The Education of Brother Thaddius and other tales of DemonWars (The DemonWars Saga)

by R. A. Salvatore

  THE EDUCATION

  OF BROTHER

  THADDIUS

  and other tales of

  DEMONWARS

  R.A. SALVATORE

  “Mather’s Blood” copyright R.A. Salvatore, 1998

  “A Song for Sadye” copyright R.A. Salvatore, 2003

  “The Education of Brother Thaddius” copyright R.A. Salvatore 2014

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Art by Larry Elmore, all rights reserved.

  CONTENTS

  Mather’s Blood

  A Song for Sadye

  The Education of Brother Thaddius

  MATHER’S BLOOD

  “Oh, but you’re a quick one!” Mather Wyndon cried out, leaping a fallen log and cutting a fast turn about a sharp bend in the trail. He spotted the creature he was pursuing, an ugly and smelly goblin, far ahead, scrambling up a steep hill and over a wall of piled rocks.

  The large man lowered his head and started straight on, but he stopped fast at the sound of a cry to his right. He cut behind a tree, grabbing its solid trunk to help break his momentum, and pivoted about, his fine elvish blade glowing with an eager white light.

  Out of the brush came the second goblin, running wild, running scared, holding its crude spear—no more than a sharpened stick, really—out wide in one hand, in no position to throw or to stab.

  The creature wasn’t up for any fight, anyway, Mather understood as soon as he saw its features, twisted into an expression of the sheerest fright. That was the secret of fighting goblins, the seasoned ranger knew. Catch them by surprise, and the cowardly beasts would scatter, all semblance of defense thrown aside. Mather smiled as a second creature burst out behind the goblin, a huge beast with the lower body of a horse supporting the upper body of a man: a centaur, five hundred pounds of muscle, and this one, Bradwarden by name, was merely a boy, Mather knew.

  A boy, but an impressive sight no less!

  Hardly slowing, howling with glee, the young centaur ran up the goblin’s back, trampled the ugly thing down into the dirt, then, as he came up above its head, he lifted his hind legs and stomped down hard, splattering the goblin’s skull.

  Mather didn’t see it; having all faith in his half-equine companion, the elven-trained ranger was already in pursuit of the first goblin, running hard up the ascent, then leaping atop the stone wall, and then leaping far from it with graceful fluid movements. Mather was closer to fifty years of age than to forty, but he moved with the agility of a far younger man. Though he had spent the majority of his life in the harsh climate of the Timberlands, serving as silent protector for the folk of the two small towns in the region, Dundalis and Weedy Meadow, he felt few aches in his old bones and muscles.

  From the top of the ridge, Mather saw spread out before him a familiar vale of man-height spruce trees, triangular green dots among a field of white ankle-deep caribou moss. And there was the running goblin—and indeed it was a quick one!—scrambling along, cutting sharp corners about the trees, stumbling often, and half the time turning right around in a circle as it tried to keep its bearings in this vale where all the trees looked the same.

  Down went Mather in a rush. The goblin spotted him and squeaked pitifully, then ran in a straight line away, to the south, and up another slope. As it neared the top, the foliage changed back to deciduous trees, small growth and scrub. The goblin slipped into one tangle of birch and peered back anxiously.

  “If you’re waiting for your friend, you’ll be waiting a long time, I fear,” came a voice behind the goblin. Mather’s voice.

  The creature shrieked and scrambled out of the birch, one step ahead of the ranger, one step ahead of that deadly blade. The goblin went around a large trunk, but Mather was the quicker, coming around the other way, cutting off the escape. The goblin lifted its club and, forced to fight, tried to assume a defensive position.

  Mather’s blade swerved left, then right, and the goblin’s club moved with it, in line to block.

