Their heads turned toward Jame. “My fool.”
“All right,” she said, coughing. “You needn’t rub it in.
Chingetai shook himself, shedding a black cloud of ash.
“Ah, what was I saying? My grandson-in-law.”
Jame felt her mouth drop open. “What?”
“Now that your duty to the Earth Wife has ended, it’s time that you settled down, and I have just the right lodge-wyf for you.”
The Earth Wife seized Jame and hustled her through the dispersing haze with Chingetai on their heels. On the other side, they found themselves in the village before the communal underground hall. Chingetai seized an astonished Prid and thrust her forward.
“Granddaughter, behold your new housebond!”
A great shout welcomed their appearence within the lodge. Row upon descending concentric row of faces turned up toward them, mead cups raised. All were women. At the door men fought, not very hard, to rescue the groom, but were driven back with showers of food on which to make their dinner. Jame and Prid were seated side by side, half stunned by the noise, with no idea what to say to each other.
“Bitter honey and sweet!” cried the women, raising their mugs. “Roast rabbit for a fruitful union!”
“No need to worry about that.” One of the women carrying Jame’s putative children stood up, sporting her round belly, followed by the rest. All looked well pleased with themselves as the hall rang with shouts of approval.
One hand on her own stomach, Gran Cyd saluted Jame. “To the Favorite’s success!”
“What?” asked Prid, seeing Jame’s expression.
“I’m not ready to be a father.”
Cyd gestured for her to rise and, when she did, rapped her smartly with a stick once on each shoulder, then sharply on the head.
“Ouch,” said Jame, as the crowd roared congratulations. “What was that for?”
“To seal the contract and to remind you that your new wyf is allowed to beat you only three times, with no larger a stick than this. If she does more than that, or if you complain to me more than thrice, the marriage is void.”
Jame caught Prid’s glance. They both looked hastily away, blushing. Jame drank deep, for something to do. She had once sworn never again to get drunk, but surely this was an exception. Her head began to swim.
At last the feast came to an end and they were led, with much discordant song and shouted advice, to the mouth of a lodge, down which they were thrust. Jame lost her footing on the stair and sprawled, cursing, at its foot. Finally, the racket above withdrew.
Jame looked about her, her ears still ringing. A fire had been set on the raised hearth and candles surrounded the better furnished of the two sleeping ledges. Otherwise, the lodge appeared to be long deserted, with dust thick around its edges and the musty smell of old tapestries. At the far end of the chamber hulked the spidery ruins of a large loom.
“Your mother’s?” she asked Prid.
“Yes.” The girl was shivering despite the warmth, thin arms wrapped around her. “I used to sit under it and watch the shuttle fly back and forth. My mother was the best weaver in the village. Gran’s walls are hung with her work. I haven’t been here since she died. It smells like, it smells . . .”
Her teeth chattered together.
“That was a long time ago,” said Jame, shaking her head to clear it. “I smell only history.”
Prid, roused, glared at her. “You don’t understand. That was where she lay. Alive. Dead. There was so much blood. I touched my baby brother’s fingers. So perfect. So still.”
“Clean deaths, then. Natural. My mother . . .”
“Yes?”
“She imploded, rather than touch me. I think she meant it for the best.”
“Oh.”
Jame gave her a wolf’s feral grin, all teeth. “You see, there are worse things, and more outlandish. Beware, if you take me as a model.”
Prid gulped. “I wanted to be a war maid like great-aunt Anku, but her way has also led to death.”
“In the end, all things do. Better to ask how to live. What will you do now, Prid?”
The girl gave a shaky laugh. “Keep lodge for you, apparently, and weave, if I can remember how, and try to be happy.”
“I’m not going to be here often. You could divorce me. Here’s a log, if you’d like to beat me over the head. I promise to complain loud and long.”
Prid shook her tawny mane. “I have no place else to go, except back to Gran Cyd, and I’m too old now for that. Married to you, I at least have the status of a lodge-wyf. Oh, but to live here alone . . . !”
