There was a sharp sound of something flicking through the air. A wasp-like sting brought him up and he slapped a hand against his injured neck.
Peashot glared and ran. Aedan forgot everything in the surge of indignation. This was one injury, one foul more than he was prepared to take. He had no hope of catching the fleet-footed fox, at least not with heavy plodding strides, so he tore at his laces, hurled the shoes away, and set off in pursuit. Peashot glanced over his shoulder just in time to see Aedan flying towards him.
Wrath and fear urged them to a speed that should have been impossible at this stage of the day. Aedan had to slow somewhat, and Peashot, ever aware, slowed as much as he could afford while still preserving a safe distance. The trail led them back to the road and they ran on, the walls of Castath rising in the distance. Aedan’s feet were taking a hammering on the stony road, but freedom from the waterlogged shoes had given him wings. A large crowd of boys was passing through the city gates about a mile ahead – it looked like a good hundred of them – so the hope of making the first eighty was gone. He paid no attention to the runners he was passing and fixed his eyes on the little darting menace.
Peashot was showing himself to be fleeter of foot than Aedan had expected. They ran on, weaving through slower groups, and began swerving between carts and pedestrians as the road intersected others and traffic increased. Finally the walls were before them. They sped through the city gates, blind to the guards and deaf to the cheers and laughter of the people.
Instead of taking the main road, Peashot slipped down a narrow alley, but over the past weeks this had become Aedan’s ground too, and the gap between them closed as they threaded the dim corridors. Aedan could hear his tormentor’s breathing now. Another few turns and he would have him. Finally they burst into the open. Peashot stumbled for the first time and it was all Aedan needed. He shoved from behind, throwing the smaller boy down, and then pinned him on his stomach, a knee on his back.
But now that he had Peashot at his mercy, he hesitated.
He remembered the last time he had taken personal revenge, letting his temper and hatred have their way. It had not felt good. It had not made him feel strong – threatening yes, but not strong. Nor had it done anything to mend the hollowness his father had left in him. As he looked at his fist, he understood for the first time that using it this way could never be strength. It was weakness, a spineless yielding to low urges.
He took the weight off his knee and sat down against a sun-bathed wall, giving himself over to the ragged pursuit of air and the throbbing in his bad leg. Peashot turned over and sat up, surprise and relief blending on his face between the red and white splotches of exhaustion.
He had not made it through the trials, Aedan thought, but he had learned much, and he would find another way to achieve his purposes, somehow. The warm sun lulled him as he considered his future.
From across the courtyard, he heard the sound of heavy footfall as two boys crossed the space and were greeted with, “Seventy-seven, seventy-eight.”
It only took a heartbeat for realisation burst on Aedan and Peashot. They sprang from the ground and sprinted across the open courtyard just as a large group of boys emerged at the other end, also at a full sprint. The distance closed; it would be tight. Peashot was ahead, but Aedan’s bare feet moved in a blur as he drew up. The other boys were taller, fierce-looking contestants that pounded the earth in big strides. Wind hummed in Aedan’s ears as he leaned forward and threw every last ounce of strength into his legs. He passed the smaller boy and they shot between the finish markers to the sound of, “Seventy-nine, eighty!”
His bad leg buckled and he plunged forward, skidding and tumbling until he came to rest in a panting heap. He was only dimly conscious of a growing riot of voices behind him. Something about barefoot and rules. A horrible thought began to grow as one of the race officials approached him.
“What happened to your shoes?” the official asked.
“I took them off on the last section of the trail.”
“You were told to keep them on. It was one of the rules.”
“We were only told that for the swim. Nobody said anything about the run.”
The official shook his head. “You should have known. You were meant to keep your shoes and will have to be disqualified. It means that –”
“Silence!”
The voice was enormous, and quite familiar. The courtyard hushed instantly. Osric was not shouting, just making himself heard. Those near him backed away.
“Rules are presented before they are to be obeyed, not after. Agreed?”
Everyone agreed except the boy who had raised the objection. Osric fixed his eyes on him. The boy nodded quickly.
“No rule against running barefoot was made known. Does anyone contest that?”
Nobody contested it. Osric walked away and conversation resumed.
Aedan hobbled over towards Peashot. There were several things he wanted to say, many of them barbed. The small boy’s defiant screen was up, but Aedan had no desire to break it again. Finally, putting his hand to the tender spot on his neck, Aedan grinned.
“Good shot,” he said, and lurched off to the barracks.
The nurse removed the last of the bandages and Aedan stared at the polished brass plate, shocked by his reflection.
“The top of your ear will not regrow I’m afraid. The hair on the side of your head may, in time. But I doubt it. I think the best would be to keep your hair a little longer to cover the damaged area.”
Aedan barely heard. He had not expected this. There were scars that gave a kind of respectability, but this did the exact reverse. A heaviness descended on him. How could he present himself in daylight? He looked like a chicken half-plucked and part-mutilated. One of the younger nurses walked into the room. He turned his head away in embarrassment, keeping the ruined side hidden from her. The older nurse saw what was happening and gestured for her young assistant to leave.
