BLOOD ON THE PRACTICE BLADE

Chapter 5:Blood on the Practice Blade

 Lyra

The training yard baked under the late-morning sun.

Ashford found me near the weapons racks, exactly where a weak Beta prince would try to avoid notice. He was already smiling, that sharp, restless grin that never reached his eyes when he looked at me. Golden skin gleamed with a light sheen of sweat. The desert campaigns left him always slightly wild around the edges, and today the edges were aimed directly at me.

“There you are, spare,” he called, loud enough for the handful of officers and trainees to hear. “Heard the Crown Prince finally put you on a shorter leash. Thought we should test how short.”

He tossed a practice blade at my feet. The metal rang against the stone. I did not pick it up immediately. Every instinct screamed that this was another public performance, another chance for him to remind the yard that I was less than nothing. The bindings under my uniform felt too tight. The residual fever from the last two days still sat low in my blood.

“Pick it up,” Ashford said, still smiling. “Or do I need to fetch the Crown Prince to give the order?”

I picked it up. The weight was familiar. I had trained in secret for years with heavier blades than this, in rooms no one monitored. But the “Second Prince” was not allowed to look competent. I settled into a deliberately poor stance, shoulders curved, grip slightly wrong.

Ashford came at me hard and fast, the way he always did. He wanted the spectacle of me on the ground. I gave him most of what he wanted, stumbling back, letting the blade turn too wide, absorbing a bruising strike across the ribs that stole my breath. The watching officers laughed. Someone called out a lazy bet on how many passes before I dropped.

Then he overextended, just a fraction, confidence making him careless. I moved.

The strike was small, precise, and mean. The edge of the practice blade caught the inside of his forearm where the guard left a gap and opened a thin, bright line of blood. Not deep. Deep enough.

Ashford stopped.

The yard went quiet.

He looked down at the blood welling against golden skin, then backed up at me. The smile was gone. Something hotter and far more dangerous moved behind his hazel eyes. For three full heartbeats neither of us spoke. The air between us felt charged, tight, almost electric. I could see the exact moment the mockery shifted into something that was no longer simple cruelty.

“Well,” he said finally, voice lower. “Look at that.”

He stepped in close, closer than the sparring required, close enough that I caught the sun-warmed scent of him under the dust and metal. His free hand closed around my wrist, not quite hard enough to bruise, and turned it so the practice blade caught the light.

“Do that again,” he murmured, almost conversational, “and I might start thinking you have a spine after all.”

I should have pulled away. I should have resumed the weak, apologetic posture. Instead, I held his gaze for one reckless second longer than safety allowed and felt the slow-burn tension that had been building for months pull taut between us.

A shadow shifted at the edge of the yard.

Ren stood under the narrow strip of shade cast by the west wall, arms crossed, slate-grey eyes fixed on the place where Ashford still held my wrist. His jaw was tight enough that a muscle jumped once. He said nothing. He did not need to. The look alone carried weight, assessment, warning, and something that might have been the beginning of jealousy if I let myself name it.

Ashford noticed. Of course he did. His grip tightened a fraction, then released. He stepped back, blood still sliding down his forearm, and gave a short, sharp laugh that did not sound like humour.

“Enough for today, spare,” he said, louder again for the audience. “Try not to collapse before the next council. Some of us have real work to do.”

He walked away without looking back. The officers dispersed, murmuring. I stood in the centre of the yard with the practice blade still in my hand and the ghost of his grip burning against my skin.

Ren pushed off the wall and crossed the distance at an unhurried pace. He stopped just outside arm’s reach. Up close, I could see the dust of another early patrol still caught in his hair.

“You are drawing the wrong kind of attention,” he said, voice flat. “Both of them are watching you now. That is not safer. It is the opposite.”

I met his eyes and found no softness there, only the same hard assessment from the alley and the council chamber. The slow-burn awareness between us was quieter than the one with Ashford, but it ran deeper, rooted in every time he had stepped in without being asked and every time he had looked at me a second too long.

“I know,” I answered.

He studied my face for another beat,

as if searching for the crack he was starting to suspect existed. Then he turned and left the same way he always did, without permission, without reassurance, leaving the weight of his attention behind like a second set of bindings.

I returned the practice blade to the rack. My ribs ached where Ashford’s earlier strike had landed. The thin cut on his arm would be gone in a day. The shift in the way he looked at me would not.

That night, when I finally unwrapped the bindings in the privacy of my chambers, a faint bruise in the shape of fingers had already begun to form on my wrist. I pressed my thumb to it and felt the echo of that charged second in the yard.

Outside my door, two sets of footsteps paused at the same time, one measured and cold, one heavier and restless, before continuing in opposite directions.

Neither of them knocked.

A third set of footsteps stopped directly outside. Soft. Familiar. The exact weight and pace of the physician’s careful tread. The handle of my door turned, slow and silent, even though I had locked it.