“Shhh . . . ” She touched a finger to her lips, then laid it on his, light as a phantom kiss. “Now my uncle’s shirt. Stand very still.”
She was gliding around him now, half dancing, humming to herself, and her eyes shone silver. Long fingers wove through the air, through cloth. Vant’s shirt fluttered down in ribbons. True to Bear’s training, however, not a fleck of blood marked them.
“And now, I think, your skin.”
The cadet had lost much of his summer bronze and his flesh rippled with shivers, but his torso was still finely muscled. Jame traced its lines with a fingertip, leaving the faintest of red lines, immediately washed away.
“I had a friend once who used to play this game, oh, with younger, smaller boys than you, but he would cut deeper, tease up an edge, and then rip. Now, how would that feel, I wonder. Worse than an arrow in the guts? Shall we find out?”
Rue gave a stifled cry and hid her face in Brier’s coat. Brier herself watched, stone-faced, as did the onlookers by the rail. There, only Timmon turned abruptly away, breathing hard.
As she reached out again, however, suddenly the Commandant was between her and her prey. He snapped his fingers in Jame’s face. She recoiled, her eyes wide with shock and the sudden return of sanity. Black pupils swallowed the silver irises, shading them back to rain-clouded gray.
She stepped back, nearly as shaken as Vant. Her people made way for her. On the threshold of the Knorth barracks, she looked back once over her shoulder and spoke:
“He shouldn’t have laughed.”
Then she fled up the stairs to her quarters.
No lights were lit in the rooms that had once housed Greshan’s servants, nor were any fires set. Hail rattled on the rooftop hood over the cold fire pit, a few ice balls finding their way below to careen about the copper bath-basin. Jame sank down on her pallet bed and drew a blanket up over her shoulders. Jorin crawled under it. Too tired to undress, propped up by the ounce warm against her back, she rested her head on her arms, her arms crossed on her raised knees. There must be a hundred things she should be doing, but her mind echoed hollowly in her skull, as bereft of answers as of questions.
“So you’ve done it again,” whispered the walls. “Who trusted in you this time and paid the price?”
“One. Two. Too many.”
“Did you see your brother there, on the edge of the crowd? He saw. He left.”
“He was? He did? How odd. Oh, what will he have thought?”
“The worst, undoubtedly. You are his lordan, and he doesn’t trust you. Others do, and you betray them. Child of darkness, Perimal’s spawn, how could it be otherwise? Woe to them who put their faith in you, as I know only too well.”
Presently, footsteps and lowered voices sounded in the empty rooms. Someone built a fire; she could feel its warmth on her arms and the crown of her bowed head. Water splashed into Greshan’s huge tub. He must be going to play “little fishie,” she thought vaguely, and wondered if she should leave, but was too tired to rise.
Chairs scraped up, one on either side, and someone sat down with a grunt.
Commandant Sheth Sharp-tongue and Harn Grip-hard had been talking quietly for some time before she half-roused to their words.
“Trinity, what a mess,” Harn was saying, his voice rough with disgust. “Too bad Gorbel didn’t find one of us first.”
“I gather that he was and presumably still is in considerable pain. His foot, you know. He heard that ass Vant braying with his drinking partners, who just happened to be Gorbel’s own Higbert and Fash, and went to him first.”
“How could Vant ignore a direct order like that?”
“It wasn’t direct. It was conveyed through someone perceived as an enemy of his house.”
“Don’t tell me he called Gorbel a liar!”
“He wasn’t that drunk, only enough to discount the message. You know how he feels about your lordan.”
“I don’t like him either,” Jame muttered into the crook of her arm. “He looms.”
“Huh. With us again, eh?”
“Are you injured, child?”
Jame thought the Commandant was referring to the arrow crease on her thigh, which kept breaking open. “It’s only a scratch. Oh. You mean Anise’s blood. Was my brother just here?”
Harn sounded startled. “Blackie? I didn’t see him.”
“I did,” said the Commandant. “Doubtless we will learn in due course why he came and why he left. In the meantime, what do you suggest we do about Vant?”
Jame made an effort to concentrate, failed, and sneezed. The Commandant of Tentir couldn’t just have asked her opinion on such a matter, not after what she had done. She mumbled something.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The horse-master. Has he been told about the injured geldings?”
“He has. They are being . . . er . . . attended to.”
Which meant he was finishing what the hillmen had started. Poor man. Poor beasts. “Did he find a raider with his throat cut?”
“Is there a reason why he should?”
“I cut it,” she said, not very clearly. “He was holding a knife to Bel’s throat. It looked as if his face was covered with Merikit tattoos, but it could have been paint. If so, the rain might have washed it away.”
“No bodies were found. They must have taken their dead with them.”
“Damn. Then we don’t know if they were Merikit or not. But I don’t believe they were.”
“Why not, pray tell?”
“All tied up with their precious rites, aren’t they? I should know. I was there.”
And she told them, with many pauses to collect her scattered thoughts, how she had spent her free day. The whole account sounded utterly insane. A long silence followed it.
The Commandant sighed and rubbed his eyes. “You Knorth,” he said. “Never a dull moment. Do you mean to return to the hills?”
“I think I have to, Ran.”
Harn started up, the chair protesting under his abrupt shift of weight. “Be damned to that.”
“No. Honor and obligation must extend beyond our own people or they are nothing. You know that, Harn. Go she must, but not tonight nor yet tomorrow. So. We don’t know who the raiders were but, thanks to Anise and the mutilated horses, not to mention the mares’ paddock awash in blood, we know that they existed. On top of that, Gorbel claims that someone tried to shoot him while they were winnowing the field. An arrow did notch his ear.”
“Damnation. This, after that scythe-arm thrust in class. Coincidence?”
“I mistrust them. Still, who would want the Caineron lordan dead?”
Harn snorted. “Anyone who knows his father? Still, Vant should have raised his house or at least have sent for me. As it was, Brier Iron-thorn overheard and went to the rescue while Gorbel brought out his own ten to see the fun.”
“Fun!” That almost roused Jame. Anise with the arrow quivering in her flesh, horses screaming, Bel down with a knife at her throat . . . “Fun,” she repeated, bitterly.
Hands teased the blanket from her grasp. Rue eased her out of her clammy, blood-sodden clothes and urged her to rise.
“The water is hot enough, Ten. Trinity, your skin is like ice!”
Jame caught the glare that her servant shot at the two seated randon and almost laughed; neither a little bare skin nor a lot of it was likely to bother either one of them, any more than it did her. She climbed into the basin and sank down into its blessed warmth. Ahhh . . .
They were talking again, over her head, out of sight over the copper rim.
“If you expel him,” Harn was saying, “he’ll probably choose the White Knife. He should anyway. His disgrace could hardly have been more public.”
“As opposed to faith broken in secret?” The words seemed to breathe out of nowhere.
Harn started up. “What do you mean?”
“I didn’t speak. Have the walls been talking to you too?”