Chapter 16: Chapter 16: Clemency

Seth struck again, the blade coming free with a troubling hiss. Its sharp edge struck the tree before him, bouncing off with a jarring clang as if striking metal. He felt the impact from his hand all the way to his shoulder. It stopped there, terminating in a silent throb.

It was a week now since the priest had him doing these drills.

Jabari, he thought as he sheathed the massive tachi. His name is Jabari.

The priest had insisted he remember it and he was motivated to do so.

Sweat dripped from his brow, blurring his vision in one eye, and he wiped it with the sleeve of his shirt. Its week old stench did not escape his nose.

He returned to his stance without vigor, took a deep breath, intending it to calm his nerves but knowing it would fail, and drew once more. The tachi came free again, its deep blue blade, longer than he was tall, glinting in the afternoon sunlight.

He braced for impact as it struck the tree, his mind splitting thrice to contain every action.

One part he tossed to the task of containing the pain of the impact, another he gave to the task of tracking the new path of the blade no longer controlled by his sword arm, his throbbing arm doing its best to redirect it. The third, he tasked with maintaining the location of the scabbard now strapped to his waist. With his other arm out of commission, he was forced to keep a mental tab of where it was. There was no purpose to a successful retrieval if he missed the scabbard in its entirety.

The monotony of ‘the draw,’ as Jabari called it, was anything but boring. It tasked him, and forced him to work his mind. Having three of them to work was interesting, despite the confused fear it brought, and he couldn’t complain.

Its constant use led to a decrease in his headaches and he was glad for it. The aches throbbed lesser now, and he had moments when he completely forgot about them.

With another failure, he looked down at his right arm, mildly perturbed by it.

A week ago, if he’d been told a day would come where he would be forced to rely on his left arm because his right was useless he would have called whoever was responsible horrible names.

Now, watching his right arm cradled in a sling against his chest, the discomfort he felt was confusing. Scarier, still, was the fact that his left arm was functional, more so than it had ever been. In the past week it had given neither discomfort nor weakness.

It hadn’t even given up on him…

Yet.

Seth drew again, taking an odd excitement as his mind split despite failing to return the tachi properly to its sheath. The tip of the blade clattered slightly against the edges of the entrance on its return before it found the hole. He forced it in without care and it slid in noisily, sealing shut with a loud clack as hilt struck scabbard.

He looked around taking a momentary break and found no sign of Jabari. It did not surprise him. Since fixing his arm—if he was to believe the man—he’d been constantly away. It was the way with them now, a simple reenactment of actions everyday.

They would rise at the crack of dawn and eat a meal of what Seth suspected was roast pheasant, though he wasn’t certain, having asked once to no reply. Satiated, which Seth never really was, the priest would pick out a tree and set him to the task of the draw, then leave, coming back only at the dawn of dusk.

Today, however, Jabari came somewhere in a time lost between noon and dusk.

“The trail is clean,” Jabari said without preamble, patting the back of Seth’s target as he passed it. “There’s no one for miles.”

Seth’s first thought went to why a Baron would need to physically check his environment. Barons, he’d heard, could sense a wide range of their environment with nothing but their spirit—whatever that was. The thought came with a realization that he’d never truly confirmed what authority the man held. He’d merely assumed because Macbeth had been a powerful gold, judging from the deference his father had given him. It was the likes of which a Lord gave only to a soul mage standing at least on the threshold of equal authority.

It sufficed that Jabari would be more powerful. And Jabari had, after all, ended the man’s life along with the contingent of guards he’d come with.

Guards with reia guns, his mind added.

Oddly, he thought he heard the same mind laugh mockingly, as if at a particularly cruel joke.

Another realization came soon after.

They’d been in the same place for three days and had come across no one. Or to be more precise, no one had come across them. Where they even searching?

He’d thought as a son his father would’ve already begun searching by now, turning stones and uprooting trees in search of his lost child.

But does he even know? One of three minds asked.

He must, he answered. The accident had happened barely four hours away from the house. They had undoubtedly still been within his father’s territory. There was little doubt they had even left it.

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Perhaps they think you’re dead.

Seth shook his head in disagreement. He was the only child in the convoy, and he’d survived. The absence of a thirteen-year-old’s body from the crash site would be quite glaring. On habit newly born, he reached for the tachi as he conversed with himself and took the hilt in hand. There’s no excuse.

There is also the—

He drew the blade free and his mind exploded in blinding pain. It split thrice upon itself at the touch of the hilt, its words echoing as if it had spoken into an empty room, and the sentences splintered like crushed glass.

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The tachi fell from Seth’s hold, barely leaving its scabbard, to clatter in the dirt.

His thoughts exploded in his head, each broken word incomprehensible to him, their meanings hovering at the edge of his senses like imagined objects lurking in the dark. It was as though something took his brain and scraped it along shards of broken glass.

His knees scabbed as he fell, hitting the coarse dirt he did not feel, pain establishing dominance as he squeezed his only working hand over one ear.

His headache returned with a gleeful vengeance as if angry at being suppressed for so long.

He was a child at their mercy, sieged on all sides and begging for clemency from an enemy that did not exist.

Pain continued to prove a tyrant in his head even as he felt something warm trickle down his nose, tickling him even in the midst of all the pain.

Somewhere in his mind another sound joined the chaotic cacophony that was his broken thoughts, and somewhere in him, a part undaunted by the pain, something else echoed into the madness. He thought it was a chuckle, a suppressed laugh, as if held back simply because the moment was awkward, like a fart at a funeral.

As considerate as it felt, it broke him just as much as the broken words and the headache, adding to the pain of broken thoughts.

He tried to struggle against it as he thought the child of a lord should—as he always thought he should—but the action was pointless.

Slowly, he drowned in the void of pain.

His hand grew numb but he didn’t feel it. When something trickled from his ear, it was a lost sensation, a drop of pin in a hurricane during a blizzard.

When he screamed, it only made it worse. That he couldn’t silence himself only worsened a situation that shouldn’t have been capable of worsening.

When unconsciousness was a mere breath away, its darkness a recognizable color in the void, its embrace hungrily sought after, he heard the first coherent sound.

It felt like the first thing he was ever understanding, and it pierced the madness like an unnaturally solid pin through timid glass.

“That’s quite enough of that.”

The words were simple, apathetic. Something touched him after them, and everything stopped.

A hand rested on his shoulder drawing every drop of his senses to it so that he felt nothing else, and he felt nothing but gratitude for it. As an atom of order returned to him, a soft realization of how horrible everything had been, came with it.

He’d lost himself there for a while, he realized, perhaps more than a while. He’d been a prisoner of his own mind, trapped in a world collapsing on itself, shattered in countable pieces he could not count. He knew there had only been three pieces now, but then it had felt like more. It hadn’t been the quantity that had been the problem, he knew with an odd certainty. It had been the quality that had broken.

Slowly, in the reign of the loving quiet, he slumped forward.

When his face hit the rough sand, he was glad for its coarseness; glad he had the presence of self to feel it.

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