15
It was not only speech and deportment that Astarion learned in that first year in his grandmother’s house.
She hired a tutor who said plainly that there was little they could teach Astarion of reading, but they taught him an elegant hand to go with the serviceable script he had learned in the schoolhouse.
The stable master taught him to ride a horse, which he did not particularly enjoy, though arguably they had gotten off on the wrong foot.
On the first day, the man had asked him if he’d ever ridden before, and Astarion said, without thinking, “Oh, yes. I’ve ridden my mother.”
The stable master’s face went absolutely blank, and he said, in an extremely careful voice, “I’m sorry, youngster, I think I misheard you.”
“My mother,” Astarion said. “Um…she’s a druid?” And as the man continued to stare at him: “She would turn into a bear sometimes? And a draft horse that time when we had to clear the south field?”
The stable master cleared his throat and said, “That’s not quite the same thing. And…son?” He leaned in and dropped his voice. “Don’t tell people that. Or if you do, explain that you were a child. Otherwise, they’re going to get the wrong impression.”
Astarion agreed, bewildered. The stable master put him on a pony.
The pony realized within seconds that its rider expected his steed to direct itself, then directed itself to the nearest patch of clover.
The stable master took a flask out of his pocket and gazed at it longingly, then put it back without touching it.
The notion of bits and bridles and reins and whips struck Astarion as rude, bordering on monstrous, but he eventually learned to direct the pony in a manner that did not make the stable master want to drink.
At that point, he graduated to a horse, which was a lot taller than a pony.
It was even taller than his mother in bear shape, an observation that he kept to himself.
And it went a lot faster, and when Astarion fell off, it did not stop to see if he was okay. It just kept running.
He limped into dinner with his great-grandmother that night. They dined together once a tenday and took tea irregularly, as her health permitted. When she saw him moving as if he’d fractured half his ribs and both his shoulders, she asked him what had happened, then burst out laughing at the answer.
“Oh, my poor boy,” she said, putting a hand to her chest as she gasped. “Oh, sit down, and I’ll tell you about when my father taught me to take fences. Wendin, fetch some brandy. The hundred year, I think.”
Wendin bowed very slightly. “I fear that we are out of the hundred year, Madam.”
Lady Erikinia made a soft tutting sound. “Anything over two hundred years should never be used medicinally.”
“I believe we have a quite adequate fifty year, Madam.”
She sighed. “The cellars have declined, as have we all. Very well, fetch this youthful brandy for our youthful relative.”
Astarion’s great-grandmother told him a rambling but hilarious story, which helped. The brandy burned his throat but also seemed to help.
It was odd, though—when Wendin poured, Astarion caught a glimpse of the label. While his education at the vineyard had been sorely lacking, one thing he did know was bottle labels, and this one was not fifty years old, nor even ten years.
He looked up at Wendin, who shook his head very slightly.
It was odd, but so many things were odd now that Astarion scarcely knew what to make of any of it.
When he was not dining with Lady Erikinia, he ate with his deportment teacher—who peppered the conversation with reminders about his elbows and the size of his bites—or with Bajia, or sometimes by himself. There were no boys his age at the manor house.
Perhaps he was lonely, but if so, he had been lonely all his life. And now, at least, he was lonely and comfortable and learning things, and even though he had to work hard, it was work he didn’t mind doing, unlike his work in the vineyard.
Bajia taught him both dance and the rudiments of fighting with a rapier. They practiced in a little packed-earth yard off the stables that was no longer used and had weeds growing at the edges that put up small cheerful yellow flowers.
“Will I be able to fight duels?” he asked Bajia one day, after she had chased him around the yard until they were both out of breath.
“Fight them, yes. Win them…probably not.”
She looked him frankly up and down, like a horse buyer with a questionable animal.
“Not unless you get more muscle on you than I expect you will. You’ve got speed, which is a damn sight better than nothing, but one wrong parry against a bigger sword will snap your blade.”
Astarion, who had nurtured a secret fantasy of becoming a dashing swordsman, sighed.
“You’d probably make a decent knife fighter,” Bajia said carelessly, gathering up their equipment.
