Bound in Blood

V Fractures

Jame woke with a start, disoriented, dream bemused. Where was she? What had woken her?

Overhead, the sky hinted at another coming dawn although stars still glittered defiantly until her breath dimmed them. Trinity, but it was cold. She reclaimed her half of the blanket with a jerk—not for the first time that night—and snuggled against the warm body behind her, trying to ignore the shift and dig of pebbles on the stony ground.

Oh, yes; she lay among the boulders above Tentir and this was, presumably, the third of Autumn.

The first had been spent at Gothregor.

Names with faces, faces without names . . . so many of them, crowding forward, clamoring.

“Remember me!”

“Remember me!”

“Remember us all!”

Who was this man with arms outstretched, the skin hanging off them in bloody strips? Who was this boy clutching his torn neck with both hands, only able to mouth his plea, and he not even a Knorth? A beautiful girl and a tiny, neat, old lady, each with a red line across her throat:

We too are of your house. Child of darkness, have you also forgotten us? How long must our blood price go unpaid?

No. Those were only fragments of her dreams this past night. She knew very well who the flayed man was and the two Highborn women. As for the boy . . . it came after a moment’s hard concentration. Quirl. Corvine’s son.

Still, all those other faces and names only comprised the Knorth garrison at Gothregor and the dead within its hall. Many more of her house soldiered with the Southern Host or were scattered across Rathillien on detached duty. The randon college below held over a hundred by itself, counting cadets, officers, and sargents.

And Torisen had to remember them all.

“Being Lord Knorth is no easy job, lass, especially now, much less being Highlord of the Kencyrath.” So Marc had reminded her, his deep voice rumbling hollowly up the turret stair where he was laying bricks.

All right, she had thought, scowling mulishly at the larger pieces of broken glass laid out on the Council table over a chalked sketch of the huge stained glass map that she had accidentally shattered the previous spring. Cullet barrels along the wall held smaller fragments of stained glass, sorted in a rainbow of color, waiting to be melted and recast.

Likewise, the Knorth was still a scattered, shattered house and Torisen was stretching himself to the breaking point, perhaps beyond, trying to pull it back together.

Just the same . . .

She hadn’t seen her brother all that long day. Wherever she went, he was somewhere else.

Tori, dammit, do you remember me, or do I have to break something else, something bigger, to get your attention?

“He really is doing his best, you know,” Marc had said, as if reading her thoughts and, truly, no one in the Kencyrath knew her mind better.

Jame remembered her reluctant grin. “I’d take that more seriously if I weren’t talking to your backside. What in Perimal’s name are you doing?”

“Eh? Oh.” He had descended the tight, spiral steps to the northeast turret, still backwards, and ducked his balding head under the low mantel to emerge. Most doorways must seem low to the Kendar, who at ninety, in late middle age, still stood a good seven feet tall.

“If I’m to rebuild this window, I’ve got to have a furnace, probably at least two.”

“And you know this because . . . ?”

Since the Merikit had destroyed his home keep, Kithorn, Marc had been a reluctant warrior, first of the Caineron, then of East Kenshold. Never mind that he had only wanted to create things; as a yondri-gon, a threshold dweller in other houses with few rights, no one with his size and strength was used for anything except warfare.

“I wouldn’t say I know, exactly. You probably don’t remember this—it was a minor affair and you were busy resurrecting that funny, green frog god—but as a city guard in Tai-tastigon I helped to prevent a guild war between two glassworks by proving that a third hot-shop was responsible for the leak of guild secrets.”

Jame did remember, vaguely. Glassmaking was highly valued in the Eastern Lands, so much so that the Thieves’ Guild had its own court to assess stolen glassware. The Glass Guild itself had been known to send assassins after those members who tried to carry their secrets to other cities.

“Anyway, the Guild owed me a favor, and I asked to see how they did their work. Naturally, they didn’t think a big, bumbling guard like me would understand their mysteries. To them, it was all a joke.”

He had grinned, wiping brick dust off a beard now more white than red, Jame had noticed with a pang. The rest, she didn’t doubt: Marc could play the hulking moron as easily as he had the berserker on a hundred different battlefields. Why kill one adversary when you could scare the fertilizer out of twenty? Anyway, he had never had a taste for blood.

Marc shrugged. “I can’t say that I understood everything. But I did learn more than they intended.”

“So, the bricks, and the turret?”

“Ah. Tai-tastigon isn’t as special as they think. One of the garrison showed me the ruins of a glassworks here at Gothregor in the deserted halls. A thousand years old, it must be; and mind you, a wall has fallen on it, but I reckon the intact fire bricks are still good, and so are the clay firepots that escaped smashing. If I can build furnaces in these turrets, they can be fed from the story below and vent out the top, and a fierce heat it should make, too.”

“No doubt,” Jame had said wryly. “Just remember, please, that my brother lives at the top of the two western turrets. I may be furious with him, but I don’t particularly want him roasted alive.”

And so she had left Marc happily employed, if herself less so.

Huh. Her old Kendar friend was right: she was being petty. Torisen had his work and so did she, here at the college . . . where she had just missed another twelve days of training, on top of all the time lost over the summer to injury and other complications. Why couldn’t life ever be simple?

Because you are a potential nemesis. In fact, you are the last possible Nemesis, the Third Face of God. There’s nothing remotely simple about that.

The warm bulk against her back shifted with a groan, and she clutched the blanket to keep from losing it yet again.

