OvidLemma
The portrait below is of Earl Gunthald von Liestch, the ruler of Port Rumm. Port Rumm is the largest city in Aurilicht, several times larger than the ducal capital at Verdenlecht, and a major trading hub of the continent. The earl's family have ruled the city for many generations - according to him, back thousands of years, to the days before a unified Sudrian Empire when the von Liestches were kings. Consequently, the earl is fabulously wealthy and holds quite a bit of political power - and he knows how to use it. It is Gunthald's dream that his successors will one day claim the throne of a unified Sudria, and he's willing to play dirty to make sure it happens.
40. Memoirs of a Palace Orphan
Fortunately, Val wasn't restricted to only the palace. As big as it was, she'd still have gone stir-crazy after more than a few days. As long as she had guards with her and as long as she gave them a half hour or so of lead-time, she could go wherever she liked in the city. It was, quite possibly, the most generous detention ever offered in the history of Aurilicht, though she couldn't be positive because F.C. Svorsky hadn't specified.
It meant, for instance, that she and Niko could ride into the Port Bazaar and buy a whole collection of books on magic. The earl had specifically requested that they do so when he found out how threadbare the palace's library was on the subject. So they rode down to the bazaar, flanked by members of the ducal guard and the earl's personal guard, and everybody gawked at them and their fine dresses, and everybody got out of the way when they saw four young women (since Cousin Luella accompanied and, obviously, Izzy wanted to come) on slender fillies and eight armored guards on sturdy destriers trundling down the avenue. Val wondered if this was what it felt like to be nobility. It was an exciting novelty, but it might eventually grow tiresome to have everybody gawping at you.
The bazaar was a great u-shaped tract of city down by the port, a long poplar-lined stretch of ochre-brown sandstone opening up to the port and the ocean beyond. The middle boulevard crammed vendor stalls and carts in between the three great fountains, where traders from afar spread their wares on great gaudy blankets and incense and exotic foods wafted in the air. The outer ring of the bazaar was the more-upscale Mercantile Bow, where tall buildings in pink limestone proclaimed luxuries and decadent pursuits, from The Pink Tower, which Val figured was some sort of classy bordello, to Arcaneum, a shop that specialized in books and supplies for Gifted.
"Will they let you in if you aren't Gifted?" Izzy wondered aloud.
"If they don't, then we won't shop there," Val said.
The inside was warmly-lit with antique glow-crystals and smelled both sweet and piquant, the mixed smells of old books, alchemical treatments, and various extracts. The sign next to the bronzed medallion of chem-hardened leather posted above a pre-prepared hardening kit insisted Try Me, so Val did. It was reasonably well-hardened, but not as well as she or Ginn could do.
"You girls know this material is only useful if you can do magic, right?" the proprietor said.
"We're witches," Val said. Izzy wasn't Gifted, at least not yet, but three out of four was close enough. "We need some books to fill out the library, though…"
"Are you trying to do magic, or can you actually do magic? Most people t-ah!" He yelped mid-sentence when Val flashed a light into existence next to him.
That was actually one of Niko's innovations, discovered accidentally when she was learning how to make a magical light, one of the very first spells budding magic-users learned. She'd bungled the spell, causing it to collapse almost as soon as it started, and the result was a pretty effective distraction or stunning technique that used hardly any energy. Val had managed to replicate the effect and showed Niko what she'd done 'wrong' after about an hour of experimentation. Now all of them occasionally employed magical flashes as a practical joke. Unfortunately, none of them had figured out how to cast the flashes more than five or six yards away yet.
"What spell was that?"
"We invented it," Val said. "So. Can we see your books?"
The collection of books at Arcaneum wasn't any more impressive than the decent collection Priestess Oestel had at the temple (she'd managed to take most of them when she escaped to the west bank, fortunately). However, the collection was different and actually included a volume on military magic, which Oestel was opposed to. Val bought a dozen of the most promising tomes for the astounding sum of six talents - as much money as the average tradesperson made in a year. But, as long as Earl Gunthald was bankrolling it, Val didn't particularly mind how much her new reading material cost.
