Chapter 7 — Training

I did not sleep.

I lay in my mother's old bed of a room and watched the ceiling fade from black to gray, and I heard, distantly, the Draven party leave at first light. Horses on cobblestones. Low voices. A gate opening and closing. I did not go to the window. I did not need to. I already knew what it would show me: a tall, dark rider pausing at the outer wall, glancing back at the house.

I had answered him with one word.

No.

It was the truth, in every way that counted. We had not met. In this life, he was a stranger, and the man who had asked me that question in a moonlit glasshouse had no idea what he was asking.

But he had said my name.

I turned that fact over and over until the sky went pale, and each time it cut a different way.

At some point before dawn, I understood that I was not going to win this war with knowledge alone. Knowledge was fragile. It had already cracked in my hands twice in a single day. The letters that should have been there were not. The man who should have forgotten me had not. Whatever I had believed about the world I had died in, the world I woke into was already bending out of shape around me.

I could not rely on the map anymore.

I needed to become someone who did not need one.

I dressed in the plainest clothes I owned, pulled my hair into a knot at the back of my neck, and went to the old training yard behind the east stables.

It was a bare stretch of packed earth, ringed with rotting fence posts, used for the guard's morning drills and otherwise neglected. I had come here perhaps twice in my life. The Vale daughters were not warriors. Seraphine had her music, her embroidery, her effortless gift for making a room bloom around her. I had my books, and my silence, and the reputation of a girl who would not survive a week in a fight.

In the year I had lived at Draven, I had watched Kael's warriors drill every morning from the edge of the practice ground, pretending to read while my whole body memorized their movements. The way they placed their feet. The way they rolled with a blow instead of against it. I knew what a good guard looked like. I knew how a proper strike began in the hip, not the shoulder.

I found a wooden practice blade in the rack, gripped it, and set my feet the way I remembered.

It was a beautiful stance. Textbook. Perfect.

I swung, and the blade slipped in my sweating palm, and I overbalanced so badly I went down on one knee in the dirt.

I got up. I tried again.

I fell again.

My arms had never lifted anything heavier than a book. My legs had never carried me faster than a walk. My mind knew a thousand things my body had never learned, and the gap between them was a humiliating, aching, unbridgeable thing. I understood in that moment that I had spent a whole life wrapped in the fantasy that being right was the same as being strong.

I picked up the blade for the third time.

By the time the sun cleared the stable roof, my palms had blistered and burst, my shoulders screamed, and I had fallen fifteen times. I counted. It seemed important to count.

"You hold it like you're trying to strangle it."

I whirled, wooden blade raised, and nearly dropped it.

A woman stood at the edge of the yard, arms folded, watching me with the flat, unimpressed expression of someone who had seen a great many bad students and been disappointed by all of them. She was in her fifties, lean as a whip, with a pale seam of scar tissue running from her left temple to the corner of her jaw and gray-shot dark hair cropped short. I knew her, vaguely: Maren Holt, once a Gamma of the Vale guard, retired years ago under circumstances nobody discussed. Now she taught the stable boys their drills and drank her supper alone.

"I'm practicing," I said.

"You're bleeding." She nodded at my hands. "That's not the same thing."

"I can't stop."

"Can't or won't?"

"Won't."

She studied me. It took a long moment.

"You've been hit before," she said.

I went very still.

"Not here. Not by any of these fools." She tilted her head. "You don't flinch like a girl who's never been struck. You flinch like a girl who was struck by someone who knew what they were doing, and who's still waiting for it to happen again."

I thought of a blade beneath my ribs. The warm, spreading, terrible quiet.

"I fell," I said. "A long time ago."

"Hm." Maren did not believe me, and she did not press. Instead she walked to the rack, selected a second practice sword, and crossed the yard. "Again. From the start. Set your feet."

I set them.

"Wider. Lower. You're standing like someone who's expecting to be pushed."

I widened. I lowered.

"Now hit me."

I swung. She turned the blade aside with one small, contemptuous flick of her wrist, and I stumbled into her shoulder and went down hard on both palms. The burst blisters tore. The scrape of gravel through raw skin was so sharp I gasped.

"Get up," Maren said.

I got up.

"Again."

We did it forty times.

I do not remember how many I failed. I remember, with perfect clarity, the moment my last thread of pride snapped, and I stopped caring how I looked, and became nothing but breath and muscle and stubborn refusal. I remember Maren saying, at some point, in her gravelly voice, "You could quit, you know. Nobody would blame you." And I remember answering, before I could think:

"I already did once."

She did not ask what I meant.

In the end I fell against the old boundary post at the edge of the yard, a weathered block of gray stone as old as the estate itself, and my raw palm slid across its surface and left a smear of red behind.

And I heard it.

A heartbeat.

Not mine. Mine was hammering against my throat, wild and fast. This was slower. Deeper. A second pulse, beneath my own, coming up through the stone and into my open hand, steady as a drum beating in some faraway chamber of the earth.

Thump.

Thump.

I could not breathe.

The world narrowed to the wet red print of my hand on the post. For a moment I thought the blood shimmered strangely, something silver-pale flickering at its edges like light on water. Then it was gone, and there was only stone and the dull ache in my palms and the sound of a woman's boots on packed dirt.

Maren was standing very close. She had gone quiet. Her weathered face had lost its color, and she was looking at my hand on the post with an expression I could not read.

"Where did you learn to stand like that?" she said.

"I didn't. I've been falling all morning."

"Not now." She swallowed. "Just then. When you touched the stone. The way you went still." Her eyes lifted to mine. "Your mother stood exactly like that."

My heart stopped.

"You knew my mother?"

"Everyone did. Nobody talks about her now." Maren's voice was very low. "Your father saw to that."

"Why?"

She did not answer. She looked at the red print on the stone, at the raw skin of my hand, and something old and heavy and afraid passed over her scarred face.

"She bled on that post, too," Maren said. "The week she came to Vale. And I never told a living soul what happened afterward."