Honor's Paradox

XII A New Favorite

At noon, Jame heard that Timmon was in the infirmary and went there, past Hawthorn running laps around the square.

She found the Ardeth Lordan soaking a scalded hand in cool water while the apothecary prepared an alkanet lotion for his red-blotched face.

“What have you done to yourself this time?”

His grimace deepened as it pulled at scorched skin.

“I was down in the fire timber hall. The only really hot flames are there, but so are steam jets and boiling water. You wouldn’t want to see my legs.”

“But why . . . oh, I understand.”

Timmon gave her a sidelong look. “I woke up in your bed. It wasn’t exactly what I expected.”

“I know. To begin with, I wasn’t there.”

“But you were, when it mattered.”

The apothecary smeared the lotion on Timmon’s face and covered it with a light dressing. Then, discreetly, he left.

“You burned your father’s finger, didn’t you?”

“Yes. By wedging it into the cracks of a fire timber. It was time. This morning Mother saw that I was wearing his ring.” He held up his other hand with Pereden’s moon opal signet on it. “When I wouldn’t tell her where I got it, she threw a fit and stormed out.”

“It was good of you not to betray my brother, not that I have any idea how he came by it either.” She regarded him curiously. “Do you remember the Gray Lands, and what your father said that he had done?”

Timmon gulped, looking sick. “It wasn’t just a dream, was it? I thought not. We were on the edge of the soulscape, where I have no control. Sweet Trinity, how could he? To join the Waster Horde against his own people, just for spite, and then to threaten to tell Grandfather all about it . . . He hated your brother because he couldn’t live up to him. I see that now. How . . . petty.”

“That’s one word for it. So now you understand that Tori didn’t lie about him?”

Timmon laughed, with a crack to his voice. “I expect that your brother didn’t say half as much as he could have. To do more would have been to destroy Grandfather.”

“ ‘And I promised to protest his interests,’ ” Jame quoted softly. “ ‘I keep my promises, Peri.’ ”

“ ‘Ah, his hands on my neck! Why is that all I remember?’ He killed my father, didn’t he? There at the Cataracts, he broke his neck.”

“I think so. Will you tell Lord Ardeth?”

Timmon gulped. “I could. I should. But now can I? Torisen was right: it would kill Grandfather, and certainly cause a blood feud between our two houses if not a civil war within the Kencyrath itself. And . . . and besides, Pereden wasn’t worth it.”

Jame took his unburnt hand and kissed the cracked ring. “I agree.”

Timmon flushed. “I’m not used to being taken seriously,” he said. “So far, life has just been fun and games. But it was never that, was it? Behind the Wasters were darkling changers, pushing. This entire world could have fallen because of my father. Right there. Right then.”

“Yes, but it didn’t.”

“No, but it still could. Not even my grandfather really believes in the threat, at least within his lifetime. How long have we waited for Perimal Darkling to attack? Generations. Millennia. But how far away from us is it really?”

“Sometimes,” says Jame wryly, “right behind us.”

His attention sharpened. “Your sleeve is bloody.”

“Your dear great-uncle brought knives to a fist fight and threatened to put out my eyes. There’s something wrong with that man.”

Timmon shivered. “So you feel it too. D’you think he’s going . . . soft?”

“Like your grandfather?” Jame had laughed at the idea that senility was contagious. Was it really so different, though, from Caldane sharing his hangover with his Kendar or her father infecting the entire Host with his madness in the White Hills? Clearly what happened to one’s lord had repercussions among those bond to him. Did that extend in particular to his close relations?

“I don’t know, she said, “but he’s dangerous.”

“I could do without the rain,” Jame remarked to Shade, “or without Ran Aden, or preferably without both. How long d’you suppose Caldane means to keep the Commandant at Restormir?”

Shade shrugged. It was a foolish question anyway: how was anyone to know?

They were in the Falconer’s class, as usual sitting along the wall, this time without their animal companions. The exercise was that each of the latter was to seek a particular object of its master’s choosing somewhere within the college.

