by P. M. Biswas
Kay huffed. “Have you thought about how I’d feel if I snuck you out and you got yourself killed?”
Tam softened. “There won’t be any real combat,” she cajoled him. “It’s just a scouting mission. At most we’ll have a tiny skirmish with some bandits—outlaws with bad teeth and worse weaponry. I’ll knock a couple of those teeth out, have an adventure, and show Borik that I can and should be sent out to battle.”
“I’m aware that it’s just a scouting mission, Tam. Do you honestly believe I’d agree to this if it weren’t?”
The guilt that had arisen in Tam during Emeraude’s nearly convincing lecture rose up in her again. It occurred to Tam that she was directly disobeying royal instructions that she remain uninvolved in the war, but Tam hoped she’d conduct herself with such courage and skill that she’d lay the queen’s—and Borik’s—concerns to rest. “Kay, I….”
Kay waved dismissively. “Don’t be remorseful. It doesn’t suit you. What’ll you do if there aren’t any bandits?”
“Then Borik and his unit won’t even know I’m there, because I won’t join them if there isn’t any fighting. And there likely won’t be. I’ll just skulk along behind them and get bored out of my skull.”
“At least you’ll still have a skull. Even if it is an empty one.”
“Hey! My skull’s not empty. Spear-craft requires more than a basic appreciation of the sciences. I’ve had to read about velocities and angles and arcs and gravity and—”
“Tam. You’re very knowledgeable. I wasn’t casting aspersions on your intellect. I just meant that your skull is empty of anything that isn’t spear-craft… and your obsession with practicing it against an enemy.” Kay kneaded his forehead as if he was getting a headache. “My mother will kill me for this.”
“Don’t be absurd. You’re her only heir. At most, she’ll maim you.”
“Thanks,” Kay said dryly. “That’s very reassuring.”
Tam grinned unrepentantly. “I wish us both luck.”
THAT NIGHT, Tam had a dream.
She knew it was a dream because she was back in the hut her parents had spent their joint furloughs in, between deployments. The hut had not been theirs but the government’s; such huts were lent out to those military families who were reunited in between campaigns and had little enough time together as it was. For that time and that time only, children like Tam were authorized to leave the dorm and reside with their parents in the hut allotted to them.
The leftovers of previous residents were scattered among the shelves and throughout the hut. As a child, Tam had entertained herself by exploring the hut and discovering a carved wooden pony stuffed betwixt the cooking utensils, or a yellow hair tie strewn beneath a sagging cot. There were stories in the memorabilia she found, stories about those who had come and gone.
It hadn’t seemed melancholy to her to be so fascinated by those stories. It had been a reminder that life went on and that her parents might be back again—that they might all live in this hut once more and that Tam would uncover new treasures here. For a while, before they had been confiscated by the dorm warden for bearing a suspicious resemblance to stolen possessions, Tam had kept a box of those souvenirs under her dormitory bunk.
In this dream she was four again. Her father was combing the tangles out of her hair, preparing to put one of those borrowed hair-ties on her. He was perched behind her on the hut’s lone rickety stool while Tam sat on the tiniest cot and swung her legs. Tam’s mother leaned against the opposite bed and sharpened her spear with a flint, the motions of her hand repetitive and hypnotic.
“How sharp does a spear have to be, Ma?” Tam asked. “And how can you tell when it’s sharp enough?”
Ma smirked and flipped the blade of her spear until it was flat against her forearm. “Like this,” she said and ran the blade slowly up her arm until the small hairs that grew there fell away. “If it can shave you? It’s sharp enough.”
“Zara,” Tam’s father chided. “You’re only emboldening Tam. She’ll steal your spear and go gallivanting all over town again. Or she’ll cut her veins open trying to copy your stunt.”
“It isn’t a stunt, it’s a lesson.”
“The best lesson,” Tam added.
Da scoffed. “You’d say so, wouldn’t you? Want to know what’s actually useful?” He brought the comb he’d been using on Tam up so that she could see it and tilted it at a low angle. “The angle at which a blade is sharpened influences its sharpness. A lower angle leads to a sharper blade.” He tilted the comb down even farther. “But a lower angle also weakens the edge. Blades sharpened at a very low angle may be sharper, but their durability will be lessened. They’ll get dull sooner and will have to be resharpened more frequently.”
