Silverdun frowned.
'You don't like him, do you?' said Jedron. His face looked sour.
'No, to be perfectly honest.'
'You'll like being him even less,' said Jedron. He muttered a syllable under his breath, and the automaton's glamour vanished, leaving it a dead machine again. Jedron covered it with the tarpaulin. Silverdun, in a nonetoo-subtle frame of mind, couldn't help thinking that it looked like a shroud.
'You have no idea what you've gotten yourself into, lad,' said Jedron, smiling.
On the dock, Than was pulling himself up out of the water, shaking seawater out of his hair. Jedron walked past Silverdun toward the dock. As he passed, he grabbed Silverdun's shoulder.
'Hold on,' he whispered, 'and listen closely.'
Jedron nodded toward the dock. 'Ilian is a traitor. We'll have to do something about him.'
Three weeks passed, during which Silverdun's training became a bit more what he'd expected upon his arrival. He learned to move without making a sound, though some of the means by which he was asked to do so seemed patently impossible. Feel the floorboards with your mind before you step on them? That would have been difficult even for someone with a well-developed Gift of Insight. Silverdun possessed the Gift, but had never studied it.
There was Silverdun's problem in a nutshell. Insight was a Gift of the Head, and Glamour was of the Heart. Silverdun had poured all of his efforts into Glamour as a youth because he had always fancied himself an artist. Insight was a Gift for research thaumaturges and alchemists. Men who sat in chairs and pondered. Silverdun's father had pushed him toward Insight as a more noble form of study. Silverdun knew that he could have been great at Insight. As it was, he was a mediocre Glamourist at best. But at least he'd gotten what he wanted.
In the mornings were the daily drills with Jedron. They drilled with knives and the petite arbalete, a small, short-range crossbow. Silverdun learned how to kill without making a sound, how to kill painfully, how to disable without killing, all with a calculating precision that teased at his scruples more and more with each passing day.
Silverdun took his meals with Ilian, who said little, but always seemed to keep an eye on him. Than was always nearby, always ready to assist in training, or stepping in to clean something, or bringing Jedron his meals. Jedron and Than appeared to have no relationship that Silverdun could divine. They almost never spoke to one another.
Silverdun asked about the other trainee a few more times. Ilian assured him that he was around somewhere, but that Silverdun wouldn't meet him until he was ready.
Every few days, Jedron would invite Silverdun to his study for an evening drink, but these evening drinks likely as not turned into hours-long study sessions. And Jedron never ceased to be amused by his habit of unexpectedly hurling blunt objects at Silverdun's head.
Silverdun had managed to reshape what was left of his bed into a makeshift pallet, which was far from the least comfortable arrangement he'd ever had (sleeping outdoors in the dead of midwinter after a full day's ride took the prize by a long shot), but was a far cry from paradise. Most nights, though, Silverdun was so tired that by the next morning he didn't remember his head hitting the pillow, and he rarely dreamed.
'We haven't talked about swords at all,' said Silverdun one day, after a long practice session of hand-to-hand fighting with Jedron. Silverdun was sweating and huffing, but Jedron wasn't even breathing heavily. Astonishing for a man of his age.
'No,' said Jedron. 'And we won't.'
'Why not?'
'A sword is a weapon of last resort in our work. If you find yourself drawing one, then you've done something terribly wrong.'
'And what if someone draws on me?'
'Throw a knife in his neck and run,' said Jedron, matter-of-factly.
'That hardly seems within the bounds of propriety,' said Silverdun.
'Propriety is a millstone around your neck, boy. The man with propriety is the one who dies first. The sooner you get used to that idea, the better off you'll be.'
'But,' began Silverdun. He paused, carefully choosing his words. Had he heard correctly? Jedron might as well have told him to get used to the idea of kicking puppies and slitting the throats of milkmaids. 'If our goal is to protect the Seelie way of life, how do we achieve the goal by abandoning the very thing that makes us Seelie?'
'Your precious propriety is for the safe ones. We provide the luxury of civilized ideas like personal honor by eschewing them.'
