CHAPTER 22

Chop Down the Tree

Habit is the cornerstone to a Grievar’s martial progress. However, one must be careful to avoid becoming dependent on a set training regimen; life and combat are never truly predictable.

Passage Six, Twenty-Fifth Precept of the Combat Codes

Cego’s shin slammed against the bark of the ironwood tree again.

After a while, it stopped hurting. After throwing so many kicks against the smooth bark, the blood stoppered up; the nerve endings in his leg became numb to the repeated impact.

He paused to wipe the sweat from his eyes. He listened to his brothers continue their assault on the ironwoods from beside him in the grove. He heard the sharp crack of a sapling.

Silas grinned and stepped over a fallen tree like another downed opponent. He moved toward his next victim and mechanically started chopping again.

Sam used to complain when Farmer wasn’t watching. His little brother had constantly questioned the point of spending hours in the ironwood grove, kicking trees. Now the little freckled boy mechanically chopped at the tree, numb to the pain.

Cego began to work again, focused on keeping his leg loose and throwing from the hip as Farmer had instructed.

“Like swinging a rope,” the old master had said, though Cego had wondered if the man was aware that his leg was made up of bones that could break and muscles that could tear, unlike a rope.

Cego noticed Sam had paused. The boy’s gaze was trained on a lithe form scaling the largest tree in the grove, a mother ferrcat with a dead rodent gripped in her teeth. She was on her way back to feed her young up in the nest.

It was only yesterday that Cego and Sam had silently peered from their perch and marveled at how fast the two little cats were growing. They’d been captivated as the mother gave her babies a hotly protested tongue bath.

Cego realized Silas had stopped kicking and was watching Sam. Silas had scolded them for spending so much time up in the canopy lately.

“Let’s put an end to this,” Silas said as he approached the ancient tree. “You two need to focus on training.”

The eldest brother had spent the end of each kicking session working on that big tree, slowly cutting into the groove at its base. Cego and Sam had watched as the nest vibrated and shed leaves each time Silas’s kicks shook the trunk. But the great ironwood had withstood the assault, and the ferrcat home had held in place.

Until now.

They could see that the great ironwood was near toppling, starting to stoop at a strange angle like an old man lived past his days. The ferrcats began to squeal from the canopy as the tree groaned with another of Silas’s strikes.

Silas kicked harder and faster as his opponent gave way. He sensed weakness, and Cego knew that would drive his brother to finish the job.

“No…” Sam said, his eyes latched on the ferrcats, who were now scrambling to stay in the swaying nest. If the tree fell, the mother would likely survive, but not the young—a goshawk would pick them off before nightfall if they survived the initial impact.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Cego said. He knew Silas. He knew his eldest brother didn’t care about the little creatures. The tree was his opponent, one he’d been battling with for the last month, and nothing could stop him now.

“Silas, stop it!” Sam moved toward the eldest brother, who did not respond. He stayed methodical in his striking, following some internal rhythm.

“Let me get up there and take them down first,” Sam pleaded. Their little brother had always had a soft spot for the creatures of the island. Last year, he’d nursed a fallen sparrow back to health after it’d flown into the siding of Farmer’s compound.

Silas kept kicking.

Cego knew they were only animals. He knew life and death happened on a regular basis and the baby cats wouldn’t likely make it through the year, anyway. But it bothered him that Silas didn’t care.

They heard a sharp crack that echoed through the forest. Silas’s shin met the same spot again, his hip turned, and he ripped his leg back into the weakened structure. As if a final sinew holding the trunk had been severed, the tree let out a groan and its canopy tore through the neighboring branches on the way to the ground.

The forest floor quivered and was silent except for the squealing ferrcat mother, who sprinted in fear from the boys.

Sam walked to a corner of the grove near where the top of the tree had landed. The little boy knelt and lifted a frayed body in his hand. Cego watched his brother squeeze his eyes shut as a tear slid across the bridge of his nose. Though Sam complained often, he almost never cried.

