Bound in Blood

XVII The Winter War

Mid-Winter’s Day dawned bright and clear. Better yet, the Riverland was experiencing one of its rare, mid-season thaws. Somewhere, a misinformed and probably doomed robin chirped merrily. Everywhere, there was the sound of dripping, and icicles hung from the tin roof in rows of glittering teeth, separating the boardwalk from the practice square. Cadets emerging from their barracks for assembly paused, staring, then laughed. It seemed a pity to destroy such a miracle, so they only broke as many as they needed to gain access, one by one, to the square.

The Commandant awaited them. When they had scrambled into order, he began to stroll between their ranks, hands clasped behind his back, white silk scarf of office rippling at his throat. The only sounds were the swish of his long, black coat, the drip of water, and the squelch of his boots on the soggy ground. Even the robin fell silent, as if under the shadow of a circling hawk.

“Welcome,” he said in his clear, light voice, “to the Winter War.”

The ranks quivered like so many hounds held tightly in check.

Sheth Sharp-tongue smiled. In a steady, almost casual tone, he summarized the rules of play, stressing their similarities and differences from those of Gen. Most cadets could have spoken the next line before he did. However, among the masked ranks of the officers chosen to monitor, one slender figure in black, and he no randon, listened intently.

This newcomer’s concentration was disturbed by a hoarse muttering behind him.

“Harn,” he whispered, “are you all right?”

The randon swayed as he stood, his big hands opening and closing, his eyes bloodshot and glazed as they peered through his mask.

“All right, all wrong, all gone . . . ”

“Harn!”

“I understand your enthusiasm,” the Commandant was saying to the cadets. “Remember, however, that most of you are first-year students, even you ten-commanders. Any campaign is a complicated matter. It can run away with you. Be mindful, also, to curb undue violence. No one is to be killed or even seriously maimed. To do so is not only against the rules but bad form. At the very least, it will cost you points. At the worst . . . well, your training here has been to effect results with as little force as possible. We are warriors, not common butchers. My eyes”—and here he indicated the watchers with a languid wave of his hand—“will keep me informed of your progress. You have twenty minutes to position your flags. Go.”

The cadets scattered.

It didn’t take long, since each house had endlessly reviewed possibilities. The temptation was to keep one’s flag close so as better to defend it. However, it could also be secreted anywhere within one’s territory, that is to say, within the space encompassed by one’s barracks or—at greater risk—anyplace else within the field of play.

Berrimint and Doni had both told Jame where they intended to place their own flags. Jame had chosen the cadet dormitory with its maze of tentlike enclosures. First, though, she wanted to check Greshan’s quarters one more time for Graykin. Now more than ever, his knowledge of Tentir’s secret passages would be invaluable. Besides, it worried her profoundly that he had returned at all, much less that he had reclaimed the Lordan’s Coat, or vice versa. Consequently, she ran up the stairs accompanied by Jorin with the Knorth flag folded inside her coat.

There was no sign of Graykin, however, in the shambles that Greshan’s quarters had become. She should really have it cleaned up, Jame thought. Jorin had trotted over to the chest containing the cocoon and rested his paws on it. Through his cocked ears, she heard the sleepy, interior rumble of a purr, and through his paws she felt it. To whom was the wyrm bound now? It had arrived the companion of a darkling changer, then bitten Tori, then stung her. That aside, was she being a fool to harbor a darkling, however unfallen? Huh. One might ask the same of Tentir, not that the college truly knew what it had on its hands with her.

Some slight sound made her half turn. A body crashed into her, knocking her off her feet, onto her back, falling on top of her.

“Timmon, you fool,” she gasped up into the familiar face looming above her own. “Play hasn’t even begun yet!”

“What are a few minutes between friends? We still could be, you know, and more. Just submit.”

She tried to free herself, but he had her well and truly pinned, his weight on her legs, her hands held by one of his above her head against the floor.

Jorin chirped anxiously. Timmon was a friend, as far as past experience told him, but he didn’t understand this kind of game.

Timmon ran his free hand over her face in a caress, down to cup her breast—luckily not the one shielded by the folded flag.

“Our people are waiting for us.”

“Let them wait.”

“You really don’t want to do this.”

“Oh, I really, really do.”

“Then prepare to suffer.”

“This time, it’s your turn.”

With that, he reared back, wrenching off her token scarf, and retreated with it to the door.

“Let’s see how you like being helpless.”

Then he was gone, closing the door as much as its sprung hinges allowed behind him.

Jame sat up cursing. One rule of the Winter War was that any cadet who lost his or her scarf was considered “scalped” and out of action. They had to stay where they were, communicating with no one, until either the war ended or, more unlikely, someone rescued and restored their scarf to them. Jame’s was worth a lot, as many points as her house flag. Then too, so was the Ardeth flag, which she had extracted from Timmon’s coat as he rose off of her. Now she had two major house standards in her possession, but couldn’t tell anyone, nor did anyone know where she was.

What a crappy way to start a war.

Harn Grip-hard shambled through the corridors of Old Tentir. Present and past blurred in his mind. He was a first-year cadet. He was a former commandant of the randon college. What was this urgency that drove him on? Where was he going, to do what? Who would die? Who was already dead?

“Father!” he cried, and the close-set walls swallowed his voice.

All right, all wrong, all gone . . .

When Sheth Sharp-tongue finished his address, the cadets broke and ran for their barracks. The monitors likewise dispersed, leaving the Commandant and the Highlord.

“Now are you glad that you accepted my invitation, my lord?” asked the former, indicating the heady air of excitement in which the college simmered.

“Ask me later. Did you see where Harn went?”

The Commandant’s eyebrows rose. “No. Why?”

“Something is wrong with him. I don’t like the way he looks, and he kept muttering ‘All gone.’ ”

“ ‘All gone’?” The brows fell in a frown. “Then we had better find him. Quickly. I’ll warn the other monitors. You check his quarters in Old Tentir. Recently, he’s complained of feeling ill and has taken to dining alone in his room.”

