Vellmar the Blade Read online

  “No, she wasn’t. Lancer Tal was.” Harren had his own hero.

  “Lancer Tal could never throw a sword.”

  “No, but she could fight with one.”

  “Not as well as Vellmar.”

  “Vellmar wasn’t the one who killed the Challenger.”

  “Yes, but Vellmar—”

  “Stop!”

  Both children went silent.

  “Thank you. Now if you’re done arguing about who was the best, shall I go on?” Seeing the vigorous nods, Jandahar stifled a smile. “Let’s see, where was I? It’s so hard to remember with all these interruptions…”

  “Vellmar was training,” Milena said.

  “Ah, of course. Well, Vellmar trained like a warrior possessed, every day, for hanticks at a time. Sometimes other warriors came to watch, but she didn’t enjoy having an audience. She said that blade practice was a solitary pursuit. Yet she never minded when Salomen came, because the Bondlancer never cheered or offered boisterous encouragement like the other warriors. She simply watched in respectful silence. Many cycles later, Vellmar said that was the secret to Salomen’s success—her genuine respect for others, no matter what their station in life.”

  “Of course she respected Vellmar! Who wouldn’t?” Milena asked.

  That wasn’t quite the point Jandahar wanted to make, but he could teach that with a different story. “No one dared to ask if they could train with her,” he continued. “No one, that is, but a single person. There was one person she would not say no to, who was skilled enough to provide her with the enjoyment of a true training partner. And that one person was—”

  “Lancer Tal!” Harren cried.

  CHAPTER 6:

  Practicing II

  “May I join you?” asked Lancer Tal.

  Vellmar glanced at the knife case in the Lancer’s hand and smiled at the prominent mark on the side. “That looks familiar.”

  “I did notice that you have excellent taste as well. Yulsintoh’s craftwork is well represented in this room.”

  “No other maker crafts blades with the same sense of balance,” Vellmar agreed. “Someday I’ll have a sword to match my throwing blades.”

  “You still haven’t bought one? Even after he lowered his prices?”

  Yulsintoh was famed worldwide for being the Lancer’s blademaker of choice and had raised his prices accordingly—so high that average warriors without family money could no longer afford them. When Lancer Tal had learned of his price gouging, she had threatened to carry another maker’s sword at her bonding ceremony if he didn’t make something more affordable for a warrior’s wages. Yulsintoh had responded with a new product line of high-quality blades lacking any adornment, and though the first models had only been made available a few ninedays ago, Vellmar had already seen a Guard in Salomen’s unit carrying one.

  “No,” she admitted. “Because those blades are going to be popular. I want a Yulsintoh, but not one that looks the same as every other sword I see.”

  “Don’t tell me you want one of those jewel-encrusted monstrosities.”

  “And look like some puffed-up, big-bellied warrior whose last mission was running supplies between Blacksun and Redmoon? Not a chance.”

  Lancer Tal laughed. “Fahla, what an image! No, I cannot see you with one of those. Then which one are you wanting?”

  “Have you seen the one with the teffalar grip in a red and black diamond pattern? And golden scrolling on the blade?”

  “His new design? Yes, I saw a review of it last moon, I think. Stunning looks and a new self-cleaning retraction mechanism.” She let out a low whistle. “Your taste is more than excellent. I think that’s the best blade he’s making right now, but it costs even more than the jeweled ones.”

  “I know.” Vellmar sighed. “But it’s so beautiful.”

  “Then you’d better start saving.”

  “I have been since you promoted me.” She gestured at the case still in the Lancer’s hand. “Please, put that down. I’d appreciate a little company; I’m starting to get tired of myself.”

  “Excellent. Can we start at fifteen paces? I’ll need to work myself back up to thirty.”

  Vellmar agreed, and they began their training. It was harder for her to get into her focused zone this way, but she needed to practice that, too. In competition, she would not have the luxury of being alone in a silent room. And she truly enjoyed working with Lancer Tal, whose own skill enabled a steady rhythm of throws that soon lulled her into a state that was, if not quite her zone, at least a peaceful cousin to it.

  The only time they spoke was when they were walking to the target to collect their knives, and then the conversation revolved largely around the minutiae of State House life and guesses as to the likely performance of various Games competitors. The very mundanity of it suddenly struck Vellmar as humorous, and her smile attracted Lancer Tal’s attention.

  “Something amusing?”

  As they knelt at the base of the target, sorting knives into two piles, Vellmar chuckled. “I was just thinking that if someone had told me a few moons ago that I’d be chatting with the Lancer about whether Torsenrall could win the sniper competition, I would have thought they were in need of a head healer. I guess I still haven’t fully adapted to the changes in my life.”

  “I think you’ve adapted quite well, and the proof of that is the new knife Salomen recently acquired. That was well done, Vellmar. I don’t know if she would ever have accepted one from me, but you managed to get around her. Which tells me that you’re fitting into our unit just fine.”

  Vellmar paused, taking a moment to bask in the unexpected compliment. “Thank you, Lancer.”

