He was not comfortable, his new butler, now affectionately renamed Ed, did not help either. There were many uncomfortable things about a man who had managed to remain so near him for so long without being noticed, especially now, with the blessing burning in his senses. Hrafn preferred not to think too much about that. The fault, he decided, lay with the servant who had guided him there. Like all the Hird's other servants, the man seemed to nurture an almost religious devotion to silence, which, under normal circumstances, Hrafn would have approved of.
Even so, a proper introduction to a very well-dressed old man who made no useless movement and seemed methodically threatening in everything he did would have been a minimal gesture of courtesy. But a good servant was a good servant. And free on top of that, what would Hrafn be, if not a man willing to adapt when adaptation arrived well dressed and at no cost?
"So then, Ed," he said. "Which way now?" Out there he felt a little better, and a little worse. Better because there were more things to hold on to than inside a room that possessed only inanimate matter, worse because, well, there were more things to hold on to.
"My lord, I—"
"Left," Hrafn cut in, already feeling the paths with the blessing before properly looking at them. He made a mental note to put more flowers, plants, and anything else less domesticated in his chambers. It would be good for the eyes too, he dont like living surrounded by surfaces that seemed to have been polished to please people ''better'' than him.
The building in which he now stood was vast, large enough to rival a small castle. They had not given the whole place to him alone, which was sensible, had they done so, he would have grown suspicious at once, would have spent the rest of the day wondering in what supposedly noble manner they expected to see him die in order to grant him so much privilege.
No. It was a broad complex, open in a horseshoe, with smaller structures scattered among narrow canals and linked by little stone bridges. From there, between columns and rooftops, one could see the great cathedral of the inner circle rising above the city as though everything else had been built only to justify its existence.
"Tell me, Ed," Hrafn said, walking over the spaced stones with studied care, eyes wandering across the over-carved gardens, the water too clean, the façades that seemed never to have known soot, mud, or the touch of time.
He gave Edvard enough time to recover from the first nervous tic before offering him the second."What weapon would best suit a cripple?" The question came out sincere. Perhaps that was why the little tremor in the butler's eyes was even more visible, almost nothing just a tic. The slightest pull in the nerves of a man who had probably spent his whole life learning to hide any reaction that could be used against him.
Out there, it was easier to notice such things, it was easier to notice everything. Movement above all, as was to be expected of Sahirid, servants crossed the courtyards with basins, chests and blankets, everything in their arms, everything at the proper time. Initiates passed in small groups, speaking little and the maids lowered their eyes when crossing paths with voroirs. No one ran or stopped in the wrong place, not one seemed to belong entirely to himself, and even the silence seemed trained.
"Because of the blessings," Edvard answered, "almost all weapons may suit a voroir in your… situation, my lord. There is the war axe, for instance, a weapon of weight, of impact, which—"
Hrafn let the rest drain into the bottom of his mind. He noticed an initiate he did not know, another from one of the kingdom's cities perhaps, giving orders to a servant with the ease of someone who had never needed to think about the weight of his own voice.
He felt a young woman coming up from behind, gathering courage to speak to him, only to be stopped by a discreet touch to the arm. Another maid, older, corrected her posture gently and indicated, with a short movement of the chin, another one-armed youth, as if to say: that is your cripple.
There was correction in everything, as though the place had not been raised merely to shelter bodies, but to shape them little by little, Hrafn hated every detail.
"When we speak of versatility, the sword presents rather ideal qualities for a man in your condition, since—" He had already understood. To be a voroir meant strength enough to wield nearly any weapon even if an arm was missing. That was the merciful side of the answer, the other was simpler, uglier, nothing would truly be enough, nothing would erase what was gone.
"I understand," Hrafn said, interrupting him. In part because he had understood the essential thing and because, in that very instant, he saw Edvard correct another servant only with his eyes, without even breaking the flow of his own speech, and thought it might be amusing to wound him a little.
He turned his face toward him with the most sincerely innocent tone he could fake."They will all suit a cripple equally badly. So it makes no difference."
"My lord, I did not mean to imply—"
"Yes, Ed," Hrafn said. He stopped before a tall door, wide, too heavy to serve any practical purpose. "I imagine."It was of course the armory.
The surprise that leaked from the butler was small, but real. Hrafn was already beginning to enjoy such leaks, they were like cracks in a very expensive vase. Along the way he had already noticed other entrances of that size, perhaps they were made for foreign visitors or for some larger race from the south.
"May I ask," Edvard said, adjusting the monocle with surgical care, "how my lord knew?"
"Imagine, Ed." Hrafn smiled. Then he opened the door with his foot before the man could hurry to serve him. "Be creative." The door gave way.
And for all he had just recommended creativity to the butler, Hrafn would never have imagined that. He had already felt the open space beyond the wood, thanks to the life that existed there, metal, leather, but until then he had not been paying proper attention.
Now he was.
The armory opened onto a great training yard, alive with steel and discipline. Servants carried bundles of spears and practice staves. Initiates lifted swords and rmorers watched it all with the dry patience of men who had already seen many youths mistake desire for talent. There were voices, metal striking metal, but that was not what held Hrafn.
There was a tall young man who easily stood two meters, perhaps more, broad in the shoulders, with the body of someone who seemed to have grown upward and outward at the same time, as if the world had decided to exaggerate in a single person and then stopped from exhaustion.
And still, he was not the center of the scene. It was what stood beside him, the thing was a mass of brown fur and dense muscle that, for an instant, made the armory itself seem small. It stood some three meters high, if not more. Hrafn had heard of camels in Nanna's stories, the people of the west, according to her, were quite fond of those creatures, this resembled those descriptions only enough to make all the rest stranger.
It rose on two short legs, bent in some strange way, upheld by feet on which only the toes touched the ground. The torso leaned slightly forward, heavy, ready, as though the creature had never relaxed a muscle in its life and arms were too long, nearly double the legs, and ended in three thick open fingers, his brown coat was short, dense and thick as a second cuirass, his face projected forward with something equine in it, but drier and harder, a little wrong, as though a horse had been remade by hands that knew only the vague idea of a horse.
And there was something in the eyes. Not the cleverness of a trained animal or the simple calculation of a predator. Its intelligence: A deep and unpleasant attention, too serene, almost unjust inside a body that seemed carved for war.
It was a giant.