Exile's Valor

“Yessir, Herald Alberich,” Osberic groaned from the ground.

“And that is why, for fighting, you have also been punished in this way,” Alberich continued. “Now, back into the salle. There is work to be done.”

They were all quick to follow the order, but none so quick as Osberic.

10

Kadhael Corbie disappeared from the Court and Collegia entirely. Not that Alberich would have noticed his absence, having banned the boy from the salle, but it wasn’t long before there were murmurs and speculations among his students and the Court—and being that it was his business to know things, he heard every one of them. Rumor had it that the boy’s father was so enraged that he had gotten himself thrown out of Alberich’s class and forbidden to enter the salle that he’d sent the boy straight down to the family manor, there to languish in what the young lords and ladies called “rustification.” Since it was said to be a particularly dull and cheerless place, lacking in anything that a young man might find amusing, and since rumor also had it that Lord Corbie had sent orders for his son to be confined to the house and grounds until further notice, Alberich was perfectly satisfied that the punishment fit the crime.

On the other side of the table, Lord Corbie went to Selenay and also demanded the punishment of “the Trainee who started it,” and allegedly was nonplussed to learn that “the Trainee” had already been punished. And that the punishment fit his crime, since all he had done was to bring a fight into the salle and after being reprimanded, had behaved with the proper respect for the Weaponsmaster. The trouncing—with lecture—at the hands of the Weaponsmaster in front of his peers was deemed both painful and humiliating enough, even for Lord Corbie.

And Lord Corbie had been quite taken aback to learn that it had all happened within moments of Kadhael’s expulsion.

Without knowing much about the man, but intuiting a great deal from the behavior of his son, Alberich doubted that humiliation of Kadhael at the hands of “that foreigner” would ever be forgotten or forgiven, but at least there was nothing overt that Lord Corbie could do about the incident. Alberich had exercised precisely the correct amount of authority: he’d been defied, he banished the offender. Not from any other classes at any other part of the three Collegia, only from his own. He had indeed ejected the boy by force—because the boy would have gone on defying him if Alberich hadn’t physically thrown him off the premises. He had not exceeded his authority, and in point of fact, Alberich could have given the boy a taste of what Osberic had gotten, and hadn’t. In fact, Kadhael had gotten off lightly at Alberich’s hands, and not only was there no denying it, but both the Lord Marshal and the Provost Marshal (who was in charge of discipline on and off the Collegia grounds) said loudly and publicly that they would have boxed both his ears until he was deaf.

Nevertheless, Lord Corbie would not like the man who had rejected his son; he would not like the Collegium nor the organization that had given him the authority to do so.

One more enemy . . . but Alberich was used to those by now. He would have to watch his back, but when had he ever done anything else? And sure enough, within days, there were rumors in the Court about how the Weaponsmaster was abusing his pupils, abusing his authority, treating Heraldic Trainees with indulgence and punishing Blues arbitrarily. A few Blues were quietly absent from his class after that. But there was not a great deal that he could do about that—nor, truth to be told, wished to do.

As for Osberic—according to Kantor, that very evening, when the Trainee’s bruises started aching and he started feeling particularly sorry for himself, his Companion had given him a good talking-to. Whether this was delivered in the form of a lecture or with sympathy, Kantor didn’t say—but one thing was certain: when Companions took it upon themselves to correct their Chosen, the lesson tended to stick. Osberic was certainly properly contrite the next day, and if there was still a great deal of moaning about Alberich’s hardheartedness, at least no one among the Heraldic Trainees was claiming he was a bully or a sadist. Hardhearted, he could live with. In fact, the more hardhearted they thought him, the better off they would be in the long run.

Though shortly after the Kadhael incident, there was one little lad who would not have agreed with that estimation.

He was one of the “Tedrel orphans,” brought in by the Companion Cheric the very same day as Osberic and Kadhael’s chastisement. It took a day or two to get him settled into the Collegium, so Alberich didn’t see him until his mentor, Trainee Rotherven, brought him by himself to the salle, shortly after the last class of the day.

Alberich was overseeing a set of Guards working out with maces, when the door to the salle opened and a final-year Trainee came in with a very small boy at his side. Alberich left the two to continue their bout, and walked over to the door where they waited politely.

“This is a new Trainee, Weaponsmaster,” Rotherven said, leading the young boy by the hand—a very young boy indeed, no more than seven, if Alberich was any judge. He was rather angular, with an unruly thatch of no-colored hair, but very intelligent eyes, and a look about him that was vaguely familiar. And when he got a good look at the Weaponsmaster, the boy gaped at him with shock—then awe—then spun to look up at his mentor with a look just short of accusation.

“You did not tell me this was the Great Rider!” the child exclaimed, and Alberich knew immediately by the trace of a Karsite accent that this must be one of the children brought out of the Tedrel camp after the end of that final battle.