Bound in Blood

VI Blades Unsheathed

The morning’s second class also took place in Old Tentir, this time in the large, familiar, first floor room where the more obscure weaponry of the Kencyrath was taught.

Jame’s ten-command was already there, inspecting the strange blades that the scar-faced Brandan weapons-master had laid out for them. The last time she had been here, Jame had been introduced to the clawed gloves of the Arrin-thar and, in the process, had accidentally betrayed the existence of her own ivory nails, to her own horror and to everyone else’s apparent delight.

“We knew you were a true Knorth!”

She still wasn’t used to taking them so casually. However, practice with another natural Arrin-thari, Bear, was beginning to help.

“The scythe-arm,” announced Randon Bran, holding up one of the curved blades. It looked like two swords without hilts, joined along a sharp crescent edge, with a wicked point at each end. There was room between the two sides to insert one’s arm, with leather straps at the inner elbow and palm. They came in different lengths, one roughly a yard long and the other about two-thirds that. For practice purposes, a leather strip sheathed the edge, capped at each end with a wooden ball.

“Choose two, one long, one short,” the randon said. “Test until you find the length and weight that suit you best. Think of them as swords. You’ve practiced enough to know the advantages and disadvantages of both lengths, depending on how close to your opponent you want to get and on your own strength.”

Jame noticed that Brier found a pair at once and donned them with the ease of long familiarity. When Dar, as usual overenthusiastic, drew back with a flourish into the guard position, Brier parried his unintended elbow jab at her face.

“Watch the spurs,” the instructor warned. “You can very easily put out the eye of the cadet behind you, and those we don’t grow back.”

He should know, thought Jame. Bear had slashed him across the face when he had helped to force the brain-damaged Shanir into the room that still served as his prison—this, after Bear had mauled a cadet stupid enough to taunt him. To this day, he was only formally let out for her training.

“Here, lady.” Brier handed Jame two scythe-arms shorter than her own. “Try these. They’re Southron weapons,” she added, to explain her own expertise.

Jame slipped them on, the first easily, the second with some fumbling and unintended clashing of steel. Unlike most Kencyr, she favored her right hand. Also, as a rule, she disliked edged weapons. However, the balance and heft of these pleased her.

“I still want to learn Kothifir street-fighting.”

Brier gave her a sidelong look. Such informal techniques had lost the Southron vital points in their initial ranking at the college, and Jame one of her front teeth, since regrown.

“Whenever you like . . . Lordan.”

The second ten-command due for this lesson hadn’t yet appeared.

“Huh,” said Randon Bran, annoyed.

With that, he set the Knorth ten at a safe distance from each other and began to teach them the kantirs of this new form.

Jame liked it more and more. Think of all weapons as part of your body, Randiroc had taught her on the journey south, and all techniques as variations of the Senethar. Other randon had told her much the same, but for the first time the words clicked. These, then, were projections of her claws, both before her and behind, the latter more of a challenge in that each move had double consequences, potentially unintended and lethal. She had deliberately placed herself to one side slightly behind Brier so as to watch the Southron flow through the forms—slash, high guard, low, parry, thrust—and tried to follow her. Around her, blades flashed in the measured cadences of offense and defense, fire and water. Oh, how elegant, as formal as some deadly dance.

Belatedly, Gorbel arrived with his new ten-command, looking even more morose than before.

“Sorry, Ran. Higbert fell into the manure pit and insisted on returning to the barracks to change his clothes.”

“But not his boots,” remarked the instructor, sniffing.

Tigger tapped his nose. “No sense of smell, Ran.” His tone was solemn, but his eyes glittered with mischief.

“Bastard,” Higbert snarled at him. “You deliberately tripped me.

Fash said something, laughing, into the lordan’s ear, and got no response. Gorbel didn’t make friends easily. Jame wondered what had drawn these two together, and then so thoroughly broken them apart.

Dure was anxiously searching his pockets. Jame hadn’t noticed his right hand before, as it was usually out of sight. The nails were chewed to the quick and the fingertips were padded with old scars.