Days? Make that years that she was behind her fellow cadets in all but a few disciplines. They had trained since childhood. Well, so had she, but in different ways, under a different master. In some respects, she was very, very good; in others, horrible. Nonetheless, it seemed to her that passing the Autumn cull had been a fluke, if not an injustice to other, probably more able cadets who had failed.

Then too, those here now would have a chance to repeat their first year if they failed the final Spring cull, but not her. Tori wouldn’t allow it. On Autumn’s Eve, she had sensed that he more than half hoped she would fail on her own, that he was already thinking about what to do with her next, a prospect that simultaneously chilled and thrilled her. It wouldn’t work, though, she thought, unless they proceeded as equals. She, as her brother’s consort within the confines of the Women’s World? Given the Kencyrath’s structure, given their father’s teachings, what chance was there in that of anything but disaster?

“Rootless and roofless.”

Jame watched the stars fade overhead, remembering Brenwyr’s malediction, born of her terrible grief over Aerulan’s second death in the loss of the bloodstained banner that still held her soul captive.

“Cursed be and cast out.”

Never to know her own place, homeless forever . . . What had her life been so far but a desperate search for somewhere to belong, some place to stand? Time and again she had tried, only to be driven out—from her father’s borderland keep, from Tai-tastigon, from the Women’s World, from all except Perimal Darkling itself, which she had fled as soon and as fast as she could.

Trinity, even her soul-image was rootless, armor only against all that had been thrown against her. Defensive, with a naked backside.

Ancestors, despised Three-Faced God who landed us in this mess to begin with, give me a weapon.

Her claws slid out, ten gleaming, ivory knives. Well, yes. Her father had hated them and driven her out at their first appearance, but there they were, part of her, part of her destiny. What fool would deny what already existed? You work with what you have.

And there was the rathorn colt. Jame imagined riding him, not in the helter-skelter, half-assed way she had once or twice so far, but two bodies moving as one with all that wild, surging power, that fierce freedom . . . ahhh.

Her sigh of longing turned to one of frustration. She might have accidentally blood-bound the colt, but she didn’t really have him. Not yet. And cursed be indeed if she did it by breaking him first.

As for roofs, she and Marc had shared an open attic in Tai-tastigon long before her path had crossed that of the Brandan Maledight. Perhaps she just didn’t like roofs, unless playing tag-you’re-dead on top of them with a pack of whooping Cloudies. Unlike most Kencyr, heights didn’t bother her. Enclosed spaces, however, did. The thought of another winter clapped indoors at Tentir, as she had been in the Women’s World, set her teeth on edge.

There it was again: the scrape of boots on hard, steep ground that had woken her. Someone was coming. A quick rush of hooves, followed by a muffled, complicated clunk. Jame’s head rang in sympathy, even as the blanket jerked off her and the Whinno-hir Bel-tairi, with whom she had shared it, lurched to her feet in alarm.

Tentir’s horse-master rounded the nearest boulder, swinging his leather tool sack as he came. The rathorn colt followed him, shaking his ivory armored head, his red eyes slightly crossed. Trying to ambush the Edirr and getting whacked in the nose seemed to have become their standard greeting.

With a nod to Jame, the master dropped his sack and saluted the mare.

“My lady.”

Bel responded with a nervous toss of her head. When he knelt to feel her leg for any suspicious heat, her one good eye showed white and she trembled as she fought to hold still. The Whinno-hir had just recovered from a bowed tendon before the ride south, most of which had been taken slowly to allow her time to heal fully. Jame felt guilty about that last dash to reach Gothregor on Autumn’s Eve. On the other hand, when setting out from Tentir, she hadn’t counted on how long it would take to track down a dozen-odd wasted bodies hidden offroad in deep grass or bracken. As for the ride back . . .

“Bel set her own pace,” she said, trying not to sound defensive, “and chose her own path.”

The horse-master was lifting each unshod hoof in turn to inspect it, wall, sole, and swallow. In the growing light, the crown of his mottled, bald head might have been a lesser boulder.

Bel had quieted. So far, his touch and Jame’s were among the few that she could endure. After her decades’ long sleep in the Earth Wife’s lodge, it must feel to her like yesterday that Greshan had seared her face, half-blinding her, and the Randon Council had hunted her, as they believed, to her death. Reason enough, Jame had thought, to keep her company on that first night back, and the rathorn colt Death’s-head as well, unpredictable as he was.

The horse-master set the last foot down gently and rose, his back creaking, to pat her creamy shoulder. Head on, except for shaggy brows, his features were almost as blurred as the surrounding rocks, given the flattened nose that some horse, cast in its stall, had broken long ago with a flailing hoof.

“Well,” he said, “I can see that you haven’t been careening barefoot down the River Road, nor yet down the New. How you traveled seventy-five miles in a day, though, is beyond me.”

It was also somewhat beyond Jame.

She only knew that she had given the mare her head and a destination. The Riverland was strange. No two maps showed the same features, especially since the River Snake’s convulsions the previous year with their attendant earthquakes. Off the two ancient roads that ran on either side of the River Silver, the land folded in unexpected, unnerving ways. These were the paths that she and the Coman cadet Gari had taken on their return to Tentir, starting out early on the second of Autumn.

A long, slow ride it had been, with occasional glimpses of the river below, and above flashes of white where the rathorn colt kept pace with them. If Gari noticed the latter, he hadn’t mentioned it. Indeed, he may not have even realized that they were crossing wilderness, so entranced was he with the variety of insects that he was now able to summon, if not always to control. His time with Randiroc and his crown jewel-jaws had obviously been fruitful, as had Jame’s with the Randir Heir in his role as a weapons-master. It had come as a surprise to both of them when late that night (or early the next morning) they had rounded the lesser toes of the Snowthorns to find themselves within sight of the college.

