Chapter 7...in case anyone wants a snippet

Chapter 7

            Pyra slipped from the great hall, doing her best to leave politely but without saying more than a word or two to any one person. Had her father not been out on a hunting trip, he would have forced her to stay, citing her duty to the province and to her people. As it was, when her older brother opened his mouth to protest, she waved him off and continued toward the enormous double doors that separated the hall from the rest of the castle. She stole a glance over her shoulder and smirked at Theamere, letting him know that he was on his own to deal with the various nobles and rich old men that had come to eat at their table.

            Their father, Ravitch had been gone for nearly two weeks. Had he been around, the bureaucrats would have known better than to come begging for handouts. Instead, like the vultures they were, they came to grovel at Theamere’s feet and pick his table clean. For once, Pyra was glad to be the younger of the two and a young woman. She would never have been expected to take over her father’s duties in his absence. As it was, those responsibilities fell to Theamere, the one and only son of the Lord of Graveholm. Theamere seemed to enjoy the attention that the rich old men were giving him. All of them wanted handouts: land, money, and favors, and offered very little but praise for Theamere in return. He was more than happy to sit and listen to them beg, as long as they helped out his ego while they were there.

            Pyra had even heard of a few marriage proposals passed his way, a majority of the men trying to marry their young daughters off to Heir of Ice, as Theamere had been often called. There wasn’t much else for him to inherit, besides the keep and a whole lot of responsibility. Occasionally, some of the more forward nobles had offered up a son to take Pyra off of her brother’s and father’s hands. Theamere declined them all politely. How he did it was a mystery to Pyra. Had some ancient buzzard of a man offered one of his middle-aged sons to her, she might have hit one of her wispy-haired elders.

            Pyra was bored with the dinner. So, she excused herself.  The hall was full of food, talk, and drink. None but Theamere would even notice that she had left. The feast was not holding her attention well anyway. She could practically hear the books in her father’s large library calling her name.

            Pyra opened the doors and slipped outside. Before she had taken a handful of steps down the stone hallways outside of the hall, one of the knights of the keep had fallen into step behind her.  

            “Gramm, I don’t need a guard. I’m only going to the library,” she said.

            “Of course you don’t, m’lady.”

            The metal of the knight’s boots clicked in time with his even pace and the netting of chainmail that ran down the back of his thighs jingled like a thousand tiny bells. Pyra hadn’t taken a good look at Gramm today, but she was sure that his armor and uniform were immaculate as always.  She sighed.

            “Gramm, I told you to stop calling me that. My name is Pyra.”

            She heard Gramm chuckle behind her. “You did. I’m afraid that I would make a poor excuse for a knight if I couldn’t even manage to use the correct title for my betters, though. M’lady.”

           

            Pyra glared back at the young man, offering a killing gaze to the dark-haired, roughly stubbled knight. She had to crane her neck to see his face, but that was nothing new. Since she had been young, Pyra had been staring up at all of those around her. This was in stark contrast with Gramm. Her friend had always stood a head above the rest of the men his age.

           

            “You won’t make much of a knight if you can’t follow orders, either,” she said with a wink.

            Gramm chuckled again,. He rested his left arm on the hilt of the sword that swung at his hip and scratched the back of his neck with his right. In the absence of a real retort, Pyra smiled haughtily and increased her pace.

            “That’s a very good point m’lady. Fortunately for me, your father is my liege lord. Not you. So, really, I am not required to follow any of your orders.”

            Pyra’s face fell and she let her breath out in a huff. She increased her pace even further, the stomping of her feet sending echoes through the halls of the keep. She heard Gramm’s footsteps fade into the distance, but she knew that he would catch her eventually. He liked to give Pyra a hard time, but the knight was intelligent enough to realize that she had not been lying when she had said that she was going to the library. After all, nearly everyone in the castle realized that she spent most of her time there, pouring over historical scrolls and mystical tomes. Many of her father’s retainers and friends said that she was obsessed. Pyra preferred to say that she was studious.

