The Ward of Falkroy

by Loki Renard

  Falkroy and Victoria sat beneath the shade of a yew tree, Falkroy's arm affectionately draped over Victoria's shoulders. They were watching Kelsie try her hand at simple conjuration with no small measure of interest.

  “I hope you're ready to eat whatever she manages to turn that into,” Victoria murmured.

  “I think it would be simpler if we just ate the rock,” Leo replied softly so Kelsie could not hear. “Or perhaps my boot.”

  “There!” Kelsie held up a live wriggling eel. “Food!”

  “And what do you propose? Leo and I start each at one end and have the creature writhe down our necks? It must be something edible, girl!” Victoria called out.

  ***

  Kelsie let out a laugh and tried the spell again. The eel became a sock. Still not food, but possibly slightly more palatable.

  She felt the gaze of Falkroy and Victoria upon her, protective, perhaps even loving. It had been so long since Kelsie had felt what it was to be cared for that at times she did not recognize it. And yet, here, in the middle of a sunny field, with her stomach growling as she attempted to turn a stone into something they might all enjoy, she felt a warmth in her belly and her heart that told her she was loved.

  Her devotion to Lady Varys had grown in leaps and bounds and Leo, well, he still made her shy, but for different reasons than he had at first. He was a man of great power in so many respects, and at times she caught him looking at her in a way that made her wonder if the heat between them were not entirely in her imagination.

  At other times, in the night, she heard the demon's voice. She had seen him die, and yet, in dreams, he was not dead. She kept this secret to herself, lest there be some way Victoria might evict him from her dreams. A sorceress needed some secrets, she told herself.

  She cast the spell again, and clapped her hands as true food emerged from the ether.

  “What about toast?”

  “Toast will do, come here, girl!”

  Kelsie carried her conjured meal to her companions and portioned out their share.

  “Excellent cookery,” Leo winked. She smiled and blushed, pushing a corner of the bread into her mouth to save herself the need to speak.

  “Don't tease the girl,” Lady Varys replied. “I'm still not certain she doesn't need a demon proof chastity belt.”

  “You're a fine one to talk,” Leo laughed.

  “As are you,” Victoria snarked back at him.

  “When I get you back to Englred, I'll have a smith make you something special,” Leo taunted her with a rakish smile.

  “Leo, if you so much as attempt to put such a thing on me, I promise you I will make you wear it,” Victoria replied.

  “Now remember, you promised to be obedient.”

  “I did no such thing!” Victoria sounded seriously scandalized by such a prospect. “The very notion, Leo. How dare you.”

  Kelsie grinned and chewed her food. It was dry and floury and not at all real, but the family she'd found with Leo and Victoria absolutely was. She did not know what the future held, but in that moment, that little slice of golden heaven between the warm sun and the growing grain, she knew she had all she would ever need.

  The End

  (Bonus short story follows on next page.)

  An Unsatisfied Apprentice

  Six months after their return to Englred...

  “Kelsie! Get back here! Now!”

  Leo thundered the words across the forest in the wake of the fleeing figure zipping among the trees with more than a little magical impetus to help her. A little knowledge was a very dangerous thing where Kelsie of Kinleigh was concerned. Dressed in fern green doublet and matching leggings, she was like the very woods themselves.

  It took all his speed and all his strength to catch her, but finally he did so, grabbing the back of her doublet and swinging her entirely off her feet as her momentum carried them both in a semi-circle. He turned her around, one hand on each of her shoulders and looked down at the little brat with no small measure of fondness.

  Her once innocent gaze was now decidedly impish, laughing brown eyes looking up at him with a total lack of repentance.

  “Victoria expects me to bring you home in one piece,” he lectured the budding sorceress. “If you go running off a ravine, I'm going to be damn hard pressed to do that.”

  “Victoria expects you to keep me out of her hair this week,” Kelsie laughed. “I annoy her when she is trying to impress other nobles. I don't have the airs and the graces see... so she sends me out with you.”

  “And I let you run wild, not helping the situation at all,” Leo sighed.

  “I like running wild,” Kelsie shrugged. “I hate the lessons in Englred. I hardly learn any magic at all. It's all where I'm supposed to put my elbows and what knife to stab my fish with.”

  “You've picked up a trick or two though,” Leo said, scratching his beard.

  “On my own time,” she complained. “Victoria's embarrassed of me.”

  “I have never known Lady Varys to be embarrassed about anything at all,” Leo replied, with a particular emphasis on the words Lady and Varys. Kelsie's speech was becoming far too familiar for her own safety. If Victoria heard her apprentice referring to her by her first name, well, he could only imagine what she'd do.

