Unremarkable if your eyes hadn’t memorized the contours of his arms, the line from shoulder to slim hip, the way the light played over the angles in his face. The arch of his brow. The shape of his lips.
I watched until he and his boat blended into the crown of lights made by the market street and the torchlit castle above, and then I dropped onto the bunk and put my head in my hands.
Yeah, that was definitely one of my worst moments.
o0o
Up in the Ellir Academy commander’s suite, War Commander Randart longed for sleep. He was getting too old for all-night rides and all-day inspections, distractions, orders, and logistics.
He glared at his nephew, gabbling away to Orthan as if he had never heard of sleep, and finished the rest of his ale. At least that was good. He’d have to make certain a few barrels of Old Gold were included in the commander’s stores when he took ship.
“. . . and they were watching him arrest some cutpurse. I never heard of him doing that before. Must have been his followers who actually did the work.”
Orthan laughed.
“Red says, maybe he was trying to teach the thief some poetry and the thief surrendered only to get away.”
Orthan guffawed louder, making the war commander’s head hurt. “What’s that? They didn’t tell me Jehan took the cutpurse arrested today.”
Orthan and Damedran turned twin expressions of surprise his way. “He didn’t. I told you that earlier,” Orthan exclaimed, and his brow began to lower. “Two of our fellows did—”
The war commander ignored his brother’s long-suffering You don’t listen to me. They’d been through that too many times. Dannath only listened when Orthan’s gibble-gabble was to a purpose. He got to his feet. “All I know is, if he’s not here at the start of the games tomorrow, I’ll strangle him myself.” He pointed at his nephew. “You! Go get some rest. You have one order: to win tomorrow.”
“Oh, I’ll win,” Damedran predicted, stretching as he swung to his feet. “I can thrash anyone I know on the list, one handed.” He snapped a fist into the opposite palm, muscles bunching. “I got Captain Traneg to show me the roster before I came up here. Some locals have signed up, but we haven’t seen any locals win for years.”
“People can sign on until the trumpets tomorrow,” Orthan warned, knowing his son would ignore him, but it was better to endorse his brother’s order when Dannath was looking so irritable. “You never know, but some day a good one might show up, like the old days, before Siamis came. You do your best when you’re rested.”
Damedran snorted. “The back of my hand to locals. I don’t see why you don’t close the games to them anyway. Yes, I know that’s how we recruited in the past, but maybe it’s time to change all that. Better cadets from the better families.”
“Shut up and go to bed,” the war commander ordered.
When he used that voice, it was best to obey. Damedran and his uncle slammed through opposite doors, leaving Orthan to finish the ale alone and then douse the light.
Chapter Twenty-One
After a sleepless night during which Jehan’s brain insisted on reviewing, with remorseless repetition, every single mistake he’d made in deed or speech with Sasharia, he got up, drank the hottest, strongest coffee the innkeeper could brew, then left the humble dockside inn where he’d thought to get overdue rest.
He stopped at the bathhouse and paid to use their cleaning frame. No time for a real bath, and anyway it was going to be far too hot, he thought, staring at the knife-edged shafts of yellow early morning sunlight painting the wooden wall dividing the men’s side from the women’s.
The sun was climbing into midsummer brilliance when he crossed up an old pathway behind the ruins of a castle long forgotten, and now used mainly for its stone. There, in the shade of a web-clogged alcove he paused to change out of the plain clothes and hat, pulling on his brown velvet.
He rolled up his old outfit, tucked it under his arm, and started up the back trail used by locals who hired on as stable and maintenance support staff at the guard barracks and academy. A few steps up past some flowering shrubs, his shoulder blades prickled. Unseen eyes? He stepped to the side, hand going to his sword, then dropping when he saw four cadet-aged young fellows walking behind him single file.
Three walked and one sauntered, a tall fellow with black hair and pale brown eyes of a distinctive shade—flecked with gold—that evoked flame in that strong summer light. His features were sharp, his gaze sharper; memory stirred from somewhere way back years ago, on the other side of the world.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
The tall one grinned, but did not speak.
