Danica swung her sword at Lorik, aiming for his face with a powerful slash. He quickly leaned back and raised his own weapon to defend the next incoming attack. She stepped away and then came in with a fast thrust towards his chest, aiming directly for the heart. He easily parried her attack to the side and stepped lightly around, waiting for the next incoming blow.
Again and again she aimed at what she perceived as weak points, trying to land a blow on him. Everything she did though was dodged or parried, leaving her vulnerable to a followup attack. She knew that when he started countering her blows with his own, she’d be in trouble.
She continued slashing and thrusting, until it became too much for her. Danica dropped the wooden sword and fell to her knees from sheer exhaustion. She tried to balance herself , but her right arm was so sore and pained from overuse that she nearly toppled over. Beads of sweat dripped from her face, landing like raindrops on the cold wooden floor.
Lorik helped her up and guided her over to a nearby chair. “I think it’s time you took a break. You’ll never get your vengeance if you kill yourself in training.”
She brushed him off and sat down with a scowl. “Who said anything about getting revenge?”
He scoffed at her. “You did. Every day you speak it with your actions instead of your lips. I’m no fool, despite my appearances.”
He brought her a mug filled with cool water, adding a pinch of salt to it as he handed it over. She drank slowly, thinking about what really drove her. That empty void in her soul was a constant reminder of something missing. It was as if the positive emotions in her life were being sucked away, leaving only the negative to flourish in their absence.
She stared blankly at the inside of her now empty container. “Are you going to try and tell me that I shouldn’t hate them for what they did?”
“Not at all,” he said, taking a seat beside her. “I don’t know the details of it, and I’m not going to ask. Your problem right now is that it’s threatening to consume you. You must use it to fuel your passion instead of letting it burn so wildly.”
She wiped her brow with a rag and slung it to the floor. He wasn’t wrong and she knew it. Time and again, she had let thoughts of getting back at those who had wronged her keep her awake at night. These eventually bled out into delusions of grandeur, where she had begun to imagine somehow she’d make sure others were punished for their transgressions against the less fortunate.
“Let me ask you something rather personal,” he said, interrupting her thoughts. “Have you ever killed before?”
She thought back to the night she stabbed Badger in the eye with that improvised wooden stake. “I don’t know.”
He looked at her puzzled. “How could you not?”
She wondered how much he actually knew for a moment, then shrugged dismissively. “I stabbed a man in the eye with a sharp stick while running for my life. I Don’t know if he died or not.”
Lorik nodded in appreciation. “You struck in desperation, and because of that, you are alive today. Did you plan to kill him though?”
She shook her head. “I just attacked the weakest spot I could imagine and ran. If I could go back, I’d have probably made sure he was dead before I left.”
He pulled out a knife from his boot and handed it to her. “When I was a young boy, maybe around my eighth year of life, my father took me out to the barn. I’d helped raise a goat from birth, and I cared for him every day for nearly a year. Then one day my father made me take that very knife and slit it's throat. I watched my furry little friend bleed to death before we butchered him for food.”
Danica examined the simple knife, noticing it was rather well worn. It had been sharpened and polished many times over the years and had, as a result, lost a decent amount of the original blade. Other than that, there didn’t seem anything remarkable about it. She figured he probably kept it mostly as a reminder at this point.
She handed the knife back to him. “I’m guessing that they had to do it.”
Lorik swiftly deposited back into the sheath. “No. There were plenty of others to choose from. My father was like that. He said he learned it from his father and so on. After that day though, I never had trouble helping him slaughter animals.”
Her curiosity was piqued by his story and where she assumed it was going. “Did it help you to kill people?”
Lorik shook his head. “That’s another thing entirely and we can discuss it another day. How’s your arm?”
She rubbed it for a moment and flexed her fist a few times. “It hurts, but Mira gave me something to help.”
Danica grabbed a small leather pouch laying on the floor and carefully opened it. Inside was a green powdered substance Mira called tinya leaf. She had told Danica it was good for temporary relief from minor pain and exhaustion, but to be cautious as it only masked the problem and was no substitute for actual rest. She took a pinch and swallowed it, grimacing at the bitter taste.
Lorik took her cup and refilled it for her. “Hope that helps for as bad as it obviously tasted. Follow me.”
She drank her water and set the now empty container on the floor. “Where?”
He looked back to her as he started to walk away. “Butcher block.”
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She got a suspicious feeling that she knew why, but decided not to say anything. They walked in silence out of the barracks and into the evening air. The cold of the beginning winter blew sharp against the exposed skin of her face, reinvigorating her mind. The elders predicted it would be a harsh one this year, and already it showed they were right to assume it.
They walked outside the Norport walls and down the road a ways, to a rather large warehouse used to hold livestock. She knew about it since Landon was often fond of complaining that if the walls were ever besieged, it would be inconvenient to have such an important structure on the outside of the walls. She could see the sense in his ideas, but the smell of the place inside the city limits would be rather unbearable. Especially in the summer months on hot days.
Lorik led her around to the back door and inside the rugged wooden building. The overwhelming stink of urine and feces assailed her nose and almost sent her running back outside. The squeal of pigs in their pens echoed throughout the building, mingling with other livestock animals to a lesser degree. A couple of young men busied themselves with mucking out the stalls while a group of three older men struggled to tow a rather large pig to a raised platform.
