Sword (2 page)

Hopefully her father and her brother would come back soon, too: they had braved the court to meet with the king on some matter or other, leaving her here to manage the estate and be skewered by the ungentle curiosity of children.

She made her way across the yard with the sun setting fire to the tops of the northern hills. Behind her, the fieldhands stacked their hoes by the oak and gathered their children for debriefing. She had no appetite, and no interest in the book on siegecraft her father had pointedly left her. She decided, since her father wasn't here to forbid it and her brother wasn't here to poke fun at it, that tonight she would sleep in the root cellar, where the earth was still cool and damp. Sleep was an attractive alternative to watching the candles drip and pretending to study. Or to sharpening her sword, which definitely needed it now. She wished Taireasa were here to prod her out of her moodiness. But with Taireasa came the bodyguards that were always in the princess’s presence, and a witness to the bothered state she found herself in was the last thing Kyali wanted.

She was out of sorts, and annoyed with herself for being annoyed.

It's youth
, her father would tell her, with that dry impassiveness she never could quite manage.
You're fifteen
—and then she would snarl, and he would raise one wry eyebrow, and she would trip over her own feet in sword practice and look like a fool.

Her limbs were growing longer, and banged into things at the worst moments. Her dresses fit badly and her head ached, and she knew her temper showed in her eyes, which sparked with an odd golden sheen whenever she was upset. That was her father's heritage, passed down from some questionable relation or other, and it was extremely awkward when she was trying to keep her face still. There was a grim irony in the fact that her private inconvenience had half the kingdom convinced she was fearsomely magical—and yet, unlike her brother Devin, she could claim not the slightest smattering of the Gift her House was known for.

It wasn't particularly amusing at the moment. She was a daughter of House Corwynall. She had duties, and things to be that she wasn't, and didn’t yet know how to become. She stood in the midst of brocaded chairs and tapestries holding a sword, scowling at nothing. She didn’t need the mirror on the far wall to know how out of place she looked at the moment.

"Damn," Kyali said aloud to the walls, and felt a little better.

Devin and Father should be back tonight, and if she couldn't manage a better balance than this, she had better be asleep before they arrived. Her brother was quick to scent a moment of uncertainty and turn it into a prank or a gibe, which would either improve her mood or worsen it considerably. Plotting an extravagant retaliation to this imagined slight, she descended the cellar stairs completely occupied, and so she noticed nothing odd until she reached the bottom. There she froze without knowing why, as every hair stood on end.

An arm reached out of the dark and wrapped around her neck.

She saw it coming from the corner of her eye but only had time to twitch uselessly sideways. Another arm immediately followed the first one, muffling her startled cry and stealing her breath.

Too shocked to be afraid, she bit down. The hand over her face jerked away. Her elbow drove backwards and her heel went up into a knee. The awful crack of bone that followed drew a pained groan from behind her and brought her panic in a thundering flood. Her attacker staggered, pulling her with him. The dropped candle sputtered on the floor beside them, throwing huge shadows everywhere. Spurred on by the thought that she might have to finish this struggle in the dark, she shouted. It was a much softer sound than she'd intended, but the floorboards above them creaked ominously, the arms around her fell away, and her attacker screamed as though she had burned him.

Leaving this mystery for later consideration, Kyali flung herself at the steps and scrambled up, leaving the back panel of her skirts in his fist. Her sword clattered on the floor as she snatched at it. He came hard on her heels and, as she turned, drove himself obligingly onto the blade for her. Stunned, she froze again.

Her blood sang in her ears. By the look on his face—a fair face, some much colder part of her noted, with the Western short-beard—he was at least as surprised as she was. He drew a bubbling breath. A dagger dropped from his hand and hit the floor between them.

They stared at one another.

