“I can. I have.” Alberich eyed the boy consideringly. Should he?
:Oh, go ahead, do,: Kantor answered.
He bent down, and grabbed the boy by the back of his tunic and hauled him to his feet. Without much effort, be it added—Kadhael was just about Alberich’s size and weight, but he was still an uncoordinated adolescent, not a trained, honed warrior. Alberich tightened his grip just enough that the fabric half-choked the boy, eliminating any more babble out of him.
“I will, because you do not seem to understand your own tongue properly, repeat myself,” Alberich said, with no anger whatsoever. “You are banished from the salle and the grounds. You are no longer a student here. You are leaving now, and you will never return. If you do, I will personally thrash you until you cannot stand, and throw you off the grounds again. Training here is a privilege, not a right. You have just proved you do not deserve to enjoy that privilege.”
And with that, he frog-marched the boy out the door, down the path, to the very edge of the training grounds. And with great care and utmost precision, he pitched the insolent brat right into the biggest, muddiest patch of slush that he thought he could reach.
He did not even wait to see if Kadhael went headfirst into it, or managed to somehow save himself. He turned on his heel and marched back into his salle.
No one had moved. This was good. He wasn’t going to have to discipline anyone else—yet.
He raked them all with his stony gaze. “More objections, do I hear?” he asked, raising one eyebrow.
Silence.
“Then outside you will go. All of you.” He turned a stern gaze on the Trainee, who was still sitting on the floor—Osberic, that was the boy’s name. “Osberic,” he continued, and the Trainee flinched. “Since no opponent you have now, yet equally of guilt you are to have brought a fight within my walls, it will be me that you face. Fetch two staves, and follow. Even practice swords, I will not ruin in this muck.”
He would not be too hard on him. Putting him on his face or back into the mud two or three times would be enough.
:He started the fight,: Kantor put in. :Not that Kadhael wasn’t trying to goad him into starting it, but he did start it.:
All right. Four. Teach the boy to hold his temper.
:Good answer. I’m going to watch.:
Alberich smiled as he walked out into the cold again and saw that there was no sign of Kadhael, other than a vaguely human-shaped depression in the slush. :Please do.:
The boys had formed up in a rough circle, and Osberic came up to Alberich with two fighting staffs and a hangdog look. Alberich took one without looking at it,
“Consequences, Osberic,” he said as he squared off against the boy, who began circling him warily. “Say I will not, that a Herald loses not his temper—but aware a Herald is, that consequences there are for doing so.”
His staff shot out at ankle-level, tripping Osberic. Down he went.
He picked himself back up, and aimed a blow at Alberich’s head. Alberich blocked it, riposted, and let the boy block him. “So think you—had there a fight been, what consequences there would be?”
“Uh—” Osberic tried again, was blocked again. “Lord Corbie would get me in trouble?”
“Wrong.” Alberich flipped the staff at Osberic’s ankles; the boy dodged, and Alberich flipped the other end around to thwack him in the buttocks and send him into the slush again. “Lord Corbie would protest to the Queen, who would be forced to go to the Dean, who would have to answer to why discipline was so lax among the Trainees that a highborn fought a Trainee.”
Osberic picked himself up, flushing. “My fight would get the Heralds in trouble?”
“Correct.” Alberich let the boy try a few more blows; not bad, but he wasn’t going to get through Alberich’s defenses any time soon. “And who else?”
“The Queen?” Osberic hazarded.
“Correct. Now, why will there be no trouble for what I did with Kadhael Corbie?”
Osberic didn’t answer, being a little too busy fending off a flurry of blows from Alberich, only to trip over a hardened lump of snow and land on his backside in an icy puddle.
:That should count,: Kantor said from the sideline.
:I agree.:
“Because,” Alberich continued as Osberic picked himself back up for the third time, “A proper and correct order gave I. Insolence I was given. My proper authority I exerted—no temper, no beatings, no punishments, and only when more insolence and refusal was I given, did I remove Kadhael with prejudice. To his father he will go, yes, but his father will likely box his ears. Now, know you why I am drilling you thus?” Osberic came at Alberich yet again, Alberich let the boy drive him back.
