“I don’t know how to throw knives.”
“It can be taught.”
“And you will teach me.”
He sighed, still unable to look her in the eye. “Aye, I will teach you. Today we will start with close combat; knife throwing tomorrow.”
He made Karigan insert the combs and pins back into her hair. Without a mirror or Tegan to help her, she could only guess at how ridiculous she must look.
Drent couldn’t bring himself to attack her, so he enlisted the aid of one of his students, the one the others called “Flogger.” He was almost as big as Drent, and just as ugly, and he seemed to like the idea of attacking a lady. He licked his lips in anticipation.
Drent had him creep up from behind and grab Karigan in a stranglehold. She bashed the back of her head into his face and skimmed his shin with the edge of her shoe. Flogger howled and hopped away clutching his bloody nose.
Flogger was then instructed to grab her arm. She broke his hold by grasping his thumb and bending it backward until he was on his knees whimpering. Those who paused their own bouts to watch hooted and hollered, chivvying Flogger good and hard.
When Flogger tried another grab around her waist, she pulled a pin from her hair and jabbed it into the meaty part of his forearm. He fell away swearing. She wiped the blood off on her skirts and reinserted the pin into her hair. Apart from being breathless courtesy of the corset, she hadn’t even perspired during Flogger’s attempts.
“My father’s cargo master taught me such skills of defense,” she explained to Drent. “The thief at the museum, however, had a rapier and did not attack me in that manner.”
Drent scratched his head and ordered Flogger to fetch a pair of practice swords. Karigan took hers with trepidation when she saw the malice creeping into Flogger’s eyes. His expression seemed to say he’d pay her back for the bloody nose and the humiliation he suffered in front of his fellows.
“We’ll have a bout,” Drent said, “and see what we can do to help a lady defend herself should the situation ever arise.” He rolled his eyes probably doubting that a true lady would ever find herself in such a situation.
Karigan and Flogger stepped into a practice ring and tapped swords. As Karigan predicted, the humiliation was hers within minutes. Sword moves she had been trained to make hundreds of times were hampered by her skirts and corset, and Flogger did not hold back, battering her relentlessly. As before, she grew light-headed from lack of air, and the weight of the skirts dragged her down. Flogger slammed his sword into her gut for kill point, and she crumpled to her knees in a cloud of dust, sputtering.
Flogger beamed proudly, but his fellows cast him disgusted looks and shook their heads. He had taken advantage of the “lady.”
“A little excessive, Flogger,” Drent commented.
Karigan could only stay on her knees gasping and retching, attempting to suck air back into her lungs. She had asked for it.
When she could breathe again, a guilty looking Flogger pulled her to her feet.
“Again,” Drent said.
And they went at it again, Drent yelling instructions at her on how she should move her feet to cope with the restricting skirts, and how she might conserve her breath. Flogger still managed to “kill” her several times over before Drent finally declared the session over.
Karigan stood before him panting, sweat slicking her face and neck.
“A suggestion,” Drent said, still not quite able to look her dead on, “That thing you’re wearing…”
“Thing?”
“Aye, the thing under your…the thing women wear to—” He stopped as if biting his tongue.
Karigan’s mouth quirked into a half smile. “The corset?”
Drent made a garbled noise. “Aye, the corset. If you weren’t so unreasonably adherent to fashion, you could, uh, loosen it. Make it easier to breathe.”
Karigan limped back to the castle past the wondering looks of others, her hair in total disarray, her face grimed with dirt and probably bruised, and her fine dress ripped and coated with dust, but she held her chin high. Dresses could be fixed, but pride was more difficult to patch back together.
She may never see her love for a certain man fulfilled, and she may have lost a friend today, but by the gods, she still had Drent.