Surrounded by a nimbus of luminous moths, Gari had entered Old Tentir to put up his weary mount in the subterranean stable and then to take his hardly less weary self to bed in New Tentir’s barracks.

Meanwhile, Jame had trudged uphill along the college’s northern wall with Bel at her heels, there to meet an impatient rathorn colt who seemed to think that she had meant to spirit his foster dam away from him forever.

A sudden blare of sound made Jame start. Below in the college, reveille was sounding.

“I’ll tend to m’lady,” said the horse-master, rummaging in his sack for brush and comb. “Best you were on your way down, before they come looking for you.”

Not another search party.

Jame grabbed her knapsack, whistled up Jorin from among the rocks where he had been hunting, and ran.

Her arrival at breakfast coincided with news that Gari had returned during the night and forestalled exactly the search that she had feared.

Why do people always assume that I’m lost? Jame wondered, pausing on the threshold to catch her breath as cadets led by her ten-command surged forward to greet her. I know where I am. Usually.

Amidst the uproar, someone called to her, “Lady, Gari can’t explain how you got back so quickly. Can you?”

Jame shuddered at the thought of cadets plunging off the road left and right, hunting for shortcuts.

“I can’t explain it either,” she said, quite truthfully.

Wild speculation rippled through the hall as cadets filtered back to their tables and their cooling porridge. It had been noted before how often the Knorth Lordan seemingly popped out of nowhere, often trailing wreckage. Meanwhile, Jame made her way to her own seat, pausing to pass on messages from anxious or proud parents garrisoned at Gothregor. How different this welcome was from her first day at the college, she thought, when no one could even bear to look her in the face.

But here was one for whom nothing had changed. Vant glowered at his congealing breakfast, watched uneasily askance by his ten-command. Every time she disappeared he clearly expected her never to come back, as was only right: in his opinion, Highborn females had no place at Tentir, much less acting as the master-ten of his own barracks. That should have been his role.

For her part, Jame heartily wished that her squad’s five-commander, Brier Iron-thorn, was her second-in-command at Tentir, not the surly Vant.

She paused beside him. “How many did we lose in the cull?”

“Nine,” he said, biting down on the word.

That wasn’t too bad. As she turned, though, she heard him mutter, “Somehow, you cheated.”

Jame froze except for her claws, which slid free from her fingertips as if with a will of their own. He hadn’t called her a liar—quite—but close enough. It was a lethal insult, if she chose to take it as such, and if anyone else had heard. Most of the cadets had returned to their breakfast. Only Brier was watching her steadily, teak-dark face as still as ever but powerful frame slightly poised as if for sudden intervention. She had seen the claws if not, perhaps, heard Vant’s words.

Jame took a deep breath and made herself relax, nails again sheathed.

No fighting on your first day back, she told herself sternly. Well, at least not during your first hour.

Besides, she wasn’t sure herself how she had passed the casting of the stones.

“That’s for the Randon Council to decide,” she said to Vant, speaking as low as he had. “Complain to them, not me.”

With that, she reached her place and slung her pack with its precious contents under the bench by her feet.

There was a note on the seat: “Remember the equinox.”

What in Perimal’s name . . . ?

Feeling Brier’s cool, green eyes still on her, she turned to meet them, the note forgotten. If not for Jame’s unexpected arrival at Tentir on the previous Summer’s Day, the dark Southron wouldn’t most unfairly have been demoted from Ten to Five to make room for her. She might even have become master-ten, whatever Vant thought. Jame still wasn’t sure how Brier felt about all of that. While she trusted the Kendar completely, she knew that Brier’s past experience with her original house, the Caineron, inclined her to mistrust all Highborn.

“What? D’you think I cheated too?”

“No, lady.” So she had heard. “I think you’re clever, and very lucky.”

“I think we all need luck,” said Rue, thumping a bowl of cold porridge down in front of Jame. Judging from the black flakes embedded in it, her self-appointed cadet servant had scraped it from the bottom of the kettle. Nonetheless, Jame suddenly felt ravenous.

“What do you mean?” she asked around a mouthful of the glutinous cereal, burnt chunks crunching between her teeth. It still tasted wonderful.

Rue sat down, scowling, and hunched her shoulders up to the untidy fringe of her straw-colored hair. “Things are . . . different. Ever since the night of the cull and what happened in the stable. I mean, how could they try to assassinate a fellow randon, much less a member of their own house?”

They’re only children, Jame thought, not for the first time. She and Brier, although only a few years older, seemed ancient by comparison, except perhaps for sober Niall, who had snuck off with the Host and seen more than he had bargained for in the red carnage of the Cataracts, and possibly for Rue, whose life at a Min-drear border keep could hardly have been easy.

As for the rest, their innocence had obviously taken a hard knock, and no wonder: the events of that night had shaken Tentir’s honor to the core. Randon were supposed to be a breed apart, above house politics, and certainly above the sort of cold-blooded treachery that the Randir Tempter had perpetrated within the college’s very walls, using its most vulnerable cadets as her pawns.

Jame admitted to her own stubborn streak of idealism: she didn’t want to think ill of any Kendar. The Tempter, at least, had been Shanir, and therefore part Highborn.

The spoon stopped halfway to her mouth, dripping gray gunk. So that was why “redeeming the Shame of Tentir” in the person of Bel-tairi had been so important to the Randon Council. Bel was the emblem of an earlier dishonor, one committed by her own uncle Greshan. Tentir had dealt with that as best it could, at the cost of its commandant’s life, but the harm was done, an innocent (and innocence) lost, until Jame had brought the Whinno-hir back virtually from the dead.

