Page 74 of Silverbow
“No.”
She let out a disdainful sniff and stomped across the campsite. Oryn took the plate Colm proffered and settled down in the dirt to watch her out of thecorner of his eye. She paced back and forth, examining the ground. Finally she bent and plucked a long, flimsy dried reed out of the grass. She twirled it in her hands, and seeming satisfied, took a place off to the side. She was well out of Bade and Aiden’s way, but she chose a place in Oryn’s line of sight and started moving through sword forms.
Oryn watched his plate.
“She’s quite good,” Colm murmured into his tea. He glanced at his companion, who openly watched her with interest, but Oryn pointedly stood and started the washing up to break camp. The bow would serve her better than a sword ever would. “Who was this Master of Arms of yours?”
Oryn darted a glance her way. She perched on the ball of one foot, sword, reed, held in front of her nose, in a form meant to build balance. She slid smoothly into Crane in the Meadow, her leg extending behind her, bending forward, reed outstretched. “His name was Neigel Marwar.”
The name on the bounty was not one any of them knew. Colm shook his head. “He was an Estryian knight?”
“I suppose.”
A curious decision to teach a girl the sword, but it was none of his concern. He crossed to the picket line to saddle Kiawa. The stallion stood stoically beside her mare. Oryn lifted his saddle and settled it over his back. When he bent to reach for the girth, a sharp pinch to his backside made him jump. His head whipped around to see Arawelo, eyeing him with distaste.
Gods. The mare is almost as insufferable as her rider.
Colm came to the mare’s other side to start saddling Lanta. “You should teach her,” he said quietly.
“Don’t encourage her.” Enya bloody Ryerson might be good with some basic sword forms, but it wouldn’t matter when she faced a man with a foot or more of reach on her, or a man with heavy shoulders who would wear her down with brute strength. “She should have learned music or needlepoint or something that might be of use to her some day.”
“I bloody hate needlepoint,” she hissed. Oryn sucked a long breath through his nose. She could move quietly when she wasn’t stomping around. She still held the reed tucked under her arm and tossed it into her pile of saddlebags. His irritation only mounted when she carried it for the last days they journeyed to Windcross Wells.
nineteen
Louissa
Parchment littered Louissa’s writing desk in the room that passed for the best in a shabby little inn in a shabby little northern village. Supply reports mingled with scribe’s scrolls and tiny scraps carried by pigeon and hawk. She let out a vexed hiss as she read the report of the burning of the outpost in Trout Run again. There were two versions of that calamity on her desk.
The official report, the one sent on to Misthol, claimed it was an accident with a forgotten lamp. But the other held a whisper of a rumor. A rumor that a girl was seen skulking around the outpost just before it went up in flames. The fire had burned five city blocks before it could be stopped and it took an armory with it.
She swept the reports aside to run a finger along the map at the bottom of the stack. Innesh had been an archer. Trout Run, an arsonist. Seemingly unconnected, though both were spawning rumors of rebellion. Trowbridge sat quiet, but one of the parchments on her desk held a reported sighting of Peytar’s bounty. It remained to be seen whether or not the trouble would spill beyond the Trydent.
Peytar was making his way up the Queen’s Road. He hadn’t continued on with her from Westforks. She tapped a lacquered fingernail on the dreadful little town. The Westerlands had been quiet until…
What are you up to, Peytar?She skimmed the dates of the reports again.Quiet until he took an interest in the girl who wasn’t what she seemed.
For weeks, Louissa had been puzzling over Enya Ryerson. She still had little of use to report to Pallas. She turned back to the map. From Windcross Wells, one could go anywhere. The next flare up might tell her more, though what she could do about it on this blasted path through the North, she didn’t know.
Crissa
Crissa sat with her arms wrapped around her knees rocking back and forth on the narrow little cot pushed up against the wall. At least she had a cot in this inn. In the smaller inns that couldn’t accommodate all the wielders and scribes that traveled with Louissa Adler, beds were assigned by rank, and as the newest recruit, she often found herself on a floor or in a barn.
She picked at a loose thread in the hand-me-down wielder blacks she’d been shoved into. These bore a fire wielder’s badge. Crissa sometimes thought fire would be a better gift. Water was useless, not that she could wield it at all, and that had made her first few weeks as a new recruit almost unbearable.
The first lesson a recruit learned was that the collar was inescapable. She could not try to escape. She could not think of wanting to escape. She definitely could not touch it. She could not even think of touching it without feeling as if she’d dipped her fingertips into boiling water.
The second lesson a recruit learned was obedience. To disobey the wielder holding the link was pain. Through the unseen bond created by a collar and its link, a wielder could inflict the pain of a lash or the slice of a blade with nothing more than a thought. Even when it sent her to her knees or set her sobbing uncontrollably, when the pain faded, it left no mark. Not on her skin, anyway. Her soul was another matter entirely.
The third lesson a recruit learned was acceptance. The wielders seemed particularly frustrated with Crissa’s lack of it. Her fate, she could accept, but no matter what they did to her, she couldn’t seem to find her gift, and they considered that a problem of acceptance.
Crissa couldn’t help the whimper that escaped her. He came every night for her useless lesson, and she couldfeelhis approach through the collar. It was Recruit Trakaw who most often held her link, though it mattered little. All ofthe link holders were the same, but a few seemed to take particular pleasure in delivering punishment to the new recruits. Recruit Trakaw wasn’t one of them, but she shuddered at the memory of his hand on her waist in the Thornson’s ballroom. He’d known before her Testing, it seemed.
The hook-nosed black clad wielder let himself in without knocking. “Good evening, Recruit Blakwell.”
He carried his usual bucket of water and set it on the floor between them. Crissa eyed it like she might have once eyed a bear. Now, the bear didn’t seem so bad. The bucket, on the other hand, was perhaps her greatest fear. She started to shake before the lesson even began. Without twitching a muscle, Recruit Trakaw lifted a stream of water from the bucket and formed it into a little ball that hovered between them. He beckoned it forward, and the ball went to his hand, where he divided it into three. He started spinning them between his hands like a court juggler.
“Focus on the space between,” he said in the same bored monotone he always taught in. “Look for the wielding.”