While much of Old Tentir was a mystery to Torisen, he knew his way to Harn’s tower apartment. He found it a mess, with clothes strewn all over as if Harn had been searching for something, with increasing urgency and lack of success. Under a pair of torn pants, he found the remains of Harn’s last meal. The Kendar must truly have been feeling ill to have subsisted on such watery gruel. Torisen removed his monitor’s mask, dipped a finger in to taste it and frowned. Something about the taste, no, the smell, was familiar.

He had a sudden, vivid memory of Lord Ardeth handing him a glass of wine and watching as he sipped it. It had had just such an out-of-place floral fragrance. Then he had been back in the Haunted Lands keep doing . . . something . . . with Ardeth’s voice in the back of his mind murmuring questions which he hoped he hadn’t answered.

Black forget-me-not. That was the smell. Adric used it when he wanted to remember something or when he wished to see his beloved Pereden again, as that wretched boy had been in life and lived on still in his father’s memory.

If Harn had been dosed with this for days . . . but by whom, and why?

Trinity, the stuff was potent. It tugged at his mind. He remembered the last time he had been in this tower apartment, before the Host had marched south to confront the Waster Horde at the Cataracts. They had been talking when a cadet had burst in nearly in hysterics.

“D-dead,” he had stammered. “Dead, dead, dead . . . ”

They had run down to the great hall to find two cadets crushed together face to face on the hearth . . .

Where were they now?

. . . and a darkling changer wearing a stolen face waiting for him.

“We have unfinished business,” it had said.

Cadets were rushing to the stricken pair on the hearth. One moment he saw them, the next he didn’t as then and now bled into each other. That filthy drug . . .

But someone was waiting for him at the stair’s foot—a tall cadet whom, surely, he should know.

Not another forgotten name.

Torisen paused, his face in shadow, his mind in turmoil. “What do you want?”

“To talk to you. In private. Now.”

Still adrift between past and present, Torisen followed the cadet down the stairs, through the stable, into the fire timber hall, between the towering, incandescent timbers.

They faced each other across a smoldering, stone-lined fire pit. Was this where he had confronted the changer? No. That pit was off to one side, although surely drying laundry hadn’t then hung over it. The heat was the same, though, warping the air between them, stinging the eyes, hindering sight.

“Doesn’t honor mean anything to you?” demanded the cadet furiously. “Don’t the rules? Then again, why should they when the Commandant lets you break them over and over? Quite his little pet, aren’t you? You think you’re so clever that you can get away with anything. Well, not this time.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your scarf. Someone has already scalped you, but here you are, still in play.”

“You think I’m Jame.”

The other spat on the stones. His saliva skipped among them, sizzling, going, gone. “The spoiled brat. The Highborn little lady. What did your brother think, that Tentir needed a mascot?”

He began to pace. Torisen moved also, to keep the pit between them. He wanted to hear, to understand.

“We’re just toys to you, aren’t we, and Tentir is all one big game. Well, some of us fought to get here. Three generations it’s taken my family to claw our way up from the dirt where your precious uncle flung my grandmother after he’d had his fun with her. She died giving birth to my mother, who died at the Cataracts on the Mendelin Steps, fighting for your precious brother. Her blood bought me my place here. Dishonor that, would you, by dishonoring me? I don’t think so.”

At last Torisen remembered this cadet’s name: Vant. As for the rest, he was still confused. “How have you been dishonored?”

“I was master-ten of my barracks. I still should be. It was an honest mistake!”

“What was?”

“Stop playing with me, dammit! How could anyone seriously believe that hillmen were attacking on Tentir’s doorstep? What logic was there in that? What sense is there in anything that you do or that happens around you?”

Torisen was catching up now, and his voice hardened. “You didn’t send help. You laughed. A cadet died.”

“And I tell you, it was an understandable mistake! Who are you, to be taken seriously, then or now? I’d as soon take orders from Gorbel’s pook! Your presence here is a joke, an insult. Am I to pay for one misjudgment forever?”

“That depends on you. In Sheth’s place, I would have thrown you out of Tentir altogether.”

“You misbegotten bitch!”

He circled the fire pit in a rush, meeting Torisen on the far side in earth-moving Senethar. The Kendar far overmatched the Highborn in both size and strength, but Torisen had fought bigger men than himself all his life. While Vant tried to fling him onto the searing stones, he tried to wrestle them both away.

Vant suddenly lurched free. He looked dazed and incredulous, as if someone had just struck him in the head. His eyes, slightly crossed, swept the hall.

“You . . . don’t!”

With that, he flinched again, stumbled on the rim of the pit, and fell in. There he rolled hastily to his feet, his hands already red and blistered.

“You bitch, all of you, bitches . . . ”

Then for the first time he clearly saw his adversary. “Oh.”

“Now that that’s settled, get out of that damn firebox.”

Vant shuffled from foot to foot. Clearly he felt the heat, but he didn’t take his peril seriously.

“Not until you make me master-ten of my barracks and withdraw that bitch sister of yours. You must see that her presence here isn’t right!”

“I suppose you know that your boots are smoking. I can’t be blackmailed, Vant. It would be a betrayal of my position.”

Stomping unsettled sparks from the coals beneath the stones. Now the cadet’s pant cuffs were smoldering. He beat at them with his hands in a kind of exasperated irritation. Wherever Vant had expected life to take him, it wasn’t to this, nor did he yet believe it.

“You’re Highlord, dammit!” The furnace breath of the pit made him increasingly hoarse as his throat closed. “You can do . . . what you please!”

“Not so. To lead is also to serve . . . something that neither you nor Greshan ever seem to have grasped. What you ask would be a betrayal of responsibility. Come out, Vant. Now.”

He could have ordered in a voice that the cadet would have had to obey, but he didn’t. The will that allows a man to argue while he risks immolation deserves that much respect at least.

Fire flared under Vant’s hands. No doubt he could smell as well as feel his own burning flesh.

“I don’t believe this. I don’t accept it. It isn’t fair!”

“Is the truth? Come out. Here, take my hand.”

