by Danny Macks
"Well, Chad," Lauren said as he saluted with an oak practice blade a few days later, "now's the time to show me what you know."
Chad returned the salute. Sword training was not what he pictured when he was told he'd be learning history from the master of the Libros guild and the king’s own historian. "Are you sure we shouldn't be doing this in armor?"
Lauren grinned. "I'll be fine."
It wasn't Lauren's skull that Chad was worried about.
The dirt road was wide and smooth along this section, with no potholes or puddles to trip in. A tree along the side of the road provided shade, but its branches hung too high to catch a swung blade. Lauren was about twenty years older than Chad, bearded, stockier, and once had black hair like Chad, but it was now peppered liberally with grey. He was shorter than Chad too -- but so was almost everybody. No obvious weaknesses Chad could exploit. His stance was relaxed and casual, but Chad wasn't fooled. He was ready for a fight.
Lauren waited for Chad to attack first. Slowly, Chad led Lauren through the steps of his sword training. Lauren didn't counter-attack at first, just blocked the younger man's attacks in a smooth, efficient manner. Lauren stayed on the defensive so much that his first attack a full minute later, a basic thrust, caught Chad slightly by surprise and he had to scramble to dodge it.
Gradually, Lauren increased the number and complexity of his attacks. Combinations began to appear.
Damn, he makes it look easy. But Chad also had to grudgingly admit that Lauren hadn’t used any maneuvers the younger man had not already used. No new tricks, just basic good swordplay. Chad’s stomach clenched when he realized Lauren was playing with him, treating him like a novice … or a fool. He might be only fifteen, but he was nobody’s fool.
“Your problem with your peripheral vision is worse when you are angry,” his mother’s voice murmured in his memory, but that advice was about as useful as his father’s training sessions, beating his armored body to the ground, over and over.
Lauren's blade sped up to a blur and performed a quick maneuver that sent Chad's blade flying through the air. As Chad's eyes flicked up to follow his errant weapon, Lauren stepped close and drove his knee hard into the young man's midsection. Pain felled Chad and he crumpled to the ground in a heap.
"What in the name of... of all that's Holy, were you doing?" Lauren screamed at the fallen boy.
"Doing?" Chad finally managed to gasp, after several breathless seconds. Slowly, he pulled himself from his fetal position onto hands and knees.
Lauren stalked over and picked up the fallen sword, then waited while both men collected their breath and emotions.
Chad sat up on his knees and reviewed the last moments of the duel in his head. Weariness had become a factor for both sides, and the two men had fallen into a sort of rhythm. Weariness and anger. Anger was a tool to be savored, his father had said. Then a knee hit his unprotected crotch.
"You mean when I got angry?"
"You were humming a piece of the Rage Song, lad. It's a Song of Power. Where did you learn it?"
"It's a song my father sang when we practiced together."
"When you practiced?" Lauren's surprise rang loud. "How did he hold back and keep from beating you senseless with Rage Song flowing through his head?"
Chad stared at the older man and didn't reply. After a moment, Lauren looked away. Chad's father hadn't held back.
Chad closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. For good or ill, he wasn't his father. Opening them, he contemplated the wooden sword that Lauren still held. "So, if I'm a rager, how long before I ... I mean, I'd rather be put down now than go back to my mother and brothers and ..."
Lauren chuckled and handed Chad back his sword. "It isn't as bad as all that. Let's get you tested and find out how strong a hold the Song has on you before proactively declaring you a murderer. Some people -- and not just bards -- live for decades after learning a Song of Power."
*****
Jeb shivered at a sudden chill. He looked around the main room of the Dancing Goat and no one else seemed cold. He'd better not be coming down with something. The sudden chill hit him again.
“What’s wrong with you, boy?” Harker scowled. “You acting like some shade-touched royal standing around like that. Git back to work.”
Shade-touched. Jeb looked around the brightly lit room. A shade would have stood out, visible to everyone. Nimbus on the other hand ...
He caught a faint glow from a shadow in the corner. Nimbus must have stepped into the shadow intentionally. Wait, Jeb signed covertly and went back to work.
