Brightly Burning

by Mercedes Lackey

  His mother was clearly torn between what she saw as her duty to her son and her duties to her Guild. She hesitated, then solved her dilemma by snapping, “Well, find something!” as she hurried out the door, the heels of her scarlet leather boots clicking on the wooden floor.

  Lan turned back to his contemplation of the garden, but he pulled his thin legs up onto the window seat and pulled the curtain shut behind him, cutting him off from the rest of the second-best sitting room.

  Find something? She wants me to find something? And what is there for me to do around here? Since moving to the town house in Haven, there was nothing to occupy Lan’s days. Back home—for no matter what his parents said, this place would never be home to him—he’d had friends, places to go, things to do. Riding, hunting, and fishing mostly, or shooting at targets. Just hanging about together and talking was entertaining enough, certainly more entertaining than listening to Sam natter about the exciting doings in the dye vats. Back when he was younger, that same gang of boys had played at being Heralds or Guards, at fighting the Karsites or capturing bandits. The last couple of years they’d abandoned the games, but not each other. Now there were races to be run, game to chase, rivers to swim, and that was enough for them.

  Then Mother got made Guild Representative, and Father couldn’t get us out of the country fast enough. Lan’s lip curled at the recollection. No matter how his children felt about it, Archer Chitward had ambition to be more than a simple country cloth merchant. At least in part that was why he had negotiated the marriage with Nelda Hardcrider, the most skillful needle-woman anyone in their area had ever seen. With her skill, and his materials, he reckoned she could make herself into a walking advertisement for his goods.

  Lan knew that was what he’d thought, since he’d said so often enough. His mother didn’t seem to resent being thought of as a sort of commodity, in fact he sometimes wondered if the negotiation and speculation had been as one-sided as his father thought.

  He stared out the glass window at the sorry substitute for a forest—a stand of six dwarf fruit trees, an arbor covered with brambles and roses, which would later yield fruit and rose hips, and gooseberry bushes, all neatly confined in wooden boxes with gravel-covered paths between, for a minimum of work. The rest of the garden was equally utilitarian; vegetables in boxes, herbs in boxes, grapevines trained against the wall. The only flowers growing there were those that were also edible.

  With an intensity that left a dry, bitter edge around his thoughts, Lan longed for his wild, unconfined woods. In all of Haven he had yet to see a spot of earth that had been left to grow wild; every garden of every house around here was just the same as this one. The only variations were in whether or not the gardens were strictly utilitarian or ornamental. The parks around which each “square” of town houses were built were carefully manicured, with close-cropped lawns, precise ponds or fountains, pruned trees, and mathematically planned flowerbeds.

  He wanted his horse. He wanted to saddle up and ride until he found a tree that wasn’t pruned, a flower not in a planned planting, even a weed. But that was impossible; his horse had been left back in the country. There was no stable here, and even if there had been, he would not have been allowed his horse. The two carriage horses the family had brought with them were kept in a stable common to the square, and cost (as his father liked to repeat) a small fortune to keep fed and cared for. Only the nobly born could afford to keep a riding horse in the city.

  He could have hired a horse to ride—there was a stable with horses for hire and a bigger park to ride them in—but what was the point of that? You weren’t allowed to take the beast any faster than a trot, you had to stick to the bridle paths, and the riding park was just a bigger version of the tiny park of their square. Riding in the park was nothing more than a way for girls to show themselves off for young men, and young men to assess the competition. It wasn’t even exercise.

  Lan hated Haven; he had since he’d arrived, and he hadn’t seen anything yet to change his mind. But he was in the minority, because the rest of his family had taken to life in the city with the enthusiasm of otters to a water slide.

  His mother was at the Guildhouse every day, her daughter with her at least part of the time. Lan’s younger sister Macy took after her mother in every way, and it looked as if Nelda would be handing the reins of her position in the Guild over to her daughter when the time came that she wished to step down. Macy adored every facet of city life, and so did Lan’s younger brother, Feodor. Feodor tagged after their father the way Macy trailed behind Nelda, absorbing every aspect of the business of a cloth merchant as easily as a towel soaked up water. Lan’s oldest brother Sam wasn’t even in the equation—he spent so much time at his Master’s that Lan scarcely even saw him.

  A proper little copy of Father, he is, Lan thought cynically. And how nice for him that is. Same for Feodor. They never got into trouble just for existing; they never got the long looks of disgust or disappointment. Not once. Back home, that hadn’t mattered; Lan was out at dawn and not back until dark, and if his parents were disappointed in him, at least he was able to avoid them.

  Why can’t they just send me back home? he thought longingly. It wasn’t as if they couldn’t afford it, not with all the silver his father was throwing around lately. They kept saying that it was time he grew up and took on some responsibilities and made something of himself. . . .

  Why? Highborns don’t have to! There are plenty of people with well-off parents who aren’t expected to go out and “make something of themselves.”

