Fernwick, Eastreach. Seven years later. Late winter.
The wooden sword struck Owen Harlow on the shoulder, at exactly the spot where it had struck a ten-year-old boy seven years before.
“Ow,” said Owen.
“Too slow,” said Ren.
The old captain lowered his practice sword and rubbed his shoulder. His hair had gone completely grey by now, almost white at the temples, and the lines around his eyes had grown deeper. But his eyes themselves had stayed the same. Calm, watchful, and at the moment rather annoyed.
“I wasn’t too slow. You were too fast.”
“That’s the same thing, just seen from the other side.”
Owen stared at him. Then he snorted, and it sounded suspiciously like a suppressed laugh. “You’re an unbearable brat, do you know that?”
“I had a good teacher.”
“The teacher was unbearable too. That’s no excuse.”
Ren grinned and lowered the wooden sword.
It was early, so early that the sky above the mountains in the east was only just turning grey. The training ground behind the hut was covered in trampled snow, and their breath hung in white clouds in the cold air. Somewhere in the village a cock crowed, too late and without conviction. Beyond the palisade the sheep were bleating.
Seven winters.
Ren was seventeen. He had grown, in the last three years so fast that Owen had had to buy him new boots twice and had complained about it as if someone had hacked off his leg. He was now half a head taller than his teacher. Slim, but not thin. Seven years of the sword, of chopping wood and building fences, of carrying sheep over snowy slopes when one had strayed, had made his body into something that moved like a drawn bowstring. He had his father’s black hair, which he tied at the nape of his neck with a leather cord, and his mother’s grey eyes.
And he had scars.
One on his chin, from the first time he had practised against Owen with a real blade. One on his right hand, across the knuckles. A few smaller ones on his ribs, which he owed to the orcs who had come over the palisade in the third winter.
And the one on his left arm.
He always wore a leather bracer over it, from wrist to elbow, even in summer, even when it was hot. The people in the village took it for a habit, a quirk of Owen Harlow’s quiet nephew. No one had ever asked what was underneath.
That was just as well.
Four years earlier.
“Fire is patient,” Owen had said.
It had been summer, a hot, dusty afternoon, and they had sat on a flat rock high above the village where no one could see them. Ren was thirteen. By now he could hold the flame for as long as he liked, and it was no longer small and trembling but large and bright and so hot that he could bring a bucket of water to the boil with it. He had believed he was good.
“Fire wants to burn,” Owen went on. “But it takes its time about it. It eats what it finds, and when it finds nothing more, it goes out. That’s how every fire mage thinks. That’s how I think too.”
“And my father?”
“Your father did it differently.” Owen looked down at the valley, not at Ren. He never liked talking about Aldwyn. When he did, it was as if he were lifting a stone out of a river, carefully, so that nothing broke. “We were in our second year at the Academy. He sat in the library night after night, over old books he’d had sent from Ravenhold. Your family’s records. I laughed at him. I told him he’d do better to sleep than ruin his eyes on the scribblings of dead grandfathers.”
“And?”
“And one night he woke me, in the middle of the night, and dragged me out to the training yard. In my nightshirt. I was so angry I nearly hit him.” A twitch at the corners of his mouth. “Then he raised his hand, and there was a spark. A single, small, golden spark. It shone like a star. It was only years later that it turned blue, the way you know it.”
Ren held his breath.
“He explained to me how he’d done it. That night and many others after it. I could never do it. I don’t have the blood for it. But I listened. I kept every word.” He turned to Ren. “And now I’m telling it to you.”
He explained it to him. That you must not let the fire burn as it wanted. That you had to compress it, tighter and tighter, until it had no more room to spread. That you then did not let it go but drove it on, faster than it wanted, faster than it could, until it stopped being fire.
Owen drew a line in the dust with his finger. “Like a river. Flowing lazily across the plain. And then there’s a gorge, and it grows narrow, and it grows fast, and it sweeps everything along with it.”
Like the Calder, Ren thought. In Varrow Gorge.
He tried it that afternoon. And the next. And the one after that. He tried it all summer long, every day, until his hands were blistered and his head was pounding and he fell onto his straw mattress in the evenings so exhausted that he did not even dream any more.
Nothing happened. The flame grew smaller when he compressed it. Hotter, sometimes blue at the edges. But it remained a flame.
On the first day of autumn, when the leaves on the birches down in the valley turned yellow, he gave up.
He sat on the rock and stared at his hands. “I can’t do it. Maybe I don’t have it either. The blood. Maybe he was wrong.”
Owen sat beside him and was silent for a long time.
“Do you know what your father said when I asked him how he’d done it?”
Ren shook his head.
“He said: I stopped wanting it. And started needing it.”
