by M. A. Ray
“I understand it better than I can speak it,” Francine said. “There’s all those syllables, and you have to know how to fit them together just right.”
Wallace started to walk down to the fairground. Francine, Lukas, and Dingus trailed, talking about hituleti. Tony fell in next to Wallace, and the two of them started adding their own asides about Bearded and Deltese, but for once, Dingus wasn’t just listening to everyone else. It took a few minutes before he realized Francine and Lukas, at least, were mostly listening to him, and kept on asking him questions, how to say this, how to say that. It felt pretty good. They talked about all kinds of stuff, right through playing ring toss and eating dinner. The conversation turned from languages to books. Dingus made a whole long list in his head of stuff he wanted to read, and told about his little atlas.
“Could I see that?” Lukas asked.
“If you showed me that book about muscles you could,” Dingus said.
Francine said, “I want to see both. I can show you guys the river treatise I was talking about. Let’s bring them to the ceremony and look at them afterward. There’s not enough time to get a good look at even one book right now.”
“You’re right. I’ll go and fetch mine,” Lukas said, standing up from the table. “It’s back in my camp.”
They all separated, except that Tony and Wallace went with Francine. Dingus dashed off to retrieve the atlas, pulled it out of his pack, and started back toward the lake, going a little slower to protect his precious cargo, but taking one of the shortcuts he’d found before the Moot opened so he wouldn’t be late: a long, wide patch of forest with fewer trees, easy to run through. If he’d been paying attention, if he’d been a little less sure of safety here, Arkady never would’ve been able to step right out in front of him.
He should’ve been paying more attention. He shouldn’t have stopped, but he did. Arkady stood there next to a squat fir Dingus had been about to pass. “Going somewhere, Thingus?” Arkady asked, and hearing ‘Thingus’ stilled his feet.
He sucked in a little and stuck the book into the waist of his breeches. Some of his tunic and jerkin went in with it, but he wasn’t looking at what he did—he was looking at Arkady. “Take your best shot.”
Before he’d quite finished putting the book away, Arkady swung a haymaker right at the side of his head, nothing like clean, nothing like fast enough. For Dingus, there was plenty of time to drop to a crouch. By the time the punch would’ve landed, he’d knocked the wind out of Arkady instead with a shoulder under his ribs and slammed his back on the ground. The rest of Arkady’s breath shocked out on a pained moan.
Dingus pulled his arm out from under Arkady’s body, sat across him, and started in with fists. Teach you to fuck with me, he kept thinking. I’ll teach you. Arkady’s nose gave. Dingus’s knuckles split. He heard quick steps, more than one set, but he couldn’t begin to care.
A hairy arm locked around his throat from behind. Dingus rasped for air. The arm’s owner dragged him back, off Arkady, until his heels scraped the ground. He clutched at it, pulled at it, but couldn’t get the leverage he needed to break the hold, or to hit back at the two other guys. He barely recognized them, but whoever they were, they started kicking him as soon as he cleared Arkady.
“Fuck you!” he tried to yell, but it didn’t come out right. Choking, he was choking, and his mind flashed Curran the butcher’s face in front of his eyes, snapped Rogen the bailiff into his vision. He screamed something close to no before he caught a glancing blow to the eggs, and then he just screamed. When the one choking him threw him to the ground, he fell off the stool all over again; and when they all got in on the kicking and stomping, Dingus moaned hoarsely, pulling himself into the very smallest ball he could, hearing Dingus, Dingus, half-breed thingus, hearing dilihi, over the faraway sounds of what they called him: jumped-up cocksucker, asslicker, fucker, fucker, motherfucker. He knew in the blackest pit of his heart it could only end one way: with his neck in a noose.
But it didn’t.
They stopped, finally they stopped. “Somebody’s coming,” one of them said, and they broke off.
“This isn’t over, Thingus,” Arkady hissed when he staggered past, and he spat a thick wad on Dingus’s face. Dingus shuddered, trying to push away the memory, worse than the hopeless hanging dreams.
“See here, you little thugs! Come back here! Front and center! You’ll answer for this!” Another set of footsteps—softer, lighter, too far apart to be Vandis—came to a stop next to his head. Dingus kept his eyes closed, trying to breathe evenly. The man grumbled, “Why am I not surprised?”
