The bow-legged horse-master jerked a cadet out of the way. "D'you want your face flattened like mine, youngling? You and you. Pin him down."
A sergeant and a third year cadet threw themselves on the horse's head and neck.
"Steady, steady. . ."
The master shook out a coil of rope and expertly snaked it around the far hind leg near the hock. "Now, let go!"
They sprang back.
The master pulled, aided a moment later by Harn, and the horse crashed over in a cloud of dust. It rested for moment, looking dazed, then lurched to its feet. Harn grunted approval when he saw that it was uninjured and turned to walk away. Jame followed him, rubbing her ear.
"Listen," he said, rounding on her. "When a horse gets cast in a stall like that, it can't get up by itself. It will struggle until it dies."
"Ran, I'm sorry I laughed. It wasn't funny at all. And yes, I did nearly flare at you."
"Huh." He gave her a brooding look. "But you didn't."
"Ran," she said as he turned again to leave, "tell me about the White Lady."
He swung back, so suddenly that she shrank from him. "Why?"
"Because I've seen her, first outside my quarters, calling to me, and then beside Perimal's Cauldron."
To her surprise, behind its garnish of grizzled stubble his broad face paled. "I said your being here was madness, and now this."
"Now what, ran?" she asked, bewildered by his agitation. Did he mean to hit her again, burst into tears, or faint? "Has it something to do with her being called 'The Shame of Tentir,' and why that, anyway?"
He loomed over her like a cliff face, as if poised to crush her questions with his sheer bulk, and perhaps her as well.
"Just leave!" he roared down at her, causing heads to turn across the stable and Jorin to bolt. "D'you hear me? Get out!"
She stared after him as he stumped off.
The horse-master came trotting up to see what all the shouting was about. "Now, now, remember what the Commandant said about not driving your instructors mad, lady," he said, adding, "not that it looks like with Harn Grip-hard you'd have far to go. What in Trinity's name d'you say to him?"
"Just that I'd seen the White Lady. Was that so awful?"
The master's shaggy eyebrows rose, as if attempting to scale the mottled heights of his bald head. "Well, it's a surprise, given that the poor thing's been dead these forty years. And no, I'll not tell you how or why if the senior randon of your own house won't. I've heard tell, though, that if a Knorth sees her, it means they're going to die."
"Oh," said Jame, digesting this. "Ran, did Harn just expel me from Tentir?"
"No, no." He clapped her bracingly on the shoulder as he might have to reassure an nervous filly. "You've still got a mort of tests to fail and horses to fall off. All things in good time."
V
The hunt returned at dusk the next day in shocking disarray.
Everyone in it was muddy and bruised, with ripped clothes and shattered weapons. The dogs limped, heads down, and most of the horses had gone lame. The Commandant led his own mount with a sergeant swaying on its back, his head wrapped in bloody rags. Other injured randon entered supported by friends or on makeshift litters.
"Trinity," said Harn, staring, as were most of the cadets who had gathered as the morning before at the practice ground rail, this time in stunned silence. "That damned colt did all of this?"
"Hardly any of it," answered Sheth, helping down the sergeant. Members of the man's house rushed to help him. "I've sent for a healer," the Commandant told them. "There are some broken limbs. Otherwise, this is the worst of it.
"No, not the rathorn," he repeated to Harn, preoccupied, as he turned to help the other wounded. "We ran into a tree, or rather a tree ran over us."
The rest of the story had to wait until dinner in the officers' mess. Nearly everyone attended, bandages, splints, and all. A healer, borrowed from the Scrollsmen's College at Mount Alban, was with the injured sergeant. Otherwise, even the Commandant was present for once, although this was a mixed blessing: no one dared to speak of the hunt before he did and there he sat, calmly sipping the wine that he had ordered served instead of the customary cider, clad in a coat of rich, purple velvet with trimmed with royal blue. Unlike most of his fellow huntsmen, he had found time to bathe.
Harn too drank, more deeply than usual. He had been rattled by Jameth's sighting of the White Lady and, no doubt, had made a fool of himself, luckily during the Commandant's absence. Since then, he had had time to think. Whatever his feelings about Bel-tairi and the terrible events following her death, or disappearance, or whatever-it-had-been, he felt now that he had underestimated the Knorth Lordan. It was hard not to see her as a frighteningly vulnerable version of her brother or as a fragile child when compared to her fellow Kendar cadets, but Bran's news heartened him.
On the other hand, as usual, he found Sheth's reticence maddening. At last he slammed down his glass, ignoring it when it shattered. His neighbors flinched at the flying shards.
"Well?" he growled. "D'you mean to sit there all night smirking like a cat in cream? What happened, man?"
Sheth picked a splinter of glass out of his venison stew and laid it beside his plate. "Patience never was one of your virtues, was it, Ran Harn? All right."
He folded his hands and spoke as if to them, a thin smile wryly twisting his saturnine face. "As you may have guessed, we saw precious little of the rathorn. His trail kept ending up in a hopeless muddle, crossed, re-crossed, and crossed yet again. Clearly, he was playing with us and no doubt enjoying himself enormously. Then too, we kept stumbling on stray patches of weirding and the occasional case of arboreal drift."
