The Reluctant Mage Read online

  He waited until the approaching dravas and their filthy, exhausted, terrified captives were past, and then he heaved up his guts in the road.

  Don’t believe what I showed you, Rafel. Don’t leave me alone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The clashing, clanging ring of heavy swords kissing echoed through the frosty air. Autumn was come early and stern to the Vale, with the blue sky wide and cold, the ground crisped white and all the red-leaved trees stripping themselves naked, shameless.

  Ewen the Younger spun himself clear of Tavin’s long reach, gloved fingers wrapped tight round the hilt of his training blade. The swordmaster was blowing hard, plumes of white breath smokily curling. The old seamed scar across his nose had pinked up and his broad, flat face was pink to match it.

  “Think you’re clever d’you, boy?” Tavin wheezed, taking a step back so he could assess the situation.

  Grinning, Ewen shook his head. “Don’t think it. I know it. Come on, old man. Have at me again.”

  “Hah!” Crooked teeth bared, Tavin held his broadsword one-handed and dragged his vambraced forearm across his sweat-stippled forehead. “Arrogant pup.”

  “Not arrogant. Confident.”

  “Is that so? Well, let’s see how confident you are when you’re sprawled on your arse! Huzzah!”

  Ewen laughed and met him blade for blade. The shock of impact ran through his fingers and his tempered wrists, through the sibling bones of his forearms and up to his shoulders. Beneath his booted feet the cold-nipped grass of the tiltyard flattened and tore, clods of dirt coming loose as he clashed in mock combat with a man taller and heavier than he would ever be. But that was all right. He’d been crossing swords with Tavin since he was fourteen, and after ten years he’d learned a trick or two. Besides, in fighting above his weight and reach he trained himself to survive against uneven odds: a strategy not to be sneezed at in these dark and difficult times.

  Stroke, parry, stroke, deflect. Stroke, parry, stroke, deflect. Blood burning, breath rasping, muscles lithely obedient, he fixed his gaze to Tavin’s deep-set brown eyes and surrendered conscious thought to the strangely dreamy otherworld of swordplay, where instinct was king.

  The sun was not long risen. It meant they were alone in their training, which was how he liked it. The days of a pompous and ceremonial court were long dead and buried and not even Vharne’s release from mage bondage had brought them back. He felt no sorrow for it. Empty talk was a waste of air. Deeds mattered. Only deeds. Perhaps if his mother had lived, his father’s court might at least have found its bright clothes and smiles and put them on again. But she’d died, so much for gaiety. And freedom hadn’t freed them from anything, it turned out, so the court’s colours remained sombre and every morning, very soon after daybreak, he met with Tavin in the tiltyard and they bashed at each other with long, heavy swords.

  Round and across the tiltyard they fought each other, seeking that one moment of opportunity, looking to force the happy misstep that would see an opponent disarmed, or fallen onto his back and asking to be split wide chin to balls. His muscles were complaining loudly now. Teeth gritted, eyes stinging with sweat, Ewen ignored the pain and blocked Tavin’s bone-shuddering blows. He wore a padded jerkin and their training blades were blunted but even so, if he made a mistake he’d pay a steep price for it. Tavin said a man who trained safe died unprepared and he had his reputation to think of, so he never went easy just because he sparred with the king’s elder son. The swordmaster took even mock-fighting seriously, never letting himself think it was only a game. And he didn’t let his pupils think of training that way, either. No respecter of rank, respecting naught but the sword, Tavin wasn’t afraid to use the flat of his blade like a cane and mark the hide of a king’s son who offended in this way or that.

  “Come on, come on, luffkin, keep your mind on the business!” the swordmaster shouted. “Woolly-noggined, you are, boy, and that’ll be the death of you!”

  To make his point he feinted then brought his sword up, around and over in a brute-force swinging arc. Ewen parried, caught back-footed, misstepped and lost his balance.

  “Hah!” shouted Tavin, as he hooked him round his booted left ankle and jerked him off his feet to smack the tiltyard ground with his spine and skull. “Turtle!”

  Winded and groaning, seeing stars but still with his sword gripped tight, Ewen squinted up at him. Tavin was grinning, all the empty spaces in his gums on show, short badger-streaked hair plastered to his skull with sweat.

