I am never going to get this right again. How can I, when half the time I can't feel what I'm doing?
He bit his lip, and looked down again, blinking at the sunlight winking off Mekeal's helm four stories below. Every one of them will be moaning and plastering horse liniment on his bruises tonight, and boasting in the next breath about how long he lasted against Jervis this time. Thank you, no. Not I. One broken arm was enough. I prefer to see my sixteenth birthday with the rest of my bones intact.
This tiny tower room where Vanyel always hid himself when summoned to weapons practice was another legacy of Grandfather Joserlin's crazy building spree. It was Vanyel's favorite hiding place, and thus far, the most secure; a storage room just off the library. The only conventional access was through a tiny half-height door at the back of the library - but the room had a window - a window on the same side of the keep as the window of Vanyel's own attic-level room.
Any time he wanted, Vanyel could climb easily out of his bedroom, edge along the slanting roof, and climb into that narrow window, even in the worst weather or the blackest night. The hard part was doing it unseen.
An odd wedge-shaped nook, this room was all that was left of the last landing of the staircase to the top floor - an obvious change in design, since the rest of the staircase had been turned into a chimney and the hole where the roof trapdoor had been now led to the chimney pot. But that meant that although there was no fireplace in the storeroom itself, the room stayed comfortably warm in the worst weather because of the chimney wall.
Not once in all the time Vanyel had taken to hiding here had anything new been added to the clutter or anything been sought for. Like many another of the old lord's eccentricities, its inaccessibility made it easy to ignore.
Which was fine, so far as Vanyel was concerned. He had his instruments up here - two of which he wasn't even supposed to own, the harp and the gittern - and any time he liked he could slip into the library to purloin a book.
At the point of the room he had an old chair to sprawl in, a collection of candle ends on a chest beside it so that he could read when the light was bad. His instruments were all safe from the rough hands and pranks of his brothers, and he could practice without anyone disturbing him.
He had arranged a set of old cushions by the window so that he could watch his brothers and cousins getting trounced all over the moat while he played - or tried to play. It afforded a ghost of amusement, sometimes. The gods knew he had little enough to smile about.
It was lonely - but Vanyel was always lonely, since Lissa had gone. It was bloody awkward to get to - but he couldn't hide in his room.
Though he hadn't found out until he'd healed up, the rest of his siblings and cousins had gone down to bachelor's hall with Mekeal while he'd been recovering from that broken arm. He hadn't, even when the Healer had taken the splints off.
His brothers slandered his lute playing when they'd gone, telling his father they were just as happy for Vanyel to have his own room if he wanted to stay up there. Probably Withen, recalling how near the hall was to his own quarters, had felt the same. Vanyel didn't care; it meant that the room was his, and his alone - one scant bit of comfort.
His other place of refuge, his mother's solar, was no longer the retreat it had been. It was too easy for him to be found there, and there were other disadvantages lately; his mother's ladies and fosterlings had taken to flirting with him. He enjoyed that, too, up to a point - but they kept wanting to take it beyond the range of the game of courtly love to the romantic, for which he still wasn't ready. And Lady Treesa kept encouraging them at it.
Jervis drove Mekeal back, step by step. Fools, Vanyel thought scornfully, forcing his fingers through the exercise in time with Jervis' blows. They must be mad, to let that sour old man make Idiots out of them, day after day - maybe break their skulls, just like he broke my arm! Anger tightened his mouth, and the memory of the shuttered satisfaction he'd seen in Jervis' eyes the first time Vanyel had encountered him after the "accident" roiled in his stomach. Damn that bastard, he meant to break my arm, I know he did; he's good enough to judge any blow he deals to within a hair.
At least he had a secure hiding place; secure because getting into it took nerve, and neither Jervis, nor his father, nor any of the rest of them would ever have put him and a climb across the roof together in the same thought-even if they remembered the room existed.
The ill-assorted lot below didn't look to be relatives; the Ashkevron cousins had all gone meaty when they hit adolescence; big-boned, muscled like plow horses -
- and about as dense -
- but Withen's sons were growing straight up as well as putting on bulk.
Vanyel was the only one of the lot taking after his mother.
Withen seemed to hold that to be his fault, too.
Vanyel snorted as Mekeal took a blow to the helm that sent him reeling backward. That one should shake up his brains! Serves him right, too, carrying on about what a great warrior he's going to be. Clod-headed beanpole. All he can think about is hacking people to bits for the sake of ' 'honor.''
Glorious war, hah. Fool can't see beyond the end of his nose. For all that prating, if he ever saw a battlefield he'd wet himself.
Not that Vanyel had ever seen a real battlefield, but he was the possessor of a far more vivid imagination than anyone else in his family. He had no trouble in visualizing what those practice blades would be doing if they were real. And he had no difficulty at all in imagining the "deadlie woundes" of the ballads being inflicted on his body.
Vanyel paid close attention to his lessons, if not to weapons work. He knew all of the history ballads and unlike the rest of his peers, he knew the parts about what happened after the great battles as well - the lists of the dead, the dying, the maimed. It hadn't escaped his notice that when you added up those lists, the totals were a lot higher than the number of heroes who survived.
Vanyel knew damned well which list he'd be on if ever came to armed conflict. He'd learned his lesson only too welclass="underline" why even try?
Except that every time he turned around Lord Withen was delivering another lecture on his duty to the hold.
Gods. I'm just as much a brute beast of burden as any donkey in the stables! Duty. That's bloody all I hear, he thought, staring out the window, but no longer seeing what lay beyond the glass. Why me? Mekeal would be a thousand times better Lord Holder than me, and he’d just love it! Why couldn’t I have gone with Lissa?
He sighed and put the lute aside, reaching inside his tunic for the scrap of parchment that Trevor Corey's page had delivered to him after he'd given Lissa's "official" letters into Treesa's hands.