“You think I’ll accept that?”
“You fought Okar today. Don’t you think that, if he’d wanted to kill your father, your father would have died by his hand?”
Tau was silent. Jayyed knew why. He might not want to face the truth about Kellan, but Tau couldn’t pretend he wasn’t already a better swordsman than his father had ever been.
Tau’s efforts, without benefit of birth or natural talent, had allowed him to surpass the skills of his peers and many of his betters. Still, there were limits. Tau could not have held Okar for much longer, and his father could not have held Okar at all.
The brash initiate simmered like a pot ready to boil over, and the roil of emotions on his face reminded Jayyed of the moment he’d recognized him at the testing. At the time, it had been only a few days since he’d watched Dejen Olujimi ram a blade through Tau’s father’s chest. Only a few days, and Tau had changed.
The boy, with his angry and weeping wound, had looked like a savage in the fighting circle against Uduak. Jayyed had wondered how Tau managed to get cut so badly. He remembered thinking the wound would fester. It could kill the boy, and as the match began, he remembered thinking that when Uduak was through with him, the scratch wouldn’t matter at all.
Jayyed had heard about Uduak half a cycle before the testing. He’d had him watched, and, as expected, Uduak was exactly what Jayyed was looking for. Jayyed found more like him, but Uduak was the first choice for his new scale, and at the testing, the brute did not disappoint. He’d smashed his way through everyone he faced, and then he faced Tau.
The boy was small, even for a Lesser, and it should have been a slaughter, but Tau fought Uduak for the full two hundred count. It seemed impossible. It wasn’t, and that challenged Jayyed’s thinking in ways that worried him.
In the first moments of the fight’s aftermath, Tau’s feat felt threatening and Jayyed had wanted to dismiss or deny the accomplishment, but denying a thing just because he’d rather it not be true would make him no better than the Royal Nobles of the Guardian Council. So, he chose to do the opposite. He chose to see Tau as a beacon of hope.
Jayyed had gone to the other umqondisi. He’d argued for Tau. He’d burned important favors to have the match declared a tie, to get Tau into the isikolo. And, when it was all done, wondering if he was playing himself for a fool, Jayyed went to see the boy.
He’d spoken with him, sensing the young man’s doubts. They echoed his own. Hiding those reservations, Jayyed had chosen to be encouraging. He wanted Tau, the boy who had achieved the impossible because he could not see how impossible it was, to continue to believe in himself, to know that Jayyed believed in him.
He wanted to see if Tau could continue to defy the odds, because if what Jayyed had learned was true, the Chosen needed to see that almost as much as they needed a better breed of fighter. They needed to believe that odds could be defied.
He’d given Tau a chance and, bolstered by superior training, but more through inhuman effort, the boy had become the thing Jayyed had both hoped and feared to create. Like dragons, like Gifted, like Ingonyama, Tau, a Lesser, had become a living weapon.
“You stubborn intulo!” Jayyed railed at him as they rushed for the city gates, fleeing like criminals. “Think! Think for a breath. Kellan didn’t even remember you from the day of your father’s death. You were nothing more than a crazed Lesser and he still didn’t want you to die. Can’t you see? He’s not the bloodthirsty villain you’d like him to be. If he were, he would have killed you long before I arrived.”
Tau said nothing.
“Yes,” Jayyed said, hammering the point home. “You’re not too stupid to see that.” Jayyed aimed for a nerve. “I’ve watched Kellan Okar fight for the last two cycles. Almost without doubt, he’ll win a guardian sword when he graduates. He will, without doubt, become an Ingonyama. He’s the best Indlovu the citadel has seen in twenty or thirty cycles!”
Tau turned his scarred face away. “You told us training would outdo talent,” the boy said. “You worked us half to death with promises that we could be like them.”
“What?” Jayyed countered. “You think Kellan Okar doesn’t train? You think he wakes at midday, gorges himself, poles Noble women in the ass, and then, when occasion merits, happens to fight like that?”
Themba, marching behind them, spluttered, trying to hold back a laugh.
“Move off!” Jayyed hollered.
Themba ducked his head, the chastisement chasing him and the other men away.
“I do nothing but train,” said Tau. “I give my life to the sword. That’s what you asked. It’s what I’ve done. You told me I would be their equal. You told me—”
“Tau,” Jayyed said, afraid to admit what he must. “Kellan is… There aren’t enough spans in the day for you to out-train that one. He’s a Greater Noble, but for much of his life, the other Nobles treated him like a pariah. He lives his life in defiance of that, as if to prove that he is more than ‘the coward Okar’s’ son. He’s in the citadel practice yards for as long as you are in ours. You have to understand, he lives his life as a rebuke to his father’s legacy. That, coupled with the fact that he’s…” Jayyed trailed off.
“Bigger, stronger, faster,” Tau said, finishing Jayyed’s unspoken thought. “He’s Noble and that makes him too much to overcome.”
Jayyed hesitated. Sometimes too much hope leads men to bad ends. “He’s too much to overcome,” he conceded.
“That’s it, then? I’m a Lesser and the best I can do, after giving my life to the sword, is to match their weak?”
“They think we can’t even do that,” Jayyed told him. “And, if you want the truth, I wasn’t sure we could either.”
“How can you tell me that, when you led a scale of Lessers to the Queen’s Melee, to fight against the Nobles’ best? How can you tell me there are heights to which I cannot climb, when you were the one who forged the paths?”
“I am not like you,” Jayyed said, the words frightening him as he spoke them.
“You work harder than I do? Smarter?”
There was no one close enough to hear their conversation, and Tau needed to know some of the truth. Telling him was the right thing to do, but it didn’t make the words easier. “My father was a Greater Noble,” he said.
Tau jerked as if he’d been whipped. “What?”
“Before I was born, my village was attacked in a raid. The Indlovu came but the hedeni had already razed most of it. They were retreating and my mother’s parents were murdered. They were among the last to die and my mother was next. Three savages came for her. A Greater Noble got there first. He killed them. He saved her. He felt he was owed. My mother was not yet a woman. He thought it safe to use her.”
Tau shook his head as if the words made no sense. “No… Lesser-Noble crosses are not permitted.… The babies are stillborn.”
“Not all,” Jayyed said. “When my mother learned she was pregnant, she told the other villagers that she’d lain with one of the Lessers who died in the raid. I was born later that cycle, alive.”
Tau didn’t say a word. He was staring at Jayyed and taking quick, shallow breaths.