  But Mather knew Bi’nelle dasada, the elven sword dance, and the goblin did not. The side-to-side movements were naught but feints, for this fighting style, so unlike all the others of the day, focused on the movements forward and back. His lead foot perpendicular to his trailing, bracing foot, his front knee bent and his weight out over it, Mather waved the blade again, and then, before the goblin could recognize the move, before it could react with the club, before it could even blink, Mather’s elven blade, Tempest, stabbed forward, seeming to pull all of his body, extending, extending, past the goblin’s meager defenses, through the goblin’s torso, to crack hard against the tree trunk behind the creature.

  Mather let go of the blade.

  The goblin did not fall, even as the last life left it, held firmly in place by the embedded sword.

  Mather glanced to the south, down the slope to the tiny village of Dundalis, nestled in the vale beyond. The day was early and bitterly cold, and none of the folk were about, though Mather could see the glow of the morning fires through several windows. They wouldn’t see him, though, and wouldn’t know what he had done here this morn. They knew nothing of goblins, these farmers and woodcutters. Indeed, goblins were rare in these parts; this trio were the first ones the ranger had seen in several years. But that only made them doubly dangerous to the unsuspecting folk of Dundalis, Mather realized. Goblins were not so difficult an enemy when they were caught by surprise, as Mather and Bradwarden had done. They were cowardly creatures, and purely selfish. Thus, when surprised, they would simply scatter. But if they got the upper hand, if they ever found Mather and Bradwarden’s camp instead of the other way around, then the ranger and centaur would indeed find a difficult fight on their hands. And if the goblins ever managed an ambush on the sleepy town of Dundalis…

  Mather shook the unsettling images away, but not after wondering if he should try, at least, to better educate and thus prepare the folk of the village for that grim possibility. The notion merely brought a chuckle to his lips. The folk would never listen. To them, goblins were but fireside tales. Mather looked at the dead creature. Perhaps he should bring it and its companions into the town to show them. Perhaps…

  No, the ranger realized. That was not his place, and the ramifications of such an action could be disastrous—everything from scaring half the folk back to the civilized southland to bringing an army up from Palmaris, a force that would despoil all of this nearly pristine land.

  Let the folk remain oblivious. And of the ranger, their secret protector, let the folk continue their perception of him as a mad hermit, an eccentric woodsman, to be shunned whenever he ventured among them.

  Better that way, Mather thought. He was performing as the elves had trained him. As he had learned all those years ago in the elven homeland of Caer’alfar, he did not take his satisfaction in accolades. Mather’s strength came from within.

  He grasped Tempest in both hands and yanked it free, then wiped the shining blade on the ragged clothes of the fallen goblin. He grabbed the ugly little creature with one hand and went down to the north, back into the pine vale, dragging the goblin behind him. By the time he found Bradwarden, the centaur had the other two goblins the pair had killed this day piled with a mound of sticks and dead branches, ready to burn.

  *****

  “The first kill was mine,” Bradwarden insisted later that night, while
he and Mather feasted on venison stew.

  “The goblin’s blood stained Tempest,” Mather answered, though his tone showed that he hardly cared for the credit.

  “Ah, but it was me arrow that sent the thing sprawlin’ to the ground,” the centaur reasoned with a big slurp to catch a piece of meat that slipped out the corner of his mouth. He wasn’t successful, though, and the venison hit the ground. Bradwarden, with hardly a thought, scooped it right up and popped it back into his mouth. “And lyin’ there, as it was, ye’re finding an easy time killin’ the thing. Too easy, I’m thinking, and so the kill’s me own to claim.”

  “I will split the kill with you,” Mather said. “A goblin and a half for the each of us this day.”

  The centaur stopped chewing and eyed the ranger unblinkingly. “Two for me and one for yerself,” he argued.

  Mather couldn’t suppress a smile. He had known Bradwarden for nearly five years now, and the young centaur’s overblown sense of pride and wild spirit had been a true amusement to him for all that time. Bradwarden was just into his thirties, which equated to the same stage as a human teenager. Oh, how he acted the part!

