“Him.” The Ghost’s crisp use of the word sounded like a shock in the quiet. “As do I. I worry for all of them, but should the General fall, Curatio will surely evacuate the rest. He is reasonable in that way. Cyrus, on the other hand … does stubbornness with a skill and effort that even I can admire.” He looked back at her, sidelong, with a hint of a smile. “You truly do know how to pick them. You and he are matched horses, unbroken animals that are unlikely to ever be cut loose of your maddening habits of pride and-”
“Yes, that will do, thank you.” She eased closer, and took up her place next to him, on the other side of the double doors to the balcony, at the window opposite. She looked out across the sunlit plains, the grasses set to fire by the sunset, the horizon showing the first sign of purple. “So we wait. And dwell on our every previous bad move.”
“We wait,” Alaric said. “Because we all have a duty-he to his part, us to ours.” He let the quiet infuse the air, the stillness of the coming dusk settled over the Council Chambers, and the sun dropped a few degrees in the sky before he broke the silence again. “They’ll be coming, you know.”
“I know,” she said. “When?”
“Soon,” Alaric promised. “The Sovereign will not wait. And for all my bravado in Council, you should know-they may yet break us. He will send … almost everything at us, here, because the future of his war depends on it.”
“Then I suppose we’ll have to break him. His army. His war.” She said it more certainly than she thought it, as though Alaric’s confidence had made its way to her, and they had reversed their roles in the minutes since the meeting ended.
“I suppose we shall,” he said, and lapsed into a silence that carried them well past the time when the sun sank below the horizon, and the room’s torches and hearths lit themselves, and they could no longer see anything out the windows but darkness and the reflections of themselves in the glass.
Chapter 50
Cyrus
“So you want to learn to be fearless?” The Guildmaster smelled of sweat and leather, as Cyrus’s own father had. “You want to know what it feels like to be empty of all dread, to be free from worry, to unconcern yourself with that gut-ripping, heart-rending sensation they call fear?”
Cyrus’s hand wavered in the air, his six-year-old, thin arm quivering from being in this strange place. “Yes,” he said, quietly.
“What was that?” The Guildmaster asked again.
“Yes, Guildmaster,” Cyrus said, louder this time, adding the honorific because adults liked that. He knew they liked that. Belkan had told him so.
The Guildmaster towered over him, his six-year-old self, Cyrus realized, dimly aware that this was not him now but years ago, a strange divide in his consciousness between the awareness of memory of how he thought then and how he thought now, whenever NOW was. The man’s armor was scuffed from use, yet the polish was there, impressive in its way, and his gauntlets were stiff, as though his fingers were locked into position all in a line. “What do you fear, Cyrus Davidon?”
Cyrus blinked, uncertain. How did one know what they feared? There were so many things, so very many … they hung out there, a thousand ideas just below the surface of his mind, things that he could snatch at but that wisped like vapor when he made to grab at them, to seize them and put them into the light where all could see. “I … I don’t know, Guildmaster.” Maybe if I add the title he won’t be mad at me for not knowing …
The Guildmaster’s face honed in on him, watched him, but there was no malice there, Cyrus thought, no anger. “It would be hard indeed to eliminate fear when you cannot even say what it is that you are afraid of.”
“My father,” came the voice to Cyrus’s right. He turned his head, and saw the boy with the brown hair, the unkempt and bushy hair that grew long, and his hand was raised too, though for how long Cyrus was uncertain. “I fear my father. When he had too much to drink, he always came after me-”
“Good enough,” the Guildmaster said. “You fear your father, Cass Ward?” The man took a step toward the boy named Cass, and Cyrus watched him go, turning away, and he felt regret for not knowing the right answer straight away, felt the burn of shame for being too embarrassed to name his fear, to shout it out loud and look it in the eye the way the boy named Cass had. “You fear your father because he hit you?” Cass nodded, eyes disappearing under the mass of hair. “Because it hurt?” Cyrus watched the Guildmaster, wondered if he was going to hit Cass, as though there were some lesson in that. “A reasonable fear for a normal person. Pain causes fear. You fear pain, it paralyzes you, holds you back, keeps you from giving it your all in fight. You feared your father because he was bigger than you, stronger than you, could hurt you and cause you pain.” The Guildmaster stood over Cass now, and Cyrus saw the man’s hand come down on Cass’s head, not to hurt him, but to rest in the boy’s hair, and the Guildmaster gave him a slight mussing, as though in affection. “Good on you, boy, for admitting it. Fathers can frighten, no doubt. But you fear them because of the phantom of pain. I will teach you not to fear pain. I will teach you to make the pain your own, to live in it, to turn it against those who would use it on you, who would seek to make you fearful-and to make them fearful instead. There are worse things in life than pain.”
