Hyllis Family Story 1: Telekinetic (8 page)

How could this have happened without
his notice?! She wasn’t just pretty, she was… gorgeous. He thought that he should be proud of her looks, but somehow, instead, he felt… embarrassed.

Daussie went up to bed.

Eva usually went up about the same time as
Daussie, but this night she stayed down with Tarc for a while. She talked to him about the general principles of being a healer and what she thought he might be able to do with his talent. She kept telling him about more and more things he should be reading in their little library of books. The number of things she told him to read made him feel anxious. He felt like all the assignments would soon bury him.

After Eva had gone up,
Tarc went out to check on the stables. They had a few guests staying in their rooms who had horses out there. The horses seemed fine and when he got back in the big room things seemed pretty quiet. There were just a few people left drinking at the bar so Tarc’s dad told him to go up and do some reading before he went to sleep.

It s
eemed like
everybody
thought he should do more reading. It would’ve been more irritating except he actually liked learning about anatomy.

Over the next few days, any time
Tarc was working outside he picked up some pebbles and threw them. Hitting that post while riding back from the store hadn’t been a fluke. His talent seemed to be getting stronger, making significant corrections in the flight of the stones out to 10 to 15 feet. He could even correct somewhat for the distance it was going to travel and how far it was going to fall in transit. This meant his throws were incredibly accurate, although if a gust of wind deflected the pebble after it had already traveled a long distance, he could no longer put it back on target.

At first he was pretty excited
about his ability to hit pretty much anything he wanted to. Then he started to realize that, while he could hit almost anything with a little pebble, it was harder to correct the aim of something bigger. Just like he couldn’t push a big rock hard enough to move it with his ghost, he couldn’t deflect a medium rock very much while it was flying through the air.

So, while he’d been thinking at first that he
had just become a dangerous man with a thrown rock, he started to realize he wasn’t all that fearsome. If say, one of those strangers in the tavern pissed Tarc off; he’d be able to hit them accurately with a pebble, but it wouldn’t hurt them much. Or, he could throw a big rock at the guy, but then he still had a pretty good chance of missing.

He resolved to keep exercising his ghost in the hopes that he would be able to
move heavier things and control the flight of bigger stones. He frequently kept pebbles floating above the floorboards of the wagon as he drove it around, or lifted the end of his leather strap when he was hauling wood to the kitchen. As the days passed he could tell that he was able to lift larger stones, so he felt like the exercise was effective.

Then one day, as he pulled up behind Benson’s to pick up the tavern’s
food order, he found the stock boy and one of his friends out back throwing their knives at an “X” they’d marked on the wall. Tarc stared, realizing with excitement that a relatively small knife, accurately thrown, represented a much more dangerous weapon than a pebble. He wouldn’t need to throw a heavy rock accurately if he could put a knife on target instead.

He sat watching the stock boy
’s friend throw his knife while Jeff went in to get the Hyllis’ order. Usually Tarc helped Jeff collect their order, but he’d never thrown a knife and wanted to learn more about it. He stepped over close behind the boy and started trying to guide the knife when the kid threw it. After all he didn’t have to throw the knife himself to practice guiding it. The boy was throwing it so it flipped over one complete rotation on the way to the wall.

About half the time it failed to stick because it rotated either too far or not far enough
by the time it hit. Tarc was surprised to realize that although he had a hard time
seeing
whether the rotation was too much or too little, he could easily feel it with his ghost hand. He could also readily correct it when the kid threw the blade a little too much to the right or left. “Why do you throw it so that it flips over and over?” Tarc asked. “A lot of your misses are because the knife has rotated too much or too little.”

The kid looked
disdainfully back over his shoulder at Tarc. “
Everybody
does it this way.”

Tarc
frowned, “That’s just not true. Sergeant Garcia, down at the armory, doesn’t. He throws with a ‘no-spin’ technique. You should at least
try
it.”

“
That’s stupid,” the kid said.

Tarc
said, “Can I try couple of throws?” He pulled out his own knife.