An odd role for a potential destroyer to play, she thought wryly. Whatever she did was complicated, and a constant struggle against her urge to break anything that got in her way. Was it any easier for Creation and Preservation? Probably not; especially not since neither yet knew what they might one day become.

And how will we three react then, to events, to each other?

Since Autumn’s Eve, she had known that there were three pure-blooded Knorth left—God’s claws, the proof lay carefully folded in the sack beneath the bench on which she sat, along with half an enigmatic scrap of linen that hinted at even more—but they must all accept their roles and grow into them before the coming of the Tyr-ridan. At the moment, the prospects of that seemed remote.

Meanwhile, Bel’s face remained savagely scarred and Hallick Hard-hand was still dead. Such evil could never be undone.

“Eat, lady,” urged Killy. “Assembly will sound any moment now.”

“Or if you’re not hungry . . . ” That, hopefully, from stocky Erim, who always was.

Thus reminded that time was short, Rue jumped up and started hastily untangling Jame’s long, black hair. After all, how their master-ten looked reflected on the whole Knorth garrison, and Jame seldom showed a decent interest in her own appearance. This time, the Gothregor Kendar had gotten her jacket off her long enough to pluck the burrs off of it; however, she simply hadn’t had time to comb out the ruins of Randiroc’s fancy braidwork, which in turn hadn’t been improved by the burdocks of the Moon Garden or a night sleeping in the rough. Why, oh why, couldn’t she keep other people out of her hair?

“Ow!” she said as the cadet jerked out strands knotted around a burr at the nape of her neck.

A cadet at Vant’s table snickered, but stopped when Rue shot him a dirty look. Obviously, the other ten-commands were listening, some cadets openly, others with their noses in their bowls.

“Sorry, lady,” said Rue.

“Will you please stop calling me that?” She raised her voice to address the room at large. “I’m Jame, or Ten or, at worst, Lordan.”

And certainly not Jameth, a corruption of her true name that always set her teeth on edge. On the other hand, how would they react if she admitted to being Jamethiel Dream-weaver’s namesake, much less her daughter? Jame hardly felt up to that just yet. Someday, though . . .

“The Randir are poison,” muttered Anise, following Rue’s line of thought. “Always have been, always will be.”

As she spoke, she cast an involuntary sidelong glare at Mint and Dar, who as usual were flirting. Jame wondered which one had aroused her jealousy. Adolescent Kendar were like wild colts, apt to tear off in all directions when not reined in hard by discipline.

“Ran Awl is all right,” said Quill judiciously, referring to the senior Randir officer and sometime commandant of Tentir. “That snake charmer Shade isn’t too bad either, from what I’ve seen, despite the company she keeps. There seem to be distinct groups within that house with different personalities, as if they aren’t all bound to the same Highborn.”

Sharp Quill. That hadn’t occurred to Jame, although she had long suspected that, contrary to every tradition, Lady Rawneth had more than her share of sworn followers.

Her hand stopped again. Trinity, what if Rawneth was a blood-binder too?

“At any rate,” Quill continued, seizing a chunk of bread and speaking indistinctly around a mouthful of it, “their barracks has been seething ever since the night that the stones were cast and their natural lord rode out with his life, back into exile. Since then it’s gotten worse. A fight sent two Randir cadets to the infirmary last night.”

“One died this morning,” said Niall, speaking up for the first time.

Jame shot a startled look at her second-in-command, curtailed by Rue’s ruthless grip on her hair. “Things are that bad?”

She wished that Brier didn’t have quite so expressionless a face, although she understood why: as a former Caineron yondri with the Southern Host, the handsome Kendar had learned early to keep her emotions to herself.

“Bad enough,” Brier said shortly.

“And we’ve got our senior randon jumping at shadows,” added Rue.

“Harn? Why?”

“Hold still.” Rue busily worried at a snarl, uprooting more strands. Jame tried not to flinch. “It started after you left for Gothregor. Apparently Ran Harn has begun to see your uncle Greshan walking the halls at night.”

“Master, Master, will you grant me my heart’s desire? Will you raise the dead to love me?”

Jame’s foot involuntarily nudged the sack, and she recoiled from it as if at the touch of a dead thing. According to the contract therein, Tieri’s price had been Greshan’s return from the dead.

“ ‘m hungry.” Words muttered through a mouthful of maggots. “Dear father, feed me . . . ”

“You have laughed at rumors that Greshan was seen walking the halls of Gothregor when he was five days dead.”

Stitches on a tattered letter, from Kinzi to Adiraina.

“Well, I saw him too.”

No, Lyra couldn’t have read that correctly. According to Adiraina, the same flames that destroyed so many bloodstained Knorth banners had also consumed both Gerraint’s and Greshan’s bodies . . .

“ . . . and the latter none too soon: he had been five days dead at the time.”

So who had gone into the Moon Garden with Lady Rawneth and there, presumably, sired on her the current Lord Randir?

As a story, it had as many holes as Kinzi’s poor, tattered-cloth letter.

“I saw Greshan too,” said Mint unexpectedly, for once without the trace of her usual mischievous smile. “Not clearly, mind you, and half in shadow.”

“Where?”

“He was standing outside the lordan’s private quarters. Then he disappeared.”

“How d’you know it was Greshan?” Anise demanded.

“Even by moonlight, the embroidered coat was unmistakable.”

“Huh.” Rue explored another tangle. “The last I saw of that slippery Southron Graykin, he was scuttling out of your new quarters carrying it.”

