Scar Felice (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 3) (19 page)

The smell of saddle leather and horses clung to her clothes, and when she slept she dreamed of riding.

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The next evening the wagons stopped on an open plain below hills. It was colder. Most of the passengers were wrapped in their cloaks against a needling wind that rode down from the heights. There was little shelter, and the atmosphere in the camp was quite different. People talked less, kept to their small groups huddled behind the poor shelter that the wagons offered. It was an unfriendly wind, but at least it was dry.

Felice made her way to the guards’ camp. They had chosen a spot beside two trees, or what might have been trees in a better location. They were barely higher than her head. They had stretched a rope between them and tried to make a wind break. It was probably less effective than the wagons. They had tethered the horses behind the wind break, and built their fire in the lee of the animals.

Sabra was waiting for her, wrapped in a cloak, looking uncooperative.

“Not tonight,” she said before Felice had a chance to speak.

“A little wind puts you off?” Felice was bored. She had been bored all day and looking forward to the evening. She would have wanted to ride even if the tiny rills that flowed down from the hills had been swollen and the rain had been beating the trees flat to the ground.

“It is not good for the horses. They may catch a chill.”

Felice studied her, and decided that she was telling the truth, or at least that she had no leverage to prove otherwise. She seized upon the only other possibility.

“Swords,” she said. “Show me how to fight with a sword.”

Sabra looked down at the ground for a minute, then looked up. “This is not a good idea, Ima,” she said.

“Never the less, you will show me, yes?”

“As you wish.” Sabra went back to the men huddled around the fire and came back with two long swords, quite different from the short weapon that she had been wearing herself.

Sabra saw her curiosity. “These are more akin to duelling weapons, and cavalry swords. Better reach, not so good in close quarters or a melee.” She gave one of the blades to Felice, who held it tightly, weighed it in her hand. It was heavier than she had expected. She could feel the weight of it all the way up to her shoulder. It changed her balance on the ground, rocked her back a little.

“Stand with one foot forwards. Not so much. Good. Now hold the blade with a lighter grip, point up, point towards my throat.”

She obeyed, felt her balance improve. Sabra’s blade crossed her own, same angle, tilted at a place just beneath her chin.

“Thrust at me,” she said.

Felice pushed the blade forwards tentatively, but the lieutenant deflected the blade easily and slapped her on the ear with the flat of her own blade. It stung.

“Again.”

She pushed forward more forcefully, but Sabra barely moved and for a second time she felt the slap of the blade against her ear. She tried to work out what was going on, but it was quick. She needed to watch more carefully. Another two times and the same thing happened. She tried moving away from the blade, but it made no difference. Sabra moved with her, read everything that she did and compensated. She stepped back and lowered the blade.

“What exactly are you teaching me here?” She was irritated, both at her own failure and the other’s effortless superiority. Sabra was taking no pleasure in it, it was just an exercise. She looked bored.

“I’m giving you a chance to learn without getting killed.”

“What? That I should leave swords to guardsmen?”

Sabra shrugged, and that annoyed Felice even more. She lunged again, but made it into a feint, pulled back and caught Sabra’s blade on her own. It was the first time she’d heard steel on steel so close. But Sabra switched sides and slapped her other ear. She feinted again, and tried to block the return blow, keeping her blade central and moving her head away from Sabra’s sword. It worked better than before, and the blades rang out twice, but a third pass got through and touched her left ear. She was beginning to get angry, sure that the lieutenant was taunting her. There was no lesson that she could see in this.

She swung the blade in a lateral cut, and that made Sabra jump, but opened her up completely, and she got a stinging blow to the side of her face. She could almost see what was happening. Every time she moved her sword Sabra met its tip with a stronger part of her own blade and pushed it aside, leaving her exposed, and moving forwards at the same time.

She tried again, moving forwards herself, pushing with a stronger part of the blade, but Sabra met her thrust and pushed it aside again. She was stronger, and Felice could not prevail. It was just a game, then, a humiliation. Her anger became something more, something almost uncontrolled – a shadow of the rage that had possessed her on the ship, in the storm.

One of the guardsmen said something and Sabra’s head twitched slightly to pick up the words. Felice launched herself, not really using the blade at all she thrust her fist forwards with all her strength, driving forwards with every muscle in her body.

She felt an impact. Her fist, strengthened by the pommel within it, struck home, and Sabra went down.

There was a moment of confusion. The lieutenant kept her blade between them and struggled for a moment to get her feet back underneath her, but the look on her face was one of surprise – shock even. The guardsmen were silent, suddenly, and quite still. A twig cracked on the fire. The wind blew.

Felice was as surprised as anyone that her ploy had worked, and the surprise washed away her anger. Sabra stood opposite her again, but now there was a red mark on her cheek and the side of her face. There was blood, too. Not much, but it was blood. She wanted to apologise, but hadn’t it been the point? To score a hit? She knew that she wasn’t supposed to be able to, but there it was. And what was that she had seen in her eyes? Surprise? Yes, and something else. Fear?

But she liked Sabra. Confused, she threw down the sword, turned her back and walked to her wagon. She climbed into the back, folded her face in her arms and wept. Nothing made sense to her any more. She hurt her friends, aided her enemies, lost sight of who she was and her purpose, both on this journey and in the greater scheme of things. She wanted justice for Todric, she wanted to get home. Beyond those goals nothing else mattered, or it should not. She was a trader. She belonged in the Scar. These were the realities.

