20. Long Climb
Long Climb
The practice yard before dawn belonged to two kinds of people: those who couldn’t sleep and those who refused to.
I’d been coming out here for weeks now, ever since I noticed the pattern.
Armand arrived before the first horn, while the Stone Yard was still dark and the only sounds were boot leather on stone and the ring of steel meeting air.
He worked through sword forms with the concentration of someone counting heartbeats, and I watched from the corner of the yard where the armory wall met the barracks and the shadows ran deep enough to hide a ten-year-old who should have been sleeping.
This morning, he spoke without looking at me.
“You’re going to strain your neck watching from that angle. Come closer.”
I stepped out of the shadow, rolling my shoulders against the cold. “Didn’t want to interrupt.”
“If you could interrupt me, I wouldn’t be worth watching.
” He reset his stance and started the sequence again, slower this time.
His paired blades moved in tandem, the left leading while the right covered, then the right sweeping forward as the left pulled back to guard.
“Watch my lead foot. See how it plants before the cut begins? Your body builds a foundation first. The strike is the roof.”
I watched the foot. Watched the way his weight settled before either blade committed.
In my previous life, I’d have called it root, the moment where a fighter stops being mobile and becomes a weapon platform.
The Red Gale did the same thing with a spear, planting his back foot to channel momentum through the shaft. Different weapon, same principle.
“Try it,” Armand said. He stepped back, giving me the center of the yard.
I drew my sword and settled into the guard position Danzing had drilled into us for the past eight months. Standard de Blaise form: blade angled across the body, weight balanced, off-hand ready for grappling range.
“Your foundation is good,” Armand said, circling me. “Danzing’s work. Clean, functional, it’ll keep you alive against most things your own age. But you’re fighting the weapon.”
“Fighting it how?”
“Your body wants longer reach. Your arms keep extending past where a sword has power, reaching for the leverage point of a weapon you’re not holding.” He tapped my elbow, which had drifted forward. “You were a spear fighter before.”
The observation sat between us. Armand was fourteen and perceptive, but this was a different kind of perception. Reading my body the way Danzing read a formation, finding the gaps in what my muscles told the truth about.
“Something like that,” I said.
“Try this.” He demonstrated a modified guard, blade angled differently than standard instruction. The wrist turned slightly inward, shortening the reach but opening responses I hadn’t considered. “Less distance, more options. See how your available counters change? ”
I mirrored his position. The sword settled into something more natural, less like I was forcing cooperation from reluctant steel and more like the weapon and I had found terms we could both live with.
“Better.” He adjusted my elbow again, pushing it back two inches. “Now thrust. Keep your off-hand ready. Distance doesn’t stay constant in real fighting.”
I thrust. The blade went where I aimed it, which was an improvement over the wobbling attempts from my first months in the Stone Yard. But it lacked something. The sharp decisiveness that made Armand’s movements look inevitable rather than chosen.
“Again. Faster.”
I thrust again. This time the Knight Brand twitched between my shoulder blades, a spark of warmth that pushed the blade forward a fraction faster than my arms alone should have managed. The sword point punched into the practice target with a crack that echoed across the empty yard.
Armand raised an eyebrow. “That wasn’t technique.”
“No.”
“Your Brand?”
I nodded. The warmth was already fading, retreating back between my shoulders like a cat that had stretched and decided to go back to sleep. These twitches had been happening more frequently over the past months, brief surges of heat and speed that came and went without warning or control.
“Can you do it again?”
I tried. The Brand sat quiet and heavy against my spine, ignoring me completely.
“No. ”
“Figures.” Armand picked up his own blades and fell into guard.
“My Star didn’t cooperate either, early on.
It came when it wanted and left when it was bored.
Took me two years before I could call it reliably.
” He paused. “But here’s the thing. Every time it came, I was doing something that required everything I had.
My Brand doesn’t respond to wanting. It responds to needing. ”
I filed that away. The Knight had stirred during the Palisade, during the Warchief fight, during the moments when holding back meant dying. Not once during calm repetition or measured practice.
