He stepped up to the practice block and swung the sword, bracing for the smack of impact when the blade hit the pine wood. The vibrations reverberated up to his elbow.
The swordsmith was not impressed. “Are you trying to cut down a sunflower, my boy? Swing!”
Bannon swung again, harder this time, resulting in a louder thunk. A dry chunk of bark fell off the practice block.
“Defend yourself!” yelled Mandon.
He swung harder with a grunt from the effort, and this time the impact thrummed through his wrist, jarred his forearm, his elbow, all the way to his shoulder. “I’ll defend myself,” he whispered. “I won’t be helpless.”
But he hadn’t always been able to defend himself, or his mother.
Bannon struck again, imagining that the blade was cutting not into wood, but through flesh and hard bone. He hacked again.
He remembered coming home barely an hour after sunset one night on the island. He had been working as a hand in the Chiriya cabbage fields, like all the other young men his age. He had to work for wages rather than working his family’s own land, because his father had lost their holdings long before. It wasn’t even dinnertime yet, but his father was already out of the house, surely halfway drunk by now in the tavern. Getting drunk was about the only thing at which his father showed any efficiency.
At least that meant their cottage would be quiet, granting Bannon and his mother an uneasy peace. From his fieldwork in the past week, Bannon had earned a few more coins, paid that day—it was the height of the cabbage harvest, and the wages were better than usual.
He had already saved enough money to buy his own passage off of Chiriya Island. He could have left a month ago, and he remembered how he had longed to be gone from this place, staring at the infrequent trading ships as they sailed away from port. Such vessels stopped in the islands only once every month or two, since the islanders had little to trade and not much money to buy imported goods. Even though it would be some time before he had another chance, Bannon had made up his mind that he wouldn’t go—couldn’t go—until he could take his mother with him. They would both sail away and find a perfect world, a peaceful new home like all those lands he had heard of—Tanimura, the People’s Palace, the Midlands. Even the wild uncivilized places of the New World had to be better than his misery on Chiriya.
Bannon had walked into the house clenching the silver coin he had earned that day, sure that it would finally be enough to buy passage for himself and his mother. They could run away together the next time a ship docked in port. In order to be sure, he intended to count the carefully saved coins he had hidden in the bottom of the dirt-filled flowerpot on his windowsill. The pot held only the shriveled remnants of a cliff anemone that he had planted and nurtured, and then watched die.
Upon stepping into his cottage, though, Bannon had immediately smelled burned food, along with the coppery tang of blood. He stopped, on guard. Standing at the hearth, his mother turned from the pot she was stirring, trying to force a smile, but her lips and the side of her face looked like a slab of raw liver. Her pretense that everything was fine failed miserably.
He stared at her, feeling sick. “I should have been here to stop him.”
“You could not have done anything.” His mother’s voice sounded hoarse and ragged, no doubt from screaming and then sobbing. “I didn’t tell him where you hid it—I wouldn’t tell him.” She began to weep again, shaking her head. She slumped to the inlaid fieldstones on the hearth. “I wouldn’t tell him … but he knew anyway. He ransacked your room until he found the coins.”
Feeling an acid sickness in his stomach, Bannon ran to his room and saw his meager keepsakes scattered on the floor, the straw stuffing of his pallet torn out, the quilt his mother had sewn wadded against the wall—and the flowerpot with the cliff anemone upended, the dirt poured all over his bedding.
The coins were gone.
“No!” he cried. That money should have been a new hope, a fresh life for them both. Bannon had worked hard in the fields and saved a year to get enough for them to leave Chiriya and get far away from that man.
His father had not just stolen the coins, he had robbed Bannon and his mother of their future. “No!” he shouted again into the silent cottage as his mother wept on the hearth.
And that was how his father had taught Bannon never to keep all of his coins in one place, because then someone could take everything. It didn’t matter how good the hiding place was, thieves like his father could be smart, thieves could be brutal—or both. But when thieves found at least some money, then Bannon could make a convincing plea that it was all he had, and they might not think to look elsewhere.…
“By the good spirits, my boy!” The swordsmith’s voice cut through his dark haze of memories. “You’re going to break my testing block, break that sword—and break your arm while you’re at it.”
Bannon blinked and saw what he had done. In an unconscious frenzy, he had chopped great gouges into the pine log, spraying splinters in all directions. His hands were sweaty, but they squeezed the leather-wrapped grip in a stranglehold. The discolored blade thrummed in the air, but the sword was undamaged, the edge not notched.
His shoulders ached, his hands were sore, his wrists throbbed. “I think…” he said, then swallowed hard. “I think I’ve tested it enough. You’re right, sir. It seems to be a good blade.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the last copper coin. “One more thing from you, sir. Would a copper be enough for you to sharpen the sword again?” He looked at the mangled practice block and suppressed a shiver. “I think it might have lost some of its edge.”
Mandon looked long and hard at him, then accepted the copper coin. “I’ll put an edge on it that should last a long time, provided you take care of the blade.”
“I will,” Bannon promised.
The swordsmith used the grinding stone to resharpen the sword, throwing off a flurry of sparks. Bannon watched but didn’t see, as his thoughts wandered through a quagmire of memories. Before long, he would have to get back to the Wavewalker so he could be there when they sailed out on the evening tide. The rest of the crew would be hungover and miserable, and just as penniless as he was. Bannon would fit right in.
He fashioned a smile again and touched his bruised lip, then ignored the soreness as he imagined everything he could do to the thugs if they ever bothered him again. Now he was prepared. He dipped briefly into his fantasy—no, his belief—in a satisfying life, a happy family, kind friends. That world had to exist somewhere. Throughout his childhood on Chiriya, during all the times his father had shouted and struck, Bannon Farmer had built up that picture in his mind, and he desperately clung to it.