  “Think I’ve got a noggin to spare, do you, Swordmaster?” he said, the words coming in fits and starts as his emptied lungs spasmed.

  “Didn’t see the harm,” said Tavin, still grinning. “Seeing you weren’t hardly using it.” Bending, he held out his hand. “Boy wants help standing, does he?”

  “Boy’s not a boy,” he retorted, and whipped his sword up so its point rested at Tavin’s crotch. “Steady, now.”

  Tavin froze. “Oh, now that’s dirty, that is. There’s still some life in the old pecker yet, son. We’ll call it quits and even. How’s that?”

  Boy. Son. Only Tavin could get away with such familiarity. He’d earned the liberty, and more besides. Vharne would be a sadder and sorrier place this day without the swordmaster’s staunch presence these past bleak years. The sorcerer’s grip on the kingdom might well have loosened, but other troubles crowded in his wake.

  Ewen lowered his blade. “Quits and even.”

  “Hah!” Tavin flexed his fingers. “That’s a lad.”

  Pleased with himself, he grasped Tavin’s hand and helped haul himself upright. But that wasn’t the end of his training session, oh no. Swordmaster Tavin was a stickler and a tyrant. At the start and finish of every session there were drills, drills and more drills. Not a man in a fight for his life there ever was but didn’t lose a little or a lot of his mind, said Tavin, what with the screaming and the bleeding and the rest of it, so he needed something to fall back on when his mind let him down.

  And in Tavin’s world, that meant drills.

  Lifting his blade, Ewen gave Tavin a respectful student’s nod and waited for the first command. He knew men who resented drills, but he wasn’t one of them. There was a comfort in the sound of the swordmaster’s steady voice as it barked the set patterns of swordplay passed down from master to pupil for years and years beyond remembering. Pacing steadily from one side of the tiltyard to the other and back, over and over, strongly and smoothly flowing from position to position, he felt the separate sweepings of his sword as much a part of him as his shoulders or his knees or the long bones in his thighs.

  That was another reason why he welcomed sword drills with Tavin. With every thought and all his energy poured into the physical, into the sword in his hands and the perfection of his form, with his will bent on earning Tavin’s praise and not his sharp displeasure, there was no time to dwell on uncertainty and the gnawing fear in his gut.

  Something dark is waking beyond the Vale. I can feel it.

  “Ewen!” snapped the swordmaster. “Elbows up. Up. And keep your chin tucked in. You’re woolly again, boy. Eager for a taste of my blade on your backside, are you?”

  He shot Tavin a dirty look then wrenched his mind to its proper place. Blanked it to everything save the sweep of his blade from guard left to guard right to overhead extend to underhand retract back to overhead round to cross-body left hip into cross-body right hip back to overhead extend and start again from the beginning without a pause. Faster and faster Tavin called the drills until he was at a killing battle pace, his phantom opponent a madman. Time blurred and thought blurred with it. He was running sweat, he was breathing fire, he was a sword and he hungered for blood.

  But the enemy was whispers, and rumours, and shadow.

  Can’t kill a whisper. Can’t run a rumour through or decapitate a shadow.

  “All right!” Tavin said at last. “That’s enough for today.”

  Fetched up against the tiltyard’s solid wood enclosing
wall, Ewen thudded his shoulders to the weathered boards and let his swordpoint drop to rest on his right boot. His heart pounded so hard his ribs ached, and his throat was raw with his gasping.

  “Curse you, Tavin, I’m nigh on half-dead.”

  Tavin’s reply was to pluck the training sword from his lax right hand, then sink probing fingers into the muscles of his upper arm. The bite of it made him shout and try to pull away but Tavin’s grip was like iron.

  “Hold still,” the swordmaster grunted. “It’s a little griping. Women in childbirth hold their tongues in more pain.”

  “If we could but swap places, Tavin, you’d not call it ‘a little griping’,” he retorted, then sank his teeth into his lower lip as the swordmaster’s fingers probed down to the bone. “Spirit curse you!”

  Tavin prodded a moment longer, then let go and clapped his shoulder instead. “You’re over-using that arm again, Ewen.”

