Protector of the Small Quartet

by Tamora Pierce

  A hand clamped around the back of her neck: Zahir’s. She hadn’t even heard him get out of his chair.

  “Shall I take the Lump away?” the Bazhir inquired of Joren.

  Gripping Zahir’s index finger, Kel jammed her thumbnail into the base of Zahir’s own nail. The experience, she knew very well, was a painful one.

  He yelped and let go. Joren lunged for her.

  She stepped back, ducking under Zahir’s frantic punch. Instead, the Bazhir hit Joren. Kel backed up to reach the open center of the library. Merric, to her relief, had fled. She was glad not to have to worry about him.

  Zahir was cursing and coddling his fist; his punch had connected solidly with Joren’s skull. Joren rubbed the spot where his friend had struck as he walked toward Kel. He was crimson with rage. Vinson was nowhere to be seen.

  Something clattered behind Kel. In spite of herself, she looked. Vinson had fallen over a footstool as he emerged from the shelves at her rear.

  She turned back quickly. Joren was leaping straight at her.

  Kel’s Yamani training took over. She grabbed Joren’s tunic and turned, kneeling as she did. He went flying over her shoulder, just as the Yamani ladies had done during their practices together. The ladies, however, did not hit a long study table on their bellies, sliding along its polished length to crash headfirst into a bookshelf

  A foot slammed into her back between her shoulder blades. Zahir had recovered. Kel rolled forward as she went down, to fetch up against the legs of the table she’d just polished with Joren. Zahir moved in to kick her; she seized his booted foot and twisted, growling with effort. Off balance he stumbled and fell. Kel hurled a nearby stool at him. He rolled, covering his head with his arms.

  Then Vinson gripped her ankles, dragging her forward. Kel sat up and grabbed his hands. Someone grasped her hair from behind and yanked her to the floor again. Ignoring the pain as the hair-puller kept his grip, Kel rolled away from a punch. She clung to his wrists to keep him from yanking out a chunk of hair. The roll twisted her out of Vinson’s hold on her legs. She kicked out, slamming her feet into Vinson’s belly. That hand in her hair yanked, dragging her into the middle of the floor. Her grim-faced captor was Joren.

  Kel felt his wrist and dug her thumbnails into the soft flesh between the bones. He cursed and let go.

  Lunging to her feet, Kel ran into Zahir. Grinning, the Bazhir punched her in the stomach. When her scant supper came up, she made sure he got most of it. Another solid blow from Joren connected with her back, spinning her around. His second punch hit her face just as Vinson grabbed her.

  Next time, she thought fiercely, hooking Joren’s leg with her foot and yanking, next time I’ll make sure I’ve got my back to the wall!

  Vinson was the last of the older pages to walk out of Lord Wyldon’s study. Through the open door Kel heard the training master call, “Send her in.”

  “Here, milord,” announced the man who waited on Lord Wyldon in the evenings. Holding the door as Kel passed, he winked at her in encouragement.

  Kel halted in front of Lord Wyldon’s desk as the door closed. The training master inspected her and shook his head. Kel knew she looked dreadful. From her past experience she knew she had a black eye and a puffy lip. Her nose was probably broken. A trickling on her cheeks told her the splits in both of her eyebrows were bleeding.

  “Blot that,” Wyldon ordered, and thrust his handkerchief across his desk. Kel stared as if he had offered a foreign object, then reached for it stiffly. Her left arm hurt. The skin on her knuckles was torn and bleeding on both hands.

  “Would you care to explain?” Wyldon picked up a large cup and sipped from it.

  “Sir?” she asked thickly.

  “How were you injured? As I recall, you were in one piece earlier tonight.”

  She tried to breathe through her nose, and winced. “I fell down, Lord Wyldon,” she said carefully. Lifting the handkerchief from her cut, she examined it with her good eye, and pressed the clean linen to the split in the other brow.

  “What did you say, probationer?”

  His tone made her stiffen. She tried to stand tall and put her hands behind her back, as they were expected to when questioned. The left arm only went so far before pain made her dizzy.

  “Never mind that,” snapped Wyldon. “Answer me.”