  “I should be thanking you.” Lancer Tal put her last knife into the case and closed it. “Salomen has already made friends in Blacksun, but she has little trust in their motives. On the Opah holding, she knows she’s loved for herself. Here, she never knows if it’s her personality or her title that people find attractive. There are five people she never doubts, however: Colonel Micah, Lanaril Satran, Captain Serrado, Lhyn Rivers…and you.”

  Hearing her name in such a star-studded list made Vellmar a little breathless. She had no idea how to respond and found refuge in good manners. “I take the greatest honor in her regard, and I swear to you that—”

  “Don’t swear anything to me. This isn’t between you and me. It’s between you and her. I’m simply telling you that she needs friends, and she has chosen you. Now, I know how honorable you are, and I know the difficult situation this puts you in. Your respect for the Bondlancer title pulls you one way, while Salomen’s affection may pull you another. I will say only this: When it does not conflict with your duty, give the greater weight to her affection. Don’t hurt her with formality.”

  Vellmar remembered the sadness in Salomen’s voice when she had asked if they were friends and suddenly understood the import of what Lancer Tal was saying. “I would never willingly hurt her. But what you’re asking me…that’s not how I was taught. She is the Bondlancer. And my private oath holder!”

  “If I told her that she had to choose between holding your oath and being your friend, I know what she would say. Don’t you?”

  Of course she did. What she didn’t know was how to reconcile the two positions the Lancer was asking her to occupy. She had been so careful in her interactions with Salomen, who had treated her as an equal from the very first moment of their acquaintance. It had always felt as if Vellmar had to be the one to keep her at a slight distance, rather than the other way around, because Salomen didn’t understand why they shouldn’t be friends. Vellmar, on the other hand, was painfully aware of their difference in rank and the dangerous line she was walking even addressing the Bondlancer by her first name.

  Yet had she met a version of Salomen who did not hold the title of Bondlancer, she would have treasured that friendship. It was
a conundrum she did not know how to get around without hurting the great heart of a woman she respected. And now Lancer Tal was almost ordering her to ignore the issue of rank.

  “It might take me some time to find my way in this,” she said slowly.

  “Salomen will give you all the time you need.”

  “Will you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Friendships are never perfect. Sometimes people make mistakes. Sometimes they get angry or hurt. If I make a mistake with Salomen, what will you do?”

  Lancer Tal’s eyes narrowed. “That would depend on the mistake.”

  Gathering her courage, Vellmar said, “Then you didn’t mean it when you said this wasn’t between you and me.”

  The instant tension in the room was so great that she could hardly keep from looking away. But in the end, it was the Lancer who sat back on her heels. “Shek, Vellmar. Now you’re the one putting me in a difficult position.”

  Vellmar’s whole body thrummed with the shock of having faced down her superior officer. No one had ever told her that the greatest risks she might take as a warrior could be in a silent training room, with no enemy in sight.

  “The learning opportunities never end, do they?” Lancer Tal murmured. She looked up with a wry smile. “You have the right to ask me that, and more wisdom than I have at the moment. I honestly don’t know what I would do. My first instinct if you hurt Salomen would be to send you back where I found you, with a boot print on your back. But you can’t be her friend if you’re always fearing my reaction.” She ran a hand through her hair and sighed. “I suppose the only thing I can do is make you a promise that no matter my personal feelings, I will not allow them to affect our professional interactions. And I will not interfere in the relationship between the two of you. Is that enough?”

  After careful consideration, Vellmar nodded. “It’s enough.”

  They sealed the agreement with a warrior’s forearm grip. In their short-sleeved training shirts, the grip was the equivalent of a palm touch, making their surface emotions apparent to each other despite their perfect fronts.

  “Great Goddess, you’re good at keeping your emotions off your face,” Lancer Tal said softly. “I apologize for causing you this fear. It was never my intent.”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” Vellmar answered, realizing the truth of it even as she spoke. “I’m afraid of the mistake.”

  “Then you and I have something else in common.”

  Suddenly, with a flash of intuition she could never explain, Vellmar understood what Lancer Tal was saying. She wasn’t speaking just of a possible mistake with Salomen, but of all the mistakes she could make in her governance of Alsea. Every day of her life she lived with that fear, and every day she shouldered the same responsibility in spite of it. The realization gave Vellmar even greater respect for her, and she squeezed her arm before letting go.

  “Thank you for trusting me with her,” she said.

  Lancer Tal nodded and stood, picking up her knife case. “I’m ready to try thirty paces now.”

  They walked back to resume their practice, and for the next hantick neither one spoke a word. But something had changed in that room, and Vellmar would look back at it later as one of the great defining moments of her life. It was the moment she stepped into a new role with Salomen—and learned what it meant to be Lancer.

  CHAPTER 7:

  Salomen the Strong

  “And that’s why she was such a great Lancer herself,” said Milena.

  “Because she learned from the best,” Harren added. “Lancer Tal taught her everything she knew before she retired.”

  “I think you two might be forgetting someone in your hero worship,” Jandahar observed. “Both Tal and Vellmar learned from someone else as well. Neither of them would have been the rulers they were without Salomen’s influence. It was her producer point of view that tempered their warrior tendencies.”

