P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

“Between us,” said Jame, “we’ll cripple that cat yet.”

She helped the young Caineron to rise as Lyra floundered in a welter of lace that revealed as much as it concealed, secured by a haphazard web of ribbons. That and a sketchy mask made up the night attire of a young lady belonging to a very rich house with not very good taste.

“I hate these clothes,” Lyra said, wrestling with wayward cords as if with a knot of silken serpents. “They keep trying to strangle me. What do you wear to bed?”

“Nothing. Lyra, why are you plunging around in the shrubbery, much less this late at night?”

“That’s my room up there.” The girl gestured vaguely toward the looming bulk of the Caineron quarters. As with most Caineron structures, given a family tendency to height-sickness, there were few windows, but one halfway up sported the defiant stub of a balcony. “I saw you below and came down to say hello. Hello!”

“To you too, lady.”

It was impossible not to like the little idiot, daughter that she was of an enemy house. Moreover, she and sometimes the Lordan Gorbel suggested that there might be some worthwhile Caineron after all. The value of Lord Caldane’s war-leader and current Commandant of Tentir, Sheth Sharp-tongue, went without saying.

“Now go back inside,” she told the girl. “I think it’s going to rain again. Besides, this isn’t a safe time to be abroad.”

Lyra pouted. “Oh, I’m tired of being safe. It’s so boring. Everything is, here. That’s why I was so glad to see you. Such interesting things always happen when you’re around!”

“That’s one way to put it,” said Jame dryly. “Just the same . . . ”

Lyra gave a little shriek, and Jorin began to growl. Someone stood by the southern entrance to the courtyard, a black shape defined by its stillness against a restless fretwork of leaves.

“I’ve been looking for you.”

That hoarse, rasping voice told Jame who spoke, and her heart sank. She had forgotten that the Kendar nicknamed Corvine was currently doing a guard rotation in the Women’s Halls at Gothregor. Tentir had been much more pleasant without the Randir drill sargent running any Knorth she could find into the ground. Jame hadn’t yet suffered under her discipline, but had been uncomfortably aware of the Kendar’s hard eyes following her across training field, hall, and square. Most Randir were more subtle, mirroring their mistress’s sly, almost amused malice. With this one, however, the hatred seemed more raw and personal although Jame didn’t know why.

Now she gave the Randir sargent a wary salute, deferential but tempered with just enough dignity to remind her that here at Gothregor, Jame was more than a mere cadet.

“How can I help you, Sar?”

A strange grating sound answered her. Corvine stepped out of the shadows into the courtyard’s dim starlight. For a Kendar she wasn’t tall, perhaps only a bit over Torisen’s height, but she was twice Jame’s weight and none of it fat. As to age, she might have been anywhere from forty to sixty years old; with Kendar, it was often hard to tell. The rasp in her voice came from an old throat wound which the healers hadn’t dealt with in time. The grinding noise came from her teeth.

“They say you were there when my son died.”

Startled, Jame heard herself reply, “I didn’t know that your son was a cadet.” God’s claws, she hadn’t even known that Corvine had a son. Memories of the cadets granted the White Knife by Randiroc flashed through her mind. Which one had he been?

And again, there was that fleeting, fretting sense of something—someone?—forgotten.

The Kendar stalked toward Jame, her face blunt and grim as a Molocar’s, her big hands opening and closing.

. . . clenched in on themselves like a fist . . . just waiting for someone to hit . . .

“If you want,” whispered Lyra, peeking out from behind Jame where she had taken refuge, “I can scream.”

“Not yet.”

They backed away from the advancing Randir, beginning to circle the fountain through its plume of spray. Jame hoped that Jorin was nowhere underfoot this time. She had had some experience with large, angry Kendar. They were best faced at arm’s length, when solidly on one’s feet.

“He was the last of my children. The last. And the way he died . . . ”

But to die by the White Knife was honorable, thought Jame, still confused. Perhaps the Kendar meant the boy’s wasted state.

Oh, Rawneth, what did you do ?

“Remember!” Corvine slammed her fist into the fountain’s marble rim, making Lyra jump and squeak. “Why can’t I remember? But you were there. You saw. Dammit, tell me!”

“Tell her what?” Lyra whispered.

“I don’t know. I can’t remember either.”

It had begun to rain, a quick, tentative patter that dappled the dark water, followed by a sheet falling so hard that it hurt. Corvine shouldered through it, oblivious, her voice a growl matching its muted thunder.

“You cursed so-called lordan of a ruined, fallen house, how could you let any child die that way?”

“Sar, I’m truly sorry, but I don’t know what you mean.”

“Liar!”

Lightning for an instant revealed three black figures, two huddled so close that they merged. Thunder boomed, rattling stones. Then came the deluge.

“Run!” Jame shouted at Lyra. Her own ears rang so loudly that she wondered if the girl heard, but another whiplash of light showed something white rushing away—not toward the safety of the Caineron compound but northward, out of the courtyard into the deserted halls beyond. Damn.

Jame sensed rather than saw Corvine hurtle toward her. She side-stepped. The Kendar stumbled against the fountain’s rim, cursing, and toppled over it. Thunder swallowed the splash. Lightning caught silver fish momentarily airborne.

Jame turned and ran.

Jame found Lyra some time later, only because the rain stopped and Lyra started crying, “Here! Here! Here!” like a lost chick.

“Quiet!” said Jame, taking off her sodden coat and wrapping it around the girl’s slight figure to which wet, chill lace now clung like a second skin. Nearby, an unhappy Jorin tried to groom himself dry.

Jame hoped that the rain had washed away her earlier track; however, if Corvine followed any trace of it, she would eventually come upon a clearer trail of trampled grass and muddy footsteps over stone, as Jame had once Lyra’s cries pointed her in the right direction. On the other hand, Lyra had plunged far into the maze of deserted buildings, where courtyards and roofless, crumbling halls were barely distinguishable from each other. When the Riverland had been ceded to the Kencyrath two millennia ago, how like her Knorth ancestors to have claimed the largest fortress even when they barely had the numbers to occupy a tenth of it. She and Lyra stood surrounded by looming walls whose empty windows gave glimpses of the clearing night sky. Soon there would be telltale stars, but at the moment it was hard even to be sure if one faced north or south. Still, few knew this wasteland better than Jame, who had spent the previous winter exploring it to escape the suffocating closeness of the Women’s Halls.

So. Should she hustle the young Caineron and herself back to the safety of more populated regions or go on, trusting that with her knowledge they could dodge any pursuit? Leaving the girl where she stood or sending her back on her own, undoubtedly to get lost again, wasn’t an option.

“Can you keep a secret?”

Behind her wisp of a mask, Lyra blinked. “I think so,” she said, a bit doubtfully.