  “I fell,” she replied evenly. At least she didn’t have to worry about making up a lie, when time-honored custom had already supplied her with one.

  Wyldon fiddled with his tea mug. “Come, come, girl. You were in a fight. Name those you fought with.”

  “Begging your pardon, my lord, but there was no fight,” she told him. “I fell down.”

  “You fought with Joren, Zahir, and Vinson,” Wyldon reminded her.

  “Did they say that?” asked Kel, her face as blank as any true-born Yamani’s. “How strange. I fell down.”

  Wyldon stared. “I imagine you have now come to your senses and wish to go home. At this time of year that will be difficult—”

  Surprised enough to forget her manners, she interrupted him. “No, sir.”

  “It will not be difficult? For your information, it has been snowing in the north over the past two weeks. It will snow here tonight.” Wyldon rubbed his healing arm.

  “No, sir,” Kel repeated firmly. “I don’t want to go home. Your lordship.”

  “You do not want to go home.” If she hadn’t believed he could never be startled, she might have thought that he was now. He didn’t normally repeat simple ideas.

  “I don’t believe falling down is an offense for which I can be expelled,” she said, trying to speak clearly. “I still have the rest of the year to prove myself.”

  Wyldon tapped his fingers on his desk. “You have the armory Sunday afternoons until April,” he said at last. “And an essay each week on the improper uses of combat training. Now you’d better see a palace healer. That nose looks broken. Dismissed.”

  Kel bowed stiffly, then remembered something. She held out his handkerchief.

  “Have it washed and returned to me,” Wyldon ordered.

  “Very good, my lord,” she replied, and left. Neal would tell her where the healers saw patients.

  Duke Baird of Queenscove, chief of the realm’s healers, was a tall, weary-looking man. A dark gray over-robe protected the black velvet tunic and hose he wore in mourning for the two sons he had lost. His eyes were a darker green than Neal’s, set deep under straight brows. There was a red tint to his brown hair that was absent in his son’s, but they had the same nose and the same direct gaze. While Neal paced, Baird rested big hands on Kel’s shoulders. She saw his magic as emerald-colored light around his hands, and she felt it as a cool tide through her body. Her stiffness eased; the edge came off her aches. Kel had been beaten up before, but never so thoroughly; it shamed her to feel so happy at the easing of pain. The warriors at the imperial court had always insisted they did not even pay attention to pain when they had it.

  Baird let go of her and rubbed his hands. “I am impressed, young lady,” he told her with a wry smile. “You have been royally pounded.”

  Kel smiled at him. “You should see the other fellows.”

  “There!” cried Neal, holding up his hands. “You see what I have to deal with!”

  “You may have noticed my son has an endless capacity for drama,” Baird told Kel.

  She couldn’t help it: she grinned, and winced as her split lip opened.

  “Ah,” said the healer duke, “we can’t have this.” He touched an icy finger to Kel’s lip. The hurt vanished. Next he touched the cuts in her eyebrows and on her hands; they went cold, then painless. The swellings on her knuckles shrank. Scraped places scabbed, as if Duke Baird had put three days’ worth of healing into her.

  “So much for chivalrous ideals, eh?” Neal demanded. “Three pages in their third year of training jump a first-year—a first-season page—”

  “I started it,” Kel informed her friend.

&nbs
p; “Tell me another,” he snapped.

  “I did, on my honor.” Kel looked at Neal’s father. “I think Lord Wyldon just wanted my nose seen to, your grace. Not the rest.”

  “Since he sent you without written instructions, I may exercise my judgment,” Baird told her. “I will indeed see to your nose. You’ve also pulled muscles in your left side-I can mend that and reduce the swelling around your eye. It will not do if you were to miss training because you could not see. I can also ease that headache.”

  “What possessed you?” demanded Neal. He seemed as vexed by this matter-of-fact discussion as by Kel’s story. “Why in the name of all the gods in all the Eastern and Southern Lands would you start a fight with them?”

  Kel sighed. She wasn’t about to tell how Merric had been shamed. “I didn’t like the shape of Joren’s nose.”

