The Storm Lord’s granddaughter had brought her equipment in the aerostat from High Darioneth. Like her opponent, she was wearing the armor customarily used in longsword training. She and the prince stood face to face, their feet placed shoulder-width apart, their heels on the ground, knees bent, hips twisted, front foot pointed directly at the adversary.
The swordmaster shouted, “Lay on!” and the combatants began circling. They feinted and pondered, each noting the movements of the other’s feet and the direction of their gaze, as best they could through the visors. They held their swords in guard position, resting on the right shoulder. All of a sudden they rolled their weapons off their shoulders and the wooden practice-blades were flying in a rapid exchange of blows. Like water in motion flowed the actions of these skilled adversaries. Their feet seemed to float in complicated patterns of footwork; small, shuffling yet poised steps diagonally forward, sideways, or in retreat.
The habits of a lifetime die hard. Blows cause pain, as any child soon learns; and to scathe any woman contradicted William’s nature. To begin with he moved diffidently, almost timidly, reluctant to seriously engage. In contrast Asrthiel thrust diagonally forward, using her shoulders, hip and thigh to give impetus to the strike, pushing her body-weight through behind the weapon to deliver it with utmost force. Using the edge of the shield, William blocked the blow. The impact of her blade on his shield jarred right through the bones of his arms and into his frame. He was surprised at her strength, for the wooden swords weighed four pounds, and their fulcrums were forward of the hilt. Without pausing, Asrthiel drove another long thrust towards her opponent. William countered with a crosswise thrust. She feinted, distracted him for an instant, and delivered a hard thwack to his unguarded shoulder on his shield side. Even after that, William was reluctant to do more than defend himself. Shrewdly, Asrthiel kept herself at full range and would not allow him to close in. When he approached she darted quickly aside, fetching a blow to his helm before he had a chance to spin around.
Although he was slightly dazed, it occurred to the prince that her unstinting hits must surely be making him appear foolish in front of the spectators. Since it was clear Asrthiel could take care of herself, he half-heartedly began to attack. The damsel parried his moves skilfully, effortlessly, always blocking his blade with the forte—the lower third—of her own sword, but as close as possible to the tip of his blade. It was an effective trick, because all blades were stronger close to the hilt. If a sword were struck at the tip, it was easy to brush aside. If it were struck at the base it had more of the wielder’s weight and strength behind it, and was harder to deflect or break. As they dueled, William came to understand that he was indeed confronted by a formidable opponent, and he commenced to engage in earnest.
The aim of the trial was to knock down or disarm the adversary. Asrthiel attacked with a plunging cut and William counterattacked with a shifting cut. They hacked and slashed, whaled and clashed, sweated and panted, occasionally falling back for a few moments to deliberate, wipe the perspiration from their eyes and renew their grips on their weapons before waging battle afresh.
At last William dealt a solid blow to Asrthiel’s shield, pushing her off balance so that she staggered. While she was trying to regain equilibrium, she let down her guard, whereupon he rushed her, pushed her sword out of the way and sent her sprawling on her back.
The victor let his own weapon drop from his fingers, offering his gloved hand to help the vanquished one rise to her feet. She accepted with dignity, stood up, and bowed.
“I salute you, sir.”
They were both breathing like bellows.
“You are nineteen,” he said, “and I am twenty-four. Yet I have not fought such a long battle, except against my own swordmaster, or warriors with twice my experience.”
“Do not congratulate me,” she said softly, her eyes downcast. “William, to cross swords with me is no fair contest.”
At first he did not comprehend her meaning, and then there arose before his mind’s eye a vision of her tresses alight, and where there should have been charred peel, bald rind and weeping raw flesh, there was only her flawless skin and her hair like some wondrous vessel of spun jet filaments, embracing incandescent flames of bronze and gilt and carmine. It could be no fair contest to battle one who was unscathable. Yet he laid aside the mirage, and squeezed Asrthiel’s hand, which he was still holding.
“You fight well,” he murmured. Then a grin quirked the corners of his mouth. “You are a most proficient swordswoman. Indeed, I suspect you held back, because you are a true diplomat who would rather not defeat a member of the royal family.”
