The Rage of Dragons (The Burning Books #1) (26 page)

“You won’t help your people if you don’t know your place.”

“I don’t think I like the place they’ve set for me.”

“It’s based on what you are.”

“They don’t know what I am,” Tau said, “but I can show you.”

Jayyed knew what was coming and he stopped marching. He faced Tau, looking down at him, letting the boy have his moment.

“Fight me, tomorrow,” Tau said. “Come to the practice yards before dawn.”

And, like that, the time for words and soft persuasion was over. Jayyed failed Tau that night, but he would try to help the boy see the truth, because, if he did, Tau could light the path to greatness for other Lessers. He just needed to be put in his place.

“I’ll meet you, Tau Solarin,” Jayyed said, “and, together, we’ll see what you are.”

Tau was drilling in the practice yards when Jayyed found him the next day. The sun had yet to rise.

There were bags under the older man’s eyes. “Morning, Tau. Care to spar?”

There was no heat in Jayyed’s voice. He could have been asking about the weather. Tau paced, letting his muscles loosen. He nodded at his umqondisi.

Jayyed stripped off his tunic and stretched, his body a mass of scars and corded muscle. He picked up his sword and shield and stood, ready. Jayyed was the taller, stronger, and more experienced man. Even the blood in his veins claimed superiority.

Tau put down his swords and pulled his tunic free. Retrieving his weapons, he twirled them through the warm air. Without a word, Jayyed attacked.

In the beginning they flowed with each other, letting their swords dance. Then flow gave way to force and, with dulled swords that could not manage the task, they fought as if to kill. Circling, attacking, defending only when they must, they pushed each other, both men seeking to send the other past the limits of his prowess.

Tau fought with the fervor of a zealot. He would prove he was more than Jayyed believed his birth allowed, and to do it he would maintain the pace until he won or his heart burst. It was what made him the fighter he was.

His edge didn’t come from his body or blood. It didn’t come from gifts. It was that he desired mastery more than he desired breath. It was that he wanted revenge more than he wanted to live. It was that his father’s life had mattered every bit as much as the lives of Nobles, and though they didn’t believe that yet, they would.

Already Jayyed was flagging and had taken to pushing off and away from Tau, using the gaps in battle to catch his breath. Then he began using the gaps to waste it.

“We are a people besieged,” he told Tau, his voice thin with the strain of speaking and defending. “We have all lost something, someone.”

Jayyed threw a feint at Tau’s face. Tau slapped it away and sent his umqondisi stumbling back.

“My mother lost her parents to a raid and I lost my wife to one,” Jayyed said.

Tau was not interested in Jayyed’s losses and fired his blades at the man’s shield and sword.

“My daughter lost her mother and never forgave me for not being there. I was in the Wrist, fighting. She hated me for that. For protecting others and not being there to protect them.”

Soft stories, Tau thought, clenching his jaw and switching from sword form to form, mutating and enhancing each as he went. He darted in, Jayyed reached up to block, and Tau’s weak-side blade cracked him in the ribs.

“Ack!” Jayyed wheezed, pain evident on his face as he backed away and continued to prattle. “My daughter is Gifted. I found out from my neighbor. Jamilah was already gone when I returned. Our hut empty. No goodbye.”

Tau hit him again, forcing out another cry of pain.

“She excelled at the Gifted Citadel.” Jayyed was retreating, unable to string together a consistent defense. “She fights now. Calls down dragons on hedeni. Relishes—Ah! Cek!” Tau had taken him in the thigh with the edge of a blade. “She… she relishes her role in their deaths.”

Tau saw a killing blow and took it. Jayyed blocked and Tau sent in another kill strike, this time with his strong side. Jayyed darted left, moving away from Tau’s swing, swaying with weariness. Tau, tasting blood from his overworked lungs, dashed forward, reengaging.

“Horrible,” Jayyed said. “To think her… like that. Anger, hate… burning her alive.”

Tau stabbed out, hitting Jayyed in the shield arm.

Jayyed yelped, grimaced, but kept talking. “This war… it’s made monsters of us. I don’t want to die a monster. I don’t want it for Jamilah… I don’t want our people exterminated and remembered that way.”

