Chapter 4: Travel

The next day we started to Konthriput. Uncha and the other guards woke at dawn, as was custom. I woke an hour earlier, and did my morning exercises and was rested well before the guards did their usual bouts. Because they thought me a student still—senior year students were encouraged to wear the blue and go out into the world—most ignored me except for some friendly conversations. I did spend some time going over their fighting styles. The senior red in command had a strong, surefoot style, delivering his baton and half-shield in tiny, measured strikes that almost always disarmed the silvers before they could do him harm. Uncha was ... good, and she knew it. Her form was excellent, and filled with grace, and her stamina was stupendous. I watched her go against both of the other silvers and outlast them both.

The journey to the mid-way station at Jonhar was uneventful. The roads were sturdy but steep, and the caravan rumbled along, with horses puffing & steaming. We changed horses almost every day, and that gave us a pace that would have been the envy of any merchant even a decade ago. The widened roads also had at least a ten foot clearing on either side of the road, so we had a good line of sight. The chances of an attack were minimal.

After Jonhar, the roads became more interesting. They started to crumble at the edges first, and then potholes appeared requiring the caravan master to be more artistic in his driving. The incline of the slope increased too, and horses started tiring much faster. The next station was still a way ahead when the caravan master ordered a stop. The horses would go no more.

It was mid-evening, the sun starting to shade, and the guards were to a side, having a drink. I kept to myself as usual, and was re-reading one of my favorite books, a classical treatise on the nature of the prann, and its uses.

Uncha was starting a walk towards me, probably to tell me to stable and groom her horse. The first time she had done this, I had raised an eyebrow, but had then bowed and done as she asked. What she asked me to do was against custom, but it didn’t hurt to be polite to one of the Blessed family’s scions.

It was then that I felt the flow of the prann in the local spaces bend, and the beats of my heart slowed to align with it. As I’d been taught, I watched for the first signs of danger. Through the corner of my eye, I could feel Uncha already grasping at the prann and moving. If it hadn’t been a waste of my meagre stamina, I would’ve raised my eyebrow. That was not doctrine. If her teachers had been around, they would definitely not be pleased.

As she passed me, she spared a glance for me (so wasteful!), and in her slight smirk of her lips, I read her thoughts. She thought I was frozen, a newbie in his first fight, about to pee his pants.

Even from where I stood, I could sense the approach of the attackers in the flow of the prann. Our defenders on the other hand—because of how still they were—were very hard to read, but the days I had spent watching them train and studying their footprint in the prann paid off. After a few heartbeats, I updated my mental map. The attackers were at least 3, and perhaps a fourth held as reserve. I couldn’t sense how strong they were until they came closer, but they were advancing in a classic pincer: aiming to cut off the caravan from its guards. It became obvious that they’d been studying us for some time too because the placement of the attack was optimized to sever the guards from the caravan.

It was almost perfect, and probably would have worked, at least until Uncha disrupted their plans. Her disturbance in the flow marked a clear challenge to the attackers, a bait too hard to resist. Disciplined attackers would have stuck to the plan and focused on the larger objectives, but bandits aren’t really known for their discipline. Two of them veered off to where Uncha was about to make her stand.

I studied my mental map. There was something puzzling about the formation. While the pincer was complete with three anchors, the position of the guards within the left quadrant meant that they would have ample time to recover and attack even if the execution was perfect. If the bandits had been watching us for some time, they would have surely seen me, a fifth prann user. Even if they didn’t see my early morning calistenics, they wouldn’t surely discount me. Unless, my paranoia told me, they somehow knew about my disability.