The flames rose, licking from pants to jacket, with a sudden rush to the hair. At last Vant believed the unthinkable.

“I will . . . have justice,” he panted as the smoke gnawed at his throat, “or I will . . . have revenge.”

He groped toward Torisen with a hand whose fingers were already blackening. Torisen would have met his failing grasp, but strong hands pulled him back.

Vant fumbled at the rim, blue eyes glaring out of a charring face, then sank out of sight.

“He would have pulled you in, lord,” said Brier, finally releasing him.

“What are you doing here? I thought Old Tentir was forbidden territory for the duration of the war.”

“It is,” said Rue, with a shuddering glance toward the contents of the pit, from which a pillar of greasy smoke now arose, “except for public spaces like this. We’re looking for your sister, lord. She went off to hide our flag, and no one has seen her since. That is, someone thought they saw her passing through the great hall, so we followed.”

“Instead, it was me. Damn. As soon as possible, I have got to grow a beard. Listen: has either one of you seen Ran Harn?”

“He’s missing too?”

“Dangerously so. He’s got to be found, Winter War be damned.”

The cadets exchanged glances. Calling off the war would not be a popular option or even, perhaps, possible at this late date.

“Play has already begun, lord,” said Rue cautiously, “and our team is in chaos without your lordan to lead it. Maybe, if you could take over, just until we find her . . . ”

“You would have three houses searching for Ran Harn,” added Brier.

Rue gave the Southron a curious, sidelong look. As senior and experienced as Brier was, she apparently didn’t want to miss this rite of Tentir either, not that her plan didn’t have merit.

The Highlord thought so too.

“All right,” he said. “We hunt for multiple targets. But understand me: Harn has been poisoned. I don’t know what memories are tormenting him now, but they could lead to his death.”

“And your sister?”

He gave a sudden bark of laughter. “I defy the past or anything else to get the better of Jame. Ancestors help who or whatever blunders into her way.”

He paused, looking down into the pit. “Mistakes and all, Vant, I will remember you.”

With that, he strode out of the fire timber hall.

“What do we do about Vant?” asked Rue.

Brier answered out of the bleak pit of her experience which, in its time, had seen far worse. “He chose his pyre. Let him burn on it.”

“Huh. A nice thought, next washing day.”

Hidden in the shadows, Damson watched them go. Just for fun, she gave Rue a mental nudge that made the cadet stumble. She might be clumsy herself, but at least she could let others know how it felt. This time, it had been particularly satisfying. She paused for one last glance at the pit where her tormentor lay wrapped in flames, then followed the others out.

Jame sighed. It was cold and boring, sitting here on the floor in Greshan’s quarters, her back to the chest containing Beauty’s cocoon. Was she really going to be stuck here all day? How long had it been so far? Probably only an hour, but it felt like forever.

“Have I ever sat still this long before in my life?” she asked Jorin.

Jorin was curled up on the purring chest with his chin on her shoulder. He batted an ear as if to say, What’s the problem? Catnap whenever you can.

Jame reflected that she was more likely to go for days on end at a dead run, and be damned if that wasn’t less tiring than this enforced inactivity.

“If this goes on much longer,” she told the ounce. “I have got to learn how to knit.”

Since they were supposed to be in full view, the two flags were spread out on the floor. After their initial placement, unlike in a game of Gen, they could move, but always in plain sight. Of course, that wasn’t quite true now with the door as shut as it was going to get. Surely by now Timmon had discovered his loss. If he guessed that his banner was here, however, it was in a near perfect hiding place. No one would look for it in another house’s barracks, and he could collect both it and hers before the end of play.

There was, of course, the small matter that he had cheated by jumping her prematurely.

Jame hadn’t been able to figure out how strict the rules were. The randon insisted on them, of course, but there was a definite sense among the cadets that if they could get away with something uncaught, they would. After all, things didn’t necessarily go according to plan in a real battle. The monitors were going to have a busy time riding herd on that mob.

At a whisper of sound, Jorin’s head jerked up, ears pricked. The rumbling coming from him now was not a purr but a growl.

“Well, well, well. Sitting this one out?”

Jame’s heart skipped a beat. She knew that loathed drawl. Scrambling to her feet, she lurched a bit on legs that had gone to sleep. Greshan stood behind her half in shadow. Bars of light cast through cracks in the shutters slanted across the roiling colors of the Lordan’s Coat. Vermillion and azure stitches inched away from the glare like disturbed whipworms. The discolored shirt beneath seethed.

“Graykin.” Her voice emerged as a croak. “I know you’re in there somewhere. Come out. Please.”

“Oh no. Your precious sneak has crept back to me to hide and I hold him close. No one else ever has.”

“I would have, but . . . ”

“It was inconvenient. And his neediness annoyed you, after all he has suffered in your service.”

That was only too true. She remembered Graykin dangling by hot wires threaded through his skin, made to dance to Caldane’s tune for changing his alliance to her. A winter’s agony . . .

“You speak fine words to others about responsibility and honor,” crooned that hateful voice, “but how well do you live up to them yourself?”

“I try.”

“You fail, and you know it.”

“Whereas, Uncle, you never tried at all.”

“I didn’t need to. What is honor if not that which is born in the blood? Therefore how can honor betray itself? So my father taught me when he gave me the freedom to do whatever I wanted. So I believed, then and now. I had so much. I deserved so much more. Now all I have is hunger.”

His hand—Graykin’s thin hand, with grubby nails—groped at his rustling shirtfront. Out of it he drew a fistful of squirming maggots and munched on them as he spoke indistinctly through their mangled remains.

“Always hungry. Never had enough. Always wanted more. Ah.” He swallowed. “They took it all away from me, your precious randon, all but my hunger. Now see what I’ve become.”

“I see, but I don’t understand. You supposedly died in a hunting accident and your body was given to the pyre at Gothregor. No death banner hangs there for you now, not even a token one.”

“Ha!” His laugh sprayed maggot fragments. Some he apparently inhaled because he began to cough and grabbed a chairback to support himself.

