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Dol-Makjar is huge, and strange, and terrifying. Thjazi sent him here: Azune reminds himself of that every time a horse startles or men yell at one another across one of the narrow streets of the Rookery and send his heart racing. Thjazi thought Azune needed to come here. So Azune is here, in the house of Thjazi’s brother.
It’s strange. He sleeps on one of the thickly-upholstered sofas in Hal’s office. He couldn’t handle the eerie silence and soft beds of the guest room he was offered for the first few weeks. Eventually, Hal had called him up to the office and offered him warm cider, gestured for Azune to sit, and asked him for details of the camp, stories of his brother, about Loza and Teor and Thimble. He had written them down, taking longer and longer between each question, until the rhythmic scratching of his quill and the sound of his breathing had lulled Azune to sleep.
“It’s hard to sleep alone,” Hal had said, when Azune asked him about it the next morning. “When you stop being part of a unit.” He gave him a half-smile. “I went straight to finding people to sleep next to without much care for who it was.” He gestures to the couch, the pillow he must have tucked under Azune’s head once he’d fallen asleep and the quilt Azune woke to find laid over him. “This is better.”
Hal writing late into the night reminded him of Loza in the command tent, standing with Thjazi and talking quietly over maps and battle plans while Azune struggled to keep his eyes open. It feels familiar, even if it’s never happened before.
Azune sleeps in the office, after that.
Shadia teaches him how to play. Not just chess, or tag; she insists that he follow her through hedgerows and up the sides of buildings. Hal had asked him to help her, so Azune follows. She has the same magnetism as her father, though more energetic and less carefully grounded. Like Thimble, a little, though less fierce. Maybe more like Thjazi, Azune thinks once. When the revolutionary was a boy, before—before he became who he is.
Alogar is far stranger. He looks at Azune sidelong when they’re at the dinner table together. When Azune mentioned that Thjazi trained him to fight, Alogar listened a little too closely. And Azune’s caught him twice now, trailing behind him when Azune goes for runs down along the river to try and maintain his conditioning. It’s nothing compared to marching in armor, but he’s halfway back up Caravan Hill when Alogar doubles over behind him with a stitch in his side.
“Damn,” Alogar pants. “How do you do it?”
Azune turns back for him.“I don’t have any weights,” Azune replies; but he’s breathing hard, too. He considers the question a little longer. ““Experience, I guess. It’s still easier than being on march.” He holds out his hand. Alogar takes it. His hand is missing calluses, but his grip is strong and sure. Azune pulls him up.
When Alogar straightens up, he’s nearly half a foot taller than Azune. They probably weigh about the same, after the three months Azune’s spent in Dol-Makjar; Azune’s small, but Alogar’s skinny. He doesn’t have a soldier’s muscle; too narrow through the chest, the gawky frame of a boy at the ugly end of a growth spurt.
Azune turns back around to keep running, but Alogar doesn’t let go of his hand.
“Wait,” Alogar says. “Teach me.”
“What?”
Alogar looks him dead in the eyes. None of the flickering gazes he’s been shooting Azune when he thinks he isn’t looking, trying to figure him out over a shockingly lavish breakfast. He stands on a street corner in the muddy road of Caravan Hill, his gaze steadfast. “I want to know how to use a sword.”
“What,” Azune asks desperately, because there’s no way the eldest child of a Thjazi’s brother and a Lloy doesn’t know how to swing a blade.
Alogar stiffens, and Azune can see his teeth as his lips pull tight.. “Dad says he can only do stage fights now, the flashy ones. Not the real thing. So he doesn’t want to train us.”
Azune’s seen Hal on stage, from back in the standing area of the Rookery; he helped a barker check tickets and sneaked glances at the show through the heads of the crowd once it began. The swords arced brightly, and he could see every strike before it came. It was as beautiful as it was wasteful. Azune could have crushed the tin breastplate of the lead actor before she could have blocked his attack.
Alogar tugs on his hand again. “Teach me,” he insists.
He should know how; and Azune is otherwise useless now, left running up and down hills waiting for a muster call that will never come.
