19. First Blood #2
He gestured to the assembled trainees. “Partner exercises. Senior students with junior ones. Experience teaching inexperience, while inexperience tests complacency.”
The pairings happened quickly. Armand took Maise, his paired swords already moving in complex patterns that made her own blade work look crude by comparison.
Perrin found himself opposite one of the acknowledged bastards, a lean boy who carried twin daggers.
Grit faced a heavily built trainee they called Marks, thick through the chest and shoulders, who held a war hammer like it weighed nothing.
Baldir stepped toward me.
He was taller than I remembered from last night’s distance.
Up close, the gap between nine and sixteen was a canyon.
He had the shoulders and forearms of someone who’d been swinging live steel since before I was reborn, and he moved with the easy confidence of a fighter who knew exactly how good he was.
His sword rested across one shoulder, held loosely in his right hand.
“Danzing,” he called without looking away from me. “I’ll take the one with the mouth.”
Danzing regarded us for a long beat. “Fine. Left hand, Baldir. And keep your feet inside the inner circle.”
Baldir didn’t argue. He switched his sword to his off hand with the smooth transfer of someone who’d drilled both grips since childhood and stepped inside the chalk marks that defined the sparring ring’s inner boundary.
The restriction cut his effective reach by half and denied him his dominant arm. A significant handicap.
It wouldn’t be enough.
I knew that the way I knew the weight of a spear in my hands or the sound a man makes when a blade finds his liver.
Baldir with his left hand and a restricted circle was still a sixteen-year-old with seven years of elite training, fifty pounds of muscle I didn’t have, and the bone-deep coordination of a body that had finished growing into itself.
The handicap gave me a chance to survive longer than ten seconds. It didn’t give me a chance to win .
“Begin with assessment,” Danzing commanded. “No killing blows. First blood or submission ends the match. Show me what you think you know.”
Baldir settled into a left-handed guard, his weight centered, feet planted inside the chalk. He didn’t attack. Just watched, the way his father watched, cataloging and calculating.
“Your spear work at the Palisade was interesting,” he said, voice conversational despite the steel between us. “But this is sword work. Single combat. No room for distance fighting.”
I kept my guard high, watching his footwork. Even left-handed and restricted, his stance was clean. No wasted motion. No tells I could read from posture alone.
“Your mother was quite the artist,” he continued, and I felt the bait like a hook in my ribs. “I still have some of her drawings. Wildflowers, mostly. Delicate things that don’t survive winter.”
I didn’t take the bait. Adjusted my stance instead, shifting weight to the balls of my feet the way the Red Gale had done a thousand times in a body that could actually execute the movement.
“Are you going to fight or just talk?”
“Both.”
He came in with a testing cut, left hand or not, that moved faster than most adults I’d fought in my previous life.
The angle was off from a standard right-hand approach, which should have been disorienting, but I’d spent years fighting southpaw opponents who didn’t announce themselves beforehand.
My blade caught his and redirected rather than absorbing the blow, because absorbing it would have driven me to my knees.
Even that much rattled up my arms and into my shoulders .
He followed with two more cuts, still probing, still holding back enough that I could read the restraint in his shoulders. This was assessment. He wanted to see what I’d do, not finish me.
I gave ground in a controlled retreat, parrying each strike at the angle that cost me the least energy.
His blade seemed to come from everywhere, but the left-hand grip and the chalk boundary meant he couldn’t generate the full rotation his body wanted.
Each combination stopped just short of the devastating follow-throughs his right arm would have delivered.
He’s fast. Even hobbled. Faster than Kasimir ever was, faster than anything at the Palisade. But he attacks in sets. Two cuts, reset. Cut and thrust, reset. Product of instruction rather than desperation.
When he committed to a thrust aimed at my chest, I stepped diagonal instead of back.
The angle was wrong for a nine-year-old’s legs, too short to cover the distance cleanly, and I stumbled through the last half of the movement.
But the result was the same. His blade passed through air where I’d been, and for a heartbeat, his left arm was fully extended and his weight was forward.
My pommel strike caught him in the floating ribs.
It wasn’t a hard blow. Couldn’t be, not with arms this short and a body that weighed what a wet dog does. But it landed clean, and Baldir’s eyes changed.
The amusement died. The clinical interest sharpened into something harder, and I watched the calculation happen in real time: this child just read my timing and found a gap I left open because I was fighting with my off hand. Left-handed or not, that shouldn’t have landed.
“Better,” he said, and there was no warmth in it .
He stopped holding back.
His next combination came at full speed, left-handed or not, and the difference between assessment and intent was the difference between a river and a flood.
His first cut drove my guard wide. The second snapped in before I could recover, catching the flat of my blade and wrenching it offline.
