Witch-Blood

by Ash Fitzsimmons

  “No time like the present.”

  “Val,” I groaned, “I’m exhausted, and I’m in pain. Now’s not a great time to try to teach me anything.”

  “On the contrary,” he said, producing for himself a gallon jug of wine and a glass. “The true test isn’t whether you can enchant while you’re calm and happy and focused—it’s whether you can do so when conditions are less than ideal. Which is why we’re going to see how well you can fight injured tomorrow,” he added as he poured.

  I sighed and shifted my ice pack. “You’re having entirely too much fun, Captain.”

  He swirled his wine, watching it sparkle in the light of my fire, then took a long sip. “I know this is difficult for you,” he said quietly. “Training should be a matter of years, not days. Of course,” he muttered, “the trainee shouldn’t be half as strong as you are, but there’s nothing we can do about that. The situation is what it is, and we don’t have long.” He leaned back on his elbow and drank again. “When I was trained, I had my share of broken bones and burns and such, but my injuries were spread out over years of work. Practical lessons, a bit of theory, continued weapons training—a proper education, you understand. But we don’t have that luxury now, and I’m sorry. I’d train you another way if I knew of one half as effective, but I don’t.”

  I snuffed out my flame, and after a moment’s thought, I managed to produce a glass of my own. Val didn’t protest when I helped myself to the wine. “So, who trained you?”

  He was quiet for a long moment as he drank and watched the sky. “Her name was Citca,” he finally said. “Third in command of the queen’s guard when I arrived. The captain and second had neither the time nor the inclination to work with me, but she had a knack for instruction.”

  I didn’t think Val could see my grin in the darkness, but he sensed it nonetheless. “Yes, most of my practical training was at the hands of a woman,” he said, reaching for a refill. “I protested at first, but I was twenty-three and stupid. Citca was five hundred or so, born and raised in the realm, and I was her favorite target for the next ten years.” He sounded almost wistful in his reminiscing.

  “Just magic, or swords, too?”

  “Everything.” He drank slowly, listening to the night around us. “She’d been a guard for centuries. Trained with some of the best. I wasn’t a complete novice with a blade or spear, mind you—I’d seen combat by then, and I thought I was more than competent. Cocky, really. So at our first session together, I made some idiotic jab about the weakness of women, and she broke me in nine places. That’s when I started to learn.” He paused, savoring his wine. “She was half fae, and she was built like a man—tall, broad, hairier than the women I’d known. Her father was from one of the far northern tribes, I believe, or so the rumor went. Citca never spoke of him, if she’d ever known him, but she was pale and fair enough for the story to be plausible. She looked like a Northman, at least.”

  I hesitated as I tried to assess his mood, then asked, “You two, uh…were you—”

  “Never,” he interrupted, and chuckled. “She was a warrior, and I was a boy. I was her project, eventually her comrade, but never her lover. Besides,” he added, “she was in a long-term relationship with our captain, and I knew better than to meddle.” Catching me fiddling with my ice pack, Val passed me the wine jug. “The first lesson of training was to never antagonize anyone who could blast a hole through my chest before I learned to reliably shield, and believe me, that took time. At least you came here with some general conception of magic—I knew less than nothing.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, pausing with the cork half-out of the jug’s neck.

  Val laughed again, softly and deep in his throat. “I never met a wizard until I killed one who’d sneaked across the border. My family left matters of magic and miracles up to the gods. Well,” he amended, “my father bought a few amulets and such for me—the poor man tried to cure me for years—but of course, that never worked.” He shifted in the grass and shook his head. “I’m sorry, you don’t want to know—”

  “No, go on,” I said, pushing the jug back to him. “You’ve never told me about your family.”

  He answered me with a grunt. “I seldom see the need to bring it up.”

  “Okay, fair enough. But you had no idea what you were?” I pressed.

