Another day began in Easthaven as it usually did, first with sparring practice between Akaris and Rusil for two hours. Then, they would return to his shop, where Akaris would read and Rusil would engrave into the swords.
Sometimes, she would read to him while he worked, as she did today. “ ‘The countries of Vandris, Fanheim, Khinara, and Selenar used to be one large empire,’ ” she read. “ ‘Collectively, they were known as the Empire of Dulcia, the—’ ” She frowned at a word, pausing.
“Sound it out,” Rusil prompted. He didn’t pause as he worked on his sword, his eyes squinted through his spectacles at the artistic lines his burin worked into the steel.
“ ‘Epo...eponym of the Dulcian Mountains. The empire split into the four countries it is after the War of—’ ” Her reading was interrupted by the bell sounding at the door to the shop as someone must have entered, though from the workroom, Akaris couldn’t make any form of the person who’d entered out.
“Can you see who that is?” Rusil asked, not looking up from his engraving. “I don’t want to stop right now.”
Akaris let herself out of the chair, carefully pushing it back into place before she entered through its doorless threshold. There, was a boy perhaps of her age, waiting at the countertop.
“Hello!” he exclaimed at her entrance. He had to stand at his tiptoes to see over the tall counter, but he grinned broadly at her, and held out his hand.
“Hello,” she said, uncertain. She’d never seen this boy in her life, and Easthaven was a very small village. Maybe he was passing through. It wasn’t unheard of for travelers to pass through Easthaven, especially after the closure of the Eastern Pass, it was just unusual.
He looked at her, waiting, his hand still outstretched. Oh, she realized with a jolt. She was supposed to shake his hand back. She closed her hand around his and shook it to find that he had a surprisingly strong grip despite being so small.
Before she had a chance to introduce herself a woman with dark wavy hair that matched the boy’s came through the door, a bell affixed to the door jingling against the wood as she entered. Akaris’s and the boy’s handshake dissipated, and when the woman saw Akaris behind the counter, she smiled. “You must be Akaris,” she said, her voice warm.
“Yes,” Akaris said, meekly, unsure of who these two people were and why they apparently knew her name.
At all of the commotion, Rusil finally appeared through the doorway behind her. “Hello,” he said as he wiped his hands off with a cloth. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
A small conversation ensued between Rusil and the woman whose name Akaris didn’t know, full of adult boredom. From the little Akaris listened to it, the two had moved into a cottage on the outskirts of Easthaven built by Tremmen, the town’s innkeeper, who had built the house for a profit when Easthaven had been far more prosperous.
Their conversation went on, and if Akaris was bored of the conversation of their elders, the boy who still hadn’t been introduced was sent near to death of it. He fidgeted in place, unable to stand still. After a few clearly lasting moments of his ennui, he slipped past the counter and into the back end of the shop, where she and Rusil had been only minutes before, though Rusil hadn’t noticed the boy’s exit. She hesitated, but then turned back to follow him.
The room where Rusil decorated his xirins was adorned with xirins of all shapes and sizes, hanging from the wall from wooden shelves that scaled from wall to wall of the small room, each with small wooden blade-guards to dull them. In the middle of the room, he stood, taking the sight of all the different xirins in. At her entrance, he glanced at her, but then his gaze went back to the swords, entranced. “Wow,” he breathed. “Your father made all of these?”
“Yes,” Akaris said. That had been too quiet. Speak up a little, Akaris, she remembered Rusil saying gently. “Yes,” she repeated, louder.
He passed his fingertips over a blade that hung off the wall at his height, his eyes carefully studying the intricate patterns that Rusil had engraved and embossed upon the sword. “These are xirins, aren’t they?” he asked after a moment.
“Yes.”
He nodded; his eyes still fixed on the blade. “My father has xirins too,” he said. He stiffened immediately after he said it, but Akaris didn’t press it.
There was a sudden silence, save for the crackling of the hearth in the furnace room and the distant sound of his mother and Rusil talking. Akaris suddenly came to the uncomfortable conclusion that she had only given him one-word answers to all of his questions. Was that rude? she wondered. It seemed like it would be rude. She hadn’t meant to be rude.