  “Tav, it’s right-handed I am,” he protested. “What do you—”

  “Is it blind I am, not to see it?” Tavin snapped, and cuffed him. “If I was blind, I’d see it. Right-favoured you’re fighting, and how’s that to the good? You’ve got two hands, boy, and it’s time you used both of them. Come tomorrow you’ll be a left-handed swordsman ’til I say elsewise.”

  He groaned. “Tavin—”

  Up went Tavin’s clenched fist. “It’s your swordmaster I am, and I’ve spoken.”

  Barracks discipline killed the impulse to argue. “Swordmaster,” he said, and that was that.

  Come tomorrow, Ewen the Younger would hold his sword left-handed.

  “Good,” said Tavin, and held out the training sword. “So it’s hot water and a liniment you need on that arm, you do.”

  “Liniment,” he scoffed, taking back his weapon. “That’s for horses. Stick to swordplay, you should.”

  “Stick to sticking a sword in you,” Tavin snapped. “It’s stinking like a horse, you are. Come on. Not too fancy for a barracks bath, are you, boy?”

  Tavin could be such a cross-grained man. “When did I turn up my nose at a barracks bath?”

  Taking a fistful of shirtsleeve, Tavin tugged him along. “I misremember. I’m sure you did once.”

  “Well, yes, maybe when I was six and the water was cold!” he said. “Save your long memory for sword drills and old skirmishes.”

  “Snippety snip,” said Tavin, and flung an arm about his shoulders. “You keep talking, boy, and the water’ll be cold again, you’ll see.”

  Companionably irritable with each other, they abandoned the tiltyard and retreated to the barracks. Awake now, the soldier-heart of the old court buzzed with vigorous voices and dogs snarling over bones and horses stamping in stables. Men tumbled out of cots into wool and leather and boots, and from there to barracks duties while they waited for breakfast to cook. Their swordplay came late in the day, once other soldierly tasks were completed. Seeing their prince and their swordmaster side by side and amiably bickering, they grinned and nodded and saluted with clenched fists. Ewen saluted in reply, at home here in these barracks. At home with the rough men and the rough life of a man and his sword. For him it was a kinder place than the cold stone castle where memory slept and woke and slept again, never satisfied unless it was causing pain.

  He left his and Tavin’s training blades in the armoury for later cleaning, then joined the swordmaster in the stout-walled, lamplit bath house. The air beneath its low roof was warm and damp, its flagstoned floor crowded with wooden tubs and huge iron pots of water over burning coals, heating. Presiding over the sparse luxury was wizened old Shyvie, who kept order in the place with younger men and brats to help when he yelled for them.

  Tavin was already nose-deep in a tub, his scarred, bent knees poking out of the water. He had soap in his cropped hair and was vigorously scrubbing his scalp, just like an old woman. Ewen smothered a grin, pulled off his boots and socks, then stripped out of his padded jerkin and his long-sleeved wool shirt and his cotton undershirt and his leather trews. Leaving them haphazard in a pile on the bath house’s wooden bench, he climbed into the other tub Shyvie had seen filled with steaming water, wincing and hissing as the heat bit his cooled-down skin.

  Tavin rang the bath house bell. “You might want to nip up yonder and fetch the Younger some clothes as aren’t wringing with sweat,” he suggested to the barracks brat who’d come running. “Take his mucky ones to the castle laundress while you’re about it—but leave his boots behind.”

  “Yes, Swordmaster,” piped the brat.

  Ewen watched the lad stagger away under his burden of dirty, sweat-soaked clothes. “You spoil me, Tavin.”

  A bucket of rinsing water was sat beside Tavin’s tub. “Spoil the Vale, more like it,” he said, reaching for it. “You’ve got the morning in Hall with the king, yes? Coop you in a room ’til midday in those clothes and there’ll be folk passing out from the stink every which way you look, there will.”

  Laughing, Ewen tugged off the thin leather thong tying back his hair, dropped it to the floor, then let himself slide beneath the surface of his bath. Eyes closed, he revelled in the heat and darkness, holding his breath until he could no longer ignore his body’s demands for air.

  “Soap?” he said to Tavin, who’d sloshed his head free of suds and was now scrubbing his back with a knot of rags tied to a long wooden handle.

  The swordmaster stopped scrubbing and lobbed him the soap pot. His hair was long enough now it needed a large scooped handful. To keep the king his father pleased he should cut it—and he would. Most like. One of these days.