“I told him to help himself to Greshan’s belongings. That coat may be a masterpiece and an heirloom, but I’d be just as happy never to see it again. You didn’t chase Graykin out, did you, Rue? Whatever new quarters these are, if they’re mine, he has a right to be there too.”

An obstinate silence answered her. Rue had seen what the Southron had suffered in her service—so had the rest of the ten-command—but that didn’t make them any happier to have him around. Tentir was for the randon, cadet, sargent, and officer, not for such as he. In a way, she understood.

Anise broke in, bored by the topic or jealous of the attention Mint had drawn.

“Five, tell m’lady . . . sorry, the lordan . . . how the Caineron fared in the cull.”

“Not well, I assume,” said Jame, trying to lighten the mood and to shake her own sudden chill.

Brier gave the others a hard, jade-green stare, daring them to make the matter personal. “They lost the most of any house.”

“Well,” said Killy, ever the peacemaker, “that was to be expected. We all know how Lord Caldane overstocked his quota. With seven sons all binding Kendar, he always does. And M’lord Gorbel lost all four of his new best friends.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Dar said with a laugh echoed by the others, not that it really was.

The Caineron Lordan had arrived at Tentir with four Highborn “cronies” and their cadet servants to complete his personal ten-command, although it had quickly become clear that Gorbel himself was the only one serious about randon training.

“Remember when Lord Corrudin stopped by to teach us and M’lord Gorbel’s ten how to resist stupid commands?” Dar was still laughing and others began to grin at the memory. “He had Gorbelly order one of his Highborn friends—Kibben, wasn’t it?—to stand on his head, and he did, over and over again, until the Commandant sent him home.”

Jame remembered. It had been the first time that she realized Gorbel’s companions weren’t his friends but rather spies for his father. She willed Dar not to go on, but he did, wiping tears from his eyes.

“And then . . . and then, Lordan, Corrudin told you to give our Five an order. We couldn’t hear what it was . . . ”

Caldane’s uncle and chief advisor had circled them, sleek and smiling.

“My,” he had said. “How dirty you both are, but especially you, my lady. Been playing in the mud, have we? How appropriate, given all that your house has dragged us through. I was in the White Hills. I saw. Blood, and mud, and more blood, pooling in the hollows where the wounded drown in it. There also the honor of your house died, as we see yet again in your presence here.

“And you, Iron-thorn, were once one of us. Your mother died in our service. You disgrace her memory. So you are theirs now, body and soul. Very well. It is only fitting, then, that you kiss their filthy boots. Girl, give this turn-collar the order. You heard me. Do it, you stupid little bitch.”

“ . . . and . . . and you said: ‘BACK. OFF.’ And . . . and he did, right out the window! Three stories up! Too bad that the arcade roof broke his fall.”

The memory made Jame feel sick.

Brier was watching her. “Never mind, lady,” she said under the others’ laughter. “He deserved it.”

“Did Kibben?”

M’lord had taken the cadet back to Restormir with him. No word had come of either since.

“I wonder if they’re still at it,” said Quill thoughtfully. “Kibben standing on his head in one corner and M’lord Corrudin backed into another, afraid to move.”

Jame considered throwing up her porridge, black lumps and all, but decided not to. “Caldane replaced all Gorbel’s Highborn after the Minor Harvest. D’you mean he lost his second set in the Autumn cull?”

“Yes, lady . . . er . . . lordan,” said Erim, “and all his Kendar too except his cadet servant Bark, who’s been with him since the beginning. The Commandant let him have first pick of eight more from the cull pool to make up a new ten.”

“The cull what?”

Damn. Another pitfall of ignorance, and she had stepped right into it. These cadets had grown up knowing more about Tentir than she would probably learn in a lifetime.

“The cull pool,” said Mint, helpfully. “Any ten-command that loses four or more members is dissolved. Oh, you missed a lovely time! Cadets scrambling to find new places, short tens recruiting, ten- and five-commanders all but pissing themselves . . . ”

“Why?”

“Because if they couldn’t fill their ranks, their team would be thrown into the pool too and there, everyone is equal. You join a new ten-command, you start at the bottom. The randon figure that if a squad loses that many cadets to a cull, it isn’t being led properly.”

Mint’s voice had dropped to a covert whisper, for no reason that Jame could see, and several others were stifling laughter.

“Yes,” she said, probing for what she had missed, “but not all barracks are going to come out neat multiples of ten. According to Vant, we’re down to eighty-one, and there doesn’t seem to have been any scramble here.”

“Oh, most houses end up with a short command, the last cadets to be picked. The ‘tail ten,’ we call it. But here no squad lost more than four, so there was no need to shuffle around.”

“Whose . . . ”

But she saw now where the others were being so careful not to look. Vant’s table had four empty seats.

“Oh.”

That wasn’t fair, she thought, as several of her cadets stifled snickers. Vant might be a prize pig about some things—well, about a lot of things—but he was also responsible for the day-by-day running of the Knorth barracks as well as for his ten-command. As master-ten, she had extra duties too, but she also had Brier Iron-thorn, without whom her own team might well have fallen apart.

Then she noticed that Vant’s five-commander was one of the missing cadets.

“I wish I knew why Vant hates me so much,” she said, thinking out loud. “Things would be so much easier if we cooperated.”

“Eh.” Rue untangled another snarl. “That’s an old tale, what I know of it, and not a happy one. The rumor is that Vant’s grandmother was seduced by a Knorth Highborn and died bearing him a daughter. The girl tried to follow Ganth into exile, but he drove her back and she became an Ardeth yondri. Vant doesn’t talk about his father. We think he may have been a lesser Ardeth Highborn. Then his mother got killed at the Cataracts and the Highlord took him on for her sake.”