She forced herself to step up next to him and pointed at the designs Rusil had made into the sword. The xirin hanging immediately in front of them was engraved with waves with teal syrana ink. “The drawings are made with syrana powder,” Akaris said. “They glow at night or in dark places.” She cupped her hand over the blade, causing the ink to react, a blue glow forming against the skin of her hand. “See?”
He brought his face up to the blade to inspect it, his eyes wide. “Wow,” he breathed, the light illuminating his face as he drew near it.
“You can try too,” she said. “You just have to cup your hand over it to make it think it’s in a dark place.”
He complied, copying the motion Akaris made only a few moments before. “I’d love to have a xirin of my own,” he said, still studying the blade’s glow. “In Selenar, only officers in the army are allowed to have one.”
“Really?” she asked. Rusil had two of his own.
He nodded. “Maybe since I live here now, I’ll eventually be able to get one. This is so…pretty.”
“Rusil is very talented,” Akaris said, proudly. “He’s an amazing artist.”
He nodded in agreement. “I’ve never seen swords with designs like these.” He let his hand trace across the embossed engravings. “What’s the wooden part for? The part on the edge of the sword?”
“Those guard the sharp edges,” Akaris replied. “So, you don’t cut yourself.”
He took his hand back quickly, as if the sword had bit him. “Right.”
The conversation hit a lull, and Akaris desperately searched her mind for any way to continue the conversation. This was the longest she’d had talked to anyone her own age for a long time, and she rather liked it. After her parents had died, any other children in Easthaven, who had already been older than her, had avoided her like a contagious plague. “Do you spar?” she asked, finally finding another topic.
“I love sparring,” the boy said, looking at the sword with such longing that she was reminded of the first time Rusil had explained how the syrana ink worked to her. “Though I haven’t in months. It was a long journey from Lizan to here.”
“You can spar with me,” she said. “Rusil and I practice every morning at dawn. I need a sparring partner my own age.”
“Really?” he asked, visibly excited.
“Really,” Akaris said.
“Saren!” his mother’s voice called from the receiving room of the small shop. “We should be going! We still have things to sort!”
“In a moment!” he shouted back. The boy—who was apparently named Saren—turned back to her. “I’ll see you tomorrow then. At dawn for sparring practice?”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He grinned even more widely, and Akaris noticed that he had a dimple that curled around the right corner of his lip. “Tomorrow then,” he said. He waved to her as he went to catch up with who Akaris assumed to be his mother, leaving her alone in the supply room.
“Goodbye,” she said, though she later realized her reply had been too quiet and too tardy to be heard.
As decided, they began sparring the next day, though in the warm summer weather a storm had blown in over the ever-close Dulcian Mountains and upon Easthaven. While she had always practiced outside in the sessions between the both her and Rusil, they had made due with practicing inside instead. The rug and furniture of the small parlor in Rusil’s cottage had been pushed aside, the hearth burning against the patter of raindrops that fell against the roof and windows.
Akaris and Saren stood on the room’s now bare floor, wooden practice xirins in each of their hands as Rusil preempted the lesson with instructions. “Akaris, you’re too defensive—you never take any risks if you don’t have to, and when you do, you’re too timid. Watch for openings, and don’t hesitate—just go for them.” Her cheeks burned a little, but he had the same thing or similar hundreds of times over the past few months. He was trying to help her to become better.
“Saren,” Rusil continued, “I haven’t seen you spar yet, but I’ll be watching your technique. Your mother said that you’re no novice, and neither is Akaris; this will be an interesting match. Now, are the two of you ready?”
They both nodded in affirmation.
“All right,” Rusil said. He took a few steps backwards to distance himself from the bout then said, “On guard.”
Akaris bent her knees, gripped her xirin, and let a breath of air puff out of her lips. Saren assumed the same position, a few tendrils of black hair slicked to his forehead.
“Start,” Rusil commanded.