“Time to head back to the compound for midmorning training,” Silas said with that sharp smile etched across his face. Silas limped from the grove, keeping weight off the leg he’d felled the great ironwood with.

Cego gave Sam the time to bury the little cat. His brother dug a small hole with a rock and set the frail body within before placing some leaves atop it.

“Why’d he have to do it?” Sam asked as they pushed aside the thick undergrowth on the path back toward the shore. “He could have let me take them down.”

“I don’t know,” Cego said. He never quite understood why Silas did these things.

“I know why,” Sam said, as he kicked at the dirt. “He likes hurting things. He wanted to kill.”

Cego was silent. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that Silas was vindictive, though he’d been exposed to his brother’s mean streak before. The boy thrived when he was in power, and that often came at the expense of his younger brothers.

Cego knew Sam most often looked up to Silas like a god. They lived on the island to train, and Silas was by far the best of the three. Sam tried to emulate most of Silas’s actions, tried to be like him within the Circle. But then there were times like this, when Silas seemed to not even know he had two other brothers.

Sam was quiet as they made their way from the forest onto the black sand beach, where the little pup, Arry, joined them, yapping and running along the shore. Most often Sam would run across the beach too, letting Arry try to keep up, but today they walked. Cego could feel the deep soreness in his legs from kicking the ironwoods all morning and didn’t look forward to throwing another kick in the Circle.

Sam finally spoke again. “Cego, I have an idea.”

“What’s that?” Cego asked as a gust of sea wind tossed sand in his face.

“Let’s make Silas pay for what he did,” the little boy said.

“We’re all here together, Sam,” Cego replied. “We’re working to make each other better. We can’t take it personally.”

“I know,” Sam said. “But… just today. Let’s beat him this once.”

Cego wanted to beat his older brother as much as Sam did, but neither one of them had ever come close to it.

“I don’t know if we can,” Cego said. “He’s too skilled for either of us to get through. He’s too strong.”

“We can do it together,” Sam said as he picked up a smooth stick and tossed it across the beach for Arry to chase.

Of course, Sam did not mean fighting Silas simultaneously. That would be against Farmer’s code; only single combat was permitted within the Circle. And even out of the Circle, when Cego and Sam had attempted to gang up on Silas, the older boy came out the victor.

Cego watched a swarm of little starlings nipping at a goshawk’s heels, chasing it away from their nest.

“Together,” Cego repeated to his brother. “Maybe we can.”

Sam smiled, happy that someone was listening to him for once. “How?”

Cego felt the pain in his leg and thought of how Silas had limped from the grove. They’d spent all morning chopping down trees.

“Chop down the tree,” Cego said. It was what Farmer had told them every morning before they left for the grove. Those simple words and nothing else. “Chop down the tree.”

Sam looked at him quizzically.

“We’ll do to Silas what he did to that big ironwood,” Cego said. “His right leg… it’s weak right now. You’ll be up against him first like usual. Sam, you need to chop at that leg.”

“But whenever I go for a low kick, Silas counters up high,” Sam said, nervously rubbing at his nose, which had been broken a few days prior. “I can’t defend in time.”

“You won’t have to,” Cego said. “As long as you can get some good kicks in before he takes you out.”

“You mean…” Sam trailed off. “I let Silas beat me?”

“Silas will beat either of us no matter what if we each play our own game and try to win against him,” Cego said. “But if we work together, one after the other, we can chop down the tree. Just like Silas couldn’t take down that big ironwood in one day. He needed to come after it day after day to fell it. You and me need to go after Silas’s leg, one after another.”

Sam thought about it for a moment. “Okay, I’ll do it.”

“You sure?” Cego asked. “It’ll hurt.”

“It will be worth it if we can beat him.” Sam clenched his jaw. “He needs to pay for what he did.”

It was strange, the quiet of the halls during the Lyceum’s lockdown. Even in the middle of the night, most often there would be students filling the training Circles in the common grounds, trying to get extra work in for a test or challenge match. But tonight, the grounds were entirely empty—all the students locked down in their rooms.

