“Dear Jame: Sorry for the inconvenience. This is what really happened . . . ”
Her nose was bleeding again. As she snuffled wetly into her sleeve, a dark figure limped quickly across the Forecourt toward her. Rowan, her brother’s steward. The Knorth Kendar must have been watching both doors, hoping to catch her on her way out.
Glass crunched under the randon’s boot. This must be where the shards of the great, stained glass window had fallen when she had summoned the wind and blown it out. Not that she had had much choice at the time: shadow assassins had been after her and had already half paralyzed her by their touch. The sudden blast had not only sent banners flying from the hall below but had ripped free the assassins’ shadow-cast souls, killing them with the shock. They had only been boys, apprentices sent for their first blooding on a mission to close an old contract on the Knorth ladies. They had been told that it would be an easy kill. No one had expected their target to be a Shanir nemesis.
No matter that she was only a few years older than those unfortunate apprentice assassins. In experience, she felt ancient.
Darinby was right, she thought, rubbing her eyes, remembering a friend from what seemed like a different life. To some, I am a baited trap.
“Lordan, are you injured?”
At the randon college, Jame was only a first-year cadet and Rowan an officer, but here she was also the Highlord’s heir. She waved off the Kendar and pinched the bridge of her nose to stop the flow. “ ’m fine, but keep back: ’m a blood-binder.”
Rowan stopped short. Her scarred face never registered emotion, but every line of her lean form turned wary. “Do they know that at Tentir?”
“Since the first week, when Brier Iron-thorn knocked out one of my front teeth.” She released her nose and sniffed cautiously. So far, so good. “Luckily, no one touched the blood, and the tooth grew back.”
“Then if you could spare a few minutes, Lordan, please accompany me to the common room. The garrison would like to meet you.”
What Rowan meant was that the other Knorth Kendar wanted to be sure that she knew all of their names. Kept sequestered in the Women’s World during her winter here, she hadn’t had the chance to meet many of her brother’s people. Now, however, she was his declared heir, and that changed everything.
Jame sighed. She had the highly trained memory of most Kencyr, but it already felt stuffed full and groaning at the seams. Still, maybe Marc would be there. How good it would be to see the big Kendar again and to talk over with him his plans to rebuild the keep’s stained glass windows. Never mind that he had never tackled such a project before; all his long life as a reluctant warrior, he had only wanted to create. It was kind of Tori to let him try, especially after Marc had refused to accept a formal place in the Highlord’s establishment.
Waiting for you, lass . . .
As if her brother were ever likely to let her set up an establishment of her own, much less formally bind Kendar to her service. She knew only too well how much he feared the strength of her Shanir blood. Although they were twins, it wasn’t even clear which of them had been born first, not that that mattered in a society that saw its Highborn females primarily as breeding stock.
Inside the hall at her back, all was quiet. It would be just her luck if Adiraina had dropped dead of a heart attack. On the other hand, if the matriarch started screaming, presumably Torisen would feel obliged to do something about it.
“All right,” she said to Rowan as she caught her wind-tossed hair, half of it still tangled in fancy braids, and twisted it into a knot. After all, there must be no more forgotten names, like poor Mullen’s. “I have something to do first, though. I’ll meet you and the garrison within the hour—sooner, if I can. Gari should already be there and, I hope, made welcome.”
“Lordan . . . ” The steward’s voice held all the perturbation that the damaged muscles of her face could not show. “You took your time on the road. Word arrived days ago of events at Tentir on the night of the cull when the stones were cast.” She glanced toward the halls of the Randir Women’s World where, even at this hour, some windows showed lights and moving silhouettes. “They’ve clenched in on themselves like a fist over there, especially the Kendar guards, just waiting for someone to hit.”
Jame tightened the knot with a jerk. “If they’ve heard, then they know that their Shanir Tempter earned her death, grisly as it was. She didn’t just try to assassinate a fellow randon within the college’s very walls; she suborned cadets to help her. All paid for it.”
And she told Rowan about the grim harvest that they had delivered to the pyre at Wilden.
“We heard something about that,” said Rowan, who had been listening in bleak silence. The dead cadets might belong to another house and one reckoned an enemy by the Knorth, but the loss of any young Kendar was a grief to all. “The Danior of Shadow Rock kept watch on Wilden from across the river that night, although they aren’t sure what they saw.”
Jame paused, remembering. “Something remarkable,” she said, and told the rest of her story.
“Strange indeed,” said Rowan, after a perplexed pause. “What do you make of it?”
“Not much, except that the Witch did something so terrible to those cadets that her own people nearly rebelled. That house is more flawed than I realized. You might tell my brother,” she added, hearing the bitterness in her voice, hating it, “if you can get him to listen.”
With that, she scooped up Jorin to spare his paws from random splinters in the grass and slipped away into the midnight halls of the Women’s World.
III
The Forgotten
The Brandan and Caineron compounds occupied the northernmost halls of the Women’s World. Both were large by its standards, but dwarfed by the empty halls beyond that extended to the far eastern walls and the Ghost Walks, former home of the Knorth.
Jame paused at a fountain in a courtyard between the two compounds, the last public source of water before the wastes beyond, and sank down on the marble rim. She knew she shouldn’t stop, but suddenly felt bone weary. Several days’ hard ride, a wrangle with her brother, a fight with Adiraina, and now an upcoming visit to a ghost—once, all of that would have been a mere foretaste of the night to come.
And there was something else, something she should remember but couldn’t, quite. It had niggled at her for days, like some small hole in her memory not to be found by random prodding. Something recent had half-roused it, but now it was gone again.
Stripping off her gloves, she bent to wash her face, carefully, trying to get as little blood in the water as possible. The moon, waning toward the dark, had long since set, but the clouds had momentarily parted, leaving starry rents in the night sky. Gusts of wind rattled bushes against the surrounding walls and blew the fountain’s central jet of water sideways in misty veils. Fallen leaves floated on the dark surface. Beneath them, faintly luminous, drifted silver clouds of tiny fish.
It probably wasn’t that easy to blood-bind someone, she thought, dashing water out of her eyes and wiping her hands dry on her pants. After all, that particular darkness had run in her veins all her life and, to the best of her knowledge, she had only twice bound anyone with it—a certain young rogue rathorn who had made the mistake of trying to have her for lunch and, maybe, her half-brother Bane, who in his farewell kiss in Tai-tastigon had nearly bitten off her lower lip. Even so, as when Greshan had temporarily bound his younger brother Ganth for his sadistic pleasure, the effect clearly varied depending on the relative strengths of binder and bound, perhaps also on the amount of blood involved. As for Tirandys . . .