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.
VII
Rude Walls
Jame had missed lunch, but Rue slipped her a chunk of bread and cheese which she hastily bolted, scattering crumbs, on the way to the afternoon’s first class.
This was one that Jame normally enjoyed. Half Senethar, half Senetha—that is, half fight, half dance—Sene classes were conducted in one of Old Tentir’s large, interior rooms. Candles supplied the only light, that and their reflection glimmering off the odd shards of mirror and beaten metal that lined the walls. Timmon’s ten-command was there before them, complete with its ten-commander; this class the Ardeth Lordan had decided not to miss.
He waited, elegantly poised in a nimbus of light that illuminated his golden locks and finely drawn features. No question about it: Ardeth’s young heir was handsome, verging on gorgeous. In that, Jame felt far outclassed, but she didn’t mind. She had never thought of herself as attractive except, sometimes, for her long, black hair. Others had described her as a “famine’s foal,” and so she still thought of herself, given her tendency to skip meals and her scarred face. Sometimes, though, Timmon made her question that.
He was doing it now.
Under his admiring gaze, she wanted to preen. Her muscles felt loose and limber from their exercise, all stiffness from the punishment run forgotten in the brief respite over the midday. Perfect balance possessed her. She wanted to dance, and quickly had her wish.
The randon whose class this was started to play his wooden flute, the cadets to flow in the kantirs of the Senetha. They were lucky to have such accompaniment. Sometimes classes had to make do with a tone-deaf sargent bellowing old love songs or a cadet enthusiastically banging on dented helmets with a stick. But the rules were the same. When the music stopped, the Senethar began.
Stop it did. Jame spun into position opposite an Ardeth cadet and struck, fire-leaping. He shifted from water-flowing Senetha to Senethar and slipped past her. Another did the same.
The flute began again. Now Timmon faced her. That had been arranged, she thought, and was content that it be so. He moved beautifully, making her feel graceful too. His hands and hers tracing the same patterns, mirroring each other. Physical skills came as easily to him as they had to his father Pereden, whom she had seen her brother fighting in the Heart of the Woods.
“I was with the Southern Host when M’lord Pereden marched it out into the Wastes to meet the advancing Horde,” Brier had said. “Three million of them, some fifty thousand of us. Our center column clashed head on and was ripped apart. The sand drank our blood and the Wasters ate our flesh. I was there when Pereden . . . ” She had paused, hunting for the right word, saying it at last with a curious twist: “fell.”
And again Jame recalled that memory that she had inadvertently shared with her brother—the feeling, the sound of Pereden’s neck snapping under his hands.
If your father knew what you had done . . .
But Lord Ardeth didn’t know. Neither did Pereden’s son, nor Jame.
Never mind.
“Are you tired?” Timmon’s whisper in passing stirred loose strands of hair by her ear. His warm breath made her tingle. “All that unnecessary running around. So undignified.”
Jame almost giggled, remembering Higbert grimly flopping along behind Gorbel. At least he still had had his smelly boots, if precious little else.
The music stopped.
She caught Timmon’s arm and threw him over her hip. Simultaneously, he grabbed her wrist and twisted it as he fell. She somersaulted, landing on her feet and breaking free just as he smoothly rolled upright. They circled, each looking for a new grip in another round of earth-moving. He grabbed her jacket and swept her feet out from under her. Both fell, he on top.
Time stopped. His weight on her, their faces close enough to exchange breath for breath, lip to lip, his moving hands . . .
. . . were not the ones she loved.
The randon with the flute was watching them. He raised his instrument to his lips and a derisive note rang out. Jame broke free.
It had only been a moment, she thought. Perhaps no one else had noticed. Timmon was smirking. She could have hit him. While the music played, however, she must dance.
His hands were as soft and well tended as a cadet’s life permitted, unlike those others with their agile strength and elegant lacework of scars, dear-bought with much pain in distant lands. She had heard the other Ardeth of Timmon’s ten-command grumble about their previous “class” which their leader had shirked, the ongoing repair of Tentir’s outermost wall damaged by the spring’s earthquakes.
“You could have helped,” she muttered as they slipped past each other in water-flowing Senetha. In general, Sene partners changed with each new round, but no one dared to interrupt their commanders’ duet.
“With the wall?”
So their thoughts still matched.
“What a waste of time,” he said lightly.
Then again, perhaps not.
“After all, who would be fool enough to attack the randon college?”
Everyone kept saying that. Such arrogance seemed like an open challenge to fate.
“Cattle raids happen every autumn,” said Jame, turning with him, “farther north.”
She moved more quickly to take the lead, the flutist’s notes racing after her. Everyone moved faster. At this pace, soon no one would have breath for anything but the dance.