It had been his finest moment, hadn't it? That's when he should have died. Everything since had been a mistake.
~
Summer peaked and slid into fall: warm days of hard yellow light chased away by nights so cold that in the mornings the grass had to sweat off the frost. The masters switched nearly all of the trainees' chores to chopping and hauling wood for the winter, which they piled inside the walls cord after cord. With constant reports of bandits roaming the hills, and unrest in the plains below, the castle's soldiers spent nearly as much time drilling as the trainees did.
After a while, Joti started to sit with the others during meals, placing himself at the fringe of the long tables. He listened as they told stories about their tribes and homelands, but he never chimed in himself.
While fencing, he studied Vonk's footwork, integrating it into the training he'd gotten in the Peak. One morning, as he practiced without bothering to draw his sword, he looked up and found Lashi watching him.
She tucked a strand of dark glossy hair behind her pointed ear. "What are you doing?"
"Murder-dancing."
"Did Vonk teach you to do that?"
He shook his head. "Watched him. Don't have much else to do."
"You'd learn faster with a partner, you know."
"I suppose you're nominating yourself?"
"Why not? I'm the only one clever enough to keep up. And much better to look at than those squat, ugly boys."
Joti rolled a pebble beneath his right foot. "Why do you even care?"
"What's wrong with wanting to be the best?"
"You'll never be the best. And neither will I."
She rolled her eyes, which were several shades paler than her skin. "Then I want to be closer to the best. Isn't that why you're training extra hours in the first place? If not, then what are you doing here?"
He stared at her, the sweat of his exertions dripping down his face and chest. "I can't teach you even if I wanted to. I'm still figuring this out for myself."
"Fine. Let me know when you're good enough to bother with."
She strolled off to ask an older boy named Urut to spar with her. Joti frowned, watching them a moment from the corner of his eye, then returned to his footwork. The grit under his sandals reminded him of Ankin Drog. It hadn't been that long ago, had it? Less than two years. He might be on the path to becoming a common soldier, but that was a hell of a lot better than being a worked-to-death slave, wasn't it? It was funny how fast you adjusted to what you had, and how bitter you became when you lost any ground, even if you remained much better off than you were to begin with. Funny, and stupid.
Autumn neared its end. One night, dollops of snow dumped themselves on the mountain, melting as soon as the sun came up. Rains soaked the slopes. A patrol returned from the hills bloodied and grim.
The next morning, Tokk called the cohort to the grounds before the gates. "We're going outside to have a look around. We'll be gone for three days, maybe four. If we're lucky, there won't be anything for us to find."
The trainees exchanged a series of looks. A boy named Yap lifted his fine Har chin. "And if we ain't lucky?"
"We find bandits."
"Then what?"
"Well, Yap, then we bash them."
"Oh." Yap swallowed. "Good."
The servants helped them put together provisions and equipment. A few of the others joked as usual, but most walked stiffly, spooking whenever anyone came up on them unexpectedly.
They exited the fortress, squelching downhill along the muddy road. For three wet, chilly, sloppy days, they hiked up and down through the forests of birch and pine, all the way down to the hills where the mining settlements sent dark smoke into the air. Just about everyone else complained, but Joti found himself looking forward to the marches. To the work. To the hunt.
At the end of those three days, with no sign of bandits, outlaws, or vagabonds, Tokk turned around and took them back to Dolloc.
When they were finally home and passing through the gates, Yap stopped and scowled downhill. "Stupid bandits. They were too smart to go out in the rain."
"Good thing for them," declared an Artusker boy named Sakka. "If we'd found 'em, we'd have cut their throats out, eh?"
"Oh, until they didn't have no throats left at all."
Tokk warned them they might soon be called on again. After the jaunt into the wilds to hunt and possibly kill roving gangs of outlaws, returning to their normal training felt stupid. Joti sighed to himself and took up his wooden sword.
Lashi was sparring with Urut again. After a few minutes, Joti started to think she liked training with the other boy because he had no hope of keeping up with her even when she was putting most of her attention on the new footwork she was trying out.
During a break, he waited for Urut to leave for water, then walked over to Lashi. "You're doing it wrong. You can't put all your weight on your back foot. If you have to retreat, you won't be able to push off with your front foot."
She eyed him. "Keep your opinions sheathed."
"No. Now watch this." He extended his sword, right foot forward, left planted. "Keep between a third and half your weight forward. If Urut wasn't slower than a two-legged wozzit, he could have crossed you up good."
A spark gleamed in Lashi's eye. She put out her sword in a guard, right foot presented to him. "I could always bring my front foot back like this."
She swept it backward, attempting to put it behind her and thus transition her left foot to the lead. As she did so, Joti lunged, catching her as her legs crossed. She caught his sword with hers, but with no balance beneath her, he pushed her over easily.
She grinned at him from the dirt, a tangle of lithe blue limbs. "Think you're so clever? Maybe I wanted to fight the ground."
