Squire Hayseed

by S E Zbasnik

  “So you claim,” was all he said while sliding into place. “Shall we test your theory?”

  Hayley shrugged. She didn’t want to be cruel, but after three times being sent to the ground, whacking him about a bit sounded incredibly tempting. Drifting her hands further apart, she held the staff like it was a broom and Hayley was about to smash the shit out of a rat.

  Tipping his head to the side, Gavin held the sword up, his other hand drifting far back. A merciful breeze wafted between the pair, nothing but the stomp and slurp of a thirsty horse gorging on the stream breaking the stalemate. After a moment, Gavin sighed, “I assumed you’d attack first still.”

  “Oh, I didn’t think…” she shook her head. “Right.” Hayley’s eyes darted over her knight. No doubt he’d expect her to do the exact same moves he pulled. She needed something else, something to prove her point fast. Maybe a quick knock to the noggin? That’d get this done and she could head somewhere cooler, away from the horse.

  Shifting the staff up high, Hayley wrenched her shoulder fast. Her entire body spun in a half circle, the three extra feet of stick heading straight for Gavin’s unprotected head. She didn’t swing too hard, not wanting to cause serious damage. Just making a point was enough, her staff flying fast towards him. She barely blinked before the stick stuck tight, but it wasn’t against flesh or bone. The sword knocked into the staff, held high to shield away her blow.

  Well, even she’d managed something that easy. Yanking the staff away fast, Hayley moved to beat into Gavin’s left side. Her entire focus was upon that, so all she saw was a blur. It drifted from the side of her eyes. Something forced her staff downward, reverberations bounding through her arm as her weapon jammed into the ground. Twisting in place, Gavin spun a full circle until the point of the blade rested right against Hayley’s neck.

  She swallowed hard, her body trembling as a tip of mud barely glanced against the bare skin of her throat. Any closer, just a hair and he’d have pierced through it. Her shaking hands dropped the staff, Hayley instinctively lifting both arms up in surrender. The man was still as a statue, not even a hard breath escaping from his lungs. He didn’t bat an eye at nearly cutting her down, nor coming so close.

  “It is not the weapon that decides your fate,” Gavin said, finally yanking the sword away. “But the arm that wields it.”

  “Fine,” she gasped, wiping a hand to her throat to make certain it wasn’t actually cut and she was just taking a long time to die. “I get it. Sword can beat anything. Did you have to-to nearly slice me open to prove it?”

  His eyes narrowed in confusion and he ran his fingers against the edge of the blade. Hayley scrunched her face in sympathy pain, but no blood gushed forth. “This cannot cut butter. It is dull for a reason,” he said.

  Hayley reached forward, her single index finger laying flat to a blade that was rounded on the edges. A sigh of relief that her knight hadn’t been trying to kill her escaped and she looked up at him, “So you wouldn’t hurt me?”

  “No,” he passed the blade back to her and this time folded his hands around so she had a good grip, “so you wouldn’t accidentally hurt me. I believe it best we begin with the basics.”

  “Now?” Hayley sputtered, “Why didn’t we start with those before you sent me on my ass?”

  His amber eyes lifted in a smile, “Would you have listened then?”

  “Uh…” Probably. She wouldn’t have had a lot of reasons not to. He was the big shiny knight and, sure she knew a few things about surviving. A lot, really. And… “Fine,” Hayley sneered. “I want to learn.”

  “And…”

  “And listen,” she growled, causing the older man to laugh. “Where do we start?” Feeling more secure with her grip on the sword, she hefted it up to mimic the same move Gavin did when protecting his head.

  “Here,” he said, his hand landing upon the metal helmet. Yanking off the cover, he revealed an entire set of dented and rusted armor. “We begin with you learning how to build your own training dummy.”

  She smiled at the thought, hurling blow after blow at some metal encased dummy until its head fell off. Maybe he’d let her name it. Louse Larissa wasn’t going to have a very good afternoon.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Everything hurt.

