Jos scrambled out of bed, kicking the fur covers aside and rushing to his dresser. He yanked the top drawer open and pulled out fresh garments that he donned without thought to style or cut. Jos did, however, spare a glance for the side mirror, which showed him his long black hair, snagged and tangled. There was no time to fix it, so he stuffed his feet into some nearby boots, grabbed his loathsome practice rapier from where it lay on the floor, and then shoved the door to his room wide, sweeping into the hallway.
He reached the staircase quickly and took the steps down two at a time, hugging the inner part of the wall as it curved. Past three landings, he walked briskly under a wide marble arch that led out to the sparring green.
Of course, Aryn was already there, using a rapier of his own to do a low cut, followed by a backhanded slash to his imaginary opponent’s throat. When he caught sight of Jos, he changed the end of his swing into a deep bow--too deep, actually, making it seem more mockery than respect. If Aryn understood the obvious impropriety, he didn’t show it, grinning from ear to ear as he rose, his bowl cut hair making him look like a mushroom cap.
“Morning, Cousin,” he said, and then cocked his head to add, “Sleep in a bit?”
Jos ignored the younger boy, turning to wipe the grit from his eyes.
“Well,” chirped Aryn. “I’m ready whenever you are.”
Jos clenched his teeth. Silver, grant me the skill to run this annoying shrimp through. Please, just this once. He drew his rapier, dropping the sheath to the ground, and then headed to the center of the field where his cousin waited. While most of the practice green was, in fact, green, the middle of the clearing had long ago been stripped bare, and it was on this packed dirt that Jos stopped, a grown man’s length separating himself from Aryn.
His cousin brought his weapon up, the steel looking needle thin even with its blunted end. As Aryn lifted the blade, he also eased his left foot back, facing Jos with only his right side--his sword side.
“Ready?” he asked.
Jos copied the stance. Though he was a head taller than his cousin, when they stood like this, with their legs bent and feet forming a long L, the difference was closer to a few inches, putting the tips of their rapiers nearly on the same level.
At first, neither of them moved, each watching the other closely. Unfortunately for Jos, a stiff breeze chose that moment to blow his hair into his face. Immediately, Aryn lunged. Jos saw the attack coming, but due to his obscured vision, couldn’t tell precisely where it was aimed and parried too high. Aryn took full advantage of the misplaced block by continuing forward, quickly looping his rapier under Jos’s blade and then fully extending his arm to touch Jos in the stomach.
Aryn lowered his weapon with a short laugh and said, “Bad luck with the wind, Cousin.” He smiled with sickening innocence. “Again?”
To stop himself from hitting the boy, Jos clenched his weapon tightly.
Idiot! What did you think would happen? Fighting outside with your hair down? Of course it gets in your face!
Furious, Jos stuck the rapier in the ground and put his hands into his pockets, searching for something to bind his hair back with. While his fingers fished through his garments, Aryn’s voice rose in that high tone he took when giving a lesson.
“Remember, Cousin, the blade is a part of your arm and so must be treated with the same respect. Would you shove your hand into the dirt? I think not.”
Jos gave him a baleful glare, causing Aryn to flinch.
“It’s true,” said the boy.
Narrowing his eyes, Jos grabbed the hilt of his sword and snapped the weapon into a ready position. He also used the move to fling a divot of soil at his cousin. It was a petty thing to do, but Jos didn’t care.
“Again?” Aryn asked, pointedly ignoring the clump of dirt that hit his leg. “But the wind and your hair...”
Jos continued to hold his sword up between them.
With a slight frown, Aryn started to lift his rapier, and the moment he did, Jos stabbed straight for his heart. His cousin managed to deflect the strike, but with the tip of his sword, putting his blade further to the side than it should have been and giving Jos the opportunity to attack again. Aryn stumbled as he blocked the second one, his footwork all wrong having never had the chance to get into a proper stance. This only spurred Jos onward: he lunged, he cut, he stabbed, putting every ounce of frustration he felt into each swing of the too-light sword.
