The song found its stopping place at last, though Brenna objected that stopping before the hinges were properly named was intellectual cowardice. Nessa accepted the accusation with a flourish, lifted her cup, and changed the melody under her breath.
That was when the door opened.
Pell Dunwick came in with the evening behind him, Golden Host uniform dusty at the knees, chainmail crooked over one shoulder. He had the long uncertain limbs of a colt and the expression of a man sent somewhere important who hadn’t decided whether he was allowed to enjoy it. He found the patrol table, then me, and crossed the room with his boots dragging the rushes.
“You finished eating?” Pell said.
“I was considering a second bowl.” I lifted the spoon and didn’t hurry it. “If this is an interruption, make it short. The stew has standards.”
Pell glanced at the bowl. “That’s the best one.”
“It looks like it lost a fight with a brick.”
“The brick lost,” Tomas said, passing with two bowls, not stopping.
Brenna, still bent over the question of the gate brace, muttered about load-bearing evidence. Nessa marked a rhythm against her cup, hunting a line that belonged to the tune rather than to any of us. Nobody stopped what they were doing for the uniform. I’d been in rooms where every head turned when one came through the door. This room had better arguments going.
Pell pulled out the chair opposite me and didn’t sit in it.
“Sergeant Coldwell is short of bodies,” he said.
That put the spoon down.
“Two patrols came back light this month. One didn’t come back at all until Wednesday, and then only most of it.” He said it flatly, the way you say a thing you have practiced not feeling in front of strangers. “She’s running the eastern road with six trained hands and a roster that lies. Every time the horn sounds out there she has to choose which piece of the road to leave open.”
“And she wants me on it.”
“She wants to know if she can want you on it.” Pell’s hands found the chair back. “She’s asking. Not sending. She was clear about that twice, which for her is a speech.”
“She could have come herself.”
“She could’ve. Then it’d have been a sergeant standing over your supper, and you’d have had to say no to a sergeant instead of to me.” He shrugged, and the crooked shoulder plate rode up and settled. “She said a man who doesn’t work for anybody should get his asking done at a table, with his own food in front of him.”
Something in my chest moved at that, and I disliked how easily it moved. I’d spent eleven days in this town making certain nobody could hand me an order. Being asked properly turned out to be harder to refuse than being told.
“What does she want to see?”
“Whether you can fight beside people instead of near them.” He hesitated, then went on with the careful courage of a man who has decided to tell the truth at the worst available moment. “She’ll want it settled with blades. Not talking about blades. Not walking a route and telling her where you’d have stood. She’ll put you on a line with practice steel and find out what you actually do when someone comes at you.”
“That seems reasonable.”
“It’s not reasonable, it’s Tamsin.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Reasonable would take longer.”
“And your part in this?”
“I’m the one she’ll put beside you.” He said it plainly. “If she drops an unknown sword next to me on a bad night, I’m the one who finds out with my ribs whether it was a good idea. I’d rather find out tomorrow, in a yard, with a sergeant watching.”
Nobody at the table pretended not to be listening. Brenna had stopped mid-sentence about the brace. Nessa held four notes and let them go.
I turned the spoon over once and set it down.
The plain accounting was this: I’d killed things in a hole in the ground and come out of it with money, a demon, and a sword that answered when I asked. What I didn’t have was a single person alive who would say I was reliable in a line. That was a hole in me shaped exactly like the offer sitting on the table.
“Tell her I’ll come,” I said. “Not because she’s short. Because I want to know the answer as much as she does.”
“That’s nearly the same thing.”
“It isn’t, and I’d thank you to tell her the version I said.”
Pell nodded once and finally sat, which I took to mean the errand was discharged and the chair was now his. Tomas came past, took my empty bowl before I could commit the foolishness of standing with it, and said, “Leave that.”
“I was going to return it with dignity.”
“No you weren’t.” He was already at the hearth.
Nessa, without looking up from her cup, sang four notes of something unmistakably a funeral march. Brenna said, “Accurate,” and went back to her brace.
I grinned at the pair of them, because the alternative was admitting how badly I wanted a professional to look at me tomorrow and find something worth keeping.
“Don’t draw,” was the first thing Sergeant Tamsin Coldwell ever said to me.
