The Sea of Time

VI Challenges

Jame woke, confused, in pain. She had met both Kroaky and that great pudding, King Krothen. How could they be the same, hair and voice aside? Then again, how much could one trust in dreams?

G’ah, the lines of fire across her legs . . . She thought she could feel the welts, until she was fully awake.

Was Tori attempting to scry on her through Marc’s growing stained glass window? Did he have any idea that some of his efforts might be flowing in reverse, if indeed that was the case? Genjar and the hazing . . . her own legs aching in sympathy . . .

For that matter, was Tori also privy to her own dreams? Sweet Trinity forefend.

She threw off the covers, to the disgust of Jorin who had been curled up under them, and rose. Her new quarters were located on the third floor of the Knorth barracks, looking north across the inner ward to the Escarpment and south toward the bulk of the camp. As with Greshan’s apartment at Tentir, she understood that these rooms had stood empty during the long years between Knorth heirs. At least her uncle had never tainted it with his presence. Where had Tori lived when he had joined the Host, nameless and unwanted as he had been? A flicker of the past night’s dream showed her tiny, shabby rooms in the office block near Harn, to whom Tori had been assigned as a special aide. She and her brother had talked about many things in those last days before her departure from the Riverland, but somehow little beyond the bare facts about his experiences in the south. Why was he still keeping secrets, if such they were, and what else might his dreams show her that he couldn’t bear to speak about beyond the Caineron hazing?

Rue brought her a cup of pomegranate juice sweetened with honey. It took some getting used to after Tentir’s inevitably tart cider.

“What’s our schedule for today?” Jame asked.

“Not much. This is our day off. You’re going Overcliff, aren’t you?”

So her absences had been noted. Well, of course they would be. At least she had tried to limit them to times when she was free of cadet duties.

“I need to check with Graykin,” she said. “Then Gaudaric’s grandson Byrne has promised to show me something called the Eye of Kothifir. And you?”

Rue shrugged, turning to lay out Jame’s clothes for the day including the black d’hen. Jame wondered if the cadet understood the significance of the latter. So far, only Sheth seemed to have recognized it as the proper garb of a Tastigon knife-fighter.

“I had hoped to go to the local market in the inner ward,” said Rue. “Now, I don’t know. One of our ten-commands got a note last night.”

“Damn.” Jame put down the cup, half-drained. “What did it say?”

“They’ve been ordered out on wide patrol to the foothills of the Apollynes, a full day’s ride there and back. As a test, it isn’t much. We’ve done the same on foot, with full packs. It’s just the waste of a free day.”

Similar challenges had been arriving for weeks, usually pushed under the door at night. They were never signed, but everyone knew that they came from the third-year randon cadets who had settled on this method to test the mettle of their juniors, either by groups or individually.

The tasks they assigned varied from house to house depending on its temper. The Caineron used physical trials. Only yesterday, Jame had seen one of Caldane’s ten-commands clinging, terrified, to the outside of the open lift cage as it rose up the sheer side of the Escarpment. Anyone of them might have succumbed to the height-sickness so endemic in that house and fallen to his or her death.

She also remembered the nightmare about her brother being tortured by the Caineron Genjar. What had happened next? Perhaps a future dream would tell her. Genjar, after all, was said to have suffered a “strange” death.

The Jaran, on the other hand, tended toward intellectual tests, the Edirr toward jokes such as ten-commands jogging naked through camp, painted blue.

No word came out of the Randir, but it was generally supposed that they were using this opportunity to test the loyalty of their cadets. Jame wondered if Ran Awl and Shade had made any progress in their investigation into the disappearances there and if any of the reported deaths had had anything to do with the third-years’ challenges. If so, would anyone tell Shade, given her peculiar background, or Awl, with her war-leader’s status?

For that matter, Jame had heard very little from within her own house. The third-years’ demands must have been moderate so far or surely she would have heard more, unless her people were keeping things from her again. As with certain demanding duties back at Tentir—latrine patrol or trock eradication, for example—it hurt their pride to see their lordan so demeaned, whatever her wishes.

“The whole thing is so stupid,” she said, pulling on her boots with brusque impatience. “What does it prove, to answer a riddle, to run a gauntlet, or to go on an unnecessary patrol? For example, you and the rest of my ten-command have proven yourselves over and over, even if most of you didn’t fight at the Cataracts.”

