Sito woke to the smell of the fire being built back up and the sound of Osric talking to somebody in a low voice about the hill.
He lay still and listened.
"—two of them, not one. The second stayed further back."
"Since when?"
"Since we made camp. Before the singing."
Sito sat up.
Osric was crouched by the fire with Willem standing over him, and neither of them looked particularly bothered about any of it. Osric was eating.
"You knew?" Sito said.
Willem glanced over. "Morning, your highness."
"You *knew* and nobody said anything?"
"We knew," Osric agreed. He was a lean, weather-beaten man of about forty with a flat grey stare and the general manner of someone who had long ago run out of things worth getting excited about. "Didn't seem worth waking you for."
"There were people watching our camp."
"There's always people watching our camp."
Sito opened his mouth and then shut it again.
The north road out of Epiria ran four hundred miles up through farmland and then hill country before it reached the treeline of the Mist Forest. For the first hundred it was patrolled out of the capital and safe as a chapel. After that it thinned out.
What it carried, mostly, was merchants. Timber and wool coming south, salt and worked iron going north, and a steady trickle of guild adventurers heading up to clear whatever had come out of the hills that season.
A merchant train was four or five wagons and maybe six hired swords, and hired swords were paid to survive, not to win.
Which meant that on any given stretch of that road there were men living in the hills whose entire trade was counting wagons.
A royal caravan flying the King's colors would have been left alone. Nobody who robbed people for a living was stupid enough to rob the Crown.
However at Marcus's insistence, they flew no colors at all.
"So they think we're a merchant train," Sito said.
"They think we're a rich merchant train." Osric tore off another piece of bread. "Good wagons. Fat horses. Twelve swords for four wagons is more guard than cargo, which tells them the cargo's worth guarding."
"And nobody thought to fix that."
"Fixing it means flying colors. Lord Benedictus says we're not flying colors."
Marcus's voice came from somewhere behind the wagon, muffled and unhappy. "Lord Benedictus is asleep."
"No he isn't," said Ramsey.
"Lord Benedictus is *attempting* to be asleep."
---
Marcus found him an hour later, after they'd broken camp and got moving, and swung himself up onto the bench beside him with more grace than a man that tall should have had.
"Osric tells me you're annoyed."
"I'm not annoyed."
"You're annoyed and you're seven, which means you're going to be annoyed for the entire day unless I do something about it." Marcus settled back against the canvas. "Ask."
"Why aren't we flying colors?"
"Because the first thing the elves will hear about this delegation is what it looked like coming up the road."
He tilted his head. "A royal caravan in full dress with two hundred miles of banner behind it is a procession. A procession arriving at your border is a statement. We are not making a statement. We are making a request."
"So we look like merchants and get robbed instead."
"So we look like merchants, and are not robbed, because nobody has successfully robbed a royal escort on this road in forty years."
Marcus's smile flickered. "Some of them will try. That is the cost, and it is a very low one."
Sito thought about that.
"And when they try, what am I supposed to do?"
"Nothing. You get in the wagon, you stay in the wagon, and you do not come out of the wagon until Osric or I tell you the wagon is a reasonable place to not be."
"I've trained for two years."
"You've trained for two years against men who are trying not to kill you."
He said it lightly, but he did not smile this time. "It's an entirely different exercise, your highness. I'd rather you learned that later."
---
They came out of the low hills forty miles on, around the middle of the afternoon.
Sito heard the whistle first. One long note from somewhere up the slope on the left.
By the time he'd turned his head Osric was already shouting, the caravan was already stopping, and Willem had already reached up, taken him by the back of his coat, and posted him into the wagon like a letter.
"Stay," Willem said.
"Willem—"
"Stay."
The canvas dropped.
Sito sat in the dim with his heart going and listened to men he knew drawing swords.
He counted eleven seconds. Then the noise started.
He had imagined it would sound like the arena. He was very wrong.
The arena had rhythm to it. The back and forth of two people taking turns, the crowd rising and falling with the exchanges, the clap of shins colliding and punches landing flush.
This was just shouting. Shouting and a wet sound he didn't have a name for and a horse screaming somewhere near the front.
And under all of it, a strange flat quiet from the guards themselves, because the guards weren't shouting at all.
Then something hit the side of the wagon hard enough to rock it.
The canvas tore open at the back and a man came through it.
He was big and filthy and he had a woodsman's axe in one hand, and the look on his face when he saw what was actually inside the wagon was almost funny. He'd expected crates.
What he found was a seven-year-old sitting on a folded blanket.
The man's eyes went past him to the chests strapped against the far wall. He decided the boy was not a problem and started climbing in.
Sito's blades were already out.
He didn't think about it. His hands had done it while the rest of him was still working out what was happening, which was the only reason any of it went the way it went.
The bandit swung the axe one-handed, low and fast and without any real technique, the way a man swings at a dog.
Sito went under it.
He had been fighting bigger opponents his entire life across two of them, and the answer had never once changed. You do not meet a bigger man where he is strong. You get low, you get inside, and you take away the thing he is standing on.