A NEW ASSIGNMENT
In the days and weeks that followed, Karigan had to reassess her sanity for wanting to continue her training sessions with Drent. He took her desire to learn how to fight in fancy attire to heart. He didn’t make her wear corset and dress, but he found other ways to simulate the difficulties presented by restrictive garments. He made her strap on a forty pound pack to represent the weight of her skirts, then ordered her to run around the practice grounds and participate in weapons practice while wearing it.
To train her in footwork, he buckled modified horse hobbles around her ankles to limit her movement as skirts would. He used the device, he said, on his swordmaster initiates to teach them economy of movement. Swordmastery, he said, was not about jumping around and flailing the sword through the air. It was about making each action count. There was an elegance and efficiency in simplicity.
Karigan agreed for she had seen such skill at work among swordmasters and Weapons during practice bouts and in battle. It turned brutal conflict into beauty in motion; deadly beauty.
Trying to make that economy of movement work for herself, however, proved to be another matter entirely. She could not keep count of the many times the hobbles tripped her up and she spilled unceremoniously out of the practice ring and hit the ground hard enough, thanks to the weight of her pack, that dust rose up around her. Her opponents won automatic kill points each time she fell, and while she couldn’t keep track of the points, she knew Drent and his assistants did. The points were posted at the field house at the end of every week, and competition was fierce among the trainees to attain the most points, a matter of pride and honor and desire to win Drent’s approval. Invariably Karigan was at the bottom of the list.
Her sessions left her bruised, exhausted, cut up, limping, and discouraged, but slowly, ever so slowly, she noticed her strength improving and her swordplay becoming more precise.
If trying to fight while hobbled made her feel ridiculous, knife throwing humiliated her even further. She realized, to her chagrin, that clobbering the thief at the museum with her shoe had not been a matter of skill, but of luck.
“Retain your line of sight,” Drent said during one such session. “Focus and see the knife in the target.”
Karigan squinted at the straw-stuffed dummy hanging from a wooden frame some yards away. The weight of the knife felt good in her hand. It was specially balanced for throwing. When she first received the pair, she had been quite impressed with herself and showed them off to her fellow Riders, wearing them around in her new boot sheaths. However, when Drent saw how abysmal she was at throwing, he decided to hold onto them when she wasn’t training so she wouldn’t endanger herself or others, which resulted in a good deal of ribbing from her friends.
She licked her lips and concentrated. She held the tip of the blade in her fingers just as Drent had shown her. As soon as the other trainees saw her with a knife in her hand, they scattered out of throwing distance. One wild throw had nearly killed one of them during her first session and now only Drent had the nerve to stand anywhere near her.
She would hit the target this time. She would show them. She stared hard at the dummy’s “heart” imagining the knife sticking through it. A bead of sweat trickled down her lip and she tasted salt.
Her expression set and determined, she flung her arm back for the throw, but the blade slipped from her fingers and flew over her shoulder. Someone yelped from behind. Grimacing at what she might find, she slowly turned around. The knife was planted in the ground between the feet of a Green Foot runner.
“Oops,” Karigan said. She snuck a glance at Drent whose veins were popping out on his neck.
“Oops?” he repeated quietly. T
oo quietly.
Karigan flinched in anticipation of the storm that was about to blow over her, but it never came. Drent passed his hand over his spiky hair, nostrils flaring. “You are hopeless,” he said, his voice full of despair. “Absolutely hopeless.” And he wandered away shaking his head and mumbling to himself.
Karigan blinked in surprise, then turned her attention to the runner who had not moved, as if still shocked by her close call with death. “Sorry,” Karigan said. “I, um, I didn’t meant to—” She gestured at the knife.
“Ung…” The girl shook her head, her eyes bulging. Moments passed before she was able to focus on Karigan and speak. “Um, the captain would like you to join her and the king in his study.”
Chills prickled along Karigan’s nerves at the girl’s words. “Thank you,” she managed to say.
The runner nodded and took off at a trot. Karigan pulled her knife from the ground and slipped it into the boot sheath, wondering what this summons might be about. She avoided the king as much as possible for all the pain and desires he stirred in her, but she knew that in the course of her duties she could not avoid him indefinitely. And now she had been summoned.