“You did,” said Rue, with a stubborn tilt to her shoulders.

“I slashed my way across a battlefield—Ancestors know how clumsily—to bring my brother an accursed sword that he didn’t know how to wield. Niall was there too, and Brier, after worse than either of us experienced. If the rest of you missed it, well, what about our adventures up and down the Riverland, all the way to the Southern Wastes and back? Sweet Trinity, you helped me to raid Restormir itself to free Graykin! You have nothing to prove either to me or to the Highlord who, incidentally, has forbidden all such hazing. I don’t want to see any randon cadet subjected to it. Do the regular Kendar have to put up with this nonsense?”

“They have their own rites of passage, I suppose.”

“More practical ones than ours, I bet. God’s claws, isn’t the average Kencyr’s life hard enough as it is?”

To her surprise, Rue didn’t agree.

“Of course I don’t want to be beaten or humiliated or whatever the third-years have in mind,” said the towheaded cadet, turning stubbornly to face her. “But what other way is there? In a normal year, we would have gone through this at the randon college, but the second- and third-year cadets were all here by then. Now, how else are we supposed to prove that we belong with the Southern Host?”

“Aaiiee.” Jame threw up her gloved hands in disgust. “Tradition!”

At the south gate to the Knorth compound, she encountered Brier talking to a tall young woman with the dark tan of a native born Kothifiran Kendar and cropped hair the color of wild honey. When the latter saw the Highborn, she smiled and said something to Brier that made the latter stiffen, flushing. Then, with a flipped salute, the stranger walked off.

“Who was that?” Jame asked, coming up.

“Amberley. A regular Caineron. Before I left to become a Knorth randon cadet we were . . . close.”

“Oh,” said Jame, listening as much to the other’s flat, carefully neutral tone as to her words, knowing by now how to read most nuances in the other’s manner. “How did she feel about your leaving?”

“Angry. We fought.”

It couldn’t have been easy for Brier to turn her back on all her former colleagues by changing houses, Jame thought, watching the Southron stalk back into the Knorth barracks. She had thought so before. It just hadn’t occurred to her that there might have been someone special.

The north gate of the Ardeth faced her across the road. She saw Timmon enter his compound’s courtyard wearing what appeared to be a dirty apron and carrying a bucket of steaming slops.

“What in Perimal’s name . . . ?”

He gave her a rueful smile. “I got a note. It seems that all the scullery duty I slipped out of at Tentir has finally caught up with me.”

“And you’ve consented to do it now?”

He shrugged. “You advised me to stop avoiding responsibility.”

“I’m not sure this is what I meant.”

“Should I let them humble me, d’you mean? I don’t know. It’s easier than hunting up some way of my own to prove myself, assuming that’s what I’m doing. Anyway, it could be worse. Did you hear about Gorbel’s challenge? What it told him to do was anatomically impossible. He read it out loud to his house at dinner, then tore it up.”

Jame laughed. “That’s Gorbel. He can get away with it, too, despite his fickle father. It must be nice to be so self-assured.”

“And you aren’t?”

“Sweet Trinity, no.”

Yet she was more so than she had been before her graduation from Tentir, or more specifically before she and her brother had fought to establish her competence. She had surprised Tori there, just as he had surprised her by resorting to Kothifiran street fighting techniques. She needed more lessons from Brier.

When would a note arrive for her, she wondered as she bid Timmon farewell, and what would she do about it? Ah, there was no telling until she learned what was being asked of her. Like Rue, she didn’t care to be humiliated, nor was she sure that was the way for a lordan to gain acceptance. Challenges. Huh.

The open lift cage took her smoothly up to the top of the Escarpment where she was greeted by Kothifir’s usual, lively street scene. Her way from there led outward into less respectable streets on the edge of the deserted towers. There she entered what on the outside appeared to be a narrow structure but on the inside opened out into a dingy tavern. A slatternly maid brought her a mug of thin, sour ale. Sipping it, she let her eyes roam around the edges of the room until a glimmer of white caught them. Graykin emerged from the shadows as if given birth by them.

Jame signaled for another mug.

“You’re getting very good at that,” she said as her servant slid into the opposite chair.