Clinkers rattled down the smoke hole, followed by Hatch, who narrowly missed landing in the fire.
“You could have used the door,” said Jame.
The next moment he had barreled into her. She fell backward between the hearth and the bed, barely able in that confined space to raise her arms against his flailing fists. One caught her agonizingly in the eye. She countered with an elbow to his mouth that split his lip. Prid was shouting at them. Jame got a foot into Hatch’s groin and hoisted him sideways. He rolled into the fireplace on his back amid a fountain of sparks, some of which settled in his clothes and began to smolder there. Oblivious, he scrambled free and threw himself at her again. Candles flew.
Prid dumped a bucket of water over them both.
They separated, panting, to opposite sides of the lodge.
“What in Perimal’s name . . .” gasped Jame.
“You monster!” he spat at her.
“Both of you, shut up!”
They looked at Prid in surprise. She let the bucket fall and burst into tears.
“All right,” said Jame, dropping onto the opposite ledge. Hatch hadn’t put out her eye, she decided, fingering it gingerly, but given how her head throbbed it was hard to tell. “I assume there’s some reason why you just tried to kill me.”
Hatch had gathered Prid in his arms and glared at Jame over the girl’s bent head.
“Earth Wife’s Favorite, father of Gran’s unborn child, I don’t care what sort of a freak you are. You shan’t have her!”
“You,” said Jame profoundly, “are confused—not that it isn’t a confusing situation. Housebond I may be, but I’m not about to do anything to Prid that she doesn’t want . . . or maybe that she does. G’ah, I hate being drunk!”
He glared at her. “Well then, what are we going to do?”
“I don’t bloody know.” She tried to rise and fell back with a reeling head. “Tonight, or rather tomorrow, I have to ride back to Tentir. In the meantime, the two of you figure it out.”
With that, she rolled herself up in the musty blanket and fell asleep.
CHAPTER XIX
Challenge
Summer 1
I
Jame woke late, with a vicious hangover.
Someone was bustling about the lodge, singing. A billow of dust made Jame sneeze. She rolled over, blurry-eyed, to observe Prid bundling up old tapestries, assisted by Hatch. They had already made fair inroads on the dwelling’s dank clutter, most of which they apparently had disposed of by shoving it up the stair into the open. Cheerful voices above indicated that they had help.
“Oh, you’re awake!” Prid exclaimed, seeing her move.
“Not so loud. G’ah, what did they put into that wretched mead anyway?”
“Everything left over from the winter, probably. Beer, ale, burnt water, fermented fish piss . . . People have been stopping by all morning to say what fun they had, as good as when Ma married Da, from all accounts. Here.”
She handed Jame a beaker of water, which the latter gratefully drained, splashing the last of it on her flushed face. She had been dreaming. There was someplace she was supposed to be, some duty she had neglected to fulfill. A nightmare sense of failure rose like bile in her throat, unless that was bile.
She observed Hatch by the loom, carefully removing rotten threads and setting its wooden limbs to rights.
“We de
cided,” Prid announced. “Hatch may have new duties in the village as the Earth Wife’s Favorite, but he’s going to stay here with me. Now that I’m a lodge-wyf, no one will object—unless you do.”
It seemed like a sensible arrangement to Jame, and she said so. Prid would have company and Hatch, when she was ready, would have Prid.
Then she remembered what she had forgotten: Gorbel’s challenge. “I have to go.”
The blanket had twisted around her legs. When she tried to rise, she fell headfirst between the sleeping ledge and the raised hearth. Prid and Hatch disentangled her. She gave them each a distracted kiss, grabbed her gear, and scrambled up into a bright morning.
Merikit women were sorting the offerings of the lodge—what to keep, what to discard, and what to burn immediately. Their good-natured greetings followed Jame down the boardwalk, mixed with bawdy jibes from the men about the supposed pleasures of her wedding night. Hopefully no one understood the answers that she snarled back at them in High Kens, a language rich in courtly invective.
