Assassin's Apprentice

by S. R. Vaught; J. B. Redmond

  His senses swam as he tried to look away from the building, instinctively moving his gaze toward the rush of the river, the solidness of the rock bridges. Yet that same darkness, that same … wrongness… seemed to creep out of Endurance House, polluting the river, crossing those bridges, sliding back toward…

  Wait.

  Was the shadow he was seeing coming from somewhere else?

  Aron’s knees felt weak from more than exhaustion. Perhaps he had been too long on his feet, or without sleep. Had it been so many hours since the opulence of breakfast in the Lord Provost’s chambers, or the bread and hardtack Stormbreaker had shared with him at lunch? Why was he growing dizzy?

  His head lifted as if some hand had slipped beneath his chin, and he caught sight of a ring of small monoliths beside trees that seemed heavy with brightly colored fruits.

  The blackest aspect of the shadow radiated from that spot, but the harder he tried to stare at it, the more elusive it became.

  “That’s the Shrine of the Mother,” Stormbreaker informed him, though his voice seemed to reach Aron across some distance. “We placed our Shrine beside the orchard because the Mother’s children prefer the peace of the woods—and the orchard that rings the High Masters’ Den is lightly traveled.”

  Aron tried to shift his attention to the orchard, or to the keep-within-a-keep he now knew to be the High Masters’ Den and the place he would be residing, by order of Lord Baldric.

  His head wouldn’t turn.

  His arms wouldn’t lift, and his mouth wouldn’t open to say anything to Stormbreaker, who continued to talk about how most citizens who weren’t from Dyn Vagrat or Dyn Ross had never seen a Shrine.

  A Shrine that to Aron’s senses now seemed … overly bright. Especially in contrast to the harsh grays and blacks of Endurance House. It wasn’t dark at all. There was no shadow there, or anywhere.

  I imagined it.

  But hadn’t he felt that darkness? Almost like a real and thick cloud, settling over the building, the bridges, the river, the stones?

  No, that couldn’t be.

  Because now, the monoliths were white.

  They seemed to have a glow in the late-afternoon sun, blazing, yet also somehow soft and inviting, like moonslight on the motionless surface of a pond.

  The symbol of the Brother was the bowed head of a fair-haired man with the sun’s light behind him. But what was the symbol of the Mother?

  The moons, his own mind told him, remembering some lesson from his father. The moons, twinned and full. Aron had never troubled himself overly much with the workings of faith past a basic understanding of signs and practices. He had always leaned more toward the mundane habits of his father than those of his devout mother.

  “Boy?” Once more, Stormbreaker’s voice seemed to drift toward Aron from very far away. “Aron?”

  Aron blinked at the moonslit stones, glowing from night’s silvery brilliance even as the sun remained in the sky. The sight was so entrancing, so perplexing, he could do little but sink to his knees and stare at it.

  More light flared from the circle of monoliths, and more still, until the brightness of it reached out to him, covered him, bathed him in its unusual coolness.

  Thunder rumbled above him, around him, but he didn’t care. He didn’t fear the lightning. Nothing could touch him so long as that light stayed with him.

  Was that Dari inside the Shrine of the Mother?

  The tall woman with the full moons spinning above her head?

  At first she seemed dark, but now she seemed lighter, silvery white like the stones, and much older.

  It had to be Dari, because she was touching his thoughts and essence like Dari did when they practiced going through the Veil. That, and he had never known anyone else so beautiful. He assumed the creature had to be mortal, flesh and bone like himself, because his father taught him that gods were more a belief in people’s minds and hearts than actual beings. Aron had always known that when he prayed to the Brother, he was praying to a good thing, a true thing, but not necessarily a thing he could ever see or touch or speak to in the way people talked to one another.

  Someone was trying to grab him, but no fingers touched him.

  Lightning and thunder exploded in every direction.

  Then … that bright, bright light, moved into the sapphire Brailing cheville he still wore about his ankle, then all through his body even as he welcomed its chilling presence.

  There’s a blond man with the lady, and a stag. Such a stag!