“So that would make him at least a quarter Highborn if not more. No wonder he feels entitled to more respect than he’s been getting.”

“Elsewhere, maybe. Here, Highborn or Kendar, we earn what we get.”

The blare of a horn announced assembly and a general, scrambling exodus from New Tentir’s barracks, over the low wall, into the training square. Jame dodged to the front rank of her house dragging Rue, who was still furiously rebraiding her hair. Up and down three sides of the square, other dark-clad cadets hastily fell into place: Brandan, Edirr, and Danior to the south; Ardeth, Knorth, and Jaran to the west; Caineron, Coman, and Randir to the north.

Jame noted that while the Randir kept their sharp lines, there were gaps in them, one for each cadet whose name their mistress had taken, along with his or her life. It was the first time she had seen that house literally break ranks. She wondered how long it would be before they forgot what (and whom) they had lost, and how much they remembered now.

Meanwhile, to her right, the Ardeth Lordan Timmon had taken position as master-ten before his cadets. He acknowledged her with a half-sketched salute, then faced front toward the bulk of Old Tentir. She wondered if he meant to resume trying to seduce her or if his last visit to her dreamscape had put him off for good. After all, it must have been disconcerting to invade what he expected to be a pleasantly erotic dream, only to find himself screwed to the floor with a knife through his guts. Well, she had warned him.

The Jaran master-ten stood to her left and beyond, facing her, was the Caineron Lordan Gorbel.

The latter wore what Jame thought of as his Gorgo face: hooded, slightly protuberant eyes, features scrunched together, and a wide, downturned mouth. It was almost as hard to read his expression as Brier’s. She wondered if his foot was still infected with golden willow rootlets and if he still blamed her.

His new ten-command stood behind him.

Jame recognized most as Caineron with whom she had previously trained, an assortment of lesser Highborn, Kendar with some Highborn blood, and pure Kendar. Two had held ten-commands of their own before the cull and, by Tentir’s reckoning, not good ones.

That was certainly true of Higbert, son of Higron, now glowering at her across the square. The Caineron equivalent of Vant, he had never been able to take her presence at the college seriously and now seemed enraged that she had kept her command while he had lost his. A harsh, stupid man, she doubted that anyone much loved him, least of all his former number Five, Tigger, also now on Gorbel’s squad and from his impish expression already dreaming up ways to bedevil his new commander as he had his old. Tiggeri’s offspring all seemed to be like that.

Strange to think that, although the same age, Higbert and Tigger were both Gorbel’s nephews.

So was Obidin, son of Caldane’s first established son Grondin, heir also to his father’s unfortunate thick build although not yet to his gross obesity. Obi had never made it a secret that he considered Gorbel’s status as lordan only temporary. Surely, when that regrettable time came, the new Lord Caineron would be drawn from among Caldane’s senior sons such as . . . oh, say his eldest, Grondin.

Unlike Higbert, Obi had been considered a good commander. If he hadn’t lost half his squad before the cull in a freak accident involving a bucket of eels and a ball of lightning, he still would be. Now he served as Gorbel’s Five and had brought with him three Kendar from his old ten: Amon and Bark—the former his cadet servant, the latter Gorbel’s, who hadn’t previously been able to serve with his master because Caldane kept filling his lordan’s roster—and Rori.

Who else?

Fash, a lesser Highborn about whom Jame knew little, except that he had once been Gorbel’s friend. From the way he hovered, whispering and grinning with a great expanse of very white teeth, he apparently wanted his old role back.

Quiet Dure from the Falconer’s class who kept something, presumably alive, in his pocket and never took it out.

Kibbet, brother of Kibben.

On the whole, it looked like a poisonous mix.

After that, it was a relief to find that the day’s first class, at least for Jame, was with the Falconer.

Tentir’s mews-master instructed those Shanir cadets with bonds to various creatures, such as the one that Jame shared with Jorin. Even if his classes were often cut short by one disaster or another (swarms of flies, rampant rodents, once a shower of goldfish from the ceiling), she still hoped to learn why her link to the ounce was so maddeningly erratic.

From the foot of the stair in Old Tentir, Jame could hear the ruckus in the second-story mews above—a crackling, buzzing roar slashed by the shrieks of angry raptors. Now what?

Arriving at the door with Jorin on her heels, she stopped short, staring. The air inside was a blur of small, hurtling objects, green, gold, and crimson. One of them struck her in the face. Startled, she went back a step, tripped over the ounce, and fell flat on her back.

Multifaceted jewels stared into her own crossed eyes from the tip of her nose while antennae twiddled busily over her face and chitinous feet scrabbled at her lower lip for a better grip. Before she could swat it away, the hopper launched itself back into the melee within. Jorin bounded after it.

With her token scarf pulled up for a mask and her coat drawn over her head, Jame cautiously followed.

Most of the swarm occupied the southern end of the long room, the mews proper, where screens kept out the worst of the morning’s chill. Hooded hawks, tercels, and falcons shrieked on their perches or swung upside down from them by their jesses, all blindly striking at anything that hit them. Meanwhile, the Falconer’s little merlin knifed through the cloud in a fierce, joyous killing spree, snap and drop, snap and drop.

At the northern end of the room, his master clung to a bench, swearing. His own sunken eye sockets were sewn shut. Just as blind Jorin depended on Jame’s sight, so did the Falconer on his merlin’s. Now the bird’s mad gyrations were clearly making him dizzy, not to mention his own jerking head as he instinctively tried to follow the other’s darting gaze.