Someone laughed, like Harn a bit drunk. "S'true. I got caught in a creeping grove of sumac and was nearly carried off, Trinity knows where."
"You were lucky," said another morosely, his hands such a welter of bandages that he could only glare at his untouched meal. "The cloud-of-thorns were on the move too. So were the wild roses. And the raspberry canes."
"Ah, the thorns of life," murmured Sheth. "So sweet. So sharp. Things didn't get really . . . er . . . interesting, though, until last night. We were bedding down when we first heard it. From the approaching lash of branches, I thought we were in for a storm, but there was no wind. Then it burst into our camp. I think," he added judiciously, "that we were simply in its way."
"In whose way?" demanded Harn, just short of an explosion.
"Why, didn't I say? It was a golden willow. Rampant."
"God's claws, Commandant! Don't y'know how to tell a story?" The bandaged randon leaned forward, elbows planted firmly in his dinner.
"Listen. First, as Sheth Sharp-tongue says, we hear this mighty thrashing in the forest. Myself, I wondered if the Dark Judge and judgment itself were about to fall on us. Then the earth begins to writhe. Roots are surging out of it and rocks are sinking in. See, the ground has turned as soft as quicksand and I'm fighting in its grip, all tangled up in runners like so many ropes of steel. Then comes the tree.
"God's truth, we all thought we were dead. Some were sinking, others picked up and flung aside. It had no more regard for us than . . . than for so much straw flung in its way. Less, if possible. Myself, I don't believe that the Riverland is alive and conscious, much less that it doesn't like us crawling over its wrinkled hide like . . . like . . ."
"Fleas?" suggested an Edirr, helpfully. "Lice? Wood ticks?"
"Argh. Brute nature. Brute Rathillien. That's all it is. Like a hundred other worlds before it."
"Ah, but we don't know about them, do we?" said the Commandant gently. "Only that none of them have put us to the test the way this world has."
"It needs to know its master," a Caineron muttered into his glass. "That's all."
"And if it refuses?" asked a Randir, with a sidelong smile at the others of her house.
"Then, I say, break it all to bits."
"Leaving us to stand on what?" Harn snorted. "This is ridiculous
. Look at you, bandaged up to the eyebrows. Who broke whom? You Caineron and you Randir, who cut down all the trees around Wilden to stop them from drifting away. What has that gotten you? Mud-slides in season and a rain of frogs out of it. Is all the Chain of Creation to be bent to your will?"
"Yes!" shouted the Caineron, and banged their glasses on the table, more shattering in the process.
"If this keeps up," murmured one senior randon to another, "we'll have to start drinking from tin cups, or from cupped hands."
"So we are to rule the whole of creation," said Sheth, with a wry smile, regarding their battered ranks. "Never mind the Master or Perimal Darkling or a trail of lost, fallen worlds. Never mind betrayal, heartbreak, and thirty millennia of failure. And for whom, after all, do we accomplish this great feat—our hated god, our . . . er . . . beloved lords, ourselves?"
He had spoken this last softly so that most of his fellow Caineron hadn't heard. But Harn did.
"Which do you serve, randon?"
"Ah, my dear brother-in-arms. Grant me the space to decide."
Harn looked hard at him. "Choice, yes, so that it be done with honor."
The other inclined his head, acknowledging ruefully the Kencyrath's fundamental dilemma.
"I dunno about Rathillien," said one of the hunters with satisfaction, "but we spent all day chasing down and settling for that damn tree. It's chained to a boulder now, waiting for the axe. Prime bows, its wood will make, among other things."
"It's a prize all right," another agreed, "for whichever house reaches it first."
This sparked a widespread, increasingly loud argument: to whom did the willow belong? It turned out that the randon of the two nearest major houses—Caineron and Randir—had sent urgent messages to their lords requesting foresters. The Brandan claimed that they had put their mark on it first, the previous fall. Others pointed out, however, that they had subsequently lost it: when the sap began to run that spring, not surprisingly so had the tree, right across the river south of the Danior's Shadow Rock. Other houses, smaller, farther away, or more altruistic, insisted that it belonged to Tentir, hard won with blood, bruises and sundry broken bones.
Before the randon could become too heated, Harn loudly broke in: "We stay-at-homes have some news too. Bran, show'em."
The dark, scarred randon obligingly opened his shirt to reveal five scabbed-over gashes across his hairy torso. Then he explained how he had gotten them.
"So," said someone, after a blank moment. "Our kitten has claws."
"And why," murmured the Commandant, "am I not surprised?"
"We already know that she's a reasonably controlled berserker," Harn growled. "I'll swear to that."
"We won't," snapped a Randir. "When our tempter first chewed through her gag, she induced the Kendar in charge of her to jump down a well. Something at the bottom ate him."
"Trogs, probably," muttered someone. "And poor sanitation. Never trust a rock with teeth, or a midden that burps."
