Distant tales of the Dichotomy

Haruvael kept her word.

The moment the thimble of clear sap touched her palm, the old woman closed her eyes, and the whole hall of living wood seemed to exhale. Green light climbed the walls. The moss underfoot rippled like water. She stood for a long time without moving, and when she opened her eyes again they were wet.

“My daughter is comforted,” she said softly. “Thank you, outlanders.”

Then she turned to the litter, and her voice became brisk. “Bring the girl to the Cradle Halls. My acolytes will lay her in the moss. The treatment will take three months, and I will not have you underfoot for any of it.”

“Three months?” said Vili.

“Did you think the Mother works quickly? Bones do not grow at the speed of your temper, boy.” She jabbed her staff at the door. “Nor may you take her away in the middle. The Cradle must not be moved. If she leaves before the bond is set, she dies. You may visit at dusk. Otherwise, go find something to do.”

That was how Fel came to spend his first free morning in Tohei walking alone along the bank of a slow green river, with two swords on his hip and no idea what to do with his hands.

He had never been idle in his life. In the Gallows he had hauled crates, scrubbed floors, mucked out stalls. In the Sanctum he had been beaten, taught, and tested. Now the days stretched ahead like empty rooms, and the swords weighed on him, and he found himself doing what he always did when he was restless, which was to draw them.

He took the river path to a flat stretch of grass under a canopy of weeping ferns. It was early, and mist lay on the water. The plain steel sword from the Trial of Three Doors had gone back to the bottom of his pack, wrapped in oilcloth. It had earned its keep on the causeway, and Fel had no intention of making a habit of chewing on it. Two swords were enough to be stupid with.

He set his feet, drew Krashing Fyr in his right hand and Falling Star in his left, and began to move.

He cut the mist. He cut the air. He cut a falling leaf in three pieces, and a drifting moth in two, and he was just beginning to think he was getting the hang of it when something thin and bright whipped out of the fog and snagged the guard of the golden saber.

He had a heartbeat to understand. The line went taut. The blade tore out of his fingers, spinning, and shot off across the water.

“Hey!”

He sprinted after it. The line was a fishing line, silk-thin and sharp as wire, and it ran out across the river to a shallow punt drifting in the middle of the current, where a man sat with his back to the shore and a rod in his hands.

Krashing Fyr hung from the end of the hook. The man reeled it in, unhurried, and lifted it out of the water by the crossguard.

“Nice catch,” said the man. “Curved. Gold-veined. Warm as a hen. Beautiful balance, terrible grip.”

He turned his head. He was a lean, sun-browned old man with a scraggly grey beard and a battered straw hat pulled low over one eye, and the other eye, pale as river ice, looked Fel up and down without much interest. His coat was patched, his boots were bare, and there was a bucket at his feet. It was full of swords. Dozens of them, rusty, gleaming, curved, straight, bent, all tangled together, dripping.

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“That’s mine,” said Fel. “Give it back.”

“Come and get it.”

“You hooked it.”

“I fish,” said the old man. “You were splashing. Fish splash.” He tipped his hat back. “I’m Gideon. Gideon Claive. What are you?”

Fel did not know the name, but something in the way the old man said it, flat and unbothered, like a fact on a tax roll, made the hair on his arms rise.

“Felanor,” he said. “Fel. TeneDente.”

“Ah.” The pale eye lingered on his left hand, on the scar. “The scarred one. I heard a boy with two sword-spirits had gone through the Sanctum and been sick on the floor.” He gave the punt a careless push, and it slid to the shore with no oar and no wind. “You want your sword? Beat me.”

“You’re an old man.”

“Yes.”

“You’re sitting in a boat.”

“Yes.”

“With a fishing rod.”

“Boy,” said Gideon Claive, “I have been fishing for twenty years. I have caught eleven hundred swords. Four hundred of those were still in the hands of their owners at the time.” He held the golden saber out by the crossguard, and when Fel reached for it, the fishing line twitched, and the sword whipped out of range. “Come and get it.”

Fel gripped Falling Star in both hands and lunged.

It was a good lunge, the kind Orcus had drilled into him a thousand times, but the old man’s rod whipped up, and the line looped over the black blade like a snake, and Fel’s own strike hauled him forward into the river.

He came up spluttering. Gideon had not moved.

“Again,” he said.

Fel went in again. This time he stayed low, feinted left and struck right, and the rod cracked across his wrist and a moment later a hook snagged the back of his collar and dropped him on his rump in the mud.

“Again.”

He lost eleven times before noon. The old man used the rod, the line, the bucket, the punt, a fishing net, and at one point a live carp, which he threw at Fel’s face. He never stood. He never raised his voice. And with each defeat, Fel felt something in his chest loosen, a knot he had not known was there, the tight, hot, frantic thing that had been coiled in him since the Widow’s Lantern.

“You fight like a boy trying to outrun his own shadow,” said Gideon. “Stop.”

“I’m not…”

“You are. You move as though someone is behind you with a knife. Somebody was, I imagine. Stop. Sit.”

Fel sat, dripping, in the grass.

Gideon reeled in the line and looked at him for a long time. “Raskian brawl-style,” he said at last. “With a crutch. Left-foot pivot, weight on the ball, always finishing on the heel. I’ve only ever seen one man fight like that, and he lost a leg for it. Who taught you?”

Fel stared. “Orcus. In the Shallow Gallows. He kept a tavern.”

For the first time, the old swordsman’s face changed. It cracked. A slow, delighted grin spread across it, and he began to laugh, a dry, hacking, wheezing laugh that shook the whole punt.

“The Blue Fist of the Southwest,” he wheezed. “A tavern. That fat liar. That great cheating bag of ale. He owes me twelve shims!”

“He’s dead,” said Fel quietly.

The laugh stopped.

“He died a month before I met you,” Fel said. “In a fire. Holding a door.”

Gideon Claive was silent for a very long time. Then he removed his hat, held it to his chest, and bowed his head to the river. He said nothing. The mist drifted around him, and the current turned the punt in a slow circle, and somewhere upstream a heron called.

When he put the hat back on, his eye was very steady.

“Then I owe him twelve shims,” he said, “and a student. Give me your other sword.”

Fel hesitated. Then he handed over Falling Star.

The old man drew it halfway, and the ruby on the hilt flashed, and for a heartbeat the entire river went silent. His pale eye narrowed. Very slowly, he slid the black blade back into its scabbard.

“That one knows you,” he said. “It has already chosen. Do not ask it for anything you cannot afford.” He picked up the golden saber again and turned it in the light. He frowned. “This one is warm.”

“It’s always warm.”

“Hm.” Gideon held it out, hilt first. “It is waiting for something. I don’t know what. When you find out, come and tell me. I collect strange swords.” He gave the black blade back with it. “Now. You will be here at dawn tomorrow. You will bring a bucket. You will sit in this boat for three hours without a weapon, and you will fish.”

“That’s it? Fish?”

“Fish. And when you have finished fishing, I will teach you to fight.”

“I know how to fight.”

“You know how to duel,” said Gideon. “Dueling is for people who wish to be applauded. I am going to teach you how to win.”