Chapter 3: Stand Up

The fight lasted less than a second.

Kael moved. One step, one strike. The flat of his blade cracked against my forearm hard enough to jar the sword from my grip. His boot swept my ankle. I hit the ground shoulder-first.

The training yard went quiet for a beat. Then the whispers started.

Kael looked down at me. "For your own sake, Frost," he said. "Yield."

I lay there with my cheek pressed to the stone, arm numb from wrist to elbow, and heard my mother's voice in my head, sharp and immediate.

Stand up.

I rolled onto my hands and knees. Grabbed the sword. Got my feet under me.

Kael's eyes narrowed. Just barely.

I came at him. He sidestepped without effort and caught my blade with the flat of his, redirecting it so cleanly that I stumbled past him. I planted my foot, spun, swung, and he wasn't there. His heel caught the back of my knee and I went down hard.

Half the first-years had gathered at the edge of the yard. I could feel their attention like heat on my skin — arms crossed, heads tilted, waiting. They weren't watching a fight. They were watching a lesson in what not to be. Unlike the others, the blonde girl near the front wasn't smirking. She was watching too closely for that.

I got up. Swung. He caught my wrist mid-arc, twisted the blade out of my hand, and shoved me backward. I stumbled, caught my balance, and picked up the sword. The handle was slick with blood.

The crowd pressed closer. Someone laughed. I heard the word I'd lived with my entire life, the one my mother never said but everyone else had no trouble with.

Mediocre.

I got up.

Kael hit me again. I went down.

Got up.

Down.

Up.

My knees were raw. Blood soaked through the left side of my shirt. Every breath felt like swallowing glass. But I could still stand. As long as I could stand, I hadn't lost.

Each time I fell, I watched him. Not the sword. His body — the way his weight shifted before a strike, the angle of his shoulder when he committed to a swing. My mother had drilled it into me before I could spell it: read the body, not the weapon. The weapon lies. The body doesn't.

On the seventh fall, I stopped trying to beat him. I just needed one opening.

I lunged low, under his guard. He adjusted instantly, blade dropping to catch mine. But I'd already changed direction. I threw my weight sideways, let his parry carry me past his right hip, and swung my sword in a tight arc from below.

The tip caught his sleeve. The fabric tore.

Kael stepped back.

One step. Just one. But in twelve years of standing on the same field, I had never once made him move.

The yard went quiet. The kind of quiet that comes when a crowd has to recalculate.

Then someone at the back refused it. "She got lucky. Liana Frost is too stupid to know when she's beaten."

Kael looked at the torn edge of his sleeve, then back at me. His expression hadn't changed. But something behind his eyes had shifted.

"Shut up." He wasn't talking to me. He was talking to the crowd.

This time the silence held. Even the ones who'd called me mediocre had nothing left to say.

He raised his blade. I raised mine. My arms shook so badly I could barely hold the grip. Blood ran from a cut above my left eye and I blinked it away because wiping it would mean dropping my guard.

"Why won't you give up?" His voice was quiet. He genuinely didn't understand, and it clearly bothered him. This wasn't a problem he could solve by looking at it.

I planted my feet.

"I'm the daughter of the Red Sword." My voice came out raw. "But I don't stand up because of her. I stand up because I swore I would never stop."

The edges of my vision went dark. I felt my knees buckle. My grip on the sword loosened, and the clatter of it hitting stone was the last thing I heard before the world tilted and I fell.

Sound came back first. Voices, far away and muffled. Then warmth: arms around my back, under my knees, holding me against something solid that moved with each step.

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling above me passed in arches of dark stone. Torchlight flickered across a sharp jaw, dark hair, green eyes staring straight ahead.

Kael.

He was carrying me. My body was pressed against his chest, one arm crumpled between us, the other hanging loose at my side. His stride was steady, unhurried, no different than if the hallway were empty. I could feel his heartbeat through the fabric of his shirt. Slow. Even.

Mine wasn't. I decided that was the blood loss.

My brain took a long time to understand what was happening.

"What — " I tried to push away from his chest. Pain shot through my ribs and I flinched.

His arm tightened, not roughly, just enough to hold me still. His hand shifted against my side and settled into the one spot that didn't hurt. He hadn't guessed. He knew.

He'd put most of them there.

"Stop moving," he said. "You're making it worse."

I stared at him. This was Kael Draven. The boy who looked at me like I was inconvenient. The boy who had never once done anything that suggested he cared whether I existed.

There was probably a word for being carried to the infirmary by the person who put you in it. I couldn't think of one. My head wasn't working well enough to look.

And he was carrying me to the infirmary without a flicker of hesitation. My face was close enough to his collar that I could smell steel polish and something sharp underneath I couldn't name.

"Put me down," I said.

He didn't slow down. His grip held and his pace never changed.

I stopped fighting him. I could have kept going. Some small, humiliating part of me didn't want to.