“Not at all!” The damsel knew he was joking and smiled as they both stripped off their gloves and helms, and shook out their sopping hair. Footmen bore away their accoutrements. Pages handed them towels with which they might wipe their faces, and cups of cool water to drink.
“Ah, you deny it, Asrthiel, but I shall never be certain. I will not contend with you again, because I shall always doubt whether you fight fairly.”
“As you wish, sir!” Asrthiel swept him a second bow, grateful he had devised a way to forestall any future encounters. It had been her pride that had motivated her to challenge him in the first place. She had not properly thought the matter through.
Customarily, men had the advantage over women in contests of the longsword. A heavier, taller and stronger swordsman possessed a huge advantage over a slighter adversary. There was also much profit in having a longer reach. In order to best a man, a woman must be faster, better balanced, more thoroughly trained, defter, luckier. She must own greater endurance, and tolerance of pain. She must be more cunning. Asrthiel guessed that if she were to truly acknowledge her native invulnerability, and throw off the shield and armor that slowed her movements; if she were to dare to fight unprotected, shedding the redundant fear of scathe she had taught herself in order to appear unexceptional, she might have a good chance of defeating even an expert and mighty warrior. This she surmised, but would not dare try. Her desire to be accepted as an ordinary citizen, as susceptible to injury as anyone, overrode her hankering for martial triumph.
As they walked side by side out of the drill-hall, William asked, “It perplexes me why you train at swordsmanship, for I know it is not in you to cause harm to living things. I would have imagined that hitting and hurting were foreign to your nature.”
“To my mind, it is admissible to fight an opponent who is on an equal footing and who has freely agreed to the contest,” she replied, “or to wage battle in self-defense. There is justice in those circumstances. On the other hand there is no justice in slaughtering creatures that have been born in captivity, with no chance to flee or fight back, or hunting wild beasts that have no weapons other than their four legs to make them fleet, or their own teeth and claws to defend themselves at close quarters. But you ask me why I practice with the sword. It is because I desire ardently to make myself worthy of wielding Fallowblade; employing him as he is intended to be employed, according to my birthright.” There was a catch in her voice as she added, “My father would have wielded Fallowblade, were he still amongst us.”
“To what purpose? No one would threaten war against the weather-masters!”
“Aye, and no one marches against Narngalis, either, yet your father keeps his defense forces in trim. Besides, Fallowblade deserves to be taken seriously as a weapon, and not treated as merely a mantelshelf ornament.”
“Have you brought the Golden Sword with you?”
“No. He remains, as ever, in my grandfather’s house.” Catching a glimmer of mirth in William’s eye, she laughed, admitting, “As a mantelshelf ornament.”
William said, “Since you have no swordmaster in your new household, you are welcome to employ the services of one of ours whenever you wish to practice.”
“Gramercie, sir,” the damsel said, giving him a quick smile. “That is well. Methinks I shall take the tutor out into the field. I have promised mys
elf to rehearse my lessons on rough terrain, as I am too much accustomed to the level floors of armories and drill halls and the smooth flags of training yards.”
“A first-rate notion.”
Shortly thereafter, Asrthiel removed to her lodgings in Lime Grove. It was early in Otember, the middle month of Autumn, and the time of the Lord Mayor’s Show, a popular annual spectacle in the city. Crowds of Narngalish citizens milled throughout King’s Winterbourne’s labyrinth of meandering streets and lanes. Amonst them mingled flamboyant Ashqalêthans, their clothes dyed in soft citrus colors, muffled beneath the layers of furs in which they swaddled themselves against the northern cold; blunt sea-merchants from Grïmnørsland, their faces chafed by wind and weather; crimson-clad aristocrats of Slievmordhu decked with bronze ornaments; peasants and craftsmen from all over Tir, clad in nondescript outfits of drab homespun; knights in their tabards, druids in their robes, and carlins with woad-blue discs painted on their brows.
