5A/N: A simple adventure story, for a change. Well...with Valentine nothing is ever entirely simple, but this is about as close as it gets.
A huge thank you as always to my faithful readers. Your enthusiasm means the world to me, and keeps me at this game.
Canon: My fics take the original City of Bones trilogy as canon. (For more about why I haven't read the later MI books, see my profile).
As always, everything in this fic belongs to the incomparable Cassandra Clare: characters, story and universe, of course, but also tone and language and imagery, which I've borrowed shamelessly to try to get closer to the feel of her story. To the extent that I've succeeded, the credit is entirely hers.
Lessons
by Midwinter Monday
for everyone who has been egging me on
to write more stories about Jace and Valentine
and especially
for Vivss
who loves that valiant little boy
almost as much as I do
.
Caparisons were a pain. That was the opinion he, Jonathan Wayland, was rapidly coming to as he gripped his knees tighter around the thick cloth bunched below his saddle and galloped after his father down the wide, empty valley that lay beyond Mickle End.
Not that it wasn't kind of intriguing, riding the way people did back in the days of Jonathan Shadowhunter. But it was definitely much harder, and he couldn't exactly see the point nowadays of tacking up your horse in protective gear. The days of chivalry were long gone, sadly. And it wasn't like you were going to fight demons on horseback. At least, he didn't think anyone did.
But he wasn't complaining, Jace amended silently — not if it got him a morning off from his books. His father had always been strict about his lessons, and since Jace turned nine it seemed like he'd become more grimly purposive than ever, as though some invisible deadline were hovering on the horizon and there was no time to waste.
But even Waylands took a half-holiday, occasionally. Or so his father had agreed as he looked up at last from his breakfast plate this morning, a lurking smile visible, to Jace's relief, in his sardonic black gaze. It had been touch and go, Jace reflected, and there had been a moment when he thought he'd pushed his luck too far, and that the upshot of his urgent petition — for an educational excursion, as he hastily emphasized, to try out the ancient gear he'd unearthed exploring the dustier reaches of the stable loft, was going to be a dry reprimand and an extra hundred lines of The Divine Comedy to translate.
But he knew his father pretty well. It was a heartbreakingly fine day to be cooped up indoors. He'd been fairly sure his father wouldn't be any sorrier than he was for an excuse to spend the morning exercising in the fresh air.
Jace gazed at his father cantering a pony's length ahead of him with the straight-backed, athletic grace of the natural horseman, and felt a stab of wistful admiration and envy. You would never guess, watching him, how slippery the layers of quilted cloth draped over the horse's flank were, or how uncomfortably they wadded up under your legs. Not to mention how impossible the stiff canvas covering the reins made it to feel your pony's mouth properly.
With a sigh, Jace shifted his weight down and back in the saddle the way he'd been shown, trying to copy his father's effortless seat and ignoring the ferocious ache that had begun burning in the muscles of his calves. He was glad his father's critical eye wasn't on him.
But it was definitely getting easier with practice. By lunchtime, thought Jace with a burst of optimism, he'd probably have got the hang of it. Digging his heels into his pony's flank, he flung himself exuberantly after his father until he had pulled abreast of the great black stallion and they were galloping side by side through the tall, sun-gilded grass, horses' manes streaming like pennants in the sparkling air.
The arrows, when they came, seemed to arrive out of the bright, empty sky.
They had just crossed the little stream that ran glittering through the low, wide meadow, their horses barely breaking stride as they sailed over, though Jace clutched the reins tighter than usual, still adjusting to his pony's unfamiliar feel. One moment it was day like any other — and then, out of the dense, scrubby woodland on their left, this flight of small, wicked arrows. For an instant the air was filled with a whispering like the rush of wings or the soft swish of a whip descending.
A searing pain lanced through his leg like white fire.
Looking down, Jace could see a feathered shaft sticking out through the cloth of his trousers, and blood, more than he would have thought possible for such a small hole, spreading in a wet, dark stain. A half-dozen more slender darts were lodged harmlessly in the thick folds of the pony's caparison, like pins in a pincushion.
Jace stared at his leg in disbelief. An arrow. What was an arrow doing in his calf? With a violent effort, he tried to clear his head and remember what he was supposed to do next, because the pain was pretty incredible and a little voice at the back of his mind was whispering urgently that however it got there, an arrow in his leg wasn't good. Stele, he thought hazily; but the world had begun to waver and ripple like water, grey spots blooming across his vision. The reins slipped through his fingers and he felt his pony's muscles bunch, preparing to bolt.