Tau growled, swords whirling for Jayyed’s head.

Jayyed blocked one sword, ducked the other, and ran backward in an unsteady lurch.

“Can’t keep going this way,” Jayyed said. “Guardian Council is too blind to see that. I tried to show them.… I analyzed attacks, numbers, tribes… each raid. Know what I found?” Jayyed punctuated the question with a thrust of his shield, meant to smash Tau in the face.

Tau jumped back, braced himself, and slammed the points of both swords into the shield’s center. Jayyed grunted. He’d have a bruise from that.

“More hedeni than we thought,” he said, “beyond peninsula. Far more.”

Tau attacked, working in a pattern that would require his opponent to raise his shield. When he did, Tau would deliver a killing blow. Jayyed would not last another three crosses. He was already dead.

“We can’t beat them!” Jayyed raised his shield and Tau smashed its underside, sending it higher, exposing the umqondisi’s core.

Jayyed didn’t even try to block, and Tau stabbed the point of his weapon into his chest. If they had been fighting with sharpened blades Jayyed would have been skewered. Tau’s sword would have pierced his chest, his heart, and come out his back like… like Aren.

It was over, but all Tau felt was pain. He looked down. The point of Jayyed’s sword was dug deep into his side, drawing blood. Had they fought with sharpened blades, Jayyed would have gutted him.

“Can’t win.” Jayyed coughed. “Not as we are. Cross-caste fighters, if we can even find and train enough of them, only prolong the inevitable.… There’s only one way we survive… just one.… Peace.”

Tau dropped his blades and batted Jayyed’s sword away from his side. “This is your answer? After all your talk of great Lessers, cross-castes warriors, and Nobles, you stand in front of me begging for peace?”

Jayyed went to his knees, holding himself up on shaking arms. “Our real war is with the Cull.” Jayyed retched, nothing coming up. “But the Royal Nobles and old queens have forgotten that. We have a new queen now and it’s time for new leaders who remember what actually matters.”

Tau was furious. Jayyed had turned his victory into a draw and it burned. “You think the child queen, the same one who did nothing when you were thrown off the Guardian Council, will get rid of the current crop of Royal Nobles? You think she’ll do this so she can surrender us to the hedeni, because our real fight is with fairy-tale monsters?”

Tau turned his back on Jayyed and spat in the dirt. “I am one man, mourning one man, and will never have peace as long as the Nobles who murdered my father are alive. How can the Omehi or hedeni do what I cannot, when our history holds almost two hundred cycles of killing? You ask too much and I see why the Royals got rid of you!”

“The Royal Nobles of the Guardian Council can’t see anything but war and the lives they’ve built for themselves from it. The queen is different and strong in her faith. The Goddess did not send us here to die on the bone spears and axes of people who are not our true enemy.”

Tau scoffed.

“The queen couldn’t stop my dismissal. She was too new to her power and throne, but I’m loyal to her, as loyal as she is to the Goddess. I’m telling you this because you can be part of the new world. Tau, the old Royals have lost their way and the Omehi too, but their time is coming.”

“Old Royals? New world?” Tau asked. “You’re not even talking about a revolution. You just want to replace one master for another.” The whole thing made him sick. He gathered his swords and walked off, clutching his injured side, leaving his kneeling umqondisi in the dirt.

“Tau,” Jayyed called after him. “Watch for sacrifice counters. Your enemy doesn’t have to win for you to lose.”

Tau ignored him. He was thinking about the Jayyed he’d known on the first day of training. The Jayyed who had told a scale of Lessers that, though men had their differences, they were nothing compared to their similarities.

Two hands, two legs, one heart, one mind. Nobles shared more with Lessers than they didn’t. They were more akin to Tau than they weren’t, and to say different was to speak lies.

Tau’s limits were not decided by his birth or nature but by the bounds of his determination and the extent of his efforts. That was what Tau believed, and he was going to prove it. He was going to show them all.

The day after he fought Jayyed and the day after that and the day after that, Tau slept no more than three spans a night. His life was offered like a sacrifice to the sword. Yet, when the moon had cycled, he was forbidden to attend the scale’s next skirmish.

