IX
"It's weirding up something fierce, Ten," the cadet on point called back, a plaintive, disembodied voice out of the dark, dripping forest. Muffled thunder rolled down the valley like a boulder wrapped in flannel. "And I think it's going to rain again."
"We should have turned back two days ago, when the ghost-walkers passed," the tall cadet in Five's rear-guard position muttered. "All patrols should, when it starts to weird up like this."
His voice carried, as he meant it to. The new ten-commander turned to look back at him over the seven intervening heads.
"Standing orders," he muttered defiantly, but his eyes fell.
Brier Iron-thorn could almost smell the slow burn of his resentment. Before her arrival at the college, a new Knorth cadet with a battlefield appointment, he had been provisional Ten.
In fact, none of the young cadets looked happy. All but one of them Riverland bred, of old Knorth stock, they had come to Tentir that spring thinking themselves the cream of its new crop, only to find how hard it was to serve the Highlord in a college dominated by his enemies. Worse, older cadets looked down on them both for having missed the great blooding at the Cataracts and for taking the place of friends killed there. Then, in the crowning insult, they had been put under the command of an upstart Southie of Caineron yondri stock.
To Brier, their discontent looked like the pout of spoiled children.
How old were they? Fifteen? Sixteen? At their age, she had already been in the field with the Southern Host for years, first with her mother, then on her own after Rose Iron-thorn's death in the Wastes after the debacle at Urakarn. Life was hard for the many Kendar who had lost their natural lord and must seek a new one. Nicknamed yondri-gon or threshold-dwellers, they could serve a house for generations before its master deigned to take them into regular service, especially if that house was the Caineron and its lord Caldane, who deliberately swelled his ranks with the desperate displaced who would do anything to gain his favor. Two years ago, when she had turned seventeen, he had at last given Brier her chance as a randon candidate—if she passed his private initiation.
The cadets, watching, were suddenly still. Under the helm of mahogany hair, the Southie's expression hadn't changed: as always, that hard, handsome face might have been carved from teak and those green eyes from the same malachite as the stud in her left earlobe. But for a moment the cadets had seen something there which had frightened them very much indeed.
Brier turned away. "Point, wait there. We're coming down to you."
Near mutiny returned to the ranks. "Down" meant farther south. Their assignment had been to check out the rumor of a naked Merikit seen near the college—just another dirt job for the Knorth rookies, they had thought, as well as an oblique insult to their new leader, since only Caineron hunted Merikit for sport and were said to treat them no better than wild animals when they caught one. This Merikit would, of course, long since have gone, assuming he had existed in the first place. They had expected to cover their assigned territory in time for supper. Instead, Iron-thorn had led them out of it, southward.
Now it was dusk two days later, under dark trees and a weirding overcast, with no food, no Merikit, and the prospect of more rain.
They were long overdue at Tentir. Commandant Sheth, no friend to the Knorth, could have their token scarves for this as it was. Had that, perhaps, been his purpose in assigning them to a former Caineron? What was the Southie playing at, anyway?
It would not have reassured them that Brier herself didn't know. She only sensed that something was tugging her. It felt like her new bond to the Highlord, but how could that be when he was still in Kothifir, over four hundred leagues away? Normally, Torisen's grip on his Kendar was so light-handed that her former mates dismissed it scornfully as limp. But how could Brier know what he might be capable of? The Knorth were so different from the Caineron, upon whom all her previous experience was based.
Different, and mad.
She had been brought up to believe that, too. Hadn't Ganth Gray Lord's insanity infected the entire Host, leading to its near massacre in the White Hills? Didn't his son sometimes shun sleep until his wits half turned? What was she to think of a Highborn who at the Cataracts had offered her sanctuary from Lord Caineron's wrath as if he actually cared what happened to her? That show of concern was only the Knorth glamor, she told herself, useful for binding gullible randon like Harn Grip-hard as tightly as blood could have done. Her own decision to change houses had been based entirely on ambition, since she could now never hope for advancement under the Caineron. She would use Knorth influence and the Knorth would use her ability. Pure self-interest, on both sides. It was mad to think that Highborn and Kendar could deal with each other on any other basis.
And madness was contagious.
Is that what pulls me southward? she wondered. Have I gone mad too?
The scout suddenly reappeared, with an urgent gesture for silence. Whatever he had found, though, defied his ability to describe by sign. Brier cut short his efforts with a brusque *Show me,* then followed him down to the edge of the trees, the squad close on their heels.
They emerged under black clouds so low here that they seemed to tangle in the branches overhead. An unearthly yellow light filtered down through them. Below, the river's pale breath was slowly flooding the valley to the height of the lowest trees. Between roof and floor of mist lay a slope strewn with large boulders, knee deep in grass, across which veils of weirding silently drifted. It was this middle ground to which the scout pointed.
A Randir ten-command was playing hide-and-seek among the boulders—if "play" was the right word for that silent, furtive activity. The strange cadets seemed almost to slither through the grass, supple as serpents, long-skulled heads and many jointed hands weaving as though in quest for a scent. Flushed from cover, a white haired Shanir stumbled into the open. The seekers surrounded him. They began to play him back and forth, still in that unnerving silence, as he floundered with exhaustion in their midst.
It was no affair of hers, Brier told herself. As a Caineron, the first lesson she had learned was to mind her own business.
The Shanir tripped and fell. The Randir crouched in a circle around him. One drew a fingertip delicately down his cheek, leaving a thin, red line.
"Stop that!" Brier Iron-thorn roared.
Her own cadets jumped, then nervously followed as she strode down the slope. Below, ten pale, blank faces turned toward her, ten pairs of ghost-lit, glimmering eyes, but still no one spoke.
"What in Perimal's name d'you think you're doing?" she demanded of them, then stopped short.
A Randir captain had stepped between her and the group crouching around the fallen Shanir. Brier blinked. She didn't recognize any of the ten-command, but this gaunt woman was a Tentir instructor, currently posted to the Gothregor Women's Halls and still wearing her dress grays with gold striped shoulder embroidery. What in hell was she doing here?
"Minding our own business, cadet," said the captain, smiling. The other Randir rose and silently ranged themselves behind her, still surrounding the Shanir. "We suggest that you do the same."
Brier blinked again. To hear her unspoken thoughts answered was unnerving. Worse, she suddenly realized that whatever was going on here, she couldn't just walk away from it. The rules she had followed as a Caineron no longer seemed to apply, but how was a Knorth supposed to react? For the first time in her life, she didn't know what to do.
"Randir business, on Danior land, with someone under Knorth protection. Interesting."
The new voice made them all turn sharply. A slim, dark-clad figure stood on top of a white boulder, looking down at them. For a moment, impossibly, Brier thought it was Torisen Black Lord. Then she saw the other's mask. She had indeed been drawn southward by her bond to the Knorth, she realized, but not to the Highlord.
"Don't move, Kindrie," said Torisen's mad sister. "I think you've landed in a nest of bogles."