“I have my own weapons, so there will be no need for any of you to supply me with a blade,” Sophia said. “I am not trained in any discipline you would recognise, but rest assured I can look after myself.”
“Very well,” Kane said, “then Eder and I will take first watch, Sampson and Terrell the second, and Davena and Sophia the last. Obviously, the lady Cahaya will not be expected to participate.”
Cahaya smiled wryly and gestured to her eyes, to indicate she would not be much good as a watchman. With that sorted, the camp dispersed to their tents, and Kane and Eder settled down for the night, banking down the fire and facing the forest to the east, staring head on into that faint, threatening glow.
“You shouldn’t let Sampson get to you,” Kane said, at length.
“I know,” Eder said. “But it’s difficult when he’s so… like that.”
“You weren’t this bad when the other novices used to whisper and gossip.”
“That was different. Sampson was… Sampson was there. When I got this,” he indicated the brand on the side of his neck. “Whispers and gossip and rumours are fine when you know they’re mostly not true. Sampson knows the truth, he knows what I did and that’s why he treats me like he does.”
“What did you do?” Kane asked gently. He would never have dared to be quite so forthright in the Citadel, but something about the proximity of death from the shrill, piercing song of the Sidhe in the distance, and the complete darkness of the new moon, prompted him to take the chance.
He heard Eder sigh, heavily.
“I was hoping you would never ask me that,” Eder’s voice was so quiet Kane had to strain to hear him. “I was hoping that we could stay friends and you would be content with not knowing.”
“If you don’t want to tell me, that’s-“ Kane began, but Eder cut him off.
“I was seven,” Eder said, in a hollow tone. “I had got a strange notion into my head at the time, I could say it was just a childish whim but that would be making an excuse for my perversion. I decided that I was a girl.”
There was a pause, as Eder waited for Kane to interrupt, to shout and scream or interrogate him. A twig snapped nearby, as an animal of some sort bustled through the undergrowth on the human side of the road, and Eder jumped at the sound. He continued, awkwardly.
“I’d stolen a dress from one of the girls’ dormitories, I don’t know whose it was but I told myself I was just borrowing it for the day. I was found by a couple of Brother-Prefects wandering the corridors in a girl’s dress, with a ribbon in my hair.”
Another pause, which Kane felt no desire to fill.
“Then, of course, I was taken for correction. Kane, are you going to say anything at all? You’re making me nervous.”
“What happened to you in the Halls of Correction?”
“I learned the error of my ways. I don’t particularly wish to revisit it.” Eder’s voice sounded slightly shrill. “Are you not going to say anything else at all?”
“What made you think you were a girl?”
“Ah,” the relief in Eder’s voice was evident, even against the whining chord of Sidhe-song. “I suppose I just felt like I was at the time. Obviously I was wrong, as the gods made their will quite clear when they created me a boy. My feelings at the time were irrelevant, I should have known better than to question the gods.”
“You were seven, how were you supposed to know better?”
“Suffice it to say, I learned,” Eder said, in a tone that indicated he considered the matter closed.
“Do you still feel like you’re a girl?”
“No, of course not,” Eder said, after a moment’s delay. “It was obviously something misguiding me and making me question my faith. I am lucky I was corrected.”
“Eder, they branded you, that’s hardly what I’d call lucky.”
“It stops me falling to further doubts,” Eder said, and Kane heard the catch in his voice. “Unlike you and Terrell who need to question everything and bend rules and spit divine charity back in the faces of the gods, I am reminded every day that I must be strong in faith to avoid succumbing to temptation.”
“Temptation like jewellery stalls?” Kane asked, before he could stop himself.
“Don’t.”
The silence settled between them like lead, broken only by the thin, silvery razor wire of the Sidhe hunting song, still miles away and indistinct. In the dim light from the embers of the fire, Kane could see Eder, hunched over, with his arms wrapped around his knees and his shoulders high about his face.
