Adrin

Nine days after he had become the Prince Ethereal, Adrin was becoming accustomed to his new schedule. Each morning began with a grueling, humiliating training session, an ordeal that he didn’t dread any less now than when he began. It didn’t help that his dreams left him feeling far from rested, and he couldn’t wake early enough to practice corsynity with Farn and Tsachrian every day.

After a particularly long night, he couldn’t even drag himself to the practice arena on time, and he braced himself for a scolding when he walked in the door ten minutes late. However, the candidates weren’t formed up for exercises; they were all crowded together in the middle of the room around something or someone that he couldn’t see. Even Professor Wyess and her assistants had come out from their workshop to join the throng. Only Farn kept his usual distance from the crowd.

Adrin approached quietly to see what was causing the commotion. The cause became apparent when it began to cry, and Sangar, who had been holding the baby, passed it back quickly to a tall, unfamiliar woman. She was wearing civilian clothes, but Adrin recognized that she had to be Meliand Caidry, and the baby was the reason that she had been absent from the Ethereal Guard for the last few months.

Meliand laughed and shushed the infant, then met Adrin’s eyes across the crowd and smiled. Adrin was relieved to see that smile; he never knew when he met a new person whether or not they’d made up their mind to despise him.

“Oh, good. I didn’t want to leave without meeting you. But Danthan is trying to tell me that it’s time for his nap.”

What she said wasn’t so important as the way she said it. She had the muddiest Lakelander accent that he’d ever heard, and she didn’t make even a token attempt to disguise it. Hearing her talk that way, like one of the elders back in Dhanlir, dredged up the lake mud in his own warm reply, just a greeting, but also establishing an understanding between the two of them that the others wouldn’t understand.

You got out, too?

Yes, but I haven’t forgotten where I came from.

Despite the connection, Adrin hoped she wouldn’t ask him to hold the baby. The chubby, nearly-bald little thing certainly didn’t have much in common with his famous namesake. Adrin didn’t know enough about babies to guess his age beyond “less than one.” Maybe little Danthan would have been cute if he were in a better mood, but Adrin preferred to keep his distance from this very loud and unhappy baby.

He hadn’t given enough thought to parenthood to form an opinion on it one way or another. He would have liked to have put the decision off for another decade or so, but the baby reminded him that on the path he’d chosen, fatherhood was mandatory. He didn’t hate the idea, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he did. He would still need to do his part to carry on the Talmuir line.

“See you later!” Meliand called over the increasingly indignant cries of her son. The Ethereal Guard watched her leave.

“Next time we’ll get him started with a little bow,” said Reidas Laul, who had been checking the seal in Efrinas with his nephew Sangar when Adrin had first encountered the Guard. Reidas was so solidly built that Adrin could imagine him standing firm in a hurricane while everything around him flew away. Sangar was almost as tall as his uncle but only half as broad, and darted from place to place like a hummingbird.

“A bow? Surely a boy named Danthan needs a sword.” Suzari cast a look at Adrin’s sword when she said it, no doubt thinking of Kierfes Talmuir’s lost weapon. She seemed to be in a good mood, though. Maybe she wouldn’t have so much anger to take out on him. Maybe she hadn’t even noticed he was late.

The hope was nice, while it lasted.

Adrin had practiced with several of the Ethereal Guard candidates in turns over the previous days, and some of them were better to work with than others. But today, Suzari assigned Gabril to work with him again, and the youth was even more sullen than usual. Adrin had to wonder if the pairing was as much a punishment for Gabril as it was for himself.

“Congratulations,” Gabril said sardonically when Adrin completed a kata without any missteps. “You’re almost as good as I was when I was nine. Now, try to defend yourself.”

Adrin tried. There was a cruel glint in Gabril’s eyes, something that Adrin hadn’t seen when he sparred with any of the other trainees. He couldn’t spare the attention to wonder why Gabril hated him so much now. He had to focus on staying alive.

No, Gabril wasn’t trying to kill him, even if he looked like he wanted to. This was just practice. Adrin could keep his footing, most of the time, if he concentrated on that to the exclusion of everything else. Every strike he received from the practice sword stung, even though the bruises healed moments after he was dealt them.

“What are you trying to prove, Suzari?”