  “Take two for yourself, then,” Mather teased. “After all these years, it seems appropriate that you finally best me in something, even if it is but a minor battle with a trio of weakling goblins, a trio I’d have an easier time killing myself.”

  Bradwarden recognized a challenge when he heard one. He dropped his bowl of venison stew—but cupped it as it hit the ground, catching a substantial part of the spillage and rushing it right back to his waiting mouth. He nodded his chin in the direction of the tree stump at the side of the small encampment.

  Mather smiled and shook his head. “You’ll only get angrier,” he remarked, but the centaur was already on his way. With a feigned sigh of resignation, Mather climbed to his feet and rolled up his right sleeve, then took his place opposite Bradwarden and placed his elbow on the stump.

  They clasped hands, and the centaur began to pull immediately, gaining a quick advantage. But Mather, the muscles of his forearm bulging with strength from all the years he had spent squeezing the milk stones to make the elvish wine, locked his arm in place and turned his wrist over the young centaur’s. Within a matter of seconds, Mather understood that he would again win their arm-wrestling, and he put a smug smile over his straining companion. The ranger figured that he would enjoy the victories while he could, for his strength was on the wane, while Bradwarden was growing, and growing stronger, every day. Bradwarden was twice Mather’s weight, but the centaur would likely gain that much again within a couple more years. Even now, so young, the centaur could beat almost any human at arm wrestling, though his human arms were undeniably his weakest asset.

  But Mather Wyndon wasn’t just any human, was a ranger, was in fact, the epitome of what a human warrior might achieve in body and soul. Slowly but surely, the centaur’s arm slid back and down toward the tree stump.

  Bradwarden’s eyes went wide in apparent shock as he looked over Mather’s shoulder. The ranger, expecting a goblin spear to be flying at his back, glanced around—and the centaur pulled hard, nearly pulling Mather’s elbow out of joint and slamming the ranger’s hand hard down on the tree stump.

  With a howl of pain and outrage, Mather, realizing the ruse, spun back on Bradwarden, and now it was the centaur wearing the smug smile. “Two for me and one for yerself,” the centaur said. “And now ye’re beaten again.” And then he was off, spinning and bucking to ward off Mather’s rush, then galloping across the encampment and into the forest.

  Laughing all the way, Mather followed him as far as the edge of camp. “Have your victories, then!” he shouted. “I’ve got the stew, and that makes me the winner!”

  “And what would you know of any victories?” came a melodic voice from behind, a voice like the tinkling of sweet bells, or the drift of perfect harmony on summer breezes through a forest. At first, Mather stood as if turner to stone, stunned that someone, anyone, had been able to sneak up on him so. As he considered that voice, that familiar voice, he came to recognize the truth, and his smile was genuine and wide indeed when he turned about to face the speaker.

  She sat on the lowest branch of a tree at the side of the camp, her delicate legs dangling and crossed, her nearly translucent wings fluttering behind her. “Blood of Alturias,” she said derisively, a taunt Mather Wyndon had heard so many times, a reference to a deceased distant cousin, one who had been an elven-trained ranger long before him, one who this particular elf, Tuntun by name, had apparently consider far more worthy of training than she had Mather.

  “Tuntun, my dear old friend,” he said dryly, feigning resignation, though it was obvious that he was overjoyed to see the elf.

  “Never that,” the elf replied.

  “My mentor, then,” Mather replied.

  “Hardly.”

  “My teacher, then,” Mather agreed.

  “Unfortunately,” came the curt response, but Mather understood the joke behind it. Tuntun had been, perhaps, his most critical instructor in his years with the elves, and, despite the fact that she weighed nowhere near to a hundred pounds, had bested him many times in sparring matches. Keen of wit and of skill, the delicate elf had put more than a few bruises on Mather Wyndon, body and pride!

  “What brings Tuntun so far from Caer’alfar?” Mather asked. “And does she come alone?”

