by M. A. Ray
His suit of ceremonial plate hung in the cabinet on the wall next to his clothespress. He opened the doors. The sight of the snow-white armor, with its curlicues and chasings of gold, with the shining disk-and-rays of the Queen of Heaven on the breastplate, made his eyes burn. “I’m sorry,” he said aloud, hanging on the doors, hanging his head. “I’m sorry.” My Lady, Queen of Heaven. I’m sorry I let it get this far. It could have been better. I never thought he’d get this bad. My Lady, I’m blind…! Forgive me. Help me see, the way I never have.
Krakus lifted his face to the armor. He let out a long breath and began to dress himself in his most formal vestments, the ones he’d worn two days ago. When he was arrayed, and he’d washed the dried blood off his temples, he combed his tonsured head and walked out to Section One to say the words over Nadia—alone. It shouldn’t have been that way, but he wouldn’t have asked Lech. He wouldn’t ask Lech for so much as a toothpick, ever again.
“Bright Lady, Queen over All, take Nadia Your child to the side of Your throne,” he said, while Eddie laid her body on the wood and Danny lit her pyre. “Guide her steps along the Golden Road to Your hall in Heaven, and let her forever serve You there.”
After he gave the brief service, Krakus watched for a while—but he couldn’t watch long. He should have stayed, but seeing Nadia’s lovely form wither away under the flames was too much for him. It was suppertime by then. Krakus wasn’t hungry. He found himself in the office back in his and Lech’s quarters, gazing at his personal, nearly empty, dust-laden bookshelf. Lech had gone to eat.
Krakus took down the first of his three books: the Rule of Aurelius. It was the copy he’d gotten when he was twelve; he thought he might have cracked it four or five times in forty years.
He sat down at his end of the desk, propped his feet up, and started to read. Lech found him that way a little later, and snipped, “Good to see you’re—”
“Shut up.”
For a wonder, Lech closed his mouth.
When to Shut Up
the wild outside Knightsvalley
Vandis stood next to a small folding table set up on a relatively even patch of ground, surrounded by Masters. Knighthounds sat politely at attention beside their people. Here, the deep pine forest lay on a slope. Dingus knew where they were; he’d been out this way before the Moot had opened. It was the fourth morning since the Practical had begun, and the new Juniors had earned the privilege of joining the search party for the ones who hadn’t made it back. Five Squires hadn’t returned, five to find, and Arkady made one of them, and that made the guilty pepper on Dingus’s haggis. They all stood around among the trees, waiting to be assigned an area on Vandis’s grid. Dingus stood between Wallace and Tony, who propped up a smallish cedar, his shadowed eyes shut, cradling his right hand: sore from the tattoo. He’d been the last to squeak in last night, just after dark, bitching that Vandis had made him scale a cliff. Now, for once, he had his mouth shut—but Dingus kind of missed his squirrelly yammering.
All the others were making it up, though. They’d all got their leaves: Dingus, Wallace, and Tony, and Lukas and Franny besides. It pleased Dingus no end, especially about Wallace and Tony. It wouldn’t have been the same if they hadn’t all passed. Wallace and Franny had both come back the second day, Wallace with a big scrape on the right side of his face where he’d tripped and fallen. Franny made a big fuss over him because of it, which he let her do. She also made a fuss over Dingus’s side, but less of one. It was kind of nice that she cared, but Dingus didn’t. He’d gotten exactly what he wanted, and more besides; too much. He loved that he’d done it, and that he’d done it well. More secretly, he loved that he’d been the first, but he wished everyone would leave him alone, especially since he was supposed to sit vigil with all the other Knights once he had his leaf and a change of clothes. At Ull’s table, getting tattooed, and afterward, there was no way to escape. Even while he was doing up his knives the next morning, he kept getting interrupted for congratulations and well-done and seventy-nine-years-since-an-examiner-got-caught, did-you-know. He hadn’t known that beforehand, but he sure as hell did now. The third morning of the Practical, Lukas came back, even though the night it started he’d whispered he was worried about Gregory doing something low-down.
