As he fell, a cadet grabbed both her cap and a handful of the hair coiled beneath.
The sergeant glared as she interrupted the lesson's flow to disengage the other's grip. "You should cut that short, lady. Anyone who can grab it in a fight is going to have you at a disadvantage."
Grinning, the cadet tugged. Hard. Jame bent his wrist until he yelped with pain and let go. Then she twisted the black skein of hair back on top of her head and defiantly tugged the cap down over it. Other randon including Harn had said the same thing, admittedly with reason, but be damned if she was going to lose the only attractive feature she had left.
The lesson continued.
Throw, fall, change . . . and here was Gorbel.
This was the first time that the rotation of classes had brought them up against each other. He was younger than she had thought. Breathing hard, hair plastered with sweat to his bulging forehead, the Caineron lordan stared at her.
"You," he said heavily.
"Me," Jame agreed. She expected a sneer, but he looked merely exhausted and dogged. "Ready?"
In answer, he grabbed her jacket and threw her awkwardly. For a moment, she thought his legs were going to buckle under them both. On impulse, when her turn came, she threw him near the edge of the mat. His friends pulled him off, laughing at his half-hearted attempt to resist.
That left only a half dozen cadets in the game, Brier Iron-thorn among them. The Southron flowed through the moves, the only sign of effort a sheen of sweat that made her dark face gleam like polished wood. Her expression was calm and remote, as if her thoughts dwelt on the far side of the moon. It didn't change when one of the Caineron Kendar first threw, then kicked her viciously in the ribs.
Jame had heard that muffled thud before over the course of the practice without realizing what it was. Four times? Five? More? She should have recognized the hatred in the Kendars' eyes for one of their own who had escaped their lord's cruel grip. Their masters snickered. Her own ten stirred and muttered; they had seen what was happening long before she had. So must the instructor, but he had done nothing. Perhaps he felt that a turn-collar deserved no better. Brier picked herself up more slowly than before. That last kick had hurt.
Jame felt rage stir in her. Careful, she thought, as her current partner backed hastily away. Don't over-react. Then, the hell I won't.
She stalked across the mat toward the Kendar, who shrank back and looked quickly away. Here was one who either could not or would not met her eyes. They hadn't been matched before; he had been avoiding her. She clapped, and he jumped like a spooked horse.
He was taller than she was by at least a head. She had to reach up to touch his face and turn it, nails out only enough to prick although they still drew tiny drops of blood.
"Look at me." Her voice roughened with the under-note of a purr. "There. That's better. One should always meet one's enemies face to face, don't you think?"
He was a handsome, almost pretty boy, or would have been without terror distorting his face. A sudden stench announced that he had lost control of his bowels. She tapped him lightly on the cheek and let her hands slide down to grip his sleeves.
"Now, let's play. Throw me, or try."
Stiffly, he assumed the proper stance, took a deep breath, and turned to lift her over his hip. She leaned back and shifted her weight so that his buttocks shot past her. Nervous laughter rippled through the cadets. They had often played this trick on each other, but the Caineron was too rattled to counter it.
"Again."
White face beginning to blotch with red, he tried, and was caught off-balance, bent backward with her knee in the small of his back.
"Again."
This time she moved even as he did, rolling over his arm, landing on her feet in a crouch before him. Her grip shifted to a lock on his wrist. She twisted. He somersaulted over this fulcrum of pain and slammed down on the stone floor.
"There," said Jame, straightening up. "Isn't that better?"
The instructor clapped twice. "That's enough," he said. His voice shook and so did he. "Never, ever humiliate a fellow cadet that way."
"If not respect for one, then why for any?"
He gaped at her, mouth opening and closing. At another time, it would have been funny.
"Let it go," said Brier behind her.
Jame glanced at her. "If you wish. For now."
Dismissed, the rest of the command except Rue scattered to practice on their own until dinner.
Brier gave Jame an unreadable look. "What you did back there during the lesson, lady . . . it didn't help."
With that, she turned and walked away.
Jame stared after her. Dammit, the Southron was right. Terrorizing Kendar only made them more stubborn unless it broke them altogether, and what right had she to do either? Blood right, some would say. She was Highborn, and had just demonstrated everything that she hated about her own kind's casual abuse of power, to someone who had already suffered far too much from it.
"Has she had to put up with much more of this harassment?" Jame asked Rue.
The cadet squirmed. "A lot," she admitted, "usually not so obvious. She says she can deal with it. I wasn't supposed to tell you."
It seemed that either she scared people shitless or they thought she was too weak to protect her own. What a choice. Jame sighed. In every way, the road ahead was longer than she had realized.
Chapter X: Battles Old and New
Summer 41-2
I
Someone screamed.
For a blurry moment, half asleep and half awake, Jame thought it might have been herself.
