Thawed Fortunes (5 page)

For all that he was obviously weaker than
normal, Va'del was still more graceful than any of the trainees,
the equal of almost any of the candidates. Jain felt her worry slip
away for the first time in days as she lost herself in the simple
joy of watching his fluid motions.

Nearly half a color cycle passed before
Fi'lin nodded, seemingly satisfied with what he was seeing. The
older man gave Va'del a few more instructions that were too quiet
for Jain to hear and then walked over to a pair of candidates who
were sparring.

Jain watched as Va'del continued with his
forms, using techniques that ranged from broad, powerful slashes
with his heavy practice sword, to quick, subtle stabs with the
dagger in his offhand. Jain wasn't skilled enough to follow most of
them, let alone properly appreciate his ability.

Another half color cycle passed before
Be'ter's despicable, but elegant, figure lazily strolled over to
Va'del. In a departure from his normal practice, Se'ath didn't
follow, but the way he looked at his friend with an unwholesome
anticipation made Jain's stomach twist into a dozen knots.

Again, the conversation was too quiet to be
heard from Jain's position, but she knew she'd been right to worry
as she saw Va'del's face move from the guarded caution that was his
usual way of dealing with the world at large, to the stony mask he
assumed whenever he felt really threatened.

Jain felt her insides tighten up as she hoped
against hope that she was mistaken. Only Be'ter would wait until
someone was exhausted before challenging them. It was like he had
an innate instinct about how to milk the most personal advantage
out of any given situation without regard to what was proper.

Va'del nodded in response to whatever Be'ter
said, and then walked over to the wall where he'd left the light
padding the students all used for sparring practice, and Jain felt
a pulse of relief as she realized that the pair was just going to
practice rather than actively trying to kill or cripple each
other.

The Daughter's relief lasted only a few
seconds, and then each young man saluted the other with a raised
weapon, and they began the bout in earnest.

Be'ter was old enough that he was already as
tall, and nearly as strong, as any of the guardsmen who were doing
their best to watch the match without appearing to stop their own
practice. Va'del was still a year or two from his full growth, but
his lowland mother had gifted him with her uncommon height, and
Jasmin had done something to increase his strength before she died.
The pair quickly moved onto blows that, even with practice weapons,
were only a hair's breadth short of killing strength.

Jain felt a moment of hope as she saw Va'del
surge forward with a strength and speed that had been missing from
his practice techniques a few moments before, but it quickly became
evident he couldn't maintain such a fast tempo. Only a heartbeat or
two later it became obvious the advantage was shifting back to
Be'ter.

Fi'lin spun around to see what everyone was
watching, and drawing his own practice blade, sprinted across the
massive cavern towards them. "Half strength, you fools!"

For a split second Jain clung to the hope the
weapons master would get there in time to stop the fight, but
Va'del was completely on the defensive now. While Fi'lin was still
more than ten feet away the younger boy went down, his slowing
defenses failing to stop one of Be'ter's blows, which crunched into
his ribs with bone-crushing force before the backstroke slammed
into his right leg.

Be'ter seemed to pause for a heartbeat before
his weapon licked out once more towards Va'del's lightly-protected
face. Jain felt her world tremble as what even she knew was a
killing blow raced towards the only person who'd really loved her
since her parents had given her up to the Daughters. Miraculously,
Fi'lin's blade knocked Be'ter's sword away and then swooped back in
and disarmed Be'ter of both his practice weapons.

Jain found herself at Va'del's side unsure of
how she'd made it there. Fi'lin looked at the sickly gray hue and
broken bones of the fallen trainee and bellowed for a
stretcher.

The tears filling her eyes blurred her
vision, hiding Va'del's gasping form and making it impossible to
see the light slap that Fi'lin administered to penetrate her near
hysterics. "Can you block pain, foolish child?"

Trying to pull herself together, Jain nodded,
and reached out to pull in the necessary power as one of her
instructors came running up. The familiar burning of the raw power
focused Jain's thoughts. Reflexes she'd spent a third of her life
developing took over as she stopped the pain signals racing along
Va'del's nerves from completing their trip to his brain.