“Being Master Intelligencer has some advantages. Now everyone tells me their secrets, whether they intend to or not . . . well, almost everyone,” he added, with a sidelong look at her.

Knowledge was his coin of power, one that she hadn’t always been willing or able to pay him. Perhaps that hesitation wasn’t fair. She knew that he would keep her secrets to the point of death as he had at Restormir while in Lord Caineron’s power. Still, some secrets were hers alone.

“So,” she said. “What news of the city?”

He shrugged. “There’s not much to report. Prince Ton and his mother are still scheming against King Krothen, not that they have any chance while he retains his godhood.”

“Which is to say as long as our temple remains stable. What?”

Graykin’s eyes had flickered. “Maybe nothing, but there’s word that the temple has shrunk slightly. That often happens before a Change. It’s been known to dwindle down to the size of a clenched fist. The priests try not to be inside when that happens.”

“I should think not.”

Jame remembered the miniature temple at Karkinaroth and the priests trapped, starving, inside of it. Somehow, the inner and outer sizes of any Builders’ work never quite matched.

“What about the guilds?” she asked.

“They go on much as always, depending in part on their guild masters. Some of the masters are generous with their skills, like your friend Gaudaric, and their members thrive—small thanks to his fellow armorer Lord Artifice who only thinks about his own projects, to the detriment of all the other craft guilds. He should watch out, though. His work is brilliant now, but from what I hear, thanks to his selfishness his talent may burn out when—or rather if—he loses his position. Gaudaric, on the other hand, is more likely to keep his. That’s partly why Ruso is so desperate to remain Lord Artifice. He wants to be like Professionate and Merchandy, who have retained their power practically forever.”

“That sounds like a cautionary tale about leadership,” remarked Jame.

She wondered if Graykin had considered the personal implications. What would happen to him, come the next Change? He didn’t seem to be doing anything at all for his own so oddly won guild except using the powers that it granted him.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“Not really, except that a few Karnids have crept back into the city.”

Jame stared at him. “Graykin! You’re talking about the people who slaughtered thousands of Kencyr before Urakarn!”

“Only because we chased them there, or rather because we chased their blessed prophet. Anyway, that’s an old story,” said Graykin with a shrug, as if less than two decades rendered it inconsequential. “As I understand it, when King Kruin was dying, the Dark Prophet came to him and promised him immortality if he would buy it with the lives of his heirs.”

“That must have been when Kroaky took shelter with my brother and the Host,” said Jame, as more fragments of the previous night’s dreams came back to her.

Graykin glared. “Who’s telling this story anyway, and who’s this ‘Kroaky’ fellow?”

“That’s a very good question.”

“You’re laughing at me again.”

“Well, maybe a little. Please continue. King Kruin was dying and . . . ?”

“For a while, he didn’t. Meantime, Karnid priests were welcome here and made a lot of converts. When Kruin found out that he’d been fooled, he drove out his precious advisor. After his death, the city council sent the entire Host against Urakarn.”

Including Tori, thought Jame, remembering the lacework of scars on her brother’s hands, the mark of Karnid torture that had almost crippled him for life.

“I don’t know much more,” Graykin concluded, “not being a Karnid initiate.”

“Well, see what you can find out.”

Gray hadn’t grown up within the Kencyrath, Jame reminded herself. For him, perhaps, one Kencyr disaster merged into another. The slaughter of the Knorth women, the debacle in the White Hills, Ganth’s exile, Genjar’s catastrophe before Urakarn, the Kencyr Host against the Waster Horde in the desert before the battle at the Cataracts . . . say “massacre,” and which one did you mean? Looking back, it was hardly a surprise that the Southern Host was so depleted. Trinity, the entire Kencyrath had been bled white since it had first come to Rathillien, never mind what had happened before in all those other lost worlds or during the Fall itself. What was left to fight the final battle with Perimal Darkling? Perhaps only three, the Tyr-ridan, of whom she potentially was one.

G’ah. Jame shook her head. All the weight of the Kencyrath’s past seemed to settle on her shoulders, for surely That-Which-Destroys would have to move before Preservation and Creation. She wondered how her brother and Kindrie were doing. If they couldn’t learn to cooperate, the entire history of the Kencyrath would be for nothing. Her cousin might have some sense of that, but her brother as yet had none. What a time to leave them alone together.

