Competitions

by Sharon Green

  And while she enjoyed herself completing her plans, Lord Ollon, her superior in the testing authority and current lover, would have his tragic accident. It was already mostly arranged—although there had been an unforeseen and annoying delay—and afterward Eltrina would go from second in command to being completely in charge. Her political position and power would more than triple, and finally, at long last, she would be in charge of her own destiny.

  After something tragic happened to her husband as well, she added silently without the amusement. The tiresome pig had been bothering her even more than usual, and she didn’t yet dare refuse him. He wasn’t above tossing her aside if he grew displeased, and after she’d given him so much. Well, that debt would soon be repaid, the first of quite a few…

  Eltrina felt a surge of impatience, but used the sight of the beautifully calm night to help push it away. Everything was going perfectly, and that despite the efforts of a great many fools. That group looking for applicants who fit the description of the Chosen Five in the Prophecies, for instance. She’d had to let them paw through her notes and records in order to get rid of them, but she hadn’t let them see the private reports she’d had assembled. Just about everyone in her residences fit the Prophecy in one way or another, but only if you knew everything about them.

  So Eltrina hadn’t let the searchers know everything. They would have intruded with their ridiculous investigation and ruined all her plans, and she refused to allow anyone to do that, especially not for nonsensical gibberish. People who believed in the collection of fairy tales called the Prophecy were fools, and Eltrina had never suffered fools gladly. After the reception she would tell her people about forming challenging Blendings without the interference of idiots, and then…

  And then Eltrina would have what she’d ached for for so long. Freedom, and power, and all the wonderful things that went with them… She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, actually tasting what would so soon be hers…

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Rion was delighted to see the Razas woman leave, and that despite the welcome news she brought. He’d been picturing himself turning up on Naran’s doorstep with no more than a few silver dins in his hand, feeling and looking like a beggar. Now … now he would have gold, assuming he could find a way to avoid being followed. Maybe he would do best to take Tamrissa up on her offer to help…

  “I had a surprise today,” Lorand Coll said suddenly, breaking a silence which had continued since their food had first been brought. “Holter’s having been moved out reminded me, even though Holter will be missed and he wasn’t. Eskin Drowd showed up in the testing area today.”

  “So he finally qualified,” Rion said, finding it impossible to keep the distaste out of his voice. “I hope you had the good sense to bury him in the ground, or Encouraged a tree to grow up around him.”

  “I can’t say I wasn’t tempted,” Coll agreed sourly. “Even after ‘eating my dust’ for so many days, as one Adept put it, Drowd was still sneering with imagined superiority when he saw me. I could also see that he was waiting for me to fail, so I decided I couldn’t let that happen. If I hadn’t been too tired afterward to think of it, I would have thanked him for helping me to succeed.”

  “I had almost the same help, and from a similar source,” Tamrissa put in with a grimace, apparently having pulled herself out of disappointment of some sort. “Beldara Lant has also qualified, and she got me so angry that I invited her to attack me in place of Soonen. But I also promised to respond if she did, which I hadn’t done with Soonen. At least not to begin with. Afterward, I think Beldara was glad she hadn’t accepted my challenge.”

  “‘At least not to begin with,’” Jovvi echoed, looking at Tamrissa with a frown. “Does that mean you did respond eventually? And did that have anything to do with why were you so exhausted that you were asleep as soon as they helped you into the coach?”

  “Yes to both,” Tamrissa agreed. “I certainly did respond during the last exercise, but only because Soonen suddenly had the help of Adept Gerdol in attacking me.” Rion started at hearing that, and apparently so did everyone else at the table. “For some reason they both tried to burn me to ash, but I couldn’t return the favor without missing out on my last mastery. So I drew in more power than I’d ever used before, and worked around their attack to complete the exercise. Pretending I didn’t even notice their efforts scared the starch out of them, but it used up so much of my strength that once I finished eating a really large meal, all I wanted to do was sleep.”

  “Now isn’t that an odd coincidence,” Jovvi commented, looking around as she said it. “I had almost the same experience, and apparently so did everyone else. Genovir and Algus tried to gang up on me, but I was able to overcome them and gain the mastery. Afterward it became perfectly clear why they were so deferential yesterday after I gained the first-level masteries. They knew they would try to interfere with me during the second-level testing, and wanted to give me a reason to go easy with them if I ended up victorious.”

  “Subservient behavior in front of a superior,” Coll agreed with a nod. “That’s what works with lower animals, so now we know what they think of us—if there was any doubt before.”

  “But they were also frightened because they weren’t certain it would work,” Rion pointed out. “They claimed they were under orders and did the same with every applicant, but for some reason I didn’t believe them. My personal guess is that they do it only with those whom they consider unacceptably strong.”

  “How can someone in our position be ‘unacceptably strong’?” Ro suddenly demanded, his previous dark mood still obviously with him. “Those bastards could have killed me, or at least come close enough to it to break my nerve. After that my decidin’ to stick it out would be meaningless. When it finally came down to it, I’d be—”

  Ro’s words broke off as he realized what he was saying, and Rion joined everyone else in exchanging disturbed glances. With the servants around they were all being careful of what they said, but even with circumlocution Ro had made an important point after Rion’s own. If the testing authority wanted the strongest and best for the challenging Blendings, why were they trying to weaken some of those who were best? The obvious answer was that they didn’t want any common challengers who were too strong, not when those commoners would be facing members of the nobility.