  Okay, her hair and the middle toe on her right foot were fine. Otherwise, her body felt like one massive, oozing bruise. Pain stretched clear up her back, Hayley fumbling behind with her hand to see if there was a bone sticking out. In doing so, her arm screamed at her for being so foolish. She had to have spent the whole damn day hacking and slashing at a tree trunk dressed for battle.

  Her knight would pace around her, sometimes giving tips, but just as often stepping back and letting her have a go at it. When Hayley had no idea what she was supposed to do, she’d start banging into the dummy with the pommel of the sword. She learned it was called the pommel when Gavin shouted at her to stop doing that before she broke it.

  An hour after that, he finally declared their training day over. Bruised and battered, Hayley slunk close to the stream and collapsed into the cool mud. She slurped the water near, trying to encourage some into her mouth, but there was no way she could rise. Above her wandered Gavin, wondering if she had any intentions to drown.

  “We should return to the estate before sundown.”

  “Sundown?” That was enough to cause Hayley to sit up, causing her entire body to crumple in pain. She stared up at the horizon, the light hanging somewhere in the middle of the distant treetops. “That’s not for a few hours.”

  “I know,” her knight said, easily sliding up into the saddle. He’d broken apart the training dummy, already loading up Gringolet for the trip back. “Shall you ride with this time?”

  That damn hand hung there above her. She ached everywhere, her muscles begging for her to get on the damn horse and take her weight off her legs for once. Then the creature spun its weird, elongated face towards her and Hayley balked. Stumbling back, she shook her head and stared at the ground.

  Sighing, the knight clicked his tongue and pulled the horse into a walk, “As you wish, but it is the same trek back as it was getting here.”

  “I know,” Hayley sneered. Gavin dug his heels into the horse, breaking out of the brook clearance and into the forest surrounding them. With her hands, Hayley funneled more of the cool water onto her forehead and armpits. She was a filthy, disgusting mess incapable of moving.

  And she was also about to be left behind.

  Summoning a hidden reserve of strength, she staggered to her feet and shouted, “Hey, wait up!”

  She had no idea how she made it back, her legs barely shifting in the end. It was a struggle to heft her heavy feet off the ground, so she tried sliding instead. The blister on her toe went and had its own baby blisters — triplets by the feel of it. Hayley expected Gavin to pull far ahead and leave her in the dust, but whenever she’d lift her heavy head she’d find the horse’s ass at the same distance as before.

  Once the estate was in sight, Gavin tugged the horse onward. The pair began to vanish into the dust so that when Hayley finally made it through the gates, he was walking out of the stable with the pile of weaponry and Louse dummy in hand. “Oh thank god,” Hayley gasped. She made it as far as the well in the middle of the courtyard (not giving a shit what the area was called). Her hands lifted, prepared to catch, but they couldn’t rise fast enough and her body crumpled to the ground hard.

  “Hayley,” Gavin shouted, sounding concerned.

  Prostrated on the ground, her nose and mouth mashed into trampled down grass, Hayley raised a hand and mumbled, “I’m good.”

  “Are you certain?” he laughed above her so she lifted up her thumb for emphasis.

  “I shall put these in the house and come find you,” he continued, his voice clearly wanting to laugh at her. She didn’t care, she didn’t care about anything except for the fact she didn’t have to move anymore. The ground was cool and almost soft. Just pile up some mud t
o make a pillow and she’d have a nice bed beside the well.

  Perhaps she fell asleep, perhaps Gavin was quicker than she expected, but when a hand landed upon her back Hayley jerked in surprise. Her knight shifted away as she tried to stagger up. The man who’d had her stabbing and riposting all day steadied her waning form. For a moment he looked into her face, trying to catch her eyes or perhaps see how many swears she had saved up back there. It was a lot.

  “Please tell me rest is next,” Hayley mumbled. Her body swayed towards the well, but she lashed a hand out to keep herself from pitching down it.

  “Yes, though…I think food is called for.”

  At the mention, her stomach snarled for anything to fill it. While sweating buckets and whipping her body into an overheated frenzy she hadn’t felt it. But once they stopped and the march back resumed, her gut kept sloshing back and forth in hunger. It wasn’t the hungriest she’d ever been, but it felt like the most earned.