  Neal stared at her, eyes bulging. Finally he said, “If you meant to impress the Stump, you wasted your time. Don’t you realize he’ll never let you stay?”

  Kel looked down. “He could change his mind,” she insisted. “You always think the worst of him.”

  “I what?” Neal began to produce a series of outraged noises that included squawks and whistling inhaled breaths. He sounded like one of her young nephews having a tantrum, not like a fifteen-year-old who’d been raised at court and at the university.

  “If you cannot be quiet while I work,” his father told him patiently, “go into the waiting room.”

  Neal marched out. A moment later, they heard him arguing with himself. Duke Baird closed the examining room door and placed his hands on either side of Keladry’s head. “This may sting a bit,” he warned.

  “Sting” was not the word Kel would have used to describe the healing of her broken nose. The flesh around it moved; cartilage grated. Her sinuses and teeth ached sharply, then throbbed. The pain stopped abruptly. She could breathe again.

  She could also see from both eyes. The ache in her left side was fading. A moment later, Duke Baird stepped away from her.

  “Beautiful,” he said with approval. “You’re quite strong, you know. I couldn’t have done nearly so much if you weren’t in the pink of health to begin with. You didn’t fight me, either. You made it easy.”

  “My mother cracked us on the head with her fan when we fought healers,” Kel admitted. “We all decided it was better to let them do their work.”

  “The Ilane of Seabeth and Seajen I used to dance with was a most forthright young lady,” Baird admitted, smiling. “I am glad to see that she still is.”

  Now it was Kel’s turn to gape. Her mother used to dance? With men who were not her father?

  “I hope you will remember me to her when next you write.” Baird helped her to slide off his examining table.

  “Yes, sir. I mean, yes, your grace,” Kel said, fumbling the proper words for a man of his rank.

  Baird opened the door to his waiting room. Neal stood in the middle of it, hands on hips. “I’ve decided,” Neal announced. “She’s insane. The entire palace is insane.”

  His father lifted reddish-brown eyebrows. “Does this mean that you have come to your senses and will return to the university?” he asked mildly.

  Neal choked, glared at his father, and stalked out of the room.

  “I didn’t think so,” Baird remarked softly. “Keladry, I would like to say I hope we only meet socially in future. Somehow, I don’t think that will be the case.”

  Kel grinned at him. “You’re probably right, your grace.”

  “Don’t mind my boy. He gets...overenthusiastic, but he has a good heart.”

  “I know that,” Kel reassured the duke, and yawned.

  “To bed,” the healer ordered. “You need the sleep.”

  Kel bowed, covering another yawn, and trotted to catch up with Neal.

  eight

  WINTER

  The next morning Kel opened her eyes to discover it was not yet dawn. She moaned. Once, just once, it would have been nice to sleep through the bell to Gower’s knock on her door. Even with a banked fire her room was icy, a solid argument for staying abed until the last possible moment. She probably shouldn’t do her morning exercises until tomorrow or the next day. Even with Duke Baird’s treatment, she ached all—

  Several somethings hopped on her chest, interrupting her thoughts. Kel looked down.

  Thirteen sparrows, the entire courtyard flock, stood on the coverlet. Crown hopped up the distance from Kel’s navel to somewhere below her chin, where Kel lost sight of her. She closed her eyes, waiting for the gentle peck.

  Instead the quick gait that circled her cheek stopped beside her ear. “PEEP!”

  Kel sat up, startling the birds into flight. They perched on the headboard, chattering at her.

  “Wonderful,” she said, throwing off the covers. “So much for a little extra sleep.” Looking up, she saw one of the small shutters was open. No wonder the room was cold. She hobbled stiffly to the window, mumbling, “How can a tiny bird produce such a loud noise?”

  She opened the bottom shutters. Outside, the pre-dawn world was white. Over a foot of snow had fallen in the courtyard. More continued to fall in a steady, business-like way. It muffled all sound, making Kel feel as if she and the birds were wrapped in a thick down comforter.

  “I see why you came in,” she said, turning to look at her guests. They had taken advantage of her departure to huddle in the warm hollow she’d left in her mattress. Kel grinned, and went to poke up the fire. Once she had it going, she lit a branch of candles and carried them into her dressing room. Overhead the great bell called everyone to another day’s work.

