Honor's Paradox-ARC (16 page)

The randon provided the feast from anything left over from the winter, it being too early for the spring crop. Left to themselves, most houses would have been reduced to root vegetables, dried beans, and salted meat, but this was the eve of the new year and all leftover supplies had been consolidated. Jame saw delicacies and smelt spices alien to her house for months. Galantine pie with dried berries, almond fish stew, swan neck pudding, spiced wine and cider . . . Her mouth began to water.

As cadets settled to the feast, speculation ran rampant among them: who would be scarved the Commandant of Misrule? Perhaps so-and-so because she was funny; perhaps what’s-his-name for the hideous expressions he could make; perhaps someone else because everyone liked him.

A stir arose at the door to Old Tentir. Out of it came Fash and Higbert, carrying chains. The links attached to a collar and the collar, under a dirty white scarf, was worn by Bear.

He stopped on the threshold, swaying, blinking bloodshot eyes.

Since he had emerged during the ambush in the stable, everyone had known at least by rumor that Bear was the legendary monster in the maze, rumored to eat cadets for lunch and supper, if not for breakfast. Even his past had come to light, with randon at last feeling free to describe his feats in happier days. Few, however, had seen him. His huge, shambling form and the obscene cleft in his skull awed them, while the wildness of his looks made many draw away. So did his rank smell, overlaid by the sharp tang of applejack.

They must have gotten him royally drunk to get that collar on him, Jame thought. No wonder he had slept through her clash with Narsa outside his door.

Fash and Higbert led him, stumbling, to the head table and induced him to sit.

Jame found that she had risen to her feet, as had every other cadet. They sat when he did, but on the edge of their benches, poised for Trinity knew what.

In the awkward silence that followed, Fash presented Bear first with a cup of ale, which he swigged down in a gulp, then with a roast haunch of venison. The big man looked at it suspiciously and licked his lips. A nervous laugh rippled through the Caineron as he suddenly snatched it up and tore at it like a wild beast.

This is wrong,
Jame thought.
Wrong.

Fash snatched the haunch away and held it up, making Bear paw for it. Then he thrust it under the table. Bear went after it. The table heaved. Despite themselves, more cadets started to giggle nervously. Others called at Fash to stop.

The table suddenly overturned as Bear rose. He gripped a chain and jerked Higbert within his terrible grasp.

Brier stood up, holding the cadet’s scarf.

“I order you. Don’t resist.”

Higbert, terrified, went limp. Bear plucked at his limbs, making him dance like a puppet. Rue started to clap in time, followed by others, but Bear’s movements were becoming more and more violent. He had torn a cadet apart before for teasing him.

A black coat swished past and there was Commandant Sheth Sharp-tongue by the high table. From his brother’s grip, he carefully detached Higbert. Bear’s mock scarf, slipping, revealed that the strap around his neck had spikes on it, turned inward. It was a punishment collar for unruly direhounds. Fash jerked on it, and Bear lashed out in pain at the nearest person—his brother. The Commandant fell.

“Get spears!” someone shouted, and weapons appeared in Caineron hands so quickly that they must have been hidden under the table.

This was all planned,
thought Jame. She struggled to reach her Senethari’s side, using her claws when cadets didn’t move fast enough. Bear was ringed with steel, striking at any point that came too near. The Commandant lay at his feet.

“Kill him!” Fash was shouting. “Kill him!”

“What in Perimal’s name is going on here?”

The new voice, while not a roar, carried such power that the struggling cadets stopped. Gorbel stood in the doorway to Old Tentir, his armor reeking with boar’s blood, his attendants dimly seen behind him in the great hall carrying the prize of his hunt on a pole thrust through its hocks. As he stumped forward, cadets cleared a path. Jame took advantage of their distraction to slip within the steel ring and kneel beside the Commandant. He had been struck across the face, luckily with the back of Bear’s hand, otherwise he would have had no face left to speak of. Already he was struggling to rise.

“Weapons up!” Sheth ordered the cadets and the handful of randon who had joined them.

Gorbel entered the ring and faced Bear. His hands came up and his head down in a cadet’s salute to a senior randon. Others joined him one by one, until Bear was surrounded by a circle of silent respect. Jame removed the collar from his neck. Bear snuffled and slowly straightened. Awkwardly, as if he had almost forgotten how, he returned their salute.

