But without his name, how could she? As far as she knew, they had never met. He melted in her grasp, crying, crying, as if at the loss of his very soul. She could have wept herself in frustration and distress.
Damn our blood anyway, and god-damn our god, who cursed us with it. Oh, Tori, between us what have we done?
"What is love, Jamie? What is honor?"
"Ah, Tirandys, Senethari. . ."
His voice came from somewhere behind her, at least as far away as the eastern window although it might have been farther still. The predawn glimmer cast his faint, attenuated shadow on the steep inner pitch of the roof. Her own darker shadow huddled, shapeless, at its feet. Try as she might, however, she could neither rise to embrace him nor even turn her head to see once again that beloved face, now lost forever.
Then she remembered what poor use she had made of his training.
"Tentir has rejected me. I have failed you, my teacher, my mother's half-brother, you who damned himself for her love and for mine."
"Ah, not so." On the wall, the shadow bent down. Jame could almost feel the phantom touch of his hand, stroking her hair, and her eyes stung with unshed tears. "Where I failed, you need not, nor have you yet. But oh, child, you may."
"Senethari, how? Please tell me!"
He laughed, and it was a sound to break the heart. "Who am I to judge you, child—I, whom honor's paradox destroyed? There is only this: Keep faith with those who keep faith with you. And beware: our house has failed in this before now. Already, your brother is in danger of failing again, however good his intentions. How can he not, as long as he denies his true nature? And you, who have long guessed what you may become, beware as well. Great power brings greater responsibility, and the greatest abuses. This place has unfinished business with those of our blood. I only tell you what you have already guessed. Some dreams do no more than that."
His voice faded as he spoke into a faint crackle as if of dried leaves or of fire. "Oh child, remember me."
"Senethari, wait!"
Jame struggled, hardly knowing if she wished to wake up or to sink deeper into sleep, even into death, if by doing so she could follow him, the only person who had ever accepted her knowing fully what she was.
His shadow faded as the light on the wall grew. He was returning to his pyre. Oh, not again the heat and stench and bitter taste of ashes on the wind . . .
Jame threw aside her blanket and jumped up, only to trip and fall over something that yelped. For a moment, struggling in folds of bedding that seemed to fight back, she was confused: Which changer is burning? Whose beauty have I stolen? What am I becoming?
Then her claws hooked on the cloth and ripped it away. Light blinded her. As she stood there panting, she realized that she was staring not into the flames of a pyre but directly into the newly risen sun.
"Do you mind?" said the roll of blankets at her feet. Graykin emerged from it, tousled and indignant. "The next time you have a nightmare, kindly leave me out of it."
Outside, the morning's ram's horn blared and in the dormitory two floors below, feet hit the floor.
Jame dressed quickly and went down the stair into the hall. Only when she met Vant's astonished gaze did she remember: she no longer belonged at Tentir. She sat down, feeling suddenly numb, and stared without seeing it at the bowl of porridge that a cadet thumped down before her.
Rootless and roofless. . .
So the Brandan Maledight Brenwyr had cursed her at Gothregor, within her family's own stronghold and under the eyes of its unforgiving dead.
Blood and bone. . .
She couldn't help what she was. Perhaps she couldn't live with it either.
Cursed be and cast out. . . .
But where did one go from here?
Dully, she became aware of a buzz spreading through the hall. Rue nudged her. "Lady, d'you hear? The Randon Council has finally set the mark!"
"Well, what is it?" others exclaimed eagerly, craning to hear.
"One hundred and forty!"
Jame looked up sharply. Around her, a few faces had blanched, but over all a sigh of relief echoed through the room.
I'm in, she thought blankly. Brenwyr's curse has failed, at least for the minute. Then she wondered, Why am I in?
They could easily have stuck to one hundred thirty and been rid of her. Everyone knew that the cut-off score was fluid, and she had missed the original mark by mere points. Perhaps, after all, Tentir was going to treat her like any other cadet-candidate, which was all she had asked, and more than she had hoped for.
Suddenly ravenous, she wolfed down the congealing porridge, and thought it the best thing she had ever tasted.
In the evening, the candidates would be initiated into the randon college as cadets. Until then, they were free to prepare.
Breakfast and morning assembly done, Rue hauled Jame up to the third story lordan's quarters in search of suitable clothing for her to wear for the ceremony. While the straw-haired cadet rummaged through the chests, Jame sat in shirtsleeves on the wide, raised hearth with needle and white thread, trying to knot stitch the rathorn emblem into her black token scarf.
Graykin prowled about the apartment waiting for Rue to leave, palpably jealous that she had claimed Jame's attention first. Jorin followed him, pouncing at a ribbon snagged and trailing unnoted from his boot.
"You should clean all of this out and move in." He glared at the walls of boxes blocking either end of the room. "There have got to be apartments behind all that junk. A master bedroom. Servants' quarters. Real beds."
"I like the attic," said Jame, frowning over her stitches. "It's airy."