“For what it’s worth, even if you were a girl, I think we’d still be friends,” Kane said eventually.
“You think so?” Eder asked, contemplatively.
Kane shrugged. “As long as you weren’t one of the silly whispering ones then I don’t see why not.”
“Well I suppose it’s irrelevant anyway, so there’s no need to discuss me being something I’m not,” Eder said flatly, then continued after a worried pause. “Are you going to stop speaking to me, now you know what I did?”
“Eder, if you try and make me put on a dress, then we’re going to have a falling out, but you wearing a dress when you were seven? It’s hardly a mutiny or seditious master plan, really, is it?”
Eder giggled, a nervous noise that sounded terribly alien in the darkness. “I suppose not. Are you going to tell Terrell?”
“Do you want me to?”
“No. I don’t think he’d be quite so relaxed as you seem to be. Are you sure you still want to be friends, I mean I am a heretic and all.”
“Eder, I met you after all that, remember? You’ve been marked as a heretic as long as I’ve known you and it’s never stopped us being friends,” Kane reached out to pat Eder’s shoulder, forgetting for a moment the precious rules of the Citadel. Eder jumped at the contact, and Kane felt the accursed side-effect rush forth behind his navel. It was still muted and hazy, but this time it felt like he was falling, and held onto Eder’s shoulder for balance.
“Are you all right?” Eder asked as he felt Kane’s weight on his shoulder.
Kane tried to speak but his mouth was dry and words had deserted him. Despite the cool night air, he felt heat rising underneath his skin, in his neck, his face, his ears.
“Is this that side-effect again?” Eder asked, shrugging his shoulder out of Kane’s grasp, almost overbalancing him. “You should speak to Davena about it.”
“Can’t. Sampson,” Kane recovered his voice as the spasm or side-effect or whatever it was subsided.
“It’ll be all right,” Eder said soothingly. “You’re back on the Elixir now, it’ll all go away and everything will be back to normal.”
“You don’t understand,” Kane’s voice was hoarse, and he cleared his throat awkwardly. “It’s not like a bad feeling, it doesn’t hurt. Sometimes I’m not sure if I want it to stop.”
“It’s a temptation, Kane, a distraction from the righteous path you follow,” Eder said earnestly. “You’re strong, you can resist it, I know you can.”
“Terrell thinks it makes him stronger,” Kane said. “What if he’s right?”
“We’re Child Guard, Kane. Why would they be giving us something to keep us from getting stronger?”
“I don’t know, but he sounded pretty sure.”
“Maybe-“ Eder hesitated, but took a breath and continued. “Maybe you need to spend less time with Terrell. Maybe we both do.”
“But he’s my friend, he’s been my friend almost as long as you have.”
“And he’s mine too. But if he doesn’t want to be a Child Guard he isn’t going to be coming back to the Citadel with us. He’s chosen a different path which we shouldn’t- we can’t follow him along.”
“So I should just cut him off and stop speaking to him? What kind of friend would that make me?”
“I didn’t say that,” Eder said. “But if he’s giving in to temptation and giving up being a Child Guard it might not be a good idea to go off alone with him so ofte
n. He’s already turning your mind to blasphemous thoughts.”
“You sound like Sampson. I thought you hated him.”
“I don’t hate him. He reminds me of my past wrongdoing, which is… uncomfortable but necessary.”
“He upsets you,” Kane said. “I don’t like that.”
“You don’t have to like it,” Eder shrugged. “I’ll try harder not to let it bother me. I must be grateful for the reminder.”
Kane sighed, sensing there was nothing more to be said without endlessly looping around and coming up against the wall of Eder’s matter-of-fact acceptance of his treatment. He almost wished he hadn’t started the conversation, but now the question unasked and unanswered for over thirteen years was finally resolved, but knowing what Eder’s transgression was brought up a whole plethora of new questions, most pressing of which was why such a minor thing had resulted in the branding and ‘correcting’ of the tiny Eder. Kane had known many novices who had questioned the will of the gods, sometimes quite vocally, and they had received much more gentle instruction than the brutal Halls of Correction would provide.