“If you please, cadet, tell your friends to wait for you outside.”

Gari looked sheepish, also rather silly with emerald hoppers lined up on his shoulders and down his arms like a chorus, hind legs busily scraping as they serenaded him.

“I don’t think I can tell them anything, Ran. They simply react to my mood. I woke up this morning feeling happy and, well, sort of bouncy.”

“Then settle down and think of something depressing!”

The Coman tried, but the Edirr cadet known as Mouse was giggling, which set him off again.

The Edirr’s nickname was easily explained by the pair of albino mice nestled in her fluffy, brown hair, one snuffling behind each ear and clutching its rim with tiny, pink paws. What insects were to Gari, mice were to his Edirr counterpart, only under better control.

“Look what he gave me!” she whispered to Jame and showed her a piece of paper on which was drawn what appeared to be a slouching bag. “It’s a hat, he says, and there’s a mouse under it. He can’t draw mice.”

Gari glanced at them and blushed. The hoppers leaped higher.

It didn’t matter that the Coman and Edirr were neighbors often at odds, though not in this class. How pleasant, Jame thought, to work with cadets from so many different houses rather than to compete against them, which was more the Tentir model. In that, the college did less to bring its students together than it might, despite its goal to overcome house tensions at least within the Randon.

Gari and Mouse were in general bound not to individual creatures but to swarms, the latter closer than the former since her companions lived longer. Between them, they were one reason why other cadets mockingly called the Falconer’s class the Falconeers. Another reason, Jame suspected, was jealousy, at least where Jorin and Torvi were concerned. Who wouldn’t want to share senses with a splendid (although blind) hunting ounce or with a bumbling, already huge Molocar pup?

She was unclear, though, how the cadets’ various companions interacted with each other. For all his glee in attacking the hopper horde, Jorin might play with a captured mouse but seldom killed it. The same couldn’t be said of the rats off of which Addy also fed. Jorin and Torvi made a show of animosity, but hadn’t yet hurt each other, any more than the ounce had Tori’s Yce or vice versa.

A pause for thought: was her brother bound to the wolver pup? If so, how could he be unaware of it? There was so much of which Torisen chose to remain ignorant, but then Jorin had used her senses long before she had realized it or learned how to recognize his. Then too, it seemed to take a special Shanir like the Falconer to recognize the bond in others, and even he had never mentioned her blood link to the rathorn colt.

Others of the class had fled, leaving Gorbel’s new cadet Dure and Timmon’s vacant-eyed Ardeth Drie, who was smiling to himself. If the Falconer hadn’t been so distracted, he would have boxed the latter’s ears for letting himself drift, as he often had before. No one knew to what creature Drie was bound, only that even when he walked dry-shod, he left behind a trail of wet footprints.

Alone in a corner, leaning against the wall, the Randir Shade idly played with her gilded swamp adder, Addy. Both serpent and Randir gave Jame a slight nod of recognition. Jame sank down onto the floor beside them.

She still wasn’t sure of the Randir’s part in the attempted assassination. After all, she had collided with Shade at the foot of Harn’s stair, with Randiroc and the Commandant still above. The Randir Tempter had apparently used Shade to track Jame to their would-be prey.

“What are we supposed to be learning?” she asked under cover of the Falconer’s attempts to depress or at least distract Gari by sickening him (“Rotten pork rolls! Ten and twenty fledglings baked in a pie!”).

“How to manage a swarm for spying purposes,” Shade answered.

That possibility hadn’t occurred to Jame. She could only imagine how dizzying it would be to have so many senses suddenly open to one. If Gari was blocking such an awareness, she hardly blamed him.

“I hear that your barracks has lost a cadet,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Shade shrugged. Her face looked sharper and thinner than it had, perhaps because she had pulled her hair back tightly, almost savagely, into a knot. One could easily trace the lines of the skull beneath the skin.

She had drawn the Randir cadet back into the shadows as Harn and the Commandant passed on their way down to the stables. Then had come the Randir Lordan, in a mantle of fluttering jewel-jaws. He had paused and looked at them. A surprisingly sweet smile crossed his pale face.

“Nightshade, my cousin,” he said.

Shade had looked stunned.

“Randiroc,” she replied, hoarsely. “My lord.”

And later, standing at the rail, looking down at the pathetic heap that was the boy Quirl:

“I followed you, and spoke to him, and suddenly nothing was simple anymore. It was always so clear before. Us against you. No questions. No hesitation. Tentir is changing that, and so are you. I don’t like it. It makes my head hurt.”

Jame watched Shade’s long, white fingers play with the snake’s supple form as it flowed over them in a glittering figure eight, ochre scales melting into gold, gold into pale cream. Beautiful.

“How did the Randir fare in the cull?” she asked, belatedly wondering if that was a tactful question.

“We’re down to one hundred and eleven.”

From one hundred sixty? Ouch.

“Losing twenty-odd in the stable didn’t help,” said Shade, her voice oddly remote. “Most of the Randir had nothing to do with that and are appalled by it. The Tempter chose her would-be assassins well.”

“Pus puffs! Eyeball stew!” raged the Falconer, beginning to look not only dizzy but ill.

If the hopper havoc had begun to ebb, however, it was because Gari was listening to the quiet conversation beside him and again, presumably, seeing in his mind’s eye those wasted bodies that had crawled into the high grass to die. Shade might have been one of them if Jame hadn’t stopped her from stepping forward. Why she had, she still wasn’t sure.

“D’you remember their names?”

No question whom she meant.