Armand began working through a combination, and I fell in beside him, matching his movements at half speed.
Two figures in the gray pre-dawn, one fluid and one still learning the shapes of what fluidity looked like.
The morning horn would sound soon, and Danzing’s drills would begin, and the Stone Yard would fill with the usual noise of children being turned into weapons. But for now, the yard was ours.
“Your brother won’t like this,” I said between movements. “You training potential competition.”
Armand’s mouth twitched. “Baldir worries about succession. I worry about being good enough.” He completed a sequence that ended with both blades extended in a formation I’d never seen. “Different concerns. Different paths.”
“Most sons want what their fathers have.”
“Most sons haven’t thought past wanting.” He lowered his blades. “I want to travel. I want to test myself against swordsmen I haven’t already beaten. This house is a good place to learn, but it’s not where I plan to stay. ”
The conviction in his voice reminded me of men I’d served with as the Red Gale. The ones who knew exactly what they wanted and measured every day against whether it brought them closer. Those men either died early or went further than anyone expected. There wasn’t much middle ground.
“Besides,” he added, resetting his stance, “if you can’t handle what I’m willing to teach, you won’t survive long enough to compete with anyone worth worrying about.”
The first horn sounded across the compound, deep and flat, calling the Stone Yard to morning formations.
Armand sheathed his blades and headed for the armory without another word.
I followed, cleaning my sword on a rag I kept tucked in my belt, feeling the last traces of the Brand’s warmth fade from between my shoulders.
Eight months in the Stone Yard. My sword work was catching up to competent.
My spear work was already better than that, though I couldn’t explain why to anyone who asked.
And somewhere between my shoulder blades, the Knight was waking up in fits and starts, too stubborn to cooperate and too restless to sleep through.
I could work with that.
◇ ◆ ◇
They came for me between the armory and the barracks, where the path narrowed between two stone walls and there wasn’t room to swing a sword properly.
Smart positioning. They’d been watching my routines, learning which paths I took between the morning drills and the midday meal, finding the choke point where numbers mattered more than skill.
In my previous life, I’d have been impressed by the tactical thinking.
In this one, I was ten years old and outnumbered four to one .
The lead boy, thick through the neck and shoulders with the kind of build that comes from field work before combat training, blocked the forward path.
Three others spread behind me. All of them carried training swords, the dulled steel that wouldn’t cut deep but could break bones and split skin easily enough.
“Erik sends his regards,” the lead one said.
I’d seen him around the Stone Yard. Pol, one of the cousins who came through the Palisade with Erik’s group.
He carried himself with the stiff-backed anger of someone who’d been told he had a grievance and decided to own it. “He says you left his team to die.”
“Erik’s team was sixty feet from the formation and refused to close the gap.” I kept my hands visible, away from my sword. Four opponents in a narrow corridor meant the sword was less useful than elbows and walls. “That’s not abandonment. That’s his positioning.”
“Funny. That’s not how he tells it.”
“Erik tells a lot of things. Most of them are about how nothing’s ever his fault.”
Pol’s jaw tightened. The ones behind me shifted their weight. I could hear it in the scrape of boots on stone, the way their breathing quickened. They’d committed to this. The talking was just the preamble they’d rehearsed to justify what came next.
The first swing came from behind. I ducked it by instinct, feeling the dulled blade whistle over my head, and drove my elbow back into the closest body. The impact landed square in someone’s solar plexus. Air left lungs in a satisfying whoosh and a training sword clattered against the wall.
Pol charged from the front, swinging wide in the narrow corridor where his reach worked against him.
I stepped into his guard instead of away, planted my palm under his chin, and shoved.
His head cracked against the stone wall behind him.
He didn’t go down, but his eyes went glassy for a heartbeat and his sword arm dropped.
The remaining two came together. I caught a glancing blow across my shoulder that sent numbness down to my fingertips and twisted away from a thrust aimed at my ribs.
My back hit the opposite wall. Nowhere to go.
Two of them still standing, two more recovering, and the corridor offered exactly zero room for the kind of footwork that keeps a smaller fighter alive.
Then Maise came around the corner.