Every time he thought of the young Eder being dragged away and branded, he found his hands curling into fists.
10. The Borderlands
“For the deceivers, the murderers, the men who betray their kind by treating with the creatures of darkness, let there be no rest, no mercy. For they shall be delivered unto the hells where they shall be judged and their punishment bestowed by the Brother, as a stern father might chastise his wayward children.”
The Book of the Twin Gods
The Sidhe hunt-song continued through the night, rendering everyone’s sleep uneasy and broken. It was a groggy, grumpy troop who struck camp in the rosy dawn light, not long after the song had finally died down for the night. Kane had found it more difficult to sleep than most, with the twin threat of danger, from the Sidhe outside and the strange after-effects of his brief abstinence from the Elixir inside, he had spent a considerably restless night.
The week dragged on, the sun seeming to linger every day in its already lengthy journey across the summer sky. Kane was grateful when it turned to afternoon, and the dappled shadows of the trees to the west of the road fell across the path, taking away the sting of the sun’s heat.
Between the heat and the lack of sleep, there was not much conversation to be had during their travels as exhaustion had robbed them of their wit and will to do anything other than idly bicker about unimportant things, such as who was kicking dust on whose boots, or who was stealing whose rare, coveted breeze. Kane tried to mediate as best he could, trying to maintain face in front of Cahaya and Sophia, but his own temper was short and he had to bite his tongue to stop himself threatening to knock heads together by evening.
He had remembered since the singing began that they should keep in practice with their weapons, no matter how tired they were at the end of the long marching day. Eder was fine to shoot at arbitrarily-selected targets, and Sampson and Davena were barely learning the basics of how to handle a knife without injuring themselves; but Kane and Terrell needed something a bit more substantial, and had taken to regularly sparring with each other as whatever Eder had managed to shoot during the day bubbled away in the pot.
At first, it had been a close contest. Kane was faster and better at thinking on the fly, but Terrell was stronger, and once he remembered there were no rules in the Borderlands, he used his left hand, which made things tricky. There was no swordmaster to mark points on a chalkboard out in the Borderlands, and often Kane had to call a stop to their bouts as Terrell would fight beyond the point where he should have feasibly given up or tired out. Kane suspected the presence of Cahaya, listening carefully to their exertions, had something to do with it, and tried on occasion to discreetly remind Terrell she couldn’t see him showing off.
As the days passed, Terrell got stronger, hefting his longsword like it was nothing, with a cheeky grin every time. He also got clumsier and more hasty with his decisions, and seemed to tire more quickly, although he would still continue the combat until Kane called a halt or until Davena threatened them with starvation if they didn’t come and eat immediately.
One of only two things which could stop Terrell in his tracks was the promise of food. He had always had a hearty appetite, but now seemed to be constantly hungry, devouring what meagre rations he was given in moments and then surreptitiously trying to steal bits of everyone else’s for the remainder of the evening. Since Eder had fallen into a sulk upon being asked to bring back ‘just another rabbit or two’, Terrell had set to hunting himself, setting traps around the camp of an evening and claiming for his own whatever ended up in his snares.
The other thing which could bring Terrell crashing to a halt, no matter what he was doing, was Cahaya.
If she needed something, Terrell was there, straight away, all but elbowing others out of the way in his haste to be the one to give her what she needed. He walked beside her pony every day, and sat next to her around the campfire, so close their knees touched from time to time.
“I think I’m going mad,” Terrell confided to Kane, one night as they were taking a watch together. “It’s like I’m on fire when I’m around her, I can’t think straight. I just want to be close to her.”
“Be careful,” Kane counselled him. “Sampson might let you get away with lifting her into the saddle every day but if you get any closer he’s going to know you’re off the Elixir.”
