Honor's Paradox-ARC (22 page)

“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.

VI

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.

We are dissolving into one uncoordinated mass,
thought Jame.
Water melts everything.

Its beat was in her ears as it hit the tin roof below. Its weight dragged her down. Was this what it meant to be lethargic? Never in her life had she felt so dull or slow.

Aden clapped his hands. “This is unacceptable,” he said in his voice of raw-edged silk. “Are these to be the next generation of randon, who can’t even pick up their feet? You, instructor, choose your best and let me instruct.”

The officer in charge was the Brandan Hawthorn. Her glaze swept the class, resting on no one.

“You,” said Aden. “Knorth. Dare you meet me?”

Every instinct said “Don’t,” but what else could she do?

They saluted each other, he from superior to inferior, she noncommittal, and took their positions.

He struck at her face in a blur and advanced, hands weaving. It was hard to remember that, although younger than his brother Adric, he was still a centenarian. She didn’t want to hurt him. Jame retreated. This wasn’t fire-leaping as she knew it. She blocked a strike, and felt a line of fire across her arm. Fabric parted, blood flowed. What in Perimal’s name . . . ? He struck again at her face. Again she blocked, forearm to forearm.

Retreat again. Now attack.

The heel of her hand snapped his head back and sent his white hair flying. There was blood on his chin; he had bitten his tongue.

Follow with a heart strike. Close and sweep.

He staggered, but kept his feet. Agile old man. His face remained as smooth as his movements, but Trinity, what a basilisk stare. One of his eyelids drooped. Here he came again. Her balance was off. His return sweep reaped her leg out from under her and she fell, he on top of her, his knee in the pit of her stomach driving out breath. His fists smashed into the floor on either side of her head. Strapped to his wrists, twin blades poised an inch over her eyes.

“Submit,” he hissed. “Leave Tentir today or I will blind you.”

With difficulty, Jame focused not on the knife points but on his eyes. The drooping one began to twitch.

“Blind me and answer to . . .”

“Your brother?” It was a sneer.

“No. To the Randon Council.”

He drew back and the blades retracted into his sleeves. He ran his hands through his white hair to straighten it.

“And this was your best student,” he said to Hawthorn. “You teach poorly, and Sheth Sharp-tongue made you his duty officer. To the square with you and run until I tell you to stop.” With that he stalked out.

CHAPTER XII
A New Favorite

Spring 43

I

At noon, Jame heard that Timmon was in the infirmary and went there, past Hawthorn running laps around the square.

She found the Ardeth Lordan soaking a scalded hand in cool water while the apothecary prepared an alkanet lotion for his red-blotched face.

“What have you done to yourself this time?”

His grimace deepened as it pulled at scorched skin.

“I was down in the fire timber hall. The only really hot flames are there, but so are steam jets and boiling water. You wouldn’t want to see my legs.”

“But why . . . oh, I understand.”

Timmon gave her a sidelong look. “I woke up in your bed. It wasn’t exactly what I expected.”

“I know. To begin with, I wasn’t there.”

“But you were, when it mattered.”

The apothecary smeared the lotion on Timmon’s face and covered it with a light dressing. Then, discreetly, he left.

“You burned your father’s finger, didn’t you?”

“Yes. By wedging it into the cracks of a fire timber. It was time. This morning Mother saw that I was wearing his ring.” He held up his other hand with Pereden’s moon opal signet on it. “When I wouldn’t tell her where I got it, she threw a fit and stormed out.”

“It was good of you not to betray my brother, not that I have any idea how he came by it either.” She regarded him curiously. “Do you remember the Gray Lands, and what your father said that he had done?”

Timmon gulped, looking sick. “It wasn’t just a dream, was it? I thought not. We were on the edge of the soulscape, where I have no control. Sweet Trinity, how could he? To join the Waster Horde against his own people, just for spite, and then to threaten to tell Grandfather all about it . . . He hated your brother because he couldn’t live up to him. I see that now. How . . . petty.”

“That’s one word for it. So now you understand that Tori didn’t lie about him?”

Timmon laughed, with a crack to his voice. “I expect that your brother didn’t say half as much as he could have. To do more would have been to destroy Grandfather.”

“ ‘And I promised to protest his interests,’ ” Jame quoted softly. “ ‘I keep my promises, Peri.’ ”

“ ‘Ah, his hands on my neck! Why is that all I remember?’ He killed my father, didn’t he? There at the Cataracts, he broke his neck.”

“I think so. Will you tell Lord Ardeth?”

Timmon gulped. “I could. I should. But now can I? Torisen was right: it would kill Grandfather, and certainly cause a blood feud between our two houses if not a civil war within the Kencyrath itself. And . . . and besides, Pereden wasn’t worth it.”

Jame took his unburnt hand and kissed the cracked ring. “I agree.”

Timmon flushed. “I’m not used to being taken seriously,” he said. “So far, life has just been fun and games. But it was never that, was it? Behind the Wasters were darkling changers, pushing. This entire world could have fallen because of my father. Right there. Right then.”

“Yes, but it didn’t.”

“No, but it still could. Not even my grandfather really believes in the threat, at least within his lifetime. How long have we waited for Perimal Darkling to attack? Generations. Millennia. But how far away from us is it really?”

“Sometimes,” says Jame wryly, “right behind us.”

His attention sharpened. “Your sleeve is bloody.”

“Your dear great-uncle brought knives to a fist fight and threatened to put out my eyes. There’s something wrong with that man.”

Timmon shivered. “So you feel it too. D’you think he’s going . . . soft?”

“Like your grandfather?” Jame had laughed at the idea that senility was contagious. Was it really so different, though, from Caldane sharing his hangover with his Kendar or her father infecting the entire Host with his madness in the White Hills? Clearly what happened to one’s lord had repercussions among those bond to him. Did that extend in particular to his close relations?

“I don’t know, she said, “but he’s dangerous.”

II

“I could do without the rain,” Jame remarked to Shade, “or without Ran Aden, or preferably without both. How long d’you suppose Caldane means to keep the Commandant at Restormir?”

Shade shrugged. It was a foolish question anyway: how was anyone to know?

They were in the Falconer’s class, as usual sitting along the wall, this time without their animal companions. The exercise was that each of the latter was to seek a particular object of its master’s choosing somewhere within the college.

Rain rattled on the tin roof outside. The fireplace sputtered fitfully. Jame had noticed that no flame burned properly, even with dry tinder, of which there was little. Meanwhile, leather mildewed, cloth rotted, and food spoiled. The whole world seemed to be melting.

“H’ist.” Shade touched her arm.

Aden had entered the mews.

The cadets rose, saluted, then sank back, warily, to their lesson. Jame watched him pace before them.

Over the past few days some of his smoothness had rubbed off. His white hair, while slicked back, seemed frayed at the ends and his eyebrows were ruffled. Lines were now more obvious on his face and his eyelid twitched almost in a flutter. What was it like for him to return to a place where his touchy pride had received such a blow? Did he even see the cadets before him or those of some forty years ago? Did he hear snickering where there was only cautious silence?

“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.