Kiralo: An Education In Life (0-15)
Smooth
He had never known Csirit, and so perhaps that should have made his life one smoothed like a stone in water, for there was no such thing as homesickness. And in a way it did. Early on he couldn't even imagine anything other than what he had.
From the very start he'd run around, even back when he was still in cloth diapers, exploring the house that his mommy owned. He hadn't seen anything all that odd about having a mommy and not a daddy, any more than he saw anything odd about how she acted. Normality was what it was, and so he'd run around and play with his cloth dolls and this little wooden horse that his mom had had that fit in his hand. And of course he'd eventually figure out that the two combined made for quite a bit of fun, when he wasn't running and climbing, happily ignorant of his father except in the way a letter came once in a while that left mom sad.
She smoothed his path as much as possible, teaching him how to speak. He soaked up the information, his mind as eager for motion as his body, and the world seemed the two of them, for all it wasn't true. They looked similar, as well, and while the stories she told clearly distinguished girls and boys, at that age there was little enough different in some ways between him and mommy, though she'd once whispered that he looked a little like daddy too.
He had smooth dark hair like she did, that he grew wild and long for a while, hair like she had, so long that when he dipped his fingers in it and ran down it, it was like traveling across a lake on a moonless night. She eventually taught him to pin it up like she had before she taught him how to pin it up and manage it. And she had those dark eyes with beautiful lashes, and the same soft, gentle features as him.
When men came over in dark colored layers of cloth, done up all nice and neat, layer by layer and with pretty rings on their fingers, they'd ruffle his hair, especially when he wore his 'formal clothes.' Jia had made a game of it, telling him he had to be as polite as he could be and wear this outfit that was really hot especially in the summer that made it hard for his legs to move, and was green and blue.
But it was so smooth, whatever it was made of (silk, he later learned), that he'd simply run his fingers across it sometimes while sitting at dinner where at first only smooth-faced men talked with her, and he made up affinities because their words were beyond him, and in fact sounded like gibberish to him.
Eventually there were men whose faces were less smooth-faced, and women who sat quietly as mother and their...husbands? Talked.
(Later he'd figure out that it was sort of a progression: from talking to fellow Csiritans (all young ones) and young and ambitious men, to being able to argue with and convince even those far too old to get into the silly fads of the youth.)
And he'd run and play, but when he first stepped outside he saw the world wasn't quite so smooth. In fact it was rough, complex, and he stared at the sky, and at the people who looked different from him. He was a rich yellow, and they looked as if they had been burnt just a little by the sun.
Yet still there was a gliding motion to his life, even when his mother began to teach him another language, until at last he received his first letter from his father.
Even that was smooth, but the way a cold stone was smooth.
"The third teaching of Monk Irano states that…"
"Always wise it is to know, as the ancient sage Joi says, 'that peace is better than war, but that peace can only be tended with discipline and care.'"
"'Those who act against the Gods are accursed, and those who act with them blessed. Read the precepts and learn."
The smoothest, coldest thing of all was when Kiralo was ten and one of his father's letters talked--he supposed because ten was old enough to think of it--about sexual morality in the most round-about way possible, using entirely quotes.
"She who out of wedlock has a child is twice accursed. Accursed for her child and accursed for her evil."
Kiralo, warm and smooth, who laughed when the other kids made jokes about his in-progress Southlands, who called him Ermin after a rather yellow fruit that the neighborhood boys dared themselves to steal from groves, had torn the letter up and for a year refused to see another one of them.
Smooth wasn't always good.
*****
A view of Herinzet
Herinzet was not the jewel of the Seventeen Cities. It wasn't nearly as large as Ahine, nor as rich as Sassis, but it was still a wondrous jewel, especially for a young boy, so young that the streets around their villa, located off the heart of the city, seemed the entire world. It would take years, decades, for him to slowly realize the shape and nature of the city.
The crowds yelling, especially on the Tenday markets that spread throughout the city, the perfumers and weavers who were the backbone of the city, though they didn't work with silk as some in Sassis had before the blockades.
