In a sense, I had taught my brother Nikolai how to fight, but I was never much better than him. We were more like training partners than a mentorship. This had been enough for the wizard to declare me fit to service and charged me with a young boy he had found while in Jarnmark. He was even younger than I was when I joined my first troll hunting expedition, but that hadn’t marked the beginning of my training. My father had taught me the basics with sticks and we had played in the fields as such.
I did my best to recreate how I had first learned, but didn’t have much hope for the boy. He was scrawny and short, and never seemed to get a word in edgewise with the wizard’s apprentice. That was by far his worst trait. A young boy is in his prime years to grow strong, but it takes a lot to teach the right spirit.
As it turned out, that was my mistake. I took his thoughtfulness for a weakness of spirit. I only understood later that he had been humbled again and again during his short life and meant to do something about it. His parents had sold him off and, in doing so, taught him that if he couldn’t work then he wasn’t any good. He had been cast aside and used by everyone in his life, but it was the wizard that taught him it was his own efforts that would shape his future. Thanks to the gods, for him more than anyone else, he could always pick himself back up and try again.
By the gods, did he intend to.
But, what the wizard did to him, it tried my nerves as much as the boy’s. Imagine telling a lad to climb to the top of a tree whose branches couldn’t support his weight. He did it, he did anything the wizard told him to do. I watched him at twelve years of age plummet onto the rocks. I flung a good bottle of wine from my hand as I ran to him and found him broken. Before the shock could even wear off of me his stigmata was piecing him back together. Within the hour, he was on his feet again climbing the damn tree. This was after a full day’s worth of sword training and then he said he was feeling well and wanted to have another go at me.
Not only did the healing save his life, but it gave him his vigor back. Some days, he was able to run me into the ground and only by the complaining of the girl, Ezra, did he stop trying to kill himself and that was because of the mess.
After a particular mess from drowning himself (weighted down with stones in his pockets to keep from bobbing up to the river’s surface) was a deal struck between them. None of us wanted to watch him gagging and vomiting water for another evening again so it became a matter of choking to death.
Believe me, it’s a queer feeling to squeeze the life out of a child even when you know he’ll pop out of it feeling like he just had a good nap. I did it more than I would have liked, but never to speed up training. It was a swift cure to a broken bone for him, when a sparring blow landed particularly hard or when his horse bucked him off.
The lot of us were traveling all over the world, helping the wizard deal with monsters like the knight in the acropolis, and more often than not we were essentially chased out of one village or another when they saw what we were doing to the boy. None of us could even say we were his father, because he looked nothing like us. He was born in the hills on the western edge of the map and saying he was an orphan we were taking care of just made the impressions worse.
But, the boy did learn. The wizard took him as apprentice in all forms of science, politics, and philosophy. The only thing he didn’t teach the boy was magic and that wasn’t for lack of trying. While his stigmata could force his body back into health there were still limits to how much knowledge could be squeezed into his head. Miraculously, having his skull bashed open seemed to do nothing to his memory, but the boy still needed to sleep.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
Nikolai was in charge of Ezra’s martial training, but it was nothing like what the boy had to do. Her body had the limits of a young lady, which limited how much technique could be taught to her before she was unable to pick herself off the ground. All that spare mental power was given to the wizard for her further study. That, combined with a few years of age on him, left the boy always the inferior.
I don’t think he appreciated just how far he had risen above the average man because he compared himself to her. Anything he knew, she knew also and she knew it quicker. She had the sharper wit and the smoother tongue as well. She could talk her way into a merchant’s good graces and walk out of any food stall with a sweet, or buy a bauble or gift or what have you for less than any man would have paid. The wizard had made a fine weapon out of her, for everything but the slaying of monsters.
Naturally, that left the boy but one avenue to prove himself. He had his first fatal battle a few years after I met him. It didn’t go well for him. He killed his first man the year after that. We were making ends meet by hunting bounties, which was really more a task for Nikolai and myself than for the wizard as he spent weeks to months at a time fussing over one business or another. He must have had a dozen different identities, switching between them like clothes as it suited him. Most were shabby things, but he always had a good measure of pride in his status as a royal engineer. I think he may have had a hand in the creation of that department in Vassermark if I can judge by the age of his medallion.
At some point during the years, I came to realize that he was one of the finest warriors I’d ever met. He came close to saving my life on a number of occasions, which is a lot to say for a boy barely able to grow a beard. He certainly let us challenge and kill monsters I would have had no choice but to flee from. In short, I grew fond of the boy.
It broke my heart as I lay dying, his woman in the clutches of the enemy because I had failed to protect her. I only had a moment to think about it as I laid, mingled in the blood of another warrior but that realization weighed on me greater than even the death of my parents over a decade prior. It made me realize that I had made nothing of my life but violence and then failed at that. It would have been one thing if I had brought her back to safety at the cost of my life. I could have gone over to the Shepherd with a smile and met my ancestors.
But I had failed, whereas my dear brother Nikolai had succeeded. At the cost of his life, earlier that year, he had pushed back an army and brought safety to the woman he devoted his love to, even if it was a chivalrous thing.
It was that wound which has festered inside me and which I hope to soothe with these ruminations.
Perhaps I won’t even publish these words. Perhaps I shall cast them into the fire when I’m done. I’ve written here words that should be kept secret. The boy and I live in a web of political lies and to give evidence against ourselves is a folly. Yet I write.
Tomorrow we meet with the wastelanders. If they have the man I think they’ll have, perhaps I can make sense of my death. Word has already come down that the rebellion was scattered. The men of the city between lakes have fled in every direction but no one knows quite what happened in the wallows. That swamp is as depopulated as the southern desert. No bards were there to record the deed as they were in the acropolis. When I meet with the boy again, I shall hear it from his lips and I shall do whatever I can to make amends for my failure.
Together, I imagine we will drink of a wizard’s brew, a potion perhaps able to summon the Shepherd herself. I’ve thought of many questions to ask her after my fleeting encounter with the goddess.