Why couldn’t you have been Vandis? he thought, holding himself still, hoping Reed would take his snooty voice and go away. Why’d you have to be fucking Reed?
Reed didn’t go away. Dingus heard his breeches shift, heard his boots creak. “Are you conscious?”
When Dingus kept quiet, Reed laid a hand on the bottom of his rib cage. The touch fried his skin, or seemed to, with a sizzle of nerves, and he lurched away from it and flopped to his back. “No!” Reed’s hand ended up on his stomach, and the long fingers pressed hard, here and there. He grabbed the wrist. “Don’t!”
“Stop, now.” Reed put his other hand on Dingus’s belly and palpated it while Dingus squirmed away. “I’m a physician. You know that, don’t you?”
“I don’t care!” Dingus rolled to his other side and pushed up to all fours, turning his face toward Reed. “Don’t fucking touch me!”
“In case you failed to notice,” Reed said coolly, “you’ve been thrashed to hell and gone. You need to be examined.”
Dingus huffed. “You think this is bad? You little bitch. They didn’t even crack nothing.”
The tall Master’s face was as smooth as the ice on the river at Elwin’s Ford. “You can’t know that.”
“I know how it feels.” Dingus got his feet under him.
“Not yet, boy,” Reed said, rising to close the pace’s distance between them. “Let me help you sit down.” He grasped under Dingus’s armpits and pulled back.
Dingus lurched away from him and slammed the ground in a painful heap. “Keep your hands off me!” he wrenched out. “How many times I gotta say it?”
“You’re going to bite me, aren’t you?” Reed said, hands on hips. He looked like a giant standing there, scowling down at Dingus. “If I try to examine you, you’ll bite me, and I’m willing to wager you’re carrying rabies.”
“Asshole.”
“You’re a fine—”
“Somebody’s coming,” Dingus cut in. He heard voices, he heard Franny and Lukas, and— “Vandis. I hear Vandis.”
Reed snorted. “Do you think that’s going to chase me off?” A confusion of footfalls came to Dingus’s ears, behind Reed’s voice. “You need to be examined. Here I’m standing. I’m a competent physician, so why not?”
“I don’t,” Dingus repeated, through his teeth, “want you to touch me. I know you went to hit me. I know it. I don’t trust you.”
“I did not intend to strike you.”
“You were fixing to give me the back of your hand! I know how that looks!”
“I would never have struck you! I only wanted to ascertain if your rather extreme reaction was a fluke.”
“You were testing me?” Dingus’s eyes practically sprang out of their sockets.
“In so many words? Yes.”
“You asshole!” For sure he would’ve gone at Reed—his aching muscles coiled to push off the ground—but he heard Vandis, right then, saying something about how he’d said he would be there and it wasn’t like him, and he stilled.
Reed’s head turned toward the sound. He ventured a look at Dingus, a look as close to uncertain as Dingus had ever seen on his handsome face.
I could pin it on you, Dingus thought, and knew Reed saw him think it. I could do it, he thought, and saw the blue eyes go wide. It gave him a little satisfaction, but only a little. “Don’t worry,” he said instead. “I’m not one th
at lies to get others in the shit.”
Now Reed’s eyes narrowed. For a long moment he stared, but he’d barely started to open his mouth when Vandis said, “If this is what it looks like, Reed, I will burn you to the ground,” in that quiet voice as hard as his face.
It hung, less than a heartbeat, but it hung. “It’s not,” Dingus said, all of a sudden keenly aware of his position on the ground, with Vandis looking at him, plus Lukas and, oh Lady, Franny and Pearl with their mouths wide open. “It wasn’t him.”
Vandis came close, folding his thick arms. “Then who?”
“They ran off when Reed came. They—I didn’t see,” he decided. Vandis’s eyebrows went high, disappearing under his hair, and Dingus added, “They came on too quick.”
“Reed?”
“I couldn’t say for sure,” Reed said, and Vandis scowled. Dingus got his feet under him again. “Boy, stay down!”
“I’m—”
“Dingus,” Vandis said. “If Reed’s telling you stay on the ground, stay on the ground!”
