Chapter 14
Einsa
Year Three
Everyone understood that Sharp was crazy. None of them had understood quite how crazy until Kindness Terra put a sword in her hand in Year Three.
Einsa took to the sword well, just as she had taken to the knife.
Her mother had shown her the rudiments not long after Einsa had started to walk.
She had learned in a single day lessons that most children acquire over years.
Her mother hadn’t told her not to run with scissors, she had told her not to fall over.
Einsa had few equals in the class when it came to swinging a sword. Tmanga, Brooth, Mollandra, and Thurli were all good, but Sharp was in a league of her own, as if she had found a lover rather than a blade.
In the winter while the east winds howled around the Academy’s fortress walls, leaching heat from already cold stone and trying to tear loose every shutter, the third year came once more to the Wound Garden.
Sharp, with Mollandra to her left and Einsa to her right, bustled in through the doors, already equipped with a training blade from the stores.
“It’s a carnage kind of day.” Sharp swung the blunted sword left and right, almost catching the robes of the acolytes ahead of her.
“Watch it.” Tmanga glanced back, getting out of Sharp’s way.
Three fifth-year girls strode towards the exit, among the last of their class to leave the chamber. Each carried an earned blade, long, thin, bearing a slight curve to aid the slice.
“Scram!” The foremost of the trio was a hard-faced girl with short black hair and a slice across her cheek weeping blood that oozed down over old scars.
Einsa stepped aside with the rest. Big as she was, two of these three matched her height and all of them could teach her a short, fatal lesson on the combat floor.
“I said scram.”
“Don’t want to.” Sharp stood her ground.
Einsa reached for her shoulder to pull her aside. “They’ll kill you.” But Sharp slipped away with a shrug.
The trio were far from the best swords in their year, but even to be drawing breath after five years in the Academy meant you were a survivor.
Some called it luck, but Einsa knew differently.
Some people were just harder to kill than others, and it wasn’t down to any particular skill.
They were the weeds, there among the crop the whole time, but when the blight came, or a tyrant salted the ground, they remained, as others fell.
In addition, each of these girls had seven times the sword training that Sharp had, seven seasons to her single season. It was nonsense.
“There are three of them,” Mollandra said.
Her warning implied misplaced trust in Sharp’s ability to defeat even a single fifth year, along with underlining their friend’s sudden and inexplicable inability to count.
“Give it up.” Tmanga sounded bored. “Take the beating.” Despite Sharp abandoning her after Wenda’s death, Tmanga had shown no signs of bearing a grudge.
She was right too—unless Sharp attacked them the acolytes couldn’t kill her.
They could and would use her insolence as justification for a beating, though.
“Your sword doesn’t even have an—”
“Surprise!” Sharp hurled herself into her attack even before Einsa could get the word “edge” out, throwing her sword towards the roof, underarm, point first. It was a trick she’d tried dozens of times in the dorm room with Einsa’s knife, pulling it off maybe one time in five.
She’d nearly lost a finger earlier in the year.
At the same time, she hurled herself forward, dropping to the floor beneath the dark-haired girl’s swinging blade.
Sharp’s momentum, built in two quick steps, carried her feet-first into the ankles of her rearmost opponent, taking the girl’s legs out from beneath her.
The big girl hit the floor as Sharp rolled into a crouch.
Somewhere during that roll she contrived to catch the sword she had earlier thrown into the air.
She snatched its hilt a yard above the ground and brought the blunt blade down on her fallen opponent in a beheading swing.
Swords, being steel bars, don’t need to carry an edge in order to severely fuck you up if they hit you in any part of the neck. The throat is particularly vulnerable.
If the two standing fifth years had acted quickly, Sharp would have ended up impaled on one or both of their blades.
But Sharp had given them the promised surprise and, despite all that they must have seen across the course of five nightmare years, both let a beat pass.
Sharp used that moment to snatch up the choking girl’s sword, discarding her own.
“You should take turns.” Sharp pushed red curls out of her face, grinning fiercely, the point of her new weapon levelled at the black-haired girl.