The Guildmaster looked over the crowd. “This is the Society of Arms. I teach the art of war to those who want to learn. I will teach you how beat your enemies, to make them fear you. I will teach you to purge this weakness, to exploit it in others. I will make you brave and fearless-at least those who want to learn. Some of you are fearful even at the prospect of what I have said, of living in pain to overcome it. You won’t last very long.” The Guildmaster walked back to the enclosure at the far end of the arena, where a healer waited for him, the white robes the brightest color in the room. “This is the path of the bold, the brave, the strong. This is the path for those who will fight fear to its natural death, who will pass through the fire and come out fearless.” The Guildmaster looked over them again, the half a hundred. “And we will start to determine who those among you are … right now.” He clapped his hands together, gauntlets ringing their metal chime, discordant, across the pack of children who waited. “This is your first test. Are you ready?”
There was still muffled crying in the crowd, a few sobs here and there, but most of it had ceased in the course of the Guildmaster’s speech. He looked at the boy called Cass, saw Cass looking back at him from beneath his mop of hair, and felt his voice join a very small chorus of “Yesses.” He knew, instinctively, that Cass’s voice was in there, too, even as he saw the boy’s head nod and his lips move.
“Very well, then,” the Guildmaster said, and then raised his voice, the low guttural, reassuring sound turning harsh and discordant. “Then you will fight amongst yourselves until there is only one of you standing … and we will judge which of you will remain, will learn to be fearless … and which of you will spend the rest of your lives living like an ordinary person … in all the requisite fear that brings with it.”
Chapter 51
Cyrus found himself moving before the Guildmaster had even finished speaking. He heard the words, absorbed them, but after the command to fight, nothing else needed to be said. Belkan had told him what the Society was, after all-it was to learn to fight, like his father had fought the thrice-damned trolls. That meant hitting, it meant swords, it meant fists. He’d fought his father-wrestled, more like-trying to knock the man down to little effect. But his father was big, tall, muscled, could lay him out with a single swat-not that he ever would do that, but he could, and Cyrus could feel it. He’d fought with other boys his age, too, though, clumsy, uncoordinated fights, miming the things he’d seen the drunks do in the alley outside the Rotten Fish, the tavern just down from his home. Punches, kicks, biting-he’d seen a dark elf lose an ear that way, once, seen blood come down the face of another man and seen a dwarf kicked so hard in the groin that it looked as though his pants came up to his chest.
&
nbsp; Cyrus head-butted the boy next to him, remembering what his father had told him about using his skull against the soft part of a face. His father had meant it as advice in case he’d been about the market and someone other than a guard had tried to take hold of him, but he used it now and watched the blond boy next to him, who was already near to tears, fall to the ground, his hands on his face and his low sobs turned to a high whine. Cyrus moved on, but the boy was already still. The child next to him was not as tall as Cyrus, and Cyrus jabbed the heel of his hand into the boy’s nose and felt pain shoot through his wrist from the impact. This was near to a punch, and his father had taught him how to throw a punch, a good one, straight on and with his weight behind it. The boy on the receiving end fell to the ground sobbing, too, just like the last, and Cyrus wondered if he was doing well, if the Guildmaster would teach him how to be unafraid if he knocked them all down. And if they get up, I’ll knock them down again until they don’t.
