Hunter's Academy (Veller)

Hunter’s Academy

Garry T. Spoor

Copyright 2013 Garry T. Spoor

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1

Morgan set the book down on the table that wasn’t there and flipped a few pages forward, then a few pages back. It was obvious he couldn’t find what he was looking for, but he refused to give up.
Kile sat in the overstuffed winged back chair with her cup of rosemary tea minus the rum watching him with little interest. She didn’t really like the taste of the tea but thought it impolite to refuse the offer. The globe of fire that had once warmed the small tower in the dead of winter was flickering blue and was now cooling the same room.  She wondered if she could get one of these for her cell as the hot summer days made sleeping almost unbearable.

Summer at the academy was as boring as she feared it would be. With no one to speak with or
train with, she went through her days with very little enthusiasm. The only high point was watching the Hunters appear for the gathering.  One or two arrived nearly every day and although she didn’t know any of them by name, she was still down on the field to watch them ride in. They were some of the best from every province in Aru, they had been places and seen things that no one else had ever been or seen before, and just being associated with them, even it if was on a cadet level, was and inspiring moment. Sadly those moments were brief and far between. For the most part the Hunters remained sequestered within the main building, nobody was allowed in or out without an invitation.

The rest of her days were spent in solitude, although there were a few cadets waiting out the summer with her, she had very little contact with them. It wasn’t for lack of trying on her part, but ever since the fiasco with the crossbow, Master West, and the fact that Charles Bane was expelled because of her, or at least that was what the other
s were lead to believe, she felt that she had lost any progress she had made over the first year. The other cadets wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t speak to her, and if she made any attempt to approach them, they fell over themselves trying to get away from her. She was sure Eric had some choice words and a few stories to tell the cadets on her behalf. She had even seen him speaking with a few prior to his leaving. They would look over at her when she passed and there was a mixture of fear and loathing in their eyes. She could only image what tales Eric was telling them. It didn’t matter that Eric’s reputation wasn’t all that clean, or that he had spent most of his first year making it miserable for others, they were still more willing to believe him than they were to believe her. She had truly lived up to the standard as a jinx. If it wasn’t for Vesper, she would have been completely lost in her loneliness. The yarrow stayed by her side throughout the summer and became a permanent fixture on her shoulder whenever possible.

Meal time was even worse as the dinning hall was generally empty. Most of the instructors, who
weren’t at the gathering, ate in town. Those that did take their meals in the mess hall usually sat at their own tables in their own section of the hall. The cadets had their section and Kile had hers. That lasted about two days. She couldn’t take the quick glances and the quiet remarks any longer and decided to eat alone in her room from that point on.

The nights were the only time she really felt comfortable, ironically it was the only time she was really alone. She would slip out of her room after everyone else was asleep and wander around the compound. There was little chance of anyone catching her, since the only ones patrolling at that time of the night were the guards at the front gate and Oblum’s two mastiffs, Gorum and Hunar. On some nights she would walk with the two dogs on their patrol and pick up a game of fetch with them in the field just behind the stables, but most of the time she just enjoyed the solitude with nobody judging her or demanding something of her. It was on these nights that she realized she could never really go back home, she could never go back to what she was. She had become something more out here, but whether that was a hunter or not, she didn’t know, all she did know was that the ideas associated with the comforts of home were moving farther and farther away.

She was a young woman of fifteen now, or at least that was what the charter of Riverport would describe her as, which meant that if she had stayed home, if she hadn’t taken the entry examination last year, she would, at this moment, be married to that little troll of a boy Pordist Talon. That would have made her father happy since it was his plan all along to barter her for the bottom land that ran along the southern border of the Veller farm back in Riverport. Oric Talon owned that land, and he would have given anything to marry off his son, but that was another age, another lifetime. She had taken the entry examination, and much to her own surprise, passed it, now she was on her way to becoming a hunter.

Of course she still had a ways to go, two more years of training, one year of probation, and there were still a lot of obstacles placed against her personally, the least of which was the staff at the academy as well as some of the members on the Guild Council. Maybe not all the staff or all the members, there were a few that wished her well, although they had a funny way of showing it, but for the most part they did not what her at the academy, let alone see her graduate. They
simply did not want her to become a Hunter.

She had often wondered why, what did these people that she didn’t know have against her. She had always thought her size and her weight would be her greatest hindrance, but Alex was even smaller
than she was and he was advancing as well as someone like him could advance, and she had grown a bit since coming to the academy, although she spent most of her time trying to hide it. It was the obstacles that she had never considered that had become the bigger problem. The ones she couldn’t hide. For starters she was a girl, and girls simply did not become hunters or at least the last one that had was nearly twenty years ago. There was the fact that she was the daughter of a farmer, and that appeared, for some reason, to be a mark against her, although she couldn’t understand why. Then finally some even believe that she had Orseen blood. This was news to her since she never knew who the Orseen were, but if she believed the scholars, the Orseen were a forgotten nomadic race of people that had blood ties with the Ogres.

She absently took a sip of the rosemary tea and nearly choked, being that it was cold didn’t improve the taste any. How could anyone enjoy this she wondered as she set the cup down? Maybe Morgan had the right of it after all, maybe a shot of rum was enough to kill the bitter flavor, not that she had any intention of trying it that way.

