The margrave nodded slightly, as though to himself, men gestured them to seats. “Well, then, shall we be about our business?”
Nobody had introduced the girl; she simply leaned back, recrossed her legs, and sipped at a mottled mug of steaming tea, her eyes never seeming to leave Ian. “I think, honored Margrave,” she said, “that there was some mention of a demand from some ferryman.” Just as the margrave’s voice was higher than Ian would have guessed, her voice was lower and richer than Ian would have expected; it was a musical alto, rich and sweet with just the slightest husky overtone, like an oboe. She eyed him over the rim of her mug. There was something about the way she looked at him that almost had Ian stammering.
“The margravine is, of course, correct,” the margrave said. “Although I am sure he would want us to think of it as a request, rather than a demand. A demand would seem rather arrogant.”
Ian couldn’t imagine Harbard doing any such thing as simply making a humble request, but, then again, he hadn’t taken an oath to tell the truth. “He—”
Ivar del Hival made a be-still gesture. “He would, I’m sure, be perfectly comfortable were it heeded that way,” he said, carefully.
“And the nature of this request would be… ?”
Fucking inbred nobility, raised on nothing but indirection and inflection…
“He wants the war to stop before it starts,” Ian said.
That was the deal: pass on the information, demonstrate who sent them, then back to Harbard’s Landing and a healed Hosea. Get it done, get it over with, and hope that the Vandestish didn’t kill the bearer of bad news.
“War?” the margravine asked.
Is there an echo in here?
“Harbard the ferryman, well, Your Esteemed Grace, he has some concerns,” Ivar del Hival said, choosing his words slowly. “He’s of the opinion that the extra patrols near Harbard’s Ferry, so near to the southern pass up into the Middle Dominions, well, he thinks that foreshadows a move against the Cities. He asks that it not happen.”
“Ah.” The margrave pursed his lips and cocked his head, all interest. “And because an ancient, decrepit ferryman wishes there to be no war, there should be no war.” He nodded, twice. “That does seem simple enough, does it not?” He rose, and stood looking puzzled until Ian and the rest got to their feet. “So much for that, now, eh?”
Arnie Selmo grinned at Ian. “Didn’t think it would be so easy, now did you?”
Ian cleared his throat. “With all respect, Margrave, I think you might want to take Harbard seriously.”
“A ferryman.”
Ian looked him straight in the eye. It wasn’t what the margrave was saying; it was how he was saying it, how he was dismissing it all with a quick smile and a shrug. That was wrong; it was stupid. Even if Odin wasn’t what he once was, the old god practically radiated power, and wasn’t anybody to trifle with.
The margrave had to believe that. He just had to.
A sudden pressure made him look down. Harbard’s ring pulsed on his thumb, squeezing rhythmically, like it was trying to milk his thumb. It hadn’t changed, it was just a ring, motionless on his thumb, but without moving, without growing or shrinking, it was contracting and releasing in time with Ian’s heartbeat.
He felt dizzy for just a moment, and took a half-step backward.
“Ian Silverstone?” The girl—the margravine—was on her feet. She took two quick steps toward him.
“Please. You really have to believe me,” he said to her.
He could see in her eyes that she did. The ring on his thumb pulsed again, twice, then twice more.
The fellow sitting next to the margrave shook his head. “The margrave,” he said, his voice louder than necessary, louder than it should have been, “does not have to do anything of the sort.”
“Burs.” The margrave’s tone was of command. “You have not been introduced; you will sit quietly.”
Burs Erikson seemed to ignore him. “I am Burs Erikson, son to the margrave,” he said. “Now that I have introduced myself, I tell you quite properly: the margrave does not answer to foreigners; he does not answer to ferrymen. He answers to the Table, perhaps, but any other who wants to make him answer had best try to do so by force of arms.”
“Burs,” the margrave said, his voice low but sharp, his free hand held out, fingers spread, palm up, “be still. I’ve chosen to hear this young man, and that means I have chosen to hear him out.”
