Jame didn’t tell her that Brier was also finally tutoring her in Kothifir street-fighting, something that Tentir with its reverence for tradition had never sanctioned. To her mind, though, what worked, worked. She had lost a tooth finding that out.
The morning’s second session wasn’t a class but rather one of a dozen household chores needed to keep the barracks functioning smoothly.
After a quick trip back to their quarters to collect the weekly laundry sacks and their own last set of clean clothes, they returned to Old Tentir and descended into the fire timber hall beneath the subterranean stables.
Tentir had fifteen upright, ironwood trunks. Seven were prime, towering fifty feet from the brick-laid floor to the ironwood ceiling, casting a dusky orange light from the fires burning deep within the fissures of their bark and radiating waves of heat that made the air quiver. Six were too green to kindle properly and would be for years to come. The last two and oldest dated back to the founding of the keep when it still belonged to that giant of the Central Lands, the kingdom of Bashti. These were now reduced to glowing embers within their deep fire pits.
One of these pits was lined with stones beneath which the coals still glowed, fitfully seen through boiling water left from the last laundry detail. Soap bubbles rose and burst, reflecting the fires above and below. A bucket brigade formed from the corner well to top off the pit and to cool the water somewhat. Into it were dumped more soap and the contents of the bags.
Jame went to check that their spare clothes were safely stowed from the coming deluge. When she returned, her ten were teasing Damson. It seemed that during his tour of duty Vant had never once assigned his own ten-command this particular detail.
“We always throw in the dirtiest first,” Dar was saying. “Come on, Damson. You’ll love it.”
Before Jame could stop them, they pitched the cadet into the cauldron, fully clothed.
Oh, for pity’s sake, she thought, stripped off her clothes, and dived in.
The water was hot enough, almost, to make her gasp. It would become hotter still as the submerged, inextinguishable embers worked on it. Damson was tangled in a welter of wet laundry, thrashing wildly. She caught Jame a blow on the jaw that would have been serious above water, without someone’s trouser legs wrapped around the cadet’s arms. Somehow, she got Damson up to the edge of the pit where the latter clung, gasping. Above and behind her, air and water filled with diving, whooping cadets, naked except for their black, token scarves.
“This is how we do the wash,” she assured Damson. “In summer, it may be too hot for comfort, but with autumn here . . . what’s wrong?”
“I—I can’t swim.”
“Oh. Well, neither can Brier.”
She indicated her five-commander who, although naked, was standing on the edge of the pit, narrowly observing the cavorting cadets in case one of them came to grief among the clinging swirl of clothes.
“The last time I tried to drown her, she sank to the bottom and then walked ashore. Isn’t that right, Five?”
As she spoke, Jame remembered the circumstances: Caldane’s barge teetering on top of a waterfall, she in the bow, Brier in the prow. Both had ordered the other out of the boat to safety, but in her desperation she had used master words on the Southron to overwhelm her wilclass="underline" COME HERE.
No Kencyr should be spoken to so ruthlessly, even though she had been trying to save the Southron’s life. Did Brier forgive her for acting no better than her former Caineron master?
Brier gave her a brief, unreadable look.
“That’s correct, Ten.”
Jame let out her breath in a long sigh. She was forgiven for that, at least, if just barely. “Hang on to the side and kick,” she told Damson.
Damson hooked her arms over the edge, sneezing as soap bubbles went up her nose. “All right, Lordan.”
With that, Jame joined the other gamboling cadets among roiling shirts, trousers, and underwear. Shouts and whoops sounded all around her.
“It’s too farking hot! My skin is boiling off!”
“Then get out of the pot, softy.”
“Ouch! Watch out for the stones.”
“Ten, Mint keeps dunking me.”
“Then dunk her back.”
One by one as they grew overheated, cadets left the water and helped to fish out the now clean clothes. From here, first they would be rinsed (as would the soapy cadets) and then they would be hung on lines high over the other fire pit to dry. The last Knorth detail of the day would retrieve and sort them. So went one more day in the Knorth barracks.
Meanwhile, with everyone out and nicely crinkly, they changed into their last dry set of clothes and returned to the barracks just in time for lunch.
The first afternoon class was also held in Old Tentir in an exterior, third-story room with a view over the inner square. Jame recognized it as the site of Corrudin’s ill-fated lesson in refusing improper Highborn orders.
“I wonder if they’re still at it,” Quill had said. “Kibben standing on his head in one corner and M’lord Corrudin backed into another, afraid to move.”
Jame wondered how Kibbet felt about his brother’s fate. After all, he was now one of Gorbel’s ten-command, and it was Gorbel who, at his granduncle’s bidding, had given Kibben that foolish, fateful order.
Waiting for them, however, were not Caineron cadets but Randir, with one extra member.
“Shade.”
Jame put her hand on the Randir’s shoulder, and snatched it away again. Muscle and bone had moved under her touch where they should not have.
It’s only Addy, she told herself, embarrassed by her reaction; but when Shade turned, the gilded swamp adder was looped full length around her neck. Over her gleaming coils, Shade’s face looked even more tightly drawn than before, as if she had pulled her hair back so fiercely that the corners of her eyes and part of her skull had followed.
“What’s wrong?” Jame asked on impulse, but the Randir only turned away, Addy hissing a warning over her shoulder. At least the snake’s eyes were their usual fierce orange, not black, and no alien intelligence sneered out of them
When Jame saw who was leading the class, she got a second shock. It was the Randir sargent Corvine, back from her stint of guard duty at Gothregor. She was staring at Jame with her heavy jaw set, but turned away as soon as their eyes met and clapped to gather the other cadets’ attention.
“Right, my lords and ladies. Today you practice your water-flowing kantirs. Remember them, do you? Good. Take your places.”
The cadets spread out evenly and assumed the first position of the First Kantir, Water-Stirs—the-Body.
The movements of this set are done slowly, at a steady pace. The essence of water lifts the body and carries it along. Currents shift it this way and that, with flowing hands and bending knees. Arms wave in an eddy, twining and untwining. To the observer, the body is borne like a dead thing on the breast of the flood, but the ease is deceptive. All depends on balance and the summoning of one’s inner strength to match that of external forces.
It probably helped that not an hour before Jame had been rollicking in hot water. Her braid was still wet and tended to crack like a whip when she moved too quickly, but this kantir was too languid for that. When it ended, she let out a long sigh, as if all this time she had been holding her breath, and shook out her limbs. Throughout, she had been vaguely aware of Corvine walking up and down the lines, correcting a cadet here, a cadet there, with a tap of her baton. However, she had never come near Jame.
“Right,” said Corvine. “The Second Kantir: Body-Stirs—the-Water . . . ”
This set of motions proceeds at a varied pace. The stance is deeper, the moves characterized by twists and turns. One swims, now through tranquil water, now through turbulent. Power coils within, wound by each gyration. Twenty-one feet hit the floor together as all are drawn to the bottom of the whirlpool and stomp to break free. Twenty-one bodies arch toward the surface, hands knifing upward. Ah, to float for a moment, then to dive. Bend around rocks. Chase bubbles. Race fish. A roar grows that is both water and the blood in one’s veins. Shoot out of the mist of the waterfall, and fall, and fall. Keep control. This is like flying, but one way only, down and down. Water leaps up. Body cleaves it. Nineteen feet hit the floor as one. Nineteen bodies arc up to the sun.