Ma faked a yawn. “That was stunningly boring, Simion. Look at the poor child. Her eyes are glazed over. She’s four, not fourteen. Don’t subject her to your technical monologues until she’s of an age to comprehend them.”
“I comprehend them!” Tam chirped, more out of pity for her father than because she got what Da had been saying, and mayhap Da discerned that, because he winced.
“Tam has to learn that bladecraft isn’t all about spectacle,” Da said to Ma. “Bladecraft is about discipline and patience.”
“I prefer ‘persistence’ to ‘patience,’” said Ma, “but go on.”
Da glared. “And I prefer my ‘technical monologues’ to your frivolous displays.”
“Frivolous?” Ma arched her brow. “I was under the impression that to you, those displays were devastatingly attractive.”
Da spluttered.
“Why,” Ma said, eyes dancing, “did you not fall to your knees and propose to me after a display in which I hurled my spear high enough to permanently dent the weathervane atop Santri’s Pub?”
“That weathervane still doesn’t swivel like it should,” Da grumbled. “You owe Santri money for the repairs.”
“Please, like Santri doesn’t relate that anecdote three times a night to whichever patron is inebriated enough to listen.”
“Only because that patron always happens to be you.”
“Is my drinking prowess a frivolous display too?”
“Isn’t it?” Dad challenged. “How is you regaling Tam with your daft antics more beneficial to her than my talk on spear maintenance?”
“More beneficial?” Ma teased him. “So this is a parenting competition, is it?”
“It shouldn’t be a competition. It should be us collaborating so that we can teach our careless daughter how to be cautious.”
“We couldn’t teach her to be cautious if we conceived her and birthed her all over again,” Ma drawled, and Da went red.
“Zara!” he hissed.
“What’s ‘conceived’?” Tam asked, confused.
Da went even redder. “Nothing,” he said with dismay, while Ma dissolved into laughter.
Da stared at Ma for several minutes, even after her laughter had quieted and she’d resumed sharpening her spear.
“Um, Da?” Tam tugged on his shirt. “My hair?”
Da jumped, blushing again. Why was he blushing so much? Given how fair he was compared to Ma’s shadow-dark complexion, his blushes were unmistakable. And inexplicable. “Of course, Tam-kin. My apologies.” Da carded the comb through her hair. “Do remember what I said when you sharpen your own blades someday—if you go into bladework, that is. You might grow up to be a tailor.”
“A tailor?” Tam screwed up her nose, then reconsidered. “Don’t tailors use blades? Like scissors? Isn’t almost every job bladework?”
“Yes, it is, you precocious urchin. How would you like your braid?”
“Braids,” Tam decided. “Plural. Lots of braids.”
“That’ll take ages,” Da griped but got to it nevertheless.
“Nice.” Ma winked at Tam as if at a co-conspirator. “I’ll sharpen my spear while Da braids your hair.”
“And when will I get to sharpen my spear?” Da asked her.
/> “I’ll sharpen it for you. Don’t worry, darling,” Ma said slyly, and Da’s blush flared back up.
But before he could reply, a tendril of smoke curled under the door of the hut, like a sooty, beckoning finger. It dwindled into an ashy, bitter odor, only to be followed by another tendril… and another. The stench of smoke gradually surrounded them.
Ma stood up. “There’s a fire in the fort. Maybe it’s just an accident.” She was uncommonly somber. “Maybe it’s not.”
“Maybe it’s Danis,” Da surmised solemnly.
“But that can’t be,” said Tam, because her dream-self vaguely recollected that this was yet early in the Great War, and that Danis was thousands of leagues away from Astaris. Danis could not be outside their walled city, let alone besieging it or torching it.
“Sadly, it can.” Ma slotted her spear into her belt and strode to the door. “I’m going to check. I’ll be back.”
No, you won’t be, Tam would have said, but her words had suddenly deserted her, leaving her voiceless, as she only was in her worst nightmares. So this was a nightmare, then. Not a dream.
