The Shadow Within by Karen Hancock

Author:Karen Hancock
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2010-07-27T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

21

Late the next morning, as Simon was leaving the Royal Fencing Hall on the far eastern side of the palace grounds, he was waylaid by Ethan Laramor. After several hours spent at hard weapons practice, followed by a leisurely dip in the hall’s outdoor baths, Simon was feeling more relaxed and content than he had in some time. And after all the trouble he’d taken to avoid meeting with his Borderer friend over the last few days, finding him waiting in the hall’s main yard was as dismaying as it was surprising.

Laramor, though he did make use of the archery range, rarely came to the fencing hall itself. In fact, few did, and the great high-ceilinged room where scores of young men once gathered to practice now echoed with the sounds of but a few. The stars of the sport, and those who would become stars, practiced there, but few of those were noblemen anymore. The decline had begun in Simon’s youth and was now in full swing, the art that had once been the full measure of a nobleman reduced to sport. Nowadays, while the courtiers were happy to spend an evening watching—and wagering on—various matches, to actually pick up anything more than a decorative sword themselves was increasingly unthinkable. Gillard’s skill and interest were tolerated as an amusing eccentricity, neither emulated nor aspired to by most of his peers. Thus the hall often stood empty, its lofty spaces mocking the few who dared intrude.

Abramm had come down to watch some of the practice matches yesterday, and everyone was still buzzing about it this morning. Why had he come? Would he be back today? Was he thinking of taking lessons? No one knew, but the visit had elicited more excitement than Simon had seen in some time, and everyone from Headmaster Tedron to the lowliest towel boy had only good things to say about their new king. They were especially enamored with that sling of his, which he had been persuaded to demonstrate again. Another cabbage had died—though he’d needed five attempts—and today the young boys, some of them noblemen’s sons, were out in the sparring yards practicing with makeshift slings of their own.

Only boys, perhaps, but it marked a watershed: Yesterday, if they’d been practicing with any weapons at all it had been swords. Today it was slings.

A large part of the fascination undoubtedly sprang from the thing’s novelty, though Simon had to admit the weapon had its good points: simple and cheap to make, easy to carry, and you never ran out of ammunition. And seeing the ease and accuracy with which Abramm used it the day of the picnic had done much to revise his view that it was a crude weapon used only by the unskilled and uncouth.

Nor was that the only thing about which his views had been revised that day. His opinion of Abramm himself, already on the rise, had taken a major jog upward, thanks not so much to the business with the sling or even the courage he’d shown in Graymeer’s, but to the way he’d handled his horse.

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