She had dreamed again that she sat on the hearth of the over-heated Lordan's chambers, drinking and laughing drunkenly with that sly Randir, Roane. A servant had gone to fetch "dear little Gangrene" from the dormitory below. Anticipation stirred in her gut, and lower down. It was a long time since she had indulged in the old, sweet midnight games with her darling little brother. The poor fool probably thought he was safe here at the college.
Ha. You are my meat, boy, and Father has given you to me to devour, just as he will all the Kencyrath with his death. May it be soon. I am empty, and I hunger.
A hesitant footstep on the threshold and there he stood, flanked by two guards, the boy Ganth Grayling with sick terror on his face. Out of his eyes, however, stared someone else, as she did out of Greshan's. Sweet Trinity. Torisen.
Then had come the scream that had woken her, but not from either of them.
From below, Jame heard Vant's voice raised in a shout of exasperation. She grabbed the first clothing that came to hand, a long-tailed shirt, and pulled it on as she went quickly down the central stair to the second floor with Jorin dashing on ahead.
The dormitory was divided into two sections. To the left, as one faced the square, were the ten-commanders' individual rooms. To the right, each squad slept in a canvas cubicle rather like camping out inside, except that during the day the partitions were folded back against the walls. On a hot summer night like this, Jame would have expected them to be left open to catch any stray gasp of cool air. However, the Kendar apparently suffered less from extremes of temperature than the Highborn, for which she envied them. If only it would rain!
As she threaded through the canvas maze, pulling her long, black hair free of the shirt and letting it spill loose over her shoulders, Jame heard sleepy voices within raised in protest:
"Not again."
"Let us sleep, can't you?"
"Somebody, please, gag him with a dirty sock."
A scowling, tousled head popped out between canvas flaps. "Do you mind . . . oh!"
"Go back to sleep," Jame told him, and went on toward a murmur of voices. It came from the quarters closest to the southern fireplace, a position of honor held by her own ten.
"If you can't keep your filthy nightmares to yourself," Vant was saying with a kind of throttled fury, "go home. We don't need your sort here."
He spoke to the new cadet, Niall, who
was sitting up in bed, knees clasped tightly under his chin. Thin and quiet by day, he looked gaunt and haunted by candle-light, and he was shivering. The rest of Jame's ten had gathered around him. Brier, as usual, held aloof but watchful in the background.
"You leave him alone, Ten," snapped Mint, to a mutter of agreement from the others. She sat on the edge of the cot and put an arm around the boy's hunched shoulders. "If you'd seen what he saw, you'd probably wet your bed every night."
Before Vant could answer, they all became aware of Jame.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"Nothing that need concern you, lady." Vant gave her a smile that was mostly bared teeth. "Sorry you were disturbed." He turned back to Niall. "As for you . . ."
"This is my ten-command, you know." Jame slipped around him and perched on the chest at the foot of Niall's cot while Jorin dived under it and began happily to play with whatever he found there. "Now, what was it you saw?"
When the cadet only gawked at her, Mint answered.
"Lady, last winter while the rest of us stayed snug with the garrison at Gothregor (including you, Ten), Niall stowed away in a supply wagon and went south with the Host. He served as a messenger in the battle at the Cataracts. We don't know exactly what he saw there—he won't tell us—but it must have been awful. Now he's afraid that he'll fail Tentir because he can't stop the nightmares. He thinks only cowards have bad dreams."
Vant started to jeer, but Jame stopped him.
Not another Kest, she thought, lost for lack of the right word.
"I was at the Cataracts," she said. "It was terrible. The noise, the smell . . . the very ground shook. Then the Waster Horde came, wave on wave, breaking against the shield wall, until the grass was slimy with blood and all the horses screamed. The whole thing was a nightmare. Brier, you were there too, weren't you?"
In the shadows, the big Kendar stirred. "I was, but after the battle."
"So you missed the fun." Vant made it a sneer, as if glad at last to score a point against his rival.
"Fun?" Brier considered the word. "Not exactly. I was with the Southern Host when m'lord Pereden marched it out into the Wastes to meet the advancing Horde. Three million of them, some fifty thousand of us. Our center column clashed head on and was ripped apart. The sand drank our blood and the Wasters ate our flesh. I saw Commander Larch flayed and dismembered. It took her a long, long time to die. I was there when Pereden—" she paused, hunting for the right word, saying it at last with a curious twist—"fell. We didn't know that the left and right columns had survived. Those few of us who escaped joined one or the other of them and harried the Horde all the way to the Cataracts."
"Which is why," added Jame, "the Northern Host was able to reach the bottleneck at the Escarpment first. Otherwise, that would have been the end of us all."
There was silence for a moment as the three unlikely veterans remembered and the rest tried to imagine what horrors they had seen. For once, not even Vant could think of anything to say. Jame heard a murmur on the other side of the canvas wall and soft voices saying, "Hush!" The other ten-commands were listening.