  Kelsie gave a cute little shrug and smiled. She deserved a clip over the ear for running off like that, but he'd always been soft where she was concerned. For all Victoria's proclamations that he was to be the disciplinarian, it was she who Kelsie feared. An impressive feat, given that Victoria had never so much as laid a finger on her.

  “Don't do that again,” he lectured, putting a little more force into his tone. “I want you to stay in my eye line, understand? I'll not risk losing you. We're due back in two days.”

  Kelsie fell into a visible sulk. “So I've got two days of freedom,” she moped. “Before she sticks me back into a dress and makes me repeat the alphabet with all round vowels.”

  “In the years to come, you'll look back on these days fondly,” he said. “Believe me, everything you learn now has a purpose. Victoria does not waste her time on irrelevancies. I know what it is to endure arduous training, but I can assure you it will be worth it.”

  “Of course that's what you'd say,” Kelsie said. “You think everything she does is wonderful.”

  He snorted under his breath. “You want to waste the next two days whining about your mistress? Or do you want to enjoy the hunt, and bring back some food worth eating?”

  She chose the latter option, and for a few hours there was peace in the forest. Later, they sat down by the fire and cooked and ate the rabbit they'd caught. Kelsie slurped on the marrow – a habit Victoria had not managed to break her of, and piped up.

  “What's it like?”

  “What's what like?”

  “Being an assassin? What's it like to make people die for money?”

  It was an indelicate question, but a simple one. Six months ago, she would not have had the courage to ask him. Six months from now, she would have learned enough to know that it was not appropriate. She was in a curious place in her education, and though he did not hold the question against her, he did not know where to begin to answer it.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I'm curious,” Kelsie said, snapping a bone in two. “Is it like taking an animal?”

  “No,” Leo replied. “It is nothing like that.”

  “You avoid killing when you can, don't you,” she said, astutely.

  “Always,” Leo said. “It is no small thing to have blood on one's hands. An assassin does what he does because sometimes, one evil can prevent a greater one.”

  “Two wrongs do make a right, then?”

  “One timely wrong can stop a greater wrong,” he said. “Why the questions, Kelsie?”

  She looked into the fire, her expression growing sullen. “I don't think I'm going to make it as a sorceress,” she confessed. “I thought maybe I could try being an assassin like you instead. Yo
u don't judge me like Victoria does. I get along with you. You don't snipe or punish me. You don't tell me I'm doing things all wrong...”

  “Kelsie,” he interrupted. “I don't do any of those things because you're not my apprentice. Believe me, if you were to learn an assassin's trade, you'd go through far worse than a long tea time with an extraordinary number of spoons. And you wouldn't like me either. I wouldn't be as I am now.”

  “How would you be?” That dangerous curiosity had returned.

  “Strict. Harsh. Even cruel, at times.”

  She shook her head, her expression incredulous. “No you wouldn't be.”

  He had never been seen through the eyes of someone like Kelsie before. When she looked at him, she saw someone who was always giving second chances, rarely raising his voice, allowing her misbehavior, acting at times as a confidante, even a co-conspirator. She had no concept of what he truly was. Or perhaps she did. She had seen a glimpse of it on the night they met the demon and she had hated it. She seemed to have forgotten that. Leo wondered if it might not be time for a reminder of sorts, a taste of sorely needed medicine. He did not wish to return her to the same state of fear she had been in when they first met, but she did need to know what she was dealing with. A sorceress with no fear of assassins at all was a dangerous thing.

  “Do you want a taste, Kelsie? You want to know what being an assassin's apprentice is like?”

  She nodded.

  “Get up, turn around, go fifty paces north, stop, and stand there.”

  “For how long?”

  He did not give her any further instructions. He just looked at her, waiting for her to comply. After a second or two, she stood up, brushed her hands on her britches and did as he had told her. Leo did not miss the fact that there was a little smirk on her face, as if she thought it was all a game. She could not have been more wrong.

  Leo waited an hour or so, passing the time by preparing an instrument of apprentice correction. When he was ready, he slipped through the trees silently as a ghost and found her. She was standing in a small clearing, her head bowed as if she was sleeping on her feet. It had been a long day's hunt and he knew she was tired. He also knew that the mere act of making her go out here alone was a hardship. But it was not hard enough. Not yet.

  He stole up behind her, raised his arm and bought the switch he had carefully selected and stripped down across her rear. Hard. She must have heard the swish of the branch moving through the air, but didn't move in time and the switch landed across her ass with a wicked welting blow. Her resulting screech of surprise and pain made the roosting birds in surrounding trees shoot into the sky.

  “An assassin must always be aware of danger,” Leo lectured as she screeched. “Your senses must constantly be tuned to what you cannot see. You should know when a living being is within several feet of you, you must sense danger a mile away.”

  “Ow, by all the gods owww...” Kelsie gasped, clutching at her rear.