“Not really,” another one murmured, and when Jehan looked his way his breath caught. He was about to exclaim, “Senrid?” when he realized that this fellow was not Senrid Montredaun-An, king of Marloven Hess—and head of the academy to which Jehan had gone to learn war skills so long ago.
Senrid never wore this sort of thoughtful, almost scholarly expression, nor had he grown as tall. Most tellingly, this fellow’s eyes were brown, an ordinary light brown, and King Senrid’s were grayish blue. And their spoken accents were completely different. The resemblance was nothing more than a slender build, curly short blond hair . . . and the brain fatigue of a hot summer’s day.
“I’m David,” the fellow said, pronouncing it not Sartoran DAUF-ed, but Marlovan-style, DAY-vid. David gestured at the three others. “We’re here to play in your games.”
Jehan took in the two unfamiliar ones. First, a tallish, thin fellow with a dreamy expression, wide-set brown eyes and an unkempt mat of curly light brown hair that brought Prince Math instantly and forcibly to mind. The last was a mere boy, scarcely cadet age from the looks of him. He seemed an everyday small boy, dressed in homespun shirt and riding trousers, brown hair clipped back from a high brow, though Jehan almost immediately began observing subtle anomalies, beginning with his stillness, and the steady, observant hazel gaze that seemed far older than you ever saw in any child’s face.
“And the rest of you are?” He suspected he would not get a real answer.
Nor did he. “Competitors,” David said, and then, with an air of absent courtesy, “You have no objection to a little roustabout, perhaps?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jehan recognized that they knew who he was. Where had he seen that tall one before? Now it seemed important.
“Nothing untoward,” David soothed. “Shall we meet after the day’s entertainment?”
“I suspect”—Jehan eyed the tall one again—“that I will want very much to do that. Where have I seen you before?”
“Here and there.” The tall one grinned briefly, no more than a flash of teeth. His voice was lower than you’d expect from someone that lean. Low, husky—and again familiar.
Sweat trickled down Jehan’s forehead. The morning air had gone from warm to hot, and the sun was still low. “Go on. Sign up. Do whatever it is you’re going to do.” Things could hardly get worse.
The tall one laughed softly as they passed on by.
The small one was last. As he drew near Jehan he said in Sartoran, “Stay your path.”
He dashed after his companions and they vanished around the mossy old wall of the ruined castle, reappearing halfway up the trail at a dead run.
Jehan veered between amusement and annoyance at some urchin advising him how to get to his own academy. As if he was likely to stray off the—
Path. In Sartoran. He listened to the words again, thinking in Sartoran instead of just mentally translating the words.
Stay. Your. Path.
In Sartoran, the connotation was closer to You’re doing the right thing.
Now, that was strange. He paused to peer upward against the rising sun as the four mystery visitors vanished over the lip of the hill toward the public path. He forgot about the heat, his headache, even his hunger, and began to lope up the trail toward the back way into the old, abandoned storage rooms where he usua
lly left his change of clothes. Maybe the day that had promised a long stretch of annoyance might yield some surprises after all.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lesi Valleg wept for joy, shaking her head impatiently so her vision would not blur. She stood with a cluster of seniors at the sideline of the archery butts, and watched the little boy in homespun lift his bow, pull back, and aim in the same fluid motion so he was one line from thumb to the back elbow, and when he let fly his arm snapped out so his arms were a straight line, thumb to thumb. And then his shooting hand swept down, as smooth and unthinking as the folding wings of a swan.
It was effortless, graceful, expert—and the best shot of the day, despite his age, despite the distance and oh, oh, oh, despite Damedran leaning against the wall on the other side of the butts, his bruised face expressionless.
“See that? Arm all the way back,” she muttered, wiping her eyes. “It really does make a difference.” And the other seniors standing near her, instead of rolling their eyes or sneering or yawning as they always had in the past, agreed with mutters of wonder.