Akaris lunged first, sending her wooden sword out for a few exploratory strikes, to which Saren fought back at with his xirin. Rusil had been right, Saren wasn’t a novice, he knew how to counter a strike, and it was clear that he saw what she was doing.
But Akaris found it difficult to focus on the duel at hand. It wasn’t Saren, but the setting she felt distinctly uneasy about. It was odd, like seeing the face of someone in the marketplace that belonged to an acquaintance long forgotten but being unable to make the connection between the two. She couldn’t pin it down, and it threw her off as she tried to parry Saren’s blows and then move to make her own. She couldn’t focus. She sidestepped a strike and pondered it; the thoughts absent as her sword flicked out to combat Saren’s.
It was something about the environment, the fire burning in the hearth, Saren’s sword flying through the air. It felt too familiar.
And then, she saw it, a flurry of unwanted images pressing past dark recesses of her mind, all visible to her in an instantaneous heartbeat.
The xirin on the floor, her father falling over it. Saren’s wooden xirin clashed against hers. Whap. Her mother’s motionless body on the floor. Whap. Blood pooling on the floor. Whap. Crimson blood trickling into her mouth after pressing her hands. Whap. And then, the screams. Whap.
Whap, whap, whap.
Something inside her snapped, and she didn’t freeze like the last time when she’d been in Rusil’s shop, the day before they’d first started sparring.
She parried Saren’s next strike and swept out her wooden xirin in a wide arc, to sweep his legs out from under him, hitting hard. He fell, his own xirin falling to the floor.
For a moment, there was only the sound of the wind howling against the cottage, and Akaris came into full realization of her own surroundings. Forced against the wall, sitting with his xirin still in his hand, he looked—he looked just like her father, dead and propped against a cabinet.
Her wooden sword clattered out of her hands. “Saren, I’m so sorry, I—”
“Where did you learn how to do that?” he interrupted her. “That was amazing!”
He raised up a hand for her to help him up. She took it and hauled him up as he snagged his wooden sword off of the floor.
“Are you all right?” she asked, still disturbed. Rusil was much larger and stronger than her; she’d never been able to do anything that damaging to him like she had just done to Saren, who was shorter than her.
“I’m fine!” He looked thrilled, as if he’d just had the time of his life when Akaris had just beaten him. “Can we do that again?”
Akaris glanced to Rusil, who was watching her with carefully concealed concern that only she would have been able to interpret. “Again?” he asked. He’d made the question ambiguous, but he was clearly asking her.
“Again,” she said. She picked her xirin off the ground and took in a deep breath through her nostrils to collect herself.
He studied her for a moment more, and after it, seemed satisfied with what he saw. “On guard,” he said.
They continued for another hour, smacks of wood against wood filling the parlor of her and Rusil’s small cottage. During that hour, Akaris realized that she liked sparring much better with someone that was her same size, where there was an intensity of making quick decisions at the turn of a second against someone who was thinking as quickly as her.
“All right,” Rusil said with a sigh, after another duel finished with this time Saren emerging as the victor. “Not all of us are responsibility-free children. I need to get back to work.” Saren moved to return the sword that Rusil had borrowed to him, but Rusil shook his head. “Keep it,” he said.
That seemed to please Saren greatly, he said his thanks, then stored it away at his belt, and subsequently moved to gather his cloak. “Do you want to come with me?” he asked Akaris, as he did up his cloak’s buttons. She didn’t follow. “Go with you…where?”
“My house,” he said. “My”—he paused—“mother and I just finished putting up our furniture, or I would have asked you yesterday.”
Akaris looked to Rusil for permission and he nodded. “Just be back by dark.” He found her cloak and handed it to her. “And don’t forget your cloak coming back. You’ll get sick if you get too wet.”
She quickly through it over herself and drew up its hood against the rain that she could still hear pounding against the cottage’s roof. Oddly, she felt comfortable with Saren, even though she hadn’t known him for very long. She wasn’t sure why she felt that way. He was just so easy to talk to and so…happy.
Then, he took her hand in his, and, together, they left. They ran quickly through the main avenue of shops that lined across Easthaven’s main foot road and where she and Rusil lived adjacent to his bladesmith.
