Jame accepted the mouse and let it nestle on the crown of her head, tiny pink paws nervously gripping her braids. A rap on the nose diverted Addy from what would normally have been her dinner.
Gari eyed the diminutive Twizzle. “Maybe he’s a great tracker, maybe not. We’ll see if we can find Tarn and Torvi.”
They left.
Jame checked that Addy wasn’t about to have Mick for a snack, put Twizzle down, and followed his flouncing progress along the arcade.
In the great hall, cadets had stretched a rope from one second-story balcony to the other and were making a captured randon cross it. Jame recognized Bran from her special weapons’ class. He wobbled wildly, causing her to catch her breath. Then he noted her in the shadows and winked, or seemed to—with only one good eye, it was hard to tell.
The pook led her down the stairs into the subterranean stable where she found the horse-master mucking out stalls.
“Some fool cadet thought it would be funny to set me at this work,” he said, pausing to wipe his bald head with a sleeve. “As if I didn’t do it every day anyway, assistants notwithstanding. Have I seen Shade? No. She comes here as little as possible; the horses don’t like her pet—which I see that you’ve got. Also a mouse, also a pook. What is this, a field day at the zoo?”
“Sort of.”
“Well, you’re to go on down. One of your cadets passed by and asked that I send you on if you followed her.”
Now what? wondered Jame, descending into the sullen light and steaming heat of the fire timber hall.
Damson stood near the edge of a fire pit. Jame came up beside her.
“This is where Vant fell?”
“Yes, lady.”
“And that was your doing. How?”
“I can make small changes in people’s heads. Make them dizzy. Make them stumble. Make them feel what it’s like to be fat and clumsy.”
“Now I remember. When Timmon, Gorbel and I were standing at attention in the snow, something made me fall over.”
Damson shuffled, not meeting her eyes. “Vant kept whispering in my ear: ‘Do it, do it, do it, you fat little sow.’ And so I did.”
Jame reflected that she had been lucky only to have lost her balance, and that into nothing worse than snow. A few small changes in the head . . . ! How much did it take to cause seizures or even death? Damson appeared to be a Shanir linked to That-Which-Destroys, her power an inversion of a healer’s in that it allowed her to hurt without touching, apparently without even much thought. God’s claws, how dangerous.
“Don’t do it again,” she told the cadet. “If you strike me, I may strike you back. Hard.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t hurt you. You’re nothing like Vant. I like you. There. Do you see him?”
The hall with its smoldering timbers cast few shadows, but one seemed to stand against the charred bark of an ancient tree on the far side of the pit. Fire laced its flaking skin and its eyes glowed . . . or was that only a trick of the light?
Damson snickered. “How he glares! Where’s his high and mighty pride now?”
By the smirk on the cadet’s plump face, Jame suddenly realized that Damson didn’t regret her deed. On the contrary, she had come back because the memory of it gave her pleasure.
“Now see here: you can’t kill people just because they’re unpleasant to you.”
“No?” Damson seemed puzzled. “Why do I have this ability, if not to use it?”
Trinity. Was the girl ignorant or insane? Jame herself tended to take responsibility for things genuinely not her fault, like Vant, hence the Burning Ones and the Dark Judge who came sniffing after her—or was it Damson they were after? But this cadet seemed to have no sense of responsibility at all, and precious little conscience. Was she like a hole in the air to them? How did one judge such an anomaly as a Kencyr with no inborn sense of honor?
“Think,” she said, a little desperately. “There has to be a balance. What Vant did to you was nasty, but was it worth his life?”
Damson pouted. “You almost killed him yourself after Anise died.”
“But I didn’t. The Commandant brought me to my senses in time. Do you trust his judgment? Yes? Then consider before you act: would he approve?”
“I’ll . . . try.” A bit resentfully she added, “You do make things hard.”
Jame sighed. “They often are. The easy thing isn’t always the right thing. We Shanir have to use the Old Blood responsibly or we risk becoming the monsters that some of the lords think us.”
“You mean, like your brother.”
“Tori does have that tendency, which is another reason not to abuse your gifts while in his service.”
With that, Damson trudged off, looking thoughtful and somewhat huffy.
Jame scanned the dark across the pit, but no one was there. Perhaps there never had been.
“Why are so many of us monsters?” she asked no one in particular.
Receiving no answer, she followed Damson back into the cooler, upper air.
The cadet had disappeared by the time Jame reached the upper hall, but Bran’s tormenters were still there, cheering his successful passage across the rope. One of them saw Jame. In a moment, all had given chase. She dashed up the stairs and soon lost them in the dim hallways of Old Tentir, far from the outer walls. There, let them stay until they either stumbled out or someone heard their piteous cries for help.
Her feet had taken her near Bear’s quarters as so often they did. She retrieved a candle stub from a niche and followed the rank, animal smell, thinking with a pang of her teacher shut up alone in his stinking den. The question of justice still bothered her. Where did it lie in what had happened to him? To begin with, nowhere, probably. He had been a warrior and had gotten his wounds fairly in battle—yes, fighting for her father in the White Hills, for a man who could not abide such a Shanir as Bear was and had been.
For that matter, Ganth’s madness had infected the entire Host, and most held him responsible for that day’s brutal outcome. Was he Shanir, to have had such power? She hadn’t thought of that before, but it made sense. What irony, though, given how he had felt about those of the Old Blood, like herself.
But did everything have a reason? That was hard to believe without some overarching, all-powerful authority, which didn’t seem like a description of the Kencyrath’s Three-Faced God unless he/she/it was far more devious and cruel than Jame had ever supposed. After all, wasn’t that why her people clung so desperately to their labyrinthine code of honor? Without it, what were they? With an absent god, what else held them to account and gave them worth? There must be limits, and personal responsibility.
Her thoughts circled back to Bear. Surely there was nothing just in his squalid confinement.
Or was there? Long ago, he had dismembered a cadet foolish enough to taunt him and Lord Caineron had given his brother Sheth a choice: confine his brother or kill him.
One could argue that Caldane was protecting the other cadets.
Knowing the man, though, Jame believed that he was setting a test for his war-leader. If the Commandant killed his brother, he could claim that he was only following his lord’s orders, even though he clearly didn’t think that Bear deserved death. At the same time, Caldane believed that the guilt for this unjust act would not be his, because he personally hadn’t carried it out. That was Honor’s Paradox: did one’s honor lie in oneself, or in following orders?
We are ultimately responsible for our actions, thought Jame, or we are not. That much, in a world of gray values, seemed black or white.
In this case, though, the result was endless, sordid imprisonment, to the torment of both brothers.
Perhaps somebody shared her dissatisfaction. Approaching Bear’s door, she saw that someone had been at work on the outward swinging hinges. One pin had been pried half out of its socket and tools lay scattered about the hall floor. Whoever it was would need heavier instruments, though, and perhaps had gone to fetch them.