She glanced in Drent’s direction. He was busy bellowing at a pair of swordsmen across the practice field. She shrugged off the weighted pack and informed one of his assistants that she must leave, and she hurried to the castle, stopping in her own chamber in the Rider wing just long enough to change out of her work tunic and pull on a fresh shirt and shortcoat and to splash water on her face. It would not do to appear before the king covered in dust and sweat.
When she arrived at the king’s study, the Weapon at the door let her in.
“Thank you, Travis,” she murmured.
He nodded in reply, more acknowledgment than most would receive from one of the king’s stern guardians.
Sunlight glared through the study’s many windows that faced the courtyard gardens. The room had once been a queen’s solarium, and Karigan wondered if, when the king married, it would be restored to its original use and become the domain of Estora. She took a deep breath to help resist the bitter thoughts that conjured.
The king sat at his desk, its white marble surface glowing in the sunshine, reflecting onto his face, making him appear ethereal, a creature of light, while all else around him fell into shadow. His hair and beard blazed with fine gold and copper strands instead of the more subdued amber, and contrasted with his rich brown eyes.
He sat there with his hands folded before him, and the light brought to sharp relief how strong they were as it outlined muscles and tendons, his fingers adorned only by simple gold bands. Hands that wielded a sword, hands that wielded a scepter, hands that wielded power. How she wished, how she desired, those hands of light to unfold and caress her in tender strokes. Karigan shivered.
His face, however, told another story. As king, he had acquired the skill of concealing his thoughts and feelings from others, an advantage when he did not want enemies, or politicians, or supplicants to know what he was thinking. He now donned that mask, and it staggered Karigan that he should use it in her presence. She supposed it was for the best, for it gave them distance. She would wear a mask of her own as well, that of a dutiful Green Rider.
She bowed to the king. “You summoned me, sire?”
“We did.”
He was not using the royal “we,” she knew, for he never did. Someone cleared her throat and Karigan squinted toward the windows to find Captain Mapstone seated there, with legs crossed. The sun glared around her, making her a silhouette, but Karigan recognized her shape and the flare of red hair at her crown.
“Good morning, Karigan,” she said.
Karigan opened her mouth to return the greeting when a third person barreled out of the shadows at her with his arms thrown wide open.
“Garth!” she cried.
He wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug and lifted her off the floor. How could she have overlooked his presence when she entered the study? Garth was hard to miss!
“Welcome back,” she said, her voice muffled by his chest.
His laugh rumbled against her face, and he patted her on the back before setting her down. She staggered a little when he released her.
“Good to be back,” he said, grinning.
“Please be seated,” the king said. His mask remained intact, unmoved by Garth’s boisterous greeting.
After the two Riders settled in chairs next to Captain Mapstone’s, the captain cleared her throat again and gazed at Karigan.
“As you know, Garth was on an errand to the wall to check on Alton’s progress there.”
Yes, Karigan did know. She glanced anxiously at Garth, hoping to convey in that one look how much she wanted to speak to him after this meeting adjourned.
“To our dismay,” the captain continued, “Alton has been unable to make any progress whatsoever.”
Karigan’s mouth dropped open.
“It’s true,” Garth said. “The wall rejects him—won’t let him in. It refuses to trust him.”
“Doesn’t…trust him?” Karigan’s echoing him must have sounded idiotic, but Garth’s words overwhelmed her. Over two months had passed, and there was no telling when Mornhavon the Black would reappear in Blackveil Forest. And if Alton could not communicate with the wall and fix it, how much more time would be lost before a way was found?
“You more than most understand the gravity of the situation,” the king said, “which is why you’ve been chosen for a new assignment.”
“To go to the wall?”
“No,” Captain Mapstone said. “Dale is actually heading that way.”
