushed Brier away. Her stomach churned. Suddenly, both lunch and what was left of breakfast, black lumps and all, spewed out onto the floor. “Well, sort of all right. The lordan made a mistake. And I’ve attacked another wall.”

“We saw. It was no mistake, and nearly a killing blow.”

“What, to the wall?”

Jame clawed her way upright, using Brier for support, remembering too late to sheathe her nails. For a moment the room darkened, then her eyes cleared. Trinity, but her head hurt. How often could one get hit before one’s brains fell out? Maybe they had, long ago.

“I didn’t see you coming to my rescue,” she said, gingerly fingering the rising lump.

“Twice in one day? If he lost his temper, lady, he had help, and you were careless.”

“All right. I’ve paid. Now forget it.”

But it would be a long time before anyone did.

The last class of that long, long day was held in the Knorth barracks, in the third-story common room overlooking the training square. Only for Knorth cadets, it was taught by Harn Grip-hard, Torisen’s war-leader and sometime commandant of Tentir.

He was waiting for Jame when she and her command arrived, his broad shape blotting out most of one window, back turned to them as he looked down on the busy square. Also waiting were Vant and his tail ten.

Jame sank down cross-legged on the floor, glad to be off her feet. Trinity, but her head hurt while her cheek felt hot and swollen under the ginger probe of her fingertips.

“Is my eye turning black?” she asked Brier.

“Yes.”

With autumn, the days were shortening. The sun had slipped behind the western peaks of the Snowthorns scarcely past midafternoon with a long, slow twilight to follow. Shadows already pooled in the corners of the common room. It would be hours yet, however, before anyone conceded to the growing dark and lit the first rush or wax candle.

When Harn turned, Jame thought at first that only the failing light gave his wide, bestubbled face such a gray cast. When he spoke, however, she heard the same leaden tinge in his voice. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days, and his arm was in a sling.

“What happened to him?”

Dar answered in a whisper. “He slipped on that tower stair of his. Claimed the stones were greased, but they were scrubbed clean by the time the servants got to them. Luckily, it’s a sprain, not a break. He also said that the walls laughed at him. Oh, lots of strange things have been going on, stupid practical jokes mostly.”

“It wasn’t so funny when the Commandant’s girth broke in the middle of a boar hunt,” said Quill. “Someone had notched it. He might have been killed if he weren’t such a good rider.”

“Then there were the pebbles in the porridge,” Rue muttered. “Go ahead: laugh. I nearly broke a tooth.”

Harn began to prowl among the cadets, causing some to scramble out of his way before he tripped over them.

I’ve forgotten something again, Jame thought. Something about jumping at shadows . . .

Harn stopped for a moment, staring down at her.

“What happened to your face?”

“I ran into a foot. Then a wall.”

“Huh.”

With that, the lesson began.

“You all know that the randon of each house have their own distinct battle speech. Songs tell us that the practice goes back to before the founding of the Kencyrath when the Nine Houses mostly fought each other.”

“And we still keep it up, Ran? Aren’t we supposed to be above house politics?”

That was Vant. It was a good question, but he wasn’t really interested in the answer, thought Jame, annoyed. He just wanted to put Harn off his stride, and he was succeeding.

“We should be.” The big Kendar rubbed red-rimmed eyes. “Above politics, I mean. As recent events show, sometimes we aren’t. Still, battle speech has its uses. Suppose your Caineron counterpart has made a bollix of a maneuver. D’you want to say as much to your commander in front of his?”

“Why not, if it’s true?”

“Randon to randon, yes, but if a Highborn should overhear . . . ”

Vant leaned forward, with a sidelong glance at Jame. He looked as if someone had just handed him an unexpected but welcome gift.

“So this is more about keeping things from our lords and masters than from each other, Ran? Now, that makes sense.”

“Why?” asked Erim, in complete, bewildered innocence. “How can we serve them if they don’t know how to use us properly?”

“ ‘Use’!” Vant snorted. “What an appropriate word.”

“Did you think,” he had once asked Jame, “that the Caineron are the only house whose Highborn make sport with their Kendar?”

According to Rue, Greshan had with Vant’s grandmother, and some unknown Ardeth Highborn had with his mother.

How must it feel to both prize and despise one’s own Highborn blood?

Well, perhaps she knew the answer to that, but in many ways Highborn and Kendar were both caught in the same trap of necessity and honor.

“How would you feel,” she asked, “if your lord decided not to use you, or if he just forgot that you existed at all? It has happened. It could again.”

Despite himself, Vant shivered. “Is that a threat, Lordan?”

Jame sighed. “No. It’s a paradox and, as things stand in the Kencyrath today, a statement of fact. My lord brother doesn’t like it any more than I do. But there it is. D’you want to tell our god that it’s unfair? Do. Please.”

“That’s the priests’ job. Ask your precious Knorth Bastard.”

“He’s not . . . qualified to answer, less even than I am, and I’ve waded through deeper cesspools of divinity than you can imagine.”