Aryn managed to withstand the assault, which irked Jos, but he took solace in the sweat that began to dot his cousin’s brow. The younger boy was tiring, and not two strikes later, Jos was rewarded by Aryn’s wrist giving out against a particularly aggressive side slash. Normally, the slap of a practice blade would just leave a bruise, but the rapier caught both cloth and skin with the edge of its blunted tip. As the steel ripped through fabric and flesh alike, Aryn cried out and dropped his weapon, grabbing his wounded shoulder with his left hand. Jos, however, only registered that his opponent was now open and brought his blade back around, swinging for Aryn’s exposed head. Seeing the sword flying at him, Aryn’s grey eyes went wide and he shrieked again. It was the second yell that awakened Jos to the reality of the situation. A moment before his rapier would have connected with his younger cousin’s face, the blade whipped to a halt and hovered there.
Aryn’s pupils remained fastened on the steel edge, unblinking, while he took short, ragged breaths, and then his legs gave out, dropping him onto the ground, rump first. Breaking his gaze away from the weapon, he looked at his arm and the blood that was seeping through his fingers.
Jos leaned his rapier against his neck, waiting to see if his cousin would cry so he could mock him even more about this loss than he already planned to. Aryn, however, failed to oblige. Instead, he stared silently at the injury, as if he couldn’t believe what had just happened. Jos snorted in annoyance and turned to the two waiting servants, finding both standing at the edge of the circle with stunned expressions. A snap of his fingers reminded them of their duties, and they dashed off to gather supplies. Even with dulled weapons accidents were common, but usually such injuries didn’t need to be treated on the field so Aryn would have to wait for aid.
Returning his gaze to his still seated cousin, Jos wondered if this cut was any worse than the punctured thigh he had received during one of their first sparring matches. The wound was nearly a month healed now, but it sometimes still ached. A tiny grin crept onto his face. He hoped it was.
As if on cue, Aryn looked up.
“Anger and tricks are tools used by the unskilled,” he said. “Worse, they will stunt your grow--”
Jos spat on the ground beside him, cutting the other boy’s words short. Aryn closed his mouth but didn’t avert his eyes. Jos returned the look with malice.
He knew he had cheated to win. He didn’t need to be reminded about it by some upjumped offshoot of the Arress line.
I want you to die, he thought. Die, so this can be over. But as Jos thought the words, the untruth of them rang through him. Even if Aryn did die, his father would just replace the boy. The Festival being only three days off didn’t matter. Aryn could keel over this very minute and before the body was cold his father would have a new weapons master waiting, pulled from the ranks of the national militia he controlled. Jos’s remaining days would still be spent sparring with someone better than him, and it wouldn’t do an iota of good.
Aryn and his stupid Thrynish stick of a weapon had been Jos’s last chance to find some hidden reserve of talent, but it wasn’t working, just like none of the others had. Who Jos was right now was who he would be at Kellingherth, and almost certainly the rest of his life.
Jos felt his face crumple, and he turned to the side, hiding his weakness from Aryn.
Slowly and without conviction, Jos walked to the edge of the green. When he reached it, he stopped and fell cross-legged to the ground. With one hand, he brought the rapier to rest across his knees, his eyes fixed on the line where the metal of the blade ended and the red-brown of the drying blood began.
It was a number of minutes before he heard someone approach him from behind.
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“I am ready, Cousin.”
Jos looked over his shoulder, seeing Aryn standing there, his arm bandaged and weapon in hand. Their gazes locked, holding well past the point of comfort.
Fine, thought Jos, pushing himself up.
They did three more rounds, at the end of which both were slick with sweat, and Aryn’s cut had bled through. Despite the injury, Aryn managed to win all three, and while it was true that Jos’s heart hadn’t been in the bouts, neither was it true that he had been lax.
“You’re getting better,” Aryn said, holding still as a servant replaced the now soiled cloth with a new one.
Jos didn’t respond as he traipsed through the outer green, trying to find the sheath he had discarded earlier.
“Today, reflect on the match,” the boy continued. “Tomorrow, we’ll do forms and another round of spar--”
Jos glanced up from his search, curious to see what had stopped Aryn’s speech so abruptly. The servant who had been caring for the boy was whispering something in his ear, to which Aryn pouted.
