Honor's Paradox by P. C. Hodgell

Author:P. C. Hodgell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2011-12-05T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XI

Rain

Spring 37–43

I

It was snowing when Jame left the Merikit village the next morning. Snow turned to sleet on the ride south, and sleet to chill rain. By the time she reached Tentir late that night, she was soaked and shivering.

Rue ordered Greshan’s huge, obscenely ornate bath filled for her. Jame lay in it slowly thawing out, listening to rain ping against the bronze hood and flinching as icy drops found their way down the smoke hole to tap on her bare shoulders.

The next morning rain still fell as cadets gathered in the muddy square for assembly. Most lessons were held inside, but that provided only partial relief. While not the winter chill, this was perhaps more piercing. No place in the college seemed warm more than a dozen paces from the nearest fire.

Jame’s second class took place in the Map Room with the Coman master-ten Clary. It was the first time they had met since he had hit her with a rock during the egging exercise. She came up behind him as he bent over a scroll.

“Why did you do it?

He flinched, but didn’t turn to meet her eyes.

“Fash said . . .”

“Fash says many things. You shouldn’t listen.”

Clary hunched his shoulders as if against a blow. “I’ve been waiting for you to complain to the Commandant.”

“Have I ever, about anything? It isn’t likely to happen again, is it?”

The back of his neck turned dusky red. “No. It was a shoddy trick. I wish I hadn’t done it.”

“Good.”

She passed on to Brier, who was studying a map of the Southern Wastes.

“Urakarn,” said Brier, pointing to a mark on the western edge of the desert. “Here is the plain before it where my mother and your brother followed Genjar to defeat against the Karnids. Genjar came back. So many others didn’t. They say that the ground there is still white with powdered bones. And this”—she swept her hand eastward—“is the dry salt sea over which they escaped. Is it true that my mother returned under the salt, under the sand, to save you?”

The previous spring, a weirdingstrom had carried the entire Scrollsmen’s College all the way south taking Jame and Brier with it. Jame remembered the terror of sinking, of sand closing over her head, the salt on her lips turning wet, the ancient sea returning.

Then Rose Iron-thorn’s hand had closed over her own and drawn her up to the air, to life. For your brother’s sake . . .

“I think so.”

Would they soon be revisiting those mysterious regions? Hot, dry, barren . . . Jame glanced out the window at the cold rain still descending in rods. How far away the Wastes seemed. Strange to think that someday, in some foreign desert, she might regret that it wasn’t raining.

The downpour continued the next day, and the next. Nothing dried properly. The Silver rose, beginning to gnaw away its banks. Wells brimmed on the verge of overflowing. If the Eaten One indeed represented water, she was clearly showing her displeasure, but at what?

MINE.

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