With their eight guards, a dozen books, and three chem-hardening kits, the four of them trundled back up to the earl's palace and got to work improving the earl's library.
Since the city palace was mostly empty, there was plenty of room to accommodate the Vinzennos and family friends. When Uncle Wuldie showed up to bring Luella back home, Val gave them a tour of the place - everything but the earl's private suites was fair game. She even showed them several parts of the palace that were supposed to be secret but that she and Izzy had discovered one night after they'd slipped Val's guard (who, honestly, weren't that hard to slip).
Wuldie scratched at his beard. "Are you sure we should be here? It looks like a family crypt."
Val looked to the guard who'd come to accompany them. The corporal shrugged. Val shrugged. "His excellency said anything but his private suites, and this isn't the private suites." She brought her light closer to one of the statues lining the smooth marble walls. "Torstus Kennig… kennig means king in Old Sudric…" of course, being Gifted, Wuldie and Luanna probably knew Old Sudric already, but the corporal probably didn't. "Corporal, do you know if there used to be kings in Port Rumm?"
The corporal shrugged again. "I couldn't say, miss."
Luanna ran her fingers along the statue's face, its blank, life-sized visage gazing ever forward. "Port Rumm was part of Sudria back at least a thousand years. Could these be more than a thousand years old?"
Val felt whispers, a buzzing at the base of her brain, something even more subtle that magic being cast. When she placed her hand on Torstus Kennig's marble chest, she could almost feel a heartbeat within the stone. Could almost feel a life long extinguished within it… something flashed within her mind's eye, but it was too indistinct to put words to it…
"Two thousand years," Val said eventually.
Violet meowed, which meant, That sounds about right. How Val or Violet could have told that from the whispers was a bit of a mystery, even to Val. It was like there were memories beneath words trapped within the crypt. Suddenly, she wanted to get out of there.
"I need some air," she said.
"Did… did you just…" Uncle Wuldie said. He suddenly looked pale.
"Yes, she did a divination. It's very rare," Luella said, perhaps a bit too quickly. "I agree with Val. Let's go up."
+++++
After two weeks in the palace Val was ready to go somewhere else. It's not that things were bad, per se, so much as that there were consistent and ongoing sources of annoyance. The first, obviously, was that she and Niko didn't get to cuddle nearly as much as she'd have liked. Ginn stated that she and Niko weren't allowed to sleep in the same bed, or even in the same bedroom, which was absolutely unfair, but also sort of made sense because there were so many bedrooms.
Inevitably, Val and Niko ended up 'studying' late at night. This usually started out as actual studying. Val could study for hours and hours, provided she didn't have to study any one thing for more than about twenty minutes. But, as the night wore on and Niko and Val became sleepier, they would nestle into the divan in Val's room and just flip through books at random while snuggling against one another and chatting about just about anything. Usually, it had little to do with the book.
Sometimes, Ginn would come in and remind them to go to bed. They could hear her shuffling down the big palace hallway and see the flickering light of her oil lamp. Since it was a firm rule that Val had to keep the bedroom door open whenever she had guests, Ginn would walk right in, sighing as she spotted the two girls on the divan.
"Nikoli, come on. It's time for bed…"
Niko would yawn and snuggle into Val. "Just five more minutes, Mrs. Vinzenno…"
"No, now. You can barely keep your eyes open."
Then Val and Niko would share a quick kiss - anything more would earn a sigh and a mild rebuke from Ginn - and then Val was alone for the night. She and Niko had only shared a bed a handful of times before… maybe a dozen? But she loved the feeling of warmth next to her, of Niko's little snores and sighs as she slept. Val wondered if she was in love. She wondered if, some day, Priestess Oestel would marry them in the sept, and she and Niko could go into their own bedroom, and nobody could tell them they couldn't shut the bedroom door. They might even lock it!
