by Guy Antibes
~
They decided to spend half a day in the fields, clearing out the weeds in the garden since the monks had died in the spring a year before. Brother Yvan had done gardening before, so he was able to determine which plants were weeds and which were edible. Win knew how to butcher animals, so they had fresh pork and vegetables for their dinner.
“If you are planning to stay during winter, we will have to work to harvest what the monks left behind,” Brother Yvan said. “That way, I can leave you in a few weeks and meet you again after winter.”
“You aren’t going to stay with us?” Win asked.
“My flock is considerably different than yours,” the cleric said. “They need nurturing every bit as much as the animals in the fields, not that I am comparing the two.”
Trevor couldn’t work as long as the rest, but by the time Brother Yvan left, he could spend almost a full day in the fields. When he couldn’t work in the fields, he took an inventory of the livestock.
“Take care of yourselves. I won’t communicate with you until early spring.” He looked at Boxster. “Train both of these boys to fend for themselves. Win needs to learn how to be a better soldier, and Trevor needs to learn how to live off the land.”
Trevor watched Brother Yvan leave the valley from the top of the monastery wall. Trevor knew he still needed more time to recuperate. He had lifted a sword for the first time just before the cleric left them, and he realized that he still had more to do.
He waved one last time to Brother Yvan and was about to take the stairs down to the courtyard when Win ran out of the monastery, waving a bottle.
“Good news!” Win said. “I found the monastery’s wine cellar.”
Trevor stepped down and took the dust-covered bottle.
“Shall we open it?”
“As long as we don’t finish the bottle, we should be fine,” Trevor said. He gave the bottle to Win. “I think you are still stronger.”
Win grinned and wiggled the cork out of the bottle and smelled. He made a face. “Vinegar!”
Trevor smelled it too. “Are there more bottles?”
“A cellar full of them.”
“Something ought to be potable,” Trevor said.
They went down to the cellar. Win had used an entrance that looked more like a closet or a pantry in the kitchen.
“How did you see down here?” Trevor asked.
“Oh, that?” Win said in the darkness. A flame sprung above his hand. “I can do a few magic tricks.”
“You never told me you were a magician.”
Win looked guilty. “My mother told me not to tell anyone, even you.”
“When did you ever obey Marin Denton?” Trevor asked.
“She made me promise on my grandmother’s grave. I couldn’t go against that.”
Trevor had his doubts, but the vow had worked. “What else can you do?
“A flame is the best. I can move a spoon and produce a breath of air. That is it.” Win said.
“Is your flame hot?” Trevor asked.
“It is. I can start a fire with this. Watch.” Win pointed his finger, and the flame came out of this fingertip. It is like a tiny torch.”
“Keep it on. I want to try something.” Trevor put his hand into the flame. He couldn’t feel a thing.
“Why don’t you pull that away!” Win said. “You’ll burn yourself.”
Trevor withdrew his hand. “Something happened to me when we were on the Viksaran border. I went into some kind of hidden temple and put a tablet into a slot on a stone table, and I almost passed out. I had to escape from the place since it was collapsing on me and found out I had picked up this talent.”
“What other magic can you do?”
Trevor shook his head. “Nothing. I can’t do magic. You know that.”
“What do you call being immune to fire?”
“Light a candle, and I can feel the heat, but as you can see, I can’t feel magician’s fire,” Trevor said.
“Can you feel the fire if magic started the fire? There is a candle over there. Shall we try that before we try to find something drinkable?”
Trevor shrugged. “Sure.”
Win used his fingertip torch to ignite the flame. Trevor put his finger on Win’s flame and didn’t feel anything, but when he put his finger above the candle, he could feel the heat.
“Only from a magician,” Trevor said. “You could see that. It is useful to know since I might have done something foolish with fire in the future. I won’t act like a fool.”
Win laughed. “You can always leave that to me. Now, let’s find something good.”
The next bottle they tried was “sweet,” as Win described it.
“Before we ruin all the bottles, let’s consult with Boxster. He might know what makes a bottle good or bad. That isn’t something I ever learned.”
Trevor showed Boxster the bottle after the ex-sergeant returned with a basket filled with fruit and vegetables.
“I don’t know how to harvest grain, although I know there is enough out there, Boxster said. “At some point, we will have to leave the mountains to buy bread.” He looked at the bottle. “I did find the vineyard where that wine came from. It is on a slope farther down the valley. As I recall, the best grapes are planted on south-facing hillsides, and that is the case with the monks’ vineyard. The weeds were so tall; the arbors were hidden but full of grapes. The monks were very self-sufficient.”
Trevor looked down at the basket while Boxster tried out the wine.
“Not the world’s best, but does it need to be?”
“The first bottle tasted like vinegar,” Win said. “Do you know why?”
“That is something I do know. If air gets past the cork stopper, the wine will sour. Some wineries will seal the tops of their bottles with wax to keep that from happening,” Boxster said. “At this point, we have no way of knowing which bottles are good or bad other than opening them. Once opened, the wine won’t last very long. Don’t ask me how long, because I don’t know. What I know about wine-making I learned from the wine-master on my one visit to my father’s cellar.”
