by R. J. Price
“Which allows her to take down even the warriors who are trying to protect her,” Jer said.
“Not every woman needs a warrior to protect her, let alone wants one. I thought I raised you boys to see that, to understand that?” Ervam said.
“It’s not women that I have a problem training, it’s ranked women,” Jer countered. “They already have magic, and then you want to put a stick in their hands and show them how to gut a man? You’re as bad as Aren, wanting to know how to fight like a man. There is a balance to our world and that balance is men fight, women do magic. Magic is more frightening than fighting, so I don’t see why all women want to learn to fight.”
“Fighting is in our blood. Women have always learned to fight, usually alongside their man,” Ervam said.
“You would allow Aren to train to fight like a man?” Jer asked.
“Would you want to know how to use magic, if it might save your life?” Ervam said in response.
“A warrior doesn’t use magic, just like a woman doesn’t fight,” Jer said.
“Mie is a warrior and he has magic; what would you do about your brother, then?” Ervam said, raising his voice. “Slaughter him, claim the right to death because he’s obviously flawed in some way? Where does it stop? With the scribes? They’re all thin and weak, so why allow them to continue to breed? After they’re gone? Well, why not start killing off the weaker ranks because what did they do to deserve to live?”
“Mie does not attempt to flaunt his magic and that is not what we are talking about,” Jer said.
“No, we’re talking about my training a healer to defend herself with a stick instead of reaching for her magic, as she tried to do when I gave her the stick in the first place,” Ervam said.
“What do you mean, reached for her magic?” Jer asked.
“Jer. When you attack a healer who doesn’t know how to defend herself physically, she reaches for her magic the way a queen rages.” Ervam paused to see if Jer was actually listening to him. “By teaching her to attack with physical objects, I’ve kept her from killing her attacker. Do you know what happens if I reach a village and the attacker is dead because the healer melted his eyeballs and organs out his orifices?”
Jer’s stomach did a strange little flip. He didn’t want to know how his father knew what a healer’s magic could do to destroy a body.
He was afraid to ask what his father would do in response to such a situation.
“I suppose any man who came to save a woman and found the object of his rage already obliterated, would have a frustrated reaction,” Jer said.
“No,” Ervam said. “Rushing home to seduce your new lover after making many excuses and then finding her engaged with the neighbour, that’s frustrating.”
“I don’t understand, obviously,” Jer said.
“Of course not, though think about Mar being hurt and you run to save her. Except as you launched yourself at her attacker, he simply vanished,” Ervam said. “Think on that for a moment.”
Jer closed his eyes and placed himself in that position as best he could. Lacking other ranks available to interact with Av and Jer, their father had created thinking times. Ervam would construct scenarios, many of which he had lived through as a young rank in the north, and instruct his sons on how to set the scene. From there their instincts filled in the rest.
Jer and Av both had active imaginations. Pairing that with their maturing instincts, and many of the thinking times were as real to them as the actual thing. The exercises helped in later years when they encountered other ranks in similar situations.
In his mind, Jer set the scene as his father described and let it roll through the emotions. Sliding through the motions, Jer moved to step between Mar and her attacker. Anger boiled through him, frustration at the same time. He was frustrated that someone would want to attack Mar. They should have known that Mar was his, shouldn’t have needed him to step up to protect her. His reputation should have been enough.
Reaching out to capture the attacker, Jer stumbled forward, through him. There was nothing.
Not just nothing to attack.
There was an unsettling nothingness settling over Jer’s mind. He didn’t know what to do. Who could he turn his anger on, Mar? If he was taken by a rage, would he be able to see the difference between friend and foe? If Mar were still in a rage, there was a chance that Mar would attack Jer and in his confusion he would hurt her rather than stopping her.
He opened his eyes and stared at his father.
“I think I need that drink,” Jer managed to get out.
“Welcome to the fields,” Ervam said quietly, calmly. “Let me get you that drink.”
“Fields?” Jer asked, turning towards his father as the man seemed to trail slowly towards the cupboard.
He waited, irritable, as Ervam returned with the brandy bottle and poured a small glass with all the speed of a slug. Snatching the glass from Ervam, Jer downed what was in it and set it back on the table as gently as he could.
“Fields,” Ervam said, suddenly back to speed. “Did you notice that? How everything slowed down? Let me know when you start feeling again.”
“The western baron has control of the stone circle,” Jer said. “Which has four fields. He called them the fields.”
“I suppose that must be what the emotion was named after. Warriors said to take to the fields would go out and settle themselves. This is a dangerous state of mind, Jer.”
“Dangerous?” Jer asked, picking up his glass.
He considered how many ways he could kill a man with that glass. Looking past the glass, to his father, Jer realized just how dangerous the emotion was. Very carefully he set the glass back on the table.
“Like a queen’s rage,” Jer said quietly.
“A queen’s rage tends to end in less blood,” Ervam said.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Aren watched Danya descend the steps with books in her arms. The healer smiled at Aren when she came down off the last step.