Graykin’s face, suffused and gasping, lifted toward her. “Mistress, help me!”

She took a step toward him, but already Greshan had slid his mask back over those wraith-thin, wretched features.

“Help?” he wheezed, then hawked and spat. “What, will you wear the Lordan’s Coat at last and submit yourself to my will? Foolish child, do you expect never to bow to anyone?”

“Did you?”

He straightened and wiped his mouth, withdrawing again into the shadows. “Only to death, and that most unwillingly. But you aren’t me. No, not by half, and a weak, mewling hypocrite to boot. So much for your responsibility and your precious honor! No, little girl, such a one as you will never keep me from my revenge.”

“Against whom?” she asked, confused. “Hallick Hard-hand is long since dead, if it was he who struck you down. I never did quite believe in the story of an accident.”

He laughed, a harsh, jeering sound, almost a sob. “Clever, clever, clever, but still so ignorant. Oh, what a bloody-handed house we are. Do you suppose that even your dear brother’s hands are clean?”

“What, in your death?”

“Now, did I say that? So many have died, over time, and wander the Gray Lands unburnt, muttering. The dead know what concerns the dead. But I waste time here. They took everything from me. Now I will take everything from them. I already have Harn Grip-hard’s wits. You should see how he stumbles and babbles. The past has him by the throat, with the help of this.”

He threw down a black cake of compressed herbs.

“Try it yourself, if you want to find him again, if you dare.”

With that he stepped back into the shadows and was gone.

Jame picked up the cake and sniffed it. Such a strong bouquet of flowers . . .

For a moment, the room swam around her and settled into golden morning light. Greshan, in life, was donning gilded hunting leathers. “Such a fuss,” he was saying, “about a wounded Whinno-hir. Honestly, you’d think that I had branded someone’s maiden aunt. Still, the hunt should be fun.”

Jame sneezed, and the vision passed.

She had no doubt that Greshan was going after Harn, having first rendered him helpless. But how could she leave this room to help him? Without her scarf, however falsely obtained, she was considered among the dead. Still, the dead could roam. What was more important anyway, compliance to a mere game or Harn’s life? Put that way, the choice was clear.

But she couldn’t give up the war altogether.

“Jorin, go and listen for me.”

It was a game they had practiced often in the Falconer’s class in the days leading up to the war. Mouse had proved best at it, sending out one companion and keeping the other to receive reports; but Jorin hadn’t done badly when, catlike, he was in the mood. Maybe she couldn’t (or shouldn’t) use her claws, but she could use her other Shanir attributes to keep abreast of events.

Leaving the flags where they lay as a token gesture, she slipped out of the room and ran for the looming bulk of Old Tentir.

“This damn war is only two hours old, and already it’s a damned mess.”

So Berrimint of the Brandan declared, running a hand distractedly through her short hair and dolefully surveying the double plank table set out in the Knorth barracks’ common room. Sketched on it in chalk was a rough map of the college with blocks of painted wood scattered about its surface. Scouts arrived every few minutes with new information, and an intent cadet shifted the blocks.

“Does anyone know what the hell is going on? Where’s Jame? For that matter where in Perimal’s name is your flag?”

Her ally, young Doni, looked at the board helplessly, the Knorth ten-commanders likewise. They had already searched the dormitory where the flag was supposed to be but wasn’t. Whatever opinion they had had of Jame’s ability to lead, her absence disconcerted them more than they would have believed possible.

“Some say that Timmon is wearing her scarf,” offered a Danior—one of the few left after the Ardeth had stormed their tiny barracks, torn it apart, and triumphantly retreated bearing the Danior flag as well as most of the Danior scarves. Feet shuffled. No one blamed their ally for the catastrophe, rather themselves for being too slow to prevent it. Berrimint was a competent subordinate, but given three houses to command, including the Highlord’s, she was stumbling badly.

“Enough of this,” said Brier and strode into the room, leaving Torisen in the shadow of the doorway. “Report.”

It amused him how they all—nominally the Southron’s superiors—came to attention, although some glanced slantwise in his direction. Probably they thought he was Jame again, de-scarved and therefore voiceless, but there.

They look to her, he thought, with a sudden pang of jealousy.

“If you don’t watch out,” Harn had warned him, “You’ll lose that Kendar to your sister.”

Brier Iron-thorn and how many more?

“Our spies and scouting parties are all out gathering information,” the Brandan master-ten was saying, somewhat defensively, addressing both newcomers; Rue was still out hunting for Jame. “Of the major flags, ours is well protected. Yours seems to be missing. Gorbel is literally sitting on his—with those sore ribs, this can’t be that much fun for him. Meanwhile, his own ten-commander Obidin has run afoul of a hazard in the shape of a brick balanced on top of a door. He’ll kick himself in the morning over that, if his head doesn’t hurt too much. As for the Jaran and the Randir, their flags haven’t been located yet.”

“And the Edirr’s?”

“Oh, they’re running around with it hanging out, so to speak. Moreover, their barracks is so full of makeshift hazards that they don’t dare enter it themselves.”

“Then they should have left it there.”

“You know the Edirr: they flaunt even what they don’t have, much more so than what they do.”

“Actions?”

“Besides raiding the Danior, Timmon and the Jaran made a sortie against the Brandan, but were repulsed. Meanwhile, the Caineron invaded the Ardeth. I hear that they made a real mess of Timmon’s quarters, but didn’t find anything. Possibly his flag is missing too. Oh, and Gorbel seems to be in a private war with his Randir allies, who laugh at all his orders and go their own way. Something strange is going on in their barracks. Ancestors forbid that Lord Randir has extended his purge here, now of all times.”

Torisen felt his skin prickle. He didn’t like the idea of Timmon wearing Jame’s scarf, or of the two missing flags, or of blood purges in the Randir. His sense was that the Winter War was usually a straightforward campaign, a real-life game of Gen, not something this rife with dangerous undercurrents.

“There go the Edirr again,” said someone by the window.