He railed against the decision, demanding to speak with Jayyed, who had not come to tell him this himself. Aqondise Anan was stoic in the face of Tau’s anger, saying nothing could change the order. Word of the duel had reached the citadel umqondisi, and though Kellan Okar had relinquished his right to justice, Jayyed believed it best for Tau to remain beyond easy reach.

When his scale prepared to leave, Tau went to confront Jayyed. He was met by the men of Scale Njere. They were polite but insisted that Tau remain in the barracks.

Tau’s sword brothers returned before dawn on the next day. The skirmish had been close, but they’d lost. Tau threw over his cot and yelled in Hadith’s face; shadowed by a brooding Uduak, Hadith took a lesson from Anan and accepted Tau’s anger.

That day and the next and the next, Tau beat, battered, and embarrassed his sword brothers, as if doing so would make them better or soothe his disquiet. The lack of sleep, the overwork, the stress, and the tempers caught up to him, and he woke with a chill. He stumbled his way to the practice yards, made it through the morning run, and collapsed. No one could make him leave until Jayyed came.

Tau, feverish, threatened to fight his umqondisi. He demanded they finish what they had started. Jayyed and Anan dragged him to the infirmary. He spent two days burning off the sickness.

On the third day, Jayyed visited. He asked Tau if he was trying to kill himself. Tau, the fever gone, spoke as if he were still in its grasp. He told Jayyed he needed more time, that the days were too short for all he had to do.

“Every woman, man, child, Lesser and Noble, is given the same time in a day, and no more,” Jayyed had said.

The next morning, Tau was first on the practice yards and last to leave them. He battered the flaxen practice dummy, hitting it so hard its dented helmet spun in circles on its thin head. He sparred without relent, and even weakened from the fever’s aftereffects, he pushed himself harder than anyone else in the scale.

When his sword brothers left the yards, he fought mock battles with himself, replaying every sparring session. Then, when his body’s exhaustion could no longer be denied, he sat in the yards, eyes closed, reenacting every skirmish in his mind, mentally correcting the errors in his sword work. Still, it would not be enough.

Jayyed’s theory of training had been meant to turn cross-castes into the fighting equivalent of Petty Nobles, not Lessers into Nobles. Even so, Tau found no fault in Jayyed’s methods. They produced superior results, and those results did not depend on lineage.

The best way to become a better swordsman was through intelligent effort spent on swordplay. The more effort put in, the faster the fighter would become better. Jayyed had the right of it and Tau was trying. He was giving everything he had, but he could not match the citadel’s three cycles in the isikolo’s one.

The time remaining before Tau’s cycle of training ended was not enough for him to overcome a disciplined and trained Greater Noble’s natural advantages. A man like Kellan Okar would still be his better.

Startling the guard on top of the isikolo’s nearest wall, Tau threw his swords to the ground and yelled into the night. He went to his knees, sitting on his legs in prayer position, but had nothing to say to Ananthi.

What could he say to the Goddess, who had allowed his father to be murdered and who had made Tau a Lesser, so justice would be impossible everywhere but in his dreams? How could he treat with a creator who had given him the will but not the way?

A burst of lightning caught his attention, illuminating the black sky, forking a dozen times, and striking the distant water like a spear. That was rare. Storms and rain did not come often to Xidda. Tau waited for thunder. It came, booming across the distance, its sound reaching him in the same breath as the thought that promised to change the course of his life.

Tau rocked on his heels. He saw a way, a path waiting to be walked, and it frightened him beyond measure, because he no longer knew if he had the will. He thought to forget it, ignore it, reject it. He could go to bed, join his fellows in sleep, wake in the morning, and do as they did, training, laughing, drinking, and fighting in a war without end, against an enemy that Jayyed believed could not be defeated. He could let the memory of his father fade and become a great Lesser, a man with the skill to stand mere steps behind the Nobles on the Omehi’s march into history’s pages.

Or he could be more.

Tau, on his knees, closed his eyes, took slow breaths, and let Isihogo take him.