Where Serpents Strike (Children of the Falls Vol. 1) (39 page)

Broderick could feel his ire rising in the
face of Khalous’ stern rebuke. He didn’t think the situation was as
dire as the old captain made it sound, and he had grown tired of
being yelled at.

“I think we did pretty well,” he said.

Khalous stopped as though he had just been
hit by a log. “I beg your pardon, master Broderick?”

“Brayden and I were fighting them,” he said.
“I hit one of them square in the nose. Dana killed three of them
all on her own. If the others come here we will—”

“What?” Khalous blurted. “What will you do?
What do you think a group of children can do against a company of
twenty armored black vipers?”

“What you’ve trained us to do,” Broderick
said.

“I think I’ve trained you to be smarter than
that.”

“Maybe we’d learn more if you weren’t so
busy yelling all the time!”

Khalous turned so sharply that it made
Broderick flinch. The captain stormed over to one of the animal
stalls and grabbed a thick wooden stump that he dropped with a
crash into the center of the barn.

“Up you go,” he said.

Broderick shook his head, knowing full well
what discipline was in store for him. Khalous had used this method
multiple times on Broderick, Clint, and Nash whenever they
disobeyed or whenever Khalous got tired of their bickering.

“Now!” Khalous thundered.

In an angry huff Broderick stepped up onto
the stump and lifted his right leg, balancing on his left foot.

“All night,” Khalous said.

“What?” Broderick gasped.

The longest Khalous had ever made any of
them stand atop the stump was half a morning.

“You will stand there all night in total
silence,” Khalous said, “or until you’ve learned some respect. The
rest of you into the loft. We’ll be lucky if the soldiers don’t
come here tonight looking for those responsible for the death of
their comrades. If they find any of us hiding here they will murder
everyone in this monastery for harboring fugitives from Edhen. Now
absolute silence!”

At last it occurred to Broderick why Khalous
was so furious. Their actions hadn’t just riled a den of black
vipers, they had endangered everyone in Halus Gis.

Broderick shut his eyes in shame as he
considered the chaos that would descend upon the innocent lives in
the monastery if the vipers found them here. Inwardly he kicked
himself for being so stupid.

Khalous pointed to Pick and Stoneman and
spoke in a hushed tone, “If they come, get bloody.”

“Bloody bloody,” Stoneman said.

Pick nodded.

Khalous and Pick were in the midst of
securing the barn doors when the duktori walked into the barn.
Broderick never saw much of Bendrosi, the monastery’s well-mannered
abbot, but he seemed a reasonable and kind man.

“Why have you brought the children out here
to the barn, may I ask? Is everything all right?”

Khalous seemed reluctant to answer, but he
told the duktori what had happened.

The shock was clear on Bendrosi’s face. “Do
you think the black vipers will come here?”

“I wish I knew for certain,” Khalous said.
“If they do, just stay calm.”

The abbot considered what Khalous had said.
Then he noticed Broderick standing on one foot atop the wooden
stump in the middle of the barn.

“What is happening here?” he asked. This was
not the first time the duktori had expressed interest in the way
Khalous disciplined the boys. Many arguments had erupted between
the two about his rough treatment of them, their plethora of bloody
noses, bruises, and gashes. Khalous had kept Bendrosi at bay so
far, but Broderick had often wondered how much longer the duktori
would continue to tolerate the violence, especially with Prior
Gravis displaying such strong disapproval.

“Discipline,” Khalous said simply. He
reached to close the barn door. “Do not worry, my friend. If the
soldiers come, they will be dealt with. Good night.”

Khalous and Pick braced the barn doors with
a thick wooden beam.

“I’ll take first watch,” Pick said.

Taking a deep breath, Broderick used his
hands to keep himself steady in preparation for a long night
balancing atop the log, even though he wasn’t sure that he could
last all night.

None of them ate supper. None of them spoke.
The rest of the children climbed up into the loft and bedded down
in silence.