He kept on, the sobs and wails growing louder and more persistent. He saw other boys, too, making their way through, knocking down the ones who stood dumbfounded, almost as though they were prey. It wasn’t just the larger ones, either; Cyrus saw the two girls at the front, the ones the Guildmaster had nodded to, and he watched them both tear into a larger boy with a flurry of kicks that brought him to his knees.
Cyrus saw two come at him, both just a shade smaller than him, and he dodged the first and put a fist in his face. Blood trickled down the boy’s lip, but he only flinched a little. Cyrus hit him again, then again, and felt a heavy blow land on the back of his head, with enough impact to send him sideways. He staggered, came back up with his hands in front of his face, and lashed out with a foot to the nearest one’s leg. He tripped him sideways, leaving Cyrus to look at the other one, the one with a bloody nose. Cyrus leapt after him, caught him with another punch, then another, until the boy curled into a ball and Cyrus moved on, back to the first, whom he hit twice before the boy yielded, shaking where he lay.
“Enough!” came the voice, the call, over them, and what motion there was halted, all save one-Cass, the boy had been called, and he was pummeling another, hitting him in the face over and over. “I said enough, Ward,” the Guildmaster called again, and Cass stopped his assault.
The Guildmaster and the others came out of the enclosure now, down the five steps to the arena’s dirt floor. There was a wide gate opposite them, and it opened now, and a few men came out, waiting in a huddle behind the battleground, where at least forty of the fifty that had started lay on the ground, a few unmoving. “This was a good showing by some of you,” the Guildmaster said. “A good showing indeed. Some of you have the seeds of fearlessness within you, the roots to grow mighty and strong in the sight of the God of War. Others …” he touched one boy who was curled up with the toe of his boot, not hard, but the boy whimpered anyway, “… others of you will find paths more suited to your … tendencies, shall we say?” He pointed to a few of the fallen, including the two boys Cyrus had just downed, and whispered to one of the armored men at his side, a painfully thin one. The other, a dwarf with a face that was all jaw and beard, shook his head a few times during the conversation. Their healer was already moving about the children on the floor, using his magic, mending wounds, sending some of them on their way, out the gates, where Cyrus could see other men waiting for them, herding them like the cattle he’d seen run through the streets of Reikonos in the past.
“Fifteen,” the Guildmaster said, finished with his talk with the dwarf and the thin man. “Out of fifty-four, I’ll have you know. That’s how many of you will be inducted today. Twelve years from now, when your training is complete, perhaps five of you will remain. That is the way of things here in the Society of Arms. But don’t think you’ll be safe simply because you are one of the top in your form; there have been plenty of forms that haven’t graduated a single warrior.” The Guildmaster gave them a grin, one that highlighted that his smile was missing at least three teeth. “That’s how we like it. Toughness will become a second skin to you, fearlessness is earned, not given freely, it’s a confidence that comes with knowing that you will be able to deal with anything and anyone you meet or else you’ll die with a sword in hand, and that will be fine, too. We will take … everything,” his voice became throaty when he said this, “from you. You have no past. You have no future but war, weapons, and service. You will exist only in the present, in the moment, with your weapon in your hand, and conviction in your heart that whoever stands opposed to you will die by your hand.”
He made his way through those still standing, as he said this. Cyrus cast a sidelong look at Cass Ward and got one in return. He’s trouble, Cyrus thought. Not the others, just him. He’s the only threat in this room, the only serious one.
“Cyrus Davidon,” the Guildmaster said, and Cyrus looked up to find him lingering overhead. “Do you still wish to be a warrior, to lose your fear and look into the face of death unflinching?”
Cyrus heard the moans of those still fallen, the ones the healer was working his way around to, one at a time. The smell of sweat and sand was heavy in the room; fear, Cyrus thought with his six-year-old mind. “Yes,” he said. “Guildmaster.” He remembered the honorific at the last. Adults like that.