The Commandant climbed to his feet, shrugging off the hands that reached out to steady him, and touched his brother’s shoulder. Face to face, one saw the resemblance between them: beyond the elder’s unkempt wildness and the younger’s somewhat ruffled suavity, the same sharp features, the same set of jaw and hawk’s eye. Then Sheth led Bear away, through the silent watchers, back to his noisome den.

IV

It was dusk by the time the Commandant finally returned to his quarters which, like his office, opened off the Map Room. He stilled on the threshold, sensing movement by the balcony. A figure advanced into the room, the hunched shoulders of the Snowthorns over its head, a nimbus of evening stars above that. No Kendar was so slight; no Kendar but Harn Grip-hard would have approached him at such a time, after such a day. But Harn was with the Southern Host by now. Odd, to miss his old rival so.

“I came to see if you and Bear are all right,” said the Knorth Lordan.

Sheth sighed and unwrapped his official scarf. In fact, his face still throbbed and several teeth had been loosened, but it could have been so much worse.

“Bear is asleep,” he said. “They must have saved up their rations of applejack for a long time to get him so drunk.”

“Gorbel did well, though, didn’t he?”

“Very well. His father errs in underestimating him.”

“You do realize that Fash set you up to sanction Bear’s execution.”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” he said dryly. “Also that he would have been unlikely to think up such a scheme on his own.”

“Caldane is pushing. He wants to be sure of you.”

“Of that, too, I am aware. Why else do you suppose that he demanded that you renew your lessons with Bear?”

She stepped forward, almost into the light of his candle, speaking urgently. “Ran, you mustn’t give in. This is Honor’s Paradox, pure and raw, and you are the honor of Tentir.”

This amused him, or would have if he weren’t so tired and his face didn’t hurt so much.

“Child, what will you say next?”

“Only this: my first Senethari fell prey to the paradox, and to prove that I am serious, I will tell you who he was: Tirandys himself.”

The room seemed to shift. He was acutely aware of all the battle maps painted on its wall from the Cataracts to the Fall, three thousand-odd years ago. So many victories, so many more tragic defeats. It was as if the fabled past had risen before him in the figure of one slim girl. The randon had long wondered who had first taught her the Senethar, and here was the answer, impossible as it seemed.

“Child, Tirandys was of the Master’s generation, long, long ago.”

“He was also a darkling changer, who learned too late that his honor couldn’t be trusted to his lord. Time moves differently under shadows’ eaves. You met him yourself at the Cataracts, when he was impersonating Prince Odalian of Karkinaroth.”

Sheth remembered the prince—a poor, doomed fool who had wanted to emulate the Kencyr and had paid for it with his life, or all the time had they been dealing with one of the Master’s chosen, the originator of the Senetha himself?

“Do such legends still walk under the sun?”

“You should know, for you are one of them. Senethari, please. I don’t want to lose another teacher to Honor’s accursed Paradox.”

She took his breath away. Singers’ lie and scrollsmen’s fact, all of the Kencyrath’s long, tortured history seemed to unroll before him. Was he truly set upon the same path? He was ambitious, yes, but this was too much. One did what one could, where one was. For him, it was here in Tentir’s Map Room, faced with a shadow that embodied everything he had ever fought both for and against.

“You, a Knorth, tell a Caineron this?”

“Not a Caineron,” came that voice out of the darkness of his own soul. “The Commandant of Tentir.”

He fingered his scarf without thinking. “Then a Commandant has heard you.”

He stepped forward to draw her within his candle’s light and she resolved into a slim girl whose silver-gray eyes were too large for her thin face. He touched her scarred cheek.

“Ah, you Knorth, who make even your enemies love you. To bed, now, child. Tomorrow is a new year.”

She withdrew, saluting him. “As you command, Senethari.” And left.

V

Before Jame retired for the night, however, she checked the wyrm’s chest one last time. Jorin crouched before it, quivering, tail a-twitch, like a cat waiting for its prey to break cover. The chest itself rattled on the floor in a nervous little dance.

Jame opened it.