  Val drank and waited while a multicolored cluster of piq passed overhead. “I had no reason to doubt that I was mortal,” he replied after a moment. “You, now, you’re Arcanum-reared, you knew there was another option. But for me…” He shrugged. “Outside of stories and legends, there was no one who wasn’t purely human. My father teased,” he continued, staring into the woods. “He knew nothing about Mab aside from her sex and her willingness. But he used to say that he’d have known it, had he bedded a goddess—she’d have struck him dead for passing out on top of her.”

  “Seriously?”

  “So he said. I wasn’t there to witness the deed, of course, but that’s what I can report.” Val leaned back and groaned as he stretched his legs. “You really want to know this, Aiden?”

  “Hey,” I countered, “you’ve got all the dirt on me, man. Fair’s fair, and this wine’s not bad.”

  “It’s a decent vintage, I grant you that, and remind me to fix your hangover before you sleep,” he replied. “You don’t yet have your brother’s…constitution.”

  “That’s the polite term for it, yeah?”

  He chuckled, and I heard him pull the cork free again. “All right, you want the details?” he said as he poured. “For many years, my father had only two sons, Publius and Gaius. After Gaius was born, my mother—I mean the woman I consider my mother, you understand.”

  I nodded.

  “She lost five children in as many years—three were never born, and two never drew breath. She was, as it happened, newly pregnant for the sixth time when my father had business in Capua—his father’s brother had died, and there was some dispute among his heirs about a farm he’d acquired outside the city. While he was away, he chanced upon a woman sitting on the side of the road one evening, one thing led to another, and he brought her back to the house where he was staying for the night. Apparently, they drank for a few hours, and then they did what they’d come together to do.” Val snorted and sipped his wine. “His story was that he fell asleep atop her and was so drunk that he never heard her slip away, but before she left, she took his ring. A large emerald in heavy gold—he assumed she’d sell it, and he asked a few merchants to alert him if it surfaced, but there was no sign of the ring or the woman before he returned to his wife.

  “Naturally, he didn’t mention any of this to her,” he continued. “She had a difficult enough pregnancy without his indiscretions to consider—they forced her to bed for several months, I believe. In any case, the child—another boy—lived for only three weeks.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Val lifted his glass. “Thank you, but I never knew him. They called him Marcus.” He drank for a long moment, staring into the trees as he sipped. “My mother was inconsolable for several days, half-mad with the loss…and then one of the slaves found me abandoned by the gate at dawn, wearing my father’s missing ring on a chain around my neck. My father thought he’d have to confess, but my mother announced that I was Marcus returned to her by the grace of the gods, and she refused to be convinced otherwise. If she ever changed her mind, she never said anything about it to me.”

  Setting his glass aside, Val reclined on his elbows and looked at the heavens. “My father told me the truth when I was about your age—there were few whispers, but still, he thought I should know. Of course, there was no way to tell whether I was actually his son—the ring meant nothing but a possibility if the woman he’d bedded was a prostitute, and he had been too eager to bed her to press her for details about herself. I like to think that I was his,” he murmured, turning to me. “I look very much like him and his sons, and he claimed me. And my mother, who was all kindness, never treate
d me differently.”

  He fell quiet, and I thought of Mom, who had chosen me, protected me…and now could barely meet my eyes. Pushing that image aside, I said, “But didn’t they notice the metal allergy?”

  “What of it?” he replied with a shrug. “One of my brothers couldn’t eat shellfish without risking his life, the other almost died from a bee, and I couldn’t abide iron or silver. My father assumed he’d done something to displease the gods, but in light of my brothers’ conditions, it was almost expected that I’d discover some weakness. Everyone knew that we were touched in some way—I was merely the most extreme of the lot.”

  I drained my glass, realized that my head was beginning to feel fuzzy, and resisted the temptation to refill. “So when did you change your name?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought you said they called you Marcus.”

  “They did. Marcus Valerius Maximus, son of Publius Valerius Maximus. But there was already a man called Marcus in the queen’s guard when I arrived, and Citca called me whatever she liked. It stuck.”

  I stared at him, trying in vain to see the details of his face in the dark. “Two thousand years, and nobody’s bothered to call you by your real name?”

