Watt-Evans, Lawrence - Annals of the Chosen 01 (6 page)

"It's a big
decision," Harp agreed. Breaker nodded.

They stopped in
front of the family home by silent mutual consent, and stood for a moment. Then
Breaker said, "I don't want to be just a barley farmer all my life. I
don't want to be just the kid who broke things."

"You
don't have to be," Harp said. "I was called Spiller when I was
little, you know
, and everyone thought I'd just be a farmwife like our mother, raising
beans and children, canning and sewing and cooking."

"And you think
you won't be? You won't just marry Smudge and grow beans and barley, and bear
his children?"

"Oh, I
might—but when was the last time anyone called me Spiller?" She smiled.

"That's
different. You've been playing the harp since
..
.
well, since
..
."

"Since I was
ten, and you were six," Harp finished. "Thirteen years. And no one's
called me Spiller since I was twelve."

"It's a little
late for me to take up anything like that, then. I never had your ear for
music."

"You never
tried."

"I never wanted
to."

"But you want
to wield a sword?"

"I don't
...
well, I..." He frowned,
remembering the cold ferocity of the blade when he first held it, and the exhausting
hour with the willow branch. "I don't know," he admitted.

"Erren,"
she said, "tell me what you
do
know. What
do
you want? Not just what you
don't
want, but
what you
do."

Startled
by the almost-forbidden use of a piece of his true name, which demonstrated
just how seriously Harp took this question, Breaker hesitated a moment longer
to gather his thoughts. Hearing that bit of his real identity spoken aloud
seemed to help, and at last he said, "I want to be a part of somethi
ng bigger than Mad
Oak. I want to
see
more than Mad Oak. Sometimes it feels as
if I'm closed in here, trapped in this place, caught between the ridge and the
river, as if the
ler
are holding me here against my will, and
I need to escape. But I don't want to just wander aimlessly around Barokan,
like a rogue wizard—I have roots here, I know that, my true name tells me as
much. I want to stay here, but at the same time I want to see more, to
be
more. I want to see the ocean, and the Midlands, and the salt marshes,
and to stand at the foot of the Eastern Cliffs to see how high they truly
are—but not as a stranger; as someone who belongs there, just as I belong here.
I want a role, a place in the world, but a
bigger
one than
growing barley in Mad Oak. It's not e
nough, being here. I see Joker and Brokenose
and the rest, and they're fine here, they're happy, they don't want anything
more, but I
do.

"But
I don't know
what."

"Just more,
huh?"

"Yes. And
becoming one of the Chosen—how much more could there be? I would be a part of
all of Barokan, not just Mad Oak or Longvale."

"So that's why
you agreed to be the Swordsman?"

"Yes. But
then—there's the whole thing about killing. A sword is made for killing—I was
holding a sword earlier, and I could feel how cold and hungry it was, how ready
to kill. It's not like a hunter's arrows, where the prey's
ler
surrenders itself to feed us—the sword is meant to
take
that which no one wants to give, and that frightens me a little. I
don't want to kill anyone. And if I don't, if I'm not ready to use the sword as
I'm meant to, then what am I really accomplishing by being one of the Chosen?
Killing the Wizard Lord is what they're chosen
for,
after all.
And that means they're useless, really—the Chosen don't
do
anything."

"They will if
there's another Dark Lord." "But there
won't
be."

"Because the
Chosen are there. It's like some of the priests you hear about, in other
towns—they do things to
stop
the
ler
from doing things. They offer prayers and sacrifices and rituals not
to make th
e
crops grow or the game come close, but so the
ler won't
carry off the children or blight the land. If they weren't there, the
towns would be just as uninhabitable as any wilderness. And if the Chosen
weren't there, the Wizard Lord could turn dark in an i
nstant, and no one
would stop him."

"But
why would he turn dark?" He waved a hand at the sky. "Look at the
weather he gives us! It's beautiful. He's doing fine. Why would that ever
change? Most people don't go about stealing and raping and murdering, even
if they have the
chance."

'The
wizards did, though, in the old stories. Maybe it's something about being a
wizard, about binding
ler
with talismans. Or maybe it's just that
some people are like that, even if
we
aren't, and
they
would
go stealing and rapin
g and murdering if
they had the chance. A few do, you know, despite everything, and the Wizard
Lord hunts them down to bring them to justice, so we know such people still
exist. Perhaps there are many more of them, but knowing that the priests and
the Wizard Lord would catch them keeps most of them from doing anything bad—but
if one of them
were
the Wizard Lord
..
."

