P. Hodgell - Honor's Paradox

Prid dumped a bucket of water over them both.

They separated, panting, to opposite sides of the lodge.

“What in Perimal’s name . . .” gasped Jame.

“You monster!” he spat at her.

“Both of you, shut up!”

They looked at Prid in surprise. She let the bucket fall and burst into tears.

“All right,” said Jame, dropping onto the opposite ledge. Hatch hadn’t put out her eye, she decided, fingering it gingerly, but given how her head throbbed it was hard to tell. “I assume there’s some reason why you just tried to kill me.”

Hatch had gathered Prid in his arms and glared at Jame over the girl’s bent head.

“Earth Wife’s Favorite, father of Gran’s unborn child, I don’t care what sort of a freak you are. You shan’t have her!”

“You,” said Jame profoundly, “are confused—not that it isn’t a confusing situation. Housebond I may be, but I’m not about to do anything to Prid that she doesn’t want . . . or maybe that she does. G’ah, I hate being drunk!”

He glared at her. “Well then, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t bloody know.” She tried to rise and fell back with a reeling head. “Tonight, or rather tomorrow, I have to ride back to Tentir. In the meantime, the two of you figure it out.”

With that, she rolled herself up in the musty blanket and fell asleep.

Jame woke late, with a vicious hangover.

Someone was bustling about the lodge, singing. A billow of dust made Jame sneeze. She rolled over, blurry-eyed, to observe Prid bundling up old tapestries, assisted by Hatch. They had already made fair inroads on the dwelling’s dank clutter, most of which they apparently had disposed of by shoving it up the stair into the open. Cheerful voices above indicated that they had help.

“Oh, you’re awake!” Prid exclaimed, seeing her move.

“Not so loud. G’ah, what did they put into that wretched mead anyway?”

“Everything left over from the winter, probably. Beer, ale, burnt water, fermented fish piss . . . People have been stopping by all morning to say what fun they had, as good as when Ma married Da, from all accounts. Here.”

She handed Jame a beaker of water, which the latter gratefully drained, splashing the last of it on her flushed face. She had been dreaming. There was someplace she was supposed to be, some duty she had neglected to fulfill. A nightmare sense of failure rose like bile in her throat, unless that was bile.

She observed Hatch by the loom, carefully removing rotten threads and setting its wooden limbs to rights.

“We decided,” Prid announced. “Hatch may have new duties in the village as the Earth Wife’s Favorite, but he’s going to stay here with me. Now that I’m a lodge-wyf, no one will object—unless you do.”

It seemed like a sensible arrangement to Jame, and she said so. Prid would have company and Hatch, when she was ready, would have Prid.

Then she remembered what she had forgotten: Gorbel’s challenge. “I have to go.”

The blanket had twisted around her legs. When she tried to rise, she fell headfirst between the sleeping ledge and the raised hearth. Prid and Hatch disentangled her. She gave them each a distracted kiss, grabbed her gear, and scrambled up into a bright morning.

Merikit women were sorting the offerings of the lodge—what to keep, what to discard, and what to burn immediately. Their good-natured greetings followed Jame down the boardwalk, mixed with bawdy jibes from the men about the supposed pleasures of her wedding night. Hopefully no one understood the answers that she snarled back at them in High Kens, a language rich in courtly invective.

Bel waited for her outside the gate. She had brought the mare in part because the Whinno-hir was easier to ride but mostly because she knew the Riverland better than the rathorn did. Still, the sun marched steadily across the sky as they traveled southward by the folds in the land until at last they arrived in the rocks west of Tentir.

“It’s about time,” the horse-master said, rising from his seat on a low boulder that might have doubled for his bald head. “Gorbel and his friends have been waiting for you in the training square since just after breakfast, in full armor, getting crosser by the minute. The Commandant has given you until sunset to appear.”

Both looked up at the descending sun, now less than half an hour above the western peaks.

Death’s-head ambled up wearing his usual riding tack as Jame scrambled into her light leather armor. For arms, she took a buckler and, reluctantly, a short sword, scythe-arms being a risky proposition in mounted combat if one didn’t want inadvertently to lop off ears or tails.

The horse-master surveyed her as she straightened her oversized helmet. Really, when she had time (if she had time), she needed to commission something better fitting.

“Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

He gave her a leg up onto the rathorn’s back and stood clear. Picking up on her nerves, if not on her mood, the colt capered in place, slashing with his horns. Then he plunged forward with Jame hanging on for dear life.

Their grand dash faltered at the hall door. The portals to the great hall stood open, but Death’s-head hesitated to enter where he had never been before, nor yet perhaps under any manmade roof. Jame coaxed him over the threshold.

The dark hall echoed like a seashell with the clamor of the cadets outside. A few voices picked up a chant, then more and more:

“. . . 30, 29, 28, 27 . . .”

They were timing the sun’s descent.

The rathorn’s ears twitched, but not at the ringing count. Darkness moved and became the Commandant, standing between them and the farther door.

“Well, Lordan.”

“Well, Ran.”

Would he stop her? What would be the point of that, though, when all he need do was cause a delay?

“. . . 21, 20, 19, 18 . . .”

Anyway, she had already solved his problem by failing to earn enough white pebbles to graduate from the college. Could he also mean to humiliate her by denying her this challenge? Certainly, his lord would love him for it.

“I thought you would come up with something, but this”—he indicated the rathorn—“rather exceeds my expectations. Can you control him?”

“After a fashion, Ran.”

“. . . 10, 9, 8 . . .”

“Well then, let’s see how you fare.”

He turned and pulled open the door. A shaft of brilliant sunlight, the day’s last, lanced through into the hall. Jame nudged the rathorn forward as if into the mouth of a furnace, out the door, into the square.

“. . . 4, 3, 2 . . .”

The voices petered out. Struck blind, Jame could see nothing. Then the sun set. Blinking dazzled eyes, at first she saw only black and crimson, then bit by bit what appeared to be the entire college lining the rail and the windows above, staring back at her. The eight armed Caineron riders waiting in the square seemed almost incidental.

The rathorn’s jaw dropped. Overwhelmed, he tried to back up, but the Commandant had closed the door behind him. His rump hit it with a hollow boom and he lunged forward, snorting, startled.

“It’s just a white horse in armor,” someone protested, uncertainly.

“Are you daft? Look at all that ivory!”

“It can’t be.”

“It is!”

Someone else cheered. It sounded like Rue.

The noise spread, thunderous, and Death’s-head brandished his horns at it. His defiant scream soared about the tumult, cutting it short.

In the startled silence that followed, Gorbel began to clap, slowly, in the heavy, measured way with which he had greeted her win at the Senethar so many months ago. The crowd picked up the beat.