Pain blocking was just minor enough of a
working that Jain was still able to stumble along with the
stretcher as she powered it, but before she'd taken more than a few
steps, she was grateful for the strong arm that snaked around her
waist to help guide her. It had never before seemed that the
healers' rooms were so far away from the practice area.

Just as Jain thought she was about to lose
control of her working, the arm guided her to a chair. She
collapsed into it gratefully, turning almost all of her attention
to keeping the pain block up, maintaining only a slight awareness
of what was going on around her as she'd been trained to do.

Alone inside her mind except for worry over
Va'del, and the white-hot power she was channeling, Jain almost
didn't hear her name when a familiar voice called it out for the
second time.

"You go ahead and keep that pain block up,
Jain, but don't you dare strain yourself. If you don't let us know
when you start getting tired, I'll see that you're soundly
switched. Do you understand?"

Jain suppressed a surge of annoyance. The
voice was one she somehow knew needed to be obeyed, so she mumbled
something that passed for an affirmative.

As it always did for Jain when she was
touching the power, time seemed to move slower than normal. As a
result, the multiple color cycles it seemed like passed while she
was blocking Va'del's pain probably really only represented half a
color cycle or so. All the same, Jain had developed the fine
tremble that was the first sign of exhaustion by the time she
noticed a decrease in the signals making their fiery way along his
nerves.

They must have repaired most of the damage.
They've probably drugged him by now as well.

A few moments later someone shook her, and
Jain opened her eyes to find Ah'bi's tired eyes looking her over
critically.

"I thought I told you not to push too
hard."

Jain thought about pointing out that Ah'bi's
normally-stately features were marred with exhaustion, but
suppressed the desire and instead nodded as contritely as she was
able. "Yes, Guadel Ah'bi. I had just realized how tired I was
getting when you shook me."

Ah'bi nodded and looked away, but Jain was
fairly sure that she hadn't fooled the intelligent woman who also
served as the law instructor for both the candidates and the
Daughters.

"Well, it was lucky that Fi'lin had you block
pain, and that he sent one of his boys for me. Poor Mandi wouldn't
have been able to do much more than keep him alive, and even the
two of us would have been hard pressed to do everything that needed
to be done if we'd had to worry about blocking pain too. You did a
good job, young lady."

Jain looked around and realized that there
weren't enough people in the sick room. "Where is Mandi?"

The Guadel pointed at the door. "She
collapsed a little while ago and Fi'lin carried her out. The poor
thing was spent."

Jain nodded distractedly as she looked over
at Va'del. The very fact that Ah'bi wasn't still working on him was
plenty of proof that he must be okay now, but he looked so frail.
Only the fact that she was officially not supposed to be near him
kept her from pulling herself to her feet and walking over to check
on him.

As Fi'lin returned, his wife pointed at Jain.
"She hasn't collapsed yet, but she's almost as tired as Mandi was.
Could you get her back to the dormitories for me, and let the
appropriate people know that she was helping me, so she doesn't get
in trouble?"

The whip-thin Guadel started to nod
distractedly, and then fixed Ah'bi with a piercing glare. "I can do
that, but maybe we should all talk first. You've said this little
thing is your prize pupil, can we trust her to keep her mouth
shut?"

Jain watched in amazement as her normally
composed instructor looked back and forth between her husband and
her student in shocked astonishment. "I think so. Jain's never been
as flighty as most of the girls. Obviously there hasn't been any
hint that she's talked to any of the others about having linked, or
we would have been forced to bury her somewhere under enough chores
to ensure that nobody else got any ideas."

Fi'lin nodded, and raised a hand to forestall
the question of what they could possibly need Jain to keep a
secret. "You know that Be'ter did this to the boy, and that it
wasn't the training accident that he and his sponsors will no doubt
try to explain it away as."

"I assumed as much."

