Chapter 8: To Err is Humane
Armored Dragon Calendar Year 413 – Claude, Age 8
[Claude POV]
Rudeus had left for Roa three days ago.
I stood at the edge of Paul's training field, where we had sparred so many times, the space feeling emptier now without him.
His movements had improved remarkably over the past year under Paul's instruction, the clumsy child becoming something closer to a competent fighter.
Not a swordsman in the true sense. He would never match Ghislaine or Paul in pure blade work.
But he had learned enough to survive, which was more than most could claim.
The afternoon sun cast long shadows across the empty training field.
I could still picture him here, practicing forms with desperate intensity.
Could still hear his breathing, the rhythm of his strikes, the occasional muttered curse when a technique didn't work the way he wanted.
Rudeus would spend years in Roa, tutoring a noble girl.
He would grow, change, become someone different from the boy I had come to know.
The knowledge in my head whispered of his future.
That when the disaster struck, he would be far from home, unable to help the people we both cared about.
That he would survive the initial event, scattered somewhere far from the Asura Kingdom.
That he would struggle, would face challenges that would break lesser people.
The fragments were incomplete, as they always were.
The details blurred and contradicted, as though his future had been told to me by too many people at once.
I couldn't have changed his path. Couldn't have kept him here without explaining things that would sound insane.
But I had prepared him as best I could. Had planted seeds that might help him survive what was coming.
"You're staring again."
I blinked, finding Sylphy standing beside me. Her hair was braided today.
She had grown over the past year, no longer the frightened child who had hidden at my approach.
The guilt of how I had bullied her when we were small still lingered.
"Thinking," I said.
"About Rudy?"
"About a lot of things."
Sylphy was perceptive in ways that caught me off guard sometimes.
Lately she caught the things I didn't say.
She leaned her arms on the top rail of the fence and looked out at the trampled patch where Rudeus had always planted his feet. The grass there had worn down to bare dirt. A practice sword still leaned against the far post where he had left it, the grip wrapped in strips of cloth Zenith had cut from an old apron.
"He forgot that," she said.
"He didn't forget it. Paul told him Ghislaine would put a real one in his hands in Roa."
"He cried about it a little." She said it plainly, the way she said everything about Rudy, without any meanness in it. "Behind the shed. He thought nobody saw."
"You saw."
"I always see." She glanced sideways at me, then back at the field. "I didn't tell him."
Years of keeping out of my way had taught her to watch faces for the moment before something went wrong. She had kept the habit after the reason for it was gone, and now she used it on everyone.
"He was acting strange before he left," she said, her voice soft with lingering concern. "Distracted. Like he was worried about something he couldn't talk about."
I knew what Rudeus had been worried about.
'Avoidance. Self-doubt beneath the surface. Fear of inadequacy masked by outward confidence.'
I felt my hand drift toward my temple, pressing against skin that suddenly felt too tight.
Something in me understood Rudeus's patterns without being told.
Recognized the defense mechanisms. Knew with certainty I couldn't explain that he was protecting himself from criticism by criticizing himself first.
The knowledge carried implications that made me uncomfortable.
Somewhere in my fragmented memories, someone had spent years studying human behavior.
Had learned to read the subtle signs of psychological defense.
Had developed an understanding of the mind that bordered on clinical expertise. And now that knowledge was bleeding into me.
"Your head again?" Sylphy asked.
I lowered my hand. "It's nothing."
"You do that when you're thinking too hard." She ducked through the rails and picked up Rudeus's practice sword, testing its weight with both hands the way she had seen him do. It was too long for her, and the tip dipped toward the dirt. "Mother says headaches come from not drinking enough water."
"Your mother is probably right."
She didn't believe me. She carried the sword back and leaned it against the post exactly where it had been, as if Rudy might come back for it before supper.
I thought of the fragmented memories that plagued my dreams.
The lives I seemed to have lived. The deaths I remembered dying.
Was each of those fragments a different person? Had I somehow absorbed multiple souls, multiple consciousnesses, all crammed into one small body?
The thought was terrifying. But if the combat presence could guide me through fights beyond my natural ability, and the analytical presence could help me understand people, maybe I could learn to work with them.
"I gave him a letter," I said. "Before he left. Something I'd been meaning to write for a long time."