“Apologies, Cousin,” he said. “It was foolish of me to continue to use my arm today, as now it needs even more time to heal, so we’ll just do drills and calisthenics for the next two days.”
The servant nodded in agreement.
“Don’t worry though,” Aryn said. “As soon as I’m recovered, we’ll have another match. After all,” he added with a smile, “we must do at least one more set before you leave.”
Jos hoped his arm rotted and fell off. Preferably very, very painfully.
“Until tomorrow then,” Aryn said, giving Jos another one of his too deep bows, before exiting the sparring circle. The servant did the same--though from him it was the proper depth--and then hurried after the boy.
Jos left as well. If one of the house staff found the scabbard, they’d bring it up to his room. If not...he didn’t really care. Tonight would be the real battle and for it, unfortunately, he couldn’t use a sword.
***
Jos’s back connected with the wall of his room so hard it knocked the wind out of him. He bent double, trying to suck in the lost breath, but a hand cracked against the side of his head, the solustone fused to it digging painfully into his cheekbone, taking away his balance and thoughts of air. He should have rolled when he hit the ground, as he had been taught by at least a half dozen different trainers, but instead he landed heavily on his hip and shoulder, the decorative floor rugs doing little to protect him from the flagstone underneath.
A deep voice rumbled above him, but Jos couldn’t make out the words. In a daze, he propped himself up, needing to blink his eyes twice before he could focus on the figure who loomed over him. The Lord of Arress was a stout man, with a sturdy build and a close-cut beard. His black hair was slicked back but strands were coming loose as he angrily shook his fists.
“--after all this time!” shouted his father. “How? How could you lose again? He’s nearly three years your younger and still you lose!”
“He won one today,” said a voice from the back of the room. The speaker was his mother, and Jos shifted to see her standing calmly by the door.
“Out of five!” roared his father, without even looking at her. “That’s piss! That’s nothing! Do you think your grandfather lost at your age?” On this, he leaned down. “Do you?”
Jos shook his head ‘no.’ His grandfather was the last Lord Silver and was regarded as the greatest warrior among them, if not the greatest in all of Neden. It was the only good thing people ever said about his grandfather.
His father leaned closer. “And the Trent? Would he have lost?”
By all accounts, Stefan Trent made Aryn look like a glorified pig sticker. Heir to his House, he was said to have killed an Islander with three stones when summering in Tress for the raids, and that was without a single stone himself.
Jos shook his head again but couldn’t stand to keep looking at his father’s bloodshot eyes, so put his own on the rug beneath him.
This apparently failed to satisfy, because his father grabbed onto a chunk of Jos’s long hair and yanked, putting their faces inches apart--close enough for Jos to taste the alcohol on his father’s breath and to hear the man’s next words, which were spoken in a slurred whisper.
“If you lose to Aryn one more time...one more…you will die. I don’t care that you are my child. I don’t care that you are marked. And I don’t care what your mother will do. If you cannot become an appropriate Head of House, you will not be at all. Better you gone than further shame be brought onto the name of Arress.”
The shame was his grandfather’s and father’s, but Lord Redgar Arress would never admit that, so Jos held utterly still.
Over the years, he had gotten used to his father’s fits of rage, and even the beatings, though they had seemed more severe as of late, but this...this was new. After a brief silence, the man straightened.
“Get up,” he growled, painfully lifting Jos to his feet by the roots of his hair, “…and get better.” With that, his father relinquished his grasp and stormed out of the room, slamming the door closed behind him.
For a few seconds Jos stood unsupported, but then his strength left him and he collapsed. This time he managed to twist his shoulder under his body, diverting some of his downward momentum, but the landing was still painful.
He felt more than heard his mother’s approach. She didn’t touch him, choosing instead to simply stand near him.
“With the ceremony of rebirth so soon,” she said, “any injuries you’ve acquired will need to be cared for immediately.”
Jos didn’t respond, staring into the hairs of the dyed green rug he laid on, which looked like a forest of thin trees spread out before him.