Astarion’s ears immediately perked up. “Knives?” His dreams of duels were rapidly replaced by dreams of daring midnight assassinations, leaping down from a rooftop to plant a knife in the kidney of some nefarious villain doing whatever it was that nefarious villains did.
Bajia groaned. “Don’t get that look. It’s not the sort of thing nobles are supposed to learn. It’s dirty fighting, it’s underhanded, and your great-grandmother probably wouldn’t approve of me teaching you.”
“That’s what you said about the locks.”
She rubbed the spot between her eyebrows. “Which I already regret.”
“But you can teach me?”
The human woman looked around the yard as if expecting someone to come to her rescue.
When no one did, she looked up at the sky, possibly hoping for an imminent dragon attack.
When this also failed to materialize, her lips did a complicated dance and eventually settled on resignation.
“I can. If only because sending you out into the world with a sword is asking for someone to gut you like a fish, and I’d hate for all those dancing lessons to go to waste.”
She reached out and ruffled his hair, which he hated from most people but rather enjoyed from Bajia.
“Fine. I’ll rummage up some blunted daggers and see what I can do.”
Astarion took to knife fighting like a goose to mayhem.
He loved that the strategy was to close in on your opponent and disarm them, and he loved even more that stabbing your opponent in the kidney was considered a perfectly valid path to victory.
Furthermore, he was good at it. Even though Bajia beat him nineteen times out of twenty, she had to be quick to do it, and the rare occasions when he scored a touch on her left him radiant with pride.
He felt dangerous, and as a twelve-year-old boy, he’d had precious few opportunities to feel that way.
It was just horribly awkward when his mother arrived on his thirteenth birthday, dropping down directly in front of him as he was attempting to slice a blunted dagger across Bajia’s throat.
* * *
—
He hadn’t been watching the sky, that was the problem.
For his first twelve years of life, Astarion had known that if he could see the sky, his mother might be watching him, which had put something of a damper on his early experiments with masturbation.
But over the last year, he’d fallen out of the habit, and he was watching Bajia’s hands to see which way she was about to strike—and then he feinted, and she dodged, and he lunged forward, trying to come up inside her guard—when, quite suddenly, there was a shriek,
and a hawk was sandwiched between them, and he hit her on the side of the head with the pommel of the dagger and knocked her unconscious.
Bajia fell back with a curse. Astarion fell on his ass with a yelp. His mother just fell straight down, shimmered briefly, and turned back into an elf.
Astarion knew how fragile bird bones could be, and he’d felt something crunch. “Oh, Hells, I’ve killed her.”
He was really hoping that Bajia would say, “No, you haven’t,” but she didn’t.
Instead, the human woman knelt on the packed earth of the practice yard and felt for his mother’s pulse.
“She’s still breathing,” she said after a moment, and Astarion wiped away tears of relief.
“Go get Wendin and tell him you need a healing potion.”
Astarion ran for the butler and finally found him cleaning silver in the pantry. “Gotta…gotta tell you…Bajia…need a…healing potion…”
Wendin was one of those fabulously competent individuals who can make other people feel less competent merely by standing in the same room. He set down a silver pie server, went to a cupboard, removed a vial, and said, “Now, lead the way, Master Astarion.”
His mother hadn’t moved. Astarion’s heart was in his throat, but Bajia took the potion, rubbed a palmful into the knot on Miriana’s head and another along her neck, then rolled her over and poured the rest between her lips.
Astarion’s mother came awake with a choking sputter, coughed, and sat up. “What…?” She looked around wildly. “Astarion!”
“Yes, Mother, I’m fi—oof!”
She flung herself into his arms, clutching at him.
Astarion looked down at her, wondering, When did she get so short?
He was as tall as she was now. She looked…
small. Small and shabby, her hair standing out like a dandelion puff, her clothes not merely rough but worn, frayed at the hems, the tears never mended and likely never even noticed.
“Why were you attacking him?” she demanded, turning to glare at Bajia.
“Mother, she wasn’t attacking me. She was teaching me how to defend myself in case someone tries to attack me.”
She pulled back, eyes narrowing, but kept her grip on his arms. “And why would you ever need to know that?”
“Because we live in an uncertain world,” Lady Erikinia said. “We can’t all just turn into a bird and fly away.”
