Honor's Paradox

XI Rain

It was snowing when Jame left the Merikit village the next morning. Snow turned to sleet on the ride south, and sleet to chill rain. By the time she reached Tentir late that night, she was soaked and shivering.

Rue ordered Greshan’s huge, obscenely ornate bath filled for her. Jame lay in it slowly thawing out, listening to rain ping against the bronze hood and flinching as icy drops found their way down the smoke hole to tap on her bare shoulders.

The next morning rain still fell as cadets gathered in the muddy square for assembly. Most lessons were held inside, but that provided only partial relief. While not the winter chill, this was perhaps more piercing. No place in the college seemed warm more than a dozen paces from the nearest fire.

Jame’s second class took place in the Map Room with the Coman master-ten Clary. It was the first time they had met since he had hit her with a rock during the egging exercise. She came up behind him as he bent over a scroll.

“Why did you do it?

He flinched, but didn’t turn to meet her eyes.

“Fash said . . .”

“Fash says many things. You shouldn’t listen.”

Clary hunched his shoulders as if against a blow. “I’ve been waiting for you to complain to the Commandant.”

“Have I ever, about anything? It isn’t likely to happen again, is it?”

The back of his neck turned dusky red. “No. It was a shoddy trick. I wish I hadn’t done it.”

“Good.”

She passed on to Brier, who was studying a map of the Southern Wastes.

“Urakarn,” said Brier, pointing to a mark on the western edge of the desert. “Here is the plain before it where my mother and your brother followed Genjar to defeat against the Karnids. Genjar came back. So many others didn’t. They say that the ground there is still white with powdered bones. And this”—she swept her hand eastward—“is the dry salt sea over which they escaped. Is it true that my mother returned under the salt, under the sand, to save you?”

The previous spring, a weirdingstrom had carried the entire Scrollsmen’s College all the way south taking Jame and Brier with it. Jame remembered the terror of sinking, of sand closing over her head, the salt on her lips turning wet, the ancient sea returning.

Then Rose Iron-thorn’s hand had closed over her own and drawn her up to the air, to life. For your brother’s sake . . .

“I think so.”

Would they soon be revisiting those mysterious regions? Hot, dry, barren . . . Jame glanced out the window at the cold rain still descending in rods. How far away the Wastes seemed. Strange to think that someday, in some foreign desert, she might regret that it wasn’t raining.

The downpour continued the next day, and the next. Nothing dried properly. The Silver rose, beginning to gnaw away its banks. Wells brimmed on the verge of overflowing. If the Eaten One indeed represented water, she was clearly showing her displeasure, but at what?

MINE. SHE. IS. NOT.

“She” undoubtedly referred to Prid, but why had the river goddess rejected her, with what consequences for her, her people, and all other dwellers of the Riverland? The solstice sacrifice usually went without a challenge from what Jame could learn. What happened to the sacrificed Favorite was more obscure.

And still the rain fell.

Oh, Gran Cyd, what have we done?

Late on the fourth day, the college had visitors.

The ten-commands of Jame and Timmon were on the second-floor balcony of the great hall, putting out pots to catch drips before they could run down the lower walls and soak the house banners which already sagged under the weight of their dank stitches.

“If this keeps up,” said Jame, emptying a sauce pan into a roasting pot, “wouldn’t it be better to roll them up and store them somewhere dry?”

Timmon grunted. “If such a place exists.”

The outer door ground open, swollen wood scraping on flagstones. Riders entered clad in oiled coats on dripping horses. Following them, a rose-colored canopy squeezed through the door. Something pale glimmered under it.

“It can’t be,” said Timmon, staring. “Sweet Trinity, it is. My mother.”

Lady Distan extended her gloved hand to a white-haired randon who helped her to dismount.

“And that’s Ran Aden. What in Perimal’s name are they doing here?”

“You’d better go down to greet them.”

Timmon chewed his lower lip. “Will you come with me?”

“Given how they both feel about me? Just go.”

