by Kari Cordis
CHAPTER 1
Ari tapped out an agitated staccato on his parchment, untidily splattering ink all over it, until Rodge reached over and smashed his hand into stillness. Rodge was bent raptly forward, face trying not to reveal his delight at the exceptional show Master Melkin of Applied Natural Sciences was putting on for them today.
Perhaps it was just because it was the last day of the semester, but he seemed to be in fine form. Melkin had quite a reputation for being rather violently charismatic, slamming teaching sticks down, throwing himself around the room in high choler (and usually even higher volume), and flaying students with those keen eyes and a tongue that could shred the intelligence right out of you. The going rumor was that he’d had a little too many falls as a small infant, but Rodge and Loren, Ari’s friends, found him deeply and satisfyingly hilarious. No one ever slept in Melkin’s class.
He paced below them now in the tiered classroom, scathing voice completely belying the cultured silver mane of hair and neatly trimmed beard. “Just what exactly is it that you use for brains? Since whatever it is that’s lodged between your ears apparently has no cerebral capabilities? Do you think this class has been for your entertainment?” He hadn’t been very pleased with their final exam scores.
“Do you think, and I use the verb loosely, that all that’s needed for your future is a little tirna to fill your coinbox? That your pampered little worlds will continue on, unchanging, into the distant and dreamy eternity of your unjustifiable existences?” he demanded. “We have spent months learning about a world that you are bent on utterly ignoring! All of nature points to the stirring of the forces in the south—if they rise in all of their vast and destructive powers, they will burst the deluded bubbles of your lives like a blade through a water bladder!”
While Rodge struggled to control himself, chewing softly on a balled knuckle at this treasure trove of bombast being handed to him, Ari sighed gloomily. That colorful little description nicely summed up his life already. Since the break a few months ago during Midwinter Fest, all he’d ever known had become a shadow, some of that ‘deluded reality’ Melkin saw in his half-crazed mind’s eye. Well, he would no longer be taking it for granted, this life of his that he’d never given a thought to. He watched the dust motes float through the cavernous classroom, illuminated like visible magic dust by the sunlight pouring through the huge, arched windows. Outside, Archemounte was in the grip of its brief spring. Inside, he was dry and cold as winter.
Suddenly, the bells pealed out in inexorable chimes—one of the few things existing that would dare interrupt Melkin. For a moment, the class sat frozen with anticipation, the Master glaring at them resentfully while the booming echo died away. Finally, disgusted, he flung up his arm as if to say, “what are you waiting for?!” and whirled away from them in a swirl of black robes.
In the sudden ruckus of students freed from a year’s worth of bondage, Rodge intoned in a doomsday voice, “Beware the shifting sands to the south…” He and Loren, who’d been sitting on the other side of Ari, exchanged gleeful looks. “Prepare yourselves! Next semester—here, in Archemounte—the Zombie Invasion of the North as our ancient Enemy rises from their graves…Please,” he finished drolly in his normal voice, “would someone tell me what any of that bilge has to do with natural sciences?”
“Too bad there’s not any Enemy around anymore,” Loren said, stuffing ink and parchment into his bag. “I’d rather be swordbit than get another essay back from Melkin.”
Rodge looked at him askance. “You’ve run into too many trees in those back-country jousts.”
Ari grinned. “There’s no knights in the Empire, Rodge,” he said as Loren snickered. Rodge had a celestial grade point average—but not from his scores in military history.
Loren, who’d thrown his bag over a shoulder and straightened up, paused, eyes fixing on something below them in the tiered classroom. “Ho…look at this,” he said softly. Rodge and Ari, not blessed with his extra few inches, raised up on tiptoe to see what he was looking at.
There, just coming to a halt at the Master’s desk in the front of the room, was a lithe, savage-looking man in fitted black traveling leathers. Short, dark hair covered his fine head, his deeply tanned face narrow and hawkish. He moved with the grace of a woodsman, the worn breeches sliding over long, powerful legs, the muscular arms and chest bare under his vest despite Archemounte’s crisp spring air. And slung below his trim waist…were double-hipped swords.