She got up and dusted herself off. They spent the rest of the day refining the shuffling and gliding steps Vonk used to leave himself ready to lunge or retreat at all times. For a while, the fencing master watched them in silence, then moved on.
The next day, Joti chose Lashi as his sparring partner. Vonk let them stay together until the final hour, when he reassigned Joti to Wayabara, a Tusker boy who liked to swing too hard. Joti finished the morning's practice with a fresh set of bruises and scrapes.
During archery, Lashi started working with him as well. He felt a little strange, mentoring an older girl, but she didn't seem to care about anything but honing her skills. Two weeks into his new routine, Joti woke to find it was snowing. The season's first daytime snow was apparently a holiday at Dolloc, so as the others drank and danced around the bonfires, Joti took the opportunity to exit the gates, meaning to go for a snowy run.
"Hey!" Shoes crunched through the snow behind him. Lashi jogged up to him, breath curling from her mouth. "Where you off to? Don't you know they're eating things?"
"There's always food. There isn't always snow."
"Because the gods are merciful enough to spare us for four months a year. You want to be out in this?"
Joti tilted back his face to the swooping flakes. "It never snowed in the Peak. I didn't see much of it anywhere else I've lived, either."
"Enjoy it while you can. You'll get very tired of it very soon!"
He smiled and waved and broke into a trot. To his surprise, she fell in beside him, easily keeping pace on her long legs and light frame. The snow was treacherous underfoot, and more than once he considered the yelling-at he'd get from Chief Paugh if he slipped and broke his ankle, but the cold air felt good in his lungs and for once he wasn't tired from chores and practice and he didn't know the next time he'd have the chance to run through the forest without it being a part of Tokk's training or another hunt for bandits that weren't there.
"You're from the Drim, aren't you?" Lashi said after a while.
"What gave it away? My ears?"
"Your people and mine are the only people so crazy that we think running is fun."
"In my land, running is the only way to get away from the smell of the pigs.
"
"Well, we respect you for it. In our land, if you can't run, you'll never make it to the next spring of water before the sun kills you." They'd been going for a while now but neither of them was breathing hard. "There aren't any Drim here in the Duk Mak, though. How'd you get to the Peak? Where'd you come from?"
"Who cares?"
Lashi snorted. "You don't care what tribe you came from? What family you belong to?"
"In the Peak, they tell us to forget. So I forgot."
"Oh." She turned her shoulder to gaze uphill, as though she might be able to see past the trees and falling snow all the way to the Peak. "I'm Sum. Roko tribe. Rokotan family. Very old. Very respected. You wouldn't want to get caught picking your nose in a Rokotan tent. Or else you would find your nose thrown out of the tent without you attached to it.
"I was seventh seed. When I took my seventh year, my parents brought me to the shrine to be made into a priest. Well, I didn't want to spend all night squinting at the stars and all day sorting through goat intestines. I wanted to be a soldier. My parents told me I was seventh seed and this was my duty. I told them to step on their own balls.
"They gave me a choice: be a priest, or lose my tribe. So I told them I'd leave. Instead, they tied me up and sold me to a Har tribe. They were going to make me and some other children they'd bought into slave-warriors, but after a few months, they got impatient of feeding us and looking after us and dumped us in the hills north of here.
"It was winter. Colder than it is now. The snows killed a few of us. The wyverns killed a few more. By the time they found us, I was the only one still alive."
"Who's they? Dolloc Castle?"
She nodded. "They offered to house me through the winter. I offered to carry a spear for them. That was six years ago. Another year, and I get to stand on the walls."
Joti skidded on a patch of snow and fell, catching himself on his forearms rather than his more delicate wrist, like Almak had trained them to do.
He got up and kept running. "After what your family did to you, why would you want to remember them?"
"So that one day I can find them, and spit at their feet." Lashi gazed into the distance. "And so I'll always remember to let my children choose their own path."
Together, they ran on. Without knowing he was going to do so, Joti spoke. "I was taken as a slave during a raid. They sold me to the Gru. A while later, I killed a guard. They were about to execute me when Marshal Shain found me. She confiscated me and took me to the Peak of Tears."
"Who did the raid? Tuskers?"
"Artuskers, too. They were working together."
"Don't know which clan's worse. One's too dumb by half and the other's so clever it makes them meaner than the dumb ones." She spat. This seemed to be the worst insult a Summite could make. "Do you know what they did with your family?"
"I think they got away."
"They left you behind to be taken?"
Joti shook his head. "I held off the raiders while they got away."
"How'd you manage that? How old were you?"
"I held them off at a river crossing. I was a Ninth-Year."
She looked him up and down. He was suddenly conscious that while he was getting close to a man's height, he still had a lot of filling out to do.
"You'd barely have been tall enough to open a door," she laughed. "The raiders must have drowned themselves in disgrace if they got held back by a little boy."
"Don't believe me?"
"I shouldn't," Lashi said. "But for some reason, I think I do."
They ran on into the forest. Snowflakes sifted through the pine needles like the earth was whispering to itself. Maybe he wouldn't like the snow for much longer, as Lashi had predicted, but just then, it felt like it had been sent to protect the land until it was ready to bloom again.