Cold jabbed him again. And again as he reached for a patron’s cup, jerking his hand. He wiped up the spilled drink, reached for a pitcher to refill it and his hand spasmed. Nimbus had moved, invisible in the light, and had to be standing with the table embedded in his ghostly waist and the pitcher inside his torso. Jeb gritted his teeth and reached again. Impossibly, the beer was still warm after he pulled it free.
After sorting out the wet customer, Jeb headed for the door.
“Where you going?” Harker yelled.
“Pee,” Jeb yelled back.
Jeb had never seen Nimbus in the daytime and had to search to find a shadow large and deep enough to see the ethereal’s hands.
“What! I've got a job to do, if you haven’t noticed. I’m not going to talk to you about school in public!”
This isn't about school. It is about a colt. You must buy it. Now.
Jeb took a few slow, deep breaths to calm himself. “You want a horse? What are you going to do with a horse?”
You want this horse. It is vital you have it.
“I’m around horses all the time. Harker needs help because Cadence fell sick, and after your stunt I don’t think he's going to ever let me do work in the main room again. My whole life is horses.”
This job does not matter. This colt does.
“Fine. I can’t put up with you jabbing me all day until I go look. You win. Show me the damn horse.”
*****
"This all seems a bit bizarre to me," Chad said to his mentor, as he surveyed the room, which looked more like a dungeon than part of one of the best music schools in the land.
"The Songs of Power make people want to do things, lad," Lauren replied, as he inspected one of the manacles lining the room's stone walls. "This room is to make sure they don't."
Chad didn't reply, and regarded the others sharing the test with him. Chad was the oldest of the boys by several years. The youngest was only nine. Like him, each of the other boys had a single adult companion who would share the ordeal, bound just as the boys were. Chad had commented on the lack of girls among the handful of children taking the test, and was told that the lack was simply coincidence.
Once all the people were bolted to the walls, four aged men in ankle-length white robes entered the room. Each man wore a single brightly-colored sash which draped about his shoulders and hung in front of him down to his knees. As a servant attached each of their manacles, the man with the red sash began to speak.
"Welcome to the Trial of the Songs," said the first of the four old men in a deep booming voice in contrast to his thin frail form. "This test is in no way connected with admittance to the school of bards. Although we recommend training should you possess a Song of Power, this training will solely be connected with mastering your gift, not in any other area."
"Each of us will sing one of the Songs of Power," continued a chubby man with receding hair and a blue sash. The chubby man nodded to Lauren. "For any historians in the room, the Songs of Power are more an emotional outpouring than what they used to call music. It cannot be written down and changes with each singer and each time it is sung. If your hearts understand any portion of what is presented to you, we ask you to sing along, even if you know only a few phrases. Singing ability is not being tested here. There is no such thing as the wrong notes or ‘off-key’. Sing out anyway."
A small gaunt man with a yellow sash and a thick acc
ent spoke next. "Each of four Songs we sing can be dispelled by one of other four... but only right Song. Song of Peace has no effect, and is not affected by Song of Rage. Men perished by trying such."
The servant locked the last of the old men to the wall and left the room. After the door closed, Chad heard the lock turn and a bar drop in place.
"We will wait for the servant to get out of range of hearing," said the last man with a green sash. After a long pause, he said simply "Song of Happiness" and began to sing.
Chad didn't understand any of the words the man sang. They didn't even seem to be words at all, just meaningless syllables strung together on a light airy tune that made him grin. Chad smiled at Lauren and saw the older man also had his face spread in a wide goofy grin. Chad turned his gaze to the other strangers... the other new friends who shared the room with him, and saw several dancing about in place and one man locked in a fit of giggles.
A young boy across the room, easily the youngest of Chad's new, dear friends, was singing along in a piercing off-key that Chad would have found annoying on any other day, but struck him as funny today. He laughed loudly at the silliness of it all. He even laughed as the elder with the red sash said into the mirth, "Rage Song."