Then morning inevitably came, and Val would slowly rise into consciousness, her thoughts coalescing as the strange whispers beneath the palace abated, as if scattered by sunshine, or perhaps by wakefulness. Usually, she awoke whenever Violet got hungry. She'd pad up along Val's body, knead her belly with her paws, and then sprawl herself out on Val's face, which was not in the least comfortable. Then Val would push her cat off and serve her breakfast - but Val's own morning meal had to wait until after practice in the knight's field with Ette. That was where the palace guard trained, but only three days a week and in the afternoons.
On one Mitvake morning, after two weeks and two days being 'detained' in the earl's palace, Val buckled her doublet in place and padded out to the field, a thirty-by-forty-foot courtyard at the center of the palace. There were seats in the gallery above for onlookers, though they rarely had more than a dozen people looking on, mostly servants. They liked to gawk at the former Wayfair bounty-hunter and his three students going through their drills. Today, though, Val heard gasps, polite applause, and the rapid klonk-klik-klonk-klik of expert sparring with practice swords even as she paced out to the field.
Ette and a taller, slimmer, slightly-younger man engaged one another, the younger man in an inside guard stance, his dark, curly hair and short beard wet with sweat, and Ette heaving in breaths, set in a long stance, the tip of his practice sword raised to shoulder level.
Klonk-klik-klonk-klik-klik, their swords met in a flash. The man was almost as fast as Ette, who was probably the fastest fighter that Val had ever seen, and clearly more skillful with the sword. So Ette had strength, and maybe speed, but the other man had technique. Klonk-klik-klonk-klik. Ette grunted and pushed the man back as they engaged. He turned the momentum into a rapid spin and klik'ed against Ette's practice sword, his blade sliding down until it smacked against Ette's exposed forearm. The audience in the gallery above clapped and cheered. Money exchanged hands.
"Ow!" Ette said, rubbing the red spot on his arm. "That's four to two… want to make it best out of nine?"
The man shook his head. "I'm afraid you have me exhausted, Sir…"
"Mr. Ettebono Vinzenno," Ette said. Grumbling, he shuffled over to his pack and retrieved four low marks to pay the man. Apparently, there's been a friendly bet between the two.
"Vinzenno… like the pirate?"
"Aye." Ette winked. "He was my grandfather, Sir Andrat. Oh… and it looks like my students are finally here."
Sir Andrat nodded cautiously. "Your students are girls?"
Ette nodded. "Three girls and a young man. That one's my daughter, Val. And maybe my boy, Galv, will be along if he gets his bony arse out of bed."
"Galvan's coming," Val assured him.
She skipped out to greet the man. He was six feet tall and well-muscled, though not as well as Ette… though, then again, few men were. He had the curly hair, pale eyes, and dark complexion of the Khasun people, who lived south of the mountains. "I'm Val," she said.
"Sir Andrat. I'm his excellency's weaponsmaster, as well as tutor to young Lord Terrian… if he gets his bony arse out of bed." He glanced to Ette, who chuckled. "I hope you don't mind if I watch you practice, Val?"
"If you like, sir," Val said. "I've only been training for less than a year, though, so I'm not very good yet."
Ette shot Andrat a nervous look and then gestured for the girls to come out to the knight's yard to form up. Val greeted Izzy and Niko with hugs and, since Galvan decided to plod out to the yard just then, hugged him, too, so he wouldn't feel left out. That was how the girls usually greeted one another in the mornings, though they also had a formal greeting when Ette had them meet up and salute him as their teacher and then one another.
"All right… warm-up stretches and then we'll open with some basic drills."
They did stretches, jogging, and then burpees, which was pretty standard for their warm-up. Then Ette led them through knife exercises 1-5, and then sparring, with basic throws and rolls only. Then he tried to get them to go to go through exercises 1-4 with the quarterstaff and Iselde (who, at some point in the distant past, only did combat training because the other girls were) objected.
"Why are we doing beginner drills?" she said.
"It's important to return to the fundamentals from time to time," Ette said cautiously. His glance shifted toward Sir Andrat. "Until you can best your teacher in fundamentals drills, you're not good enough…"
"I can't best you because you're a lot bigger and stronger than me," Izzy said. "I've been practicing the branch form on my own, but I need somebody to practice with."
