Rebel Elements (Seals of the Duelists) (8 page)

“War?” Bayan asked, surprised and alarmed. “Students can go to war?”

“If we need the magic, absolutely. It’s an oft-forgotten fact that, as Headmaster, I hold the rank of Warmaster and am expected to direct all duelists on campus in case of battle, whether student or teacher. Now, that hasn’t happened in over four centuries, and we don’t expect it anytime soon, but we train for it nonetheless. In our duty to the empire, anything less than full readiness can be counted as treason.”

Bayan looked at Calder, expecting the same level of disbelief in his friend’s eyes, but instead he saw casual acceptance.

“You boys both have plenty of defense training classes?” The headmaster’s eyes lingered on Bayan.

Calder answered with easy confidence. “Aye, sure enough.”

“Bayan?” The headmaster’s voice carried a thread of worry.

“I’ll be just fine.”

The headmaster frowned, perhaps at Bayan’s failure to use his title. “I’ll have Instructor Staasen speak with you later, just to confirm your skill level.”

A slender man in a plain green tunic and pants approached from one of the hallways and silently offered a note to the headmaster, who read it. “I’ve got a meeting with the mayor of Peace Village soon,” Langlaren said to his new students, “but he’ll just have to wait until we’ve officially begun your class’s semester.” The headmaster smiled. “You passed Peace Village on the way up. A town unique within the empire, where residents benefit from the protection of scores of nearby duelists, yet remain free to come and go from our bastion of solitude as they please. Many of them either attend history or culture classes here or work as members of our extensive support staff. Our bread doesn’t bake itself—unless I send my Flame avatar after it.” The headmaster chuckled at his own joke, but Bayan didn’t understand.

The door opened again, admitting several teenage girls, then a group of gangly boys. They filed toward the dais and sat on the benches closest to the door, murmuring amongst themselves. Other adults filed in as well and sat in the section behind Pim and Wekshi. As the room filled, Bayan thought the adults must be teachers and staff, and he studied them closely. Not all had tattoos. Some of them looked relaxed and confident, while others leaned forward onto their elbows, as if eager for whatever was about to happen next. Many watched Bayan as thoroughly as he watched them.

The headmaster beckoned to each small group, inviting them to sit down. Most of them sat at least a few rows behind Bayan and Calder. Bayan pivoted on the bench and looked back at the group of teenagers.

Many stared with open curiosity. Some looked confused, and whispered to each other behind their hands, but Bayan heard some of the louder comments.

“Is he Shawnash?” murmured a curly-haired boy with close-set eyes.

“No, too short.”

A girl with long pale braids said, “The cute one’s got a horrible burn. Too bad.” Her friend nodded.

A girl with thin cheeks and fat, light brown curls noticed Bayan’s regard. “He’s staring at me! How rude!”

Bayan waved at her, but her eyes widened in outrage, and she furiously whispered to the girl next to her. Bayan rolled his eyes.

“Girls never change, do they?” he muttered to Calder.

Calder snorted. “I think it’s against their code.”

A young man raised his hand and asked, “Headmaster, where is the dark boy from? He’s not a ragtag, is he?” Bayan frowned, which seemed to alarm the boy. Giving up on making friends for the moment, Bayan turned his back on the group.

“Bayan Lualhati comes to us from Balanganam, trainees. He is our first Balang on campus, and we are pleased to welcome him among us. But you don’t need to ask me. Bayan can answer for himself just fine.”

“So,” a freckle-nosed girl asked, “he can speak our language?”