Hawthorn glanced around to make sure that the randon in question was absent. "Yet Lady Rawneth has since sent her pet tempter back to . . . er . . . grace our halls."
Since her return, she had, in fact, kept mostly to the Randir barracks, to no one's disappointment except (perhaps) the Randir.
"Odd," remarked a Danior. "We've been watching the Highlord for any of his father's destructive traits, and here they pop up in his sister. True, it's not as if she could read runes or reap souls. . ."
He paused, perhaps remembering when Knorth and Ardeth had danced and darkness had gaped. But nothing, after all, had come of that.
"Just the same," said another randon, maybe following the other's thought, maybe not, "d'you think Torisen knows?"
"He might," said Bran, securing his shirt. "We all know how the Highlord feels about the Shanir, and his attitude toward our Jameth has been . . . puzzling. Does he want her to succeed at Tentir or not? Does he really mean to keep her as his heir, perhaps to become the first highlady in our history? Does he even know his own mind in the matter?"
"Or perhaps," murmured a Randir, "he's lost said mind altogether. It's been known to happen in his family. Ask the Knorth: how secure do they feel in his power since the battle at the Cataracts, much less since he fled Kothifir for the Riverland as if the Shadows themselves were snapping at his heels?"
Harn started to rise, but Sheth's fingertips on his arm stopped him.
"Time will tell," the Commandant said gently. "Shouting won't."
"No offense, rans," said a Coman, his eyes flickering nervously from face to face, "but the rest aside, we all know there's only one person at Tentir qualified to train a natural Arrin-thari."
He jumped as Harn's fist crashed down on the table.
"No! We agreed that that was far too dangerous. Remember the mauled cadet. And look what he did to your face, Bran."
"Oh, I don't blame him for that. After all, at the time we were forcing him at spear-point into a cage."
"Just the same . . ."
"Enough," said the Commandant quietly, and the room lapsed momentarily into a strange, almost embarrassed silence.
Behind the wall, in the gloom of Old Tentir's secret ways, Graykin listened with interest.
"Speaking of the Highborn," said Hawthorn, "I'd watch out, if I were you, for the Ardeth Timmon."
"Why?" demanded a member of that house.
"Because you also produce strong Shanir, as we know to our grief from Pereden. Because his son may also be a dream-stalker, as well as a charmer. Because he's already snared a Kendar girl with his glamour and bedded her. We all know what damage that can cause, and how many Kendar Pereden ruined."
"Nonetheless, it's a house matter," said the Ardeth flatly. "Don't interfere."
"Still, he's bound to try for the Knorth Lordan."
"I pity him if he does," Harn said with a sudden bark of laughter. "God's teeth and toenails, didn't you hear? Our kitten has claws."
Chapter XIII: Blood and Ivory
Summer 45
I
Jame woke with a start, dew beading her eyelashes. She had taken to sleeping directly under the hole in the as yet unmended roof, to Jorin's dismay, but in the past few days it had made her feel less like a prisoner. During the night it had rained, hard, driving her back to shelter. As soon as the storm had passed, however, she had returned to watch the hazy stars emerge one by one.
Although she thought that she had dreamed again, after that, she remembered little except a voice calling:
. . . come, come, come . . .
Perhaps that was what had woken her.
She rose, taking care not to disturb the ounce, and looked out. The heavy cloud cover of the past few days had condensed into slow rivers of fog rolling silently down the mountain slopes to the river. Above, a crisp night sky sparkled with stars, the sliver of a waxing moon having long since set. It was either very late or very early, and deathly still.
In a corner, Graykin stirred, grumbled, and went back to sleep. He had told her the previous night of the conversation that he had overheard in the officers' mess. That had given her several things to think about.
. . . come, come . . .
This would be the third day of the hunt, and the seventh in the college's weekly rotation, meaning no classes. One might even sleep in and skip breakfast. If she could slip out unseen, no one would know she was gone until evening.
. . . come . . .
She dressed quietly, choosing her black, knife-fighter's d'hen over a cadet's jacket. It felt good to have the Talisman's old tools back in hand for a night's prowl, if through a different maze than that of Tai-tastigon. Solitary by nature, how she missed the freedom to come and go as she chose. As she extracted grapnel segments from the d'hen's full sleeve and snapped them together, she wondered if she would ever become accustomed to acting with or through others. A long talk with the earnest Brandan master ten had given her a list of her responsibilities as head of her own barracks, which she had memorized and
then passed on to Vant, to his ill-disguised disgust. Well, if she had to lump it, so could he.
Attach the line, anchor the hook, and swing out into the night. Hopefully, the Kendar with their dislike of heights would never think of such an escape route. On the ground, she freed the grapnel with a flick of her wrist and caught it as it fell.
The fading summons drew her northward across the foggy training fields, over the bridge under which the mud battle had been fought, to the outer wall. Despite ongoing repairs, parts of it were still down, tumbled by the quake, and the whole length unguarded. Of all the Riverland keeps, ironically, Tentir possessed the fewest fortifications. When Jame had asked Vant about this, he had snorted:
To Ride a Rathorn Page 25