“I will,” Azune promises. It comes out heavy as a vow. “Can you get us a pair of swords?”
It turns out that Alogar can’t, but Shadia can. She snags a set of brightly painted keys off the beautiful iron-wrought hanger by the front door of Hal’s home and spins them around her hand.
“Come on,” she says, and runs off without waiting to see if Azune will follow.
He does.
They end up at the theater in the Rookery. All the actors have gone home for the night; the last show closed three days ago, Shadia says, so half of them are still sleeping off their post-show hangovers and Hal’s still working on script edits for the next one.
She slips through a door and Azune follows her into a room full of racks and boxes, like a supply train full of the supplies for an underarmed and overdressed army was rustled through unsuccessfully. Dozens of suits of clothing, doublets and hose and dresses hang limp and gem-colored on racks. There are enough boxes of boots and slippers to outfit a company. And, against one wall, there are racks of swords.
“What do you want?” Shadia asks, tapping her foot. “Some of them are kind of old, but Inez made me polish them before the last show, so they’re all shiny.”
“Something dull,” Azune says, because he doesn’t want to kill Alogar by accident or get an arm lopped off; a man is at his most dangerous with a sword before he learns how to use it. “But—heavy.”
Shadia pokes around in the racks for a while, then sighs. “You should pick. He won’t notice if any of these go missing. We aren’t even doing promotion right now, so they’ll just sit here.”
Azune steps toward the glimmering racks of weapons. Several of them are wooden, carved into broad swordlike shapes and covered in silvery foil. He pushes those aside, and taps the blade of another. The metal’s real, but it doesn’t ring. Not good enough. He goes through them one by one: wooden. Badly balanced. Hilt loose, which he sets aside mechanically for repairs. Halfway through the first rack, he stops in his tracks.
The sword he lifts up is iron, and nicked in three places—deep enough to weaken the metal. The hilt is leather-wrapped. There’s a set of scratches along the guard, vaguely angled and clearly carved with the old wielder’s intent. It would be unremarkable, except for the fact that Azune remembers it. He tests the edge. It’s been blunted, but it could still be ground sharp. It remembers what it’s meant to do.
“Where did he get this?” he demands, turning to Shadia.
She’s perched on top of a full wardrobe, swinging her legs as she watches him. She shrugs. “We got a bunch of new swords lately,” she says indifferently.
That doesn’t explain why Eliseo’s sword is here, the shitty falcon he tried to scratch into it under Azune’s thumb. “This was one of my comrades’,” he grits out. “He fell at Maharlian Falls. He had a younger sister in our company. She should have gotten it.”
“Maybe she didn’t need it,” Shadia says, and leaps down from the wardrobe. “A real mercenary sword?” She holds out her hands for it.
Azune hesitates, but he sets it into her open palms.
It drops into her hands, and she hardly recoils. A sword’s a light thing when held close to the body. She takes three steps back, into a little aisle through the mess. Shadia brandishes the sword; her arm’s bent and straining to hold it up, the blade made for a full-grown man. She turns to him and grins. “Cool,” she says lightly.
She smiles like Eliseo did by the fire, telling stories. Like he did the night before the battle started, before he fell and Thjazi was tricked and Loza outmaneuvered and all their weapons were thrown down.
“How did he get these?” Azune asks again, more force in his voice. “Shadia, these are from the Torn Banner.”
Her smile slides off her face, as though something in his tone scared her. “Well,” she says, a little hesitantly. “They got ordered to disband, right? A lot of mercenaries don’t need them anymore. So we bought a bunch for the theater.” She shrugs. “We were low on stock. It’s cheaper to buy used weapons and blunt them than get special ones forged.”
“Okay,” Azune says, instead of falling to his knees. “Okay.” Loza had sent him away, told him the Banner was disbanding and that she was going to travel with only half a dozen men, that he couldn’t come with. But Azune still kept his weapons, his kit. They're tucked under the sofa in Hal's office. He cares for them every night, rubs oil into scuffed leather and puts it all in order, just in case he needs to march. It’s unimaginable that anyone would give it up; that they could forget, in just a few months, their brothers and sisters in arms. But—if someone has to have them—maybe Hal’s the right man. Maybe he’ll remember what they were, whose blood they drew. Thjazi certainly will, once everything dies down and he can come back to Dol-Makjar.