Once Prince Jehan had told her that this was the way he’d been taught to shoot by that academy on the other side of the continent. But that fact had only earned scoffing. Every cadet knew he was a cloud-brain. And everyone knew the Marlovens were mere horse riders, they didn’t train on water as well as land.
If you want to shoot you need first to learn form. Aim will then come, she remembered her old teacher saying. It wouldn’t do to remind everyone. She’d be accused of swagger. And anyway, that boy had carried off the silver cup. She didn’t need to remind them.
She followed the crowd, hoping she could talk to him. She wanted to tell him it was a pleasure to watch him. It would have been a pleasure to shoot against him, no matter who won, if only her arm hadn’t been broken.
But the trumpet blew the signal to change events, and most of the competitors, locals as well as cadets, swarmed to the tables to get some water before lining up for the last and favorite event of the land games: the relay race, which took all afternoon.
“You don’t have to go,” Ban said to Damedran as they followed more slowly. He regretted his earlier triumph when Damedran was summarily thumped in the last grappling match, though he’d enjoyed it thoroughly (and privately) at the time.
Damedran turned his puffy face Ban’s way, then flashed up the back of his hand.
Despite the insult Ban was not angry. Not when he saw the spasm of pain that tightened Damedran’s features.
Ban, Bowsprit, and a couple of others exchanged wry looks. Nothing felt quite real any more; life was no longer predictable. One thing was clear, despite his drubbing Damedran was going to carry on anyway.
The trumpet pealed, and everyone looked up.
“Teams gather here,” bawled the captain in charge of the relay.
Damedran limped slowly to the edge of the field from which the sprinters would take off on the first leg of the relay. Paying no attention to the chatter around him, he said, “I’ll ride. Can’t run or canoe.” He gave them a painful grimace that was supposed to be a smile.
Ban saw Wolfie peering intently to one side, his mouth twisted in the smirk that meant either he’d been fighting or was going to fight. And there was Red moseying along, looking skyward, as he passed by the various teams assembling. He slowed near the strangers who had so unaccountably appeared and taken all the prizes. Red stopped as the unfamiliar four talked briefly and quietly among themselves, bent to pick something from one boot, then he straightened up and sauntered with a bit more speed to Wolfie, and muttered behind his hand.
Wolfie beckoned to a couple of their other followers, and Ban suspected what was probably going to happen. He knew his guess was right when Wolfie stepped up to Damedran and said, “The little one is doing the ride.” He chuckled the way he always did before somebody ended up getting scragged. “Guess they won’t win the relay.”
Damedran shook his head.
Ban said in disgust, “You’re going to drop on the littlest one.”
Wolfie, Red, and the other two turned his way, their faces ranging from guilty to defiant to angry.
Damedran said, surprising them all, “That’s not an . . . an . . . a fair scrag. Dropping on a little boy, that’s just rabbiting.”
“Fair?” Wolfie repeated derisively. For him, a scrag was a scrag. Any excuse served to have one, because he always won.
“Fair?” Red repeated, as if he’d never heard the word.
“But you dropped Lesi Valleg,” Ban observed. It had been a guess. He saw from Damedran’s quick grimace that he’d been right.
“That was different,” Damedran muttered, trying not to look yet again to where the tall, thin girl with the sling-bound arm stood, her straight brows low, watching him with unsmiling intensity. “We couldn’t win against her. I wanted, I needed, wins in everything.” He dropped his head back, uttering a strangled laugh.
“It isn’t different,” Ban said.
Damedran’s mouth tightened. He opened his hand. “She wouldn’t have won anyway. Not against that little brat.”
“Who are they?” asked Calan Pradiesh, Red’s cousin from the coast.
“I don’t know.” Damedran shifted with painful care to observe the newcomers, who stood in line, the tall one grinning at something the short one said, the fair-haired one looking pensive, the one with the wild, curly hair watching two raptors riding the thermals high up under the flat carpet of tiny puff clouds that promised rain. “But he used moves I’ve never seen.” He fingered his shoulder, winced again. “Or felt.”
