P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

The Southron gave her a sharp look, but turned her command into the Knorth quarters without question, where a midday meal of bread, new cider, and cheese awaited them. Jame slipped into the Caineron barracks on the heels of Gorbel’s ten, and from there quickly into the shadows.

These abounded in the multistoried compound due to its general lack of windows. Caineron notoriously suffered from height-sickness. As their growing numbers at Tentir forced them to build ever higher, the less they cared to think about it.

Gorbel was arguing with Obidin. He was all right, dammit, just in need of catching his breath in the privacy of his own quarters for a few minutes. He would join them shortly. Now go away .

Unseen, Jame trailed Gorbel and Bark up the stairs until Gorbel stumbled again and almost fell. She darted forward to help him regain his balance. He snarled at her.

“If you want to keep it a secret,” she told him with a grunt as his weight came to bear on her, “you take what help you can get.”

His quarters were more spare than she had expected, large enough to hold his extensive collection of hunting gear, all in prime trim, as well as some truly startling dress coats. Otherwise, the large room was simple and, of course, dim, although it did have windows fitted with closed slats for ventilation.

While Gorbel collapsed on a bench and Bark went to fetch bandages, Jame tried to pull off the Caineron’s boot. He swore at her again in obvious pain and gripped his seat. His moon face was pale, dank strands of hair clinging to its sweat-sheen.

“Do you really think”—heave—“that someone just tried”—heave—“to kill you?”

Gorbel braced his other foot against her shoulder and shoved.

The boot popped off. Jame sat down suddenly, with it in her hands.

“Yes!” He touched his ribs experimentally and winced. “You don’t nick bone by accident. Although who it was or why, damned if I know.”

Bark returned with strips of linen draped over one arm and a basin of warm water in his hands. While he cleaned and bound up the wound, Gorbel lowered his foot into the basin with a sigh of relief. Then he glowered at Jame.

“Why do you care, Knorth?”

“I suppose,” she said, rising and staring into the basin, “that you aren’t so bad. For a Caineron. Trinity!”

Gorbel’s foot was tightly laced about with fine, white, willow rootlets. As they sensed the water’s warmth, they began to untwine and spread into a fibrous mass that filled most of the tub. Longer fringe roots reached out to tap the ceramic walls of their prison, probing for any crack or flaw.

“If you were a tree, I’d say that you were root-bound. How are you ever going to get your boot back on?”

Bark produced a sharp knife and began, carefully, to prune the growth. Gorbel winced at each cut.

“How often do you have to do that?”

“In the beginning, once a fortnight.”

“Now it’s every other day.” Bark spoke without looking up. “This can’t go on much longer.”

Green lines wandered up the veins of Gorbel’s leg into the cover of his pants. The arboreal infection was spreading.

“D’you want me to send for Kindrie?”

Gorbel snorted. “Your precious cousin, the Knorth Bastard? Much good he did me the last time. No. I have to consult someone else, someone more powerful, but first I have to find the perfect bribe. Now leave. I’m in enough trouble without one of my ten stumbling across you in my bedroom.”

She glanced at a thin pallet in the corner, no more luxurious or inviting than her own.

“Your ten-command is as poisonous a mix as I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. Out of all the cull pool, why them?”

Gorbel’s thick shoulders drooped. Suddenly, he looked exhausted. “Some of them aren’t so bad. The rest are blood-kin, and no one else wanted them. Besides, it was my dear nephews and cousins or another lot of raw idiots fresh from Restormir. What would you have done?”

Jame paused in the doorway, considering. “Probably the same. You do realize, though, that any one of them—or their fathers—is more likely to become the next Lord Caineron than you are.”

He glared at her under the sweat-sodden fringe of his hair, and winced as Bark cut another trailing rootlet. “D’you think I’m stupid? Of course I know. I’m only here as the Caineron Lordan because you are as the Knorth. No doubt some of my new ten will do their best to . . . er . . . dethrone me before next summer. But this is my one chance to gain something that my dear father can’t take away. I intend to earn my randon collar. So, I suspect, do you.”

The similarity hadn’t previously occurred to Jame, but she saw it now clearly. Tori was bound to respect her status as a randon. Likewise, Caldane would be forced to accept Gorbel’s. The collar was her pass out of the Women’s World, and Gorbel’s out of the fickle reach of a father with too many expendable sons. “Good fortune to us both, then.”

Only as she slipped out of the Caineron barracks did it occur to her to wonder whom Gorbel meant to ask for help, if not the most powerful healer in the Kencyrath.

Jame had missed lunch, but Rue slipped her a chunk of bread and cheese which she hastily bolted, scattering crumbs, on the way to the afternoon’s first class.

This was one that Jame normally enjoyed. Half Senethar, half Senetha—that is, half fight, half dance—Sene classes were conducted in one of Old Tentir’s large, interior rooms. Candles supplied the only light, that and their reflection glimmering off the odd shards of mirror and beaten metal that lined the walls. Timmon’s ten-command was there before them, complete with its ten-commander; this class the Ardeth Lordan had decided not to miss.

He waited, elegantly poised in a nimbus of light that illuminated his golden locks and finely drawn features. No question about it: Ardeth’s young heir was handsome, verging on gorgeous. In that, Jame felt far outclassed, but she didn’t mind. She had never thought of herself as attractive except, sometimes, for her long, black hair. Others had described her as a “famine’s foal,” and so she still thought of herself, given her tendency to skip meals and her scarred face. Sometimes, though, Timmon made her question that.

He was doing it now.

Under his admiring gaze, she wanted to preen. Her muscles felt loose and limber from their exercise, all stiffness from the punishment run forgotten in the brief respite over the midday. Perfect balance possessed her. She wanted to dance, and quickly had her wish.

The randon whose class this was started to play his wooden flute, the cadets to flow in the kantirs of the Senetha. They were lucky to have such accompaniment. Sometimes classes had to make do with a tone-deaf sargent bellowing old love songs or a cadet enthusiastically banging on dented helmets with a stick. But the rules were the same. When the music stopped, the Senethar began.

Stop it did. Jame spun into position opposite an Ardeth cadet and struck, fire-leaping. He shifted from water-flowing Senetha to Senethar and slipped past her. Another did the same.

The flute began again. Now Timmon faced her. That had been arranged, she thought, and was content that it be so. He moved beautifully, making her feel graceful too. His hands and hers tracing the same patterns, mirroring each other. Physical skills came as easily to him as they had to his father Pereden, whom she had seen her brother fighting in the Heart of the Woods.

“I was with the Southern Host when M’lord Pereden marched it out into the Wastes to meet the advancing Horde,” Brier had said. “Three million of them, some fifty thousand of us. Our center column clashed head on and was ripped apart. The sand drank our blood and the Wasters ate our flesh. I was there when Pereden . . . ” She had paused, hunting for the right word, saying it at last with a curious twist: “fell.”