The other Caineron were selecting and donning their scythe-arms. Higbert defiantly chose the two longest he could find. He hadn’t been here when Bran had given his instructions but still, thought Jame, how stupid.

Tigger drifted past behind him, and suddenly the former ten-commander seemed to go mad.

Higbert spun around with a yell, blindsiding the randon and knocking him into the wall. Everyone heard Bran’s head crack against the stone; then he was down. Cadets scrambled out of Higbert’s way and the wild flailing of his blades. He seemed oblivious to them, intent only on his mad gyrations. His roars contained words:

“ . . . get it off, get it off, GET IT OFF!”

Jame backed into a corner by a window, wondering if she should follow Corrudin’s example and jump out. Too late. Higbert had her pinned, without realizing it. In fact, his back was to her and her blades were up, parrying the wild, reverse slashes of his spurs. She couldn’t get at him with her hands to deliver an incapacitating pressure-point blow: six inches of steel projecting from one hand and nearly a foot from the other kept them literally at sword’s point.

Around him, she saw Brier trying to come to her rescue, but Caineron blocked the Southron’s way. Several blades had come unsheathed. Fights seemed to be breaking out all over the room, born of confusion or worse. Gorbel bellowed, ending with a surprised grunt. Obidin was trying to restore order, but no one was listening.

Trinity, thought Jame. You could be defending yourself against the cadet in front of you and accidentally attacking the one behind.

As if to prove her point, Higbert tried to ram his back against the wall. Jame barely had time to raise her points so as not to skewer him before he slammed into her, knocking her breathless. She felt something small and hard move between them, under the Caineron’s clothing. When he reared away, she saw a lump zigzag across his back, headed generally southward.

At the collision, the button had popped off her short blade and its leather sheath had fallen away. She slid its point under Higbert’s jacket at the waist and slashed upward to the collar, cutting open both coat and shirt. Something gray thumped to the floor. She snatched it up and tossed it to Dure, who hastily pocketed it. Higbert’s back was a map of red welts following the creature’s progress.

As she tried to disengage her blade, its spur caught on Higbert’s belt.

He spun around, whipping her out of her corner. Her feet hardly touched the ground as, perforce, she followed her trapped weapon and arm.

“Higbert, stop . . . ”

He answered with a roar not unlike a baited bull’s. His split jacket slid down to entangle his arms. Then her steel spur cut through his belt. Flung free, Jame rolled back into the corner by the window.

Higbert’s split pants fell to his ankles. He nearly pitched forward onto his own blades, but recovered and began savagely to slash away the ruins of his clothes. His scythe-arms had also come unsheathed and left bloody gashes in their passing. The man wasn’t a berserker; however, in this mood he could almost have gelded himself without noticing. Knorth and Caineron alike drew back, collectively holding their breaths.

As suddenly as he had started, Higbert stopped, panting, clad only in boots, blades, and bloody rags. Veins stood out all over him. He looked at one naked scythe-arm, then the other, then up, straight at Jame. With a snarl, he lunged.

Jame ducked as sharp steel gouged the wall where her head had been. She came up inside his reach. The unbated point of her short blade sliced through his leather braces at palm and elbow and his right scythe-arm spun free, out the window. They heard it clatter on the tin roof of the arcade and fall to the square below. At the touch of her bare steel resting, lightly, against the hollow at the base of his throat, Higbert froze.

So did everyone else at Gorbel’s belated bellow:

“STOP!”

He had put his full Shanir power into that command, but with a hitch in it as if of shortened breath.

Jame craned around Higbert’s bulk to see him. The Caineron lordan was leaning against his Five with blood on his coat. Obidin spread the latter to reveal a slashed shirt and a nasty cut skittering up across his ten-commander’s white, hairless torso. A flap of skin hung from it. At its lowest point, where the initial blow had struck, it had just missed the vulnerable flesh beneath the rib cage’s arc.

“I think,” said Obidin conversationally, “that someone just tried to gut you, Uncle.”

“Did . . . er . . . someone lose this?”

Commandant Sheth Sharp-tongue stood in the doorway, holding Higbert’s scythe-arm.

