Jame found Timmon still in her quarters.
“I saw Narsa,” she said, kicking his booted feet off of her bed. “She’s very upset.”
“She’ll get over it,” he replied, unconcerned.
Should she tell the rest of it? No. That was Narsa’s secret. However, his indifference grated on her.
“You’re going back to your quarters,” she told him. “Everyone should be at lunch by now. Take my ten-command if you’re still shy about facing your own.”
He went, reluctantly, and returned when she had just finished changing into dry clothes.
“Now what’s the matter?” Then, with a change of tone, “Timmon, sit down. You look terrible. Here, drink this.”
The Ardeth downed a cup of water with shaking hands, nearly choking on it. A dash of freckles stood out on his white face like flecks of dried blood. “She was there. Narsa. Hanging over my bed. Still warm.”
Jame sank to her heels beside him, feeling as if someone had just punched her in the stomach. Suicide without even the dignity of the White Knife, solitary, desperate, and unexplained, except to the one whom Narsa had felt to be her mortal rival. To whom did her secret belong now?
“. . . and her leg,” Timmon was saying. “Dangling there, all black and swollen. What could have happened to it?”
“Addy! She was underfoot. If Narsa trod on her . . .”
“You mean the Randir’s snake could be to blame for Narsa’s suicide?”
Jame was taken aback by his sudden eagerness. “It must have been hideously painful,” she said cautiously, “perhaps even fatal without a healer’s immediate care.”
“That makes sense. Sort of. Narsa didn’t like healers. Besides, we have none currently in residence. If the pain became unbearable . . . I mean, dammit, she wouldn’t kill herself just because I didn’t meet with her as we had planned, would she? Well, would she?”
“I don’t know. But she’s still dead.”
“I realize that. What I mean is you don’t think I’m to blame . . . do you?”
“Timmon, it was your bed she hanged herself over. That means something.”
He was up now and pacing. “Why should it, except that she was angry at me? What cause she had for that, though, I don’t know. We both had fun while it lasted.”
“You’re trying to slide out of responsibility again.”
“For what, and if so, why not? My father took his pleasure where he pleased, and he was a great man.”
“Sweet Trinity,” said Jame, exasperated. “According to whom?”
Oh, where was that flash of steel that she had seen at Gothregor when Timmon had spoken up for his house and driven Fash back? Even now, she sensed that he was arguing with himself more than with her. Pereden would easily have shaken off Narsa’s death, without bothering to find reasons for it. His son was having a harder time of it.
As if reminded by his reference to his father, Timmon had drawn out the packet that the Highlord had given him and was holding it gingerly.
“How do you suppose your brother got this?”
Now it was Jame’s turn to feel uneasy. Somehow, she was sure that it hadn’t been Torisen who had taken ring and finger from the pyre. She also still didn’t know why her brother had killed Pereden in the first place, only that all Perimal would break out if anyone else learned that he had.
“I honestly don’t know,” she said, feeling herself turn cagey in turn. “Does it matter?”
“It might. Perhaps they came from the Southern Wastes, although why one of the Highlord’s people found them when Grandfather couldn’t is beyond me. That must be it, though. After all, everybody knows it was a changer at the Cataracts impersonating my father who led the Waster Horde.”
He said this last with a note of defiance, but also unease. However much he might reassure himself, not everyone who had been there believed the changer story.
“One of these days,” said Jame, “you’re going to have to step out of your father’s shadow. My advice is that you burn that finger, wear the ring, and be the man that Pereden should have been.”
Timmon hesitated, uncertain, then slipped the relics back into his pocket.
“It’s too soon,” he said obliquely.
Jame sighed. He was so nearly worth saving. When it came down to it, though, she didn’t entirely trust her own feelings. Perhaps, as when Lord Ardeth had used his Whinno-hir Brithany to test a young Torisen, it was time for a second opinion.
“Well, then, what now?” she said. “I have things to do. You can continue to skulk here, go back to your household chores, or come with me, but only if you swear on your honor never to tell anyone anything about what you may see or hear.”
This clearly intrigued him.
“Keeping secrets, are we? All right. I’ll swear and I’ll come.”
Again, Jame visited her uncle’s quarters first to check on Jorin. When he heard her enter, the ounce yawned, jumped down from the chest, and stretched to seemingly impossible lengths.
“I thought even you would have slept enough by now,” she told him, and opened the box.
The chrysalis lay cocooned in ruined finery like an egg in a gaudy nest. The shell had become entirely translucent. Within it, something stirred in an azure glow etched with shifting lines of gold.
“Any day now,” said Jame, tracing a fine crack with her fingertip. “Then we’ll see.”
She, Timmon, Jorin, and the pook slipped out the front door of the barracks. Under cover of a rowdy game of blind-tag played between sargents and randon in the square, raucously coached by cadets, they gained the northern gate unnoticed and left Tentir.
Above the college was a random collection of boulders that had rolled down from the mountains above, some as small as a bald man buried up to the eyebrows, others twice a man’s height. Death’s-head charged around one of the latter, skidded to a halt, and brandished his scythelike twin horns in Jame’s face.
“If I were the horse-master,” she said, holding very still, “that would be my cue to bash him in the snout with this tool bag.”
Timmon had scrambled backward halfway up a boulder. There he lost his grip and fell at the rathorn’s feet. Death’s-head pawed around him, then retreated with a snort.
“Given that you haven’t been trampled to death,” said Jame, “I think that means that he’s accepted you.”
Harmless, was the word that had formed in her mind. Mostly. What kind of a judgment was that?
Timmon scrabbled to his feet, staring. “What . . . how . . . t-this is the colt who ambushed us at the swimming hole, isn’t it? The one that Gorbel hunted? Do you ride him?”
Jame made a face. “After a fashion.”
“D’you think he would let me?”
The rathorn, advancing, knocked him over.
“I don’t think so.”
The colt wheeled on his hocks and disappeared around a boulder with a taunting flick of his silken tail. Timmon followed him with Jame hard on his heels, hoping that she hadn’t set him up for the slaughter. What followed amounted to a game of hide and seek. Timmon grabbed a creamy tail. Bel-tairi squealed and bolted. Back came the rathorn, roaring to her rescue, and Timmon scrambled up another rock, only to descend again when the colt and the Whinno-hir had calmed down and fallen to grazing.
“I didn’t know that rathorns ate grass,” he said, trying hard to breathe normally.
“So will a dog or a cat, if it suits them. He’s omnivorous, as far as I can make out, although rocks disagree with him. Here.” She handed Timmon a curry brush from a sack that she had brought from her room. “You take Bel.”
She watched as he approached the mare, noting how he moved so as not to startle her. Either he knew about her blind side, or instinctively avoided it. Then too, she always grazed with it toward the rathorn. Her single dark eye rolled warily at his touch, but she soon quieted under it. That was good: mild as she was, few people could handle her after the torture that Greshan had inflicted on her. Fair enough for a second (or third?) opinion.