P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

“What do you mean?” she asked around a mouthful of the glutinous cereal, burnt chunks crunching between her teeth. It still tasted wonderful.

Rue sat down, scowling, and hunched her shoulders up to the untidy fringe of her straw-colored hair. “Things are . . . different. Ever since the night of the cull and what happened in the stable. I mean, how could they try to assassinate a fellow randon, much less a member of their own house?”

They’re only children , Jame thought, not for the first time. She and Brier, although only a few years older, seemed ancient by comparison, except perhaps for sober Niall, who had snuck off with the Host and seen more than he had bargained for in the red carnage of the Cataracts, and possibly for Rue, whose life at a Min-drear border keep could hardly have been easy.

As for the rest, their innocence had obviously taken a hard knock, and no wonder: the events of that night had shaken Tentir’s honor to the core. Randon were supposed to be a breed apart, above house politics, and certainly above the sort of cold-blooded treachery that the Randir Tempter had perpetrated within the college’s very walls, using its most vulnerable cadets as her pawns.

Jame admitted to her own stubborn streak of idealism: she didn’t want to think ill of any Kendar. The Tempter, at least, had been Shanir, and therefore part Highborn.

The spoon stopped halfway to her mouth, dripping gray gunk. So that was why “redeeming the Shame of Tentir” in the person of Bel-tairi had been so important to the Randon Council. Bel was the emblem of an earlier dishonor, one committed by her own uncle Greshan. Tentir had dealt with that as best it could, at the cost of its commandant’s life, but the harm was done, an innocent (and innocence) lost, until Jame had brought the Whinno-hir back virtually from the dead.

An odd role for a potential destroyer to play, she thought wryly. Whatever she did was complicated, and a constant struggle against her urge to break anything that got in her way. Was it any easier for Creation and Preservation? Probably not; especially not since neither yet knew what they might one day become.

And how will we three react then, to events, to each other?

Since Autumn’s Eve, she had known that there were three pure-blooded Knorth left—God’s claws, the proof lay carefully folded in the sack beneath the bench on which she sat, along with half an enigmatic scrap of linen that hinted at even more—but they must all accept their roles and grow into them before the coming of the Tyr-ridan. At the moment, the prospects of that seemed remote.

Meanwhile, Bel’s face remained savagely scarred and Hallick Hard-hand was still dead. Such evil could never be undone.

“Eat, lady,” urged Killy. “Assembly will sound any moment now.”

“Or if you’re not hungry . . . ” That, hopefully, from stocky Erim, who always was.

Thus reminded that time was short, Rue jumped up and started hastily untangling Jame’s long, black hair. After all, how their master-ten looked reflected on the whole Knorth garrison, and Jame seldom showed a decent interest in her own appearance. This time, the Gothregor Kendar had gotten her jacket off her long enough to pluck the burrs off of it; however, she simply hadn’t had time to comb out the ruins of Randiroc’s fancy braidwork, which in turn hadn’t been improved by the burdocks of the Moon Garden or a night sleeping in the rough. Why, oh why, couldn’t she keep other people out of her hair?

“Ow!” she said as the cadet jerked out strands knotted around a burr at the nape of her neck.

A cadet at Vant’s table snickered, but stopped when Rue shot him a dirty look. Obviously, the other ten-commands were listening, some cadets openly, others with their noses in their bowls.

“Sorry, lady,” said Rue.

“Will you please stop calling me that?” She raised her voice to address the room at large. “I’m Jame, or Ten or, at worst, Lordan.”

And certainly not Jameth, a corruption of her true name that always set her teeth on edge. On the other hand, how would they react if she admitted to being Jamethiel Dream-weaver’s namesake, much less her daughter? Jame hardly felt up to that just yet. Someday, though . . .

“The Randir are poison,” muttered Anise, following Rue’s line of thought. “Always have been, always will be.”

As she spoke, she cast an involuntary sidelong glare at Mint and Dar, who as usual were flirting. Jame wondered which one had aroused her jealousy. Adolescent Kendar were like wild colts, apt to tear off in all directions when not reined in hard by discipline.

“Ran Awl is all right,” said Quill judiciously, referring to the senior Randir officer and sometime commandant of Tentir. “That snake charmer Shade isn’t too bad either, from what I’ve seen, despite the company she keeps. There seem to be distinct groups within that house with different personalities, as if they aren’t all bound to the same Highborn.”

Sharp Quill. That hadn’t occurred to Jame, although she had long suspected that, contrary to every tradition, Lady Rawneth had more than her share of sworn followers.

Her hand stopped again. Trinity, what if Rawneth was a blood-binder too?

“At any rate,” Quill continued, seizing a chunk of bread and speaking indistinctly around a mouthful of it, “their barracks has been seething ever since the night that the stones were cast and their natural lord rode out with his life, back into exile. Since then it’s gotten worse. A fight sent two Randir cadets to the infirmary last night.”

“One died this morning,” said Niall, speaking up for the first time.

Jame shot a startled look at her second-in-command, curtailed by Rue’s ruthless grip on her hair. “Things are that bad?”

She wished that Brier didn’t have quite so expressionless a face, although she understood why: as a former Caineron yondri with the Southern Host, the handsome Kendar had learned early to keep her emotions to herself.

“Bad enough,” Brier said shortly.

“ And we’ve got our senior randon jumping at shadows,” added Rue.

“Harn? Why?”

“Hold still.” Rue busily worried at a snarl, uprooting more strands. Jame tried not to flinch. “It started after you left for Gothregor. Apparently Ran Harn has begun to see your uncle Greshan walking the halls at night.”

“Master, Master, will you grant me my heart’s desire? Will you raise the dead to love me?”

Jame’s foot involuntarily nudged the sack, and she recoiled from it as if at the touch of a dead thing. According to the contract therein, Tieri’s price had been Greshan’s return from the dead.

“ ‘m hungry.” Words muttered through a mouthful of maggots. “Dear father, feed me . . . ”

“You have laughed at rumors that Greshan was seen walking the halls of Gothregor when he was five days dead.”

Stitches on a tattered letter, from Kinzi to Adiraina.

“Well, I saw him too.”

No, Lyra couldn’t have read that correctly. According to Adiraina, the same flames that destroyed so many bloodstained Knorth banners had also consumed both Gerraint’s and Greshan’s bodies . . .

“ . . . and the latter none too soon: he had been five days dead at the time.”

So who had gone into the Moon Garden with Lady Rawneth and there, presumably, sired on her the current Lord Randir?

As a story, it had as many holes as Kinzi’s poor, tattered-cloth letter.

“I saw Greshan too,” said Mint unexpectedly, for once without the trace of her usual mischievous smile. “Not clearly, mind you, and half in shadow.”

“Where?”

“He was standing outside the lordan’s private quarters. Then he disappeared.”