P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

Others of the class had fled, leaving Gorbel’s new cadet Dure and Timmon’s vacant-eyed Ardeth Drie, who was smiling to himself. If the Falconer hadn’t been so distracted, he would have boxed the latter’s ears for letting himself drift, as he often had before. No one knew to what creature Drie was bound, only that even when he walked dry-shod, he left behind a trail of wet footprints.

Alone in a corner, leaning against the wall, the Randir Shade idly played with her gilded swamp adder, Addy. Both serpent and Randir gave Jame a slight nod of recognition. Jame sank down onto the floor beside them.

She still wasn’t sure of the Randir’s part in the attempted assassination. After all, she had collided with Shade at the foot of Harn’s stair, with Randiroc and the Commandant still above. The Randir Tempter had apparently used Shade to track Jame to their would-be prey.

“What are we supposed to be learning?” she asked under cover of the Falconer’s attempts to depress or at least distract Gari by sickening him (“Rotten pork rolls! Ten and twenty fledglings baked in a pie!”).

“How to manage a swarm for spying purposes,” Shade answered.

That possibility hadn’t occurred to Jame. She could only imagine how dizzying it would be to have so many senses suddenly open to one. If Gari was blocking such an awareness, she hardly blamed him.

“I hear that your barracks has lost a cadet,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Shade shrugged. Her face looked sharper and thinner than it had, perhaps because she had pulled her hair back tightly, almost savagely, into a knot. One could easily trace the lines of the skull beneath the skin.

She had drawn the Randir cadet back into the shadows as Harn and the Commandant passed on their way down to the stables. Then had come the Randir Lordan, in a mantle of fluttering jewel-jaws. He had paused and looked at them. A surprisingly sweet smile crossed his pale face.

“Nightshade, my cousin,” he said.

Shade had looked stunned.

“Randiroc,” she replied, hoarsely. “My lord.”

And later, standing at the rail, looking down at the pathetic heap that was the boy Quirl:

“I followed you, and spoke to him, and suddenly nothing was simple anymore. It was always so clear before. Us against you. No questions. No hesitation. Tentir is changing that, and so are you. I don’t like it. It makes my head hurt.”

Jame watched Shade’s long, white fingers play with the snake’s supple form as it flowed over them in a glittering figure eight, ochre scales melting into gold, gold into pale cream. Beautiful.

“How did the Randir fare in the cull?” she asked, belatedly wondering if that was a tactful question.

“We’re down to one hundred and eleven.”

From one hundred sixty? Ouch.

“Losing twenty-odd in the stable didn’t help,” said Shade, her voice oddly remote. “Most of the Randir had nothing to do with that and are appalled by it. The Tempter chose her would-be assassins well.”

“Pus puffs! Eyeball stew!” raged the Falconer, beginning to look not only dizzy but ill.

If the hopper havoc had begun to ebb, however, it was because Gari was listening to the quiet conversation beside him and again, presumably, seeing in his mind’s eye those wasted bodies that had crawled into the high grass to die. Shade might have been one of them if Jame hadn’t stopped her from stepping forward. Why she had, she still wasn’t sure.

“D’you remember their names?”

No question whom she meant.

Hands paused, and a molten coil sagged. Without thinking, Jame slid her fingers under it to support the serpent’s weight. Addy’s skin was dry, warm, and soft, until one felt the shifting muscles underneath it and the bulge of her last meal. The figure eight became a three-loop serpentine flowing over four hands.

“Some. I remember Quirl.”

“How do the other Randir feel about it?”

“As if something important has been taken away, but it’s getting harder and harder to remember what. That fight in the barracks last night . . . a cadet was looking for someone—his brother, he thought. And he wouldn’t stop. Finally one of Lady Rawneth’s Kendar told him that no such person was at the college, which by that time was true. The boy went berserk. Before we pulled him off, he had smashed her with a fire iron until her head was nothing but bloody meat, shards of bone, and oozing brain. Still, she lived until dawn.”

Jame thought of shambling Bear with his cloven skull and ruined mind. Kencyr were hard to kill; but truly, there were worse things than death.

“One hundred and eleven,” she repeated. “That’s eleven ten-commands. What happens to the extra cadet?”

Shade gave her a death’s-head smile, but without the sharpened teeth that those most fervently in her grandmother’s service favored. “That’s me. A ‘tail ten’ of one. Oh, it’s not so bad. My house never has known quite what to do with me.”

That Jame could well believe. Lord Kenan only had one child, a half-Kendar, Shanir daughter bound to a snake which her grandmother Rawneth had given to her when she had sent her off to Tentir. Out of sight . . . out of mind? But why then the serpentine gift?

Quill had suggested that not all Randir Kendar were bound to the same Highborn.

“To whom are you bound?” she asked, impulsively. “Besides to Addy, I mean.”

Shade’s glance was as sharp as black, ragged ice. “To whom are you?”

“No one. Oh. I see. I think.”

“I’m Highborn enough never to have felt the need—and my lord father, apparently, never saw the point, nor my granddam.” She smiled, a bleak twist of thin lips. “Anyway, I get the rank of ten-commander with no responsibilities and can join any class I want. Something similar happened to Randiroc when he was a cadet here, but he was also still officially the Randir Heir so they made him master-ten of the barracks. I wonder how he managed that, especially as his Shanir blood became more and more obvious. Randir are talking about him, a bit, since he was here,” she added, seeing Jame’s surprise. “He made quite an impression, and not one m’lady overly savors.”

“Maybe that’s why she did . . . what she did,” said Jame thoughtfully.

Shade’s grip on Addy must have tightened, for the adder reared back with a hiss echoed by her mistress.

“Who?”

“Why, Lady Rawneth. Didn’t you know?”

“I thought we were being punished for trying to kill our rightful lord, or going mad, or both. My grandmother did this to us?”

“I think so.” Trinity, it had only been a guess. What if she was wrong? No, dammit, she wasn’t.

Shade read Jame’s answer in her face. Her own expression hardened, skin to bone.

Meanwhile, Jorin was soaring through the air in fluid, golden bounds, batting at the whir of wings. He landed on a rickety table which collapsed under him, gathered himself from its wreckage, and sprang again, straight through a screen and out a second-story window.

Horrified, Jame struggled to rise, but her hands were tangled in Addy’s coils. The wicked head whipped around. Triangular jaws gaped to hiss in her face, all puffy, white gullet and fangs with a black tongue flickering between them. The eyes too were black, all pupil, and hideously knowing.

Meddling Knorth . . .

Jaws lunged toward her face. In a blur, Shade’s hand was between them. The strike itself was so fast that Jame hardly saw it, only the serpent drawing back with a hiss while Shade more slowly withdrew her hand to stare in disbelief at the punctures on the palm and back.

“She’s never done that before,” the Randir said.

Mouse gaped at the oozing wounds, at the same time clutching her shirt front which both mice had dived down at the snake’s sudden move. “Should we call a healer? Swamp adders are deadly!”