Reluctantly, Timmon went. His mother offered him her pink-gloved hand to kiss and allowed herself to be escorted out of the hall.

The horses and riders descended into the subterranean stable.

Aden was left surveying the hall. From his expression, nothing he saw pleased him.

A randon of his house, hastily summoned, stepped forward to welcome him. The Highborn looked down his nose at him.

“What, not Sheth Sharp-tongue?”

“The Commandant has been summoned home for an urgent consultation, Ran.”

“Really. How irregular. In his absence, I am the senior officer here. Until Sheth deigns to resume his post, Tentir is under my command. Now, show me to the Commandant’s quarters.”

“Well,” said Brier at Jame’s shoulder as the two randon left.

Jame made a face. “That remains to be seen.”

“Can he really take over Tentir, just like that?” asked Dar over dinner. “I’ve never heard of such a thing before.”

Everything on the table was cold, the well having overflowed in the basement and put out the kitchen fire. Trocks and newts had taken refuge on all available tabletops, while salamanders smoldered under the surface, emitting sullen bubbles.

“Ran Hawthorn was left in charge, and she seems to have accepted it,” Mint remarked. “Ran Aden is just too senior to argue with.”

“The Commandant will be back soon,” said Erim. “She may not feel that it’s worth a fuss.”

Still, thought Jame, gnawing a slightly soggy heel of bread, she wished that Harn Grip-hard were here instead of with the Southern Host. If nothing else, as the Highlord’s war-leader he outranked his Ardeth counterpart. As Erim said, though, Aden’s tenure couldn’t last for long. Already the Commandant’s return was long overdue.

She also wondered about Lady Distan, Timmon’s mother. Granted, it wouldn’t have been raining when she set off with her escort from Omiroth, but what need had kept her stubbornly on the road in such inclement weather? A postprandial visit seemed in order.

When Jame arrived at the Ardeth barracks, however, everyone was still at table. She slipped up to Timmon’s quarters to wait for him there, not reckoning that his mother would come with him. There was her voice on the stair, though, and the swish of her damask robe. Too late to run. Where to hide? Ah, under Timmon’s bed, where she had taken cover once before, accidentally on top of the wolver. She could almost hear his amused, gravelly voice: Under other circumstances, this would be fun.

Under these circumstances, definitely not.

“At last,” said the lady, entering the room. “Privacy.”

“Mother, guest quarters have been prepared for you. After such a long ride, aren’t you tired?”

“Now, would you hustle me off so fast after I have ridden so far to see you?”

Timmon’s bed was covered with a lace counterpane. Jame watched their feet through it—Timmon’s in fine-grained but sensible boots, his mother’s in rose-colored slippers. For such a dainty woman, she had large feet, proud in the up step. One could imagine them mincing over armies of the fallen.

“Very well.” Timmon sounded resigned. “I’m pleased to see you, of course, but why are you here?” Then his tone sharpened. “Has something happened to Grandfather?”

“One might say so. My dear, I know that you didn’t mean to cause trouble at the High Council, but you must see what a problem you created by letting Adric think that you were Pereden.”

Timmon’s feet shuffled. “I didn’t tell him. He told me.”

“And you didn’t correct him. About everything else he seems rational—so far—but this quest for the relics of his beloved, fallen son has partly unhinged him. When he refers to you as Pereden, he is content. When he calls you Timmon, as he does more and more frequently, he grows fretful.”

Jame wondered what Timmon had done with the finger and ring of his father. For that matter, blood and bone, he was a sort of relic in himself.

“I’m sorry about that.”

“So are we all. You do see, though, if he names you his heir as Pereden, Dari will have good cause to question both his judgment and your claim.”

“Mother, you assume that I want to become Lord Ardeth.”

“Of course you do. Haven’t you enjoyed being his lordan?”

Timmon began to pace restlessly. “Here and now, yes. It gives me status at the college. I never thought that it would last, or wanted that responsibility.”

