Deeds of Honor (16 page)

"Then I would like to stay. I would like to—to not be so frightened, like all the rest."

"Good. Rahel, come hear Selis's oath. Say this after me, Selis: I ask protection of the Fellowship of Gird until I am grown, and swear to obey the Marshal of my grange as I would my own father, and accept his discipline if I am wrong."

"Don't I have to hold that thing?" asked Selis nervously, looking at the recess.

The Marshal laughed softly. "No, lad. The medallion in your hand will do well enough for you."

Selis repeated the oath without incident.

"Now," said the Marshal. "Since you disobeyed earlier, and brought trouble it took two Girdsmen to handle, here is your punishment." But he was smiling. "You will stand in the grange with us, until the next shift of watchers comes to keep vigil; can you do that, or are you too weak?"

"I can stand," said Selis, suddenly warm again.

"Lay the medallion where it was," said the Marshal. "And then take your place here." He pointed to one of the corners. "And here—" He had ducked into the passage and out again before Selis was quite aware of it. "You cannot stand there clad in bandages, like a half-wrapped corpse. Here's training armor, and a cloak. And hold this sword so. It won't be long until the change of watch: just stand so."

And Selis found himself blinking hard to stay awake, the padded canvas surcoat and long wool cloak warm against the fog. He could not believe it: he, the rabbit, with a sword in his hands, keeping vigil in a grange of Gird. When the watch changed, he fell asleep as soon as the Marshal laid him in a bed.

What happens to minor characters when their small part is done? As I wrote the last part of
The Deed of Paksenarrion
, I had to tell the story of a traumatized boy who appeared briefly in
Oath of Gold
before I could settle into finishing the book. It appeared in my first two short-fiction collections, and later I put it up on the Paksworld website. So why here, again? Because sometimes those minor characters and minor side-stories connect with something years later. This story tells only the beginning of a lost boy's new life. How he grew up, what he did, how he influenced others didn't enter my head for years, until I was writing the end (and stories beyond the end) of Paladin's Legacy. There he was again, still a minor character whose life had intersected with a more prominent one years after the end of that series and before the events of "The Last Lesson." Will he ever come back to fill in the years between? I have no idea.

On the morning of half-Winter, nine hands of days before Midwinter Feast, seventeen young men who hoped to become Knights of the Bells sat around the long table at one end of the knights' salle with the Knight-Commander.

"Gentlemen, today we will consider the duel, both in law and practice." He looked up and down the table. Every year they looked younger to him. The light, the dark, the nobly born, the commoners...no girls this year. He pushed that away. None of his own daughters had wanted to be knights. No matter that both Falkians and Finthans knighted more women. He dragged his attention back to the day's lesson.

He cleared his throat and began. "You all know that dueling is forbidden by the Code of Gird. Yet you have all heard that duels are fought by Girdish men, despite stiff penalties if they are discovered. You may have been tempted yourselves to offer a challenge or answer one. I imagine you are curious about dueling. Perhaps you think it is much like any fencing practice."

He glanced around the table: a few smiles, a few nods. "It is not. The fencing practice you have had here is nothing like the dueling ground, gentlemen. However quick and strong you are, facing swords bated on edge or point under the eye of an instructor is very different from facing live steel in the hands of someone who means to spill your guts on the ground."

Now they frowned, most of them.

"You know this—it has been mentioned by your armsmasters—but you cannot understand as yet. Let me tell you about my experience."

He could feel their quickened interest. He rarely spoke of his own experience, any of it. He was the king's cousin, a Duke until his appointment as Knight-Commander of the Bells, still a member of the Royal Council. It was easy to imagine himself into those young, inexperienced heads: instead of a dull lecture on the law, they would hear an exciting story from a royal personage. So they thought.

"A few years before I took over the Bells," he said, "I fought a duel. I had of course been in battle before, so the feelings—the changes in myself—in facing live steel were not new to me, but they were to my opponent. It was his first duel." They would want to know who; he wasn't about to tell them, and he went on without pausing. "He was highly trained, very skilled, and—being so much younger than I—naturally faster in his movements. It reminded me of myself, in my first fight with live steel."

