Jim Butcher - Furies of Calderon

"You were out in that? Fortune favors fools and children," Bernard said. He grunted and asked, "You're a runaway, are you?" "No, sir."

"We'll see," Bernard said. "Come with me, lass. Don't run. If I have to track you down, I'll get irritable."

"Yes, sir."

Bernard nodded and then frowned at Tavi again, his voice hardening. "When we get home, boy, you're to go to your room and stay there until I decide what to do with you. Understand?"

Tavi blinked up at his uncle, shocked. He had never reacted like this before. Even when he'd given Tavi a whipping, there had never been the sense of raw, scantily controlled anger in his voice. Bernard was always in control of himself, always calm, always relaxed. Looking up at his uncle, Tavi felt acutely aware of the sheer size of the man, of the hard, angry glitter to his eyes, of the strength of his huge hands. He didn't dare speak, but he tried to plead with his uncle, silently, letting his expression show how sorry he was, how much he wanted things to be right again. He knew, dimly, that he was crying but he didn't care.

Bernard's face remained hard as granite, and as unforgiving. "Do you understand, boy?"

Tavi's hopes crumbled before that gaze, wilted away before the heat of his uncle's anger.

"I understand, sir," he whispered.

Bernard turned away and started walking down the causeway again, back toward home. "Hurry up," he said, without looking back. "I've wasted enough time on this nonsense."

Tavi stared after him, shocked, numb. His uncle hadn't been this angry the day before, when he'd caught Tavi leaving. What had made this happen? What could drive his uncle to that kind of fury?

The answer came at once. Someone he cared about had been harmed- his sister Isana. Had she truly almost died? Oh, furies, how bad was it?

He had lost something, Tavi knew, something more than sheep or status as a skilled apprentice. He had lost his uncle's respect-something that he had only just began to realize that he had possessed. Bernard had never treated him like the others, not really-never shown him pity for his lack of furycraft, never assumed Tavi's incompetence. There had been, especially over the past few months, a kind of comradeship Tavi hadn't known with

anyone else, a quiet and unobtrusive bond between near-equals, rather than his uncle speaking down to a child. It was something that had been built slowly over the past several years, as he served as his uncle's apprentice.

And it was gone. Tavi had never really realized it was there, and it was gone.

So were the sheep.

So was his chance at the future, of escaping this valley, escaping his own status as a furyless freak, an unwanted bastard child of the Legion camps.

Tears blinded him, though he fought to keep them silent. He couldn't see his uncle, though Bernard's impatient snarl came to him clearly. "Tavi."

He didn't hear Amara start walking until he had stumbled forward, after his uncle. He put one foot in front of the other, blindly, the ache inside him as sharp and more painful than any of the wounds he had received the day before.

Tavi walked without looking up. It didn't matter where his feet were taking him.

He wasn't going anywhere.

For Amara, the walk back to Bernardholt proved to be a long and arduous exercise in ignoring pain. Despite her words to Tavi earlier that morning, her ankle, injured during the wild landing beneath last night's storm, had stiffened and burned hideously, barely supporting her weight at all. Similarly, the cut Aldrick ex Gladius had dealt her back in the renegade camp throbbed and ached. She could barely ignore one injury without the other occupying her full attention, but even so, she had enough presence of mind to feel pain on behalf of the boy trudging along in front of her.

The reaction of his uncle had not been unkind, she thought at first. Many men would simply have commenced with beating the boy, and only after would they have had anything to say about why the beating had been delivered, if at all. But the longer she walked, the more clear it became just how deeply injured the boy had been by his uncle's words-or perhaps the lack of them.

He was used to being treated kindly, and with some measure of respect. The quiet, cool distance that the Steadholder had shown was new to Tavi, and it had hurt him badly-dashing his hopes for making a future for himself at the Academy and driving home the notion that without furycrafting of his own, he was nothing more than a helpless child, a danger to himself and others.

And here, on the wild frontiers of the realm of humanity, where life or death hinged on the daily struggle against hostile furies and beasts, perhaps it was true.

Amara shook her head and focused on the stones of the causeway beneath her feet. Though she felt some empathy for the boy, she could not allow his plight to distract her from her task, namely, to discover what was happening within the Valley and then to take whatever action she thought best to see to it that the realm was protected. She already had some facts to piece together, and her attention was best spent on them.

The Marat had returned to the Calderon Valley, something that had not happened in nearly seventeen years. The Marat warrior Tavi and his uncle had confronted could well have been an advance scout for an attacking horde.

But the growing light of day made that possibility seem increasingly remote, bringing inconsistencies to light. If they had truly encountered a Marat, why had the boy's uncle showed virtually no relief upon finding his missing nephew? For that matter, how had the Steadholder been on his feet again at all? If the wounds were as serious as the boy had described, it would have taken an extremely talented watercrafter to have had Bernard on his feet again, and Amara didn't think that anyone that skilled would live far from one of the major cities of the Realm. Surely, the injury must have been less than the boy described-and if that was true, then perhaps the incident with the Marat had been likewise exaggerated.

Put into the context of fiction, Tavi's tale of his adventures the previous day made a great deal more sense. The boy, crushed with feelings of inadequacy, could have made up the tales in order to make himself feel more important. It was a far more plausible explanation of what he had told her.

Amara frowned. It was a more plausible explanation, but the boy's courage and resourcefulness could not be denied. Not only had he survived the violent furystorm of the evening before, but he had also rescued her-at considerable danger to himself-when he could have taken himself to safety without risk. Such courage, conviction, and sacrifice rarely went hand in hand with falsehood.

In the end, Amara decided that she had very little information to work with, until she had spoken to the uncle as well-and he seemed to be in no mood for any kind of discussion. She would have to learn more. If the Marat were preparing to attack again, defending against them would require a major mobilization, at the end of the year and at fantastic expense to both the High Lord of Riva and the Crown's treasury. There would be resistance to such news-and if she went to the local Count with nothing more than the word of a shepherd boy to go on, she would doubtless hear endless repetitions of the tale of the boy who cried thanadent. She would need the testimony of one of the Count's trusted landowners, one of the Steadholders, to get more than a token response.

The best reaction she could hope for in such a case would be for the Count to dispatch scouts of his own to find the enemy, and even if they managed to return from such a deadly encounter, it might be with a Marat horde on their heels. The Marat could swallow the valley in one assault and ravage the lands around Riva, while its High Lord, held captive by the onrush of winter, could do little but watch his lands be destroyed.