King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

Without warning the rumble of conversation died and Greyson put his head down. “Shimon, the sword-master,” he hissed. “He never comes in here.”

A man loomed behind me. I focused on the squid but refrained from actually putting it in my mouth.

“You, boy,” Shimon said. “Ancrath. Out in the yard. I’m told you have promise.”

42

Four years earlier

I knew of Sword-master Shimon. Makin told me stories about him. About his exploits as a young man, champion to kings, teacher of champions, legend of the tourney. I hadn’t expected him to be so old.

“Yes, Sword-master,” I said, and I followed him out into the courtyard.

To say he moved like a swordsman would be understatement. He looked as old as Tutor Lundist, with the same long white hair, but he stepped as if he heard the sword-song beating through each moment of the day.

Qalasadi had gone from the shadows and the courtyard lay empty but for a serving girl crossing with a basket of washing, and the men on guard at the gate. Other guards crowded the door of the refectory behind us, but they didn’t dare follow us out. Shimon had not extended them an invitation.

The sword-master turned to face me. The bookish look of him surprised me. He could have passed as a scribe, but for the dark burn of the sun and a hawkishness about the eyes. He drew his sword. A standard issue blade the same as mine.

“When you’re ready, young man,” he said.

I slid my sword out, wondering how to play this. Qalasadi was probably telling my uncle who I really was right now, so why not make full use of the opportunity?

I slapped at his blade, and he did that rolling-wrist trick the Prince of Arrow used, only better, and took my sword out of my hand. I heard laughter from the doorway.

“Try harder,” Shimon said.

I smiled and picked my sword up. This time I moved in quick with a thrust at his body. He did the trick again but I rolled my wrist with his and kept my blade.

“Better,” he said.

I attacked him with short precise combinations, the moves I had been working on with Makin. He fended me off without apparent effort, replying at the end of each attack with a counter-attack that I could barely contain. The rapid clash of metal on metal echoed around the courtyard. I felt the music of steel rise about me. I felt that cold calm sensation rolling out over my arms, cheeks, the skin of my back. I heard the song.

Without thought I attacked, slicing high, low, feinting, deploying my full strength at precisely the right moments, all of me moving, feet, arms, hips, only my head still. I increased the tempo, increased it, and increased it again. At times I couldn’t see my blade or his, only the shape of our bodies, and the necessity of the dance let me know how to move, how to block. The sound of our parrying became like the clickety-click of knitting needles in expert hands.

Shimon’s hard old face didn’t look made for smiling, but a smile found its way there. I grinned like an idiot, sweat dripping off me.

“Enough.” He stepped away.

I found it hard not to follow him, to press the attack, but I let my sword drop. There had been a joy in it, in the purity, living on the edge of my blade without thought. My heart pounded and sweat soaked me, but I had nothing of the anger that normally builds even in practice sessions. We had made a thing of beauty.

“Could you beat me?” I asked, pulling in a breath. The old man seemed hardly winded.

“We both won, boy,” he said. “If I’d taken a victory we would have both lost.”

I took that as a yes. But I understood him. I hoped that I would have had the grace to step back if I saw him weaken. Not to do so would have spoiled the moment.

Shimon sheathed his sword. “Enjoy your lunch, guardsman,” he said.

“That’s it?” I asked as he turned to go. “No advice?”

“You don’t try hard enough at the start, and you try too hard at the end,” he said.

“Hardly technical.”

“You have a talent,” he said. “I hope you have other talents too. They will probably bring you more happiness.”

And he went.

“Unreal,” Greyson said when I returned to the table. “I’ve never seen a thing like that.”

And that was all the time I had to bask in my glory. The bell sounded to let us know lunch had ended and I got to go back to guarding the Lowery Gate.

The Lowery Gate nearly broke me. I gave deep consideration to naming myself to my grandfather. In the end though, I wanted to see how this court worked from the inside, how my relatives went about their lives, who they really were. I guess I wanted a window into my past and not to mucky it up with my own surprises.

I slept again in the guardhouse and woke to new duties. Qalasadi didn’t appear to have gone to my uncle. I suspected that he thought I would wield some influence once my identity was known and he didn’t want to make an enemy of me. If he didn’t let my secret slip, who would know that he ever knew it? And so he would face no censure for not revealing me.

My new assignment was as personal guard to Lady Agath, a cousin of my grandfather’s who had been living at Castle Morrow for some years. A fat old lady, getting to the point where the weight started to slip from her as it does with the very old. Live long enough and we all die skinny.

Lady Agath liked to do everything slowly. She paid me no attention other than to moan that my scar was ugly to look at and why couldn’t she have a presentable guard? To the wrinkles brought by her advanced years she added those that fat people acquire as they start to deflate. The overall effect was alarming, as if she were a shed skin, discarded perhaps by a giant reptile. I followed her around Castle Morrow at a snail’s pace, which afforded me the time to look the place over, at least the part of it lying between the privy, the dining hall, Lady Agath’s bedchamber, and the Ladies’ Hall.

“Be still, boy, you’re never still,” Lady Agath said.

I hadn’t moved a muscle for five minutes. I continued the habit and held my tongue.

“Don’t be smart with me,” she said. “Your eyes are always flitting from one thing to the next. Never still. And you think too much. I can see you thinking right now.”

“My apologies, Lady Agath,” I said.

She harrumphed, jowls quivering, and settled back in her black lace. “Play on,” she told the minstrel, a dark and handsome fellow in his twenties who had a sufficient combination of looks and talent to hold the attention of Agath and three other old noblewomen at one end of the Ladies’ Hall.

The Ladies’ Hall appeared to be where Horse Coast women came to die. For certain there weren’t any ladies there on the right side of sixty.

“You’re doing it again,” Lady Agath hissed.

“My apologies.”

“Go to the wine-cellar and tell them I want a jug of wine, Wennith red, something from the south slopes,” Lady Agath told me.

“I’m not supposed to leave you unattended, Lady Agath,” I said.

“I’m not unattended, I have Rialto here.” She waved toward the minstrel. “I always have my wine from the cellar. I don’t know what they do to it in that kitchen but they ruin it. Leave it open to the air I guess. And the girls always dawdle so,” she remarked to the other ladies. “Go, boy, quick about it.”