He made an odd face then, and coughed a gout of blood all over her. She blinked through the drops. She knew she had to move—
not dead till they stop bleeding
, Father would say—but she couldn't. For all her years of study, all the secrecy and swordplay, she had never killed a man. She supposed, watching his face in a perversely distant way, that she still hadn't quite managed it. But he fell forward onto her then, going limp; after the instinctive terror of having him land on her subsided, the sight of his glassy gaze, of her old practice sword sticking out of his ribs, made it clear that she had done it now.

She watched his face closely while his blood dripped down her cheek. He didn't move. He seemed not to be bleeding anymore, though with all the blood on him already, how could one tell? She didn’t intend to get closer to check. She couldn't hear anyone else in the house. Through the haze of shock, she was grateful the soldiers weren't here to witness this bizarrely personal moment.

"Well," Kyali said, beginning to be pleased at how well she was taking this—and then threw up on him.

Damn.

* * *

New lessons were the result of the ordeal, which was not shocking: new lessons were the result of nearly everything.

Devin, when her family had arrived to find her scrubbing blood out of the floorboards, had predictably deemed her hopeless, right before he slipped on an overlooked puddle. Their father, also predictably, had directed the House guards to bury the man in the south field, made her drink half a cup of unwatered wine, and sent her to bed.

Kyali spun and parried as her father's sword came at her. The jolt when their blades met made her whole arm ache. Sweat pasted stray tendrils of her hair to her face. Her leather armor creaked with every move. She wobbled back on guard, her arms and legs trembling with fatigue.

It was both comforting and disturbing that she was not the only one out of breath this afternoon: beads of sweat stood on her father's brow and his armor was creaking, too.

He waved a hand at her, meaning, she hoped, that they should rest. Prudently, she waited until he leaned against a tree before staggering to one of her own, pressing her back against its bark. Her legs were barely able to hold her weight. Every time she grew accustomed to the lessons, he would add some new element and she would spend a week sore and winded and stumbling before she began to get the hang of it again. These lessons were both harder and easier than the other things he taught her: the movement of troops across provinces, the tricks of supply lines and alliances, the careful use of spies. An odd sort of childhood—but as the alternative was learning to sew and do accounts, she wasn't about to complain.

Except now she had killed a man, and she could no longer pretend her father was merely amusing himself by teaching her.

Her father sighed, and Kyali darted a worried glance at him. He'd been very quiet since last night, which in her experience meant she'd done something wrong. But he avoided her gaze and so she looked elsewhere, determined not to be seen as a child today.

The wheat fields stretched out below them, brown stalks peppered with kerchiefed heads and teams of dray horses, and in the distance, the wide expanse of the Sainey River sparkled back up at the sun. It would have been a far more peaceful view if the fieldhands weren't watching them so closely.

By now rumor would have reached the capital; there was no way the soldiers who had found her in the aftermath of last night's little debacle had kept silent about it. She glanced over again. Her father seemed to be contemplating the same view. But she had learned the trick of staring at things from the corners of the eye from him, and she knew it was her face he really watched. Caught between gazes, she pretended to be absorbed in a rock under the toe of her boot. Her shoulders drew up.

"It bothers you, then, does it?"

There was no curiosity in his question; the answer was probably plain on her face just now. She shrugged. He sheathed his sword and folded his arms, looking a bit like a statue of himself as he considered the expanse of his fields.

"No," she said, which they both knew was an outright lie, but her father let it pass with mocking civility and spared her having to invent a justification.

"It'll only get worse, now that they've evidence it's not play we do here," he said.

She glared, feeling a rush of heat in her eyes. There was no hiding it; he knew exactly what it meant, having the same trait himself, though it almost never showed in him.

"What
is
it then, exactly?" she asked. "You're not preparing me for marriage, unless you were planning to marry me to an outlaw. Why—"

She choked the words off, flinching away from her own anger. There was more of it than she had believed.

Why are you teaching me to be
you?

She could never ask him that. Just thinking it made her heart thump.