Bel waited for her outside the gate. She had brought the mare in part because the Whinno-hir was easier to ride but mostly because she knew the Riverland better than the rathorn did. Still, the sun marched steadily across the sky as they traveled southward by the folds in the land until at last they arrived in the rocks west of Tentir.
“It’s about time,” the horse-master said, rising from his seat on a low boulder that might have doubled for his bald head. “Gorbel and his friends have been waiting for you in the training square since just after breakfast, in full armor, getting crosser by the minute. The Commandant has given you until sunset to appear.”
Both looked up at the descending sun, now less than half an hour above the western peaks.
Death’s-head ambled up wearing his usual riding tack as Jame scrambled into her light leather armor. For arms, she took a buckler and, reluctantly, a short sword, scythe-arms being a risky proposition in mounted combat if one didn’t want inadvertently to lop off ears or tails.
The horse-master surveyed her as she straightened her oversized helmet. Really, when she had time (if she had time), she needed to commission something better fitting.
“Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
He gave her a leg up onto the rathorn’s back and stood clear. Picking up on her nerves, if not on her mood, the colt capered in place, slashing with his horns. Then he plunged forward with Jame hanging on for dear life.
Their grand dash faltered at the hall door. The portals to the great hall stood open, but Death’s-head hesitated to enter where he had never been before, nor yet perhaps under any manmade roof. Jame coaxed him over the threshold.
The dark hall echoed like a seashell with the clamor of the cadets outside. A few voices picked up a chant, then more and more:
“. . . 30, 29, 28, 27 . . .”
They were timing the sun’s descent.
The rathorn’s ears twitched, but not at the ringing count. Darkness moved and became the Commandant, standing between them and the farther door.
“Well, Lordan.”
“Well, Ran.”
Would he stop her? What would be the point of that, though, when all he need do was cause a delay?
“. . . 21, 20, 19, 18 . . .”
Anyway, she had already solved his problem by failing to earn enough white pebbles to graduate from the college. Could he also mean to humiliate her by denying her this challenge? Certainly, his lord would love him for it.
“I thought you would come up with something, but this”—he indicated the rathorn—“rather exceeds my expectations. Can you control him?”
“After a fashion, Ran.”
“. . . 10, 9, 8 . . .”
“Well then, let’s see how you fare.”
He turned and pulled open the door. A shaft of brilliant sunlight, the day’s last, lanced through into the hall. Jame nudged the rathorn forward as if into the mouth of a furnace, out the door, into the square.
“. . . 4, 3, 2 . . .”
The voices petered out. Struck blind, Jame could see nothing. Then the sun set. Blinking dazzled eyes, at first she saw only black and crimson, then bit by bit what appeared to be the entire college lining the rail and the windows above, staring back at her. The eight armed Caineron riders waiting in the square seemed almost incidental.
The rathorn’s jaw dropped. Overwhelmed, he tried to back up, but the Commandant had closed the door behind him. His rump hit it with a hollow boom and he lunged forward, snorting, startled.
“It’s just a white horse in armor,” someone protested, uncertainly.
“Are you daft? Look at all that ivory!”
“It can’t be.”
“It is!”
Someone else cheered. It sounded like Rue.
The noise spread, thunderous, and Death’s-head brandished his horns at it. His defiant scream soared about the tumult, cutting it short.
In the startled silence that followed, Gorbel began to clap, slowly, in the heavy, measured way with which he had greeted her win at the Senethar so many months ago. The crowd picked up the beat.
The colt shook his head and moved forward along the rail. His hooves struck hard earth in time to the clapping. It picked up and he began to prance. The riders turned with him, their horses’ eyes rolling white as they caught the rathorn’s scent. Cadets fell back from the rail as he passed in a shimmer of white silk and ivory.
“Show-off,” Jame muttered at him.
They regained their original position in front of the hall door and swung about to face their opponents.
Silence fell again, except for Death’s-head pawing the ground.
“Have you words for me?” Jame asked Gorbel, following the formal pattern.
