P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

Meanwhile, to her right, the Ardeth Lordan Timmon had taken position as master-ten before his cadets. He acknowledged her with a half-sketched salute, then faced front toward the bulk of Old Tentir. She wondered if he meant to resume trying to seduce her or if his last visit to her dreamscape had put him off for good. After all, it must have been disconcerting to invade what he expected to be a pleasantly erotic dream, only to find himself screwed to the floor with a knife through his guts. Well, she had warned him.

The Jaran master-ten stood to her left and beyond, facing her, was the Caineron Lordan Gorbel.

The latter wore what Jame thought of as his Gorgo face: hooded, slightly protuberant eyes, features scrunched together, and a wide, downturned mouth. It was almost as hard to read his expression as Brier’s. She wondered if his foot was still infected with golden willow rootlets and if he still blamed her.

His new ten-command stood behind him.

Jame recognized most as Caineron with whom she had previously trained, an assortment of lesser Highborn, Kendar with some Highborn blood, and pure Kendar. Two had held ten-commands of their own before the cull and, by Tentir’s reckoning, not good ones.

That was certainly true of Higbert, son of Higron, now glowering at her across the square. The Caineron equivalent of Vant, he had never been able to take her presence at the college seriously and now seemed enraged that she had kept her command while he had lost his. A harsh, stupid man, she doubted that anyone much loved him, least of all his former number Five, Tigger, also now on Gorbel’s squad and from his impish expression already dreaming up ways to bedevil his new commander as he had his old. Tiggeri’s offspring all seemed to be like that.

Strange to think that, although the same age, Higbert and Tigger were both Gorbel’s nephews.

So was Obidin, son of Caldane’s first established son Grondin, heir also to his father’s unfortunate thick build although not yet to his gross obesity. Obi had never made it a secret that he considered Gorbel’s status as lordan only temporary. Surely, when that regrettable time came, the new Lord Caineron would be drawn from among Caldane’s senior sons such as . . . oh, say his eldest, Grondin.

Unlike Higbert, Obi had been considered a good commander. If he hadn’t lost half his squad before the cull in a freak accident involving a bucket of eels and a ball of lightning, he still would be. Now he served as Gorbel’s Five and had brought with him three Kendar from his old ten: Amon and Bark—the former his cadet servant, the latter Gorbel’s, who hadn’t previously been able to serve with his master because Caldane kept filling his lordan’s roster—and Rori.

Who else?

Fash, a lesser Highborn about whom Jame knew little, except that he had once been Gorbel’s friend. From the way he hovered, whispering and grinning with a great expanse of very white teeth, he apparently wanted his old role back.

Quiet Dure from the Falconer’s class who kept something, presumably alive, in his pocket and never took it out.

Kibbet, brother of Kibben.

On the whole, it looked like a poisonous mix.

After that, it was a relief to find that the day’s first class, at least for Jame, was with the Falconer.

Tentir’s mews-master instructed those Shanir cadets with bonds to various creatures, such as the one that Jame shared with Jorin. Even if his classes were often cut short by one disaster or another (swarms of flies, rampant rodents, once a shower of goldfish from the ceiling), she still hoped to learn why her link to the ounce was so maddeningly erratic.

From the foot of the stair in Old Tentir, Jame could hear the ruckus in the second-story mews above—a crackling, buzzing roar slashed by the shrieks of angry raptors. Now what?

Arriving at the door with Jorin on her heels, she stopped short, staring. The air inside was a blur of small, hurtling objects, green, gold, and crimson. One of them struck her in the face. Startled, she went back a step, tripped over the ounce, and fell flat on her back.

Multifaceted jewels stared into her own crossed eyes from the tip of her nose while antennae twiddled busily over her face and chitinous feet scrabbled at her lower lip for a better grip. Before she could swat it away, the hopper launched itself back into the melee within. Jorin bounded after it.

With her token scarf pulled up for a mask and her coat drawn over her head, Jame cautiously followed.

Most of the swarm occupied the southern end of the long room, the mews proper, where screens kept out the worst of the morning’s chill. Hooded hawks, tercels, and falcons shrieked on their perches or swung upside down from them by their jesses, all blindly striking at anything that hit them. Meanwhile, the Falconer’s little merlin knifed through the cloud in a fierce, joyous killing spree, snap and drop, snap and drop.

At the northern end of the room, his master clung to a bench, swearing. His own sunken eye sockets were sewn shut. Just as blind Jorin depended on Jame’s sight, so did the Falconer on his merlin’s. Now the bird’s mad gyrations were clearly making him dizzy, not to mention his own jerking head as he instinctively tried to follow the other’s darting gaze.

“ If you please, cadet, tell your friends to wait for you outside.”

Gari looked sheepish, also rather silly with emerald hoppers lined up on his shoulders and down his arms like a chorus, hind legs busily scraping as they serenaded him.

“I don’t think I can tell them anything, Ran. They simply react to my mood. I woke up this morning feeling happy and, well, sort of bouncy.”

“Then settle down and think of something depressing!”

The Coman tried, but the Edirr cadet known as Mouse was giggling, which set him off again.

The Edirr’s nickname was easily explained by the pair of albino mice nestled in her fluffy, brown hair, one snuffling behind each ear and clutching its rim with tiny, pink paws. What insects were to Gari, mice were to his Edirr counterpart, only under better control.

“Look what he gave me!” she whispered to Jame and showed her a piece of paper on which was drawn what appeared to be a slouching bag. “It’s a hat, he says, and there’s a mouse under it. He can’t draw mice.”

Gari glanced at them and blushed. The hoppers leaped higher.

It didn’t matter that the Coman and Edirr were neighbors often at odds, though not in this class. How pleasant, Jame thought, to work with cadets from so many different houses rather than to compete against them, which was more the Tentir model. In that, the college did less to bring its students together than it might, despite its goal to overcome house tensions at least within the Randon.

Gari and Mouse were in general bound not to individual creatures but to swarms, the latter closer than the former since her companions lived longer. Between them, they were one reason why other cadets mockingly called the Falconer’s class the Falconeers. Another reason, Jame suspected, was jealousy, at least where Jorin and Torvi were concerned. Who wouldn’t want to share senses with a splendid (although blind) hunting ounce or with a bumbling, already huge Molocar pup?

She was unclear, though, how the cadets’ various companions interacted with each other. For all his glee in attacking the hopper horde, Jorin might play with a captured mouse but seldom killed it. The same couldn’t be said of the rats off of which Addy also fed. Jorin and Torvi made a show of animosity, but hadn’t yet hurt each other, any more than the ounce had Tori’s Yce or vice versa.

A pause for thought: was her brother bound to the wolver pup? If so, how could he be unaware of it? There was so much of which Torisen chose to remain ignorant, but then Jorin had used her senses long before she had realized it or learned how to recognize his. Then too, it seemed to take a special Shanir like the Falconer to recognize the bond in others, and even he had never mentioned her blood link to the rathorn colt.