Varia #2
I found Varia in the training yard.
She had a practice sword in her hand, and she was running through a sequence alone. Her dark hair was loose around her face in the morning air.
She stopped when she saw me.
“The shoulders will fit in three months,” she said. “The waist in four. Sooner if you commit to the sword work.”
“Good morning to you too,” I said.
She smiled.
“Horse first,” she said, turning toward the stables. “You cannot fight from an animal you cannot control. And you cannot control an animal you are afraid of. Are you afraid of horses?”
“I have a healthy respect for horses,” I said.
“That is a way of saying yes,” Varia said. “It is fine. We will fix it.”
The horse she brought out was a bay, dark reddish-brown with a black mane. I made eye contact. He regarded me with the patient, slightly skeptical expression of someone who had been through this before and was reserving judgment.
“His name is Velox,” Varia said.
She talked me through the mount. Left foot in the stirrup, weight on the left leg, swing the right over, do not think about it too hard.
I thought about it too hard. I did it wrong.
She watched without expression. I dismounted. I mounted again. It was marginally less wrong. Velox bore all of this with patience.
Once I was up and more or less settled, Varia walked alongside us as we moved through the yard. She talked while she walked, not looking at me, watching Velox instead.
“He feels everything you feel before you do,” she said.
“Your tension arrives in his back. Your uncertainty arrives in your hands. He is not reading your signals—he is reading you. If you are working against yourself, he will know it and he will spend the ride compensating for you, which is exhausting for both of you and useful for neither.”
“So, I need to relax,” I said.
“You need to be honest,” she said. “Relaxed and honest are not the same thing. Relaxed is an instruction your body cannot follow if your mind is still arguing. Honest is letting what is true be true. You are learning something. You do not know how to do this yet. Let the not-knowing be true, and he will stop waiting for you to pretend otherwise.”
I thought about this for the length of one full circuit of the yard. It was, I noted, essentially the same principle Caen had explained about the claiming bond. The bond transmitted what the body and heart were actually doing, regardless of what you were trying to present.
Velox, it appeared, operated on similar mechanics.
I stopped arguing with the not-knowing. Velox’s stride smoothed perceptibly.
“There,” Varia said.
We trotted. Trotting was designed to disagree with the human spine, and I was its primary disagreement for the first several minutes.
Varia told me to push my heels down. I pushed my heels down.
Varia told me my heels were not down. I pushed them further.
Something in my posture shifted, and the trot became a different experience entirely. The trot was not smooth, but collaborative, the horse and I arriving at a temporary working arrangement.
“Better,” Varia said.
It had the weight of a significant compliment.
We broke at midmorning. Varia produced two leather flasks from somewhere on her person and handed me one without asking.
Water, cold.
It was delicious. It was delicious in the way water can be when you’ve been working harder than you realized.
In that moment, it tasted better than it ever could in comfort; the coolness felt earned.
We sat on the low wall at the edge of the yard, drinking slowly, watching a pair of garrison soldiers run drills in the far corner.
In the distance, above the outer wall, the peaks of the Zhaduun were visible.
They were always visible from the yard—the mountains that defined the horizon with the permanence of something that had been there before the outpost, before the kingdom, before any living thing had looked up and needed a word for what it was seeing.
They absorbed the morning light the way they absorbed everything.
Nothing reflected back from them. They stood there, patient and dark, doing what they had always done.
Varia followed my gaze.
“You get used to them,” she said.
She drank from her flask.
“No,” she corrected herself. “You stop expecting them to go away. That is not the same thing.”
It was good to sit together and rest in the quiet pause between one stretch of work and the next. The silence asked nothing of us. There was no need to perform. Varia held it naturally, her flask balanced on her knee as she watched the drill unfold.
“How long have you been a soldier?” I asked.
She was quiet for a moment.
“Since I was sixteen. My village was near the line.” She drank.
“My mother was once a soldier, before she settled down to have a family. It was not a choice that required much deliberation.”
“You grew up with this,” I said.
“I grew up inside it,” she said.
“I came to Scipio’s garrison four years ago. I had served elsewhere before. Places that were smaller. Commands that were—less.”
Less. I knew exactly what she meant.
“Skip runs a different kind of garrison,” I said.
“He sees his people,” she said. “All of us. You do not know how rare that is until you served under men who do not.”
We sat with that for a moment. The drill in the far corner. The cold water. The leather sat slightly loose on my frame.
“Does it get easier?” I asked. “The war. The line. Year after year of the same thing.”