  Locking a helping hand around Hayley’s shoulders it wasn’t to their little house Gavin led them but the main one. For a moment Hayley glanced down at her mess of clothing. Over half of it was mud, the boots in particular slathered in it from her jaunts into the stream to cool off. She was about to say something when her knight turned her towards a little side door. While the entrance at the top of the stairs was ornate with ivy carved into the frame, this looked like someone found a scrap of wood and nailed it up.

  He didn’t bother knocking, just yanked on the handle and walked them inside. A small table holding handfuls of bowls rested close, Hayley knuckling her way over to land on a stool. Her knight glanced over once to make certain she wasn’t about to pitch to the floor before he vanished.

  Pawing at her chest, she sighed as another mud clump splattered to the floor. She’d have to wash that, wash everything on her body. It’d probably take hours just to get through the mess of her livery. “I would really like to lay down and not get up for thirty days.”

  “You have returned!” a voice pinged through the small stone room and Hayley turned to find Ania dashing towards her. The girl stopped right across from Hayley, her big eyes watching as the bruised and battered squire smacked into the mud on her chest. “You are filthy.”

  “Yep,” Hayley nodded her head hard, unable to deny it.

  Ania swung her legs around the opposite stool, her clothed knees nearly brushing against Hayley’s. She felt bad and tried to shift, doing her best to keep her mass of mud from touching the girl’s clean skirts. Placing her chin in her hand, Ania stared hard as she asked in her flat voice, “Did he take you to the stream?”

  Hayley bobbed her head, uncertain how to respond. It was a stream, but there could be a lot of stream in the area. Maybe there was another fancier stream where the dashing knight took girls he liked.

  Smiling, Ania reached up to undo her kerchief revealing black hair bobbed to her ears. “He goes there often to train, says the ground is softer.”

  Wincing, Hayley reached back to the bruises along her spine from all her falls. If that was softer… Wait? “How do you know that?” Seemed like one of those secret knight things, at least it sure felt out of the way of everywhere.

  A blush rose on Ania’s cheeks and she shrugged, “I’ll bring food, sometimes. Check to make certain he doesn’t require anything.”

  Tension snapped through the room, Hayley tasting its bitterness in the back of her throat, but for the life of her, she had no idea why. Ania was fiddling with the hair curled around her ear, for once her burning eyes going anywhere else. She opened her mouth a few times as if testing the air while all Hayley could do was stare in confusion.

  Finally, the girl shook off her blush and asked, “What did he start you on?”

  “Stabbing…?” Hayley said uncertainly before shaking her head and mumbling, “Sword.”

  Ania’s big brown eyes burned into Hayley’s as if she hadn’t understood a lick of that. Feeling a flush of embarrassment start on her own cheeks, Hayley stabbed at the air, “The big knife.”

  “Oh,” the girl said loudly, her lips stretching wide in a smile, “yes, sword. Makes sense. Which one?”

  “A pointy one?” Hayley threw out. There were other types of swords?

  “Well, I doubt it would have been the broadsword, but if you did not favor the long perhaps a bastard would be more called for.”

  Hayley narrowed her eyes, confusion bristling her brows, “Wait, what do a sword’s parents have to do with…?”

  The girl giggled as if Hayley said something absolutely hysterical, her laugh so powerful the mark on the side of her face began to flush pink. Ania was about to explain when the floor creaked loudly and Hayley whipped her head over to watch Gavin stumble in — bowls in hand.

  “Here, I found some old stew and…” He ceased mumbling to the food in his arms and looked up, “Oh, hello Ania.” The amber eyes focused right into hers as if the girl needed to be constantly watched. She smiled at the attention, her head bobbing while Gavin placed the food right in front of Hayley.

  She barely waited for a spoon to drop into her hand before shoveling the barley soup into her gullet. It was lukewarm and watery, but it tasted divine — her tastebuds singing in harmony as each morsel of fuel slid down to her gut. Hayley nearly slobbered through a fourth of her bowl before Gavin sat down.