Dingus sat down, wincing at the tenderness in his crotch.
Vandis turned to Reed now. “What’s the damage?”
“I don’t know. He’s refusing an exam.”
“The hell he is. Do it.”
“No!” Dingus blurted.
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t want his hands on me!”
“I could—” Lukas began, but he shut his mouth with a snap when Vandis’s eyes burned onto him.
“Are you arguing with me, too?”
Lukas scuffed a foot in the needles. “No, Vandis,” he mumbled.
“Let Lukas,” Dingus said desperately. He didn’t want anybody checking him, but if he had to let ’em, anybody but Reed. “Please, Vandis, I—”
“I would rather it be Reed,” Vandis said, don’t-argue in every line of him.
Dingus stared. Why are you doing this to me?
“He’s the best there is.”
“I’ll make this quick,” Reed promised, stepping toward him, and went into a squat behind. He pressed his hands around Dingus’s ribs, and Dingus, stiff head to toe already, twitched. The last, the dead-last thing he’d wanted was more hands, more touching. His insides screamed at the insult. Reed found all his sore spots and prodded at them, and when the physician came around front and started touching his face, he ground his teeth to keep from screaming.
“Be somewhere else,” he heard Vandis bite off. Damned if he didn’t wish he could be—but Vandis had been talking to the others, must’ve been, because their footsteps receded.
“Open your eyes,” Reed said, tugging the skin beneath them with his thumbs. I can’t, Dingus thought, but he opened them. He couldn’t meet Reed’s gaze. “Lean into the light.” He leaned to the side, into a patch of light that fell through a gap in the treetops. “Look at me. Are you dizzy, sleepy, faint?”
He grunted through his clamped jaw, “No.”
“Look at me, please.”
Dingus managed it, just for a heartbeat, no more; he saw nothing but business in Reed’s eyes, but he couldn’t stand much of it, and he definitely couldn’t look at fucking Vandis.
“Lie back.”
His breath juddered at the hands pressing his belly, under his ribs and then down low. When Reed moved his thigh aside and went lower, though—no. He scooted back as fast as he could.
“You took a blow here,” Reed said. “I need to—”
“I’m through.” He looked at Vandis: You can’t make me, he thought, and Vandis read it on his face and smiled, the tiniest bit.
“It’s enough, Reed. What’s the verdict?”
“Bruises,” Reed said, sitting back on his heels. “If there’s any dizziness, difficulty breathing, I’ll expect to hear about it. You’re a lucky boy.”
Dingus couldn’t suppress a snort. “Told you I’m fine. They weren’t shit for dishing it out.” Or taking it, he thought. He’d gotten kicked plenty, but he bet he’d given Arkady more to think about. “Can I get up now or what?”
“Feel free,” Reed said, straightening.
“What about the Practical?” Vandis asked.
Before Reed could answer, Dingus paused in the middle of scraping himself off the ground to say, “I’m standing it.”
“I wasn’t asking you.”
Reed waved an uncaring hand. “I don’t see why not.”
“Thanks for staying with him,” Vandis said.
“What do you take me for?” the physician demanded, and left without waiting for a response.
Dingus and Vandis looked at each other. A lazy breeze shuffled through the pine branches, and Vandis shook his head. He stooped and picked something up off the ground—Dingus’s book. He held it out and Dingus took it: dirty, the blue leather of the cover gouged by pebbles, and blood on it, maybe his, maybe Arkady’s. The spine was broken, the pages loose, and he turned it over and over in his hands, miserable at the damage.
“Who did this?”
“I didn’t see.”
“Why would you lie to me?”
“I’m not.”
“I know you saw.” Vandis lifted his hand, the back of it, and rubbed the fingers of his other hand along his knuckles. “I’m busy, Dingus, not unobservant. I can see you threw punches. Did you start it?”
“No,” he said, even though Arkady must’ve been itching to get at him for days over that sucker punch. There wasn’t any call to get three other guys on him. Should’ve been man-to-man.
Vandis made an exhausted sound, scratching at his scalp. “I hope you’re not thinking of dealing with this yourself.”