He paused, took a sip of water. It had been
nothing
like his first fight with live steel, really, but this was not about himself. And the young man who had faced him had certainly shared a bloodline and a naive arrogance much like his own at that age. He began again, sketching the progress of the duel...the first encounter, the first blooding, the pause for wounds to be bandaged, the return to the dueling ground, the next and the next.

"But then," the Knight-Commander said, "I saw what was happening to my opponent, and I understood that he was not longer able to master himself, no longer thinking clearly. It was up to me, as the elder, to do so." He paused again to look at the listening faces, all intent. "I stood up from my guard, dropped my blade, said I had finished, and thanked him, walking forward ready to shake his hand. He stared, stiff as stone for a moment, then switched his blade to his heart hand and shook mine." No need to say that the young man had burst into tears and thanked him.

"So you saved yourself," Soldan Masagar said, a faint edge of contempt in his voice. He was a baron's son from the northwest corner of the kingdom.

The Knight-Commander nodded. "It is true, I am alive now. But I did it not to save myself—but him."

"You mean—you could have killed him instead?" "Probably not, unless he slipped and fell," the Knight-Commander said. "Twenty years slows a man. He would have killed me...and it would have ruined him."

"I don't see that—it would have made his reputation as a swordsman." That was Parin, a Marshal's son from Elorran's old domain.

"As a
murderer
," the Knight-Commander said. "As a man to be feared and possibly hated. A man whose whole life would be marked by that duel, making his destiny more difficult, if not impossible."

"But you—but—" The young man's voice faded away in the face of the Knight-Commander's steady gaze.

"When I was young, I killed men," the Knight-Commander said. "I know what it does to a young man, to kill out of fear or pride or hot blood."

"But
your
reputation—"

"Could not suffer what his would, had
he
ended it—or had he killed me."

"If you think dueling is so bad, why did you agree?"

The Knight-Commander laughed. "I did not say I thought dueling was so bad, when it's first-blood only. The problem is, gentlemen, that it's hard to stop at first-blood when you are angry, when your pride has been hurt, or when you are too frightened." His expression hardened, and he looked from face to face. "And do not tell me, young hot-bloods, that you cannot be frightened. Anyone can be frightened, just as anyone can lose control in a temper. You can—you may—and some of you
will
—do terrible things in those situations. You think now you will not. You think now you will be steady as oaks, immobile as stones, but you have not been tested."

"My father says
you
were tested." Predictably, a Marrakai, second son of a second son. "But he won't tell me how."

"Indeed I was, and when I was younger than any of you. And I lived, which some of you would call victory and success. As far as the body goes, that is true. But in choosing life, in a desperate situation, I killed...more than I had need, it might be. It haunts me to this day, those lives lost."

Silence. The Knight-Commander watched face after face, touching each with his magery, tasting their reaction. Most were thoughtful, a little worried now about their own store of courage and resolution. Two were thoughtful another way. The baron's son from the far northwest, who had already expressed his distrust of mages. The Marshal's son from the old Elorran district, a little too eager for fame, a little too prideful of his Girdish heritage.

"How many of you," the Knight-Commander asked, "have ever chanced with live steel?"

Silence, glances exchanged.

"Come now," he said. "This is not a trap; I know how boys play with daggers and older lads with swords, if they can escape adult supervision. You will take no harm from honesty."

"I have," one said, and then another. Only a third, in this class—better than he'd expected.

"I hope you had the sense to wear protection," the Knight Commander said. "Since you are here, I suppose you did. And have any of you ever been on the dueling ground?"

Shaken heads, a chorus of variations on "No."

"Let me make it clear what that is like. Semmis—stand there." He pointed; the student named rose and moved quickly to the far end of the salle. "Take off your doublet and shirt." As he spoke, the Knight-Commander stood and removed his own tabard and doublet, then yanked his shirttails free and pulled his shirt over his head. There were gasps from a few, quickly stifled. Good. He knew what they were seeing—an old man's body, an old man's wrinkled spotted skin over muscles still hard, the mat of hair on his chest and belly gone as white as his beard, the scars of his battles still puckered, easily traced. "Galdin, you act as Semmis's second. Nellrin, you are mine. Seconds, go into the armory and bring out two identical fighting blades. Baren, Tamor, shut the doors to the salle; let no one in. Karden, fetch a sack of bandage rolls from the supply closet."