  Placing his arms astride his meal, he folded the palms together and began to pray. Ah shit, was she supposed to do that too? Hayley swiped the back of her hand against her chin, her eyes darting from the silently praying knight back to Ania who was chirpily watching him.

  Once he finished, he lifted his head and smiled at the two girls sharing a meal with him. Gavin got a few bites in before he turned to Ania to ask her, “Did you make this?”

  “No, no, I collected the barley is all.”

  “Every small bit matters,” he smiled, diving back into his meal with gusto. Ania lit up brighter in return and Hayley was reminded of how much the other girls all tittered back at the squire challenge the first time Gavin walked out. God, that felt like a month ago, but it was only a couple of days. She was liable to age ten years before she got out of here.

  Ania suddenly stood up, her hands flapping through the air. “There is bread yet, I shall get it for you.”

  Gavin spun out as if to try and stop her, but it was too late. She’d already vanished out the door. His hand hung in the air, jaw ajar before he shrugged. “You should eat up,” he said, seeming to notice that Hayley hadn’t completely slurped up her food in a minute.

  Scraping the wooden spoon against the bottom of the bowl, Hayley got a good dozen more slurps down into her stomach before she asked, “What’s next?”

  Gavin smirked, “That does always seem to be your most pressing concern.”

  She shrugged, “Just curious, or should I not know? Do squires get told things?”

  Pausing in his delicate eating, Gavin lifted his head and stared at Hayley, “Depends upon the knight.”

  “Fine,” Hayley rolled her eyes, “do I get told things?”

  He took a slow, delicate taste of his soup. No slurping for the elegant knight — the table manners seeming to have been bred into him. After savoring his meager meal like a feast, he sighed, “Depends upon you.” At that, she glared harder. “I expect you to prosper, for your skill to increase. It may require weapon’s training three or four times a week, though I cannot always be at hand to observe.”

  God’s holes, four times a week? Her legs were rubber, her arms burned in agony if she lifted the spoon higher than a few inches off the table. Who knew what a mass of bruises her spine was now! How in the hell could she expect to survive four days of this?

  “But tomorrow shall be a light day,” he said, seeming to wipe the concern off of Hayley’s brow. Maybe she wasn’t saddled with a monstrous slave driver after all. She pursed her lips so tight at the thought her jaw ached. Absently, Hayley’s hand drew against her upper thigh when she felt the amber eyes staring into her. “You
shall need it.”

  “Fine,” she threw out, trying to distract from…she didn’t even know.

  The creaky door rattled awake, depositing a grinning Ania with a loaf of fresh bread and a handful of small bowls in her arms. She lay the spread out quickly, her fingers jabbing towards a trio of different colored goops. “I brought some spreads if you’d like. This is a currant jam,” she directed to the blood red one, “a compote of jellied peppers,” that went to the green one. “And this is…”

  “Squash goo?” Hayley interrupted while eyeing up the yellow mush.

  Ania smiled, “No, butter.”

  That one she recognized. Darting forward, Hayley dug her fingers into the heel of the bread and yanked it free. Peaks of bread prodded from the top, unhappy with their release from the mother loaf. Hayley plucked the scraps off with her fingers, greedily swallowing the rarest of rare for her — un-moldy, piping fresh bread. She stuck another crumb in when Ania waved the butter closer.

  Nodding her thanks, Hayley moved to dip her finger in to pick up a slab, when Ania yanked it away. At the crunched up look Hayley gave her, the girl laughed, “Try using this instead.” From out of her hands appeared a silver knife, short as a pointer finger, with some kind of fancy design on the handle. Hayley’s eyes burned into it as Ania dropped the precious treasure into her fingers.

  It was heavy, way heavier than it looked, which meant this thing was real. Real silver entrusted to a thief. Her neck beaded up in sweat, reminding her that she was far from alone. Digging into the butter, Hayley slathered her heel of bread in as much as she could before laying the silver knife back on the bowl’s lip. She felt a sigh of relief echo through the room, no doubt both Knight and servant watching her intently — as if she’d be that careless.