“How,” Rodge breathed in frank and derisive amazement, “does Moony Melkin know a Dra?” Ari’s mouth fell open. Below them, the frenzied dash of exiting youth had changed to a barely excusable, rubber-necking shuffle, all of them apparently wondering the same thing. For all the scorn and dislike and fascination and derision that the Master held in the popular imagination, no one would ever have dreamed he had such unlikely contacts. Eccentric? Yes. Deranged, unhinged, unfriendly? Definitely. But to consider he had a regular life, let alone an interesting one, outside the classroom? Never. Ari and Loren and Rodge dallied right along with everyone else, craning their necks and ogling the visitor as casually as possible as they crept in micro-motion down the steps and out the door.
“Wonders never cease,” Rodge said blankly once they were out in the hallway. He was much smarter than either Ari or Loren, but he didn’t look it with his finger wiggling around in his ear like that. Rodge actually had never been overly concerned with looks. He may have felt his lank black hair, tendency to spots, and shockingly scrawny physique made it a waste of time.
“Maybe Melkin hired him to assassinate the headmaster,” Loren mused with indecent hope under his breath. He’d recently been in the presence of that august personage for, really, a minor infraction, and hadn’t had much good to say about him since.
Rodge snorted. “More likely, a price has been put on Melkin’s head by some of those failing Blood that don’t know how they’re gonna break that particular news to Mummy and Daddy…” The boys grinned. They made their way through the crowded halls, full of jostling, exuberantly liberated fellow students, and out through the great arch of the double doors. Outside, the Great Square was in the full throes of spring, oaks and maples and elms bordering it in leafy dress, ivy clambering thickly over the dignified stone of all the old buildings. The Imperial University was the pride of the North (one of several, actually), and it had been built accordingly. The students, for the most part, were among the wealthiest and most important children in the Empire.
Several of these paragons of prestige were currently rolling around in the muddied grass nearby, surrounded by several cheering—or jeering, depending on their affiliation—classmates. Some self-designated herald was helpfully alerting the general public with the cry of “Fight! Fight!” and Ari and his friends swerved over to see how it was going. Fourth year fights were usually pretty good, a lot of the older students having enrolled in defense classes by that time, but even first year scraps could be entertaining if there were country boys involved.
The fight was more of a jubilant roughhouse than a display of skill, and they’d just turned around to make their way out of the crowd when they ran into Irelle. As one unit, they lurched to a halt—she was far and above the prettiest girl in school, and definitely not one to casually pass without an attempt at conversation.
“Hi, Loren,” she said. All the girls knew Loren. He was tall and good-looking, blond- haired and blue-eyed, and had that square-jawed, boyish smile thing going for him.
“Hi,” he said casually, as if he hadn’t given her a thought all year. They talked nonchalantly of summer plans and coming back next year while Ari’s mouth went dry and he wished himself into the ground. Girls
were surely the most amazing, attractive, destructive force in the universe, and right now he wanted nothing to do with them. They always gave him that look…half-curious, half-revolted, or at least that’s the way he saw it. Sure enough, in a pause in the conversation, Irelle flicked her cute eyes at him, taking in the dark skin and burnished red hair that was totally out of place here in the northern Empire. He kept his eyes lowered—and not just out of shyness. They were a vivid bluish-green, and he felt really attracted far more attention than he was comfortable with.
“Well, we’ve gotta be going,” Loren drawled easily, moving off at the head of his friends to a chorus of soft “Bye, Loren.” He sighed contentedly once they’d broken out of the growing crowd. Rodge looked at him in disgust.
“Must be nice to be blond and beautiful and rich and Landed,” he accused him sarcastically.
“It is,” Loren confessed, affectedly running a hand through his hair. Rodge and Ari looked at each other. They were his best friends, and it was for his own good. They jumped him.