But his father was already wheeling his stallion to seize the mare's tossing head and drag her round. The next instant, he had caught Jace in his arms and was sliding off his horse into the high grass.
"Fey," he hissed between his teeth as he lowered Jace to the ground; in his mouth the word sounded like a curse. His dagger was out and Jace wondered with a distant curiosity how his father intended to use a knife against bows and arrows — but he had already laid it against Jace's trouser leg and was cutting away at the blood-soaked cloth to lay the wound bare. Jace heard him swear softly. There was blood on his father's shirt too, a patch of bright scarlet spreading across his left shoulder.
"Father," he began, "you've been—" but his father cut him off.
"It's a scratch, Jonathan." His voice was curt, though not unkind; he was clearly telling the truth. But there was a look on his face that frightened Jace, the harsh, closed, interior look of someone keeping pain, or something else terrible, tightly in check.
His hands were on the injured leg, gently probing. Jace stared down with a sort of sick fascination at the polished wood vanishing into his flesh, blood welling slow and dark around it — and then quickly fastened his eyes on the delicate feathers at the other end, wincing as pain spiked beneath his father's fingers. They were a soft green, flecked with gold like the chrysalis of a butterfly. Jace thought he'd never seen anything so beautiful.
His father straightened, and Jace watched him slide the knife back into his belt before reaching for his stele. His movements seemed oddly slow, as if he were moving through water. Above them, the horses shifted uneasily, bridles jingling softly.
"It's only a flesh wound, Jonathan, nothing an iratze can't take care of." His black eyes swept dispassionately over Jace and their cool, clinical gaze was oddly reassuring. "Any enchantment on it will be a slow-acting one — if it weren't, you'd be dead by now. We've all the necessary counter-charms at home."
A thin, high, insistent singing had begun in Jace's ears; for an instant it obscured his father's voice like a curtain of rain sweeping in over the hills, and then it cleared.
"But the arrow must come out first," his father was saying, "and I don't want to do it here. This field isn't a healthy place to stay."
Of course, he thought vaguely: arrows didn't flock by themselves; whoever loosed them was still there. For the moment, they were shielded by the horses' bodies, a living rampart of flesh and leather between them and the invisible archers at the edge of the meadow, but it was a very temporary refuge.
Jace drew a breath, struggling to force back the waves of dizziness and concentrate. From the recesses of memory, the echo of his father's resonant, didactic voice rose up in his ears, mixed up with the beeswax and chalk-dust smell of the room where they'd pored over the classic works on warfare and tactics:
On open ground, there is no possible answer to an archer shooting from cover.
A ripple of cold went through Jace.
Looking up, his throat dry, he saw to his surprise that his father was smiling.
"It's a textbook problem, isn't it Jonathan? Flat terrain with no cover to speak of, nothing but knives and the horses against bowmen in easy shooting distance." They might have still been in the schoolroom; his father's tone was easy, relaxed, no hint of tension visible in his handsome face, or the hands which were now curled firmly round Jace's leg, rapidly inscribing the dark spirals of a pain-dulling rune into the bare skin below his knee. Jace felt his own knotted muscles relax as the red-hot fire in his calf dwindled to a dull, burning ache.
"But those were mundane textbooks, Jonathan. Useful enough in their way but—" His smile widened: an unsettling smile, like the glint of steel in the dark.
"—limited," he finished, his eyes fixed calculatingly on the low woods beyond Jace's head.
He had Jace's left wrist in his fingers; Jace felt the sting of the stele again, tracing out a complicated rune along the inside of his forearm: not an iratze, an intricate crisscrossing pattern he didn't think he'd ever seen before. He gazed down at the delicate interlacing of lines taking shape beneath his father's stele and his perplexity must have been obvious because his father looked up as he sat back on his heels, a glimmer of humour in his dark eyes.
"You're looking at a Diffraction rune, Jonathan. And you're quite right, it's not a Mark you've been taught yet. An old variant, not often used these days: similar to a rune of Invisibility, but infinitely less crude. With a bit of effort, faerie Sight can pierce an Invisibility rune — and you may be sure they'll be looking: it's the first thing they'll be expecting us to try. But Diffraction runes work by misdirection, like wards. It won't render us invisible, precisely, but it will make our passing seem no more than a shadow across the ground or the wind playing through the grass."
