“The Nazis are the reason I don’t have any grandparents any more,” Gunther told Rusty, as they finished washing away the blood on their faces. “My parents fled to London the moment they realized that the Germans would not stay out of the Netherlands. I was born there later, and I grew up there. It is why my English is so good.”
“I don’t reckon I’ve ever heard of the Netherlands,” Rusty said. “Was that on the western front or the eastern front?”
Gunther stared at him for a second, then laughed. “You are funny. No, no. Ah… the Netherlands, people often call it Holland.”
“Oh! You’re the wooden shoes guys!” Rusty said, vaguely recalling cutting out and pasting pictures in grade school, pictures of windmills and tulips and women wearing weird bonnets.
“Everyone always points out the wooden shoes thing,” Gunther rolled his eyes. “We have not done that for a long time, and I grew up in Manchester, anyway. Ah, it is a city in England,” Gunther said, seeing the confused look in his eyes.
“I reckon England’s pretty good,” Rusty said, before he started scooping water up in his hands, and rinsing around his sore but intact teeth, before spitting. “My brother’s got an old war friend in Britain. He sends us books. There’s a few by this Tolkien cat, that are pretty out of sight. It’s how I learned about wizards.”
“A cat writes books?” Gunther’s brow furrowed. “Never mind. But I think I understand, yes. For me it was a different book. A very good author called Karl May. He wrote about a German man who tamed the American West. He was called Old Shatterhand. Have you heard of him?”
Gunther was almost eager, and Rusty sure did hate to see it fall when he shook his head. “No. I know Roy Rogers, and sometimes my Dad lets us watch Gunsmoke when Mom goes to bed early. But I never heard of a Shatterhand guy.”
“Oh.” Gunther looked away. “Well it’s okay. This is not like the Old West anyway. Except for maybe that knife that Terathon drew on Reevian. That was pretty Western.”
“You saw that too?” Rusty asked.
“Meine kobold— my familiar pointed it out,” Gunther said, shrugging. “I was trying to figure out what to do about it, but then they started talking and I knew I did not have to do anything.”
“You thought he was going to hurt Reevian?”
“He was going to kill him if Reevian gave him a reason to.”
“How… how do you know that?” Rusty whispered.
Gunther put down his own rag, and looked around the bathing room. No one else was here, but he lowered his voice as he bent down to Rusty’s ear. “When you grow up a Jew in a country where a lot of people blame Jews for dragging them into the war— which we did not, nobody gave a fuck about us for decades and Hitler did as he pleased— you learn to read people. How they stand, how they look, how they let their faces go when they are about to attack, it all tells a story. And Terathon was looking to give Reevian a very bloody end, up until Reevian made it clear he submitted.”
“But aren’t we all supposed to be fighting the Dark Lord?” Rusty asked.
“We are. Whoever that dark lord is, they need us for that,” Gunther said. “But… ah, you were not here for a lot of the talks we had while you were recovering. There is a tension between all the wizards. Well, except for Zarkimorr. The others all fear him, and he acts as if they cannot hurt him. Perhaps he is right. But for all the others, there is a… ah… what is the word… rivilitat? Rivil…”
Rusty’s perfect memory let him fill in the blank. “A rivalry. Gosh.” he thought about it, some. Thought about how his Dad was forever complaining about how the ranchers out in the west patch couldn’t agree on the land, so the migrants had up and squatted on it. “Are we talking a contest or a prize they’re trying to win, or is it a feud? I guess if there’s knives out it’d be a feud,” he said, thinking it over out loud.
“I do not know. If it were a contest, then they would be trying to sabotage each other’s chosen ones. Jadar could have pushed me off the tower with a magical breeze or something during assensing class. Terathon could remove my liver in the night while I slept and none would be the wiser. But they do not seem to care about hindering or hurting us, they teach us all equally. Something is going on that I cannot see. But it does not matter.”
“Why not?”
“Because this dark lord is worse than Hitler,” Gunther’s eyes blazed with anger. “I have seen what he has done! And if I can stop him, then I can save someone else’s grandparents.”
The raw conviction in his voice made Rusty’s eyes water. Now that he knew Gunther was all right, he felt for him. This guy, yeah, he was pretty swell...
“And now that I know you’re not useless, like Ken, or just a girl, like Alice, I won’t try to hurt you so bad you have to go home. I won’t have to carry you on my back like a weak baby.”
…no, scratch that, he was still an ass.