  “It is my real name. As long as I’ve been here, the custom has been to use only one. Praenomen, nomen gentilicium, cognomen—one serves as well as another here.” He paused, considering my reaction. “Why is this distressing to you?”

  “Well…I mean, I feel bad…”

  “Don’t. The true Marcus Valerius barely lived. If I’d been insistent, I probably could have reclaimed it, but why bother? It’s only a name.” He sat up and pushed himself to his feet, and I followed suit. “But enough of that,” he said, brushing off the dirt. The wine and his glass vanished, and he steered me back toward the cave opening. “Sleep. And before I forget…” His fingertips landed on my temples, and an instant later, the alcohol haze faded into plain exhaustion. “There, now. I don’t want to hear any excuses about overindulgence in the morning.”

  I followed him into the trees, but I couldn’t quite let it go. “Would you rather be called Marcus?”

  Val stopped and looked back at me, his expression enigmatic under the strobing lights of passing piq. “I haven’t been Marcus to anyone since I was twenty-three,” he said. “I’d surely forget to respond to it if someone tried to bring it back. But…” He paused, and I saw the corner of his mouth twitch. “Thank you.”

  “Yeah, no problem,” I said, turning to start the climb down. “I mean, speaking as someone who’s learned to answer to Dudley…”

  “I was meaning to ask why that bothered you,” he replied, waiting until I’d dropped a couple of steps before beginning the descent.

  I resisted the instinctive urge to swat at a piq who passed me, heading toward the surface. “If wizards have a kid without magical talent, the kid’s called a dud,” I said, using the English term. “Russell thought that one up once he realized there was something wrong with me, and it spread.”

  “Ah. And that explains your reaction—there’s nothing else I can call you that makes you quite so angry.” He jumped the last few feet and landed in a smooth crouch, and I stepped off the bottom ledge onto the cave floor. “Aiden, uh…you know I only do that to test you, yes?” he asked, suddenly unsure. “I don’t mean any offense, but—”

  “I’m not offended. You’re helping me.” I started toward the corner of the cave we’d staked out, then stopped and waited for Val, remembering what I’d meant to ask him in the clearing. “You said you didn’t know anything about magic when you got here, right? How did you go that long without figuring it out?”

  He called up a fireball in his hand and lit his way across the room to the cot he’d made for himself. “No wizards around, no faeries, no reason to experiment,” he replied, settling onto his bed. “A friend of mine was almost run through with a spear. I panicked and somehow threw up a shield around him—that was my first time.”

  “Bet your friend was grateful.”

  “Terrified.” He grimaced, then stretched out and folded his arms behind his head. “As were the rest of the men. They ran me off, I wandered for a few months, and I stumbled onto Titania. Never went home again.”

  We lay there in the darkness, listening as Joey snored in his bag beside me.

  “So,” I finally ventured, “your father—”

  “Had I returned to Rome,” said Val, “I would have put my family at risk. Better for them to think that Marcus died abroad.” He paused briefly. “I suppose that Marcus did, in a way.”

  “Yeah,” I muttered, wincing as my dad’s voice echoed in my head. “Probably better that they never found out.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. The whole ‘half-human immortal with untold power’ situation might have been surprising, but…” He rolled onto his side and glanced down at me. “My father was a religious man, even if not always the most devout in his observances. In all likelihood, he’d have thought me touched by the gods, if not semi-divine. That would have been awkward,” he said with a sigh, flopping onto his back. “I considered making my way home at first, before I crossed into Faerie, but you know…one man’s demigod is another man’s monster. Sometimes you’re the hero, sometimes you’re the creature to be slain. Depends on who’s telling the story, I suppose.”

  “Guess you’re lucky, then,” I mumbled, zipping up my bag. “Assuming I get out of here alive, if Dad finds out what I’ve done, he won’t stop at disowning me.”