  Aron had never seen such antlers on a real beast in the forest. He didn’t even know if a rack of that size was possible, and the way the horns tangled together at the top—

  The lady of the moons stepped away from her companions and favored him with a glance.

  Aron felt her eyes like stakes through his lungs.

  She looked … familiar to him.

  I’ve seen her before. I’ve seen her in a dream? Where?

  The longer he stared, the more terrible she seemed to become.

  His mind brought him an image of a great white Roc bearing down on him, talons open to snatch him straight from the ground. His breath wheezed out of him, but he was smiling.

  He kept right on smiling as he pitched forward and his head met the ground so hard it knocked all images of the real world straight out of his awareness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ARON

  Aron’s head throbbed.

  He wanted to lift his hand and rub a particularly painful spot above his left eye, but his arm ached as badly as his skull.

  Did I forget to latch Tek’s stall again? Did Seth hit me?

  He blinked, trying to focus in the semidarkness and make out the familiar lines of the room he shared with his six brothers. There should have been bedrolls and arms and legs and lots of snickering, maybe even another punch to send him silly again—but nothing happened. There were no bedrolls. There were no brothers. Just a dancing yellow light. A fire. In a stone hearth. Stone walls.

  He was in a small chamber with a bed, neatly made, beside him on his left.

  Aron pressed the cloth beneath him and understood he was in a bed, too, a real bed with a stuffed mattress, pillows, and linens. The cloth felt soft against his bare skin, nothing like the rough-spun blankets his mother usually made.

  I’m not at home.

  Because… home is gone.

  The truth came back to him, full and pummeling, and he cried before he could stop himself. He called out for his father, squeezing his eyes closed and wishing the fire and the stone walls away from him. He’d give it all up, his future, his life, anything the Brother might take or want, just to hear his father answer him.

  A hand stroked his head, warm, with long fingers. “Our quarters are small, but we spare no expense on bedding,” Stormbreaker said from his right. “At Stone, we work hard. Men and women should be able to rest in comfort, if nothing else.”

  Heat blazed through Aron, and humiliation that he was sobbing in front of his guild master, but he couldn’t stop the tears. He felt as if his heart were ripping into pieces, like someone had stuck a blade into his chest, twisting, twisting more. He only wished the blade were real enough to kill him.

  Stormbreaker made no comment about his emotions. He didn’t laugh at him or smack him like his brothers would have done. He only offered the comfort of his hand on Aron’s head, and after a time he said, “I won’t tell you the pain will heal. You’ll never forget what was taken from you, and it will never hurt less when you focus your thoughts on that loss.”

  Aron gulped for air around his sobs, willing his body to stop shaking beneath the cotton blankets. At least Stormbreaker thought enough of him to speak the truth. He couldn’t imagine how he would survive this hurt, moment after moment, night after night. How could he continue to be in this world when his family was gone? How could he sleep in a soft bed in a castle with his own fire in its grate, when the bones of his people lay scattered in some forest clearing?

/>   “I can tell you that you’ll find new focus, that you’ll learn to manage the pain.” Stormbreaker’s voice soothed Aron’s raw senses, seemed to reach into the agony and lessen it just enough to make it bearable. “I can tell you the loss will become a part of you, like a scar. With time, the scar won’t pull and bleed each time you stretch.”

  Aron got hold of himself enough to glance at Stormbreaker, who was seated on the edge of his bed. The High Master pulled back his pale hand and let it rest in his lap. Candles in sconces ringing the small room illuminated Stormbreaker’s face and the moisture in his own green eyes. The spiral rank-marks, the benedets on his face, gleamed as he shifted, and Aron wondered if he had been crying.

  Stormbreaker met Aron’s gaze directly, and Aron had no further question about whether or not the man had been shedding tears. “If I could have saved them all, I would have,” Stormbreaker said.

  For a moment, Aron assumed Stormbreaker was speaking about the massacre along the Watchline, and he remembered how Stormbreaker had argued with Windblown, how he had gone back to Aron’s father and told Wolf Brailing something that sent him running into the house—then into the wagon with his family, and out onto the byway.

