Young Warriors (28 page)

Congratulations to Ciara Corbeil
of Oceanside, California—winner of the
YOUNG WARRIORS contest!

WARRIOR— a person who shows or has shown great vigor, courage, or aggressiveness.

I am a modern warrior. My weapons are not only my sword and bow but also my spirit and my elaborately carved words. I lead my own army of four: my brother, sister, and two loyal friends. My character is strong enough to keep any enemy at bay. My followers look to me in times of trouble, and I give them the courage to go on.

In today's world, many are the choices of right and wrong for kids my age. We are constantly challenged by peer pressure and parental guidance. I am honest and have my own code of chivalry. I help those who have difficulty making decisions and stand by those who find themselves in trouble. My quest is to choose what is “right” even when it feels like I am swimming against the current.

That is why I am a young warrior.

The strong and sassy heroine of “Thunderbolt”
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Pamela F. Service, author of “Lioness,”
brings Arthurian adventure
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Turn the page for a preview of
Tamora Pierce's latest Tortall legend!

On sale in October 2006.

Wednesday, April 1, 246

I have this journal that I mean to use as a record of my days in the Provost's Guard. Should I survive my first year as a Puppy, it will give me good practice for writing reports when I am a proper Dog. By setting down as much as I can remember word by word, especially in talk with folk about the city, I will keep my memory exercises sharp. Our trainers told us we must always try to memorize as much as we can exactly as we can. “Your memory is your record when your hands are too busy.” That is one of our training sayings.

For my own details, to make a proper start, I own to five feet and eight inches in height. I have good shoulders, though I am a bit on the slender side. My build is muscled for a mot. I have worked curst hard to make it so, in the training yard and on my own. My peaches are well enough. Doubtless they would be larger if I put on more pounds, but as I have no sweetheart and am not wishful of one for now, my peaches are fine as they are.

I am told I am pretty in my face, though my sister Diona says when my fine nose and cheekbones have been broken flat several times that will no longer be so. (My sisters do not want me to be a Dog.) My eyes are light blue-gray in color. Some like them. Others hold them to be unsettling. I like them, because they work for me. My teeth are good. My hair is a dark blond. Folk can see my brows and lashes without my troubling to darken them, not that I would. I wear my hair long as my one vanity. I know it offers an opponent a grip, but I have learned to tight-braid it from the crown of my head. I also have a spiked strap to braid into it, so that any who seize my braid will regret it.

I am so eager for five o'clock and my first watch to begin that my writing on this page is shaky, not neat as I have been taught. It is hard to think quietly. I must be sure to write every bit of this first week of my first year above all. For eight long year I have waited for this time to come. Now it has. I want a record of my first seeking, my training Dogs, my every bit of work. I will be made a Dog sooner than any Puppy has ever been. I will prove I know more than any Puppy my very first week.

It is not vanity. I lived in the Cesspool for eight year. I stole. I have studied at the knee of the Lord Provost for eight more year. Three year of that eight I ran messages for the Provost's Dogs, before I even went into training. I know every corner of the Lower City better than I know the faces of my sisters and brothers, better than I knew my mother's face. I will learn the rest quicker than any other Puppy. I even
live
in the Lower City again. None of the others assigned to the Jane Street kennel do. (They will regret it when they must walk all the way home at the end of their watch!)

Pounce says I count my fish before they're hooked. I tell Pounce that if I must be saddled with a purple-eyed talking cat, why must it be a sour one? He is to
stay home
this week. I will not be distracted by this strange creature who has been my friend these last four year. And I will not have my Dogs distracted by him. They will ask all manner of questions about him, for one—questions I cannot answer and he will not.

My greatest fear is my shyness. It has grown so much worse since I began to put up my hair and let down my skirts. I was the best of all our training class in combat, yet earned a weekly switching because I could not declaim in rhetoric. Somehow I must find the courage to tell a stranger he is under arrest for crimes against the King's peace, and detail those crimes. Or I must get a partner who likes to talk.

I am assigned to the Jane Street kennel. The Watch Commander in this year of 246 is Acton of Fenrigh. I doubt I will ever have anything to do with him. Most Dogs don't. Our Watch Sergeant is Kebibi Ahuda, my training master in combat and the fiercest mot I have ever met. We have six corporals on our Watch and twenty-five senior Guards. That's not counting the cage Dogs and the Dogs who handle the scent hounds. We also have a mage on duty, Fulk. Fulk the Nosepicker, we mots call him. I plan to have nothing to do with him, either. The next time he puts a hand on me I will break it, mage or not.

There is the sum of it. All that remains is my training Dogs. I will write of them, and describe them properly, when I know who they are.

