Don’t you dare.
Ivory horns clashed against stone. Sparks flew.
The girth looked pathetically thin and fragile. At its top, between his withers, was a loop of rope presumably to hang on to.
Not giving herself time to think, she slid down onto the colt’s back and gripped the loop. He lunged from side to side, threatening to smash her legs against the rocks as he undoubtedly had the horse-master’s nose and ribs. She kept her feet up, not even trying for the stirrups.
“Here we go!” said the horse-master, and Bel jumped out of the way.
The colt lunged out, bucking. She had only guessed that he didn’t want to kill her, based on the fact that he hadn’t yet done so. Without the loop, she would have been pitched over his head within moments. He reared and bounded forward on his hind legs, then launched into a gallop. There was no guiding him. They might have rampaged straight through Tentir, but luckily he kept above it, passing the paddocks—to the terror of their inmates—and so on northward over the wall, through the orchard, and into the wood beyond.
Finally Jame got her feet into the stirrups. Ah, that was better. In fact, it was like flying. She stood up in the irons and gave a whoop of glee that turned into a half-shriek as the colt bolted, throwing her backward but not off. One iron flew free.
I’m going to fall . . . no, I damn well am not.
The stirrup cracked her on the ankle, then her groping foot found it and thrust home.
They were galloping now through the forest. Again, more cautiously, she rose in the stirrups and rode above the rathorn’s back, balancing, swaying as he threaded between the trees, through dying day and coming night. The wind tore at her hair as she shook it free. Her hands left the rope and gripped the colt’s silken mane. In her mind, she felt his shifts in balance a moment before he acted on them and adjusted accordingly. On they raced and on, into the twilight wood, chasing shadows cast by the new-risen moon.
XIV
Two Chests
It was well past time that Jame checked on Graykin. Looking back, she didn’t know how she had come to put it off for so long, unless his voice occasionally heard through the walls had reassured her. Even then, however, two different people had seemed to speak, both Gray and her hated, long-dead uncle Greshan. It all had something to do with that wretched coat but what, she didn’t know.
Then too, the card in her hazard deck haunted her: “ . . . help me. . . . ”
Consequently, the next day before breakfast she rapped on the door that had once led to her uncle’s private quarters.
“Graykin?”
No response. He might, after all, be out in quest of his own breakfast, pilfered from one of New Tentir’s nine kitchens or even from the officers’ mess in Old Tentir. But no: the door was locked from the inside. Moreover, here was another piece of efficient Kendar work, proof against her prying claws.
At a step behind her, she turned quickly. Brier Iron-thorn stood regarding the door. “Have you come to winkle him out, lady? About time. All of this hide—and-seek has been getting on the cadets’ nerves, and he’s been whispering to some of them: ‘Don’t think you’ll make it as a cadet.’ ‘Couldn’t stand the rope test, could you?’ ‘D’you think anyone will ever trust you, turn-collar?’ ‘Still scream in your sleep, don’t you, sissy?’ Niall punched him through the arras for that. A pity that they blunted the blow but still, it was as good an answer as any, short of a dagger.”
Jame hadn’t heard any of this. She wondered what else they had kept from her about Graykin’s doings.
Brier brushed her aside. “Stand back.” She pivoted and unleashed a brutal fire-leaping side kick against the lock. It didn’t yield. “And again.” This time, wood splintered and iron shrieked, echoed faintly by someone inside. When the door swung open, however, Greshan’s quarters were empty.
They presented a luxurious ruin. Rotting silk shrouded the huge bed and drew ruined fingers across the dirty windows. The floor was covered with Greshan’s costly trinkets, mostly broken. A mute music box here, an ivory comb tangled with coarse black hair there; here a huge, ornate mirror, there peacock feathers, befouled, as for a vomitorium. Old as they were, their original owner’s scent floated over them in a miasma of lost decadence and self-indulgence.
Jame wondered if Greshan’s father had known how his older son had spent the gold earned by the blood of his warriors, or if he had even cared. Here had lived the golden boy, the Lordan, who could do no wrong. Without had lain the neglected younger son, Ganth Grayling, who could do nothing right.
Scattered about were signs of Graykin’s more recent habitation: crusted bowls of food, stale underwear, empty bottles. Judging by the mounds of moldering clothes, he had often played dress-up before the large mirror. He could have the lot, as far as she was concerned, but the assumption of another’s role bothered her. Where was Graykin himself? In her scorn and neglect, had she lost him altogether?
“Save ’em if you can, liddle girl. Meanwhile, ’m hungry. I feed.”
Brier was picking objects out of the mess. “I’ll return these to their owners,” she said. “Things have been disappearing in the barracks all autumn. Here. This is yours.”
She handed Jame a knapsack. Trinity. She hadn’t even missed it. Inside was Kindrie’s contract, apparently undisturbed. Ancestors be praised for that at least.
While Brier continued her quest for cadets’ missing property, Jame searched for the Lordan’s Coat. Clothes were piled knee-deep in places and seemed to cling to her legs as she waded through them. A cloying stench rose from them, part sweat, part perfume so concentrated in the bottle by years of disuse that it seemed the spoor of some living thing whose den this was. Jorin at least seemed to think so and was burrowing industriously, looking for it. A pounce, a rat’s squeal, a crunch.
Some chests had simply been dragged into the apartment rather than unpacked. Jame opened one and found a litter of underclothes silk-shattered with age and stains. Another by the ornate fireplace made her hastily step back, stifling an exclamation.
Brier looked up from across the room. “What, lady?”
“Nothing. Just a smell.”
Not just any smell, though. This one stung her eyes and stirred her memory. She was standing in the Ardeth kitchen on that tumultuous day of her arrival at Tentir last summer.
“Timmon, your family crest is the full moon, isn’t it? Then why is there a serpent rampant over your mantelpiece? Oh.”
Just then, the darkling crawler whom they had been hunting had lost its grip on the crumbling stones and fallen on top of her. Timmon had subsequently hit it with a shovel and the mantel had fallen on it, along with most of the chimney. They had never found its remains. Her assumption had been that it had dissolved in its own corrosive juices.
Gingerly, she lifted the edge of a shirt and saw a dull, metallic glint beneath it. The wyrm called Beauty had not only survived, it seemed, but spun itself a new cocoon within which to heal and perhaps to metamorphose as it had once before over the winter in her brother’s unused bed. Instinctively she reached for her knife.
“Don’t,” said the wall, or maybe the fireplace.
Jame stopped herself from calling to Brier.
“Why not?” she asked, keeping her voice low.
“It purrs.”
She could feel that, vibrating at her touch, inside its shell. Perhaps one outcast had found comfort in another. Then too, except when it had been under the influence of its previous owner, one of the Master’s darkling changers, she had never sensed active malice in it. Could a dumb creature even be evil? Could anything that didn’t have the free will to choose?
I chose, she thought. Deliberately. To be born under the shadows was not necessarily to submit to them.