"Oh, it's that, all right. The wind blows in one end and out the other. You just wait until winter. Sweet Trinity, part of it doesn't even have a roof."
Rootless and roofless . . .
"I don't like being confined, and I don't like this place." She sneezed into her scarf but, at a glare from Graykin, forbore wiping her nose with it. "It smells. Besides, it gives me bad dreams. Who lived here anyway?"
"Your uncle, lady. The last Knorth Lordan."
"Ouch." Jame had stuck the needle into her thumb. "And who was that?"
Rue had turned aside to examine the shreds of a silk shirt. She didn't want to say the name, Jame realized. Interesting.
"Who?" she prompted, removing the needle.
The cadet tossed away the ruined shirt, and the name of its former owner with it. "Greshan, nick-named Greed-heart at least among his Kendar."
"Did you know how our father came to power?" Tori had asked Jame in the ruins of Kithorn. "His older brother, the Knorth Lordan, was killed in training at Tentir."
Something very bad had happened in this airless, windowless room. Jame regarded a large stain on the wooden floor. It was barely a shadow now, sunk deep into the grain, but someone had bled here, perhaps to death. She remembered her dream that first night at Tentir and shivered.
Dear little Gangrene.
Ugh.
In the past her sleep had sometimes been troubled, but rarely by dire visions. Tori was the far-seer, not her. Yet that last winter at Gothregor she had dreamed truly that Graykin had fallen into Caldane's hands and that Bane was on his way to the Riverland. It was less remarkable that she and Tori had shared certain dreams; as children, they had done so constantly, thinking nothing of it. Perhaps rejoining her people was waking dormant powers in her. If so, she didn't much care for them.
Graykin turned up his nose at the pile of clothes that Rue had set aside as potentially salvageable, the plainest and most practical among all that spoiled finery.
"You should at least dress according to your rank. How about this?"
He had picked up the embroidered jacket.
Rue stared. "Why, that must be the Lordan's Coat."
"What, my uncle's?"
"Not just his, lady. Every Knorth heir for generations has worn it, and generations of Knorth Kendar have mended it."
"Here," said Jame. "Let me see that."
Graykin gave it to her, reluctantly, and she spread it out on her knees.
Although dimmed by a half century of dust, the needlework was exquisite. Tiny stitches covered every inch of the surface in shades from the autumn gold of a birch leaf to the phantom blue of a shadow on snow, from the sharp green of spring grass to the deep crimson of heart's desire. Lines swooped and curved. Fantasies of shape and color swirled, blending into each other. Half-seen images came and went with every shift of light.
"Careful!" said Graykin sharply as threads snapped at her touch.
If the coat was truly as old as Tentir, Jame thought, gingerly turning it over, probably little of its original fabric remained. The earliest records must long since either have been repaired or stitched over, as with the house banners in the great hall. Nearly fifty years of neglect hadn't helped. Without thinking, she tugged at a hair caught in the threads, and jumped as the coat writhed on her knees as if in pain.
"Sweet Trinity. What's this?"
Rue bent to look. "Well, they do say that every lordan since the beginning has worn this coat, and that each of them has added something . . . er . . . personal to it."
"You mean," said Graykin, with a queasy smirk, "that this is not only an heirloom but also a 'hair-loom'?"
All three regarded the strand in question. It was short, coarse, and irrepressibly curly.
Rue clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle.
Graykin blushed.
"Hmm," said Jame, with a raised eyebrow. "The Kendar really hated my dear uncle, didn't they? I wonder why."
"I wonder . . ." began Rue, then stopped.
"What?"
"Well, just before your uncle died, the White Lady disappeared."
"Who?"
"The Knorth Matriarch's Whinno-hir mare, Bel-tairi, sister to Lord Ardeth's Brithany. She left Valentir, where she was visiting a new great-grand-foal among the herd, but she never reached Gothregor. There are rumors that m'lord Greshan met her in the wilderness and . . . well, did something to her. He and Lady Kinzi weren't on very good terms at the time. Then news came that the lordan was dead, and his father the Highlord soon after him. The whole thing was a right mess, by all accounts."
"The senior randon call her 'The Shame of Tentir,' " said Graykin. "Why, I don't know. So I listen," he added crossly, seeing Rue's expression. "Is it my fault that they talk and I hear things? They also say that she has unfinished business with the Knorth and that having you here as lordan may be stirring things up."
"Unfinished business," murmured Jame, turning over the coat. So Tirandys had said: I only tell you what you have already guessed. It seemed, since she had rejoined her people, that she kept stepping into one ancient mess after another. Trinity, didn't her family ever clean up after itself? Then too, what was she to make of the pale lady who had called her Kinzi-kin and vanished like a ghost, leaving hoof-prints in the turf? Unfinished business indeed, and here in her hands, perhaps, was another piece of it.
The coat's peacock blue silk lining had at some point been soaked with a dark fluid. It was also ripped.