"The one you worked on for hours?" Sylphy asked. "I saw you rewriting it over and over."
She had been watching. Of course she had.
"I wanted to get it right," I said. "He's going to need... perspective. Eventually."
I left before she could ask more questions, making my way home through the winding village paths.
The letter had been the best I could manage, not a warning about the future, but something that might help him when responsibility became too heavy to bear alone.
As I passed the Greyrat house, I heard Norn's cheerful laughter from the yard.
I glimpsed Zenith in Paul's doorway, watching over the yard with that patient expression mothers wore.
Norn came running to the gate when she saw me, a wooden spoon in one fist and mud to her elbows. "Claude! Rudy went to Roa!"
"I know. I was there when he left."
"He's going to bring me a present." She held up the spoon as if it proved something. "A big one."
Zenith laughed and called her in to wash. Before she went back inside she lifted a hand to me. "Come for supper whenever you like, Claude. The house is too quiet without his racket."
I thanked her and kept walking.
Rudeus was already gone, far from his little sister and everything familiar.
In four years, Norn's little world would be torn apart along with the rest of ours.
I pushed the thought aside.
◇ ◇ ◇
The letter had taken hours to compose, spread over the three days of Ghislaine's stay.
The combat presence had been silent, having no interest in written words.
But the analytical presence had stirred, offering... impressions. Intuitions about what might resonate. Approaches that felt right without my understanding why.
I remembered touching my temple, pressing against the dull ache that had accompanied the presence's influence.
I had written the first draft at our kitchen table after supper, with the forge ticking on the other side of the wall as it cooled. It began, Something terrible is going to happen in four years, and I stopped there and read it back. If Paul found it, he would think his son's friend had gone strange. If Rudeus believed it, he would spend four years in Roa looking over his shoulder. I fed it to the hearth and watched the edge curl black until I was sure it was gone.
The second was all advice. Practice every day. Be patient. Never give up. Any traveling priest could have written it. Rudeus would read it once and use it to mark his place in a spellbook.
The third was about me. The headaches, the cold thing that came during fights, the knowledge I had no business having. Halfway down the page I saw that I was asking him to carry something of mine on his way out the door, and I tore it into small pieces.
Mother came in for the water jug while I was on the fourth. She looked at the scraps on the table, then at me.
"A letter for Rudy," I said.
"It looks like a hard one."
"It keeps coming out wrong."
She filled the jug and didn't offer to read it. At the door she said, "Write it the way you'd say it to him, then. You've never had trouble talking to that boy," and left me with the candle.
The one I gave him was short.
Rudy. You're going to mess things up in Roa. Everybody does. The people who get anywhere just get up again, even with everyone watching.
If it gets heavy, tell somebody. Even if it's embarrassing.
Write to Sylphy. She'll pretend she doesn't care.
It was the letter I'd want to receive if our positions were reversed.
A sense of rightness came from the same place as the analytical impulses. Approval, maybe.
I had pressed it into his hands the evening before he left, at the end of a goodbye supper that had been planned for a month. Whether it would help him, I couldn't know.
◇ ◇ ◇
That night, lying in bed with the darkness pressing close, I took stock of what I knew.
There were two presences, at least. The first came during combat, cold and focused, and it moved my body in ways I hadn't learned. The memory of the slaver fight still haunted me, the coldness with which I had killed, the absence of hesitation.
The second came when I looked at people. It took my attention and gave back understanding that felt borrowed rather than learned.
The fragmentary memories suggested more than two. The smithing that guided my hands at the forge might be one, the magic theory I had never been taught another. Each might be a different life bleeding into mine, or I might be cutting one strange experience into many pieces.
If they were going to stay, I wanted to be the one who opened the door. I sat up in the dark, set my feet on the cold floor and held my right hand out the way I held a sword in Paul's yard, waiting for the cold thing to take the grip. My arm only got tired. I tried the other one next, picturing Sylphy at the fence and asking what her face had meant, and got nothing back but my own guesses about a girl I had known all my life.
I lay back down and pulled the blanket to my chin.
I closed my eyes and reached inward, searching for the presences that shared my skull.
Nothing responded.
But I could feel them there, waiting in the darkness of my own mind.
It was company, of a kind.
◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ AUTHOR'S NOTE ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆
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