He digs through the rest of the swords with a single-minded intensity. They’re all well-kept and the real metal ones sheathed so they can’t come to rust, linseed oil smudging against his fingers as he feels blade after blade.
About half of them are real.
All of them are blunted. It must have taken real work to grind all the edges down.
He grabs two of them, in the end; the same length, just a little higher than his hip, and well-balanced despite the lack of sharpness.
He leaves Eliseo’s sword. It’s damaged, not badly enough to be of no use but enough that he wouldn’t trust it to hold against a hard blow.
Azune wraps the two swords in thick canvas. “Let’s go,” he says.
“Sure,” Shadia agrees easily, and grabs Eliseo’s sword. She thrusts it through her belt. The end of the scabbard drags on the ground.
He sighs. “I’ll carry that home for you,” he promises. She heaves it to him, struggling with the weight of the metal. Azune hands the blades over when they reach the Fang house’s front door, and Shadia disappears them as quickly as any street magician.
The next day, he washes the dishes from breakfast. Hal keeps trying to put Alogar and Shadia on a chore rotation, but he doesn’t protest when Azune cleans, only partly because Hal’s usually out the door before the kids are done eating. It’s one of the only things he can do to give back.
Sometimes, one of Hal’s children will leave scraps on their dishes. If it’s more than a bite, Azune’ll finish it; today, the bowl is properly empty. He washes the clay with the same efficiency of a rotation cleaning the mess.
He’s polishing a paring knife dry when Alogar turns up. He’s wearing a sensible shirt and a lightly padded vest and leather leggings, and bundled in his arms are a pair of long shapes wrapped in canvas.
“Come on,” he hisses. “There’s space out back.”
Azune sets down the towel and follows.
Shadia’s out back too, Eliseo’s sword held in both her hands. She’s small enough that she probably actually needs both arms to hold it up; it’s not a bad instinct until she grows more. Azune remembers how hard it was to juggle a too-heavy blade and a shield. She has time to train.
Alogar grabs one of the swords and holds it in one hand.
His stance isn’t bad, for being so clearly untrained. His feet aren’t together, and his arm is bent about the right amount; but his elbow drifts out sideways, and Azune can already see his arm starting to shake. Unlike his sister, he doesn’t give up and add the other hand to help balance himself.
Azune sighs. “I’m not teaching you how to cross swords today,” he warns. “Honestly, I should just have you hold it until you drop, and then do it again.” He picks up the other sword. “What are you trying to learn, anyway?”
“How to use it,” Alogar says, and flashes him a fanged grin.
“Like a man-at-arms?” Azune asks. “Or a duelist, or a knight, or—”
“Whatever you did,” Alogar replies.
It drags a little laugh out of his chest. “I used a hammer,” Azune says, “once I got big enough.” He takes a few steps to find an even place to demonstrate. “Swords aren’t usually good against armor. If you’re in a war, you want an axe or a hammer. Especially if you’re killing knights.”
Shadia’s face wrinkles. “Then why’s everything swords?”
Legends say Azgra didn’t wear heavy armor, so certain he was that he was unkillable. Shadia’s a Lloy. Her family forged the swords to end his reign. Azune shrugs. “Your father runs a theater. I’m guessing he only wants it to look like they’re trying to kill each other.”
“Fair,” she says. She takes a stance, and it’s nothing like a mercenary’s. Shadia puts her feet together, and turns one out, and steps the other forward carefully. Her shoulders strain; she’s clearly overbalanced with the heavy weapon. With a lighter blade better suited to a twelve-year-old, she’d be in an actual ready position, just not one he knows.
Azune leans forward. “Why do you know how to hold a sword better than Alogar?”
Shadia sticks her tongue out at her brother. Alogar rolls his eyes. “Inez taught me.” She turns back to Azune, grins. “She said she couldn’t teach me if I wanted to be a real fighter, but I don’t. So I figured I would learn how to make it look like I was.”
