Briarheart

by Mercedes Lackey

  “How would a Fae have done it?” I asked, hoping that I was hitting the right note of humility and eagerness to learn. Because, after all, this was not just one of the Fae, this was the Fae who had taken the Royal Family literally under her wings, and the last thing I wanted to do was displease her.

  She smiled, much to my relief. “Well, it would depend on the Fae. A Dark Fae would just have blasted them into dust. Someone like Domna would make them feel her irritation, and they’d leave on their own. But a Fae would not have separated a piece of her magic for them to feast on because we conserve our magic whenever possible.”

  “Oh.” I considered that.

  “Magic is food for us, as it is for those butterflies,” she replied. “Or rather, the energy that is transformed into magic is food for us.”

  “And you don’t waste food,” I said solemnly.

  She smiled again. “So show me a way you could have sent them on their way without frightening them and wasting magic.”

  I thought about this as a few of the butterflies that had missed their chance at the feast drifted back over to me hopefully. Poor little things. My heart wanted to feed them, but I had my instructions.

  Then it occurred to me; I must be putting off some sort of magical scent, luring them the way flowers lured butterflies in my own garden. So I concentrated again and closed the power up like a flower furling its petals for the night. When I opened my eyes again, the butterflies were drifting off elsewhere in slightly baffled confusion. And Brianna nodded with approval.

  We didn’t do anything more exciting than that for the rest of the afternoon. Where today’s lesson with Sir Delacar had been the very rudiments of quarterstaff work, today’s lesson with Brianna was the very rudiments of magic. How to call it up and close it down, and a very little bit of how to direct it. Nothing complicated—but a great deal of repetitive practice. When she dismissed me for the day, I felt sore inside in the same way that all my muscles had felt sore after this morning. My mind was very tired, and that place in my chest where the power came from ached vaguely.

  I opened the door in Brianna’s kingdom—that was how I thought of it—all on my own and found myself in the palace garden again. From the position of the sun, it was probably very near suppertime, and I was starving.

  At least I wouldn’t have to change or bathe.

  I made my way to the Great Hall, where the servants were just starting to lay the table for dinner. For working people, lunch was the big meal of the day, and supper—the word literally came from the word “soup”—was generally soup and bread and butter and perhaps some fruit or vegetables in spring, summer, and fall, or fruit and cheese in winter. When Father was alive, we had kept the common custom since we seldom had much to do with the Court. Perhaps once or twice in a week, Father and Mama would take dinner with the Court, and I’d eat in the kitchen with our few servants. But since Mama and I had come to live in the palace, I’d had to get used to eating this big long meal at the end of the day.

  And it was a long meal. Seven or eight courses on an ordinary night, ten to twelve on special occasions, and as many as twenty for a great state affair. And for a great state affair, each one of those courses might have multiple dishes. All that food generally made me feel overstuffed even when I was careful not to eat too much, and serving it took a long, long time. The dinner after Aurora’s christening was supposed to have been one of those, but virtually everyone had fled in the wake of the Dark Fae’s attack, so we would probably be eating the various foodstuffs in some form or another for the next three days at least. Even though a lot of it had already gone to the poor.

  It was a good thing that old Gerrold, the palace wizard, had renewed the preservation spell on the pantry just before we started making the food for the feast. If he hadn’t, Papa being Papa, he probably would have declared a feast for the whole town below the palace to keep it all from going to waste.

  Sure enough, when the rest of the Court and the palace staff had gathered, the very first course was the clear broth that had been intended to start off Aurora’s christening feast.

  Halfway through dinner, I was starting to nod off, but I shook myself awake long enough to finish. I even managed to make polite conversation with the other people near me at the high table, but being young meant that I was mostly supposed to listen to what they had to say and nod in the right places. I was pretty good at that; Belinda’s lessons on Court manners had stuck even if nothing else much did. As soon as the plates were cleared and the benches and tables pushed back for the evening’s entertainment, I excused myself and headed for my room using that private stair behind the dais.

  Belinda started to follow me, but I waved her back. “I undressed myself for years; I’m perfectly capable of doing it now,” I said, making sure to soften my tone so she wouldn’t take it as being snappish or pert. “You enjoy the minstrels.” I knew she loved music and dancing, and I didn’t want to deprive her of either. I don’t hate Belinda; I’m actually rather fond of her. When she’s not trying to stuff me into some sort of mold or trying to curtail my reading on the grounds it will “make me look bookish,” she’s a decent governess. She knows Court manners better than most and the proper way to address anyone of any station; she can sew as well as a seamstress; and she is as good a housekeeper as Mama. She’s even conversant in managing the land of a manor house.

  She swayed back and forth indecisively. “If you’re sure…”

  “I’m sure,” I replied, and winced. “Right now, all I want is bed.” And before she could lodge any further objections, I started up the stairs.