Her father tipped his head like an old battle crow, looking like he'd heard the words she was holding behind her teeth. "Don't you like it? I was perhaps mistaken."

Gods, there was no way to win with him. She wasn't even sure she
wanted
an answer— ten years at this; it couldn't be a whim that the Lord General chose to teach his daughter the sword. Surely not.

But what if it was?

"You know I do," she said, and they stood a moment, listening to the distant shouts from the fields. "But," she added, having recovered her argument, and he cast her a weary sideways glance—he hated that word. "But I've put this practice sword to a somewhat different use than you intended now, have I not? The villagers may find it a good tale to tell, but I doubt the gentleman's kin will. And others who have found my… hobby… amusing will think again. Won't they?"

"You've the Gift now, yes? You've used it—against, dare I guess, young Lord Alusyn in our cellar last night?"

How could he tell? She'd said nothing of the strange effect of that shout, or—

Wait.
Lord
Alusyn?

It was one of his strikes from the side. The surprise made it to her face; she could feel it there, widening her eyes. Kyali thought hard. She knew the name; a moment's thought gave her the lineage and the location, and her knees went weak.

She'd killed a baron's nephew. A
Western
baron's nephew.

Her father gave a grim smile then, seeing her understanding dawn. "I need not explain to my daughter the repercussions of this," he said, looking her steadily in the eye. "Need I?"

He had explained it enough already, in lessons and lectures. Relations with the four provinces of the West were difficult: the rule of the kingdom sat in the East, on the other side of the Deepwash River, and all sorts of things from trade to taxes to the old names of the seven gods were points of contention—but the real issue, she suspected, was simply that the throne sat in the East. A girl raised in House Corwynall, the more martial of the two royal lines of Lardan and the one on whose estate the Eastern provinces' soldiers were trained and housed, could hardly be unaware of the tension. A girl who sometimes couriered orders to troops stationed near the Deepwash's winding border as part of her training was aware of a bit more… like that the men on their side were matched precisely in number and location on the other. It was not common knowledge, and her father wanted it not to be.

She was of the Blood, as was her brother: as eligible for the throne as Taireasa was, though nobody had voted a Corwynall onto the throne in so many generations it was just history now, something to read in a book. She was of the Blood and she'd killed a
Western baron's nephew
.

A Western baron's nephew had come to kill
her
.

Kyali shook her head, swallowing a thousand questions, beginning to be truly afraid now. She sensed in a vague, startled way that her whole life had just turned on this point. Her father watched as though every thought in her head was already known to him, and they probably all were. He was the Lord General, after all, and troops moved at his orders, as did she. "Good enough," he grunted.

It wasn’t; not nearly. But she held her tongue and stared, a tactic that sometimes worked. He laughed without much mirth and tipped his chin out, toward the fields.

"Just look," he said. "Look at it."

She did. The habit of obedience was too ingrained in her not to: she heard his voice and her muscles moved before her mind caught up. Devin, older by a few years and having studied music instead of warcraft, had escaped such thoughtless compliance.
Why
was Devin’s question, generally before one was done speaking, and his flighty attention skipped over half the explanation anyway unless you caught his interest.
Changeling
, he had called her last night. Outside of
Síog girl
, it was his favorite to throw at her, because of her eyes and her hair. (And because she hated it. But he had given her the best of the pancakes this morning without a word, and that was Devin too.)

"Change in the wind," her father murmured, dragging her attention back to this strange morning and all the things she didn't want to think about. He nodded at the distant fieldhands. "They know it. They watch because you’re part of it, daughter. They’re looking to see which way it blows, and what it brings. Allow them that with whatever grace you can."

Well,
that
was hardly comforting.

"
Look at it
, Kyali Corwynall."

It was utterly unlike him. Kyali gave up obedience to stare at him, finding his face as impassive as ever when she turned, but there was a haunted look to it just the same. She frowned, worrying, waiting for him to tell her how to mend this mess she had made.