So Alogar didn’t take that offer. Azune looks over at him. He’s frowning in concentration as he looks at Azune’s feet, trying to mimic his stance.
Azune steps over to him. “More like this,” he says, and sets a hand on Alogar’s shoulder to pull it down and back. “You want your neutral pose to be unreadable and easy to maintain.”
They don’t get past holding the sword that day, but Alogar gets a decent stance out of it. Azune shows him how to move back and forward and turn without dropping too much of his guard.
They practice for another two weeks. Azune convinces Shadia to use a lighter sword also smuggled out of the props room. She’s hopelessly flashy with it, and he pokes her side every time he can read her well enough to easily avoid her strike. But she laughs when he does it, and she’s getting quick enough that he can’t hit her with the flat of his blade every time she overextends.
When she does hit him with the light sword, she pulls back the strikes at the last moment. He’s hardly bruised.
Alogar knows less, and he’s slower to write the movements into his memory. But he drills over and over until his body moves without having to think. He doesn’t soften his strikes. He moves through the point of impact with all his momentum.
He could be a good soldier someday, Azune thinks; if only he had a war to fight in.
He’s strong, too. He’s able to practice for longer than his sister—longer than Azune could when Thjazi first set a sword in his hands and told him he was ready. Today, he manages the three drills Azune gave him without a single misstep.
“Well done,” Azune praises.
Alogar lights up with the praise, eyes dancing. His arms don’t shake at the weight of the blade, and he comes back to neutral instead of slackening his grip. He’s growing already by leaps and bounds. “You’re a good teacher,” he says.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Azune admits, “but you’re definitely a good student.” He is. Alogar’s not half-dead or a third son or hungry, tagging along with mercenaries for the slimmest hope at a better life or at least dinner. For whatever reason, he wants this; wants to learn to fight, not with the showmanship of the theater but to taste blood in his teeth.
Alogar lets his sword fall to his side. “Good,” he says. “Because the second I turn seventeen, I’m going to join the Barrowguard.”
The name rings a bell, but only faintly. Azune’s only ever cared about the fight in front of him. He cocks his head at the boy, asking the question without a word.
He’s getting better at that. Alogar laughs sheepishly and launches into his answer. “It’s—” he waves his free hand. “Listen, I’ve gotta do something. My mom’s out there, doing something. I’m here, in Dol-Makjar, listening to all the stories about how she and Uncle Thjazi are saving the world. Or trying to, anyway. The Barrowguard… they keep a watch. They’re trying to solve it, fix the Barrowdells. Anyone can join.”
Just like his mother and uncle, Azune thinks; not enough to try and solve one problem. They have to try and upset the whole system. Then he realizes that trying to fix a Barrowdell means being near it, in one of the dangerous tears left in the world. A few practice drills aren’t going to cut it. Not for that. He picks up his own sword off the ground, hefts it once in his hand.
“Now,” Azune says. “Try to hit me.”
The swords are still blunt, but they hurt; Alogar could break his ribs if he connected. He hasn’t had the time to build muscle, but he already moves with force. Alogar settles into his stance; it’s not a duelist’s stance, not a knight’s. It’s the stance of a mercenary, a man with a sword and a cause and nothing to lose.
Azune nods.
Alogar leaps at him. Azune slaps the blade aside with the flat of his own, and Alogar overbalances by a hair.
Azune sweeps his foot out from under him and Alogar falls. He points the sword at the center of his chest. “Dead,” he says. “Keep your stance wider.” He gives Alogar his hand and pulls him up off the dusty ground. Slaps him on the back. “Try it again.”
Azune waits in a neutral stance, lets Alogar shake himself off and make a few practice swings before he comes back for another try. He can respect the boy’s perseverance; he recenters himself, and then he tries again. He doesn’t give up easily. Azune breathes in, and out, and holds his sword so that he can bat aside Alogar’s blade.
His first strike is a feint, not committed enough to actually hurt, and Azune sidesteps it. His second is faster, and harder; two steps forward and a swing. No lunge. No showiness. But it’s part of the pattern Azune taught him. He parries the swing, lets it roll off his sword like water, dragging Alogar down. Alogar recoils quickly, swings at Azune’s other side and is stymied by his guard.