“Hey!” he protested, but the rest of his commentary was muffled in grunts and laughter and thuds as the three tussled and wrestled and thumped each other across the Square and up the two flights in the boys’ dormitories to their room. They were out of breath and still deep in noisy and good-natured abuse when they hit their door—literally, sort of bouncing off of it as their entwined body mass misjudged the distance. Ari, who with one arm was affectionately choking off Loren’s air, had the most limbs free and kicked open the door.
At which all three instantly froze, Rodge, whose arm was twisted up behind his back, abruptly terminating his yowl of protest. For a second they just stood, wound up together, staring and panting.
“We’ve been violated,” Rodge cried, disentangling himself. Their room was total chaos. Drawers were open and their contents strewn about. Ari’s bed was smashed and Loren’s mattress sliced so that the bedraggled straw from start of term protruded limply. A window stood open, the spring breeze toying with their exposed things, and Rodge marched indignantly over to slam it shut.
“Who would do this?” he demanded angrily, peering out through the glass as if he could catch sight of the perpetrator. Ari and Loren followed more slowly, dazed. Things like this didn’t happen in the country, even on a big estate like Harthunters.
Behind them, the door swung shut.
In the split second it took to turn around, Ari felt the hairs on the nape of his neck come up. That door never closed on its own. Even with a good, firm tug they had trouble getting it to latch sometimes. He and Loren, who’d grown up hunting and camping in the wilds of the Northern back-country, whirled around. But they’d never been the hunted before, and they just stood there dumbly, wondering why a strange man was standing in the corner of their room.
He didn’t look like a burglar. He didn’t look interesting at all, actually, being rather middle-aged, with a stubble of beard shadow and the air of a common man; his voice could have belonged to any laborer off the streets of Archemounte. In fact, the only thing remarkable about him was his eyes, which were sharp, flat, and unreadable. Like the eyes of the peddlers that came to Harthunters every turn of the seasons.
“I saw your door open,” he explained. “He was just jumping out the window when I came in. I must have scared him off.”
“Ah!” Rodge jumped and spun around at the sound of the stranger’s voice, staring at him with considerable distrust. “Who are you?”
He didn’t say anything. What he did do was incalculably worse—he started walking towards them, slowly and purposefully. It was so unreal, so outside any of the boys’ experience, that they just stood there, bewildered. Before the strangeness of it could really register, several things seemed to happen all at once.
The door to their room was flung open and the dark, lean, leather-clad stranger that had come to see Melkin earlier was suddenly filling the room. The commoner, whom the boys had tumbled onto as acting rather suspicious, whirled around and instantly lunged toward him with reflexes the average streetsweeper would be very proud of.
The Dra glided into him and did something violent and permanent—the stranger suddenly spasmed into a hunch and then slowly collapsed until he lay sprawled over a pile of Loren’s dirty tunics. Into the shocked silence came a thunk—later determined to be Rodge fainting, hitting Loren’s disgorging mattress like a dead fish.
As if this wasn’t enough activity, Melkin, still in his black velvet Master’s robes, swirled noiselessly into the arena, shutting the door behind him and sweeping the contents of the room with eyes like cold iron. They were grey, Ari noted numbly, which wasn’t apparent from the top row of seats in a classroom, and sharp as a blade. His lined face was tense, but he gave the boys—the conscious ones—a black scowl that suggested he didn’t appreciate their shenanigans. Before he could say anything, his Dra companion dropped smoothly into a crouch, sure hands beginning a chillingly expert search of the awkward, silent body just added to the laundry pile.
It only took a second and then he rose with a dagger in his brown, long-fingered hands. He and Melkin exchanged a look as he gravely handed it to him. “Sheelsteel,” he said quietly, his voice deep and rich in his expressionless face. Ari stared at him, half-admiring, half-horrified at his composure. His eyes were almost black, glittering and powerful in the still, hatchet face. He was really only a medium-sized man, but Ari had never known anyone to so thoroughly occupy space. He was so caught up in the sense of power and danger coming off the man that it took him a minute to realize what he’d said. Sheelsteel? Sheelsteel came from the vast desert to the south of the Empire, an alloy used only in the Enemy’s weapons. Where would a Northerner get that kind of blade? It’s not like it was valuable, being way inferior to strong Northern steel.