She stopped him. They must be standing face to face. “Foolish boy. If not lordan or lord, what will you be? Just another Highborn subject to the will of others. Oh yes, your randon collar will give you some authority, but still you must follow orders rather than give them. Did I raise you for such a fate?”

He stepped back. “No, Mother. You raised me to be like my father.”

She pursued. Jame would imagine her gloved hands smoothing his coat, possessively patting it. “And what better model could I give you? Pereden was the perfect man, the perfect mate. I could never have given myself to any one else, and have to no one since. You owe your existence to my choice and judgment. Oh, what a lord he would have made!”

The door opened.

“Drie.” Timmon’s voice echoed with his relief at this interruption, then sharpened. “What’s the matter?”

“Water has gotten into the fire timber hall, into the fire pits.”

“Sweet Trinity, the stables. Mother, accompany Drie to your quarters. I need to help with the horses before the steam scalds them.”

He rushed out.

Jame forcibly restrained herself. Bel was in the subterranean stable, sheltering from the rain.

Drie and the lady faced each other.

“You,” she said, with such patent loathing that it made Jame’s skin crawl. “He should have left you behind long ago. What does a lordan need with a whipping boy?”

“Lady, Pereden was my father too, by a Kendar mother. Would you dishonor his choice of mates?”

“Oh!” Her riding whip whistled down with a crack across his shoulders and he cowered, submissive, before her. “Stand still, you. This is what you were born for.”

Jame wriggled out from under the bed. The lady’s back was to her, the whip raised again. She caught the other’s arm, drew back, and swept her feet out from under her. Distan went down in a billow of rose chiffon.

“Run,” Jame hissed at Drie who, after a wide-eyed stare, did so. Jame followed him—fast enough, she hoped, to avoid recognition.

Tentir seethed. Below, horses were screaming. A stream of them, freed, rushed up the ramp and out the front door of the great hall. Bay, chestnut, sorrel, black . . . Jame didn’t see Bel’s creamy, dappled hide among them. She edged down the ramp by the wall against the upward stampede, flinching away from heaving shoulders, rolling eyes, and pounding hooves. Here was the horse-master, slapping haunches.

“I haven’t seen her,” he gasped. “Likely she’s behind, guiding the others.”

Steam exploded between the floorboards, blowing some clean out of their beds. The water couldn’t begin to extinguish well-seasoned ironwood, but its clash with fire filled the air with hot, searing jets. Jame staggered among them, feeling sweat prickle out all over her body. The escaped horses thinned out. Here came one like a phantom out of the mist. She grabbed a white mane and swung onto a dappled back. Up the ramp, into the hall, out the front door. Mud slithered underfoot. Bel nearly fell. Cold rain dinned on heads and shoulders. Tentir’s training fields spread out before them beneath a sheet of water, under a full moon shredded by flying clouds.

The next morning, Aden addressed the assembled cadets from the shelter of the Commandant’s balcony while they stood below in their ranks, in the pouring rain, getting wetter and wetter.

“You are all sloppy and lazy,” he told them, down his long nose, “disgraces to your houses and scarves. My time here may be short, but I intend to teach you what discipline is. To begin with, you will run—I say run—to your classes in formation, in cadence, stopping only to salute any randon whom you may pass. Randon, return those salutes. I will be visiting your classes. If I find any inadequacy, you will repeat them in your free time, all night long if necessary. Punishment runs will increase in number and duration. Expect nothing but field rations and inspections. That, I think, is enough to start with.”

There was a sodden pause.

“Salute!” roared the duty sargent, and they did—to every officer in sight, in no particular order.

A scramble followed as the ten-commands fell in and sprinted off, many headfirst into each other. For the Commandant, they would have done it perfectly. By unspoken agreement, for Aden Smooth-face they turned the maneuver into a shambles.

“That was fun,” Jame remarked to Brier, limping slightly from a kicked shin. “Still, I expect we’ll pay for it.”

Throughout the day, Aden descended on class after class, finding fault with most of them, assigning punishment duties. Feet began to pound around and around the muddy square. The field rations turned out to be shot through with chartreuse mold. And still the rain fell. Under the steady downpour, amusement turned to dour obedience.

