Page 2 of Ironhold, Trial One

Although that roar wasn't as great as when the younger man's blade flashed out, opening Grak’s throat in a spray of crimson across the sand. Darius watched the hammer tumble from his nerveless fingers. It seemed to take Grak a moment to realize that he was dead. Then he toppled like a fallen tree, the impact enough to send more sand up into the air.

The younger man stood there in triumph, cleaning his blade on the sand. Normally, after such a fight over nothing, Darius would have waited for things to die down a little, then punish the survivor as a reminder that this was Ironhold,hisdomain.

But given who this young man was, there were limits to what even Darius could do. Instead, he gestured, the way the announcer would have in the colosseum itself.

“I give you your winner, Alaric Blackthorn!”

CHAPTER ONE

“Hold still,” I say, as the fisherman squirms beneath my needle and thread. “How am I meant to stitch you up if you keep moving?”

“It hurts!” he complains. “I figured with you instead of old Arla, at least it might be a gentle touch, Lyra Thornwind.”

I wince because I don't like the thought that I'm causing him pain. I have never been good at doing that. I had hoped that the numbing root would have kicked in by now, letting me work on his wound without a problem. But there is only so long it is possible to wait.

“I’m sorry,” I say, keeping my blue eyes on my work. “There’s no painless way to stitch a wound closed.”

He huffs. “In the city, there would be healers who could close this with a touch.”

“And you would still find a way to complain about it, Benkan,” my mother says, looking up from where she is brewing an herbal infusion to try to stop the wound from festering.

I’m told that I look just the way she did when she was twenty, like me. The same golden cascade of hair spilling down my back, the same fine, almost delicate features. The same slender frame and deep blue eyes. These days, my mother looks worn with years of being Seatide’s healer, working without the kind of magical talents that those elsewhere use for the task. Still, she manages a smile that disarms the fisherman’s annoyance. That’s a talent in itself, with a man as given over to grumpiness as Benkan.

“It’s not that I’m ungrateful,” he insists, as I keep sewing. “It’s just… how soon will I be able to get back on my boat?”

“Two days,” my mother declares, in her sternest tone. “That’s a nasty cut you took there, Benkan.”

“Two days? What am I meant to do in the meantime? How am I meant to feed myself and my family?”

My mother’s expression has no give in it. “Two days. They’d rather have no fish for a night than see you lose an arm when that wound opens again and gets infected.”

She has mastered the art of being tough to be kind. Of telling people the hard truths, and occasionally hurting them when they need to be hurt, so that they will heal cleaner. When a bone must be rebroken to set clean, she can do it. I have a harder time of it.

“It’s not just a question of fish for supper with Aetheria’s officials in town,” he complains. “If I don’t get a good catch, I might not have enough to pay what they demand, and who knows what they might take then.”

“Surely they can only take what you have?” I insist. I barely understand why the officials are here at all. Seatide is not a wealthy village. It is a small place, clinging to a rocky shore, barely surviving on what those within can haul out of the ocean.

Benkan laughs then, which makes his arm shift, almost spoiling my work. "You have a good heart, Lyra, but you don't understand how the world works. These are conquered lands, which means the Aetherian bastards can take what they want. If I’ve no money, they might decide they want me for their mines, or that colosseum of theirs.”

“Somehow, I doubt they’d make a gladiator of you, Benkan," my mother says. "Now, hold still so my daughter can finish her stitching."

Again, she is the one being firm. If it were her doing this, she would probably just hold him in place until she was finished. I can't do that. I have never had the knack of being hard with people. I just have to focus on what I'm doing, moving the needle as quickly and precisely as I can, hoping that the thread won't snap. It is dipped in honey to try to fight off any infection. A trick of my mother's.

It doesn't take long before I've managed to stitch the wound completely, tying off the end of the thread and then cutting it. There is a kind of satisfaction that comes from being able to help someone like this.

My mother is the one who holds out her palm for payment.

“Ah, about that,” Benkan says.

“Is this where you tell me you have no coin, Benkan?” she asks, with no give in her tone.

“I need it all for the official’s demands,” he insists.

“And wedon'tneed it?” Her tone is firm as she gestures to the interior of the home in which we live. It is a small, two room shack, built from wood, and with a floor of packed stone. Shelves around the walls hold the tools of the healer’s trade, roots drying for later use, herbs in small stone jars. There are a couple of books in which she has collected recipes and tips relating to the healer’s art. Much of the space is dominated by the table at which we are sitting, and by a large cauldron that we use to cook up cures when needed.

“I still have some fish from the last catch,” Benkan says, quickly. “I can pay you in that.”

My mother gives him a stern look, then nods curtly. “That will have to do, I guess. But the next time you manage to slice your arm open with your own gutting knife, you'd better bring real payment.”

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