Rain rattled on the tin roof outside. The fireplace sputtered fitfully. Jame had noticed that no flame burned properly, even with dry tinder, of which there was little. Meanwhile, leather mildewed, cloth rotted, and food spoiled. The whole world seemed to be melting.

“H’ist.” Shade touched her arm.

Aden had entered the mews.

The cadets rose, saluted, then sank back, warily, to their lesson. Jame watched him pace before them.

Over the past few days some of his smoothness had rubbed off. His white hair, while slicked back, seemed frayed at the ends and his eyebrows were ruffled. Lines were now more obvious on his face and his eyelid twitched almost in a flutter. What was it like for him to return to a place where his touchy pride had received such a blow? Did he even see the cadets before him or those of some forty years ago? Did he hear snickering where there was only cautious silence?

“You.” He turned suddenly to Shade. “To what creature are you bound?”

“A gilded swamp adder, Ran.”

“Low enough, certainly. And you.”

The Edirr cadet jumped. “T-to a scurry of mice, Ran.”

“As low or lower. You.”

Gari met those angry, hooded eyes with more confidence than he would have before seeing much worse things on the long ride to Gothregor. “To any swarm of insects you care to name, Ran.”

“Snakes, rats—”

“Mice,” squeaked Mouse, around a fist stuffed in her mouth.

“—and fleas. What great Shanir you all are, to be sure. Much good your precious Old Blood does you. Old man, how dare you waste precious class time with such frivolities? What good can such ‘skills’ do anyone?”

The merlin on the Falconer’s shoulder bated and panted angrily, but his blind master only smiled.

“Laugh at me, will you? Shortly we will see who finds this amusing. And you”—he stopped before Drie—“A fish, isn’t it? Some fat old carp in the keep pond. You smile. I know that look. Nothing can reach you while you are with it, isn’t that correct? Oh, I think that we can arrange something that will shake even you, boy. Pereden’s bastard, come to Tentir. Amazing. Insufferable.”

Jame had risen to her feet, the hair at the nape of her neck prickling. Where did the old randon think he was, Tentir or Omiroth, and when?

“Ran,” she began, but was interrupted by the bounding return of Jorin.

“Waugh,” said the ounce, and dropped a coin at her feet where it spun, flashing gold, then rolled toward a crack in the floor with the cat in wild pursuit.

Aden was glaring after him when the Molocar Torvi knocked him over to bring a food bowl to his master—his idea or Tarn’s? Jame wondered. Before Aden could regain his feet, the rest arrived: Addy with a ribbon, two mice hauling a scarf, and a chittering swarm of three-inch-long water beetles bearing nothing but their own busy selves. The randon flailed at each beetle in turn as it rushed over him. Some of the beetles got sidetracked into his clothing, causing him to slap furiously at himself.

“You think this is funny?” he panted, although no one had dared to laugh. “We’ll see. Oh, yes, we will.” And he stormed out.

“What,” asked Shade, “was all of that about?”

“Nothing, I hope,” said Jame, but she regarded an unperturbed Drie uneasily.

The rest of the day passed without incident, except that Captain Hawthorn continued to run around the square, having received no order to stop. She had settled into the steady, loping stride of a veteran and seemed prepared to continue all night if necessary, but her regular passing by their lit windows began to unnerve the cadets.

“Does he mean to run her to death?” asked Mint. “Can he?”

“Eventually.” Jame threw down her Gen cards, unable to concentrate on the game. “Damn.”

Erim came in, shaking off his wet coat. “Ran Aden’s lights are out. He’s gone to bed.”

“Sweet Trinity.” Jame rose abruptly. “I’m going to stretch my legs.”

The others stared at her, at first barely comprehending such a breach of protocol. Then Dar leaped to his feet.

“Me too,” he said.

“And me.” “And me. “And me.”

They waited until Hawthorn passed once again and fell into step behind her. Other cadets emerged from other barracks as they passed, more and more. They ran in cadence, and the boardwalk shuddered under their booted feet. When the walk could hold no more of them, the rest of the student body began to stomp in time to the runners’ beat within their barracks.

Boom . . . BOOM . . . BOOM!

Even the rain was drowned out.

A light glimmered on the Commandant’s balcony, a candle held high by a wild-haired figure swathed in a silken dressing gown.

