Derring-Do for Beginners, page 1
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Watch for more at Victoria Goddard’s site.
DERRING-DO FOR BEGINNERS
THE RED COMPANY
BOOK ONE
VICTORIA GODDARD
Copyright © 2023 by Victoria Goddard
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
CONTENTS
I. In the City
1. In Which Damian Fights His First Duel
2. In Which Damian Considers Ends in Themselves
3. In Which Damian Attains a Position
II. Someone Leaves Town
4. In Which Jullanar is Examined
5. In Which Jullanar Comes to the Gates of the City of Knowledge
6. In Which Jullanar Does Not Correct Other People’s Assumptions
7. In Which Jullanar Discovers She Has A Mission
8. In Which Jullanar Looks Through A Lantern
9. In Which Jullanar Tries To Look On Things As An Adventure
10. In Which Jullanar Arrives In the Painted City
11. In Which Jullanar Learns of Serendipity
12. In Which Damian Holds His First Lesson
13. In Which There is Much Practice
III. Someone Comes to Town
14. In Which A Month Has Passed
15. In Which Damian Hears of Distant Lands
16. In Which Jullanar Is Faced With A Conundrum
17. In Which Jullanar Makes a Decision
18. In Which Damian Wishes to Reciprocate
19. In Which Damian Offers A Gift
20. In Which Damian and Jullanar Make a New Acquaintance
21. In Which Damian Struggles Several Ways
22. In Which Jullanar Tries to Translate the Untranslatable
23. In Which Damian Offers Hospitality
24. In Which Jullanar Enters A Tavern for the First Time
25. In Which Several Things Happen
IV. The Outskirts
26. In Which Jullanar and Damian Seek a Poet
27. In Which Jullanar and Damian Find Something
Author’s Note
PART ONE
IN THE CITY
CHAPTER ONE
IN WHICH DAMIAN FIGHTS HIS FIRST DUEL
It was quiet in Ixsaa, in the hours before dawn. In the room he shared with his twin brother, Damian lay for a few moments in his bed, listening to his own heart beating. Alezian was breathing softly, and it was a windless morning at the tail end of summer. He could smell the herbs that scented their sheets, and a waft of less pleasant odour from outside the window. In the distance the baker’s rooster crowed; it was always the first awake.
Damian knew the crows of every cockerel and rooster in the Greenmarket. He knew which houses had night-wandering cats, and whose dogs or geese could be counted on to stir. He knew the night tracks of rats, and the occasional secret visits of the wild foxes, the soft-winged owls, the night-flying geese.
He was training to be a swordsman, and he practiced early in the morning, before the city was awake.
People watched him if he started too late, which he found discomforting. As he was not willing to abandon the more extravagant elements—the hand-over-hand swing along the underside of the harbour chain, the climb across the face of the aqueduct, the circuit of the three walls of Ixsaa in their varying states of decrepitude—but he was not inclined towards display, either, he had moved his start time earlier and earlier, until he was able to do the whole circuit safely in the dark.
His twin brother thought him mad, but that was all right. Damian could not fathom Alezian’s own interests in trade, for all Ixsaa was a city of merchants, not warriors. Alezian could follow the merchants, the ways of the city their mother had adopted; Damian could follow the narrow path of their quietly whispered family legends.
This particular morning he stretched and dressed, and glanced once at his brother in the bed beside his, who, as always, slept deeply.
Alezian had to be chivvied to exercise when he was on land, claiming—with some truth, Damian admitted—that the most successful merchants were always the fattest. The only thing that kept him from true corpulence was his love of sailing.
For the whole last year Alezian had been going back and forth between the Ixsaan navy, where he might start as an officer, or the merchant fleet, where he would have to begin as an ordinary seaman. Either way he needed to be able to climb the ropes and manage a cutlass. This morning he was legally able to decide; he would, Damian was sure, choose the merchants.
This morning Damian was legally able to duel.
He dressed in his practice gear, leather breeches supple with age and use, linen shirt with the sleeves bound at his wrist, leather jerkin. He pulled on the half-boots he always wore.
He was mocked for that habit, half-boots being entirely unfashionable, but Damian reasoned that any real fight would come either when he was expecting it, when he could dress as he wished, or when he was not, in which case he should be prepared to fight in his ordinary clothes.
Both Alezian and their mother sighed at this logic and tried to convince him he should wear something other than leather and old, worn linen for his ordinary clothes.