He was rolling up his own left sleeve as he spoke, the stele gripped in his right hand. Through the haze of light-headedness, Jace felt a fresh twinge of envy as he watched his father swiftly inscribing the complex rune on his own arm: he couldn't imagine ever being able to use his own right hand with his father's unthinking dexterity.
Done with the stele, his father swung his hand through the air in an experimental arc, watching the movement with narrowed eyes before putting the stele away, apparently satisfied.
"And if the horses were to take off suddenly—" Rising smoothly to his feet, he gave the stallion a ringing smack on the rump that sent him plunging away through the long grass, Dagmar thundering at his heels, "—and with a good deal of commotion, our own departure is all the more likely to go unnoticed."
And swinging Jace up into his arms with a single easy motion, he stepped out without a backward glance into the high, waving grass.
Heart hammering, Jace gazed out over his father's arms, expecting at any moment to hear the lethal whicker of a fresh flight of arrows from behind them. But the only sound was the soft whisper of the breeze sweeping across the grasses in pale, silken combers. His fists, he discovered, were gripped tightly in the stuff of his father's sleeve. With an effort he removed them.
Ten paces — fifteen — twenty. They must be a good hundred yards from the woods now, moving swiftly and noiselessly towards the shelter of the trees on the far side of the valley. But a good archer could send an arrow twice that distance. Around them, the meadow lay open and empty and silent in the hot sun. Jace felt the hairs at the back of his neck prickle.
Fifty paces now, his father's steady, unhurried stride never faltering, silently widening the distance between them and those deadly, unseen bows. Jace's view back towards the woods was blocked by his father's shoulder, but he couldn't stop picturing the flitting figures among the trees — the bowstring drawn back with unearthly grace between cruel, clever fingers — the thud of the arrow burying itself in his father's broad back.
Jace shuddered involuntarily, and then gave a little yelp as the movement jarred his wounded leg, sending a shock wave of pain through his body.
"Steady, Jonathan." The words were barely a murmur, their warning plain. The Diffraction rune might confuse their enemies' sight, but they were still well within earshot. Jace's fright was swamped by a wave of hot shame. He bit his lip, turning his head away.
Unexpectedly, his father's arms tightened around him.
"You'll do," he said, his voice surprisingly gentle. "Nearly there now." And more forcefully when Jace didn't say anything: "Jonathan. Do you think I would ever let anything happen to you?"
His tone was reproving, stern almost: the voice he used when Jace made a stupid error of translation or missed an obvious opening in fencing; and Jace felt himself flush again, because of course he was being an idiot. It was the shock and the pain probably, stopping him from thinking straight. As if his father couldn't outsmart a bunch of rotten Downworlders.
He nodded silently, and felt his father's smile against his hair where it lay pressed under the angle of his jaw. With a little sigh, he curled up closer against his father's chest, letting a sense of security and relief wash over him, warm as the sunlight pouring down on them out of the cloudless skies.
Lifting his face from the soft cloth of his father's shoulder, he saw that they had almost reached the treeline on the far side of the valley, the wooded hillside looming dark above them, blocking out the bright sky. Forest was the Fair Folk's natural element, Jace thought with a lingering unease, but at least there was cover here — and he would back his father's woodcraft against any stupid faerie. There was no reason anyway to think their enemies had spread out on both sides of the valley.
And then they were slipping into the tangled underbrush, the woods closing over their heads like a high, vaulted roof. Dimness and silence enveloped him, as if he'd stepped over the threshold into the manor's cool and airy entrance hall, the scent of moss and damp earth as welcome to his over-wound senses as the smell of home.
Jace let out a breath he didn't realise he'd been holding. Pushing his sweaty curls out of his face, he leaned his damp forehead against his father's shirt with a small sigh of relief, trying not to think about the faerie archers they'd left on the other side of the meadow, or the arrow still lodged unpleasantly in his calf, or the strange chill that seemed to be stealing through his limbs like an icy breath.
And pretending for a moment that he wasn't nine years old and supposed to be brave whatever happened, he allowed himself to close his eyes at last.
|o|
So I'm doing something here I've never tried before, and posting this before the whole story is finished. We'll see how that goes... At any rate, the next chapter is reasonably close to done. —MM
(**CHAPTER TWO NOW POSTED!**)