Then they’d all had to worry about Tony, except that he’d come, and they’d all been as delighted as they had been worried—but not as delighted as Santo, who’d whooped and hollered and hugged Tony so tight he gasped, and then hovered like a balding mother hen while Tony slept through getting his tattoo. He was at least halfway asleep now, leaning on that tree, while everybody talked about where their Masters planned to go next.
“We’re going to the MacNairs at first, Evan says.” Wallace grinned. “I can’t wait to show Mam and Pap my leaf. After that, I don’t know.”
Franny said, “Dreamport.” The two of them looked at each other, kind of sad. She wasn’t wearing her hair in maiden braids anymore; instead it was in a long, gleaming braid down her back, and Dingus thought she looked prettier than ever. “Pearl wants to check on her sister, I’m going to see my parents, and then we’re going to work in Headquarters for a while.”
“We’re going, too. Aunt Kirsten thinks I need to work in the infirmary up there and get some more experience with illnesses. Bedpans, here I come.” Lukas shuddered. “What about you guys, Dingus?”
Vandis had said Windish, but he’d also asked Dingus not to tell anybody. “Don’t know. Don’t care where we go really, I just want to go.” It was true, too. There were so many places Dingus wanted to see that it didn’t much matter, as long as it was somewhere he’d never been.
“Santo says Camp Poverelli,” Tony put in, surprising everyone. He yawned and pressed his fingers against his eyelids.
“Again, eh?” Wallace said.
“He’s got his eye on a kid for Squire. Won’t be there long this time, he says. Wants to pick up Mikey and drag us around Dixon Forest a few months, the way he did with me.”
“What’s Camp Poverelli?” Dingus asked.
“It’s the refugee camp outside Brightwater,” Lukas supplied, when Tony didn’t. “Well, the biggest one, anyway.”
“My mama’s stayin’ there.” Tony brightened some. “Can’t wait to show her what I made of myself.”
Everybody but Lukas started to talk about their parents. Lukas stuck his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground.
“If I went to show my leaf to my family,” Dingus said into a lull, “don’t think I’d come out of it alive.”
“Yeah, I don’t think I’d survive, either.” Lukas kind of smiled at him in a way that said it wasn’t a joke. He couldn’t imagine what perfect Lukas could’ve done to deserve it, but deserving didn’t always matter.
“Well, here’s one in their eye.” Dingus put his right palm on his chest, showing his leaf, bright and fresh under the peeling skin. He’d sort of pictured it faded, the way Vandis’s was, but it was still fresh and new and, to his eyes, beautiful, especially since it had hurt so much to get. I’m a man grown, he thought, and I got the proof right here. Vandis had even said it was time for him to wear his swords once they left Knightsvalley, and given him a leather belt to hold the scabbards along with four knives, the same as his Master’s own, in a leather roll. He carried the single-edged hunter now, at his waist. The other three had stayed behind: the big brush knife tied to the right side of his pack, and the pocket folder and skinning blade still in the roll. He couldn’t bring himself to give up the little pocketknife Grandpa had given him.
Dingus had won his man’s rights. Never in his life had he felt this good, all the way down to the bone, and if last night he’d had the heart-eating dream again, well, so what? He was dealing with it, and to feel better, all he needed was to look at his right hand.
Lukas grinned and flashed his own leaf, too—still a little swollen, not quite to peeling. “That’s right.”
Pretty soon they all broke apart. Franny went off with Pear
l. Some groups were pairs, some were three, on account of a few of the Masters were staying here in base camp: Vandis, Kirsten, Kathleen, and Reed. Lukas was staying, too, just in case somebody else needed extra help. Dingus hoped he’d be included with Santo or Evan; it’d be weird with any other group. When Santo and Evan came over, Wallace left with his Master right away, waving good-bye. Tony groaned and pushed himself straight. “Let’s get it over with.”
“You’re staying here, kiddo,” Santo said, and Tony half fell on him, half hugged him.
“Lady’s gonna bless you for that one, Santo.”
“Oh, She blesses me,” Santo said, patting Tony’s back. “C’mon, Dingus, it’s gonna be us two.”
They stopped by Vandis’s little table to check their place on the grid. “Have fun,” Vandis said, and Dingus and Santo fanned out with the others.