  “But Salomen was more warrior than producer,” Milena stated.

  “Where did you get that idea?”

  “She was Salomen the Strong!”

  Jandahar laughed. “She didn’t get that name by being the strongest warrior on Alsea. She got it by being the strongest empath.”

  “Oh.” Milena radiated disappointment.

  “I know which story I’m telling next time. You two are just a little too fixated on warriors. You do realize there are five other castes, yes? Hm, let me think…” He tapped his finger on his chin and pursed his lips in an exaggerated manner. “Isn’t your bondfather in one of those castes? Remember him? The man downstairs, making your midmeals for tomorrow?”

  “Bai!” They spoke in unison, then giggled.

  “We know!” Harren said. “But warriors are more exciting.”

  That was true, Jandahar thought. Though the castes were equal, each tended to focus on the exploits of their own. Only the stories of warriors were loved regardless of caste.

  He was definitely telling a Salomen story next time.

  “Well, on to the exciting part of this tale,” he said. “The Games opened with great fanfare, under clear blue skies, and Blacksun Basin was full to bursting with competitors and spectators. The blade-throwing events took place over three days, and the battle between Vellmar and her birthmother attracted every journalist in the area. They tried to make it seem as if the two were in a fierce rivalry, but the truth was…”

  CHAPTER 8:

  The Games I

  “Shek, Bai, couldn’t you miss once in a while?” Vellmar grumbled as she rose from her chair.

  Linzine Vellmar chuckled. “I will if you do it first.”

  “I can’t. You never taught me how.”

  That brought a full-throated laugh as Linzine slapped her daughter on the back. “Well said! So if you miss, I’ll know you never learned it from me.” She sat down in her own chair and made a shooing motion.

  Vellmar could not keep the grin off her face as she walked up to the competitor’s box, outlined in white on the close-mown grass.

  Any lingering fears she might have had about her birthmother’s reaction to this competition had vanished the previous day, when she had taken the red medal for the thirty-pace short-blade event and relegated her mother to blue. The difference between the two medals was, just as she had predicted, the width of a hair. All of her practicing had paid off, and Linzine was as thrilled as if she had won the red herself.

  After the competition, they had gone to meet Linzine’s Guard unit, who had all flown to Blacksun in support of their star member. Vellmar spent a loud and boisterous evening being introduced as “my daughter, the one who took my medal away from me.” Nearly every member of the unit had privately informed her that they would have known her for Linzine Vellmar’s daughter at a glance, given their matching looks. It was true; Vellmar had inherited her height, her thick black hair, and her wide-set, dark blue eyes from her birthmother. Her slightly tipped nose and generous mouth came from her bondmother.

  The spirits flowed freely that night, and bets were enthusiastically placed for today’s event. Vellmar was not sure how she had gotten back to her State House quarters and vowed never to drink that much again—at least not during competition.

  This morning had been a difficult awakening. She was certain the temperatures were higher this afternoon than they had been the previous day, and the crowd was far noisier. She and her birthmother had been featured in a special broadcast last night—not that they had been aware of it while taking turns staring at the bottoms of their spirit glasses—indicating that Vellmar had left her small-town heritage in Pollonius and never looked back in her naked pursuit of ambition, while her mother remained loyal to her place of birth and resented her daughter for abandoning her roots. Now they were battling it out between them: youth and ambition versus experience and loyalty.

  As a result, tickets for today’s e
vent had sold out. She had seen pockets of empty seats in the stands yesterday, but today there was not a single one in evidence. Fifty thousand people were watching her compete with her birthmother, and she was feeling the pressure.

  She set her left foot just behind the fifteen-pace line, pointed her left shoulder at the target as she pulled her right arm back, then exhaled and let her torso unwind. The knife departed her hand as if by its own volition, flying true and thunking into the exact center of the target before she had finished her follow-through. The crowd roared.

  When Vellmar arrived back at the seats, Linzine tilted her head to one side. “I think the wind blew that one on target. Your release was slightly off.”

  “If you’re going to lie, you should practice that instead of blade handling. Fahla knows you need it. A child could see through you.” She retook her seat as the next competitor rose.

  She already loved these moments, when she and her birthmother sat side by side, watching the other competitors and talking in a way they never had before. They were teasing and joking like peers, rather than mother and daughter. It was as if by entering the Games, she had crossed a threshold and walked into her mother’s world. She had been greeted as an equal and found it deeply gratifying.

  “She’s right, Vellmar,” said the competitor sitting next to Linzine. It took Vellmar a moment to realize he was speaking to her mother, who—as the elder warrior bearing the family name—was currently the only person who answered to it. For as long as they shared the same space, Vellmar was known as Fianna. It was an odd jolt of her childhood.

  “What, that I need to practice lying?”

  “That daughter of yours is as good as you. I was hoping that once you got old enough, the rest of us might have a chance to topple you off your throne. Now we’re looking at another tencycle of Vellmars taking home the medals? It was bad enough when all of us were competing for the blue medals because you always took the reds. Now we can’t even compete for that.”