  I think maybe if I had been older, she might have come anyway. Suspicious that I was having a rendezvous with someone I shouldn’t and all that. Belinda had the most suspicious mind I’d ever seen when it came to people having meetings with people they shouldn’t. Then again, that is part of her job—to keep the young lady in her charge from getting herself into trouble thanks to a too-romantic mind. But so far, I hadn’t had any suitors at all, suitable or unsuitable, and Belinda didn’t know about Giles’s being my friend because she never came down to the kitchen. So she didn’t have any suspicions on that subject, and I was allowed to go up to my room in peace, undress in peace, and fall straight into bed in peace.

  Thank heavens.

  “How did you know what the breast bandage was for?” I asked Elle a couple of days later.

  She grinned and pulled her mass of curls up into a loose knot on the top of her head. “Archery. It’s ever so much easier to shoot with everything flattened down a bit. Back home, I practiced every day.”

  “I should have taken up archery,” Anna grumbled. “My mother might actually have allowed it.” She glanced over at me. “You know what that’s like; you have that bear of a governess. The only reason I was allowed to join the Companions was because the King ordered it.”

  I looked around at the five of them, all of us resting after the first round of our workout. “How did you all get picked, anyway?”

  Elle and Anna looked at each other, and Anna nodded to Elle. “The Queen suggested us, and I don’t know about Anna, but I couldn’t agree fast enough.”

  Anna bobbed her head. “I’ve been envying all the interesting things you’ve been getting to do, Miri, and this? I’ve wanted to be a lady knight since I was little.”

  I glanced at the boys. “I went straight to Delacar and told him I wanted in,” said Giles. “I couldn’t let my best friend go into this without someone to have her back!”

  “Nat and I are best friends too,” said Robert. “Sir Delacar came to a bunch of us who were beginning squires and asked for volunteers. We both thought that this would be a whole lot better ’cause we get archery and some interesting stuff from Sir Delacar in the afternoons instead of squire chores.”

  Oh, that made a lot of sense now. While I was getting lessons in magic, they were getting lessons in things knights absolutely would not be caught dead doing—archery was for women and peasants to thei
r way of thinking. It’s a bit of snobbery. Anyone could afford a bow and arrows—you could make them yourself if you had to—but swords and armor cost real money. And it’s a bit of masculine preening.

  But before I could ask anything else, Sir Delacar got us up and moving again.

  I was right. The weaponry lessons did get “easier” in the sense of feeling good at the end of them and not so tired and sore that I wanted to give up. I got better at it too, enough better that Sir Delacar had me measured for my own set of riveted chain mail. Giles had gotten measured for his right away, and not long after I got my armor, so did the other four, although beyond making sure it fit, we weren’t using it yet. Soon we were practicing with bows and swords as well as quarterstaffs, though when I asked about jousting, Sir Delacar snorted with contempt.

  “Jousting is for knights playing games of honor,” he said, making sure his voice carried to all six of us. “You can’t afford to play games—and you can’t afford honor, either. If an enemy comes for Princess Aurora, he won’t come riding in on a high-bred warhorse to issue a challenge. He’ll come sneaking up a back stair with a knife. Or he’ll ambush her in the garden when she’s playing. Or—well, I have the other possibilities covered with the plans I am discussing with the captain of the Royal Guard.” He coughed. “I’m counting on the six of you to be her bodyguards against more direct threats.”

  Now I saw why Delacar had Papa’s respect. There was so much more to him that I was beginning to think that the “fat, lazy knight” persona was all a ruse to cover up his clever, even devious, mind.

  We all nodded and went back to practicing in the yard we shared with the other squires. I couldn’t help but notice how different the style the other squires were being taught was from ours. Theirs was full of rules. Disarmed meant defeated. No low blows. No dirty tricks, like maneuvering your opponent so the sun was in his eyes, or kicking dust into his face, or even getting him to face into the wind so his eyes dried out.

  These rules were exactly what had brought my father down. I wasn’t supposed to know the whole story, but I’d overheard people talking about it when the King brought us to Court.

  The whole story is this: In war, knights are supposed to be a solid line of force meant to shock the enemy. The heavy armor protecting them, the war-trained horses, all these are supposed to strike the front line of an enemy’s forces and break it apart. And in the event that the enemy also has knights, your knights are supposed to break them apart so they can’t do the same thing to your foot troops. Not every kingdom has knights; not every kingdom can afford them. Knights are expensive to train and equip. Warhorses need special training and are heavier than ordinary horses. Full armor is extremely expensive to make and has to be fitted to each knight individually along with the weapons they have proficiencies with. They and their horses also have to be trained, housed, and fed even when they aren’t fighting. Then you have to add to all that the squires with their own training, feeding, and housing.

  And the knights are often nobles, which means you have noble families to answer to, so they’re valuable to another kingdom. If they are unhorsed and surrender, you’re supposed to ransom them back.

  One of Tirendell’s knights got cut off from the rest. He tried to surrender, but the enemy foot troops swarmed him and clearly intended to kill him instead. Father saw this happening, went to his rescue, and also got swarmed and cut down along with his fellow knight.