“Rewel is fuming up top, probably going to visit you later and insist you tell him what you’re hiding,” Danya said. “The only thing I could think of that would cause such oddities is if you had been infected by one of the living stones, but I think the stones are dead now and he wouldn’t believe it.”
“Living stones?” Aren asked.
“Queen’s stone, bloodstone.” Danya nodded twice, then frowned. “There are a few others, if only I could recall what…” The woman trailed off, eyes roving over Aren’s face. “Why do you look like you’re about to go hunting for a man?”
“No reason,” Aren said. Though she would have to have a conversation with Av. Queen’s stone had filled the cave that she had stumbled into while running from Worl, and she also knew that it caused consumption. When Av had asked about her health at his father’s home she had assumed it was because being near the living stone might cause another bout of consumption, not because it would cause something else entirely. “What are those?”
“These?” Danya smiled again. “These are books on the rights. These were the start of trying to define honour. Something happened and for whatever reason they wrote down the rights so that outsiders would understand why we behaved the way we did and didn’t care when a warrior gutted a man with his own shoe.”
“His own shoe?” Aren asked.
“It was an armour-plated shoe,” Danya stressed, setting the books before Aren. “You might know the rights by a different name or by feeling alone. There’s right to claim, which by the sounds of it Av did for you, the right to stumble, right to life, right to death. On and on. Though I don’t find the others all too necessary these days.”
“Let’s start with the right to claim,” Aren said, picking up one of the books.
They were surprisingly small for being honour books. She opened the page and found the book to be marked as having been transcribed and translated from an older text. Given the age of the book in her hands, Aren guessed the older version wa
s written in a language no one left alive could read.
“The right to claim says that anyone of rank can claim anyone else in order to save them. It’s mainly used by warriors to claim queens who are in hiding or working themselves to death because they think they know what is best. The right to claim is almost never voiced to the one who is claimed and in true claims, the warrior doesn’t know why he’s claiming the queen,” Danya said almost too quickly for Aren to understand.
“Queens hid?” Aren asked.
“Yes, oh yes. It is only in the era of the short-lived queens that your rank has been raised to boast what it is. In centuries past queens could pass as commoners until they were thrown into a rage. Even their anger wasn’t noticed so much as felt by the lumps on one’s head.”
Aren struggled with that. “And… Av used the right to claim on me. But his claim is only valid because he didn’t know I was a queen?”
“If a warrior knows a queen is a queen, it’s not really the right to claim. The rights were created to explain the gut reaction. A warrior who claims a woman who is obviously a queen just claims her. She is obviously looking for a warrior and therefore he doesn’t have to defend his right.”
“Defend his right to whom?” Aren asked.
“To the queen. You have the right to kill him for claiming you, and those who live in the open will kill a warrior they find to be inferior,” Danya said, hesitated, then added, “at least they used to.”
She turned that over in her mind. “Then why create the right to claim if the one you claim isn’t to know you’ve claimed them?”
Danya seemed to struggle for a moment. Then she said, “Perhaps that is one of those questions that spawned all the other honour books. Or perhaps it was a specific queen a warrior had to defend himself to, like the one who sat the throne?”
“Is the ‘right to stumble’ the queen’s version of that?” Aren asked.
“Very nearly. Right to stumble is the right of any woman to trip and fall in front of a man she is interested in,” Danya said.
“That’s foolish. You don’t need a right for that,” Aren growled.
“Have you ever been in a situation where you were caught by Av and, despite taking out another warrior, he somehow stopped you?” Danya asked.
Aren thought back to just before she became Mar’s guardian. Of the flight from the kitchens and of Av and Jer chasing her across palace grounds. Unsettled, Aren adjusted against the cold stone wall.
“He is stronger than I am,” Aren said.
“Did you take down another warrior only to be bested by him?” Danya asked.
“Yes, but Jer is the weaker of the two of them,” Aren protested.
“Hence the need to declare what ‘right to stumble’ is. You stumbled, he decided to claim,” Danya said quietly. “By chance, did you directly before, or after, happen to have womanly thoughts about Av?”
Aren gritted her teeth, growling through them before she spoke, “I am not the summation of animalistic instincts!”
“Imagine what Av would say, if you told him that he claimed you because instinctively he was attracted to you,” Danya chuckled. “Or if you told him that before he claimed you, you stumbled onto his path to make him notice you. Men hate that. Think it’s all them.”
“What’s the life and death ones, then?” Aren asked.
Danya became still. Perhaps as a healer these were rights that pertained only to her. For a very long time she said nothing, then the healer met Aren’s eyes.
“Right to life says that a mother may attempt to keep a babe alive even though the healer would seek right to death. The child is crippled and likely not to survive, is only suffering during its life. Mothers are only able to claim this after either losing everything else or going through multiple pregnancies. It’s allowed only to keep the mother from falling into a darkness that will not be shaken off easily,” Danya said quietly.
“Have you seen this?” Aren asked.
