Chapter 1
I have three rules for these sessions, and I go over them every night while I wrap my hands.
Rule one: no touching the lesson doesn't require. Rule two: don't look at her mouth when she argues, which is always. Rule three: answer nothing that isn't about fighting.
Violet Sorrengail is already waiting when I come in.
The gym is empty at this hour, the lanterns turned down to a low amber, the mats still smelling of the sweat and liniment of a hundred cadets who were here before dinner. Somewhere above us the wind is working at the shutters. Down here it's quiet enough that I can hear her breathing as she ties off her braid and stretches her wrists, rolling each one slowly, testing it, the way I taught her.
"You're late," she says.
"I'm on time. You're early."
"Then you're less early than I am." She steps onto the mat and settles into her stance. Weight on the balls of her feet, knees soft, hands up. It's better than it was a month ago. It's not good enough for what's coming.
"Daggers on the bench," I say.
She looks at me like I've asked her to take off her arm. "I fight with daggers."
"You fight with daggers when you can reach them. Tonight you're going to learn what to do when someone the size of Jack Barlowe has you flat on your back and your sheaths are underneath you."
For a second I think she'll argue. Then she unbuckles them one by one, six blades laid out in a neat row on the bench, and comes back to the mat with her hands empty and her chin up.
Rule one is easy for the first hour, because everything I do to her in the first hour is the lesson.
I come in slow, telegraphing, letting her see it. She slips the first grab and the second, quick as she always is, but the third time I hook her ankle and take her down and follow her to the mat, and she lands hard and the breath goes out of her. I pin her wrists. Her pulse jumps under my thumbs.
"Dead," I say.
"I know." She's glaring up at me. "You don't have to narrate."
"Then stop dying." I let go, sit back on my heels. "Your problem isn't speed. You're faster than almost anyone in your year. Your problem is that the second you're on the ground, you freeze. You start calculating. By the time you've worked out the best possible move, I've already broken something."
"Maybe I like calculating."
"Calculate on your feet. On your back, you move. Anything. Hips, knees, teeth. Make it expensive."
She pushes up onto her elbows, a strand of hair stuck to her cheek. "Teeth?"
"Barlowe won't care about manners. Neither should you."
We go again. And again. She learns the bridge, the hip escape, the way to trap an arm and roll, and every time I put her down she gets up a little faster, a little angrier, which is what I want. The anger is useful. It's when she's afraid that she gets slow.
On the fourth round she gets a knee up between us and shoves, and I give her the space, and she scrambles back toward the edge of the mat instead of pressing it.
"No." I sit up. "Where are you going?"
"Away from you."
"Away from me is where the next one is waiting. Barlowe doesn't travel alone. If you get loose, you don't run to the corner and catch your breath. You get up, and you get your back against a wall, and you get a blade in your hand. In that order."
She pushes a damp strand of hair off her forehead. "You make it sound like you've done this."
"I've done this."
She waits for more. I don't give it to her. Rule three, at least, is holding. After a moment she nods, as if she's filed the silence somewhere for later, and comes back to the center of the mat.
On the sixth round she goes still beneath me, eyes unfocused, and I almost let up before I realize she isn't hurt. She's listening.
"What?"
"Andarna." A huff that's almost a laugh. "She says you're showing off."
"Andarna can't carry a saddle yet."
Violet's eyes narrow. "She heard that. She says when she's bigger she's going to sit on you."
"She's welcome to try."
"She says she'll remember you said that." Violet hooks a leg around mine, braces, and rolls, and for the first time tonight I end up on my back with her knee on my chest and her forearm across my throat. Not perfect. Her weight's too far forward; I could throw her in a breath. I don't.
"Better," I say, around the pressure.
"I know." There's color high on her cheeks and she's smiling, not at me, at herself, at what she just did. My eyes drop to her mouth before I can stop them.
Rule two.
I drag my gaze back to the beams and break the hold before she can see anything in my face, and she tumbles onto the mat beside me, laughing under her breath. We lie there a moment, both of us breathing hard, staring up at the dim beams.
My sleeve has ridden up during the roll. I don't notice until I feel her looking. The relic curls black from my wrist up past my elbow and disappears under the fabric, and her eyes follow it the way they follow anything she doesn't understand, like the whole thing is a page she intends to read to the end.
People look at the relic all the time. They look at it with fear, or with contempt, or with the particular wariness of officers who know exactly what it means and wish someone else had to stand near it. Nobody has ever looked at it the way she's looking now.
"Does it hurt?" she asks.
It's such a simple question. I've had this mark since I was a boy, and in all those years, not one person has asked me that.
I should get up. I should tell her it's none of her business, tell her to go again, tell her anything that has a fist in it.
"It did," I say. "The day I got it. Like being branded from the inside. It doesn't now."
She turns her head on the mat to look at me. "And the rest of it? Whatever it means?"
There it is. The edge of the thing I can't give her. I can feel Sgaeyl at the back of my mind, very alert, very silent.
"That's not about fighting," I say.
"Everything here is about fighting." But she doesn't push. She reaches out instead, slowly, the way you'd reach toward a dragon you haven't been introduced to, and lays two fingertips on the inside of my wrist where the first swirl begins. Her hand is warm and a little rough at the knuckles. She doesn't trace it. She just leaves her fingers there, as if she's checking for a pulse, as if she wants to know I'm made of the same stuff she is.
I let her. I count four breaths. On the fifth I sit up, and her hand falls away.
"Again," I say.
She studies me for a moment longer than she should, then rolls to her feet. We go again. I put her down. She escapes. I put her down. She gets an arm free and drives an elbow into my ribs hard enough that I grunt, and I'm stupidly, disproportionately pleased.
By the time the lanterns start to gutter, her shirt is soaked through and she's limping very slightly on the left, which she thinks I don't see. I call it. She goes to the bench and buckles her daggers back on, one by one, and each click of a sheath sounds like a door closing.
"Same time Thursday?" she asks, without turning around.
"Same time Thursday."
"Riorson." She does turn then, last dagger in her hand, flipping it once over her knuckles in the restless way she has. "Thank you. For answering."
"I didn't answer."
"You answered one." She slides the blade home. "That's one more than you usually do."
She leaves first. I wait until her footsteps have faded off down the corridor before I unwrap my hands, slowly, the linen gray with chalk and damp with sweat. The inside of my wrist still feels warm, which is absurd. It's been ten minutes.
"Three rules," Sgaeyl says.
"Don't."
"You broke two. You answered her, and you let her put her hand on you."
"She touched me. I didn't touch her. That's not what rule one says."
"It is exactly what rule one means." Sgaeyl lets that sit. "And on the sixth round you looked at her mouth."
"For half a second. She was talking."
"She was not talking. She was smiling." Another pause, longer. "You will break the third by Thursday."
I throw the wrappings into the bin by the door, harder than they deserve, and I don't argue, because she's been in my head for years and she knows exactly what I'll do on Thursday.
I'll be early.