Higbert twisted around, as far as he could against the warning prick of steel at his throat. Outrage flooded his already florid face.

“This bitch just tried to stab me in the back!”

“No, she didn’t!” Dure protested.

The other Caineron cadets shifted, muttering. The Knorth drew together behind Brier.

The Commandant’s eyebrows rose. He couldn’t see Jame, still crammed as she was behind Higbert.

“Er . . . what bitch?”

Jame slipped under Higbert’s arm. “I think he means me, Ran, but I didn’t.”

A murmur of relief at seeing her still in one piece rippled through her ten.

“I told you,” said Rue in a penetrating whisper.

That nothing stops me? Huh. That was Graykin’s coda, and all too likely, someday, to be proven wrong.

The Commandant looked bemused. Usually it was Jame’s weapon that flew out the window. Besides, here was a classroom full of cadets holding each other at swordpoint while their instructor leaned against the wall, blurrily rubbing his head.

“If anyone would care to explain?”

Tigger whistled soundlessly, eyes on the floor. Dure watched Jame, hand in his pocket, appeal naked in his face. She gave him a slight, reassuring nod. His secret belonged in the Falconer’s class and, presumably, with his lord.

“I told you . . . ” Higbert began angrily, as if only capable of fixing on one grievance at a time.

“Yes, yes, so you did. I think, on the whole, that a bit of fresh air is in order. Bran, kindly organize a punishment run.” His cool eyes met Jame’s and Gorbel’s. “If no one takes responsibility, then all should pay, don’t you think?”

With that, he tossed the scythe-arm to Higbert, who nearly dropped it, and swept out of the room.

Punishment runs were conducted in the arcade that skirted the training square. One had been going on when Jame first arrived at Tentir and another had taken place while she lay ill in the infirmary.

The infirmary.

God’s claws, she had forgotten to tell Shade who had dropped Addy on her chest as she slept, presumably hoping the serpent would bite her if she stirred. It was getting hard to kept track of all the people who had, or were still trying, to kill her. She should keep a list.

A punishment run could take all day, leaving cadets only grateful that it was over smooth, flat ground. Then there were the training runs, longer and harder, outside the college. The most vicious ones of all were real, over any sort of terrain, in all sorts of weather, seventy-odd miles a day with life or death at stake. One worked up to that, obviously. The only thing faster was a post rider with remounts every twenty-five miles, or to go by the folds in the land, with the chance of ending up anywhere. As transportation, weirding and step-forward stones didn’t bear thinking about . . .

. . . except what in Perimal’s name was Dure doing with a flesh-eating trock in his pocket?

As discipline went, though, ninety-odd minutes pounding the boardwalk under the tin roof was mild, especially when the drill sargent in charge didn’t really push. At the worst, it was embarrassing. Jame passed the Ardeth Lordan lounging in his garrison’s doorway, grinning. Whatever his second class had been, he had apparently decided to skip it. That was Timmon: he could charm his way out of nearly anything and still earn good scores in the testings. He looked less amused, however, as she jogged past again and again, as if to say, “You’ve made your point. Enough is enough.”

Jame shot him a dirty gesture: May all your male offspring be born with three legs, one of them useless.

Meanwhile, Gorbel was in trouble. Normally, he had a steady, stubborn gait that would carry him as long as necessary. Now, however, he began to stumble. Obidin caught him on one side and his servant Bark on the other. The former probably thought that the scythe slash was literally giving his ten-commander a stitch in the side, but Jame guessed differently. So, probably, did Bark.

As the Caineron ten slowed, the Knorth caught up. They were nearing the end of the run, also their respective barracks.

“Take them in,” Jame told Brier.

The Southron gave her a sharp look, but turned her command into the Knorth quarters without question, where a midday meal of bread, new cider, and cheese awaited them. Jame slipped into the Caineron barracks on the heels of Gorbel’s ten, and from there quickly into the shadows.

These abounded in the multistoried compound due to its general lack of windows. Caineron notoriously suffered from height-sickness. As their growing numbers at Tentir forced them to build ever higher, the less they cared to think about it.