Hands paused, and a molten coil sagged. Without thinking, Jame slid her fingers under it to support the serpent’s weight. Addy’s skin was dry, warm, and soft, until one felt the shifting muscles underneath it and the bulge of her last meal. The figure eight became a three-loop serpentine flowing over four hands.

“Some. I remember Quirl.”

“How do the other Randir feel about it?”

“As if something important has been taken away, but it’s getting harder and harder to remember what. That fight in the barracks last night . . . a cadet was looking for someone—his brother, he thought. And he wouldn’t stop. Finally one of Lady Rawneth’s Kendar told him that no such person was at the college, which by that time was true. The boy went berserk. Before we pulled him off, he had smashed her with a fire iron until her head was nothing but bloody meat, shards of bone, and oozing brain. Still, she lived until dawn.”

Jame thought of shambling Bear with his cloven skull and ruined mind. Kencyr were hard to kill; but truly, there were worse things than death.

“One hundred and eleven,” she repeated. “That’s eleven ten-commands. What happens to the extra cadet?”

Shade gave her a death’s-head smile, but without the sharpened teeth that those most fervently in her grandmother’s service favored. “That’s me. A ‘tail ten’ of one. Oh, it’s not so bad. My house never has known quite what to do with me.”

That Jame could well believe. Lord Kenan only had one child, a half-Kendar, Shanir daughter bound to a snake which her grandmother Rawneth had given to her when she had sent her off to Tentir. Out of sight . . . out of mind? But why then the serpentine gift?

Quill had suggested that not all Randir Kendar were bound to the same Highborn.

“To whom are you bound?” she asked, impulsively. “Besides to Addy, I mean.”

Shade’s glance was as sharp as black, ragged ice. “To whom are you?”

“No one. Oh. I see. I think.”

“I’m Highborn enough never to have felt the need—and my lord father, apparently, never saw the point, nor my granddam.” She smiled, a bleak twist of thin lips. “Anyway, I get the rank of ten-commander with no responsibilities and can join any class I want. Something similar happened to Randiroc when he was a cadet here, but he was also still officially the Randir Heir so they made him master-ten of the barracks. I wonder how he managed that, especially as his Shanir blood became more and more obvious. Randir are talking about him, a bit, since he was here,” she added, seeing Jame’s surprise. “He made quite an impression, and not one m’lady overly savors.”

“Maybe that’s why she did . . . what she did,” said Jame thoughtfully.

Shade’s grip on Addy must have tightened, for the adder reared back with a hiss echoed by her mistress.

“Who?”

“Why, Lady Rawneth. Didn’t you know?”

“I thought we were being punished for trying to kill our rightful lord, or going mad, or both. My grandmother did this to us?”

“I think so.” Trinity, it had only been a guess. What if she was wrong? No, dammit, she wasn’t.

Shade read Jame’s answer in her face. Her own expression hardened, skin to bone.

Meanwhile, Jorin was soaring through the air in fluid, golden bounds, batting at the whir of wings. He landed on a rickety table which collapsed under him, gathered himself from its wreckage, and sprang again, straight through a screen and out a second-story window.

Horrified, Jame struggled to rise, but her hands were tangled in Addy’s coils. The wicked head whipped around. Triangular jaws gaped to hiss in her face, all puffy, white gullet and fangs with a black tongue flickering between them. The eyes too were black, all pupil, and hideously knowing.

Meddling Knorth . . .

Jaws lunged toward her face. In a blur, Shade’s hand was between them. The strike itself was so fast that Jame hardly saw it, only the serpent drawing back with a hiss while Shade more slowly withdrew her hand to stare in disbelief at the punctures on the palm and back.

“She’s never done that before,” the Randir said.

Mouse gaped at the oozing wounds, at the same time clutching her shirt front which both mice had dived down at the snake’s sudden move. “Should we call a healer? Swamp adders are deadly!”

“Not to my family. We have some natural immunity. Here.”

Shade dumped Addy into Jame’s lap.

“Aaiiee,” said Jame, trying to grip the triangular head without getting bitten while the muscular body writhed against her legs. Be damned if she was going to pin the thing by sitting on it.

Drawing a knife, the Randir cut a cross between the primary punctures, then sucked and spat blood on the floor where it ate into the wood.

Addy’s flailing quieted. Her black eyes contracted back to their usual fierce, unblinking orange.

As Shade wound a cloth around her hand, paws thundered up the stair and Jorin was back, still wildly excited, in search of the diminishing horde. Empty exoskeletons crunched under his feet. The hoppers clinging to Gari had also fallen silent.

The Falconer collapsed on a bench, panting, as his merlin returned sullenly to her perch on his padded shoulder. “I think . . . that’s enough . . . for today. Class dismissed.”

Slinging the loosened coils around her neck, Shade left the mews without another word or backward glance.

Jame stared after her. It had suddenly come to her why Rawneth had gifted her granddaughter with the snake: as a spy.

“My name is legion,” the Randir Matriarch had told Jame through her servant Simmel, just before Jame had smashed his head in, “as are my forms and the eyes through which I see.”

What she hoped to see through the swamp adder wasn’t clear. Perhaps any view inside the college would interest that voracious collector of secrets.

Trinity. Was it possible that Shade was a blood-binder? If so, had she just inadvertently challenged and perhaps broken Rawneth’s grip on the serpent? If so, what next?

“Look,” said Gari, holding out a strangely translucent hopper. It had regressed, one molted transparent shell within another, smaller and smaller, hopper within hopper. From somewhere inside came the sand-grain death rattle of an egg that would never quicken to life again.