The vastness of the city that could only truly be seen from the Prince's tower. He'd stood there once as a young man, and suddenly it was all revealed. The sprawl of buildings with slanted roofs for the seasons of hard rain, their colors muted but with bursts of festive red, the shacks and smell, the sights as the walls sprawled out.
The New Wall at the farthest reaches, well-maintained, with land even set aside for pastures so that they could have their own native cavalry, and then the Broken Wall, which sat clumped in the middle of the city like a bit of gruel that had congealed, and attracted the worst elements, as one might say, and then the Old Wall which surrounded the richest parts of the city and divided it all up.
Kiralo was born and lived out his youth in a neighborhood near the New Wall, where successful craftsmen lived, and so his journeys outside saw that and little else.
He grew, and before long his mom was teaching him Southlander, and if they mocked him for his clumsy tongue and accent, he was swift in making friends and swift in leading them on adventures across the cobbled streets, jumping and racing, laughing and playing. Eating fried dough balls covered in syrup that one boy's father specialized in making for a rich merchant with a sweet tooth.
Later he'd stand in the Prince's Tower and it would all look so small, but what he first learned of Herinzet was that it was made of people, like anywhere else.
He befriended those he could, and grew slowly towards manhood among over a hundred and sixty thousand other such people.
Yet, early on, his world seemed so small and intimate.
His view as clear as the skies above.
*****
Horse Tales
Jia taught him stories and games which were so amusing that at times he'd even forget he was learning anything at all. Stories of Csirit and stories of myths and legends, and he'd lay tucked in his cot, in his own room--which most of his friends lacked, sharing it with other siblings--as she told story after story.
But there were always certain stories he demanded. "Tell me horse stories, mommy."
She soon learned as many as she could, and Jia must have gone to great lengths to learn all of the stories of fabulous horses and great heroes riding them and even talking horses that were the spirit of all horses…
Yet he ate them up without so much as a thanks, despite all that he thanked her for. Just listened with wide eyes and imagined himself on horseback. Imagined himself a hero, someone who could protect mom and ride horses and...his imagination failed him, but he knew that horses sounded like the most amazing thing ever, and whenever he saw one, however distantly, he'd go to watch it.
And watching became deeper dreams, until at last he asked if he could have a horse. She had frowned and shaken her head and he'd tromped off outside to race someone, a traditional enough game, or throw around a leather ball with no aim in mind at all.
A few weeks later, she had bought partial ownership in a stables, and she took him down. He gaped at the wide open pitch, surrounded by iron gating, and the low, thatched stable, and the smell. It was the smell of horses, of everything that was them, and if it was pungent, that was all the better.
He gaped, tears in his eyes, and Jia said, "The stablemaster has agreed to give you lessons, there are some choices."
He went into the stable and he thought about it as he watched the horses, one by one, shown to him as the stablemaster, a dark faced man with henna'd red hair, named their virtues. This one was temperamental but fast, this one sedate and slow, and he stared at them and the more he stared the more nervous Jia was.
But then he picked an older pony, strong and steady. He was dark grey, and he snorted when Kiralo offered him food and ate, his tongue warm against Kiralo's skin. Across his face was a single patch of white, and so he was called Lightning.
"Boy," the stablemaster said, "You'll have to care for Lightning yourself if you're gonna learn anything about horses. It's hard work, not something for a soft Csiritan, yet here we are."
Kiralo had nodded and said, "I'm willing to work hard, learn hard."
"Then let's start with mucking out the stables and learning how much to feed this LIghtning of yours…"
It was like nothing else, to be on the back of a horse. To hear its heartbeat and feel its movements. It was as if he was born and lived for those moments, and as often as he could with all of the schooling he went through, all of the life he had to fit into his brief childhood, he came back here for Lightning.
*****
Lift Your Voice
This was a world of songs. So did some say, and he could believe it. Kiralo first learned to sing from his mother and the songs to the Gods that she sung in a low, quiet voice, as if she wanted to speak only to them. He'd copy her, and she'd correct him on his words, his grammar, and on how he sung it.
