The Sea of Time (12 page)

BRIER AND THE REST of the ten-command had gotten perhaps ten miles away from Kothifir by the time that Jame caught up with them, having slowed Bel alternately to a trot and a walk so as not to overtire her. Jame rode up beside Brier Iron-thorn on her tall chestnut gelding. Bel’s head barely came up to his shoulder. Neither spoke for the next mile. The others tactfully fell back to give them privacy.

“You should have told me,” Jame said at last, nudging the Whinno-hir into a brief trot to catch up with the chestnut’s longer stride. Trinity, no wonder people used saddles; her tailbone throbbed with every bounce.

Brier shrugged. “You had other things to do. Besides, why should you waste a day with the rest of us?”

“Because I’m your ten-commander, idiot. I assume that precious note of yours included me.”

“It did. Specifically. In none too polite terms.”

“Which made you all the more determined to leave me out.”

Brier shrugged again. “It was a stupid order, and presumptuous, given who sent it, to demand that the Knorth Lordan do anything. To involve you in such nonsense demeans us all.”

Jame sighed. “If it had only been addressed to me, I might have torn it up the way Gorbel did with his challenge. Rue had it right: this little expedition proves nothing unless we run into a raid. But I
am
your commander and therefore responsible for you. In the future, we aren’t going to like many of the commands given to us, but we will still have to obey them. Do you have any spare water, by the way?”

Brier unhooked a goatskin pouch from her saddle and handed it down to her. Jame drank, then leaned forward to offer Bel a cupped handful of water. The mare’s pink tongue rasped her fingers dry, once, twice, and again.

“All right,” she said, straightening, a bit defensive. “I’m here without travel rations, tack, or even a weapon, discounting the knife in my boot. When I saw you heading out without me, well, I didn’t stop to think.”

She paused, flicked by her sixth sense. Death’s-head was nearby, but so was something else.

“Horses,” she said. “Strange ones.”

They were finally in the foothills of the Apollynes, their view restricted by rolling hills, shrubs, and giant rocks. Their mounts stirred uneasily as hoofbeats approached both ahead of them and behind. Could it be another Gemman raid like the one that had cost the young seeker her life?

The rathorn Death’s-head roared around a boulder lower down and surged up the incline toward them, his white mane roached up all down his spine and his tail flying like a battle standard.

Simultaneously, black mares erupted from the surrounding rocks with riders also in black,
cheches
concealing all but hard, bright eyes set in sun-dark faces.

“Karnids,” Brier snapped. “Circle up.”

The cadets backed rump to rump with Bel squeezed in the middle, in danger of being kicked by any one of them. Jame slipped off and dodged between the surrounding horses. Death’s-head swerved toward her, as usual nearly running her over but allowing her to grab his mane and swing onto his back as he surged past. The rathorn pivoted to face the mares, then paused, snorting. Some of them were in season. Their scent drew off his attention as others dashed in.

Jame found herself in the center of a swirling storm of horseflesh. Sleek black heads with red eyes snaked past. White fangs snapped at her. Hands grabbed. She drew her knife and hacked at them, all the time clinging to the rathorn’s mane, forced to ride high by the roached spine. Brier’s shout seemed distant. They were running away with her, the rathorn stumbling over rocky ground, striking almost at random.

Come. You know where you belong
.

The image formed in her mind of a tall, black-robed figure lifting his arms to receive her. He wore a single, silver glove.

I hacked off that hand when it reached out between scarlet ribbons to claim me . . .

Death’s-head snorted and steadied.

Not my lady.

Then he stumbled again and threw Jame over his head. She fell among rocks and lay there, dazed. All around her iron hooves struck spark from stone. A hand grabbed her arm and jerked her up across a saddle, knocking the breath out of her. The dimming sky whirled overhead. Then it went black.

V

FLAMES LEAPED IN THE DARKNESS, and black-clad figures hovered, flickering in and out of sight.

“Do you recant . . . do you profess . . . then we must convince you, for your own good.”

 
. . . gloves of red-hot wire . . .

Oh god, my hands! Burning, burning . . .

VI

JAME HEARD THE FIRE CRACKLE and cringed from the memory of searing pain.
Ah, my hands
. . .

No. Rather, it was her head that ached. Again. She touched it gingerly and encountered a bandage wrapped around her temples.

Branches snapped like fingers in the fireplace and flames leaped. She was in her quarters at the camp and someone—Rue?—had set a blaze there. Jorin stretched out beside her, as usual complaining when her movement disturbed him, then rolling onto his back for a stomach rub. The bed was soft under her, the room warm although the late summer nights were growing cool. A large form eclipsed the fire and threw another log on it. Sparks flared up around him as he turned.