“This may be a difficult time for you, Aedan, but you will be your own worst critic. Nobody will pay it as much attention as you, and eventually not even you will notice. Besides, you are strong and healthy. You have much that others don’t.”
On the way back to his dorm, words fluttered around and behind him – singed, branded, scorched, roasted. Then there was the innocent question of a child come to visit his father at the barracks: “Daddy, what happened to that boy’s head? He looks so ugly.” The embarrassment of the parents was almost more stinging than the curiosity of their child. The nurse, Aedan was beginning to realise, had not really told him the truth.
The first eighty were back, following a two-day rest. Aedan had spent most of the time sleeping and reading at Osric’s house – his leg and ankle were so stiff and sore than he could not walk the day after the race. He had been looking forward to the company of the others. Now he dreaded it.
The groups had been rearranged and the only face he recognised from his original dorm was Peashot’s. The reception from the others was as bad as he’d feared.
“Wow! What happened to him?”
“You should have kept the bandage.”
“There’s a barber out there who needs to be tried in court.”
“You forgot to toast the other side.”
“If I had a hog with a face like yours, I’d doc its tail and – Ouch! Which snivelling son of a …”
Aedan stared in surprise. Peashot faced the big boy down, his little tube still poised. It was Jemro, a beefy young giant said to be as mean as he was strong.
For someone of his size, he covered the distance at an impressive speed. Peashot ducked the first blow and landed one of his own in a muscle-bound neck before the momentum of the charge carried him to ground. He received only one stunning punch to the eye. The next stopped short when Aedan grabbed a handful of blonde hair and tugged.
Jemro bellowed and leapt to his feet, catching Aedan with a wild backhand that sent him reeling. Aedan’s bad right leg collapsed under him, but he
scrambled to his feet again. He was not afraid of boys like this.
“If you had a hog,” he shouted, “your manners would make your mother unsure which one to feed on the floor.”
Jemro looked like he did not know exactly what Aedan meant, but he understood the tone clearly enough. “Nobody insults me!” he yelled, and charged.
Aedan backed away quickly, taking his weight on his good leg and keeping his eyes locked on Jemro’s until he felt the wall behind him. As the charge commenced, he narrowed his eyelids to slits and let his features contort with the anticipation of pain. Jemro would crush him against the wall – the eagerness in the big boy’s face was plain to see.
Then, when the distance between them was little over a body’s length, Aedan dropped under the charge and felt the wall shudder with a meaty thud and a clonk that had the percussive quality of a skull.
Jemro moaned. His trembling knees appeared unable to reach a decision. Aedan assisted them with a good kick, dropping the bully in a solid heap. He stepped back and waited, but the oversized boy only cradled his head and whimpered.
Aedan hadn’t exactly thumped him; it hadn’t been a fight in the traditional sense, but he didn’t think Jemro would be too eager to start with him again. The chatter resumed as he walked back. Boys retold their favourite moments of the encounter in excited voices. Aedan found his bunk. It was the same one, and Peashot had his too.
“You don’t have to fight my battles,” Peashot said. “I didn’t ask for your help.”
“I didn’t ask for yours. Why did you shoot him?”
Peashot thought about it. “He just needed tenderising. When he started speaking like that I had no choice.”
“Why did you think I needed tenderising?” Aedan asked.
“You reminded me of someone I knew, someone I owed.”
“And now?”
“No. You’re alright now.”
“Good,” Aedan said feeling his bruised jaw. “I’m feeling tender enough.”
The next month was one of study. At the end of the month they would be examined on the knowledge they had acquired. Their characters would then be reviewed and the final list of twenty names compiled.
The bombardment of information began on the first day and covered history, law, navigation and cartography, foreign relations, and war strategy. Giddard drew a few chuckles when he pointed out that the last two subjects were not intended as a sequence.
Those who could not write sweated with the effort of retaining information that now streamed from the masters. Giddard and Rodwell took the classes of history and law respectively, and both proved to be thoroughly impressive teachers, particularly Giddard. He could hold the whole lecture hall in silence, retelling ancient chronicles in a way that brought dead kings to life and stirred the dust of forgotten battles until they raged again in the minds of his students.
Law was far more interesting than any had expected. Rodwell, in his piping voice, presented the subject by making people the focus rather than policies. He was careful to maintain a flow of interesting examples illustrating how laws were applied to individual situations. Unfortunately he also maintained a flow of frothy missiles, as those near the front quickly discovered. It was a curious thing to see boys stampeding into his class only to fill up from the back.
Aedan began to itch again with a returning hunger for knowledge, a hunger that he had known back in the Mistyvales when his mother had been able to teach him without interference. His father had exploded at them one afternoon, accusing her of turning Aedan against him with her lessons. By then, Aedan had reached the stage where he was conversant in two languages. Kalry had also been taught Orunean, and the three of them had often shared long conversations in the foreign tongue. Clauman, who had always sneered at the idea of being taught anything by his wife, had seen these gatherings as a personal attack, as if he were being shown up for his illiteracy, excluded and mocked. It was during the last of these confrontations when Aedan had stepped in to defend his mother, and learned to fear his father’s hands. After that, Nessa had stopped teaching her son during the day and only risked short lessons at night.