The Guildmaster studied him shrewdly, and Cyrus could smell the leather of the man, could see the scars where a blade had worked long cuts across the man’s forehead in a diagonal slash, an X above his eyebrows. His cheeks were pitted worse, and when he smiled at Cyrus only half his face lifted. “That’s good talk.” His hand came down on Cyrus’s head, gave it a tousle, then came back to his belt, where Cyrus heard a noise of metal on leather and steel, a screech of a blade running out of a scabbard, then it was in his face, in his hands, pressed into his palms by the Guildmaster, a blade longer than his forearm. “But let’s see if good action follows it. Take this …” The Guildmaster squatted, and pressed the weapon into his grasp then turned his eyes left, where Cyrus followed his gaze to a boy at his right, whom Cyrus had headbutted only moments before. Cyrus’s look flitted back to the Guildmaster, and he felt the first stir of uncertainty as the Guildmaster looked back at him, watching, assessing, judging. “… and kill him.”
Chapter 52
The weight was heavy on Cyrus’s shoulder, the hand of the Guildmaster resting there, and Cyrus looked at it, looked at the metal gauntlet on the soft cloth of his shirt. That smell of leather was persistent, the other smell, too, that reminded him of the time he wrestled with his father and hit his nose, hard, and it wouldn’t stop bleeding … that was here as well, but it wasn’t his nose that was bloody, not this time …
The dagger had weight, too. He knew it was dagger. His father had showed him all manner of weapons, from short swords and axes to polearms, when he had gone to the militia house for a day. There were even a few hanging above the mantle in his house, he had seen them all his life. But when his father was clad in the black armor, he wore a sword. “A dagger is just a shorter sword, son,” his father had told him. “You’ll know it when you see it.”
And he saw it now, the blade, it fit in his hand but the hilt bulged out on the ends. “Like this,” the Guildmaster said, and pushed the guard up against his hand so that more of the hilt stuck out of the bottom of his fist. “Hold it like this.”
Cyrus did, and he felt the Guildmaster steer him toward the boy, the one he had hurt so badly that the child hadn’t bothered to get up yet. And he is a child, not even a boy because he wasn’t ready, couldn’t handle it, folded and lay down when the call came over us-
“Do it,” the Guildmaster said. There was a silence in the arena that Cyrus reckoned had fallen in the last few minutes. “Go on.”
Cyrus took another step toward the boy; he was over him now, hovering, and looked down over the patch of blond hair, where two grubby hands, smeared with dirt were held against the boy’s face. He was writhing, sobbing quietly, no older than Cyrus. Younger even, perhaps. It was so hard to tell.
Cyrus swallowed, as though he could drown his fears inside him. He stared down at the boy and felt only pity, looking at the ragged cloth, at the shoes that were no more than foot covers with holes in them. “They’re orphans, all,” Belkan had said when he brought Cyrus to the Society. “Like you.”
Cyrus stepped closer, toward the lad, who was looking up at him now, eyes half-closed, curled up like a baby Cyrus had once seen sleeping at a neighbor’s house. The boy was still, though, breathing steady, watching Cyrus closely, but with a far-off look in his eyes.
“Go on,” the Guildmaster said from behind him. “Have at it.”
There was a still in the arena and the place was dark, lit only by the lamps all around them, a thousand of them, perhaps, and Cyrus wondered idly who took the time to light them all. The boy waited for him, unresisting, crying softly, and Cyrus saw the little droplets of water that ran down the boy’s cheeks, remembered the feel of his own before he ran out from overuse. Pitiful. He’s not there yet but close. Then he’ll be like me.
The air was quiet, everyone watching him, even the men at the door. Beyond them he could see snow falling outside, damp, and even more quiet out on the streets than it was in here, with the men watching and waiting. The fear bit at him, and he knew he was failing the test, hesitating, and he stared down at the boy again. The smell of urine was strong now, and he could not tell whether it was from the boy or from himself. He looked again at the boy, then at the gate to the world outside the arena, so small, and getting ever so much smaller by the minute, the quiet, snow-covered streets. The sand beneath his feet was crimson, red with blood.
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