Ash and Silver by Berg Carol

Author:Berg, Carol [Berg, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-11-17T08:00:00+00:00

• • •

I didn’t get back to the docks to examine Fix’s maps right away, nor to the infirmary to check on Inek. I had no opportunity to address any of the plaguing mysteries. On the morning after my adventure with Fix, the Marshal ordered all knights-in-residence, parati, and squires to the mainland for general exercises.

As the fortress erupted into frantic preparation, a tyro brought me a wax tablet:

Greenshank. Hone your skills and await your master’s orders.

The quaking fool couldn’t tell me who sent it. But I knew. I couldn’t fret; there was not a moment to consider Damon or anything but the present.

After a day’s storm-wracked row up the coast to Val Cleve, we spent fourteen days of hard riding, hard marches, and hard fighting. We dueled and fought in the melee. We practiced attack formations in open country and skirmished with small determined cadres in dense forest. A series of increasingly difficult archery challenges for my little cadre while under attack put me in mind of Damon and his odd emphasis on my skill with the bow. But I’d no time or strength to question. Every tyro, squire, paratus, and knight was pushed to his limits.

This wasn’t the first such general exercise since I’d been at Evanide, but it was by far the most brutal. By the seventh day, pain, blood, and exhaustion were the entirety of our existence. March. Fight. Ride. Fight. Crawl. Fight. Eating and sleeping were unimaginable, and yet magic failed without food or rest. One of Inek’s former squires drowned when his boat capsized. Two men died of wounds in the melee. A knight was terribly burned when a panicked paratus’s defensive spellwork rebounded. Not even pureblood healing could remedy the virulent sepsis and sheer bodily damage from severe burns. The man would surely die in agony, and the paratus be dismissed. It was a dreadful loss.

My small cadre was fortunate. Dunlin broke his left arm, but fought on with determination and assurance. Heron escaped the melee uninjured, but ended with a harsh cough. He’d inhaled sea water while rescuing the drowned squire’s two comrades. I’d been so intent on taking out a tricky target deep in a gloomy woodland with an arrow I could scarce aim, an attacker slashed my lower back. I never even saw who did it. I owed Dunlin’s superior swordwork that the wound was not a fingertip deeper. The exhilaration of hitting the near-impossible target almost made up for the humiliation, and the pain merely blurred into the horrific landscape.

Reason peeped out from time to time warning of the implication: the Order was preparing for all-out war. Not immediately, but soon. The days until autumn and the Sitting were growing fewer. That was when all would come to a head. Damon’s plot. Damon’s war. I was sure of it.

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