Chapter 19: Chapter 19: The Weapon of The Priests

In teaching Seth how to walk, the stance Jabari always had him begin with was awkward. Even to a child’s mind blanketed in curiosity, adventure, and a mild coloring of maturity, there was no sense in it.

In it, Seth stood uncomfortably. It kept the toes of one foot always a few inches ahead of the other, as if shuffling forward in a contemplated step. Seth imagined it was set in some anticipated frontward action. Time told him he was wrong.

“They are individuals,” Jabari would say. “They care nothing for each other, never had, never should. They only exist to do as they are told. The older children get, the more they forget this, replacing standing orders where they’d seen the individuality as troubling to command.”

Jabari once showed him what moving from the stance resembled, awing him with the versatility of it.

When Jabari stood, he stood with the toes of his right foot inches ahead of his left, legs shoulder length apart. It made him lean almost imperceptibly to the right. But when he moved, he was, in a simple phrase, a symphony of motion. His right leg leaned forward, then he swayed left. Seth had no understanding of how he had done it. It had been slow and purposeful, obviously intended for him to see. Jabari had led with his right only to go left. The left leg had done something Seth did not understand.

When Jabari did it again, taking the exact same stance, he moved to the right. Each time he moved, Seth’s mind had been certain of where he would go, only for the priest to head in the opposing direction.

There was a trick to it. Seth knew this as a child knows their parents are biological, and he was determined to learn it.

Jabari did the best he was willing to as he taught Seth, using words where actions seemed lacking and insufficient and Seth listened and strived to learn. But while he often developed a mild understanding of the priest’s words, it was never enough to understand all of it.

But Seth didn’t need to understand to do what he was told, he simply had to watch and mimic. Understanding was left to things like decision making, and philosophical debates, and he was neither leader nor philosopher.

In time, he found the pattern of how the man walked.

So every morning after the first month, he would stand awkwardly, crouched in attack, and draw, now glad that he did not have a tree to strike. Without a target, his return was impressively better and the strain of the task vastly lesser.

He would draw blade from sheath, listening to it cut through the air like a particularly silent whip. Then he would pull it just at the peak of its arc, returning it with a specialty. The trick, he’d learned, was in the timing of the wrist. If he flicked it just at the time the blade completed its full draw, he could get it back in its sheath better.

When he’d told Jabari one evening, during one of the priest’s conversational moods, he’d been met with a surprising response.

“Wrong.”

“But it works,” he argued.

Jabari made a pattern in the grass Seth couldn’t follow, his hand twirling and curling in strange patterns. It was something he did every evening that Seth couldn’t understand.

When he spoke, there was no delay in his action, conversation and pattern seeming as individual actions carried out by separate people. “That something works,” Jabari said, “does not mean it’s right.”

“But it works,” Seth repeated.

“Yet it remains wrong.”

“Then what’s right?”

“Figure it out.”

Seth did not stop, though. He continued with the flick of his wrist at every culmination of the draw. It made his return easier, his draw faster. The tip of the blade flickering at the end of its arc. And for someone who claimed it was wrong, Jabari never reprimanded him for it.

…………………………

Seth had just finished his breakfast after the tasking ordeal of morning practice. His legs ached as much as his shoulders, perhaps even more. Taking a striking stance with the form of standing Jabari had made him learn worked his legs and his bare feet as much as the draw worked his arm.

He felt the effect in the soles of his feet as they touched the ground since he was never allowed any footwear while he learned it. It was in the swell of his calves, the flex of his thigh. It was worse in his inner thighs where both legs met his groin.

Everything ached save his right arm, an arm that was once his good arm, now relegated to the title of 'useless arm.' It remained cradled in a sling, unchanged since the first day, without feeling or much of anything. These days he caught himself forgetting he even had it at all.

“So…” he continued, drawing on the word as Jabari picked up another apple. “What is the weapon of the priests?”

“Which priests?” Jabari said. “Specificity is much more important than you think.”

“The seminary,” Seth clarified. “What’s their weapon?”

“Any.”

Seth’s brows furrowed. “That doesn’t seem efficient.”

“Perhaps.” Jabari took a bite of an apple, incompletely peeled. There was a previous apple perfectly relieved from its skin resting on the grass beside him.

“If they focus on one weapon, then they spend more time on it and master it,” Seth continued.

Jabari studied the apple in his hand as if he didn’t particularly like the outcome of the first bite. “I said any, child, not all.” He took another bite then stared at the apple again, almost as if slighted somehow.

“So….” Seth let the word trail off, so that the priest would create a sentence out of it, give an answer without him having to ask a question.

Jabari tossed the apple over his shoulder then reached for the one in the grass without a word. The priest did not indulge him.

When the silence lasted long enough that Seth felt the man had forgotten their conversation as he often did on a few occasions, he made a little noise to remind him. It was in the clearing of his throat, the mild sniffling of his nostrils like someone who'd found a certain discomfort in their nose and needed it gone but where unwilling to pick at it with a finger.