  The only thing he really wanted to do was out of the question, of course. Given a choice, he’d have entered the Guard. He knew he rode well enough to get into the mounted troops; he certainly didn’t fancy marching for leagues and leagues on his own two feet. He rather thought he’d look good in the Guard uniform of dark blue and silver, and it was an admitted magnet to attract pretty girls, or at least it had been at home. Even foot soldiers got attention when they passed through Alderscroft.

  The one and only time he’d mentioned his ambitions, there had been such an outcry he hadn’t dared say anything about it again. And without family support—well, he could pretty much forget about getting into the mounted troops, at least for a long while. If you brought your own horse and passed the riding trials, you went automatically into the cavalry, but if he didn’t have family support, he wouldn’t have a horse. And he wasn’t so desperate that he cared to just run off and join the ground troops.

  Definitely not. Without some weapons’-training, real training with a Weaponsmaster, he’d go straight into training with that most basic of front-line weapons, the pike. It would be months before he got his hands on a bow or an edged weapon, and all his time would be spent on grueling marches and drills.

  I might as well be a woodcutter, it would be as much work and more interesting.

  And anyway, he couldn’t even run off to join the Guard for another two years. Even if he lied about his age and identity, his parents would probably find out where he was and drag him home again.

  Nobody would believe I was sixteen anyway. Skinny and lanky he might be, but he was also undersized. He didn’t even look fourteen. Feodor looked older than he did, and was certainly taller.

  Of course, as his father pointed out constantly, a lack of height didn’t matter to a merchant or a Guildsman.

  By this time he had brooded himself into a truly black humor, and the moment he heard the house-maids come giggling into the kitchen for their late breakfast, he bolted up the stairs for his room, now carefully polished and scrubbed, any trace of him erased. He took a perverse pleasure in pulling the curtains shut on the morning sunshine and undoing their work by casting himself on the bed, boots and all.

  He closed his eyes, nursing his bitterness in silence, wishing that he could will himself back home to Alderscroft.

  HE didn’t realize that he’d dozed off until he started awake to find his mother shaking him and the curtains pulled wide ope
n again to admit the midday sun.

  “Wake up!” she said crossly, the dreaded frown lines making deep creases between her brows. Her face, a perfect oval framed by the braids she wore wrapped around her head, was the very portrait of parental annoyance. Her hazel eyes narrowed with suppressed anger. “When I told you to find something to do, I didn’t mean to go take a nap! Here—”

  She thrust the same forgotten roll of tools at him that the Guildmaster had forced on him last night, and Lan suppressed a groan. Was he never to be rid of the blasted thing?

  “Did you hide this in the cushions last night?” she accused.

  He blinked and began to dissemble; she cut him off before he’d gotten more than a word or two out. “Don’t bother to lie,” she said acidly. “You do it very badly. You did. It’s just a good thing that the Guildmaster thought Feodor was older than you—he offered to take Feo as his ’prentice, so Feo can use these, and he won’t be offended to see that you’ve given Feo your present.”

  Relief must have shown on his face, for his mother’s lips tightened. “Tidy yourself and get downstairs. Your father and I have something to tell you.”

  She clattered out of his room, and Lan’s relief evaporated, replaced by dread.

  Oh, gods, now what? Was he going to be ’prenticed to someone after all? His heart plummeted, and with cold hands he straightened his tunic and swept his hair off his forehead.

  Feeling as if he were going to his doom, he plodded down the stairs and into the lesser sitting room where he could hear his mother and father talking.

  They both looked up as he entered; his mother still had that tightly closed expression around her mouth, as if her lips were the opening to a miser’s purse, but his father looked less grim. Archer had a milder temper to go with his gray-threaded, tidy chestnut hair, but today there was a sense of sadness around his calm, brown eyes, and his square jaw was set in a way that suggested it would not do Lan any good to argue with the fate planned for him.

  Lan took deep breaths, but still felt starved for air.

  “Sir,” he said, suppressing the feeling that he ought to bob like a servant, but keeping his eyes down. “Ma’am. You wanted me?”

  “Sit down, Lavan.” That was his father; Lan took a seat on the nearest chair, a hard, awkward thing that was all angles and a little too tall for his feet to lie flat on the floor. That was the signal for his father to rise and tower over him. Lan’s chest tightened, and he truly felt as if he couldn’t breathe. “I was hoping for all of my sons to follow in my trade.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lan replied in a subdued tone of voice, going alternately cold and hot, a feeling of nausea in the pit of his stomach. I’m going to be sick, I know it. . . .

  He looked up through his lashes as his father looked down at him and sighed.

  “Well, having two of my offspring take to the trade is more than any man should expect, I suppose.” Archer shook his head. “Lan, have you any idea what you propose to do with yourself with the rest of your life?”

  His feeling of sickness ebbed, but he started to sweat. “Ah—” Don’t say that you want to go into the Guard! he cautioned himself before he blurted out the truth. That was not what Archer wanted to hear. “I, ah—”

  “That’s what I thought.” Archer looked back at his wife, who grimaced. “You know, in my day, you’d have found yourself packed off to whatever master I chose to send you to. You wouldn’t have a choice; you’d do what I told you to do, as I did what my father wished for me.”

