Chapter 21 #2
Whatever they were doing, it was playing with fire. Still, she tried to hide her disappointment as Kipp approached. She liked her friend a lot, she really did, but he was no born fighter and if she wanted to master her own abilities, she needed stronger opponents.
As though sensing her hesitation, Hawthorne spoke again. ‘You do not become a legend overnight,’ he told her quietly. ‘A legend is forged with blood and steel. It takes time.’
I don’t have time , Thea wanted to shout at him, but she clamped her mouth shut and stopped herself from grabbing her fate stone.
‘Learn the rules,’ he said, his voice low and rumbling. ‘Only then can you break them.’
‘Any other pearls of wisdom for me?’ Thea asked, wishing he’d stay to instruct her and Kipp, but knowing that he wouldn’t.
‘You are in desperate need of wisdom,’ he replied wryly. ‘But start with this: if you fight like a fool, you’ll die like a fool.’
‘Great.’
Kipp stood beside her now, shifting from foot to foot, interest bright in his eyes at the presence of the mighty warrior.
Hawthorne waited until the lanky shieldbearer had composed himself and stopped fidgeting.
‘One more thing,’ he added. ‘Always end your opponent when you can. Men are known for playing dead and running away in the night, or coming back to slit your throat in your sleep. But no man or monster can run away with his guts hanging out or with his head detached from his body.’
And on that brutal note, the Warsword left the two shieldbearers to stare after him as he stalked through the sparring pairs.
‘Well, that was morose,’ Kipp stated, his expression somewhat baffled. ‘What else did he tell you?’
‘Something about if you fight like a fool, you’ll die like a fool?’ Thea replied, the hair on the back of her neck rising as her heart pounded wildly.
Kipp huffed a laugh. ‘Guess I’m a dead man then.’
With Vernich the Bloodletter yelling orders from the arena, they began their drills.
The rest of the day slipped away from them and by sundown, every muscle in Thea’s body was screaming in protest. The week had taken its toll and she could hardly walk the trail back to the fortress without limping.
She wasn’t the only one suffering. Two recruits left Thezmarr that evening without farewells.
Despite all her prior efforts, Thea was unfit and undisciplined.
She was certainly no match for Seb, and if she was no match for the likes of him, then she wasn’t worthy of any warrior title.
With the apprenticeships for Warswords now in play, she was going to have to push herself harder than ever before.
If you seek power in a world of men and monsters, there is nothing more powerful than knowledge and the ability to wield it.
Filled with a renewed sense of purpose, Thea curled up in her cold narrow bed, Dax once again at her feet and, with no fear for her safety, fell soundly asleep.
She woke long before dawn and slipped from the room to train alone in the dark.
The weeks that followed very much resembled Thea’s first as a shieldbearer.
Training and sparring, training and sparring, with endurance sessions and shield wall lessons thrown in for good measure.
At first, Thea was in perpetual pain, her muscles, her lungs, her bones…
Everything hurt from the relentless exertion she put her body through, yet she persisted and, ever so slowly, she felt herself growing stronger, faster.
She woke up and trained before the rest every day, no matter the violent storms that seemed to lash Thezmarr in the early hours of the morning.
As Esyllt had predicted, a handful of recruits dropped out, unable to stand the thankless drills and dire warnings of impending doom.
Some days they simply found themselves down a person, and no one said anything about it.
Kipp and Cal became her constant companions, and though she often missed Wren, Sam and Ida, she was grateful to the young men for their friendship.
Without them, the Bloodwoods, the arena and the Great Hall would have been bitter, lonely places.
Together, they celebrated their small wins and commiserated with each other over their bruises, cuts and scrapes.
Kipp and Cal understood her in a way that her sister and their friends never had.
They knew what being a warrior of Thezmarr meant to her.
Thea fell into a steady routine of more training, drills, eating, researching former trials and Warsword history with Malik in the library and passing out in her bed with Dax curled up at her feet.
Depending on her level of exhaustion, she switched between using the masters’ baths and the women’s bathing quarters on the other side of the fortress, not wanting to push her luck.
With each passing day, the urgency and desperation to pass the initiation test grew, as did her burning desire to be named one of the Warsword apprentices. That tension rippled through the entire cohort, the competition amplifying with every lesson, every drill.
Her spying days were not altogether forgotten, and Thea listened for whispers in the fortress, for news of breaches in the Veil and the scourge Hawthorne had mentioned to her.
Such secrets were heavily guarded among the higher ranks of the guild, but the unease was palpable nonetheless. Something was coming.
Time slipped by and soon, late autumn was falling around Thezmarr in the orange and golds and reds of the Bloodwoods.
The Warswords and commanders remained unimpressed with them.
Cal and Kipp often likened the brutal warriors to caged animals, snarling at the slightest inconvenience or mistake.
It was no secret that they did not want to be training the shieldbearers, and it was certainly no secret that none of them wanted to take on an apprentice.
Still Thea trained. Hawthorne had been right about her being years behind the rest and so she was determined to work twice – thrice as hard as the rest.
As autumn turned cold and the days grew shorter, Thea, Cal and Kipp drank in everything and anything the masters had to teach them: how to stay upright in the saddle while wielding both blade and shield; how to brace a shield wall against a volley of arrows; how to find north and south by the smattering of the stars in the night’s sky and the height of the sun.
But the lesson that Thea embraced with every fibre of her being, so much so that it became one with her, was how to wield a blade.
She learnt how to swing a sword, how to slice and pierce her mark every time, how to kill her enemies.
Rough calluses formed on her hands and fingers, adding to the assortment of burn scars that already marred her skin. She didn’t care.
She could feel her progress every day. Could sense it in the lack of mocking comments from the other shieldbearers. Slowly, from an object of ridicule and disdain, she had become a peer, and as more time passed, she was determined that her role would change again – to a threat.
Like the other shieldbearers, Thea practically fell over herself every time there was an opportunity to run an errand for one of the commanders, whether it was delivering messages around the fortress, cleaning weaponry, or tending to horses before a journey.
Just like the others, she wanted to prove herself indispensable to Thezmarr.
She wanted them to know her name; she wanted their recommendations, their praise, though that was always rare.
There were clear standouts in each cohort and, to her dismay, Sebastos Barlowe was one of them.
While she had improved immensely since her first day, she still lingered in the middle of the group in terms of her skills and abilities.
Whenever she dwelled on this, Hawthorne’s words echoed in her mind: ‘You're already years behind some of them. The next test for warriors will be in three months, then not for another year. You need to be ready.’
And Althea Nine Lives would be. She had no other choice.