Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1) (44 page)

“Call them off or I’ll be painting everything
red.”

It was what Aedan had feared. With a hostage they
could dictate anything they pleased. He opened his mouth to speak when he noticed
something in Ilona’s hand. She raised her arm and Aedan caught the glint of a
blade just before she jabbed it into her attacker’s thigh. He screamed and
dropped his hands to the injured limb. Ilona ducked away, but she caught her
foot on something hidden in the long grass, and fell. The man drew her knife
from his leg with a shudder, raised his own to throw at her, and then dropped in
a heap as a rock collided with his head.

Peashot looked down with a savage smile.

Aedan’s attention was pulled away as someone
yelled. He turned to see Hadley struggling on the ground under a boy larger and
heavier than him. The boy was clawing, spitting and biting like a rabid dog.
Teeth marks in Hadley’s neck began to well with blood. The clawing became more
frantic and then, gradually, the arms wilted and fell limp. Hadley released his
hold on the boy’s neck and both of them slumped back and lay still.

Only one of the gang remained standing, knife
poised. Lorrimer and Vayle were circling him. Vayle hobbled noticeably as he
thrust and swung Aedan’s staff, his training sword still tucked away on his
back. He was clearly too weak to step in and commit himself, and it seemed that
Lorrimer was too timid.

Aedan had been moving to assist Hadley, but he
changed direction. He grabbed Hadley’s fallen sword, ran at the thug, drew his
attention with a yell, and hurled the sword at him.

The man jumped aside and faced Aedan, forgetting
the other two for only an instant.

Vayle’s staff descended on his head, followed by
Lorrimer’s and then Vayle’s again. He sagged like a collapsed tent.

“Quickly,” Aedan shouted, as he rushed back to Hadley
who looked unnaturally still. “Tie them up. Cut ropes from the stalls.”

Hadley was breathing in shallow gasps, there was a
lot of blood on his face, and one eye looked wrong. Ilona left Malik propped
against the cart wheel and rushed over. Aedan caught his breath as he saw the
red film over the lower part of her neck.

“You’re hurt.”

“It’s not deep,” she said. “He only cut the skin.”
She began to look over Hadley, prodding with the greatest of care, and soon
found the painful area between his ribs. She lifted his shirt to reveal an
ugly-looking gash.

Aedan thought his friend was done for and turned
away with a groan.

“Don’t worry, Aedan,” Ilona said. “It didn’t reach
the lungs. No bubbles in the wound. No coughing blood. You just need to help me
put on a bandage for now.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” She smiled.

“How is Liru?” he asked, looking to where Delwyn was
nursing her.

“Broken arm, I think. Maybe shoulder too. She was
hit very hard. And they enjoyed it.” Her eyes spilled over, and Aedan’s fists
clenched. “What kind of people do that?” she said.

“People that belong in prison or worse.”

She finished with the bandages and looked up.
“Thank you, Aedan. I know it was you. We’ve all heard about your ways with
strategy.”

Aedan turned his eyes down, embarrassed.

“I have been horrible to you for a bad reason,”
she continued. “When you and Peashot took the last places in that endurance
trial, it was Malik’s best friend who lost out. I hated you for it. But he
couldn’t have done what you did here. And he would never have done what you did
for my grandparents. I’m glad now that you beat him, just don’t tell Malik I
said that. Malik spent a year training him.”

Something of Malik’s hatred began to draw into
focus. But then everything in Aedan’s mind went into a wild blur as the
dazzling girl leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead.

Peashot and Kian jumped down. Kian’s face was half
bloodied by a deep scratch. A rock had been returned to him with a powerful arm.
As they joined the others and helped to cut ropes, one of the gangsters began staggering
to his feet. Peashot rushed at him with a wild scream and planted a knee in the
man’s face. The gangster fell and so did Peashot, clutching his knee and shouting
a string of words that would have put any of the thugs to shame.