  Done with lathering, he emptied his own rinsing bucket over his soapy hair, spat out suds then looked across to Tavin. The swordmaster’s brooding face killed his careless training question stone dead.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Elbows braced on his tub’s sides, chin sunk to his chest, Tavin frowned at his wriggling toes. “There’s a whisper of strife. Tickled my ear late last night, it did. You need to hear it, boy. And the king too.”

  He sat up. “If the king needs to hear it, Tavin, then tell the king.”

  “It’s all morning you’re spending with him, isn’t it? You can tell him,” said Tavin, still frowning.

  Ewen stifled a sigh. Not so much the length of the tiltyard had his father the king and Swordmaster Tavin ever walked in step, side by side. The king’s father, Ewen the Elder, had made Tavin barracks swordmaster. By the time he died, seven months later, every barracks man was ready to sword himself following Tavin. Ewen the Elder’s son Murdo knew better than to fiddle with the barracks, so Tavin stayed swordmaster—and they tossed words at each other only when it was needful. Beyond barracks business they did their best not to cross paths.

  Why that was, he’d never found out.

  “Tav, you rile me,” he said. “When Padrig and I tread toes you knock our heads together until we’re put straight. It’s knocking your head to the king’s that’s needed now, I’m thinking.”

  “Try it, boy,” Tavin growled.

  No, he didn’t think he would. “You should tell me why you and the king clash swords.”

  “If it was business of yours I’d mention it here or there,” said Tavin, fiercely scowling. “Do you want to know what I know or do you want to poke at me ’til I bite off your finger? Choose you should, and quickly. I’ve a day waiting with work in it.”

  The swordmaster’s barrel body was hooped and criss-crossed with scars. In his time he’d hunted boar and stag, skirmished the kingdom’s borders and ridden down desperate men charged as outlaws. He’d killed a beast, the only man in Vharne to do it. Never did the swordmaster startle at shadows.

  So if Tav’s uneasy…

  “Tell me,” he said. “I want to know.”

  Instead of answering, Tavin ducked deep into his own bath water, splashing it onto the flagstoned floor. Exasperated, Ewen waited for him to come back up.

  “Tavin,” he said, once the swordmaster was breathing air again, and gave hi
s voice a little weight. “I’m the king’s son. I can’t pretend I never heard you.”

  “Boyde came in from riding the rough country,” said Tavin, after a silence. “It’s a good man, he is. Not fanciful. Sees what he sees and doesn’t see more than that, or pretend to.”

  Ewen felt his belly tighten. “I know Boyde. What did he see? Share the news, Tav. Don’t be a selfish man, you.”

  “Riding the rough, like I say, he came across three brain-rotted wanderers,” Tavin said, keeping his voice low in case Shyvie or one of his brats were anywhere close enough to hear him. “Out of their wits, babbling and drooling, like they do. He put them down, kindly. They crossed the border from Manemli, he says.”

  A shiver prickled across his wet shoulders. “Is he sure? We’ve had wanderers over to us from Iringa—seven in less than a month. That’s a worry on its own, that is. But Manemli?”

  “Boyde’s a canny man,” said Tavin. “He’s sure. Seen a stripe-haired Iringan ever, have you?”

  There was no such thing as a stripe-haired Iringan.

  Ewen reached over his tub’s side for the soap. It was slippery, like his thoughts. Scowling at his scooped handful, he dropped the jar back to the wooden bath stool, soaped his chest and under his arms then grabbed a bath cloth and scrubbed them free of grime and sweat. Scrubbed the rest of his body after, not looking at Tavin. Not voicing those thoughts.

  I knew something was twisting. I felt it in my dreams.

  He ducked himself into the water, then came up streaming. “So it’s wanderers from Manemli and Iringa now. When there’s been no Manemlin set foot in Vharne since the end of sorcery. What do you say it means, Swordmaster?”

  Tavin stared at the bath house’s timbered ceiling. Lamplight gleamed on his wet hair and skin, and plunged his eyes into masking shadow. “The north’s stirring, son. Ghosts are on their feet and walking, I say.”

  “What kind of ghosts?” he said, his belly tight again. “Not sorcery, Tav. That’s behind us, that is. Dorana’s dead.”