My right hand had already started for Duskfang’s hilt. I hadn’t told it to. Some animal in me had seen a strange sergeant and reached for steel, and she’d read it off me from ten paces. I stopped, made the hand hang, and felt about as impressive as a boy caught reaching for sweets.
The Garrison Yard opened broad behind its timber gate. Armor clicked under the pale spring sun. Stable hands hauled wooden targets across packed earth while two mules filed complaints. A returning patrol passed spears and battered packs to waiting hands without ceremony, and somebody sharpened a blade near the wall, each stroke dry and unhurried. Work had a shape here, and a schedule, and witnesses with no reason to flatter me.
They had reasons of their own. Half a dozen recruits found something to do near the fence the moment a stranger walked in with a sword on his hip.
“That’s him?”
“That’s him.”
“He’s smaller than the story.”
“The story had a spider in it. Everything’s smaller than the story.”
“Two coppers says the sergeant has him down before the bell.”
“Nobody’s taking that. Find a bet with a loser in it.”
Tamsin stood beside a rack of practice steel, dark hair in a soldier’s braid, an old scar showing along her left forearm between glove and sleeve. She looked me over once. Face, hands, feet, in that order, the way a woman reads a bill of sale.
“Rules,” she said. “Blunted steel. It still breaks bone, so wear the padding. When I say hold, you hold before you finish being clever. If pain climbs, you say so before you decide you’re brave.”
“That last part sounds personally directed.”
“It is. Elowen cleared your hand. I’m finding out about the rest of you.”
“No route to walk? No counting my paces?”
She looked at me as though I’d offered to recite poetry.
“I need to know if you can fight,” she said. “So you’re going to fight.”
She pulled two blunted arming swords off the rack and threw one to Pell without warning. He got a hand to it on the second grab and looked pleased with himself for catching it at all.
“Pell first,” Tamsin said. “Nothing held back on either side. Body and limbs. No faces, no throats, no knees.”
Pell settled into his guard and the eagerness went out of his face. What replaced it was better. He’d been drilled by someone patient: point up, elbow in, weight where he could spend it. He was two years younger than me and he’d spent the best part of one of them in a uniform, in a line, with other people standing where his mistakes would land. Kade had taught me to fight. Nobody had ever taught me to do it beside anybody.
He came first, and he came properly.
His opening cut was fast and honest and aimed at my ribs, and I got the flat of my blade on it and felt the shock go up into my wrist. He didn’t stop there. He worked the line, one, two, changing height, and drove me back three steps before I found the shape of him.
And then I found it, because reading a man was the one thing Kade never had to teach me. He drilled everything else into me for years. That part was already there when he got me.
Short, short, long. His retreat came in two quick steps and one that carried him a hand further than it needed to. He did it every time he reset, and he did it because somebody had drilled the reset into him and never drilled the third step out.
I let him have the next exchange. I gave ground, let him think the line was moving his way, and when his boots went short, short, I was already standing where the long step wanted to put him.
He arrived into my blade instead of behind it. The blunted edge caught him across the belly plate hard enough to fold him over the sound of it, and he sat down in the dirt with the surprised expression of a man who has been struck by the weather.
The fence made a noise.
“Feet,” Tamsin said to Pell, not unkindly.
“Yes, Sergeant.” He got up rubbing his stomach and grinning like I’d done him a favour. “That was the third step.”
“That was the third step,” I agreed.
“Nobody’s ever taken it off me before.”
“Nobody’s ever wanted it as badly.”
Tamsin let that run out. Then she took the sword from Pell’s hand, tested its balance against her palm, and stepped onto the line herself.
“Again,” she said. “With me.”
She didn’t look grand.
That was the first thing, and it kept being the thing. Point below my eyes, elbow loose, weight quiet over both feet. A plain position that made every direction feel closed. Kade’s guard had been a shut gate I could worry and circle and occasionally make creak. Tamsin’s was a room with no door in it at all.
“Touch my shoulder,” she said.
I tried.
Her blade caught mine before my first step finished. She turned her wrist, let my point slide past, and tapped me below the collarbone hard enough to promise a bruise by supper.
“Again.”
I changed the angle. She took that one too, and the flat of her sword rang off my forearm and left my fingers buzzing.
“Again.”
