Masques (14 page)

After breakfast, Aralorn found herself cornered by Myr, and before she knew it, she was agreeing to give lessons in swordsmanship. Myr divided the adults into four groups to be taught by Aralorn, Myr, Wolf, and a one-armed ex-guardsman with an evil smile and the unlikely name of Pussywillow. The other three teachers were, in Aralorn’s estimation, all much better with a sword than Aralorn was, but luckily none of her students were good enough to realize how badly outclassed she was.

The first part of any low-level lesson was a drill in basic moves. Haris Smith-Turned-Cook handled the sword with the same strength and sureness that a good smith uses in swinging a hammer. He learned rapidly from a word or a touch. Edom had the normal flaws of adolescence—all elbows and awkwardness. The others were in the middle range. Given three or four years of steady sword work, they would be passable, maybe.

It didn’t really matter, she thought. If it came down to hand-to-hand fighting, they were all doomed anyway. But it was something to keep the people busy and make them feel as though they were working toward a common goal.

She fought her first bout with Haris, deciding to face the best fighter first—when she was fresh. It was a good idea. He might not have had much experience with a sword, but he had been in more than one dirty fight. If she’d had to rely on only her swordsmanship to fight him, she might have lost, but she’d been in a few dirty fights herself.

When she finally pinned him, Haris gave her the first genuine smile she’d seen on his face. “For a little bit of a thing, you fight pretty well.”

“For a hulking brute, you’re not too bad yourself,” she said, letting him up. She turned to the observers. “And that is how you fight on a battlefield. But not in a training session on swordsmanship. The sword got in his way more than it helped him. If he were fighting in a battle today, he’d be better off with a club than with a sword. That will not be true in a month, for any of you—I hope.”

The others were easier, so she lectured as she fought. By the time she was facing the last student, Edom, she was short on breath. Cleaning the inn had been good for keeping in shape, but a two-hour workout with a sword was enough to test her powers of endurance.

She opened with the same move that she’d used in all the other fights—a simple sidesweep that all the others had been able to meet. Edom fell, which should have shown him to be an utter idiot with a sword. She heard a few suppressed sniggers from the audience. But something about the fall struck her as a little off; if he had fallen from the force of the blow, he shouldn’t have fallen quite as far as he had. She wasn’t big enough to push him that distance without more leverage than a sidesweep allowed for.

She helped him up and handed him his sword. Grasping his wrist, she showed him the proper block and swung again. He met it that time, clumsily. She worked slowly with him at first, gradually speeding up. He progressed slowly, with nothing more odd than ineptness showing in his fighting.

She worked with him on three blocks, aiming different attacks at him and showing how each block could be used. She was getting tired, and made a mistake that a better swordsman would never have made. She used a complex swing, difficult to execute as well as counter, and misjudged it. Horrified, she waited for her sword to cut into his leg.

He blocked it.

He shouldn’t have been able to, not at his level. She wasn’t sure that she could have blocked it. She certainly couldn’t have executed the combination that he used. She stepped back and met his eyes. Softly, so that no one but she could hear, he said, “Can I explain in private?”

She considered a minute and nodded. Turning back to the others, she dismissed them, sending them to watch Myr, still fighting nearby.

Alone, Edom met her gaze. He shuffled a foot in the dirt. “You . . .” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat and tried again. “You know that I’m not quite what I appear to be. I’m not even Rethian; I’m from Darran. I don’t know if you know it, but Darran is under the ae’Magi’s influence, too.”

“Darran?” Darranians hated magic. People who could work magic left, or risked being killed. Impossible to imagine Darranians approving of the ae’Magi.

He saw her expression.

“Yes. It was pretty obvious when it happened,” he said. “Scary. I said the wrong thing, and I had to run for my life.” He shrugged. “I don’t know why I came here. Something . . . drew me here, I guess. It seemed as good a place to go as any. I found the valley full of people like me, hiding from the ae’Magi. But they were all Rethians. Given current feelings between Darran and Reth, I could hardly tell them that I was a noble-born Darranian.

“So I told them that I was the son of a Rethian merchant. I thought that it was a good idea, I speak Rethian with a faint enough accent that I could pass for any number of western provinces—and it explained the richness of my clothes.

“Then Myr came and started this swordsmanship training. Where would a merchant’s son get trained in Darranian-style swordsmanship? So I faked it.”

Aralorn looked him over. “Quite a problem, I agree. What you will do is tell this all to Myr. You do it, or I will.” She put a bite into her last sentence. She’d trained her share of new recruits before she became a spy—some of them needed orders that sounded like orders.

Edom balked; she saw it in his eyes. Whether it was the order, the idea of telling Myr his secret, being told what to do by a woman, who was also obviously Rethian (prejudice went both ways between Reth and Darran), or all of the above, she didn’t know. Though she suspected all three. She waited while he worked it out, saw him swallow his pride with an effort.

