By the Sword (15 page)

The more she thought about it, the better the idea sounded. And the more intolerable and confining the idea of remaining here became. Finally she excused herself from the table—her seatmate didn't even notice—and slipped out of the Great Hall and into the corridor beyond.

Once there, she hiked her encumbering skirts above her knees, and ran for her room. There were no servants in the hall to see her, and although she split one sleeve of the gown, she no longer cared. Let Dierna give it to one of her maids.

She slipped out of it as soon as she reached her room, tossed it in a heap in the comer, and dragged her saddlebags out from under the bed. She rummaged through chests and wardrobe in a frenzy, discarding most of what she encountered without a second thought, casting what she'd decided to keep on the bed.

It was amazing how little she owned that she wanted to keep. Her armor, Lordan's outgrown castoffs, a few personal treasures and the jewelry and books Lenore had left her ... it all fit into two saddlebags with room to spare. She started to take a last look around her room—and realized that it held nothing of her or for her anymore.

So she turned her back on it, and strode out, chain mail jingling with a cheer she began to feel herself.

Out in the stable, even the grooms were absent, enjoying their own version of the wedding feast. All the better; that made it possible for her to saddle up Verenna and ride out without anyone noticing.

The mare came to her whistle and stood quietly while she saddled and bridled her. She felt Verenna's tense eagerness as she mounted, as if the mare was as ready to be free of the place as Kero was. She touched her heel lightly to the mare's flank; Verenna leapt forward. They trotted across the courtyard, cantered to the gates. She was at a full gallop as they passed the gates in the outer wall. Kero laughed as they burst out into the sunshine, wind whipping her hair, Verenna striding effortlessly under her. Nothing was going to stand in her way now!

But she pulled Verenna up abruptly at the sight of the two mounted figures waiting for her at the crossroads. Suddenly sick with dread, she approached them at a walk.
What if they tell me to go back? What if they don't want me? What if—

“What kept you?” asked Tarma.

This was not precisely what Kerowyn had pictured when she'd asked for teaching.

“Chopping wood I can understand,” Kero said slowly, hefting the unfamiliar weight of the ax in her right hand. She eyed her appointed target, an odd setup of two logs braced against the tree, and shifted her hand a bit farther down on the haft. It wasn't a very big ax, and she had the sinking feeling that it was going to take a long time to chop her way through the pile of log sections stacked up at the edge of the clearing. She'd already put a dent in the pile over the past few days, using a larger ax in a conventional manner, but this tool baffled her. It wasn't much heavier than the hand axes some of Rathgar's men had fought with. “I've been cutting wood for you since I got here, and I can see that you still need firewood. But why brace the logs so that I'm cutting at
that
angle?”

Warrl—Tarma's enormous wolf-creature—snorted, flopped himself down in a patch of sun, and laid his ears back in patent disgust. His kind were called kyree, so Tarma had told her—and she needed no testimony as to his intelligence; she'd seen that herself with her own eyes. She'd gotten used to his presence over the past weeks, and now she could read his expressions with more ease than she could read Tarma's. It would appear that she was being particularly dense, though for the life of her she couldn't figure out what she was missing.

Tarma chuckled evilly, and leaned against the woodpile. If Kero had tried that, she'd probably have knocked half the logs down. The pile didn't shift a thumb's length. “But what if you've got it wrong?” the Shin‘a'in asked conversationally. “What if we
don't
need you to chop firewood? ”

“What?” Kero replied cleverly. She blinked, and did a fast revision of her assumptions. “You mean you heat that great stone hulk with magic? But I thought you said—”

“That it takes more effort to do something magically than it does to just
do
it, yes,” Tarma replied, a maddening little smile on her face. “No, we don't heat it with magic, yes, we use wood, and we still don't need you to chop it. We hire it done. A couple of nice farmer lads with muscles like oxen. So why would I be having you chop wood, and why would I be giving you different sizes of axes to do it with? And now why would I start asking you to work at odd angles?”

Kero blinked again, and the answer came to her in a burst of memory—recollections of Lordan working. out against the pells. “Because you want me to strengthen my arms and shoulders,” she said immediately. “All over, and not just a particular set of muscles.”

“And because while you're doing so, you might as well be useful. Besides, if I make you really chop up wood, you won't hold back. Against the pells you might. Against me, you already do.” This time Tarma laughed outright, but Kero couldn't resent it; somehow Kero knew the Shin‘a'in wasn't laughing at her expense. It was more as if Tarma was sharing a sardonic little joke. “Out on the plains we were set to working bellows at the forge, toting water for the entire camp, or any one of a hundred other things. Be grateful it's wood-chopping I've got you doing. Ax calluses you're getting now are going to be in about the same places that you'd want sword-calluses.”

Kero sighed and took her first, methodical blow. Now that she knew why she was engaging in this exercise in frustration, it wasn't quite so frustrating.
And,
she vowed silently,
I'm going to be a lot more careful in placing my hits. I just might impress her.

She certainly wasn't impressing her grandmother. Kethry had tested her in any number of ways, from placing a candle in front of her and telling her to light it by thinking of fire, to placing various small objects in front of her and asking her to identify which of them were enchanted. She'd evidently failed dismally, since Kethry had given up after three days and told her she'd be better off in the hands of the Shin‘a'in.

But she won't take that sword back,
Kero thought in puzzlement, swinging the ax in an underhand arc, repeating the motion over and over, switching from right to left and back again under Tarma's watchful eye. It's
hers, but she won't take it back. I don't understand—it's obviously magical, and no one in her right mind would give something like that away—but she keeps saying that it spoke for me, and it's mine.