Bayan groaned and buried his face in his hands. Calder patted his shoulder in sympathy.

~~~

“Kiwani!”

The girl in front of the easel heard her name being called, but didn’t look away from her painting.

“Kiwani!” Anneke slipped around the door frame, brown curls frizzing around her round face. “Didn’t you hear me, dearest?”

“No, my apologies,” Kiwani lied, turning to face her shorter friend. Azhni, Kiwani’s constant companion,
tsked
but said no more, as was her habit. The quiet, angular woman jiggled her clunky bead necklace, though: a sign of her displeasure with Kiwani’s falsehood.

Anneke ignored Kiwani’s hired help. “There are two more trainees at the Academy. Your classes can begin. Didn’t you hear the others running about and yelling?”

Kiwani had heard them. Azhni had even stepped to the window and looked down from the second-story painting studio to see what was going on. When she informed Kiwani that the trainees streamed toward the Hall of Seals, Kiwani told her she wanted to finish her painting first. After a dozen such arrivals since her own, the novelty had worn off. The trainees were all commoners from places she didn’t care about, anyway.

However, she couldn’t maintain her assumed ignorance in the presence of a girl who shared her noble status. Pasting on a smile, she set down her palette and brush, then smoothed back her long, dark, straight hair, accentuating the fact that, unlike Anneke’s, it had never been shaved off to accommodate a shell headdress. A headdress that neither of them would wear now. “I must have been too far into my work,” she said by way of apology. “I’ll head down straight away. Many thanks, darling, for informing me. Come, Azhni.”

She picked up her thick cloak, slipped past Anneke, and headed down the stairs, Azhni trailing at her heels.
Lovely,
she fumed, as she tugged on the garment and frogged its closures shut.
Now I owe Anneke a favor for coming to find me, on top of the other favors I owe her. Some days, I wish I were a commoner, without all these difficult conventions. At least they get to do as they please
.

She stepped out onto the winding path that led down to a set of cliffside steps, ignoring the cozy lushness of the narrow, stream-cut valley before her. Other campus buildings crowded the far side of the cliffs and lined a series of stone and wooden bridges. Several narrow bridges connected her side to the far side. She chose one and crossed over, with Azhni still behind her, and headed for the enormous tunnel leading toward the Hall of Seals. Over the tunnel’s upper lip cascaded a waterfall, which formed the stream below. The stream had been frozen solid during her first few days on campus, but now it rushed along, swelled with icemelt. She climbed onto the wooden walkway that edged past the waterfall and hurried past its blowing mist.

As she and Azhni headed into the dark tunnel to the Hall of Seals, Kiwani reflected that the experience was a lot like finding out she was destined to be a duelist: what had been bright was now dim, chill, and seemingly endless. Wrapping her hands in the thick wool of her cloak, she wished for the hundredth time that she didn’t have the spark of magic inside her.

Gone were her dreams of following in her father’s footsteps. Wateyo tes’Eshkin was a powerful and influential nobleman, trusted implicitly by both Emperor Jaap and his father before him. Emperor Hedrick had even selected Kiwani as a Blessed Ward of the Empire, a sign of great personal favor to her family. Now that she was just another duelist, all efforts to smooth her way into a successful political career were wasted.

Without the political influence she craved, she could not become a beloved heroine of the people, like those who populated the stories her father had told her as a child. She knew he had been trying to inspire her, and it had worked, if perhaps too well. Nothing was more important than succeeding at her goal to serve the empire in a fashion glorious enough to place her name in the history books.

Duelists were glorified bodyguards. Yes, perhaps one in a thousand children possessed the rare gift of elemental manipulation, but all duelists did the day long was beat each other bloody for pay. The empire’s justice system was completely random! Half the time, the claimant in the wrong actually won the dispute.
Where is the fairness in that?

“Lady Kiwani, are you attempting to lose me?” Azhni asked. Kiwani had become used to Azhni’s rarely-used voice, roughened as it was from scarring due to a childhood disease.

Belatedly, Kiwani noticed that her annoyance with the imperial justice system had caused her to speed up. Sighing, she slowed, not wanting to slip on the frosted walkway. If she was going to injure herself, however, best to do it when Azhni was within calling distance.