Ren did not understand it. Not that day.
He understood it three weeks later, on a cold evening, when the orcs came for the first time and he saw one of them climb over the palisade, right behind Owen, who was just driving his sword into another one’s chest and did not notice.
Ren did not think. He did not think of fire or rivers or gorges. He thought of a staircase. Of a woman in a pale dressing gown who broke off her fight in the middle of a movement.
Not again.
He stretched out his hand.
What shot from his fingers was no spark. It was a bolt of lightning, glaring and golden and so loud that the sheep in the pastures scattered in panic. It struck the orc full in the chest and hurled it back over the palisade, and then it was gone, and the night was dark and still.
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Then came the pain.
It burned its way from his wrist up his arm, like molten metal under his skin. Ren screamed. He fell to his knees in the mud and pressed his arm to his chest, and through his tears he saw lines spreading across his skin, red and branching, like the veins of a leaf or the branches of a tree in winter.
Owen was with him before he could scream a second time. He pulled Ren behind a woodpile, out of sight of the others, and held his arm tight. His face was grey.
“How much?” he whispered. “How much mana did you put into that?”
“I don’t know,” Ren gasped. “All of it. I don’t know.”
“Did anyone see?”
“I don’t know.”
Owen closed his eyes. Then he pulled off his coat and wrapped it around Ren’s arm.
Later, after the orcs had been driven off and the village was tending its wounds, people in Fernwick said that lightning had struck. In the middle of the night, under a clear sky. A sign from the gods, said some. A bad omen, said others. No one thought of Owen Harlow’s quiet nephew, who lay on his straw mattress with a bandaged arm and had a fever for a week.
The scars never quite faded. They stayed on Ren’s left arm, a fine, branching pattern of pale lines, like frost on a windowpane.
“That,” Owen had said, when the fever was over and he took off the bandage, “is the price. Your father told you. Something faster. But fast doesn’t mean free. Every bolt eats you from the inside if you don’t master it.”
He had looked at Ren for a long time.
“From today you no longer learn how to call it. From today you learn how to hold it.”
That had taken three more years.
Three years in which Ren had learned not to hurl the lightning outwards but to keep it inside himself. To send it through his arms and legs, only for a heartbeat, only enough that his muscles reacted faster than any person ought to be able to. That he saw a sword stroke before it came, and dodged it before it missed him.
That he was faster.
One heartbeat. He could not bear more than that without it hurting. Two, if he gritted his teeth. Three, and afterwards he could not lift his arm for an hour, and his nerves burned as if someone had scattered shards of glass into them.
But one heartbeat was enough. One heartbeat could be the difference between a blade that struck you and one that cut empty air.
One heartbeat, Ren sometimes thought, was all his mother had been missing.
The present.
Owen raised his practice sword. “Again.”
“But you just lost.”
“That’s why, again. I’m old, not dead.”
They practised until the sun climbed over the mountains and the snow on the training ground gleamed pink and gold. Owen won two bouts, Ren won five. Not one of them with the lightning. That had been the rule for three years: on the training ground, in broad daylight, where anyone in the village could watch, there was only the sword and the fire. The rest they practised at night, up on the rock, where only the stars were watching.
When they had finished, Owen wiped the sweat from his forehead and sat down on the chopping block at the edge of the ground. He was breathing harder than he used to. Ren noticed it. He said nothing.
“Bodvar’s coming today. With the wagon from the south.”
Ren nodded. Bodvar was a dwarven trader who came through Fernwick twice a year, on his way back from the markets in the south to Orvundar. He sold iron and tools, bought wool and cheese and brought news that no one else had.
And sometimes he brought letters.
By midday the dwarf’s wagon stood on the village green, surrounded by children and sheep and chickens, all equally curious. Bodvar himself stood on the driver’s box haggling with the smith’s wife over a set of nails, with a voice like a rockfall and a beard as broad as he was.
As Ren came closer, he saw that one of the village boys, Jory, the miller’s son, was standing behind the wagon knocking on the canvas with a stick. Two other boys stood beside him, giggling.
“Hey, dwarf!” Jory called. “How’s the weather down there?”
The others laughed.
Bodvar did not even turn his head. He simply went on haggling over the nails as if Jory were a fly. But Ren saw the dwarf’s shoulders tense. Saw his hand on the driver’s box curl into a fist.
Ren stopped beside Jory.
“Good question. The weather down there is the same as up here, by the way. Astonishing, I know. It’s almost as if we were all under the same sky.”
Jory turned round and went red. “I was only …”
“I know. You were only.” Ren nodded sympathetically. “Do you know who forged the nails your father used to mend the millwheel last autumn?”
Jory opened his mouth. Shut it again.
