Honor's Paradox-ARC (21 page)

“Ran Hawthorn was left in charge, and she seems to have accepted it,” Mint remarked. “Ran Aden is just too senior to argue with.”

“The Commandant will be back soon,” said Erim. “She may not feel that it’s worth a fuss.”

Still, thought Jame, gnawing a slightly soggy heel of bread, she wished that Harn Grip-hard were here instead of with the Southern Host. If nothing else, as the Highlord’s war-leader he outranked his Ardeth counterpart. As Erim said, though, Aden’s tenure couldn’t last for long. Already the Commandant’s return was long overdue.

She also wondered about Lady Distan, Timmon’s mother. Granted, it wouldn’t have been raining when she set off with her escort from Omiroth, but what need had kept her stubbornly on the road in such inclement weather? A postprandial visit seemed in order.

When Jame arrived at the Ardeth barracks, however, everyone was still at table. She slipped up to Timmon’s quarters to wait for him there, not reckoning that his mother would come with him. There was her voice on the stair, though, and the swish of her damask robe. Too late to run. Where to hide? Ah, under Timmon’s bed, where she had taken cover once before, accidentally on top of the wolver. She could almost hear his amused, gravelly voice:
Under other circumstances, this would be fun.

Under these circumstances, definitely not.

“At last,” said the lady, entering the room. “Privacy.”

“Mother, guest quarters have been prepared for you. After such a long ride, aren’t you tired?”

“Now, would you hustle me off so fast after I have ridden so far to see you?”

Timmon’s bed was covered with a lace counterpane. Jame watched their feet through it—Timmon’s in fine-grained but sensible boots, his mother’s in rose-colored slippers. For such a dainty woman, she had large feet, proud in the up step. One could imagine them mincing over armies of the fallen.

“Very well.” Timmon sounded resigned. “I’m pleased to see you, of course, but why are you here?” Then his tone sharpened. “Has something happened to Grandfather?”

“One might say so. My dear, I know that you didn’t mean to cause trouble at the High Council, but you must see what a problem you created by letting Adric think that you were Pereden.”

Timmon’s feet shuffled. “I didn’t tell him. He told me.”

“And you didn’t correct him. About everything else he seems rational—so far—but this quest for the relics of his beloved, fallen son has partly unhinged him. When he refers to you as Pereden, he is content. When he calls you Timmon, as he does more and more frequently, he grows fretful.”

Jame wondered what Timmon had done with the finger and ring of his father. For that matter, blood and bone, he was a sort of relic in himself.

“I’m sorry about that.”

“So are we all. You do see, though, if he names you his heir as Pereden, Dari will have good cause to question both his judgment and your claim.”

“Mother, you assume that I want to become Lord Ardeth.”

“Of course you do. Haven’t you enjoyed being his lordan?”

Timmon began to pace restlessly. “Here and now, yes. It gives me status at the college. I never thought that it would last, or wanted that responsibility.”

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.

IV

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.

“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.

V

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.