Sword Read online

  SWORD

  AMY BAI

  First edition published 2015.

  Copyright © 2015 by Amy Bai

  All rights reserved.

  Your purchase of this eBook license entitles you to read it for your own enjoyment. If you’d like to share with a friend, please purchase a copy for them!

  Respect the author’s rights — don’t pirate!

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, via digital transfer, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Published in the United States by Candlemark & Gleam LLC, Bennington, Vermont.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-936460-61-8

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-936460-62-5

  Cover art and design by

  Jenny Zemanek

  Seedlings LLC

  www.seedlingsonline.com

  Map design by Alan Caum

  Book design and composition by Kate Sullivan

  www.candlemarkandgleam.com

  To Art: my rock, my goad, my shoulder, my always.

  Table Of Contents

  Book One: The General's Daughter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Book Two: Lady Captain

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  SWORD

  Dark the wind that brings the storm

  and lost, all, to its breaking,

  Yet firm shall hold Sword, Song, and Crown

  A land of their own making.

  Sword shall guide the hands of men

  and Song shall ease their sorrow,

  Crown shall harbor all their hope

  And lead them to tomorrow.

  BOOK ONE

  THE GENERAL'S DAUGHTER

  CHAPTER 1

  "Merry we’ll meet till the tides they all turn,

  then dance with the blades as the shadows return…"

  Children skipped and sang an old nursery rhyme in the parched air of the late afternoon. Their shadows fell strange in the slanting light. In the shadow of an oak thick with age, a girl crouched glumly on her heels, drawing aimless lines in the dirt with a battered practice sword. She was noble, this girl, a scion of the great House of Corwynall, whose oak it was: the oak and a great deal more. The silver locket at her breast declared it even if her patched dress did not.

  "Sing we a new song, for sadness and woe,

  kings and queens all shall the darkest road know—”

  The children, passing under one another's linked arms, stared at her and interrupted themselves with whispers. The girl never spared them a glance. Only someone who knew her very well would have marked the way her gaze held them always in its periphery, how her face tightened when a gust carried their words across the yard.

  "Rise shall the earth and the heavens shall fall,

  fire can guard from what water can call…"

  It was the most senseless thing she had ever heard. Why couldn't they sing “Skip to the River” or some other silly rhyme?

  The tip of her sword dug into the earth. She blunted the only weapon her father would allow her till she had proved herself worthy of better, and recited the Five Tenets of Siege Defense in her head, hating that she hated their stares.

  They were too young to help in the fields, barely able to toddle. But they learned it from their parents, who were too far away right now to stare. What did the general's daughter do today? those parents would ask when they were home in their cottages over supper. And their eyes would follow her in tonight as they headed home to talk—she hoped—of something more significant than the state of Kyali Corwynall's gown or the battered old sword she carried everywhere.

  Bold thoughts, coming from a girl crouched under a tree.

  She pinned her gaze on the far hills, refusing to notice the sly looks of the children. The mountains were wrapped in a haze of summer heat, little more than shadows against the sky. The soldiers always teased her when she looked in that direction: the mountainfolk taught the Gift and the sword to all who proved both worthy and Gifted… and they took girls and boys both for study. You ought to go, her father’s officers often jested, secure in the knowledge that no Corwynall of the royal line ever left the family estates. They'd like you up there.

  Síog girl, fae child, her brother would usually add, being less wary of her temper and endlessly amused by how those names made her blush. Surely they would have you, you look enough the part.

  Sometimes, like now, it almost seemed like a good notion. Up there, the air would be cool and there would be snow in the winters, which she had never seen. Up there, no one would know her name, or stare at her.

  Bind them together with holly and rue, the next lines of the song were, and she heard it even though they didn't sing that one. Kyali bit her tongue, annoyed that they had managed to fix the silly thing in her mind. Those that will follow the heart's voice be true.

  This was the last time she tried to be helpful to the estate staff.

  The headman's niece, whose rightful custody these little imps were, was probably behind the barn with one of the soldiers, looking to get herself a marriage the old-fashioned way.

  That was unkind. Arawan was not a fool. But Arawan was not here, she was, minding babes with eyes like pointing fingers, and likely providing considerable amusement to the soldiers of the Third Battalion, who were scattered about the estate on boring guard duty today. Those men didn't find her odd, if only because she'd tagged after so many of them in her younger years. They weren't above a jest at her expense. But jests she would take from them, and from her brother Devin, as she took orders from her father and her father's officers… and neither from anyone else. Even now the men posted at the stables were sneaking looks at her, grinning. It was almost enough to make her smile back.