She stared at the flickering blue flames that floated before her, and although she enjoyed the cooling effect on the hot summer day, she still did not fully trust anything associated with the mystic arts. Unfortunately every hunter has to have some affiliation with the arts in order to be a hunter, it was known as the Hunter’s Edge. This, in its own way, became yet another obstacle against her. She couldn’t be like every other hunter that passed through the academy, with an edge that was both effective and common, no, she had to be different.  Her edge, her ability, was outside the norm, it defied classification and therefore she was commonly referred to by the not so flattering term of freak. Of course that was what she would have been called if anyone other than Morgan, her mystic arts instructor, knew what she could do. She possessed the very rare, very unique ability of communicating with the natural world. She could actually speak with animals. According to Morgan’s research, this edge has never been seen in a hunter as far back as their written history, and since that can be traced back to one year after the Hunter’s Guild was established, it is safe to say that no other hunter has ever been able to communicate in this way. This was just another thing that separated her from everyone else, another wall placed between her and the rest of the cadets. To sum it up she was a short freaky farmer’s daughter with half ogre blood.

Well, that didn’t actually improve her mood.

Morgan finally gave up looking for whatever it was he was looking for and slammed the book closed. The sudden noise startled Kile out of her daydream and she almost spilled the rosemary tea.

“There is nothing about it in here.” He remarked as he scratched his chin the way he does when he
was confused, which seems to be quite often when she was around. “It would appear that what you have described is not a documented ability of the alva that I have been researching.”

“Sorry sir.” She responded, although she wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for.

“Oh no.” He said waving her off, “This is amazing, fantastic even. If what you’re telling me is true, then what you have is unique, similar to that of what the alva described and yet quite different. We have to explore this deeper, find out how far it actually extends.”

“I’m not sure I can sir, it only really happened that one time.”

“Well, we’ll only know by trying, won’t we?” He said as he walked over to his shelves and began searching through the crockery.

She
watched as the Morgan frantically sorted through the plates, bowls and cups, and was starting to regret telling the mystic about the circumstances surround her finding the crossbow in the armory that had ultimately cleared her of all charges pertaining to the accident on the archery range. She wasn’t sure she fully understood it herself, and as she tried to explain it to him, she found that it sounded even more foolish than how it felt when she was doing it. She had actually smelled her crossbow in an armory filled with crossbows, she actually picked up her own scent, or that was how Vesper had described it. It sounded ridiculous, impossible and a little disturbing, but Morgan, on the other hand, thought the entire incident was fascinating and kept asking questions that she couldn’t answer, eventually he turned to the old books he had brought with him from the tower, but now it appeared that they had as many answers as she did.

Morgan suddenly turned around and presented her with two bowls he had
just pulled from the shelf.

“Which one was yours?” He asked as he held them out to her.

She looked at the two bowls, and they were exactly the same. Two bowls from a matching set. A set she neither recognized nor owned.

“Neither sir.” She answered a bit confused.

“Come, come now, you’re not even trying. You ate out of one of these bowls, which one was it?”

Kile looked over the bowls again
. She did have to supper with the Mystic once during the winter, the same day he gave her the globe of fire to warm her cell, but it never occurred to her to examine the bowls. She didn’t think she was going to be tested on it. She looked at them again, and then randomly pointed at the one on the left.

“That one.” She said.

“You’re guessing.” He replied as he pulled the bowls back. “Smell the two bowls and see if you can pick up your scent.”

Great, now he wanted her to sniff the bowls, she knew telling him was a bad idea. If he asks her to
mark one, she was out of here.

She
took the first bowl and smelled it, and then she picked up the second. She felt extremely foolish and since both bowls smelled the same to her, she knew this was going nowhere fast. It didn’t help with Kaza sitting up on his high shelf trying to muffle a crow like snicker. She thought about picking one at random again just to end the humiliation, but that wasn’t going to help her understand it any better.

“I really can’t tell the difference.” She admitted.

Morgan looked more defeated than she felt as he took the two bowls from her. He turned each one over in his hands to examine them, and then shrugged.

“I guess it’s for the best, I don’t really know either.” He said as he set them back on the shelf. “It’s possible that the scent has dissipated over time.”

“It really only happened that one time sir.” She reminded him.

“It could have been the heat of the moment. Placed under a significant amount of stress we find we can do
all sorts of thing we otherwise didn’t know we could do.”

It was a good thing she didn’t tell him that she caught Eric’s scent that same day when he entered the stables and caught them persuading Charles Banes into confess
ing. Morgan would be parading cadets past her and have her try to identify them by sniffing. She could only image how well that would have gone over.

“Of course you could be channeling the ability.” He added.

“Channeling? I don’t understand.”

“Well, you
did say that Vesper was with you. Yarrows are known to have a heightened sense of smell. It is quite possible that Vesper was detecting your scent and you were just picking up on his reactions.”

She
pondered the idea for a moment. It did make a lot of sense, and it would explain why she couldn’t do it all the time, of course Vesper wasn’t around when she smelled Eric. She had sent him off to fetch Gorum and Huron since she didn’t dare go herself, and hadn’t seen the yarrow until the next morning, but then, if what Morgan says was true, she could have picked up the dog’s reactions. They had detected Eric as well, or it may have been something even simpler. Maybe it wasn’t Eric’s smell that alerted her, maybe he made a sound when he entered, or possibly a change in the light when the stable door was opened. She really didn’t think about it at the time, but it could have been any number of factors.