As the sun touched the rim of the city wall, I walked into the Jane Street kennel. For our first day, we had no training before duty. I could enter in a fresh, clean uniform. I had gotten mine from the old clothes room at my lord Provost's house. I wore the summer black tunic with short sleeves, black breeches, and black boots. I had a leather belt with purse, whistle, paired daggers, a proper baton, water flask, and rawhide cords for prisoner taking. I was kitted up like a proper Dog and ready to bag me some Rats.

Some of the other Lower City trainees were already there. Like me, they wore a Puppy's white trim at the hems of sleeves and tunic. None of us know if the white is to mark us out so Rats will spare us or so they will kill us first. None of our teachers would say, either.

I sat with the other Puppies. They greeted me with gloom. None of them wanted to be here, but each district gets its allotment of the year's trainees. My companions felt they drew the short straw. There is curst little glory here. Unless you are a veteran Dog or a friend of the Rogue, the pickings are coppers at best. And the Lower City is rough. Everyone knows that of the Puppies who start their training year in the Lower City, half give up or are killed in the first four months.

I tried to look as glum as the others to keep them company. They are cross that I wanted to come to Jane Street.

Ahuda took her place at the tall sergeant's desk. We all sat up. We'd feared her in training. She is a stocky black woman with some freckles and hair she has straightened and cut just below her ears. Her family is from Carthak, far in the south. They say she treats trainees the way she does in vengeance for how the Carthakis treated her family as slaves. All I knew was that she'd made fast fighters of us.

She nodded to the Evening Watch Dogs as they came on duty, already in pairs or meeting up in the waiting room. Some looked at our bench and grinned. Some nudged each other and laughed. My classmates hunkered down and looked miserable.

“They'll eat us alive,” my friend Ersken whispered in my ear. He was the kindest of us, not the best trait for a Dog-to-be. “I think they sharpen their teeth.”

“Going to sea wouldn'ta been so bad.” Verene had come in after me and sat on my other side. “Go on, Beka—give 'em one of them ice-eye glares of yours.”

I looked down. Though I am comfortable with my fellow Puppies, I wasn't easy with the Dogs or the folk who came in with business in the kennel. “You get seasick,” I told Verene. “That's why you went for a Dog. And leave my glares out of it.”

Since Ahuda was at her desk, the Watch Commander was already in his office. He'd be going over the assignments, choosing the Dog partners who would get a Puppy, or just agreeing to Ahuda's choices. I asked the Goddess to give Ersken someone who'd understand his kindness never meant he was weak. Verene needed Dogs that would talk to her straight. And me?

Goddess, Mithros, let them be good at their work, I begged.

Who would I get? I know who I
wanted
. There were three sets of partners who were famous for their work. I kissed the half moon at the base of my thumbnail for luck.

Outside, the market bells chimed the fifth hour of the afternoon—the end of the Day Watch and the beginning of the Evening Watch. Dogs going off duty lined up before Ahuda's desk, their Puppies at their backs, to muster out. When Ahuda dismissed them, they were done for the day. Their Puppies, six of our classmates, sighed with relief and headed out the door. Before they left, they told us what we were in for, each in their own fashion. Some gave us a thumbs-up. A couple mimed a hanging with a weary grin. I just looked away. What was so hard for them? They'd had Day Watch. Everyone knew that Evening Watch got the worst of it in the Lower City.

With the Day Watch gone, Ahuda called out the names of a pair of Dogs. They'd been lounging on one of the benches. When they looked at her, she jerked her thumb at the Commander's door. They settled their shoulders, checked each other's uniforms, then went inside. I knew them. My lord Gershom had commended them twice.

Once the door closed behind them, Ahuda looked at us. “Puppy Ersken Westover. You're assigned to those two Dogs for training. Step up here.”

Ersken gulped, then stood to whistles and applause from the veteran Dogs. I straightened his clothes. Verene kissed him, and our fellow trainees clapped him on the shoulder or shook his hand. Then Ersken tried to walk across that room like he was confident he could do the job, in front of about twenty ordinary folk and the Dogs of the Evening Watch.

Hilyard elbowed me. “
You
coulda given him a kiss, Beka, to brighten his last hours.”

I elbowed him back some harder. Hilyard was always trying to cook up mischief.

“My kisses ain't good enough?” Verene demanded of him. She punched his shoulder. “See what sweetenin' you get when they call
you.
”

Ersken came to attention before Ahuda's desk. She looked down her short nose at him. “Stop that. Relax. The Commander's giving them the speech, about how they're not to break you or dent you or toss you down the sewer without getting permission from me first.”

The Dogs laughed. One of them called, “Don't sweat it, lad. We're all just workin' Dogs down here.”

“They keep the honor and glory and pretty girls for Unicorn District.” That Dog was a woman whose face was marked crossways by a scar.

One of them said, “Up there, the fountains run rose water. Here they run—”

“Piss!” cried the Dogs. It was an old joke in the Lower City.