He dropped to one knee as the axe went over him and put the right blade through the back of the man's leg above the boot.
The bandit howled and came down on the wagon bed with his whole weight, and the wagon shook, and he was suddenly very close and very loud and reaching for Sito with a hand the size of his head.
Sito kicked off the chest behind him, got clear, and put his left blade across the man's wrist on the way past.
The axe fell. The man kept howling.
Then Willem was in the back of the wagon, and Willem did not howl or hesitate or say anything at all, and the noise stopped.
---
It was over about a minute after that.
Sito came down out of the wagon on legs that did not feel like they belonged to him and looked at the road.
There were bodies on it. He counted nine and then stopped, because he did not actually want the number.
Eleven more men were on their knees in the grass with their hands behind their heads and guards standing over them. One of the eleven was crying and making no attempt to hide it.
Not one of the guards was hurt. Osric had a split lip. That was all of it.
Sito had expected a battle. What he had watched, through a tear in the canvas, was closer to harvesting.
He looked back at the wagon.
He had been very fast. His footwork had been clean. The cut behind the knee had been exactly the cut the Old Master had drilled into him a hundred times for exactly that situation, and it had worked exactly the way it was supposed to work.
It had put a man on the floor of a wagon so that Willem could kill him.
That was the part.
Not the blood, which he'd expected, and not the smell, which he hadn't. The part was that his technique had a purpose, and he had spent two years learning it without ever once holding that purpose in his hands.
'Huh,' he thought.
---
Marcus walked the line of kneeling men slowly, looking at each one, and stopped in front of a grey-bearded man near the end.
"You're the eldest."
The man said nothing.
"I'm not asking for a confession, I'm making an observation. You're the eldest, which means you're either in charge or you were until very recently."
Marcus crouched so their eyes were level. "How many are in the camp?"
The man's jaw worked.
"There are women in that camp, and there are children in it, because there always are." Marcus's voice was perfectly conversational. "If I put you all in the ground here, they starve in the hills before the first frost. If I take you back to Epiria for trial, you hang, and they starve in the hills before the first frost."
"Do you see my difficulty?"
Nobody moved.
"So instead you're going to stand up, and take your wounded, and go back to that camp. Tomorrow you're going to break it and walk south. Whitbury will take farmhands. It's forty miles. You'll make it in three days if you don't stop."
The grey-bearded man stared at him.
"Why," he said.
"Because I am going to a place where I intend to ask a very proud people for something they do not want to give me," Marcus said, "and I would prefer not to arrive with thirty men's worth of hanging behind me. Take it or don't."
They took it.
Sito watched them carry their wounded up the slope, and watched until the last of them was over the ridge, and didn't say anything for a long time.
"You wanted to ask me something," Marcus said eventually.
"You let them go because it was convenient for you."
"Yes."
"Not because it was right."
"It was also right. The two are allowed to overlap." Marcus looked down at him. "Would you rather I lied about the order I thought of them in?"
"No."
"Good. Then we understand each other, and you have learned the single most useful thing I know."
He started back toward the wagons. "A kingdom is run almost entirely by people doing correct things for reasons they would be ashamed to say out loud."
---
That night Sito sat by the fire with his bowl untouched in his lap.
"What Circle were they?" he asked.
Ramsey looked up. "First. Every one of them."
"All thirty?"
"All thirty."
Every core, once it forms, grows in rings. The scholars called them Circles, and a man's Circle was simply how many rings his core had managed to close. It set the ceiling on everything. What he could cast, how hard his body could be driven, how much of the world's mana he could hold before it began spilling back out of him.
Everybody woke at First. There was no exception anywhere in the records.
Most people also died at First.
A farmer at First Circle could work a field two days longer than his grandfather could and mend a broken arm in half the time, and that was the entire extent of what it did for him.
A town guardsman who trained hard for twenty years might close a second ring and be very proud of it.
Third was where the nobility began, and where the Royal Guard did. Willem and Ramsey were Third.
Osric was Fourth. Fourth Circle men were rare enough that the Kingdom knew all of theirs by name.
The Masters of Epiria were Fifth. All eight of them. That was not a coincidence, and it was not a requirement written down anywhere either.
"So when those men came at us," Sito said slowly, "they were farmers. And they walked into four royal knights and a Master."
"Aye."
"They didn't have a chance. Not one of them. Not even a bad one."
"No," said Willem.
"Did they know that?"
The two guards looked at each other.
"Probably," Osric said from the dark. "Wouldn't have stopped them. Hunger makes men foolish. And the more hungry they become the more foolish they'll be until either foolishness or hunger puts them in a grave."
Sito turned the bowl around in his hands.
"How do you find out? What Circle you'll get to."
"The Rite," Ramsey said, and he brightened considerably, because it was clearly one of his stories. "Thirteenth name-day. Your core closes its first ring and the mana comes up through you and you shine, your highness. Whole body, head to foot. The color tells you your affinity. The brightness tells the scholars how far you'll climb and how quick you'll do it."
"And yours?"
"Green as a meadow and about as bright as a candle in fog." Ramsey grinned. "My ma cried for two days. Then she got over it, and I made Third anyway, which the scholars said would take me thirty years. Took me nineteen."