I feinted high and went for the forearm, which had worked on every boy in Brookhaven and twice on a man who should’ve known better. Her boot moved half a span. My blade found air. Hers stopped against my ribs on the side I couldn’t guard.
Pell made a sympathetic sound. One of the recruits made a considerably less sympathetic one.
“Your feet,” Tamsin said. “You announce the clever part with them.”
Heat climbed my neck. I went again without being told, and that was the mistake, because going again without being told was exactly what she’d just described.
She met me coming in. Her point turned mine aside and she stepped through the gap I’d made by wanting it, and her shoulder took me under the arm and put me on the ground on my back with the wind gone out of me and the spring sky very bright and very far away.
The yard sounded like a yard again: boots, wood, somebody laughing and being elbowed for it.
“That’s the spider-killer,” a recruit said, delighted.
“Stay down a moment,” Tamsin said.
“I was planning a graceful recovery.”
“You were planning to be up before you could breathe, so I’d think the fall was nothing.” She crouched, and up close her face had no cruelty in it at all, which was somehow worse. “What hurts?”
“Shoulder. Hip. Pride is bleeding out and nobody has called for a healer.”
“The pride can wait.” She stood. “Get up.”
I got up. The hip complained. I put weight on it anyway and found it’d hold, which was the only question that mattered.
“You’re fast,” she said. “Faster than Pell and you read a man in three exchanges, which most soldiers never learn to do at all. That’s the good half.”
“And the bad half is lying in the dirt behind me.”
“The bad half is that you fight like a man who has always been the most dangerous thing in the room.” She let that sit exactly as long as it needed to. “On a road you won’t be. You’ll be one of four, and the other three will be somewhere you can’t see, trusting you not to open a hole they have to fill.”
That went in further than the shoulder had.
We went again. Twice more she took me apart, and neither time was the same as the last, and both times I saw the thing that beat me only after it already had. She wasn’t stronger than me. She wasn’t faster than me. She simply knew where I was going to be, because I kept telling her, and she’d been listening to men like me since before I could lift a blade.
By the fourth exchange my arm had started to shake and my breath had gone ragged and loud.
“Enough of that,” Tamsin said, and lowered her sword. “Now show me the other thing.”
I stopped. “What other thing?”
“The thing you’ve been not doing for a quarter of an hour.” She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t doing anything with her face at all. “Whatever went through the Spider Queen’s court at Shadowmaw. I’ve heard four versions and I don’t care about any of them. Do it here, where I can watch it, and I’ll know what I’m putting on my road.”
The mark in my left palm had been warm since the first exchange. It got warmer.
Finally.
I let the pact answer.
It came up my arm the way heat comes off a forge door, all at once and from underneath, and my teeth set against it. A dusk-dark line gathered along the blunted iron. It didn’t quicken my feet or forgive my hip. It made the weapon certain, as though the next contact had already happened somewhere and the world was only waiting to catch up.
I stepped and cut.
Tamsin met it.
The impact cracked across the yard like a dropped beam, and I felt it in my back teeth, and I wanted more of it immediately. Her blade flew off line and her rear boot carved a furrow through the dirt. Surprise opened her face for less than a heartbeat, and then she was moving sideways, refusing the second contact instead of trying to hold it, because she’d just learned in one exchange what holding it’d cost her.
Somewhere behind me a recruit said a word his sergeant would’ve fined him for.
I followed. Not faster than before. I didn’t need faster. Every time our swords touched, the weight in mine forced her to give ground or lose the line entirely, and her guard stopped being a room without doors and became a series of doors she kept closing.
It went through me like a long drink of something strong. Fifteen minutes ago this woman had put me on my back without hurrying. Now I struck a veteran’s guard and made the opening myself, and my whole body wanted to laugh, and some low greedy part of me was already counting how many more times I could make her retreat before the morning ended.
“Left foot,” Pell said sharply.
Too late. I’d crossed it behind the right while pressing. Tamsin yielded a step, let my blade pass, turned inside my reach, and put her point precisely on the hip she’d already introduced to the ground.
The yard folded up around it. My leg went out from under me half a hand’s width and came back wrong, and the dark line wavered along the iron.
“Feet,” she said.
I limped back onto the line. “My hip has submitted a longer report.”
“Ignore it. Don’t ignore your feet.”
