Honor's Paradox-ARC

by P. C. Hodgell

  Throughout, they kept watch not only for the other team but for the elusive “something” that was the prize of the entire exercise.

  Eventually they arrived at the clumped cloud-of-thorn bushes with the river loud beyond them and Breakneck Rock beyond that.

  “There are fifteen of us, eighteen when the last scouts and Niall arrive,” Jame said. “We should be able to comb this dollop of wilderness from one side to the other.”

  “Separate? D’you think that’s wise?”

  She could almost see the Coman assessing the risks and trying to decide how to make her responsible for them. Fash must have been most persuasive. Even so, Clary looked uneasy. What had that wretched Caineron said to him anyway?

  “We could, of course, huddle here until nightfall, leaving the wood to our scouts and the other side. Does that sound better to you?”

  Clearly, it didn’t.

  “Form a line and spread out,” she told the cadets of the two ten-commands. “Keep in sight of each other to either side. Somehow, I think it would be very easy to get lost in here today.”

  The cadets obeyed her, Clary continuing to grumble. To the right was Brier; to the left, Damson. The Coman, she noted, gravitated to the side closest to Tentir, pushing the Knorth toward the river. She gripped her sling and counted the intact shells nestled in moss in the sack hanging from her belt. Two dozen. Over the past fortnight they had all grown heartily sick of scrambled eggs. This had better be worth it. The signal rippled down the line, from the banks of the Burley to the shadow of Tentir.

  Right, she thought, waving them forward. We’re off.

  Brier stayed perhaps closer than she should have, as if determined to keep Jame under her eye.

  Dammit, Jame thought, am I that easily broken, nothing but a shell full of blood, sealed with wax? What’s the worst that could happen to me here?

  What about an encounter with the Dark Judge? Little had been heard from that great cat since the onset of spring, but he was out there somewhere, and Jame still felt shy about straying too far from the college after dark. Sometimes she sensed his restless presence in her dreams, but something kept him at bay. Long might it last.

  To her right, Damson disappeared behind a stand of budding lilacs. The bushes seemed to move with her, now cutting off Brier as well. New shoots erupted out of the ground ahead of the main stands, rasping against each other. It was, after all, the season for arboreal drift. Everything in the valley that could move probably was, toward sunnier slopes, toward water, away from predators with axes.

  Was someone calling?

  “Wha . . . wha . . . wha . . .”

  Jame stopped, the breath catching in her throat. She had considered the Dark Judge, but not the Burning Ones. Did they ever come this far south, especially without their master who had lain in the earth since the winter solstice? Lilac and raspberry canes rustled and rose, hedging her in. Sounds from beyond reached her muffled and distorted. Her own voice, when she called out, was swallowed by the burgeoning leaves.

  A shadow fell across her. She squinted up against the low-slung sun at something black suspended over her head. It had an almost human shape—wide-flung arms, at least, and between them what seemed to be a hunched head. But no feet. It stirred, by no wind felt below. The sun flamed around its edges.

  “Sssoooo. Forgotten about me, had you?”

  She peered upward. “Vant? What in Perimal’s name are you doing up there?”

  “Ooohh, just hanging around, waiting for you. My new friends are here too, at least in spirit.”

  Was that really a voice or just the sloughing of the wind in the leaves? The day had turned dreamlike around her, cut off as she was in this pocket of strangeness. Why, after all, should her former five-commander haunt her, when she had had nothing to do with his death? But he had appeared to her, not to Damson, who must be at most a dozen yards away and wouldn’t be shy about taking credit.

  As if she had heard her name called, Damson appeared, fighting her way through the thicket. “There you are, Ten! Who are you talking to?”

  Above, cloth ripped. The black shape plummeted toward Jame, blotting out the sun. She tried to fend it off, but it threw its dismembered arms around her neck and bore her down. She fought free with Damson’s help to find that she had been wrestling with one of the Commandant’s old, leather coats.