For a time, Kiralo even thought that song was somehow a part of his faith itself, but when he went out, there a workman sung, there a boy hummed a tune, there the lonely daughter of one of the cloth-weavers played a flute from a balcony and looked down every so often, hoping a boy might be drawn to her, dreaming of who-knows-what.
The laborers sung many songs, some beautiful and some ugly as they worked to move things in and out of a house, or load or unload a cart, "Haul it up and haul it over/ Work and work until you're through/ Time goes by like a lover's sigh…" and then one of the men had laughed and sung some alternate line, "For anyone but you!"
The men had burst out laughing at that, and he'd tried to memorize those and other words.
His mom realized quite wisely that he had far too much to do with himself to bother with an instrument, but she let him train his voice and he'd sometimes sing songs or try to make poems into songs as he mucked about in the streets and in the stables.
Yata, a friend of his, had grinned when he had first shown off a song he'd half-written himself with his mother's help and said, "Your voice is prettier than my sister's."
Kiralo had blushed and laughed and said, "Race you!"
****
The Flower Blooms
When he was young he'd shown a talent for poetry that his mother had tried to nurture. It began in songs and looped back around to songs in its own way. He would try and fiddle again and again with words, mixing Southlander and Csirit until even his mother's head sometimes spun with the way he managed to blend them together, picking and choosing meaning as his friends might steal a choice piece of fruit from a tree. This word here, and that word there, but when his father got to him and learned of it, then he sent manuals on poetry and examples of poems.
They flowed like the water and were as still and dead as well. Poems on long walks and poems on beautiful vases, poems that later he would be disgusted by, because even a vase moves, and a walk was fluid and beautiful. A ride still more beautiful. But then he had known only that the works said one thing, and his father the same thing, and so when he wrote he slipped free entirely of Southland constraints and even music to write these perfectly formed jewels that he had been so proud of.
"How fragile the greenrim flower is/ I hold it in my hand/ Like peace in a good ruler's" he'd written, and it was all but a copy of half a dozen other poems. The threefold structure, the flower imagery, the personal touch. As if a poet could not write about someone who wasn't themselves, something they wouldn't do.
Of course a poet could, but the more he studied those poems, and the more he heard the restrictions, the way this word and that word paired together was inauspicious, the way there were very specific forms and topics and the way, he slowly figured out, that his father was not actually a very good poet. He was a competent poet in the sense that the Civil Service Exams had required him to be, and he could fill in the blanks that Csiritan poetry fell into without a deft hand as easily as anyone else.
But he wasn't good at it. Competent, and that even barely.
At the time, though, Kiralo had been proud of his greenrim and had read the poem to Jia and smiled when she patted his head.
Much later, when he was seventeen, he would rewrite the poem in a way. In a way not at all. He wrote an entire poem, and like the Csiritan poems, it was all about himself. About the first two men he had killed.
There was a peasant village who had been plagued by bandits, and because the Wind-Dancers were having a sort of break, recovering from a few skirmishes, he hared off on his own after them, went to the village and talked to the elder, brought the traditional gifts and said the traditional things, and drank with the elder and the village to show that he meant well, and helped to train the villagers on the basics of self-defense, since clearly their city was not sending help just yet.
The bandits had come, but now the villagers had a Rassit, and the poorly armed bandits were routed. Five dead in a battle of ten minutes, the rest captured or run off, but what he remembered was the first as he'd ridden through the cloud of dust that he'd called up, the Spirits brown and twisting in the winds. He'd loosed his arrow and it had gone almost through the man, lodging in his chest as he rode past.
"How sturdy the bolt is/ as it leaves my hand/ To make a redrim flower/ To plant bitter and necessary harvest."
Not his greatest success, but the lines and the poem had reordered his life slightly, had made him see just what he was rejecting. A hand whose notion of peace was dominion, whose notion was that the world was fragile beneath his grip.
