Chương 26

Dorr counted them out onto the writing slope one at a time.

"Charter law, two volumes. Retainer conduct, three. First aid, one. Written tactics, two." He squared the stack with a flick of two fingers.

"Eight. And the timetable." John took the timetable first. Dorr's hand was as neat as print.

"The two portions would be administered separately," Dorr continued.

"The written and oral exam would be set by the registry — myself and two colleagues. Armsmaster Kilhane takes the physical in his own yards on his own day. The registry has no say in what he does there, and he prefers it so."

"When?"

"Twenty-six days. The written falls on the twenty-third." Dorr folded his hands.

"You should understand what passing means, Master Rook. The Academy becomes your certifying authority in the Guild's place. You remain Lady Vey's retainer under our own bond, and no further institution's guarantee is required. Failing—" he said it without drama, a line item— "terminates your residence in her household. Her surety returns to her either way after the usual three days."

"And the physical."

"Ah." Dorr drew out one page, a copy of some standing order, and ran his thumb down the margin.

"The armsmaster may certify whatever rank you actually demonstrate. It needn't match your former Guild standing. If you showed Iron, he could enter Iron." Cal looked at the page. It seemed like a generous clause, offered to a man who had no use for it. Proving he was still a competent Bronze was going to be work enough.

"Understood. Thank you."

"Twenty-six days," Dorr said, and slid the stack across. The volumes and timetable were still under John's arm when he reached Elara's dorm, and he was glad of them. They gave his hands something to be. Nessa had laid breakfast while he was out: bread, a dish of butter, boiled eggs, the teapot. Elara sat at the table in the blue morning dress with her hair entirely pinned, and her attention was on her cup as if the tea were the most interesting thing in the world.

"Good morning, Master Rook."

"My lady." He set the primers on the sideboard. Then he thought better of it and set them on the floor beside his chair. Then he picked them up again, because the floor seemed a poor place for charter law, and put them back on the sideboard.

"You found what you needed?"

"Primers, my lady. And a timetable." He sat. He reached for the bread and explained, to nobody who had asked, the structure of the upcoming exam.

"How thorough," Elara said to her tea in response.

"Very, my lady."

"You needn't keep calling me that at breakfast."

"No, my lady." Her mouth flattened. One corner lifted anyway, and she turned it into lifting the cup. Twice afterwards, Elara opened her mouth to say something; twice nothing came out. Nessa followed each failed opening with her eyes.

"More tea, my lady?"

"Please." Nessa poured. Her eyes stayed on Cal over the spout of the pot. He was eating steadily, eyes on his bowl. Nessa set an egg in front of him harder than an egg required. Seventeen, and ordinarily incapable of silence, she had not said a word since he came in. Her eyes went from him to Elara and back, the way a person checks a room they are sure has been rearranged.

"You're very talkative this morning, Master Rook," she said at last. And then, with exactly the same weight, "And you're very quiet, my lady."

"Eat your breakfast, Nessa."

"Yes, my lady." Mirelle, at the foot of the table with the household book open beside her plate, did not look up from any of it. That was the strange part. Mirelle was rather intentional with her observations; John had grown used to being watched like a hawk, particularly around the Lady. This morning, she didn't seem bothered in the slightest by his presence, simply writing a figure, drying it, and turning a page to continue on the other side.

"We are at one dish of butter a morning until the surety is cleared," she said to the book.

"Divide it sensibly." She asked Elara whether the water rooms were at second bell today, and whether she wished to be walked down, and that was the whole of Mirelle's contribution to the conversation. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. John ate the egg. He buttered bread with a sensible share of butter. Elara asked if the primers were legible, and he said they were, my lady, very. Nessa's eyes narrowed a fraction further.

A few minutes later, he finished, stood, and thanked them for the meal. Elara said, "Will you be at the Annex?"

"Yes, my lady," he replied, collecting and storing away the primer and timetable before leaving to hit something in a controlled manner. The narrow square between the rain cistern and the empty equipment shed was empty, as it usually was. The yard was empty of anyone he knew. Two retainers drilled at the far rail, spaced so their steel rang once per pull, and a girl in house grey swing-fenced alone by the wall, winding old leather grip around her knuckles between forms.

Somewhere along the scored edge of the paving, a groundskeeper dragged a scythe-blade brush, slow and rasping, going nowhere in particular. Settling in, John ran a finger along the peace cord first, knot to knot. Then he untied it, and drew. The sword came up into an instinctive guard. He let it. For a long while he did only what the body already knew: the descending cut, the diagonal, the rising cut, the returns, footwork on the sunken paving at the corner he'd claimed as his own.