But Rusty could work with that. He’d just treat him more like a brother than a friend. And not a cool brother, like Cyrus or Jordan. More like a Ray Ray. Rusty still owed Ray Ray a knuckle sandwich for stealing his piece of birthday cake during the boys party.
“Gee, thanks for not crippling me,” Rusty said, as sarcastically as he could.
“You are welcome,” Gunther said, completely missing the sarcasm. “Come. Reevian told me we have one more class before nightfall. I must guide you there and I do not want us to be late.”
*****
It wasn’t unusual to have two classes on the same day. But this one took them further down the tower than they’d been before, down past the balcony where Jadar had shown them the world gates of the elves, down through some sort of checkpoint, where Mummers bearing weapons that looked like crossbows watched them closely through long horizontal slits in the walls. But Reevian walked without concern, and his confidence put their worries to ease.
And as they descended, they started to see more and more wood worked into the construction. Where the top of the tower was bare stone, save for the spaces that the students ate in, attended classes, and bedded down at night, everything else was unfinished and empty. But down here, it had the look and feel of a place very much in use. And down at what must be, by Rusty’s perfect recall and some fast stair counting, the fifth floor from the bottom, they started finding carpets covering the floors that had the rumples and wrinkles of occasional use.
A little past that point, they started to see tapestries. They showed fantastical creatures, men in strange armor, and battles full of knights riding things that very much weren’t horses. They were more like bulls, if bulls had faces like badgers. They seemed to be fighting a lot of dragons, and short men with beards, and even a few elves, here and there.
But there was always something recurring. Every tapestry had a symbol blazoned atop it, sewn in with gold-colored thread, a symbol of a unicorn’s head.
As they walked, Ken hurried forward a bit, tugging on his robe, and ended up neck and neck with Rusty. “What’s with the horny horse?”
“That’s a unicorn. They’re a fantasy creature.”
“Well so’s most of this place. Are they something we gotta worry about?”
“Um,” Rusty tried to remember, and got the information he was looking for instantly. “Their horns can cure poison and heal people and stuff. They run from most people, but like virgins.”
“They what? That doesn’t sound good. Horses and people, uh…”
Rusty blushed a little, kept his eyes firmly on Reevian’s back. “Not like that. Like they’ll rest their heads in a maiden’s lap, and that’s how you can catch them.”
“To get the healing horns.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of a jerk move, now that I think about it,” Rusty muttered.
He didn’t mutter quietly enough, because Reevian held up a glove with a single finger extended, and waggled it. Fiery sparks danced around the digit, and Rusty got the message loud and clear and shut up.
And three junctions later, as the tapestries got thicker and they started passing by rooms with wooden desks and chairs and other furnishings, they came to a heavy iron door at the end of a hallway. “Your instructor is inside,” Reevian told them. “Pay them the respect you would give us. Attend your lesson well. When you are finished, return as you came and do not deviate. Do you attend?”
“We attend, teacher,” they chorused, and the wizard turned and left without another word.
It took all four of them working together to get the door open.
“You’re late,” the woman leaning on the windowsill told them.
She was about as tall as Gunther, but broader, built solid and with masses of scars covering the bare skin of her arms, where the leather bracers didn’t protect. She wore something like a layered apron that belted around her waist, and button up trousers that were tucked neatly into heavy duty boots. An iron cap with a golden unicorn’s head on the front of it sat above a scowling face that had three scars that cut a crosshatch through the left side, one line of it slashed through where the tip of her nose had once been.
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“We’re sorry, we didn’t mean to be late—” Alice began, staring at the woman like she was a wild animal.
“Come in, line up, shut up, and look front,” the woman commanded, her voice drawling and low. And Rusty, who’d heard this tone many a time from his Mom, did as he was told.
He did look front, but he took a second to review his memory to get the full details of the room when he was staring at the far wall. It was a big place, obviously a corner of the tower that had been left mostly empty. There were no tapestries here, but there were heavy wooden shutters and sills on the currently open windows, and a series of long, low benches against the left-hand wall. Dangling bags hung from hooks in the ceiling, and tall wooden posts were embedded in the floor, forming a line front to back on the right-hand side. A few of the posts had carved and splintered faces, at varying heights. A few also had genitals, and that made Rusty’s eyes go wide.
Maybe that was why she punched him.
She hit him hard. Rusty was on the ground, his stomach was a solid knot of pain, and he found himself curled up and trying to keep from barfing up every bit of the oatmeal he’d eaten.
Through tears of pain, and his own feeble gasps, he heard Ken ask the question that was foremost in his mind now.