****
Faith
The gods began the world and they shall never end it. They were kind and they were clever, and the spirits were part of it. He would watch them sometimes. Every so often a guru would send a message through the wind, or a dangerous drunk might call on a spirit too dangerous, and even outside of that, the spirits danced and played at the edges of vision, or rose a little out of the sword that held them, or the water in its buckets.
Spirits were everywhere, and the Gods were everything and he learned their names and functions and learned to pray for them, and was even told about the Emperor.
That soon would tarnish, and yet he had thought about it from the start. The Emperor was a man, and more than that, imperfect.
He couldn't imagine the Southlands under the rule of the Emperor, he seemed so far away and the Southlanders seemed so fierce and proud and independent.
Faith buried itself deep into his heart, and like the blossom that survives underground even through the hardest winter, when all doubts had passed, there was a bountiful harvest.
*****
The Process of Living
It was harder just to live than he had expected, he'd think, as they stayed in the village for some time. She was on a sort of vacation, to find a pond and yet all they had found were streams and rivers, and rumors of watering holes that turned out to be nothing at all.
The Southlands were beautiful, they really were, rolling plains and hills, and good land that could be harvested with the help of spirits. Cattle were raised, and horses, and by the banks of the river there was fishing.
In fact, constant work was what Kiralo saw. The boys and girls, men and women, even the old worked constantly, and whereas girls were rarely let out for long in the streets, here they were out in the fields working like anyone else, when they couldn't help in the home in one fashion or another.
Every body was needed, the process of living wasn't an automatic one, but seemed to rely on sweat and labor and secretive Names whispered from father to son to son, on and on.
Great unbroken chains of labor and rest and life, and yet at night they sung and danced if any strength was left in them.
He tagged along, and occasionally Jia went back to that village, or to another, and he'd offered to help. Not the fields, but he carried things and got underfoot and learned. He made fast friends who slipped away when Jia was ready to return to the city, and he began to grow stronger and leaner in response.
His smile and strange ways clashed with his perfect Southlander accent, and they teached him the lower dialects and accents, the ways that court Southlander didn't make sense to them, and he taught them what he could, even mentioned the pieces and bits of Names he'd picked up.
The first girls he'd ever befriended had been peasant girls, who as much as anything wanted someone to talk to while they worked, wanted something to do with themselves. He tried to be polite to everyone, even the village idiots and drunks.
The people were rough, and often broken, and he knew that he was a curiosity, that's all. A strange foreigner who talked like them and was willing to play at being just another kid, and his mother was yet another, even more interesting aberration.
They stared at her as a foreigner, and as a woman who was rich, and as a woman who didn't have a husband, and as a woman who was beautiful, like something out of a dream. He'd seen enough of her to know she wasn't a dream, that she was real and that was better than any dream, but if he'd been told as a child that they wanted his mother, he would have been confused and yet...of course they did.
Beneath the exterior, she was just as concerned with the process of living as them, though, and though she indulged him they never stayed too long, never overstayed their welcome, and they brought gifts wherever they can, learned the rituals of the peasants' strange faiths enough to at least avoid offense.
Kiralo remembered it all, when the time came. And he always came with gifts. Perhaps it was like pouring water into the desert, the way the needs of the worlds were, but he remembered the stretched, drawn faces even in times of prosperity, and so he tried at least to be generous.
Everyone was trying to live, everyone wanted to continue on their lives, and after his mother's death this fact had seemed even more significant.
****
Hazel
Abdai was the son of the stablemaster, thirteen to Kiralo's eight when the crush first started, the first crush he'd ever had, and the reason he knew he was Mirena, that he preferred the company of men.
It was in the way his hair was so brown it looked like a nut, short and cut so that only a few stray tufts went beyond his head, how it looked so soft and smelled faintly always of horses. It was the hazel eyes that seemed to alight with mirth as he talked of horses and running, jumping and throwing.
It was his thick lips and wide smile, the way he had a little bit of stubble on his cheek, just the first blush of early growth, and how Kiralo would stare at it for a long time wondering what it was like to touch.
Rough, he knew, and yet.