  Aron swallowed, tested his own voice with a hum, then whispered, “You tried. I know that now.”

  Stormbreaker looked away from him, into the fire. “Trying matters little when failure is so complete.”

  Aron started to offer reassurances again, his own comforts, as best he could think them up, but his instincts held him silent. In the stillness, he realized Stormbreaker might be remembering something else entirely now, some other failure or tragedy. His thoughts moved to the reality of Stormbreaker’s sister, and the fact they couldn’t both have been Harvest prizes. So how had they come to Triune? Aron wanted to know, felt like it might be very important in his understanding of Stormbreaker, but he couldn’t dredge up the courage to ask him about it. Instead, he looked into the fire, too, and wondered if fire gazing helped with pain that came from the heart.

  Indeed, a few moments later, the shaking in Aron’s body subsided, and he could breathe without sobbing anew.

  “I’m not the mother who birthed you.” Stormbreaker kept his focus on the hearth. “The next time you reach the limits of your endurance, you’ll tell me before you pitch to the ground and crack open your foolish head.”

  Aron cringed away from Stormbreaker’s words, but he didn’t miss the concern. It was like taking a reprimand from his father, or from Seth, after Seth’s time in the Guard.

  “A Stone Brother who can’t attend to his own body and his own needs is a hazard to us all,” Stormbreaker added. “We’re a guild, not a stable of wet nurses with infants to be tended.”

  Aron hadn’t considered his actions in this light, and now that he did, he felt new prickles of embarrassment. “Yes, High Master. I’ll be more cautious in the future.”

  “Choices. It comes first to that, as I told you yesterday. In the end, you’ll be nothing more than the sum of choices you’ve made.” Stormbreaker still seemed obsessed by the fire, but the tension in his muscles eased a fraction. “Aron, did something unusual happen to you outside Endurance House? Something that drained what was left of your energy?”

  Aron tried to put his mind on what happened, made it up to the point of seeing Endurance House and the shadows—but, really, those creatures he saw in the Shrine, they couldn’t have been real. It was his exhaustion that caused him to imagine fancies and nightmares, maybe his hunger and thirst.

  And his fear.

  He pushed himself into a sitting position, then hung his head. “Endurance House bothered me, the thought of it, that’s all. And the Shrine of the Mother. My imagination ran wild with me, and for a moment I imagined I saw—that I saw a goddess, or maybe a god, or both, inside the monoliths.”

  Stormbreaker gave a noncommittal grunt disturbingly like a sound Lord Baldric might make. “You would be the envy of everyone who worships the Mother, then. Take no shame in visions, especially of visitors from the heavens. Those are usually good omens.”

  Aron tried to absorb that interpretation, but nothing about his vision felt like a good omen. He didn’t know how to keep talking about what had frightened him, and his embarrassment over his weakness and his shortsightedness was still too fresh. He slipped out of bed, wrapped a blanket around his waist, and eased past Stormbreaker, to the room’s only window. In some part of his mind, he knew the blanket was scant cover, but the room was passably warm, and he assumed Stormbreaker would offer him clothing soon enough. In the moonslight, he could see the stone wall of the keep-within-a-keep, and some of the orchard beyond it. Even though he squinted, he caught no hint of that Shrine, or of the dark little building across the river from it.

  “You’re in the west-facing tower of the High Masters’ Den.” Stormbreaker came to stand beside him, gathering his gray robes close about his tall frame. “The Shrine is on the east side. Dari could see it from her room in the east tower, positioned opposite your own, just down the hallway outside your door.”

  Aron gave no response, but he was both relieved and disappointed that he had no view of the Shrine.

  “Zed will be coming to the Den now that Windblown has been elevated to Seventh High Master,” Stormbreaker said as he placed a hand on the sill. “He’ll share this room with you, since the two of you will be the newest. You’ll mix only with other apprentices from the Den. It won’t be easy, and you’ll have much ground to cover, but I trust you and Zed will help each other in that task—if, that is, it was no dread contagious illness that caused your vision and fainting this evening.”