The kid stepped to one side, holding out a hand to invite
Tarc up to the line. Tarc stepped up to the line, putting the handle of his knife in the base of his palm with his fingers paralleling the shank. It felt a little clumsy and he thought he should ask Sergeant Garcia exactly how he held his knives. Tarc took a throw that way anyway.

Despite his attempt to throw it without spin,
the knife was rotating some anyway. Tarc used his ghost to stop the rotation and guided the blade back on target.

He blinked when he saw that the knife
stood quivering
exactly
in the center of the X.

“Hey! That worked pretty good!”
the kid said with an awed tone.

Tarc
tried another throw, guiding it so that it also hit precisely in the center of the X. Then, realizing that he had overdone it, he brought a couple in close, though not right on the target.

The kid said, “
Wow, let me try a no-spin throw.”

Tarc
stepped aside and the kid stepped up.

He showed
Tarc the way he was gripping the knife and said, “Is this how you do it?”

Tarc
shrugged, “Looks good to me, but you really should ask the sergeant. He’s the expert.”

The kid lifted an eyebrow, “
You’re
pretty damn good.”

“I just got lucky
those first two.”

The kid took a throw. The knife was rotating despite the kid
’s attempt to throw it without spin. Tarc resisted the impulse to stop its spin and it clattered off the wood. “Shit!” the kid said, stepping over to pick up his knife.

“You can’t expect to get it on the first throw,”
Tarc said. “Don’t snap your wrist like that and it won’t turn.”

The kid took a couple more throws and on the third one managed to throw it so that it stuck.
Tarc could tell it was a good throw so he guided enough that it hit pretty close to the X.

F
inished stacking things on Tarc’s wagon, Jeff had just stepped up. “What the hell kind of throw is that?” he asked.

Jerking a thumb
at Tarc, the kid said, “This guy’s teaching me to throw with the ‘no-spin’ technique.” He threw again. Tarc could feel that the knife was going to rotate too much, but this time he straightened it for the kid and also guided it right to the X. As it stood quivering in the center of the X the kid turned to Jeff with a raised eyebrow, “You think
you
might want to learn this ‘kind of throw’?”

Tarc
turned and got back in the wagon.

The kid said, “Hey, aren’t you
going to teach Jeff how to throw?”

“You’ve got it,”
Tarc said, shrugging. “You teach him.
I’ve
got chores.” He clucked to Shogun and they pulled away. He wondered uncomfortably what they were going to think when the rest of their throws didn’t go as well as the first few.

Back in the stable he unloaded the last few things off the wagon and untacked Shogun. Things hadn’t looked really busy when he’d delivered the stuff to the porch behind the kitchen so Tarc took a guilty moment to throw his knife a few times at a funny twist in the grain of the wood on the wall at the back of Shogun’s stall. He shook his head. He’d been able to hit the mark, but it was a struggle. His knife was just about as heavy as he could possibly control and it wasn’t balanced very well for throwing. He walked back into the kitchen wondering if he could trade it for a better one.

Eva looked up as
Tarc came in. Looking a little harried she said, “Sheriff Walters is here! Daussie has already taken out some plates, but it would be nice if you could take the rest of them.”

Irritated to be back on serving duty,
Tarc picked up the plates, stacking several up his arm. Out in the big room Tarc saw the Sheriff and seven of his men sitting at the big table. Walters was a big man. He used to be large and powerful they said, but now had run mostly to fat. On top of the taxes he charged, he frequently dropped by the businesses in town, expecting their particular services to be provided gratis. Though the townspeople complained about his taxes, the town hadn’t been attacked for years and they all respected him for that. He and his deputies also maintained fairly good order which held great import for the businessmen.

Daussie had already served the Sheriff and the men next to him.
Tarc began setting plates down in front of the other men. He noticed with some uneasiness that most of the men’s eyes followed Daussie as she headed back to the kitchen.

Daum stopped
Tarc before he could go back to the kitchen. “You bring the Sheriff and his men mugs of beer. I’m going to try to talk to the Sheriff about those hard looking men that have been coming through.”

