A long time seemed to pass. The lilac break crept past and the shouts receded. She leaned back against a tree, silently cursing her throbbing head and the blood trickling down her face.
“Damn!” said someone almost in her ear, in her brother’s voice. “That hurts.”
He shifted against the other side of the tree, his coat rasping against its bark.
“Tori?”
“Jame?”
“What are you doing here?” both asked simultaneously, then, “Where is ‘here’?”
“An hour north of Gothregor.”
“Fifteen minutes south of Tentir. What happened to you?”
“Storm threw me. We were tracking a rogue golden willow and it charged us.”
“You didn’t fell it, did you?”
“That would require it to stand still first. Trinity, I hate arboreal drift. And you?”
“I’m not sure. Something hit me.”
“Careless, careless . . .”
“No more so than you, run over by a tree.”
“At least you’re past the main threat.”
“What?” she asked, confused. She heard him draw himself up.
“The Commandant told me that someone was sure to challenge you to combat before the end of the school year. That happened at the High Council meeting. Why else d’you think I allowed that bastard Fash to take you on? Even so, under all of our eyes, he went further than I expected.”
“Oh, that wasn’t an official challenge, just one of M’lord Caldane’s little tricks to humiliate us both.”
She sensed her brother’s dismay, even as his voice began to fade.
“Then you’ve got to get out of there. Listen, Jame, I can’t protect you. Not at Tentir. Much less so far away at Kothifir. I can’t let you go.”
“If the randon will it, you can’t stop me.”
“Who can’t?” said a new voice, attached to a pair of large, surprisingly gentle hands. “What have you done to yourself this time?”
Jame blinked up at Brier. She needn’t turn to know that Tori was gone.
“Clary came back to camp with the Commandant’s coat, but without you. What happened?”
Jame almost giggled. “I think he hardboiled his eggs.”
Brier’s big hand was full of shell shards plucked from Jame’s clothing. Among them lay a blood-stained rock.
“Not this hard,” she said grimly. “And with the power of a sling behind it . . .”
“Never mind.” Jame pushed her aside and wobbled to her feet, remembering the Coman’s expression. “Fash had him confused.”
Behind them they heard shouts, laughter, and splashes: the losers were paying their forfeit in the Burley’s frigid waters. Jame wiped her forehead with her sleeve and decided not to bother. There was little enough blood. Besides, her team had won. Somehow, though, she didn’t think that Clary would revel in that victory.
They walked back to Tentir where, it transpired, the merchants and Graykin had already left, having found few customers among the canny randon.
Rue had bought a length of shimmering white samite, however, which she presented almost defiantly to Jame.
“It was dead cheap,” she said, “and I think I may know how to keep it from fading away.”
“Good luck to you, then,” said Jame, and thought no more of it.
On impulse, she went to Bear’s den and sat down outside of it.
“How does one manage?” she asked him through the grate. “Brothers and sisters . . . how can Tori and I talk when to do so freely both of us have to be either asleep or concussed? How do you communicate with the Commandant with so few words in common? Yet I’ll swear that he loves you, and you, him.”
She considered Sheth’s guilt. He had followed his lord’s orders that Bear be either confined or killed. Who could have guessed, all those years ago, that the torment would go on so long?
Controclass="underline" Caldane over Sheth, Sheth over Bear, Tori over her. Command aside, how did one let go when love was the bond?
“Tori will stop me if he can, for my own good. Ha. And yet he gave me this.” She fingered the carven cat with its snapped-off hind leg, the maimed symbol of their past. “Did we ever really share everything?”
Mine, mine! No, mine!
“He trusts me, yet he doesn’t. Do I trust him?”
Bear snuffled in the dark behind his door. Huge, ivory nails protruded through the grate, groping. On impulse, Jame gave him the carving. More snuffling, then a sharp snap: he had broken off the cat’s other hind leg.
Jame sighed.
I will stop you.
Not if I can help it, she thought.
Hours ago, Kindrie had seen the merchants pack up their wares and leave the training square, with Graykin in his gaudy finery rushing to join them at the last minute. The healer had meant to travel south with them from Tentir as far as Gothregor, but that clearly was not to be. The Southron had glanced up at the second-story common room window where he stood, then had flinched away. Kindrie wondered if Graykin had even told Jame that her cousin had arrived and was waiting for her in her quarters.
The barracks were deserted, everyone out attending class. Life hummed all around him, echoing in the empty rooms as if in a seashell’s chambers. He had grown used to the constant stir of Mount Alban and his place in it. This reminded him of his isolation in the Priests’ College at Wilden, where no one spoke to him except in abuse. The best he had hoped for there was to be left alone, free to retreat into the Moon Garden that was his soul-image, where no one could hurt him.
Why had he never met his mother there, except as a pattern of moss and lichen against a stone wall? That blurred face had watched silently over his childhood and he had never recognized it until it had come to claim him, a terrible thing of cords and hunger . . .
But life was different now. He had a family. He had friends.
So he told himself. At the moment, though, he felt alone, and cold, and hungry.
Who are you, that anyone should take notice of you? whispered the ghosts of his past.
Plates clattered in the dining hall two floors below and the smell of cooking rose. Cadets were returning from their lessons, talking, laughing. Footsteps sounded on the stair. A slim figure entered the apartment, speaking to someone over her shoulder. Then she turned and saw him.
“Kindrie! Have you been here all this time? That wretch Graykin, not to have told me!”
She advanced and took his hands, hers warm within their black gloves, his cold in her grasp, while her hunting ounce Jorin sniffed his legs.
“What happened to your face?”
She touched a darkening bruise and laughed. “The children here play rough, but they haven’t yet driven me out.”
No, thought Kindrie, they wouldn’t. One of them at least must be a slow learner not to have realized that by now. He envied her cheerful toughness, so unexpected in one seemingly so fragile.
She turned and called down the stair. “Rue, bring food up here. Tonight I dine with my cousin. And set a fire. It’s going to be a chilly evening.”
The towheaded cadet brought up bowls of thick soup, fresh bread, and a pitcher of ale. While they ate, the ounce begging them impartially for scraps, Rue piled kindling under the large bronze basin and set it on fire. Slowly, the chill left Kindrie’s bones and his spirit.
“It doubles as a bathtub,” said Jame, referring to the basin, “but you know that from the last time you were here. Would you like it to be filled? No? Then what’s this about Kinzi’s letter being translated?”
Kindrie explained.
Jame swore, rose, and began to pace. Jorin scrambled out of her way.
“I should have paid more attention,” she said. “After Lyra swallowed half of it, though, and I couldn’t read what was left . . . Trishien’s translation is certainly suggestive and in line with my own suspicions, but what can we do? Kirien is right: this isn’t proof. I don’t know what would be, short of a confession from Rawneth herself.”