Still, Cego was surprised he was the only one roaming the halls. It hadn’t been hard for Abel to rewire the simple Quarter D lockpad to let him out, though perhaps the ancient tech of their dorm had done them a favor for once.

He crept past the hanging lightboards and watched the line of luminescent spectrals rising toward the upper-level floors.

How strange it was that the Lyceum didn’t want students to know of the incoming Flux army.

Wouldn’t the truth at least let them prepare, get in touch with their families? But even then, Cego wasn’t certain many would believe that Silas had broken across the border.

It was curious what folk did to maintain the vision of the world they were comfortable with.

Cego followed the lower-level stairs down to the catacombs. As expected, the rusty door was open, and even more predictable was the sight of Kōri Shimo sitting within the onyx.

Cego waited patiently for the boy to finish his session in the blacklight. Shimo’s eyes flicked open and met Cego’s.

“You do know the school’s on lockdown, right?” Cego asked.

Shimo nodded. “And why does this matter?”

Cego shook his head. “Sometimes, I wonder why you’re even here. I mean, is it because of this Circle?”

Shimo stepped from the onyx and stood in front of Cego. “Yes, I don’t believe there are many onyx Circles as pure as the one here. And the Lyceum is where I’m meant to be.”

“Why?” Cego had been meaning to ask the boy this question since they’d started meeting in the catacombs. “Do you even go to classes anymore? Do you plan to graduate and become a Knight? Or a professor, maybe?”

Shimo’s eyes twinkled, as if he was laughing within. “A professor? For some reason, I do not think I would be such a good teacher.”

“You taught me how to use the onyx,” Cego said.

“You taught yourself,” Shimo replied. “I merely showed you its function.”

“So, you’d like to be a Knight, then—that is, if the Citadel is still standing after Silas’s army arrives.”

Shimo was silent. “These are all only titles. I’m here for a purpose—to fight. And on this note, are you going to train or not?”

He gestured toward the Circle.

Cego shook his head again, though he felt the urge to step within. “Not tonight. I came to check on you, let you know what’s going on, because I figured no one else would tell you.”

“Let me know about the Flux army?”

“Yes,” Cego said. “The Daimyo tried to stop them at the border, but they couldn’t.”

“I didn’t think they would,” Shimo said. “The Slayer can’t be stopped this way.”

“And… you know how he can be stopped?” Cego asked.

“As do you,” Shimo said cryptically.

Cego did know, though. He’d always known. “The blacklight.”

“Why else do you think you’ve been training within it, torturing yourself each night?” Shimo asked.

“I thought it was so I could become better, faster,” Cego said. “Catch up to Silas. Get a decade of work in with only weeks in there.”

“Yes, that’s part of it,” Shimo said. “But you know there is more. I trust you have been seeing the blacklight even when you’re out of the onyx?”

Cego thought back to Dynari’s class, how he’d occupied a strange space between the island and the Lyceum. “Yes, I can… see moves before they happen.”

“This is what Silas sees,” Shimo said. “And no one can beat him, not Grievar Knight nor Daimyo mech, if they cannot harness the blacklight.”

“What are you going to do?” Cego asked. “Silas will try to kill those who don’t join the Flux.”

“Are you asking me if I’m going to join the rebel force?”

Cego nodded.

Kōri Shimo smiled, one of the few times Cego had seen the boy’s lips deviate from a flat line. “I’ve enjoyed training with you, Cego. For so long a stretch of time.”

Cego wasn’t quite sure what Shimo meant, as the two had never truly trained together. They’d simply been there for each other on the sidelines of the onyx.

“Well.” Cego shrugged. “I’ve got to get going.”

Kōri looked about ready to step back into the onyx. Cego had no idea how the boy could take so much punishment.

“Whatever side you end up on,” Cego said as he began to walk from the catacombs, “thank you for helping me.”

Shimo nodded in response as he stepped back into the black ring.