"So don't
choose people like that to be Wizard Lord."

She shrugged.
"Maybe you can't tell them in advance, even with magic."

"It still seems
..." He groped for a word, and finally said, ".. . clumsy."

'The
system's worked for hundreds of years. So the question is, do you want to be
part of it? Or would you rather not have the responsibility? If you don't want
to be a farmer or a musician, ther
e are still plenty of other choices besides
being the world's greatest swordsman. You could become a guide, maybe, or a
bargeman, if you want to travel."

Breaker nodded. He
had sometimes thought about exactly those options.

"The Swordsman
says I have the ability, though," he said, remembering the feel of the
sword in his hand. It had felt strange, but somehow right.

"Did he?"

Breaker nodded.
"He tested me this morning. In fact, we practiced for an hour. With
sticks." He grimaced. "He hit me a lot."

"Well, after all,
he's not just
a
swordsman, but the world's
greatest
swordsman. He can
defeat anyone. But he said you have the ability you need?" "He
did."

"Then maybe the
ler
led him here deliberately. Maybe you're
meant
to be the next
Swordsman."

"Or maybe he's
lying—he wants to retire and will take the first willing candidate, no matter
how inept I am."

"Maybe. But
he's one of the Chosen. He's supposed to be a potential hero. Would he lie and
shirk his duty?"

"He
might," Breaker said, without much conviction.

"I suppose he
might. So what it comes down to, baby brother, is whether you trust him, and
whether you trust yourself to be one of the Chosen, and whether you
want
to be the Swordsman. If you'd be satisfied being a guide— well, the
Greenwater Guide has no heir that I know of, and they don't ever have to kill
anyone."

"Well,
maybe if some fool of a traveler wandered off and offended the wrong
ler . .."

"Even
then, it wouldn't be the guide's job—he'd just let nature take its course. So
which would you rather carry—
ara
feathers, or a sword?"

"Most guides
only ever learn and work one or two routes. The Chosen protect all of
Barokan."

"Yes. It's
quite a responsibility."

Breaker stood
silently for a moment, considering, and remembering the morning's experiences;
then he smiled and shrugged.

"Someone
has to do it,"
he said. "It might as well be me."

Harp smiled back,
and the two entered the house.

Perhaps an hour
later their mother, known in Mad Oak as White Rose, returned and saw Breaker
seated at the kitchen table.

"So you've
given up on that foolishness?" she demanded, without preamble.

Breaker did not
pretend to misunderstand her. "On the contrary," he said. "I'll
be practicing with the Swordsman for an hour every day until he feels I'm
ready, and then a wizard will transfer the magic to me, and I'll be one of the
Chosen."

She started to open
her mouth to argue, then saw the expression on his face.

"You're sure,
then," she said. "I am."

"Even if it
means killing a man."

Breaker had had time
to prepare for this. "If the Chosen are ever sent to kill the Wizard Lord,
Mother, I think we can all be sure he deserves it. It hasn't happened in a
century, and it probably won't happen in my lifetime—but if it does, then yes,
I'll kill him if I must. This is a good role, an important role."

She stared at him
for a moment, and he gazed steadily back.

"Well,"
she said at last, "you're nineteen, you're a man—I can't stop you. But I
think you're being a fool."

"Someone has to
do it," Breaker said, as he had to Harp. "It might as well be me. And
if that makes me a fool, then so be it—I'm a fool. But remember, we live in
peace, untroubled by rogues or bad weather, because the Wizard Lord watches
over us—and we can trust him to do that because the Chosen watch over
him.
I learned that from
you,
Mother. Am I a fool to do my part to maintain
that peace?"

White Rose sighed.

"I hope
not," she said. "By all the
ler,
I hope
not!"

 
Breaker's mother was the last to reconcile
herself to
I
her son's new
calling, but by midwinter even she had finally accepted it, at least to the
extent of allowing the Swordsman to move into the family home, so that his
trudging through the snow would not delay the daily practices—and so the town's
unexpected long-term guest would not impose on Eld
er Priestess any
more than he already had. White Rose knew better than to needlessly aggravate
the town's senior interlocutor with
ler.

The two wizards who
had accompanied the Swordsman had left after just three days in Mad Oak. Once
they were certain that the Swordsman had found his successor they had no
further business in town, and Mad Oak had little to entertain visitors.