All the cadets were staring at her. They liked things straightforward, the way they had been taught. In the Kencyrath, walls were to keep things out, not to batter one’s brains against. Don’t ask questions, said the Women’s World, unless you were one of the eccentric and therefore somewhat disreputable Jaran.

Thinking hurts their little brains.

Jame wished that her own didn’t ache quite so much. At least she had the excuse of having just been kicked in the head by Timmon, which in turn made her long to rattle these others’ comfortable complacency.

“What does our three-faced god have to do with us? These days, precious little that I can see. Vant, I’m sorry, but we were all put here to be used, if only someone would tell us what we’re supposed to do. Like you, I really, really hate not knowing; and sometimes I’m afraid that not even our god remembers for what purpose we were bound together to begin with.”

For the first time, Harn looked almost amused. “Child, you’re frightening your playmates. For that matter, you’re starting to scare me.”

Vant gulped, gathered himself, and spoke, although his voice still shook. “Lady, I don’t know what you mean. Highborn may not lie, but they never talk straight either. It would be better if Tentir were restricted to the Kendar. There’s been a Highborn at the bottom of every mess we’ve gotten into here for generations. Look what happened the last time a Knorth lordan was in residence. If not for Greshan, Ran, your father would still be alive.”

Harn’s face went blotchy, red and white. “Hallick Hard-hand knew his duty. He chose the White Knife to fulfill it, thus redeeming the college’s honor. Do you speak ill of him or of his choice?”

Jame rose quickly and stepped between them. She didn’t speak nor did the big randon look down at her; however, after a moment Harn’s incipient berserker flare died and he turned away.

“What?” Jame said to Brier as she sank back into her place. “We Highborn have to be good for something.”

Quill had been thinking. “That’s as it may be, Ran, but isn’t it important for Highborn, especially lordan, to learn randon discipline? Look what happened to M’lord Greshan, who never even tried, and to Ganth Graylord, who did but failed. Sorry, lady.”

She waved this away. “Tentir tests those who presume to power. Ganth didn’t exactly fail, but he didn’t stay either. I wish he had, too.”

Harn glowered at her. In his bloodshot eyes was something almost like pain. “If so, Lordan, do you willingly submit to such testing?”

The Commandant had once said that by the end she would know if she belonged at the college, which was as much to say if she belonged anywhere. “I have. I do.”

The Kendar’s heavy shoulders slumped. “So be it.”

With that, he tried to pick up the threads of the scattered lesson, but his mind was only half on it and his class not with him at all.

The rumble of his voice wrapped itself around Jame, dulling her thoughts. Her head throbbed as if with a second heartbeat, fit to split her skull.

Rue touched her sleeve. “Are you all right?”

Yes. No. Listen to the whisper of the pooling shadows:

Ran Harn has seen your uncle Greshan walking the halls at night.

That was what she had forgotten: a knapsack containing a contract woven of dead threads, stinking of old, cold blood—Kindrie’s proof of legitimacy, but also Tieri’s death warrant and Greshan’s charter to walk free.

“I have to find it.”

She started to rise, but sat down again with a thump as her head threatened to explode.

“Find what, lady?”

“In the dining room, under the bench. I just ran off and left it there this morning.”

“Ah. That.” Of course, Brier had seen Jame carelessly stow the sack. Unlike some, the Southron never forgot anything. “Wait here. I’ll fetch it.”

Watching her go, Harn literally and figuratively threw up his one good hand. “Whatever I meant to teach, it’s gone. Instead, think about what you’ve learned, or at least heard. Good night and sweet dreams.”

Of course, it was hours yet until bedtime, as much as Jame longed for the day to end. So it would, just as soon as she had the knapsack and its precious contents back in her hands.

As she left the common room in search of Brier, however, Rue and Mint seized her.

“Come see!”

Between them, they tugged her across the hall into what had been her uncle’s private quarters.

Here was the reception chamber with its huge, raised fireplace, surprisingly clean. When Jame had last seen it, it had been packed and stinking with Greshan’s spoilt, moldering luggage, left unclaimed nearly fifty years after its owner’s death. She looked for the Lordan’s gaudy Coat under which she had slept and dreamed so vilely—was it only thirteen days ago?—but didn’t see it. Rue was probably right that Graykin had laid claim to it, and good riddance . . .

To both coat and its most recent claimant? No, don’t think that. The Southron was bound to her, however inconvenient that currently was proving. She owed him for his service . . . and, face it, hated that she did so.

The two cadets pulled her to the right, toward the door opening onto the servants’ quarters and she entered, the rest of her ten eagerly trailing after.

Inside, she stopped and stared.

“Well, it’s certainly different.”

When she had last seen the northwest wing of her uncle Greshan’s suite, it had been a long corridor with small rooms opening off of it to either side and a squalid little scullery at the end—dim, dusty, claustrophobic. Sealed after the former lordan’s death, no one had set foot in these dismal precincts since. During her absence, however, the Knorth cadets had obviously worked hard to transform it into a place where their eccentric lordan would deign to spend the winter instead of camping out in the attic under a hole in the roof.