The chrysalis was rocking back and forth in its tawdry bed. Cracks laced its shell, then shards fell away to reveal something within covered with a dark, wet caul.

A gasp sounded from the door. Rue stood there open-mouthed, with other cadets arriving to gawk behind her.

“Lady, be careful!”

“Stand back,” said Jame, still unsure of what she was dealing with.

The struggles inside the chest stilled as if exhaustion had taken hold. Jame carefully hooked her claws in the membrane where it seemed the thinnest. It split at her touch. Something like a child lay within, curled in a fetal position, thumb in its mouth. Its body, however, was scarcely more than a tangible shadow and nearly as light when Jame picked it up. She saw that it had not one set of arms but three, the middle two rudimentary with hands folded over its stomach, the lower two almost but not quite legs.

The membrane fell in twin drapes from its shoulders, rustling and unfurling as golden light began to spread through its veins. From black to midnight blue to azure, the veil lightened as if with the sunrise into a pair of glowing wings.

Jame held them away from her body so as not to damage them. Jorin, sniffing, seemed inclined to bat until a quick word from her made him withdraw his paw.

The wings brushed the floor and spread to an arm’s width each. They were already drying. The shadow child sighed, removed its thumb from its mouth, and opened its eyes. They too were golden.

Memory stirred.

Golden-eyed shadows crouched over her in Perimal Darkling, around the Master’s bed. Long fingers like shadows in the coverlet’s creases poked at her. Except for their eyes, their bodies seemed no more substantial than those shadows.

“Who
are
you?”

Forgotten us so soon? Shame, shame, shame! Our lord sent for us, called us from our dim world into his dim rooms, up from the depths of the House. Said, “Teach this child the Great Dance, as you taught the other one. One name will do for both.” And so we taught you, the new Dream-weaver. Years, it’s been, all to be consummated tonight. Now get up, up, up . . . or shall we get into bed with you?

No!

Jame shuddered at the memory, but what she held, blinking at her, was innocence.

“I think I know your elders,” Jame said to the shadow child. “May you too achieve that last metamorphosis and teach others how to dance, but not as I almost did. Farewell, unfallen darkling; Beauty, farewell.”

It smiled at her, flicked its wings, and rose from her arms. The others rushed in as it fluttered out the window and rose against a gibbous moon near the full. All watched it until it veered north and was soon out of sight.

“Legends indeed,” said Jame, turning to her cadets. “And a happy new year to you all.”

CHAPTER IX
Echoes of Kothifir

Spring 20–21

I

Speckled with drying blood, the Coman scout panted up the ridge through leafless trees.

“Their headquarters are near Perimal’s Cauldron,” she reported. “They spotted us. Hurl got egged.”

“The first cadet lost and it had to be one of mine,” said the Coman master-ten-commander Clary. “Still, that’s useful information. We can storm them while we still have full sacks.”

Jame sighed, her breath a cloud on the crisp air. Clouds scudded overhead against a bright sky, and the occasional snowflake drifted down. Spring, ever fickle, had turned to glance back at winter.

The Coman was annoyingly eager to leap ahead with the exercise. Perhaps uncertainty unnerved him, or maybe he wanted somehow to make his half of the team look good at the expense of hers, which was stupid. Of all houses to be paired with on this rare, much-coveted double lesson, why couldn’t it have been the Brandan or the Danior, her natural allies? Instead, she was set against both on the other side.

Anyway, hadn’t she seen Clary talking with Fash before the class? Fash, as usual, had been jovial. Clary had looked uncomfortable. Everyone knew that the Coman lord couldn’t make up his mind whether to support the Knorth or the Caineron who, after all, were his blood-kin. Awkward for him, unfair for his cadets, who couldn’t decide where their loyalty lay.

Still, while at Tentir all were family, regardless of house politics. That, according to the Commandant.

Ha.

“Such an assault should only be out of desperation if we run out of time,” she said, repeating the sargents’ earlier advice. “As it is, we still have most of the day if we need it. No one has found the target yet, and that’s the main objective.”

“It would help if we knew what we were looking for,” Clary grumbled.

He had a point, and made another one by not meeting her eyes, which also annoyed her. Surely she had gotten past that point at Tentir after two culls. Her ten-command stirred restively, picking up his tone and her discontent with it.