Then too, she had little trust in her own ability to fulfill her role—that is, without destroying everything in her path. Tai-tastigon in flames, Karkinaroth crumbling, Tentir rocked to its roots . . . past results did not bode well for the future.

Their conference done, she rose to depart. “Same place and time next week?”

“I’ll send you word. Some of my guild are getting suspicious, especially Hangnail, the same who shoved you down the ladder into the Undercliff.”

“Watch out for that one. He means you no good.”

“I know,” he said, and laughed soundlessly, dismissively, within his hood.

From the desolate outer rings, Jame made her way toward the central towers, one of which housed Gaudaric’s workshops. The lower three floors offered such armor as the average buyer might want, all well-crafted but nothing special, mostly made by apprentices and journeymen. The fourth floor, however, was the master’s showroom. Gaudaric’s basic style was supremely functional, whether in steel or leather, elegant in its simplicity. However, he also entertained himself with fancier touches. Shafts of light from arched windows illuminated contoured breastplates of shining steel, helmets fashioned to resemble the heads of lions or bears, woven strips of rhi-sar leather in all the colors of nature, and one whole suit that looked like some fantastic beast with horns everywhere. Most wondrous of all, however, was a simple scale armor vest made of rathorn ivory, worth half the guild’s annual income.

“Talisman, Talisman!” Byrne rushed down the spiral stair from an upper floor. “Are we going to see the Eye of Kothifir?”

His grandfather followed him, wiping sooty hands on a leather apron.

“Is it safe?” Jame asked him.

“If you mean because of Lord Artifice, I think so. True, his boys were a trifle heavy-handed when we first met, but Ruso isn’t so bad, really. For the most part, he’s just obsessed with his craft.”

“And you aren’t?”

Gaudaric ruffled his fringe of gray hair, considering. “I’m serious about it, of course. It’s my life, but so is my family. Ruso only has his mechanical toys, his bullyboys, and his ambition. To tell the truth, I feel a bit sorry for him.”

Not entirely reassured, Jame let Byrne tug her out into the street, bound for the Optomancers’ Tower. It was a tall, thin, crooked structure full of strange devices, eyeballs in jars, and prisms flaring rainbows against whitewashed walls, all glimpsed through windows as they climbed the outside stair. At the top, just above the cloud cover, the tower ended in a windowless dome, and out of its door popped a gangly young man wearing enormous lenses in wire frames that drooped with their weight.

“Welcome to the Eye!” he said as he bowed to them with a flourish into the darkness. “Watch your step. Oh!”

Byrne had barged into something that tinkled like glass wind chimes and broke.

“Not to worry. Not to worry. The Eye sees all regardless. Just stand still while I close the door. There.”

They stood still as ordered in darkness so total that not even Jame’s keen night vision helped her. Meanwhile their guide fumbled around them. More glass broke.

“Damn. Where is it? Oh, here.”

A sudden, dazzling light pooled on the floor in a circle some four feet across.

It took Jame a moment to focus on what she saw. The lens pointed west, over Kothifir’s walls along the edge of the Escarpment, toward Gemma, the circling clouds presenting no obstacle. Dots moved on the clifftop plain, the closer identifiable as Kencyr patrols. Jealous Gemma was always threatening raids on its wealthy sister-city, necessitating at least the Host’s token presence Overcliff.

The lens rotated, grinding.

“Look!” cried Byrne in delight.

There was the Rose Tower, as clear as life. Tiny figures climbed up and down its circular stair. Merchants swarmed around its foot, one of them having his pocket picked. Jame waved her hand over the scene. It rippled across her fingers, which trailed shadows across the floor.

The focus shifted up the tower. Near the top was a ring of projecting thorns from which figures dangled, surrounded by diving birds. They must be hanging just outside the windows of the king’s apartment. Krothen had made good his threat to execute the Gemman raiders captured eleven days ago. Jame had heard rumors that one of them was the son of a Gemman council member.

“Show me home!” Byrne demanded.

Above them, the optomancers’ dome groaned and rotated. The city on the floor revolved, dizzyingly, until Gaudaric’s tower came into sight. The armorer himself was sitting on a window ledge, buffing a helmet. Byrne waved to him.

“Hello, Grandpa!”