Broderick tried to occupy his mind with
stories and songs to pass the time as he continued balancing atop
the stump, but after a while he ran out of stories, and found that
he couldn’t recall all the words to some of the songs. Through the
spaces in between the barn boards he watched the glow of the moon
as it arched higher in the sky until it rose above the roof and out
of sight.

His foot was getting sore, as were the
muscles in his thighs and shoulders. Fighting off sleep wasn’t
difficult at first, but as the night wore on he found his eyes
growing heavy and his back slouching. He began to wonder if it
would be so bad if he climbed down off the log and slept for a
little while. He doubted Khalous would notice, but he also feared
the captain’s wrath if he did.

He heard creaking in the loft above as
someone moved down the ladder to the barn floor. A moment later he
felt Brayden’s hands on his arms.

“I’ve got you,” his brother whispered.

“What are you doing?”

More creaking drifted down from above
followed by the tapping of hands and feet descending the ladder. It
was Nash. He took hold of Broderick’s left arm as Brayden took the
right.

“What are you—” Broderick started to ask
again.

“If you’ve got to do this all night, then so
do we,” Nash said.

Preston descended a moment later, followed
Dana. They formed a circle around Broderick and propped him up with
their outstretched arms.

The five of them remained there for the rest
of the night, throughout the chill of the early morning air, and
the first glimpses of the rising sun. By the time Khalous climbed
down from his bed high in the loft and found them, they were all
bleary eyed and exhausted. The captain looked them over one by one,
nodding with the thinnest of smiles on his lips.

“All right,” Khalous said, motioning with
his hand for Broderick to step down. “I want to make sure you all
understand this.” His voice was calm and devoid of the ire that had
infused his tone the night before. “You are no longer citizens of
Aberdour. You are strangers in a foreign land. You have no king.
You have no country. The high king of Edhen doesn’t care who you
once were. You are dirt to him. If his soldiers get their hands on
you, any of you, Orkrash will kill you.” He pointed from one end of
the group to the next. “The only thing any of you have are the
people next to you. This is what gives you strength.”

Broderick looked to his right at Brayden and
Preston, then left toward Dana, Nash and Ty. He wouldn’t have made
it through the night without any of them.

Khalous was right. They had no country
anymore. They had nothing except each other. Broderick realized
that he had been living as though he were still within the safety
of Aberdour, well protected behind its stone walls. He felt with an
icy chill through his core that it had come time for that to
change.

The months passed. Another summer came and
went, followed by another bitter winter. The group continued to
bond under the leadership of Khalous, who never wavered in his
seriousness or discipline.

He had begun inviting Dana with them on
their training exercises and even forged her a new bow more
powerful than the one she’d had before. She could launch an arrow
into the dead center of a target from even the longest distances, a
feat that none of the others could replicate. She was getting
faster, stronger, and more tactical.

Khalous had the monastery’s blacksmith forge
for the boys new swords of folded steel, which he charged them with
sharpening on their own whetstones. The swords were heavier, but
only at first. Their arms grew stronger, their attacks faster, and
before long they were holding their own against Pick and Stoneman
in dueling matches high atop the eastern fields.

Broderick found that he rarely thought about
life in Aberdour anymore. His long lost sisters Lia, Brynlee, and
Scarlett, were a mere memory that he chose not to think about. All
he had was a growing fire in his chest that burned against the
Black King. For Broderick, the day they returned to Edhen could not
come soon enough.

Dana thought the game had a simple enough
objective: retrieve the trophy and bring it back to the top of the
hill. Complicating matters was the fact that the trophy was hidden
in a padlocked box somewhere in the monastery.

Also hiding was Pick, Stoneman, and
Khalous—the Old Warhorse, as the boys had come to call him. All
three of them were ready to sack anyone not clever enough to tread
quietly.

“You all hid your weapons inside the
monastery right?” Brayden asked. He was crouched low in the tall
grass on a slope facing Halus Gis, dressed in light leather armor
and pants designed to make less noise when he moved.

“I put mine behind the barn,” Dana said. She
missed the comfort of her bow in her hands and the rattle of
quivered arrows at her hip, but she knew this was all part of the
exercise.

She glanced at her two teammates.