Cego left the boy and the blacklight Circle, taking the stairs up to the third floor. He walked the length of the Harmony, a shadow passing locked classrooms and sleeping quarters. He embraced the darkness of the Lyceum, creeping silently through quiet buildings when the rest of the world slept.

Cego had been there before.

The medward was not locked down like the other Lyceum wings. Most patients that were stationed there did not have a choice to leave; bedridden students and Knights set in stasis were not the mobile sort.

Cego crept through the ward, listening to the chorus of mechanical beeps echoing the pulses of the attached bodies. He dreaded that some of those heartbeats would flatline as he passed by, as if the machinery would detect his presence, recognize a boy from a different world who wasn’t meant to be there.

Cego ducked out of the way as a little spectral flitted from bed to bed, checking on patients while the clerics rested. He stopped just outside one of the private patient rooms, trembling and sliding to the floor beside the door.

He clenched his hands in the darkness and listened to the pulse of the heartbeats. He gritted his teeth, steeling himself, then stood and entered the room.

Sam was sitting where he always was, up against the wall beside the cot and the plant. Xenalia had updated Cego regularly, told him his brother’s appetite had been fine and he had no problem sleeping.

“Think you’ll come with me to the tide pools today?” Sam stared blankly at Cego. “I bet the storms that passed through dredged up some good catches.”

But Cego’s brother wasn’t here.

“I don’t think I can come today, Sam; I need to train.” Cego tried to respond as if he were with his brother, in that place.

When Cego had first seen Sam in this state, he’d tried to break through to him. He’d attempted to snap the little boy out of the trance he was in, release the hold the Cradle had. But it had been futile.

“Please, won’t you come for a moment?” Sam asked, as Cego knew he would. “Call Arry down from the dunes too; I bet she’d love the run.”

“I can’t go today,” Cego responded, as if reading a script, the same dialogue he’d gone through with his brother the last time he’d visited the ward. “I’ve got to train.”

Maybe Cego should have come there every evening to exchange the same loop of senseless words with his brother. But he’d been scared. He felt the same blacklight within him that he knew was embedded in Sam. He had befriended the darkness that his brother had been lost to.

But Cego couldn’t be scared anymore. He had to free Sam from his prison, before it was too late. Before Silas came and left his little brother in the darkness.

The boy abruptly spoke again. “So, you’ll come down to the rocks with me, Cego?”

Cego sighed, felt the tears welling in his eyes. “Okay, Sam, just this once.”

“Why do you need to train so much?” Sam asked. “Is it so you can finally beat Silas?”

Cego nodded. “Yes.”

Though Sam was speaking from another world, the boy was right. Some things never did change.

Cego approached Sam, stepping into the moonlight behind him. He wrapped his arm around his little brother’s neck. He’d done it thousands of times before, shown the boy how to defend the strangle.

Tears flowed freely down his face as he began to squeeze. Sam didn’t protest. He sat there, trusting Cego.

Cego would have done anything to protect Sam. He still would do anything to protect him.

A little bit longer and it will be over, Sam. You will be free.

He saw Sam running on the black sand beach, the wind catching his mop of hair, Arry nipping at his toes.

He saw Sam laughing as he emerged from the surf, covered head to toe in seagrass.

Cego felt the little boy start to twitch as he went unconscious.

Cego had been there before.

Gliding into a building like a shadow and seeking his targets, those unaware of the certain death that was coming to them. Finding their neck, cinching their arteries, constricting the life from them.

This had been the work of the Strangler, the Flux operative, the Slayer’s shadow. But Cego had left the Strangler behind after he’d seen Murray give his life. Cego had made the decision to return home to protect those he loved.

He felt his breath catch, and the strength in his arms went out. He stumbled backward, away from Sam, his eyes wide, fully realizing what he’d been doing.

How can I be capable of such things?

Sam’s body jolted, the blood rushing back to the little boy’s brain. After several breathless moments, the boy turned and looked back at Cego from the floor.

“Think you’ll come with me to the tide pools today?” Sam asked.

Cego slid away across the floor until he was outside the room, back in the ward with its mechanical pulse.

He ran from the darkness.