P. Hodgell - Bound in Blood

With that, he tried to pick up the threads of the scattered lesson, but his mind was only half on it and his class not with him at all.

The rumble of his voice wrapped itself around Jame, dulling her thoughts. Her head throbbed as if with a second heartbeat, fit to split her skull.

Rue touched her sleeve. “Are you all right?”

Yes. No. Listen to the whisper of the pooling shadows:

Ran Harn has seen your uncle Greshan walking the halls at night.

That was what she had forgotten: a knapsack containing a contract woven of dead threads, stinking of old, cold blood—Kindrie’s proof of legitimacy, but also Tieri’s death warrant and Greshan’s charter to walk free.

“I have to find it.”

She started to rise, but sat down again with a thump as her head threatened to explode.

“Find what, lady?”

“In the dining room, under the bench. I just ran off and left it there this morning.”

“Ah. That.” Of course, Brier had seen Jame carelessly stow the sack. Unlike some, the Southron never forgot anything. “Wait here. I’ll fetch it.”

Watching her go, Harn literally and figuratively threw up his one good hand. “Whatever I meant to teach, it’s gone. Instead, think about what you’ve learned, or at least heard. Good night and sweet dreams.”

Of course, it was hours yet until bedtime, as much as Jame longed for the day to end. So it would, just as soon as she had the knapsack and its precious contents back in her hands.

As she left the common room in search of Brier, however, Rue and Mint seized her.

“Come see!”

Between them, they tugged her across the hall into what had been her uncle’s private quarters.

Here was the reception chamber with its huge, raised fireplace, surprisingly clean. When Jame had last seen it, it had been packed and stinking with Greshan’s spoilt, moldering luggage, left unclaimed nearly fifty years after its owner’s death. She looked for the Lordan’s gaudy Coat under which she had slept and dreamed so vilely—was it only thirteen days ago?—but didn’t see it. Rue was probably right that Graykin had laid claim to it, and good riddance . . .

To both coat and its most recent claimant? No, don’t think that. The Southron was bound to her, however inconvenient that currently was proving. She owed him for his service . . . and, face it, hated that she did so.

The two cadets pulled her to the right, toward the door opening onto the servants’ quarters and she entered, the rest of her ten eagerly trailing after.

Inside, she stopped and stared.

“Well, it’s certainly different.”

When she had last seen the northwest wing of her uncle Greshan’s suite, it had been a long corridor with small rooms opening off of it to either side and a squalid little scullery at the end—dim, dusty, claustrophobic. Sealed after the former lordan’s death, no one had set foot in these dismal precincts since. During her absence, however, the Knorth cadets had obviously worked hard to transform it into a place where their eccentric lordan would deign to spend the winter instead of camping out in the attic under a hole in the roof.

The servants’ quarters retained two small rooms at the far end and a now-spotless scullery, but the rest had been opened up between rows of support columns. The floor was scrubbed down to its honey grain and strewn with meadow flowers, across which lay glowing bars of late afternoon light. Faint sketches on freshly whitewashed walls hinted at murals to come. Best of all, sections of the western wall had been knocked out to form windows overlooking the boulders and the lower reaches of the Snowthorns with the peaks looming high above, black against a golden sunset. Cool air with a tang of snow blew in.

A flash of white below, either Bel or the rathorn colt. She would have to warn the horse-master that if either equine ventured beyond the lowest tumble of boulders, they would be visible from this new vantage point. With Bel, it hardly mattered, but she wanted to keep the colt secret as long as possible to forestall more hunting parties.

“We can shutter the windows when winter comes,” said Rue, still anxiously watching Jame’s face, misunderstanding her sudden frown. “Or screen them with oiled linen. And look: won’t this be fine on a Mid-Winter’s Night?”

Near the end of the long room, they had set a huge, curiously shaped copper basin on an ironwood platform to be used as a free-standing fire pit. The ceiling overhead had been cut open to form a smoke hole. At that end of the attic, Jame remembered, roof and floor nearly meet. She tapped the basin, which rang sweetly. Around its lip ran a frieze of naked boys, some wrestling, others otherwise employed.

“Let me guess. My uncle’s bathtub?”

Rue blushed and Mint giggled.

“Something like that,” said the latter. “M’lord Greshan enjoyed playing ‘little fishies’ with the scullery lads, or so I’ve heard. It was crated up in the outer room. If we put the fire underneath instead of inside, it can be your bath now.”

“I’ll consider it,” Jame said gravely.

A disturbance at the door, and Brier pushed her way through the ten-command with the pack swinging in her hand. Jame took it with a sigh of relief. She was entirely too good at misplacing valuable objects. This one would have to be securely stowed somewhere until she had a chance to give it to her cousin Kindrie, whose property it really was.

Graykin would kill for such proof of legitimacy. If Vant’s situation was complicated, Gray’s was worse, with Lord Caineron for a father and some Karkinaroth scullery maid for a mother.

Someone gasped.

Jame turned, and the flesh leaped on her bones.

Down the clean-swept, colonnaded room, across the dim entry hall, the door to Greshan’s apartment had silently opened. A figure stood on the threshold, backlit, oddly dwarfish. Emerald and amethyst swirled over one shoulder, vermillion and orange like a garish splash of blood over the other. Then the watcher stepped back and the door closed, slowly, furtively.

So Mint and Rue were right: her half-breed servant still occupied Greshan’s private quarters and wore her uncle’s clothes. No doubt that had been the lavishly embroidered Lordan’s Coat, tailored for broader shoulders than the Southron’s, mocking his pretensions even as he reveled in its rich, occasionally sordid history.

At first he had reported to her regularly. It was weeks, though, since she had last seen him, although sometimes she heard him whisper mockingly to her from the secret passage behind one wall or another, as she just had when Timmon kicked her in the head. No doubt he fed himself by raiding the college kitchens and occupied the long, empty days by spying on the college’s inhabitants, as he just had been on her.

That’s more than I promised him when I accepted his service , she thought defensively.

Yes, but it was still less than he deserved for his suffering on her behalf at his father Caldane’s hands.

. . . that dream again: the half-starved cur on the empty hearth . . .

Really, though, the little man was so irritating with his needy, never-ending quest for self-respect, all tied to her own uncertain status, that she sometimes feared she would kill him out of sheer frustration.

A shuffle of feet and a cough caused her to turn. No one met her gaze. Graykin hardly existed for the other Knorth, she realized, except for Brier who stared at the closed door with hard, green eyes; what could the bastard son of her former lord be to her but an enemy? What shamed the others was that they had been afraid to enter Greshan’s quarters themselves to reclaim them for their current lordan. Greshan’s specter haunted more than poor Harn. Tentir’s rough walls might keep many dangers out, but they still held their secrets within and with them a wrongness, a sickness, that threatened to rot the college’s very bones.