That evening Timmon dined with the Commandant Pro Tem and his mother on provisions that the former had brought with him, without which he apparently never traveled.

“He thinks we’re all plotting against him,” he reported to Jame afterward. “Well, in a way we are, but he also mentioned a Day of Misrule when he was truly Commandant here and some trick or other was played on him.”

Jame remembered what she had heard. “He was lured out of his quarters by a racket and tagged. The cadets made him share his stash of delicacies at the feast.”

“Something so trivial?”

“Obviously not to him.”

“He doesn’t like the Shanir either. You and Drie in particular drive both him and my mother wild.”

“Drie had better stay out of her way. Now that you’ve begun to slip out of her grip, she’s setting him up as your whipping boy again.”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes, as if beating him can still make you behave.”

She watched Timmon consider this. His mother might be right.

“I also think,” she added, “that she hates him personally for being your father’s son. About Aden, is it possible that he gave your father the idea to make Drie eat his bound-carp?”

Timmon stared at her. “It is and he did. Over dinner, he bragged about that almost as much as he complained about his lost treats. Something about all Shanir really bothers him.”

“He isn’t one himself, is he?”

“That may be the problem. He seems to think that we have an unfair advantage over him. In my house, that could be true. Ability aside—and it’s no small thing to climb so high in the randon ranks—Aden owes his internal house rank largely to being Grandfather’s younger brother. Watch out for him.”

“Oh, I will. And you watch out for Drie.”

Timmon leaned against the rail. Here under the tin roof they were sheltered, but in danger of being trampled by punishment runs. One went past, the boardwalk booming under their feet.

“Brandan,” remarked Timmon. “At least he isn’t playing favorites.”

“You think not?” Jame wondered if Aden knew that Lord Brandan’s sister Brenwyr was a Shanir maledight.

Timmon picked at the moss encrusting the wooden rail. “It’s funny how knowing about my father and Drie has changed the way I feel about both of them. That is, I always knew about the carp, but I never realized what it meant to Drie. Mother and Great-uncle Aden are really getting on my nerves, the way they keep praising my father and comparing me to him. I know, I know: not so long ago I would have been delighted. Maybe, though, he was simply human, not the paragon I was raised to believe in.”

He glanced at Jame almost shyly under a fringe of damp hair.

“How did you feel about your father?”

Jame considered this.

“I always thought that he was a monster. He was so bitter, so frustrated, with no time for Tori or me as children except to shout at us. Everything revolved around his passion for our mother, who was lost to him forever.”

She paused, remembering how once he had found her in the hall of the Haunted Lands keep and for a moment had thought that she was her mother returned. Then with recognition the softness had run out of his expression like melting wax.

“You.”

She remembered being slammed against the wall and pinned there.

“You changeling, you impostor, how dare you be so much like her? How dare you! And yet, and yet, you are . . . so like . . .”

And he had kissed her, hard, on the mouth.

“My lord!” Her Kendar nurse Winter stood in the hall doorway. He drew back with a gasp.

“No. No! I am not my brother!”

And he had smashed his fist into the stone wall, next to her head, spattering her with his blood.

“What?” asked Timmon, watching her.

Jame shook herself. “There was so much I didn’t understand then. What child sees adults clearly? When I turned seven and sprouted these”—she flexed her claws and grooved the mossy rail with them—“he called me a filthy Shanir and drove me out of the house into the Haunted Lands.”

Timmon’s eyes widened. “He did?”

She laughed, without mirth. “That’s how Tori and I were first separated. Your granduncle isn’t the only one who can’t abide those of the Old Blood. It’s a funny thing, though; the more I find out about Ganth—say, what happened to him here at the college or how his own father treated him, not to mention that foul beast I have to call uncle—the more human he seems. Do any of us really know our parents? They seem so big at first, and then they shrink.”

“My father didn’t live long enough for that. He’s still the golden boy to all who knew him. And yet . . . and yet . . . there’s something wrong. Why did he call your brother a liar?”

