Short Swords: Tales from the Divine Empire (The First Sword Chronicles Book 3)

by Frances Smith

  Honestly, and I’m the one who has too much pride.

  “Thanks a lot,” Dawn said, her green eyes gleaming with gratitude. She threw her hat towards the hat stand in the corner of the room, and missed, sending it colliding softly with the wall instead before it dropped onto the floor. Dawn shrugged. “I’m not sure what I would have done if you hadn’t been here. I didn’t really think that through.”

  “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” Summer muttered. “You’re certainly in a good mood, all things considered.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be in a good mood?” Dawn asked, throwing herself into the chair with the damaged leg with such force that Summer feared that it would snap. It didn’t, but Dawn did land in it with sufficient force to tip it over onto its back with her inside, both of them hitting the floor with a thump.

  “Be careful,” Summer said.

  “I’m fine,” Dawn said, waving one hand in the air even as the rest of her remained hidden behind the fallen chair.

  “I was actually worried about the chair.”

  “Very funny, Summer,” Dawn said, rolling onto her feet. “I know you love me, really. Anyway, as I was saying, I am in a good mood and I don’t know why I shouldn’t be.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Summer said, lacing every word with enough sarcasm to poison someone less infuriatingly dense than Dawn Starfall. “How about the fact that we just got told that our entire lives have been lies, that the person we looked up to most in all the world has deceived us; that the destiny we thought we were promised was never ours to begin with. Did none of that faze you at all? I know it did, you looked like you were about to cry when I last saw you.”

  “No I wasn’t,” Dawn said at once.

  Summer smirked. “If you’re going to lie to me, Dawn, they’ll need to be better lies than that. So come on, why are you acting so insouciant now?”

  Dawn was silent for a moment. She leaned against the wall, acting tranquil and unruffled. Except that was the point – she was acting. In fact, Summer recognised the pose that she was using, lounging on one shoulder, with one leg folded up, foot resting upon the wall. It was from a play that they’d seen at the Haymarket last month, the lead had posed the exact same way whenever he was portraying tranquil and unruffled. It was all that Summer could do not to roll her eyes. It was bad enough that Dawn put on these airs and affectations, but that she copied them directly from whatever she’d last seen at the theatre was almost comical. The only good thing about it was that it enabled Summer to spot the affectations easily.

  Dawn produced a cigar from within the folds of her doublet, and hummed gently as she held it between two fingers. After a few seconds, smoke began to rise from one end of the cigar, and Dawn grinned as she placed it in her mouth.

  “You’re too young for those,” Summer said. “And it’s a disgusting habit, anyway.”

  “Yes, Ma,” Dawn said through the cigar in her mouth, taking it out to casually puff some smoke out of her mouth. The image of casual gentility was then spoiled slightly by the fact that she dissolved into a coughing fit as her face turned green.

  “The Champion of the Sacred League,” Summer murmured, as she took Dawn’s cigar away before she hurt herself some more. “At least the people will be spared that embarrassment.”

  Dawn shook her head as she stopped coughing. “No, that’s where you’re wrong, and that’s why I’m not bothered by it. I will admit that right after Lady Aurora gave us the assignment I was upset, a bit. Only a little bit, but upset all the same. But then I went away and I thought about it for a while, and I realised what’s really going on.” She tapped her nose knowingly with one finger, winking at Summer as though she knew something that Summer did not. Which was, of course, quite preposterous. There was nothing Dawn could possibly know that Summer didn’t.

  And yet, now that Dawn had brought the subject up, Summer found herself the tiniest bit curious.

  “Go on then,” Summer said. “Lift the scales from my eyes and reveal to me the real story.”

  Dawn grinned. “Adversity.”

  “Adversity?”

  “Exactly, when was the last time you read a story in which the hero comes from a palace and has everything their own way until their inevitable victory?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Summer said. “Unlike you, I don’t waste my time reading pulp nonsense. I have taste.”