“It’s important,” Ian said. “I’m not sure if you know who this Harbard is, but he’s not just a ferryman with delusions of grandeur; he’s one of the Old Ones.”
“Naturally.” Burs Erikson snickered. “Of course. Every naked hermit living off nuts and bark is an Old One, bored of meat and warmth. Every decrepit derelict begging for a crust or bone is really an Old One, merely testing the mettle of the those whose door is honored with his knock. Every withered old hag, her dugs hanging down to her knees, selling horrid-smelling potions of dubious origin, is really an Old One, assuming such a form to amuse herself.“
Arnie Selmo didn’t look over at Ian as he murmured, “What is this idiot’s problem? Think he’s showing off for the girl?”
“I’ll tell you one more time: Best not to make assumptions about how well locals don’t speak English.” Ivar del Hival’s broad face displayed a grin that was in no way friendly. He gave a quick glance at the margrave, as though to say, “Watch him.”
Burs Erikson wasn’t done. “And, of course, any skinny peasant with a smelly leather rucksack and a gold-dipped ring is really the Promised Warrior, here to lead us toward the Winter’s End. Pfah.”
“Now, Burs, my beloved son,” the margrave said, “that is certainly going too far.”
If Ian hadn’t been watching, he might have missed the ever-so-slight gesture that the margrave gave with his index finger. It wasn’t much, just a quick little back-and-forth waggle, followed by a tiny beckoning gesture.
“No, Margrave, it’s not.” Burs Erikson’s swordbelt was hung on the back of his chair. He gave his sword a shake. “Let’s see just how good this… killer of fire giants is. I don’t insist on a death-duel, or even to-the-first-scar—in truth, I’m not at all sure that I’d want to honor this… Ian Silverstone with my scar. But let’s take out a couple of blades, and have a little first-blood match. I’ll even vow to try to keep the wound small.” He turned to Ian. “Come now; let’s cross blades. I’ll even take a dull practice blade to you, Killer of Giants.”
“Just one fire giant,” Ian said. “And that was largely … good fortune.”
The temptation, of course, was to puff up his chest and act tough in front of the girl, but that wasn’t only stupid, it was probably what was expected. Ian was by years of training a fencer—a foil fencer, not a duelist. And while he had been working on turning his sport into a weapon, under the sharp eyes of Thorian Thorsen and Ivar del Hival, crossing real blades with a real swordsman like this much-scarred Burs Erikson could get him killed.
But Burs Erikson was determined to take offense, no matter what he said. “Ah, so brave and talented that he can brush off killing a fire giant.” He turned to the margrave. “Margrave and Father, please. Let me hurt him.”
“I see no offense having been given, Burs,” the margravine put in. She rested her hand on his forearm. “And I’d rather not see you treat the codes and usages of your future Order so lightly.”
“Burs, my beloved son, this man is our guest—”
“No, he is our prisoner. He was brought here under arms, yes, but that was—”
“That was entirely according to my instructions.” The margrave was playing his part to the hilt. It was clear that he wanted Ian to agree to some sort of duel with Burs, but it wasn’t at all clear as to why.
“This problem,” Ivar del Hival put in, “seems to be one that’s easily solved. The honored Burs Erikson doesn’t think that Ian Silverstein is necessarily worthy of a real duel, but he wants to fight one anyway.” He shook his he
ad. “I’ve sparred with him, Margrave, and I’ll tell you, there’s some demon in his right hand—he… he doesn’t seem to know how to simply go for a quick scarring move. He doesn’t seem even to see the arm, the foot, the leg as a target.”
Ian didn’t smile. The foot, the leg, the arms, weren’t targets in foil, and it was taking him time to adjust his technique.
Ivar del Hival frowned at him, then turned back to the margrave. “You put him in what you think of as a simple little duel with Burs Erikson, and I swear to you we’ll end up with a dead man on the floor, whether it’s Ian Silverstein or Burs Erikson.”
“I’m not afraid of that,” Burs Erikson said.
“With age comes the wisdom for proper fear,” Ivar del Hival said. “But I don’t want to argue the point—let us just state our case, and let you deal with it as you think wise, as we depart.”