  “This must be what we were sent to find,” said Damson.

  From outside the hollow came the muffled sound of shouting. The two teams must have clashed just beyond the grove’s precincts. Damson plunged off to join the fray. Jame paused to whack the coat several times against a rock, just to make sure, then followed the cadet. Beyond the lilacs, white missiles laced the air, accompanied with yelps and jeers. There was Clary, setting an egg to his sling. He saw her, hesitated, switched eggs, and swung. Jame glanced behind her for his target, and her temple seemed to explode.

  I owe Graykin an apology, she thought, on the slide down into darkness; Being egged is more painful than I realized. Then the coat was jerked out of her grasp and she fell.

  A long time seemed to pass. The lilac break crept past and the shouts receded. She leaned back against a tree, silently cursing her throbbing head and the blood trickling down her face.

  “Damn!” said someone almost in her ear, in her brother’s voice. “That hurts.”

  He shifted against the other side of the tree, his coat rasping against its bark.

  “Tori?”

  “Jame?”

  “What are you doing here?” both asked simultaneously, then, “Where is ‘here’?”

  “An hour north of Gothregor.”

  “Fifteen minutes south of Tentir. What happened to you?”

  “Storm threw me. We were tracking a rogue golden willow and it charged us.”

  “You didn’t fell it, did you?”

  “That would require it to stand still first. Trinity, I hate arboreal drift. And you?”

  “I’m not sure. Something hit me.”

  “Careless, careless . . .”

  “No more so than you, run over by a tree.”

  “At least you’re past the main threat.”

  “What?” she asked, confused. She heard him draw himself up.

  “The Commandant told me that someone was sure to challenge you to combat before the end of the school year. That happened at the High Council meeting. Why else d’you think I allowed that bastard Fash to take you on? Even so, under all of our eyes, he went further than I expected.”

  “Oh, that wasn’t an official challenge, just one of M’lord Caldane’s little tricks to humiliate us both.”

  She sensed her brother’s dismay, even as his voice began to fade.

  “Then you’ve got to get out of there. Listen, Jame, I can’t protect you. Not at Tentir. Much less so far away at Kothifir. I can’t let you go.”

  “If the randon will it, you can’t stop me.”

  “Who can’t?” said a new voice, attached to a pair of large, surprisingly gentle hands. “What have you done to yourself this time?”

  Jame blinked up at Brier. She needn’t turn to know that Tori was gone.

  “Clary came back to camp with the Commandant’s coat, but without you. What happened?”

  Jame almost giggled. “I think he hardboiled his eggs.”

  Brier’s big hand was full of shell shards plucked from Jame’s clothing. Among them lay a blood-stained rock.

  “Not this hard,” she said grimly. “And with the power of a sling behind it . . .”

  “Never mind.” Jame pushed her aside and wobbled to her feet, remembering the Coman’s expression. “Fash had him confused.”

  Behind them they heard shouts, laughter, and splashes: the losers were paying their forfeit in the Burley’s frigid waters. Jame wiped her forehead with her sleeve and decided not to bother. There was little enough blood. Besides, her team had won. Somehow, though, she didn’t think that Clary would revel in that victory.

  They walked back to
Tentir where, it transpired, the merchants and Graykin had already left, having found few customers among the canny randon.

  Rue had bought a length of shimmering white samite, however, which she presented almost defiantly to Jame.

  “It was dead cheap,” she said, “and I think I may know how to keep it from fading away.”

  “Good luck to you, then,” said Jame, and thought no more of it.

  On impulse, she went to Bear’s den and sat down outside of it.

  “How does one manage?” she asked him through the grate. “Brothers and sisters . . . how can Tori and I talk when to do so freely both of us have to be either asleep or concussed? How do you communicate with the Commandant with so few words in common? Yet I’ll swear that he loves you, and you, him.”

  She considered Sheth’s guilt. He had followed his lord’s orders that Bear be either confined or killed. Who could have guessed, all those years ago, that the torment would go on so long?

