“You.” He turned suddenly to Shade. “To what creature are you bound?”
“A gilded swamp adder, Ran.”
“Low enough, certainly. And you.”
The Edirr cadet jumped. “T-to a scurry of mice, Ran.”
“As low or lower. You.”
Gari met those angry, hooded eyes with more confidence than he would have before seeing much worse things on the long ride to Gothregor. “To any swarm of insects you care to name, Ran.”
“Snakes, rats—”
“Mice,” squeaked Mouse, around a fist stuffed in her mouth.
“—and fleas. What great Shanir you all are, to be sure. Much good your precious Old Blood does you. Old man, how dare you waste precious class time with such frivolities? What good can such ‘skills’ do anyone?”
The merlin on the Falconer’s shoulder bated and panted angrily, but his blind master only smiled.
“Laugh at me, will you? Shortly we will see who finds this amusing. And you”—he stopped before Drie—“A fish, isn’t it? Some fat old carp in the keep pond. You smile. I know that look. Nothing can reach you while you are with it, isn’t that correct? Oh, I think that we can arrange something that will shake even you, boy. Pereden’s bastard, come to Tentir. Amazing. Insufferable.”
Jame had risen to her feet, the hair at the nape of her neck prickling. Where did the old randon think he was, Tentir or Omiroth, and when?
“Ran,” she began, but was interrupted by the bounding return of Jorin.
“Waugh,” said the ounce, and dropped a coin at her feet where it spun, flashing gold, then rolled toward a crack in the floor with the cat in wild pursuit.
Aden was glaring after him when the Molocar Torvi knocked him over to bring a food bowl to his master—his idea or Tarn’s? Jame wondered. Before Aden could regain his feet, the rest arrived: Addy with a ribbon, two mice hauling a scarf, and a chittering swarm of three-inch-long water beetles bearing nothing but their own busy selves. The randon flailed at each beetle in turn as it rushed over him. Some of the beetles got sidetracked into his clothing, causing him to slap furiously at himself.
“You think this is funny?” he panted, although no one had dared to laugh. “We’ll see. Oh, yes, we will.” And he stormed out.
“What,” asked Shade, “was all of that about?”
“Nothing, I hope,” said Jame, but she regarded an unperturbed Drie uneasily.
The rest of the day passed without incident, except that Captain Hawthorn continued to run around the square, having received no order to stop. She had settled into the steady, loping stride of a veteran and seemed prepared to continue all night if necessary, but her regular passing by their lit windows began to unnerve the cadets.
“Does he mean to run her to death?” asked Mint. “Can he?”
“Eventually.” Jame threw down her Gen cards, unable to concentrate on the game. “Damn.”
Erim came in, shaking off his wet coat. “Ran Aden’s lights are out. He’s gone to bed.”
“Sweet Trinity.” Jame rose abruptly. “I’m going to stretch my legs.”
The others stared at her, at first barely comprehending such a breach of protocol. Then Dar leaped to his feet.
“Me too,” he said.
“And me.” “And me. “And me.”
They waited until Hawthorn passed once again and fell into step behind her. Other cadets emerged from other barracks as they passed, more and more. They ran in cadence, and the boardwalk shuddered under their booted feet. When the walk could hold no more of them, the rest of the student body began to stomp in time to the runners’ beat within their barracks.
Boom . . . BOOM . . . BOOM!
Even the rain was drowned out.
A light glimmered on the Commandant’s balcony, a candle held high by a wild-haired figure swathed in a silken dressing gown.
“Stop it! I said, all of you stop!”
The runners halted in place. Faces upturned, they waited, hair straggling wetly over their faces, their breath hanging on the dank air.
“You insubordinate, worthless brats, I’ll settle with you later. For now, just . . . just go to bed. All of you. Now!”
And so they did.
As night descended, the storm built to a crescendo, the beat of the rain now punctuated by distant, approaching thunder. The rumble of it growled down the valley from the north like a giant clearing his throat while glimmers of lightning played within the clouds.
Jorin had crawled under the blankets and was huddled as close to Jame as he could get, in danger of pushing her off her pallet. He hated the cold and damp, but thunder worst of all.
Trinity knew how the rathorn colt was doing out in the wet. She would have to check his coat for rain rot as soon as it was practical.
Bel at least had taken shelter in the great hall of Old Tentir with as many of the herd as would fit. The horse-master was in for a long night.
What would happen if the rain never stopped? “Water ultimately dissolves everything,” Ashe had said. “It can unmake the universe.”
A world of water . . .
And that awful man, Aden. Had he really gone soft, as Timmon feared? She had heard that when senility struck, all one’s true characteristics came spilling out without check. What a terrifying thought. Surely the Ardeth randon hadn’t always been as he was now.
Still, the Commandant must return to the college soon. Why had Lord Caineron summoned him in the first place, let alone Gorbel? Such a thing had never happened before during her stay at Tentir. She gathered, listening to the randon, that it was unusual at the best of times. Even a war-leader like Sheth held an independent command when he was responsible for the college. Trust Caldane to meddle.
And so Jame’s thoughts rolled, tumbling over each other, in and out of fitful sleep.
Gradually she became aware of an insistent, four-part beat. Water fell into a pan: drip-drip-drip-drip. . . . Rain hit the shutters: splat-pat-pat-pat. . . . Thunder echoed: BOOM-room-room-room. . . . And under it all ran words, a half chanted, bubbling refrain:
. . . mine-she-is-not, mine-she-is-not, mine-she-is-not, mine-he-is . . .
Jame woke with a start. What?
Prey to a sudden, half-realized fear, she scrambled into her clothes and, leaving Jorin under the covers, ran down the stair, out into the storm. There on the boardwalk she collided with Timmon.
“He’s followed Drie to the river,” he gasped, but stopped her as she started east toward the Silver. “No, to the Burley.”
Which was just as well considering that the lower fields were underwater.
Otherwise, no need to ask who “he” was. “Why” was another matter.
“I had supper with him again,” panted Timmon, wiping streaming hair out of his eyes as they floundered through the downpour, “or would have if all his provisions hadn’t gone moldy. Such colors, you wouldn’t believe. I wonder if he laced them with poison instead of spice, the way Grandfather does.”
“I bet Lord Ardeth tried poisons on him when they were boys, just to see how he would react.”
“Trinity. D’you think? Anyway, this time he blamed the cadets for the spoilage, not Grandfather or the weather. Then, after I’d left, you stopped Hawthorn’s run.”
“That wasn’t just me.”
“Oh, depend on it, he noticed. And he was so pleased to be punishing the Commandant’s duty officer. Through her he meant to pay back the whole school for its laxity and insolence, or so he said.”
He checked her with a hand on her arm, looking troubled and more than a little scared. “I think he’s gone mad. His eyelid was twitching so much that he sealed it with candle wax, and he kept calling me Pereden.”
“But why Drie, and why now?”