Virion Eralith
I moved the baton in my right hand a little, a flick of the wrist really, and the wand-cane in Corvis's hands slid off with a lightness that spoke to the gap between us.
This boy, I sighed in my head, pivoting on my heels and moving to Corvis's back in a motion that was muscle memory older than his father.
The boy's eyes widened in surprise as he turned, his wand-cane coming from the left, and I saw in that brief flash of his face the same hunger that had driven me when I was young enough to believe that speed could make up for everything else.
I parried it again, the baton finding the cane's flat with a crack that echoed off the garden walls.
"You have been training with Ashton Auddyr, right?" I asked, the face of Jarnas's grandson surfacing in my memory.
A good boy, that one. Serious. Dedicated. The kind of student who would make any teacher proud, even a teacher as exacting as Jarnas had always been. "It's been bearing fruit!"
I saw Corvis's expression twitch as I said it. Just a flicker, there and gone, but I caught it. This boy was always on edge, always so evasive when it came to compliments.
As if praise was something that burned him, something he had to duck away from before it could leave a mark. I had noticed it when he was small, the way he would deflect Merial's fussing with a smile that did not reach his eyes, the way he would turn aside from Alduin's words of pride like a blade glancing off armor.
At nine, he had not grown out of it. Not totally.
"Yes," Corvis replied as I parried another of his attacks.
There wasn't much to say about him, I thought, watching the way he held his cane, the way he positioned his feet. He was nine years old. Without mana, there was little he could do, and even technique had little meaning at that age.
The body had not grown into itself yet. The muscles had not learned what they would need to know. The mind was still learning to translate intention into action without the language of years to guide it.
But experience was always useful at all ages. That was something I had learned the hard way. Maybe that was the reason why I was so condescending to make him go to the Wild East.
Maybe I was just an old fool who had forgotten what it was like to be young and afraid, desperate to prove something to a world that did not care.
Nah. That wasn't it.
A part of me was just too happy to see my grandson take my very same steps out of his own volition. The selfish part, perhaps. I too had traveled to the Beast Glades when I was young, and at that time there was nothing like the Unraveler's Company.
Probably that was the reason why I was so happy and so ready to let my grandson go out into the wild.
Because I remembered what it had given me.
Because I remembered the person I had been before I went, and the person I had become after.
Because I wanted Corvis to find whatever it was he was looking for, even if he was not sure himself.
While this old fool of an elf was trying to make Dicathen closer with the old ways of politics, his grandson had founded an organization that accepted all races.
When Cynthia had heard of it, she was beyond shocked. She could not believe her ears. She had been trying to make Xyrus Academy, her academy, open to all for years, and she had always failed. The politics were too entrenched.
The old grudges ran too deep. The walls that Sapin and Elenoir both had built around themselves were not just made of stone.
And yet here was my grandson, nine years old, building in months what she had not been able to. Both our works eclipsed by a nine-year-old and the old dwarf who was his business partner. All I could feel was a strange, fierce joy, watching him move through the world like he had been given a map the rest of us had never been shown.
Corvis's next strike came from my right.
I side-stepped and made to disarm him, but the boy halted before I could do it. Oh, he learned his lesson, I said in my head, and I felt something warm spread through my chest.
However, he did not calculate how to balance himself properly and almost risked tripping on his own feet if it was not for his magic steadying him. The wind gathered under his heels, soft as a mother's hand, and I saw the concentration on his face, the way his brow furrowed, the way his lips pressed together.
"No magic, Corvis!" I chastised, keeping my voice light, playful. "You know the rules."
"Yeah, sorry, but I don't want to fall on the ground right after failing to hit you," Corvis said, and there was something in his voice that might have been frustration, or embarrassment.
"What? You didn't think I would have caught you?" I asked with a smirk, and I meant it. I would always catch him. That was the part of being a grandfather that no one ever told you about.
You spent your whole life learning to fight, to kill, to protect a kingdom from everything that threatened it, and then your grandchildren were born and you realized that all of it had just been practice.
Practice for this. Practice for being the one who caught them when they fell.
"If I could use magic I would be way better," Corvis complained.
"I am sure of it," I said, and I meant that too. "But we are not sparring!"
"And what is this?" Corvis asked, his face frowning in that way that had become so familiar to me over the years.
"Just a playful exchange of blows," I joked, and I watched his face, waiting for the smile that did not come. It was a detail, I knew. But a detail that mattered to me.
"Anyway," I said, seeing Corvis's mood beginning to shift. This boy was always so susceptible to his own darkness. It was like watching clouds gather over a clear sky, swift and inevitable. Happiness never seemed to want to stay close to him.
It was something me, Alduin, and Merial had noticed since he was old enough to feel emotions, old enough to pull away from a hug that was offered too quickly, to smile at a joke that should have made him laugh.
Something in him was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Something in him was always bracing for impact.
"Where is Berna?"
Corvis's bond, which he had brought back one day from one of his stays at that hag Rinia's, was probably the best thing that could have come into Corvis's life at his age.
We had been thinking of giving Corvis a pet for emotional support for a long time—something small, something gentle, something that would sit in his lap and let him hold it when the world got too heavy.
But we had never found the right thing. And then Corvis had come back from the Elshire Forest with a bear. A bear that followed him everywhere, that slept at the foot of his bed, that looked at him with eyes that held something I had never expected to see in a beast's face.
The Elshire Forest, it seemed, had given the little prince a gift. And a very big one, at that.
"Over there," Corvis said, pointing his finger behind me, and as I turned I saw, covered in a pile of leaves left behind by a gardener, a brown mass of fur.
She was curled into herself, her massive sides rising and falling with the slow rhythm of sleep, and she was so still, so utterly silent, that I could have walked past her a dozen times and never known she was there.
"I haven't felt her at all," I said, and I heard the surprise in my own voice.
For a beast that was bigger than most animals I had ever seen, Berna was scarily stealthy. There were times I did not feel her mana signature at all. It was as if she could fold herself into the background of the world, become part of the air and the earth and the slow pulse of the forest, and I would look at her and see nothing but a patch of shadow where something living should have been.
Just like Tessia's robin. The thought surfaced unbidden, and I let it settle. My grandchildren truly had peculiar pets.
Creatures that moved through the world like they had been given permission by something above. Maybe it was really the Elshire Forest that had bestowed those mana beasts upon them.
"That sword-eating bear must be more silent than a Shadow Panther," I said, and I was almost moved to believe it.
"She didn't mean to eat your swords," Corvis said, and I heard the defensive note in his voice, the protective edge that came up whenever anyone said anything about his bond.
"Yeah," I replied, turning back to face him. "I know who told her to eat my collection."
Corvis looked away, whistling, his gaze fixed on something in the middle distance that was not there.
This boy. This strange, serious, secretive boy who had never learned to be a child. Who carried himself like someone twice his age and twice his size.
I reached out and ruffled his hair and he did not pull away. He stood there, my grandson, my strange, impossible grandson, and let me touch him, and I thought about all the things I did not know about him and all the things I would probably never know, and I knew that it did not matter.
And whatever he was carrying, whatever weight he had chosen to bear alone, I would be here to catch him when he fell.