I tried to circle away, but his legs ate the distance in a single stride that my body couldn’t match.
The whole thing took maybe four seconds.
His pommel caught me across the jaw. My head snapped sideways. The yard tilted. Before I could register the pain, his blade was at my throat, steady and cold. A thin line of heat told me the edge had already done its work.
“First blood,” he said.
I dropped my sword and raised my hands.
“Yield.”
Baldir stepped back and lowered his weapon. He was breathing harder than a left-handed match against a nine-year-old should have cost him, and I filed that away for later. My pommel strike had landed. That mattered more than the loss.
He switched his sword back to his right hand, and the change in how he held it told me everything about what the full fight would have looked like. The weapon settled into his grip like water finding its level. Right-handed, with room to move, he’d have ended me before my guard was set.
「Knight of Swords: Resonance Detected」
「Condition Met: First Engagement, Superior Opponent」
「The blade remembers what the body cannot yet hold. Noted. 」
The heat between my shoulder blades flared and settled, a brief spike that came and went like a coal catching wind. The Brand had been watching. Whatever it measured during that exchange, it found something worth recording.
I wiped blood from my throat, checking the wound. Shallow, barely more than a nick. Professional work from a boy who could have opened my windpipe without changing his grip.
Before I could respond, Danzing’s voice cut across the yard.
“Acceptable adaptation under pressure,” he announced. “Both fighters showed flexibility. But experience without strength is cleverness on borrowed time. Size, reach, and adult muscle will beat cunning nine matches out of ten.” He looked at me. “Remember which side of that number you’re on.”
The other matches had finished while we fought.
Maise sported a split lip from Armand’s superior speed, but she was grinning like she’d enjoyed every moment.
Perrin had managed to mark his opponent’s wrist before getting pinned.
Only Grit seemed to have held his own, standing across from Marks with both boys breathing hard but neither clearly defeated.
“Evening meal, then weapon maintenance,” Danzing commanded. “Tomorrow we begin group tactics. Learn how individual skill translates to formation fighting.”
◇ ◆ ◇
As the yard dispersed, Baldir lingered beside me.
“Your mother’s drawings,” he said. “I mentioned them earlier. I wasn’t baiting you.”
I waited, still tense, tasting blood .
“They were in the south wing storage after she died. Crated up with her other belongings and left to rot, because nobody wanted to claim a dead mistress’s things.
I found them two winters ago when the steward had us clearing space for grain.
” He rolled one shoulder, the kind of gesture people make when they’re uncomfortable with what they’re about to admit.
“Wildflowers, mostly. Birds. The view from the east wall at sunset. She had real talent. The kind you don’t throw in a grain cellar. ”
“So you kept them.”
“So I kept them.” He met my eyes, and for a second I saw something under the arrogance that he’d probably rather die than acknowledge. “If you want to see them sometime, they’re in my quarters. That’s not a game or a test.”
He walked away before I could respond, leaving me standing in the practice yard with blood drying on my throat and a question I didn’t have an answer for.
Two winters ago, Baldir was fourteen. Old enough to have heard every ugly word the house whispered about Clarissa.
Old enough to know that keeping a dead mistress’s art was the kind of sentiment that could be used against him if the wrong person found out.
He kept them anyway, because the work was good and letting good work disappear offended something in him that rank and politics hadn’t managed to kill yet.
Father’s whore was buried second circle. That’s what he called her two hours ago. And then he saved her drawings from a grain cellar because he couldn’t stand watching talent rot.
I didn’t know what to do with that. The Red Gale would have filed it as useful intelligence and moved on. Danarre, the version of me that was nine years old and still learning who these people were, felt something harder to name.
The Red Gale would have taken that fight right-handed, left-handed, blindfolded and drunk.
Would have dismantled Baldir’s technique in six exchanges and taught him what real combat looked like.
But the Red Gale had a body that matched his experience, arms that could swing a spear for hours, legs that covered ground like a wolf in open country.
I didn’t. Not yet.
I had to fight like Danarre de Blaise. And Danarre de Blaise was nine years old with arms that ached from holding a sword for twenty minutes and a Brand that offered power his bones couldn’t contain.
I picked up my blade, cleaned it on my sleeve, and walked toward the barracks. There was a lot of growing to do.
◇ ◆ ◇
「Hel’s Ledger」
Vessel: Danarre de Blaise | Year 824 | Age 9
House de Blaise | Status: Bastard (Unacknowledged)
Location: de Blaise Estate, Stone Yard
「Knight of Swords」 — Waking
「Emperor」 — Sleeping
「Magician」 — Sleeping
The vessel bled for the first time in this body and didn’t flinch. Hel ran her thumb along the thread and felt the Knight twitch in its sleep. Small teeth, still. But the jaw is learning to close.