remember he had argued with my mother the night before, which was strange because they never argued, in fact they rarely spoke at all. In the morning she wasn’t at breakfast and I wasn’t allowed to say goodbye when the cart came for me. I haven’t seen her since.”
They lapsed into silence, Vaelin’s line of thought leading him to questions he felt were best unasked.
“ I know what you’re thinking,” Nortah said.
“ I wasn’t thinking…”
“ Yes you were. And you’re right. My father sent me to the Order because you were sent here by your father. I told you they were rivals but I didn’t tell you all of it. My father hated the Battle Lord, loathed him. For a while it seemed all he could talk about was how his position was constantly undermined by a gutter born butcher. It irked him greatly that your father was so popular with the people, a thing my father could never achieve. He wasn’t one of them, he was high born, but your father was a commoner, risen to greatness on his own merits. When he sent you here it was a great symbol of devotion to the Faith and the Realm, a public sacrifice that could only be matched one way.”
“ I’m sorry…”
“ Don’t apologise. You are as much a victim of your father as I am of mine. It took me years to reckon it, why he had done it, one day it just popped into my head. He gave me up to better his position at Court.” He gave a wry, humourless smile. “Our dear King, it seems, cared little for his gesture.”
I am not my father’s victim, Vaelin thought. My mother sent me here, to protect me. He left the thought unsaid, suspecting Nortah would find it difficult to accept.
“ It’s ironic don’t you think?” Nortah asked after a moment. “If we’d never been given to the Order most likely we’d have become enemies, like our fathers. And our sons would have been enemies, maybe even their sons, and on and on it would have gone. At least this way it ends before it could begin.”
“ You sound almost content to be in the Order.”
“ Content? No, just accepting. This is my life now. Who can say what the future will bring?”
Scratch yawned, his teeth gleaming in the firelight, then moved to Vaelin’s side, snuggling close before settling down to sleep. Vaelin patted his flank and lay back on his bed roll, looking for shapes in the vast array of stars above and waiting for sleep to claim him.
“ I… feel I owe you a debt, brother,” Nortah said.
“ A debt?”
“ For my life.”
Vaelin realised Nortah was trying to thank him, in the only way Nortah could thank anyone. Not for the first time he wondered what kind of man Nortah would have been had his father not sent him here. A future First Minister? A Sword of the Realm? Battle Lord even? But he doubted he would have been the kind of man who gave his son away just to better his rival.
“ I don’t know what the future will bring,” he told his brother eventually. “But I suspect you’ll have many chances to repay the debt.”
It was a curious fact of life in the Order that the older they got the harder their training became. It seemed their skills had to be raised ever higher, honed like a sword blade. And so as autumn became winter their sword practice doubled, then tripled until it seemed it was all they did. Master Sollis became their only master, the others now distant figures preoccupied with younger charges. The sword became their life. Why was no mystery. Next year would bring the Test of the Sword when they would face three condemned men, sword in hand, and triumph or die.
Sword practice began after the seventh hour and continued for the rest of the day with a brief interlude for food and the relief of a short re-acquaintance with the bow or their horses. In the morning Master Sollis would show them a sword scale, flashing through the dance of thrusts, parries and strokes in the space of a few heartbeats before commanding them to copy it. Failure to repeat the scale exactly earned a full pelt run around the practice ground. Afternoons saw them swap their swords for wooden replicas and assail each other in contests that left them all with an increasingly spectacular collection of bruises.
Vaelin knew himself to be the best swordsman among them. Dentos was master of the bow, Barkus unarmed combat, Nortah the finest rider and Caenis knew the wild like a wolf, but the sword was his. He could never explain the feeling it gave him, the sense that the blade was part of him, an extension of his arm, his closeness to it accentuating his perception in combat, reading an opponent’s moves before they were made, parrying blows that would have felled another, finding a way past defences that should have baffled him. It wasn’t long before Master Sollis stopped matching him against the others.
“ You’ll fight me from now on,” he told Vaelin as they faced each other, wooden swords ready.
“ An honour master,” Vaelin said.
Sollis’s sword cracked against his wrist, the wooden blade flying from his grasp. Vaelin tried to step backwards but Sollis was too fast, the shaft of ash thudding into his midriff, forcing the air from his lungs as he collapsed to the ground.
“ You should always respect an opponent,” Sollis was telling the others as Vaelin fought to contain his rising gorge. “But not too much.”
With winter came Frentis’s Test of the Wild and they gathered in the courtyard to see him off with a few choice words of advice.
“ Stay out of caves,” said Nortah.
“ Kill and eat everything you can find,” Caenis told him.
“ Don’t lose your flint,” Dentos advised.
“ If there’s a storm,” Vaelin said, “stay in your shelter and don’t listen to the wind.”
Only Barkus had nothing to say. Finding Jennis’s body during his own Test was still a raw memory and he confined his farewell to a soft pat on Frentis’s shoulder.
“ Lookin’ forward to it, I am,” Frentis told them brightly, hefting his pack. “Five days outside the walls. No practice, no canings. Can’t wait.”
“ Five days of cold and hunger,” Nortah reminded him.
Frentis shrugged. “Been hungry before. Cold too. Reckon I’ll get used to it again quick enough.”
Vaelin was struck by how strong Frentis had become in the two years since his joining. He was now almost as tall as Caenis and his shoulders seemed to grow broader by the day. Added to the change in his body was the change in his character, the whine that coloured his speech as a boy had mostly disappeared and he approached every challenge with a blind confidence in his own abilities. It was no surprise that he had emerged as leader of his group, although his reaction to criticism was often instant anger and occasional violence.
They watched him climb into the cart with the other boys. Master Hutril snapped the reins and steered the cart through the gate, Frentis waving with a broad grin on his face.
“ He’ll make it,” Caenis assured Vaelin.
“ Too right he will,” Dentos said. “He’s the type that comes back fatter than when he went out.”
The days passed slowly as they practised and nursed their bruises, Vaelin’s concern for Frentis growing with every dawn. Four days after the boy’s departure it had begun to dominate his thoughts, dulling his sword skills and leaving him with livid bruises he barely noticed. He couldn’t shake the nagging knowledge that something was wrong. It was a familiar feeling by now, a shadow on his thoughts he had grown to trust, but stronger now, nagging, persistent, like a tune he couldn’t quite remember.
When the fifth day passed he found himself hovering near the gates, clutching his cloak about him as he searched the gathering dark for sign of the cart bringing Frentis back to the safety of the Order House.
“ What are we doing here?” Nortah asked, his face for once made ugly by the pinching chill of a winter’s night. The others were back in their tower room. Today’s practice had been hard, harder even than they were used to, and they had cuts to tend before the evening meal.
“ I’m waiting for Frentis,” Vaelin replied. “Go inside if you’re cold.”
“ Didn’t say I was cold,” Nortah muttered but stayed put.
Finally, as the clear winter sky darkened to reveal its stars, the cart came into view, Master Hutril guiding it towards the gate, bearing four charges, three less than had left with him five days before. Vaelin knew even before the drays’ shoes clattered on the courtyard cobbles that Frentis was not among them.
“ Where is he?” he demanded of Master Hutril as he reined in.
Master Hutril ignored the discourtesy and gave Vaelin a rigidly neutral glance. “Wasn’t there,” he said,
