< Fear the Stick >

“Sing!”

Selbin d’Courte was no military expert, to be sure, but all the same he wasn’t able to work past the blatant absurdity of the command. He stared at his new mentor, blue eyes wide and thoroughly confused, and he almost stopped moving.

Loki gave him a look that said if he dared stop running before the drill was complete, there would be six separate hells to pay. The young prince redoubled his effort to keep his feet moving. “I don’t … understand! Why … would I … sing?!”

“I don’t recall the part where this is a dialogue!” Somehow, even though he tended to limp rather prominently when he walked, Junior Sentinel Loki Heiler — prized prodigy of the Third Guard — could run without anything even close to trouble. “Sing!”

Why was it so cold all of a sudden?

Selbin tried to think of something he could use to fulfill this ridiculous order. A lullaby, a skipping song, a nonsense rhyme, something.

As soon as he started to sing, Loki thwacked him with his quarterstaff, hard, against the left arm. Selbin yelped and stumbled to a stop, nearly tumbling flat onto his face. “Hey!” he almost wailed. “What was that for?!”

Loki stopped like a specter, as smooth as imported silk. “What did I tell you before this drill started, Your Highness?”

Selbin blinked, struggling to catch his breath. “… Y-You said … if I can’t … if I can’t … talk … then I’m running too hard. That I should … ease up.”

Loki nodded. He looked almost proud for a moment, and Selbin was more than a little surprised at how buoyant he felt, considering he barely knew this boy. Then the young officer’s face hardened. “If you can hold a tune, you’re not running hard enough. Come on! Up you get! Did you think this was a break? Get going!”

Selbin managed to hold his tongue as he brushed off his pants and started moving again, but it was a near thing. He rubbed his arm where Loki had struck him, licking at his lips and wondering if he could get a new trainer.

He didn’t see Loki’s supervisors anywhere in the training yard, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. And even though it was hard to keep a thought straight in his head with his lungs burning and his heart hammering the way it was, Selbin d’Courte knew that if he complained about his current teacher, they would be the ones to pick up the slack.

He thought about the hulking hammers hanging from Olrec Stoutfeather’s belt, stamped with the ivory tower crest of the Tenth Guard; he thought of the infinitude of knives hidden in Naya Belmont’s leather armor, and the curved swords she kept at her hips, and the longbow she tended to have strapped to her back, and the armor-backed gloves she wore even while sleeping.

Selbin decided he’d try his luck with Loki’s stick.

Page 72

Sythius would not speak, even when Loki commanded him several times to “Explain yourself! Get back here! Damn it, Rookie!”

Some part of Loki recognized the fact that the giant didn’t simply run off, leaving his mentor in the cobbles. His pace never picked up faster than Loki could keep up. Had there been more time to deliberate on this, Loki may have found himself affronted by such an action, but there wasn’t. Something had caught fire in Sythius’s eyes and his mind, and there was simply no time nor tolerance for questioning whatever it was.

Whatever intuition served the wild man for a compass led him and his young leader deep into the merchant stalls of the Middle Ring. Even the most shameless of hucksters seemed to know better than to get in Sythius’s way to sell him a pendant or a pair of boots. Some folks did try to stop Loki. The less observant of them offered sweets and toys; the smart ones offered boot-knives and swords that sheathed themselves in walking staves.

Loki ignored them all. He had eyes only for his monstrous charge.

They stopped, at one of the corners that made up the huge pentagonal shape of the ring. In between two storefronts was a single, neglected wooden door. It was reinforced by heavy, dull iron. It had the look of a portal that hadn’t been entered voluntarily in eons.

Sythius glared at the thing like it had personally offended him.

Loki forced his senses to sharpen, and thought for just a sliver of a moment that he could hear something behind that door.

Something like … breathing.

Page 71

Sythius changed faces at some point nearing the evening. It wasn’t something tangible that did it; it wasn’t some gradual shift, either. It just … happened. And even though Loki had been spending the entire day taking very special care to pay close attention to the big man’s mood ever since his first outburst, he hadn’t been able to predict this.

He’d looked one moment, and seen a look of grim neutrality — as though Sythius understood that there was a mission on, that he was supposed to take this seriously, but wasn’t sure why — and then he’d looked another moment and seen a look of savage fury.

Sythius’s anger wasn’t orchestrated. It wasn’t something that he built. It was simply there. For most people Loki had met, and for Loki himself, anger was a mechanism, something that slowly built and built until it had to be vented. The young officer had heard anger described as a good person’s natural response to the injustices of the world. Anything, in other words, that went against the teachings of the Four Saints, would bring anger out of the righteous.

For Sythius, though, there was no such process.

He seemed to not only elicit emotions; he became them.

Such that Loki suddenly found himself fearing not just for the object of the giant’s rage, not just for himself, but for the whole of civilization. The thought crossed his mind at least six times in as many seconds that — if he didn’t quell this monstrosity nestled in Sythius’s amber eyes — the White Wall of Phila would be torn down before dawn rose on its next day.

Page 70

Loki sat across from Sythius, toying idly with the meal that had been set in front of him, trying to figure out what to do. The giant was clearly fit for combat; he was one of the strongest, most resilient things the young pyromancer had ever seen.

But he didn’t seem to understand the finer points of soldiery.

He was protective, and Loki supposed that was good, but …

“Look, Rookie,” Loki said slowly. “It isn’t … we can’t … hurt the people,” he said. “We’re soldiers. We protect everyone. Not just the people we like.” He didn’t know if this was going to work. Sythius was staring blankly at him. He’d already devoured his food. He’d practically inhaled it.