They all reflected on the grappling. The lazy way the tall one moved to block, to deflect, and his whip-fast, brutal attacks. All without breaking a sweat.
“They won’t win,” Wolfie reminded them, rubbing his hands.
Ban studied the small boy who stood there so still and poised as he contemplated the stands where the commanders sat with the prince. Neither of the Randarts smiled, and all the seniors knew they were angry. But they could do nothing. The competition was open, and had been for years.
Nobody cared what Prince Jehan thought.
Ban said suddenly, privately, to Bowsprit, “I think . . .” He shook his head.
Bowsprit turned his thin, pointy nose toward Wolfie’s huge, muscular form, and then to the small, slender boy who was probably about nine, if that. “I think so, too.”
“First-leg runners, line up here,” called the captain. “Second-leg canoe, follow Captain Semmeg, third-leg mountain climbers, follow Captain Torvic, and the horse riders for the last leg, you go with Captain Lesstrad to your posts. We’ve got animals up there waiting for you.” The trumpet played the signal, and a roar went up as the relay racers separated.
Ban took off behind Captain Torvic, along with the five other members of cadet teams, two members of the royal fleet, and the blond foreigner with the pensive face, the one who had won every single sword match.
Ban loped in the fellow’s direction, questions forming in his mind, but the other cadets reached the unknown first.
“Where you from?” piped a ten-year-old.
“Oh, here and there, you might say,” was the answer, with a faint trace of accent. “Never really settled in one place.”
“Where’d you learn your sword work?”
The fellow smiled. “Various teachers. They tend to be hard on mistakes, so, you know, we learn to make as few as possible.”
“How hard?” asked a fourteen-year-old girl with the squint-eyed distrust of the middle teens.
“Let’s say . . . they broke us of bad habits.”
Everyone, even the ten-year-old, heard the humorous ambiguity behind “broke.”
“Belay the chatter and hurry up there,” called Captain Torvic.
That ended the talk until they reached the site for their leg of the relay. While they waited, the newcomer prowled around looking down at the road, up at the cliffs, at the distant sea, at the sky, and though Ban watc
hed him steadily, he never turned Ban’s way.
The newcomer with the frizzy hair was first to their post, and the blond one took off. One of their own group was next, crimson faced with effort, and Ban sprinted up the mountain, hoping he would not see Wolfie or Red, but afraid he knew where they were.
When he reached the last leg, gasping with effort, the little boy was gone, and the blond fellow sat on the grass, smiling at the sky. Ban almost said something, but shook his head and started back down the trail to the academy.
It was a long, hot, gloomy walk. He took the horse trail anyway, but didn’t see anyone.
When he reached the academy, it was to find out that the newcomers had won. The small boy rode bareback into the center of the parade ground on a high-spirited charger, his hands not even on the reins.
Prince Jehan was the first to applaud, and then the others joined, but not with any spirit. The river-rush of voices all talking and exclaiming was almost louder than the clapping.
Bowsprit and Ban, having hoped the boy would escape being scragged by Wolfie, Red, and their chosen few senior cadets, said nothing at all as they followed the glum seniors to the parade ground for the distribution of the prizes.
Up in the stands, Dannath Randart was so angry he felt his blood boiling in a drumbeat through his head. But he schooled himself to sit without moving, fists on his knees, as he stared down at the shambles of his plan.
Plans could be remade. He knew that. He glowered at his nephew, who limped from the horse picket across to the senior line. Why did the idiot have to ride in the relay when he could barely sit his horse, just to lose yet again? Now Randart had to consider ways to wrench some kind of victory from the distasteful, no, the shameful exhibition.
The blame would go squarely on the shoulders of the staggeringly stupid white-haired fatwit sitting to his right, who was now getting up and flicking dust from his faultless velvet in order to go down to the field to hand out the prizes.
Randart glared at Jehan. “Those newcomers. I want them.” And at the shocked look on Orthan’s face, he forced a semblance of civility into his tone. “I believe the king would want to hear about their training. Please, your highness, request them to honor us for a celebratory glass up in the command tower.”
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