“Which was a long time ago,” Trevor said.
“Before I left Brachia,” Boxster said. He wiggled the wine bottle at Win. “We might have a better dinner than I thought with this.”
Win laughed. “We have grapes. I wonder how difficult it would be to make wine?” he asked.
“There might be something in the library,” Trevor said. “I stopped looking when all the books on the shelf I examined were epistles on the proper worship of Dryden. Maybe we should look a little more thoroughly.”
“It is generally better to be more thorough than less,” Boxster said.
They found an entire shelf on subjects devoted to running a farm.
“I don’t know if this is the best advice, but the information is better than anything we know,” Boxster said. “We can learn to be farmers this winter, but first we need to find the sections on preserving food. I’m not excited about drinking sour wine all winter long.”
The three of them used the prior’s office as a schoolroom as they read to each other and took notes. When they needed practice, they did what they read about. Win found a storeroom that opened onto the courtyard and was filled with barrels of salt and jars of spices and desiccated herbs hanging from the rafters.
“Salted meat and herb gathering,” Win said as he showed Boxster and Trevor his discovery.
“You are the expert,” Boxster said.
Trevor had to concede that Win’s time in his mother’s royal kitchen gave him a better perspective on what they studied. Boxster usually always had the best answer. Still, when it came to food and preservation and cooking, Win proved himself superior in every aspect of food preparation and farming.
That said, Trevor still picked up more about the agricultural and cooking side of life than he ever expected. He was the best at finding herbs in the fields and the forests around the valley.
O
nce they got their food situation going, it was time to begin practicing with weapons. Trevor’s strength was gradually returning, and he finally began speeding up his practice forms. The monks had a tiny armory, but there were enough weapons to practice with and a huge barrel of arrows.
Trevor and Boxster hiked through the forests lining the valley and brought down small game. There were enough sheep, goats, and pigs that they didn’t need to find bigger game and passed on deer that they spotted in the forest and the edges of the valley.
Winter came, and Boxster and Win left the monastery to see if they could buy chickens in the village before snows might shut them off from the rest of the world. Win rode with more confidence than Trevor remembered. His ability with arms was now much better than average, and with him working with Trevor and Boxster, he was a good sparring partner.
They made a thatch-covered shed for the livestock that took all their time after Boxster and Win arrived with a wagonload of chicken crates and three barrels of flour and a barrel of sugar.
They moved the livestock into the crude barn they had made and into the courtyard, as well. Trevor and Boxster also cleaned out barrels of sour wine and stored water along the wall that held the gate.
With the wine, flour for bread, and sugar to make them all sweeter for their efforts, Trevor thought they were ready to spend a cozy winter practicing arms and learning how to be farmers when visitors came.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
~
T revor awoke to someone pounding on the door to his cell. He blinked his eyes, and the sound was fainter as whoever it was pounded on the next door in the corridor. He put on his clothes in absolute silence and buckled on his sword. He put on his boots last and splashed water on his face to wake up.
A rooster crowed, so Trevor guessed dawn wasn’t far in the future. He put his ear to the door, but didn’t hear anything but pounding farther down the corridor. He edged his door open and saw three men. One was a magician holding his palm out with a flame lighting the passageway.
“What are you doing here?” Trevor said. “We lock the door at night.”
“How many of you are here?” one of the men said.
“Enough to take care of you,” Trevor said, drawing his sword. “We don’t want any trouble, so you can put your swords away and leave, or you won’t be leaving at all.”
“You don’t look like a monk,” the magician said.
“I take that as a compliment,” Trevor said, walking slowly toward them. “Now, your swords or your life. Take your pick.”
“You are too confident for one man against two and a magician.”
“I wouldn’t give you an offer to leave if I wasn’t,” Trevor said.
The magician threw his flame at Trevor just as the others rushed him. Their sword fighting skills might have been better on a broader corridor, but Trevor worked with the men longer than he needed. It was one thing to spar and another to fight when one’s life was on the line, and fighting with a bare sword, one’s life was always on the line in Trevor’s mind.
The time had come to put a sorrowful end to the fight, and the only foe left standing was the amazed wizard.
“You should be burned! What kind of spell do you use? I will surrender if you teach me.”
Trevor snorted. “I have no talent other than what you just saw. I won’t offer you surrender, but I will give you ten counts to get out of the monastery. One…”
The magician threw something else at Trevor. He could feel some pressure, but whatever it was, it had no real effect. It reminded him of the force the Viksaran magician used to try to push him back in the West Moreton woods
“Two…” Trevor began to advance on the magician.
The man turned and ran as Trevor followed him out to the courtyard. There were five horses tied up.
“Three…” Trevor said.
The magician called his compatriots, but the only response to his call was Boxster, who stood at the doorway, holding a torch and a bloody sword.
“I don’t think your friends are going to be of any help. Four…”
The magician’s eyes grew wide. He fumbled with his reins but ended up padding through the muddy courtyard. He paused to throw a stream of fire, but it didn’t make it halfway across to Trevor.
