To a swordsman it was not a pleasing picture. Melio could not help but correct her grip on the hilt, as she had known he would do. That was only a start, of course. He taught her how to set her feet, demonstrated proper posture. He named the various parts of the sword and explained the function of each. Within just a few minutes he had lost a good deal of his reluctance.
He explained to her that Edifus personally fought with the champion of the Gaqua, a tribe that had controlled the Gradthic Gap, the route through the mountains between Aushenia and the Mein Plateau. Just how this duel was arranged was lost to history, but the battle itself was detailed down to the slightest move. Melio had never taught the moves to someone completely unfamiliar with them, but within a few stops and starts he managed to take on the Gaquan’s skin. He held the scabbard like he would a sword, and moved through the series of strikes and parries at quarter speed. Mena was quick to anticipate his moves, and showed him as much.
Despite himself, Melio warmed to the work. He seemed to forget his reluctance and the slight stature of his pupil and the strange, shadowed space they occupied. The words formed on his lips and his mind seemed to welcome them, to hum with the return of skills long neglected. Whenever he paused or seemed to falter, Mena pinned him with her eyes until he continued. If he was embarrassed by her naked torso he did a good job of hiding it. By the late morning Mena had worked through the entire sequence and knew the early portions by heart.
Eventually, they paused by mutual, silent agreement, both of them slick with sweat. They stood for some time, catching their breath. Melio wiped the perspiration from his forehead with his palm, though the moisture returned in an instant. Now that they had paused, a look of confusion seeped across his features. He peered at the scabbard clenched in his fist, flipping it from side to side as if he were not quite sure how it came to be there.
“How long before my brother summons us?” Mena asked.
“I thought you did not believe it would ever happen.”
“I don’t, but how long until the summons that you believe will come?”
“If it happens, as I’ve been told, he will start searching for you this spring. And in the summer he’ll call the armies together. There are many of us who speak of it. When he calls, I’ll hear of it through people I know among the traveling merchants.”
“So,” Mena said, “a few months. Not much time. How good a swordswoman do you think I can become in a few months?”
Melio could not shake his look of bafflement. He did not try, nor did he answer the question. Instead, he said, “We should oil that blade. The rust is a crime. Though, of course, we should make training swords. There’s likely good wood in the hills…”
CHAPTER
Maeander had known since boyhood that his gifts were different from his brother’s. Hanish possessed a sharp mind, an encyclopedic memory, a capacity to manage both grand schemes and minute details at the same time, a skill for inspiring adoration from the masses, and a keen understanding of how to manipulate myth in his favor; all fine enough, but Maeander was the one who walked with their people’s tangible, martial anger pulsing within him. His cool demeanor, his smile, his slow eyes: all disguised the seething core of violence ever-present within him.
He never stood before any man without pondering how he could kill him in the space of seconds, with or without a weapon. While others smiled and chatted and commented on his appearance or upon the weather, Maeander imagined what force would be necessary to drive the wedge of his tensed fingers through a person’s neck so that he could grab and tear loose the artery pumping blood into his head. He had always imagined such things, and he had yet to grow tired of the unease his stare infused into others.
Maeander knew that he, not his brother, most fully embodied the wrath of the Tunishnevre. The ancestors told him as much themselves. And they advised him that favor was turning his way; he had only to wait for it, to stay true, and to be ready. This was also why he had groomed Larken all these years. The Acacian was as fine a killer as any Mein, and he would make a perfect ally when the time came.
By sending Maeander in search of the Akarans, Hanish had given him an assignment secondary to the one bestowed on Haleeven. But in the end, Maeander believed, it would be the one of ultimate importance. The Tunishnevre needed Akaran blood. Nothing suited their needs more than liquid spilled from the veins of Leodan Akaran’s children, direct descendants of Tinhadin himself. Corinn might suffice as a last resort; but if the others lived, the Tunishnevre would want and need their blood as well. Think of how the hand that delivered such ambrosia would be rewarded! The ancestors, when they’d been freed from the curse, would shine favors on those that had made it possible. Why should he not be foremost among those? Why should their wrath not live on in him, in a tangible, physical presence that could reshape the world far more completely than Hanish had yet dreamed?
Maeander embarked on his hunt with the same vigor he had shown for campaigning. He gathered around him a pack of his most trusted, veteran killers and the best of the young ones, the most inured to their own fatigue and to others’ suffering. He led them, barking and rabid, in search of a trail nine years old. He sailed up the River Ask; disembarked below the Sinks; and cut east, weaving through the broad-leaved forest abutting the Methalian Rim. There were no particular clues that led him here, but much of the area’s dispersed population remained loyal to the dead Akaran king. Maeander searched among them, questioning, punishing, leaving villages aflame and young men whose arrogance angered him nailed to trees by the hands and feet and pin-cushioned with arrows. A few tongues babbled nonsense loosened by fear, but he could recognize this for what it was and took payment for wasted time in ways none in the woodlands would soon forget.
As he rounded the barrier mountains that separated Aushenia from the Mein Plateau he was no wiser for his efforts. He had, however, warmed to the work. He had long held the belief that the terror and pain one instilled in a victim were directly proportionate to the pleasure to be received as the tormentor. If this was so, he had caused much terror and pain. He knew this was not what Hanish had asked of him, but this mission was his to prosecute as he saw fit.
Aushenia offered a rolling expanse of field and woodland, cities and towns, in which to further test this equation. Officially, the province remained a Numrek possession, but so many of the foreigners had quit the place in favor of the Talayan coast that the territory had reverted to semi-autonomy. The Numrek were more trouble than they had ever been worth, Maeander thought. There was nothing harder to account for than the character of one’s “friends.” Strange also that lands defeated only a few years before refused to come to terms with the new order of things. Aushenian recalcitrance thrived like weeds in every crack and crevice of the place. And, more to the point, there had always been rumors that the northern forests hid bands of Acacian exiles, people gone nomadic, wandering from place to place, refusing to acknowledge reality. His men waded into Aushenia like wolves into numberless sheep, searching for signs of Acacian gold among those woolly fleeces.