  In the sunlit yard, the children sprawled like puppies, panting in the heat, and argued over what to sing next. Their voices hung in the air like dust.

  "Dark the wind that brings the storm,

  and lost, all, to its breaking;

  yet firm shall hold Sword, Song, and Crown

  a land of their own making—”

  Fierce shushing from one of the guards stopped that rhyme, which was senseless but lately seemed much less silly. There were no smiles on the soldiers' faces now. There was a scowl on hers. Now nobody ventured a glance toward her. Somehow that was worse than the stares.

  A shiver twisted over her and Kyali bent her head to look at the ground so nobody could see her expression.

  Arawan would have to come back soon.

  Hopefully her father and her brother would come back soon, too: they had braved the court to meet with the king on some matter or other, leaving her here to manage the estate and be skewered by the ungentle curiosity of children.

  She m
ade her way across the yard with the sun setting fire to the tops of the northern hills. Behind her, the fieldhands stacked their hoes by the oak and gathered their children for debriefing. She had no appetite, and no interest in the book on siegecraft her father had pointedly left her. She decided, since her father wasn't here to forbid it and her brother wasn't here to poke fun at it, that tonight she would sleep in the root cellar, where the earth was still cool and damp. Sleep was an attractive alternative to watching the candles drip and pretending to study. Or to sharpening her sword, which definitely needed it now. She wished Taireasa were here to prod her out of her moodiness. But with Taireasa came the bodyguards that were always in the princess’s presence, and a witness to the bothered state she found herself in was the last thing Kyali wanted.

  She was out of sorts, and annoyed with herself for being annoyed.

  It's youth, her father would tell her, with that dry impassiveness she never could quite manage. You're fifteen—and then she would snarl, and he would raise one wry eyebrow, and she would trip over her own feet in sword practice and look like a fool.

  Her limbs were growing longer, and banged into things at the worst moments. Her dresses fit badly and her head ached, and she knew her temper showed in her eyes, which sparked with an odd golden sheen whenever she was upset. That was her father's heritage, passed down from some questionable relation or other, and it was extremely awkward when she was trying to keep her face still. There was a grim irony in the fact that her private inconvenience had half the kingdom convinced she was fearsomely magical—and yet, unlike her brother Devin, she could claim not the slightest smattering of the Gift her House was known for.

  It wasn't particularly amusing at the moment. She was a daughter of House Corwynall. She had duties, and things to be that she wasn't, and didn’t yet know how to become. She stood in the midst of brocaded chairs and tapestries holding a sword, scowling at nothing. She didn’t need the mirror on the far wall to know how out of place she looked at the moment.

  "Damn," Kyali said aloud to the walls, and felt a little better.

  Devin and Father should be back tonight, and if she couldn't manage a better balance than this, she had better be asleep before they arrived. Her brother was quick to scent a moment of uncertainty and turn it into a prank or a gibe, which would either improve her mood or worsen it considerably. Plotting an extravagant retaliation to this imagined slight, she descended the cellar stairs completely occupied, and so she noticed nothing odd until she reached the bottom. There she froze without knowing why, as every hair stood on end.

  An arm reached out of the dark and wrapped around her neck.

  She saw it coming from the corner of her eye but only had time to twitch uselessly sideways. Another arm immediately followed the first one, muffling her startled cry and stealing her breath.

  Too shocked to be afraid, she bit down. The hand over her face jerked away. Her elbow drove backwards and her heel went up into a knee. The awful crack of bone that followed drew a pained groan from behind her and brought her panic in a thundering flood. Her attacker staggered, pulling her with him. The dropped candle sputtered on the floor beside them, throwing huge shadows everywhere. Spurred on by the thought that she might have to finish this struggle in the dark, she shouted. It was a much softer sound than she'd intended, but the floorboards above them creaked ominously, the arms around her fell away, and her attacker screamed as though she had burned him.

  Leaving this mystery for later consideration, Kyali flung herself at the steps and scrambled up, leaving the back panel of her skirts in his fist. Her sword clattered on the floor as she snatched at it. He came hard on her heels and, as she turned, drove himself obligingly onto the blade for her. Stunned, she froze again.

  Her blood sang in her ears. By the look on his face—a fair face, some much colder part of her noted, with the Western short-beard—he was at least as surprised as she was. He drew a bubbling breath. A dagger dropped from his hand and hit the floor between them.

  They stared at one another.