“So.” The margrave eyed Ivar del Hival skeptically. “There is no way to test his abilities without drawing blood? None at all?”
“None that I can think of, Margrave, and since—”
“There is another possibility,” the margrave said. “We could let them … play with a couple of training swords.”
“Training swords?” Ivar del Hival asked. “You mean a couple of those tarred sticks—”
“No, no, no,” the margrave said. “That’s how you do things in the Dominions, perhaps, but we train our young would-be noblemen with simpler weapons: edgeless swords, with blunt points, very flexible. As long as they’re not thrust into the eyes or the hollow of the throat, one can do little damage, beyond a bruise or two.”
Ian had heard of such things before. They were called fencing foils, and he had spent more hours with one in his hand than he could count.
But he didn’t smile; he didn’t grin; he didn’t tighten or relax.
Ducks and corn, he thought, ducks and corn. Fucking ducks and goddamn corn.
Not this time, motherfucker, he thought, not this time.
Chapter Ten
Sparring Rules
After that scumbag of a father had kicked Ian out for failing to be a sufficiently compliant emotional and physical punching bag, Ian had supported himself mainly by tutoring in foil, augmented with the occasional odd job and college poker game.
It was amazing how good one could get at foil or poker when it mattered, when you were the one person in the gym or at the table who knew he had to win the match, had to dominate the game, to win and win and win again, and stash it away for the summer, or find yourself, once again, reduced to spending August living off corn stolen from the Ag School’s experimental farms, stretched out with ducks harvested from Mirror Lake in the middle of the night, with a broomstick and a piece of wire.
Ducks and corn. To Ian, ducks and corn meant poverty and hunger. That meant fear. That could mean loss of self-control. But you didn’t have to accept that loss of control as though it were a law of nature; it was just a matter of paying attention, just a matter of reminding your body, your face—and your mind!—that they belonged to you, that a moment of revealed weakness or pleasure could fuck everything up.
Ian had once allowed himself a small smile in a late-night dorm living-room game of seven-card stud when he filled a perfectly concealed baby full house that looked like a possible straight. He had only smiled for a moment, but that was too much: Phil Klein, across the table from him, paused as he was dropping his hand to the table, about to bet his flush to the hilt. Ian had watched a pot that should have kept him in rice and beans for easily two weeks fade until it was barely a Big Mac.
He had thought of that pot throughout every bitter bite of corn and duck that August.
Not again.
Total control; a poker face. Oh, sure, it would be possible to do it more cleverly, more sophisticatedly, to put on whatever expression best suited your purpose, but Ian didn’t try to act it out. That way led to danger. Feigning fear, trying to display resignation or fake eagerness, all those could fail.
Nobody could see through a wall.
Ian held his face still as two vestri servants were summoned, then dispatched to get a pair of foils while Ivar del Hival and Arnie Selmo helped him get ready.
He stripped off his heavy hiking boots and exchanged them for a pair of sneakers from his rucksack, and traded the heavy cotton shirt he was wearing for a green V-necked ER shirt. Not exactly a fencer’s tunic, trousers, and vest, but even if he had been silly enough to bring his fencing gear along—he had more useful things to pack his rucksack with—he wouldn’t have wanted to wear them, not for this. A fencer’s tunic was just fine for its intended purpose, but useless for anything else. The high-waisted trousers and crotch-strapped tunic kept the midsection protected from the point of an opponent’s foil, but any of a dozen normal movements—say, dropping into a wide-legged horse stance and then throwing a punch—would tighten the crotch strap hard enough to make the idiot doing it drop his sword and bend over, clutching himself.
He seated himself squarely on the floor and went into his stretches, ignoring the funny looks he got from the Vandestish. It didn’t matter what they thought; the stretches were important. He had a little more flexibility, a little more speed when properly stretched, and he would take any edge he could get.
It also made him less likely to injure himself, and that was important, too.
But forget about injuries, forget about swords, forget about everything else.
He took his time finishing his stretches.