  “I think, under other circumstances, I would find my appetite gone now,” Jovvi commented, staring down at the food in her plate. “Confusion often does that to me, and right now I’m very confused because of what we were told only a short while ago. We have to win the competition tomorrow, or we don’t get to go to the reception the day after.”

  That was another excellent point, and Rion joined the others in considering it silently. Being too strong had brought down attack on their heads, but now they’d been told they had to be stronger than everyone else. And there was no doubt that they were being urged to win. The Razas woman’s voice and attitude had made that clear, and yet… What were they supposed to do?

  “You know, it’s really strange,” Tamrissa said suddenly, drawing everyone’s attention. “I’ve just now remembered one of my late husband’s more odious games. He would give all the servants a few hours off, and once they were gone he would chase me from room to room all over the house. The longer I kept running the happier he was, and when I finally dropped from exhaustion he would … have the rest of his entertainment. It took me a while to realize that I didn’t have to keep going to exhaustion, I could simply pick a time to pretend to be exhausted and he never knew the difference. After all, I was only being measured against my own strength… I’m sorry, I don’t know why I brought that up…”

  Rion joined Jovvi and Coll in assuring her it was quite all right to mention something without relevance to the conversation, but that was just as much of a lie as Tamrissa’s apology. The girl had had an excellent thought, and had found a way to mention it to the rest of them without alerting any servant who
might be listening.

  The fact had slipped Rion’s mind, but that first competition would be on the order of a foot race. Each participant would be striving to be best, but against time and situation rather than directly against each other. And in a foot race, it was possible to win by a single body length as easily as by ten or twenty yards. If they pretended that that was the best they could do, who would be able to prove otherwise? And then a thought of his own occurred to him.

  “If we’re sharing personal incidents, I have one of my own I’d like to share,” he said, keeping his voice diffident but looking around pointedly at each of the others. “Once, when I was a boy, Mother began to invite people over who had sons of their own who were approximately my age. I thought at the time that she did it to provide me with playmates, but during each visit she insisted on having some sort of contest among all the children. Once it was a race, and once it was a test of strength, and once it was even a comparison of book learning.”

  “So you were constantly being required to perform,” Jovvi said with a sympathetic nod. “Did she expect you to win at everything?”

  “Yes, and most of the time I did, but being able to brag wasn’t her entire reason for doing it,” Rion said. “She held the contests to see how well I would do against some criterion of her own, using the other little boys as nothing more than yardsticks. She didn’t care about their performances, only mine, which took me awhile to realize. At the time I was too busy wondering why the other boys hated me when I won.”

  Again there were murmurings of commiseration, but the expressions of understanding in everyone’s eyes told Rion they’d gotten his point. Depending on how strong the other competition entrants were, the whole point of the exercise might be to assess the strength of Rion and the others. If the thing was legitimate, they would face other possible members of Blendings; if it wasn’t, the testing authority would have dross there just to make it all look good. But they would have to wait to find out which it would be.

  The rest of the meal passed in relative silence, and once it was over Vallant Ro was the first to leave, with Jovvi right behind him. Ro had seemed to be struggling with some sort of strong emotion while Tamrissa told them about the way she’d been attacked, but the man hadn’t said anything to her afterward. It was possible his struggle had had nothing to do with Tamrissa, but that was something Rion had no time to worry about. If he were going to ask Tamrissa’s help with his own problem, it had to be now.

  “I wonder, dear lady, if you have recovered sufficiently to share a brief nightcap with me in the library,” he said when it seemed that Tamrissa was ready to take her own leave. “I have something I’d like to discuss with you, and you as well, Coll, if you’re willing.”

  Rion didn’t know precisely why he’d included Coll in the invitation, but it might have had something to do with how miserable and alone the man looked. Coll had helped him on more than one occasion, so now it wasn’t possible to exclude the man while asking for Tamrissa’s help.

  “Well, all right, but just for a short while,” Tamrissa agreed after a moment, looking really weary. “I needed to get this food into me, but I need more sleep just as much.”

  “Well, I don’t have anything better to do with my time,” Coll said with a shrug as he threw his napkin aside and rose. “No offense, Mardimil, I’m just in a terrible mood. What I should have said was, if we’re not here for each other, who can we expect to be here for us?”

  “No offense taken, Coll,” Rion said as he rose as well, actually meaning the words. “And we do have to be here for each other, so becoming insulted over nothing would be stupid. Here, dear lady, take my arm.”

  Tamrissa had gotten to her feet before he reached her, and the girl looked more distracted than unsteady. She did, however, take the offer of his arm, and they made a small, slow procession to the library. Once there he tried to seat her, but she shook her head with a small smile.

  “Thank you, Rion, but I need to stand up for a while,” she said, patting his arm before releasing it. “Now, what sort of problem do you have that I might be able to help with?”