  He made an odd face then, and coughed a gout of blood all over her. She blinked through the drops. She knew she had to move—not dead till they stop bleeding, Father would say—but she couldn't. For all her years of study, all the secrecy and swordplay, she had never killed a man. She supposed, watching his face in a perversely distant way, that she still hadn't quite managed it. But he fell forward onto her then, going limp; after the instinctive terror of having him land on her subsided, the sight of his glassy gaze, of her old practice sword sticking out of his ribs, made it clear that she had done it now.

  She watched his face closely while his blood dripped down her cheek. He didn't move. He seemed not to be bleeding anymore, though with all the blood on him already, how could one tell? She didn’t intend to get closer to check. She couldn't hear anyone else in the house. Through the haze of shock, she was grateful the soldiers weren't here to witness this bizarrely personal moment.

  "Well," Kyali said, beginning to be pleased at how well she was taking this—and then threw up on him.

  Damn.

  * * *

  New lessons were the result of the ordeal, which was not shocking: new lessons were the result of nearly everything.

  Devin, when her family had arrived to find her scrubbing blood out of the floorboards, had predictably deemed her hopeless, right before he slipped on an overlooked puddle. Their father, also predictably, had directed the House guards to bury the man in the south field, made her drink half a cup of unwatered wine, and sent her to bed.

  Kyali spun and parried as her father's sword came at her. The jolt when their blades met made her whole arm ache. Sweat pasted stray tendrils of her hair to her face. Her leather armor creaked with every move. She wobbled back on guard, her arms and legs trembling with fatigue.

  It was both comforting and disturbing that she was not the only one out of breath this afternoon: beads of sweat stood on her father's brow and his armor was creaking, too.

  He waved a hand at her, meaning, she hoped, that they should rest. Prudently, she waited until he leaned against a tree before staggering to one of her own, pressing her back against its bark. Her legs were barely able to hold her weight. Every time she grew accustomed to the lessons, he would add some new element and she would spend a week sore and winded and stumbling before she began to get the hang of it again. These lessons were both harder and easier than the other things he taught her: the movement of troops across provinces, the tricks of supply lines and alliances, the careful use of spies. An odd sort of childhood—but as the alternative was learning to sew and do accounts, she wasn't about to complain.

  Except now she had killed a man, and she could no longer pretend her father was merely amusing himself by teaching her.

  Her father sighed, and Kyali darted a worried glance at him. He'd been very quiet since last night, which in her experience meant she'd done something wrong. But he avoided her gaze and so she looked elsewhere, determined not to be seen as a child today.

  The wheat fields stretched out below them, brown stalks peppered with kerchiefed heads and teams of dray horses, and in the distance, the wide expanse of the Sainey River sparkled back up at the sun. It would have been a far more peaceful view if the fieldhands weren't watching them so closely.

  By now rumor would have reached the capital; there was no way the soldiers who had found her in the aftermath of last night's little debacle had kept silent about it. She glanced over again. Her father seemed to be contemplating the same view. But she had learned the trick of staring at things from the corners of the eye from him, and she knew it was her face he really watched. Caught between gazes, she pretended to be absorbed in a rock under the toe of her boot. Her shoulders drew up.

  "It bothers you, then, does it?"

  There was no curiosity in his question; the answer was probably plain on her face just now. She shrugged. He sheathed his sword and folded his arms, looking a bit like a statue of himself as he consider
ed the expanse of his fields.

  "No," she said, which they both knew was an outright lie, but her father let it pass with mocking civility and spared her having to invent a justification.

  "It'll only get worse, now that they've evidence it's not play we do here," he said.

  She glared, feeling a rush of heat in her eyes. There was no hiding it; he knew exactly what it meant, having the same trait himself, though it almost never showed in him.

  "What is it then, exactly?" she asked. "You're not preparing me for marriage, unless you were planning to marry me to an outlaw. Why—"

  She choked the words off, flinching away from her own anger. There was more of it than she had believed.

  Why are you teaching me to be you?

  She could never ask him that. Just thinking it made her heart thump.

  Her father tipped his head like an old battle crow, looking like he'd heard the words she was holding behind her teeth. "Don't you like it? I was perhaps mistaken."

  Gods, there was no way to win with him. She wasn't even sure she wanted an answer— ten years at this; it couldn't be a whim that the Lord General chose to teach his daughter the sword. Surely not.

  But what if it was?

  "You know I do," she said, and they stood a moment, listening to the distant shouts from the fields. "But," she added, having recovered her argument, and he cast her a weary sideways glance—he hated that word. "But I've put this practice sword to a somewhat different use than you intended now, have I not? The villagers may find it a good tale to tell, but I doubt the gentleman's kin will. And others who have found my… hobby… amusing will think again. Won't they?"