Chapter 5: The Grange

The Grange was all motion and din — the dull thump of leather on leather, the sharp ring of practice steel. I threaded through the chaos of it as quietly as I could, working my way toward the very back, where the man I had come for would be found. With a little luck I would reach him before the masters marked me. Prince I might be, but within these walls I am counted only another young man at his craft, and by the rules of the house any master may call me out for a bout. I am no longer an acolyte — those years are behind me — but I am still bound to accept the invitation if it comes. Most days I do not mind the rule. This was not most days. I needed to reach my man, and I needed to do it before the house made other plans for me.

Halfway down the hall I came up against Weapons Master Larkin. He bowed deep — I am the prince, after all. “Welcome again, Gord.” Inside the Grange he may use my given name; beyond the doors it would be My Lord. “What a pleasure, to have you grace us with your presence.”

I could not tell from the voice whether he was fawning or sliding a quiet blade between my ribs. Both, perhaps. It is true enough that I should come more often. I should always have come more often. And now, when at last I am meant to be here as much as ever I once wished to be — now, since Bran died, I have no time for it. I train still. But I train in the grey of early morning, or late in my own rooms, behind a barred door.

“It is always a pleasure, Master. I only wish I could give the Grange more of my hours.” He inclined his head, grave. Before he could think to test me himself, I went on. “In truth, I am looking for Weapons Master Josen.”

Larkin’s brows climbed his forehead. Of every name in the Grange, Josen was the last he had looked to hear from me. “Master Josen?” His mouth bent into something curious and amused. “Come with me, then.”

We found him at the very back, slumped against the wall with his chest heaving, blowing out the last of a bout with an acolyte who was bent double a few feet off, retching with the effort of having survived it. I gave the poor lad a look of pure fellow-feeling. I remembered that part too well — what Josen does to a body. Larkin waited a courteous moment for the master to find his breath, and then said, smooth as oil: “Josen. I believe you were just about to call Gord out.”

Josen straightened, shook the sweat from his scarred face, and turned to me. The dark, broken landscape of that face gave away nothing at all. “Gord. Aye. It would be a pleasure.” He held my eye, and I took the challenge up in mine, and the thing was done before either of us had said a true word. “So kind of you to join us.”

A murmur ran along the wall behind me. We had an audience already.

No surprise in that. There would be more, and soon, for this would be a thing worth telling later.

Here I must set down a thing plainly, because the rest makes no sense without it, and because I have grown tired, in the writing of this, of letting even these pages believe the lie I have spent my life building.

I am not the indifferent swordsman the court takes me for. I never was.

Davil saw to that — Davil, who taught me that a hidden strength is worth ten strengths displayed, that the blade a man does not know you carry is the blade that saves your life. So in my rare turns at the Grange I have always fought at something short of my best, dropped the bouts I could have held, let myself be reckoned a disappointment and worse. It is the truest thing I own, that disappointment. I built it with great care, year on year, and I have worn it so long that I half believe it myself on the days it suits me to — which, I have come to see, is most days. That is the trouble with a mask worn well. You forget, in time, that the face beneath it is doing anything at all.

But the masters who have come to my rooms by night know the other truth, and they have pressed me to show it. And there are rumours abroad now besides — for I was the only man who cut his way to Bran’s side in that field, and men have done the arithmetic of that. So the crowd along the wall did not only want a show. They wanted an answer. How good is the prince, truly? It is the one question I have spent my whole life refusing to answer, because the answer may yet be the only road out of this kingdom alive, when the hour comes. To spend it here, today, was to spend something I might never get back.

I was going to spend it anyway. I needed Josen. And there was no buying Josen with a lie.

For we have history, he and I, and a debt in it. I must fight him, and fight him true, before he would give me so much as the time of day. He had to see that the boy he knew was gone.

Josen. The legend.

One of the finest blades in the kingdom, and some would cut the one of and leave it bare. Once his name stood for skill and for something rarer — an unbending loyalty to the King, forged in war, proven a hundred times in the King’s own service. It was why the King had made him Aelea’s Companion: the single sworn guard who stands beside the princess from the cradle, his life forfeit for hers, the highest honour a fighting man of White Stone can be given. He held that post with an absolute and joyless devotion until the day he, too, fell under the shadow of my father’s growing fear.

But Josen, alone of all of them, was not taken by the Black Coats. He slipped them, and vanished — out past the law, into the wild. Two years the most wanted man in the kingdom, a king’s ransom on his head. I missed him in those years more than I let myself know. He had taken a hand in my training once, and I had been a disappointment to him then, though for reasons he did not yet understand. And I knew — knew in my bones — that he was no traitor. Not then.

And then, one day, he simply came back. And since that day he has lived quiet, all but bound to the Grange, and no hand has been laid on him. I have never understood it — why he, of all men, stands above my father’s rage, untouchable, when the rumour is plain that he is no longer counted the King’s friend. Friend and mentor though he had been to me, I had kept my distance these years entire. I had never felt my own footing sure enough to risk the nearness — for my sake, or for his.

So even this — even a bout on the practice mat — would be a thing to remember.

“What weapons do you choose?” he asked me.

Another murmur, that a master would grant his challenger the choosing. But I had looked for it. The first quiet question of my testing, before a blade was even lifted: what would I choose? “Two rounds,” I said. “Long swords. Then unarmed.”

His brow went up, and a dry amusement spread slow across the ruin of his face. He nodded, and turned to Larkin. “You will judge?”

We took our blunted swords from the wall and each checked the other’s edge was true and dull, and almost before I had readied myself we stood facing across the mat.

I slid easily into the warm-up, the long prescribed dance of forms that must be walked through before any bout in the Grange, watching Josen as I matched him step for step. I had never truly crossed blades with him before. And even here, in motions we both knew cold — performed in his case with a terrible, exact perfection — I could feel the edge come off him, that extra quickness living in the very tip of his sword, a thing I had not been good enough to feel the last time we sparred, years gone. I would have to make my showing early, before the ache that the castle wall had left in my fingers the night before could slow them. For I had no doubt at all of how this bout would end. Josen would win it.