The Sea of Time (10 page)

CHAPTER VI

Challenges

Summer 111

I

JAME WOKE, confused, in pain. She had met both Kroaky and that great pudding, King Krothen. How could they be the same, hair and voice aside? Then again, how much could one trust in dreams?

G’ah, the lines of fire across her legs . . .
 
She thought she could feel the welts, until she was fully awake.

Was Tori attempting to scry on her through Marc’s growing stained glass window? Did he have any idea that some of his efforts might be flowing in reverse, if indeed that was the case? Genjar and the hazing . . . her own legs aching in sympathy . . .

For that matter, was Tori also privy to her own dreams? Sweet Trinity forefend.

She threw off the covers, to the disgust of Jorin who had been curled up under them, and rose. Her new quarters were located on the third floor of the Knorth barracks, looking north across the inner ward to the Escarpment and south toward the bulk of the camp. As with Greshan’s apartment at Tentir, she understood that these rooms had stood empty during the long years between Knorth heirs. At least her uncle had never tainted it with his presence. Where had Tori lived when he had joined the Host, nameless and unwanted as he had been? A flicker of the past night’s dream showed her tiny, shabby rooms in the office block near Harn, to whom Tori had been assigned as a special aide. She and her brother had talked about many things in those last days before her departure from the Riverland, but somehow little beyond the bare facts about his experiences in the south. Why was he still keeping secrets, if such they were, and what else might his dreams show her that he couldn’t bear to speak about beyond the Caineron hazing?

Rue brought her a cup of pomegranate juice sweetened with honey. It took some getting used to after Tentir’s inevitably tart cider.

“What’s our schedule for today?” Jame asked.

“Not much. This is our day off. You’re going Overcliff, aren’t you?”

So her absences had been noted. Well, of course they would be. At least she had tried to limit them to times when she was free of cadet duties.

“I need to check with Graykin,” she said. “Then Gaudaric’s grandson Byrne has promised to show me something called the Eye of Kothifir. And you?”

Rue shrugged, turning to lay out Jame’s clothes for the day including the black
d’hen
. Jame wondered if the cadet understood the significance of the latter. So far, only Sheth seemed to have recognized it as the proper garb of a Tastigon knife-fighter.

“I had hoped to go to the local market in the inner ward,” said Rue. “Now, I don’t know. One of our ten-commands got a note last night.”

“Damn.” Jame put down the cup, half-drained. “What did it say?”

“They’ve been ordered out on wide patrol to the foothills of the Apollynes, a full day’s ride there and back. As a test, it isn’t much. We’ve done the same on foot, with full packs. It’s just the waste of a free day.”

Similar challenges had been arriving for weeks, usually pushed under the door at night. They were never signed, but everyone knew that they came from the third-year randon cadets who had settled on this method to test the mettle of their juniors, either by groups or individually.

The tasks they assigned varied from house to house depending on its temper. The Caineron used physical trials. Only yesterday, Jame had seen one of Caldane’s ten-commands clinging, terrified, to the outside of the open lift cage as it rose up the sheer side of the Escarpment. Anyone of them might have succumbed to the height-sickness so endemic in that house and fallen to his or her death.

She also remembered the nightmare about her brother being tortured by the Caineron Genjar. What had happened next? Perhaps a future dream would tell her. Genjar, after all, was said to have suffered a “strange” death.

The Jaran, on the other hand, tended toward intellectual tests, the Edirr toward jokes such as ten-commands jogging naked through camp, painted blue.

No word came out of the Randir, but it was generally supposed that they were using this opportunity to test the loyalty of their cadets. Jame wondered if Ran Awl and Shade had made any progress in their investigation into the disappearances there and if any of the reported deaths had had anything to do with the third-years’ challenges. If so, would anyone tell Shade, given her peculiar background, or Awl, with her war-leader’s status?

For that matter, Jame had heard very little from within her own house. The third-years’ demands must have been moderate so far or surely she would have heard more, unless her people were keeping things from her again. As with certain demanding duties back at Tentir—latrine patrol or trock eradication, for example—it hurt their pride to see their lordan so demeaned, whatever her wishes.

“The whole thing is so stupid,” she said, pulling on her boots with brusque impatience. “What does it prove, to answer a riddle, to run a gauntlet, or to go on an unnecessary patrol? For example, you and the rest of my ten-command have proven yourselves over and over, even if most of you didn’t fight at the Cataracts.”

“You did,” said Rue, with a stubborn tilt to her shoulders.