“I’ve heard he’s not as prejudiced as most Rethians.” She waved a hand in the vague direction of the rest of the camp. “And with the lack of trained fighters here, Myr can’t afford to be too picky.”

Edom stared at her a moment. “I guess I’ll go do that now, then.” He gave her a small smile, took a deep breath, and seemed to relax. “If he doesn’t kick me out, I guess it might be nice to be useful, instead of sitting on the sidelines all the time.” After a brief bow to her, student to teacher, he ran off to where Myr was fighting.

Aralorn stretched wearily. Tired as she was, it had felt good to work out with a sword rather than a mop—it was almost as good as playing at staff.

The exercise had made her hot and itchy, so she wandered over to the creek. It took her a while, but she found a place deep enough to wash in, with a large flat rock that she could kneel on and avoid the worst of the mud. She ducked her head under the water—its icy temperature welcome on her overheated skin.

As she was coming up for air, she heard a newly familiar voice say, “See, I told’ja she had a funny-looking sword. Look, the handle’s made out of metal.”

Aralorn took her time wiping her face on her sleeve and smoothing her dripping hair away from her face. Stanis and his silent-but-grinning companion, Tobin, stood observing her. She hid a smile when she recognized Stanis’s solemn-faced, feet-apart, hands-behind-his-back pose. She’d noticed that Myr did that when he was thinking.

“Have you killed anyone?” Stanis’s voice was filled with gruesome interest.

She nodded solemnly as she rolled up the long sleeves of the innkeeper’s son’s tunic again. Maybe she should cut them, too. The boots were giving her blisters.

“You’re not supposed to fight with swords that don’t have wooden handles,” said Stanis worriedly. “If you kill a magician with your sword, his magic will kill you.”

She could have explained that any mage powerful enough to be problematical that way would certainly not need a sword to kill her. But she didn’t want to scare them any worse than they already were.

“That’s why I only
wound
magicians with my sword,” she explained. “When I kill magicians, I always use my knife. It has a wooden grip.”

“Oh,” said Stanis, apparently satisfied with her answer.

They were silent for a moment, then Stanis said, “Tobin wanted to know if you would tell us about killing someone?”

“All right,” agreed Aralorn. Far be it from her to give up the chance to tell stories. Her friends rolled their eyes when she started one, but children were always a good audience. She looked around for a good place. She settled on a grassy area, far enough away from the stream so that the ground was relatively dry, and sat down cross-legged. When her audience joined her, she cleared her throat and began the story.

That was where Wolf found her. Her audience had grown to include most of the camp, Myr’s raggle-taggle army as enthralled as any bunch of hardened mercenaries at her favorite tavern. He walked quietly closer until he could hear what she was saying.

“. . . so we snuck past the dragon’s nose a second time. We had to be careful to avoid the puddles of poison that dripped from the old beast’s fangs as it slept.”

She had just thrown away her career and her home—no matter what the outcome of this, she had disobeyed orders. If she returned to Sianim, it would be as a criminal and a deserter. She knew that. Knew that Myr’s little band of refugees was doomed unless they had the luck of the gods—and he didn’t believe in luck, not good luck, anyway. Yet here she was, entertaining this grim and hopeless bunch with her relentless cheer.

“Dragon’s ears”—she spoke in such serious tones that several people in her audience nodded, including, to Wolf’s private amusement, Myr—“though you can’t see them at all, are very acute. There we were, the four of us, loaded down with all sorts of treasures, sneaking past this huge beast that could swallow us all in one gulp. We held our very breath when we neared it. Not a sound did we make, we stepped so soft.” Her voice dropped to a carrying whisper. “Now you remember those bejeweled golden goblets Wikker’d liked so well? Just as we crossed in front of the dragon . . . that great beast, he breathed out, and it was as if we were caught in a spring storm the wind was so bad. It grabbed one of Wikker’s goblets, and it landed right on that giant fiend’s scale-covered muzzle.” She closed her eyes and looked sorrowful for a moment, waiting . . .

“What happened?” asked a hushed voice from the crowd.

Aralorn shook her head and spread her arms. “What do you expect happened? It ate us.”

There was a short silence, then sheepish laughter as they realized that she’d been telling them a tall tale from the beginning. Wolf was close enough to hear Stanis’s disgruntled, “
That’s
not how it should have ended. You’re supposed to kill the dragon.”

Aralorn laughed, hopped to her feet, and ruffled the boy’s hair as she passed by him. “There is another ending to the story. I’ll tell you it later. Now, though, I think that I hear someone calling us for lunch.”

Aralorn ate the last of the bread and cheese that was lunch, and Wolf touched her on the shoulder. She dusted off her hands and followed him without a word. They slipped out of camp and scaled one side of the valley. Once on the top, they followed a faint trail through the trees that led to a cliff with several dark openings, including a large, shallow-looking cave.