Mother and son turned. The ancient elven woman stood in the doorway, leaning partly on a tall staff and mostly on Wendin. She gazed at her granddaughter with an expression that Astarion had learned to read as exasperated fondness.
“It’s been a year,” Miriana said. “You said that he could come back after a year.”
Lady Erikinia raised one eyebrow, her parchment-thin skin sliding over her skull. “I said that he could go back if he chose.”
His mother turned on him, eyes wide and frantic. He took a step back involuntarily. “Astarion, listen to me. You can come home now.”
“What?”
“It is your choice, Astarion,” his great-grandmother said in her deep, rich voice. “Stay or leave.”
“I don’t want to leave,” he said.
His mother stiffened. She searched his face as if he were a stranger. “Truly? You want to stay here?”
He knew that he was hurting her, but he also knew that he would never, ever go back. “Truly.”
He expected her to weep or to rail at him, but she surprised him. She drew herself up, and for a moment he could see the family resemblance to the lady of the manor. “Very well,” she said. “My house is always open to you, my son. I love you, however far away your wings take you. Go well.”
She turned to Lady Erikinia and bowed. The ancient elf inclined her head in return.
And then Astarion’s mother was a falcon streaking across the sky, and Astarion never saw her again.
* * *
It was two days later that Astarion returned to Dalyria’s lab, hoping to make use of the light.
The embroidery on one of his sleeves had begun to fray, and there was no sense in holding a grudge against Dalyria for forgetting other people existed.
You might as well blame the sun for coming up—which presumably it still did on a regular basis, at least for other people.
Besides, Astarion had so many grudges, lovingly polished and displayed to the best possible advantage, that he was loath to add any inferior specimens to his collection.
This led him down a pleasant avenue of thought wherein he dangled Violet by her ankles over running water, which proved so diverting that he did not pay close enough attention to the sound of voices from the lab.
He opened the door just in time to hear Cazador say, “I know that it didn’t work, my dear. I want to know where you acquired it.”
Astarion froze, but it was too late. The master vampire swung toward him, and he caught a glimpse of Dalyria’s face, impassive except for the pleading in her eyes.
He ran the mental calculations in an instant. If this was about the unicorn blood, then even if Dalyria tried to hide his involvement, Cazador would torture it out of her eventually. By then, the old man’s blood would be up, and it would be very bad to attract his attention.
Best to defuse it now, before it starts. He feigned a yawn. “Dear me, is this about that little bottle of unicorn scab?”
Cazador’s nostrils flared. “You knew about this?”
“Of course I did, Father. I’m the one who got it for her.” Astarion sauntered into the room. “Why, did it explode or something?”
The vampire narrowed his eyes. He was a high elf as much as Astarion was, but his face was thinner and sharper, all pale angles and dark hollows. “Why did you acquire it for her?”
Astarion’s shrug was a masterpiece of nonchalance. “She said she wanted it for some experiment or other, and I felt like doing her a favor. And that ratty little magic shop—you know the one—was on the way to the night’s hunting ground.”
Cazador had clearly been deflected, but he wasn’t put completely off the scent. “You know that my children are forbidden to drink the blood of thinking creatures.”
“Father, if I may…” Astarion leaned toward him and let a faintly patronizing smile play across his lips: two senior family members discussing the foibles of a young one.
“Regardless of what my sister may have intended, no one could have drunk that blood. Chewed it, possibly, if you could chisel it out of the bottle. That unicorn has been dead since the Time of Troubles, at least. Its blood probably has more use as a paperweight.”
Sometimes the best lies were true. There was a brief moment in which things could have gone either way, and Astarion waited, trying not to look like he was waiting.
Either he laughs and walks away or he tells me he’s disappointed, and Dalyria and I spend a fortnight in the kennels with Godey dropping rats through the bars…
Cazador laughed, and Astarion’s guts unknotted. “You need a special enchantment to keep the blood fresh. It loses potency so quickly. A vial of fresh unicorn blood, now…” He tapped one sharp nail against his lips. “Do you know, that gives me an idea? Dalyria, attend me.”
He swept from the room. Dalyria followed in his wake, flashing Astarion a grateful look as she passed.
That’s two favors you owe me, sister. Astarion smiled to himself and sat down to mend his sleeve in the light of the empty lab.
* * *