Three days out from Tentir, the randon college, they found the first body.
The jewel-jaws led them to it in a fluttering cloud, changing color against each surface that they passed—tawny for the bark of a late summer birch, gold for its leaves, stormy blue for a thickening sky. When they landed on the back of the cadet's forage coat, however, they crinkled their wings in disappointment and turned the dusky brown of a bruised plum.
The slighter of the two cadets chased them off with her gloved hands and turned over the body.
Her companion caught his breath. "Lady, what happened to him?"
"I don't know. He's Randir, anyway. Look at how his token scarf is tied."
They stared down at a face that should have been young, but that had sunken in on itself under parched and browning skin. A faint crackle came from his chest as if something small and tired shivered there. He was breathing. Then, horribly, his eyelids stirred and opened. The eyes themselves were almost opaque, without pupils, but they moved as the irises shifted, searching.
Lips creaked open, splitting, bloodless, at the corners.
"Mmmm lorrr . . . "
In a swift movement, the randon known to the hillmen as Mer-kanti was there, kneeling beside the boy. He drew a white-hilted knife, opened the coat, and gently slid the blade home between prominent ribs. The boy sighed and closed his eyes.
The cadet Gari frowned down at him. "Isn't he one of the cadets who tried to assassinate Ran—"
"Careful," said Jame. "We aren't that far from Wilden. Yes, I think so. For the life of me, though, I can't remember his name."
"But the Commandant gave them all permission to leave." This is unfair, Gari's tone said in bewildered outrage. How could it have been allowed to happen?
He was very young.
It did seem hard that the boy should have to confront another of death's uglier faces so soon after his swarm of bees had plunged, stinging, down the Randir Tempter's throat. Gari hadn't told them to do that; they just had, answering his vengeful mood, aided by Jame who at the time had been forcing the woman's mouth open with her thumbs jammed deep into the hinges of the other's jaws.
"The Commandant even said that they could come back next year if their lord permitted," Gari added, still protesting.
"That's just it. It was their true lord whom they tried to kill."
Jame glanced at the hooded randon who was hacking branches off a sapling. This close to his home keep, she tried to think of the Randir Lordan solely by his hill name, Mer-kanti. For years he had avoided the shadow assassins sent by the false lord's mother, Rawneth, Witch of Wilden, so long that he had almost forgotten the habit of human speech. White skin, white hair, eyes that could hardly bear sunlight—if he hadn't been so obviously a Shanir, one of the Old Blood, Rawneth's scheme never would have worked. As it was, his people turned to him by instinct, as this poor boy just had, unless they were personally bound to the Witch or to her son.
Then she saw what the randon was doing, and went to help.
Soon they had a pole sled lashed with boughs, attached to Mirah's saddle. The green-eyed mare took this as placidly as she did most things, including her master's need for a diet of fresh blood and his penchant for painting her pale gray hide all the hues of the current season.
When they lifted the cadet, he seemed a mere husk, all but weightless, and he cast no shadow.
They spent the rest of that day and the next searching for those others of Mer-kanti's house who had tried to kill him in Tentir's subterranean stable. All were mere shells. Some, like the first, were still alive, barely. To these also he brought the White Knife, an honorable death at the hands of their rightful lord.
Then, on the night of the fifth day, they descended to the Silver and crossed it into Wilden's grim shadow.
Like all the Riverland fortresses, Wilden was built around the fragments of an ancient hill fort. However, unlike Gothregor, where the stones formed the foundation of the death banner hall, Wilden's ruins stood on their own, crowning a small hillock in a courtyard near the front gate. That night, a pyre had been laid on the sweet, late summer grass within the ring of stones, and on it rested the bodies of those expelled cadets who had lived long enough to reach home. Kendar stood around them, silent, bearing torches whose flames shifted uneasily in the sulfurous currents that flowed down the steep streets from the Witch's Tower set high above. There, at a lit window, the Randir Matriarch Rawneth kept watch. So she and they might all have stood, waiting, since the first word of the failed assassination had reached Wilden days before.
Rawneth meant to teach her people a lesson, Jame thought. Perhaps they wished her to learn one as well.
Careful hands lifted the husks from the sled and placed them beside their fellows. A priest stepped forward and spoke the pyric rune. The night blazed up, as if the very air were tinder. A long sigh rose from the watchers. Fire lent a tinge of color to Mer-kanti's pale, impassive face and to the white hair within the shadow of his travel-stained hood.
There was a disturbance on the other side of the flames.
Rawneth's son, Kenan, Lord Randir, shoved his way through the crowd, glaring across the pyre at the randon known as Mer-kanti, who was also the exiled Randir Heir, Randiroc. Kenan wore full rhi-sar armor with gilded inserts. He glittered red-gold in the firelight, a lordly sight meant to overawe; but hate twisted his handsome face into something ugly, something unnatural, something—somehow—almost familiar, Jame thought. His lips writhed. If he gave orders, either no one heard them over the fire's roar or, perhaps, understood. Certainly, no one moved when he and his mother's sworn followers tried to force their way through the silent onlookers to get at the rival who had eluded them for so long.
Randiroc watched them struggle against the passive resistance of his house, then turned and left, unspeaking, unhindered. Muffled in their forage hoods, trying their best to be invisible, the two cadets slipped out on his heels.