“Kill him!” Fash was shouting. “Kill him!”
“What in Perimal’s name is going on here?”
The new voice, while not a roar, carried such power that the struggling cadets stopped. Gorbel stood in the doorway to Old Tentir, his armor reeking with boar’s blood, his attendants dimly seen behind him in the great hall carrying the prize of his hunt on a pole thrust through its hocks. As he stumped forward, cadets cleared a path. Jame took advantage of their distraction to slip within the steel ring and kneel beside the Commandant. He had been struck across the face, luckily with the back of Bear’s hand, otherwise he would have had no face left to speak of. Already he was struggling to rise.
“Weapons up!” Sheth ordered the cadets and the handful of randon who had joined them.
Gorbel entered the ring and faced Bear. His hands came up and his head down in a cadet’s salute to a senior randon. Others joined him one by one, until Bear was surrounded by a circle of silent respect. Jame removed the collar from his neck. Bear snuffled and slowly straightened. Awkwardly, as if he had almost forgotten how, he returned their salute.
The Commandant climbed to his feet, shrugging off the hands that reached out to steady him, and touched his brother’s shoulder. Face to face, one saw the resemblance between them: beyond the elder’s unkempt wildness and the younger’s somewhat ruffled suavity, the same sharp features, the same set of jaw and hawk’s eye. Then Sheth led Bear away, through the silent watchers, back to his noisome den.
It was dusk by the time the Commandant finally returned to his quarters which, like his office, opened off the Map Room. He stilled on the threshold, sensing movement by the balcony. A figure advanced into the room, the hunched shoulders of the Snowthorns over its head, a nimbus of evening stars above that. No Kendar was so slight; no Kendar but Harn Grip-hard would have approached him at such a time, after such a day. But Harn was with the Southern Host by now. Odd, to miss his old rival so.
“I came to see if you and Bear are all right,” said the Knorth Lordan.
Sheth sighed and unwrapped his official scarf. In fact, his face still throbbed and several teeth had been loosened, but it could have been so much worse.
“Bear is asleep,” he said. “They must have saved up their rations of applejack for a long time to get him so drunk.”
“Gorbel did well, though, didn’t he?”
“Very well. His father errs in underestimating him.”
“You do realize that Fash set you up to sanction Bear’s execution.”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” he said dryly. “Also that he would have been unlikely to think up such a scheme on his own.”
“Caldane is pushing. He wants to be sure of you.”
“Of that, too, I am aware. Why else do you suppose that he demanded that you renew your lessons with Bear?”
She stepped forward, almost into the light of his candle, speaking urgently. “Ran, you mustn’t give in. This is Honor’s Paradox, pure and raw, and you are the honor of Tentir.”
This amused him, or would have if he weren’t so tired and his face didn’t hurt so much.
“Child, what will you say next?”
“Only this: my first Senethari fell prey to the paradox, and to prove that I am serious, I will tell you who he was: Tirandys himself.”
The room seemed to shift. He was acutely aware of all the battle maps painted on its wall from the Cataracts to the Fall, three thousand-odd years ago. So many victories, so many more tragic defeats. It was as if the fabled past had risen before him in the figure of one slim girl. The randon had long wondered who had first taught her the Senethar, and here was the answer, impossible as it seemed.
“Child, Tirandys was of the Master’s generation, long, long ago.”
“He was also a darkling changer, who learned too late that his honor couldn’t be trusted to his lord. Time moves differently under shadows’ eaves. You met him yourself at the Cataracts, when he was impersonating Prince Odalian of Karkinaroth.”
Sheth remembered the prince—a poor, doomed fool who had wanted to emulate the Kencyr and had paid for it with his life, or all the time had they been dealing with one of the Master’s chosen, the originator of the Senetha himself?
“Do such legends still walk under the sun?”
“You should know, for you are one of them. Senethari, please. I don’t want to lose another teacher to Honor’s accursed Paradox.”
She took his breath away. Singers’ lie and scrollsmen’s fact, all of the Kencyrath’s long, tortured history seemed to unroll before him. Was he truly set upon the same path? He was ambitious, yes, but this was too much. One did what one could, where one was. For him, it was here in Tentir’s Map Room, faced with a shadow that embodied everything he had ever fought both for and against.
“You, a Knorth, tell a Caineron this?”
“Not a Caineron,” came that voice out of the darkness of his own soul. “The Commandant of Tentir.”
He fingered his scarf without thinking. “Then a Commandant has heard you.”
He stepped forward to draw her within his candle’s light and she resolved into a slim girl whose silver-gray eyes were too large for her thin face. He touched her scarred cheek.
“Ah, you Knorth, who make even your enemies love you. To bed, now, child. Tomorrow is a new year.”
She withdrew, saluting him. “As you command, Senethari.” And left.
Before Jame retired for the night, however, she checked the wyrm’s chest one last time. Jorin crouched before it, quivering, tail a-twitch, like a cat waiting for its prey to break cover. The chest itself rattled on the floor in a nervous little dance.
Jame opened it.
The chrysalis was rocking back and forth in its tawdry bed. Cracks laced its shell, then shards fell away to reveal something within covered with a dark, wet caul.
A gasp sounded from the door. Rue stood there open-mouthed, with other cadets arriving to gawk behind her.
“Lady, be careful!”
“Stand back,” said Jame, still unsure of what she was dealing with.
The struggles inside the chest stilled as if exhaustion had taken hold. Jame carefully hooked her claws in the membrane where it seemed the thinnest. It split at her touch. Something like a child lay within, curled in a fetal position, thumb in its mouth. Its body, however, was scarcely more than a tangible shadow and nearly as light when Jame picked it up. She saw that it had not one set of arms but three, the middle two rudimentary with hands folded over its stomach, the lower two almost but not quite legs.
The membrane fell in twin drapes from its shoulders, rustling and unfurling as golden light began to spread through its veins. From black to midnight blue to azure, the veil lightened as if with the sunrise into a pair of glowing wings.
Jame held them away from her body so as not to damage them. Jorin, sniffing, seemed inclined to bat until a quick word from her made him withdraw his paw.
The wings brushed the floor and spread to an arm’s width each. They were already drying. The shadow child sighed, removed its thumb from its mouth, and opened its eyes. They too were golden.
Memory stirred.
Golden-eyed shadows crouched over her in Perimal Darkling, around the Master’s bed. Long fingers like shadows in the coverlet’s creases poked at her. Except for their eyes, their bodies seemed no more substantial than those shadows.
“Who are you?”
Forgotten us so soon? Shame, shame, shame! Our lord sent for us, called us from our dim world into his dim rooms, up from the depths of the House. Said, “Teach this child the Great Dance, as you taught the other one. One name will do for both.” And so we taught you, the new Dream-weaver. Years, it’s been, all to be consummated tonight. Now get up, up, up . . . or shall we get into bed with you?