Loki heaved a sigh. Sythius tilted his head, like a confused hunting dog.

Loki skewered a chunk of roasted pepper, ate it thoughtfully, toyed with his fork, and wondered if the authority of an officer was really worth it. Was he ready for this? He knew his way around his own body, sure enough, and he had the sharpest eyes in the Guard, even at his age. But did he have the patience to lead?

“Protect … everyone,” Sythius rumbled.

Loki blinked. “Yes.”

“Soldier … protects … everyone.”

Loki nodded. “Yes.”

Sythius put on one of his grins. He nodded, too.

“So … Sythius. Are you going to attack any more civilians?”

“No.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Protect everyone.”

The slightest of half-smirks rose on Loki’s lips. “Good man,” he said.

Page 69

“Rookie!” Loki snapped. “What did I say?!”

Sythius eyed the boy owlishly. “Said … do nothing. No matter what … they say to me.”

“And what are you doing?”

“Didn’t … say anything to me,” Sythius muttered, almost pouting. “Said … to you.”

Loki blinked. “You … that’s your excuse? Let that man go! Now!”

Sythius looked back at the pitiful creature in his grip. The man struggled vainly, clawing at Sythius’s mammoth arm, and the giant had a look of something that looked like sick amusement before he tossed his prize away. He turned back to Loki and looked expectant.

Loki sighed, shook his head, and gestured. “Come on.”

He filed a note away: this hunter from the north was very literal.

There was something Loki didn’t notice, though, until most of the afternoon had passed them by. All the while—as the boy soldier introduced Sythius to the various landmarks and accommodations of the city that the old songs called the Homestead of the Stars—even through the seedier parts of the Outer Ring where even the higher-ranked officers didn’t go without keeping a hand glued to their weapons, there were no further incidents.

He wouldn’t think about the fact that the death of Master Akar’s prized assassin would have spread like wildfire, until later. He wouldn’t think about how impossibly Sythius had grabbed a fully-grown adult in one hand and pitched him aside like a toy until later, either.

At the moment, all he could do was focus every bit of energy into walking, because the last thing he wanted this hulking monstrosity to know was that his natural walk was so much more shunted and pathetic, and it wouldn’t do to show weakness to a new recruit.

He had no way of knowing that Sythius Sil’nathin already understood more about his physical condition than anyone in Moonguard, just from watching. From listening.

From feeling.

Page 68

“No matter what anyone says, do not answer.” Loki eyed his new protégé with suspicion. “Do you understand? Whatever anyone says to you, you will say nothing, you will do nothing. You will follow me. You will wear your badge in plain sight, and follow me.”

Sythius didn’t respond, but the set of his face changed. He adjusted his furs so that the Hawk badge was in plain view. He seemed to take some measure of pride in that badge, even though it was unlikely that he had any idea what it meant. The larger, broader constructs of social discourse weren’t just lost on this behemoth from the north.

To Sythius Sil’nathin, they simply didn’t exist.

Together, the two most unlikely compatriots in all of Moonguard stalked the roads of the Outer Ring.

As Loki had expected, there was derision. The poor district of any prosperous city had more reason than any to despise the forces in charge. In Moonguard, those forces were the Ten Guards. The vassals of Saint Vilaya herself.

There were any number of factions who would view the induction of a stranger, a prisoner, into the ranks of the army as proof of further infection.

“Can’t walk on your own, big guy?” someone jeered at the giant. “Need a babysitter to tell you when to step, when to bow, when to shit? Pathetic!”

Even when someone spat in Sythius’s face, he made no reaction at all.

But then something else happened.

“Well, well. The mystic’s cripple found himself a pet! Or maybe your mistress thought her precious widdle baby needed someone to wipe his ass?”

Sythius moved so fast that, at first, it looked like he disappeared.

A mammoth fist wrapped around a young man’s entire face, and slammed him up against the great white wall that Loki swore so many moons ago to protect with his life.

Sythius’s eyes narrowed, seemed to glow with some foreign power.

“... Did you talk?”

Page 67

Loki walked as briskly as his twisted body would allow him, and didn’t notice for a long time just how slowly his new charge had to walk in order to keep pace. He didn’t say anything; the first thing Loki had had to rid himself of, upon joining the Ten Guards, was his propensity to be offended.

“If you’re to join us on the field,” Sister Nan-Tamé had told him, “and have the chance to prove yourself worth the sum we paid to get you here, then I don’t have time to listen to you complain. Particularly about your own pride. You are elite. You are a precious commodity. Or you will be. The only person you have to prove yourself to, anymore ... is me.”

There was no way that Loki was going to go back to his commanding officers and bitch about his pet giant’s strides being too long. Back at the Landing, where he and his mother had eked out a life before coming here to the ivory gemstone that was Moonguard, he would have been too incensed to think straight.

Now, he barely felt a twinge.

Or, at least, he tried to tell himself that.

“You’re big,” Loki said, “and you’re strong, and you have skills. But now we have to know if you can listen. You heard what they said. You’re my subordinate. Do you understand what that means, Sil’nathin?”

Loki stopped, turned, and waited.

The big man blinked. Then frowned. Then he said, “... Follow orders.”

Loki nodded. “That’s right. Are we going to have a problem with that?”

Another blink. Another frown.

Then: “... No.”