The Gauntlet and the Fist Beneath, page 3
Floré blinked and screwed up her nose. She didn’t know Yulder well, had only met the man a handful of times in passing. He had pale skin and was scrawny, tall, his face seemingly a permanent scowl. She thought a long moment for what lights in the sky could be.
‘Does Yulder… like his ale?’ She said at last, and Tellen and Rodram laughed but Tyr shook his head and shrugged. Taciturn Esson, or Essom, contemplated the chissick stones, nonplussed.
‘Man’s a stable one,’ Tyr said, ‘Mebbe a wee bit quiet since he lost his people in that business with the Marshlock, but a sensible lad. Swears down, lights last three nights, one or two, from the direction of the Unerdan. You know his farm?’
Floré shook her head. Tyr glanced at the millworker Tellen.
‘The land’s on the side of a hill,’ Tellen offered. ‘The cabin is at the top and the trees cleared back far enough that on a dark night to the west you can see the glow of Undal City and Hookstone Town and the lighthouses of the Star Coast to the south, down beyond the forest. A bonny place. Me and the team put it up ten years past.’
The four men sat in silence for a long moment and Floré tried to picture Undal as a distant glow instead of a vibrant presence. When did I last see Undal? she thought, and considered a ride out to the Yulder farm some night soon just to see it again, even from afar. Janos would like that, to see Undal again, to picture people reading his poems in that distant glow. Tyr looked troubled.
‘I’ll ask in Larchford if they’ve any word,’ Floré said, ‘and before I go, I’ll speak to the whitestaff and see if she has any wisdom on this. Then I’ll grab Cuss or Yselda and head off.’
Tyr nodded and picked up a chissick stone, turning it over in his hands. He turned to Floré at last.
‘Go safe, Sergeant. Eyes sharp, blades sharper.’
‘Eyes sharp, blades sharper,’ Floré echoed. She saluted and turned and strode towards the whitestaff’s house, the only stone building in town.
She had made it a dozen yards when Tyr called out, ‘Get a blessing from Shaman Jule on the way out of town, aye?’
Floré raised a hand in acknowledgement but did not turn, her brow furrowing in annoyance. No chance of that. The shaman would say something seemingly profound if she went to him, quoting from his scripture or his heart, but it would do nothing. Shamans couldn’t even touch the skein; how could he bring her any closer to Anshuka that she already was? Floré shook her head and kept striding.
~
The Whitestaff Izelda was smoking a long-stemmed pipe carved from a single piece of wood. She was sat in a rocking chair of rough wood in a simple homespun dress, her feet bare. Her Riven amulet, a green carved stone on a fine chain of silver, hung from her neck, but Floré could not see her staff anywhere. The whitestaff’s house was just south of the village green, two storeys of dark stone with a thatched roof and a large vegetable garden surrounding it, as well as two tall apple trees.
She blew out a smoke ring as Floré walked up the garden path and raised a hand in greeting. Floré returned the wave.
‘Ho, Whitestaff. All is well?’
‘All is well, granddaughter,’ Izelda said, and Floré determinedly did not let her expression change at the term even though she wanted to scowl. Izelda used it on anyone without grey in their hair or a stoop in their spine. Izelda’s own hair had passed from grey to white to something translucent far before Floré had ever heard of Hasselberry, its wispy paleness in stark contrast to the wrinkled brown of her skin.
‘I’m off to Larchford this night. Some sheep gone, one found mutilated with odd wounds. Clean cuts, no meat missing. Eyes cut out.’
Izelda nodded and took another breath from the pipe, letting the smoke languish behind wrinkled lips. She blew out another smoke ring, smaller this time.
‘Goblins,’ Izelda said with a dismissive hand, clearly uninterested. ‘Was there anything else, Sergeant Floré? Your girl must be almost ready for my schoolhouse. I would be better for her than spending all day playing with toy swords and reciting… poetry.’
Floré ignored the statement and rested her hand gently on the pommel of her sword. She stared out from the whitestaff’s garden towards the watch house. A whitestaff, even one in her dotage, was a powerful presence. The village benefited from her medicine and her storm prediction, and folks travelled from across the forest to seek Izelda’s wisdom. Floré knew she should be deferential, but the old woman was a gossip and a prude. She made herself breathe in and out twice, deep and slow, and turned back to Izelda.
