"Eighteen in all. I can count, you know."
"Actually, it's twenty-two, because the Highlord's war leader—Ran Harn, in this case—and the Commandant each get an extra black and white to play with. You look confused. Now, attend, child, while I teach you the facts of life."
He sat down on the steps, obliging her to do the same and other cadets to swerve, cursing, around them.
Jame gritted her teeth. She hated it when Timmon went all superior on her or forced her to follow his lead. Even more, though, she feared these sudden gulfs of ignorance that kept opening up under her feet, threatening to swallow her whole.
"Did you notice that rather severe Ardeth randon watching us at play just now, when you threw your sword out the window? Remember his gray silk scarf? That's the mark of a randon council member, one of nine, each a former commandant of Tentir except for the one currently wearing the white scarf."
"Sheth Sharp-tongue."
"Indeed. You may also have noticed other gray scarves wandering around the college recently. Even Harn Grip-hard had dug up some ratty bit of gray cloth to mark his rank—honestly, your house and its clothes! Anyway, they're taking note of the best and the worst of us. Sometime before Autumn Eve, they meet in the college Map Room to cast the stones.
"Imagine the scene: It's nightfall. The room is lit with a thousand candles, illuminating the murals of all our greatest battles. The Council sits in a circle on the floor. Behind each stands a sergeant of his or her house. Also there's a scrollsman tucked away in a corner somewhere to keep score.
"So. Starting with the Highlord's house, the attendant randon calls out the name of each cadet in turn. As lordan, you'll come either first or last, as I will for the Ardeth. If no one casts a stone, you're in. The same goes for one or more unchallenged whites. Get only black, though, and you're out."
His blithe tone began to make Jame feel queasy. Of his own success, he apparently had no doubt. It was that stress on the second-person pronoun "you" that twisted her guts.
"Yes," she said, "but what if there's a mix of black and white stones?"
"Ah, then it gets interesting. In the second round, get at least six white stones and you're in, or at least six black and you're out. If it's four or five either way, though, they consider it too close to call, so on to round three, where Harn's and Sheth's extra stones come into play. There, simple majority rules."
"Enough," she said, standing up. "You're making my head hurt."
"Ah, don't fret." He also rose, with a laugh. "If you do get thrown out, you can always try a contract with me. Trust me, it would be fun. We could practice tonight, to see if we suit each other."
Just then, an Ardeth girl brushed past them on the way down the stairs, ramming her elbow into Jame's sore ribs as if by accident. Timmon caught her as she lurched sideways and nearly fell.
"Narsa!" he shouted after the descending Kendar. "Stop that!"
Jame caught her breath and drew herself upright, out of his embrace. She had recognized Timmon's one night conquest from so many weeks ago before he had given up trying to make her jealous.
"Still after you, is she?"
Timmon looked exasperated. "I keep telling her that it's over. Why won't she believe me?"
"You, my boy, have been a bit too free with your glamour, and don't look at me like that: You know what I mean."
"There was never a problem with it until you came along," he muttered, no longer meeting her eyes.
"None that you deigned to notice, anyway, and from now on stay out of my dreams. One of these nights, you're going to get hurt."
They had reached the great hall and stopped to watch the Danior cadet Tarn wrestling with a Molocar pup. Young as it was, all bumbling paws and flopping dewlaps, it easily bowled him over and sat on his chest, licking his face.
"The Caineron Lordan gave him to me," he explained, trying to escape its great, sloppy tongue. "We haven't bonded yet, and of course nothing can replace Torvo—Turvie, stop that!—but still . . ."
He laughed as the pup rolled onto its back, grinning idiotically, and presented its belly to be rubbed.
Jame pressed her hand to her forehead in sudden pain. "Ouch."
"Now what?" Timmon demanded, half solicitous, half exasperated.
"Nothing. Someone I've been expecting has just arrived." She flinched again. "Quit it! I hear you. I'm coming. Excuse me," she said to Timmon. "I've got to find the horse-master."
On the ramp down to the underground stable, she met Gorbel and the other four Highborn of his ten-command, on their way up from their last lesson of the day. The Caineron Lordan grunted when he saw her and would have limped past without speaking.
"It was kind of you to give Tarn that puppy," she said, stopping him.
"Huh." His eyes, bloodshot and sullen, refused to meet her own. Obviously his willow-infected foot still hurt despite Kindrie's best efforts. "Runt of the litter, wasn't it? Either that or throw it to the direhounds."
One of the Caineron made a low comment to another, and both snickered. Gorbel had come back from Restormir with a new set of Highborn "friends" or, more likely, spies for his father. Jame wondered how they could rank as cadets, arriving this late in the season, long past the tests. The Commandant hadn't said anything, but then neither had he about Gorbel.
At a guess, the Caineron Lordan had also gotten an earful from Caldane about fraternizing with the hated Knorth, however accidentally. Jame sighed. It looked as if they were going to be enemies again, not that they had ever had much of a chance at friendship. A shame, that: Gorbel was better than most of his house, when his father left him alone. She stepped aside and let him go.