“What the hell? Why’d you hit him?”
“Wrong question,” the woman said. “The question you should be asking, is why did he let me hit him?”
Then Ken yelped, and Rusty made out what he’d later use total recall to figure out was a very short and very one-sided fight.
Boots sounded at his back, heavy feet walking slowly across the floor to him, and Rusty scrambled away, still gasping, tumbled on the floor to get eyes on her. She nodded, paused in her relentless pace, and drew back a heavy foot. “Dodge,” she told him.
He didn’t manage, not all the way, but enough that the kick that would have caught him in the chest hit his shoulder instead and sent him spinning away, bouncing off a wall, and half-crawling, half-running, his head pounding with pain and fear, having no objective but away.
“Better,” he heard her say, and then she stopped, and her boots thudded against the floor as she jogged toward the others.
She chased them around the room, barely giving them time to recover, seemingly with an unending supply of energy and enthusiasm, though not a flicker of humor or joy crossed her torn-up face. She only stopped when they backed off to all corners of the room, nodding, and moving to stand in front of the only doorway out. The long room was silent, save for Alice’s sobs, Ken trying to breathe through a bloody nose, and Gunther and Rusty’s ragged panting.
“Take a break,” the woman told them. “There is water in the cupboard by the benches. You have three minutes. You may speak. You may ask questions. If I don’t like the questions I won’t answer.”
Then she sat on the floor, one leg up, hands on her knee, watching them.
“Who… the hell are you?” Ken asked, sniffing between every other word.
“I’m Jand and I get paid to hurt children.” she yawned. “Two minutes and twenty-eight seconds.”
“Can we kill you?” Gunther asked.
“No. You can try. But you won’t kill me.” Jand showed her teeth. It was less a grin, than an ape’s warning.
“Why are you doing this?” Alice whispered, through sobs.
Jand stared at her blankly. “Now that’s a stupid question. Why are you in this tower to begin with? What’s your purpose here?”
“You’re training us to fight. You’re training us to fight the dark lord,” Rusty said.
“See? He gets it,” Jand said. “Try to be like him. He’s good at dodging.”
She scooped off her helmet, and threw it. The leather and metal cap caught him in the face and everything went black for a second as he hit the ground again.
“Mostly good at dodging,” Jand said, standing up and stretching. “We’ll work on that.”
“Hey!” Ken said. “You said we had three minutes! I’ve been counting, it’s nowhere near that!”
“Oh, that?” Jand said. “I lied.” She turned and shut the door behind her with one arm, and its click was heavy and low, like a funeral bell foretending doom.
Jand was bald, the first bald woman Rusty had ever seen, but he didn’t have time to contemplate it as he ran for his life. Gunther tried to fight back, and Jand didn’t pull her punches until he was on the ground and nursing his wrist, screaming that it was broken. Ken and Alice and Rusty tried to keep away from her as much as they could, but it didn’t matter. She pursued them relentlessly, stretching them out on the floor with every hit, and adding in a quick boot to the ribs once they were down.
Eventually it ended. It felt like an eternity, but reviewing it in his mind, Rusty figured it was only about seven minutes. Jan strolled over, retrieved her helmet from where it had fallen, and said simply, “The lesson’s over.”
Then she walked over and opened the door, before sitting down on one of the low benches, shifting her belt around on her ample waist until a pouch that had been behind her was now in front of her, digging out a pipe, and lighting it with a chunk of glowing rock. She puffed as she considered them. “Well? Why are you still here?”
Rusty glared at her from where he and Ken were trying to get Gunther up without jostling his arm more. Gunther wasn’t helping, and Rusty was boiling mad. “Is this it? You didn’t teach us how to fight! You just beat us!”
“Fighting’s another lesson,” Jand said, unperturbed. “Had to cover the basics first.” She puffed smoke out from pursed lips. “Unless you think you have got that part mastered? You want to prove it to me, so we can get to the fighting part?”
“Uh, Rusty…” Roz said, from where he was hiding behind a bench. “That’s a really, really bad idea…”
“What do we have to do to prove it to you?” Rusty said, stepping away from Gunther.
The helmet caught him in the chest, and down he went.
“Dodge!”
Rusty lay on the floor. Gunther whimpered. Alice sobbed. Only Ken stepped forward. “So I’m pretty sure Gunther’s wrist really is busted. Is that your job, to break us so we can’t fight any more?”