  With no hearth, the dressing room was icy. Kel danced on the bare stone flags, teeth chattering as she stripped off her nightgown. A colorful sight awaited her: fading yellow-purple bruises spread over her left side and mottled her legs. A bigger, red-purple bruise was just surfacing on her belly. Kel whistled, impressed in spite of herself She had to have been in one or two worse fights than this, although they slipped her mind at the moment. The marks vanished under her clothes as she drew on her undertunic and scarlet wool hose. By that point she was shivering so badly that it was all she could do to feed the laces through the holes in the long garments. She was securing the hose to her undertunic when she heard a rap on her door.

  “Just a moment,” she called, grabbing a robe. Wishing that servants could simply enter her room and knowing the boys would destroy her things if she had the special locks removed, she ran to open the door. Gower took two steps past her with his tray, then turned to stare.

  “Sunrise come early today, miss?”

  Kel blinked at him. “What?”

  The man nodded to her face. “Looks like the sun’s about to come up in your eye. Nice color.”

  “Thank you, I think.”

  He put down the tray and saw the birds perched close to the fire. “Time was a man didn’t have to deal with wild animals in the palace,” he commented.

  “They aren’t wild, exactly,” she protested as he left the room, closing the door.

  The sparrows cheeped. Kel emptied a cup of the seed she had begged from the stables weeks before onto her desk. Dumping her collection of colored rocks from their shallow dish, she filled it with water and put it down for the birds. That done, she hurried to wash and finish dressing. Looking at her face in the mirror, she saw what Gower had meant: the swelling was gone, but she had brightly colored bruises around one eye and her other eyebrow and on one cheekbone. Kel shook her head and left her room.

  Turning around after she locked up, she nearly tripped over Merric. He shoved her. “I didn’t ask you to come bullocking in!” he yelled. “I don’t need you to defend me!”

  Kel held up her hands and stepped back. “I didn’t do it for you,” she told him.

  “Now they’ll give me all kinds of grief, saying I got a girl to—hunh?”

  Kel sighed. “I didn’t do it for you, all right? I wanted to pick a fight with them and you were there, that’s
all.”

  The noise was drawing other pages out of their rooms.

  “Just leave me alone!” Merric yelled, uncomfortably aware of their audience. He punched Kel in the left arm, then the right, as if daring her to hit back.

  The blows hurt, but she let him have them. His pride was sore; she understood that. Her parents had explained it, the first few times that someone she had tried to help got angry with her. She wished that Merric had tried to hit his tormentors as well. He wouldn’t be so angry if he’d gotten in a punch or two of his own last night.

  “Just because you’re a stupid probationer girl doesn’t mean you can ignore custom like that, either!” Merric informed her.

  Kel sighed again. She had been patient enough—she wanted her breakfast. “Like I said, it had nothing to do with you.” Tucking her hands into her belt, she marched down the hall. The other boys gathered around Merric. She could hear them asking him what had happened.

  She wondered what he would say. Not your problem, she told herself, and picked up her pace. She was hungry.

  Neal was not far behind her. “Ungrateful little swine,” he muttered as he sat across from Kel.

  She looked up from spooning honey onto her porridge. Never had breakfast looked so good. Healings always made her hungry. “Me?”

  “No, Merric.”

  Kel looked down. “Oh. You heard.”

  “My room isn’t that far from yours. He doesn’t have to be your slave the rest of his life, but a little thanks—”

  “And if it was you?” Kel asked, buttering a scone.

  Neal blinked at her.

  “Would you have thanked me?” She bit into her scone.

  “Well, I—I—”

  Kel swallowed. “It’s bad enough Joren and his pack shamed him. Me seeing it shamed him more. Me doing something about it...” She dug into her porridge, letting Neal think it over.

  As she ate, she looked for Joren, Zahir, and Vinson. Their appearance was much more colorful than hers. Since they hadn’t broken anything, they had not been sent to a healer. Not bad work, for a first-year, she thought, careful to keep her face straight.