Damian snorted softly. Let his brother yearn after silk and velvet and rare furs and all the trappings and trinkets of wealth. That was not his concern.
He slipped out of the room as silently as he could, practicing stealth as a matter of habit as well as courtesy.
He, Damian Raskae, might have chosen the way of the sword from the earliest possible age, but he had chosen it for its beauty and its challenge, not its violence or its power. He did not want to be a boorish fighter, the sort his mother had always dismissed in her stories.
His mother was in the kitchen. Damian was startled to see her, for though she was an early riser, an hour before dawn rarely saw her out of bed. He had intended to do no more than pass through on his way to the locked shed where they kept their weapons, but she gestured to the seat next to her.
“Good morning,” he said reluctantly.
“Good morning, Damian,” she replied, not in Calandran but in their own language, Tanteyr.
They rarely spoke it nowadays, though it had been the language of his childhood. Most of the other Tantey in the city had moved on, seeking a place they could form their own community.
Damian hesitated, his curiosity pricked, though he responded in Calandran to show that he was a man now, not bound by her rules. Alezian had been very firm about that. He was always much clearer about the way things were done than Damian was. “What is it, Ema?”
“It is your sixteenth birthday today, Damian,” she said, still in Tanteyr.
“Yes, Ema. Can we talk about it later? I want to get to the grounds before dawn.”
She regarded him steadily. He met her gaze, refusing to back down. This was not the mountains, not the old country of her stories, where she had been a queen. This was the city, and in the city a man was expected to be strong and resolute.
He was just turned sixteen. In the city he was a man now, able to join the navy or run for office or own a business or fight a duel. He was by some minutes the elder over Alezian, and under Ixsaan law was now technically the head of the household. He did not need to submit to his mother any longer.
He opened his mouth to say that, and caught himself.
Every story she had told him of the old country, the one high up in the mountains, had ingrained that youth should bow before age, child before parent, prince before queen—and that women were the equal of men.
Did he not pride himself he was not a boor, not only a fighter, but also (if secretly) a prince of the Realm, one to whom courtesy ought come as easily as skill at arms? Was he not proud that his mother had been a warrior, was a better archer than most, was one of the best riders in the city?
She was still watching him, her expression faintly sad. Did she think he had forgotten all their own language? He thought Alezian might have, or pretended to.
Alezian wanted to be accepted, to become a merchant prince, to live in one of the big houses on the Crescent and look out on his ships coming and going up from the Delta. Alezian was embarrassed by their mother’s refusal to do a proper feminine job, that she had hung out her shingle as a public notary, and that she trained the horses she bred up in one of the feeder valleys herself.
Damian bowed to his mother and then sat down. “My apologies, Ema,” he said in Tanteyr, fumbling a bit with the words. “It is yet early, and I was not anticipating this audience.”
The more formal language and pacing made him feel grander than the small kitchen seemed to warrant. He straightened his shoulders, trying to feel like a prince of the old country.
“What is it your desire to speak of?”
She paused, watching him. He bore her scrutiny as patiently as he could, imagining her a queen, crowned with silver as she had once been.
Then she shook her head. “No, go on, Dami. I don’t think this is a good time, after all. I don’t think you’re ready to hear what I wanted to tell you.”
He knew well enough not to press after such a flat statement, and so he took his leave, kissing the hand she held out in the Ixsaan custom.
He puzzled over her words as he went around the fountain in their tiny courtyard to the shed on the far side, wondering if he’d misunderstood something.
Possibly he had spoken incorrectly. He really did not speak Tanteyr often. As Alezian said, there was no need to. Their mother had left because of a civil war in the old country, and almost all of those who had initially stayed with her had gone off to found their own colony somewhere far away from Ixsaa.
It was not as if Damian or Alezian were ever going to become king. He had paid enough attention to know that was not how succession worked up there in the mountains. And anyone who came this far to trade would have learned Calandran as a matter of course.
His heart beat faster, as it always did, as he undid the locks on the shed.
He did not need to see to know what was inside: his mother’s bows and quivers on the left, her swords and spears. On the right, his brother’s sword and cutlass.
And in the middle, the swords and daggers and other weapons Damian had scrounged, bought, and been given over the years.
He reached for the sword in the middle, hand closing on the tooled leather of its scabbard, and smiled in simple joy to have the rapier in his hand.