“This is Dra Kai,” the Master introduced him absently, his attention focused intently on the dagger blade he was drawing from its sheath. Over and over he turned it in his hands, eyes narrowing. They hardened as he looked up. “Who’s your friend?” he asked softly, voice like sandpaper.
Ari and Loren blinked at him. They looked at the man on the floor that was lying so still. Then they looked at Rodge, who was never at a loss for words…unless he was unconscious. Then they looked at each other, until finally Melkin bellowed, “ANSWER ME!”
They both jumped and Loren immediately began to babble, “We don’t know, Master Melkin, sir, we just walked in and he was here and the room was all a mess—”
“You’ve never seen him before?” Melkin barked.
“No!” Loren exclaimed, and would’ve continued, now that he had some momentum built up, except that Melkin cut him off.
“Ari?” he demanded.
“No, sir.” Ari tried not to sound as bewildered as he felt. Both of the men facing him had rather uncomfortably penetrating eyes. Although for all of Melkin’s noise, it was the Dra that seemed to dominate the general surroundings.
Melkin glared at them for a moment, looking disgusted, then shared a quick look with the bronzed, muscled man next to him. They seemed to agree on something. Without a word, the Dra turned and knelt. He tossed the body of the intruder up over a broad shoulder as if it was made of straw and slipped soundlessly out of the room. It was a little surreal. If Melkin hadn’t still been there, colder and more business-like than they’d ever seen him at the front of the classroom, the boys might have thought they’d dreamed it.
“All right,” he grated out, piercing eyes boring into them. “I want you to think. By some misguidance of the gods you’ll be thrust out into the world as adults in a couple years, so start flaming acting like it. That man didn’t drop by to check out the view. Why was he here?” he snapped.
The boys gawked. Rodge moaned in the background, coming to. It was the start of a very long night.
Ari, lying sleepless on the floor hours later, still couldn’t quite believe it was all happening. Melkin had brought them down to his office, interrogating them for hours, first individuall
y, then together, then in pairs, then singly again—until it was obvious that despite his suspicions, even he was struggling to make anything reasonable out of the whole incident.
Rodge had been dismissed first. He was so unburdened with affluence that he had to scribe every spare moment just to scrape together tuition each semester. He certainly didn’t have anything of value. His parents were equally uninteresting. Granted, they both worked in the Courts of Justice, but they were scribes, not even directly involved with Cases of Judgment.
Loren, of course, was the most likely suspect to be a victim of crime, being of Landed blood and due to inherit Harthunters one day. But the estate was almost a week’s ride away and he hadn’t brought anything of value to University with him. As far as he knew, there were no enemies of the family, either. His father, Lord Harthunter, was just and generous, as affable and well-liked as Loren.
And that left Ari, who was inexplicably the last to be released by a Master almost frothing with frustration. He would have thought he’d be the least likely to attract such unwholesome attention. He had absolutely nothing to his name, did his best to avoid almost everyone but his roommates, and didn’t even have a family. But Melkin wanted to hear his short, simple life story over and over, glaring at him the more keenly with every repetition. There’d been a few years he barely remembered with the Illian nuns, then Lord Harthunter had run across him on a hunting trip in the southern Empire and adopted him, an orphan without a single bit of historical interest to his name, as a brother for Loren.
What a bizarre coincidence, Ari thought as he lay staring into the dark and listening to Rodge snore. That such an unwelcome probe into his personal life should afflict him just as he’d become so agonizingly aware of it himself. Unbidden, Mistress Harthunter’s harping voice came echoing through his mind as it had a thousand times since that day over Midwin.
“It’s time he moved on, Herron. Your One Great Deed has been more than satisfied, and we are spending money on him that should be going to other purposes.”