His mother never scolded--such was beneath her station--but her long pause had a similar effect.
“Your cousin Aryn learned directly from a Thryn over the course of a year,” she said. “You’ve had two weeks with the shadow of those teachings.”
Jos shifted uncomfortably. His mother loved stating facts as if they led to an obvious conclusion. All he heard was his father’s reasons for gambling on Aryn--it wasn’t everyday that a Thryn decided to break their silence around strangers or to use those normally bottled words to teach weaponwork unique to their nation.
Why they had picked Aryn of all people, Jos would never understand.
“It is inevitable that you would lose to him,” his mother continued when he didn’t provide an answer. The tone she used was identical to before, but Jos could tell that, to her, his failure had deepened. “A wise man would find a way to learn from the experience.”
Clenched his teeth, Jos got his feet under his body and slowly stood. Without looking at his mother, he moved to a nearby chair. Though its wooden arms and legs were ornate, the seat itself was actually quite comfortable and he breathed out as he sat back.
The door to his room opened and Jos turned, seeing two women enter, both dressed in the green and black livery of House Arress. When his mother had called for the servants, he didn’t know, but they strode purposely in, clearly having been summoned.
“Magda, look him over,” his mother commanded.
The older of the two didn’t hesitate, beginning to inspect him with firm, knowing hands the moment she reached his side. Magda had cared for him off and on when he was a child and so thought nothing of unbuttoning his shirt or rolling up his pant legs to get to the various scrapes and bruises. At another time, he might have found the treatment embarrassing, but with his father’s words echoing in his mind, he barely registered it.
“Delin,” his mother said, looking at the other woman, who was tall and slim, “pen apologies to Houses Balt and Melfi. My son has decided to sequester himself before the Festival and so will not be available for pleasantries over the next few days as planned.”
Magda paused in her ministrations. “With the right paints, he could attend a function or two, my lady. Not long mind you, but enough to be seen.”
“No,” his mother said. “I will not give them an opportunity to find weakness in us. Let their next view of him be as he stands atop the dais, during the rebirth.”
Magda shrugged, rubbing pungent ointment into the skin of his scraped knee and elbow.
“What of the Lady of House Filad and her daughter?” Delin asked. “Should I tell them the same?”
Jos saw his mother glance his way and knew what she was thinking: the sizable bruise he felt growing on the side of his face wouldn’t be easy to pass off as anything other than what it was, and slaps were rarely earned on the practice green.
“Yes,” his mother finally said, “with our deepest regrets, but say that I will still meet with them so we may discuss the future as planned.”
Delin nodded, making a note in a small book she carried.
“Your diagnosis, Magda?” said his mother. “Must I rent that creature from House Kale to see him healed in time?”
“It’s not as bad as all that,” the old woman said. “Most of it will mend quickly or be easy to hide. The only trouble is his face and perhaps his shoulder. For those, he can’t lay on his stomach tonight, lest the blood pool, making the bruising worse. He’ll also need cold compresses for both, which I’ll have sent up regularly, and tomorrow I’ll return to massage out what I can.”
“I expect you to make every effort,” his mother said, and from her tone, it was clear that he was included in that statement.
Magda curtsied, quickly departing, and after a moment Delin followed.
Jos and his mother were left looking at each other: him half-naked, elbow and knee wrapped in linen, while she stood tall in a regal gown of dark green, silver-stitched at its edges. In the center of her forehead was an oval-shaped bone, vertically set. No chains or threads held it in place. Instead, it appeared to sprout from her skin, like a third eye made of ivory. Despite it having been there Jos’s entire life, it always drew his gaze.
“You won’t beat Aryn,” his mother said, moving her head slightly to break his stare. “Accept it and move past it. The only true defeat is refusing to acknowledge that which we cannot change.”
So saying, she turned and was soon gone from his room, the door shut firmly behind her. Knowing his mother, the words were probably from a great philosopher or logician long past, or maybe even directly from the disembodied soul that she shared her mind with. To Jos though, they just sounded like a death sentence.
Finally alone, he slumped in his chair and slowly began to cry.