“I’ve heard that you tear off toenails,” someone else said. “Is that true, my lord?”
Creston nodded without hesitation. “This will be explained to you tomorrow, but since you have asked, I will go ahead and tell you the truth,” he said. “You will be tested with pain. If you break, the pain will be doubled. Meaning if I am tearing off a toenail and you confess the information you have been told not to tell me simply to make the pain stop, I will break a toe. You will be expected to function after that. I will proceed to tear off each toenail and go to work on your fingernails until you can resist the pain and not divulge the information you have been told not to divulge. This is necessary to teach you pain resistance. Your training at Blackchurch until this moment has been a simple thing. Now, the real training begins. Are there any more questions?”
After that, no one had anything more to say, but the recruits were looking at each other anxiously. Seeing that he had the group properly terrified, Creston had Tobin dismissed them.They ran away as if their arses were on fire, leaving Creston and Tobin chuckling.
“How many do you think will return tomorrow?” Tobin asked.
Creston shrugged. “I have been doing this almost twenty-five years,” he said. “It is different with every group. Sometimes they all return, sometimes only a few. We shall see tomorrow.”
Tobin was still smiling. “I do believe you gave that same speech when I was part of your class,” he said. “Fortunately, I only sustained one lost toenail. I held out.”
“You did,” Creston said. “But, as I recall, you nearly chewed a hole in your tongue.”
“True.”
“I’ve had more than one recruit bite half their tongues off.”
Tobin grimaced. “Charming,” he said with distaste. “Yet you are still here, still torturing recruits.”
Creston snorted. “Still here,” he said. “I would not miss it.”
Tobin hesitated. “My lord, may I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“You are the Earl of Sidbury,” he said. “Why do you not simply retreat to your properties and live as a lord of the realm? Why remain here and teach?”
Creston lifted his eyebrows, a thoughtful gesture. “I only train part time as it is,” he said. “Anteaus handles my class sometimes, so I do spend about half my time at Axen.”
“Why not all the time?”
Creston smiled faintly. “Because I believe what I do here is important,” he said. “I’ve seen hundreds of men and women come through this guild, and I am proud to say that I had a small hand in training them to be better warriors. It is important to me. Besides—I can bring my sons with me, and they train alongside the very best in the world.”
He was referring to his older boys—Garston, Keaton, and Preston. They went everywhere with him, including Blackchurch when he returned periodically to finish training a class that Anteaus had started. His eldest, Garston—or Gar, as he was called—had seen eight summers, and a brighter, more determined boy had never been born. Creston was wildly proud of the child, who spent most of his time at Blackchurch with St. Denis and St. Sebastian, as the two were essentially his teachers and acted as mentors to the children of their trainers. Even when Creston returned to Axen, Gar would stay behind at Blackchurch. Keaton and Preston, six years and five years, respectively, were still a little too young to be away from their mother, but even they spent all of their time at Blackchurch with St. Denis, the great instructor.
But that was St. Denis’ calling these days.
Once the Blackchurch instructors started having children, St. Denis had transitioned to becoming more of a tutor and less of a guild administrator. That role fell to St. Sebastian. But two years ago, St. Denis had suffered an attack of apoplexy that left the right side of his body slightly damaged, so he was slowing a little in his old age. He had an entire gang of boys and girls that he tutored, all of them very attached to him, and he relished his role at Blackchurch these days.
Life, for him, continued on.
And it continued on for Creston de Royans, the Earl of Sidbury.
Before Tobin could reply to Creston’s statement, Creston caught sight of an approaching soldier, heading in from the south. Tobin saw that Creston was distracted, so he began to collect the pieces of vellum that had been passed around to the recruits, drawings that depicted some of the methods of interrogation and torture that Creston had been speaking of. Some of the recruits couldn’t read, so diagrams were the bestwhen explaining certain things. As he cleaned up the area, the soldier approached Creston.
“My lord,” he said, “there is a knight at the gate who is asking to see you. His name is Theo de Betheny.”
Creston’s brow furrowed. “I do not know that name,” he said. “Who does he serve?”
“He did not say, my lord.”
“Did he say what his business is with me?”
The soldier shook his head. “Nay, my lord,” he said. “He told me to tell you ‘Mary.’ He said you would understand.”
That didn’t clear things up for Creston at all. “Mary?” he repeated. “That’s odd. As in Saint Mary?”
“I do not know, my lord,” the soldier said. “Shall I send him away?”