Jame flinched at the dream memory of Pereden’s neck breaking under her brother’s hands and of Harn’s comforting rumble: All right, Blackie, all right. Don’t fret. He wasn’t worth it.

She still didn’t know what that meant.

Timmon left soon afterward, grumbling about no dry linen to be found in the entire college. How nice for that to be one’s primary concern, although somehow she doubted that it truly was Timmon’s.

That night Jame dreamed that she walked the Gray Lands where the unburnt dead drift. It was no surprise that she should find herself here, given her conversation with Timmon; however, she wondered if this was the dreamscape, the shared soulscape, some errant fragment of her own disordered mind, or a bit of all three.

Here, at least, were those familiar, sickly hills rolling under a leaden sky which leaned over them with almost palpable weight.

Whip grass twined and whined at her feet, seeking to take root in her boots: . . . stay with us, stay . . .

The air was sticky with warm drizzle, the hollows full of stagnant water under a scum of ash, sluggishly aroil as if disembodied drowning men struggled there. At the margins all was melting, life and death dissolving into water.

In the way of dreams, it didn’t surprise her to find Ashe at her side. The haunt singer leaned on her staff, pallid and slack of visage but still iron-willed, as must be anyone who walks the world’s edge. Her voice as usual was rough and halting.

“Water ultimately . . . dissolves everything. It can . . . unmake the universe.”

“Is that what will happen if the Eaten One doesn’t relent? To find her work here is . . . disturbing, to say the least. Have our worlds become so intertwined? But truly, Ashe, I don’t know what she wants.”

“The question is not asked of you . . . for once. Nor is that . . . the answer you seek here.”

Someone splashed through the mucky sedge below.

“Father!” Timmon called. “Father!”

On the opposite slope, a swirl of wind fretted the grass. Blades rose and wove themselves around a flaw in the air, plaiting themselves from the legs up into the semblance of a human figure. Something like a head turned. Dry grass whipped about it like sere hair.

“. . . I . . . I . . . I . . .” keened a thin, high voice like a breath blown over a blade of grass.

Timmon floundered up the slope toward it, holding the seared finger that was all that remained of Pereden Proud-prance, and which trapped him here in the Gray Lands, if just barely. Pereden took it in a stem-woven hand and settled the missing finger in place as if assuming a mislaid glove. A quiver ran through him as grass became underlaid with wicker. He drew himself up, creaking. Some hint of his former appearance returned, although rustling fitfully around the edges.

“I . . . I . . . I was my father’s favorite. I . . . I deserved to be. I deserved everything, b-b-but he took it all away.”

“Who did? Father, look at me! Talk to me!”

Blank sockets instead of eyes swept past him, seeing what? Through them, one saw the inside of his empty, plaited head. “He spied on me. He told Father, ‘Peri is weak, Peri isn’t to be trusted.’ He was jealous, so he lied. Father didn’t believe him, oh no, but the others did.”

He coughed ash and spat twigs like so many tiny bones. Some tangled in the dry grass around his mouth and bobbed there. He gnashed on them petulantly.

“I knew I could turn the Waster Horde. The Host would have done it for their beloved Blackie, but they failed me. Everyone fails me. Poor me. Oh, but the Wasters, they knew my value. Yes, they did. ‘Beat Blackie. Take his place,’ they told me. So I led them against the Kencyr Host. I would have won too, if Father hadn’t betrayed me as well. Why should he meddle and stop the fight when I was so close to winning? It was my battle—mine!—against Blackie and all his lies. I told him that I would tell Father all that I had done, and why. Oh, that scared him, lick-ass that he is.

“ ‘It will kill him,’ says Blackie. ‘And I promised to protect his interests. I keep my promises, Peri.’ ”

“Ah, his hands on my neck! Why is that all I remember? Where am I now? Someone has cheated me. You.” He clawed fumble-fingered at Timmon, who retreated before him back into the water. “Return it to me, all of it. I . . . I . . . I . . . was my father’s favorite. I . . . I . . . deserved to be. I deserved everything. . . .”