Keeping to the side, Torisen went to look. There, indeed, they went, waving their flag before them, prancing in some drill of their own eccentric creation, and singing.

“We’re the Edirr and we don’t care.

“Come and catch us if you dare!”

Torisen noted one at the end of this procession who looked less happy than the others, a girl with fluffy brown hair followed by a scurry of mice.

“They use them as spies,” said the cadet at his elbow. “We kill them when we can.”

“What about the Commandant’s rule about no undue violence?”

The cadet shrugged. “They’re vermin. Who cares?”

“ ’Ware Ardeth!”

The shout came from below. Under cover of the Edirr diversion, Ardeth cadets were spilling into the first-floor Knorth quarters through the door to the internal hallway that ran from one end of New Tentir to the other. Weapons were forbidden but all on both sides were highly skilled at unarmed combat. Some of them dashed up the stairs to the common room. The cadet in charge of the intelligence board threw his arms around his map and blocks in a despairing gesture.

Torisen kept back, watching. What were they after? Then he spotted Timmon’s golden head among them and met his questing eyes. He looked enough like his father Pereden to always give Torisen a jolt. Worse, around his neck, the Ardeth wore two scarves, one embroidered with a singularly inept rathorn crest; Jame never could sew a straight line.

He had to get Timmon away from his troops. A strategic withdrawal seemed in order. Using wind-blowing, Torisen winnowed through the combatants, keeping them between himself and Timmon. Reaching the stairs, he ran down them.

Below the first-story reception area was the subterranean kitchen. Torisen entered and slipped behind the door. Breakfast long over, it was quite dark with only a banked fire. He picked up a candle with a snap-wick and waited.

Timmon plunged past him into the room, almost skidding into the central fireplace, entangling himself with its impedimenta.

“Where are you?” He floundered about, not waiting for his eyes to adjust. “What are you doing here when I left you scalped in your blasted uncle’s room? And don’t tell me it’s because I snatched your scarf a few minutes before this farce of a war actually started. I do things like that. You don’t.”

“I don’t?”

“There you are.” He focused on Torisen’s shadowy form by the door. “What’s wrong with your voice? If you’ve caught cold sitting on that beastly floor, it serves you right. You should have let me warm you.”

“I should?”

They were circling the fireplace now, two shapes of darkness in a dark room. Embers caught random lines of their moving forms. It was eerily reminiscent of the scene in the fire timber hall, dressed down to farce.

“You know eventually that you will yield to me. I get what I want, and I deserve what I get, like my father. Am I so much less than him?”

“More. I hope.”

“What, then? Dammit, I’m not the one who keeps pulling your wretched brother into our dreams. It’s quiet and private here. Come. Let’s make the most of it.”

Torisen had stopped. Timmon moved to embrace him, but stopped short when the snap-wick flared to life between them.

Torisen smiled into the Ardeth’s astonished face. “I’m flattered, but no thank you.”

With that, he twitched off both of Timmon’s scarves, stepped out the door, and locked it behind him.

“Obviously you don’t know my sister very well,” he said, and left to find his uncle’s quarters.

Behind him, Timmon started to pound on the door and to shout.

The boy stumbled on. He didn’t know why he was so miserable. No one had been making fun of him for once and his best friend Sheth hadn’t made one of his witty remarks—the sort whose sting is only felt afterward. Sheth probably didn’t even intend to make him feel stupid. Perhaps smart people didn’t understand how barbed their intelligence was to those less gifted.

Besides, the boy’s father was the current commandant of Tentir. Wasn’t that a special thing, one to be proud of? And Harn was very proud of his father. Hallick Hard-hand was everything that the boy longed to be: strong, honorable, smart, and above all confident. That his father could ever have been a chunky, blundering cadet like himself never crossed Harn’s mind.

Right now, his father was out with the eight other former randon commandants and that beast Greshan. They were hunting the Whinno-hir Bel-tairi whom Greshan had maimed, all through spite for his grandmother whose mount the White Lady was. Of course, the Highlord, Greshan’s father, didn’t see it that way. High spirits, he called it. A boy’s enthusiasm for the hunt gone astray.

But even Highlord Gerraint understood that a wounded Whinno-hir couldn’t be allowed to run, weeping blood for all to see. Others might not understand Greshan’s boyish glee, might see something dark and twisted in torturing such an innocent creature for so poor a reason. So he had called on his commandants—the entire Randon High Council—to finish what his son had begun. Let their hands also be red. Let them share the guilt so that none, ever again, would speak of it, or so Sheth had said.

Horses in the square. The hunt had returned. Looking out a window, he saw not the Whinno-hir’s body but the lordan’s slung across his horse’s back, fair hair hanging in a swath over his face. Hallick dismounted with difficulty, almost falling. His hunting leathers were bloodstained. He cradled his strong left hand, while blood seeped through the field dressing. They would take him to the infirmary.

The boy ran there. At the door, he met Sheth.

“Don’t go in,” said his friend. “Harn, please don’t.”

But his father had heard his voice and was calling for him.

Hallick sat on a chair, blood running down his fingers to drip on the pile of loosened dressing.

“He got in a lucky blow, son. Now I haven’t the strength to finish the work. You must help me.” He offered the boy a white-hilted knife. “Terrible things will follow this day’s work, but at least the honor of Tentir will have been saved.”

“I don’t understand.”

I’m too stupid, he thought. Sheth would understand. He did. That’s why he didn’t want me to enter.

“They will say it was a hunting accident, those who don’t know. But it was a judgment. No Knorth Lordan passes through our hands without being judged whether he be worthy to lead our people. Greshan didn’t believe it when I told him. He laughed. Who, after all, was fit to judge him, the Highlord’s heir? We are. Only we. And we did.

“Now help me, boy. Take the knife, draw it just so across my wrist. Cut deep. Deeper. Good. Now sit with me one last time and wait. It’s all right.”

All right, all wrong . . .

So the boy waited, hearing only blood dripping on the floor and his father’s increasingly shallow breath. Then it faltered and stopped.

All gone.

He never saw the shadowy figure by the door holding something dark to her nose, weeping silently.

