“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.