Reg stood behind Val while she struggled, again, to pull the bowstring back. In her hands, the bow seemed like a recalcitrant goat, intentionally figuring out the most frustrating movement to make next. The lower end, slanted across her body to the left because it was too tall for her, kept slipping out of small bark crevasses. The arrow bobbled on the bowstring, pointing only vaguely towards the targets, before slipping out of the nock. The bowstring thwapped forward, hitting Val on the arm right above the bracer. Val threw the bow down and sat down, frustrated. “Reg, this isn’t going to work. I think I’m getting worse.”
Reg slumped, “It’s not archery that’s the problem; it’s the bow. And Instructor Brilleye. If you had a bow that was sized for your body, you’d be doing fine. You were doing well with the shortbow.”
“But that doesn’t matter. I’m not allowed a bow that’s appropriately sized because of ‘standards.’ Instructor Brilleye is going to win and kick me out of the guard.” Val sounded on the verge of tears.
Reg nodded, “Yeah.” He paused to think before saying, “Maybe our goal shouldn’t be to make you good at archery with that bow. That seems like it’s not going to happen. But failing at archery doesn’t mean that you need to get kicked out of the guard—it’s like what Captain Merrin always says, ‘The spider’s goal is to feast, not to weave her current web.’ What’s our actual goal? It’s to get you to stay in the guard, not to get you to pass a muddy exam with the wrong equipment. What if you talked to Commander Pompadon? Or Captain Merrin? Maybe they could intercede for you.”
“Maybe.” Val said, sounding doubtful. “I can’t see it working, but it doesn’t hurt to try.”
Bartholomew chittered encouragingly in Val’s ear, but Val stayed sitting slumped on the ground. Reg patted her on the back and then took both their bows and quivers, and dropped them off with Hul, the lackadaisical one-armed armory master who had checked out their bows for the morning’s practice. Hul grunted thanks, before continuing to sharpen one of those long ax-bladed spears that the guards seemed to favor. The metal weapons seemed to take a lot more sharpening than the druid-touched wooden ones, but most full guards preferred them anyways—they were sharper and held their edge better.
Their first exams were only five days away. The weeks had flown by, full of work and challenges. Reg had spent every spare moment he had pulling out his doll and making its eyes glow. He wasn’t quick with it, but he could consistently light up its eyes, and was able to conjure a handful of sparks nine times out of ten. Seeing the doll’s emerald eyes shining at him was joyful, no matter how many times he made it happen. And holding a hand of dark green sparks that tickled his skin as they leapt about felt like a dream.
Annise had him drilling throwball spells. He’d gone to two of the intramural throwball games; adults playing was an entirely different sport than young kids throwing around a wicker ball on primary school fields. The game was fast and violent. The Primal Panthers—the team that Annise had organized—had been trounced in both games. The other teams in the league, full of grizzled veterans of the guard who’d been playing together for decades and going on dangerous monthly missions in the below, were on an entirely different bough than the recruits. The passes of the veterans were longer and crisper; their conjured whips, webs, shields, snares, hands, and barriers of the veterans snapped into existence much faster; and their leaps and tackles were harder. Those defeats did nothing to dampen Annise’s enthusiasm for throwball, and she had Reg spending some time every day practicing the evocations to catch the wicker ball without burning his hands.
Professor Ashsprocket seemed even more excited than Reg about Reg getting through his block. While everyone else in Remedial Evocations was practicing infusing increasingly complex shapes with power, Professor Ashsprocket had been working hard with Reg to get him caught up. Reg was not a quick study, but with Professor Ashsprocket’s enthusiastic instruction, he was soon starting to master the mind-bending glyph visualizations, flow-regulation, and channel-shaping that went into controlling sparks and that was a foundation for more advanced evocations.
In Advanced Arms, the instructor had finally let them pick up weapons—glaives, the long-handled spear-axes—to practice katas. The katas were strange, full of powerful sweeps and leaping retreats. Thrusts were rare and feints were non-existent. Reg pictured the massive goat-knight thing that had charged down on them while they were in the mist—he could see why thrusts wouldn’t work against beasts like that. There were almost no blocking movements, instead the katas had them throwing themselves from one side or another, sometimes even vaulting with the help of the glaive. Unlike the katas for circle-dueling, these glaive-katas required a huge amount of space for each of them to execute.
The moves were difficult, and the instructor of arms expected perfection. Yesterday, Reg had spent the entire session trying to get enough height and power on a vaulting forward strike and left frustrated. It didn’t help that the instructor’s only feedback was “Wrong. Higher. Sharper.” No one in the class could quite get the hang of the explosive motion—not even Fenjor who was normally the first to grasp moves that required lots of power. Still, actually practicing with weapons made the sessions more enjoyable.
The Self & the Other had started covering memory—”the seeds of self” as Instructor Mossgate put it—and while the sessions didn’t induce nightmares the way the sessions on terrors had, they were slow going. Most sessions, Instructor Mossgate had them memorize sequences of cards before taking small draughts of liquid forgetfulness, served in tiny quail egg-sized cups and then trying to hold on to their recent memories. Being unable to remember the feeling of what they tried made progress difficult, and they took turns describing what the loss of memory felt like and what they were doing to try and hold on to a partner before switching roles.