Professor Wyess’s raised voice startled Adrin, and Gabril took advantage of the distraction to unleash a flurry of blows at Adrin and knock him down. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as the first day; he was at least getting better at falling.

“Enough already. Are you trying to train him, or beat him into a stupor?” Dacrine asked.

“He can handle it. See?” Suzari gestured as Adrin got back up. “He’s already back on his feet. It’s good for both of them. Gabril needs to learn patience. If he lets his temper get the better of him on the battlefield—”

“That’s the most pathetic excuse I’ve ever heard,” Dacrine said. Everyone in the arena had stopped what they were doing to listen to her argue with her wife, but the attention seemed to have no effect on her. “You let Gabril beat up on Adrin because you know if you did it, you’d look like a bully. Instead you get to watch and pretend you’re doing something honorable.”

“What I am trying to do is squeeze a decade of training into him in as little time as possible. He’s the Prince Ethereal, he can handle—”

“He’s not going to turn into Raen if you push him hard enough!” Professor Wyess’s voice cut through the room like a thunderbolt. “And it’s not going to bring Raen back if you punish him enough.”

Suzari bowed her head, her pale cheeks turning pink. It was the first time that Adrin had seen her flush with shame instead of anger.

“I can’t let anyone take his place, Dacrine,” she said.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“It looks to me like you’re trying to force him into that place.”

Suzari shook her head. “We needed Raen. He was a leader. A fighter. The only one who could have filled his father’s place, maybe even surpassed him one day.” She glanced over at the memorial garden, and her wistful expression turned sour. “But now we’ve lost them both, and instead we get . . . this.”

“I know how much you loved him. Both of you.” Dacrine acknowledged Gabril, who was looking at the floor. Adrin was surprised to see him showing any sign of chagrin.

“You’re right. Adrin Remyer is not Raen Semfrey. And he’s never going to be Raen Semfrey. You’re not going to turn him into Raen, or Danthan, for that matter. He’s something different entirely.”

“I know that,” Suzari said. “I’m doing the best I can to mold him, to turn him into a warrior before it’s too late—”

“What you’re doing is letting his true value go to waste.”

A hope stirred in Adrin, something that he thought was dead and buried, as Professor Wyess went on.

“It was a tragedy, what happened to Raen. I don’t know what went wrong that day, and I suppose we’ll never know. I wish he were here to follow in his father’s footsteps. He would have been a great leader for the Ethereal Guard one day. But for Elorhe?”

More silence followed, and it was Gabril who broke it. “He loved Jocyanë. That’s why he went.”

“He could have been a great king,” Suzari said.

“Maybe. But maybe the Ocean saw that Elorhe needed something other than a great warrior who could lead you in battle. There’s nothing new about that. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten how you used to complain to me about Gerimon, and even at his best he’s never been what you’d call a great swordsman. Zafrys didn’t even try.”

Now Dacrine approached Adrin directly. “I’ve been so damn busy that I didn’t have time to look at your portfolio until now. And that was stupid, because if I had, I could have saved us both a load of trouble. I just hope that these idiots out here haven’t damaged your brain while they were bashing you with sticks.”

Adrin searched for words. It seemed too good to be true. He glanced at Gabril, then Suzari, unsure what to make of their expressions.

“Do you know what he did? In his bloody spare time? He drew up a manual override system for the linecar brake. Just sketched up the schematics and handed them over to Sudriff like it was nothing. And it works.”

Adrin’s eyes widened. He’d given the design to the engineer in charge of repairing the linecar system a couple days ago, but hadn’t had time to think about it since. Had they already implemented the design?

“So?” Gabril said.

“In all my years of teaching, I can count on one hand the number of students I’ve seen who understood ceram engineering to the level he demonstrated in that little design he tossed off to Sudriff. And not one of them was an undergraduate. Do you even understand what I’m saying? The Ocean chooses people because Elorhe needs their gifts. This room is full of potential Ethereal Guardians. But without disruptor weapons, all your skills, all your might would come to nothing. Without your armor, you’d all be names on stones in the memorial garden. We don’t need yet another fighter to face the challenges coming our way. We need tools. We need innovation. And the Ocean saw that, and she gave us Adrin.”