“Your power is gone,” Trevor said. “Five…”
The magician fled into the deep blue of dawn.
“We will be feeding another pyre this morning,” Boxster said. “Since Win didn’t have to fight, he can clean up after us.” He yawned, turned around, and disappeared into the monastery, the light of the torch following in his wake.
Trevor gawked at four more horses to take care of before he followed Boxster’s example and went back to bed, but he ran into Win on the way.
Win whined at the prospect of cleaning up after both fights, but Trevor reminded him that Boxster and he would be taking care of the bodies.
The bodies were draped over the intruders’ saddles and taken to a place close to the monks’ pyre. Boxster had brought along a jar of rendered fat that Win had learned to produce and poured it on the bodies. He took the torch and lit the small pyre.
“Are you going to watch them burn?” Boxster asked.
“A vigil like Brother Yvan?” Trevor shook his head. “I am wondering what we will have to do to secure the monastery. They can climb over the wall without much trouble, but we will have to do a better job at making the monastery pilfer-proof.”
After breakfast, the three of them perused the monastery library for information about locks, and Trevor found a passage that described the best defense was a stout timber on brackets to bar doors shut. Locks weren’t broken, but they were quickly picked.
Trevor inspected the lock that the intruders had too-easily picked. He hadn’t heard a thing from within the monastery until the intruders pounded on the door and woke him up.
~
Trevor sat across from Boxster in the empty refectory. Win had already gone to bed after downing a full bottle of wine. Trevor and Boxster had sipped while Win had gulped.
“Are we going to be soldiers of fortune?” Boxster asked.
Trevor was surprised by the statement. “I thought that was our plan.”
“Plans often change. Here we are as comfortable as I’ve been, living off what we harvested during the fall and early winter. You might be thinking that this is the good life.”
Trevor laughed. “Not me. I’m working hard, so when we get out of here, I can fully function again. The fight with the intruders last week was a turning point for me. I thought I might want to stay here, sort of a future of recuperation, but when I was able to swing a sword again and be challenged, I realized I needed more conflict in my life. I don’t have to be fighting with my sword all the time, but I need stimulation to be happy, now that I am better.”
“Stimulation hasn’t been absent in your life, that’s for sure,” Boxster said. “It hasn’t been for me since I left Brachia.”
“I would have thought Duke Worto’s usurpation would have been an exciting time.”
Boxster leaned over. “My dirty little secret is that I was warned off by one of the duke’s lackeys. I fled before anything happened. I was fifteen at the time. I’ve been running from myself as much as from the duke’s assassins all this time, and that includes seven years running from the duke’s men in Brachia. Being stuck here has given me too much time to think. I made myself what I am as a penance of the weakling who left Brachia. I was a prince, too, you know.”
“I knew you were noble, but a prince? That means Duke Worto killed your family?”
Boxster looked more troubled than Trevor could ever remember. “All except me. The assassins started visiting me a few weeks after I left. I hid all over Brachia for seven years, as I said. I can’t believe I survived for so long. I was lucky a retired soldier saved me from being killed on the street of a border town.”
“So, what did you do? I can’t imagine an assassin being successful against you.�
��
“My savior told me to join the Fulerian army across the border and learn arms. He told me I wouldn’t survive a pub fight the way I tried to defend myself. I took his advice. His name was Boxster, and when the opportunity came for me to choose an army name, I chose Desolation because that was how I viewed my life, and I stole his last name. It is common enough on both sides of the border between Brachia and Fuleria.”
“What is your real name, if you are willing to tell me.”
Boxster gulped wine this time. “You know I was a prince of Brachia. I’m Rory Pierce, second prince of the late king of Brachia. Once I learned to defend myself, I was much like you. It took me four years in the Fulerian army to acquire the skills that you have, but I took to arms as well as you have. My advantage over you is that I had a real education. If Brother Yvan hadn’t taken you under his wing, you would be as ignorant as Win. Not that Win doesn’t have his qualities, but he isn’t educated.”
“Just because he isn’t from our class?” Trevor said. He was offended by Boxster’s comment.
“No, because he wasn’t educated. Do you think he knows history, mathematics, geography, and the more aesthetic aspects of life like we do?”
“No,” Trevor said.
“He can acquire those. Does that settle you down?”
Trevor took a deep breath. Boxster was right about Win. He was a more faithful friend than any others in the castle whom he had met, but he didn’t include Boxster in that evaluation. He didn’t know what to think about Boxster, even after all the months they had been together, but Boxster hadn’t been forced to nurse Trevor back to health. He could have left him anywhere from the border of West Moreton to Tarviston.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
Boxster gazed at the dark-green glass goblet and then rolled it in his hands. “Because we are going back out in the world, and I needed to tell someone other than Yvan. Telling him something is like confiding to a stone wall. He knows how to keep a confidence. Do you?”
“Not as well as Brother Yvan, it seems, but I don’t consider myself false with any man, or woman, for that matter.”