  Control: Caldane over Sheth, Sheth over Bear, Tori over her. Command aside, how did one let go when love was the bond?

  “Tori will stop me if he can, for my own good. Ha. And yet he gave me this.” She fingered the carven cat with its snapped-off hind leg, the maimed symbol of their past. “Did we ever really share everything?”

  Mine, mine! No, mine!

  “He trusts me, yet he doesn’t. Do I trust him?”

  Bear snuffled in the dark behind his door. Huge, ivory nails protruded through the grate, groping. On impulse, Jame gave him the carving. More snuffling, then a sharp snap: he had broken off the cat’s other hind leg.

  Jame sighed.

  I will stop you.

  Not if I can help it, she thought.

  II

  Hours ago, Kindrie had seen the merchants pack up their wares and leave the training square, with Graykin in his gaudy finery rushing to join them at the last minute. The healer had meant to travel south with them from Tentir as far as Gothregor, but that clearly was not to be. The Southron had glanced up at the second-story common room window where he stood, then had flinched away. Kindrie wondered if Graykin had even told Jame that her cousin had arrived and was waiting for her in her quarters.

  The barracks were deserted, everyone out attending class. Life hummed all around him, echoing in the empty rooms as if in a seashell’s chambers. He had grown used to the constant stir of Mount Alban and his place in it. This reminded him of his isolation in the Priests’ College at Wilden, where no one spoke to him except in abuse. The best he had hoped for there was to be left alone, free to retreat into the Moon Garden that was his soul-image, where no one could hurt him.

  Why had he never met his mother there, except as a pattern of moss and lichen against a stone wall? That blurred face had watched silently over his childhood and he had never recognized it until it had come to claim him, a terrible thing of cords and hunger . . .

  But life was different now. He had a family. He had friends.

  So he told himself. At the moment, though, he felt alone, and cold, and hungry.

  Who are you, that anyone should take notice of you? whispered the ghosts of his past.

  Plates clattered in the dining hall two floors below and the smell of cooking rose. Cadets were returning from their lessons, talking, laughing. Footsteps sounded on the stair. A slim figure entered the apartment, speaking to someone over her shoulder. Then she turned and saw him.

  “Kindrie! Have you been here all this time? That wretch Graykin, not to have told me!”

  She advanced and took his hands, hers warm within their black gloves, his cold in her grasp, while her hunting ounce Jorin sniffed his legs.

  “What happened to your face?”

  She touched a darkening bruise and laughed. “The children here play rough, but they haven’t yet driven me out.”

  No, thought Kindrie, they wouldn’t. One of them at least must be a slow learner not to have realized that by now. He envied her cheerful toughness, so unexpected in one seemingly so fragile.

  She turned and called down the stair. “Rue, bring food up here. Tonight I dine with my cousin. And set a fire. It’s going to be a chilly evening.”

  The towheaded cadet brought up bowls of thick soup, fresh bread, and a pitcher of ale. While they ate, the ounce begging them impartially for scraps, Rue piled kindling under the large bronze basin and set it on fire. Slowly, the chill left Kindrie’s bones and his spirit.

  “It doubles as a bathtub,” said Jame, referring to the basin, “but you know that from the last time you were here. Would you like it to be filled? No? Then what’s this about Kinzi’s letter being translated?”

  Kindrie explained.

  Jame swore, rose, and began to pace. Jorin scrambled out of her way.

  “I should have paid more attention,” she said. “After Lyra swallowed half of it, though, and I couldn’t read what was left . . . Trishien’s translation is certainly suggestive and in line with my own suspicions, but what can we do? Kirien is right: this isn’t proof. I don’t know what would be, short of a confession from Rawneth herself.”

  “Will she get away with it, then?” The thought closed Kindrie’s throat. So many dead, all the women of his family except his mother and she left in lonely exile . . .

  “The Bitch of Wilden has kept her secret for decades so far. And to use Kinzi’s letter would be to betray the ladies’ precious knot code.”