The branch form was a school of techniques for quarterstaff in the section of the combat book past the first sixty exercises - after number sixty, there were no longer any numbers, but rather you were supposed to string techniques together and adapt them on the fly for different variables and scenarios. While Val still had trouble with a few exercises in the last twenty, she got the feeling that those were mostly fancy techniques done for show and not ones that anybody actually used in combat. Otherwise, they would have shown up in the back half of their book, Art of Defense & Practise Regarding the Pole.
Sir Andrat scratched his stubbly chin. He was very interested in them now, for some reason.
"We were practicing branch form in the last class," Galvan said. "I'm definitely not ready to move on from it."
That was perhaps understating things. Galvan was, by a significant margin, the least competent fighter in their group… though he'd actually made up a lot of ground now that he'd committed himself to twice-daily practice. Val used to regard him as kind of hopeless when it came to fighting, but now regarded him as being where she'd been about five months ago and proceeding at about the same pace. She hoped that didn't mean that Galvan might want to take over the family business when Ette retired now… not that there was much of a business at the moment.
"Fine. Branch form," Ette sighed, looking defeated and just a bit nervous, for whatever reason.
Val inferred that he was worried about looking foolish about his training, about looking bad in front of a man who was a knight and a weaponsmaster. Maybe they weren't as competent as Val liked to think? To be safe, Val put a little extra something into her exercises, mustering as much precision and crispness as she could manage, making the loudest hoo exhalations she could (that was the sound they were supposed to make at the end of a combination), and doing her best to stay in exact sync with Niko when the drill called for that. Hopefully, Niko was doing likewise with Izzy and Galvan was doing likewise with her, but Val worried only about herself.
Ette sighed… he sounded… well, Val hoped he wasn't disappointed. "All right, excellent job kids… free form mixed sparring. Starting with first partners and then cycling, two minute rounds."
Val got paired with Niko first, which always made things interesting. Niko wasn't nearly as big or strong as Ette, but she was enough bigger and stronger than Val that it mattered. She was also almost as fast as Val, which meant Val had to try to out-technique her… and Niko wasn't particularly weak in that regard either. Or maybe, after gauging Ette's reaction, they were all just equally bad? She tried to pay attention to Ette's low conversation with the knight, but it was hard when she was worming her way out of a near submission. Then the two-minute sandglass emptied with a little click and automatically flipped over. That meant Val was paired with Galvan, which was easier, since she could just get him to the ground and pay half-attention while he tried to deal with her. The only downside was that he sweat more than the girls and sometimes dug his nails in if you swamped him on the ground.
"I thought you said they were beginners…" Sir Andrat said.
Ette ran his fingers through his short, dark hair. "They are. Val has the most training of the lot… she's been training with me for about ten months. The other two girls about a month less."
"What training did they have before that?"
"None, I swear," Ette said.
"That's impossible…"
"Keep your voice down, sir… they think it's normal…" Ette checked to make sure none of them was listening. Which Val was, of course, but he didn't seem to notice. "Something strange happened in Verdenlecht…"
Galvan flailed around, so Val adjusted her position to keep him swamped. He was bigger than her, obviously, but didn't quite have a mastery over leverage yet. She continued to listen.
"Something strange?" Andrat asked.
Ette nodded. "Val proposed that we start teaching classes to the sept and I indulged her, expecting a dozen lackluster tradespeople and their kids, folks whose interest would quickly peter out… instead, I got about fifty people training like they were born to be warriors. Those three girls are the most extreme, but I had twenty almost as good. Galvan never showed any particular interest or talent, and well… that's a bad example at the moment, but he's much better, too. But that's not the only strangeness…" he pointed to Val and Galvan. "Val! Reset!"
That meant they were supposed to return to their original fighting stances. Val cursed under her breath and rolled off of Galvan into the ready position, losing track of the conversation.
