Book 6: Chapter 49 - Tests within Tests (RAW) (Patreon)

Chapter 49 - Tests Within Tests

The straight tree is cut for its usefulness; the crooked tree for daring to grow untamed.

- Aphorism from the Land of Streams.

The gatehouse swallowed sound and light came in thin blades through slits in the walls. Chains thicker supporting the portcullis than a man’s wrist vanished into the ceiling dark. The Knight Jacques led a few steps ahead, enough to show authority and that he held command. To me, it was all futile posturing, the actions of lesser men pantomining their betters.

Behind us, the guards resumed their places as though nothing had happened at all, with a shrug of their shoulders.

We emerged into the inner bailey.

The place breathed steel and war. Hammers rang from a forge somewhere to the left near one of the corner towers. The dry clack of wooden practice swords from a yard ahead. Men hauling sacks. Boys running messages. A groom leading a destrier, black with sweat. Birds burst off a roofline when someone shouted near the stables. The walls rose on every side, old and thick, enclosing us in a sheath of well-placed rock.

My guide watched me watching it.

“You’ve the look of a man looking for something,” Jacques mused, turning around only slightly.

“I’ve the look of a man with eyes,” I replied. It was an inane answer to his inane statement.

It would not be long before he and the greater part of his men would be reduced to numbers on my Status page.

Still, he grunted. Not approval. Not disapproval. Just something noncommittal.

He led me across the yard at a steady pace. A few heads turned our way. More turned toward the armor. Good harness drew the eye here, the way gold did in poorer places. It implied training, inheritance, but with my face, they would not believe experience. Still, men who wore steel like this were seldom nobodies, even when they claimed to be. And this was the steel that I viewed as a more modest set.

We passed a row of training dummies split open and stuffed with old straw gone black from the weather. Passed a block where sides of beef hung half-butchered, red and wet and shining under flies. Passed two men at the whetstone, drawing edges across it with the slow patience of monks at prayer.

At the mouth of the practice yard, he stopped.

A knot of men worked there under the eye of one broad-backed brute in a sleeveless gambeson dark with sweat. He had a neck like a stump and arms corded from wrist to shoulder with old work and older violence. One ear was little more than a ragged crescent. A blunted waster rested across his shoulder, though the way he held it made it look no less dangerous than sharpened steel.

He was shouting at a boy old enough to bleed and young enough to think that made him a man.

“No, not like that. Again. If your wrist bends there, I may as well hand you over to the crows to feed on.”

The boy tried again. The brute knocked the wooden blade out of his hand so hard it spun through the dirt

“There,” Jacques declared, pointing. “Armsmaster Heval.”

The big man turned at the sound of our approach. His eyes landed on the Knight first, then on me, then dropped at once to the armor. His expression did not soften. Men like him had seen too much fraud to be impressed by polish alone.

The Knight beside me folded his arms. “Found this one at the gate asking for service,” he added. “Claims he can fight.”

The Armsmaster looked at me without blinking. “Claims are cheap, Jacques Boulle,” he half-growled.

The yard had gone quieter by then. Quieter in the way a kennel grows quiet when a new dog is thrown in.

I shifted the halberd from my shoulder and planted it next to a water barrel. Heval’s gaze dropped to it, then rose back to my face.

“Well then,” he barked, tossing me a practice sword. “Let’s see what your steel remembers.”

I caught it easily, casually. I smiled, adding, “One more if you will be so kind.”

His eyes narrowed, “Cocky git aren’t ya? Find, but you’d be better served asking for a shield. We haven’t seen none of that fancy dreck with two swords in a while,” he answered with a shrug from his mountainous shoulders. “There, take another and be quick about it.”

I picked up another slightly shorter waster. The boy who had been practicing watched me like a lizard that had been denied its place in the sun. Such a shame, I thought, he should be enjoying what little time he had left, not wasting his thoughts and energy on pointless enmity.

Still, it would be a waste not to use him, I decided to myself. “Will he be joining in, too?” I asked nonchalantly, nodding towards the other youth as I excuted a casual flourish with both practice weapons.

“Bold one, aren’t you?” Heval said with a grunt.

I did not deign to give him an answer. The Armsmaster answer was another grunt and gesture to the other youth, and together they circled me in the practice yard. 

I noted the sun in my eyes from the gap between the clouds. Then the boy’s grip, too tight and too high on the hilt. Then Heval’s feet, square and patient, set like a butcher at his block. A ring formed around us without anyone being told to make one.

The boy came first. Young men mistake let eagerness take the place of courage. He rushed in with a shout and an overhead cut that began in his shoulders so loudly even a drunk could have read it. I stepped half a pace aside, lifted my left-hand blade, and let his waster glance off it with a hard crack. He had more strength than sense, which was common enough, but to me it might as well have been a light touch. Before he could recover, I snapped the shorter blade into his ribs.

Wood thudded into padding and flesh. He yelped and staggered sideways, breath spilling out of him in a shocked grunt. The strike was not hard enough to break anything, but it was hard enough to deliver my message. Weak enough to hide my true power.

The men around us barked laughter. Cruel, easy laughter of long familiarity. The sort men reserve for the young when they are reminded how little they know.

Heval did not laugh. He moved and there was no roar or warning. One moment he was watching, the next the blunt waster on his shoulder was in both hands and scything toward my head with ugly efficiency. I pretended to get both of my blades just in time. I gave them all the impression that it felt like stopping a falling beam. To me he might as well have been toddler, his speed akin to the slowest and dullest of creatures.

I gave ground, intent on cementing my deception. I needed to show skill and competence. I could not show that I was a weapon looking for a target.

