It’s a given, in storytelling, that a character’s values and priorities will influence their actions. Everybody knows that, and it’s one of the main parts of good characterization. A loving mother will go extraordinary lengths to protect her children; characters fight duels to defend their honor; a wanderer must search for new lands- and with any luck, return home with a fortune in hand.

What happens when a character has mutually exclusive priorities? Or they’re caught between contradictory training they received at different points in their life?

Those bits are tricky to write. For me, anyway. They always come out sounding wishy-washy, because, in order to explain his shifting motivations, the character has to pause, ponder, and contradict himself. But if there’s no explanation, the reader’s left scratching his head and wondering why the change.

What to do? Put the character in a fight for his life, apparently. There’s just enough time to reorient his priorities, and not enough time for indecisive sounding explanations. The decisions he makes under pressure will reveal aspects of his character to the reader (and to you, the author, if you’re a pantser).

This snippet is part of the Garia Cycle. If you guys don’t remember that series, I don’t blame you; there are only two published books and that was between six and eight years ago. To make a long story short, the Garians are a partly-nomadic steppe people and have various entanglements with their more settled Morlander neighbors. This bit is from a prequel focused on Téo’s father Lazlo, who is about fifteen years old and hasn’t quite accepted that he has enemies. Lots of them.

***

The central plains of Garia were only flat and featureless to unobservant outsiders. Even in the earliest days of spring, there were signs of life, and of course, the rocky outcroppings and copses of trees didn’t come and go when the seasons changed.

There was always the question of, was it better to avoid the trees altogether, or to be the one hiding in that same copse? Lazlo looked about for a moment, and seeing no one, turned his horse in that direction.

The trees didn’t provide much cover at this time of year, but the wind was less among their bare branches. A much more comfortable place than the open steppe, when one must attend to a necessary matter. He dismounted, looped the horse’s reins around a convenient branch, and began the rather complicated task of shifting his many layers of clothing.

He’d barely finished retying his belt afterward when his horse snorted and started. Lazlo ducked instinctively and the arrow that would’ve ended his life slammed into his horse’s neck, sending it staggering back then kicking and plunging as it tried to get away from the pain.

Lazlo instinctively turned to calm the horse, then it dawned on him that someone was trying to kill him, and he forgot all about the horse, whirling back around and barely avoiding another arrow that would’ve struck him in the chest and instead fell harmlessly among the trees.

A new set of instincts screamed at him to run! but Lazlo found himself running toward the bowman that was half-concealed by the underbrush, dodging left and right, clumsily yanking his sword out of the scabbard as a third arrow flicked by his face.

The assassin dropped his bow and went for his sword, but terror gave Lazlo a speed he didn’t know he had, and he battered the sword aside with his own blade and brought it down on the man’s hooded head, to no avail. The impact jarred his arm up to the shoulder and they both slipped, staggering and sliding on the soft ground, momentarily gripping each other with their left hands for balance before Lazlo brought the blade down again. The hand on his tunic fell away and he leapt back, out of arm’s reach.

That time, the assassin fell and didn’t get up again.

It was so fast that Lazlo stared, incredulous, at the man expiring at his feet, unable to make himself believe that he’d just killed an assassin.

“Now what?” he said aloud. The assassin, of course, didn’t answer. Lazlo thought for a moment, forcing his mind into compliance and logic.

He wasn’t hurt, but his horse was. He wiped the blood off his sword, sheathed it, and looked around.

His horse was gone.

No. Not gone, just, not where’d left it. The noise and chaos of the fight had made it bolt, until its trailing reins caught fast on a downed tree. It eyed him as he came nearer, snorting and stamping, its ears pinned flat.

“Come here. Come here; come here,” Lazlo chanted softly, holding out his hand and praying the horse didn’t break away again.

It didn’t come to him, but it didn’t shy away as he approached and took the reins with a gentleness he didn’t feel. The arrow had passed through the horse’s neck, piercing the triangle of muscle and sticking out by half an arm’s length on either side. It must not have touched the spine, or the horse would be down, and dying.

He knew not to touch the arrow unless he was prepared to staunch the resulting bleeding, which he wasn’t. But they couldn’t wait for help to find them, and the assassin had come on foot, or his horse had bolted out of sight when the fight started. Either way, Lazlo was going to ride his own horse home, or walk.

He couldn’t ride a horse with an arrow sticking out of its neck.

Yes, you can, if it means you live. What is one horse, compared to the king of Garia? a voice scolded in his mind. It sounded exactly like Mircea.

The wind rattled in the trees again, and Lazlo jumped and spun around, looking for the next assassin.

There was only one, he thought, but given that he hadn’t even seen the first one, Lazlo swiftly decided discretion was the better part of valor, and took off for home.

The horse sensed his fear long enough to gallop most of the way, but there was blood running down its neck, and it slowed to a stumbling trot as they came up the palisade gates.

***

Did you catch it?- the moments Lazlo has to reorient his priorities? There were two of them:

– he instinctively starts to deal with his horse, because he grew up on the steppe; if he loses his horse, he’s probably dead. But a man, actively trying to kill him, is in fact, a bigger threat than the abstractly hostile Mother Nature.

– he hesitates to ride his injured horse to safety- which is one of Lazlo’s defining character traits; he retains some kindness even in a hostile environment. But he also pragmatic, and scared, and realizes that getting out of the fight alive is way more important than his horse’s comfort.

It’s an interesting set of priorities to work through. I think this is the second time someone’s tried to kill him, so he’s getting used to the idea that that’s a thing, but he hasn’t completely squashed all his previous training, which includes things like, ‘don’t let your horse get away; you won’t make it back home without him.’ And of course, he doesn’t want to completely squash that training; it might save his life someday. He also has some combat training with sword and bow, but he’s never been in a real battle, so the speed of a fight surprises him, and he has to consciously think about what to do afterwards.

When I was planning this scene, I initially had Lazlo go for his horse first because that’s what I would do, then second-guessed myself because, as previously noted, someone is trying to kill him, then second-guessed myself again because a boy who’s grown up in the fantasy equivalent of Kazakhstan is going to be taught from birth to keep his horse secure. So it all worked out in the end; just required a bit of thinking about the character, the setting, and what makes sense in that environment.

Now I have to work on writing fight scenes, because that was only a couple of paragraphs and it shouldn’t have taken me an hour to write. Wish me luck!