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Jabari spared him a simple glance at this and paused, waiting. Still, he said nothing.

“So…” Seth repeated, hopeful.

Jabari continued to stare, patiently. “So what?”

“Why any?”

Jabari shrugged.

He has no frigging idea? Seth wondered, confused.

If that was what Jabari expected him to believe, then the Seminary was an even deadlier place than he thought. For Jabari not to know it meant the tradition was—unsurprisingly—older than his time as a priest. But more intimidating was that he was not at the top of the hierarchy since those at the top would obviously know. Seth had always suspected this, but to have some form of confirmation was quite daunting. Though he tried to put it from his mind, it troubled him nonetheless. Just how powerful are the other priests?

When he refocused his attention on Jabari, he found the man eating the second apple. While his expression remained displeased, it was not as grave as the last one.

When he’d gone halfway through the apple, he turned to Seth and offered it to him.

Seth moved to take it with both hands and failed. In the end, he received it in his single hand.

“Good.” Jabari nodded. “That one doesn’t have as much poison.”

Seth froze, the apple touching his lips.

“Hurry,” Jabari added. “We have to move. We should be at the border soon enough. And there is a ship we have to get to before it leaves.”

Seth’s mind split almost immediately, as if unable to comprehend everything he’d just heard as a singularity. One part turned over the first statement, seeking out a joke where he knew there was none. Had the man eaten half a poisoned apple for fun? It turned to the other apple, its attention on it distorted. Without command of his eyes it was merely aware of the apple's position as one is aware of where something is in their room when they are out. He caught it wondering just how poisonous the one in the grass was for it to have been discarded.

Where was the priest even getting poisoned apples? Snow white’s step-mother?

In another part of his mind, he pondered most on things he feared. There he dissected the second statement. That they were leaving the territory had not come as a surprise. Still, like the realization that the seminary had mages stronger than Jabari, a confirmation of it shook him at the core. But wouldn’t the territory’s boarders be closed? He wondered. Though no longer in his father’s part of the Baron's territory, the son of one of the Baron’s lords was still missing. It had been three months, but still…

Did the loss of a Lord’s child amount to nothing?

He’d understood when no one had come looking days after his accident. He’d even understood when they’d left his father’s territory without hinderance. They’d been travelling through the woods, often times moving through the decrepit rubbles of dilapidated buildings, remnants of the despair of the first world crack. Untouched in decades and practically forgotten. He’d been surprised at the absence of wild life of any kind, soul beasts or otherwise. He had expected to run into them at least once, since they were usually rampant in abandoned parts of the world and was surprised not to find them. And since very few humans and mages ventured into these parts except the occasional adventurer or hunter, it explained why no one had come for him. But to be able to leave the Baron’s territory so easily with the kidnapped child of a lord was ludicrous.

Yet Jabari certainly spoke of it as if there would be no hindrances; as if it was to be expected.

The priest's confidence was terrifying.

The fact that he wanted to hurry to a ship meant they would traverse a massive body of water, and ships only docked at ports.

The Baron's Fief had only one port Seth knew of, and there would be guards there. His mind smiled at that thought, a drop of light in an ocean of fear and doubt. But to his surprise, his mind didn’t seem as pleased with this as was to be expected. In it he felt a touch of hesitation, as if returning home was becoming less a priority and more an option; a less appealing one, at that.

Unlike the other minds, Seth’s third mind didn’t really have any task. It simply spared its attention on the point where the apple touched his lips, wondering if the contact was enough to poison him. There, untasked, it hovered in boredom.

Then, within the space of a breath, it pulled up every single piece of fruit Jabari had offered him since their journey began. Every pheasant. Every drink of water. Every nonchalant offer of consumable. Had they been poisoned too?

You’d be dead if they were, retard, his thoughts whispered back in response, mocking him.

“Do not dally, boy.”

Jabari’s words broke him from his strange cognitive dissonance. He turned as his minds seemed to reunite, losing their individuality, though he knew they remained separated, hovering at the edge of his attention like quiet children scheming a particularly daring theft.

Jabari stood and dusted his spotless cassock. “Eat so we can move,” he said.

They were simple words, nothing new in the past few months. But his next words sent a shiver through Seth.

“And be quick about it, there isn’t enough poison in there to kill you. There never is.”

With that, he turned, picked up the tachi, and walked away.

Seth’s attention moved to the apple in the fraction of a second before leaving it. When it returned to Jabari, the unnaturally long sword was gone as if it had never been. He frowned at how irksome it was each time the priest hid it away as he came to his feet, following quickly.

He took a tentative bite of the apple as he walked and tasted nothing out of the ordinary and cast his worry aside. If Jabari wanted him dead he’d have died long ago.

He made a thoughtful sound somewhere between a grunt and a groan as he chewed, bare feet carrying him in uncomfortable steps.

Doesn’t taste so bad, one of his minds noted.

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