OvidLemma
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-Ovid
OvidLemma
The portrait below is of Earl Gunthald von Liestch, the ruler of Port Rumm. Port Rumm is the largest city in Aurilicht, several times larger than the ducal capital at Verdenlecht, and a major trading hub of the continent. The earl's family have ruled the city for many generations - according to him, back thousands of years, to the days before a unified Sudrian Empire when the von Liestches were kings. Consequently, the earl is fabulously wealthy and holds quite a bit of political power - and he knows how to use it. It is Gunthald's dream that his successors will one day claim the throne of a unified Sudria, and he's willing to play dirty to make sure it happens.
40. Memoirs of a Palace Orphan
Fortunately, Val wasn't restricted to only the palace. As big as it was, she'd still have gone stir-crazy after more than a few days. As long as she had guards with her and as long as she gave them a half hour or so of lead-time, she could go wherever she liked in the city. It was, quite possibly, the most generous detention ever offered in the history of Aurilicht, though she couldn't be positive because F.C. Svorsky hadn't specified.
It meant, for instance, that she and Niko could ride into the Port Bazaar and buy a whole collection of books on magic. The earl had specifically requested that they do so when he found out how threadbare the palace's library was on the subject. So they rode down to the bazaar, flanked by members of the ducal guard and the earl's personal guard, and everybody gawked at them and their fine dresses, and everybody got out of the way when they saw four young women (since Cousin Luella accompanied and, obviously, Izzy wanted to come) on slender fillies and eight armored guards on sturdy destriers trundling down the avenue. Val wondered if this was what it felt like to be nobility. It was an exciting novelty, but it might eventually grow tiresome to have everybody gawping at you.
The bazaar was a great u-shaped tract of city down by the port, a long poplar-lined stretch of ochre-brown sandstone opening up to the port and the ocean beyond. The middle boulevard crammed vendor stalls and carts in between the three great fountains, where traders from afar spread their wares on great gaudy blankets and incense and exotic foods wafted in the air. The outer ring of the bazaar was the more-upscale Mercantile Bow, where tall buildings in pink limestone proclaimed luxuries and decadent pursuits, from The Pink Tower, which Val figured was some sort of classy bordello, to Arcaneum, a shop that specialized in books and supplies for Gifted.
"Will they let you in if you aren't Gifted?" Izzy wondered aloud.
"If they don't, then we won't shop there," Val said.
The inside was warmly-lit with antique glow-crystals and smelled both sweet and piquant, the mixed smells of old books, alchemical treatments, and various extracts. The sign next to the bronzed medallion of chem-hardened leather posted above a pre-prepared hardening kit insisted Try Me, so Val did. It was reasonably well-hardened, but not as well as she or Ginn could do.
"You girls know this material is only useful if you can do magic, right?" the proprietor said.
"We're witches," Val said. Izzy wasn't Gifted, at least not yet, but three out of four was close enough. "We need some books to fill out the library, though…"
"Are you trying to do magic, or can you actually do magic? Most people t-ah!" He yelped mid-sentence when Val flashed a light into existence next to him.
That was actually one of Niko's innovations, discovered accidentally when she was learning how to make a magical light, one of the very first spells budding magic-users learned. She'd bungled the spell, causing it to collapse almost as soon as it started, and the result was a pretty effective distraction or stunning technique that used hardly any energy. Val had managed to replicate the effect and showed Niko what she'd done 'wrong' after about an hour of experimentation. Now all of them occasionally employed magical flashes as a practical joke. Unfortunately, none of them had figured out how to cast the flashes more than five or six yards away yet.
"What spell was that?"
"We invented it," Val said. "So. Can we see your books?"
The collection of books at Arcaneum wasn't any more impressive than the decent collection Priestess Oestel had at the temple (she'd managed to take most of them when she escaped to the west bank, fortunately). However, the collection was different and actually included a volume on military magic, which Oestel was opposed to. Val bought a dozen of the most promising tomes for the astounding sum of six talents - as much money as the average tradesperson made in a year. But, as long as Earl Gunthald was bankrolling it, Val didn't particularly mind how much her new reading material cost.