The servants’ quarters retained two small rooms at the far end and a now-spotless scullery, but the rest had been opened up between rows of support columns. The floor was scrubbed down to its honey grain and strewn with meadow flowers, across which lay glowing bars of late afternoon light. Faint sketches on freshly whitewashed walls hinted at murals to come. Best of all, sections of the western wall had been knocked out to form windows overlooking the boulders and the lower reaches of the Snowthorns with the peaks looming high above, black against a golden sunset. Cool air with a tang of snow blew in.

A flash of white below, either Bel or the rathorn colt. She would have to warn the horse-master that if either equine ventured beyond the lowest tumble of boulders, they would be visible from this new vantage point. With Bel, it hardly mattered, but she wanted to keep the colt secret as long as possible to forestall more hunting parties.

“We can shutter the windows when winter comes,” said Rue, still anxiously watching Jame’s face, misunderstanding her sudden frown. “Or screen them with oiled linen. And look: won’t this be fine on a Mid-Winter’s Night?”

Near the end of the long room, they had set a huge, curiously shaped copper basin on an ironwood platform to be used as a free-standing fire pit. The ceiling overhead had been cut open to form a smoke hole. At that end of the attic, Jame remembered, roof and floor nearly meet. She tapped the basin, which rang sweetly. Around its lip ran a frieze of naked boys, some wrestling, others otherwise employed.

“Let me guess. My uncle’s bathtub?”

Rue blushed and Mint giggled.

“Something like that,” said the latter. “M’lord Greshan enjoyed playing ‘little fishies’ with the scullery lads, or so I’ve heard. It was crated up in the outer room. If we put the fire underneath instead of inside, it can be your bath now.”

“I’ll consider it,” Jame said gravely.

A disturbance at the door, and Brier pushed her way through the ten-command with the pack swinging in her hand. Jame took it with a sigh of relief. She was entirely too good at misplacing valuable objects. This one would have to be securely stowed somewhere until she had a chance to give it to her cousin Kindrie, whose property it really was.

Graykin would kill for such proof of legitimacy. If Vant’s situation was complicated, Gray’s was worse, with Lord Caineron for a father and some Karkinaroth scullery maid for a mother.

Someone gasped.

Jame turned, and the flesh leaped on her bones.

Down the clean-swept, colonnaded room, across the dim entry hall, the door to Greshan’s apartment had silently opened. A figure stood on the threshold, backlit, oddly dwarfish. Emerald and amethyst swirled over one shoulder, vermillion and orange like a garish splash of blood over the other. Then the watcher stepped back and the door closed, slowly, furtively.

So Mint and Rue were right: her half-breed servant still occupied Greshan’s private quarters and wore her uncle’s clothes. No doubt that had been the lavishly embroidered Lordan’s Coat, tailored for broader shoulders than the Southron’s, mocking his pretensions even as he reveled in its rich, occasionally sordid history.

At first he had reported to her regularly. It was weeks, though, since she had last seen him, although sometimes she heard him whisper mockingly to her from the secret passage behind one wall or another, as she just had when Timmon kicked her in the head. No doubt he fed himself by raiding the college kitchens and occupied the long, empty days by spying on the college’s inhabitants, as he just had been on her.

That’s more than I promised him when I accepted his service, she thought defensively.

Yes, but it was still less than he deserved for his suffering on her behalf at his father Caldane’s hands.

. . . that dream again: the half-starved cur on the empty hearth . . .

Really, though, the little man was so irritating with his needy, never-ending quest for self-respect, all tied to her own uncertain status, that she sometimes feared she would kill him out of sheer frustration.

A shuffle of feet and a cough caused her to turn. No one met her gaze. Graykin hardly existed for the other Knorth, she realized, except for Brier who stared at the closed door with hard, green eyes; what could the bastard son of her former lord be to her but an enemy? What shamed the others was that they had been afraid to enter Greshan’s quarters themselves to reclaim them for their current lordan. Greshan’s specter haunted more than poor Harn. Tentir’s rough walls might keep many dangers out, but they still held their secrets within and with them a wrongness, a sickness, that threatened to rot the college’s very bones.

Jame shook herself. Enough futile banging of heads against walls for one day.

“Everybody out,” she said, slinging the pack in a corner and unfastening her jacket. “It may be early for you, but I need some dwar sleep and mean to get it if it kills me.”

They filed out except for an unusually quiet Rue who stayed in her self-appointed role as body servant, gathering Jame’s clothes as she stripped them off. She was naked before she saw the white note on the pillow.

“Remember the equinox,” it read, and this time it was signed: “Index.” Probably some Jaran cadet had slipped in to leave it, as they had the first note in the dining hall.

The old scrollsman meant another Merikit ritual in which Jame was presumably supposed to take part as the Earth Wife’s Favorite, but about which she knew nothing. Moreover, it was half a season away.

“Bugger that,” Jame muttered and cast herself down on an almost too soft pallet in the corner, only to swear and shift off the thorns of a well-meant but inconveniently placed rose.

Silence fell except for the muted voice of the college settling for the night. Outside, the long twilight dwindled. The last sound Jame heard before sleep took her was Rue locking the door.