“I slashed my way across a battlefield—Ancestors know how clumsily—to bring my brother an accursed sword that he didn’t know how to wield. Niall was there too, and Brier, after worse than either of us experienced. If the rest of you missed it, well, what about our adventures up and down the Riverland, all the way to the Southern Wastes and back? Sweet Trinity, you helped me to raid Restormir itself to free Graykin! You have nothing to prove either to me or to the Highlord who, incidentally, has forbidden all such hazing. I don’t want to see any randon cadet subjected to it. Do the regular Kendar have to put up with this nonsense?”

“They have their own rites of passage, I suppose.”

“More practical ones than ours, I bet. God’s claws, isn’t the average Kencyr’s life hard enough as it is?”

To her surprise, Rue didn’t agree.

“Of course I don’t want to be beaten or humiliated or whatever the third-years have in mind,” said the towheaded cadet, turning stubbornly to face her. “But what other way is there? In a normal year, we would have gone through this at the randon college, but the second- and third-year cadets were all here by then. Now, how else are we supposed to prove that we belong with the Southern Host?”

“Aaiiee.” Jame threw up her gloved hands in disgust. “Tradition!”

At the south gate to the Knorth compound, she encountered Brier talking to a tall young woman with the dark tan of a native born Kothifiran Kendar and cropped hair the color of wild honey. When the latter saw the Highborn, she smiled and said something to Brier that made the latter stiffen, flushing. Then, with a flipped salute, the stranger walked off.

“Who was that?” Jame asked, coming up.

“Amberley. A regular Caineron. Before I left to become a Knorth randon cadet we were . . . close.”

“Oh,” said Jame, listening as much to the other’s flat, carefully neutral tone as to her words, knowing by now how to read most nuances in the other’s manner. “How did she feel about your leaving?”

“Angry. We fought.”

It couldn’t have been easy for Brier to turn her back on all her former colleagues by changing houses, Jame thought, watching the Southron stalk back into the Knorth barracks. She had thought so before. It just hadn’t occurred to her that there might have been someone special.

The north gate of the Ardeth faced her across the road. She saw Timmon enter his compound’s courtyard wearing what appeared to be a dirty apron and carrying a bucket of steaming slops.

“What in Perimal’s name . . . ?”

He gave her a rueful smile. “I got a note. It seems that all the scullery duty I slipped out of at Tentir has finally caught up with me.”

“And you’ve consented to do it now?”

He shrugged. “You advised me to stop avoiding responsibility.”

“I’m not sure this is what I meant.”

“Should I let them humble me, d’you mean? I don’t know. It’s easier than hunting up some way of my own to prove myself, assuming that’s what I’m doing. Anyway, it could be worse. Did you hear about Gorbel’s challenge? What it told him to do was anatomically impossible. He read it out loud to his house at dinner, then tore it up.”

Jame laughed. “That’s Gorbel. He can get away with it, too, despite his fickle father. It must be nice to be so self-assured.”

“And you aren’t?”

“Sweet Trinity, no.”

Yet she was more so than she had been before her graduation from Tentir, or more specifically before she and her brother had fought to establish her competence. She had surprised Tori there, just as he had surprised her by resorting to Kothifiran street fighting techniques. She needed more lessons from Brier.

When would a note arrive for her, she wondered as she bid Timmon farewell, and what would she do about it? Ah, there was no telling until she learned what was being asked of her. Like Rue, she didn’t care to be humiliated, nor was she sure that was the way for a lordan to gain acceptance. Challenges. Huh.

II

THE OPEN LIFT CAGE took her smoothly up to the top of the Escarpment where she was greeted by Kothifir’s usual, lively street scene. Her way from there led outward into less respectable streets on the edge of the deserted towers. There she entered what on the outside appeared to be a narrow structure but on the inside opened out into a dingy tavern. A slatternly maid brought her a mug of thin, sour ale. Sipping it, she let her eyes roam around the edges of the room until a glimmer of white caught them. Graykin emerged from the shadows as if given birth by them.

Jame signaled for another mug.

“You’re getting very good at that,” she said as her servant slid into the opposite chair.

“Being Master Intelligencer has some advantages. Now everyone tells me their secrets, whether they intend to or not . . . well, almost everyone,” he added, with a sidelong look at her.

Knowledge was his coin of power, one that she hadn’t always been willing or able to pay him. Perhaps that hesitation wasn’t fair. She knew that he would keep her secrets to the point of death as he had at Restormir while in Lord Caineron’s power. Still, some secrets were hers alone.