“Oh, I am. I’m getting my leaf. Don’t matter who thinks I shouldn’t.” Dingus started hobbling back toward the campsite, spraddle-legged from the soreness in his groin. For once, he didn’t have to slow down for Vandis. “I’m gonna earn it, and it’s going on my hand, and I’ll be a fucking Knight of the Air, so help me.”
“Well, then,” Vandis said. They walked on for a minute or so, quiet, before he added, “I guess I’d best make way.”
“Damn straight.”
Vandis reached up to clap Dingus on the shoulder, but thought better of it. They grinned at each other. “So how many?” Vandis asked.
“Four. Still the most pussy-ass beating I ever took.”
“Just don’t go after them. We’ll never live it down.”
“No, Vandis,” Dingus said. “I won’t.”
Knights
Lady’s Peak
It was coming on dusk, the next day. Vandis stooped over a large firepit, cut for the purpose on the side of Lady’s Peak, the highest mountain of those that cradled Knightsvalley. He’d come to a broad shelf between tree line and snowline, partly natural, partly artificial. Steps had been chiseled into the mountainside, and every year for the last twenty, Vandis had walked up those steps with a huge bag of torches and a lit brand, putting them in sconces carved out of the rock itself in time out of mind. One by one as he climbed, he placed and lit them, until the staircase glowed with firelight. When Sofia had retired, Hieronymus had begun; when Hieronymus had retired, Vandis had begun; when Vandis died, since he didn’t plan to retire, his successor would do the same. There weren’t many rules among the Knights, but there were damn well traditions. Vandis had learned to honor them because they honored his Lady.
Now he lit the firepit high above the valley, getting ready for the Knights to come up. The Squires—candidates for Knighthood—would follow when night really fell. That Dingus would be in their company swelled Vandis’s chest until he thought it would burst. Once he had the fire crackling, he walked to the edge of the gigantic shelf. Far below, the lake shone like a deep-blue mirror, unstirred by the sweet breeze that ruffled Vandis’s hair, reflecting the lights of the festival all around the shore, and farther out, the first bright stars. Oda was rising in a fat crescent, gleaming off the snowcaps across the valley, chasing Naheel down over the horizon. The trees were already a black mass climbing the slope
s, with campfires flickering among them, hardly visible through the branches. At the lakeside shrine, tiny figures scurried around, feeding the bonfire that would burn until the end of the Moot and send its smoke far up to the Lady. Kessa was down there, and Dingus. He hadn’t lied the other night when he told Dingus this had been the best year of his life. There’d been sorrow for those who were killed, flavored sour with guilt, but at fifty Vandis had finally learned what he’d been longing to learn since he was a child, and never even known he wanted. He grinned and stepped back from the brink, just as he heard the horn blow for the examiners to ascend to the shelf. This year, he’d get to do the job himself, instead of serving as a stand-in for whatever reason.
He crossed the shelf to say hello to the tree. It was an ancient, twisting yew with a knot in the bole that resembled an old man’s face, growing out of a crack in the mountain. He’d always wondered how it had grown so high, for such a long time. Once, Adeon, drunk as a lord, had told him a story about the old man who had lived in the yew. The fairies had died before Vandis’s memory really began, but once in a while he wished he remembered more: men who lived in trees, mermaids, and dragons. Some said the dragons only slept, far below the surface, on their great mounds of treasure, but Vandis had trouble buying that.
When he looked at that little face in the yew, he thought of dragons first. Second, he thought of the year he’d finally laid eyes on it himself. He’d been twenty-two: five years older than Dingus and a lot of the Squires who’d been pushed forward this year, three or four years older than anyone else in this group or his own. Old Man Dingus had held him back, and held him back—but there’d been Santo and Evan, always, and for them, Lady only would know how grateful he was. They’d never called Vandis a pussy for refusing to take off his shirt, never made fun of him for flinching when someone touched a bruise, never once ratted him out—not that they’d had to. It seemed stupid now, but he’d been terrified they’d fall under the stick, too, and so he’d always stood up to take the blame, the stupid punishments, and later, always, at the edge of the valley where the old man camped, the thrashing. Then he’d pick himself up in the morning and shuffle off to the next prank. He’d been every inch the dumbfuck. Dingus, though—he needed another taste of absolutely warranted pride.
