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.