“We should be.” The big Kendar rubbed red-rimmed eyes. “Above politics, I mean. As recent events show, sometimes we aren’t. Still, battle speech has its uses. Suppose your Caineron counterpart has made a bollix of a maneuver. D’you want to say as much to your commander in front of his?”
“Why not, if it’s true?”
“Randon to randon, yes, but if a Highborn should overhear . . . ”
Vant leaned forward, with a sidelong glance at Jame. He looked as if someone had just handed him an unexpected but welcome gift.
“So this is more about keeping things from our lords and masters than from each other, Ran? Now, that makes sense.”
“Why?” asked Erim, in complete, bewildered innocence. “How can we serve them if they don’t know how to use us properly?”
“ ‘Use’!” Vant snorted. “What an appropriate word.”
“Did you think,” he had once asked Jame, “that the Caineron are the only house whose Highborn make sport with their Kendar?”
According to Rue, Greshan had with Vant’s grandmother, and some unknown Ardeth Highborn had with his mother.
How must it feel to both prize and despise one’s own Highborn blood?
Well, perhaps she knew the answer to that, but in many ways Highborn and Kendar were both caught in the same trap of necessity and honor.
“How would you feel,” she asked, “if your lord decided not to use you, or if he just forgot that you existed at all? It has happened. It could again.”
Despite himself, Vant shivered. “Is that a threat, Lordan?”
Jame sighed. “No. It’s a paradox and, as things stand in the Kencyrath today, a statement of fact. My lord brother doesn’t like it any more than I do. But there it is. D’you want to tell our god that it’s unfair? Do. Please.”
“That’s the priests’ job. Ask your precious Knorth Bastard.”
“He’s not . . . qualified to answer, less even than I am, and I’ve waded through deeper cesspools of divinity than you can imagine.”
All the cadets were staring at her. They liked things straightforward, the way they had been taught. In the Kencyrath, walls were to keep things out, not to batter one’s brains against. Don’t ask questions, said the Women’s World, unless you were one of the eccentric and therefore somewhat disreputable Jaran.
Thinking hurts their little brains.
Jame wished that her own didn’t ache quite so much. At least she had the excuse of having just been kicked in the head by Timmon, which in turn made her long to rattle these others’ comfortable complacency.
“What does our three-faced god have to do with us? These days, precious little that I can see. Vant, I’m sorry, but we were all put here to be used, if only someone would tell us what we’re supposed to do. Like you, I really, really hate not knowing; and sometimes I’m afraid that not even our god remembers for what purpose we were bound together to begin with.”
For the first time, Harn looked almost amused. “Child, you’re frightening your playmates. For that matter, you’re starting to scare me.”
Vant gulped, gathered himself, and spoke, although his voice still shook. “Lady, I don’t know what you mean. Highborn may not lie, but they never talk straight either. It would be better if Tentir were restricted to the Kendar. There’s been a Highborn at the bottom of every mess we’ve gotten into here for generations. Look what happened the last time a Knorth lordan was in residence. If not for Greshan, Ran, your father would still be alive.”
Harn’s face went blotchy, red and white. “Hallick Hard-hand knew his duty. He chose the White Knife to fulfill it, thus redeeming the college’s honor. Do you speak ill of him or of his choice?”
Jame rose quickly and stepped between them. She didn’t speak nor did the big randon look down at her; however, after a moment Harn’s incipient berserker flare died and he turned away.
“What?” Jame said to Brier as she sank back into her place. “We Highborn have to be good for something.”
Quill had been thinking. “That’s as it may be, Ran, but isn’t it important for Highborn, especially lordan, to learn randon discipline? Look what happened to M’lord Greshan, who never even tried, and to Ganth Graylord, who did but failed. Sorry, lady.”
She waved this away. “Tentir tests those who presume to power. Ganth didn’t exactly fail, but he didn’t stay either. I wish he had, too.”
Harn glowered at her. In his bloodshot eyes was something almost like pain. “If so, Lordan, do you willingly submit to such testing?”
The Commandant had once said that by the end she would know if she belonged at the college, which was as much to say if she belonged anywhere. “I have. I do.”
The Kendar’s heavy shoulders slumped. “So be it.”
With that, he tried to pick up the threads of the scattered lesson, but his mind was only half on it and his class not with him at all.
The rumble of his voice wrapped itself around Jame, dulling her thoughts. Her head throbbed as if with a second heartbeat, fit to split her skull.
Rue touched her sleeve. “Are you all right?”
Yes. No. Listen to the whisper of the pooling shadows:
Ran Harn has seen your uncle Greshan walking the halls at night.
That was what she had forgotten: a knapsack containing a contract woven of dead threads, stinking of old, cold blood—Kindrie’s proof of legitimacy, but also Tieri’s death warrant and Greshan’s charter to walk free.
“I have to find it.”
She started to rise, but sat down again with a thump as her head threatened to explode.
“Find what, lady?”
“In the dining room, under the bench. I just ran off and left it there this morning.”
“Ah. That.” Of course, Brier had seen Jame carelessly stow the sack. Unlike some, the Southron never forgot anything. “Wait here. I’ll fetch it.”
Watching her go, Harn literally and figuratively threw up his one good hand. “Whatever I meant to teach, it’s gone. Instead, think about what you’ve learned, or at least heard. Good night and sweet dreams.”
Of course, it was hours yet until bedtime, as much as Jame longed for the day to end. So it would, just as soon as she had the knapsack and its precious contents back in her hands.
As she left the common room in search of Brier, however, Rue and Mint seized her.
“Come see!”
Between them, they tugged her across the hall into what had been her uncle’s private quarters.
Here was the reception chamber with its huge, raised fireplace, surprisingly clean. When Jame had last seen it, it had been packed and stinking with Greshan’s spoilt, moldering luggage, left unclaimed nearly fifty years after its owner’s death. She looked for the Lordan’s gaudy Coat under which she had slept and dreamed so vilely—was it only thirteen days ago?—but didn’t see it. Rue was probably right that Graykin had laid claim to it, and good riddance . . .
To both coat and its most recent claimant? No, don’t think that. The Southron was bound to her, however inconvenient that currently was proving. She owed him for his service . . . and, face it, hated that she did so.
The two cadets pulled her to the right, toward the door opening onto the servants’ quarters and she entered, the rest of her ten eagerly trailing after.
Inside, she stopped and stared.
“Well, it’s certainly different.”
When she had last seen the northwest wing of her uncle Greshan’s suite, it had been a long corridor with small rooms opening off of it to either side and a squalid little scullery at the end—dim, dusty, claustrophobic. Sealed after the former lordan’s death, no one had set foot in these dismal precincts since. During her absence, however, the Knorth cadets had obviously worked hard to transform it into a place where their eccentric lordan would deign to spend the winter instead of camping out in the attic under a hole in the roof.