As he belted it on his hip all thought of his mother’s apparent quibbles left his thoughts.
She was a warrior queen; he was almost a warrior prince. Surely that was more than enough.
She was probably a little emotional that her two boys were becoming men today, and she did not like showing emotion, his mother. Another way she was not like the women of the city.
He relocked the shed, excitement surging as it always did when he had his sword at his side and the morning before him. He did not bother with unlatching the gate but instead leaped up and swung himself over the top of the wall and off lightly into the still-sleeping city.
Inside the house Kasiar Ounlalin sat in her kitchen, the sword she had intended to give her elder son laid on the table before her, and missed her late husband terribly.
Damian was running easily by the time he left the last houses of the city behind, though his heart was beating much harder than was usual.
He could not see anyone as he approached the duelling grounds, but it was still very early; the sky behind the mountains was barely tinted with red.
The air was fresh, smelling good with some sort of herbal or flowery scent. He noted the direction of the wind and the small likelihood of clouds, and did not distract himself with questions of what the wind smelled like.
He also did not look too often at the pale falcon riding high above him. That was a secret he was unwilling to share with anyone outside of his family.
It occurred to him that perhaps it was some piece of knowledge to do with that portion of their heritage that his mother had wanted to tell him. He glanced up at the falcon.
It was too early for him to chase its shadow, the falcon’s usual challenge.
Perhaps it, too, was acknowledging that this day was a special one.
He slowed to a walk when he turned off the main road north to the lane leading to the duelling grounds. He did not want to seem too eager. That was considered a fault by both his mother and the fraternity of swordsmen he was finally about to join.
The crumbling stone walls of some ancient edifice from the long-vanished Calandran Empire provided a sheltered and private place for the duels, which were sacred to the god of war and only to be seen by men.
As a boy he had been permitted to watch from the inner fence marking out the circular grounds, never to cross the threshold and set his sword against a man’s.
That would change this morning—if one of the swordsmen were willing to meet him. It would be humiliating to find no one there.
He was not worried about humiliating himself on the grounds. He was here to learn.
Torches burned either side of the door, indicating someone, at least, had come.
He took a breath, settling himself, looking up at a flicker, but a soft cooing told him it was a pigeon moving in the niche over the door, not some uncanny movement of the blurred carving of the ancient god contained within.
He raised his right hand to part the heavy curtains, leather dyed red, that blocked the door, and ducked through.
His heart was beating steadily now, his breath easy. He was ready to meet what the fates had in store for him.
There were five men there. They stood around another torch, this one thrust into the ground by the gate of the inner enclosure, speaking quietly among themselves. When Damian walked up they stopped and ranged themselves to look at him.
He regarded them in the uncertain light, taking in their silhouettes and their stances.
Two he knew from watching at the staging grounds where the caravans gathered, though he did not know their names: a red-haired man from the Delta, tall, barrel-chested, with arms whose muscles were like clusters of river rocks, and a black-haired and black-bearded Calandran, as tall as the red-haired man but lean and quick as the narrow bastard sword he was known for.
A little apart from them were two young blades from the Crescent, severn or eight years older than Damian himself.
They had nothing in common with the first two but the respect given to those who bore a certain degree of mastery; the young blades between them had won all the prizes for fencing in the war-games held each summer for the past five years. They had the usual proud surnames of the Crescent’s wealthy families, but went by Erios and Faros when out and about in the half-masks that marked them as members of the Fraternity of the Crescent Blade.
The fifth was a stranger. He stood easily, the silhouette of his clothes slightly foreign: his breeches did not cling close but billowed out slightly before being bound into his tall boots, and he wore a half-cloak in some dark colour, as if the cool air was winter-cold. It moved restlessly in the light wind, swirling over the sword belted and chained at his hip.
Damian had watched the duellers for the past several years. He knew the ritual. Once he came to the waist-high stone between door and fence he stopped and bowed.
“Who approaches the duelling ground?” asked the black-bearded Calandran.
“One seeking to prove himself,” Damian replied—at last, at last! His heart was beating too fast again, as if it wanted to match the guttering of the torch in the breeze. The stranger’s cloak moved in the wind, like a restless shadow.
“Only men may stand upon this ground, which is sacred to Arkhos, the god of war.”
“I am of age this day, and I willingly bring my blood and my blade as an offering to Arkhos,” Damian said truthfully, though he had to suppress a pang that he so easily denied the teachings of his mother.
