Where were they now?
. . . and a darkling changer wearing a stolen face waiting for him.
“We have unfinished business,” it had said.
Cadets were rushing to the stricken pair on the hearth. One moment he saw them, the next he didn’t as then and now bled into each other. That filthy drug . . .
But someone was waiting for him at the stair’s foot—a tall cadet whom, surely, he should know.
Not another forgotten name.
Torisen paused, his face in shadow, his mind in turmoil. “What do you want?”
“To talk to you. In private. Now.”
Still adrift between past and present, Torisen followed the cadet down the stairs, through the stable, into the fire timber hall, between the towering, incandescent timbers.
They faced each other across a smoldering, stone-lined fire pit. Was this where he had confronted the changer? No. That pit was off to one side, although surely drying laundry hadn’t then hung over it. The heat was the same, though, warping the air between them, stinging the eyes, hindering sight.
“Doesn’t honor mean anything to you?” demanded the cadet furiously. “Don’t the rules? Then again, why should they when the Commandant lets you break them over and over? Quite his little pet, aren’t you? You think you’re so clever that you can get away with anything. Well, not this time.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your scarf. Someone has already scalped you, but here you are, still in play.”
“You think I’m Jame.”
The other spat on the stones. His saliva skipped among them, sizzling, going, gone. “The spoiled brat. The Highborn little lady. What did your brother think, that Tentir needed a mascot?”
He began to pace. Torisen moved also, to keep the pit between them. He wanted to hear, to understand.
“We’re just toys to you, aren’t we, and Tentir is all one big game. Well, some of us fought to get here. Three generations it’s taken my family to claw our way up from the dirt where your precious uncle flung my grandmother after he’d had his fun with her. She died giving birth to my mother, who died at the Cataracts on the Mendelin Steps, fighting for your precious brother. Her blood bought me my place here. Dishonor that, would you, by dishonoring me? I don’t think so.”
At last Torisen remembered this cadet’s name: Vant. As for the rest, he was still confused. “How have you been dishonored?”
“I was master-ten of my barracks. I still should be. It was an honest mistake!”
“What was?”
“Stop playing with me, dammit! How could anyone seriously believe that hillmen were attacking on Tentir’s doorstep? What logic was there in that? What sense is there in anything that you do or that happens around you?”
Torisen was catching up now, and his voice hardened. “You didn’t send help. You laughed. A cadet died.”
“And I tell you, it was an understandable mistake! Who are you, to be taken seriously, then or now? I’d as soon take orders from Gorbel’s pook! Your presence here is a joke, an insult. Am I to pay for one misjudgment forever?”
“That depends on you. In Sheth’s place, I would have thrown you out of Tentir altogether.”
“You misbegotten bitch!”
He circled the fire pit in a rush, meeting Torisen on the far side in earth-moving Senethar. The Kendar far overmatched the Highborn in both size and strength, but Torisen had fought bigger men than himself all his life. While Vant tried to fling him onto the searing stones, he tried to wrestle them both away.
Vant suddenly lurched free. He looked dazed and incredulous, as if someone had just struck him in the head. His eyes, slightly crossed, swept the hall.
“You . . . don’t!”
With that, he flinched again, stumbled on the rim of the pit, and fell in. There he rolled hastily to his feet, his hands already red and blistered.
“You bitch, all of you, bitches . . . ”
Then for the first time he clearly saw his adversary. “Oh.”
“Now that that’s settled, get out of that damn firebox.”
Vant shuffled from foot to foot. Clearly he felt the heat, but he didn’t take his peril seriously.
“Not until you make me master-ten of my barracks and withdraw that bitch sister of yours. You must see that her presence here isn’t right!”
“I suppose you know that your boots are smoking. I can’t be blackmailed, Vant. It would be a betrayal of my position.”
Stomping unsettled sparks from the coals beneath the stones. Now the cadet’s pant cuffs were smoldering. He beat at them with his hands in a kind of exasperated irritation. Wherever Vant had expected life to take him, it wasn’t to this, nor did he yet believe it.
“You’re Highlord, dammit!” The furnace breath of the pit made him increasingly hoarse as his throat closed. “You can do . . . what you please!”
“Not so. To lead is also to serve . . . something that neither you nor Greshan ever seem to have grasped. What you ask would be a betrayal of responsibility. Come out, Vant. Now.”
He could have ordered in a voice that the cadet would have had to obey, but he didn’t. The will that allows a man to argue while he risks immolation deserves that much respect at least.
Fire flared under Vant’s hands. No doubt he could smell as well as feel his own burning flesh.
“I don’t believe this. I don’t accept it. It isn’t fair!”
“Is the truth? Come out. Here, take my hand.”
The flames rose, licking from pants to jacket, with a sudden rush to the hair. At last Vant believed the unthinkable.
“I will . . . have justice,” he panted as the smoke gnawed at his throat, “or I will . . . have revenge.”
He groped toward Torisen with a hand whose fingers were already blackening. Torisen would have met his failing grasp, but strong hands pulled him back.
Vant fumbled at the rim, blue eyes glaring out of a charring face, then sank out of sight.
“He would have pulled you in, lord,” said Brier, finally releasing him.
“What are you doing here? I thought Old Tentir was forbidden territory for the duration of the war.”
“It is,” said Rue, with a shuddering glance toward the contents of the pit, from which a pillar of greasy smoke now arose, “except for public spaces like this. We’re looking for your sister, lord. She went off to hide our flag, and no one has seen her since. That is, someone thought they saw her passing through the great hall, so we followed.”
“Instead, it was me. Damn. As soon as possible, I have got to grow a beard. Listen: has either one of you seen Ran Harn?”
“He’s missing too?”
“Dangerously so. He’s got to be found, Winter War be damned.”
The cadets exchanged glances. Calling off the war would not be a popular option or even, perhaps, possible at this late date.
“Play has already begun, lord,” said Rue cautiously, “and our team is in chaos without your lordan to lead it. Maybe, if you could take over, just until we find her . . . ”
“You would have three houses searching for Ran Harn,” added Brier.
Rue gave the Southron a curious, sidelong look. As senior and experienced as Brier was, she apparently didn’t want to miss this rite of Tentir either, not that her plan didn’t have merit.
The Highlord thought so too.
“All right,” he said. “We hunt for multiple targets. But understand me: Harn has been poisoned. I don’t know what memories are tormenting him now, but they could lead to his death.”
“And your sister?”
He gave a sudden bark of laughter. “I defy the past or anything else to get the better of Jame. Ancestors help who or whatever blunders into her way.”
He paused, looking down into the pit. “Mistakes and all, Vant, I will remember you.”
With that, he strode out of the fire timber hall.
“What do we do about Vant?” asked Rue.
Brier answered out of the bleak pit of her experience which, in its time, had seen far worse. “He chose his pyre. Let him burn on it.”