  Aron felt yet more foolish for his behavior over Endurance House and the Shrine. He dared to look up into Stormbreaker’s expressionless face, feeling like he owed some explanation beyond a simple apology. “I didn’t want to complain or be some spineless slackard.”

  Stormbreaker nodded, and he didn’t look angry at all now. “It’s never cowardly or lazy to speak up for yourself. You may speak up to me, Aron, always, if you do so respectfully and accept my judgment when I offer it.”

  For a moment, Aron scarcely could remember his initial urges to hate Stormbreaker. He wanted to listen carefully to everything Stormbreaker said. Learn fast. Answer all the question put to him—

  “Dari’s room,” he muttered, putting together what Stormbreaker said about seeing Endurance House and the Shrine from her window. If he could study the building and stone monoliths from above, perhaps he could understand what happened earlier in the evening when he collapsed, if it was anything beyond the addled workings of his own mind.

  Yes. That would be best, to look, to try. Then, no matter what he saw, he’d do his best to explain the shadows and figments to Stormbreaker, and trust the High Master wouldn’t think him insane.

  “Aron?” Stormbreaker called after him as he hurried from his chamber, turned in the direction Stormbreaker had indicated Dari’s chamber would lie, and took off down the stone hallway. “Aron!”

  “I’ll be back,” he shouted, letting go of his blanket as he counted doors to be certain he could estimate the position of Dari’s room, if it truly was exactly opposite to his own. “I just need a moment, truly.”

  Aron’s bare feet smacked against the smoothed rock as he left the rounded portion of the tower and entered the hallway. He passed only sparse furnishings, nothing more than chairs, some bookcases, some wrought armor, and pikes and staffs hanging in racks on the wall. Then he once more reached a rounded section. And Dari’s room would be—there—but—

  But a huge boy stood outside her door, arms folded.

  The boy was wearing a brown tunic, breeches, and boots.

  And his skin was blue.

  Aron was running so hard and fast he stumbled at the shock. Forward. Toward the door. Toward the boy.

  Who wheeled to face him and glared with fierce, slitted yellow eyes.

  Aron fought to control his balance, then fell in what felt like a slo
w, dreamlike motion. The boy’s image shimmered in his awareness, blazing yellow, then blue, then yellow again. He seemed to be getting taller. And wider.

  The boy opened his mouth and let out a roar that would have sent rock cats fleeing in terror.

  Aron struck chest-first against cold rocks, screaming even as breath crushed out of his body. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move at all, save for fishlike gasping to recover the air he lost. When he lifted his head, he saw four huge golden paws directly in front of him. Paws with claws larger than his own forearms.

  Then he heard running feet, and Stormbreaker’s call, and more running feet. Aron coughed and managed to suck in a breath as Dari’s door opened.

  “Iko,” Dari said, laughter barely contained in her words, “be easy. Aron poses no threat to me. He’s the one you came for.”

  By the time Aron looked at Dari, the blue boy was just a boy again—no paws, no claws, just those bright yellow eyes and a smile that seemed like a taunt. “Him?” The boy’s voice sounded nothing like the roar he had managed before. “Is this some jest, Mother?”

  Another blue person, this one female and large and older, with her ebony hair swept into a knot atop her head, stood beside Dari, one protective hand on Dari’s arm. This woman wasn’t smiling, and in fact, looked as if she might never have smiled in the length of her existence.

  “Visions never jest, my son,” the woman said, her tone confirming that laughter wasn’t part of her constitution.

  But other people started to laugh.

  Aron rolled over to find Stormbreaker, Windblown, Zed, and a small collection of Stone Brothers and apprentices—at least two female—standing over him. The tallest of the boys hung back from the rest. He looked to be about Seth’s age, with reddish hair and brown eyes. His arms were folded, and unlike everyone else in the hallway, this tall, brooding boy wasn’t laughing at all. His cold gaze moved first to Aron, then to Windblown and Zed, then back to Aron.