Jame watched from the doorway, unaware that she was crying. Black forget-me-not made her head spin. One minute she saw a boy and his dead father, the next Harn kneeling in ungainly tears before an empty chair.

She was vaguely aware of a tall, thin boy standing beside her, also silently watching. In the sharp lines of his face, she recognized a young Sheth.

Harn blundered between them. Sheth, grown ghostlike, followed him. Jame followed them both. As she entered the square, she took a deep breath of the caked flower. The practice area was full of fighters, as if every house had suddenly rushed out to do battle. They were phantoms to her and she a ghost to them, dimly aware of each other through the haze of ancient tragedy.

Where was Harn going?

Of course, to her uncle’s quarters.

Greshan’s apartment was still in disarray, but this time it was the lived-in mess of a young man who didn’t value his possessions when they weren’t currently adorning him. He himself lay on the bed under a canopy of silk, his bloody gilt leathers staining the disordered satin spread. The Lordan’s Coat covered his face, its empty arms thrown wide as if futilely trying to embrace him.

The boy/man Harn stood in the doorway, breathing hard. He stiffened at the sound of weak, muffled laughter. The coat stirred; no, that which it covered had moved. A hand crawled up and dragged the coat off the “corpse’s” face. Here, though, was no dead meat but a living if desperately wounded man. Greshan laughed again, and caught his breath in a gasp.

“Oh, your father struck a shrewd blow,” he panted. “I would have been cleaved in two . . . if this blessed coat under my leathers hadn’t slowed the strike. What . . . did you think that I was dead? Just . . . resting. Planning. Little man, you’ve been kneeling in blood. Don’t tell me . . . that fool your father has taken the so-called honorable way out of his treachery. And well he should . . . to have raised his hand against his master’s son. All for nothing, too, you see . . . because here I still am.”

The boy made a deep, retching sound, at which the other laughed harder, half choking. Harn stumbled to the bedside, seized the coat, and thrust it into Greshan’s face. The black rage of a berserker flare was on him, perhaps for the first time. Greshan beat against the boy’s congested face. Unnoticed, young Sheth stepped forward and pinned the lordan’s thrashing legs. Greshan’s face pressed into the embroidered contours of the coat, choking on it in his death throes. The peacock blue lining was halfway down his throat. His teeth gnashed at it. As he weakened, his blood seeped through at the indenture that was his gaping mouth. Then, finally, he lay still.

Guilt in a small room. Bloody hands.

So this was how Harn and Sheth had unintentionally secured Ganth the Highlord’s chair, by killing his older brother.

The forget-me-not was wearing off. Jame saw Harn bending over a much smaller body than Greshan’s, although his full weight still bore down on it. He was smothering Graykin.

Avenger in the wall . . .

“Harn, don’t!”

She tried to pull him off.

The Commandant thrust her aside and caught his colleague in a choke hold. It must have been like trying to throttle a bull. Sheth adjusted his grip and wrestled Harn off his prey. The two lurched back, one clinging to the other.

Likewise, the coat fought Jame as she struggled to tear it free. There might have been a back under its silken threads, a body pressed down face to face with the Southron. She unsheathed her claws and ripped. The sensation was of tearing flesh off bones and it came, wetly. Graykin lay beneath, as skeletal as a corpse months dead, and he didn’t breath.

Jame breathed for him. Beneath her mouth, his changed into a dog’s muzzle.

She jerked back. There they lay on the Master’s cold hearth, she in her ivory armor, he in his scruffy fur. Once she had thought that this hall was her soulscape and here she had lain in wretched oblivion while this poor creature guarded her sleep. Self-knowledge had freed her, but not entirely, not while part of her soul, freely given, remained chained here.

Get away, she thought in near panic. Run before he wakes and begins to whine again. Do you want him always clinging like a sick child, always holding you back?

But it wouldn’t do. Giving him a job while his soul remained trapped here was like patting him on the head and saying, Go away and play. Just leave me alone.

No. She had to free him, but how? Break the braided chain that wound like a noose around his neck. It was woven of her own shining black hair. Break a strand and it bled. Must she rip out her only vanity? So be it. She slashed and tore, finally loosening the knot with her nails.

Now breathe into his slake mouth, once, twice, until his rank breath answered hers.

Follow me. Follow. Away from this cursed place.

And they ran, he panting on her heels, still a mongrel cur, away from the hearth, out of the hall, across the blighted hills, toward a fresh wind blowing.

He blinked up at her, and smiled crookedly. “Lady.”

Free he might be, but his will held the bond between them. Damn.

The Commandant knelt beside Harn with a hand on the bigger man’s slumped, shaking shoulders. Sheth looked more disheveled than Jame had ever seen him, his dark hair in his eyes, one of which was turning purple, his white scarf of office twisted askew around his neck.

All the time, she had been vaguely aware of them lurching around the room, one clinging to the other’s back, smashing furniture. Harn had rammed Sheth against a wall, but hadn’t loosened his grip. At last, the Knorth Kendar had tangled his feet in a welter of ruined shirts and pitched forward headfirst.

“That’s how it was,” the Commandant said, breathing hard. Jame had to think for a moment to remember what he was talking about. Oh, yes. “I don’t think Harn even knew that I was there. That one’s life wasn’t worth Hallick Hard-hand’s, nor worth much of anything as far as I could tell.”

“I agree, Ran. But that foul coat . . . ”

“You’ve settled for that, I should think.” He eyed the garment ripped almost seam to seam by her claws.

“Not quite, Ran.”

She rose from the bed and nudged it gingerly with her foot. It flapped over, like something that should have bones but didn’t. There were stains on the lining, dark red on peacock blue, soaking through to the weave. At first they looked random. Then one could discern crude features—a gaping mouth, running nose, bloody eyes. Leering.

“Greshan,” said the Commandant.

“And this is his death banner. All these years, his blood has trapped his soul in it.”

The randon looked up sharply. “I didn’t realize that that was possible.” A corner of his mouth twisted. “What an odd life you must lead, to know such a thing.”