The tramp of boots announced a regiment of
soldiers. They had heard the noise and come to inspect. Coren, who was still
recovering from the shock, gave them the details. The whole gang was chained
and removed to the city prison.

All but one.

Aedan noticed with a rush of dismay that the man who
had wrestled his staff from him was not in the final number. And that man would
tell Clauman what had happened.

Hadley spent three weeks in a dangerous fever and the
vision in his right eye was blurry for months afterwards. Mistress Gilda said
he was very lucky to still have the eye at all. Vayle had been stabbed in his
leg. He limped for weeks. Liru and Malik both had broken bones which had to be
set, and the rest of the group escaped with bruises and cuts. The gang was
jailed with no chance of release for many years.

News of the rescue spread through the academy,
drawing a bewildering amount of attention. Envious classmates were thoroughly
impressed with the injuries the boys now sported, particularly Hadley’s and
Malik’s.

Peashot was mad that he had gained nothing more
than a bruised knee.

The group told and retold the story, expanding a
detail here and there, until it sounded like they had conquered an army of
ogres. They remembered clearly what moves they had done, and the explaining was
always accompanied by swinging arms and explosive noises – with a good measure
of argument over who hit whom and when. They had the decency, however, to
forget that after the encounter Lorrimer had found himself a quiet spot and
indulged in a brief cry.

The whole business was something at which the
girls might have rolled their eyes and raised their noses, dismissing it all as
boyish imaginings. But Ilona and Liru, two of their own, had been present. So,
instead, they fussed over the conquerors, Hadley in particular, calling them
brave and honourable until the boys who had missed out became quite miserable and
sick of it all.

Malik never once commented on the fight. He fell
completely silent whenever the topic was raised. His taunting of Aedan came to
an end, but there was no doubt that the cold anger in his eyes grew colder and
fiercer. It was as if Aedan had offered insult by rescuing Malik’s family.

The masters were all very pleased with the boys,
and Matron Rosalie scolded them for being reckless. They managed to find favour
with her again when they arranged for Enna to prepare a stew in the hostel
kitchen. Enna was immediately given a job and Peashot an appetite.

Dun used the encounter with the gang as an
exercise in strategy. He recreated the environment in the training hall where
many variations were discussed and played out.

The general feeling was one of pride, but it was
one in which Aedan could only partly share. Both Peashot and Hadley asked him
about the bruises he had sustained before the fight, and how he had known the
attack would happen, but he wouldn’t talk of it, and they let him be.

One evening, Aedan crept out of bed, opened a secret cubby in
his desk and withdrew a tattered page. He clutched it and made his way to the
kitchens where coals would still be glowing in the oven.

For a long time he stood with the folded page in
his hand, thinking, remembering. He counted the beatings – three in the north,
one on the journey, one that Harriet had interrupted, and the last one. Something
had changed, broken in him during that last beating. Though it was one of the
mildest, it had been different. Before, he had been thrashed for something he
had done, but the last time it had seemed he was being thrashed for who he was.

In him, there had been a secret longing to reunite
with his father, and it had been chased away, bleeding. Clauman would not be
collecting him from the academy to work with him. There would be no father-and-son
togetherness.

Never again.

That bubbling cauldron of remembered injuries and
fermented hate slid forward from the dark inner chamber and began to tip again.

He could not use his fists, but there was a better
weapon. From now on he would know his father no more. Clauman would be a
stranger to him. Aedan would be deaf to his words and blind to his face. His
father was dead.

He looked at the page, considered opening and
reading it one last time, then decided against it. He knew what it said, every
word. None of it meant anything to him now. With a flick of the wrist, he spun it
into the coals. It perched there for some time before beginning to blacken and
smoulder. Finally it burst into flames.

To watch it flake and crumble hurt more than he
had expected, but he did not try to rescue the page. He stayed until it had
disintegrated, and wondered if little Dara would understand, for it was she who
had written out the words with such care.

In the weeks that followed, Aedan took to long
periods of brooding. Part of him wanted to wander out and chance upon his
father that he might unleash his bitterness and completely ignore the man in
the most obvious way possible, but another part of him was afraid.