  Dawn stuck her nose up in the air. “I’m not even going to respond to such a scurrilous slander. The answer, in case you were wondering, is none at all. The closest that you will ever get to such an occurrence is where the hero starts in a palace but is swiftly turned out of it by the vicissitudes of cruel fate. Like in The Winter Ballad when the five children of Lord Grimm find themselves hunted and thrown on their own resources after the death of their father.”

  “Is that the one that you tried to pass off as an accurate portrayal of life in the Most Ancient Empire before I found twenty historical inaccuracies in the prologue?”

  Dawn blinked. “Yes, but I never said it was a historical novel and anyway, you’re missing the point. The point is: heroes are forged in adversity. And that’s why Lady Aurora lied to us today.”

  “As opposed to lying to us the rest of the time?”

  “Yes!” Dawn said loudly. “It never was a lie, none of it. We really are the chosen ones, or one of us is anyway. This lie, this pretence, this apparent getting rid of us, it’s all a test. Don’t you see? We have to be sent out into the world in conditions of adversity to prove that we have the strength, the will, the intellect, the loyalty to survive out there, to succeed. This is our chance; this is when we prove that we are worthy to be heroes.”

  Summer’s eyebrow rose. “You don’t seriously believe that.”

  “Of course I do,” Dawn cried. “It makes perfect sense!”

  “It doesn’t make as much sense as the truth,” Summer said. “Let’s say you’re right, then what about Eve?”

  “Eve… Eve is just a puppet, something to make us believe in what Lady Aurora is telling us, something to disguise the test,” Dawn said. She hesitated. “No, no, she’s in on it too. Or...no, maybe she isn’t, but she might be. Eve is...Eve is the final part of the final test. Eve is the monster at the end of the dunegeon, we have to beat her and get past her before we can claim our reward.”

  “You’re making this up on the spot, aren’t you?”

  “No!” Dawn snapped. “I came up with it...I mean, I realised what was really going on earlier today.”

  Summer sniffed the air. Underneath her bravado and her bluster Dawn reeked of anxiety. That much probably could have been guessed by anyone, but Summer’s enhanced sense of smell, heightened by her wolf-shifter heritage, confirmed it. Summer was filled with contempt for Dawn and her desperate theatrics...but at the same time, she was also filled with pity.

  “Why are you doing this, Dawn?” Summer asked. “Why are you making up this story when you know full well it isn’t true?”

  “It could be,” Dawn said.

  “But it’s not,” Summer said. “And you know it’s not and I know you know. It’s not a castle, it’s a table with a cloth on it, and that’s a stick, not a sword. And this is a rejection, not a test.”

  “You’re wrong!” Dawn shouted, her whole body trembling like a tree being buffeted this way and that by strong winds. “You’re...you’re wrong. Lady Aurora loves us...loves me. She wouldn’t...she hasn’t...there’s no way that she’d just turn her back on us like this for some one like this, this Eve. Have you seen her, she’s insipid! She can say what she likes, she can swan around with a new girl at her side, but I know where Aurora’s heart is: it’s with me.” Her voice quavered as she said it, sounding half defiant, half false, and all childlike. Her green eyes were watery, as if she was about to crying. “And one day she’ll remember, and she’ll come back to me.”

  Summer frowned. “Dawn-“

  “Don’t ‘Dawn’ me, I’m not stupid just because you think I’m an idiot,”
Dawn shrieked.

  Summer chuckled. “I suppose I walked right into that one, didn’t I?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” Summer said. She pushed herself onto the desk and sat down on it. “Dawny, for what it’s worth, I’ve never thought of you as an idiot. You’re a very smart girl. That’s why I don’t understand why you’re acting like this. You think I like this any better than you do? You think that this doesn’t hurt me? But it’s real, and it’s happening, so we have to live with it, the both of us.”

  Dawn sunk onto her knees. “Why should I, if I don’t want to?”

