9. Blade #2
Amusement moved through his face, brief and unguarded, before giving way to something more serious. He reached for my hand, turned it over in his, and studied it.
I could see the thought in his eyes. He was imagining where his ring would go.
“The ring,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I have not said yes.”
“I know.”
“I am…considering.”
“I know that too.” His thumb moved across my knuckles, the gesture so habitual I was no longer certain he knew he was doing it. “I am not asking you to decide this morning.”
“You are very patient,” I said, “for a man who I suspect has already decided.”
His eyes softened first. Then the hard line of his mouth eased.
“I have decided,” he said.
He held my hand and did not look away.
“But the bond is not only mine to choose.”
***
“Come,” he said, standing. “I am going to teach you something.”
He left the bed, and I was treated, in the full, unambiguous light of a Mytharo morning, to the unobstructed view of him that the previous evening’s firelight had only partially delivered.
He was extraordinary. And I say that as a woman who had conducted rigorous comparative research and believed in precise empirical assessment.
And even now, in the relaxed aftermath of our recent activities, he was impressive in the dimension that my research had flagged as the primary variable.
Impressive was, I was finding, a word that required significant upward revision in his case.
He reached for the leather. Dark and fitted, worn soft at the joints and edges from years of use.
Reinforced across the chest and shoulders, scarred where blades had glanced and weather had bitten in.
Belt. Bracers. Straps pulled tight by hands that knew every buckle, every notch, every familiar sequence.
The hunter’s hook came off the wall first. He turned it in his hand once, testing the weight, then held it out to me.
“The small axe,” I said.
“Hunter’s hook,” he said. “The long version is used on the wall. The short version is used in close combat. Wide blade. One purpose.” He met my eyes. “You know what the purpose is.”
I knew what the purpose was. I had watched soldiers carrying them since the briefing. I had understood, with the clarity of a military historian encountering a purpose-built tool, exactly what it was designed to do at close range to an anatomical target.
“Show me,” I said.
I got out of bed and retrieved the linen nightgown from the floor where it had ended up the previous evening. I pulled it on.
The morning light was doing something to the linen, which was pale enough and thin enough that it was conducting itself with much lower opacity.
Skip gazed upon me with hunger. He was taking a moment to register this fact. He made a low sound.
“The nightgown,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. His voice was slightly rougher than it had been thirty seconds ago.
“It is somewhat transparent in direct sunlight.”
“Yes,” he said again.
He did not appear to consider this a problem.
He moved the furniture.
The chair went back with one hand. He moved the solid oak table as if it weighed almost nothing. I would have needed to empty it first, brace both feet, commit my entire body to the effort, and still would have considered two feet a respectable achievement.
He did not appear to notice that he had done this. His attention was already on the cleared floor, assessing the available space.
I had noted, on multiple previous occasions and in increasing detail, that he was strong. I was revising strong upward. The table had been, by any reasonable structural analysis, heavy. He had moved it the way I moved a cup of tea.
He handed me the hook and stepped back. He watched me hold it, his gaze sharp, as if he was running a rapid diagnostic test.
“You are gripping it like someone who has never held a weapon,” he said.
“That is because I have never held a weapon.” I looked at my hands on the handle. “My prior experience with bladed implements is limited to a box cutter I kept in my apartment for opening packages.”
“A hunter’s hook is different from everything,” he said, stepping behind me. His hands came over mine. He adjusted my grip.
His thumbs repositioned my fingers on the handle.
“Lower. The arc is tighter. You are not driving forward. You are driving down.”
I was paying full attention to the instruction.
I was also paying full attention to the fact that he was directly behind me, his chest against my back, his arms around mine, his hands over mine, and the warmth it produced was not something I could ignore.
“Elbow in,” he said. His voice was close to my ear. “The motion is short. You are not building momentum. You are placing weight.”
He guided the arc once, slowly. My arms moved with his. The motion was tight and purposeful. This was a finishing tool rather than a fighting one, built for one specific job in one specific set of circumstances.
I understood it immediately. Pattern recognition.
He stepped back. “Again.”
I ran the arc. He watched.
“Better. Weight forward on your left foot.”
I adjusted. The motion settled. I ran it again. And again. By the fourth repetition, it had stopped feeling like a performance and started feeling like something that my body understood.
“Again,” he said. “Faster.”
I ran it faster.
When I looked up, he was closer than I had registered. He was within the training distance. He reached forward and adjusted my forearm angle with two fingers.
One hand settled at my hip, warm and present, while the other corrected my grip.
“Run it again,” he said.
I ran it.
The arc was correct.
“You learn fast,” he said. “You are still a beginner, and I hope you never need to use it in earnest.” His voice was even.
He was delivering an honest assessment with neither flattery nor cruelty.
“But you know the basics now. In a small room, with one target at close range, you can act. That is not nothing.”
I set the hook on the desk.
“Now, the sword,” he said. He crossed to the weapons arrangement and took down something short-bladed and light.
It was a small sword, built for someone who needed to carry it without it impeding movement. He held it out.
“For your belt.” He turned the sword once in his hand before holding it out. “It can take a head, if the angle is right. But that is not what you should use it for. Against one of them, use it to slow them, cut them, and create space. Throw it to interrupt the momentum. Buy seconds.”
He glanced toward the weapons rack.
“A hunter’s hook is better for the killing stroke. Shorter. Heavier at the blade. Made to catch at the neck and finish the work.”
He met my eyes.
“Seconds are what you use to reach the hook. Carry it until it stops feeling like something you are carrying and starts feeling like a part of you. If one comes for you directly and you cannot reach the hook in time—throw the sword.”
“Throw it,” he said again. “Not to kill. You cannot kill it that way. Pain slows them. Throw it to interrupt the momentum. A blade in the shoulder, the chest, anywhere it lands. They heal. You know this. You have seen it. But healing is not the same as not feeling. They feel pain the way anything feels pain. The difference is that they survive it. The blade goes in, and they stop. They do not stop because they are hurt in any permanent sense, but because pain is information their body responds to before their mind can override it.”
He took a deep breath. He was hoping I would never have to apply this knowledge, but wanted me to have it.
The fire had burned lower since we woke. The room was warm and close. The heavy oak desk was still scattered with maps and reports.
“Yes,” I said.
“Say it back.”
“Throw the sword to slow it,” I said. “Use the seconds to reach the hook.”
We trained for another forty minutes or so.
By the end, I could execute both weapons with what he described as adequacy.
He moved to the window, and I followed. We stood together in the morning light, looking out at the view.
The Zhaduun Mountains came first. They seemed to insist on it. Always there, always dark, their stone drinking in the morning sun instead of reflecting it. At the peak of the tallest mountain, Druvenfall sat with patient permanence.
Then the sun. Warm and present.
Then, below us, the crypt stairwell was visible at the base of the keep’s eastern wall, its entrance capped beneath the heavy stones.
Something was in there.
Something was in there right now, in the dark below us.
I looked down at the ring on his left hand, still waiting.
Two things waiting. In different ways, for different reasons, with different qualities of patience.