Beyond the tower, out of focus, was the rim of the Escarpment.

“If you can see over that,” said Jame, “I’ll really be impressed.”

The image moved close to the rim, closer, and then the view angled sharply down toward the red tiled roofs of the camp.

“It’s all done with mirrors,” said the young man proudly.

Jame watched the flecks that were people swarming around the inner ward where local traders had set up the market that Rue had wanted to visit. A smaller cluster of specks was riding down the southern road, reminding Jame of the unfortunate Knorth ten-command whom that accursed note had sent forth to labor on this, their free day. She remembered the rest of her conversation with Rue, the things said, the things unsaid, and sudden unease gripped her.

“Can you show me the southern road?”

The retreating specks grew, then blurred, but not before she had counted them. There were only nine.

“Byrne, we have to go. Now.”

The boy set up a howl, but she found his arm in the dark and grabbed it. Where was the damned door? The image on the floor cast some reflected light over its surroundings even while its brilliance dazzled the eye. She tripped over a stool, breaking more glass, and lunged toward a faint, rectangular outline.

“Oh, I say!” protested the young man behind her.

“Sorry, sorry . . .”

Then they were outside, on the stair, down in the street. Byrne hung back, wailing with disappointment.

“Look.” Jame stopped short, still gripping his arm. “I apologize for dragging you away, but this is important . . . no, listen: sometimes grownups have to do things that children don’t understand. That’s part of what makes them grownups.”

Byrne wiped a snotty nose. “Like when Grandpa can’t play with me because he has to work?”

“Yes. Now, do you want to grow up or not?”

“Y-yes . . .”

“Then humor me.”

The child snuffled all the way back to the Armorers’ Tower, but stopped dragging his feet. Jame left him there with one of his grandfather’s journeymen.

“Get me down as fast as you can,” she told the liftmen at the rim, and stepped into the cage.

It fell out from under her. She clung to the bars, suspended above the floor, wondering if they had simply dropped it. The camp rushed up to meet her. Finally, her feet touched the floor, and then her knees almost buckled. The cage slammed down onto its platform, raising a billow of dust and causing yelps of alarm from its toll-keepers. Jame staggered out, into the camp.

“Lost your command, have you, Jamethiel?” Fash called out to her, laughing, as she ran past the Caineron barracks.

Her sixth sense told her that Bel-tairi was with the remount herd to the west of the camp while Death’s-head was ranging much farther afield. She called them both. Bel met her at the South Gate. She scrambled onto the mare’s bare back and they set off at a gallop down the south road towards the shadowy Apollynes.

Brier and the rest of the ten-command had gotten perhaps ten miles away from Kothifir by the time that Jame caught up with them, having slowed Bel alternately to a trot and a walk so as not to overtire her. Jame rode up beside Brier Iron-thorn on her tall chestnut gelding. Bel’s head barely came up to his shoulder. Neither spoke for the next mile. The others tactfully fell back to give them privacy.

“You should have told me,” Jame said at last, nudging the Whinno-hir into a brief trot to catch up with the chestnut’s longer stride. Trinity, no wonder people used saddles; her tailbone throbbed with every bounce.

Brier shrugged. “You had other things to do. Besides, why should you waste a day with the rest of us?”

“Because I’m your ten-commander, idiot. I assume that precious note of yours included me.”

“It did. Specifically. In none too polite terms.”

“Which made you all the more determined to leave me out.”

Brier shrugged again. “It was a stupid order, and presumptuous, given who sent it, to demand that the Knorth Lordan do anything. To involve you in such nonsense demeans us all.”

Jame sighed. “If it had only been addressed to me, I might have torn it up the way Gorbel did with his challenge. Rue had it right: this little expedition proves nothing unless we run into a raid. But I am your commander and therefore responsible for you. In the future, we aren’t going to like many of the commands given to us, but we will still have to obey them. Do you have any spare water, by the way?”

Brier unhooked a goatskin pouch from her saddle and handed it down to her. Jame drank, then leaned forward to offer Bel a cupped handful of water. The mare’s pink tongue rasped her fingers dry, once, twice, and again.

“All right,” she said, straightening, a bit defensive. “I’m here without travel rations, tack, or even a weapon, discounting the knife in my boot. When I saw you heading out without me, well, I didn’t stop to think.”