“To punish me!” Osberic shouted, his cheeks burning with humiliation. “To make me look stupid in front of everyone!”
“No, that would the act of a bully be,” Alberich told him. “So that, should Lord Corbie protest it was you who began the fight, I can tell the Queen that you were punished, and all here will swear to that. This is not for you, it is for the Heralds, that all know that we tend to the misdeeds of our own in proper measure.” He then neatly sidestepped the last rush and tripped Osberic as he went past. Once again, Osberic measured his length in the mud. “A Herald cannot merely right be, Osberic. A Herald must guided by the law be. He cannot dispense the law, if he follows it not himself. He cannot dispense the law, if he thinks himself immune from it. He cannot dispense the law, if he will not deal it to his fellows in the same measure as he does to those whom he has in charge.”
“Yessir, Herald Alberich,” Osberic groaned from the ground.
“And that is why, for fighting, you have also been punished in this way,” Alberich continued. “Now, back into the salle. There is work to be done.”
They were all quick to follow the order, but none so quick as Osberic.
10
Kadhael Corbie disappeared from the Court and Collegia entirely. Not that Alberich would have noticed his absence, having banned the boy from the salle, but it wasn’t long before there were murmurs and speculations among his students and the Court—and being that it was his business to know things, he heard every one of them. Rumor had it that the boy’s father was so enraged that he had gotten himself thrown out of Alberich’s class and forbidden to enter the salle that he’d sent the boy straight down to the family manor, there to languish in what the young lords and ladies called “rustification.” Since it was said to be a particularly dull and cheerless place, lacking in anything that a young man might find amusing, and since rumor also had it that Lord Corbie had sent orders for his son to be confined to the house and grounds until further notice, Alberich was perfectly satisfied that the punishment fit the crime.
On the other side of the table, Lord Corbie went to Selenay and also demanded the punishment of “the Trainee who started it,” and allegedly was nonplussed to learn that “the Trainee” had already been punished. And that the punishment fit his crime, since all he had done was to bring a fight into the salle and after being reprimanded, had behaved with the proper respect for the Weaponsmaster. The trouncing—with lecture—at the hands of the Weaponsmaster in front of his peers was deemed both painful and humiliating enough, even for Lord Corbie.
And Lord Corbie had been quite taken aback to learn that it had all happened within moments of Kadhael’s expulsion.
Without knowing much about the man, but intuiting a great deal from the behavior of his son, Alberich doubted that humiliation of Kadhael at the hands of “that foreigner” would ever be forgotten or forgiven, but at least there was nothing overt that Lord Corbie could do about the incident. Alberich had exercised precisely the correct amount of authority: he’d been defied, he banished the offender. Not from any other classes at any other part of the three Collegia, only from his own. He had indeed ejected the boy by force—because the boy would have gone on defying him if Alberich hadn’t physically thrown him off the premises. He had not exceeded his authority, and
in point of fact, Alberich could have given the boy a taste of what Osberic had gotten, and hadn’t. In fact, Kadhael had gotten off lightly at Alberich’s hands, and not only was there no denying it, but both the Lord Marshal and the Provost Marshal (who was in charge of discipline on and off the Collegia grounds) said loudly and publicly that they would have boxed both his ears until he was deaf.
Nevertheless, Lord Corbie would not like the man who had rejected his son; he would not like the Collegium nor the organization that had given him the authority to do so.
One more enemy . . . but Alberich was used to those by now. He would have to watch his back, but when had he ever done anything else? And sure enough, within days, there were rumors in the Court about how the Weaponsmaster was abusing his pupils, abusing his authority, treating Heraldic Trainees with indulgence and punishing Blues arbitrarily. A few Blues were quietly absent from his class after that. But there was not a great deal that he could do about that—nor, truth to be told, wished to do.