  “Because you can’t wish this away just because you don’t like it,” Summer replied. “I’m leaving. I’m not going to hang around to be humiliated. I think it would be for the best if you did the same.”

  “I can’t,” Dawn whispered, bowing her head. “I can’t leave her.”

  “Why not?” Summer asked. “You’ve got a lot to offer, you could start over somewhere else; you could do great things.”

  “I love her,” Dawn said. “I can’t...I can’t just let go of that. I love her. I need her to love me to. That’s why I’m going to get her back. I’m going to pass this test and best the dungeon keeper and I’m going to get it all back, every last bit of it: the respect, the position, the destiny. And her. And her most of all.” She was silent for a moment. “You called me Dawny.”

  “What?”

  “You said, ‘Dawny, for what it’s worth, I’ve never though of you as an idiot.’” Dawn smiled. “Only my friends call me Dawny.”

  Summer shook her head. “It was a slip of the tongue, that’s all.”

  “No it wasn’t,” Dawn said. “We are friends, aren’t we?”

  “Why would we be friends?” Summer demanded. “Why would it matter if we were friends? Our lives are over. Whatever fate brought our paths together has ended now. We’re done.”

  “We don’t have to be,” Dawn said.

  “Yes, we do,” Summer replied. “I’m leaving, Dawn. I’m going...I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m not staying here. I’m going find my own destiny.”

  “You don’t have to,” Dawn said. “You could stay here, with me.”

  “And do what?” Summer demanded. “Work on a test that doesn’t exist? Hang around like a dog waiting for Lady Aurora to remember that I exist? Stick with you and your delusions?”

  “They’re not…I’m not…why do you always have to be so mean all the time?” Dawn yelled.

  Summer snorted. “Why shouldn’t I be?” she asked. “The world is.” She got up off the desk and wandered back over to the bed. Casually, her movements unhurried, she began to buckle on her belt and rapier.

  “Don’t go,” Dawn said. “You don’t have to go. She’ll remember us; she’ll take us back I know she will.”

  “No, she won’t,” Summer said quietly.

  “Don’t go,” Dawn said again. “I need you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “But I want you.”

  Summer shook her head. “Have you talked to your friends yet? Holly, Faith...Rosie?”

  “It’s Daisy, I don’t have a friend named Rose,” Dawn said sharply. “Or did you mean Cherry?”

  “Whichever,” Summer said, draping herself in a dark green cloak. “The point is, have you told them yet?”

  “No,” Dawn said.

  “When you do, if any of them stick with you you’ll be lucky,” Summer said.

  “They’re not like you think they are,” Dawn said. “They’re my friends, we’re six against the whole wide world, they won’t just leave like... like my mother, or...”

  “We’ll see,” Summer said, pulling on her gloves. “Or you will anyway, I’ll be far away by then. But let me give you some advice: when everyone abandons you, you’ll have to start again whether you want to or not. When you do, try not to be so... desperate.”

  “I’m not desperate!” Dawn snapped.

  “Of course you’re not,” Summer replied sceptically. She put on a broad brimmed hat, completing the attire of a young bravo about town. She looked back at Dawn, still kneeling on the floor, still looking as though she might break into tears at any moment. “Are you really going to stay here, and hope against hope that Lady Aurora changes her mind?”

  Dawn nodded. “I’m going to do it, Summer. I’m going to turn this around. I’m going to have it all.”

  Summer smiled. “I’ll tell you what: if that actually happens, I will come back and admit that you were right and I was wrong.”

  Dawn’s face lit up. “Really? You promise?”

  “I promise,” Summer said. “But now...I have to go. Goodbye, Dawn.”

  “You have to come back,” Dawn whispered. “You promised you would, so you have to.” She smiled weakly. “So it isn’t goodbye, not forever.”

  Why couldn’t you have lied to her? Summer thought. Why couldn’t you have kept her here? If you could see what you’ve done, would you regret it?

  Probably not.