  “By tomorrow night I expect to have gold,” Rion stated, seeing that Coll paid attention as well. “With that in mind I intend to meet—someone, but my mother is having me followed. Do you have any idea how I can avoid those followers without letting them know I’ve done it?”

  “Well, we should be able to figure out something,” Tamrissa replied, suddenly more caught up. Coll stood with raised brows, but didn’t seem ready to comment. “The best idea would be to have them think they are following you, while it’s really someone else in your place. That way they won’t go searching, and won’t be on the alert the next time you want to do the same.”

  “The suggestion is excellent,” Rion said with his own brows high. “What I can’t seem to picture, however, is how I might accomplish it. It’s a virtual certainty that Mother’s people have at least one house servant in their employ, which means I’m under almost constant observation.”

  “Yes, you probably are, so we’ll have to take you out of the house,” Tamrissa returned, her mind clearly in the midst of deep calculation. “There’s a lovely dining parlor not far from here, one I went to a few times before I married. If we decide to visit it tomorrow night, your shadows will certainly follow.”

  “And I’m to slip away from there?” Rion asked, feeling confused. “Leaving you completely unescorted and departing on foot? Unless I’m mistaken, even if I were willing to do that it would never work. As soon as I disappeared they would begin to search for me.”

  “Of course they would, so you won’t disappear,” Tamrissa countered with a glorious smile. “You and I will leave the house together in plain view—a short while after Lorand leaves by himself. Lorand will go to the dining parlor, arrange for the rental of a horse from the nearby stables, and then he’ll wait in the entryway of the dining parlor, which happens to be fashionably dim. When we walk in he’ll take your place, and you’ll slip out the back while the watchers have their attention on him. If he’s willing to do it, that is.”

  Both of them turned to look at Coll then, Rion ready to plead with the man. But Coll’s face wore a look of surprised anticipation, and then he grinned.

  “It sounds like fun,” he said, and the words actually rang true. “My friends and I occasionally did this sort of thing when we were too young for our parents to be willing to let us come and go as we pleased. You and I are approximately the same size, Mardimil, and even our hair color is close enough to pass at a distance. If we wear the same clothes the way we’re doing now, it should work like a charm.”

  “And you really don’t mind?” Rion asked, looking from one to the other of them. “I’ve never had anyone willing to do things for me without being paid, and certainly nothing like this. How can I ever thank you?”

  “Some day we’ll need a favor, and you’re the first one we’ll ask,” Coll assured him with a much more gentle smile. “Isn’t that right, Tamrissa?”

  “Certainly,” Tamrissa agreed, but her impish grin reminded Rion that she’d already gotten a favor from him. “Besides, I needed something like this to take my mind off my own troubles, and somehow I think Lorand feels the same. By asking us to help, you’re doing us the favor.”

  When Coll nodded his agreement, Rion would have enjoyed finding the words to express how he felt. An experience like this was priceless, but also seemed beyond verbalizing. So he took Tamrissa’s hand and kissed it instead, then exchanged a handshake with Coll before turning and hurrying out of the room. Rion hadn’t cried in quite a long time, but certainly felt like doing so now.

  But when he reached his bedchamber, he found himself ready to laugh instead. Tomorrow night he would see Naran again, and not for a moment or two and not as a beggar with hat in hand. It would be wonderful, marvelous, and now he didn’t know if he’d be able to stand the wait…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Jovvi stared at Tamma for a while once
the coach began to move the next morning, trying to decide whether or not to say anything to the girl. Her own problem wasn’t quite as pressing as it had felt last night, when she’d gone directly to her bedchamber after dinner to avoid needing to speak to Lorand. But Lorand hadn’t tried to speak to her, either last night at dinner or this morning at breakfast. He still looked at her in the same way when he thought she wasn’t likely to notice, but he hadn’t tried again to get her to change her mind.

  Which was both a good thing and a bad one. Jovvi sighed as she silently admitted that she didn’t really want to lose Lorand, but the uncertainty surrounding him was impossible for her inner self to overlook. She both wanted him and didn’t want him, but at least he wasn’t adding to the turmoil she suffered with. That made it only a little easier to bear, but Jovvi was prepared to be grateful for small favors.

  “Is everything all right?” Tamma said suddenly, startling Jovvi. “I don’t mean to pry, but that sigh sounded like one of mine.”

  “Actually, I was going to ask you the same question,” Jovvi replied, finding something of a smile. “I can tell that you’re disturbed again, but it’s not the same disturbance you felt yesterday.”

  “I’ll say it isn’t,” Tamma agreed glumly, then she looked up at Jovvi with her head to one side. “I seem to have changed my mind about Dom Ro again, and it occurred to me that there may be something seriously wrong with me. All this, ‘yes I want him, no I don’t want him’ back and forth can’t possibly be normal, but wouldn’t you tell me if I were seriously ill?”

  “Yes, I would, and no, you’re not,” Jovvi said with a laugh she couldn’t possibly have held back. “Women may not have a lot of rights in this world, but changing our minds does happen to be one of them. And in your situation, vacillating back and forth couldn’t be more normal. But does this mean you’ve now decided you want Vallant?”