Tam coughed as the fumes thickened. Her windpipe constricted convulsively. She sought to stand, to accompany her mother as she left, but Da dragged her back down onto the cot.
“Don’t,” he said as acrid smoke permeated the hut. He was eerily calm, like the smog wasn’t on the verge of choking them. The air had become cinder black and just as unbreathable. “Don’t go, Tam. The world’s on fire. Don’t go out there.”
Then why did you let Ma go out there? Tam would have accused him if she could have spoken.
Mysteriously, her father heard her anyhow, for he responded. “She had to go, Tam-kin,” he said gently, as if the smoke didn’t affect him at all. “And I will too. Someone has to put out the fire.”
If someone has to put out the fire, Tam thought as the dense smoke suffocated her, why can’t it be me?
TAM WOKE in the morning with a crick in her neck, a throbbing in her temples, and an old, familiar ache in her heart.
Well, that had been an encouraging dream, hadn’t it?
The dream, half memory and half prophecy as it was, had left Tam with a chilling sense of foreboding, but it must just be her overcooked brain warning her against implementing her plan. It wasn’t like Astar would have let her parents’ souls out of the nightlands for a brief sojourn into their daughter’s sleeping mind, just so they could warn her.
But what if Astar had done exactly that?
So what if He had? What Astar did was His business; what Tam did was hers.
And so what if Tam’s parents had indeed been warning her, as parents often did? Even if Tam had abided by Da’s counsel in the dream, she’d still have ended up dead of smoke poisoning. Might as well go riding out to confront the fire.
The only concession Tam could make to their warning was to take her practice spear along—the spear she had sharpened just as her parents had taught her. There was a rectangle of skin near her right elbow that was always conspicuously hairless. Ma would have been proud.
The dream had dredged up emotions in Tam that she would rather not deal with. Reliving what it had been like to have parents had made her gut wrench, and abnormal as it was to want to have more nightmares, she prayed she would, just to be able to see Ma and Da again. Just to be able to feel Da’s fingers in her hair. Just to hear Ma’s laugh.
Tam knuckled her tightly shut eyes. Wetness leaked out of them and smeared the backs of her hands, but she just wiped them on her tunic and climbed down from her bunk.
Wallowing in her loss wouldn’t get Tam anywhere. Working with it, though—taking it out of herself, where it was buried fathoms-deep, and shaping it into pure, diamond-hard dedication—that would at least prevent others from experiencing the same loss she had. She could go out there and do battle so that, when Astaris triumphed, the Astarian soldiers would come back to their children.
That much Tam could do.
No.
That much she had to do. Not to do so would be cowardice. And her parents hadn’t raised a coward.
Today Tam would prove it.
She freshened up and peeked out the dorm window. Luckily the dormitory’s warden was busy overseeing the offloading of supplies from the grocer’s cart. That would enable Tam to slip away unseen.
Or not quite unseen.
Piotr, the sixteen-year-old boy whose bunk was below Tam’s, got up when he saw her retrieving the rough-woven knapsack beneath her mattress.
“Going somewhere?” he asked lightly—and knowingly, damn him. Tam was infamous for her roguery.
She just shrugged and hauled the knapsack over her shoulder. It was full of food, packed with rolls of bread and strips of dried meat that Tam had secreted away in her pockets during yesterday’s breakfast. “Nowhere.”
“Like always,” Piotr quipped and proffered his arm for Tam to take. It was a gesture that said he would honor the pact upheld by all the children in the dorm—a pact to never rat on each other, no matter what. Snitches weren’t popular among the soldiers’ progeny.
Tam clasped Piotr’s arm firmly in camaraderie.
“Ow!” Piotr exclaimed. “You and your gods-be-damned muscles. You’re short, but you’re built like a rock. What manner of torturous training does Borik put you through? Aren’t you underage?”
That was true. Borik only gave Tam minimal training, since she was still seventeen. After his interference with Maryada’s tutelage, Tam had been relegated back to an unofficial apprenticeship and was forbidden from sparring.