She paused, flicked by her sixth sense. Death’s-head was nearby, but so was something else.

“Horses,” she said. “Strange ones.”

They were finally in the foothills of the Apollynes, their view restricted by rolling hills, shrubs, and giant rocks. Their mounts stirred uneasily as hoofbeats approached both ahead of them and behind. Could it be another Gemman raid like the one that had cost the young seeker her life?

The rathorn Death’s-head roared around a boulder lower down and surged up the incline toward them, his white mane roached up all down his spine and his tail flying like a battle standard.

Simultaneously, black mares erupted from the surrounding rocks with riders also in black, cheches concealing all but hard, bright eyes set in sun-dark faces.

“Karnids,” Brier snapped. “Circle up.”

The cadets backed rump to rump with Bel squeezed in the middle, in danger of being kicked by any one of them. Jame slipped off and dodged between the surrounding horses. Death’s-head swerved toward her, as usual nearly running her over but allowing her to grab his mane and swing onto his back as he surged past. The rathorn pivoted to face the mares, then paused, snorting. Some of them were in season. Their scent drew off his attention as others dashed in.

Jame found herself in the center of a swirling storm of horseflesh. Sleek black heads with red eyes snaked past. White fangs snapped at her. Hands grabbed. She drew her knife and hacked at them, all the time clinging to the rathorn’s mane, forced to ride high by the roached spine. Brier’s shout seemed distant. They were running away with her, the rathorn stumbling over rocky ground, striking almost at random.

Come. You know where you belong.

The image formed in her mind of a tall, black-robed figure lifting his arms to receive her. He wore a single, silver glove.

I hacked off that hand when it reached out between scarlet ribbons to claim me . . .

Death’s-head snorted and steadied.

Not my lady.

Then he stumbled again and threw Jame over his head. She fell among rocks and lay there, dazed. All around her iron hooves struck spark from stone. A hand grabbed her arm and jerked her up across a saddle, knocking the breath out of her. The dimming sky whirled overhead. Then it went black.

Flames leaped in the darkness, and black-clad figures hovered, flickering in and out of sight.

“Do you recant . . . do you profess . . . then we must convince you, for your own good.”

. . . gloves of red-hot wire . . .

Oh god, my hands! Burning, burning . . .

Jame heard the fire crackle and cringed from the memory of searing pain. Ah, my hands . . .

No. Rather, it was her head that ached. Again. She touched it gingerly and encountered a bandage wrapped around her temples.

Branches snapped like fingers in the fireplace and flames leaped. She was in her quarters at the camp and someone—Rue?—had set a blaze there. Jorin stretched out beside her, as usual complaining when her movement disturbed him, then rolling onto his back for a stomach rub. The bed was soft under her, the room warm although the late summer nights were growing cool. A large form eclipsed the fire and threw another log on it. Sparks flared up around him as he turned.

“Awake, are you?”

It was Harn Grip-hard.

“Y-yes, Ran. How long . . .”

“Enough for your ten-command to fight free and get you back here, plus a few hours. It’s passing on toward midnight. You took quite a crack to your head.”

“Those black mares . . . what were they?”

“The Karnids’ mounts? They’re called thorns. Introduce a mare in season to a rathorn stallion and, if he doesn’t kill her, eleven months later you get the blackest, meanest little filly you can imagine. All they lack is their sire’s armor. Now, why were the Karnids after you?”

“I didn’t realize that they were. It was a confusing situation. I don’t even know who grabbed me.”

“That was Iron-thorn again, trying to get you out from underfoot before someone trampled you into jelly. Then your command ran for it, quite sensibly, with that bloody beast of yours mounting rear guard. What were all of you doing so far out to begin with?”

Jame told him about the challenge.

He snorted, went to the door, and spoke to someone, probably Rue.

Jame lay back, thinking. Why had she had that sudden image of the Master reaching out for her?

Come. You know where you belong.

Gerridon thought that she belonged with him, in Perimal Darkling, as the new Dream-weaver. What did the Karnids have to do with that?

Then there had been that flash of Tori at Urakarn, under the Karnid torture that had nearly crippled him and left his hands scarred for life. Had he just woken at Gothregor, that nightmare memory still seared into his mind? Once again, it seemed, their dreams had crossed.