Clint just yawned, not seeming to care.

Broderick folded his arms, frowned, and
said, “I still don’t see why we had to hide our weapons.”

“Because we’ll have to scale the walls,”
Brayden said. “I don’t want the clatter of weapons giving away our
positions.”

“Remember last time Khalous had us sneak
into the monastery?” Dana added. “He stationed Ariella at the gate
to confiscate any weapons.”

“That’s what they do in some towns,” Brayden
said.

Broderick’s nature in recent months was to
argue at every possible instance, most notably with Brayden, so it
came as no surprise to Dana when he said, “But I can scale the wall
with
my weapons.”

“I know you can,” Brayden said, keeping his
cool. “That’s not the point.”

“That wall is fifteen feet high,” Clint
argued. “How do you expect us to scale it?”

Broderick poked Clint in his gut. “Told you
to stop stealing tarts from the kitchen.”

Clint shoved him. “Go piss.”

Dana tried to hide her smirk. She knew that
Clint’s weight wasn’t solely the fault of his love for food. Over
the last two years he had received several growth spurts that had
not only given him noteworthy girth, but considerable height.
Underneath his portly build, however, was well-formed muscle fully
capable of pushing that weight around.

Brayden scratched an outline of the
monastery walls in the dirt with a short stick. “Trees grow close
to the walls here and here.” He poked the ground twice, once in the
northeast corner, and once in the middle of the southern wall.
“Their limbs should get us close enough to hop over.”

“They do,” Dana said.

“How do you know?” Clint asked.

“Remember last year when the duktori heard
there were black vipers in the west, and he ordered the gates shut
for a whole moon?”

The boys nodded.

Dana shrugged. “I used to sneak out at night
to practice with my bow.”

“You? Break the rules?” Clint said, and his
tone was fringed with sarcasm.

Broderick shook his head. “Bad sister.”

“All right,” Brayden began. “We need to
sweep the grounds in sections. If we split up we can each search
one area. We’ll meet behind the barn when the dinner bell
chimes.”

Broderick started toward the monastery,
throwing a terse, “Got it,” over his shoulder.

Clint hurried after him.

“Wait,” Brayden said. “If you find the box,
don’t touch it. Come find me first. All right?”

Broderick and Clint kept walking, both of
them ignoring Brayden.

“All right?” he called again.

Still, they didn’t respond.

Brayden stood, sighed, and looked at Dana,
his eyes begging for help. She shrugged, not knowing what to tell
him.

“Looks like they’re headed south,” she said.
“North for us?”

“North it is,” Brayden answered.

He took off at a quick jog down the
hill.

Dana was more than content to be alone with
Brayden. The two of them worked well together, she thought. Her
natural attention to detail coupled with his careful thought
process made them a formidable pair during Khalous’ many war games.
Too often she felt that Brayden’s cautious nature stemmed from
fear, but at least it worked to his advantage, unlike Broderick who
too often acted before he thought.

Brayden had become a respected combatant as
well. His coordination with his sword and shield, his perfect
balance, and acute focus, made him a sharp warrior. He wasn’t as
fast as Broderick, or as stylish as Nash, but he managed to
coalesce the best bits of Khalous’ teachings to become a
well-rounded fighter. He was relentless with his training. He never
stopped perfecting his body. If Khalous demanded one hundred
pushups, Brayden did one hundred, twenty-five. If the boys were
challenged to sprint one league, he would run two. If he did this
to better improve himself or stay in competition with Broderick,
Dana couldn’t be sure, and she didn’t think it mattered.

Unlike her brothers and Clint, who had all
grown considerably over the years, Dana hadn’t grown much at all,
at least not in height. Though still short and small waisted, her
features had become more refined. Where once a young girl’s round
cheeks and soft jaw sloped into a scrawny neck, now appeared a
woman’s face that gave way to a graceful collar and other
attributes more akin to womanhood.

She followed Brayden north toward the ravine
that divided the eastern hills from Halus Gis. They traversed a
fallen tree to cross the precipice and hurried up the slope behind
the eastern wall of the monastery.