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 Quirclass="underline"
“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.”