As for Osberic—according to Kantor, that very evening, when the Trainee’s bruises started aching and he started feeling particularly sorry for himself, his Companion had given him a good talking-to. Whether this was delivered in the form of a lecture or with sympathy, Kantor didn’t say—but one thing was certain: when Companions took it upon themselves to correct their Chosen, the lesson tended to stick. Osberic was certainly properly contrite the next day, and if there was still a great deal of moaning about Alberich’s hardheartedness, at least no one among the Heraldic Trainees was claiming he was a bully or a sadist. Hardhearted, he could live with. In fact, the more hardhearted they thought him, the better off they would be in the long run.
Though shortly after the Kadhael incident, there was one little lad who would not have agreed with that estimation.
He was one of the “Tedrel orphans,” brought in by the Companion Cheric the very same day as Osberic and Kadhael’s chastisement. It took a day or two to get him settled into the Collegium, so Alberich didn’t see him until his mentor, Trainee Rotherven, brought him by himself to the salle, shortly after the last class of the day.
Alberich was overseeing a set of Guards working out with maces, when the door to the salle opened and a final-year Trainee came in with a very small boy at his side. Alberich left the two to continue their bout, and walked over to the door where they waited politely.
“This is a new Trainee, Weaponsmaster,” Rotherven said, leading the young boy by the hand—a very young boy indeed, no more than seven, if Alberich was any judge. He was rather angular, with an unruly thatch of no-colored hair, but very intelligent eyes, and a look about him that was vaguely familiar. And when he got a good look at the Weaponsmaster, the boy gaped at him with shock—then awe—then spun to look up at his mentor with a look just short of accusation.
“You did not tell me this was the Great Rider!” the child exclaimed, and Alberich knew immediately by the trace of a Karsite accent that this must be one of the children brought out of the Tedrel camp after the end of that final battle.
“Great rider?” Rotherven said, his brow furrowed with puzzlement. “But—”
“Never mind, I understand him,” Alberich interrupted. He looked down at the boy with some bemusement. So that was why the boy looked vaguely familiar; he was Karsite, or at least, half Karsite. Most of the hill-folk shepherds were mongrels by Sunpriest standards anyway. “So,” he said—in Karsite, “we have another of the Sun’s children come to be a White Rider, eh?” This one must not have been too damaged by his experiences, or he wouldn’t have been Chosen so very young. “There are others here, not as White Riders, but as Selenay’s pages. You won’t be alone.”
“Oh.” Relief suffused the boy’s features. “I did not know that, Great Rider—”
Alberich looked up at Rotherven. “Selenay has perhaps five or six Tedrel orphans; in her service as pages they are. See that this lad meeting them is, please. Perhaps a playfellow he will find among them.”
Then he looked back down at the boy and continued the conversation in Karsite. “Also, there is Priest Gerichen, a true man of the Sunlord. You may go with the others to the Temple of the Sunlord if you wish—though they do not call it that here, but rather, the Temple of the Lord of Light. And if you do not wish to do so, you need not. You are free to serve who you wish, here.”
“I still serve the Sunlord, Great Rider,” the boy said quietly. “The Sunlord of the Prophecy.”
“Then you will find His House yonder in Haven, and Gerichen at His altar,” Alberich replied, suppressing a smile at the child’s solemn demeanor. It was quaint and charming, but a little sad also. Those children had been forced to grow up far too quickly. “I have it on the best authority that He approves of the White Riders and all they stand for, and that there is nothing in the pledges that a White Rider must make that run counter to His will. Quite the opposite, in fact. In serving as a White Rider, you will also serve Him. You will be a hope and an example to our people, and repay some of the debt to those who saved and succored us, as I try to do.”
The child’s face took on a look of fierce pride and determination. “I will not fail you, Great Rider!” he said, in tones that made it a vow. “I will not fail the Prophecy!”
Rotherven’s expression of bemusement, as he looked from Alberich to the boy and back again, made Alberich very glad that he had a great deal of practice in keeping his own face under control, or he might have laughed aloud.
“It is a great responsibility,” Alberich replied, as gravely as if the child was three times his actual age. “And a signal honor.”