“Don’t tell my Tony, but I asked for you special. Ever since Elwin’s Ford I been wanting to get a better look at you. It’s not just anybody can dodge me for a week.”
Dingus fidgeted, not knowing what to say.
“Still like Vandis?”
He grinned. More than ever. “Yeah.”
“Let me tell you something,” Santo said. “We rib him up and down, but pretty close to everybody likes Vandis, most especially as Head. We pick ’em by vote, and there’s a good reason he got it over guys ten years older than he was, without even knowin’ he was in the running.”
He didn’t say more, and finally Dingus was forced to ask, “Why?”
“It’s ’cause of Pearl,” Santo said, as if there hadn’t been any kind of pause. “When she started out, her Master was Leif. And he was doing the dirty on the side, something with slaves—they wasn’t too clear with us Squires, see? Somebody found out and the Masters had a trial at the Moot. They read the sentence at the end, in front of everybody. They was kicking him out, getting ready to brand the leaf off, and Pearl too, ’cause she was his Squire—but this was her first year, she was only twelve.
“Only thing was, it was Vandis’s first year too. Remember we was sixteen, him and Evan and me. When Hieronymus—the Head before, Vandis told you that—read off that Pearl wasn’t gonna be a Squire either, well … ” Santo paused, laughing a bit. “We start hearing, way in the back, somebody yelling and screaming. ‘That’s not fair,’ and something about the Lady, I mean, winds, you couldn’t understand it. And Vandis comes up through the crowd. He’s shoving people and stomping up. There wasn’t a lot of Vandis back then, he was just this little tobacco plug, but he pushes me and I fall. So then he goes up to Hieronymus, I mean, right up in his face, and yells, he sprays spit, the whole deal. He says, ‘The Lady teaches we’re all accountable for our own selves! Are you seriously holding her accountable for his bullshit?’
“So Hieronymus starts in on him, ‘If we see something wrong happening, the Lady wants us to fix it.’ And Vandis—you know how he kinda … puffs up?”
“And turns purple?”
“Yeah, that.” Santo chuckled. “That’s the first time I saw him do it. And he screams right back, ‘How’s she supposed to know anything about the Lady besides what he tells her? You’ll teach anyone about our Lady, but not her? You hypocritical asshole!’ And Old Man Dingus in the back, he just busts up laughing.”
“Huh,” Dingus said. “It must’ve worked out. Pearl’s still here.”
“Yeah, it did. Wasn’t quite that quick, but close. That’s part of why Vandis is where he is. A good part. He’s a loudmouth, no doubt about it, but he’s usually right.”
“Ha, yeah. Can’t really see Vandis being a kid though.”
“Funny,” Santo said, tapping his temple, “I think about him, I still see him sixteen and angry.”
“Well, he’s still pretty angry sometimes.”
Santo had a good laugh at that. Pretty soon they got to the place their grid square began and spread out, carefully keeping each other in sight, to look for sign and call out for the lost candidates. Nobody answered, but Dingus started seeing some top sign: broken branches, a thread from somebody’s clothes. He called Santo over.
“Somebody tramped this way, all right,” Santo said.
“Two people.” Dingus crouched and measured off with his handspan, looked at the placement of the partial prints on the moss, calculated. It’d mostly sprung back, but there were a few tiny spots where feet had dug in and taken some out. The spots looked random, but he could see the patterns there, and where the little chunks had gone. “Can’t tell if it’s men or women, not quite anyways. One’s about five foot, I think.”
Santo raised his bushy eyebrows. “You sure? Dark in here.”
“Pretty sure,” Dingus said, even though he was positive.
“I’ll trust ya.” The Master smiled. “Lead on. I’ll do the yelling.”
He went ahead, flushing, and picked up the trail: mostly knee-height and under, he figured out, since the moss lay thick in spots, and it was easy to see where bits were gone. Some places it was pine-tree moss, too, so he could see exactly where a foot had fallen.
He stopped before he went over the edge. An old fallen tree bridged the ravine, slanting across to the lower ground on the other side. It had to be thirty feet deep, maybe more, a long enough fall to kill if you landed bad. Santo swore—at least, Dingus thought he did. It was in a language he didn’t recognize, but he could see why. Near the middle of the log, the moss was torn away in patches: there, where someone’s foot had slipped, and there, on either side, where a desperate grip had failed.
