“You.”
She remembered being slammed against the wall and pinned there.
“You changeling, you impostor, how dare you be so much like her? How dare you! And yet, and yet, you are . . . so like . . .”
And he had kissed her, hard, on the mouth.
“My lord!” Her Kendar nurse Winter stood in the hall doorway. He drew back with a gasp.
“No. No! I am not my brother!”
And he had smashed his fist into the stone wall, next to her head, spattering her with his blood.
“What?” asked Timmon, watching her.
Jame shook herself. “There was so much I didn’t understand then. What child sees adults clearly? When I turned seven and sprouted these”—she flexed her claws and grooved the mossy rail with them—“he called me a filthy Shanir and drove me out of the house into the Haunted Lands.”
Timmon’s eyes widened. “He did?”
She laughed, without mirth. “That’s how Tori and I were first separated. Your granduncle isn’t the only one who can’t abide those of the Old Blood. It’s a funny thing, though; the more I find out about Ganth—say, what happened to him here at the college or how his own father treated him, not to mention that foul beast I have to call uncle—the more human he seems. Do any of us really know our parents? They seem so big at first, and then they shrink.”
“My father didn’t live long enough for that. He’s still the golden boy to all who knew him. And yet . . . and yet . . . there’s something wrong. Why did he call your brother a liar?”
Jame flinched at the dream memory of Pereden’s neck breaking under her brother’s hands and of Harn’s comforting rumble: All right, Blackie, all right. Don’t fret. He wasn’t worth it.
She still didn’t know what that meant.
Timmon left soon afterward, grumbling about no dry linen to be found in the entire college. How nice for that to be one’s primary concern, although somehow she doubted that it truly was Timmon’s.
That night Jame dreamed that she walked the Gray Lands where the unburnt dead drift. It was no surprise that she should find herself here, given her conversation with Timmon; however, she wondered if this was the dreamscape, the shared soulscape, some errant fragment of her own disordered mind, or a bit of all three.
Here, at least, were those familiar, sickly hills rolling under a leaden sky which leaned over them with almost palpable weight.
Whip grass twined and whined at her feet, seeking to take root in her boots: . . . stay with us, stay . . .
The air was sticky with warm drizzle, the hollows full of stagnant water under a scum of ash, sluggishly aroil as if disembodied drowning men struggled there. At the margins all was melting, life and death dissolving into water.
In the way of dreams, it didn’t surprise her to find Ashe at her side. The haunt singer leaned on her staff, pallid and slack of visage but still iron-willed, as must be anyone who walks the world’s edge. Her voice as usual was rough and halting.
“Water ultimately . . . dissolves everything. It can . . . unmake the universe.”
“Is that what will happen if the Eaten One doesn’t relent? To find her work here is . . . disturbing, to say the least. Have our worlds become so intertwined? But truly, Ashe, I don’t know what she wants.”
“The question is not asked of you . . . for once. Nor is that . . . the answer you seek here.”
Someone splashed through the mucky sedge below.
“Father!” Timmon called. “Father!”
On the opposite slope, a swirl of wind fretted the grass. Blades rose and wove themselves around a flaw in the air, plaiting themselves from the legs up into the semblance of a human figure. Something like a head turned. Dry grass whipped about it like sere hair.
“. . . I . . . I . . . I . . .” keened a thin, high voice like a breath blown over a blade of grass.
Timmon floundered up the slope toward it, holding the seared finger that was all that remained of Pereden Proud-prance, and which trapped him here in the Gray Lands, if just barely. Pereden took it in a stem-woven hand and settled the missing finger in place as if assuming a mislaid glove. A quiver ran through him as grass became underlaid with wicker. He drew himself up, creaking. Some hint of his former appearance returned, although rustling fitfully around the edges.
“I . . . I . . . I was my father’s favorite. I . . . I deserved to be. I deserved everything, b-b-but he took it all away.”
“Who did? Father, look at me! Talk to me!”
Blank sockets instead of eyes swept past him, seeing what? Through them, one saw the inside of his empty, plaited head. “He spied on me. He told Father, ‘Peri is weak, Peri isn’t to be trusted.’ He was jealous, so he lied. Father didn’t believe him, oh no, but the others did.”
He coughed ash and spat twigs like so many tiny bones. Some tangled in the dry grass around his mouth and bobbed there. He gnashed on them petulantly.
“I knew I could turn the Waster Horde. The Host would have done it for their beloved Blackie, but they failed me. Everyone fails me. Poor me. Oh, but the Wasters, they knew my value. Yes, they did. ‘Beat Blackie. Take his place,’ they told me. So I led them against the Kencyr Host. I would have won too, if Father hadn’t betrayed me as well. Why should he meddle and stop the fight when I was so close to winning? It was my battle—mine!—against Blackie and all his lies. I told him that I would tell Father all that I had done, and why. Oh, that scared him, lick-ass that he is.
“ ‘It will kill him,’ says Blackie. ‘And I promised to protect his interests. I keep my promises, Peri.’ ”
“Ah, his hands on my neck! Why is that all I remember? Where am I now? Someone has cheated me. You.” He clawed fumble-fingered at Timmon, who retreated before him back into the water. “Return it to me, all of it. I . . . I . . . I . . . was my father’s favorite. I . . . I . . . deserved to be. I deserved everything. . . .”
Timmon flailed in the water. The hungry dead rose up around him.
“Now,” said Ashe, and Jame plunged down the slope.
The water was viscous and rank, full of clutching currents. She grabbed Timmon. How hard it was to lift him, how treacherous the water.
“I . . . I . . . I . . .” he muttered, echoing his father’s reedy, needy voice.
“Not you, not yours,” she shouted at the thing unraveling on the slope with her full Shanir power. “I condemn you, I deny you, I break you!”
Timmon suddenly came free in her grasp. They lay tangled together in her bed, both fully clothed, both weeping water. Timmon leaned over and vomited. Then he began to cry.
“There, now,” she said, cradling him in her arms, brushing wet hair from his clammy brow. “There, there. He wasn’t a monster. He was only weak. It happens. Now sleep.”
And Timmon did.
The following day was wet, muddy, and miserable.
It started with a fight between Timmon and his mother in his quarters. No one heard the exact words, but they caught the tone. Soon after, Lady Distan rode off with her escort, despite the pounding rain and warnings of possible flash floods.
Aden Smooth-face stayed behind.
He appeared at Jame’s second lesson of the morning, which happened to be the Senethar.
She had expected to see him before this, given how he felt about her. It surprised her that he had chosen to visit her strongest class. He knew that it was, too: she remembered him observing her coldly in his gray mask during the second cull, the one for which he had voted to fail her.
Today they were practicing fire-leaping, as if in defiance of the weather. Kick, strike, pivot, sweep . . . the kantir continued, twenty cadets trying to move as one yet somehow not quite matched in time. Everything seemed soggy. Joints creaked. Limbs swam rather than catching fire.