Now, without the looming dread of his father’s wrath, Aedan’s mind stirred, looked about, and found itself eager. He scribbled notes as fast as his hand would allow. Once, when the boys reading over his shoulder began to distract him, he switched to Orunean, and was rewarded with their frustration and eventual loss of interest.
Classes would end at mid-afternoon, and the boys could spend the evenings as they chose. Most gathered to discuss and refresh themselves on what they had been taught during the day, cudgelling their brains to retain the growing mountain of material. Few could read or write. Some of the literate ones kept to themselves, revising their notes in private. Others, like Aedan, would read them out to the groups that quickly formed around them. It was no labour to him – at last his company was widely sought, even if it was only for the sake of what he could offer.
Peashot was seldom absent from these groups. Aedan often noticed him repeating extracts to himself, and imagined his ears to have the same foxy sharpness as his eyes.
Though they were not quite friends, there was a growing understanding between them, a growing respect. There were friendlier, politer boys, but there was something dependable about Peashot that ran deeper than his manners – which were appalling at all times. Aedan realised it when he imagined being in another fight. Though he wasn’t sure how, he knew that Peashot would be the one to stand with him.
Not many in the dormitory could read, so Aedan was regularly prevailed upon. Jemro objected on the first night, saying he would smash the mouth of the next person who opened it, because he wanted to sleep. There was a short lull and then an eruption of voices, individual boys finding courage in the anonymity of the mass. Jemro was told, among other things, to go sleep at the farm with the other lazy beasts, to go have a rematch with the wall, and to go stuff his head into a compost heap and moan there. The upshot was that he pretended to sleep while Aedan read, repeating sections that some struggled with and adding a few bits of relevant information gathered from his own reading.
Some proved to be adept learners, in spite of the inability to use letters. One boy, Vayle, understood foreign relations in such depth – his father being a sea merchant – that he was able to explain some aspects in even more detail than the lecturer. He also seemed to be possessed of a near-perfect memory, recalling any facts that had been too quick for the pen. They assumed he was illiterate until he snatched one of Aedan’s more poorly recorded pages and filled in the blanks. Vayle simply did not need to write in order to remember.
When it was discovered that Aedan was apprenticed to the great general himself, he was harried for inside information concerning the exams, but Osric had foreseen this and forbidden Aedan to contact him until the exams were over.
The weeks passed and the day approached. A stony-faced clerk explained how things would proceed. All the exams would be oral. There would be six rooms, one per exam. The boys would enter each of the rooms individually where they would be asked a set of questions and their answers would be evaluated.
The announcement caused an immediate outcry and panic. What was the sixth topic?
The clerk would tell them nothing more.
Aedan was kept up late the night before the exams with questions and requests to revise sections. Nobody minded. Even Jemro was seen to be mouthing a few of the passages.
The big day arrived. It was a dark, icy morning, an iron sliver of midwinter’s heart. The courtyard was buried under frozen sleet. Boots stamped constantly. The same clerk instructed the group to line up according to height. Peashot mumbled something and scraped his way to the front; Aedan was only a few places behind. Once a boy was called, the rest would not see him again until they had finished their examinations and were taken to a hall where they were to wait.
Aedan watched as Peashot was called and led towards the first exam. The shivering, stamping line watched i
n silence, but things got noisy when they realised conversation was not forbidden. Aedan’s turn came sooner than he had expected. He tried to calm himself as he was led along a one-walled, open air passage to the first room. An official stopped him and made him wait several paces short of a closed door. When the door creaked open, the boy who had stood ahead of him emerged wearing a look of abject shock.
“Next!”
A dart could not have given him a sharper jolt. Aedan scurried into the room where he was confronted by a large desk, behind which sat Giddard, his lined face as hard as the morning’s ice, and two clerks who were dipping quills and preparing to score the new candidate. Aedan suddenly realised that Giddard was speaking – no – had finished speaking, and was looking at him, apparently awaiting a response.
“I – I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening properly.”
“Not listening properly? That’s a poor start when our purpose is to determine if you listened properly for the past month. I asked your name.”
“My name is uh …” His name. What was it?
Giddard furrowed his brow.
The scribes frowned.
Thoughts scattered like rabbits under a hawk’s shadow. There would be no chance of recalling anything now, not even a name. What a way to leave. He would be known as Aedan the nameless.
Ah!
“Aedan, sir. Yes. Aedan. That’s my name. Aedan.”
The clerks frowned again and shook their heads as they wrote.
“Very well Aedan, I have four questions for you. Try to answer promptly.” He directed a meaningful look.
“Yes, sir.”
The clerks dipped their pens and held them ready to pronounce judgement on the attempt.
“First: Name the kings who mark the seven epochs in Thirna’s history.”
Aedan relaxed. This would be easy. “Vendun, Tana, Merr, Athgrim, Eilif, Broknerra, and Elgar who still holds the throne at Tullenroe. Do you want me to say that Tana was a queen and not a king?”
Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1) Page 21