“Dale? But how?” The Rider had been gravely wounded during the battle at the breach in the wall and remained in Woodhaven to mend.
“She wanted to go,” Garth said, “and I really thought one of us ought to be at the wall to help Alton communicate with Merdigen. She was tired of being cooped up in the mending hall at Woodhaven and Lord D’Yer’s chief mender deemed her fit to travel, so long as she did not participate in strenuous activity and rested frequently.”
“I don’t understand. How could Dale communicate with Merdigen if Alton can’t?”
“We,” and Garth jabbed his thumb at his Rider brooch, “can enter Tower of the Heavens even if Alton can’t. The wall still trusts us.”
Karigan shook her head in incredulity.
“With each passing day,” the king said, “we chance the return of Mornhavon. We must use well the time you’ve bought for us.” For a moment, the mask slipped from his face, and she saw in the depths of his eyes his concern, not just for what could lie ahead, but for her and all she had already endured. Karigan averted her gaze.
“What’s my assignment?”
“It’s actually threefold,” Captain Mapstone said. “We are sending you west, first to Selium.”
Karigan managed to refrain from jumping out of her chair and cheering. In Selium she’d get to visit with her friend Estral Andovian but she was curious to know what Selium had to do with the wall.
“One of our most frustrating issues,” the captain continued, “is our lack of knowledge, or rather, our loss of knowledge concerning the arcane arts and ancient craft, such as that used to construct the D’Yer Wall. Why or how we lost it, who can say?” She shrugged. “If certain knowledge were to fall into the hands of the enemy? Then perhaps it was deemed necessary to destroy anything that documented important creations like the wall to safeguard them. There is a chance, however, that one document has survived through the ages. Merdigen told Garth he had a dim recollection of a book kept by one of the mages who helped build the wall, a log of sorts that may offer Alton clues as to how he can bypass the guardians and begin restoring the wall.”
“You believe this book is in Selium?”
Captain Mapstone sighed. “We don’t know. Chances are it no longer exists at all, but if it does, the one person who might know something about it is the Golden Guardian.”
&nbs
p; “Ah.” The Golden Guardian, Aaron Fiori, was Estral’s father. He was, in a sense, the lord-governor of Sacoridia’s arts, history, and culture, and he oversaw the school of Selium and the city of the same name that surrounded it, though more often than not he was traveling the countryside collecting stories and songs, playing music, and seeking talented children to bring to the school. Actual day-to-day management of the city and school was left to the lord-mayor and the dean.
“Lord D’Yer is already having his people turn their archival collections upside down for the hundredth time,” Captain Mapstone said, “and Dakrias Brown and his clerks will be doing the same here.”
Karigan smiled when the captain named the king’s newest chief administrator. Recognizing the immensity of the undertaking, she didn’t envy him his task, though he might receive aid from a ghost or two.
“It may be that the book is under some spell of concealment,” the king added, “which is why it has not come to light before. If Lord Fiori can search for it with this in mind, it may guide him. You will bear a message directly to Lord Fiori, personally written by me so he understands the urgency of the matter. And if he is on one of his travels, then I suppose you will have to approach Dean Crosley.”
There was a knock upon the door and the king’s secretary, Cummings, poked his head in. “Pardon me, Your Majesty, but the Huradeshian delegation is awaiting you in the throne room.”
The king nodded and stood, all three Riders rising with him. On his way out he paused in front of Karigan, no longer an ethereal being of light, but an ordinary man, his king’s mask slipping again. “May your journey be a safe one, Karigan,” he said. “And may it prove successful.”
Karigan could not meet his gaze. “Thank you, sire,” she murmured, but he had already left the room, the door sweeping shut behind him.
She tore her gaze from the door only to find the captain watching her closely. Then with a blink of her hazel eyes, the captain shifted her attention to Garth.
“You may be excused,” she said. “The rest concerns Karigan’s other errands and I’m sure you’ve much to catch up on now that you’re back.”