  I closed my eyes, but I heard Val’s cot creak as he stirred again. “Listen to me carefully,” he murmured, bending close to my ear. “By the time I finish with you, your father won’t be able to harm a hair on your head. This I swear, Aiden. Let go of your fear.”

  I felt him staring at me. “It’s not that I’m afraid,” I began, but Val cut me off before I could try to explain.

  “You are afraid. I’ve seen the fear in you—and there is so much of it, boy. But as for your father, you fear that you will never make him proud.”

  I mulled that over and willed my throat to unclench. “Never will now, will I?”

  “Then the worst has come to pass, and you’re still standing. Metaphorically, I mean,” he amended. “Are you sure you don’t want something more substantial to sleep on?”

  “I’m fine. Thanks, though.”

  “You’re a terrible liar,” he replied. “But try to remember that in the end, he doesn’t determine your worth. Yes?”

  “Sure.”

  Val snorted. “Glad we had this talk, Aiden.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Good. I’m still going to make you fight injured tomorrow.”

  I groaned and pulled the bag over my head, hoping to delay the dawn.

  Having recuperated for a week and exhausted his options for entertaining himself, Joey came along to training the next morning. “I’m assuming the risk,” he announced on arrival before Val could throw him out. “It’s either this or watch the stalactites drip, and geology has never been my passion. So, what can I do to help speed this along?” he asked, leaning against the nearest tree with his arms folded.

  Val sighed and rubbed his head. “You can stay out of the way.”

  “Come on,” he cajoled, “give me something to do. Anything. Shoot, I’ll play water boy if need be.”

  In reply, Val swung his finger around the clearing, pointing to the dozens of blackened pockmarks in the grass. “See those?”

  “Yeah…”

  “That’s what happens when Aiden loses focus. I repeat: stay out of the way.”

  Fortunately, self-preservation won out over Joey’s quest for entertainment, and he stood well behind Val for most of the day. As for me, I spent much of the morning down a limb or two, struggling to juggle my pain, my shield, and the ever-present urge to reduce my opponent to ash. By the time Val called lunch, I’d managed to keep copies of Leo and Milo at bay for half an hour, even with a dead arm, and Val seemed content as
he patched me up. “That was better than I’d anticipated,” he said, working on my shattered elbow. “You’re learning more quickly now. A good sign.”

  “Pain’s a good teacher?” I muttered as the bones knit.

  “Well, yes, but it also means that you’re beginning to internalize all of this—you’re anticipating the necessary enchantment, even if you aren’t consciously aware of doing so. In fact…”

  The bright colors of the active magic around my arm muted, and Val stepped away with a little smile. I gave my arm a test flex and winced at the scrape of bone against bone. “It’s not—”

  “Finish the job.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but Val’s smile was firm, and I knew better than to waste my breath. Hoping I wasn’t about to blow my arm off, I eased it straight, gritted my teeth, and clamped my other hand over the worst of the fractures. “If there’s some trick to this that you’re not telling me,” I said, glaring at Val, “and I end up requiring a hospital, I’m going to forget all of my training and come after you in the night. With a claymore.”

  “You’d need both hands for one of those,” Joey offered. “And decent gloves, don’t forget.”

  Before I could reply, Val stepped between us and turned around. I don’t know what sort of look he gave Joey, but from the way Joey’s eyes widened and he slinked into the trees with his hands raised in surrender, I can make a good guess.

  “The only trick,” said Val, pivoting back to me as Joey retreated, “is to envision what you want and make it happen. That’s enchantment at its most elementary. Leave the technical games to the wizards—what you need to do is focus on effecting a change. If the will is there, the power will follow.”

  He crossed his arms and waited, and I closed my eyes. I could imagine what the break looked like inside—I’d had enough compound fractures to picture the jagged edge of a bone—and the radiating pain from the impact bruises helped me zero in on the deep injury. Keeping that thought in mind, I imagined the bones rejoining…and as I did, I felt a familiar tingle spread over my arm. My eyes shot open to see the enchantment I’d created, and while it wasn’t as neat or bright as Val’s had been, it was working.