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Instructor Mossgate complained a few times that Captain Merrin refused his request to bring a mnemophage into class. Reg didn’t know what that was, but if Captain Merrin had signed off on the classes on fear and then decided that a mnemophage was too much, he wanted no part of it.
In Tactics, Captain Merrin had shifted away from thinking trellises and theory, and they had started discussing small-group tactics for common twist-scenarios. When should a group-leader call a retreat? What assault tactics are effective against blight-gaunts? Lost weepers? Squeakers? Wraith knights? How do those tactics vary based on party composition and health? The message that she drilled into them over and over again was that no fight should be ‘fair.’ Any conflict that involved risk to guards was one where a group had made a tactical mistake.
The lessons in Tactics were accompanied by three practica. In all of them, they spent three days camping on a wild branch. For Reg, the camping bits of it felt like a light vacation—the long months he’d spent working on wild branches had prepared him well for three pampered days with thick bed-rolls, well-made tents, and well-stocked supplies. It was luxurious. Val had a similar reaction, but her joy was dampened by not being allowed to scamper around the wild branch to explore—Captain Merrin had them treat the branch as if it were the mist below. That meant hiking in squads of seven or eight, staying precisely on the trail, and setting up camp and rest-sites as if they were down in the mist.
These hikes were punctuated by mock ambushes from Captain Merrin and other guards where the groups had to respond accurately and swiftly to a guard popping out from behind a bush and yelling “I’m a lost weeper!” or “I’m a horde of skele-raptors guided by a thorned-herder!” The first ambush felt silly, but the levity quickly drained away when the recruits realized how poorly they’d done. Recruits tripped over each other trying to deploy ground thorns to retreat, pulled out the wrong weapons for an enemy, and set themselves up in the wrong formations. Each ambush was followed by reports of deaths and injuries—“at least three of you would have died if that had been a real scourge-mage”—followed by thorough critiques of everything they’d done wrong, down to small details like how Reg had his practice glaive strapped to his rucksack or how Jackobee had called “everyone, form a defensive square” rather than the faster-to-understand “square defense.”
Starting with the second practicum, the veteran guards that Captain Merrin had running the training also started trying to get close enough to the groups to mark recruits with a dab of paint. Val, Jackobee, and Reg had to be moved to the same group—friendly birds and squirrels kept bringing messages to the two druids about people lurking behind trees or crawling through a patch of gnome-hair moss, and Reg had spent far too much time looking out for chimera-cats, griffins, scale-bears, and invisi-snakes on wild branches to let even a magically-veiled guard close to any group he was in. The other four members of their squad were rotated out regularly to make sure the rest of the recruits were in groups that could actually be snuck up on and had chances to practice their situational awareness.
After the second practicum, Reg had arrived back in his room and discovered a packet of letters that had been delivered from home. His father’s letter was long and full of small details about the ranch—two beetle studs were being fractious; problems with some sections of the trunkward fence after a windstorm; one of the older phase spider matrons had been lost after wandering away from the herd; the price of goat cheese had dipped, but spider silk was selling well, and they’d ordered another loom to process a bit more of it themselves; and more. Reg read that letter over and over again, picturing the sights, sounds, and smells of the ranch and how everyone was doing.
Barkle’s letter was brief; “Anky misses you but she doon good. Dont get et or twisted.”
Martha’s letter was a bit longer and included the exciting news that she’d be moving to Ithilia in a few weeks to tend bar in the city and maybe see if she could find better merchant contacts to sell some products from the ranch. Reg wrote a long letter back, full of enthusiasm about visiting her in Ithilia and describing the places that he’d been able to visit on his occasional weekend trips with friends. He wrote about the spider market, full of more breeds than he’d ever even read about; The Cooking Corner, a huge building full of floor after floor of cooking equipment: ash cauldrons, crystal-powered stove burners, enchanted knives that chopped mushrooms on their own, frost-encrusted logs that you could put into a cellar to keep things cool, and specialized tools that Reg didn’t even recognize; and The Clumsy Satyr and all of the strange drinks he’d tried there.
Daphne had included a painting of a goat. Or maybe it was a scale-bear? Reg hung it up on the wall above his small desk where it either glowered or smiled down at him. Whatever it was, it made him happy whenever he saw it.
Nadia, Reg’s older sister, didn’t write a letter. She was probably still angry with Reg for leaving the ranch, but Reg wrote a letter to her anyway, full of anecdotes from the recent practicum that he knew Nadia would enjoy. He chuckled to himself as he wrote about how Cracic had been afraid to make manure with someone else on guard, and how after sneaking off, the snooty elf had wiped with handfuls of herder’s bane.
As Reg wrote these letters home, he realized that the Achivian Guard campus now felt like home. The vaulted halls, morning runs, punishing classes, and late nights in the library had become as natural and comfortable to him as days spent watching over a flock followed by nights sleeping curled up by a burl while a few stars glimmered through gaps between leafy branches. It was a good feeling.