  “Does that matter?”

  “Not much. The winter I spent in the gentle care of the Women’s World was almost as bad as yours in the Priests’ College at Wilden. I owe them nothing. But there are three of us now. One of us is bound to stop her, somehow.”

  “Probably you.”

  Jame smiled with a flash of white, barred teeth. “Oh, I would like that very much.”

  Kindrie regarded her as she paced. Her clenched hands drove nails into her palms and her eyes flashed silver in the firelight. A shiver passed through the soulscape. It occurred to him suddenly that she had just fought down an incipient berserker flare. Her control frightened him almost as much as her potential violence.

  “You are dangerous, aren’t you?”

  “Sometimes, very much so. Others, I trip over my own feet. But you can tell Kirien this to add into the mix: the night of the fire when your contract was signed, the darkling changer Keral was there posing as Rawneth’s servant.”

  Kindrie stared at her. “How do you know that?”

  Jame made a face. “It’s a bit hard to explain. Sometimes I see visions, as if various places are trying to show me things. Autumn’s Eve in the death banner hall and in the Moon Garden, I glimpsed a lot that still confuses me. But Keral was definitely there. Moreover, I don’t think Rawneth had any idea who or what he was. She isn’t the sort to pay much attention to servants.”

  “So that would mean,” said Kindrie slowly, working it out, “that Keral is probably Lord Randir’s father.”

  “And Shade’s grandfather, which is how she inherited her dose of darkling blood. What we don’t know for sure is what face Keral showed Rawneth as they made love.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been Greshan’s?” Kindrie asked, confused.

  “No. She thought he was Greshan at first, but then he changed, and not back into Keral. Kinzi said that Rawneth was pleased. I don’t see her happy to have been tricked into congress with a lackey.”

  “Who, then? Gerraint?”

  “No. At a guess, your own father, Gerridon.”

  “But the Master isn’t a changer, is he?”

  “No. My dear uncle Gerridon has had as little to do with the shadows as possible. Others pay for his seeming immortality. But Rawneth wouldn’t know that. I always thought that M’lord Kenan reminded me of someone. Now I know whom: Keral.”

  “So Kenan is also a changer?”

  “That I don’t know. Maybe it skipped a generation, but as secretive as the Randir are, how would we know unless he loses control and betrays himself? Rawneth is or was watching Shade through her serp
ent Addy, presumably to see if she starts to show her bloodlines, which she has. Some cadets of her house are already after her, but not for that.”

  She told Kindrie about the attempt to drown Shade in the Randir basement during the Day of Misrule.

  “This is very confusing,” said Kindrie, running a hand through his white hair, leaving it in unruly cowlicks. “You say that the cadets who tried to kill Shade aren’t bound to her grandmother? Then to whom?”

  “Not to Randiroc, maybe not even to Kenan. You know the Randir better than I do. Who else is there?”

  Kindrie thought back to his time at Wilden, most of which had been spent in the Priests’ College. “Some Randir Highborn only serve Rawneth because they fear her. There are also Randir Shanir in the college, not all there willingly. Some of them may be able to bind.”

  “Huh. No wonder the Randir cadets are so confused, except for those bound directly to Rawneth. The whole thing is as murky as dirt soup. I’m obliged to you for bringing me news, however. Was that the only reason you dropped by Tentir?”

  “No. I was on my way to Gothregor, to give Torisen this.” He rummaged in his pack and brought forth a leather cylinder containing a roll of parchment. They spread it out on the floor where Jorin tried to sprawl on it, but was chased off. Names covered every inch of it, some with miniature ink portraits beside them, faces deftly caught in a few flicks of the brush.

  “This is wonderful,” said Jame, examining it. “Everyone bound to Tori must be here.”

  “Very nearly,” Kindrie admitted, glad that the firelight hid his blush of pride. “I started with the names we collected last fall and went on from there. The Knorth scrollsmen were a great help.”