I learned a lot on hunting trips out into the wilderness. We live, as I mentioned, near a great marsh which we actually share with the lizard people. They sound really scary, but they are pretty peaceful with us. Mostly because we don’t interact. But when we are hunting deep in their territory, we leave them something of what we’ve killed. And when they go near our town or the road, they leave things for us. They are actually very beautiful. The light plays off their scales in the sun so they look covered in rainbows. The colors on their skin can be very bright and striking. But their slitted eyes and long claws are quite intimidating. We would sometimes see them off in the distance. Gavendor showed us how they would walk through our camps at night just checking on us, not in a bad way.

Often on our overnight hunting trips, at the end of the day around the campfire, Gavendor would tell us tales about days past when we lived closer to lizard settlements and would fight off goblins and trolls together. But nowadays they lived deep in the swamp and I’d never seen any of their settlements. They used poison tipped stingers pushed out of blow guns to capture and kill their prey. You had to be careful to recognize their traps or one of our dogs or horses could get poisoned. But that’s how life was in the marshland. You had to keep your wits about you. Gavendor reminded us of that a lot.

When I wasn’t on hunting trips and it was too cold or rainy to go outside, I read interesting books from my father’s library. Getting the books was a tricky business as he kept his desk and documents there and he and my brothers spent a good deal of time in that room. I don’t think they much read the books so much as liked using them as a backdrop for their work and meeting with other nobles.

I tried to read history books and religious texts that Unroch picked out for me, but I would get stuck in some boring detail and fall asleep before I could get through much of it. When I looked through the books myself, I found that we a full shelf of natural history books. These were interesting. Most of these had my mother’s name in the cover, so I guess they had been hers. I managed to take and keep most of the collection in my room by simply rearranging the books to cover up the gaps. No one ever came looking for them.

Aelfgar, my brother (not my father), made fun of me when he found me reading one of those because he said I only liked them because they had pictures in them. He was not wrong. But the pictures were to help identify things. Anyway, I’d never found him reading a book, so I don’t know why he got to judge my choices.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Unroch would often help me with the difficult plant identifications. He wasn’t a plant expert himself, but he could explain the vocabulary and together we’d generally figure things out. The really poisonous stuff was easy to figure out because everyone seemed to know about those. As I mentioned, most people hunted and gathered in the marshland for food, so that was important information and no one kept that to themselves.

The marsh boasted many hundred species of mushrooms and some of these could kill you with a small dose. We generally only gathered a few species for eating that were plentiful near our town, but sometimes, on hunting trips, I’d find something new and it was nice to know if I could safely add it to the stew. You could also do a quick earth incantation over the food and if the food was highly toxic, you could feel it. I suspect if it only made people a little sick you might not be able to tell, but it was useful to try.

Sometimes, I was made to sit with the ladies’ circle, usually in days leading up to my birthday ball, as if dealing with that wasn’t enough. The ladies’ circle is a group of older women who sit around stitching, embroidering, and knitting to gossip about all the other women in the manor and town. It was wretchedly dull and I was a nightmare with a needle and thread as they kept reminding me. They tried to show me books on baby making and things, but by that time, I had already helped deliver a few litters of puppies and some foals. I knew plenty about the process. It would have been more helpful if they’d had a book on stitching and how not to poke yourself with the needle.

That brings me to the second time I’d remembered crying. I had the duty to kill our last bitch. I had to cut her open so the puppies would live when she started having difficulty delivering them. I had wondered if my own mother had been cut open to get me out, but decided not to ask. Anyway, all but one of the puppies survived, so I felt it had been the right thing to do. She’d been in so much pain and likely she and all the pups would have died if I hadn’t done it.

I hadn’t wanted to do it. Gavendor had thumped me on the back and reminded me that sometimes you had to do things like that, when he saw I was still a bit teary eyed over it. He helped me feel a little better. I was by myself when I had cried really hard after burying the dog in a dry side of Thornhill we used for such things. I know it’s not the same as a person dying, but it hurt anyway.

I had used that dagger that Gavendor had trained me to fight with. Killing when it was not for food hadn’t felt like I thought it would. I guess I had always thought it would be in battle and it would feel good like they make it sound when a hero survives such things. But it didn’t. My only consolation were the puppies. I supposed that battles would have survivors for consolation, but the stories didn’t seem to emphasize that. It was hard to look at the dagger the same way after, even though I cleaned it up and sharpened it so you could never tell it had killed an innocent.