Danica looked at Lorik with her eyebrow raised. “Did you bring me here because you were feeling homesick earlier?”
He flashed a brief smile and shook his head. “The smell does take me back to the olden days, but no. Wait here a moment.”
She watched him as he ran off and assisted the men with wrangling the pig up to the top of the platform. The four of them together easily got it in place, tying off the ropes onto the wooden beams around it. It squealed and screamed, trying to break free of its bonds to no avail.
The men chatted for a moment and laughed. From that short of a distance she’d normally be able to hear what was being said, but the ambient noise was too much to make out anything. She simply watched them as they looked over to her on occasion and continued talking.
Eventually Lorik motioned for her to join them, and she made her way up the steps. She could see now what had the pig so agitated. The platform was covered in blood, and she knew that it could smell the death all around it. The fear was there in its eyes as it struggled to find a way out. In some ways she could understand that fear.
One of the men handed her a wickedly sharp blade and Lorik took her over to the pig. “To start, you take that knife and stick it in the neck here, then slice it downwards. It takes a few moments, but not too long.”
She stared at the pig, looking it directly in the eyes. “Then what?”
“Then we go home and they finish it up,” he said. “Unless you’d like to learn about butchering.”
“Another time maybe,” she said softly.
He started to say something but stopped as she plunged the knife into the pig's throat and quickly cut down. It squealed and struggled harder than ever against the bonds as crimson blood drained down a small hole cut into the floor. The men cheered her on, but she ignored them. She never took her eyes off the animal, watching it thrash around until it lay still. She wondered if the pig hated her for what she had done to it.
Did it really matter?
She handed the knife back to the man that had given it to her and walked away. The cold air outside was fresh and wonderful compared to what she had been breathing in there. The sun was beginning to set now over the top of the wall, casting a massive shadow across the outer limits of the city. She began heading towards home, thinking about what had just happened.
Lorik was soon at her side. “You seemed to handle that rather well. I struggled with it my first time.”
She looked at him, her icy blue eyes reflecting the approaching cold of the night. “The girl I was, you could easily underestimate. The woman I am now, you shouldn’t.”
He nodded in appreciation of that sentiment. “I’ll remember that.”
They walked in silence the rest of the way back to the barracks, each one reflecting in their own way. When they arrived, Danica took her leave for the night from Lorik. She was tired and hungry, and wanted nothing more than a good hot meal and to wash up. The tinya leaves were helping to dull the pain, but they had their limits.
She grabbed some stew from the giant kettle in the kitchen and a large piece of flatbread. Not her favorite meal, but it was hot and ready to eat. She didn’t stay around the kitchen for very long, feeling resentment from the other women for having to work now while she shirked her previous duties. They knew nothing of her training regimen and simply assumed she was getting special privileges now. She didn’t feel guilty, but it was rather annoying the way they acted and that was really what bothered her the most about it.
She started towards her room but made a slight detour to talk to Landon. Something had been bothering her about the recent events of the day and maybe he had some sagely advice to hand out. When she arrived, she found not the sour looking captain of the guard neck deep in paperwork, but Angela sitting at his desk writing notes.
Danica set her tray on a nearby shelf and walked in. “Should I congratulate you on your new promotion?”
Angela looked up at her tiredly and harrumphed. “Were I in charge, my first act would be to round up all the harebrained men and exile them to the north. I’d personally send Landon over the mountains in only his undergarments.”
Danica gave a weak smile at the snide remark. “That bad then? Where is he anyways?”
Angela's face went serious. “He took a small group and headed down to the docks. There were some troubling reports of people attempting to incite open rebellion again.”
Danica nodded to her in response. People were getting angrier about the class divide and increased cost of goods. They were raising taxes on everything and siphoning what they could from the working class and poor. People were getting more upset over it while the nobles flaunted their excess in front of them. It didn’t take a genius to know that was a recipe for disaster.
She looked at the scattered notes on the desk, and saw what they regarded. “Still working on that?”
Angela Sighed and looked up at her. “He thinks there’s something there in the history, but I haven’t found it. I prefer my stories to have some elements of drama and the only juicy tidbit in there was Rowan's father, Alric, had arranged for his son to marry a noblewoman from Vadona. One day she mysteriously disappeared and no one knew what happened to her. Quite the mystery it seems, but there’s nothing else about it.”
“It is,” Danica said, only half interested in rumors of the nobility. “But that doesn’t seem very relevant to current matters.”
Angela sighed. “No, it’s not. But I do like mysteries, regardless. You look tired.”
Danica felt it too. She bid Angela a good night, took her food and headed to her room. She put a log in the fireplace and stoked the fire. The flames soon burned bright, bringing her vision back into a normal color spectrum. She watched them dance around while she ate in quiet solitude.
She imagined those flames were like her, burning hot and ready to destroy everything in their path. Lorik wasn’t wrong with what he said earlier. She’d have to focus harder on controlling her anger and stop letting it consume her. The fury she felt was a powerful tool that could drive her to be better. She was just like the fire.