“That’s not too bad,” Tarma observed. She pushed herself off the woodpile, and gestured to Kero to stop, then strolled over to the two logs and began examining the cuts closely. Kero wiped sweat from her forehead with her sleeve, and shook her arms to keep them loose.
“That’s not too bad at all. And considering what a late start you got—can you finish those in double time?”
She gave Kero the kind of look Dent used to—the kind that said, be careful what you say, you’ll have to live up to it. Kero licked salty moisture from her upper lip and considered the twin logs. They were chopped a little more than halfway through. The target she’d been creating was just above the iron bands holding them tight to the tree trunk.
So when I get toward the end, they’ll probably break the rest of the way under their own weight. She squinted up at the sun; broken light coming down through the thick foliage made it hard to tell exactly where the sun was. It was close to noon, though, that was for certain. Her stomach growled, as if to remind her that she had gotten up at dawn, and breakfast had been a long time.
The sooner I get these chopped, the sooner I can have something to eat. Some bread and cheese; maybe sausage. Cider. Fruit—and I know she magics that up; pears and grapes and just-ripe apples all served up together are not natural at any time of year.
“I think I can,” she said, carefully. “I’ll try.” Tarma stepped back, and nodded. Kero set to, driving herself with the reminder of how good that lunch was going to taste—Especially the cider. At double time she was getting winded very quickly; there was a stitch in her side, and she couldn’t keep herself from panting, which only parched her mouth and throat. Her eyes blurred with fatigue, and stung from the sweat and damp hair that kept getting in the way. Finally, though, she heard the sound she’d been waiting for; the crack of wood, first on one side of the trunk, then on the other. As she got in one last blow, then lowered her arms and backed off from the tree, the two half-logs bent out from the center trunk, then with a second crack, broke free and fell to the ground.
Kero rather wanted to fall to the ground herself. She certainly wanted to drop the ax, which now felt as if it weighed as much as the tree trunk. But she didn’t; she’d learned that lesson early on, when she’d dropped a practice sword at the end of a bout. Tarma had picked it up, and given her a look of sheer and pain-filled disgust.
She’d never felt so utterly worthless in her life, but worse was to come.
Tarma had carefully, patiently, and in the tone and simple words one would use with a five-year-old, explained why one never treats a weapon that way, even when one is tired, even when the weapon is just pot-metal and fit only to practice with.
Then, as if that wasn’t humiliation enough, she put the blade away and made Kero chop wood and haul water for the next three days straight, instead of chopping and hauling in the morning, and practicing in the afternoon.
So she hung onto the little hand-ax until Tarma took it away from her. “All right, youngling,” she said in that gravelly voice, as Kero raised a hand at the end of an arm that felt like the wood she’d just been chopping. “Let’s get back to the Tower and a hot bath and some food. You’ve earned it.” Then she grinned. “And after lunch, a mild little workout, hmm?”
Kero finished getting her arm up to her forehead, and mopped her brow and the back of her neck with a sleeve that was already sopping wet.
“Lady,” she croaked, “Every time you set me a ‘mild little workout,’ I wind up flat on my back before sundown too tired to move. You’re a hard taskmaster.”
Tarma only chuckled.
Lunch in the Tower was as “civilized” as even Kero’s mother could have wished. The three of them sat around a square wooden table in one of the upper balconies, sun streaming down on them, a fresh breeze drying Kero’s hair. Despite the fact that she had braided it tightly, bits of it were escaping from her braids, and the breeze tugged at them like a kitten with string. She kept trying to get it back under control, but it persisted in escaping, and finally she just gave up and let it fly. There was no one here to care how “respectable”—or not—she looked.
She felt much the better for her hot bath, though her muscles still ached in unaccustomed places from that little exercise this morning. Furthermore, she knew very well that she was going to hurt even more tonight. But it was a small price to pay for freedom.
Freedom from the bower, from boredom, from pretending I was something I wasn’t. That thought led inevitably to another. So what am I now? What am I supposed to be doing with myself? And one more—Why wasn’t I like Dierna, content with being someone’s lady?
An uneasy set of thoughts—and uncomfortable thoughts. But problems that, for the moment, she could do nothing about. She forced her attention back to more immediate concerns.
Like lunch.
I don’t know where Grandmother gets her provisions, but Wendar would kill to find out. On a platter in the center of the table were cheese, sausage, and bread. Simple fare, certainly not the kind of things one would expect a powerful mage to savor—but they were the best Kero had ever tasted. It wasn’t just hunger adding flavor, either; even after one was pleasantly full, the food at Kethry’s table tasted extraordinary.
Beside the platter was a second, holding fruit; not only apples, pears and grapes, but cherries as well.
Definitely not natural. Those are fresh apples, pear season is over, grapes are ripe, but cherries won’t be for another moon, and apples don’t ripen until fall.
But the sun felt wonderful, the apple she’d just cut into quarters was pleasantly tart, and Kero didn’t much want to think about anything for a while.
I’m going to enjoy this, however it came about. Father was wrong about Grandmother, and he was probably just as wrong about mages in general.
“Think you’re ready for some family history?” Kethry said, casting a long look at her from across the old table, as Kero reached for a piece of sausage. “I think I have a fair number of surprises for you. For one thing, you have some rather—unusual—cousins. Quite a lot of them, in fact.”
Kero froze in mid-reach.
The sorceress sat back in her cushioned chair, tucked flyaway hair behind one ear and smiled at her expression. In her russet gown of soft linen she looked nothing at all like a feared and legendary mage. She looked like the matriarch of a noble family.
And I must look like a stranded fish, Kero thought, trying to get her mouth to close.
“Don’t look so stricken, child,” Tarma said, and reached across the table, picked up the sausage, and dropped it into her hand. “There’s no outlawry on the family name. It’s just—well, you have a lot more relatives than you know about. Those cousins, for instance.”
“I do?” She gathered her scattered wits, and took a deep breath, only then becoming aware that she was still clutching the sausage. She put it down carefully on her plate. “I mean—you said something about daughters and granddaughters earlier, but Mother never said anything—I didn’t know what to think. How many? Did Mother have a sister or—”