The majority of houses and inns in the city were half-timbered, or wattle and daub, whitewashed with lime, roofed with slate. The Laurels was no exception. Behind the high walls of the estate, the house was triple-storeyed and spacious, containing rooms more numerous than Asrthiel and her retinue would ever need. Protocol, however, demanded impressive lodgings for the representative of High Darioneth. The premises suited Asrthiel’s requirements. There was no incumbent brownie, but that was not extraordinary. Brownies were an uncommon luxury. Most households relied on human domestic servants to perform the chores.
Mistress Draycott Parslow proved to be an accommodating landlady, benign and somewhat eccentric. She was fond of recounting the story of how she had obtained her wealth, for she had not always been well off. She used to dwell alone in a remote house on a hilltop in one of the mining districts. Her husband had been killed by the collapse of a shaft, in one of the old “coffens,” or mine-workings, in the hill. Conceivably attracted by the widow’s seclusion, the local spriggans used to gather in her cottage almost every night to apportion their plunder. Small in stature, with upstanding and pointed ears, wide mouths and broad noses, these eldritch incarnations would creep in, accompanied by a strong odor of leaf-mold. In return for the use of Mistress Draycott Parslow’s premises, they would leave a small coin by her bedside. The money, meager though it was, helped to make the dame’s life a little more comfortable. Yet she was not content; from beneath the bedcovers of a night, she would secretly peer out at the wights and long to possess their treasure. There was silver plate, and gold, and jewels—all real, she had no doubt; perhaps unearthed from ancient barrows.
Eventually, one night, when they had snared more than the usual amount of loot, the spriggans began to dispute angrily about the distribution of it. There were seven wights but only five gold cups—as well as plenty of other wealth—and all the spriggans wanted to own a cup. They dickered and debated, disagreeing on the value of the vessels, and who should have one, and how the rest of the goods ought to be shared in compensation. Their slits of eyes glittered with malice, while their barbed, whipcord tails switched angrily back and forth.
Mistress Draycott Parslow, spying from under her blankets and pretending to be asleep, seized her opportunity. Surreptitiously, beneath the bedcovers, she doffed her shift, turned it inside out and put it on again. Turning one’s clothes was, of course, an authenticated ward against minor wights such as spriggans. When she had protected herself against their powers, she reached out and grabbed a gold cup, boldly crying, “You shan’t have a single one of them!”
The startled spriggans fled, but the last one, as he departed, swept his bony hand over the old woman’s shift.
The wights abandoned all the treasure and failed to come back on the following nights. To the astonishment of the local inhabitants, Mistress Draycott Parslow became a rich woman. Gnawed by a niggling fear that the spriggans might eventually return seeking revenge, she soon left the cottage and went to live in King’s Winterbourne, where she purchased The Laurels and settled down in the cottage in the grounds, which was far more sumptuous than her old abode. When asked why she dared to tell the story, when everyone knew that if you revealed you had obtained wealth from wights that wealth would disappear, she would explain, “Well, I have spended all the treasure already, so if I ain’t got it, it cannot banish. Besides, it were real bullions and jools; it were not just some wafty glamor cast over a pile of hay-corns and leaves.”
And she always added this coda: she was unable ever again to wear the shift that had brought her good fortune, without suffering intense torment. “Nobody knows how it can be, that putting on a shift can bring me such agrimonies,” she would say wisely. “But I knows. ‘Tis the work of the spriggans!”
Privately, Asrthiel wondered why the old woman did not simply throw out the threadbare shift. Perhaps she kept it for luck.
Once the weathermage had settled in to her new home, her work proceeded uneventfully. It was second nature for her to forecast the weather; no difficulty was involved. Each day she would send a messenger to the castle with her latest predictions. Sometimes she walked to the royal residence herself to deliver the news, for it was less than half a mile away, and while visiting she would avail herself of the king’s private library, or practice swordplay with one of the weaponmasters. It was not until the middle of Otember, on a King’s Day, when her bri-senses detected the approach of a violent electrical storm, that she was asked to actually intervene. She had become aware that a weak cold front, associated with severe thunderstorm activity, would clear from the east that night. A high pressure ridge would extend across Tir the following day, with a center strengthening to the east of the Four Kingdoms on Love’s Day, bringing fine weather.