“Let me hit you,” he growls, and tries for a stab. He lunges a little, overextends.
Azune knocks the sword out of his hand and it lands in the dust. “Dead,” he points out. “I won’t let you strike me, or else I would be.”
Alogar nods. “Fair enough,” he says, and gives Azune a grin.
He looks so much like Thjazi.
Azune’s half-lost in that thought—in what Thjazi must have looked like as a youth, beard not filled in and still a little coltish from sudden growth—when Alogar settles back into stance, and locks eyes with him. He starts running the same set of moves, feint-step-forward-swing. It’s ingrained in both of them, easy enough to dance the steps with only half his mind. Alogar doesn’t make the same mistake on the stab, and Azune cuts two steps to his side so that he has to turn the drill and try to remember it all at once.
Alogar strikes out high towards his shoulder and Azune parries. He strikes back; not as fast as he can move, not as hard. But not being hit is more important than striking the first blow, and Alogar will learn that.
Alogar dances out of the way, breaking the pattern.
Mistake; he’s off it now, and Azune can see him struggle to try and find his way back in when moving less to begin with wouldn’t have thrown him. But his reach is longer than Azune’s, so he cuts toward the other shoulder and Azune has to shift there to block him. The distraction lasts long enough to let Alogar slip back into range.
Fighting’s not fun. But as Alogar—sweaty, irritated, learning—tries to go for a gut stab, the noise and chaos of Dol-Makjar falls away, and suddenly Thjazi is standing where his nephew is, tracing the same movements. He’s faster than Azune—better—and Azune can only barely manage to keep up. Thjazi pushes him several steps back with the sharp edge of the Liar’s Blade. “Good one,” he says, grin crooked. “But you can do it better, Azune. Try again.”
Azune hefts the sword and strikes out. Alogar parries instead of dodging, moves his body just a half-inch more than perfect and parlays the momentum straight into another blow.
“STOP,” Thjazi screams at the top of his voice, and Azune freezes.
The sword is blunted, but Alogar isn’t fast enough to soften his blow—he always commits to his strikes. Something glints as it hits him, and impacts his ribs with the momentum and pain of a hard kick. Azune falls to one knee with the wind knocked out of him and his side bruised, maybe worse.
“Stop,” the voice repeats, and laying in the dust of the yard of a stately house in Dol-Makjar, Azune realizes; not Thjazi, but Halandil. Hal, in a tone he’s never heard the man use, incensed and yelling at the top of his lungs. “Alogar, drop that sword, now. Then go to your room. Azune - dammit, Azune.”
Hal comes to kneel down next to him. His face is hard with rage as he shoves up Azune’s shirt, presses a hand into his side. “Is anything broken?” he asks flatly.
Azune shakes his head. It hurts, but nothing’s out of place.
Hal straightens. He towers over him. “I should have made myself clear,” he says, harsh as any drill master. “You are not to train with weapons in my home. You are not to duel with my son. You are not running goddamn drill, and you are absolutely not doing it with my children.”
That’s it, then. Azune will have to find somewhere else to stay, with the Banner gone.
“Clean yourself up,” Hal orders. He turns away. His back looks like his brother’s. “And then come talk to me. I’ll be in my office.” He doesn’t offer Azune a hand.
Azune doesn’t bother to get up at first. He just kneels there in the dirt. He gives himself a minute. Then he comes back to himself: Hal’s given him an order, and he drags himself up to follow it. His side hurts, but his order was to clean first. His movements are mechanical: grab his sword. Then the one Alogar dropped. Run a rag, stolen from the kitchen, over them. The dust comes off easily enough. He slips them back into their scabbards. He reties his hair, since some of the reddish strands have come loose from his braid. He walks into Hal’s house and sets the swords gingerly on the massive central table.
They look bare, somehow, even in their sheaths; like by bringing them into the house, blunt edges or no, Azune has severed all the joy and peace that live here.
Azune walks up the stairs like a man being led to the gallows.