With their eight guards, a dozen books, and three chem-hardening kits, the four of them trundled back up to the earl's palace and got to work improving the earl's library.
Since the city palace was mostly empty, there was plenty of room to accommodate the Vinzennos and family friends. When Uncle Wuldie showed up to bring Luella back home, Val gave them a tour of the place - everything but the earl's private suites was fair game. She even showed them several parts of the palace that were supposed to be secret but that she and Izzy had discovered one night after they'd slipped Val's guard (who, honestly, weren't that hard to slip).
Wuldie scratched at his beard. "Are you sure we should be here? It looks like a family crypt."
Val looked to the guard who'd come to accompany them. The corporal shrugged. Val shrugged. "His excellency said anything but his private suites, and this isn't the private suites." She brought her light closer to one of the statues lining the smooth marble walls. "Torstus Kennig… kennig means king in Old Sudric…" of course, being Gifted, Wuldie and Luanna probably knew Old Sudric already, but the corporal probably didn't. "Corporal, do you know if there used to be kings in Port Rumm?"
The corporal shrugged again. "I couldn't say, miss."
Luanna ran her fingers along the statue's face, its blank, life-sized visage gazing ever forward. "Port Rumm was part of Sudria back at least a thousand years. Could these be more than a thousand years old?"
Val felt whispers, a buzzing at the base of her brain, something even more subtle that magic being cast. When she placed her hand on Torstus Kennig's marble chest, she could almost feel a heartbeat within the stone. Could almost feel a life long extinguished within it… something flashed within her mind's eye, but it was too indistinct to put words to it…
"Two thousand years," Val said eventually.
Violet meowed, which meant, That sounds about right. How Val or Violet could have told that from the whispers was a bit of a mystery, even to Val. It was like there were memories beneath words trapped within the crypt. Suddenly, she wanted to get out of there.
"I need some air," she said.
"Did… did you just…" Uncle Wuldie said. He suddenly looked pale.
"Yes, she did a divination. It's very rare," Luella said, perhaps a bit too quickly. "I agree with Val. Let's go up."
+++++
After two weeks in the palace Val was ready to go somewhere else. It's not that things were bad, per se, so much as that there were consistent and ongoing sources of annoyance. The first, obviously, was that she and Niko didn't get to cuddle nearly as much as she'd have liked. Ginn stated that she and Niko weren't allowed to sleep in the same bed, or even in the same bedroom, which was absolutely unfair, but also sort of made sense because there were so many bedrooms.
Inevitably, Val and Niko ended up 'studying' late at night. This usually started out as actual studying. Val could study for hours and hours, provided she didn't have to study any one thing for more than about twenty minutes. But, as the night wore on and Niko and Val became sleepier, they would nestle into the divan in Val's room and just flip through books at random while snuggling against one another and chatting about just about anything. Usually, it had little to do with the book.
Sometimes, Ginn would come in and remind them to go to bed. They could hear her shuffling down the big palace hallway and see the flickering light of her oil lamp. Since it was a firm rule that Val had to keep the bedroom door open whenever she had guests, Ginn would walk right in, sighing as she spotted the two girls on the divan.
"Nikoli, come on. It's time for bed…"
Niko would yawn and snuggle into Val. "Just five more minutes, Mrs. Vinzenno…"
"No, now. You can barely keep your eyes open."
Then Val and Niko would share a quick kiss - anything more would earn a sigh and a mild rebuke from Ginn - and then Val was alone for the night. She and Niko had only shared a bed a handful of times before… maybe a dozen? But she loved the feeling of warmth next to her, of Niko's little snores and sighs as she slept. Val wondered if she was in love. She wondered if, some day, Priestess Oestel would marry them in the sept, and she and Niko could go into their own bedroom, and nobody could tell them they couldn't shut the bedroom door. They might even lock it!