In the heartbeat in which the two fifth years exchanged a glance, considering the option, she attacked, targeting the second of the larger girls, who parried too late, taking a bloody slice across her ribs.
“You can go.” Sharp danced back out of range.
The wounded acolyte cursed and spat, then despite the accusing glare of her friend, and the judgement of the three additional fifth years who’d come to join the audience, she limped off, clutching her side with crimson fingers.
“Just you and me,” Sharp said. She frowned. “Is it ‘you and I’? I never can tell. I hope they teach us…”
The dark-haired girl came at her with controlled fury, stepping over the friend who still lay on the floor clutching at her crushed throat and making horrible wet noises.
Sharp stood her ground, and they crossed swords. “Ha!” She danced away once more. “You nearly got me.”
But for Sharp’s outrageous reactions, and her instinct for the fight that seemed to have been in her from the moment she landed wet and bloody on the birthing mat, she would have lost her sword hand or at the least been sliced from the heel of her palm to her inner elbow.
The fifth year might not be good for a fifth year, but she wasn’t terrible either, and compared to the third years, new to the art, she might as well be a hero stepping from legend.
Sharp let out an unearthly scream and threw herself at the girl.
In the next fraction of a heartbeat both of them were on the ground, Sharp on top, her blade through the acolyte’s shoulder, one foot pinning the girl’s sword hand to the floor by the wrist. The screams as Sharp moved her sword as if churning butter echoed through the Wound Garden, ceasing only when the dark-haired girl fainted from the pain.
Sharp left the sword standing, recovered her practice blade, and went on out into the hall. Her attack shouldn’t have worked. But it did. Behind her, the third-year acolytes swarmed the two wounded fifth years, stealing everything of worth. Einsa couldn’t bring herself to join them.
“What even was that?” Gholla asked, looking close to vomiting.
“That,” Mollandra said, following in the victor’s footsteps, “was Sharp.”
Einsa swapped a look with Tmanga, finding the girl’s dark eyes unreadable, shrugged in the hope it would free her of the horrified amazement weighing on her shoulders, and finding that it did not, followed Mollandra.
In all her time at the Academy, Einsa had carried with her the unshakeable conviction that she would be one of the three survivors.
The testing, the killing, all the horror was merely the process of deciding which pair of her fellow acolytes would be graduating with her.
She had thought that one of them would be Bek, based partly on the girl’s calm confidence but mainly on her gut feeling.
She had believed that Mollandra would fall early on, and only recently had truly begun to understand that the girl had a different kind of steel at her core.
Looking around herself of late, Einsa had started to wonder for the first time where her own place among the final three was. And if there even was one.
Ashort while later the class was in pairs scattered across the fight floor.
Sharp’s victims had been dragged away to die somewhere less inconvenient.
In the surprising event that either survived, then they’d be unlikely to last to the end of the week.
Being injured or ill did not grant an acolyte any respite from the Academy’s constant training, challenges, and threats.
“What’s up?” Mollandra swung a side cut, the blow they were to practise.
“I’m fine.” Einsa parried the blow. “I’m always fine.”
“You lie well with your mouth.” Mollandra swung again, hard, fast, accurate.
“Well, thank you, Molly. I think that’s the nicest thing anyo—” Einsa swung back, Mollandra deflecting the blow without effort. “—anyone’s ever said to me.”
“But your body gives you away. You hunch up when you’re sad. You did it after Bek. For a long time.”
“You did too,” Einsa muttered. Mollandra had been inconsolable. Full of wrath and sorrow. “We both did.”
Mollandra nodded. “You’re doing it now.”
“I’m not sad,” Einsa lied. All of them were sad, of course, apart from a few crazies like Sharp.
And, strangely, Einsa had never really been able to read Mollandra.
She’d thought her a friend—she had to be a friend, after Bek there was no one left—she had thought her friend was an open book, only to realize that she’d been reading what she was given and had never even turned the true cover.
“Well, cheer up. We’ve got Dungeon Class next.” Another cut, this one almost too fast for Einsa to turn away.
Einsa struck back, unable to keep a smile from twisting her face. Dungeon Class with Instructor Akki was the worst of the lot.