‘I’ll be taking a cadet,’ she said. ‘The captain said to leave Petron. Most likely it will be Yselda.’
The old woman nodded sagely as if she were granting assent, and Floré’s sense of calm and respect left her in an instant. She cricked her neck to one side.
‘Final thing, mighty skein-mage. Apparently Yulder has seen glowing orbs the size of carts, flying through the night sky from the Unerdan, out over the treetops. I figured that sounded like your kind of business. Heard of such a thing?’
Izelda considered Floré for a moment and then stood and laid her pipe on a small table next to her chair and walked inside wordlessly. Probably shouldn’t have called her ‘mighty skein-mage’, Floré thought, and she shrugged and waited an awkward minute. Surely it wasn’t such a lapse in manners that the old woman would just walk off completely. The whitestaffs felt themselves as a people apart from most skein-mages, but Floré reckoned they were skein-mages nonetheless, and Janos said they were no different except in training. She ran her hand over the grip of her silvered dagger and was considering at what point she could just leave when the old woman appeared again in the doorway, clutching a heavy leather-bound book. Izelda sat down and put her pipe back in her mouth and opened the heavy tome.
‘Why are you called the Stormguard?’ she asked grimly, flipping pages, eyes down. Floré wrinkled her brow and blew air from her nose. She took a breath before speaking and tried to keep her tone even, trying not to betray her annoyance.
‘After Ferron fell and the rotstorm rose,’ she said, ‘the slaves were freed, and the protectorate was founded on the bones of old Undalor. The Stormguard man the Stormwall, watch for demons and monsters, and protect the realm and those inside it. The City and Forest Watches keep peace, the Lancers guard our borders, and the Commandos keep the beasts of Ferron at bay. Freedom and protection for those who need it.’
Izelda nodded and then laid a finger on an illustration in the book she held and showed it to Floré. It showed a starlit sky over a calm sea, and above, two oblong shapes of grey-white.
‘Orbs of light, dead of night, hide your eye, take your flight.’
The whitestaff closed her eyes as she spoke the words, her voice a sombre mantra, and then opened them and gave a snort.
‘The only orbs of light I know, granddaughter, are the eyes of Ferron the mighty, that he used to seek out naughty boys and girls come Deadwinter!’
Izelda cackled and Floré huffed. She was being mocked, and as she peered closer, she could see the book in the whitestaff’s lap was a collection of Antian tales; she recognised the heavy runic script. Her friend Voltos had tried to teach her, a lifetime ago, but she could never manage to decipher the intricacies of the runes.
‘Good day, Whitestaff,’ she said through clenched teeth, and started to stride down the garden path with a face as red as the old woman’s tomatoes.
‘Good day, granddaughter!’ the old woman called, still laughing, ‘Mind Ferron doesn’t catch you!’
2
NIGHT FISHING
‘To ask the anatomy of a Judge is to utterly miss the point. They defy description, and each is individual. Anshuka, Berren, Lothal, Nessilitor; each is unique, each is like nothing else. To call Anshuka a bear is like calling a tree a leaf. Berren was not a man; Lothal was not a wolf; Nessilitor no more an owl than a man is a mouse.’ – Pantheon of the Protectorate, Campbell Torbén of Aber-Ouse
Floré could hear the whitestaff laughing until she was out of the garden, and she quickly strode to the guardhouse. The sun was almost below the trees completely now. Cuss, Petron, and Yselda were waiting in much the same manner she had seen them earlier and didn’t notice her approach. Cuss was eating a heel of bread, his blanket successfully stuffed in his pack, and Petron was trying vainly to draw the now strung longbow, which was not Stormguard issue. They had shortbows inside; the longbow must have been his late father’s. She knew his mother had no time for archery, had hardly time to breathe, hence her happiness to turn the two boys over to the Stormguard. Floré frowned at the brothers. Both had curly brown hair and dark skin of descendants of old Undalor, but Petron was slight and short where Cuss was tall and brawny. Well, more round than brawny, she thought.