Timmon flailed in the water. The hungry dead rose up around him.

“Now,” said Ashe, and Jame plunged down the slope.

The water was viscous and rank, full of clutching currents. She grabbed Timmon. How hard it was to lift him, how treacherous the water.

“I . . . I . . . I . . .” he muttered, echoing his father’s reedy, needy voice.

“Not you, not yours,” she shouted at the thing unraveling on the slope with her full Shanir power. “I condemn you, I deny you, I break you!”

Timmon suddenly came free in her grasp. They lay tangled together in her bed, both fully clothed, both weeping water. Timmon leaned over and vomited. Then he began to cry.

“There, now,” she said, cradling him in her arms, brushing wet hair from his clammy brow. “There, there. He wasn’t a monster. He was only weak. It happens. Now sleep.”

And Timmon did.

The following day was wet, muddy, and miserable.

It started with a fight between Timmon and his mother in his quarters. No one heard the exact words, but they caught the tone. Soon after, Lady Distan rode off with her escort, despite the pounding rain and warnings of possible flash floods.

Aden Smooth-face stayed behind.

He appeared at Jame’s second lesson of the morning, which happened to be the Senethar.

She had expected to see him before this, given how he felt about her. It surprised her that he had chosen to visit her strongest class. He knew that it was, too: she remembered him observing her coldly in his gray mask during the second cull, the one for which he had voted to fail her.

Today they were practicing fire-leaping, as if in defiance of the weather. Kick, strike, pivot, sweep . . . the kantir continued, twenty cadets trying to move as one yet somehow not quite matched in time. Everything seemed soggy. Joints creaked. Limbs swam rather than catching fire.

We are dissolving into one uncoordinated mass, thought Jame. Water melts everything.

Its beat was in her ears as it hit the tin roof below. Its weight dragged her down. Was this what it meant to be lethargic? Never in her life had she felt so dull or slow.

Aden clapped his hands. “This is unacceptable,” he said in his voice of raw-edged silk. “Are these to be the next generation of randon, who can’t even pick up their feet? You, instructor, choose your best and let me instruct.”

The officer in charge was the Brandan Hawthorn. Her glaze swept the class, resting on no one.

“You,” said Aden. “Knorth. Dare you meet me?”

Every instinct said “Don’t,” but what else could she do?

They saluted each other, he from superior to inferior, she noncommittal, and took their positions.

He struck at her face in a blur and advanced, hands weaving. It was hard to remember that, although younger than his brother Adric, he was still a centenarian. She didn’t want to hurt him. Jame retreated. This wasn’t fire-leaping as she knew it. She blocked a strike, and felt a line of fire across her arm. Fabric parted, blood flowed. What in Perimal’s name . . . ? He struck again at her face. Again she blocked, forearm to forearm.

Retreat again. Now attack.

The heel of her hand snapped his head back and sent his white hair flying. There was blood on his chin; he had bitten his tongue.

Follow with a heart strike. Close and sweep.

He staggered, but kept his feet. Agile old man. His face remained as smooth as his movements, but Trinity, what a basilisk stare. One of his eyelids drooped. Here he came again. Her balance was off. His return sweep reaped her leg out from under her and she fell, he on top of her, his knee in the pit of her stomach driving out breath. His fists smashed into the floor on either side of her head. Strapped to his wrists, twin blades poised an inch over her eyes.

“Submit,” he hissed. “Leave Tentir today or I will blind you.”

With difficulty, Jame focused not on the knife points but on his eyes. The drooping one began to twitch.

“Blind me and answer to . . .”

“Your brother?” It was a sneer.

“No. To the Randon Council.”

He drew back and the blades retracted into his sleeves. He ran his hands through his white hair to straighten it.

“And this was your best student,” he said to Hawthorn. “You teach poorly, and Sheth Sharp-tongue made you his duty officer. To the square with you and run until I tell you to stop.” With that he stalked out.