It was the pointed way of his chin and the way his name sounded and how he laughed when Kiralo's idiot friends had started calling him 'Hazenut' when Abdai was a lovely name. It was that they worked together, that they rode together and that the first time he fired an arrow, it was because Abdai had encouraged him to do it, saying that if he was on the back of the horse, "You might as well learn a little more."
It was the way when he told his mom all of this she had looked at him and began to start reading heroic stories to him. There were romances in them, and some of them were between men, as the bold Han and the shy Kiralo (his name, but not at all like him) had fought together against the chaos to save the life of the tenth Emperor.
"Han seems like he's a jerk," he'd said one night.
"I've heard that said," Jia said fondly, "You don't need to date a Han. Or be a fool like Kiralo."
She was wrong, in a way, everyone was a fool for love, but at the time he'd nodded eagerly and realized at last what he was feeling.
Story after story taught him, wrongly in some cases, it was to be true, what to expected and taught him that it was okay, and that it happened.
He remembered once, when he was eighteen, he'd gone to a bar and when he informed a woman flirting with him that he was Mirena, she had laughed and said, "At last a man who knows how to appreciate beauty!" And then she'd leered at one of the other Rassit who had gone out drinking with him.
He'd laughed, and that was a large part of the attitude. Clans mattered, and so if a Mirena was unable to marry and go through the fumblings to make heirs, that was a matter quite different, but the act itself, the desire and even the love, was if anything celebrated in its own way.
His crush on Abdai eventually died for many reasons, but the feelings didn't.
*****
Racing Through Youth
He began to race against other boys on horseback at nine, and sometimes even challenge the people from other stables to races. Lightning was starting to get a little bit old, and he'd have to get a real horse as he grew up fast and taller than the average Csiritan. But for the moment his life was in the exercise and the feel of wind against his hair, and the bits and pieces of Names that he could learn.
He learned the word for leather and whispered and called out the Spirits so that they would soften the saddle against the horse's body. He whispered the Name of the breeze that flowed through the pasture and he watched the spirits play about him, drawn to his actions as a fly towards a carcass. Or as onlookers towards a show.
It wasn't all that surprising, really. Spirits were strange and hard to define, and he learned their names at first slowly, but he was a magpie, and bit by bit he learned the names, mostly of the petty spirits, and learned even sometimes to understand what they meant. The petty spirits didn't talk like people did, and many didn't even manifest.
It was so strange, watching their forms, which seemed tied to what they were and yet also strange. An insect with hundreds of legs or the feel of a breeze were both forms that spirits came in, including ones that touched only a single sense. A sound that told where it was or a smell that was unlike any other.
Spirits were strange, and yet everyone knew of some, everyone kept with them. Some men it was said even befriended Spirits, rather than merely working with them and trusting them. They kept close to spirits and became Gurus, or practiced any number of means to control and direct Spirits on a grand scale.
But even those that didn't grow up that way knew the joy of hearing a spirit shiver at its name, coming as it was called, knew how frustrating it could be to beg for help when the lesser spirits barely understood anything, and yet when you called them often enough, they started responding, started sometimes even lending their strength and power in their own way if you pleaded often enough.
And he learned how to command them, how to force them. Sometimes one had to blow out one's breath to call the winds, and offer string to placate spirits of cloth, but sometimes one could take.
As he grew he began to play more serious games as well. Abdai had begun to teach him the art of the bow, and now he raced around doing trick shots at targets, daring his friends to try to hit a target on the wing halfway across the pasture, or firing backwards in the old style, still used but hardly the special trick it had been before.
He learned to shoot so fast his fingers were numb at the force, and how the flight of an arrow could be whispered and begged along by a wind spirit, or made stronger by a spirit of hearth and metal. Everything that could be learned he set himself to learning it, and by the time he was eleven, his path was diverging quite widely from the scholar his father wanted him to be.
He never found out if his father knew earlier on, but Kiralo doubted it.
*****
A War of Art
Even without the increasingly warlike nature of the games he played, there was poetry as well.