But how dull a world it was when only realities counted. So much had happened that was different, unexpected, exciting. Todric’s death had been a trigger, a thing that had hurled her across the world. She had never desired these things, these adventures, and yet they were part of her now. She could never again be who she had been, but at the same time she had no idea who she had become, or even if she liked this new Felice. There was a violence in her that could be provoked, a childish violence that paid no heed to consequences. She was impatient, too, which was new. And she was clever. Her father had always said that she was clever, but now she was clever out here in the larger world where she had expected to be foolish. Alder was an idiot by comparison. Powerful, but an idiot. She had saved his life, she had tracked Raganesh, she had talked the Faer Karan out of killing her, she had secured the information that Alder and the Ekloi had wanted. Raganesh was an idiot, too, a simpleton monster.

Was this arrogance? Was she adding that especially unpleasant vice to her other acquisitions?

There was a noise and she looked up. A plate of food had been set down beside her and a man was hurrying away, back to a fire, and friends, and a cup of wine. She called thanks after him, but did not eat the food. These people were lucky to have such simple lives, to have friends to talk with and a fire to sit around. That was all that you needed – to understand your place, to have food, shelter and friends. Everything else was complication, annoyance. It was trouble.

She lay back and looked at the stars. They spread out above her in an unparalleled display. The bare land, the treeless plain, made it easy to see them, allowed them space to shout down their full glory. She had seen other worlds. The old mages, the ones who had ruled before the coming of the Faer Karan, had believed that there were worlds out there among the stars, that the sun was a star seen close at hand, but not too close. Had she been out there? Were the places that she had visited among the stars themselves? She thought not. It had not seemed far, and they called it stepping. Would you step between the stars? Again she did not think so.

It was all very large, and she was so small. Raganesh had ruled with the other Faer Karan for four hundred years, and before that he had been elsewhere. For how long? He could have been thousands of years old when they came here. The Ekloi, too, were older, almost certainly longer lived. She had seen eighteen years. Of six of them she could recall no more than an image or a word; broken, scattered, unreliable fragments. If luck stayed with her she would know perhaps sixty more, and when she was gone Raganesh would still be there, serving his masters, striving to escape from the Ekloi. Alder, too, she guessed, would still be there, and Todric’s name would be forgotten, and the marker that showed where his bones had been laid would be worn down, broken, illegible.

And yet even her insignificance was glorious. She could act, reach out and touch those around her, and the world would not be the same. If it was some small thing that changed, or some great one, it did not matter in the least. The echoes of that change would be felt for ever. No one would know who she had been, what she had thought or dreamed, but the world would remember her in the simple fact of what it was and how she had changed it.

She picked a piece of cold meat from the plate that had been left and bit into it, savouring the saltiness and the texture of the cooked flesh. Life was what it was, and it was a waste not to enjoy it, so matter how trivial ones triumphs and pleasures.

“Felice.”

She looked up. It was Sabra. She stood at the open end of the wagon, her face a silhouette against the dying fires of the camp, but swollen on one side. Felice did not trust herself to speak.

“I am sorry,” Sabra said. “I was unkind.”

“You were teaching me.” An apology was unexpected.

“So I thought, but it was you who taught me a lesson: to respect whoever stands before you. The colonel has said it to me often enough.” She touched her face. “You have made the point another way.”

“You are not hurt?”

“A bruise, a graze, nothing that I have not endured a hundred times in training, but my pride has received a mortal wound. May I sit?”

“Of course.”

Sabra jumped up into the wagon and sat down beside her. She pulled out a small flask and offered it to Felice. She declined. Sabra took a drink from it and tucked it away again.

“My name is Ennis,” she said. “Ennis Sabra. My father was a lieutenant of the guard at White Rock, and my mother was an archer, so you can see how I ended up in the guard. Limited options. They both died bloody when I was seven. It was one of those little skirmishes that the Faer Karan used to enjoy so much. My father died trying to get to my mother when her squad of archers were cut off by cavalry, so I lost them both. But I don’t remember much about it. A brown, rough face as big as the moon, a kindness that was always there. Cora, Colonel Bantassin, raised me. She was one of my mother’s friends, a sergeant then. She took me in and taught me everything I know, which isn’t a lot.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I want you to know.” Sabra looked at her in the dark, but where her eyes should be there was only shadow, and a glint of reflected starlight. “Anyway, I learned a lot of things that were important to being a guardsman, a guard officer. There’s perhaps a dozen who can beat me with a sword at White Rock, maybe two who are better with a bow, but I won’t admit it to anyone else. I’m good. The reason I became an officer is simple. I follow orders, I’m better at everything than the men I lead. I could kill any one of them – not that I want to. To the guard White Rock is all that matters. In the past it was only the guard, and we relied on no-one else. We stood or fell by our own virtues. We did what we had to do, and we survived.

“I’m good at physical things, but I’m not clever, so I concentrate more. I watch what the clever people do and I copy them, I listen to them. It’s worked so far. I watch everything and I try to understand, but I don’t understand non-guard.

“Serhan has changed everything. I didn’t like him when he arrived at White Rock. He wasn’t guard, he was outlandish, otherwise, and his mind worked in curves, not straight lines. Cora did, she saw something to like, and she was right. He saved lives, guard lives, and he made a difference.

“We started to trust him, to think of him as our leader, a political leader, an alternative to the Faer Karan. The world was a better place because of him. He had us fighting bandits, not each other, and those were glorious times.

“They were hard times, too. We became more than just the guard. Other things began to matter. There was a cause beyond mere survival, and there was Serhan. It is good that things have changed, but I do not understand it. When I think about what is right and what is wrong I can see what I need to see, but I am guard, and raised a guard. I obey orders. I know what is right and proper in a guard and judge the world by that measure. It is not adequate to the task. I see weakness and lack of skill where I should see gentleness and wisdom. I fear that I have misjudged you because your way is different from my own, so I am sorry.”