“My mother claimed it for me. I wasn’t to survive. At least that’s what Rewel told me. Our village will place a child to the elements if they are crippled in some fashion and at birth I was,” Danya said. “Because I was a healer, which they could not tell at birth, my magic fixed me, but leaves me with little to use on others.”
“Couldn’t a healer fix a cripple?” Aren asked.
“A healer can only tell the body that it is broken and return it to the state that it was in before. A healer cannot regrow a lost limb, just as they cannot return a dead child to life,” Danya said.
A burden of her rank, no doubt. Aren didn’t doubt that each rank had its own burdens. Queens had to serve the commoners no matter their own thoughts. They had to link themselves to a village and even then it didn’t necessarily mean that they could rule the village or even themselves. If someone better came along they risked losing their lives, depending on how they were linked to those around them.
“And right to death?” Aren asked.
“Usually claimed by a healer for one under their care,” Danya said. “The body is alive and willing, but the spirit has fled, is the usual case. When right to death is claimed, it is the burden of the one claiming it, to perform the duty. Unless a loved one accepts the burden willingly.”
“That’s terrible,” Aren said.
“If a person lives in constant pain, why make them suffer more?” Danya asked. “Those who take their own lives also claim right to death. Those who are found to be just in their claim are said to have exercised the right. Those who do not are called cowards.”
Aren looked over the books before her. Four in total.
“Do these include all the rights?” she asked Danya.
“Yes, the honour books in our library elaborate a little on each, but I thought these would be a good start for you,” Danya said.
“I will read them.” Aren said.
“There is one other that I should, perhaps, point out to you,” Danya said, scooting away from Aren.
Out of reach of Aren’s invisible leash. Aren looked at the distance between them and met Danya’s eyes. The healer paled as the light globe beside Aren turned blue.
“And what would that be?” Aren asked.
“Right to rest. Never claimed for oneself, instead it is instilled by others on a certain one. Most especially used for queens who sit the throne,” Danya said quietly.
Aren frowned. “And?”
Silent for a long time, Danya watched Aren.
“I’ve seen the throne looking through your eyes. It’s never done that before, that I know of,” Danya said. “My mother said that the throne was making pairings, would bless a couple and the couple would birth more ranks.”
“What of that? It’s been trying to create a better queen, to end the era of short-lived queens,” Aren muttered.
Danya sucked in a breath through gritted teeth. “I think the throne may have claimed the right to rest for you. You are obviously in turmoil Aren. Nothing is wrong with you physically. But if you aren’t another short lived queen, I see no reason why it would not claim right to rest.”
“So that I could what? Heal?” Aren laughed at the idea. “One cannot heal a lifetime of problems. One can only wake each morning and be determined to not allow it to happen again.”
“You can heal hurts of the spirit,” Danya said. “I’ve been taught how to do it, as any village healer is supposed to be taught. We do not only see to the physical welfare of the people under our care.”
“Do you happen to specialize in bad childhoods?” Aren asked. “Because that’s all it was. A bad childhood. No need for rest. Just dust yourself off and be a woman about it.”
“No, I don’t specialize in it. But why don’t you read on these some, read on right to rest, and then I can come back and we can talk about your childhood, maybe find out why the throne would claim right to rest? And rest away from the court, for someone who is obviously physically fit.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Laeder set aside
the financial reports as Telm walked into the study. Jer’s study, the one which the warrior would be using come spring once Aren and Av were mated, and Laeder had been granted access. Unfortunately Laeder could not recall if Telm had been told that he had been granted access.
“I know he hasn’t the right to yet, but Jer said he’d offer me a position of scribe to the court, once he is steward,” Laeder said.
He began shuffling papers about, to hide a few things, to reveal the financial reports from the previous month, and to look errant-minded as he searched for the missives that had arrived that morning. A clear few days meant that messengers could reach certain well-travelled roads.
“The pathways are clear of ice and snow, and are dry,” Telm said, sounding hollow as she took the seat across from Laeder.
The head of house looked years older than she had at dinner a few nights before. Laeder wondered if the change was in connection to Aren’s little adventure, or if something else had happened.
“Lady Telm, you look weary,” Laeder said.
“It happens in the winter,” Telm said with a slow nod. “I feel my age.”
“You also look concerned. If you ever need someone to speak with, confidentially, I can be an ear to listen,” Laeder offered.
Would it be that easy? Or would that confidentiality mean that not even Jer could know? Laeder could keep such a secret, if necessary. He wouldn’t have to tell Jer what he knew, only that he knew.
“No, thank you for the offer,” Telm said. She motioned to the financial reports. “The coin master said you had those. Those are mine. I need them to do my budgets.”
There was no strength behind the words. Only weariness. Laeder would have to ask around, to see if Telm had weakened in previous winters, or just this one. If Telm’s health was failing, the healers had to be sent for, and Ervam at the very least had to be notified so that he might return to the palace and see to her care. The trainer was probably the only one, barring Aren, who could keep Telm in bed long enough to recover.