"So they're wrong."
"Well it's hard to predict the exact meaning of each awakening, but the scholars do a pretty good job of getting it right most of the time." Ramsey shrugged. "Most folk in my village barely lit up like a lamp midday and stayed First their whole lives. That's just the way of it. Nobody expects a farmer's boy to light up the square."
"It's different for nobles," Willem said quietly.
"How different?"
Osric answered, in the same flat voice he used for reporting picket rotations.
"Saw one in Coldren, years back. Duke's third son. Whole hall full of people, family up on the dais, two scholars with their books open. Boy steps up, and the light comes, and it's..."
He made a small motion with two fingers. "That much. Barely a glow to it. You could have covered it with a cup."
"And?"
"And the hall went quiet, and his father didn't look at him, and by midsummer the boy had been sent off to manage a grain estate four hundred miles from anywhere. Nobody in that family has said his name at a table since." Osric went back to his food. "For a commoner it's a Tuesday. For a noble it's the worst day of his life."
Sito looked into the fire for a while.
"What if the light doesn't come at all?"
Ramsey laughed.
Not cruelly. He laughed the way a man laughs when a child asks what happens if the sun doesn't come up.
"It comes, your highness. It's been coming since before there were books to write it down in. Every soul in every kingdom, the day they turn thirteen." He stretched his legs toward the fire. "Faint, sure. Ugly color, sometimes. But it comes."
"There's no word for a man it didn't come for," Willem added. "That's how you know it doesn't happen. Nobody ever needed to invent one."
---
Two more attempts came over the following eight days. Neither got within thirty yards of the wagons.
Word had started moving up the road ahead of them, and after the second one the hills went quiet and stayed quiet.
On the ninth evening, Sito found Marcus by the fire and held out one of his blades, hilt first.
"Train with me."
Marcus raised an eyebrow. "You have a master."
"My master's four hundred miles away and I'm on this road for three more weeks. You were a royal knight before you were a Master. Ragnar said so."
"Ragnar says a great many things with his mouth full."
"Was he wrong?"
Marcus looked at the blade for a moment. Then he sighed, stood, and pulled a plain steel sword from his spatial ring.
"Half an hour. And I want it understood that when the old goat finds out I did this, I intend to tell him it was entirely your idea."
They cleared a space past the wagons, and the guards stopped pretending to do anything and watched.
Marcus opened with something slow. A lazy descending cut meant to be blocked, the sort of thing you throw at a child to see where the child puts his feet.
Sito didn't block it.
He stepped inside the arc before it had finished coming down and was suddenly under Marcus's arms, close enough that the sword had nowhere left to go.
Marcus got clear on instinct.
"Hm," he said.
The second exchange lasted longer. Marcus tested the left side, then the right, then the left again, and found there was no seam anywhere. The boy switched lead foot mid-step twice and it cost him nothing either time.
By the fourth exchange Marcus had stopped being polite about it. By the sixth he had stopped being slow.
He put the boy on his back eventually. It took him rather longer than it should have.
"Again," Sito said, getting up.
They went again. And again.
Somewhere around the eleventh round, Marcus realized he was being handled.
Three exchanges running, the boy had come off the same line and left him the same opening on the right, and Marcus had taken it each time because it was free. On the fourth, the opening was there again and he went for it again, and the opening closed, and the left blade came up through the space where his arm now was.
He barely got out of it.
He was Fifth Circle, and he barely got out of it, against a child who did not weigh as much as one of his legs.
Marcus stood there for a moment with his heart going.
The boy had not been reacting. The boy had spent three rounds paying for the fourth one, feeding him a habit and then billing him for it, and had done the whole thing with no expression on his face at all.
That was not a prodigy's reflexes. That was a veteran's composition.
He looked, properly, for the first time, at what he was fighting.
Too much shoulder for the frame. Forearms on a seven-year-old that belonged on a boy of twelve, and none of it soft. He landed heavy for his size — not clumsy, heavy, the way a thing lands when it is denser than it looks. He had gone eleven rounds against a Master and his breathing had barely changed.
And around each wrist and each ankle, the Old Master's enchanted wraps. Still on. Nobody had told him to take them off, and it had not occurred to him to ask.
Marcus did some quick arithmetic about what the boy weighed and what those wraps had to weigh, and then decided he would be doing no further arithmetic that evening.
'Impressive,' he thought.
And then, because he was an honest man when nobody was listening: 'And most unsettling.'
They stopped when Sito's arms finally gave out.
The prince lay flat on his back in the dirt, chest heaving, absolutely delighted with himself.
"Again tomorrow?"
"Go to bed, your highness."
"Is that a yes?"
"It is an unfortunately," said Marcus.
He stood there a while after the boy had gone, turning the borrowed sword over in his hand and looking at nothing in particular.
'His ability to adapt is uncanny, he never loses the same way twice,' he thought.
Then he found his communication crystal, held it for a long moment, and put it back in his ring without using it.
There was nothing to report. Nothing he could put into words that would not sound like a grown man being impressed by a child.