His style changed and shifted and now the words flowed together and banged against each other. He'd end a line halfway through and deny the rhyme in the next, he'd put together food and flowers and have them rub lines against each other, he'd borrow Southlander words for Csiritan poetry and Csiritan words for Southlander poetry, sometimes even just for the sound of them.
It was a strange sort of mastery, like what he felt on the back of a horse, as if the entire world was something he could, if not control, at least encode.
Understand in a way. He wrote about other people as much as about himself, and about things he'd read, or things he'd understood. He wrote about far-off lands and the way that they must imagine the Southlands.
Because surely, just as people told stories about Csirit and he asked his mom and she said 'no it is not true' and just as he knew that the epics made up all sorts of things about the Southlands, surely someone in far off places made up things about both of them.
He imagined it, and imagined a different world, and blended and fused it together. He even thought to write something one day, about an outsider to the Southlands. But not a Csiritan, that was too obvious, something stranger still.
Ideas now, and poems. It was a poor weapon to repudiate his father's vision, but like a Rassit out of arrows and down his sword with only a Hektu knife left, he used what he had.
So focused was he on the war, that when it all came crashing down, he wasn't prepared at all.
*****
Rot and Purification
Then sickness came. The Arfu, as some called it, almost comically named. It struck one and left them in the bed, half-rotting away, bones softening and muscle growing weak and diseased. It didn't eat one up so much as spoil one. Jia was terrified, and cried when she heard, and told him about her father, how he'd been so strong and then gone.
People died in a day or lingered for months.
Abdai died a week into the disease, and the gang all broke up, terrified and hiding or dying. By the end of the summer season, eight thousand lie dead.
And he nursed his mother even though she tried to send him away. Changed her soiled bed clothes and fed her sweet fruit and porridge and called on every spirit he knew to help her however he can. He labored day and night, and the doctors she hired did as well, despite the costs that were wracking up.
They healed her skin and it sickened again, her heart and it struggled to beat. Everything fell apart, and yet he kept on trying. He went without a horse that whole time, and by the end he was drained.
He'd stare at her drained and dead and hate himself, because after a certain point the tears didn't come any longer and he was more weary than anything else. It made him a bad son, it made him a horrible son and he wanted to confess how horrible it was by the second month, how…
His hands shook when he was away from her, and he imagined her death and couldn't picture it or mourn it because there wasn't anything after her.
It was the grim whiteness of a corpse, and the blackness of the dead.
In the stories and the descriptions, one of two things happened. Either the pious and caring son by their treatment cures the father or mother, showing their filial piety and respect, rewarding them for it, or the parent dies. Yet dies happy, and giving a blessing or some sign that everything was worth it, that there is at least an end. Instead she lived, but broken. She lingered a year, a broken year at the edge of life, the illness past but the rot there.
She prayed a lot in the last year, for purification and not of her body.
He didn't know what to pray for, what to hope or dream for, what to act for. The Summer ended and it felt as if he were the one rotting away inside.
*****
The Other
Kiralo, Jia, and the death. The twosome, the relationship which had seemed so perfect, between mother and son, now had a third member, who wished to court the mother and leave the son behind. He'd run away from home to train with Lightning, or run the derby or write poems and now death tinged it at the edges.
He felt as cold as if his insides had been plunged into ice, and he'd run the trick shots, pushing his horse as far and fast as sense would go, and then leaping off to run some more, to hone himself until he was worn away.
He'd trudge back home and collapse into the bed as if he were one of the dead, as if he wanted this Other as much as she feared it. And then he'd wake up again, and again, and again.
The days passed slowly but they passed. He cared for her and tried to learn and listened and learned to hate, and sometimes the only warmth there was was that fire. That her mother was dying and Father was alive seemed to him such a great injustice that to think on it would send him storming off.
He was too polite to make a beast of himself with his circle of friends, but he didn't laugh, he didn't smile. He curled himself into a deeper and deeper ball until there was nothing left. He acted, he did, and felt as if it all could end only one way.
Then towards the end, it faded. It was remarkable and horrible, but when his mother finally approached death, when their long fight was at last over, when the battle was lost and the troops fleeing for their lives, then he felt at peace with it.