“Stop it! I said, all of you stop!”

The runners halted in place. Faces upturned, they waited, hair straggling wetly over their faces, their breath hanging on the dank air.

“You insubordinate, worthless brats, I’ll settle with you later. For now, just . . . just go to bed. All of you. Now!”

And so they did.

As night descended, the storm built to a crescendo, the beat of the rain now punctuated by distant, approaching thunder. The rumble of it growled down the valley from the north like a giant clearing his throat while glimmers of lightning played within the clouds.

Jorin had crawled under the blankets and was huddled as close to Jame as he could get, in danger of pushing her off her pallet. He hated the cold and damp, but thunder worst of all.

Trinity knew how the rathorn colt was doing out in the wet. She would have to check his coat for rain rot as soon as it was practical.

Bel at least had taken shelter in the great hall of Old Tentir with as many of the herd as would fit. The horse-master was in for a long night.

What would happen if the rain never stopped? “Water ultimately dissolves everything,” Ashe had said. “It can unmake the universe.”

A world of water . . .

And that awful man, Aden. Had he really gone soft, as Timmon feared? She had heard that when senility struck, all one’s true characteristics came spilling out without check. What a terrifying thought. Surely the Ardeth randon hadn’t always been as he was now.

Still, the Commandant must return to the college soon. Why had Lord Caineron summoned him in the first place, let alone Gorbel? Such a thing had never happened before during her stay at Tentir. She gathered, listening to the randon, that it was unusual at the best of times. Even a war-leader like Sheth held an independent command when he was responsible for the college. Trust Caldane to meddle.

And so Jame’s thoughts rolled, tumbling over each other, in and out of fitful sleep.

Gradually she became aware of an insistent, four-part beat. Water fell into a pan: drip-drip-drip-drip. . . . Rain hit the shutters: splat-pat-pat-pat. . . . Thunder echoed: BOOM-room-room-room. . . . And under it all ran words, a half chanted, bubbling refrain:

. . . mine-she-is-not, mine-she-is-not, mine-she-is-not, mine-he-is . . .

Jame woke with a start. What?

Prey to a sudden, half-realized fear, she scrambled into her clothes and, leaving Jorin under the covers, ran down the stair, out into the storm. There on the boardwalk she collided with Timmon.

“He’s followed Drie to the river,” he gasped, but stopped her as she started east toward the Silver. “No, to the Burley.”

Which was just as well considering that the lower fields were underwater.

Otherwise, no need to ask who “he” was. “Why” was another matter.

“I had supper with him again,” panted Timmon, wiping streaming hair out of his eyes as they floundered through the downpour, “or would have if all his provisions hadn’t gone moldy. Such colors, you wouldn’t believe. I wonder if he laced them with poison instead of spice, the way Grandfather does.”

“I bet Lord Ardeth tried poisons on him when they were boys, just to see how he would react.”

“Trinity. D’you think? Anyway, this time he blamed the cadets for the spoilage, not Grandfather or the weather. Then, after I’d left, you stopped Hawthorn’s run.”

“That wasn’t just me.”

“Oh, depend on it, he noticed. And he was so pleased to be punishing the Commandant’s duty officer. Through her he meant to pay back the whole school for its laxity and insolence, or so he said.”

He checked her with a hand on her arm, looking troubled and more than a little scared. “I think he’s gone mad. His eyelid was twitching so much that he sealed it with candle wax, and he kept calling me Pereden.”

“But why Drie, and why now?”

“You woke Granduncle up with your stampede. The next thing I knew, he was in my quarters brandishing a whip, saying that he meant to know where I had gotten Father’s ring or he would have the hide off of Drie. A few lashes and, well, I couldn’t stop myself. I wrestled the whip away from him and broke it. He was to deal with me, dammit, not with my half-brother. While we were shouting at each other, Drie slipped away. As soon as he noticed, Granduncle went after him. I couldn’t stop them, so I went after them.”

Stopping first to collect her, Jame noted; but still he had prevented Aden from beating Drie.

They fought their way through lashing cloud-of-thorn bushes toward the swimming hole.