His father had warned him that revenge would be
severe if he meddled with the robbery. And he had meddled. It was difficult to
know if the threat was real, and it hung over him like an axe suspended from
the roof beams by a ragged string.

“Aedan, must you get mud
all
over the floor?”

Hadley was the only one in the dorm with any notion
of orderliness. His notion was unanimously disregarded.

“Just sharing,” Aedan mumbled as he passed
Hadley’s section on the way to the little washing cubicle.

He got a lot of mud off, and a lot remained. This
was fairly normal. On the way back he left samples of deep brown and wild ochre
with every step.

The others were in bed. He passed their alcoves
one by one and noted the familiar scenes. Hadley looked down at the mud stains
and shook his head; Vayle was lost in a book, probably some abstract and
philosophical tosh like the meaning of meaning, far beneath the notice of any
normal boy; Lorrimer was crouched over a page, lips and pen moving together,
obviously composing another poem; and Peashot was lying on his back adding a
gravestone to his collection scratched in the wall.

“You miss curfew every rest day,” Peashot noted, his
voice carrying round the log partition as Aedan dropped onto his bed. “How come
you don’t have any charges?”

“Who says they know?”

“Well how do you get back through the gates?”

“I don’t. I climb the wall.”

“Are you mad? It’s high enough to break both your
legs if you fall. And the grips are tiny.”

“Been good for my climbing.”

“Slipping won’t.”

Aedan grunted.

“You’re not still taking the shortcut back through
the law wing are you?”

“Of course.”

“Didn’t you hear what happened to Kian and Warton?
They got caught by that Iver everyone’s been warning us about. When he finished
with them Warton was actually crying – least, that’s what Cayde said. Those
older law students are bad news and this Iver is a champion street brawler.”

“So? Why should that scare me?”

“He’s at least nineteen, and huge. What are you?
Thirteen?”

“Almost fourteen. I’m not walking around just
because they want it to themselves. Slipping through the law-wing boulevard
cuts off a quarter of a mile. Anyway, these flabby law students would have to
catch me first.”

Peashot made a rude sound. “One day you’re going
to get snagged. You’re always snooping around anywhere that’s forbidden or dangerous.
Where’d you go today? Some wild and lonely spot again?”

“The oak and hawthorn section of the forest.”

“You mean the dark and eerie section.”

“I don’t think it’s eerie. And don’t give me the
Fenn-scout lecture. I always take sword, knife and bow, and anyway, the scouts
would have no reason to go into those areas.”

“Master Dunn would skin you if he found out you
were wandering there alone. But you’re probably right. No scout with half a
brain would go into that area. I’ve only seen it from the hill. Don’t even know
how you get in past the brambles. Sometimes I think you’re like one of those
tracker mongooses – still half wild.”

“He’s more than half wild,” Vayle observed, his
voice floating down the room. “Have you seen the way he moves when we’re in the
forests? Doesn’t make me think of a mongoose. More like a marsh eel in muddy
water. I heard that not even Wildemar could find him during the last survival
challenge. Probably found another one of those inaccessible spots. If you ask
me, I’d say he goes there to sing.”

Aedan shook his head. “Vayle thinks I can’t sing,”
he explained.

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” Vayle said. “It’s
just that you sing worse than anyone I’ve ever heard before.”

Aedan threw a wet sock over the partition with
just enough weight to travel two cubicles and land in Vayle’s. It produced a
suitable reaction of disgust.

“You always take that leather case that you hang
around your neck,” said Peashot. “You guard that thing like it’s full of gold
and rubies. Aren’t you ever going to tell us what’s inside?”

“Touch it and I’ll kill you.”

Peashot chuckled. “So what’s the real reason for
your gloomy wandering?” he asked. “Why do you like those kinds of places?”

“Why do you always draw gravestones?”

Peashot didn’t answer.