"Call us when
the time comes," the woman had said, handing the Swordsman a talisman,
which he quickly pocketed. Then she turned to the guide and said, "To
Greenwater, then!"

For the first month
after the wizards departed half the village expected Breaker to give up; it
became a popular amusement among the townsfolk of all ages to come watch the
practice sessions and see an old man with a blunt stick repeatedly embarrass
big strong Breaker, regardless of whether the youth was wielding a similar
stick, a real sword, or almost anything else that came to hand. Time after
time, when the two of them squared off after the day's lessons, th
e Swordsman
demonstrated that he could hit Breaker anywhere he chose, at any time he
chose, with either a stick or a sword.

By the end of that
first month, however, it sometimes took him two or three tries before he
connected, and the townsfolk had large
ly stopped speculating on how soon Breaker
would abandon his pursuit of a role among the Chosen.

In the first few days
some of the other young people of Mad Oak had challenged Breaker to mock duels
after seeing his poor showing against the old traveler; mo
st of them were
startled to discover that in fact Breaker was not slow or clumsy at all, and
could match or better most of his opponents from the very first. After a month
Breaker could usually fetch any challenger a sound blow on the side of the
head within the first minute of combat, and the impromptu stickfights ceased.
Some of the village wits began to mockingly call Breaker "the Young
Swordsman," rather than using the nickname he had borne for a dozen
years.

But as the practice
sessions continued,
the mockery faded.

By midwinter, when White Rose invited the
visitor to sleep in the loft, calling her son the Young Swordsman was no longer
a joke at all.

The Old Swordsman could still reliably defeat
the Young, though. The young man who still thought of himself as Breaker could
put up a good fight, and hold off his more experienced foe for several
minutes, but inevitably every bout still ended with a rap across the back of
his hand, a tap on his heart, or some other blow indicating his defeat. No
weapon the Young Swordsman might wield ever touched the older man.

That irritated
Breaker, but there seemed little he could do about it, and he
was
definitely
improving—just not enough to matter, yet.

In his more optimistic moments, though, he
could imagine a day when he could beat the Old Swordsman and claim a role
among the Chosen. He tried to imagine what that would be like, but failed.

He spent many
evenings, after his household chores were done, asking the Old Swordsman about
his life as one of the Chosen, g
etting answers that varied according to the
old man's moods. He discovered that the more specific a question, the more
likely it was to get a consistent and useful answer—which was hardly a
surprise, since that was almost always true everywhere, regardless of the topic
of discussion.

He tried to think of useful, specific
questions, but it wasn't always easy.

"When you travel," he asked,
"do people just give you food and shelter, wherever you go, just because
you're the Swordsman?"

The Swordsman laughed at that. "No,"
he said, and because he was in a good mood that night—dinner had been roast
ham and chestnut gravy—he went on to explain that sometimes he was treated as
an honored guest, sometimes he had to work for his keep, sometimes he had to
pay with coin, and there were a few towns where he was shunned no matter what
he did.

"Sometimes,"
he said, "a little display of fancy bladework and passing the hat will
cover my expenses nicely; you'll want to learn some tricks, like slicing
through lit candles with
out blowing them out, for such occasions."

"Like
what?"

The Swordsman snorted, fetched his blade, and
demonstrated his ability to slice a good beeswax candle in two while leaving
the top half still in place and burning, if a little wobbly.

"More!" Fidget called.

'Tomorrow," the
old man replied, and from then on it became a household tradition for him to
perform one such trick every evening, to the great amusement of Spider and
Fidget—such as slicing a tossed apple into thirds in midair, or spearing the on
ly red grape from
among half a dozen green ones flung at him, or first swinging his blade above a
cloth spread on a table so fast that the wind of its passage stirred the
fabric, then once the cloth moved, passing the blade beneath it without
scratching the table, cutting the cloth, or letting the cloth entangle the
sword
...

His repertoire was impressive, but Breaker
ceased to find it amusing fairly quickly, as in each case he was set to attempting
to imitate the stunt the next morning. Some such tricks were much easier than
they looked; most were not. Breaker failed to master most of them—which did not
discourage the Old Swordsman at all, but it did discourage Breaker.

"You have no magic helping you,"
the old man said, after one such failure.

"Could you do it without the
magic?" Breaker countered.

"I don't know," the Swordsman said.
"I might; I've been practicing a long, long time."

Breaker grimaced silently in reply.