  “Yes, sir.” A tiny spark of hope rose in him. Did his father have some other plan? Whatever it was, could it be better than being sent off to some miserable dyer or fuller? Unless—he—oh no—not a temple—

  “If you were lucky, I’d have sent you to be a priest,” his father continued, echoing Lan’s unfinished thought. “There’s some that would say it’s the proper place for you.”

  “You’d at least be serving your family if we did,” Nelda said acerbically. “Which is more than you can claim now, lolling about in bed most of the day and glooming around the house doing nothing the rest of the time!”

  “Superfluous” sons and daughters were often sent to one temple or another; the sons of the highborn were the ones that became the priests that were ultimately placed in the best situations. The rest took what they were assigned, normally poor temples in tiny, isolated villages in hardscrabble country or in the worst slums of the cities. Their families were greatly praised, of course, and it was generally thought that they incurred great blessings from the god or goddess of their choice for sending one of their blood to serve.

  Lan gulped back alarm and forced himself to keep his eyes up. If he read his mother’s words aright, he wasn’t being sent to a temple either.

  “You’re luckier than you deserve,” she said after a pause, sounding very bitter and resentful of her son’s good fortune. “And your father is kinder.”

  “Now, Nelda, the boy isn’t bad,” Archer admonished. “He’s just a bit adrift.”

  “You aren’t home enough to see,” his mother replied, “or you weren’t, back in Alderscroft. Running off with those ne’er-do-well friends of his, never coming back until all hours, and the gods only know what he was up to with them—”

  “Nothing that anyone ever complained about,” Archer retorted, a sharpness in his tone showing that he was getting weary of his wife’s complaints. “No one ever said anything to me about Lan getting into mischief.”

  “Well, they wouldn’t, would they?” Nelda muttered, but there wasn’t much else she could say beyond that. No one had ever complained to her about Lavan’s behavior either, as Lan well knew, because no matter what he and his friends got into, they always made sure it wasn’t where anyone would see them.

  Archer turned back to his son, and rewarded his wary hope with a faint smile. “Times change, more so here in Haven, maybe. We’ve got another place for you, and you can think the Collegia for it.”

  “I’m going to the Collegium? But I’m not—”

  He wasn’t a Bard or a Healer, and he certainly wasn’t a Herald! But his father laughed and shook his head.

  “Na, na, not to the Collegia—that’s for the highborn, not for the likes of you! Or at least, not unless you show some kind of genius, my boy, and since you’ve not shown anything so far, I rather doubt you’re going to start now! But it’s the Collegia and the way the highborn send their younger sons and sometimes daughters there for extra learning that made the Haven Guilds think something of the kind was a good place for our younglings.” He cocked his head to the side and took in Lan’s baffled expression. “You’re going to school, lad.”

  “School?” Now he was more confused, not less. He knew how to read, write, and cipher, so what more could he possibly learn? “I’ve already been to school.”

  “Not like this, you haven’t.” Archer settled back on his heels and tucked his thumbs into his belt, looking as proud as if he had thought of the idea of this “school” himself. “This is the school all of the Trade Guilds in Haven put together. You’ll be going beyond what the priest at Alderscroft could teach you—history, fancy figuring, oh, I don’t know what all else. And the schoolmasters will be testing you, seeing what it is you’re good at. When they’ve got you figured, they’ll be finding a Master for you to ’prentice to; something you’ll fancy more than clothwork, I reckon.”

  “You’ll start tomorrow,” Nelda stated, narrowing her eyes, “And you should be thanking your kind father for such a blessed opportunity.”

  “I am—I mean, thank you sir,” Lan replied, still in a daze, and not quite certain if this was something to be glad about, or otherwise. More schooling? He hadn’t been particularly brilliant at bookwork before. . . .

  But as he continued to stammer his thanks, he evidently sounded sincere enough to satisfy both his mother and father. They dismissed him, and made no objection when he went back to his room.

  He stood beside his bed in the open window, staring at th
e blank wall of the neighbor’s house, close enough that if he leaned out, he could touch it. The wall seemed an apt reflection of his state of mind.

  Only one thought was at all clear.

  Now what am I getting into?

  TWO

  ONE of the manservants woke Lan at dawn the next morning, gave him barely enough time to dress, and chased him downstairs. While the sullen fellow stood there with his arms crossed, tapping one foot, Lan threw on the first things that came to hand—his tunic and trews from yesterday. His mother waited for him at the foot of the stairs, and eyed him with patent disfavor.

  “Get back up there and put on something decent. You don’t have to make people think we’re too niggardly to clothe our children properly,” she ordered sharply. “And get your hair out of your face. You look like a peasant.”

  He straightened abruptly with resentment, but didn’t feel up to a verbal joust that he’d only get the worst of, since most of what he would like to say was likely to bring on some sort of punishment. Instead, he stalked back upstairs with his spine making a statement of irritation and did as he was ordered. He rummaged through his wardrobe, changing into tunic, shirt, and trews of his father’s best white linen and indigo-blue wool, and slicking his hair back with a wet brush.

  And if something happens that I get this stuff dirty or scuffed up, I’ll no doubt hear all about my carelessness.