Rusty heard her shift, heard her heavy bootsteps crossing the floor, and gazed up at her as she scooped up her helmet, then turned to consider Ken, tossing the cap up and down in one hand. “No,” she admitted. “I should fix that before you leave.” She rummaged down the front of her tunic, pulled out a ring of small, glittering things rimmed with silvery metal. She sorted through them, then grunted in satisfaction. “Here.”
She knelt down beside Gunther, and Rusty saw Ken study the back of her neck, saw him tense up and clench his fists.
“Oh oh, oh bad idea,” Roz whispered.
Rusty shook his head frantically, even though it hurt to do so, and Ken glanced his way and paused. He took a few ragged breaths, but he stepped back and his hands relaxed.
“Selah,” the woman said, pressing one of the glittery things against Gunther’s hand. And Rusty felt warmth against his face, instinctually looked toward it as he felt a spell building up.
“Do the assensing thing! Do the assensing thing!” Roz urged, and almost without effort, Rusty thought of the symbol he needed to turn it on.
He watched yellow light play through her fingers, felt the pressure of the magic, noted without surprise that Alice and Ken were doing the same thing. It didn’t feel like any spell or working they’d felt from the wizards. It was weaker, for one thing, and it seemed to ebb further as the light flared and then waned.
But Gunther kept sobbing. “It still hurts,” he whispered, between gasps.
“Bite on this,” Jand said, and passed him a leather strap. Then she grasped his wrist and turned it, and Gunther’s muffled squeal reminded Rusty of the days where he’d had to help slaughter a hog. “It’s broken all right. The charm won’t do anything for bones.”
She let go of his hand and stood, tucking the ring away.
“What… what was that? That golden thing?” Alice asked.
“Healing charm,” Jand said. “Rest until you can walk, then go see your wizard. He should be down a floor from here. He can fix bones.”
Rusty opened his mouth to say that Reevian had told them to go directly upstairs when they were done, and probably wouldn’t be happy if they went exploring without a guide, but he stopped when he saw Ken frantically shaking his head. Now it was his turn to shut up, and really think about it. And when it occurred to him that they had a golden opportunity here to snoop, he blamed the hits he’d taken for not thinking of that himself. “Um,” he said, instead. “Can I have some of that healing charm?”
“Stand up,” Jand commanded. “Walk over here,” she said, fishing the ring out again.
And the moment he managed, she tucked it away when he was a few feet distant. “You don’t need it. You’ll heal on your own.”
Then she sat down on her bench again, and smoked her pipe, and didn’t answer any other questions.
“That was not a lady,” Alice burst out, the second they were out, with the door shut behind them. “I don’t know who she thought she was, but ain’t no woman should act like that!”
“It’d be pretty shitty behavior for a guy too, if we’re being honest here,” Ken said. “But that doesn’t matter, right now. Gunther, how you feeling, big guy?”
“Like some hundin beat me like a drum,” Gunther muttered, cradling his wrist.
“Hun-what?” Rusty asked.
“Never mind. I’ll do better next time. I can walk, Ken, get off me now.”
Ken eased his arm away from Gunther’s shoulder. The big kid wobbled, but stayed upright.
“Okay, real talking time,” Ken said, lowering his voice. “We need to make a choice and we need to make it now. We either go looking for Reevian, or we go back upstairs. And we need to make this choice as a group, because he told us to go back upstairs and if we go looking for him, then we won’t. But Jand told us to go find him. So…”
“I need my arm back now,” Gunther said.
Alice hesitated. “I don’t know Jand. I don’t know how ‘portent she is, but she ain’t a wizard. I don’t want to get in trouble with the wizards. Maybe we should go upstairs and wait for Reevian to get back, get your bones fixed then.”
“I vote we go looking,” Ken said, turning and looking at Rusty. “We’re mostly American. Let’s vote. You vote no, we go back upstairs and be good. You vote yes, we go looking. We ALL go looking, Alice.”
Alice bit her lip. “I..” then she looked at Gunther, and the drawn lines of his face. And her own face softened. “Yeah. All right. Rusty?” she shot him a hesitant look. “You make the choice, I guess.”
“Okay, Ken’s pretty slick,” Roz said. “He’s doing this because he’s curious, but he knows if he just came out and said that, then Alice would maybe tell on him. This way he got her to come around on the idea.”
It felt a little dishonest to Rusty, but he’d had to deal with enough sisters that he knew most girls wouldn’t hesitate to tattle the second you did something they didn’t like. So he just nodded. “Reckon we need to get Gunther fixed up. Let’s go find Reevian.”
It was a small choice, really.
But a few days later, it would change everything.