“Ran, believe me, whatever my failings at Tentir, about some things I know considerably more than I find comfortable.”

“So. Presumably it possessed that wretched boy and might have you, if you had claimed it. What would you have done with it, Lordan?”

Jame didn’t have to think. “Burn it. Here. Now.”

The Commandant piled kindling on the cold hearth, some of it from the smashed chest that had held the coat, and added the soiled underclothes as tinder.

“Here.” Torisen emerged from the shadows and offered the snap-wick candle.

“Tori! How long have you been here?”

“Long enough to understand a number of things better.”

“Yes, but why are you here?”

“The Commandant invited me to see a slice of cadet life. Is Tentir always this confusing?”

“It comes and goes.”

“Also I wanted to apologize. I really thought that you had flayed that cadet. Instead, now I’ve burned him alive.”

“Vant is dead?”

“I sincerely hope so.”

“No doubt someone will explain that to me later,” said the Commandant, and snapped the wick alight.

The tinder caught. As he tried to throw the coat on it, however, it wrapped its arms around him. He and Tori pried it loose. It fell writhing on the flames. The stitches seethed into a face, mouth agape where the blood had seeped through.

“You!” it spat at Torisen. “Beware your own victims, Highlord.”

Torisen drew back. “I don’t understand you.”

“Think, and you will. The dead know what concerns the dead.”

The arms tried to rise, but thin threads entwined them like a net and drew them back, down into flames burning gold, cerulean, and chartreuse.

The heat drove the watchers back. The fire roared up once with a shriek, then sank to a sullen hissing of embers and the stink of burnt hair.

Sheth was breathing hard, but spoke steadily. “I thought that he was going to escape. What, pray tell, were those threads that pulled him back?”

“Every lordan for generations has added a strand of his hair to the weave. I’m the first and the last not to do so. It was a hair-loom, not just an heirloom. Some fragments of their souls were trapped in it too.”

She regarded her brother, frowning. That was the second time Greshan had spoken of unspecified unburnt dead. Were they never to be free of them?

Then she flinched. Suddenly into her mind had come a drawling voice, as clearly as it struck Jorin’s ears: “A prime pelt on this hunting cat. I reckon it’s wasted where it is.”

“Fash has Jorin. I’ve got to go.”

“Wait. Take these.” Tori handed her two scarves, one of which she recognized with surprise as Timmon’s. “I locked him in the Knorth kitchen—poetic justice, as it turns out.

She hastily donned her scarf, then stuffed the other one and the two flags into her coat, creating considerably more of a bosom than she normally sported, and a lumpy one at that.

When she was gone, Torisen and Sheth looked at each other.

“I seem to have saddled you with a whirlwind,” the Highlord remarked. “By the way, did you know that most of your student body appears to be rioting in the square?”

“Ah, children. They will have their war, one way or another. I see that I will have to talk to their so-called leaders. At least we know what your sister has been doing. Now, if you please, tell me about that wretched boy Vant.”

Rounding a corner on the stair, Jame ran head-on into Rue.

“Oh, good,” said the cadet, helping her up and dusting her off with the air of having regained a treasured if elusive possession. “You have your scarf back. Now you can take over again.”

“Where is everyone? Not squabbling in the square, I hope.”

“The Edirr started it. You know how they like to prance around taunting people. Well, the Coman took the bait. Their master-ten stomped one of the Edirr mice flat, which upset its mistress, and your friend Gari let loose all the mice’s fleas, which upset everyone. The next thing we know, both sides are screaming for their allies.”

“To battle fleas?”

“Oh, Gari pulled ’em off again, but not before he’d help to start a general melee.”

“So besides the Edirr and Coman, that’s the Caineron, Randir, Ardeth, and Jaran playing in the mud.”

“Most of ’em, anyway. Now Timmon has gone missing.”

“Huh. What about our people?”

“Brier sent the Brandan back to guard their own barracks—honestly, that Berrimint can’t think of anything for herself—and left a token garrison below to hold our quarters. She’s using the confusion to raid the Randir to search for their flag, assuming it isn’t with master-ten Reef.”

“And where is she?” Jame was beginning to feel dizzy. None of their plans for the war had encompassed anything like the chaos that had in fact ensued. Maybe that in itself was a good lesson to learn about the whole experience.

“Reef is in the Caineron barracks, I think. They say that she’s pretty much taken over the campaign.”

“Don’t tell me that Gorbel is locked in his room too.”

Rue blinked. “Why should he be?”

“Precedent.”

“Well, I hear that he is feeling poorly—too long without dwar sleep after having a bear fall on him, y’know.”

“All right. Follow Brier and tell her that I’ve gone to the Caineron . . . ”

“The Caineron!”

“ . . . to get back my cat, assuming that’s where he is, before Fash turns him into a hearth rug. Now run!”

Reaching Gorbel’s room without encountering her own people downstairs or the mob in the square involved climbing out the attic smoke hole, crossing the roofs to the towering Caineron barracks, and then climbing up to one of Gorbel’s shuttered windows.

No one below noticed. From the uproar, it sounded as if all were too busy having a good time wrestling in the mud, with the occasional flash of a thrown icicle.

Jame hooked her claws in the window frame, swung back, and crashed feet first through the slats.

“Well, that was a grand entrance,” remarked Gorbel, without turning around.

The Caineron Lordan huddled alone like a toad by the fire wearing a sumptuous dressing gown, this time with clothes on underneath. His house flag was wrapped around his legs. Sprawling across his knees, Twizzle whuffled a greeting.

Jame regarded the dog thoughtfully. “When this is over,” she said, “you might want to talk to the Falconer about your pook. Are you all right?”

In truth, Gorbel looked awful. Sweat plastered thin strands of black hair to his bulging forehead and his eyes were feverish.

“Never dance with a cave bear.” His snort of laughter ended in a racking cough.

“Gorbel, you need a healer, or at least a few days of dwar sleep.”

