Page 29 of Astarion

“My mother,” Astarion said. “Um…she’s a druid?” And as the man continued to stare at him: “She would turn into a bear sometimes? And a draft horse that time when we had to clear the south field?”

The stable master cleared his throat and said, “That’s not quite the same thing. And…son?” He leaned in and dropped his voice. “Don’t tell people that. Or if you do, explain that you were a child. Otherwise, they’re going to get the wrong impression.”

Astarion agreed, bewildered. The stable master put him on a pony. The pony realized within seconds that its rider expected his steed to direct itself, then directed itself to the nearest patch of clover. The stable master took a flask out of his pocket and gazed at it longingly, then put it back without touching it.

The notion of bits and bridles and reins and whips struck Astarion as rude, bordering on monstrous, but he eventually learned to direct the pony in a manner that did not make the stable master want to drink. At that point, he graduated to a horse, which was a lot taller than a pony. It was even taller than his mother in bear shape, an observation that he kept to himself. And it went a lot faster, and when Astarion fell off, it did not stop to see if he was okay. It just kept running.

He limped into dinner with his great-grandmother that night. They dined together once a tenday and took tea irregularly, as her health permitted. When she saw him moving as if he’d fractured half his ribs and both his shoulders, she asked him what had happened, then burst out laughing at the answer.

“Oh, my poor boy,” she said, putting a hand to her chest as she gasped. “Oh, sit down, and I’ll tell you about when my father taught me to take fences. Wendin, fetch some brandy. The hundred year, I think.”

Wendin bowed very slightly. “I fear that we are out of the hundred year, Madam.”

Lady Erikinia made a soft tutting sound. “Anything over two hundred years should never be used medicinally.”

“I believe we have a quite adequate fifty year, Madam.”

She sighed. “The cellars have declined, as have we all. Very well, fetch this youthful brandy for our youthful relative.”

Astarion’s great-grandmother told him a rambling but hilarious story, which helped. The brandy burned his throat but also seemed to help.

It was odd, though—when Wendin poured, Astarion caught a glimpse of the label. While his education at the vineyard had been sorely lacking, one thing he did know was bottle labels, and this one was not fifty years old, nor even ten years.

He looked up at Wendin, who shook his head very slightly.

It was odd, but so many things were odd now that Astarion scarcely knew what to make of any of it.

When he was not dining with Lady Erikinia, he ate with his deportment teacher—who peppered the conversation with reminders about his elbows and the size of his bites—or with Bajia, or sometimes by himself. There were no boys his age at the manor house.

Perhaps he was lonely, but if so, he had been lonely all his life. And now, at least, he was lonely and comfortable and learning things, and even though he had to work hard, it was work he didn’t mind doing, unlike his work in the vineyard.

Bajia taught him both dance and the rudiments of fighting with a rapier. They practiced in a little packed-earth yard off the stables that was no longer used and had weeds growing at the edges that put up small cheerful yellow flowers.

“Will I be able to fight duels?” he asked Bajia one day, after she had chased him around the yard until they were both out of breath.

“Fight them, yes. Win them…probably not.” She looked him frankly up and down, like a horse buyer with a questionable animal. “Not unless you get more muscle on you than I expect you will. You’ve got speed, which is a damn sight better than nothing, but one wrong parry against a bigger sword will snap your blade.”

Astarion, who had nurtured a secret fantasy of becoming a dashing swordsman, sighed.

“You’d probably make a decent knife fighter,” Bajia said carelessly, gathering up their equipment.

Astarion’s ears immediately perked up. “Knives?” His dreams of duels were rapidly replaced by dreams of daring midnight assassinations, leaping down from a rooftop to plant a knife in the kidney of some nefarious villain doing whatever it was that nefarious villains did.

Bajia groaned. “Don’t get that look. It’s not the sort of thing nobles are supposed to learn. It’s dirty fighting, it’s underhanded, and your great-grandmother probably wouldn’t approve of me teaching you.”

“That’s what you said about the locks.”

She rubbed the spot between her eyebrows. “Which I already regret.”

“But you can teach me?”

The human woman looked around the yard as if expecting someone to come to her rescue. When no one did, she looked up at the sky, possibly hoping for an imminent dragon attack. When this also failed to materialize, her lips did a complicated dance and eventually settled on resignation. “I can. If only because sending you out into the world with a sword is asking for someone to gut you like a fish, and I’d hate for all those dancing lessons to go to waste.” She reached out and ruffled his hair, which he hated from most people but rather enjoyed from Bajia. “Fine. I’ll rummage up some blunted daggers and see what I can do.”

Astarion took to knife fighting like a goose to mayhem. He loved that the strategy was to close in on your opponent and disarm them, and he loved even more that stabbing your opponent in the kidney was considered a perfectly valid path to victory. Furthermore, he was good at it. Even though Bajia beat him nineteen times out of twenty, she had to be quick to do it, and the rare occasions when he scored a touch on her left him radiant with pride.

He felt dangerous, and as a twelve-year-old boy, he’d had precious few opportunities to feel that way.

It was just horribly awkward when his mother arrived on his thirteenth birthday, dropping down directly in front of him as he was attempting to slice a blunted dagger across Bajia’s throat.