It was only two days later that Shain arrived at Dolloc Castle and told him that the woman with the orange braid had been seen in the hills below.
22
A few days later Haniel left the tower at the end of the day to find Bronzino waiting for her. They fell in step and walked together, winding in a direction that did not quite take them home. Bronzino led them through a square filled with merchants, and they stopped outside a toy seller.
"Did you ever have a toy? When you were little, before all this?"
They entered the stall. "Doll, I think," said Haniel, "carved out of wood, simple dress. Mostly me and my brothers and sisters played soldier with sticks. I had a good one, with a good place to grip it just the size of my hand, but my sister broke it on purpose."
"That was mean of her."
"I'd been hitting her with it."
"I had a ball, I think." Bronzino sighed. "I hadn't thought about any of it, you know, for years, and then fucking Wit…ever since there's pictures of the cottage, but they always seem off, and I can't quite piece things together. I can't tell why I'd want to; but feel like I have to, and I can't help it."
Haniel nodded. Her eyes rested on a doll with a porcelain face dressed as a princess, in a shiny dress with a small metal crown. "I don't think my parents made enough to pay for this in a year, and if me or my sisters had had it, it would have been covered in mud and broken by noon."
"Those are for different kinds of children," Bronzino said wryly. "The children who live in this capital aren't like you. They play in rooms, and have people who teach them to care for things."
Haniel sneered at the doll for a moment. "I like to think that even if I had had a room and a governess, I still would have broken this damn thing."
"But if you had a room and a governess, your parents could have just bought you another."
Outside, Haniel started to take a turn that would point them towards the Adepts' quarters, but Bronzino shook his head and turned on a street leading out of the old city by the tower. They fell in with the steady flow of workers coming from Old City, into the sprawling mass of houses in the ethnic neighborhoods that they lived in.
"Tell me again about the Mad Dwarf," he said.
"I met him when I first was under Master Bour, which was the first place They sent me out of the capital. I was nine. Did your master send you to the market to watch things?"
Bronzino nodded. One of the central powers of the Order was the ability to express values in gold. When they first joined the Order, the Gifted would spend hours meditating to cultivate a mystical connection to gold itself and the values that other wizards had placed on it. They also would spend as much time as they could simply watching commerce, in whatever form it happened to be around.
"It was a simple market, really, except for the dwarf, who had a large collection of very good metalwork. It was all solid, useful stuff—wire, springs, hinges, and screws…he made excellent screws. It always struck me, back then, how much stuff like that was really worth. I asked him where he got his metal from, because it wasn't quite like anything I'd seen before. He said it was mostly from things that he found, and that people would let him into their sheds and he'd fix what he could and take the broken things, which he'd melt down and turn into his wares.
"Anyway, the market went on, and at the end of it, the dwarf's stuff was all gone, and he left the market with a small cart, a few scrawny goats, and a couple bags of seeds. I asked him how much gold he had gotten for his things, and he said he hadn't gotten any—just the goats and the seeds. He said that his hinges were just hinges, and he only had the two doors on his house and didn't need more of them, but that the goats and the seeds were living things, and he expected that they would grow and keep him fed for the winter and even give him some extra cheese and grain to trade. He seemed extremely pleased, but I knew for a fact that he had lost at least 75 in gold on the transaction.
"So, I told Bour that I thought that the farmers were cheating the dwarf, and Bour told me that the dwarf was quite insane and a heretic, who deliberately tried to live beyond the power of the Order by never touching gold. I asked why he did that. Bour said that he was not sure, but that
I could ask the dwarf."
"He told you to go talk to the dwarf?"
"I always assumed that it was because he did not like me, and was happy to have me out of his hair, whenever he could."
Their surroundings changed rapidly. Instead of tall stone shops and houses, they walked amongst wooden buildings, only one or two stories high. Laundry hung from every window and between the houses. Families chattered over stoves on porches built onto ramshackle roofs. The workers they had been following dispersed into the warren of buildings; in their place the streets were nearly solid with children running to and fro; men and women carrying packages, animals, and food; and vendors hawking their wares from makeshift stands on the street corners. Alternatively they were overwhelmed by the smell of filth, or the smell of cooking food.
"So, I went and talked to the dwarf. He didn't have much to say about gold, or the Order, but he was very proud of his fields and his goats, which were somehow scrawnier than when he had gotten them. He showed me how he was going to make cheese, if they ever started giving milk. He told me to come back in a few weeks, and try the cheese; he was ridiculously hopeful.
"On my way back, I passed the farmers he had traded with: all their crops were coming in, they had sold the dwarf's things at a profit, and seemed to have whatever they needed.
"When I came back, he didn't have any cheese, but something had started to grow in one of his fields, and he couldn't have been any happier if it was a child. It went on like that all summer: he was pleased as could be with a farm that was clearly failing, and everyone around him prospered. In the fall, he hardly harvested a thing—I had no idea how he was going to survive the winter.
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