He knocks on the door of Hal’s office. Apart from the solid wood under his feet, he could be in any war camp. There could be any leader, lurking in his war room, ready to punish any man who disobeys.
“Come in,” Hal commands.
Azune creaks the door open, walks to the center of the room, and waits. Hal sits behind his desk, fingers locked together and gaze directed at the scattered papers in front of him. When Azunes stops, he gets up from his chair and steps around the desk until they’re face to face.
Azune flinches, just a little; waiting for the blow.
“Azune,” Hal says instead, and the anger’s gone from his voice. Only something weak and mournful is left. “You’ve been through a war. Were even lucky enough to live through it. I’m not asking you to put that aside if you aren’t ready to.” He sets a hand on Azune’s shoulder. It’s warm and broad. If he closed his eyes it could almost be his father’s; it could be Thjazi’s, so similar to his brother. “I was no older than you are now when I first took up my sword. I hope you’ll be able to set it down someday, let the battle go. But I wouldn’t ask you to, soldier.”
Hal’s face is grave. He takes a deep breath; Azune’s seen him do it before he calls a room to attention, before he steps on the stage and compels his audience to believe.
“But you won’t bear a weapon in my house. And you won’t teach my children to kill.”
The words are merciless as an order to hold against cavalry. Azune can feel the weight of gambeson and chain on his shoulders. He can smell the blood and shit and churned earth of a battlefield—of any battlefield, his or one of Hal’s left behind long ago.
“Yes, sir,” he says. Obeys. Bows his head and squares his shoulders and waits for the punishment.
Hal sighs, and suddenly the afterimage of the soldier Azune sees in him is gone. His loose shirt lays over a soft stomach, and his eyes are deep and warm. “Azune, I’m not—” he pauses, moving to sit on the cushioned couch across from Azune’s makeshift bed. He’s almost whispering, but it still carries, tired and sad. “I understand some of what it means to be you. You’re a man. But Shadia and Hero, even Alogar… they’re children, Azune. Let them be children.”
Hero is a little girl. She was afraid of Azune the first time they met, until Hal had swept her up in his strong arms and introduced them at face level. She’s still quiet around him.
But Shadia is twelve. She’s the same age Azune was when the Gallows Choir took him up and threw him away. She’s taller than he was then, burlier and more muscular. She has the strength to run and tumble and cartwheel without gasping for breath. She climbs to the tops of trees to hang by her legs, not to scout. She breaks into the theater and steals prop swords to play with, not to outfit an army. She picks fights with Alogar over the reddest apples and the best slice of cake. She is, unmistakably, a child.
“Sir,” Azune agrees. And then, because this is Hal, and he’s sleeping in the man’s office and eating at his table, he tells him the truth. “Alogar asked me to train him.”
Hal sighs. Azune’s heard that sound a hundred times; there are only so many ways breath can leave a man’s lungs. “Please,” he says softly. “Please don’t put a weapon in his hand. Let me protect him.”
Alogar is sixteen, Azune considers saying. When the next war comes, he will need to know how to use a sword. He’s already looking for his fight. Alogar is old enough to die on a battlefield; old enough, like Azune, to have made it out of the end of a war. Alogar, today, would die on the first battlefield he steps on.
Instead, he lets his sister bait him into petty squabbles that end with her in a headlock. He quarrels with her, but he never draws blood. Before today, he’d never landed a hit hard enough to break a bone, not on anyone. He is, impossibly, still a boy.
Azune thinks of the rest of the secret; of what Alogar said about the Barrowguard. He’s a few months older than him, but Azune’s only just sixteen. He can keep Alogar’s confidence without lying to Hal. He can let him be a child a few months longer.
He looks Hal in the eyes, soldier-to-commander, and nods. “I’ll keep the swords hidden. I won’t train them anymore.”
Hal reaches towards him, both arms outstretched. It’s unfamiliar; Azune has a split-second to wonder if that’s what a hug looks like from a father before Hal’s hands land on either side of his shoulders to grasp him firmly, one warrior to another.
“Thank you,” he tells Azune. “You’re a good man.”