Yselda was sat calmly on the grass, braiding her long black hair, her training sword neatly stowed, her shortsword sheathed on her lap. Her eyes were closed and her face turned to fading sun. Floré frowned at her too. At their age she had been working every hour of the day and more beyond, drilling with weapons and practising fieldcraft, helping repair the swamp-rotted boards of the wall. The fist and the blade and the guarded mind; the resilience needed to survive the rotstorm. Thinking of it drew her hands to her gauntlets; even now she couldn’t bear to be without them.
Floré pictured the first time she truly trained with a sword, her and Benazir and the other new cadets at Stormcastle XIV, far in the north. The rotstorm was so close, and she had been so nervous; she could remember rubbing sweaty hands on her cadet tabard, feeling so weak compared to the others, so stupid compared to the cadets from cities and towns.
The sergeant had called them forward one at a time whilst the rest stood in ranks and watched. He had them attack a dummy with a practice sword, shoot a target with a shortbow, and then as a group run laps of the training yard until they fell. Floré swung the sword like a club; she had never touched a real sword before that day. The bow she thought she might do better with, but the pull on it was so heavy she could scarcely draw an arrow and her three shots went wild. The others were all much the same, chopping with abandon at the training dummy and shooting their arrows short or wild or both. Some of the Brek could shoot well, thick shafts of yew piercing the target, and the cadets all cheered. Finally Benazir was called forward; she had been lingering at the back.
Floré remembered watching her move with a sword, moving through forms, cutting fast and precise. The cadets had all fallen silent as Benazir continued, cold, calculated, silent, hitting the dummy with every conceivable combination of blows. The sergeant laughed when she finally stopped, face flushed and fringe sticking to her forehead, and sent her to the bows. All of her shafts flew true to the central target ring, and the cadets cheered as they had before.
‘Fallow Fen,’ a big lad next to Floré muttered to her. ‘She’s one of them Fallow Fen folk. Town got ate by the storm.’
Then it was the run. There were twenty cadets. After three laps of the yard some stopped running, wheezing, sweat pouring, clutching their sides. Benazir was amongst them; she retreated to the side of the training yard and watched from below her dark fringe as the rest ran on. Floré kept running. After five laps, more began to drop out. Soon it was only Floré and two others, one of the Brek lads and another she hadn’t spoken to. They ran on and on and Floré had felt her legs burn so she slowed and fell back, but then a lap later the Brek lad peeled off to the side and stumbled to a stop, holding himself against the rough stone wall. Floré remembered feeling sweat and pain, but ignoring it. She could run. She could do the work. She ran and ran, ignoring the pain until the boy she’d not spoken to swore and fell off to the side and it was only her, and then she kept running, another lap, another, and eventually the sergeant waved her down and she slowed to a stop, her lungs on fire.
As she stopped running thunder tumbled through the sky and the edge of an arc of purple lightning cut through the storm high above them. All the cadets had stared up, except Benazir, who had stared down at the ground. When training was dismissed and they were sent for food, Floré went and sat opposite Benazir.
‘You can fight,’ she had said, and Benazir had simply stared at her.
‘Could you teach me?’ Floré had said, attempting a smile. ‘I need to know how. Please.’
‘The sergeant will show you,’ Benazir said, unsmiling. They had both had long hair then, Floré a mass of loose curls pulled back from her face in a rough braid that was constantly spiralling out, Benazir silent and staring from beneath a fringe of straight black. Those were the first words she had heard Benazir say to anyone. The girl ate alone, and had kept to herself in the day since the cadets had assembled in Stormcastle XIV. Floré had tentatively spoken to a few of the others by that point, but she was unused to so many people and didn’t know how to speak to them then, how to make friends. Floré remembered those first nights in the barracks, cold, forcing herself not to think of home.
‘The sergeant will show us all,’ Floré said, ‘but I want to learn those sword things you did. The fancy stuff. We need to know how to fight. It’ll be fun – we could train together. I’m Floré. From Tollen. Floré Artollen now, I guess. You’re from Fallow Fen?’
Benazir had simply stared, and then left the table without another word.
