Then she hesitated, sniffing. Through her own senses, as well as Jorin’s as he crouched by the door, she caught a whiff of sour sweat, almost but not quite familiar. Certainly, it wasn’t the Commandant. Hopefully, it wasn’t her. She also had a sense of being watched, something that the blind ounce was unlikely to register.
The Commandant paced between the central table and the windows, back and forth, back and forth, long coat flaring as he turned. It was hard not to compare his feline grace with his brother’s ursine shamble but pace they both did, trapped alike in their separate cages.
“You know why we confined him in the first place,” he said, not looking at her.
“Yes, Ran. He mauled some cadet stupid enough to taunt him.”
“Yes. The fool did it repeatedly over the course of a long winter, and none of us noticed. I didn’t notice. It wasn’t just a mauling, either; it was a dismemberment. Bear is no berserker. After the first burst of rage that broke the cadet’s neck, he went about taking him apart as calmly and precisely as I’ve seen him plan many a campaign—this, with half a dozen randon trying to pull him off. He isn’t safe, child. He never has been.”
That dark face in hawklike profile was unreadable, but under the flat words lay cold horror. No need to tell her that he had been one of the randon trying desperately to pry loose Bear’s prey from that deliberate, deadly grip.
Jame began to pace with him now, around and around the table. She walked in his shadow, nailing it to the floor despite the changing light. Her voice was his conscience, speaking out of darkness. While he hadn’t bidden her to come, neither did he tell her to go, so she walked at his shoulder, thinking, questioning from the heart of an innate power that must be answered.
“If you thought he was so dangerous, why did you make him my teacher?”
“That was my Lord Caineron’s will.”
Was it, by Trinity, Jame thought.
She suddenly remembered a certain life-sized doll that Caldane kept in his bed so that he might nightly disembowel it. Was he playing at being Bear? Had he hoped that the brain-damaged randon would deal with her as he had with that unfortunate cadet so long ago?
“Was it also his will that Bear be confined?”
“That, or killed; now, as then. It is a little . . . test that my lord has set me. The first time, the decision was relatively easy. I couldn’t kill my brother, nor could I advance in my lord’s service without obeying him. This was some three decades ago, you understand. I was young, and ambitious. It isn’t easy growing up in the shadow of such a man as my brother was then. Yet how could I have known how hard it would be to wall him up alive for so many years? Now we are held fast in our respective cages, by my will.”
“Rather, by your lord’s.”
Jame felt anger grow in her again, that cold flame of her Shanir nature that consumes unclean things, that force that breaks that which needs to be broken. She knew all about Lord Caineron’s “little tests.” One of them had caused a Caineron cadet candidate to thread red-hot wires under Graykin’s skin so that Caldane might make his former servant dance again at his will. He would have reasserted his control over Brier just as ruthlessly, if Jame hadn’t intervened. Caldane wanted honor to mean obedience to him, following his orders, however nasty, while he himself kept his hands clean. For all she knew, that long-ago cadet’s test had been to provoke Bear until he did what he had done. The choice Caldane had forced upon the Commandant wasn’t dishonorable, but it had created a double misery and compromised Sheth in his own eyes. If Caldane could break such a man, he could break anyone, and so would end honor as the Kencyrath had always known it.
One thing at least she believed she could set straight here and now. She halted and turned, so that in his restless circling he was obliged to stop, face to face, her gloved hand on his chest.
“I think I know why Bear tore that cadet apart. I’ve seen him do something similar when he accidentally breaks one of the toy soldiers you carve for him—and he can’t help but do that sometimes, you know, because his claws are so overgrown and clumsy. Then he takes it apart trying to find the flaw that allowed it to be broken. That’s the randon way, isn’t it?” She gestured toward the maps, to the countless scrolls analyzing every detail of battles long since won or lost. “We analyze. We dissect. We try to understand. What Bear doesn’t realize is that the fault is within his own damaged mind.”
The Commandant took her hand, his touch surprisingly gentle. “And if he comes to believe that the flaw lies within someone else—say, within you, child—what then?”
She answered him steadily, holding his eyes as he held her hand. “You said it yourself, Commandant: none of us is safe. We never have been.”
As she turned to go, she heard him say softly, under his breath, “And all this time I thought he broke my carvings because he was angry at me.”
Jame was almost out the door when she caught another whiff of that stale sweat. Simultaneously, she saw a familiar face peering around the corner of the door to the Commandant’s office, which opened off the Map Room. Instead of leaving by the main door, she slipped aside at the last moment and slid through the suddenly vacated crack with Jorin at her heels.
Inside, she barreled into someone and trod heavily on his foot. He gave a half-stifled yelp of pain. In shifting her weight off, she stepped first on Jorin, who likewise squawked, then on something that crunched under her boot, pitching her sideways. She barely saw the desk in time to catch herself on it rather than hit it chin-first. Her eyes rapidly adjusted to the dim light of the windowless room. She was leaning over drifts of paper, under shelves swept bare.
“What in Perimal’s name are you playing at?” she demanded of the room’s other occupant, who was sitting on the floor nursing his sore foot. It would have been hard to avoid, shod as it was in a boot at least three sizes bigger than its mate.
No one had seen Gorbel for some time. Now Jame understood why.
“You hurt my foot,” he said through clenched teeth.
“I should have stomped harder. Gorbel, why have you ransacked the Commandant’s office? God’s claws, I’ve seen a blind thief leave less of a mess.”
“What d’you know about thieves, blind or otherwise?”
“Never mind that. What were you looking for?”
“Keep your voice down! D’you want him to hear?”
“He has already, unless he’s deaf.” Gingerly, she pushed herself upright, and tottered again as something rolled underfoot. “Answer me.”
“I need a rock called the Commandant’s Seat. The Wood Witch won’t cure me for anything less. But it’s not here.”
“Quiet.”
Outside in the Map Room, someone had spoken, and it wasn’t the Commandant. The voice, like the smell, raised the short hairs on Jame’s arms and set Jorin to growling softly.
“It would seem that you have mice in your closet, Sheth Sharp-tongue.”
“None that will do much harm,” replied the Commandant’s cool voice, “although, from the sound of it, they’ve created rather a mess.”
Jame peered around the doorjamb with Gorbel breathing heavily down her neck as he also craned to see. This close to the Caineron, Jame realized that although he stank of pain and cold sweat, his wasn’t the stale, sick odor that she had smelled in the Map Room.
“So,” said that almost familiar, wholly obnoxious voice. “You betrayed your brother to feed your personal ambition. Now that you have all you want, how does it feel to have him still here, like a guilty conscience, buried alive? What would you give to be purged of him forever, eh? Fire is said to be the great purifier.”