Glim dressed himself in a rumpled tunic and swiped at his face with a handful of water from a jug on the floor. The memory of his body and bones separating flooded his mind. Pain. Indescribable pain. Not just of body, but something deeper.
What if I left, he thought for the hundredth time. Left Wohn-Grab.
Glim considered the idea. If he prepared well, it might not be so bad. He’d head south, to the lower part of Phyria. If luck went his way, he’d lose the gift to ply, and could return to join the guard. The idea frightened him. But no harm in being prepared. He stepped towards the door, but his father stalled him.
“Hold on a minute. I’m coming with you.”
To Summerling Ridge? He’d almost said it out loud. No, you whit. He means the lesson.
That surprised him. Father usually left before he did, and broke his fast with the guardsmen somewhere in another tower. But today, father walked with him, waving at the gardener along the way.
Glim took the stairs to the dining hall. As usual, a hubub of conversation could be heard through the door. And as usual, Glim’s heart sank at the thought of walking through it. His father’s presence didn’t change that very much.
Pyri and Gyda sat at their usual table. Pyri saw Glim enter.
“Good morning, Captain!” she said brightly.
“Fine morning, isn’t it, girls?” Father smiled.
“Sit with us?” Gyda offered, shoving bowls aside to make room for Glim and his father.
Glim walked behind his father. They scooped porridge into their bowls and took a slice of stale bread to go with it. Father plopped a tiny scoop of dried nuts and berries into each of their bowls.
Don’t sit with Gyda. Don’t sit with Gyda, Glim begged him in his mind.
His father sat next to Gyda, leaving Glim to sit across from her. Glim stared at the shriveled bits of fruit in his bowl, barely noticing the girl’s long brown hair and rosy cheeks. Or her eyes, which could wince at Glim like a pair of daggers. Or sparkle with sudden warmth, as they did now. By Phyr’s black ballsack, the girl confused him.
Like her best friend Pyri, Gyda wore an impeccable tunic with a colorful ribbon braided into the hem of the collar. As merchant’s daughters, they did their best to look neat and tidy.
A contrast that they reminded Glim of frequently. But not today. Instead, Pyri said, in a sugary sweet tone: “Glim, you should let my mother cut your hair sometime.”
“Um, sure,” he replied, wishing the conversation would end there. Mercifully, it did, and they ate in peace.
“We need to be going,” his father said, rising from the table. “Come along, son.”
They left the dining hall and walked along the path to the tower. Glim took two steps for each of his father’s.
“Why are you coming with me?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. Master Willow asked me to. Said it was important. Anyway, it’s about time some other guards took a turn planning the patrols.”
As soon as they arrived, the tower door opened and Master Willow invited them in, a smile pasted onto his face. “Thank you for coming, Jarl. I know you have a lot to do so I’ll get right to the point. Please, take a seat.”
Master Willow led them into the sitting room with its overstuffed leather seats. Vases with strange flowers wafted sweet perfume through the room. Glim’s father shifted uncomfortably in his seat, taking the teacup Master Willow offered him. “What can I do for you?”
It was his tutor’s turn to seem uncomfortable. Not in the usual way, with his dismissive sneer or posturing. Nor the way he wrinkled his nose, as though Glim were a bit of stinky garbage he was loathe to touch. This discomfort was something new. Something genuine.
“Glim’s training is about to progress. We overcame a hurdle recently and he’ll be using his essentiæ in new ways soon. Tapping into a larger store. So it is time to make an awkward decision. I wanted you here because its something that will have more impact if Glim sees it for himself.”
Master Willow took a steadying breath.
“And what I have to show, well… it would be more appropriate for you to be here. And also, for you to help your son decide his next steps.”
“I’m happy to help. What is it you need to show us?”
“One of the earliest lessons a mage must learn, and perhaps the most important, is how to confront drain. Plying essentiæ is not always precise. There are so many subtle factors at play. How much sleep you got the night before. How cold or warm it is. Even a slight difference in temperature has an effect. There is always a danger, when one plies, of overwhelming the reservoir of essentiæ at one’s command. The spell has no choice but to draw on what it can. To consume essentiæ that the plyer might not wish it to.”
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“I know a bit of what you speak,” his father said, a trace of bitterness in his voice.
“I try to spare you such concerns, Jarl, but this one is unavoidable.”
“I understand. You can show him.”
Master Willow tugged at the hem of his robe, down by his ankle. He looked at Glim somberly. “I must show you the proper way to mitigate drain. Skillful plyers will direct the drain to a specific place. Otherwise, the essentiæ might drain from, say, your mind. Erasing memories, or addling your senses. Even causing you to become blind, or mute. It might draw on your guts. Perhaps slicing you apart from the inside, until you bleed yourself to death without a scratch. If you aren’t mindful of where to draw from, the essentiæ will just grab the easiest path. Which is rarely what you want to happen.”