Harn stumped back bringing a dark, sullen third-year cadet.

“Char here says that neither he nor his friends sent you any such message.”

“We’ve been waiting to tell you, ever since we first heard,” said Char, sounding exasperated. “We would never have made up such a lame-brained challenge.”

Jame snorted. “As if any of them make any sense. Is this how you test your juniors, with stupid commands? We each find our own rite of passage. Do you agree?”

“Well, yes, of course, but . . .”

“But nothing. Let the other houses make fools of themselves if they must. Here and now, I’m enforcing my brother’s order and forbidding it within the Knorth.”

The cadet stiffened, at first with outrage and then as if drawn further up against his will by her sudden tone of authority. Here, after all, was not only a second-year master-ten but the putative commander of the Knorth barracks and the Highlord’s heir.

“Yes . . . Lordan,” he said, saluted, and left.

Harn drew up a chair and sat down beside the fire. Wooden legs groaned under his weight.

“So,” he said heavily, looking into the flames. “We have to ask ourselves: who among the Host would want to lure you into such a trap, presumably in collusion with the Karnids?”

“If you’re right.”

“Accept for a moment that I am.”

Jame considered her various enemies, in particular Fash, but how would a Caineron cadet newly arrived at Kothifir have connections with Urakarn? Further thought along those lines made her head ache anew.

“We’ll know in time,” she said, dismissing the matter.

“You mean, when he—or she—tries again.”

“If it takes that. Harn, why have you been avoiding me?”

He shifted in his seat.

“It’s been that noticeable, has it?”

“To anyone with half an eye. You can’t think that as Knorth Lordan I want to take my brother’s place as Commandant of the Host.”

He snorted. “A fine mess that would be.”

“Agreed. So?”

Harn fidgeted some more, making the chair’s joints protest. “When Blackie first joined the Host, I didn’t treat him very well. I was a fool.”

“You didn’t know him then. I don’t think he knew himself yet. It takes fire to forge steel.”

. . . oh God, my hands . . . !

He gave her a sidelong look under unkempt brows. “And what fires have you known, heh?”

“A few, if you can call them that. Not enough to be my brother’s equal.”

He snorted. “No doubt. I saw him tested early, before Urakarn. He was challenged too, by the Caineron. Burr warned me. We burst into Genjar’s quarters to find Blackie standing, hooded, on a shaky stool with his hands tied behind him. The other end of the rope was thrown over a rafter and knotted around his neck.”

“Yes, I know.”

He shot her another glance. “He told you about it? That surprises me. I nearly flared.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Around Blackie, I seldom do. That was no such fire as the one to come, but it showed his mettle, if I hadn’t been too blind to see it. In those days, his strength lay in endurance. In you, now, we all feel the power building, like that poor booby of a third-year, when you let it out.”

Now he had embarrassed her. “I can’t help what I am, only what I may become, and maybe not even that. I’m a nemesis, Harn. Yes, potentially one of the Three. And I don’t know yet what I might destroy.”

The big Kendar rose and stood over her, a hulking shape edged with light.

“A nemesis, eh? That explains a lot of things. And your brother?”

“A creator, not that he knows it yet.”

“Too bad there aren’t three of you. Now, that would be something. Are you Blackie’s destroyer?”

Jame forced herself not to shrink in his ominous shadow. They had known each other at Tentir, but here things were different, closer to the bone. His voice was mild, but his big hands unconsciously flexed. He would kill to protect Torisen. The thought wasn’t foremost in his mind, but it lurked close to his berserker nature, and she had seen how suddenly that could be triggered.

She wrapped her hands around one of his (Trinity, how easily he could have crushed her fingers), and held it until its twitching stilled.

“I will never willingly harm my brother, or you, or anyone else whom I love.”

He relaxed slowly and freed his hand. “Well, no. At least not intentionally. You’ll care what you do and take responsibility for your actions afterward, however daft they are. I see that now. What more can one ask, eh? I’ll bid you good night, then, my lady. Sleep well.”

Jame did, although at one point she half-woke to hear Jorin growling. In the morning, Rue discovered that a note addressed to the lordan had been slipped under the door. Jame unfolded it and read the four-word unsigned message:

“Leave,” it said, “and never return.”