Tarc
went behind the bar and got down four mugs. He began filling them with beer while watching what was going on. Uneasily, he noted that the deputies looked rather soft in comparison to the strangers who’d been stopping at the tavern recently.

The table the Sheriff and his men were sitting at only
had eight seats. Daum pulled a chair up next to the Sheriff where he sat at the end of the table. Tarc thought the Sheriff looked irritated, but that didn’t keep the big man from digging into his mashed potatoes.

Tarc
couldn’t really hear the conversation between his father and the Sheriff, especially over the jovial gab of the deputies. However, when Tarc delivered the beer, the Sheriff was waving a hand in dismissal and saying, “Yes, yes, I’ve heard about those men from my deputies. You just keep letting my men know if they even
look
like they might cause trouble. If they actually
do
raise a ruckus, we’ll take care of them.” He turned back to the table, “We run a tight ship here, right boys?”

The Sheriff’s men all grinned and made noises of affirmation.

Daum got up with a frustrated look on his face. He walked back to the bar with Tarc, saying, “I’ll take out the other four beers, you get back to your chores.”

As
Tarc walked back to the kitchen, the big door opened and some more lunch customers came in. He glanced uneasily to see if any of them were the kind of tough looking strangers that had been concerning them. He wondered at his sense of mild anxiety that some of the strangers might come in right then. It seemed that he should be hoping some of those strangers would arrive while the Sheriff and his men were there to check them out.

The people who came through the door
were all townspeople Tarc noted with some relief.

But
as he took the buckets out for more water, he wondered again just how well the deputies would do against the kind of hard men that been stopping in the tavern recently.

***

Jacob and Tarc walked to the armory together, Jacob excitedly telling Tarc about a couple of strangers he’d seen. “They came in my family’s shop to get their boots repaired.
Now
I know what you mean when you say they looked, ‘hard.’ They were dirty, and their clothes were worn with patches, but made of heavy cloth. They weren’t hugely muscular like John the blacksmith, but you could tell they were strong. They weren’t wearing uniforms like a soldier would, but still; you got the feeling they were soldiers. Or maybe used to be.”

Tarc
said, “My dad’s been worried about them. Why are there so many of them lately? He wonders if they are planning to rob us, or maybe someone else.”

Jacob scoffed, “They’d have to be crazy to do something like that. They wouldn’t get back out of the walls before the deputies were all over them.”

Tarc looked at his friend out of the corner of his eyes, “But there’s a
lot
of them. And… I’ve seen them next to our deputies. In a one-on-one fight with one of our deputies? I wouldn’t want to be betting on our guys.”

“
Tarc, deputies don’t fight fair. There’s always more than one of them when they take someone on. Those guys might be tough, but they won’t be able to get away from an entire patrol.”

They were turning into the drill center so their argument ended with the last shot from
Tarc, “There’s a
lot
of them. If they all came at once, the deputies would be in trouble.”

Tarc’s turn defending the wall went better this time. He was able to stop someone with his spear, and got in a good blow against another attacker who managed to climb the wall at Jacob’s position. He felt proud of himself, but realized that if he’d been up against Sergeant Garcia he certainly would’ve lost again.

They finished up their wall training a few minutes before the bell rang to switch to swords.
Tarc went to Garcia, “Sarge, I’ve gotten interested in throwing knives. Could you give me a few pointers?”

Garcia smiled at him, “Sure, have you been trying to use a spin, or no spin technique
?”

“No spin.”

“Let’s see your knife.”

Tarc
got out his knife. His dad had given it to him for Christmas several years before. It was a good all-purpose knife with a wooden handle and a sheath. Garcia took it and said, “Well, this isn’t a bad knife for throwing compared to a lot of other knives out there. You’d do a
lot
better with a real throwing knife of course. They’re better balanced.” He lifted his chin, “Show me what you can do with this one.” He pointed at the practice wall, “Try to hit the big knot.”