“I do know that, Great Rider,” the child said, nodding. “Cheric has told me so. And it is—all I could ever wish to be.”
“Excuse me, Herald Alberich, but I was supposed to tell you that young Theodren here is one of the orphans,” Rotherven said, then laughed self-consciously, “but obviously you already know that.”
“I do, but I thank you,” Alberich replied, and turned back to the boy. “So. I am glad to see you, Theodren. You will be learning weapons at my hands—as any other Trainee. And you must call me Herald Alberich, not Great Rider. I am no greater than any of the other Heralds—the White Riders. We are all brothers and sisters.”
“Yes, Herald Alberich.” The boy gave an odd little salute that he must have learned from the Tedrels. “I was afraid, when my friend Rotherven said I was to be given over to weapons lessons. Now I am not.” He smiled. “I was afraid the training would be like—the bad place.”
“It will be hard, but not like that other place, I promise you,” Alberich said, and turned back again to Rotherven. “He will be in the beginner’s class, of course—just following luncheon, that would be.”
“Yes, sir.” The Trainee’s expression told Alberich everything he needed to know; evidently Theodren had been properly terrified when he’d been told he was to learn weapons’ work, and Rotherven’s solution had been to bring him directly to Alberich so that he could see his teacher for himself. Or, perhaps, the suggestion had come from Rotherven’s Companion, who had been no mere colt when Rotherven was Chosen. “Thank you for talking to him; I think he’ll settle now, and I was a bit worried about him—”
Alberich nodded. “You have done exactly what was needed, bringing him here. My thanks.” And to Theodren, “This young man is also my pupil, and he will be as a brother to you as well as a Brother Rider. You may give him your trust. He will also see that you meet the others brought out of the camp that are now in Selenay’s service, and perhaps you may find a friend or two among them, as well.”
The child’s eyes shone with gratitude. “Thank you, Herald Alberich.”
Then Theodren looked up at Rotherven, and said, in Valdemaran that was much better than Alberich’s, “Thank you for bringing me to the salle, Rotherven. Herald Alberich is the chief of those who came to save us, and I am honored to be taught by him.”
It was so formal, and so charming, that Rotherven couldn’t help but s
mile. It was a kind smile, and Alberich knew at that moment that the older boy had been a good choice to watch over Theodren. “Well, good. And now you’ve met all your teachers, so let’s get some dinner. You’ll be back here after luncheon tomorrow.”
Alberich escorted them to the door of the salle, then watched the two of them off up the path back to the Collegium. As they disappeared into the twilight shadows, he felt Kantor coming up beside him. He put his hand on Kantor’s shoulder, and felt the Companion’s silken hide beneath his palm, warm and smooth.
:Cheric can’t Mindspeak him very clearly yet, and the little lad was petrified,: Kantor told him. :He thought he was about to be put into one of those vile Boy’s Bands that the Tedrels used to “toughen” the boys. Nasty training, if you could call it training. Kept them on short rations, more or less forced them to steal if they were going to keep from going hungry, but beat them within an inch of their lives if they got caught. Weapons’ training with real, edged weapons—if you got hurt or died, too bad. Every infraction was punished with a beating, in fact. Small wonder he was terrified.:
:Well, I’m glad he recognized me. I only hope he doesn’t hero-worship me.: Alberich sighed. :Though it might be pleasant for me, it would do him no good.:
:I wouldn’t necessarily agree with that.: Kantor nudged him affectionately. :You could do with a little hero-worship.:
:Adoration is for the Sunlord. I am content with respect,: Alberich replied, but rubbed Kantor’s ears with affection. :So long as I have the friendship of my Companion and a few good comrades, I am content,:
:Piff. I can think of one other thing you could do with.: Kantor’s eyes sparkled with mischief, and Alberich had a very good idea what he was talking about, but he pretended otherwise. After all, it was usually Kantor who managed a jest on Alberich, rather than the other way around.
:Yes, indeed,: he replied blandly. :I could do with my dinner.:
And he laughed aloud at Kantor’s exasperated snort.
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