To Light A Candle

If Lord Lycaelon needed a reason to dispense with Volpiril’s services, Anigrel would give him one.

As well as the opportunity to rid himself of all other Mages who might prove to be—inconvenient.

—«♦»—

IF the specter of Shadow Mountain hadn’t been hovering over events, Kellen would undoubtedly have been happier than he’d ever been in his entire life.

He got up each morning while the dawn mists still filled the valley of Sentarshadeen, dressed, and, carrying his breakfast with him, walked to the House of Sword and Shield, eating as he walked. Sometimes Shalkan came with him, and the two friends talked of nothing in particular. The weather—it continued to rain, but Kellen was getting used to it. How Vestakia was settling in.

When Kellen arrived at the House, he would either change to his working clothes (he wore a distinct shade of green—not his signature color, either—a hue which had been arrived at after a great deal of debate, apparently) or into his armor, depending on what he was to work at that day.

Kellen was learning things that Jermayan had lacked the resources to teach him. To attack, and to defend himself against multiple attackers. And more—he was learning to keep the choices in every combat in his own hands, so that he could kill or not as he chose. Under Master Belesharon’s guidance, he was learning to trick an attacker, to stun or disarm him, to simply be elsewhere when the blow fell.

It was more than simple misdirection, far more than the feints and dodges that Jermayan had tried to show him. It was—well, if he had to put a name to it, it was a new state of mind. Part of the battle-mind, to be sure, but a state in which he could choose to be like a fish in the water. He could see where the fight was going, the way a fish could sense a rock in the stream ahead of him, and he could move with the fight, or around it. When he finally got the trick of it, it had all come at once; suddenly, the sense was there, and he’d slipped aside from every blow that the four other knights were trying to land on him, without needing to counter any of them. And the state of mind he had been in was so uncannily peaceful—as if it was a kind of meditation! It was only when Master Belesharon had called a halt to the fight and he dropped automatically out of that mental state that the exhaustion hit him.

“I would not toy with that, if I were you,” Master Belesharon said, neutrally. And Kellen had readily agreed. Useful that might be, if he were surrounded by attackers that he dared not strike at, but the effort this state took was greater than actually defending himself.

With his Knight-Mage gifts to guide him, Kellen learned fast, but there was always more to learn. There was the theory of war itself, not of knight against knight, but of armies in the field.

And so he was introduced to the two great Elven strategy games, gan and xaqiue.

Gan was played on a square board divided into 864 tiny squares. There were 144 counters, divided into six suits, and up to six players could play, though usually only two or three did. The simple object of the game was to be the last person with counters on the board. The complex object of the game was to win beautifully and with style. An opponent’s counters could be removed from play either by surrounding them, or by forcing them to the edge of the board.

So far Kellen had lost every gan match he’d played. But he was starting to lose more slowly.

Xaqiue bore a faint resemblance to shamat, which was played in Armethalieh. In shamat, there were two armies of playing pieces, each of which could move only a certain way, and the object was to capture the other player’s City.

Xaqiue was similar—in that one of the points of the game was to capture the opposing player’s pieces. But in xaqiue, captured pieces remained on the board, in the service of whoever captured them last, and the moves each piece could make changed depending on how many moves it had already made and what other pieces were nearby.

Kellen found xaqiue fiendishly complicated.

“It is no more complicated than a battle,” Naeret would say, when Kellen had been forced to resign yet another game in the middle, hopelessly tangled in a welter of moves and countermoves, and having managed to forget which pieces still belonged to him. “Yet you would remember that well enough.”

“I could get killed in a battle,” Kellen muttered.

“Yet all life is war,” Naeret said, setting the pieces out once again. “Perhaps it is all worth considering equally seriously.”

—«♦»—

BETWEEN sword exercises and games—though Kellen suspected that the Elves did not think of “games” in quite the same way he did—there were the lectures (though he supposed “instructions” might be a better word). Seen simply, these were tales of ancient battles—and just what he’d wanted to hear ever since he’d realized there had been ancient battles.