"What you may not have thought through yet is
that this will change the whole dynamic among the candidates. I've
been able to use Va'del as a counterweight against Be'ter with the
more easily-swayed boys. Once they saw someone successfully stand
up to that piece of filth, more of them started growing spines. I
even started hoping we'd be able to salvage the bulk of them."

Jain felt her eyes go wide at the frank
discussion of the impact Be'ter had made on the other candidates.
All of this time and she'd never even suspected that the adults
realized what a snake Be'ter was. Be'ter had always implied that he
was too smart to get caught and all of the candidates and Daughters
had assumed he was right. It had just seemed too impossible to
believe that their instructors would know but choose not to do
anything about it.

Ah'bi nodded. "Of course, I should have
realized that. With Va'del having been beaten so severely, those
same boys will start following Be'ter around like gurra lambs
again. Powers! I wish we could do something to kick him out of the
candidate pool."

Fi'lin was pacing across the smooth, rock
floor of the sick room now. "There isn't anything that can be done
there, he's got his sponsors so tightly wrapped around his fingers
they don't believe any of the bad they hear about him, despite the
fact it's come from nearly every instructor who's ever spent any
time around the boy. They're convinced it's all some kind of
political effort to get him kicked out before he can become the
greatest leader their bloodline has ever known."

Ah'bi had a look of concentration on her face
that made it seem as though she were doing sums. "But how can we
possibly...no, you can't be suggesting that. Do you have any idea
how much trouble we'd get into if anyone ever found out?"

I don't know why he cared if I could keep a
secret. They don't even have to talk to each other to
communicate.

"Dear heart, we don't have a choice if we
want to stop him from ruining every candidate we currently have in
training. They've already done it to Be'ter. I could tell, he moved
too quickly for it to be anything else, not in the short time he's
been gone."

Ah'bi looked at Fi'lin for several seconds.
"That isn't all, is it? You're not just worried about stopping
Be'ter, you're worried about Va'del, aren't you?"

Fi'lin didn't answer, but his wife finally
nodded and turned to Jain. "You probably didn't catch much of that
other than the fact that Va'del needs to be able to stand up to
Be'ter, but there are other ways besides the linking augmentation
to make a man more deadly. I'm going to do some of them to Va'del,
and then, if you're willing, and can keep it secret, you'll make
sure that they continue to function correctly. I'd do it myself,
but if I visited him that frequently it would eventually make
people suspicious."

Jain looked uncertainly back and forth
between the two Guadel before letting her gaze settle on Va'del's
blanketed form. "Yes, whatever it is, if it helps Va'del I'll do
it, and if necessary I'll take it to my grave."

The admission had been harder than she'd
expected. Not that she wasn't willing to help, she just couldn't
help worrying that this was all just a test to see how many rules
she was willing to break.

Ah'bi took a deep breath and nodded. Jain's
niggling fears evaporated over the next two color cycles as Ah'bi
proceeded to use what Jain had thought were unrelated techniques
and pieces of knowledge to work changes on Va'del's body she never
would have imagined were possible.

"The bones are fairly easy, you just have to
change their structure. Everything has a structure, but some
structures are stronger than others. We need something that is
strong enough that it won't break as easily."

As Jain watched, Ah'bi sent out little
trickles of power that changed parts of Va'del's bones to something
that was harder. Soon all of the major bones in his body had little
sections of material that wasn't normal bone running through them.
It vaguely reminded Jain of a wire frame, or the supports that the
miners sometimes used in areas of the Capital where the stone
wasn't as strong.

"There, that's as much as can be done today.
Each time you are able to talk to him privately you'll need to
strengthen the reinforcement, expanding the amount of material that
has been changed until you reach a point where the red part in his
blood no longer seems as plentiful, then go in and change some of
it back. Especially in the larger bones here and here."

The older woman seemed to sense her student's
confusion. "The red part has something to do with oxygen, that's
why it's one of the things we modify to make it so those who have
to go outside don't get sick and die."