Pell laughed before he could stop himself, and this time the fence laughed with him, and it was aimed at me, and I found I minded it less than I’d expected to.
Tamsin lowered her sword a fraction. “Again. Settle before the strike. If your leg falters, you don’t leap over the mistake.”
We began again, and this time she never met the blade squarely. She touched and turned, worked my bad side, made me carry the weight of every missed cut. She was the better swordswoman. I knew it every time her point found the place my body had failed to cover.
Knowing it didn’t make her stronger than what rode in my steel.
On the fourth pass I settled before I struck. Tamsin tried to turn the cut, and the force went through the contact and tore her guard wide, and I held my feet, recovered inside the line, and brought the practice blade toward her shoulder.
She retreated once. Twice. Her heel found the edge of the churned ground.
I saw the opening then, a clean path through a trained guard that the boy I’d been couldn’t have forced with both hands and a prayer. The power sat in the iron, mine to spend, and every greedy inch of me wanted her to feel it land.
“Hold,” Tamsin said.
I stopped with the blunted edge a handspan from her shoulder. The iron trembled with everything still in it, and my arm shook with the effort of not finishing, which frightened me more than the fight had. Full force into an unarmoured joint wouldn’t have been a lesson. It would’ve been a surgeon, then a cane, then a woman who used to be a sergeant.
The dark line withdrew. No pain followed it, no debt, nothing owed. My pulse hammered anyway.
Nobody at the fence was making noise now.
Tamsin looked at the sword, then at my feet, then at my face, in that order. She was breathing harder than she’d been. Not much. Enough.
“Pell,” she said. “What did you see?”
“I saw him take your guard apart, Sergeant.” Pell’s voice had gone careful. “Twice.”
“And the second time?”
“The second time he could have finished it.”
“He could.” She rolled her shoulder once, testing something, and didn’t tell us the result. “Say the rest.”
Pell looked at me, and to his credit he didn’t soften it. “He stopped because you told him to. Not because he wanted to.”
“That’s the whole morning,” Tamsin said.
She held her hand out for the practice sword. I gave it to her, and my fingers didn’t want to open, and I made them.
“That force isn’t the problem,” she said. “That force is why I’m still talking to you instead of sending you home. The problem is that it arrives before your judgment does, and on a road my people stand inside the distance where that matters.”
“Then teach me the judgment.”
“Some of it.” She turned the blade so the sun ran down it. A faint soot-coloured trace remained along the blunted edge where the dark had been. “Not this.”
“One more,” Tamsin said. “Then I answer you.”
She set it up without explaining it, which I was beginning to understand was how she taught. Pell took the left of a narrow ground between two practice frames, close enough that our elbows would argue. She put a stable hand at the far end with a padded pole and told him to come down the ground at us whenever he felt like it and not to be polite about the timing.
“Pell holds left,” she said. “You hold right. Whatever comes down that ground, you deal with it without opening the side Pell is standing on.”
“And if he needs help?”
“Then help him without leaving your ground.” She stepped back out of the ground. “That is the entire job. Men die on that road because somebody good went to help somebody else and took a hole in the line with him.”
The pact settled into the blunted iron again, a dusk-dark line no wider than the edge. My arm had begun to shake somewhere in the last quarter hour and hadn’t stopped.
The stable hand came at us in a rush, and he wasn’t polite about the timing.
He went for Pell first, because Pell was the one in the crooked armour. The pole came in low and hard and Pell took it on his blade and lost a step, and the whole right side of him opened up where I was standing.
Everything in me wanted to step across and end it. It was one pace. The angle was there. I could’ve put the blunted edge into that man’s ribs and had it finished before Pell got his feet back, and the fence would’ve seen me do it.
Instead I stayed on my ground and cut down across the ground in front of him, and the pact went through the pole and broke it a hand below the padding.
The stable hand stopped very suddenly, holding two feet of splintered ash.
“Sorry,” I said.
“That’s the second one this month,” he said, and didn’t sound sorry at all, and went to get another.
Pell recovered his line. “You didn’t cross.”
“I wanted to.”
“I know. I could hear you wanting to.”
We ran it four more times. The pole came at me twice, at Pell twice, and once at the seam between us where neither of us owned the ground, which I understood afterward had been the actual test. That time we both moved, and our blades met with a bad flat clang, and Tamsin let the pair of us stand in the wreckage of it for a moment before she said anything.