            The door that led to her father’s library was innocuous enough. It was made of the same dark wood as every other door in the keep, and more than likely, every door in all of Graveholm. The timber that the doors were made of covered the mountainous region. Logging was a powerful industry in the area, and the local craftsmen were incredibly talented.

            Behind that door, though, was Pyra’s favorite room in the kingdom. Shelves and shelves of books lined the front and right walls of the library, with various colors of covers and bindings. Some of the books were incredibly thin, no more than a sheaf of paper between two bindings. Others were massive tomes, hundreds and hundreds of pages, written in cramped and miniscule script and bound with thick leather covers. Their content covered innumerable topics, from histories of the kingdom and its prominent families, to lineages and trees of Pyra’s own family, to poems and stories by some of the most prominent scribes of recent centuries.

            The room itself was small. There was an enormous window on the far wall, to let in some light and provide a view of the frozen landscape below. The ceiling was low enough that the bookshelves reached all of the way to it. The library was not the largest room in Graveholm, nor was it the most opulent. It had a simple kind of beauty. It was calm and quiet. Almost no noise filtered in from the hallways of the keep, or through the window to the outside world. To Pyra, it was a sanctuary, more so than any church or cathedral in the world.

           

            The left wall was covered with books in lieu of scrolls. Most were academic texts. Those were coated in a film of dust, as no one in the castle had the time nor, for many, the ability to read such ponderous works. Literacy was not a common commodity this far north. Pyra left them alone because they were boring and written by the very same stuffy old men that were currently boring her brother with their intellectual babble.

            Instead, her attentions were focused on a small pile of scrolls that had been removed from the shelves and piled meticulously on the lone desk in the center of the library. These were scrolls of magic, brought from the great schools of Immeo by Elder Moss. Years ago, upon the Elder’s retirement, he had brought scrolls written by some of the greatest minds of the age to Graveholm. His own spellcraft and that of his mentors was inked on dozens of scrolls, and Pyra had a mind to read them all.

            She grabbed the scroll from the top of the pile, unrolled it, and picked up where she had left off the day before, reading aloud so that she could better understand the spells that were scribbled on the parchment.

            “Fire, for warmth and for destruction,” she began. “Magical fire, as natural fire, must begin with a spark. That spark, brought to life in a nurturing environment and given proper fuel, will give rise to flame. Friction is the simplest path by which a spark is formed, more often than not through the snapping of the thumb and middle finger.”

            Pyra stopped and sighed, rubbing her temples. She always had to prepare herself for trying something magical. Elder Moss could call upon the power on command. Pyra had to do a lot to clear her mind beforehand.  

            She closed her eyes and began deep breathing, clearing her mind of everything but the current that floated beneath the air, running through everything and everyone. The faintest buzzing reverberated through the library and under Pyra’s skin, making her skin crawl and the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Her mind, acting as a kind of extra sense, cast out, grabbing at the ethereal river. She gathered the “water” using her mind like she would a bucket, holding as much power as she could.

            Elder Moss had taught her the steps. Pyra was confident in her abilities. She gripped it, holding the magic tight, forcing it into a spherical shape and snapped her fingers.

            Nothing.

            She snapped again, this time harder, as if that would make some kind of difference. Again, nothing happened. The young woman focused harder, denying herself any knowledge but that of the condensed magic that she held only in her mind. She was strong enough to do this and she knew it.

 Pyra imagined the magical fire held in a tight sphere, rotating swirls of red and yellow, not unlike the sun in the sky, held beneath the translucent surface of the ball.

            She snapped again. This time, she felt the temperature in the room increase marginally and her thumb and middle finger began to tingle uncomfortably. She furrowed her brows and squinted, this time sucking in her breath and holding it. She snapped once more, this time bringing an almost imperceptible light to her hand. Another snap and she heard a faint crackle. One more, the most forceful yet, produced a small ember, like one of those thousands that snapped and danced from the fireplace in the great hall.

            Pyra smiled, becoming more excited and all the more focused for it. She snapped more and more frequently, producing a spark with each rubbing together of her fingertips. The heat in the room increased drastically, causing her to breathe more heavily and sweat to drip from her forehead into her eyes. Her fingers had become wet, reducing the friction between them and lessening the sparks that jumped from her fingertips. So, Pyra wiped them on the hem of her dress and snapped once more.