Then morning inevitably came, and Val would slowly rise into consciousness, her thoughts coalescing as the strange whispers beneath the palace abated, as if scattered by sunshine, or perhaps by wakefulness. Usually, she awoke whenever Violet got hungry. She'd pad up along Val's body, knead her belly with her paws, and then sprawl herself out on Val's face, which was not in the least comfortable. Then Val would push her cat off and serve her breakfast - but Val's own morning meal had to wait until after practice in the knight's field with Ette. That was where the palace guard trained, but only three days a week and in the afternoons.
On one Mitvake morning, after two weeks and two days being 'detained' in the earl's palace, Val buckled her doublet in place and padded out to the field, a thirty-by-forty-foot courtyard at the center of the palace. There were seats in the gallery above for onlookers, though they rarely had more than a dozen people looking on, mostly servants. They liked to gawk at the former Wayfair bounty-hunter and his three students going through their drills. Today, though, Val heard gasps, polite applause, and the rapid klonk-klik-klonk-klik of expert sparring with practice swords even as she paced out to the field.
Ette and a taller, slimmer, slightly-younger man engaged one another, the younger man in an inside guard stance, his dark, curly hair and short beard wet with sweat, and Ette heaving in breaths, set in a long stance, the tip of his practice sword raised to shoulder level.
Klonk-klik-klonk-klik-klik, their swords met in a flash. The man was almost as fast as Ette, who was probably the fastest fighter that Val had ever seen, and clearly more skillful with the sword. So Ette had strength, and maybe speed, but the other man had technique. Klonk-klik-klonk-klik. Ette grunted and pushed the man back as they engaged. He turned the momentum into a rapid spin and klik'ed against Ette's practice sword, his blade sliding down until it smacked against Ette's exposed forearm. The audience in the gallery above clapped and cheered. Money exchanged hands.
"Ow!" Ette said, rubbing the red spot on his arm. "That's four to two… want to make it best out of nine?"
The man shook his head. "I'm afraid you have me exhausted, Sir…"
"Mr. Ettebono Vinzenno," Ette said. Grumbling, he shuffled over to his pack and retrieved four low marks to pay the man. Apparently, there's been a friendly bet between the two.
"Vinzenno… like the pirate?"
"Aye." Ette winked. "He was my grandfather, Sir Andrat. Oh… and it looks like my students are finally here."
Sir Andrat nodded cautiously. "Your students are girls?"
Ette nodded. "Three girls and a young man. That one's my daughter, Val. And maybe my boy, Galv, will be along if he gets his bony arse out of bed."
"Galvan's coming," Val assured him.
She skipped out to greet the man. He was six feet tall and well-muscled, though not as well as Ette… though, then again, few men were. He had the curly hair, pale eyes, and dark complexion of the Khasun people, who lived south of the mountains. "I'm Val," she said.
"Sir Andrat. I'm his excellency's weaponsmaster, as well as tutor to young Lord Terrian… if he gets his bony arse out of bed." He glanced to Ette, who chuckled. "I hope you don't mind if I watch you practice, Val?"
"If you like, sir," Val said. "I've only been training for less than a year, though, so I'm not very good yet."
Ette shot Andrat a nervous look and then gestured for the girls to come out to the knight's yard to form up. Val greeted Izzy and Niko with hugs and, since Galvan decided to plod out to the yard just then, hugged him, too, so he wouldn't feel left out. That was how the girls usually greeted one another in the mornings, though they also had a formal greeting when Ette had them meet up and salute him as their teacher and then one another.
"All right… warm-up stretches and then we'll open with some basic drills."
They did stretches, jogging, and then burpees, which was pretty standard for their warm-up. Then Ette led them through knife exercises 1-5, and then sparring, with basic throws and rolls only. Then he tried to get them to go to go through exercises 1-4 with the quarterstaff and Iselde (who, at some point in the distant past, only did combat training because the other girls were) objected.
"Why are we doing beginner drills?" she said.
"It's important to return to the fundamentals from time to time," Ette said cautiously. His glance shifted toward Sir Andrat. "Until you can best your teacher in fundamentals drills, you're not good enough…"
"I can't best you because you're a lot bigger and stronger than me," Izzy said. "I've been practicing the branch form on my own, but I need somebody to practice with."
