Jame shivered, remembering her vision of Bear burning alive in his close, hot room. Without doubt, the thought had been in the Commandant’s mind, but he had rejected it as he did again now.
“I would not thank anyone who helped my brother to such a death.”
“True,” purred the other voice, “the flames are terrible. Did you know that even the dead feel the pyre gnawing their bones? I who was dead tell you this. A pleasant thought, is it not?”
Jame thought that the speaker stood by the opposite wall, against a particularly vivid map half in shadow. Certainly, something moved there, and again was still.
“But what is the betrayal of a brother compared to that of your precious Highlord? What did you think his son would give you for what you and Harn did?”
“We did nothing for him.”
“Only secured him the Highlord’s chair. Is that ‘nothing’?”
Another movement. The speaker wore a garish jacket that camouflaged him against the map’s busy details while shadow fell across his face. Nonetheless, Jame suddenly knew that stink all too well, having been almost intimate with it in the form of the Lordan’s Coat.
Ignoring Gorbel’s muffled protest, she burst out of the office and stormed across the room.
“Graykin, what in Perimal’s name d’you think you’re doing?”
For a moment she hesitated. Was that Gray after all, or someone larger, turning toward her an arrogant, coarsely handsome face that she had only seen in nightmares?
“Greshan?” she breathed.
Her servant flinched away and seemed to shrink within the gaudy coat, eyes wide with shock.
“Oh,” he said in his own voice, taking them all in, seeing where he was. “Oh!”
With that, he bolted, stumbling, out the door. Jorin started after him, but Jame called him back. She turned to the Commandant who all this time had stood by the table, seemingly at his ease.
“I’m sorry,” she said, profoundly embarrassed. “He will never bother you again.”
“No. I prefer that you do nothing.”
“But, Senethari, he’s been pestering Harn too, and upsetting him.”
Why? she wondered again. What did Sheth and Harn do for the Highlord, and which Highlord? Dammit, Gorbel was right: I shouldn’t have interrupted.
Sheth opened his office door, out of which the Caineron lordan tumbled, and surveyed the chaos within.
“Very thorough,” he remarked. “Out of idle curiosity, my lord, what were you searching for?”
Gorbel turned dusky red and tongue-tied.
“Ran, he needs to give the Commandant’s Seat, whatever that is, to the Wood Witch so that she will heal him.”
Both contemplated Gorbel’s foot. He was wearing something more like a leather bucket than a boot, with white rootlets wriggling through the seams. As if aware they had been observed, they tried first to burrow into the floor, then to scuttle away, taking Gorbel’s foot with them. When he grabbed himself by the ankle, they snaked back into their leather container, causing him to hiss in renewed pain.
“You only had to ask,” said Sheth mildly.
He waded into the shambles of his office and from the table picked up a chunk of clouded quartz.
“Workmen found it when they were laying the foundations of New Tentir, oh, long, long ago. Ever since then it’s been gathering dust on one commandant’s desk after another. Here.”
He tossed it to Gorbel.
The Caineron stared at the rock, outraged. “This thing? But it looks nothing like a chair!”
“Not chair. Seat. Look again.”
Gorbel did, and blushed even deeper.
Jame regarded the two, joined, moonlike lobes. “Why not the Commandant’s Bottom?” she asked.
“Too obvious. And besides, it could be worse. Now take it and go . . . unless you’d like to stay and clean up this mess.”
They left hastily.
XI
Equinox
By now it was almost noon and the sun had risen over Old Tentir’s roof in a shimmer of heat. Most cadets had loitered back to the shade of their quarters for lunch and a nap afterward, leaving the practice square vacant and sun-cracked. It didn’t feel like the thirty-sixth of autumn. A haze was growing, and with it a kind of shudder in the still air. It was the equinox, Jame thought. Anything might happen. Her eyes turned instinctively northward and despite herself she shivered.
Gorbel limped beside her, holding the piece of quartz. “Nothing like a chair or a seat,” he was muttering. “Why do people play stupid word games? You, clear off. I have business that’s none of your affair.”
With that he lurched and almost fell, caught by Jame’s steadying hand.
“Why didn’t you bring Bark?”
“It’s none of his business either.”
Jame wondered if, like Burr in his early days with Tori, Bark was really at the college to spy on his master. True or not, Gorbel could easily believe so.
“You need help if you’re going to find this Wood Witch of yours.”
He snarled at her. “As if you knew. She’s wherever she’s needed.”
By now, Jame had a fair idea who Gorbel’s mysterious healer was. “It’s the equinox,” she said, helping him hobble out the northern postern. “She may be otherwise engaged.”
The training fields stretched out before them, beyond that the outer wall and then the apple orchard.
Farther up were the paddocks of the remount herd. Something seemed to be going on there. Instead of grazing, the horses were moving about uneasily, sometimes breaking into swooping flight like a flock of disturbed birds. Bel’s cream-white coat glimmered among the mares as she tried to calm them. The rathorn colt Death’s-head must be off hunting, unless it was his presence to which they were reacting, prey to predator.
Jame considered the colt wistfully. While he was no longer actively trying to kill her, she hadn’t yet ridden him without at least one bone-jarring fall that usually ended each lesson. His reflexes were too damn fast. Also, he hadn’t yet consented to wear any tack. Worst of all, her irrational fear of horses in general only grew the longer she failed. Graykin liked to say that nothing stopped her. Nothing had, until now.
Put it out of your mind, she told herself sternly. One problem at a time.
Crossing the fields cost Gorbel more than he was willing to admit. With every step, the rootlets tried to dig in, coming loose clotted with clay that added to the weight of his boot. This might have been a sodden garden, not a sun-baked field. Soon he was too breathless to argue. Here was the edge of the meadow beyond the orchard and forest trees leaning inward, jealous of the land that they had lost. Under their eaves, the animals waited. Jame saw squirrels and rabbits and badgers and deer, all unnaturally still, watching them stumble past. Beyond, the wood was darker, with yellow eyes among the leaves. Wolf. Boar. Elk. Bear.
Jorin pressed against her leg, bristling but too afraid to growl. Again, she had the sense of looming powers. Heat hazed the sky and the Snowthorn’s peaks high above seemed to waver as if about to fall. Forest loam exhaled mist to drift, wraithlike, between the trees. The wind had all but died.
This is the festival of harvest and hunt, the fruits of the earth, murmured the leaves. Child of another world, is our bounty also for you?
“Would you prefer that we starved?” Jame asked the watching eyes.
“Huh,” said Gorbel. “Want feeds as want needs, wolf on hind, hart and hare on winter bark, damn the tree, but never for mere sport. I know. I transgressed.”
Jame glanced at him, askance, surprised. Gorbel was the most avid hunter she had ever met.
Beyond Gorbel, a stag watched them pass with dull eyes from his bracket cover. Blood burbled in his throat around the snapped shaft of an arrow loosed by a careless hunter who couldn’t be bothered to track down his wounded prey. Further on, the buzz of many flies came from the bristling heart of a massive cloud-of-thorns bush. In among the spikes was a great mound of flesh—a huge wild sow surrounded by the smaller lumps that were her starved offspring.