He waved this away and paused to scratch an armpit. “Damn that Gari. When he reclaimed his flea circus, he was supposed to infest the Brandan with it, not us. A healer? Not until this farce of a war is over.”

“Listen, I need your help. Fash is about to skin my cat.”

This roused him. “A fine hunting ounce like that? He wouldn’t dare.”

“He dared to flay Merikit.”

“Huh. You’re right. No respect for skin, that man, nor hide, nor hair, except his own. Took me a long time to learn that.”

He rose, dislodging the pook, letting the flag slump to the floor, and shambled over to the door.

“Huh. Stuck.”

Jame scooped up the flag and stuffed it into her coat. She was starting to bulge like a bolster.

The door was locked.

“H’ist,” said a low, urgent voice through the keyhole from the outside.

“Dure? D’you have your friend in your pocket?”

“Yes. Stand back.”

Something scrabbled at the lock and then began to devour it. Black, articulated feelers probed through the wood, broke off acid-weakened fragments of metal, and shoved them back into the black hole that was the trock’s mouth. The whole mechanism fell out on the floor with the trock still clinging to it. Dure scooped up his pet and dropped it back into his pocket.

They followed Gorbel as the Caineron Lordan lumbered down the stairs, Jame dearly longing to increase his speed with a well-placed kick. Voices rose to meet them from the barracks’ common room.

“No bloody cat bloods me and gets away with it,” Fash was snarling.

“You did try to put his eyes out first.” That was Shade, sounding almost casual and quite bone-chillingly cold. “Even if he is already blind.”

“Get out of the way, you Shanir freak. Reef, tell her to move.”

The Randir master-ten’s voice answered, coolly amused. “Who am I to tell my lord’s daughter, however misbegotten, to do anything? You started this. You finish it.”

“Yes, Fash,” said Gorbel, rounding the stair. “Try.”

Jame could at last see the room below. Jorin crouched hissing in a corner. Shade stood between him and Fash, pointing at the latter with Addy wreathed about her arm, gaping jaws balanced on her fingertips. Arm and serpent seemed to twine together like one bifurcated creature, balance and counterbalance

Fash saw Jame and laughed. “See? I told you that a threat to her kitty-cat would bring her running. Need I remind you that her scarf is worth as much as her missing flag?”

Gorbel ignored this and Reef. “By whose orders was I locked in my room? Where are the others?”

Reef answered blandly. “Someone said they should join the squabble in the square. Supposedly, the order came from you. Who was I to stop them? Really, Lordan, you belong in bed. Why not take the little Knorth with you? Just leave us her scarf, and shut up that yapping hassock.”

Gorbel was shaking, with fever or with fury, Jame couldn’t tell. Whichever, he looked dangerous to himself and to others.

The pook was yipping at Gari, who faintly sizzled in a haze of tiny, leaping forms. The pook sat down abruptly and began frantically to scratch—at head or tail, it was unclear.

Gari’s eyes met hers.

In an instant, Jame saw the situation plainly: a Coman, a Randir, a Caineron, and a Knorth, nominally enemies but all members of the Falconer’s Shanir. She also saw what Gari was about to do.

“Up,” she said to Gorbel and Dure. “Out,” to Shade.

Grabbing Jorin, she joined Shade on the boardwalk and slammed the door behind them, just as Gari let loose his seething horde.

“Ambushes, insects, general mayhem—we seem to be repeating the night of the cull as farce,” said Shade, tucking Addy’s twitching tail inside her shirt to improve the serpent’s grip. Her own trembled slightly. “At least no one has put a hole in the Commandant yet.”

From the way that the Randir rubbed her arm, Jame knew that she had felt the bones shift in it. Such a thing had happened to her before, at least twice in the past season. Jame had witnessed similar phenomena elsewhere, under what she hoped were very different circumstances. On impulse, she touched the Randir’s shoulder.

“Shade. Don’t do anything rash. There’s got to be an explanation.”

The other turned stony eyes on her. “I’m sure there is. The question is, can I live with it? Meanwhile, your five-commander is trying to get your attention.”

On the far side of the square, Brier waved again.

“Excuse me,” Jame said, and began to work her way through the battling masses, dodging a fury of flung mudballs as she went. Farce indeed. Above, she could see the Commandant on the Map Room balcony. That was where the various teams were supposed to deliver their spoils of war.

Brier handed her the Randir flag. “The arrogant bastards hardly bothered to hide it, or to keep an adequate guard.”

Jame stuffed it into her jacket, which was now close to bursting.

“Help me get up there.”

Brier formed a cup with her big hands. Oh lord. All right. She put her foot into the proffered hoist and was flung upward. Balcony and wall whirled past. She was going to miss the opening. Suddenly the Commandant was in her way and she crashed into him. As they picked themselves up inside the room, she saw that she had planted one muddy boot firmly in his stomach and the other in his already battered face.

The monitors had assembled in the Map Room, including Torisen and Harn in the background, the latter looking sick but shakily on the mend.

Jame pulled the four flags out of her coat one by one.

Awl surveyed the Randir banner wryly, then Jame. “Do you have anything else in there?”

“Sadly, no,” said Jame, regarding her flattened chest with regret. “Oh, except for this.” She extracted Timmon’s scarf. “Someone should release him from our kitchen, unless he’s thought to climb up the chimney.”

The Commandant had been adding up points. “I make this two hundred sixty flag points captured, one hundred thirty retained, and one commander’s scarf worth ninety. Four hundred and eighty all together.”

“The Ardeth pretty much swept the Danior,” protested one monitor.

“Altogether, flag, commander, and cadets, the Danior are only worth ninety-one. True, we haven’t added up all the ten-commanders, fives, and common cadets, but do you see anything matching this?”

Some grumbling ensued, but no real protest.

“Very good,” said the Commandant. “The Knorth team wins. Excuse me while I announce it to the cadet body.”

Moments later he returned, wiping mud off his face with his scarf. “They appear to be having too much fun to attend properly. I will inform them later. Meanwhile, will someone please go and release the Ardeth Lordan from duress vile in the Knorth kitchen?”