Page 143 of Sword & Shadow
Thom frowned. “You’re willing to clean fish? Aren’t you too delicate for that?”
“The next time you call me delicate, it’ll be you I’m filleting.” The highlady held out her hand toward Ethenn. “May I have one of your knives, please?”
Ethenn slipped one of the shorter blades from his belt. “They’re daggers,” he remarked.
Her brow quirked in amusement. “Knife. Dagger.” She shrugged. “Same thing.”
Ethenn looked about ready to correct her when Evylin grabbed his arm. “Come on,” she said, tugging him toward the horses to retrieve the practice swords.
They walked out across the open moor, looking for a section not overgrown with brush. Several hundred feet away from the camp, they found a wide patch of mossy grass. With spring readily approaching and the terrain flat around them, the sun cast the field in a bright golden glow.
Tossing the training swords down into the scrub, Evylin faced Ethenn. “Ready?” she asked.
He pushed some of his overlong hair from his eyes. Like the rest of the men, his face was now scruffy with a beard, though it was thin and hardly constituted the term. “I guess,” he said.
“Don’t sound so excited,” Evylin remarked.
“Sorry.” A small, apologetic smile came to Ethenn’s face. It shifted his features, and suddenly, he looked much less serious than usual. “It’s just...this isn’t supposed to be happening—me having magical abilities.”
Evylin tipped her chin up, remembering his reluctance in the Wind Keep. His adamant refusal was almost as strong as Deckard’s. She considered him. “You didn’t want us to know you were a Warrior,” she noted. “Why not?”
Ethenn took a deep breath, settling his hands on his thick weapons belt. “Because I don’t want to be a Warrior.”
She pursed her lips. “And Jonn doesn’t want to be a Mage.”
“It’s—” Ethenn sighed. “It’s different for me, I think, though I don’t know the colonel’s reasons.”
Evylin didn’t bother to enlighten him. She wasn’t so sure she knew Deckard’s reasons herself.
“For me, it’s...” Ethenn paused, then dipped his head as though ashamed. “I don’t want to spend my life working for some higher cause, becoming some weapon for someone else’s ends. I want a small existence where I can disappear and be insignificant, as suits me.”
Frowning, Evylin couldn’t fathom such disparaging feelings. “I don’t think you’re insignificant,” she said, hoping to bolster the young man’s self-worth.
Ethenn gave her a cynical grin. “You don’t really know me, Evie,” he said calmly. “Of no fault of your own. I don’t let people know me.”
“Because you think people don’t want to know you?”
“Because I don’t like people.”
Evylin raised her brow. “You don’t like me?” she asked teasingly.
“Well...” His neck turned crimson. “No, it—it isn’t that I don’t like you, but—”
“You don’t trust me,” she realized, then nodded. “You don’t let people know you because you don’t trust them. I can relate.”
“You can?”
Tapping a finger against the handle of her sword, Evylin decided the conversation was getting too personal—for both of them. “Yes, I can,” she said. Then she changed course. “And while I sympathize with your plight, I’m afraid you can’t stay untrained. Would you like to get started?”
At Ethenn’s nod, Evylin opened her mouth, then closed it. She furrowed her brow, stared at the ground, and let out a “hm.”
“Hm?” Ethenn repeated.
Evylin met his dark gaze. “Turns out, I don’t know much about how to train a Warrior. I hardly know how to be one myself.”
“But you seem to do it so . . . easily.”
“I think that’s why Ilain says it’s innate,” Evylin replied. “When the time comes, the magic takes over. I’d guess that’s what happened to you, too, in the fighting rings before and in the Keeps now. You just didn’t know it. Or...you did, but you tried to ignore it.”