He continued to ask questions, though.

"What are the other Chosen like?"
he asked one very cold night, as the family huddled by the hearth, as much to
silence his father's grumbling about the weather the Wizard Lord had sent them
as because he really wanted to talk.

"I haven't met all of them," the
old man said.

That startled Breaker, and he turned his
attention from the fire to the Old Swordsman. "You haven't?"

"No," the old man said, rubbing his
hands together. "I've never met the current Beauty or the current Thief,
so far as I know. They keep to themselves."

All three of Breaker's sisters had turned to
listen now, while their parents kept their faces toward the fire.

"Why?" Fidget asked.

"I can't say for certain," the
Swordsman said, "but if you think about it, thieves don't generally like
advertising themselves. And the new Beauty lives in Winterhome, where the
women keep themselves secluded—I've only been there once, and I didn't meet
her. I didn't like it much—it's right under the cliffs, you know, and it feels
closed in and unbalanced, as if half the sky is ready to fall on you. And the
whole society there is strange, with the division between Host People and
Uplanders; half the year it's too crowded, and half the year it's half-empty.
It's not comfortable. Or at least, I didn't find it so."

"You said the
new
Beauty lives there," Breaker said.

The Swordsman
snorted. "I did, didn't I? Foolish of me. She's been the Beauty for more
than twenty years now—in fact, I wonder how much longer she can last at it.
That's hardly new. But what I meant was that I did know
a
Beauty, who retired in favor of the present one because her
husband-to-be got jealous and she decided having a family was more important
than serving the Council of Immortals. And yet another held the post when I
first joined the Chosen, though only for a year or two; I never met h
er, either."

"Tell me about all of them!"

And to Breaker's surprise, the old man
obliged—though not immediately. He waited until the younger girls had been sent
to bed before continuing.

The Beauty was a role intended as a
distraction more than anything else, he explained; just as the Chosen Swordsman
was by definition the greatest swordsman in Barokan, the Beauty was by
definition the most beautiful woman in Barokan, which meant that her mere
appearance was often enough to make grown men forget whatever they were supposed
to be doing. Her original purpose among the Chosen had been simply to make the
Wizard Lord's servants and guards—and perhaps even the Wizard Lord himself—
abandon their duties, so that the other Chosen would meet less resistance.

The Beauty did not
need to practice anything, as the Swordsman did, nor do anything special to
preserve her beauty;
ler
took care of her appearance with no
effort on her part. This did not mean that her role came without a price,
though; she was constantly barraged with the attentions of men, and inevitably
drew the envy of other women. How the Chosen Beauty handled this varied from
one to the next, but for all of them it was wearing. The Swordsman had held his
role for forty-four years; no Beauty had ever lasted t
hat long, and he
doubted any ever would. Whether even magic could keep a woman supernaturally
beautiful for several decades was an open question, and one that showed no sign
of being answered any time soon.

"I don't know
much about the woman who was the B
eauty when I was first chosen," the old
man said. "She had held the post about a dozen years, I think, and had had
enough of it. She did no traveling anymore, and resigned the role before I had
gotten around to meeting her. Her successor made a point of finding me,
though—and bedding me, as I was young and handsome then, not the battered ruin
you see now."

"Bedding you?" Harp asked,
startled.

"Oh, yes. And if you're thinking that
might have become complicated, such a relationship between two of the Chosen,
you should consider that human nature is such that the woman universally
acknowledged to be the most beautiful in the world cannot be visibly pregnant;
therefore, the
ler
of her talisman would not allow her to
conceive. That was a part of her magic. That w
as one reason she gave up the role
later."

"But. .. She
tracked you down in order to bed you?" Harp persisted. "But she
didn't
know
you."

"Yes, well, she was
...
a little odd, perhaps. But also, she
wanted a man her magic didn't affect. I think she wanted to prove she could
seduce a man without magic. Not that that was at all difficult in my case, back
then."

"Her magic didn't affect you?"
Breaker asked.

"No, of course not—haven't I told you
about that?"

"No."

"Oh." The old man looked slightly
embarrassed, for the first time since Breaker had met him in the pavilion the
night of the harvest dance. "That's part of being Chosen. We're .
.. well, not immune to magic, exactly, but almost. None of us are
affected by each other's magic, nor can the Wizard Lord's magic harm us
directly. In general, the
ler
bound to us
protect us—didn't you notice I had no
ara
feathers on my cloak when I arrived?"