She had stopped crying long ago, and they'd both run out of tears and reached whatever was left on the other side of tears.
Wills, legacies, memories. Dreams.
She was leaving everything to him, she was banking on him, trusting him to go forward. She had enough wealth to give him a start, to take him to sixteen or seventeen with tutors and the stables and anything he wanted.
The best she could now give him.
A chance.
*****
A Legacy of Gold
There were many legacies, and after her funeral he dug through them. He'd known what she did, but now it became even more clear that she was an amazing woman. Widows or unmarried mothers in the Southlands went to their families, or to their families families' if they had any, and if they did not and could not remarry, they usually starved and did any scrapling work they could, unless their husband had taught them something.
The wife of a Blacksmith might become one as well to feed her children if he died, if she knew the Names of the forge and hearth and steel and fire and leather, if he'd taught her in fear of what might yet come.
Not forever, for every woman was expected to gratefully shuck the burden once their eldest son became sixteen, but it was accepted.
It was through this small hole that Jia slipped, as cunningly as ever. The money Kuojah had sent her, and the false implication that because she recieved letters from him she might have connection, was enough to begin it.
She would donate money to merchants that needed it, and if their venture was a success she would get back a portion. Gambling on good luck and good weather, meeting with people and judging them carefully. She'd grown richer and richer over the years, until even men with long beards and old rheumy eyes whose every child and grandchild had a dowry to marry anyone nodded at her when they entered, and she saved it rather than moving to the wealthy districts.
Or perhaps she'd saved it because Kiralo had friends and interests here, and everything was for him. Maybe she wasn't that different from any other widow in that way, but it was something that he couldn't have managed, something few expected of a woman, and yet she'd done it.
She had shouldered burdens he couldn't understand, including more marriage proposals than he had expected, letter after letter tossed away, and now some of the meetings, some of them men who came again and again in handsome robes backed by dozens of servants, made sense.
He wondered who he'd be if she'd accepted. Not here, sorting through all that remained of the most beautiful woman who had ever lived, the wisest and smartest the…
Every emotion he had thought was dead came to life, like the injured and half-frozen limb which suddenly received a little warmth. It burned, burned and he read through his tears, his heart torn in two and buried at crossroads.
He had friends who were there, including Yata, and he had her legacy.
So he tried to live.
*****
A House in Black and White
The tutors came in serious robes, and he dismissed and hired them as carefully as if it were his last silver piece. He was now the master of his own household, and he managed it as frugally as he could, feeling an obligation that he'd never felt before.
He had a few years, this twelve year old, and he had to make something of himself. For a time he was somber, and for another stretch he was exuberant, but it all came back to the fact that he was changed, and each time he turned to look at it, it was in a different way.
Three years of study, three years of growth.
Even of first awkward kisses that led to very little. New friends and old friends, and all the time the house was the last place he wanted to be.
It was this black and white tomb where she had died, and so he spent as much time as he could outside of it. Lightning was replaced by Cloudsong, grey and white and a beautiful girl indeed, a horse he believed could take him places.
Perhaps he was sick of blacks and whites alone.
Three years was enough.
*****
An Art to War
His vision was war, and his goal was the Rassit. He spent almost a year preparing, and he prepared by reading military manuals and learning what he could from crippled old veterans. Once he knew what he wanted, he could hire such men for the cost of a drink to spill their every story, and he listened and nodded and honed himself.
He didn't read the Csiritan books of war, not until far later. In fact, though he did want them, the letter to his father was a sign more than anything. For the past three years his father had been sending more letters, more stern and yet more formal than any of them before. As if trying to run his life from afar.
To request books on the nature of war was a sign, and it was a sign that Kuojah understood all too well.
*****
Proof of Meaning
His legs gripped tighter to Cloudsong's body as he raced along the pitch, the wind howling at his back. Faster, faster than he'd ever been. His hands gripped the short bow, so carefully chosen and so carefully made, and he pulled it back, horse racing so fast that he thought he would fly off.
