“Blood will have blood, they say. Greshan has been seen walking.”
A soft laugh came from the nearest wall.
“And talking,” Harn added.
Jame dragged herself reluctantly out of pleasant stupor. “That’s just Graykin playing dress-up, and sneaking around by the secret passageways . . . I think.”
Her voice echoed hollowly: think, think, think . . . What had that hated voice said out of her servant’s mouth?
“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’?”
It still made no sense to Jame, but clearly it did to the Commandant. “You said I wasn’t to stop his prowling,” she reminded Sheth.
“You did?” Harn’s voice was sharp with suspicion.
“The less attention paid, the better. Leave the dead to the dead.”
Now the Knorth sounded shaken. “If you know about that, you know it was for the best, whatever the reason, whatever the result.”
“Hush,” said the Caineron, with surprising gentleness. “I know.”
“Well, I don’t.”
Jame fumbled to rise. The water was only about a foot deep and the basin’s bottom heavily embossed with the images of improbable sea creatures. Above that, however, the copper walls rose like a sleek, slippery wall. With an effort, she hoisted herself enough to peer over the rim.
There sat the Commandant as elegant and cool as ever, his long legs stretched out before him, crossed at the ankles. Harn, on the other hand, was sweating.
“What broken faith?” she demanded. “What secret? And what does any of that have to do with Vant?”
“You keep us to our purpose admirably. What about Vant?”
“He may be an arrogant ass—”
“And he looms. Yes, we know.”
“But he doesn’t deserve to die. Anise might have been killed whatever he did. Mostly, he isn’t a fool. He’s just in a muddle about having some Highborn blood, hating the way he got it, and feeling that it should guarantee him more respect.”
Harn grunted. “Sounds like a fool to me.”
“Then I prance in, a Highborn female, and all the rules that seem to bend around me turn against him. He doesn’t see the logic or justice in that.”
“A masterly description. Your point?”
“My brother needs all the good randon he can get, and Vant still has the makings of one. Just the same I won’t have him running the Knorth barracks anymore. Brier should be master-ten. Not Vant. Not me.”
“Are you giving up?”
“Aren’t you expelling me?”
“Because of what you did in the square? Oh, I don’t think so. It was . . . an arresting dance. Very powerful, on the edge of something very dark, and all in the midst of a controlled berserker flare. I doubt if any but a few realized what they were witnessing.”
“I’m not sure I did,” grumbled Harn. “First a three-millennia-old fighting style and now this. Is that the way we all once danced the Senetha?”
“I doubt that such skill was common even in those fabled days. Strange times, old friend, when ancient legends walk amongst us.”
Jame let herself slide back into the cooling water. “I’m not a legend,” she muttered. “I’m a monster.”
“One doesn’t necessarily preclude the other. We have known true monsters, Harn and I, and so, I suspect, have you. They never stop. You did.”
True, Bear hadn’t stopped when he dismembered that wretched cadet. Neither had Harn when in a berserker rage he had torn an arm off another Caineron.
“So I’m an inconsistent monster.”
“There are worse things.” He rose, followed by Harn. “Finish your bath and rest. We will decide what to do about Vant, keeping your opinions in mind. Good night.”
With that, they left.
Jame tried to raise herself and slipped back. All her bruises were stiffening. She never wanted to move again, but the water was growing cold.
“Hello?” . . . ello, ello, ello . . .
Rue must have left to give them some privacy. Well, then, she must simply wait, and try not to drown in the meantime. After such a day, what an anticlimax that would be.
Jame wedged her elbows between an overendowed squid and a leering whale, sank farther down, and fell asleep.
XIII
A Day in the Life
It took the college days to settle down, during which the sargents worked the cadets too hard to brood over what had happened on the equinox. Jame also thought about it as little as possible. On the ninth night afterward, however, dreams came to her.
She was walking the Gray Land. The sere grass whined underfoot, bending and tossing in pewter waves on hills that rolled forever on and on beneath a sickly waning moon. Ash was on the wind, on her lips, in her throat, and her clothes turned gray with it.
Shadows drifted past as if cloud-cast, but there were no clouds nor any stars, and the moon that should have been waxing here was always dying, yet never quite dead.
. . . never, forever, never, forever, the wind keened.
Now, faintly, she could see the wandering dead who cast the shadows. Some were mere flaws in the air, barely disturbing the grass on which they trod, turning ghostly countenances up to a pallid lunar rind as eaten away as they themselves were. Jame recognized faces from her own death banner hall, but none answered when she breathed their names, not even Tieri trailing the cords of her fast-fading mortality.
Others moved with more purpose, Kinzi and Aerulan among them, drifting against the wind—southward, she thought, but in such a place how was one to know?
A figure more solid than the others stood with its back to her on the crest of a hill. She touched its shoulder. It turned to reveal the ghastly face of the haunt singer Ashe, who should have been dead and probably was, but who still walked among the living.
“Do haunts dream?” Jame asked her.
“Child . . . what is the dream . . . life or death? I merely stand . . . and watch them pass . . . some drawn one way, some another. Saddest are those . . . who only drift in gray dreams . . . from which they can not wake.”
“And these, all of them, are the unburnt dead?”
“Aye. Bound in blood . . . free neither to come nor to go. Is life . . . all that different?”
“But where is this place, Ashe? I thought I knew the soul and dreamscapes. This is neither.”
“You know fragments . . . of both. This place . . . you know even better. Look.” She turned back the way she had been facing.
Following her dull gaze, Jame saw the round battlements of the keep in which she had been born. She was in the Haunted Lands.
A figure lurched past below in a gaudy coat, although the sick light caught only the flash of silver thread and of gold.
Jame ran down the hill toward it, conscience-stricken, stumbling as the grass clutched at her feet. “Graykin! Are you dead and I never knew?”
The face that turned toward her would have been handsome, but death had coarsened and bloated it. It grinned, and maggots wriggled between its teeth.
Trinity. Greshan.
“Save ’em if you can, liddle girl. Meanwhile, ’m hungry. I feed.”
Jame woke with a gasp.
Some dreams are prophetic. Others mean nothing. How can one tell which is which? Oh, but Graykin lost and the taste of bitter ash on her lips . . .
Rue was adding wood to the fire under the copper basin. Even when Jame didn’t bathe (as she did more and more often as she discovered the pleasures of it after an exhausting day), several buckets of water were added to preserve the copper and to add humidity to air already arid with the approach of winter.
“First snowfall,” said Rue cheerfully, tossing on another log. “Not that it will stick long this early in the season. Here, lady. This came for you from your brother by post rider last night.