            An isolated fire, the size of the flame on a small candle sparked to life and hovered above her thumb. The appearance of the fully realized flame startled Pyra so badly that she fell over, knocking down the chair that she was sitting in at the same time. The fire sputtered out of existence just as she yelped loudly and crashed to the ground.

           

            The library door burst open and Gramm entered, looking disheveled and wholly unlike himself.

            Pyra looked up at him from the ground, smiling at his worry. “I’m fine, Gramm. I just startled myse…”

            The knight shook his head and cut her off, the frantic look in his eyes revealing that something else was wrong.

            When he spoke, his voice was low and his breathing labored. “Your father. He’s hurt. Run and get Elder Moss. Bring him to the infirmary. Hurry.”

            With that, he was gone, off and running down the hallway. Only after he’d gone did Pyra notice the trail of blood that he had left on the floor behind him. Before she realized it, Pyra was sprinting down the hall, her bare feet smacking on the cold stone. The last she had seen the Elder, he had been at the feast, engaged in an argument with some gray-bearded noble.

            She slowed her advance when she neared the hall. It wouldn’t do to come sprinting in. When she entered, Pyra immediately noticed that the noise in the hall had lessened significantly. The food and drink had obviously set in, created a general malaise in the room. Theamere locked eyes with her upon her arrival, and she cast a frightened glance in his direction. He looked confused, but she did not have the time to explain anything to him yet. She had to find the Elder.

            When she spotted the old man, he was slumped in his chair with his chin on his chest, snoring softly. It appeared that the festivities had been too much for him to handle. Pyra could only hope that he had not taken part in too much drinking. She needed him awake and sober to help her father. She walked to him, quickly but carefully. She did not want to draw any unwanted attention to herself. The last thing that her father needed was to have the vultures plucking at him while he was hurt.

            Pyra moved to shake the Elder’s shoulder, but he sat up straight as a rod before she could even touch him. He shook his head to wake himself, while he scratched at the few wispy white hairs on top of his head.

            Before Pyra had a chance to explain herself, his gray eyes met with hers. “What happened, child? What’s wrong?”

            “Father is hurt. Gramm told me to come and get you, but there was blood, and I don’t know what happened to him, and they’re in the infirmary waiting for you, and I don’t know how badly he’s hurt, and I’m supposed to bring you to him.” She panted, out of breath, and stared at him, amazed at how he could stay so calm while she was so upset.

            He rose slowly and calmly, nodding his wrinkled and age-spotted head once. “You’ve done well. Walk with me to see to him, please.”

            Pyra nodded quickly and offered her arm to the Elder. As they walked, he asked her what she knew about her father’s injuries. She told him nothing. She knew nothing. All she knew was that there was blood. Her father’s blood. Or Gramm’s. Or someone else’s entirely.

           

            So, the pair walked in a hurried silence, moving as fast as Elder Moss’s aged joints and Pyra’s shaking legs would allow. As they neared the infirmary, a group of hushed voices could be heard. A group of her father’s knights approached them, blood soaking the front of their armor and their capes.

            One spoke up, his tone soft, saying, “This isn’t a sight for the lady, Elder. I’d send her on her way.”

            Pyra shouldered past him without a word. The other knights wanted to stop her from going in, she could see it on their faces. None of them were brave enough to physically stop her, though. Gramm might have tried it, but he was in the infirmary still. Pyra could hear him talking to someone.

            With the Elder just a step behind her, Pyra pushed through the door into the infirmary. She stopped dead in her tracks, her breath catching hard in her chest and forming a twisted knot in the back of her throat. Lord Ravitch of Graveholm, her father, lay on an infirmary bed, covered in dark blood. His face bore the brunt of the damage, with fresh, red, liquid pouring down the left side. His clothes and sheets were all stained dark.

            Pyra stood in shock. She had never seen her father so fragile. So vulnerable. She wanted to weep for him. She could only stand silently, barely feeling Gramm’s hand on her shoulder and the reassuring pressure that he put there.