Master Willow raised his robe, exposing his leg. As he raised it further, past his knee, Glim noticed a series of scars, boils, and discolored flesh. When he saw his tutor’s thigh, he gasped out loud. Glim clamped his hand over his mouth in horror, hoping Master Willow hadn’t noticed.
He had. But it seemed he was expecting Glim’s reaction.
Master Willow’s outer thigh bulged with a maze of scars, burns, frostbitten patches, and other maladies piled on top of the other.
“Ignoring drain leads to a quick and gruesome end. This is what unskilled mitigation of drain looks like. And here is what skilled mitigation looks like.”
His tutor dropped the hem of his robe and then tugged up his sleeve. His forearm had a neat pattern of divots in the shape of a spiral that curled around his arm.
“You need to decide, Glim, where to direct your drain. It is best to avoid the head area, and anything near your core. Probably not your hands or feet either. You won’t have but a second to choose. So you need to have your answer ready. You need to sear it into the pathways of your mind, so that the moment you sense drain you can stop whatever you’re doing and let the spell fizzle out of whatever conduit you have chosen.”
His father leaned over and patted Glim’s knee. “He means you have to pick a spot to mess up.”
Glim shuddered. Well, that takes care of that, Glim thought with revulsion. Definitely time to get free of this ‘gift.’
“Please, finish your tea,” his tutor said. “That’s all for today’s lesson. When you return tomorrow, I’ll teach you how to avoid drain in the first place.”
When they left the tower, his father let out a breath he’d apparently been holding in for an entire hour.
“Come with me, son.”
He walked his down the battlement ramp to the second-best maintained part of Wohn-Grab, the headquarters of the guard. Thousands of years of bored watchmen had left their mark. Every stone of the tower wall had been polished clean. Every sword shone bright. The banners snapped crisply in the wind. Dark gray, with a white symbol in the center: A torch with an X centered behind it. Or as Glim thought of it, the stinky snowflake.
As they walked, guards nodded in deference to their captain, and smiled at Glim. He followed his father to the armory. It smelled of leather, just as their home did. Also like metal, oil, and sweat. Racks of swords and spears, shields, bows and arrows, and other weapons stood in neat rows. Father selected two wooden swords and tossed one to Glim.
He caught it by the hilt, grinning. He loved moments such as these. Not only because he got to train, or miss a lesson with Master Willow. No, he loved these moments because it’s when his father usually let things slip he ordinarily kept quiet. Something about swinging swords at each other got him in a talkative mood.
They walked to one of the ramparts, taking wide granite steps that hugged the outer wall. From here, Glim could see both the town and the mountains with clarity. The town looked peaceful, with lazy strands of smoke rising from the chimneys. The mountains receded into the distance as far as Glim could see. Icy, dark, and forbidding.
But the next moment, the only thing he saw was the arc of his father’s sword, the answering strike of his own, and the stones around him shifting as he changed position.
“That’s right, Glim. Read the angles. Watch my elbows. No, keep your hips squared to me. You need to keep your sword between mine and you at all times. Don’t get fancy.”
They sparred a while, getting into a rhythm. He deflected his father’s sword as economically as he could.
His father nodded in approval. “As you move, think about where you feel the movement most. Where does your skin stretch as you swing or parry? What needs to bend? Where do you flex? Those would be poor places for scar tissue to build. Across your back, for example, would be particularly bad.”
“I don’t want scars anywhere.”
“I understand. Try to avoid it if you can. But Master Willow is right: it’s better to get a scar somewhere than to lose your eyesight or forget your own name.”
Glim’s forearms started feeling trembly, and he realized father had sped up his attacks. Glim tensed and swatted the sword away with a wild swing.
“You’ve already lost,” father said calmly, pointing his sword at Glim’s throat. “You’ve become rattled and overextended your thrust. Remember your breathing. In slowly, then hold. Out slowly, then hold.”
Glim counted the moments as he filled his lungs and held the air still, then released it at the same rate. His nervousness melted away. His father pressed the attack for a few more moments, which Glim matched, then pulled away.
“Very good! Let’s take a break.”
They walked to a nearby stack of crates and sat. Glim kept quiet, watching his father’s dark eyes scan the ridgeline of the mountain out of habit. He seemed to wrestle with something, then spoke.
“Your mother had burn marks all over her face. So tiny and so many that they were hard to pick out. I never did understand that very well. Why would a Winder have burn marks?”
His eyes got a faraway look as memories took hold.
“I don’t think it was from drain,” he said. “More like a lifetime of getting a faceful of embers. Like the blacksmith does. I do recall a couple of marks at her hip. Perhaps that’s where she chose. But there’s something else.”
He turned to face Glim full on. “she told me something once that struck me as odd. She said it is possible to drain not from the body, but from the mind. Like she kept a store of essentiæ up here,” he tapped his temple, “for just in case. I don’t know how. But keep it it mind. No pun intended.”
He laughed at his own joke, which seemed to get funnier the more he thought about it. “Come on. Let’s get lunch.”
But Glim did not laugh. He wondered for the thousandth time: Why must I do this?