“Maybe it’s the quiet,” Aedan resumed. “Let’s me
think, or maybe it’s the opposite of normal thinking, more like untangling. I’m
comfortable in those spots.”

“Suits your mood lately – somewhere between angry
and sulky. You’ve been different since the festival.”

Aedan didn’t want to explain.

Hadley walked up and leaned against the rough log
partition. “It’s not Liru’s influence, is it?”

“What do you mean?” Aedan asked, bristling.

“She
is Mardrae
.” Hadley was the only one
in the group who hadn’t warmed to Liru. It was rooted in the one unfortunate
trait he shared with Malik – a distrust of those from far-off nations.

“So?”

“Well, doesn’t it bother you? There’s foreign and
there’s foreign. Kian’s alright – Orunean folk aren’t much different to us, but
these Mardrae are
very
foreign. You don’t think she could be changing
you?”

“You say Mardrae like it’s a disease, like any
change she caused would be bad.”

“Some people here think it is. Many people, actually.
They say if her father wasn’t rich, they wouldn’t have let her into the academy.”

“And you think they shouldn’t have.”

“No. I don’t really care. Just saying that she’s
maybe bringing you down with her foreign ways of thinking.”

Aedan was getting annoyed, partly because of the
prying, partly because of the way Liru was being discussed. “She has nothing to
do with that,” he said, more abruptly than he’d intended. “It’s something else
on my mind … something … different. And even if she is foreign, life is tough
for her in Castath. I’m not going to make it worse by keeping away like every
other bigot.”

But as he thought about it, he realised it was not
generosity behind his loyalty, as his words implied. It was that he cherished
her company. Liru never made him feel ashamed. He drew as much from her
friendship as she from his.

“Well, whatever,” said Hadley. “I thought I’d just
mention that she’s very foreign and strange. And stern. Weirdly stern. Maybe
someone more lively would be good company now.”

Aedan clamped his teeth. So what if she was
different? It was time to change the subject. “Well, it’s not like Peashot’s
been any brighter since he twisted his stupid ankle,” he said.

Vayle made an explosive sound from his alcove, but
said nothing more.

“And anyway,” Aedan continued, “with all the time
you spend with Rillette, soon you are going to start agreeing with all that
talk about storms bringing monsters and death and the end of the world.”

“Rillette’s not stupid, and how do you know that
the talk isn’t true?”

“I passed through DinEilan, remember. That’s where
all the rumours point. I never saw anything like what the people are saying.”

Aedan wasn’t entirely sure he believed his own
words, but it felt a lot safer to mock strange claims than support them. As a cynic
he couldn’t be pulled down; a cynic was already down.

“Well,” said Hadley, “I think we are heading for
some eerie changes. A few weeks back, this group of people from a hamlet called
Eastridge saw something fly overhead that was too big for a bird. And no, it
wasn’t a cloud. Whatever’s happening, it’s coming closer.”

“Is this the point when you usually put your arm
around Rillette?” Aedan asked.

Peashot laughed.

Hadley grinned and took it with his usual good
humour.

“Oh Hadley,” Peashot squeaked in his most
Rillette-like voice, “You make me feel so safe the way you pretend to believe
all my rubbish so you can hold me in those enormous muscly arms with your
sleeves rolled so high and your chin stuck out fearlessly at the dragons and
ghouls and – Ouch!”

Hadley landed a few more good blows that stopped
the mockery, but he was unable to silence the laughter.

“She’s never mentioned anything about dragons or
ghouls,” he said, trying in vain to present a serious defence to his laughing
opponents. “The other stuff is real. Even Lorrimer agrees.”

“What do you mean ‘even Lorrimer’?” Peashot cried.
“He still believes in that nursery rhyme about foot-biter faeries. That’s why
he always puts his boots on when he has to make a dark trip to the privy.”
There was no retort from Lorrimer. “What’s he doing?”