So, marvelous. It spoke for me. Now what am I supposed to
do
with it?

“Faster,” Tarma said. Kero sped up her blows, trying to keep each one falling in exactly the same place; right on top of and within the narrow bite she'd incised on the sides of the logs. Those logs were strapped tightly to either side of what had once been a tree. When it had been alive, it had somehow managed to root itself in the exact middle of this clearing and had taken advantage of the full sun to grow far taller than any of the trees around it. Perhaps that had been a mistake. From the look of the top of the stump, some two men's height above her head, it had been lightning-struck. That top was splintered in a way that didn't look to be the hand of man.

This was not where Tarma schooled her new pupil and practiced her own sword-work; this was just what it seemed, a kind of primitive back court to the Tower, with a large outdoor hearth for cooking whole deer on one side, the pile of firewood ready to be chopped on the other, and in the center, the old, dead tree with iron bands around it.
A big
old, dead tree. Kero could circle what was left of the trunk with her arms—barely.

“That's not too bad,” Tarma observed. She pushed herself off the woodpile, and gestured to Kero to stop, then strolled over to the two logs and began examining the cuts closely. Kero wiped sweat from her forehead with her sleeve, and shook her arms to keep them loose.

“That's not too bad at all. And considering what a late start you got—can you finish those in double time?”

She gave Kero the kind of look Dent used to—the kind that said,
be careful what you say, you'll have to live up to it.
Kero licked salty moisture from her upper lip and considered the twin logs. They were chopped a little more than halfway through. The target she'd been creating was just above the iron bands holding them tight to the tree trunk.

So when I get toward the end, they'll probably break the rest of the way under their own weight.
She squinted up at the sun; broken light coming down through the thick foliage made it hard to tell exactly where the sun was. It was close to noon, though, that was for certain. Her stomach growled, as if to remind her that she had gotten up at dawn, and breakfast had been a long time ago.

“I think I can,” she said, carefully. “I'll try.”

Tarma stepped back, and nodded. Kero set to, driving herself with the reminder of how good that lunch was going to taste-

Especially the cider. At double time she was getting winded very quickly; there was a stitch in her side, and she couldn't keep herself from panting, which only parched her mouth and throat. Her eyes blurred with fatigue, and stung from the sweat and damp hair that kept getting in the way. Finally, though, she heard the sound she'd been waiting for; the
crack
of wood, first on one side of the trunk, then on the other. As she got in one last blow, then lowered her arms and backed off from the tree, the two half-logs bent out from the center trunk, then with a second crack, broke free and fell to the ground.

Kero rather wanted to fall to the ground herself. She certainly wanted to drop the ax, which now felt as if it weighed as much as the tree trunk. But she didn't; she'd learned
that
lesson early on, when she'd dropped a practice sword at the end of a bout. Tarma had picked it up, and given her a
look
of sheer and pain-filled disgust.

She'd never felt so utterly worthless in her life, but worse was to come.

Tarma had carefully, patiently, and in the tone and simple words one would use with a five-year-old, explained
why
one never treats a weapon that way, even when one is tired, even when the weapon is just pot-metal and fit only to practice with.

Then,
as if that wasn't humiliation enough, she put the blade away and made Kero chop wood and haul water for the next three days straight, instead of chopping and hauling in the morning, and practicing in the afternoon.

So she hung onto the little hand-ax until Tarma took it away from her. “All right, youngling,” she said in that gravelly voice, as Kero raised a hand at the end of an arm that felt like the wood she'd just been chopping. “Let's get back to the Tower and a hot bath and some food. You've earned it.” Then she grinned. “And after lunch, a mild little workout, hmm?”

Kero finished getting her arm up to her forehead, and mopped her brow and the back of her neck with a sleeve that was already sopping wet.

“Lady,” she croaked, “Every time you set me a ‘mild little workout,' I wind up flat on my back before sundown too tired to move. You're a hard taskmaster.”

Tarma only chuckled.

Lunch in the Tower was as “civilized” as even Kero's mother could have wished. The three of them sat around a square wooden table in one of the upper balconies, sun streaming down on them, a fresh breeze drying Kero's hair. Despite the fact that she had braided it tightly, bits of it were escaping from her braids and the breeze tugged at them like a kitten with string. She kept trying to get it back under control, but it persisted in escaping, and finally she just gave up and let it fly. There was no one here to care how “respectable”—or not—she looked.

She felt much the better for her hot bath, though her muscles still ached in unaccustomed places from that little exercise this morning. Furthermore, she knew very well that she was going to hurt even more tonight. But it was a small price to pay for freedom.

An uneasy set of thoughts—and uncomfortable thoughts. But problems that, for the moment, she could do nothing about. She forced her attention back to more immediate concerns.

Like lunch.

I don't know where Grandmother gets her provisions, but Wendar would kill to find out.
On a platter in the center of the table were cheese, sausage, and bread. Simple fare, certainly not the kind of things one would expect a powerful mage to savor—but they were the best Kero had ever tasted. It wasn't just hunger adding flavor, either; even after one was pleasantly full, the food at Kethry's table tasted extraordinary.

Beside the platter was a second, holding fruit; not only apples, pears and grapes, but cherries as well.

But the sun felt wonderful, the apple she'd just cut into quarters was pleasantly tart, and Kero didn't much want to think about anything for a while.