Distant thunder grumbled and the air shifted restlessly. The walls stirred. Under the bed, Jorin engaged in mortal combat with a stray sock.
"Did you kill anyone in battle, lady?" asked Erim.
"Probably." Jame grimaced. "I had Kin-Slayer, y'see, and was trying to hack through the thick of things to give it to my brother. If ever a sword thirsted for blood, it's that one."
"And you actually managed to hang on to it?"
Vant, rallying, caused a ripple of nervous laughter. In practice, one way or another, Jame almost always managed to lose her weapon.
"This one I could barely get rid of," she answered grimly. "I tell you, that damn blade likes to kill, and it can cut through anything . . . if you know the trick."
The "trick" was to wear Father's emerald signet ring on one's sword-hand, as she had discovered by accident. She had tried to tell her brother, but didn't know if he had taken her seriously.
"Do you ever dream about it, lady?" asked Niall, looking at her askance. "The battle, I mean."
Jame considered. "Occasionally as a bloody muddle, which most of it was. Sometimes, though, it's all too clear. I have to get Kin-Slayer to my brother or he will die, but I don't know where he is and there are so many people in the way. Some of them are changers. They wear Tori's face and beg me to throw them the sword. When I don't, they change into my father and curse me: 'Child of darkness, filthy Shanir, die and be damned . . .' "
They were all staring at her.
"And then," she finished, somewhat lamely, "I wake up."
Quill's face had twisted with concentration. "Isn't there a song about a randon who shrieked all night long in his sleep before a battle, until his Kendar had to stuff tufts of wool in their ears? The next day he fought like a demon, but in silence because he was too hoarse to make a sound."
"I remember that one," said Killy eagerly. "He got behind the enemy and cut down a score of them before they even knew he was there. With everyone else roaring battle-cries, y'see, they didn't hear him until it was too late."
"Another Lawful Lie," said Vant scornfully.
"Maybe." Jame considered the story. "To me, though, it has the ring of truth."
"Then you don't think I'm a coward, lady?"
"Because you have nightmares? Of course not. Everyone has them. The more you see, the less these particular ones should bother you; but if you start running away from them, you may never stop."
Like Tori, in a way. He wasn't running now, but somehow he had been stopped dead in his tracks, and that wasn't good either.
She roused herself. "Enough. Go to sleep, all of you, and dream sweetly if you can. If you can't, well, it isn't the end of the world. And if you give Niall punishment duty for this," she added softly to Vant in passing, "you're a bigger fool than I thought . . . if that's possible."
A breath of fresh air met her on the stairs. As she reached the attic, the hole in the roof briefly flooded with light, followed at a slight interval by the thunder's growl. Jorin retreated to a corner; he disliked storms and hated getting wet. Jame crossed to the hole and leaned out of it.
The storm was approaching from the north, rumbling down the throat of the valley. Snake-tongues of lightning flickered across the sky, throwing the mountain sides into sharp relief and making the river gleam like its name.
Watching it come, Jame considered nightmares, specifically the one from which Niall's scream had woken her. No one now alive knew what had happened in that close, hot room, the night that Greshan had summoned his younger brother up to it; yet, somehow, the memory lingered, like the stink of the gorgeous coat that her uncle had worn, now resigned to a chest in his former apartment. Each dream brought her closer to some terrible truth. For herself, whatever it was, she felt she could endure it, but could Tori? It hadn't occurred to her until that night, when she had seen his eyes set in their father's terrified face, that it might also be dragging her brother along, one nightmare at a time, toward an ultimate horror.
Damn and blast. Tori was stronger than her in so many ways, but not in this.
The air fidgeted this way and that, now hot, now deliciously cool, lifting tendrils of Jame's loose hair. Leaves began to fret. Now came the wind, roaring in the tree tops, making boughs toss until the whole forest heaved like an ocean gone mad. A blinding flash, a boom like the end of time, and rain fell in a shower of icy arrows mixed with stinging hailstones.
Well, they would cope. Whatever haunted Tentir wasn't stronger than both of them, as long as they supported each other.
She stayed, drinking in the tumult, until at last the storm rumbled off down the Riverland, and one by one the stars crept out of hiding.
II
At breakfast, Niall still looked haggard but more in control of himself, answering her raised eyebrow with a slight, shy duck of his head. Talk and laughter moved freely back and forth across the hall
, as if the previous night's storm had broken more than the oppressive heat. Only Vant looked sour, as if he had swallowed something nasty. Jame sat at the head of her table and Brier at the foot. They both tended to be quiet in company, but for the first time Jame felt included in the group even while it respected her reserve. She wondered if Brier Iron-thorn felt the same way.
Then she remembered: the Southron had said that she had been there when Pereden . . . fell. What an odd, ambiguous word. Did Timmon know? Should she tell him? Better not.
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