  Delacar knew that we could absolutely count on the enemy being ruthless, so he was training us for that. Tripping. Rushing and headbutting. Grappling. Shield bashing, aiming for the hands or wrists, finding all the weak points in your opponent’s armor. It was a good thing that we were practicing with wooden swords, the edges padded with wool, or we’d probably have killed one another a dozen times each day. And you might have thought that when the grappling and headbutting and all that came into play, he’d have had the girls practicing against the girls and the boys against the boys. Not a bit of it. It was boys against girls, and Delacar showed us girls tricks we could use to make the boys’ weight and reach work against them. Which was fair, since he taught the boys not to hold back against us girls.

  I’d gone into this driven purely by the determination to protect my baby sister. But I was discovering that I liked all this for itself. I liked feeling strong enough to take care of both of us. I liked having skills that could keep both of us safe. I loved the pride in Papa’s eyes when he came down to review my progress with Delacar and the relief in Mama’s when she understood everything that Delacar was teaching me. So what if some members of the Court looked at me with pursed lips and disapproving expressions? There were others who approved, tacitly and openly; and there were at least as many girls my age who looked on Anna, Elle, and me with envy as there were ones who watched us with contempt or puzzlement. Sure, there were female knights—but there weren’t any at Papa’s Court, and some people just didn’t understand why any girl would aspire to the white belt of a knight. And there were not that many girls here in the first place.

  As for the six of us, tales of knights always spoke of the brotherhood and camaraderie of being brothers-in-arms, and to tell the truth, since I didn’t have a romantic bone in my body, I’d always thought that this was a lot of nonsense.

  Now, though, I realized that it wasn’t. I had friends, real friends, for the first time in my life! Not just Giles, either, but also Elle, Anna, Nat, and Rob. We spent a lot of time together in the mornings encouraging one another when we were not actually training, resting, or recovering. And during the training, it was as much about helping one another as it was gaining skill. I know the others were enjoying this as much as I was; we were never late; we were often early; and for me, at least, there was a pang of disappointment when we broke up for the day, and I really wished they could join my magic lessons.

  And we weren’t just friends. We were a lot more than just friends by now. We knew we could count on one another no matter what; we each had five people we could trust with our deepest secrets. We were what Sir Delacar had called us when we met that first day in the yard.

  We were Aurora’s Companions. And we would guard her and one another against all odds.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I MIGHT HAVE BEEN FITTED FOR MY ARMOR, BUT IT TOOK TIME to make. And this would be only the first set; master craftsmen would be working on a better, lighter, stronger version. By the time I got my first riveted chain mail (and, holy angels, it was heavy!), Brianna had moved our practices from her little kingdom into the real world. I understood now why she had started things in her home in the first place—it was the location where she was strongest, where her protections were layered and centuries old, and if I made a big powerful mistake, it would be relatively easy to contain the damage to a small part of her garden. When I had gotten enough skill, we moved to a practice room inside her castle. But now I had enough control that she felt it was safe to bring me and my power out into the “real world.”

  So she created a protected place in the forest close to the palace for both of us to use for further lessons. Outwardly, it looked like a peasant’s cottage, old and nestled in the trees, cleverly made to look as if it had been there for centuries. There was an actual path to the cottage that branched off from one of the main roads the Court used when going hunting, and she had made sure that I knew the way, but I usually used the tree-trunk door to get there. In fact, that was the last lesson she taught me in her kingdom: how to use the tree trunk as a gate to any place she had set this particular door to go to. Doors, I had learned, were available for any Fae to use—but where they went was locked to each individual, and to allow another to go to the same destination, the information had to be shared.

  The door in the tree trunk didn’t drop me right at the cottage; that would have been very risky for Brianna. An enemy could magically watch the forest and find her cottage as soon as she crossed the destination threshold. She explained to me that while she could fortify her own kingdom ag
ainst interlopers, especially against Dark Fae, she could not do that with the forest.

  So the door opened onto a path in the middle of the deep woods, and you had to know where you were going in order to find Brianna’s cottage.

  On the outside, you’d never know it wasn’t the dwelling of some particularly prosperous peasant. It stood two stories tall, with a thatched roof of straw that had turned silvery gray with age. Two huge oak trees cradled the walls between them, as if they had been saplings when the cottage was first built. Whitewashed cob walls held red-painted window frames with red shutters. There was glass in the windows rather than horn or oiled parchment, which indicated a certain amount of wealth. A flower and herb garden with a whitewashed fence stood between the cottage and the end of the path. All perfectly normal. A decrepit-looking cottage might tempt someone to try to get inside to see if there was anything left in there to steal.

  On the inside, it was one single room with warded walls to prevent anything we did inside from leaking out—and quite often the room was larger on the inside than the cottage was on the outside. It gave me quite the start when I first realized that the size changed. Maybe one day I’d learn how she managed such a feat.

  But even though I might learn how, at least in theory, I doubted very much I’d ever be able to do it. The Fae were not only the masters and mistresses of magic, they’d also had centuries to learn every nuance of the craft. As half-Fae at best, more likely only a quarter, I might live longer than a human but not long enough to learn all I’d have to know to do what a Fae like Brianna can.

  Anyway, the point of this place was to have a practice area out in the real world, where Fae magic could be a bit more unpredictable and where human magic could come into play as well. Brianna intended to teach me defensive magic first—something a lot more refined than my brute-force shield against that Dark Fae had been.