The branch form was a school of techniques for quarterstaff in the section of the combat book past the first sixty exercises - after number sixty, there were no longer any numbers, but rather you were supposed to string techniques together and adapt them on the fly for different variables and scenarios. While Val still had trouble with a few exercises in the last twenty, she got the feeling that those were mostly fancy techniques done for show and not ones that anybody actually used in combat. Otherwise, they would have shown up in the back half of their book, Art of Defense & Practise Regarding the Pole.
Sir Andrat scratched his stubbly chin. He was very interested in them now, for some reason.
"We were practicing branch form in the last class," Galvan said. "I'm definitely not ready to move on from it."
That was perhaps understating things. Galvan was, by a significant margin, the least competent fighter in their group… though he'd actually made up a lot of ground now that he'd committed himself to twice-daily practice. Val used to regard him as kind of hopeless when it came to fighting, but now regarded him as being where she'd been about five months ago and proceeding at about the same pace. She hoped that didn't mean that Galvan might want to take over the family business when Ette retired now… not that there was much of a business at the moment.
"Fine. Branch form," Ette sighed, looking defeated and just a bit nervous, for whatever reason.
Val inferred that he was worried about looking foolish about his training, about looking bad in front of a man who was a knight and a weaponsmaster. Maybe they weren't as competent as Val liked to think? To be safe, Val put a little extra something into her exercises, mustering as much precision and crispness as she could manage, making the loudest hoo exhalations she could (that was the sound they were supposed to make at the end of a combination), and doing her best to stay in exact sync with Niko when the drill called for that. Hopefully, Niko was doing likewise with Izzy and Galvan was doing likewise with her, but Val worried only about herself.
Ette sighed… he sounded… well, Val hoped he wasn't disappointed. "All right, excellent job kids… free form mixed sparring. Starting with first partners and then cycling, two minute rounds."
Val got paired with Niko first, which always made things interesting. Niko wasn't nearly as big or strong as Ette, but she was enough bigger and stronger than Val that it mattered. She was also almost as fast as Val, which meant Val had to try to out-technique her… and Niko wasn't particularly weak in that regard either. Or maybe, after gauging Ette's reaction, they were all just equally bad? She tried to pay attention to Ette's low conversation with the knight, but it was hard when she was worming her way out of a near submission. Then the two-minute sandglass emptied with a little click and automatically flipped over. That meant Val was paired with Galvan, which was easier, since she could just get him to the ground and pay half-attention while he tried to deal with her. The only downside was that he sweat more than the girls and sometimes dug his nails in if you swamped him on the ground.
"I thought you said they were beginners…" Sir Andrat said.
Ette ran his fingers through his short, dark hair. "They are. Val has the most training of the lot… she's been training with me for about ten months. The other two girls about a month less."
"What training did they have before that?"
"None, I swear," Ette said.
"That's impossible…"
"Keep your voice down, sir… they think it's normal…" Ette checked to make sure none of them was listening. Which Val was, of course, but he didn't seem to notice. "Something strange happened in Verdenlecht…"
Galvan flailed around, so Val adjusted her position to keep him swamped. He was bigger than her, obviously, but didn't quite have a mastery over leverage yet. She continued to listen.
"Something strange?" Andrat asked.
Ette nodded. "Val proposed that we start teaching classes to the sept and I indulged her, expecting a dozen lackluster tradespeople and their kids, folks whose interest would quickly peter out… instead, I got about fifty people training like they were born to be warriors. Those three girls are the most extreme, but I had twenty almost as good. Galvan never showed any particular interest or talent, and well… that's a bad example at the moment, but he's much better, too. But that's not the only strangeness…" he pointed to Val and Galvan. "Val! Reset!"
That meant they were supposed to return to their original fighting stances. Val cursed under her breath and rolled off of Galvan into the ready position, losing track of the conversation.
OvidLemma
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