P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

With a nod to Jame, the master dropped his sack and saluted the mare.

“My lady.”

Bel responded with a nervous toss of her head. When he knelt to feel her leg for any suspicious heat, her one good eye showed white and she trembled as she fought to hold still. The Whinno-hir had just recovered from a bowed tendon before the ride south, most of which had been taken slowly to allow her time to heal fully. Jame felt guilty about that last dash to reach Gothregor on Autumn’s Eve. On the other hand, when setting out from Tentir, she hadn’t counted on how long it would take to track down a dozen-odd wasted bodies hidden offroad in deep grass or bracken. As for the ride back . . .

“Bel set her own pace,” she said, trying not to sound defensive, “and chose her own path.”

The horse-master was lifting each unshod hoof in turn to inspect it, wall, sole, and swallow. In the growing light, the crown of his mottled, bald head might have been a lesser boulder.

Bel had quieted. So far, his touch and Jame’s were among the few that she could endure. After her decades’ long sleep in the Earth Wife’s lodge, it must feel to her like yesterday that Greshan had seared her face, half-blinding her, and the Randon Council had hunted her, as they believed, to her death. Reason enough, Jame had thought, to keep her company on that first night back, and the rathorn colt Death’s-head as well, unpredictable as he was.

The horse-master set the last foot down gently and rose, his back creaking, to pat her creamy shoulder. Head on, except for shaggy brows, his features were almost as blurred as the surrounding rocks, given the flattened nose that some horse, cast in its stall, had broken long ago with a flailing hoof.

“Well,” he said, “I can see that you haven’t been careening barefoot down the River Road, nor yet down the New. How you traveled seventy-five miles in a day, though, is beyond me.”

It was also somewhat beyond Jame.

She only knew that she had given the mare her head and a destination. The Riverland was strange. No two maps showed the same features, especially since the River Snake’s convulsions the previous year with their attendant earthquakes. Off the two ancient roads that ran on either side of the River Silver, the land folded in unexpected, unnerving ways. These were the paths that she and the Coman cadet Gari had taken on their return to Tentir, starting out early on the second of Autumn.

A long, slow ride it had been, with occasional glimpses of the river below, and above flashes of white where the rathorn colt kept pace with them. If Gari noticed the latter, he hadn’t mentioned it. Indeed, he may not have even realized that they were crossing wilderness, so entranced was he with the variety of insects that he was now able to summon, if not always to control. His time with Randiroc and his crown jewel-jaws had obviously been fruitful, as had Jame’s with the Randir Heir in his role as a weapons-master. It had come as a surprise to both of them when late that night (or early the next morning) they had rounded the lesser toes of the Snowthorns to find themselves within sight of the college.

Surrounded by a nimbus of luminous moths, Gari had entered Old Tentir to put up his weary mount in the subterranean stable and then to take his hardly less weary self to bed in New Tentir’s barracks.

Meanwhile, Jame had trudged uphill along the college’s northern wall with Bel at her heels, there to meet an impatient rathorn colt who seemed to think that she had meant to spirit his foster dam away from him forever.

A sudden blare of sound made Jame start. Below in the college, reveille was sounding.

“I’ll tend to m’lady,” said the horse-master, rummaging in his sack for brush and comb. “Best you were on your way down, before they come looking for you.”

Not another search party.

Jame grabbed her knapsack, whistled up Jorin from among the rocks where he had been hunting, and ran.

Her arrival at breakfast coincided with news that Gari had returned during the night and forestalled exactly the search that she had feared.

Why do people always assume that I’m lost? Jame wondered, pausing on the threshold to catch her breath as cadets led by her ten-command surged forward to greet her. I know where I am. Usually .

Amidst the uproar, someone called to her, “Lady, Gari can’t explain how you got back so quickly. Can you?”

Jame shuddered at the thought of cadets plunging off the road left and right, hunting for shortcuts.

“I can’t explain it either,” she said, quite truthfully.

Wild speculation rippled through the hall as cadets filtered back to their tables and their cooling porridge. It had been noted before how often the Knorth Lordan seemingly popped out of nowhere, often trailing wreckage. Meanwhile, Jame made her way to her own seat, pausing to pass on messages from anxious or proud parents garrisoned at Gothregor. How different this welcome was from her first day at the college, she thought, when no one could even bear to look her in the face.

But here was one for whom nothing had changed. Vant glowered at his congealing breakfast, watched uneasily askance by his ten-command. Every time she disappeared he clearly expected her never to come back, as was only right: in his opinion, Highborn females had no place at Tentir, much less acting as the master-ten of his own barracks. That should have been his role.

For her part, Jame heartily wished that her squad’s five-commander, Brier Iron-thorn, was her second-in-command at Tentir, not the surly Vant.

She paused beside him. “How many did we lose in the cull?”

“Nine,” he said, biting down on the word.

That wasn’t too bad. As she turned, though, she heard him mutter, “Somehow, you cheated.”

Jame froze except for her claws, which slid free from her fingertips as if with a will of their own. He hadn’t called her a liar—quite—but close enough. It was a lethal insult, if she chose to take it as such, and if anyone else had heard. Most of the cadets had returned to their breakfast. Only Brier was watching her steadily, teak-dark face as still as ever but powerful frame slightly poised as if for sudden intervention. She had seen the claws if not, perhaps, heard Vant’s words.

Jame took a deep breath and made herself relax, nails again sheathed.

No fighting on your first day back , she told herself sternly. Well, at least not during your first hour.

Besides, she wasn’t sure herself how she had passed the casting of the stones.

“That’s for the Randon Council to decide,” she said to Vant, speaking as low as he had. “Complain to them, not me.”

With that, she reached her place and slung her pack with its precious contents under the bench by her feet.

There was a note on the seat: “Remember the equinox.”

What in Perimal’s name . . . ?

Feeling Brier’s cool, green eyes still on her, she turned to meet them, the note forgotten. If not for Jame’s unexpected arrival at Tentir on the previous Summer’s Day, the dark Southron wouldn’t most unfairly have been demoted from Ten to Five to make room for her. She might even have become master-ten, whatever Vant thought. Jame still wasn’t sure how Brier felt about all of that. While she trusted the Kendar completely, she knew that Brier’s past experience with her original house, the Caineron, inclined her to mistrust all Highborn.

“What? D’you think I cheated too?”

“No, lady.” So she had heard. “I think you’re clever, and very lucky.”

“I think we all need luck,” said Rue, thumping a bowl of cold porridge down in front of Jame. Judging from the black flakes embedded in it, her self-appointed cadet servant had scraped it from the bottom of the kettle. Nonetheless, Jame suddenly felt ravenous.