When this was reported to King Warwick he called for the young weathermaster and asked her for assistance. “The apples hang ripening on the trees,” he said, “almost ready for the harvest. If strong winds and rain should batter the orchards of Narngalis at this season, the fruit crop will be in danger of failing. Pray avert this storm, Lady Maelstronnar.”
Thus it was that Asrthiel went straightway and climbed a spiral stair that led to the rooftop of the tallest turret of the castle. At the king’s command, nobody came near to distract her from her task. She gazed towards the east, and reached out her faculties like invisible tendrils on the wind, feeling her way through the pressure fluctuations, the differences in humidity and temperature, the flows and eddies of atmospheric rivers, until Cecilia Dart/Thornton
she discovered the core elements of this pattern, the essential forces brewing the storm.
Distant air currents, like gossamer streamers, rustled through the awareness of the weathermage, coiling in cyclones and anticyclones. Alive with boundless energy, sometimes they smelled of electricity, sometimes of salt, and sometimes they were tinged with the fragrance of new-mown hay. Always the currents smacked of freedom and excitement. As Asrthiel breathed, she could scarcely tell where her own exhalations ended and where the gusts began. She knew faraway clouds, pouring like cream, and comprehended the flux of humidity like fine-grained banners of hyaline tissue, smoother than silk. Vapors sighed in her ears, tasting of purity and distilled freshness, scented with tranquillity. Perspiring with exhilaration, the girl on the turret could scarcely differentiate her sweat from raindrops, her heartbeat from thunder, her own voice from the cries and whispers of the wind.
Heat and cold undulated through the troposphere, driving forces invisible to the human eye. Hot winds like tatters of crimson velvet, raw as liquor and roaring; cold tides, piquant as green apples, chiming or piping thinly; the butter-mellow tepidness of hot and cold colliding in transition. The damsel on the roof perceived the remote workings of temperature, and it seemed hard to distinguish between her own pulsing blood-heat and the energies unleashed by the furnace of the sun. Her mind grasped faraway ligatures of lightning, and she did not know whether the high-powered levin bolts were discharging between the heavens and the ground, or in the snap-ping syn
apses of her own nerves.
Above Asrthiel the atmosphere churned. Updraughts caught her hair in billowing strands, threading them along their paths. Her eyes, shining, reflected the streaming clouds, so that they seemed no longer eyes at all but long oval windows opening onto the roiling skies behind her head. Winglike, her sleeves and mantle flared from her shoulders. Standing on that height Asrthiel spoke the words and performed the gestures, working with air and water and fire in far-off places; summoning, deflecting, coordinating; diluting the ferocity of the elements, turning them away from the cultivated lands of the north to expend the remnants of their rage on the mountains.
When at length her work was finished, she descended the stair, a little weary, perhaps, but not visibly exhausted, considering she had single-handedly thwarted a portion of the atmosphere’s might. In fact, as always after she had weather-worked, she felt profoundly at peace.
Throughout that night the people of Narngalis had watched the lightning flicker and blaze on the heights of the Northern Ramparts, hearkening to the crash of airs riven asunder, the howl and boom of thunder rocketing from rock-face to chasm. The tumult seemed to split the very foundations of the world. And they knew, then, what a great weathermage they had in their midst, who could protect their kingdom from something so unimaginably puissant. On her own the Lady Maelstronnar had achieved a task that commonly demanded the united skills of many brí-wielders.
Everybody was grateful to Asrthiel; nonetheless their gratitude came from a distance, as though they revered her as someone not quite human. Indeed, at times she herself wondered whether her essential character had lost some qualities of humanity. She only ceased to feel hurt by the silence of those who entered her presence when she came to understand that it was not indifference or animosity that made them tongue-tied, but awe. Even William now seemed reserved in her proximity, trying unsuccessfully to conceal his wonder at her deeds. More than ever, she felt alienated and alone.
Weatherwitch: Book Three of The Crowthistle Chronicles Page 23