"A knife in the back?" Jame asked, only half joking. However, the tear seemed too ragged, its edges frayed, and she found no corresponding slit in the outer fabric.
Rue added the coat to her armload of saved clothing. "At least we know now why it stinks. I'll try to clean these, m'lady, and hope they dry by tonight. In the fire-timber hall, they might. Then we'll see about cutting them down to your size and repairing the coat. After all," she added, seeing Jame's expression, "it's a piece of history."
"And, in its way, a masterpiece. All right, all right. As for the rest, I have mended my own clothes before, you know."
Being waited on made her nervous. In the Women's Halls of Gothregor, the petty tyranny of servants had made her feel ignorant and stupid. Now it was happening again.
"Oh." She ruefully regarded the scarf. Her attempt at the rathorn crest looked like an upside-down boot with two spikes growing out of its sole; and, as usual, she had managed to sew her gloved fingertips together.
Rue left, grinning.
"If you ever want a lock of my hair," Jame called after her, "just ask! And don't forget your own scarf."
The cadet had done her needlework the night before, and a very fine job of it too, but someone had stolen it. Jame hoped the barrack wasn't going to be plagued with a petty thief.
Graykin watched Rue's departure wistfully. "Smelly or not," he said, "there goes a royal coat."
His tone reminded Jame that, as Caldane's son, he was half Highborn. However, his illegitimacy and his mother's Southron blood barred him from even the trappings of that rank. She didn't think that he was missing much. Graykin, however, clearly felt otherwise.
"How you look and act reflects on the dignity of your house," he said stubbornly, with a discontented glance at her battered face and the purple bruises on her wrists where Harn had gripped them, all affronts to his own dignity as well. Fortunately, he had come in too late the night before to see what the rest of her looked like.
"Enough small talk," she said, gingerly biting off tangled threads, wincing as they caught on the raw gap in her front teeth. "Report."
As she had suspected, he had spent the past three days exploring the secret passages of Old Tentir, eavesdropping whenever possible.
"I would have told you last night that you'd qualified," he said with a sniff, "but you were pretending to be asleep. Anyway, the Randon Council set the mark at one hundred and forty, then waited for the Commandant to take them off the hook. But he didn't. Now they've got their breeches in a twist trying to decide how to deal with you. The Caineron claim that you've been kept on for the amusement of their lordan—his name is Gorbel, by the way."
"Gorbelly?"
"Close enough. Fun and games aside, they mean to humiliate your brother through you—and remember, the Highlord can't do anything about it short of jerking you out of here."
The college has its own rules, Torisen had told her at Kithorn. If you're hurt there, I can't even demand your blood-price.
"And that," Graykin was saying, "would be a victory for just about everyone except the Knorth. The general belief is that by admitting Gorbel without testing him, Sheth is tacitly saying that his master's son can get away with anything. The other randon aren't happy about that. They think it damages the college's integrity; but these are intensely political times."
"I have noticed," said Jame dryly.
"By the same token, although he let you in, they don't think Sheth will let you stay to the end. He's covering his ass with both lords, as it were, giving the Highlord's sister a chance but at the same time turning a blind eye to the Caineron lordan."
Sheth Sharp-tongue must be under intense pressure, Jame thought, to accept his lord's belief that honor meant nothing but obedience. Honor's Paradox had destroyed Tirandys. If Caineron could corrupt Tentir through its commander, what chance did the rest of the Kencyrath have?
"The consensus, though, is that you won't last. What Highborn girl could? The Randir called you a freak."
"Huh. They should talk. These passages in the old fortress must be giving you lots of chances to spy."
"I am your faithful sneak, mistress," he said with a mocking cringe.
"Don't call either of us that," she said sharply. "The Mistress was a different Jamethiel, and you're my . . . my loyal servant. Damn. That doesn't sound right either."
"Pretty titles, dirty hands."
His hands, she noticed, were remarkably dirty.
"Pick out some new clothes for yourself, while we're at it," she told him. "You look as if you've been dragged up a chimney backwards."
"Hand-me-downs," he said with disgust, kicking at a pile of moldy finery.
"I seldom wear anything else. These passages . . . what are they like?"
"Dark, narrow, filthy."
He wanted to keep them to himself, she thought. Knowledge was power, and the Caineron Bastard had precious littl
e of either. Neither did she. "Once you said you would never deceive me, although there were many ways you could within the bounds of honor."
He glared at her, caught by his own pledge.
"All right, all right! From what I've seen so far, the hidden ways are much more direct than the public ones. I'll show you if you like," he added ungraciously. "I may . . . er . . . even have found the brat's hidden room. At least I thought, once, that something was keeping pace with me all down one wall, on the other side. I could hear it muttering and clawing at the stones. Then it started to pound on them. Whatever-it-is was big. And strong. The stones shook. And I'll tell you this too: The kitchen staff lays aside raw joints of meat for it. I saw them do it when I was . . . ah . . . borrowing some food. I have to eat too, you know."
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