The first few notes, a pounding bass with the heavy beat of a military march, struck Chad like a blow. Before the first measure had sounded, all the laughter in the room shriveled to nothing. The first thing Chad felt, after shock, was betrayal. The elder had betrayed him by dashing his hopes and joy in this cruel way. Chad spat those pieces of the Rage Song he knew back at the man, hoping to hurt him with his song the way he could not with his manacled hands.
It was only after Chad faltered in the Rage Song, that he noticed the elder was not singing alone. Lauren, who'd also betrayed him by subjecting him to this humiliation, matched the elder with the red sash note-for-note in a gruff, syncopated, tenor counterpoint that somehow fit together with the elder’s bass. Chad, in sullen silence, realized that it was a plot. Both men deserved to die for a hundred tiny slights that Chad hadn't noticed until this moment.
Another enemy, a man next to the small boy, lunged forward until either the manacles or his bones creaked loudly, foaming at the mouth and spitting curses garbled to incomprehensibility by his own berserk anger. He deserved to die, too. While others shouted curses and obscenities, Chad slowly worked to pull his hands from the manacles and looked from man to man, plotting what he would do to each, once he was free.
Finally, Chad's gaze settled on the boy across from him. He knew a variety of ways to hurt the boy. Methods played in Chad's mind in vivid detail that would damage more than just the youth's tiny body. Ways that would ...
"My God, I've become my father," a small voice said inside Chad's head. "I've got to ..."
Chad sang.
His first note resembled a wail of despair and a groan of agony. It cut through the growls and curses as suddenly as the Rage Song had cut through the earlier laughter. Somewhere in the first measure, he heard the elder with the blue sash say "Song of Mourning" and join in.
Chad didn't know how he knew this song, but as it unfolded, he realized he knew each note and each syllable with the intimacy of breathing. Chad's "meaningless" words sang of friendships lost. He sang of regret. Regret for unkind actions and unkind thoughts. Regret for simple kindness not done. Regret that he could never tell his dead older brother that he loved and admired him. Regret that his father would beat Chad for saying those same words to anyone, especially to Father, who once in a while deserved that admiration.
Tears were flooding down Chad's face, hiding the rest of the room, but the release of singing felt oddly good. Chad had never been one to complain or wallow in self-pity, and Chad's song felt like neither of those things to him. He was about to start a second verse when he heard a thickly accented voice say "Song of Peace" and begin to sing.
The Peace Song resembled a lullaby. It quickly cut Chad's song, but without the wrenching sensation of the last two transitions. To Chad, the Song said simply that it was time to stop hurting; time to trust again. Chad's tears stopped, but he also began to realize he was afraid.
"It’s like I'm walking on thin ice," he thought to himself. "The Song is holding me up, but I don't trust it."
As the Song drew toward an end, Chad looked around the room with his drying eyes and saw the contented, quiet looks that everybody else in the room seemed to share. It was easy to imagine the quiet state he saw giving way to the Song of Happiness.
"The difference is in me," Chad suddenly realized. "I don't understand, because I really don't understand peace." The thought saddened him. He was still feeling a bit sad despite the gentle music filling him, when the man in the yellow sash brought the Song of Peace to a close.
Chad knew not one Song, but two. Chad had only heard of one man, past or present, who could sing two Songs of Power. The thought made him want to vomit.
Lauren looked a little ill too, but Chad doubted it was for the same reason.
*****
Jeb had to admit that Nimbus had a good eye for horseflesh. The colt was still shiny from birth but had already found its legs. He wobbled around his dam; a small, shaggy, black, mountain horse. Growing more sure of his footing with every step.
I fear we are too late. Nimbus signed from inside the shadow of the barn. The shades are here.
They were trying to stay hidden, but Jeb could see one: a hint of motion inside a shadow. Then he noticed another movement in a different shadow. Shades were a rare thing and most people had never seen more than one at a time their entire lives. How many are here?
Three.
Jeb fought hard to keep his excitement from showing on his face as did some quick calculations. The gestation period of a horse was eleven months and it had been almost exactly eleven months since Midnight had died. The colt's parents weren't chargers, but Jeb knew that didn't really matter. Despite what the priests said, reincarnation and immanence didn't really work that way.
