Exile's Honor

:Doesn't mince words, does he?: Caryo chuckled.

'Then it's time you learned,' Selenay told him ruthlessly, and with a touch of glee. 'It's a standard skill all Heralds are supposed to know. You might have to find your own food in the wilderness, after all.'

'And I, in wilderness will be allowed? Not likely, that.' He sighed with resignation. Or disgust. Or both, perhaps. She didn't care. He might as well learn to fish; it wouldn't do him harm, and it might do him good.

She spent the next candlemark or so in a position every Trainee ever schooled by the Weaponsmaster's Second would probably have given his last hope of the Havens for. Schooling the infamous Alberich, playing stern and implacable tutor to the Great Stone Heart himself! And it was highly entertaining as well.

She presented Alberich with his pole, and had to show him how to bait the hook—and the formidable Alberich proved to be very reluctant to touch the bait!

'Now don't be so squeamish,' she ordered, pulling a worm out of the earth of the bait pail and handing it to him. 'I've shown you what to do, it's not that difficult.'

He took the worm in his thumb and forefinger, and held it stiffly in front of him. 'Must I?' he asked in a strangled voice.

She suppressed her mirth, and instead fixed him with the same sort of gimlet-eyed stare he gave reluctant Trainees. She didn't even need to say anything.

He barely skinned the worm onto the hook, and she knew it wouldn't stay. Sure enough, the third time he pulled the hook up out of the water to check on it, the worm was gone.

He glanced aside at her; she was pulling in eels at an astonishing rate and already had a bucketful. She just gave him that look again, and nodded toward the bait bucket, without saying a word.

With a long-suffering expression on his face, he probed the loam with a reluctant finger for another worm.

By the end of the afternoon, she was highly satisfied with her half of the expedition. She had a fine mess of eels, far more than a mere bucketful, certainly sufficient to provide Heraldic Collegium with an eel-pie supper. She had a properly sunburned nose (but not so much that it was going to hurt later) and Alberich was—

Well, it was comic. The incredibly competent Alberich did have something that he couldn't do. He had caught exactly two fish, both of them little sun-perch, and neither big enough to keep. He had lost most of a pail of worms, and it was a good thing that he hadn't hooked anything large, or Selenay suspected he'd have lost the rod as well. He, who couldn't miss a target, couldn't cast a line to save his life. He, who was so dexterous with any weapon of any sort, tangled his line with appalling frequency.

Mind, he had managed to relax, if only by cursing under his breath at his pole, his line, the wretched fish that stole his bait. Practicing with his students out of doors as much as he did, he hadn't had a clerical pallor, but there weren't quite as many frown furrows cutting across his scars.

She put up her gear with a sigh of regret; he put his up with a sigh of relief. The old man came to take charge of the tub of eels, which was as well, since she couldn't exactly take them back to the Collegium in her saddlebag. Together they rode—at a walk, this time—back down the lane to the road.

'How did you manage never to learn how to fish?' she asked him, after they rejoined the traffic on the road heading into Haven.

'I should learn, where?' he asked. 'When very young, helping in the inn, I was. Then it was in the Academy, and fishing, a sport for gentleman is, or a subsistence for the poor. No part has it in training for a cavalry officer.'

He must have been very young when he first began to work, then....

:And very poor,: Caryo told her, knowing that she needn't say more. Although fishing was traditionally a way for the poor to add another source of all-season food to the larder, the poor also had to have the time to fish. Which, clearly, Alberich had not. The very poor also might not have enough to spare for hook, line, and bait.

'Besides,' he added meditatively, 'where lived I and served I, no great rivers there are. Swift streams only. Trout, have I heard of, which great skill takes. Wealthy man's sport.'

'Well, you've got the knack now,' she replied cheerfully, and was rewarded with his sour look.

'Then best it is that to Haven I am confined,' he said. 'And should fish be required of me, purchased at market they can be. Else, it would be starvation.'