Lightning outlined two figures on Breakneck Rock. One gripped the other by the collar and carried something silvery. By the afterimage, Jame recognized the latter as a fish spear.

“Pereden, Distan, welcome. Have you come to see Tentir purified?”

Rain plastered his white hair over his face, over the eye sealed with wax that still continued to twitch under its lid. That side of his face had gone slack and the corner of his mouth drooped.

“I suppose that we will lose your valuable company tomorrow,” he said. “Meanwhile, keep my quarters since you have claimed them. Damned half-breed. When they rise that high in the service, there’s no putting them in their place. Why can’t anyone realize that I’ve been doing my best to save Tentir?”

“What is he talking about?” Timmon asked Jame, raising his voice over the thrashing wind and rain.

Jame shook her head, although she had a suspicion. Ancestors please that she was right.

The swollen, surging Burley had risen halfway up the face of Breakneck Rock. Behind Aden, unseen by him, a broad, leathery back surfaced in the river. Lightning glimmered off its wet skin. Then it submerged again.

Timmon clutched Jame. “It’s huge! How can something so big be in our swimming hole?”

Jame remembered the chasm beyond the underwater ledge that gave the rock its name, from which huge eyes had once watched her. She also remembered the shallow Silver Steps and what had lurked there.

The wind changed direction, blowing from the west down the gullet of the canyon that fed into the hole. Stinging rain whipped sideways. With it came an approaching roar more felt than heard. It must be raining even more heavily in the mountains than here.

Drie leaned eagerly toward the rock’s edge against the short leash of the Highborn’s arm.

“Get back!” Jame called to him, Timmon’s voice joining her own: “Ran, let him go!”

Aden made a face at them like a dolorous clown. “Could it be that you don’t understand either? No, no. Peri, remember the first time we caught this freak at his piscine perversions? He wouldn’t cry when we beat him, because he was with that damn carp. What right had the bastard to defy us or to try to escape? What right have such creatures even to exist? You never should have sired one, Peri. Distan, you laughed too. So many abominations at Tentir: Shanir, half-breeds, even the Highlord’s unnatural sister, ancestors preserve us. Well, I can free the college of one freak at least.”

He shook Drie. “Call it, boy, call your filthy familiar.”

As if in response, a vast head reared up and slammed down thunderously on the rock. Its eyes were the size of ships’ wheels; its bristling whiskers, spars. The cavernous oval of its mouth gaped. Something like a pallid tongue flopped out to scrabble with overgrown nails on stone. The Eaten One existed only from the thighs up, the rest stuck down the catfish’s gigantic maw. Her skin glimmered pale green; her hair draped like seaweed on a low-tide shore. But the face that she turned upward was of transcendental beauty, even with its lambent eyes and needle teeth bared in a smile.

Drie broke loose and threw his arms around her as hers closed around him.

“GLUP,” went the catfish, and swallowed them both.

Aden belatedly raised his spear to thrust it into one of the creature’s eyes, but it slid back into the water, out of reach. Water slopped over the cliff top.

The wind was roaring now, and a wall of debris like jagged jaws swept toward them down the Burley. Hands jerked Jame and Timmon back from behind. A tangle of branches, tree trunks, and boulders flayed the rock face, taking Aden with it. Then a wall of water hit stone in an explosion of spray. The flash flood swept on carrying all before it. Aden could be seen for a moment on the crest of the tide before it lifted him over the lip of Perimal’s Cauldron and bore him down.

“I was wrong,” said the Commandant. “We have seen the last of M’lord Aden before morning.”

Jame turned and threw her arms around him. “Ran, you’re back!”

“Er . . . yes,” he said, disengaging from her hug. “It would seem that I was missed. Poor Aden. He was beginning to be a problem, as I discovered tonight when I returned not only to find him trying to run my duty officer to death but also settled in my quarters. I fear, though, that you have also lost a friend and you, Lordan, a half-brother.”

“Lost perhaps,” said Jame, looking down river thoughtfully, “but I imagine Drie is finally where he always wanted to be, and the Eaten One has the Favorite of her choice. Look. It’s stopped raining.”