“Whose ground was that?”
“Mine,” Pell said.
“Mine,” I said, at the same time.
“Correct,” Tamsin said. “That’s why it’s where you’ll both die if you don’t fix it.”
We fixed it. On the last pass the pole came down the seam and Pell called it, one word, and I let him have it and covered the outside instead, and the ground held with two of us standing in it and nothing open behind.
“Hold,” Tamsin said.
I held. The dark line withdrew from the iron. My arm was shaking hard enough now that I put the point down in the dirt and let the ground carry it, and I didn’t care who saw.
Pell was grinning at me through a faceful of sweat.
“What?”
“You called it my ground,” he said. “Out loud. In front of her.”
“It was your ground.”
“I know.” He wiped his face with his forearm. “I’ve been on this yard since spring and nobody’s ever said that where the sergeant could hear it.”
Tamsin took the practice sword out of my hand and racked it herself, which she hadn’t done for Pell.
“Here’s my answer,” she said. “Two parts, and you can refuse either.”
“I’m listening.”
“First. You’re dangerous, and you’re not road-proven, and those are different words. I’ve watched a man take my guard apart twice in one morning, and I’ve watched the same man walk into a fight because he wanted the fight. Both of those were you, and both of them are going to be true for a while.”
“That’s the flattering half, is it?”
“That’s both halves.” She pulled her glove off and worked the shoulder I’d nearly ruined for her, once, without comment. “Second. If you choose to ride with my patrols, you ride under the patrol leader for the length of the patrol. Not because you belong to Marchgate. Because a road with two people deciding things is a road with nobody deciding things. You take the terms for the day, and at the end of it you can walk off and never come back and nobody will call it desertion, because you were never enlisted.”
That had the shape of a sentence built in advance, and so, I suspected, did sending Pell to my supper instead of coming herself.
“You’ve been careful with me,” I said.
“I’ve been accurate with you. Careful is what I am with the recruits.” She put the glove back on. “Do you want it or not?”
Eleven days in this town, and the thing I’d spent all of them arranging was that nobody could tell me to do anything. Standing in the churned dirt with my arm shaking, I found I wanted this more than I wanted that, and I couldn’t decide whether that was growth or appetite.
“I’ll take the terms,” I said. “For the day, each day, and you’ll have my word before we ride and not after.”
“Good.”
That was all. She turned toward the rack, and the morning was apparently over, and I discovered I was standing there waiting for something more like a ceremony.
“Sergeant.”
She stopped.
“The thing in the sword,” I said. “You said you couldn’t teach it.”
“I can teach you where to stand. I can teach you not to open a gap. I can’t teach you what that force does at the edge of a joint, because I’ve never had it in my hand and I’m not going to pretend otherwise to keep your respect.” She looked at me levelly. “Everything I don’t know about it, you’re going to find out on somebody. Choose who.”
“Is there anybody who does know?”
“One. Garran Rook, at Harrows Turn, three days east on the trail.” She said the name without warmth. “He trained blades that carry something extra. He swore to the Iron Judge and he broke the oath, and the second half of that is why nobody sends him students anymore, and the first half is why he could teach you.”
“You’re recommending an oathbreaker.”
“I’m telling you where the knowledge is. What you do with a man’s history is your own business.” She lifted the racked sword, checked the soot-coloured trace along the edge, and set it down again. “I’d rather you learned it from him than on my road.”
Pell walked me to the gate because nobody had told him not to. My hip had stiffened, and the shoulder had begun to write its own report, and every part of me that had been shaking had settled into an ache I could carry.
“First patrol’s tomorrow,” he said. “Dawn.”
“Will she put me beside you?”
“She already has. She told the roster boy before you’d finished agreeing.” He caught himself. “I don’t think that was a trick.”
“It was a little bit of a trick.”
“It was a little bit of a trick,” he agreed happily, and went back into the yard.
I stood in the gate a moment with the town going about its morning behind me. Under its bindings the mark in my palm stayed warm and quiet, like something well fed and in no hurry.
She never once told you what you are worth.
“No,” I said. “She told me where to stand.”
You liked that better.
I didn’t answer her, which she took for the agreement it was.