By the time Jame returned to Tentir, the college was astir. This was its one free day out of seven, so there had been no morning clarion call. However, the growing heat and long habit discouraged sleeping in.
As she approached the Ardeth quarters along the board walk, Timmon stumbled out.
“You came!” he croaked.
“I did not. Stop making a fool of yourself and put on some clothes.”
Farther along the walk around its northward bend, Vant had been talking to Higbert and Fash before the Knorth quarters. All three fell momentarily silent to enjoy Timmon’s discomfiture, then started up again, ignoring Jame’s approach.
“So, how do you mean to spend your bit of free time?” Higbert asked Vant, a little too loudly.
“Well, my lady seems to think that Tentir is about to be ravished by Merikit marauders. Perhaps I’ll go hunting.”
“Prime pelts on some of those hillmen,” said Fash, with a wide, white smile and his cold eyes sliding sideways as she came up to them. “I reckon they’re wasted where they are.”
Jame was used to Kendar who loomed over her—scarcely one didn’t—but these three were doing their best to make her feel it.
“Move,” she said, glowering up at them. They did.
Where to now?
She still felt restless and displaced, worse than at the solstice when she had at least been in sight of the Merikit rites, such as they were, before the Burnt Man had blown up a mountain and dropped a fair-sized chunk of it in the middle of Kithorn’s courtyard. What he might do this time made her profoundly nervous.
Worse, Chingetai was one of the few among his people who apparently couldn’t see the truth behind the ancient rituals. To him, Burnt Man, Earth Wife, Falling Man and Eaten One were just old shamans outrageously dressed, self-important for a day, even if he had taken them seriously enough to make a grab for the entire Riverland. Yes, while scrambling up the seasonal rites and setting in motion the mess with which they were all still trying to cope. Maybe she should take a horse and see how far north it could get her by the folds in the land before dusk. Bel could probably make it all the way. But surely it was too late for that. Chingetai must manage on his own, as dangerous as that could be.
Do you want the world to end?
Her wandering feet carried her into Old Tentir and up the stairs. The second floor contained the Map Room, guest quarters, the mews, the infirmary, and various classrooms mostly clustered around the outer walls or the great hall which rose through all three levels up to the sooty rafters.
The third floor was largely abandoned, as if to avoid the architectural strangeness that rose throughout the structure, growing worse the higher one went. Jame had encountered many mazes, but never one so full of subtle, seemingly innocent misdirection. While appearing straightforward, even dull, the corridors here slightly dipped or rose, and bent around each other so gently that one’s senses were seduced. Here, hidden ways led more directly than public ones, but she didn’t have Graykin with her to show her the entrances, nor had he yet fulfilled his promise to teach her where they were.
The thought of her half-breed servant pricked her conscience. She knew she wasn’t looking after him properly, but how could she when he remained holed up in Greshan’s private quarters, the one place where he apparently felt at home? That he had been wandering the college dressed in her uncle’s moldering finery she didn’t doubt, although why that should upset Harn, she had no idea.
Away from the outer windows, the third floor was dark enough to require a candle and dank enough to make one shiver even on so hot a day.
Here at last was the hall she sought, even though every time she seemed to approach it from a different direction. The door, however, was new, banded with iron; and the flap through which the inmate was fed had been replaced by a slot too narrow to wriggle through, as she had in the past. Not for the first time, she probed the lock with a claw, but failed to pick it. Kendar work was annoyingly effective. It didn’t seem to matter that Bear had broken out on the night of the ambush in the stable in answer to his brother’s silent call for help; no one was taking any chance that he might escape again.
Jame dripped wax on the floor and set the candle upright in it. Stretching out on the floor, she peered through the slot. The air that breathed out of it into her face was hot, stale, and stinking. Firelight lit the interior. More than ever it resembled an ill-kept cave, although she knew that it contained all the toys and luxuries that might once have delighted its inhabitant. Something momentarily eclipsed the fireplace. A large, shaggy figure was shuffling from one end of the room to the other, back and forth, back and forth. Caged. Trapped. Pacing.
“Bear,” she whispered. “Senethari.”
“Humph?”
His face suddenly appeared in the slot, eyes nearly lost in a wild mane of graying hair.
“Huh!”
A shift of position, and firelight glared through the chasm in his skull that plunged down nearly to the ledge of his shaggy eyebrows. It was an old injury, one that should have killed him, but his constitution had proved too strong. Instead of his life, it had robbed him of his mind.
Huge claws fumbled at the slot. Jame touched them lightly with her own much smaller ones. They no longer let him out to teach her the Arrin-thar, considering him too dangerous. No one had asked her opinion. She drew an apple out of her pocket and carefully impaled it on one of his nails. He was enthusiastically devouring it when something nudged her in the ribs. She rolled away into a fighting crouch, then relaxed, flushing both with embarrassment and growing anger.
Commandant Sheth Sharp-tongue stood above her, scratching Jorin’s ears as the ounce rubbed, purring, against his knee.
The words boiled out of her:
“Ran, does he really need to be shut up in there like . . . like a wild animal? You know he only broke out because you called him.”
Without answering, the Commandant of Tentir went down on one knee. Snuffling came from within, then a grunt of recognition. Despite herself, Jame held her breath as Sheth reached inside to stroke that wild hair. Before the White Hills, Bear had been the Caineron war-leader, a great randon. Afterward, Sheth had seen him move on the pyre, among the flames, and had pulled him out. Did he regret that now? To lose a revered older brother in battle was a grief, but to live with him afterward, reduced as he was by his terrible head wound to a shambling hulk—that was heartbreaking horror.
“Better that he should burn,” a voice breathed as in her ear, out of the opposite wall.
Sheth withdrew his hand and rose, his swirling black coat knocking over the candle. Without a word, he strode off. Jame stomped out the flame before it could spread. For an instant, as clearly as if it had actually happened, she had seen Sheth offering the light through the slot to his brother, and the fire spreading within, a pyre too long deferred, this time uninterrupted. She followed the white glimmer of the Commandant’s scarf, a slow, tight rage growing in her.
Behind her, the prisoner resumed his endless, mindless shuffle, back and forth, back and forth.
They entered the Map Room. With the sun barely risen over the fortress’s eastern face, the canvas shades on the west windows were a deep shade of peach verging on apricot and the room itself was dim. Cool air from the interior of the old fortress soughed in the door by which they had entered, to be answered by fitful puffs of warmth through the slits in the shades.
The walls were covered with intricately detailed murals depicting all the major battles that the Kencyrath had fought on Rathillien from the early days over three millennia ago to the most recent at the Cataracts. Cabinets beneath contained scrolls ranging from official reports to eyewitness accounts by common Kendar and a few mere bystanders. Jame had spent many hours here, both with her ten-command and alone, studying the records. To her, this room was just as sacred as the upper galleries of the great hall where the collars of the honored randon dead hung, rank on rank.