in my forehead. I wondered if I would wear that stone for the rest of my life, allowing anyone who attuned a stone to it to find me no matter where I was. It occurred to me that if they were allies it would be no bad thing, but enemies could track me that way and so far only enemies had. I wondered what the Turned were doing; had Lentro spoken to the others? Had they heard him and were they now outraged and fighting the control that the last king's amulet had over them? Were they plotting and scheming to bring down the one who wore it? Had Kukran been burned to ash already or had whoever made the attempt failed? I put that thought aside as well. Whatever happened would happen and we would hear word of it in time.
Fields of hops, barley and wheat thinned to smaller and smaller patches, the country becoming wilder. We passed meadows empty of livestock and villages empty of people, both man and animal either slaughtered or fled.
In the first empty village we entered, Sapphire had reined in and slid easily off his horse, the wound in his arm not seeming to give him much trouble. I could not see it but guessed he had cleaned and bound it. No blood showed through to his coat, at least, and in any case it was his arm, not mine.
“What?” I asked him.
He pulled down the pack he had tied to his horse and began loosening the ties.
“Time to change,” he said.
I thought about it and nodded. “You speak Gerrian?”
He nodded and began pulling clothes from the pack, the kind of rough spun cloth that they wear in the north, where they cannot afford to trade for our superior materials and colors. Yellows, blues, dark reds, wool and supple leather. I got down and we changed, picking clothes that fit where possible, making do where they did not. I took a slug of whiskey, put the bottle carefully away.
“You don't look like one of us,” he said in the Alendi dialect.
“My mother was a slave but my father was a warrior who stole her from the south.”
“What is your name?”
“Pel Epmeran,” I said without pause.
He snorted. “The son of a slave.”
I smiled back. “The son of a freedman. Stay in character.”
“Tarl Epjarn,” he supplied. “You are giving me lessons now?”
I didn't answer but instead looked around the ruin of a village; seeing what I wanted I went and got two stout sticks the length of swords. “Speaking of lessons, ours should continue.”
“I watched you, you have the way of it.”
“I could be better.”
“We could all be better, there is always someone better. That's never the point. Just be aware, know, think, act, don't pay attention to the skill of the enemy, only know him and kill him and move on.”
“Train me.”
He started repacking and I didn't think he would say more, I thought the answer was no, but it was more complicated than that. “They took me when I was five,” he started his story as he slung the pack up on the horse and tied it there. “I was a gutter rat, a… what do you call it? A beggar. A thief. There were hundreds of us gutter rats preying on each other, starving, killing each other. We were free but no one wanted us. There was famine. I was surviving.” He swung up into the saddle. “Bring the toy swords.”
I blushed. It was the contempt he put into the words 'toy swords.' But I didn't protest. I just did as I was told. He was giving me something and I was determined to accept the gift.
“I'd already killed, twice, by then; older boys who tried to take food I'd suffered to get. I wasn't alone. There was civil war. There was famine. There were thousands of people in Opreth and every one of them was hungry to one extent or another. The enemy had hit us while we fought amongst ourselves and the countryside was ruled by nomads. They didn't want the cities. They were killing everyone outside them so more refugees were arriving every day. Like a thousand rats in a barrel we were turning on ourselves.”
We rode out of the village and I listened, enthralled. I had heard of Opreth. I knew what had happened in the country of Fortherria, far to the north and east, a land once as civilized as ours. Not now. The cities were ruins. The country ruled by nomads who let fertile lands lie fallow and ran cattle on them. The cities were near empty, I had read, thinly populated by wretches who farmed market gardens inside the city walls. In Opreth a population of half a million had reduced itself to less than a handful of thousands. Gang wars, starvation, cannibalism, they had literally consumed themselves while the nomads killed any who fled the nightmare. They were still there, those few thousands in their cities that the barbarians mostly ignored.
“The noble line of the nomads have a few traditions they maintain. Ku Mirt is one of them. They came into the cities and took some of us. They begin training at five, or thereabouts. They are not too fussy about age so long as the boys look five or so.”
For a good while, as we walked the horses, he was silent but I didn't say anything. I sensed he would tell me more as long as I left him to decide what he would tell.
“Food is the reward, and we were all hungry. A thousand of us went into Yurpron Fastness. They trained us hard and some died of the training, but the survivors killed the rest. Over twelve years I killed roughly a hundred of them. Maybe more. I didn't count. The competition to survive was fierce. We were told early that only twenty would leave there alive when we reached seventeen. That we would then serve the royal house as tools well made.” He glanced at me then and just a glimpse of those cold blue eyes told me what he was saying this for.
He had asked me once. 'Are you five?' And when I had said no he had told me, 'We begin training at five. No exceptions.' No exceptions.
“I can't teach you to be what I am,” he put it into words where none were needed. “I killed children when I was a child, boys when I was a boy and youths when I was a youth, and some of the teachers along the way. And every day the training; morning noon and night, training in ways you don't want to imagine and in things you would rather not know about, so no. No, I can't teach you to be me. And would not if I could. But I will teach you a little more of the sword, if you want to learn that.” And then he kicked his horse into a canter and after a long moment I followed.
97
“The point is faster than the edge but don't favor it, just use what's right in the instant. You are not showing off your skill for a crowd of admirers, you are just killing and every time you move someone should feel your blade in them. Groin and inner thigh, belly and neck are the best killing hits but don't pass up an opportunity, any time you cut them it hurts and they react, step back, twitch, wince, something, and then you kill them.” Sapphire kept up a running monologue as we worked. There was something about the way he used the practice sword that told me he had never held one in his hands before today. It was a frightening thought. When he had learned he had taken wounds any time he failed to block or duck a blow. “You use the term swordplay, the first time I heard the phrase I laughed till I cried, later and in private,” he was striking at me relentlessly and I knew why it had seemed to Kerral that he was holding back, it was because he was not actually trying to kill me. Having seen him in action I could see the difference. “There is no sense of play in killing, and if you have a sword in your hand instead of a rock what difference? Bare handed or a knife, a rope, a plate, a bottle, a brick, a scythe or a rake. There is no play in it, just get the sharp bit into their body and kill them.” I was defending desperately. “You focus too much on the sword, the sword is there but it isn't everything, you learned somewhere how to see that an enemy is going to move but you need more, you need to learn to know how and where he is going to move, and then use it to be out of that and have your blade in his body.” He didn't move his feet, sometimes for a minute at a time, then he would step to make sure he was close enough to hit me with the blade, which he did with monotonous regularity. “You were better than this with a real blade and a real enemy, everyone is more focused, if not more skilled when it matters. Usually less skilled but that doesn't matter, what matters is that you are not trying to kill me and if you don't you will learn nothing from this.” He stepped in past my sword as though it wasn't there and punched me in the plexus so hard that I went down hard on my back before I knew I'd been hit. “That's enough for now. Think about trying to kill me.”
I already was.