“What do you think?” Hadley said. His eyes rolled
with the words, but then they focussed and glinted with that familiar headlong
enthusiasm. “You two hold him down. I’ll snatch the page.” Hadley had been
trying without success to get Lorrimer to read one of his many poems – the
first thing to which he had turned his fledgling literacy skills – and Hadley
was not one to be put off for long.

Aedan and Peashot sauntered past. Lorrimer ignored
them until they spun and pounced. By the time he had fought them off, Hadley held
the page. It took all three of them to keep the tall boy down while Hadley read
in snatches. Aedan managed a peek at the writing, curious as to why Hadley was
struggling over the simpler words. The problem was visible at a glance.

Oe daffidilz ar disgusting worts comperd too yoo

Peepil ar blind and schupid if thay cant see its
troo

Evrything els has grown uglee now eevin food

Eevin wen its muttin schoo

Beecoz nun of theez ar az pritty az yoo

Peashot had begun to snigger at the first line, Aedan at the
second, and by the time the poem was finished, Hadley could read no more. The
laughter was so loud that several boys appeared at the door wanting to know its
meaning. Hadley was about to read for all, but Aedan seized the page and gave
it back to Lorrimer. The look on Lorrimer’s face had told him that the joke had
gone far enough.

“Just something Lorrimer wrote,” Hadley informed
the visitors. “It was very good.”

“Ah,” said Kian. “Who is he being in love with
this month?”

That sent another wave of laughter through the
room.

When they had the dorm to themselves again,
Peashot began singing softly, “Oh the daffodil, such a disgusting wart …”

“I’ve changed my mind about something,” Vayle
announced over the chuckles. “I think it’s only fair to Lorrimer that the truth
of Peashot’s sprained ankle be known.”

The singing stopped.

Curious heads appeared from the alcoves. All
except Peashot’s.

“Come on,” said Hadley. “Enough suspense. Tell
us.”

“Hadley, if you could push time along the way you
push everything else, you’d be an old man before the month is up.”

Hadley tapped his foot. The others grinned.

“It begins not in the training hall, as you all
assume, but in Mistress Gilda’s class. Those prize quills of hers became too
much of a temptation to our friend and I saw him filch one and slip it into his
pocket. I think you can imagine that it would have been too long, so he must
have pushed it through the material at the bottom of the pocket to keep
anything from sticking out the top.

“It should have worked, but I noticed that in the
next class while Dun was speaking, Peashot began gripping the left side of his
trousers and getting into the strangest positions. I think the quill had begun
to slip down behind his leg. That was when Dun caught him fidgeting, and
yelled, setting him off on the blue circuit.”

Vayle paused for effect.

Peashot had not emerged.

“Well, guess what happens when there is a quill
with two sharp ends held against the back of your leg and you bend your knee to
run?”

Another pause. Lights were beginning to show in
the listeners’ faces.

“Everyone else was so focussed on his sprained-ankle
lie that they didn’t see the little patches of blood higher up. He skewered
himself.”

Lorrimer’s laughter outdid the rest of them this
time. And when the fit passed it would start up again. He lay on his back,
knees drawn up, feet pounding the mattress. Peashot, surly in his corner, was
unable to do anything but wait.

“And the best part,” Vayle sputtered, “is that he
now has a fat cast on a perfectly good ankle and has to hobble around for two
weeks and then attend reconditioning classes with Sister Edith for another two.
Winter will be here by the time he’s able to stop faking the limp.”

This time, twice the number of boys jostled at the
door begging to know the reason for the mirth rocking the building. But the
little secret remained within the dorm. Only Kian would be told, but later.

Lorrimer was so tickled that after the oil lamps
had been snuffed he continued to chortle to himself. And that’s when it
happened.

“Hic! Oh no …”

There was a brief silence.

“Hic! Ouch! Blast, that was sore.”

“Lorrimer, that you again?”

Silence.

“Hic!”

“Yep. It’s Lorrimer. Again.”

Someone snorted.

“These blasted hiccups. If I could throttle them
and smash them against the – hic! – ouch! – wall … You know how embarrassing it
was at the dance. Shut up. It’s not funny!”