“Awake, are you?”

It was Harn Grip-hard.

“Y-yes, Ran. How long . . .”

“Enough for your ten-command to fight free and get you back here, plus a few hours. It’s passing on toward midnight. You took quite a crack to your head.”

“Those black mares . . . what were they?”

“The Karnids’ mounts? They’re called thorns. Introduce a mare in season to a rathorn stallion and, if he doesn’t kill her, eleven months later you get the blackest, meanest little filly you can imagine. All they lack is their sire’s armor. Now, why were the Karnids after you?”

“I didn’t realize that they were. It was a confusing situation. I don’t even know who grabbed me.”

“That was Iron-thorn again, trying to get you out from underfoot before someone trampled you into jelly. Then your command ran for it, quite sensibly, with that bloody beast of yours mounting rear guard. What were all of you doing so far out to begin with?”

Jame told him about the challenge.

He snorted, went to the door, and spoke to someone, probably Rue.

Jame lay back, thinking. Why had she had that sudden image of the Master reaching out for her?

Come. You know where you belong
.

Gerridon thought that she belonged with him, in Perimal Darkling, as the new Dream-weaver. What did the Karnids have to do with that?

Then there had been that flash of Tori at Urakarn, under the Karnid torture that had nearly crippled him and left his hands scarred for life. Had he just woken at Gothregor, that nightmare memory still seared into his mind? Once again, it seemed, their dreams had crossed.

Harn stumped back bringing a dark, sullen third-year cadet.

“Char here says that neither he nor his friends sent you any such message.”

“We’ve been waiting to tell you, ever since we first heard,” said Char, sounding exasperated. “We would never have made up such a lame-brained challenge.”

Jame snorted. “As if any of them make any sense. Is this how you test your juniors, with stupid commands? We each find our own rite of passage. Do you agree?”

“Well, yes, of course, but . . .”

“But nothing. Let the other houses make fools of themselves if they must. Here and now, I’m enforcing my brother’s order and forbidding it within the Knorth.”

The cadet stiffened, at first with outrage and then as if drawn further up against his will by her sudden tone of authority. Here, after all, was not only a second-year master-ten but the putative commander of the Knorth barracks and the Highlord’s heir.

“Yes . . . Lordan,” he said, saluted, and left.

Harn drew up a chair and sat down beside the fire. Wooden legs groaned under his weight.

“So,” he said heavily, looking into the flames. “We have to ask ourselves: who among the Host would want to lure you into such a trap, presumably in collusion with the Karnids?”

“If you’re right.”

“Accept for a moment that I am.”

Jame considered her various enemies, in particular Fash, but how would a Caineron cadet newly arrived at Kothifir have connections with Urakarn? Further thought along those lines made her head ache anew.

“We’ll know in time,” she said, dismissing the matter.

“You mean, when he—or she—tries again.”

“If it takes that. Harn, why have you been avoiding me?”

He shifted in his seat.

“It’s been that noticeable, has it?”

“To anyone with half an eye. You can’t think that as Knorth Lordan I want to take my brother’s place as Commandant of the Host.”

He snorted. “A fine mess that would be.”

“Agreed. So?”

Harn fidgeted some more, making the chair’s joints protest. “When Blackie first joined the Host, I didn’t treat him very well. I was a fool.”

“You didn’t know him then. I don’t think he knew himself yet. It takes fire to forge steel.”

 
. . . oh God, my hands . . . !

He gave her a sidelong look under unkempt brows. “And what fires have you known, heh?”

“A few, if you can call them that. Not enough to be my brother’s equal.”

He snorted. “No doubt. I saw him tested early, before Urakarn. He was challenged too, by the Caineron. Burr warned me. We burst into Genjar’s quarters to find Blackie standing, hooded, on a shaky stool with his hands tied behind him. The other end of the rope was thrown over a rafter and knotted around his neck.”

“Yes, I know.”

He shot her another glance. “He told you about it? That surprises me. I nearly flared.”

“But you didn’t.”

“Around Blackie, I seldom do. That was no such fire as the one to come, but it showed his mettle, if I hadn’t been too blind to see it. In those days, his strength lay in endurance. In you, now, we all feel the power building, like that poor booby of a third-year, when you let it out.”

Now he had embarrassed her. “I can’t help what I am, only what I may become, and maybe not even that. I’m a nemesis, Harn. Yes, potentially one of the Three. And I don’t know yet what I might destroy.”