Floré smiled at the memory, two awkward girls in a mess hall, her naiveté in thinking they’d have free time to train as they wished. Benazir’s reticence. Training dummies and dulled swords and cold salt porridge every morning. She looked at the three cadets before her, in the calm of Hookstone forest, Cuss and Yselda older already by a year at least than she had been those first days. Within weeks of reaching Stormcastle XIV she had a sword always at her side, spending long days camped out along the wall fixing boards, learning to fight. Benazir always next to her.
Floré shook her head and frowned, and focused on the job in front of her. Larchford and sheep, pine trees bending in the wind.
‘Right,’ Floré said, ‘fall in, cadets.’
The three rushed to their feet to stand in a ragged line. Floré took a few moments to adjust their stances, tapping legs and arms and chins and backs. They all wore cadets’ tabards, like her own but with no lightning slash across the chest and no border of gold, only plain green material.
‘Petron?’
‘Aye, Sarge?’
‘Aye, Sergeant. The words, if you please.’
The boy straightened and cleared his throat. ‘Stormguard, preserve the freedom of all people in the realm. Suffer no tyrant; forge no chain; lead in servitude.’
He ended with a passable salute with the first two fingers of his right hand to the centre of his forehead, which Floré, Yselda, and Cuss matched.
‘Well enough, Cadet,’ Floré said. ‘Now stow your gear, put that ridiculous bow back before your mother catches you, and get out of my sight. Word is the whitestaff caught you cleaning pots with the skein.’
The boy winced and looked at his feet. They all stood in silence for a moment and he sniffed. Floré blew a breath out through her nose and heard Janos chiding her in the back of her mind. She so quickly slipped back to old habits that were fit for trained soldiers, not village children. Petron raised his gaze from the dirt and started to stammer a response, but no words came out. Floré silenced him with a raised hand.
‘Calm down, lad. Listen to the briefing, then stow your gear, get some sleep. A day scrubbing pots for Izelda won’t kill you. If you can clean pots with the skein at twelve summers, you might end up a fire-slinging skein-mage of the Stormguard proper one day. If you want to learn the longbow, we will set aside some time, but an unfamiliar weapon on duty is apt to end in disaster. Aye?’
Petron gripped the bow and managed something like a smile, his eyes watering, and nodded his head. Yselda sniggered but stopped when Floré cut her a glare. Cuss looked forlorn on behalf of his brother. Floré knew from the whitestaff that aside from Petron none of the children in the Hookstone forest villages were much shake with the skein, but Cuss never seemed jealous of his younger brother. Janos said Petron seemed strong enough to go to Stormwall next year if he wanted. His mother could certainly use the money. The idea of that boy standing on the wall, heading into the rotstorm surrounded by armoured commandos to hunt a rottroll made her stomach tense. Floré sighed as she turned and looked Cuss up and down.
‘Five sheep missing in Larchford,’ she said, ‘another found mutilated, clean cuts, eyes missing. What do you think?’
Cuss swallowed hard and glanced at Yselda, who stayed patiently quiet and kept her gaze forward, off into the distance.
‘Could it be… goblins?’ he said at last. Floré shook her head at him and turned to look across the village green.
‘Could it be goblins, Sergeant, Cadet. Speak with some steel in your spine for pity’s sake.’
‘Sorry,’ he said, and Yselda elbowed him in the ribs, thinking herself beyond Floré’s sight. His eyes widened and he quickly corrected himself. Floré continued to gaze at the village green, not letting on she had seen Yselda’s arm move.
‘Sorry, Sergeant!’
‘Cadet Grantimber,’ she said, turning back to him, ‘are you still holding half a loaf of bread?’
‘Aye, Sergeant,’ Cuss said, taking one arm clutching a half-chewed loaf from behind his back. Floré turned to look towards the darkness of the trees. The boy was not fit enough to keep pace if she was going to make Larchford by dawn, and his sword work wasn’t the best either. He had good strength in his arms and his guard was not bad, but his archery was barely passable even for a village boy, and he was slow and prone to clumsiness. Goblins were easy to kill but a mistake could still turn things rotten, and if there was a rottroll… Her eyes took in the loch, the forest, the hills to the east.