Pol, the stable-master, stood on the opposite side of the corral from Jeb, haggling with speculators: potential buyers who hoped to get a low price by convincing the owner to commit to a sale while the foal was still too young for his true value to be known. The colt looked back and forth between the crowd and Jeb, then wobbled to the edge of the fence.
“Aren't you a friendly fellah,” Jeb said as he reached to rub the colt's jaw.
"None of these offers will buy a donkey," Pol said to the speculators as he noticed Jeb reaching over the fence. Pol started walking around the corral with a frown, kicked through the shade in the shadow of a water trough as he moved, and jumped back in surprise. Jeb half-smiled at his own memory of biting cold. When the stable-master jumped, the shade gave up on hiding, assumed a faintly humanoid shape and hovered into full view. His friends followed suit, then all three disappeared. Stunned silence followed.
“I double my offer!” one of the speculators yelled.
"Two pounds!" yelled another. "Silver!"
"Three!"
*****
Jeb angrily kicked every piece of trash on the street the entire way back to the Dancing Goat. Nimbus hovered beside him, but avoided most shadows, staying invisible in the light.
“Do you realize how much money I could've made if I bought that horse before the shades showed up.” A dried cow patty exploded on a stone wall from the force of Jeb’s kick. “Gold! I could've resold him at the castle and been paid in gold! I've never even seen real gold.” Jeb passed the side of the Goat’s stable toward the doors at the front. “That’s what you were trying to tell me, wasn't it?”
No.
“I’m such an idiot!”
“Yes. You are.” Harker leaned against a post at the entrance of the alehouse proper, his hairy arms crossed over his protruding gut. “That was one hell of a long pee. Lunch rush’s over. What’s up wit you?”
Jeb mumbled, “Sorry,” and hung his head. “I think I saw Midnight -- the new one. Three shades s
howed up, but disappeared when people noticed them.”
Harker made a gesture against evil, then chuckled. “Only you would feel a shade and go running off after it.” He scratched his chin through his thick beard. “Yer growin. Startin’ to get a shape. Given any thought to gettin’ yerself a husband?”
“I don’t want a husband.”
“Okay, a wife then. Either way, you can’t pretend to be a stable boy forever.”
Jeb wasn't pretending. But he also knew arguing with Harker was a waste of breath. “What brought this up?”
“You spilled ale on yerself.” He pulled his shirt away from his body. “That’s why I figgered you stormed out.”
Jeb scowled, crossed his arms protectively over his chest, but didn't reply. There wasn't much to see, but as one of the few people who knew Jeb’s secret, Harker was exactly the kind of man to be looking. “Did anybody else notice?”
“Not this time, but they will. Yer growing up, kid. Ain’t nothin' neither of us can do to stop that. You need to know what yer doin' next.”
Jeb felt a quick, cold touch on his back. “I think I would like to learn to read.”
Harker scowled. His opinion of “young-folk that got airs” was well known.
“And books and accounts,” Jeb added. “So I could run an inn someday.”
Harker’s scowl grew speculative. He scratched his chin. “Bess be getting the inn when I’m gone.”
“If she wants it. Is that what your daughter wants?” Both Jeb and Harker knew she felt otherwise.
“You find a tutor and make sure it don’t cost too much and I’ll think on it.” He stood up and brushed his hands together, signaling the conversation over and time to get to work. “I’ll think on the lessons. I ain't promised you an inn.”
Jeb nodded and got to work.
Chapter Three – Education
The mountain air at the bardic college, cool despite the sun, reminded Chad of home in Thesscore. Good weather for grapes, like those that blanketed the eastern slopes of the barony in fragrant trellised rows. Chad and his younger siblings played hide-and-seek and save-the-damsel in those hills every time his mother, Lady Elena, visited the area. She took regular trips across the full length and breadth of the five baronies of Thesscore. During most of her outings, Father and little Wulf were away on their own trips.