It was a small house, but larger than her own. It was decorated with violet syrana blossoms that burned purple against the dark sky, though Akaris didn’t have much time to admire them as the rain continued to pelt down on them, and the pair rushed their entrance into Saren’s home, Saren holding the door open for her as she entered.
His home was much warmer than the air cooled by the late summer rain and she raked back her wet hair with her hand, casting her hood off of her head. The whole house had an aroma that smelled like freshly baked bread, and as the two passed through the kitchen, she soon saw the wonder smell’s source, a perfect, steaming golden-brown loaf sitting on the kitchen’s countertop.
A moment later, Saren’s mother, Myra, appeared as she stood up from fetching some flour. When she saw Akaris and Saren, she smiled. “Are the two of you hungry?” she asked.
The pair of them were each given a warm, soft slice of bread, and Saren lead her to his own bedroom as Akaris carefully took a bite out of her slice, careful not to get crumbs onto the floor. Though even after she finished it, she saw that her efforts wouldn’t have mattered anyways. Saren’s room was already messy even though he’d just moved into it, cluttered with papers, books, and an unmade bed. He spotted one book its spine facing the ceiling, and hurriedly kicked it under his bed, though why he chose that one to hide out of the six on the floor, Akaris wasn’t sure. Upon further inspection, it also had a bookshelf, which interested her the most.
She had never seen so many books in one place. “These are all yours?” she asked, incredulous. She turned to him, tearing her eyes away from the small library.
“Well,” he said, looking embarrassed. “They’re my father’s. He wanted me to take these with me. You can look at one if you want.”
That’s the second time he’s mentioned his father, Akaris thought to herself, though still she didn’t ask. “How did he find so many?” There weren’t any stores that Akaris even knew of where to purchase books. Maybe there were some in Caelan, but she and Rusil had surely never visited them. She found one off the shelf, then flipped it open to find that it was a history on Vandris.
“I had a tutor that taught me Vandrin,” he explained as she looked through it, sitting on his bed as she still stood. “My”—he still made the slightest pause—“mother thought it was important to know more than one language. She made me read that one, though I still don’t think I’d understand it even if it was in Selenian. I don’t like history very much.”
Akaris sat next to him at the edge of his unmade bed. “Having a tutor sounds nice,” she said, distantly, as she skimmed over the words. “I like history. I was reading a book on it before you came into the shop yesterday. There’s a library in Caelan, but children aren’t allowed inside. Rusil always borrows a few for me to read while he works.”
He nodded to the book. “Do you want to borrow that one?”
“Really?” she asked. “You’re sure?”
“Sure,” he said with a shrug. “I’m certainly not going to read it again.”
“I’ll be careful with it. Really careful.” It seemed like a big thing to trust her with, borrowing her a book that belonged to his father. She didn’t have anything from her father, and she couldn’t imagine ever giving it to someone else. She closed it, careful.
“Does your mother help you with your schooling? I haven’t met her yet.”
“She used to.” He looked puzzled, and Akaris felt her hands tighten around the book’s spine. “She died,” she added quietly. “Half a year ago.”
“Oh.” His voice became hushed and reverent. “I’m so sorry.”
“No, it’s all right. Well, it isn’t, but—” She cut herself off and chewed on her lip, struggling how to articulate exactly how she felt.
“I understand,” he said. He looked as if, again, he was having an odd moment where he was on the verge of saying something but was struggling with the delivery. “I lost my aunt before we came here,” he said, finally, a certain stiffness to his words. “It was hard for me too. And my father, he isn’t…gone, but I probably won’t see him for a long time. So, I can understand.”
“I’m sorry about your aunt,” Akaris said, sincerely. “And your father.”
He smiled weakly, then after a pause, he asked, “Do you think maybe I could borrow your book on swordsmanship? You beat me pretty badly—several times.”
She laughed and he smiled at her, his toothy grin emerging to scale across his cheek to cheek once more. “Yes,” she said. “You can borrow it.”
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