Exile's Valor

nose, and there were two with black eyes, and no one would know until it was over how many bruises and strains there were. No Companions were injured, but that was always possible, too.

The second third began after a brief pause for water—both drunk and poured over heads—and a quick change of players. Then they were off again, with no less vigor than before.

“It seems very dangerous!” Karath shouted to her, over the cheers and shrieks. She glanced at him; he seemed just as excited as everyone else. His color was high, and he had a wide smile of enjoyment.

“It is!” she shouted back. “Our Weaponsmaster is using it for war-training!”

“Aha!” He nodded vigorously, then cheered wildly with everyone else as the Scarlet and Green goalkeepers on the neutral goal got into a clinch, and a Scarlet rider nipped in right under their noses and slammed home a goal.

Hurlee on ice had been exciting. This was beyond exciting—this was intoxicating. Even Selenay, who had been in the thick of war, was caught up in it, drunk as any of them on it, free to feel it, knowing that this time, there was no fear that anyone would die. One rider was actually knocked unconscious by the ball before it was over, and there was a broken wrist and a second broken arm, both caused by being unseated and falling badly. But Selenay knew that the Healers would soon put all of them to rights, and when the Healers were done with them, the congratulations they would get at the hands of the rest of the Trainees—and everyone else with an interest in the game—would soon make the pain just a memory. The Scarlets took the lead and held it for most of the game, but at the very end, in the final third, the Greens took the victory away from them by a single point.

When the winded and the exhausted winners and losers both had been mobbed and rushed off the field to their own celebratory feast, Selenay found herself hoarse with screaming and nearly as tired as if she had been out there on the field herself.

“My word!” the Prince said, his eyes still wild with excitement. “That’s altogether more thrilling than any tournament I’ve ever seen! You say your Weaponsmaster is using this for war-training?”

Selenay nodded, and sat down so that everyone else could. Protocol, after all—while the Monarch was on her feet, no one else could sit. There was some little time before the alfresco dinner, which would be served out in the gardens, and she wanted to give her staff plenty of time to have it set up before she led the ravenous hordes toward the food. Meanwhile, pages were going around with wine and fruit, and she availed herself of both. Karath sat down in the place of honor beside her, though he still looked as if he would like to go find a Hurlee stick and try the game for himself.

Not Selenay. She enjoyed watching the game, but once it was over, she couldn’t help but think about why Alberich was so in favor of it. She didn’t want any of those youngsters to have to see what she had seen. There had been too many no older than they who had not returned from the Wars.

“Indeed, he is, Your Highness,” the Seneschal said, as both the Rethwellan Ambassador and the Ambassador from Hardorn leaned closer in order to hear. “He and the Equitation Instructor have found it an invaluable substitute for melee and skirmish training. They say they have found that both the mounted and foot versions are equally valuable. And it is all the better for the fact that the Trainees want to do it, and several of them spend a great deal of their free time in practice at it. We are restricting the mounted version to the final-year students, however, given the level of expertise required, and the danger involved.”

“Better a broken bone or two now, than something worse in combat,” Selenay said, sobered by her recollection of another spring day—nearly this time last year—

Then she shook off her melancholy. This was supposed to be a day given over to relaxation and pleasure, and she was not going to spoil it. “Well, gentlemen, you can tell your friends and kin back in your homelands that we here in Valdemar know how to provide both novelty and entertainment for our guests,” she said lightly. “I do believe that was the first ever public game of mounted Hurlee.”

“And I hope you will convey my admiration to your Weaponsmaster for finding so clever a solution for a training dilemma,” the Prince said with a smile. “Though I will confess, if that is the level that he trains to, he is fully as expert as our own Weaponsmaster at home—though perhaps not quite to the exacting standard of Swordmistress Tarma shena Tale’sedrin, the famed Shin’a’in who trained my father and older brother.”

“But not you?” asked the Hardornan Ambassador, and Selenay had the oddest sensation that he knew something about Karath that he would like very much for Karath to reveal. Something unflattering. . . .

Though why he would wish for such a thing—

Ambassadors are always jockeying for favor. I suppose he thinks that if Karath appears less than perfect, I will lose interest in him. Absurd.

The Prince frowned, and for just a moment, a shadow passed over his face. But in the next moment, he was all smiles again, and Selenay wondered if she had even seen it. “Alas, no,” he replied smoothly. “The Swordmistress retired and closed her school before I was old enough in my mother’s eyes to be sent away to it. And at any rate, from all I have heard, the lady is extremely ascetic in her ways and strict in her discipline; some might say, she is overzealous in both regards. And I—well—” he shrugged. “I am not much like my brothers. While I feel that every man of breeding should be adept at the use of arms, I fail to see why he should undergo the same rigorous training as someone who intends to live by them. Personally, I am afraid that the Swordmistress and I would be doomed to perpetually clash, so perhaps it is just as well. It would be a terrible scandal for a Prince of the blood to be thrown out of a school for mercenaries as an abject failure, or worse, a discipline problem.”