Azhni always required a lengthy explanation to Kiwani’s new acquaintances. She’d given the speech a dozen times in the last score of days and was tired of it. Kiwani’s mother was unable to bear any more children, so she was an only child. As such, her parents were, to put it mildly, overprotective. Azhni had been engaged by her parents, ever since Kiwani could remember, as nanny, bodyguard, and chanter—since her damaged voice prevented her from training in the rare and powerful magic of song.

How her father, even with his vast resources, could afford the continual services of a chanter for fifteen years was beyond Kiwani. She’d asked him several times over the last couple of years to let the woman go, but he’d always refused. Once, she even suggested to Azhni that her father could not afford the chanter, hinting that Azhni might be exaggerating the need for her services. Azhni’s response was that, after so long, Kiwani’s father couldn’t afford
not
to employ her.

Kiwani had to admit that Azhni’s constant presence did come in handy at times. Once, she had fallen from a horse at the family’s ancestral estate on Wisnuk Bay and broken her leg and her wrist. Azhni had healed both limbs within moments by pulling her blood crystal from the pouch that never left her belt and chanting until the crystal resonated with magic.

Unfortunately, due to her parents’ paranoia about her continued health, the blood drop inside Azhni’s crystal was taken directly from Kiwani, and Azhni had told her it wouldn’t work on any of her friends if they got injured. Making an injured friend wait in pain while Azhni crafted a new crystal on the spot had made for a few awkward moments through the years.

The Hall of Seals loomed ahead, all red paint and sint-fingers. Kiwani and Azhni descended the covered stairs and followed the stone path to the hall’s rear entrance.
A pox on Anneke for coming to look for me. Why did she bother? She already has classes anyway; she started months ago! Now I have to go in, and I’ll look foolish for being so late
. She sighed, adjusted her expression, and tugged open the heavy door.

“What’s he doing with a plant? That’s a strange looking flower,” a boy whispered behind Bayan.

“Marikit was a Pinamuyoc,” a girl muttered, “and even she called Balangs mucklings.”

Bayan bristled, but Calder put a hand on his arm and shook his head. Up on the dais, the headmaster had just finished introducing the six elemental magic instructors, two of whom Bayan had already seen: Wekshi, the Shawnash Wind Instructor, and Pim Aalthoven, the Waarden Wood Instructor. All six instructors bore tattoos on the backs of both hands.

The door opened in the back of the room, and two women glided in. The older woman, her hair bound back in a long, straight ponytail, followed the younger to one of the back benches. Bayan swallowed, staring at the younger woman. She carried herself with perfect poise, and her face, with a pointed chin and wide dark eyes, reminded him of a more serious Imee.

“And these—thank you for joining us, Kiwani—are your three meditation instructors, Greer, Jurgen, and Rina.” Headmaster Langlaren waved a hand in turn to the plump blond man who had opened the door earlier, then to an older man with a curly gray tail of hair and age-spotted skin, and finally, to a lithe, attractive younger woman with brown ringlets. No tattoos on their hands, Bayan noted.

“They’ll begin your first meditative classes tomorrow, along with spell practice classes from the element instructors, and Imperial History from Joos de Rood.” He indicated a slender man with a shock of brown hair ringing his balding pate. The rest of his hair formed a frizzy tail at the back of his neck, and he gave the new trainees a crisp nod.

“In addition to your classes, you will occasionally be assigned chores around campus. These may be in the kitchens, out and about on the grounds with Groundsmaster Gerrolt Visser—” A wiry, older man with frizzy gray hair briefly stood and waved an untattooed hand. “Or they may be specific tasks assigned to you by any of your other instructors. We are all servants of the empire, and as such it behooves us to serve ourselves by keeping our home and training areas clean and safe at all times.

“Now, most of you new trainees have had Doc Theo match you to a blood crystal, so if you’ve done that already, you’re free to head down the hall to retrieve your textbooks and workout gear.” A general buzz rose as students shuffled from the bench sections and filed down the hallway to pick up their supplies.

“Thank you,” Headmaster Langlaren continued over the din, “and sints guard you all.” He stepped down toward Bayan and Calder and waved over a tall, gray-haired man with a long nose who wore a brown tabard with two linked circles embroidered on the breast. “Trainees,” Langlaren addressed his newest students, “this is the head physician on campus, Theo Willemsen. He’s one of our several chanters from the Temple of Ten Thousand Harmonies, and he or one of his staff sits in on every arena class in case of severe injury. I’ll leave you in his excellent hands.” The headmaster nodded and moved away.