  “Would she need an escort in these lands full of bumbling, stupid humans?” the elf replied.

  Mather bowed, granting her that. Indeed, he knew that Tuntun could pass all the way through the human lands and back again, stealing food wherever she chose, sleeping wherever she decided was most comfortable, without being spotted once by anybody.

  “And why am I so blessed with your visit?” the ranger asked.

  Tuntun half-jumped, half-flew, down from her perch, going at once to the cauldron and sniffing it, then curling her features in obvious disgust.

  “Were you just curious as to how I was getting along?” Mather pressed. “It has been three years, at least, since I have seen you or any of the Touel’alfar.”

  “That is the joy of training rangers,” the unrelenting Tuntun went on. “Once we are done with them, we set them back to their own kind and do not have to smell them again.”

  Mather let it go with a chuckle. He knew that behind the gruff words and constant insults, Tuntun, perhaps more than any of the other elves, truly cared for him. Tuntun, though, had always equated any show of the softer emotions with weakness, and both of them understood that weakness could quickly spell disaster for one working as a ranger.

  “And yet here you are,” Mather said, his smile as unrelenting as Tuntun’s insults, “come to share my meal and my company.”

  “Come with news,” Tuntun corrected. “And to see how you fare with the child of Andos and Dervia,” she added, referring to Bradwarden’s parents, whom Mather had never met.

  “Bradwarden grows stronger each day,” Mather replied, and even as he spoke, as if on cue, a beautiful, haunting music drifted on the breeze. “And his piping improves,” the ranger added.

  Despite her demeanor, Tuntun smiled at the sound of the centaur’s distant music, a wondrous tune indeed, and nodded her approval. “He has his mother’s gift for song, and his father’s strength.”

  “A fine companion,” Mather agreed. He sat down and picked up his stew, then, and Tuntun did likewise, lifting Bradwarden’s abandoned bowl. Neither spoke for a long while, both just enjoying their meal and the continuing melody of Bradwarden’s piping.

  “I am returning to Caer’alfar,” the elf explained much later on, after Mather had told her of his more recent exploits in the region, including the fight that day with the goblin trio. “I meant to go this very night and should not have veered from my path to speak with you. Too long have I been away.”

  “But you did come, and with news, so you said,” Mather replied.

  “Do you remember when you were a child?
”

  “When Tuntun used to stop me from eating my meals hot, or even warm?” Mather returned with a grin.

  “Before that,” the elf replied in all seriousness.

  Mather stared at her hard. He had been only a few years old when the elves had taken him in, rescued him from a mauling by a bear, nurtured him back to health and then trained him as a ranger. He didn’t remember the bear attack, just the elves’ retelling of it. Try as he might, he could remember nothing of the time before that, other than small uncapturable images.

  “You had family,” Tuntun explained.

  Mather nodded.

  “Younger siblings, and a brother who was born some years after you left them,” Tuntun went on.

  Mather shrugged, hardly remembering.

  “His name is Olwan,” Tuntun explained. “Olwan Wyndon. I thought you should be told.”

  “Why? And why now?”

  “Because Olwan has decided to make the Timberlands his home,” Tuntun explained. “You will know him when you see him, for there is indeed a resemblance. He rides north with his family and two other wagons, headed for the settlement called Dundalis.”

  “This late in the season?” Mather asked incredulously, for few ventured north of Caer Tinella after the beginning of the ninth month, and here they were, halfway through the eleventh, and those who knew the region were somewhat surprised that winter had not begun in earnest. It was not wise to be caught on the road during the Timberland winter.

  “I said he was your brother,” Tuntun replied dryly. “I did not say that he was intelligent. They are on the road, two days yet from the town, and a storm is growing in the west.”

  Mather didn’t reply, didn’t blink.

  “I thought you should know,” Tuntun said again, and she rose up and straightened her clothes.

  “And am I to tell him, this Olwan, who I am?”

  Tuntun looked at the man as though she did not understand the question.