The Ethereal Guard deserved all the glory they received for putting their lives in danger to fight ancient abominations. But Adrin had never cared much for glory. He liked making things. He had been thinking of his former self, the student who had come to learn under this woman’s guidance, as another person, completely separate from the Prince Ethereal he had become, but maybe he didn’t have to. Maybe he didn’t need to discard his old self after all.

“Take him with you, then,” Suzari finally said. “And the rest of you have better things to do than stand around gawking.”

“Come on,” Professor Wyess said. Adrin followed her into the workshop, where one of her assistants was inscribing a channel into what looked like a breastplate. The other had been hovering near the door, watching the scene like everyone else, but he muttered something about being right back and hurried out as they entered.

Dacrine took a bracer off the rack on the wall and handed it to Adrin. “Whose bracer is this?”

Adrin frowned for a moment, turning the piece of armor over in his hands. The lightweight ceram had been lacquered a pale green, and the whole thing was inscribed with channeling patterns. He shifted his vision to see how the ambient field interacted with them, but without a wearer, there wasn’t much interaction going on.

He recognized the functions of most of the patterns, and worked to fit them together in his brain. Strength and support, standard for any piece of ceram armor. And so many tiny connections. Simple conduits for currents to flow through.

“It’s Farn’s,” Adrin said, handing it back to her.

“Well, that was an easy one. How about this?” She gave him a greave.

“Sangar,” Adrin replied quickly. This one had been even easier than the first. All the patterns were for optimization of speed, skimping even on the sort of basic support and strength channels that had distracted him on the bracer.

“And Suzari wanted to turn you into a warrior.” Professor Wyess shook her head as she put the piece back where it belonged. “What a waste.”

“Ah . . . thank you, Professor . . .”

“Dacrine,” she corrected him. “You’re the bloody Prince Ethereal, you don’t need to call me Professor.”

“I didn’t realize how much Raen meant to them.” Adrin glanced out the door, where practice had resumed in the arena. “They never said his name or anything. I know he was the son of Danthan Semfrey and the Tresuan, but . . .”

“Suzari put all her hope for the future and all her devotion to Danthan into that boy. Gabril was always just a step behind Raen, always trying to catch up, always trying to prove he was just as good if not better. And then he took it harder than anyone else when Raen drowned.”

It made more sense now. Gabril and Suzari saw him as someone who was trying to take the place of their beloved Raen, while falling far short of his example. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t his fault, but . . .

“And Jocyanë?” Adrin said.

“Who knows what Jocyanë is thinking?” Dacrine said.

Adrin pushed the princess out of his mind. He’d just been given the keys to a kingdom with limitless possibilities.

“I don’t want to keep making the same things. The disruptors are wonderful, but they still can’t destroy a construct, and the seals won’t hold them forever. I want to find a way to end them,” he said.

“If Vas couldn’t destroy them at the height of their power . . .”

“That was four hundred years ago. They were still cutting channels in stone, powering everything with their own vitricity. We have knowledge, resources and technology that they couldn’t have dreamed of,” Adrin said.

Dacrine grinned. “I like the way you think. Your portfolio would have been good enough to get you a place here, you know. You displayed an excellent understanding of concepts and your designs were elegant, no more or less complicated than they needed to be. And that braking system, that was on another level. It makes perfect sense, but I never would have thought of it in a thousand years.”

“It . . . got easier, after I went into the Ocean. Putting it all together, I mean.” Adrin wasn’t used to receiving that sort of praise.

“Figures. You had a foundation that the Ocean could build upon, and she gave you what you needed. Etherret has a whole theory about it, says it usually works that way. If you were meant to be a fighter, the Ocean would have made you into one.” Dacrine opened a drawer behind her workbench and pulled out a lockbox. “I love Suzari, but she doesn’t understand. Precious few of the others, either. They’re so wrapped up in their feats of vitricity that they think we don’t do more here than give them neat toys to play with. But we live or die by engineering, now more than ever, the Ethereal Guard more than anyone else. Have a look at this, Adrin.”

Dacrine opened the lockbox and beckoned Adrin closer. Inside were a few shards of shisao, none larger than a fingernail. They were the same deep black as the blade he carried, like tiny windows into a void where occasional threads of light filtered through.

“We’re no closer to discovering how this stuff was made than we were when Alzyn found the symbic device in Norana. Maybe you’ll have better luck than Etherret and I did figuring it out.”