She stopped him. They must be standing face to face. “Foolish boy. If not lordan or lord, what will you be? Just another Highborn subject to the will of others. Oh yes, your randon collar will give you some authority, but still you must follow orders rather than give them. Did I raise you for such a fate?”
He stepped back. “No, Mother. You raised me to be like my father.”
She pursued. Jame would imagine her gloved hands smoothing his coat, possessively patting it. “And what better model could I give you? Pereden was the perfect man, the perfect mate. I could never have given myself to any one else, and have to no one since. You owe your existence to my choice and judgment. Oh, what a lord he would have made!”
The door opened.
“Drie.” Timmon’s voice echoed with his relief at this interruption, then sharpened. “What’s the matter?”
“Water has gotten into the fire timber hall, into the fire pits.”
“Sweet Trinity, the stables. Mother, accompany Drie to your quarters. I need to help with the horses before the steam scalds them.”
He rushed out.
Jame forcibly restrained herself. Bel was in the subterranean stable, sheltering from the rain.
Drie and the lady faced each other.
“You,” she said, with such patent loathing that it made Jame’s skin crawl. “He should have left you behind long ago. What does a lordan need with a whipping boy?”
“Lady, Pereden was my father too, by a Kendar mother. Would you dishonor his choice of mates?”
“Oh!” Her riding whip whistled down with a crack across his shoulders and he cowered, submissive, before her. “Stand still, you. This is what you were born for.”
Jame wriggled out from under the bed. The lady’s back was to her, the whip raised again. She caught the other’s arm, drew back, and swept her feet out from under her. Distan went down in a billow of rose chiffon.
“Run,” Jame hissed at Drie who, after a wide-eyed stare, did so. Jame followed him—fast enough, she hoped, to avoid recognition.
Tentir seethed. Below, horses were screaming. A stream of them, freed, rushed up the ramp and out the front door of the great hall. Bay, chestnut, sorrel, black . . . Jame didn’t see Bel’s creamy, dappled hide among them. She edged down the ramp by the wall against the upward stampede, flinching away from heaving shoulders, rolling eyes, and pounding hooves. Here was the horse-master, slapping haunches.
“I haven’t seen her,” he gasped. “Likely she’s behind, guiding the others.”
Steam exploded between the floorboards, blowing some clean out of their beds. The water couldn’t begin to extinguish well-seasoned ironwood, but its clash with fire filled the air with hot, searing jets. Jame staggered among them, feeling sweat prickle out all over her body. The escaped horses thinned out. Here came one like a phantom out of the mist. She grabbed a white mane and swung onto a dappled back. Up the ramp, into the hall, out the front door. Mud slithered underfoot. Bel nearly fell. Cold rain dinned on heads and shoulders. Tentir’s training fields spread out before them beneath a sheet of water, under a full moon shredded by flying clouds.
The next morning, Aden addressed the assembled cadets from the shelter of the Commandant’s balcony while they stood below in their ranks, in the pouring rain, getting wetter and wetter.
“You are all sloppy and lazy,” he told them, down his long nose, “disgraces to your houses and scarves. My time here may be short, but I intend to teach you what discipline is. To begin with, you will run—I say run—to your classes in formation, in cadence, stopping only to salute any randon whom you may pass. Randon, return those salutes. I will be visiting your classes. If I find any inadequacy, you will repeat them in your free time, all night long if necessary. Punishment runs will increase in number and duration. Expect nothing but field rations and inspections. That, I think, is enough to start with.”
There was a sodden pause.
“Salute!” roared the duty sargent, and they did—to every officer in sight, in no particular order.
A scramble followed as the ten-commands fell in and sprinted off, many headfirst into each other. For the Commandant, they would have done it perfectly. By unspoken agreement, for Aden Smooth-face they turned the maneuver into a shambles.
“That was fun,” Jame remarked to Brier, limping slightly from a kicked shin. “Still, I expect we’ll pay for it.”
Throughout the day, Aden descended on class after class, finding fault with most of them, assigning punishment duties. Feet began to pound around and around the muddy square. The field rations turned out to be shot through with chartreuse mold. And still the rain fell. Under the steady downpour, amusement turned to dour obedience.
That evening Timmon dined with the Commandant Pro Tem and his mother on provisions that the former had brought with him, without which he apparently never traveled.
“He thinks we’re all plotting against him,” he reported to Jame afterward. “Well, in a way we are, but he also mentioned a Day of Misrule when he was truly Commandant here and some trick or other was played on him.”
Jame remembered what she had heard. “He was lured out of his quarters by a racket and tagged. The cadets made him share his stash of delicacies at the feast.”
“Something so trivial?”
“Obviously not to him.”
“He doesn’t like the Shanir either. You and Drie in particular drive both him and my mother wild.”
“Drie had better stay out of her way. Now that you’ve begun to slip out of her grip, she’s setting him up as your whipping boy again.”
“Oh no!”
“Oh yes, as if beating him can still make you behave.”
She watched Timmon consider this. His mother might be right.
“I also think,” she added, “that she hates him personally for being your father’s son. About Aden, is it possible that he gave your father the idea to make Drie eat his bound-carp?”
Timmon stared at her. “It is and he did. Over dinner, he bragged about that almost as much as he complained about his lost treats. Something about all Shanir really bothers him.”
“He isn’t one himself, is he?”
“That may be the problem. He seems to think that we have an unfair advantage over him. In my house, that could be true. Ability aside—and it’s no small thing to climb so high in the randon ranks—Aden owes his internal house rank largely to being Grandfather’s younger brother. Watch out for him.”
“Oh, I will. And you watch out for Drie.”
Timmon leaned against the rail. Here under the tin roof they were sheltered, but in danger of being trampled by punishment runs. One went past, the boardwalk booming under their feet.
“Brandan,” remarked Timmon. “At least he isn’t playing favorites.”
“You think not?” Jame wondered if Aden knew that Lord Brandan’s sister Brenwyr was a Shanir maledight.
Timmon picked at the moss encrusting the wooden rail. “It’s funny how knowing about my father and Drie has changed the way I feel about both of them. That is, I always knew about the carp, but I never realized what it meant to Drie. Mother and Great-uncle Aden are really getting on my nerves, the way they keep praising my father and comparing me to him. I know, I know: not so long ago I would have been delighted. Maybe, though, he was simply human, not the paragon I was raised to believe in.”
He glanced at Jame almost shyly under a fringe of damp hair.
“How did you feel about your father?”
Jame considered this.
“I always thought that he was a monster. He was so bitter, so frustrated, with no time for Tori or me as children except to shout at us. Everything revolved around his passion for our mother, who was lost to him forever.”
She paused, remembering how once he had found her in the hall of the Haunted Lands keep and for a moment had thought that she was her mother returned. Then with recognition the softness had run out of his expression like melting wax.