Brier herself reserved judgment. Nothing in her past as a Caineron yondri inclined her to trust any Highborn, not that the Knorth hadn’t treated her well. That more than anything else kept her off balance, waiting for them to show their true colors. Still, there was something about this odd lordan that, against her will, compelled her attention.
“Fallen for the Knorth, have you?” jeered the Caineron lover whom she had left behind. “And you really think that you can trust them?”
Brier didn’t know, but she would try. What else, after all, could she do?
Voices sounded in the outer hall. Someone laughed. Brier gratefully put down the again sputtering quill and went to investigate.
Her ten-command were shedding their winter coats and shaking snow off of them. Smallest and slightest among them, the lordan was easy to spot. But what had happened to her face? Brier stalked over and caught Jameth by the chin, turning her head to see. The Highborn gave her a rueful smile. One of her eyes had swollen almost shut and her lip was split.
“I got run over by a cow,” she said.
It was calving season for the black, bad-tempered herd, whose expectant mothers liked to wander off to bear their young in private. Cadets were duly sent to bring them back. That had been the ten’s charge instead of their usual third-period class.
Dar grinned. “We came on her just after she’d dropped, with the calf steaming in the snow, barely on its feet. Of course she charged us. M’lady’s horse threw her, getting out of the way, and both beasts trampled her.”
“Actually,” said Killy, “I think it was the calf scrambling to catch up who did the worst damage.”
Brier let go of the lordan’s chin. I sent her on that duty, she thought, then chided herself: Am I to blame that the chit can’t stay out of trouble? And who am I, anyway, to touch her?
“You could have been gored,” she said gruffly.
Jameth shrugged it off, as unnervingly dismissive of risk as always. “So could any one of us.”
“There was a funny smell, too,” said stolid Erim, obviously following his own line of thought. “Like burning fur. And we saw prints in the snow.”
“Cave bear?” Brier asked sharply. Any large predator on the prowl was cause for concern with the herd willfully astray.
“Bigger than that, and melted, then frozen again, around the edges.”
“I think it was the Dark Judge,” said Mint, for once without the trace of a smile. “Haven’t you heard him howling in the night?”
They had all heard something.
“The wind,” said Killy, uncertainly.
“Wolves,” suggested Quill.
“All things end, light, hope, and life. Come to judgment. Come!”
A shiver ran though the assembled cadets as the lordan murmured the blind Arrin-ken’s terrible cry. The third of the Three People had disappeared into the wilds of Rathillien so long ago that they had come to seem like legends of another age. It was hardly fair that the Riverland itself should be haunted by the most dire of their ranks, a great cat blinded by the changer Keral with burning coals on the Master’s own hearth, now as bent on justice as a lesser creature might be on revenge. Indeed, could he still tell one from the other? Either way, who was he hunting now?
Brier clapped her hands, making them all jump.
“Enough shivering at shadows. Time for your fourth-period class.”
As the cadets dispersed, Brier touched the Highborn’s sleeve.
“They go to study the Senetha,” she said. “The Commandant has sent word that he expects you in the Bear Pit.”
One eyebrow raised while the other twitched over its swollen socket. “So that was what Fash meant,” the lordan murmured to herself. “Thank you, Brier. I’ll see you at dinner. I hope.”
And with that she was gone, leaving her coat a muddy, forgotten mound on the floor.
The Pit was as Jame remembered it—a windowless thirty-foot-square room deep in Old Tentir, its walls serrated with splinters, its floor gouged here, stained there. A round hole in the ceiling surrounded by a waist-high wall opened into the room above, forming a balcony. Torches flared there, casting a wavering circle of light on the floor below. No sound penetrated this far into the old fortress. One might have been stricken deaf. This was the dark, bloody heart of the Shanir, where their god’s chosen monsters battled with claw and tooth, where those such as Jame—gifted (or cursed)—learned how to fight.
The arena was empty, the balcony deserted, but a heavily padded coat and leather helmet with a metal face grid hung from the wall. Jame put them on.
As she waited, her thoughts returned to the Dark Judge. If he was nosing around, someone was guilty of something, or so he at least believed. His prey were Shanir linked to That-Which-Destroys, and she knew that he ached for the excuse to judge her.
By association, she considered the Burnt Man, now safely in the ground until Summer’s Eve. He and the blind Arrin-ken had made a lethal pair, the most dangerous aspects of Rathillien and the Kencyrath combined. She had noticed before how this world responded to such correspondences.
What would the Burning Ones do in their master’s absence? If she had guessed right at the solstice, Vant now led them in another cross between the two worlds. So, whom did the Dark Judge and the Burning Ones hunt, assuming they both followed the same trail? Vant was the crux, and Ancestors knew he had no love for her. At least like the Burnt Man, the Burning Ones tended to stay far to the north, on Merikit land. It wasn’t their footsteps that she had seen melted into the snow.
Ah, enough of that, she thought, shaking herself. Back to the matter at hand.
It was a long time since her last lesson here, before her brain-damaged Senethari had been judged too dangerous to impart such potentially lethal instruction. She had worried about him, but denied entrance to his hot, close apartment, she had been unable to visit him, much less to see to his needs.
No one else understands, she thought. He’s trapped. Buried alive. His brother should know better.
As if in answer to her thought, she heard a whisper of cloth above and looked up to see a dark silhouette behind the balcony wall. The face was invisible, but firelight turned the Commandant’s white scarf red as if dipped in blood.
Jame saluted him in silence. In silence, he inclined his head.
The opposite door opened. Through it came a shuffling, snuffling sound, and then a dark, hunched form that filled the frame from side to side.
Jame hadn’t seen Bear since the night when renegade Randir cadets had tried to assassinate their natural lord in Tentir’s stable. As Bear emerged blinking into the light, she was appalled at his filthy condition, even more so by his enormous ivory claws, far too large to retract. Those on his fingers were bad enough; those on his toes, however, had again grown to curve back on themselves, piercing the soles of his feet. He entered, shambling, on all fours. Firelight defined the fearful cleft in his skull left by an enemy’s axe, seared by the pyre that had failed to consume him. No one so grievously wounded should still be alive, but Kencyr are hard to kill. So he had been for the past thirty-some years.
Jame stared. It had been some time since she had last seen him, admittedly, but wasn’t the chasm in his skull marginally shallower than it had been? She remembered it as nearly splitting an eyebrow. Now the stub of a white scar rose to disappear into the wild tangle of his gray hair.
He sat back on his haunches and surveyed the room. Her heart ached for him; this wreckage had been one of the Kencyrath’s greatest war-leaders, victor of a hundred battles. No one, great or small, should come to such a state.
His nostrils flared and he grunted.
The next moment, he was upon her.
Jame ducked as lethal claws swept over her head, raking splinters off the wall. Their return stroke rasped against the metal mesh protecting her face. She dived sideways, but he followed, teeth bared. His bite tore away half of her sleeve. She blocked with the other one, desperately wishing for her knife-fighter’s d’hen with its reinforced fabric. Mere padding was slight protection here. Rolling out of his reach, she set herself on guard with claws out. Sweet Trinity, did she really want to use them on him, against no armor at all? On the other hand, he seemed set to disembowel her if he could.