The horse-master stood at the door of the tack-room, watching with disapproval as the five Kendar Caineron cleaned up after the Highborn whom they served.
"You ride it, you care for it," he muttered aside to Jame. "M'lord Gorbel knows that. What cause has he suddenly to go all high and mighty?"
"I think his father is riding him. Hard. And his foot hurts, which is partly my fault. Master, I need your help."
He raised bushy eyebrows at her. "Now what have you done, stampeded the herd off to Hurlen?"
"No, they're quite close," she said, somewhat distractedly, adding as if to the air, "Stop that, or d'you want me to start shouting back?"
"Here now, lady, are you all right?"
"Oh, I'm not the one hurt . . . much. Please, master, come with me, and bring your tools."
"Which? What for?"
"Over-grown hooves, back teeth that need floating, a bowed tendon, and a roast chicken. No, sorry, I'm supposed to bring that last one. Meet you at the north gate."
Some fifteen minutes later Jame emerged from Tentir with a soggy bundle hidden under her jacket, leaking grease onto her shirt. The horse-master waited, a bulging leather work-bag slung over his shoulder.
"I think," he said, "that you three lordan have run mad. That fool Timmon just tried to charm his way into coming too."
Of course his curiosity would have been piqued, thought Jame, looking anxiously about for the Ardeth's grinning face.
"No, no. I set him to cleaning tack—a proper punishment for all the times he's left his own mount in a muck sweat. The last I saw, the Caineron were jamming the tack-room door, pretending to be deaf and pointedly polishing spurs, with him boxed inside. Ha. Let him practice his guiles on that lot. Now, which way?"
Jame paused to check her mental compass. "West, above the college."
He grunted and set off. Like most of his charges, the horse-master had four gaits: walk, trot, canter, and bolt. Their brisk pace soon had Jame clutching a stitch in her side. They passed between the trees, climbing toward where the lower slopes of the Snowthorns were strewn with enormous, fallen boulders, like so many snaggle-teeth set in a giant's lower jaw. Most of them still had drifts of volcanic ash piled against their western sides where the pounding rain had failed to wash them completely away.
Rounding a huge rock, they came on a pale lady
with long, white hair, sitting on a stone. She leaped up with a frightened cry, swayed, and became a Whinno-hir standing on three feet with the fourth raised, delicate hoof trembling.
The horse-master had stopped dead, staring. "M'lady? Bel-tairi? I thought you were dead!" He dropped his bag with a muffled, complicated crash and threw his arms around her neck. The mare suppressed a start, then bent her head gently to return the embrace.
A sharp clatter of hooves, and there was the rathorn colt, ears flat, crest rising all down his spine.
"It's all right!" Jame hastily stepped between them. "I told you: what do I know about these things? But he can help. Here." She tossed the soggy bag at the colt's feet. He ripped it open and began to tear at the roast fowl, all the time keeping a wary eye on the two Kencyr.
"Seems you've been busy, lady," said the horse-master to Jame. He blew his nose on his sleeve and reached for his tools. "Ancestors know, you're the last person on Rathillien I would expect to be keeping such company, nor yet a Whinno-hir with a rathorn, for that matter. How did it happen, and where's m'lady Bel been these forty years past, while we all mourned her as dead?"
While he bound the bowed tendon back into place and trimmed the mare's hooves, Jame tried to explain, if not the whole story, at least as much as applied to the two equines. It was, perforce, a narrative full of holes.
"Let's see if I've got this straight," said the horse-master at last, as he lifted one of Bel's rear hoofs and began to rasp it flat. "M'lady here gets branded by that bastard Greshan, then chased to the top of a mountain path where she finds a stone door opening into . . . what? Oh, right: the lodge of the Earth Wife, whoever that might be. There she falls asleep for the next forty-odd years until she hears Lady Kinzi's death banner calling to her. Once she's found that, she comes looking for you. At that point, four decades' worth of teeth and toenails all catch up with her at once."
"Er, yes, more or less." She noted that he had skipped over the mystery of Greshan's death, if indeed it was a mystery and not simply a hunting accident as Hallik Hard-hand had reported, before killing himself. On the other hand, how many would know the truth, besides those who had been there? "You believe me?"
"I'm not about to call the Highlord's sister a liar. Besides, here Bel-tairi is." He started gently to brush her mane away from the ruined side of her face, but let it alone when she flinched. Instead, he turned his attention to the over-grown sweep of her tail, tangled with briers but still magnificent. "A pity to cut that. Braid it, maybe, but later." He drew a long file out of his sack. "Open wide, m'lady."
When the Whinno-hir did, looking nervous, he unceremoniously slid his hand into her mouth, seized her tongue, and drew it out to one side.
"Here, make yourself useful. Hang on to this, firm but gentle. Don't pull it."
Jame found herself gripping that surprisingly thick, muscular organ. It twitched. The mare's eye rolled with alarm as the master slid the file between her back teeth and her raw, inner cheek, but Jame's hold immobilized her as he began to rasp away the barbs. The sound was awful.