  “Silence!”

  She bit her lower lip to stop from crying out and looked at him with tears welling in her eyes.

  “Go another fifty paces,” he said. “Wait again.”

  “Leo...”

  “GO!”

  She let out a small squeak and obeyed him.

  ***

  Kelsie had made a big mistake. She knew that now, even as she reluctantly walked through the forest, her rear burning from the single stroke of the switch. She shouldn't have taunted Leo, not even the little bit she had. The look in his eye had changed completely. He had become a different man, a colder man, a man with little in the way of mercy to spare.

  She counted out what she hoped was fifty paces and then stopped. She stood there, looking all around her, trying to listen as hard as she could so she would hear him coming. Not that she was entirely certain it would make a difference. If Leo came for her with a switch, then she was getting switched.

  The minutes stretched out and she began to tire again. The ache of the welt was beginning to abate, letting her body start to fall back into a sleep state.

  SWISH!

  “No!” Kelsie cried out just as the lash found her rear again, this second stroke laid perfectly across the first one. How he did that in the dark she had no idea, but he'd compounded the effect massively. She bounced up on her toes, clutching at her rear and bouncing as she rubbed furiously.

  “Stand still!” He barked the order in a way that made her body obey.

  “Leo...” she whimpered his name.

  “Master Falkroy to you, he growled. “Another fifty paces. Go.”

  “Leo, I'm...”

  “GO!”

  She went again, given no choice. The moon told her that the hour was growing very, very late, though she did not need to see the silvery glow to know that, because her exhausted, sore body was telling her the same.

  He repeated the process again and again and again. He always seemed to know the precise point where she was losing the struggle for awareness and lay his damn switch across her rear again. By the time she had received six strokes across her aching cheeks, she was fifteen hundred feet from their camp, her whole bottom was welted and sore and she was ready to burst into tears.

  “Please, Leo,” she begged. “No more. I can't.”

  “This is nothing,” he said, folding his arms over his chest, the switch still held in his large hand. “This is a gentle induction. In my first month of training, I was left to stand on a plank suspended between two tall towers overnight. Had I fallen, that would have been the end of me. In the second month, I did it while carrying lead weights. The third there were nails driven into the plank. Assassins are trained to the very limits of physical and mental endurance and it is not a pleasant process. Pain is a constant companion. Those six little strokes I gave you are nothing compared to the beatings I endured. And the beatings are nothing compared to what happens later. There were days I begged for a beating rather than do what they asked of me.” He leaned down so his pale steel gaze was locked on hers. “I died and was made a monster, Kelsie. I do not want that for you. Victoria is working to civilize you. I would take you apart, find the beast that lives in every human heart and I would stir it until it consumes every bit of good feeling. You'll not understand these words, but I hope you can understand some of their meaning.”

  She shivered and nodded, forgetting her sore bottom for a second as his words and his tone conveyed a kind of horror she knew she did not want to face, let alone experience. Men like Leo were not born. They were made in brutality and blood. His goodness and kindness existed in spite of all he had been through, not because of it.

  “Are you ready to return to Englred, and your mistress?”

  Rubbing her rear with rueful shame, Kelsie nodded in the affirmative.

  With that nod, he transformed once more. He dropped the switch and his features softened. Warmth and life returned to his eyes as he looked at her with some measure of compassion.

  “Come here,” he said, pulling her into a hug.

  He wrapped his arms around her and she was enveloped in his masculine strength. It was much needed comfort after the cold and painful night, and she pressed against him for physical and emotional warmth.

  “I couldn't do this if I were your master,” he murmured against the top of her head. “And I like being able to do this, so how about you mind Victoria as best you can, and save me the trouble of having to be tough on you. There are enough sources of pain and misery in this world. I do not want to be one of them.”

  ***

  Three months later...

  “You have no idea how tiresome it is being a good influence,” Victoria sighed as she gracefully collapsed onto a chaise next to Leo one fine afternoon. She had been at court for what felt like weeks, but had only been a matter of hours. Since her return to Englred, she had been attempting to behave in a manner befitting the kind of sorceress she wanted Kelsie to think she was. Responsible. Respected.

  He wrapped his arm around her and press
ed a bristly kiss to her cheek. “Do you need to misbehave, Madame Varys?”

  Victoria turned her sparkling gaze on him. “Always.”

  “You're doing a fine job of restraining yourself when Kelsie is around,” he complimented, his fingers running through her hair with a gentle touch.

  “And you're doing a fine job of pretending to be tame,” Victoria replied. “I know you would rather be in some far flung corner of the kingdoms, slaying someone deserving.”

  “You know that, do you?” He allowed a hint of a smile to play about his lips. “It does not cross your mind that I might be content here with you?”