Work Text:
1.
Lyra doesn't remember the first spear she ever held. She remembers the guards would let her hold theirs, sometimes, when they were coming on or off duty, keeping hold of it themselves so she wouldn't hurt herself. She cast her first spear at the age of ten, on her first day of training for the guard. It didn't reach its target, but clattered to the ground a body's length away. Lyra felt ashamed and frustrated. She had practiced with rocks and had good aim, and she was the Morgol's daughter and had a lot to live up to; she had expected to be better than this. "The aim wasn't bad," her instructor confirmed, "but you need to put more power into it."
When she saw El that night, her mother asked her how training had gone. "All right," said Lyra, keep her shoulders straight and her chin up. "For a first try. I'll get better."
She didn't ask if her mother had been watching. She hoped her mother hadn't. Her mother raised her eyebrows at Lyra's terse response, as if she knew things hadn't gone well (it wasn't easy, sometimes, having a mother who could see right through you), but she didn't press.
Three days later, she ran flying into the house after practice to tell El that she'd hit the target this time, and her instructor said that that was very early in training to do so. "Did you see?" she demanded, and El said, "Yes, I saw."
2.
Lyra was very calm while it was happening, her voice cool and steady as she gave the robber warning. He was not of Herun, not familiar with the guard. He laughed at her, made a crude comment, turned his attention away from her to the largest trader, and went towards the man with a knife in his hand. She let her own fly, to pierce through cloth and skin.
It wasn't hard to do; but retrieving the knife afterward was hard, sliding it out of skin and flesh and blood. The traders were watching her: she didn't let it show.
(She hoped she hadn't let it show. Finally, after it had gnawed at her for two weeks, she asked her mother if it had. "I don't believe it showed to them," El said.
"To them," Lyra said flatly. El just looked at her. Unspoken between them was the knowledge that El was both the land-ruler of Herun, and Lyra's mother, and both of those gave her very good vision.)
3.
Her hand was resting automatically on the knife at her belt, and Lyra could do nothing. She watched Bri, watched Raederle, and the stone in Raederle's hand. She watched it become light, so bright it turned Raederle's face as white as bone.
Lyra swallowed, and didn't look away, until Raederle started to scream. She looked at Bri Corbett, then, exchanging a brief glance of helplessness, and Raederle was still screaming. Lyra let her hand drop off the pommel of her knife and cracked it across Raederle's face until she stopped screaming, and then held her as tight as she could.
"Do you understand?" Tristan asked her several days later, when she was speaking to them again, and she and Lyra were sitting on the deck watching the guards fishing, as they had been since Bri had forbidden them from practicing knife-throwing. "What she did with the stone? That's not something you can do, is it?" Tristan asked uncertainly.
Lyra shook her head. "It's. She said she could do small things. She showed me something with a piece of twine, to tangle the path of a man."
"Small things," Tristan echoed. "Even from where I was hidden away, I could hear her screaming. Is she all right?"
"I don't know," Lyra said. Raederle was holding herself very straight these days, her face a mask, and Lyra thought of guarding her own face after her first kill. "I think she surprised herself--she's still Raederle," Lyra said firmly.
"Yes," Tristan said, sounding vaguely surprised, as if the thought that Raederle's odd powers might be changing her hadn't crossed her mind. Her brow crinkled, as she gazed at the guards' fishing lines instead of at Lyra. "It's all so different from Hed," she murmured. "It's hard sometimes even to know when I should be worried, or surprised…would you be able to teach me that?"
Lyra was confused for a moment. "What Raederle did? Or," she followed Tristan's line of sight and said somewhat dubiously, "fishing?"
A quick, impatient look. "No," Tristan said firmly. "What they were doing. With the knives."
"Tristan," said Lyra, and put her hand on Tristan's shoulder. She wanted to shake her, just a bit, or hold her protectively as she had held Raederle. "You--your brother hated the idea, when I offered to teach him, of picking up a weapon. He said it wasn't a thing of Hed. How can I--?"
Tristan scowled at her, although it didn't seem personal; it more seemed like she was trying to keep herself from crying. "That was his choice; surely this is mine? I wish you all would stop trying to, to keep me from--" She was fighting the battle against tears. Lyra did wrap her arms around Tristan's shoulder then, letting her cry herself out.
"Is it even something you truly want to learn?" she said when the sobs died down a bit.
Tristan, huddled in Lyra's arms, shook her head. "No," she said. "But it doesn't seem fair, if Morgon's the only one who had to change."
"He would have hated it," Lyra said, her own throat clogged. "If you did this."
Tristan pulled away, but she also nodded in acknowledgment before swiping her sleeve roughly across her face to wipe away the tears. "I guess it's just as well," she said pragmatically. "Bri would have another fit."
Lyra thought of arrows, stowaways, Ymris war ships, Raederle's stone, and knives that went awry, and found herself startled into laughter.
4.
Lyra was not afraid for herself: she had pledged to kill Ghisteslwchlohm, which left no room in her for anything else concerning herself. But she felt something like fear in those weeks when they waited at Lungold; she had land-rulers to protect, and little knowledge about how to fight a wizard and shape-changers. She and the rest of the guard drilled and drilled with knife and arrow and spear. Lyra missed none of her targets, but felt as unnerved as if she had.
One day while she had bow in hand, she felt someone watching and turned around to see Har and Mathom, Mathom in crow-shape on Har's shoulder. When she turned, Mathom took flight, and Har stepped to her side. "Your aim rings true," he said. He reached for the extra bow that Imer had left behind. "May I practice with you?"
His aim was as true as hers, to the heart of the target every time. She observed that he touched the tip of each arrow before he sped it on its way. When he saw her noticing, he smiled his wolf's smile. "A piece of wizardry," he admitted. He didn't touch the next arrow; it landed on the edge of the target instead of its center.
"You knew them," Lyra realized, startled. One grew up knowing Har was a legend, and one heard about the time Suth spent in his land, but she somehow hadn't quite put that together with the wizards she herself had met.
Har made a small noise in his throat. "Some of them," he said. He smiled faintly. "Talies and I are still too similar to get along easily..."
"Is that why you came?" Lyra asked. "To see them again?"
"Partly," Har said. "Partly because this seemed to be the place where there might be answers: from Ghisteslwchlohm. From the Star-Bearer. From Deth." The ambiguity of the last name seemed to catch at that both. "You are worried about protecting us," Har said into her silence.
"Ghisteslwchlohm tore the land-rule from Morgon," Lyra said tightly, "and you are putting yourself in his path."
"We are none of us defenseless," the wolf king said gently. He turned from her, shot another arrow that struck true.
Not defenseless, thought Lyra, but vulnerable and precious in ways that made her voice catch in her throat. She raised her bow instead of protesting, and they shot together during the length of the gray afternoon, waiting for something to come to Lungold.
END