Ian Silverstein stood facing Burs Erikson a few yards away. The local practice sword wasn’t as flexible as a fencing foil, and it was perhaps two or three inches shorter. The tip was merely blunt, not a button, and the guard was a full bell, an epée guard, not a foil guard.
But it was a foil, and by God, Ian Silverstein was still a foil player.
Burs Erikson brought himself to attention, and slashed his own foil through the air in a series of figure-eights that Ian found overelaborate for a salute.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Ian smiled. Some things were the same everywhere. Back home, most teachers, most schools, had their own personal salute. With a bit of knowledge, you could sometimes even tell what year somebody had started. D’Arnot’s salute, D’Arnot had once confessed, was the same movement that his father the orchestra conductor had used to wave his baton in 4/4 time.
Ian merely raised and dropped his own point, then dropped back to en garde, his tip up.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the margrave and the girl watching him from one side, while six of Burs Erikson’s soldiers muttered among themselves as they kept an eye on Ivar del Hival and Arnie Selmo—
—but none of that mattered.
The marble path beneath his feet was wider than a standard fencing strip, but that was okay.
One thing at a time, boy, one thing at a time.
He dismissed the rest of the universe. It didn’t matter. If you have one strength, and that strength is concentration, then you’d best learn how to use it.
Fine. There was a man with a foil opposite him. Burs Erikson was not quite as tall as Ian was, but built more solidly. Thick wrist, possibly as strong as Ian’s. But he wouldn’t be expecting the strength of Ian’s wrist, not at first. He would want to engage, take Ian’s blade, control the contact.
Timing and space would be the issues; Ian had easily three, four inches of extra reach—enough for a real advantage; Burs Erikson would be trying to work his way inside Ian’s defense, quite probably by attacking his blade.
If he didn’t try to end it all at the start, with a running attack.
No.
He wouldn’t. The flèche was a fencer’s trick, not a swordsman’s. It was one thing to try a flèche, a running attack that almost guaranteed the end of the point one way or another, on a fencing strip, where the only thing at stake was a point that you could win if you did it well, and at worst maybe a touch of embarrassment if you did it too clumsily.
But only somebody craz
y or desperate would do that in a real duel. Somebody who, like Thorian Thorsen of the House of Steel, wanted to live to fight another day wouldn’t expose his torso so directly.
So: no flèche, but Burs Erikson would try to make it quick, to embarrass Ian.
Ian’s left arm was held properly up and back, slightly cupped. Ian took every advantage, big or little: with his left arm at head-height, it added balance and stability, and by whipping the arm down and back during a lunge or ballestra, he could add a little speed, a little more balance, to an attack.
Come on, asshole, attack me, he thought.
Fencing was, much of the time, simply a battle of idiots: the first idiot to make a mistake lost. Anything could be a mistake, though—fencing was like life that way.
They moved toward each other until Burs Erikson, too eager to end it all quickly, did a strange little staggered half-step to bring him into range, then closed the distance with a bouncy ballestra, trying a quick beat against Ian’s blade. A good way to fight a duel, perhaps—while you controlled your opponent’s blade, he was going to have difficulty hurting you with it. But Ian was ready for it, and simply parried from sixte to quarte, then gave a quick beat against his blade, but didn’t attack. It was sound strategy to spend the first few moments of a match feeling out the opposition.
Burs Erikson didn’t try the obvious; a quick remise, continuing the attack, was a fine match technique, likely as it was to score before the opponent could complete his riposte, but that was a fencer’s technique, not a duelist’s.
In a real duel, that was far too likely to leave both duelists with swords stuck in them.
The missed beat had brought Burs Erikson’s sword out of line; Ian feinted a high thrust, then lunged low, in full extension, touching Tyrson just at the belt line.
Ian recovered with a crossover retreat—a too-pretty move, perhaps, but it was handy in the arsenal of a fencer who wanted to control the distance between himself and his opponent—and had no problem in parrying Burs Erikson’s next lunge, leaving their blades engaged.
The Silver Stone Page 13