“I know but-“ Terrell let out a frustrated sigh and rolled backwards onto the grass. “I need her. It’s like breathing, I don’t have a choice. You know what it’s like.”
Kane didn’t. Whatever strange feelings had come over him during his first abstinence from the Elixir had not returned. While he did still occasionally get strange pangs around Eder, and once or twice when the light caught Cahaya in a certain way, they were muted, like hearing a sound underwater or trying to scratch an itch through thick cloth. It was frustrating, but, from the sound of it, to have the full experience Terrell was going through would be much worse.
“I don’t know what to do,” Terrell continued, without waiting for an answer. “She’ll think I’m a madman.”
“Nah. She knows you’re a madman,” Kane said, and wasn’t quick enough to dodge a punch that made his arm numb.
“Be serious,” Terrell said. “I’ve got nobody else I can talk to about this, without talking to her and every time I try to do that I choke on it.”
“We’re in the Borderlands,” Kane shrugged. “Maybe some part of you has finally developed a sense of self-preservation and knows that this is a really bad time and place to get silly over a girl.”
“It’s not silly,” Terrell sulked.
“You don’t think-“ Kane determined to select his words with care lest Terrell misconstrue them, “you don’t think that it might be something about the Borderlands? Possibly some kind of lingering Sidhe magic in the air, or maybe that awful caterwauling every night?”
Terrell waved a dismissive hand. “Can’t be, it started well before we got in here.”
“It didn’t seem this bad before, though,” Kane pressed.
“What are you, the Correctors?” Terrell shoved him so hard he almost lost his balance. “I’m fine, I’m not under a spell or suffering from the madness of the forest, I’d know if I was.”
Kane rolled his eyes but didn’t feel like continuing the argument into the small hours, so let it lie. He didn’t want to fight with the one person he could properly confide in, the person who had shared in his small, brief rebellion.
Every night, just before sunset, the hunt-song began again. Kane couldn’t tell if it was getting any closer night by night, but it was still faint and indistinct enough to not be an immediate concern. He dismissed everyone earlier, with instructions to get as much sleep as they could.
About a week after they had first spoken under the darkness of the new moon, he sat in awkward silence with Eder in the dying light. He had
spent hours going over and over their conversation that night, to the point where he half-feared he had driven himself mad with over-examination. There was nothing to be said, and at the same time there was so much to be said, but he didn’t quite know if he had the words or even the thoughts formed to have the conversation he wanted to. The singing seemed to wrap around his mind like gossamer thread and pull inexorably tighter until he was unable to think or speak.
“Kane,” Eder said, quietly, breaking Kane out of the spider-web of thought and inaction.
“What is it?”
“Can I tell you something?”
“Of course, anything.”
“I’m… I think I’m afraid.”
“What of?”
“Them. That.” Eder waved a hand expressively.
It took a few moments for Kane’s sleep-deprived mind to figure out what he was talking about.
“Oh, you mean them.” Neither of them wanted to name the hunters who were out on the prowl in the eastern forests, for fear of somehow drawing their attention and calling them down on the camp.
“Yes. I know we’ve been taught to fight them, I know it’s everything we’ve trained and learned and practised for, but… I don’t know if it’s going to be enough.”
“Eder, you can shoot better than anyone else I know, you’ll pick any attackers off before they even get to you.”
“That’s not the point. I don’t know if I could actually kill someone, you know, on purpose.”
“They’re monsters, Eder, fierce horrible ones, remember? It’s not like you’d be shooting people,” Kane said. “Besides, hopefully we’ll reach the other side of the forest without even running into them at all. We’re making good time as it is and the song hasn’t gotten any closer.”
“But-“
“Eder, listen to me,” Kane said firmly. “I know you think you can’t do it but I know you can. I believe in you, you’ll be a great warrior someday, mark my words.”
The Child Guard Page 11