“I challenge you as the Knorth Lordan to prove your worthiness of that title.”
“I accept your challenge.”
Death’s-head snorted. Enough. He laid back his ears and charged, nearly leaving Jame astride thin air.
One of the horses, a piebald, turned and bolted with a squeal, the rathorn roaring on his heels. Confronted with the rail, he vaulted over it into the packed ranks of cadets, there shedding his rider. Then, confused, he plunged through the front door into the Caineron barracks. Cadets who had lined the windows to watch jumped out of them. Crashes and shouts came from within.
The colt was already swerving away. Jame swayed perilously off balance in the saddle, nearly over the rail herself with all her weight on the outer stirrup, before regaining her seat.
They were charging back toward the riders still clustered in the middle of the square. This time three broke ranks and ran, screaming, before them. Death’s-head thundered in pursuit. The Caineron cadets sawed on their reins, turning their mounts’ foaming muzzles to the sky, but nothing would stop them. So many would smash the entire rail flat, never mind the cadets who lined it.
“Hall, there. Hall!” Jame shouted, echoed by Gorbel.
The door opened. Two horses bolted through, carrying their hapless riders with them, but the third was shouldered aside and crashed through the barrier near the Brandan quarters, into the passageway that led to the southern door. His rider, scraped off against he wall, lay blinking at his departure.
It had taken the rathorn less than two minutes to clear the square of his most skittish opponents. That left Gorbel himself, his five-commander Obidin, Higbert, and Fash.
At a hoarse cry from their leader, the four charged. Death’s-head leaped to meet them, swerving at the last moment to pass between Fash and Higbert. On her left, Fash dealt Jame’s buckler a blow that drove it back to her shoulder. On her right, Higbert hacked at her sword and sent it flying. Simultaneously, the colt slashed at Higbert’s girth. Then they were past. Higbert slowly toppled over, saddle and all. Fash screened him as he dashed to the rail and dived over it. His horse plunged out of the square through the hall door.
That ended the second round, Jame thought, as the rathorn trotted aroun
d the perimeter, seeking his next prey. So far, their sheer number had prevented Gorbel or Obidin from striking a blow. Nonetheless, the loss of her sword was almost a relief as it allowed her to grip the colt’s roached-up mane for balance. She had already grasped that her only chance for survival was to stay on the rathorn, and that she could do precious little to direct him now that his blood was up.
They would try to catch her between them again—or would they?
Here came Fash, gashing his mount’s sides with his spurs, riding high in the saddle with sword upraised. The raw hate in his face struck her like a physical blow. She didn’t like the man, but neither did she loathe him as much as he apparently did her.
Vant’s features flashed before her, just before the Dark Judge had ripped off his head. He too had seen her as an abomination and as a personal insult. What about her inspired such malice? Everything she did seemed to slap someone in the face.
Philosophize later, she thought, gripping the colt’s mane.
Fash’s sword rang on her buckler, numbing her arm to the shoulder. Their mounts wheeled, head to tail, as he battered down her defense. Just before it fell, the rathorn rammed his nasal tusk into the horse’s belly and wrenched up, disemboweling him. The animal squealed, stumbled over the descending loops of his own intestines, and went down. Fash sprang clear. Death’s-head knocked him off his feet, then went after him as he rolled on the ground as if after a snake, pounce and strike, pounce and strike.
The crowd roared.
There was blood in the rathorn’s mouth. Jame could taste it and the savagery that it unleashed in his veins, in her own. Ah, the intoxication of one’s strength, of one’s ability to kill and kill and kill . . .
Beast of madness, here is your heart.
In that jolting ride, Jame had bitten her own tongue, her blood mixing with the phantom taste of his. She fought to free her mind of that red haze, of that raging blood lust.
Obidin unintentionally aided her by riding up behind. Death’s-head kicked the five-commander’s mount in the face, dropping him. Fash used the momentary distraction to gather himself and leap, trying to pull her out of the saddle. She dealt him a stunning blow with her buckler, He fell away and rolled under the rail to safety.
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