A hot, menacingly snort blasted down the back of Jame's neck.
"Don't give me that look," she told the rathorn over her shoulder. "This is apparently how it's done, and it doesn't seem to hurt her."
"Not if done right," said the master briskly. "Change sides. Hold. And that's that. A few weeks for the mouth to heal, a bit longer for the tendon, decent forage with plenty of oats, and all will be right again."
"Except for her poor face," said Jame, watching the mare wander off, gingerly working her jaw.
"Well, yes. No helping that, worse luck, but one can live with scars, as well you know." He bent to clean and stow his tools. "About the rathorn, now. You say he's gotten himself blood-bound to you—a damn fool thing to do, but there it is. How d'you mean to handle that?"
Jame sat down on a rock and considered. The colt crouched some distance away like a great cat, pinning his prey with a dew-spur, occasionally raising his head to spit a bone at her.
How indeed?
So far, he had communicated with her mostly in blasts of raw emotion, usually rage or fear. He was intelligent, though, with a complex language of his own comprised, as far as she could tell, largely of scents and images. No doubt he already understood her better than she did him, although she suspected that he would pretend to misunderstand whenever it suited him. They hadn't come yet to a true test of wills.
Just you try, said those red, red eyes, with a glint of unholy anticipation.
Jame sighed. Sooner or later, she would have to. In the meantime, ancestors help them, they were stuck with each other.
The master stood and shouldered his bag. "You're going to need help," he said flatly.
Jame had been hoping for just such an offer, but now she hesitated. This was clearly a job as much for a dragon-tamer as for a horse-trainer; and while the bond between them prevented the colt from deliberately killing her, she sensed that he would cheerfully slaughter anyone else who annoyed him.
"I think," she said, "that he and I should get better acquainted first. I'm right, aren't I, that he's still too young to put under saddle?"
"By half a year at least, if he were a horse. With a rathorn, who knows?" He shook his head—in exasperation or amusement, it was hard to tell. "Mad, the pair of you. No, I won't speak of this to anyone, nor of m'lady Bel's return. Yet. Small blame to her, poor thing, but Trinity only knows what ancient stink her reappearance may stir up."
On the point of leaving, he paused and looked back at them with a sudden lop-sided smile under his flattened nose.
"Ah, but what a thing that will be, someday, to ride a rathorn—assuming he doesn't have you for breakfast first."
III
Three weeks passed.
By now Jame's ribs had healed, although the bruise on her side remained a wonder to behold, if anyone had been there to see it. On her return that first night, Graykin had announced that he had found lodgings more to his taste and had departed, meager possessions in hand. Jame wondered where he had gone and what he found, day after day, to occupy himself, but was too pleased at her sudden privacy to ask questions on the increasingly rare occasions when he reported to her. She hadn't realized until then how much she had grown to dislike his nightly, disapproving presence. God's claws, if she didn't care how she looked, why should he?
On the other hand, Harn had finally exerted his authority during her absence to repair the barracks roof. She supposed the work had to be done sometime. Still, it irked her not to see the stars at night slowly wheeling overhead or to wake in the morning with dew on her face.
. . . rootless and roofless . . .
Huh. Maybe she just didn't like roofs.
Worse, though, with the attic enclosed, for the first time she became aware of the stale reek of the lordan's quarters below, seeping up through the floor-boards. The smell gave her bad dreams, or rather the same dream over and over, in which she sat drunk beside a roaring hearth, listening with a terrible, gloating anticipation to hesitant steps as they approached on the outer stair. Then the door would open and she would see her brother's bewildered eyes set in their father's incongruously young, terrified face.
One night, the door opened and Timmon stood on the threshold, his smirk melting into dismay.
"Eek!" he said.
"You have the most uncomfortable dreams," he informed her the next day. "Just once, why can't I find you frolicking naked in a meadow or something?"
"I frolic poorly, and I did warn you. That dream is particularly dangerous. Stay out of it."
She certainly wished that she could, but some sly, malignant force seemed to be behind it, pushing. Sooner or later, as she had warned Tori, they would both have to see it through, but not just yet.
In the meantime, partly to escape it, partly to keep Bel and the rathorn company, she took to sleeping up among the boulders, sometimes waking in the early dawn to find herself bracketed by their warm bodies. Whenever that happened, t
he colt always lurched to his feet with a snort of disgust as if to say, How dare you sneak up on me?
Often, though, she woke to the arrival of the horse-master, come to apply fresh poultices and to re-bandage the mare's leg. A bowed tendon, obviously, was not to be taken lightly. As night turned to pallid dawn, he often stood with her by the hour in a mountain stream, up to their respective knees in icy water and his flat nose running with the cold. Meanwhile, a diet of oats and lush summer grass began to fill in the flesh between her ribs and to restore the gloss to her coat.
The colt foraged for himself, although he still complained bitterly whenever Jame forgot to bring him treats or anything other than his beloved roast fowl.
"So learn how to catch and cook them yourself," she told his retreating back as he stalked away from an offering of (admittedly) rather tough stewed kidneys.
To Ride a Rathorn Page 43