Yells filled the air as he fired a bolt at the target the size of a fist on the tree. Under his breath he whispered to Anin, God of Warriors, and to the spirits of the bow and the wood, the horse and metal, to everything he could, imploring that they aid his shot. But he was already passing, and there was another target, but he shifted his right leg and Cloudsong dodged the obstacle, and now he wove while trying to line up another shot, this one through a ring hanging opposite the other one, and then turn, turn as fast as he could.
Now he did almost fall off, but he was racing ahead. Another arrow entered the air and he was knocking a fourth as he moved forward. This target was far lower, infantry probably.
The roar filled his head as he moved. Sweat almost blinding him as moved, body tense.
"Left!" a voice called, and Cloudsong turned almost literally upon a coin, and he raced down at the targets. Dozens and dozens, and he was expected to mow by them. Arrow after arrow entered the targets, and moving this fast, with this much at stake, he didn't try to get fancy. He aimed for their body and nothing more and then whipped around for the charge that was expected, groping clumsily for the sword.
Mounted Archery at targets was the same as the real thing, at least in the sense that once the targets could move and were far enough away, it was difficult. But he'd never truly practiced using the sword in these conditions, and yet he rode through the 'ranks' and slashed as he could, before being ordered to turn again, and again. To flank the foe here and charge them there, until Cloudsong was groaning under his command and until the roar of the crowd had died away. They stood in clumps and masses, and he rode by them when at last there was a call, "Halt!"
He adjusted the helmet, the horsehair itching against his back, rubbing Cloudsong and whispering. "Thank you, Cloudsong."
Maybe it wasn't enough. He felt good at what he was doing, he thought he'd done well, but they were the Wind-Dancer Rassit. He was hardly trying out for a third-rate operation, and they mostly replaced their members from experienced Rassit.
He rode up to where the three members were. One almost thirty, hair already growing grey, one a year or two younger and slightly plump, but with scars all across his face, and a third, handsome and perhaps twenty, two scars across his chin, with perhaps the most impressing moustache he had ever seen.
"I do say...that was...well," the plump one began.
"Were you born in the saddle, boy?" the greying man asked, his voice fast and rapid, bordering on Far Southerner for how different it was from the way people around here talked.
"If'n it makes you more likely to say yes," he said, and was it strange that he felt pride that he sounded like he belonged in the city more than the greying man, not a trace of anything except a proper North Southlander in his voice, "Then I'd be born on anything you want."
The man with the moustache broke out laughing. "By the Spirits, I like you already boy? How old are you?"
"Fifteen, but--"
"Spirits," the plump man said, quietly.
"And your name? I am Kueli," the man with the moustache said.
Kiralo hesitated and said, "Kiralo."
He pulled off his helmet, and they stared.
"You look a full-blooded Csiritan," the greying man said, "We haven't...well."
"You can call me Etya," the plump man said, "And watching you...I saw a mediocre Rassit."
Kiralo flushed, and perhaps not all of them could be so easily charmed.
"But you're fifteen, and trained in none of it, hm? Someone who is a mediocre Rassit at fifteen is likely to become a great one, if they've trained all of that on their own," Etya said. "I am impressed. And your father not a Rassit at all?"
"I never knew him," Kiralo said, which was closer to the truth than he wanted.
Kueli said, "Enough with the questioning. We've bastards enough here, what's one more? And first full-blooded Csiritan since ol' Hano a decade ago." He shrugged, his words blunt.
"By that we mean, we would be happy to have you," Etya said. "Now, we need to see who else we might bring."
He turned back to the crowds, and the other applicants on their mounts, ready to do the run he'd just done.
He'd done it.
Mom. Mom.
He was going to become a Rassit.
*****
A/N: Okay, so I'm really uncertain about this because there's so much ground to cover that it's hard to do good character and worldbuilding and move things along without it being too long. So it kinda sucks.
But...
Eh. Anyways, also, I decided. Reaction Posts and Omakes will be rewarded with bonuses to dice rolls so long as it doesn't suck all the tension out of the game.