Heval pressed, not fast but relentless, each strike coming with the calm of habit. A strike and thrust to drive me right. Another slash to catch me as I corrected. Then a short thrust at the face that was more insult than killing blow, the sort meant to make a fool flinch and open himself. I knocked it aside with the longer blade and chopped low with the other toward his lead knee at a speed that was believable.

He pulled the leg back just enough.

The boy had found his breath and his pride. He came in again from my left, angry now, which made him even more predictable than before. He slashed at my side while Heval advanced from the front, trying to trap me.

It was, if I was generous, a reasonable and it might even have worked on a lesser man.

But I was not a lesser man. I had humbled would-be legends and fought things that had existed only in nightmare. No, enough of such thoughts, not yet. The magic within pleaded to be used, to end this farce in a glorious burst.

No, I cried out within as I yielded the center and moved where the boy had been, not where he was, shouldering past the wake of his missed cut and turning so that Heval had to check his swing or stove his own pupil’s head in. The yard erupted in jeers. The boy flushed red under the dirt on his face.

“Use your eyes, whelp,” Heval snarled, and clipped the boy across the shoulder with his own waster hard enough to sting. 

The boy rushed me a third time, smarter now, feinting high before cutting low toward my thigh. Better. Someone had beaten a few lessons into him, even if they had not stuck. I dropped my point, caught the low line, and turned the blow aside. At the same instant I felt, rather than saw, Heval closing in. Blind-Fighting was a useful skill and situations like this helped to to give it a chance to rise.

A simple block with one waster, followed by a kick that sent to bigger man to the floor, showing a sliver of my true power. A few of the watching men laughed harder at that. A few did not laugh at all. The Armsmaster looked at me suspiciously from the floor, it was a move that went beyond skill, but to contest it would make him look like a bleating fool.

Heval got up to his feet and shoved the boy aside with one meaty hand and came at me alone now, whatever amusement he might have had gone from his face. He swung from the right. I caught it on the longer blade. Next, he reversed his stroke and hammered low. Slowling my speed deliberately, I got the shorter waster down in time, but only just, and the strike skidded into my armored thigh.

From the force of it, I knew he was not pulling his blows. There was no need.

I circled, pretending to breathe harder, idly noting that I had barely spent ten points of Stamina. The let my borrowed practice swords lie lower, to make them look heavier than they had moments ago. 

Heval saw it and came forward with the confidence of a man who had broken plenty of hopefuls. He cut high. I parried. He stamped in and hooked his waster down over mine, trying to bind one blade and smash through with sheer mass. I abandoned the trapped weapon at once, let the pressure take it low, and stabbed with the other toward his face.

He turned his head enough that the tip only rapped against his bad ear. Still it was enough to count and a red line of temper came into his expression, stark and maginificent. Throwning his waster aside, he answered my touch with a shove that would have knocked a smaller man flat, expecting me to stumble back and lose my footing in the churned dirt. He was to be sorely disappointed as I had learned of balance and strong stance from Fen. A murmur went through the ring. 

Heval stepped back first and his chest rose and fell twice. Three times. Sweat darkened the neck of his gambeson. His eyes stayed on mine, weighing not the strike alone but the road that had led to it. Then he spat into the dust between us.

“That touch was yours,” he said.

The boy, still off to the side and trying to pretend he had not been made a fool of before half the bailey, opened his mouth as if to protest. 

Heval cut him off without looking. “Shut it.”

Thankfully, he did just that. Men hate being shown up before their inferiors, and pride makes more corpses than hunger. I could feel every eye in the yard on me. Measuring. Revising. The quick ugly arithmetic of rank and threat.

Heval rolled his wrist once, then held out his hand. I gave him both of the practice swords.

He glanced at both, then at the halberd by the barrel. “You move well enough. Better than most who come here with polished steel and a noble’s chin. Not pretty, though.”

Move well enough? I moved like a serpent striking. The Armsmaster praise was meant to salvage what little pride he had left. Still, I would allow him this as there was a good chance he would be dying soon.

“Pretty men die too,” I answered dryly, a vague attempt at quick wit.

That drew a few grins. Even Heval’s mouth twitched, though only for an instant.

Sir Jacques, who had watched the whole thing with his arms folded and the look of a man regretting that his guess had not been vindicated, finally pushed off the fence-post he had leaned against. “Can he stand in the line?” he asked.

Heval looked me over one more time, slow as a knife skinning hide. “He can,” the Armsmaster replied. “And if he keeps his head, he might keep breathing longer than a month.”

A “fair” endorsement in a place like this. The boy stooped to retrieve his weapon, cheeks burning. 

I crossed to the water barrel, lifted the dipper, and drank. The water was warm and tasted faintly of iron and old wood. 

Behind me, the yard slowly exhaled and found its voice again. Practice resumed. Wagers were quietly settled. Someone mocked the boy in a whisper just loud enough to be heard. Someone else asked my name.

“It is a good thing that the Lord is present and is holding court. He will likely wish to see you… he does not care for being presentable. And your gear is fine enough,” Jacques offered, his eyes narrowing as his brow furrowed into deep lines.

Doubt had not taken root too deeply there, overtaken mostly by the promise of a warrior that was already equipped and ready for war. My performance had been, though far from exemplary, satisfactory. I went to take my halberd, resting it once more on my shoulder.

I let a genuine smile cross my face despite this whole encounter garnering me only five points of experience. “Well then, it would be boorish to keep the Lord de Savant waiting, Sir Jacques. Please lead on, I look forward to meeting the lord which I seek to pledge my sword.”