Gorbel was arguing with Obidin. He was all right, dammit, just in need of catching his breath in the privacy of his own quarters for a few minutes. He would join them shortly. Now go away.

Unseen, Jame trailed Gorbel and Bark up the stairs until Gorbel stumbled again and almost fell. She darted forward to help him regain his balance. He snarled at her.

“If you want to keep it a secret,” she told him with a grunt as his weight came to bear on her, “you take what help you can get.”

His quarters were more spare than she had expected, large enough to hold his extensive collection of hunting gear, all in prime trim, as well as some truly startling dress coats. Otherwise, the large room was simple and, of course, dim, although it did have windows fitted with closed slats for ventilation.

While Gorbel collapsed on a bench and Bark went to fetch bandages, Jame tried to pull off the Caineron’s boot. He swore at her again in obvious pain and gripped his seat. His moon face was pale, dank strands of hair clinging to its sweat-sheen.

“Do you really think”—heave—“that someone just tried”—heave—“to kill you?”

Gorbel braced his other foot against her shoulder and shoved.

The boot popped off. Jame sat down suddenly, with it in her hands.

“Yes!” He touched his ribs experimentally and winced. “You don’t nick bone by accident. Although who it was or why, damned if I know.”

Bark returned with strips of linen draped over one arm and a basin of warm water in his hands. While he cleaned and bound up the wound, Gorbel lowered his foot into the basin with a sigh of relief. Then he glowered at Jame.

“Why do you care, Knorth?”

“I suppose,” she said, rising and staring into the basin, “that you aren’t so bad. For a Caineron. Trinity!”

Gorbel’s foot was tightly laced about with fine, white, willow rootlets. As they sensed the water’s warmth, they began to untwine and spread into a fibrous mass that filled most of the tub. Longer fringe roots reached out to tap the ceramic walls of their prison, probing for any crack or flaw.

“If you were a tree, I’d say that you were root-bound. How are you ever going to get your boot back on?”

Bark produced a sharp knife and began, carefully, to prune the growth. Gorbel winced at each cut.

“How often do you have to do that?”

“In the beginning, once a fortnight.”

“Now it’s every other day.” Bark spoke without looking up. “This can’t go on much longer.”

Green lines wandered up the veins of Gorbel’s leg into the cover of his pants. The arboreal infection was spreading.

“D’you want me to send for Kindrie?”

Gorbel snorted. “Your precious cousin, the Knorth Bastard? Much good he did me the last time. No. I have to consult someone else, someone more powerful, but first I have to find the perfect bribe. Now leave. I’m in enough trouble without one of my ten stumbling across you in my bedroom.”

She glanced at a thin pallet in the corner, no more luxurious or inviting than her own.

“Your ten-command is as poisonous a mix as I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. Out of all the cull pool, why them?”

Gorbel’s thick shoulders drooped. Suddenly, he looked exhausted. “Some of them aren’t so bad. The rest are blood-kin, and no one else wanted them. Besides, it was my dear nephews and cousins or another lot of raw idiots fresh from Restormir. What would you have done?”

Jame paused in the doorway, considering. “Probably the same. You do realize, though, that any one of them—or their fathers—is more likely to become the next Lord Caineron than you are.”

He glared at her under the sweat-sodden fringe of his hair, and winced as Bark cut another trailing rootlet. “D’you think I’m stupid? Of course I know. I’m only here as the Caineron Lordan because you are as the Knorth. No doubt some of my new ten will do their best to . . . er . . . dethrone me before next summer. But this is my one chance to gain something that my dear father can’t take away. I intend to earn my randon collar. So, I suspect, do you.”

The similarity hadn’t previously occurred to Jame, but she saw it now clearly. Tori was bound to respect her status as a randon. Likewise, Caldane would be forced to accept Gorbel’s. The collar was her pass out of the Women’s World, and Gorbel’s out of the fickle reach of a father with too many expendable sons. “Good fortune to us both, then.”

Only as she slipped out of the Caineron barracks did it occur to her to wonder whom Gorbel meant to ask for help, if not the most powerful healer in the Kencyrath.