Over and over, he rode the feeling, letting the man he had never met put the blade where it belonged. A hundred. Two hundred. He lost the count and let it go. Sweat ran into the scar near his jaw that he could not remember earning. Somewhere in the second hour he stopped, mid-form, and looked at his own hands. This was how Cal had got to Bronze. No instruction; repetition until the flesh gave up arguing.

And John, who had sat through two years of anatomy in a lecture hall with the heating broken, had been riding the thing like a borrowed horse since he arrived: point it, let it run, never once question what it could do in concrete numbers. He sheathed the sword and went back to the residence for a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. The pencil was the borrowed one, rough where someone had whittled it with a dull knife. For paper he had the resignation form.

It had lived in the coat pocket since Dorr gave it to him; turned over, the back was clean. It had been waiting for a use. He sat with his back against the cistern wall, set two fingers to his wrist, and counted at the cadence. He had no timepiece on him, so this would have to be a rough estimation. Resting pulse — 48. Slow. Trained heart or Aura's doing? Unknown. The words came out in English without his deciding it.

The grey woman was twenty paces off, and the groundskeeper passed behind him every few minutes, and anyone who read Avarran could read it over his shoulder. That was one reason. The other was that Avarran had no word for the muscle he meant when he meant the long band that pulled the arm down into a cut. It had back. It had thigh and the burning and wind. He wanted latissimus. He wanted lactate. So he used English and wrote the words he wanted.

Then he put his hands on the yard stones, in sets of a hundred, to a thousand, counting out loud under his breath while the two retainers at the rail stopped drilling to watch a man apparently doing press-ups beside a cistern for the better part of an hour. Recovery pulse at thirty seconds, at one minute, at three.

He wrote each one down, blew on his hands, and did it again — this time flooding Aura through the whole body the way Cal had always done it, the blanket approach, hot and indiscriminate — and took the same measurements. With Aura — 1, 000 in roughly half the time. Pulse 140. Rest in ~60 counts. Cost: noticeable. Maybe a fifth of the reserve. He looked at the three entries. Then he stood up, took up his sword and began swinging. He wanted speed.

He let the Aura answer the wanting, and this time he paid attention to where it went. It went everywhere. Into the calves. Into the jaw, which had nothing to cut with. Into the heart, which pounded as if the whole body were about to flee; into the lungs; into the left hand, which was barely contributing to the cut and served mostly as a stabiliser. The blade came down fast, and the feeling was of a great deal of effort arriving at a small point. It was like flooding a house to wash one cup.

Fine if you had reserve to burn. Stupid if you didn't. He noted the observation: Conventional use — broad. Everything fed. Most of it wasted on muscles that never touch the cut. So: one cut. The descending cut, the plainest one. He stood in the guard and went through it slowly without Aura, feeling for the chain. The lat and the back of the shoulder bringing the arm down. The triceps opening the elbow. The forearm, last, snapping the wrist.

Under all of it the hip turning and the front knee taking the weight, the ankle, the belly bracing the spine. And against every one of those a muscle that pulled the other way and had to be made to let go: the biceps, the front of the shoulder, the back of the thigh. He gathered. He tried to feed only the chain. The first cut arrived like a slap, all arm and nothing behind it; he had poured everything into the shoulder and forgotten the hip, and the blade had no body to borrow from.

The second he got the hip and the shoulder and locked the wrist solid, and the edge wobbled through the line like a door on a bad hinge. The third he had the whole chain lit and had stiffened the biceps against the triceps without meaning to, so that he was cutting against his own arm, and the reserve under his ribs dropped more than a broad cut would have cost him. He swore in English.

Across the court the grey woman's boot scraped on the stone, and he looked, and the Aura he had so carefully narrowed loosened and ran out into his limbs the way water finds the floor. He had to gather it again from nothing. That cost too. The movement is not a single muscle firing. It's a chain of muscles. Feed the chain. Let the other side go slack. Don't look up. He went on. He did not count the failures, because counting them was another way of distracting himself.

The groundskeeper passed behind him and passed again. The Iron-rankers at the far rail finished their drill and started another. Somewhere around the twentieth cut, the blade went through the line fluidly. He felt the biceps hang loose for the entire swing, and the hip arrive a fraction before the shoulder so that the shoulder had the relevant supports engaged when it fired. The hollow under his ribs barely moved. He did it again to be sure. Then three more times.

Then he sat down against the cistern and wrote the verdict. Selective cut vs broad cut. Speed: slightly faster. Cost: roughly two-thirds of a broad cut. Saves about a third. He looked at the page for a while. A third was a third. In a fight of fifty cuts it was sixteen more cuts than the other man had.

Mildly satisfied with the result, he tied the peace cord back through the guard, knot by knot, packed the sheet inside his coat against the coming damp, and spent the remaining daylight meditating before heading back at dusk to read eight primers about the correct way to behave.