“Anybody down there?” Santo yelled. “Hello!”
“…here…” came back, whispery.
“I hear somebody,” Dingus said, when Santo didn’t react. “Want me to go down?”
“Go.”
Dingus slid over the edge on his belly, searching out footholds as he went. Some spots were as mossy as the log, and he had to go careful.
“It had to be you, didn’t it?”
The voice from below was familiar. Dingus’s boot slipped. He clutched at the ravine wall.
“It had to be you that found me…”
Scowling, Dingus climbed the rest of the way down. “I’m not any happier about it than you are,” he said, crossing the little stream to Arkady, who lolled against the opposite wall with a grossly swollen calf stuck out in front of him. It bulged around his boot top, and the laces were busted. “Are you okay?”
“Of course,” Arkady rasped, more sarcastically than Dingus thought he had a right to. “I’m just sitting here for fun.” Then, under his breath: “Asshole.”
Who’s the asshole here? Dingus thought, but didn’t say. “Santo!” he called. “Arkady’s down here! We’re gonna need help!”
“What’s going on?” Santo asked, coming to the brink. “Arkady, you wanna wave so I know you’re alive down there?”
Arkady lifted his hand.
“What’s the problem, guys?”
“It’s his leg,” Dingus said, earning a glare from Arkady. “Broken, probably.”
“Sit tight.” Santo’s running footfalls faded into the distance above.
“You got it, huh?” Arkady asked.
Dingus didn’t want to brag. It didn’t mean quite as much now that he saw Arkady this way: scraped and broken and in pain. “Yeah.”
“How’d you do it?”
“What do you mean? I—”
“How’d you fix it with Adeon?”
“What?”
“Come on. He had to be in on it. Vandis, too?”
Dingus flushed. “What the fuck is your problem?”
Arkady smirked, the expression ghoulish with his grayed face in the variegated shadow of the trees above, the dirty bandage over his nose, and the greening bruises over his eyes. If he wasn’t so messed up, Dingus would’ve messed him up all over again.
Dingus snorted. He ain’t shit. Who caught up, and who’s in the bottom of a ditch?
“I could—” Arkady began, but Dingus wasn’t about to deal with him anymor
e.
“Damn, you stink,” he said. “How long you been down here? Two, three days? You shit yourself, didn’t you?” He shook his head, laughing. “You know what? I could piss on you right now, and nobody’d know the difference.”
Arkady gaped.
You actually think I would, Dingus thought, vaguely insulted, but it had shut Arkady up, so he let it go. Mercifully, before too long he thought he heard running feet above; the mossy ground softened the noise, but they approached pretty quick. He straightened and went to the edge of the stream to make sure. After a moment, he said over his shoulder, “Don’t worry. They’re coming. We’ll get you out of here.”
“Think if I suck Vandis off I’ll pass next year?” Arkady whispered, and heat flashed up Dingus’s spine. He turned to face Arkady, his fingers pulling into claws. His lips peeled back from his teeth; his eyes felt hot and dry, and a growl issued, involuntarily, from his throat.
No threat, not a threat, he’s half fucking dead, he thought, squeezing his eyes shut. He willed his heart to slow down.
“Arkady!” Ryan shouted, and Dingus twisted to see the mutton-chop face that peered over the brink. “I’m coming, buddy!” Ryan climbed down with two heavy sticks tied to his back, slipping and sliding, and splashed across the stream; Dingus stepped aside for him to crash to his knees in front of his Squire. “Come help me, Dingus.”
Dingus ended up tying the splint to Arkady’s leg while Ryan held it down. Screams echoed off the walls of the ravine, and Dingus was hard put to suppress at least a little bit of a smile. After that, they wrapped him in a blanket and lashed him to a litter that Santo lowered to them. Arkady passed out somewhere in there, and he was silent while Ryan and Dingus carried the litter down the ravine to the south, where there was a gentler slope, or so said Tania, who’d taken Finbar one square over that way.
“Thanks for staying with him,” Ryan said about halfway there.