"Sir—are you going to—?" Alarm in their tone, as it should be.

"Go and do what I told you." Habit of obedience sent them on their way without more questions. The air in the salle was cold; he felt his skin drawing up into gooseflesh, felt the urge to shiver. Instead he drew a little heat from his magery, the least he could. He would need his strength elsewhere. By the time the two seconds had returned with the swords, he had taken off his boots and socks and stood barefoot on the cold stone floor, and bade Semmis do the same.

The young man's body was symmetrical, well-muscled, his skin smooth, unmarked with anything but a narrow scar on one shoulder. Semmis looked a little pale, as well he might, half dressed and barefoot in a cold salle and facing he knew not what challenge from his Knight-Commander.

"I have issued no challenge," the Knight-Commander said, as the seconds emerged with swords and silence held the room. "Yet." Silence deepened. "Semmis, take the sword my second hands you." He walked over to the seconds. "I will take the one your second hands me...now bow to the seconds." He turned to the others. "Half of you to either side, against the walls. Take off your boots, all of you: they will outline the dueling ground. And you, Parin, you will be the master, the one who gives the command to begin, and cries hold when blood is drawn." Parin nodded, looking eager. "You seconds, you will now mark the ground, and if either of us retreats outside it, the duel ends to that one's dishonor. Karden, be ready to bandage any wounds. I prefer not to drip on the floor, nor do I wish to spend the afternoon on my knees scrubbing it clean." He grinned at the others. No one grinned back.

Quickly the seconds outlined the space he pointed out with discarded boots and socks. The Knight Commander stepped inside it; Semmis, he saw, had also stepped in, and was now flushed a little.

"Duels are ordinarily fought outside," the Knight-Commander said. "Often at dawn, sometimes at night, in a ring of torches. Rarely in midday, always in secret, because as I reminded you, Gird forbade dueling. What does the Code of Gird say?"

Several repeated it, almost in unison.

"Indeed."

Before him, Semmis' expression had gone from confusion to wariness: he was beginning to believe this was real.

"Semmis, I challenge you to a duel. There is no offense; I needed someone to use as an example, and you are slightly better with a sword than Joris." He was also one of the more level-headed students, and should thereby take longer to reach the mindless stage of combat. "If you do not accept, you will be known as a coward hereafter and disgraced before all. You will not become a Knight of the Bells. Respond."

A twitch, no more, of Semmis's mouth, then he answered. "Knight-Commander, I accept your challenge."

"Are you satisfied with your weapon?"

"I am, sir."

"Are you satisfied with your second?"

"I am, sir."

The Knight-Commander glanced at Parin. "Your cue," he said.

"On guard!" Parin said. His voice cracked on the second word; from the corner of his eye, the Knight-Commander saw that he flushed, embarrassed. The Knight-Commander raised his blade, pointed it at Semmis's chest. Twelve paces away, Semmis's blade pointed at him, only the slightest tremor tossing light down the blade.

The Knight-Commander knew, none better, what Semmis felt as he saw that point aimed at him, those sharp edges gleaming. He knew how aware Semmis would be of the cold stone beneath his feet, the light from the high eastern windows, the movement of the air, those who watched...and he saw the moment when Semmis's focus cast all that out, as he himself had cast out awareness of snow, encircling trees, nervous horses stamping and snorting, the whole vast scale of life that had never seemed so large or so fragile, the first time
he
had faced a naked blade.

In that moment, the Knight-Commander sprang—slower than in his youth, but with all the authority of a man experienced in battle. To his credit, Semmis did not retreat or falter; his parry was strong, his riposte quick. The Knight-Commander's parry moved it aside, and his own riposte caught Semmis on the forearm, just as he'd planned, on the outer side, away from the dangerous arteries. Still, the wound bled.