  Summer slung her pack over her shoulder and picked up her violin case. She walked away from Dawn, far enough away that she wouldn’t be accidentally caught up in the act of magic. Then she fished the dwarven crystal out of her pocket.

  It looked a little like a sapphire, cut by patient and by cunning artifice into a perfect sphere. Its blue was the blue of the most beautiful oceans, the blue of eyes meant to be immortalised by poets, the blue of skies free and clear and heralding neither trouble nor obstacle. The kind of skies that Summer Phoenix would blaze a trail across to find her destiny in some new land.

  Dawn sniffed. “What is that?”

  “A world needle,” Summer murmured.

  Dawn’s eyes widened. “I remember that…from the vault, the rocks you were asking about. Did you steal that?”

  “Well, it isn’t as though the dwarves are going to want it back, they’re dead,” Summer said. “All the ones who would have known how to make this work, anyway.”

  “But they don’t belong to the dwarves any more,” Dawn said. “They belong to Lady Aurora.”

  “Lady Aurora just told me that she lied to me my whole life,” Summer snapped. “I’m not going to be held back by the thought of what Lady Aurora might think! Not any more. This stone, this can take me away from here. I’ll do what the dwarves never got the chance to do, what the dragon lords wouldn’t allow once they came into their power.”

  “You’re going to use that thing, is that it?” Dawn asked softly. “You’re going to use that to travel to...another world?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “So you’ve got a green one too, right?”

  “Yes,” Summer said. It was a lie, but a lie kindly meant, and lying wasn’t bad if you were doing it to spare someone from hurting.

  “Do you know where you’ll end up?”

  “No,” Summer admitted. “I’ve got no idea. I only just managed to work out how to use this; I never had time to learn how to actually direct it.”

  “Then how do you know you’ll end up somewhere nice? Or safe?” Dawn asked plaintively.

  “I don’t,” Summer replied. She grinned. “But like you said, Dawny, no hero ever got anywhere without a little adversity.”

  She closed her eyes, and reached out with her will for the True Magic, the manipulation of the energies of the world, the invisible aether that surrounded and sustained them. She envisaged it as Lady Aurora had taught her, as an invisible tapestry running through all things, binding them, underpinning them, lurking within each and every living thing and hedging them about. She could feel the threads within Dawn, humming softly in response to her gentle probing, and she could feel the crystal sphere within her hand like a ball of twine, a tangle of so much energy, disconnected from the wider world but desperate to be a part of it, singing to her, calling out to be used.

  Summer opened her amber eyes again. “You could come with me, if you want? The two of us, on a great adventure. Who knows what we might see.”
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  “You...you want me to go with you?” Dawn blushed. “I...Summer...really?”

  “Come on, before I change my mind.”

  Dawn hesitated, kneeling down amongst all of the possessions that Summer could not or would take with her on her journey. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?” Summer said. “What’s so great about this place?”

  “Lady Aurora,” Dawn murmured. “I can’t leave her.”

  Summer laughed. “No, you really can’t, can you? It’s...that’s either commendable loyalty or completely pathetic and I can’t decide yet which it really is. I just hope that, one day, she realises just what she had in you, and what she let go.”

  “I had a dream last night,” Dawn declared. “I was standing in the middle of a forest. It was so warm, so beautiful. And then, all of a sudden, it go so cold, it was chilling me to my bones, and all around me the leaves began to fall. I didn’t understand what it meant when I woke up, but now I do: Summer was leaving.”

  Summer chuckled. “Listen, you and me we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think we were special, if we didn’t want to be anyway. But your dreams… I know you’ve always thought they meant something, but they really don’t. You could as easily have dreamt about magpies or dancing bears.”

  Dawn shook her head. “No. I dream that, and then you leave. I should have known sooner, and then maybe I could have stopped you.”

  Summer laughed. “I would have liked to have seen you try. I’ll see you around, Dawn.”

  “You are coming back, aren’t you?” Dawn whispered.