But Tam did observe the spear warriors as they trained and sparred, and mirrored what they did, such that her actual training was on par with theirs. Or so she hoped. Maryada often passed by to give her tips when Tam was practicing with the wooden dummies; Borik had banned Maryada from sparring with Tam, but not from speaking to her. “Borik doesn’t do much,” Tam affirmed. “It’s just that there’s a lot of hefting to do.” Tam mimed hefting her spear.
“You spear-wielders….” Piotr shook his head. “My Ma’s a swordswoman and she’s formidable, but her spear-toting friends are simply petrifying. I can’t even imagine what you’ll be like at her age. You’ll probably be capable of crushing my bones in your fists.”
Tam preened. “’Course I will.”
Piotr chortled. “Like that isn’t scary. I’m just happy to be training to be a scholar, like Prince Kay. I couldn’t lift anything heavier than a quill.”
“Leave the heavy lifting to me,” Tam boasted. She strutted out of the dorm, her morale restored after that dreadful dream. Hearing that all her hard work was paying off—even in her appearance—was rewarding.
Tam collected her practice spear from the armory as she customarily did before her daily training, and her being there was so natural that the armory sentries didn’t even question her as she popped in and out.
Now all that remained was getting herself a horse and meeting Kay at the palace gates.
CARADOC, THE Royal Huntsman, was dashing in his brown leather vest and gold-buckled breeches. Kay stole glances at those breeches from under the rim of his hunting helmet, and Tam cooperated by staying out of Kay’s line of sight. It was the least she could do.
“There are unlikely to be any wayward boars this season,” Caradoc said in befuddlement at Kay’s peculiarly timed boar hunt, “as they have mostly migrated south for the summer. We may yet chance upon a herd of deer, however.”
Kay hunched, put off as he always was by violence, be it against humans or animals. “Brilliant,” he mumbled. “A deer will do.”
Caradoc looked at Kay askance. That was not the zealous attitude of a prince who had convened a hunting party on a whim.
Tam, in contrast, was all but vibrating with excitement on her not-so-noble steed. It was a horse she’d borrowed from the huntsman’s stables for the occasion, an aging chestnut mare named Maple, who had looked Tam up and down with a gimlet eye and had apparently found her wanting. Maple had t
olerated Tam saddling her, but it was a grudging tolerance, like Maple was resigning herself to a young rider’s incompetence.
Well, Tam would show her. Tam would show everyone.
Shortly, Kay’s missive that he was going on a hunt would be delivered to Queen Emeraude, but by the time the queen received it and deduced that Tam was the source of this bizarre scheme, it would be too late. Tam would be out of the fortress and free to join her comrades. Not that they were her comrades. Yet. But they would be.
Only the thought of Emeraude being disappointed in her niggled at Tam. But Emeraude wouldn’t be disappointed for long. She had given Tam her heartfelt advice, much as Tam’s own parents would have, and while Tam regretted having to ignore that advice, she was resolved to persuade Emeraude that she was right to have ignored it. Tam’s method of persuasion was a bit extreme, that was all.
Just a bit.
Tam inhaled the crisp morning breeze and admired the blue-gray hills beyond the fort’s towering stone walls. At last she’d be able to venture beyond those walls and into the wilds, where her destiny awaited her. She could hear its call, a distant siren song filled equal parts with terror and rapture. Her spear quivered in her grasp, as if eager to launch itself at an opponent. Her pulse pounded.
Caradoc reminded the group of how to behave safely during the hunt and which dangers to avoid. Tam gave the appearance of being attentive, but in reality she was desperate to be off.
“We will not venture beyond our hunting grounds,” Caradoc said. Kay gazed at him adoringly, hanging on every word, as if Caradoc were singing a ballad and not rattling off a list of potentially deadly threats. “We will stay within the boundaries of Lyton Forest and will not, under any circumstances, veer off into the Wanderwood. If we meander into that accursed place, none of us will get back alive. The elves will bewitch us with their vile magic and then kill us. I shouldn’t have to remind any of you of that, and do forgive me, Your Highness, for haranguing you with what you already—”
“No, no,” Kay hastened to assure him. “I appreciate your, um. Your professionalism?”