“And do you know who stands between us and the orcs, the kind who came over the palisade in the third winter? The ones who slashed your uncle’s leg open?” Ren nodded east, towards the mountains. “Not the king. Not the dukes. Them.”
Jory looked at the ground. The other two boys had stopped giggling.
“Apologise. Or don’t. But if you don’t, at least ask yourself why not.”
He turned away and went to the wagon. Behind him he heard Jory mumble something quietly that might have been an apology, and then run off.
Bodvar looked down at him. The smith’s wife had gone with her nails.
“You’re Harlow’s boy.”
“His nephew.”
“Most people up here are idiots. No offence.”
The dwarf laughed. It was a deep, rumbling laugh that came from right down in his belly. “No offence, he says. By the beards of my fathers.” He reached under the driver’s box and pulled out a packet wrapped in oilcloth. “For your uncle. From Crownhaven. Cost me a good many detours, that thing.”
Ren took the packet. It was light. A letter.
“How is it at the border?”
Bodvar’s smile vanished.
“Bad. Worse than last year. Worse than every year before. They don’t come in small bands any more. They come in armies. In the autumn the fortress at the Greyhorn fell. The first in a hundred years.” He spat to one side. “And from your kings of men not a single soldier has come to this day.”
Ren said nothing. There was nothing he could have said.
Bodvar lowered his voice. “They whisper a name in the mountains. The prisoners. When you ask them who leads them.”
“What name?”
The dwarf hesitated. Then he leaned forward, so far that his beard almost brushed Ren’s face, and said it, as quietly as if he were afraid the wind might carry it away.
“Malachar.”
Owen opened the letter in the evening, at the three-legged table, by the light of a tallow candle. Ren sat opposite him and watched him break the seal. It was a plain seal, without a crest, only an impression in brown wax.
Owen read the letter twice. Then he laid it on the table and pushed it across to Ren.
The handwriting was small and neat, the letters crowded close together, as if someone had needed to save paper.
Des, the Academy takes in new students in the spring. The Aptitude Trial takes place on the first day of the Blossom Moon. Anyone who passes the trial is admitted, no matter where he comes from. So the law says, and even the king cannot change it without it being noticed.
I cannot help him. Not openly. I have been watched ever since. But I will be there.
You should know who else is coming this year. W’s daughter. And the princess. The prince is already in his second year.
Think it over carefully, old friend. If he comes, there is no going back.
S.
Ren read it three times. Then he laid it on the table, very carefully, as if it might break.
“Silas Merrow.” The name came by itself.
Owen nodded. “He studied with us at the Academy, with your father and me. The three of us were …” He hesitated. “We were friends. Today he teaches there. He’s one of the few who know we’re still alive. I wrote to him four years ago, after the lightning.”
“You never told me.”
“No.” Owen looked at him. “Because I didn’t know whether I would ever send him. This letter here. The answer.”
Ren looked at the paper. W’s daughter.
He thought of a fountain freezing under small hands. Of a girl with white hair who sat on the ice and refused to accept help.
He thought of a nod across a table.
“I’m going.”
“I know.” Owen folded the letter. His hands were steady. “I’ve known you would go ever since you held a flame for twelve breaths to save my life.” He raised his eyes. “But listen to me, Ren. Listen carefully.”
Ren waited.
“At the Academy you’re a commoner. A boy from a border village, with no name, no family, no money. You’ll show fire and sword. Nothing more.” Owen leaned forward, and in the light of the candle his face suddenly looked very old. “No lightning. Not in the trial. Not in lessons. Not in a duel. Not when they insult you, and not when they insult your father, and they will. Under no circumstances.”
“And if it’s a matter of life and death?”
Owen was silent for a long moment.
“Lightning betrays your blood. And there are people at that court who will recognise the style of the House of Ravenmoor at first glance. If you use it, Ren is dead. And Lucian a few days later too.” He looked him firmly in the eyes. “So think very carefully beforehand about whose life is worth it.”
Ren thought of his mother.
He said nothing. But he nodded.
That night he stood outside the hut for a long time, in the snow, looking west.
Somewhere over there, beyond the hills and the forests and twelve days’ march of road, lay Crownhaven. The white towers. The palace with the fountain in the garden. The city where his parents had died and where their names were cursed every year on the king’s name day.
He pulled the leather bracer from his left arm. In the moonlight the scars shimmered silver, branching like frost on glass.
Then he raised his hand.
A spark flickered between his fingers. Small. Golden. Brighter than the stars above the mountains of Orvundar. It danced from fingertip to fingertip, crackling, hissing, and the air smelled of thunderstorms.
Not blue like his father’s. Not yet.
One day, his father had said.
Ren closed his hand, and the spark went out.
“Soon,” he said quietly.